Category: Observations and other stories

Room with a View

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

Day or night, it was an amazing vista, the ever-changing skyline of one of the world’s great cities…Chicago. From 2000 until we sold our condo at 15th and State Street in 2018, it was our view, and it never got old.

Our condo started out as a weekend retreat for my wife and I, a bit of “alone time” from our three children who were hovering at various heights of finishing their educations, finding a life partner, and launching. An excellent time for a weekend getaway address; I heartily recommend it for those of you in that life-stage.

The South Loop was beckoning, in its early stages of gentrification. The Printer’s Row area, in particular, was jumping. I knew and had worked the area selling typesetting there in the 1970’s. Back then it was dirty, scruffy, and industrial, and I could never imagine wanting to live there. It was printers, lithographers, typesetters, and related print trades, all thriving, and unable to see the dawn of the digital age and of the Internet that would render their products and services obsolete. Many of the buildings still bear the names of the companies that built them.  Our building was built as a frozen food warehouse for Meadowgold Butter. Old time Rock Island Line riders recall seeing that big butter sign for years.

What these buildings had in common was that developers bought them at the low end of their value, gutted them to remove all traces of industry, and built out condos or apartments that appealed to both “fifty-somethings” like us, or parents of students enrolled at more than a dozen downtown colleges. Views were important, but so were amenities. In-building restaurants, workout rooms, party rooms and decks drove the buyers in big numbers.

I remember feeling blessed to be able to afford such a view. Business was good. We loved walking all around downtown, the art fairs, new restaurants opening almost weekly, even the Catholic parish of Old Saint Mary’s, once the ugliest church in town at Van Buren and Wabash, now reborn in splendor at 15th and Michigan. At the invitation of the pastor, Maureen signed our names onto the concrete floor underneath the tile of the sanctuary, so I guess we were among the first there.

We loved showing off our view to anyone and everyone who wanted to come downtown. It even gave us a little bit of a “cool factor” with our friends, most of whom lived in the burbs, and perhaps thought of us as adventurers.

My mother sent us a card when we closed on the condo, congratulating us on our “additional home” as she put it. It had us wondering what “additional” meant. Were we showing off, was it something we did not deserve? But when her sister Evie came to town, she could not wait to get her down there, to showcase her “successful” kids. Ah sisters. Do they ever stop competing?

—————–

The Lights………

I remember watching a violent summer storm as it swept through downtown. Bolts of searing white lightning struck the huge white antennas on top of Sears tower. The lightening seemed to strike every 30 seconds or so. And when it did touch, the blinding white streak lingered two or three seconds, as if it took a little time to offload its raw energy into the building.

One of my favorite summer activities was helping to land commercial aircraft as they reached for O’Hare. Their lights would appear in the west, seeming to drop from the blackness above them, as if they were parachute flares fired from some celestial mortar.  

They would form a yellow-white necklace of lights, five miles apart up there, but appearing to be part of the same string from my balcony. The string would head east over the lake, then slowly turn north, then west, and begin to descend out of sight somewhere on the north side.  

I knew those pilots needed my guidance, which I freely offered, wineglass in hand.

In the early years, before the architectural explosion stole our view to the northeast, we would watch fireworks weekly throughout summer. It got to the point where you sort of took it for granted. Afterwards, we discovered that the glass exterior of Trump Tower acted as movie screen of sorts, and we watched real-time reflections of those same fireworks. 

Lights could be funny at times. Our bedroom was a partition walled room, about eight feet high in a twelve-foot-high loft. The north facade was all glass and when a southbound Rock Island train came by at night, its oscillating  headlamp raced above our heads and made crazy lighted patterns above us.

Two mornings  a year, in January, when the sky was clear and the conditions were right, a beam of blinding light from Trump Tower pierced right through our condo. It lasted only a few minutes, but it was like trying to look into the sun itself. 

The office lights at night in the skyline told a different story.  The unseen workforce of cleaning workers would turn whole floors on or off as they labored all night.

The Sounds……

The South Loop seemed loud at first, then a bit quieter, and then your mind tuned the sounds out altogether. The Orange and Green Lines of the CTA shared elevated tracks across State Street. They rumbled and squealed by almost as frequently as that “El” in the Blues Brothers apartment. And the Red Line ran silently under our building on its way to Cermak and the south side, or downtown and to the northern city limits.

Throw in the parade of firetrucks, ambulances, police cars, street traffic below us and commercial aircraft above us, and you had a perfect storm of noise. Only we stopped hearing most of them after a while. They blended into our unconscious as loop dwellers.

And I recall the deafening silence that followed 9/11 for several days: an eerie and mournful absence of life and activity.

The wind…….

There were many times we could observe “lake effect” snow clouds high up and out over Lake Michigan, held offshore by winds aloft and destined to be dumped on unlucky Hoosiers to our south and east.

The cranes also acted as wind indicators, at least on the weekends. The crane operators unlocked the cranes when they were not lifting, and they tended to rest in the path of least resistance from the wind. So, if all the cranes on a Saturday were pointed east, you knew the winds were out of the west. An expensive weathervane, to be sure. 

Cranes were also indicators of both atmosphere and finances. From 2001 until 2008, one could count at least a dozen construction cranes from our deck. We watched as our original view all the way to the colorful lights of Navy Pier slowly vanished as the cranes spun their webs of glass and steel into taller and taller buildings.  And in the spring of 2008, when everything crashed into the Great Recession, the cranes went away. By 2015, they were coming back and are adding to their number to this day. 

The people…….

Life in an area so densely populated as the South Loop is a daily immersion in the diversity of the city itself. Your fellow building occupants, the building staff,  pedestrians who share the sidewalks and parks with you, shopkeepers, eatery staffs; White people, Black people, Asian people, Muslims, and Hispanic people, all interacting every day.  Medical workers, office workers, first responders, salespeople, educators, and retail workers were your neighbors, and the racial stereotypes of your old neighborhood did not apply much. The black man down the hall who played classical piano was a surgeon. The gay couple upstairs were successful realtors. The Korean woman who ran the in-house cleaners read classic literature when not waiting on you. If nothing else, it helped to keep your mind free of first impressions and faulty stereotypes.

These are among my favorite “people” memories of the South Loop….

  • Thanksgiving dinners in Tapas Valencia Restaurant The owner of this “small plate” restaurant in our building sponsored a free turkey dinner for the needy each Thanksgiving. The needy came in many varieties: the obviously poor, large immigrant families, the guys from nearby Pacific Garden Mission, women from battered women shelters, and some folks who could clearly afford a meal, but just wanted to share the day with someone. The restaurant managers, Jose, asked the residents to volunteer to wait tables, bartend, and buss tableware. We worked under the supervision of the young people who waited on us every time we ate there, which was often. It was a day of reversed roles for all involved, and it was fun.
  • Our condo balcony was right near the larger building patio, or party deck. If a wedding reception were in full swing on the big deck, revelers  were only fifteen feet away and would invite us to join them. I am embarrassed to say how many times we accepted.
  • One summer day, we witnessed the unusual sight of dozens of people walking on the elevated tracks, accompanied by police and firefighters. Behind them was a vintage  “el” train, circa 1940’s or 50’s. As it turned out, the people were “train buffs” who had paid for a special ride on the old train. When it broke down above 14th street, they had to walk to the Roosevelt stop. When we encountered them on the street level, they were in “train buff heaven.” They were absolutely thrilled.
  • Early Saturdays in May and again in October, the bridges went up to accommodate the Lake Michigan boaters on their way upriver, whose tall masts needed the clearance. The annoyance of the less privileged in their stalled cars inevitably degraded into group horn honking, growing in intensity as the time passed.
  • Public disturbances were common and came in several varieties. First, real protests for almost any cause you could think of, attended by a patient, if somewhat bored, police force, protecting their 1st Amendment right to peaceful protest.  Megaphones were your first clue.   
  • Columbia College art projects could easily be mistaken for a riot. My favorite was the twelve students dressed as a single caterpillar, slinking down State Street. The third type were Indian weddings, usually near the Hilton. The key players were the guests, often more than 150 of them, chanting, ringing bells, and clapping as they circled the hotel several times. The object of all this craziness was the groom, wearing colorful Indian garb and sitting astride a white horse, gilded in gold. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere but there. 
  • The homeless, were, of course, everywhere. For a time, they lived near the south branch of the Chicago River in a small tent city. They could be found in every park, especially in warm weather. As it turned cold, they sought the overhead cover of viaducts from 18th Street to Foster Avenue, far to the north.  It was good to see the cops checking on them near the river each night and to read of a remarkable dentist who shelled out $200 each night to bring them McDonalds coffee, burgers, and blankets. 

The beauty…….

There was so much of it…….

The great skyline itself at sunset and after dark as the lights came up, Maureen turning our little deck in to a blazing garden each summer, the rebirth of the River and the coming of the Riverwalk, concerts in Millennium Park, the art fairs, and so much more.

By 2018 it was time for us to go: our ages, the need for more space, proximity to the kids and grandkids, lowering our financial load as we contemplated retirement and, yes, personal safety, all factored in. And it was good to begin again, this time in the peaceful and quieter southwest suburbs.

Chicago gets a bad rap in the world’s press, but it is one of the world’s great cities, and for a time we lived right in the middle of it. Our South Loop years were among the best of our lives.

Cresting the Hill

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

I have so many happy memories from my childhood, memories that even after more than a few decades can still bring about an easy smile, or even an outright grin.

Memories of Christmas mornings with my brothers and sisters, trying with all our collective might not to descend upon a mountain of gifts in the living room, before the first light of day showed itself.

Memories of the last day of the schoolyear, with freedom beckoning, and endless summer days of baseball in the alley. Swimming in “batches” at Columbus Park, and getting to sleep on the back porch of the two-flat, the most coveted of berths in an age before air conditioning.

But there is one memory that come most easily and most often. The memory is seated in the annual family vacation, for many years in Sister Lakes, Michigan. Over the years my family rented cottages from two other families, who were also friends of my parents. In earlier years it was the Hayes Family on Little Crooked Lake. The cottage we rented had a name: Myrtle’s Place. In later years, and the more memorable years for me, we rented from the Clancy family on Round Lake, in a little group of family-owned cottages called Clancy’s Camp Geraldine. 

A family with eight children leaving home for two, and sometimes three weeks, is quite an undertaking. The entire week before departure was filled with preparations including housecleaning, shopping, packing, prepping the fishing gear, tuning up the old Chevy; and then finally, on a magic Saturday morning, starting out.

In those days, the one-hundred-and-ten-mile trip took about five hours, given the partially built Interstate system, and stopping for breakfast at Ritter’s Restaurant in Stevensville. My boredom with the highway travel was like most kids’ travel boredom. “Are we there yet?” has been passed from one generation of kids to another. I am guessing that some bored Roman kid in the back of a chariot asked the same question.

My travel boredom suddenly dissipated, and my excitement began to kick in when we finally reached the exit for Napier Avenue, 12 miles out from Sister Lakes. It elevated once again when we passed The Pearl Grange, eight miles out. Then another jump at Spinks Corner, six miles out. I could barely contain myself as we crossed Pipestone Road, three miles out.         

It was coming. The last landmark of mounting excitement was the Sister Lake Laundromat, about a mile from the crest of the last hill. And as the old Chevy lumbered up to the top of that last hill, you held your breath as the vista as last appeared below you.

The lake in all its sunlit glory burst into view, framed by an ageless red barn on one side and migrant workers toiling on the strawberry crop on the other. You could make out a little ice cream and bait shop on the shore called Dill’s Landing. And your young heart began to sing, because this was the beginning of vacation, that wonderful time of swimming and fishing and hiking and fireworks and that most precious gift to little boys: freedom.   

To be honest, years later, when it was my turn to drive the car as a husband and father, I had to try to conceal the same youthful glee when we crested that same hill. I wondered whether those young faces in the back seat felt like I did, both when I was their age, and in the moment.

———————

Since St. Patrick’s Day, our lives have been defined, and limited, by Covid-19. We are isolated, lonely, often bored, seeking new ways to fill our days. Some of us are out of work, some of us are hungry, and some of us are broke, and in need of help.

We survived the spring, began to struggle free in the summer to enjoy tented restaurants, virtual baseball on television, and smaller family get togethers. But in the absence of any clear and competent national leadership, the message was garbled. Travelling through Door County Wisconsin in July, my wife and I dined in some great restaurants with tight safety protocols in place. We felt safe. A few days later, in Sheboygan County, we found ourselves in the Wild West. Mask-less serving staff chatting you up a few inches form your face, crowded bars, groups of twenty at large tables. We left early for Chicago.  

About half the country, much of it rural or politically oriented, turned its collective back on the scientists. Wearing a mask marked the team you played for, and probably tagged you as a regular viewer of FOX or CNN/MSNBC.  A motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, bare-faced Trump rallies, ultra-right-wing marches, and countless weddings, parties, defiant restaurant owners, and small-town mayors all called it a hoax. Throw in a few state governors in denial and the gun was loaded, cocked, and ready to fire.

Now the gun has fired, is firing still. We got pretty much what Dr. Fauci and company told us we would get. We will likely see 500,000 dead by April 1st, 2021. Almost unthinkable.

Even the most delusional of governors are now back-peddling, trying to put the genie back in the bottle; but the genie has escaped and is doing her worst, and still the deniers persist. Recently, Frank Bruni, a New York Times writer, echoed the words of a front-line nurse in South Dakota, perhaps the epicenter of delusional pandemic behavior. In describing her most adamantly delusional COVID-19 patients, she said, “They shout at us that they don’t have COVID and berate us for wearing our PPE because it’s a hoax. Only when we intubate them, do they stop shouting.” Powerful stuff.   

————–

In these last few weeks, I sense a slight movement upward, and perhaps toward the crest of a different kind of hill. The void in national leadership will soon end and adults are already filing into the room. Several promising vaccines are here, with more coming. The deniers will continue to deny, and surely many will resist the chance to get inoculated. But most of us will jump at it.

The crest of this new hill beckons and when we complete the first round of vaccinations, it will feel like the Napier Avenue exit, twelve miles out. And when the other vaccines come online, it will feel like The Pearl Grange, eight miles out. And when the schools reopen, it will feel like Spinks Corner was reached, six miles out.  Travel plans will feel a lot like reaching Pipestone Road, and when the pandemic drops off the front page, we will have almost crested the hill, right near the laundromat.

And what is on the other side? What great prize awaits us?

In a word, touch. What we long for more than anything is to touch again. The touch of a simple hug or handshake. The touch of a kiss. The touch of being in a crowded room, a restaurant, a theatre, a concert. The touch of a crowded ballpark, the touch of family gatherings.

We will regain the touch of human interactions in actual meetings in a room, absent the lack of tone of Zoom meetings and email strings.

We will revel in chatting with folks at an adjacent restaurant table, mask-less and carefree. And we will tip more easily and more generously, remembering how these workers took the brunt of the pandemic.

We will trade baseball talk with total strangers at a ball game, as we pass their beers down to them from the beer vendor in the aisle, and then pass their money back to the vendor.  A remarkable exercise in trust. 

Our kids will feel the touch of social warmth and comfort and happiness of a well taught classroom. That is, once they get over having again to get up early for school.

We will be less aloof in crowded elevators, unafraid to make eye contact, or trade light commentary, simply happy to be in a crowded elevator.

We will take in the joy of a family gathering, perhaps less eager to make a point, or exercise on old complaint. Happily content to be together to mark a birthday, a graduation, or a holiday. We will not have to hide our private worries about where or who you might have been too close to in the week before. 

We will rediscover the simple joys of entertaining and showing off our homes at their best. We will put out the folding chairs, the fold-up tables, the extra dishes and flatware, and the serving platters that have sat too idle for too long.

Our medical professionals will begin to relax, knowing they met the challenge. They will slowly leave behind the triage nightmare and they can return to the much more rewarding business of restoring health.      

We will see ambulances go by, and silently thank those paramedics who served throughout this time.

We will sit in Millennium Park and many other parks, and take in a concert, grateful for shared summer nights and the joy of music.

We will smile at each other as we walk our streets and pathways, silently acknowledging the simple privilege of not having to move to the other side of the road as we pass.

And those of us who are church-goers will gladly extend a hand in peace to those around us.

We are not at the crest of the hill yet, not by any means. But we are slowly moving up that hill. We will soon begin to feel our hearts glow again, slowly at first, and then increasing, as we pass the landmarks of isolation and move toward the joys of touch. It will be a Happy New Year.

A Modest Proposal-2nd Draft

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

Comedian Chris Rock once quipped, “The way to stop the killing is to make bullets cost $5,000 each” I think he was on to something.

I published this original article almost two years ago, but after this last week in El Paso and Dayton, I felt the need to add to it and try again, for whatever it’s worth.

In November of 2017 I wrote that some 26 church-going people in Texas had been gunned down by a madman using a weapon that used 5.56 millimeter (also known as .223 caliber) military style ammunition. The month  before that, another madman in Las Vegas used the same ammunition, plus 7.62 millimeter and a few other types to kill 58 and injure more than 500. Before that it was the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando and 49 dead (9 millimeter and 7.62 millimeter), Virginia Tech with 32 dead, (.223 and .22 calibers) and Sandy Hook Elementary with 27 dead, 20 of them children (223 caliber). The list is endless, including Columbine’s 13 dead (9 millimeter), Aurora, Colorado, 12 dead (.40 caliber and .223 caliber) and on and on. In most cases, very large quantities of legally purchased ammunition were part of the story.

Since that time, add these to the list………….

  • May, 2018 10 dead/ 14 wounded in Sante Fe, Texas (.38 cal. and shotgun)
  • October, 2018 Pittsburg, PA synagogue, 11 dead/6 wounded (.223 and 357 semi automatic pistols)
  • November, 2018, Thousand Oaks, CA, 13 dead/12 wounded (.45 semi automatic pistols)
  • February, 2019, Aurora, IL 6 dead/6 wounded (pistol, caliber unknown)
  • May, 2019, Virginia Beach, VA 13 dead/4 wounded (.45 ACP)
  • July, 2019 Gilroy, CA 4 dead/12 wounded (Automatic rifle, 7.62MM)
  • August, 2019, El Paso, TX 22 dead/24 wounded (Automatic rifle, 7.62MM)
  • August, 2019,m Dayon, OH 10 dead/27 wounded (.223) 

We all know the drill: prayers for the families of the victims, endless speculation from the cable news for days, interviews with the killer’s neighbors, protestations from the NRA that “guns don’t kill people” and then wrapping themselves in a misinterpreted meaning of the 2nd amendment. Within two weeks it’s on to the next story.

And on the South and West sides of Chicago, it’s a daily dose of shootings, mostly 9 millimeter and .380 caliber and .22 caliber ammunition.

Ok, I get it. No politician who wants to get re-elected is going to take on the NRA. No one part of the country agrees with the rest of the country on just what form of gun control, if any, will make a difference. The NRA will insist it’s all a matter of fixing mental health. A hunter in Tennessee just won’t see it the same way as an accountant in Milwaukee. And you can buy guns of all types with minimal controls at any level.

There are an estimated 300 million handguns, rifles, and shotguns in private hands in the United States today. Estimates of ammunition purchased each year are between 10-12 billion (that’s with a “b”) rounds. We are awash in firearms, bullets and shells. And bodies.

There is a solution out there and I’m not the first to suggest it, but I might be the first one to lay out the steps of the plan. The solution: treat the most deadly ammunition the same way we treat powerful drugs that require a doctor’s prescription. Start to choke off access to the most lethal ammo.

It might take two years to seriously dry up the supply of the most deadly rounds, but it would work. Maybe we can’t stop the guns, (hell, we couldn’t even keep from repealing the automatic weapons ban!) but we can sure limit their destructive power by implementing this plan. Guns are protected by the NRA and they are very durable items. They tend to hang around for years.  Ammunition, however, is an expendable, and is not directly addressed under the 2nd amendment. Because it is expended, you can impact its availability.

——————

Here for your consideration is my plan. I welcome your critiques, arguments, and comments.

1.Dry up the supply. Recognize that certain type of ammunition need to be controlled, because they are overwhelmingly used in homicides and mass shootings. Get them off the retail market, both in stores and online. They include:

  • 9 MM
  • 7.62 MM
  • .223 CAL
  • .380 CAL
  • .45 CAL ACP
  • .22 CAL

This means that within a defined period of time (90-180 days), these ammunitions come off the retail shelves and the Internet. This also means that all other types of ammunition are unaffected by this law. You can buy all the shotgun shells, 30.06 rounds, etc. you want (subject to local regs) for hunting, sporting clays, whatever. These rounds aren’t the problem; they mostly kill deer, birds, and clay pigeons. Happy hunting.

2. Exempt the military and recognized, taxpayer-supported law enforcement from this plan.

3. Buy it all back. Task the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Bureau (ATF) to purchase from suppliers who need to purge their shelves of the munitions at full retail value. These bullets are now part of the controlled resale process and available for resale.

4. Make it financially attractive to dump your privately held ammo. Allow private gun owners six months to turn in their munitions in these categories to the ATF for a premium price (5x retail value initially, dropping to 4x, 3x, 2x, each month.) The ATF destroys these rounds. The premium is designed to discourage hoarding ammunition and to reduce the regulated rounds to a minimum.

5. Pick the agency. Charge the ATF with establishing an easily referenced national database of gun owners with FOID number, including all guns using these restricted ammunitions by serial number, and amount on hand for each weapon. Require owners of these weapons to log on, add their guns by serial number and declare how many rounds they own for each. (They’ll quickly figure out that they don’t have to be honest about how many rounds they have on hand so they can buy a few more.) If you’re not on the registry, no ammo for you.

6. Dangerous ammo is available only at ranges. License the future sales of all restricted ammunitions to licensed local shooting range operators. In other words, these munitions may only be purchased at the range for use at the range. Brass is turned in and weighed against purchased amount, much as has been done on military ranges for years. You want to expend 2,000 rounds at the range, great. You will need to buy your rounds there and to turn in your brass casings for a weight check prior to leaving. Rounds-to-casing weight charts already exist. 

 7. Assuming most gun owners will claim no ammo on hand when they register their guns, allow up to twenty rounds to be purchased (again, available at local ranges) per owner per weapon, amount logged onto the owners’ account at time of issue. You can take these home, but expended casings will be required for resupply of this ammunition. So if you fire 10 rounds from your doorway at a home invader, illegal immigrant, neighbor who came over to borrow your lawn mower, ISIS infiltrator, or Trumpian fantasy, you will need to gather up your brass if you want to replace your ammo. Assuming, of course, you don’t go to jail.

8. Build into the database the ability to transfer or sell such weapons as long as the new owner becomes listed on the database. Rounds must be transferred with ownership and logged to the new owner.

 9. Create severe legal and financial penalties for anyone caught trafficking, reselling, or hoarding restricted ammunitions after the first year. Task the ATF to bear down on gun shows and the fringe right groups, the most likely offenders. Possibly place a rewards system in place for turning in known hoarders.

10. Don’t sell ammo of any type to any and all on the existing national database of people who shouldn’t buy guns. Merge that group onto the ATF database.

—————

Here’s what I think would happen…

  • Within two years, it would become very difficult to amass 2,000 rounds of the restricted types of ammunition.
  • Would hoarding occur? Yes, but it would be largely on the political fringes, the paranoid Americans building compounds, who would now face criminal charges if caught. And it would be off the Internet.
  • Would the gang bangers change their ways? Not much. They’re not going to register illegally purchased weapons anyway, but they’ll be a lot less likely to spray “to whom it may concern” rounds across a street, killing Granny in her parlor. And they’ll give each other up for rewards on ammo hoarding. Ask the cops about that one.
  • Would a “black market” emerge? It always does, but now you’re going to have to buy from criminals and you might think twice about it. You could go to jail. Lots of folks will think twice about that, 
  • Will size matter? Not when it comes to magazines, which has been one of the weaker notions of gun control. 30 round magazines would be tough to fill.
  • Will ranges want to take part in this? You bet. It will become a lot more profitable business model when you are the only legitimate point of sale for restricted ammo.
  • Will it clear the courts? The NRA will fight it, but I think in the end lose. You can still hunt, protect your family, go to ranges to shoot and keep all your guns. That’s pretty American.

If ever there was a  time to push such a plan, it is now. So let’s see if somebody in national politics will take up this cause. As in the line from the movie 1776, “Is anybody there? Does anybody care?”

 

Easter Mondays

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

The glass suddenly shattered outward in the big window of the General Post Office, known to the locals as the GPO. Armed men, many wearing the yellow armband of Irish Volunteers, others in various military uniforms, had used their rifle butts to announce their arrival. It was the first warlike sound made, the first of many, in what would become known throughout the world as the Easter Rising. Shortly thereafter, a uniformed man by the name of Padraig Pearse came out to read a Proclamation to the confused and somewhat rattled crowds of passersby. He announced the birth of a new nation, the Republic of Ireland, free of the tyranny of Great Britain and determined to chart its own course among the other nations of the world. Later that day, they would use captured wireless equipment in the GPO to send out what would become the very first radio broadcast the world had ever heard: their Proclamation in Morse Code. It was Monday, April 24, 1916. Easter Monday.

Great Britain, already immersed in the Great War, and with a large standing army, acted swiftly to put down the rebellion. It poured thousands of troops across the Irish Sea and into Dublin, supported by artillery which was trained on the buildings and streets of central Dublin. Their gunboats navigated part of the River Liffey and blew apart other fortified positions of the Irish rebels. By April 29th, Dublin mostly in ruins, it was over, and the rebels surrendered.

The Rising might well have ended there, except for the arrogance of the local British Commander, Gen. John Maxwell, who chose to hold trials and execute fifteen of the leaders, one by one, over a period of several weeks. Each volley of shots echoed louder and louder in the souls of the Irish people, and by mid-May, the Rising had matured into the full anger of the Irish Rebellion, with fighting raging across the soon-to-be nation.
——————–
We were just about recovered from the flight from O’Hare to Dublin, having napped and showered. Our mother was in a hospital in Muncie, Indiana, scheduled for a routine gall bladder procedure earlier that day and, once we are all together in our room, my sisters urged me to call and see if we could talk to her. I had arranged to call my Muncie based sister-in-law and my brother, who I guessed were bedside around then, and my sister-in-law answered on the first ring. The tremble in her voice hinted my worst fears.

Our mother was gone. My wife saw the shock on my face as I absorbed the tearful words from the other side of the ocean. As I stammered what I heard to the others gathering in our room, the gaiety of a joyful family reunion spiraled down into a chaos of disbelief, bewilderment, a hundred questions. The next few days were a blur of last minute travel arrangements, tearful phone calls and a coming home to be all together. It was Monday, April 21st, 2003. Easter Monday.
——————-
Those two Easter Mondays, separated by some 87 years, somehow mark both the close proximity and the great distances between Ireland and America. They stand out in my mind as signposts in the timeline of my life and the lives of my ancestors. One marked the reasons my Irish family emigrated to America and the other marks the passing of a person so significant in our family’s return to Ireland.

There are millions of American families who can trace their origins to Ireland. Between 1846 and 1950, more than 6 million emigrated. Among them were three of my four grandparents, and the parents of my remaining grandmother, Theresa Oates. It didn’t take them long to establish themselves, get the jobs, start families, buy homes, and build neighborhoods.

People don’t emigrate from countries where life is good. When there is money in your pocket, food on the table, and opportunities to better yourself, people stay put. Take any one of them away and they will head for the door. The tyranny of British rule, the inability of an Irishman to own land within his own country, the failure of crops, particularly the sustaining potato, and a general sense of futility drove millions to the ports of Queenstown (now Cobh), Dublin, Belfast, and Liverpool.

They didn’t so much move as they were pushed to their new destination and new hope 4,000 mile to the west, in the United States. Most of them never thought they would return and most didn’t. Their voyage was long and difficult. I can remember asking my Grandmother Wogan several times if she would ever go back to Ireland, even pointing to the planes flying over our home in Chicago. In her mind, those planes didn’t go to Ireland.
—————

But where most Irish-American families look on Ireland as their distant origin or maybe just a nice place to visit, my family went in a different direction. In 1977, my sister Mary Ann and her husband Jim Heneghan made the decision to move their small family from a bungalow on New England Street in northwest Chicago back to Jim’s home in the Partry Mountains. His village was Tourmakedy in County Mayo, a dozen or so miles from Westport or Castlebar. They had several reasons for considering such a move, but chief among them was the health of Jim’s parents who were ageing and beginning to fail in health; most of his siblings were here in Chicago.

Most of my siblings were in some process of starting their own families, as was I, so I recall we took the news of the move with some surprise, thinking it temporary at best. I recall helping to load a large shipping box that was dropped by a crane truck in their back yard. We loaded the box with their furnishings and tied it all down for travel by ship. Then they packed their bags, scooped up their young son JJ and headed to the airport. At the last minute, Jim received news on his U.S. citizenship, which meant he would have to follow Mary Ann about a week later. So my sister took the step into this unknown new life with just herself and her son.

She had been to Ireland once before, following her high school graduation, when she vacationed there with her cousin, so the culture was not entirely new to her. What she found upon arrival in this fairly remote part of Ireland, was a badly neglected house and farm, and two people very much in need of assistance. She set about the business of turning things around. Tapping into her bottomless supply of humor and wit, she dubbed her new location “Shangri-La” from the movie about a magical, mythical kingdom.

And so she settled into her new life, adding three more children to her family, and was joined a year or so later by another sister, Terese. “Tassi” as named by our nickname-addicted mother, initially worked in a nearby shirt factory, and in time met Eddie, her future husband, and started her own family of six. Their two homes are about a mile apart from each other.

The Ireland of the late 1970’s would be very different from the Ireland today. When my brother Bill was killed in a car accident in 1979, we had to break the tragic news to my sisters at the local pub which had the only phone available. They knew that a call from America to the pub was bad news. Mary Ann, nicknamed “Minnie” by our mother, could not leave her young family and was herself expecting. Tassi, still single at that point, came home for the funeral. I remember at the time feeling that my sisters lived in a very distant land.

It was later that summer that we pooled our funds to buy our mother a plane ticket to stay a few months with her daughters. We didn’t know it then, but that trip would in great measure define the remaining 25 years of her life. Mom spent at least two to three months each year in Ireland, growing strong bonds with her children and grandchildren in both nations. She came to prefer the spring, the time of “lambing” when the baby lambs were born. She enjoyed the backbreaking work of pulling the sod from the bog, then critical for winter fuel. She brought with her bags and bags of delicacies not then available in Ireland, like Hershey’s Kisses and, most especially, Duncan Hines cake mixes. She was gregarious by nature, so she made friends all through the area in and around my sisters’ homes. She embraced her life in Ireland every bit as much as she embraced her life in Chicago.

And over the years, Chicago and County Mayo go closer and closer to each other. By the time my wife and I could manage to travel, Ireland was much closer and much more within financial reach. Consider that very first ticket we bought my mom in 1979. That $600 would have felt like $2,300 today, according to economic scales. And yet today you can fly there for roughly the same $600, some 40 years later.

———–
Without that long ago Easter Rising in 1916, no one today would consider making Ireland their new home. The country that emerged from “The Rising” on Easter Monday was a long time coming, but by the 1960’s could claim its own destiny, its own economy, and the tides of emigration slowly began to recede. And from 1979 until 2002, our mother’s annual trek to Ireland prompted us to renew the family ties with our own travel and we did so more than eight or ten times until her passing on Easter Monday, 2003. The distance between Ireland and America shrank from several weeks at sea to 7 or 8 hours in the air.
————–

Last June, I stood in front of the General Post Office in Dublin with my wife, my children and their spouses, and our five grandsons. The GPO is now both a functioning post office as well as a museum to the cost of Ireland’s freedom. My mind was filled with thoughts, memories, and emotions.

I thought of those fifteen martyrs to their cause. I thought of my sister Minnie’s late father-in-law, James Heneghan, Sr., an Irish rebel who fought in County Mayo. I recalled my sister describing how she and the women of the village prepared his body for the funeral at his death years later. I thought how different that experience must have been for her, growing up in Chicago. I thought of my mother’s many visits that slowly closed the distance between the two countries. I thought of the sacrifices and hardship that went into forming an Ireland where Americans would return and make their lives and raise their families.
Mostly, I felt a quiet pride and a sense of being blessed in being there with our little band of twelve.

My grandsons took their first “crossing” in stride, not at all impressed by the miracle of flight, but very much into the history of this new city. A few days later, when we reached my sisters’ farms, they dove out of the cars and ran headlong into the fields to see the lambs and bullocks up close. In that moment the distance between the two countries seemed to disappear altogether.

I guess I will always be a little haunted by Easter Mondays, but it’s a good thing to be a little haunted at times.

The Missing Commandments

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

There is a classic Mel Brooks scene in the History of the World movie where Brooks plays Moses coming down from the mountain. He went to a lot of trouble to capture the “Charlton Heston” Moses look, right down to the lighting, the garb, the mountain backdrop, and the long flowing beard. And he is holding three tablets instead of two. As he appears to the Chosen People, he announces to all that “The Lord, the Lord Jehovah, has given onto you these Fifteen” (and, of course, drops one of the tablets which breaks into a hundred pieces, and with his classic timing says)…”these Ten Commandments!” Great stuff!

The original Ten Commandments covers a lot of ground for mere mortals like us, and they formed a good deal of what ultimately became our civil laws. In case you forgot them from Sunday school or religion class, here they are again:

  1. I am the Lord thy God! Thou shalt have no other Gods but me!
  2. Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain!
  3. Thou shalt keep the Sabbath Day holy!
  4. Thou shalt honor thy father and mother!
  5. Thou shalt not kill!
  6. Thou shalt not commit adultery!
  7. Thou shalt not steal!
  8. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor!
  9. Do not let thyself lust after thy neighbor’s wife!
  10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, nor his farm, nor his cattle, nor anything that is his!

————-

With the first three, God made sure of his own interests: One God to a customer, no false images, don’t talk bad about Me, and give Me my one day a week. Old Jehovah must have been feeling a bit insecure that day.

He gave a nod to Mom and Dad with the fourth one, although He Himself never had parents. Guess he felt a little guilty about rousting Adam and Eve from paradise.

And the last six are don’ts: don’t murder anyone, don’t screw around, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t go lusting after your neighbor’s hot little wife, and don’t covet thy neighbor’s bigger home, farm, cows, BMW, or anything else he owns and you don’t.

But the Brooks movie got me thinking. What would those missing five commandments have been? The first ten already touch on all the biggies, the stuff you might go to jail for, cause a divorce, get you shot, or maybe promise you a one-way ticket to Gehenna after your death. Did he really cover all the ground?

So rather than leave you wondering, here are my choices for those missing Five Commandments, but I offer them for your consideration in three flavors: The Heavies, The Regulars and The Lights. After all, I’m no Jehovah, and besides, he covered all the really hard stuff with his first ten.

The Heavies:

  1. If thou should become a leader, remember that the best leaders are servants to those they lead.
  2. Thou shall try to find someone in this world to love more than yourself. You’ll like it.
  3. Do some good for someone, or a lot of someones, if you can.
  4. Tolerate.
  5. Though shalt not hold a grudge forever.

The Regulars:  

  1. Thou shalt utter more sentences that end in question marks than in exclamation points.
  2. Thou shalt remember that thou is in charge of just thy life, not mine.
  3. Thou shalt simply own thy possessions, rather than the other way around.
  4. Thou shalt be generous and then keepeth thy mouth shut about how generous thou art.
  5. Thou shalt remember that having a lot of money is nice, but it’s not a virtue.

The Lights:

  1. Thou shalt remember that thou cannot put an old head on young shoulders. (Compliments to Deacon Bob Ryan on this one.)
  2. Thou shalt not suck the air out of the room at a party.
  3. Thou shalt not be afraid to over-tip thy server.
  4. Thou shalt not worry about those things thou can’t fix.
  5. Thou shalt not lose faith in thy team, no matter how bad they sucketh this year.

—————

So here is my open invitation to all of you…………….what would thou like to add to any or all of these lists? Feel free to reply to Comments!

Illumination

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

I sat in my lawn chair and listened to a free concert of Lerner and Loewe music performed by the Millennium Park Orchestra and Chorus. A beautiful summer night in one of the most luminous spots in one of the world’s great cities. This is about as “First World” as it gets with wine, gourmet foods, good friends and not even an entry fee to get in. Millennium Park is a triumph, a “must see” when you visit Chicago. It is an evolving blend of artwork, interactive sculpture, landscaping, and performing arts, all surrounded on three sides by the rich and varied architecture of the Chicago skyscrapers. It never gets old.

Framing the north end of the park, along Randolph Street, are four prominent office buildings: the Blue Cross Building, the white towering AON Building, the old original skyscraper Prudential Building, and behind it the newer cousin, known as Two Pru (2 Prudential Plaza). There are scores of other residential creations on and behind Randolph, as well, but these are the office buildings. And the Pritzker Pavilion, home to a summer series of concerts, sits at their feet. As night falls and their lights come up, you can’t help feeling very fortunate to be there, in such a riot of lights and colors, all soaring above you in your little musical island of privilege.

It was during their renditions of songs from Camelot, a story now linked as a memory, however faulty, to the Kennedy years, that my mind began to wander. For some reason, I thought of those famous lines from an obscure poet named Emma Lazurus:

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Those words of kindness are written at the base of the Statue of Liberty and taught to generations of American school kids as our nation’s spirit of welcome and offer of a new beginning to those seeking to leave behind a weary world. The golden torch she holds high is that “lamp beside the golden door” to democracy and freedom. Our Camelot.

And yet, those words express only a wish and, like most wishes, are not entirely true and really never have been. Historically for most immigrants, as soon as the stop at Ellis Island was behind you, and you were officially welcomed on the path to naturalized citizenship, you pretty quickly found that you were not all that welcomed by whomever happened to get here before you.

You were a threat. A threat to my job, my neighborhood, my set of beliefs. Maybe you didn’t speak my language, didn’t attend my church. Rich people don’t often emigrate, so you were poor and probably would end up draining the tax coffers in some way. You didn’t have many skills and you may have brought illnesses with you. You were not schooled. You looked different. You were Irish, or Italian, maybe Polish, or a Jew, and you were a threat.

So you took the abuse. You made neighborhoods in the cities and built the ghettos of your particular clan for the safety in numbers it offered, and you took the low work. You worked and married someone like you and started a family. You bought a two flat or a bungalow and you celebrated your culture in the taverns, the church halls, and with parades. And you worked. You and your children and their children earned your way in over several generations.

My wife’s paternal grandfather was such an immigrant. Thomas Hawkins came from Ireland around the turn of the 20th century, passed by the “Irish Need Not Apply” signs all along the Eastern seaboard and made his way inland to Chicago; the CTA hired him to work at a bus barn near North Avenue and Cicero in some entry level job. At the end of his first shift, he asked the foreman if he should come back tomorrow. The foreman, a bit puzzled, said yes. Again the next day and the day after that, he repeated his question at day‘s end until the foreman, now exasperated, told him “Look, man, you have a job. Show up here every day but Sunday.” It had never occurred to young Thomas that there was anything but day work, work as he knew it from the old country.  A steady hourly wage, a defined work week, and benefits were entirely new to Thomas and millions like him.

But only a dozen years later, this same immigrant would feel himself American to the core, as did his fellow Irish Americans. His son, Marty Hawkins, my wife’s father, told the story of being a little boy sitting on the front porch steps while his dad and friends had a beer and discussed politics. It was Irish brogues all around. One of them remarked, in a thick brogue that “The trouble with this country was that we’re letting too many foreigners in!” Young Martin looked up from face to face, knowing that every one of them was from Ireland. I asked him what he said or did and he told me, “I didn’t say anything.” A wise young man.

——————

Building lights work differently at night for office buildings than they do for residential buildings. Condos, apartments, and hotels have many more dark windows than lighted ones, what with people travelling, un-booked hotel rooms, being part time or weekend getaway places. It is unusual to see a horizontal string of illuminated windows in such a building running more than four or five windows in a row.

Office buildings, at night, tell a different story. Most offices are open architecture these days, so you will see whole floors of lights flick on or off. And as I sat there for several hours at my concert, it occurred to me that the different floors of lights going on or off reflected the movement and progress of the cleaning personnel who were cleaning those offices. If you wondered who make up those cleaning crews, you need only get on board a southbound Metra in the morning, a train taking you out of the city, not in. Onboard you will find the cleaning crews, some white, and some black, but overwhelmingly Mexican and Central American women, tired at the end of their long night shift and on their way home.

—————-

It seems far from Camelot now, under the brutal and profane thumb of a president who is trying hard to sell his dystopian vision of a white, privileged, isolated USA, where immigrants pose not just a threat to our economy, but also bring crime with them. He is selling fear and specifically fear of immigrants from Mexico and Central America. He has blurred immigrants into those seeking sanctuary from violence. He has separated mothers and fathers from their children. He has abandoned and betrayed our role as world leader.

Sadly, there are many who have bought into his vision of a “walled off” America and to that crowd he has become a sort of Messiah. Equally as sad, he is using his vast presidential powers to enable and empower mean-spirited trolls at the national level who are as devoid of character and compassion as he appears to be. Most of them seem to have lifeless eyes, as if their soul has been removed. They are working hard to dim the lamp of welcome atop that statue in New York Harbor, to have it go dark altogether if they can have their way.

But as I watched those office windows light up, it struck me that this is why the haters will lose: the immigrants will simply outwork them. Just as immigrants before them, like the Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews and others, they will take every lousy job that comes along, make minimum wage, go without healthcare and dental plans, and keep working. They won’t take vacations, they will drive old cars and fix them in their driveways on Sunday. They will work two jobs, take on odd jobs if they can. They will pool their family wages in a weekly effort to survive in America. And they will keep working.

You can see them cutting the grass on your local golf course, wiping down your car at the car wash, running the kitchens of the local eatery, landscaping your house, cleaning your hotel room, scavenging the alleys for old metal, picking the crops, and cleaning the offices at night. And they will keep working. They may clean the offices now, but they know that education is key, and their children will work civil service jobs and entry level management positions and work in those same offices their parents once cleaned and their grandchildren will become the leaders and professionals and they will carry their work ethic into generation after generation. And that’s why they will win, winning for the United States in the bargain.

So as long as those office lights keep shining in the night to mark the progress of the immigrant workers, their glow will have to replace the dimmed lamp of freedom from the Statue of Liberty. And someday soon, when this madness is swept away by the millions of Americans who really understand the value of liberty and the meaning of democracy, perhaps the golden torch will regain its luster and we will once again welcome the world’s immigrants to our new and better Camelot.

 

Catholic Born, Part Deux

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

When I posted a recent article called “Catholic Born,” I got a few responses from readers. Some indicated they felt much the same way as I did, and I suspect those who remained silent disagreed either a little or maybe a lot with what I wrote, but that’s OK.   It was one comment made by my daughter Julie that kind of hit home. She told me “Thanks for not being a priest, dad. Even with all its flaws, and there are many, I find comfort in the rituals.”

While there was little danger of me ever becoming a priest, it made me realize that as I laid out my thoughts on the many teachings of the Catholic Church that I have discarded, as well as the dissatisfaction I feel over current church rules, I missed something important. Being raised Catholic is as much the culture you live in as it is any set of personal beliefs. Leaving that culture behind you is as rare and as difficult as a lifelong White Sox fan waking up one morning and buying season’s tickets for Wrigley Field.

A bit about that culture……………….

The stories:

I was twelve years old and standing in line in front of my dad at the door to the confessional in Resurrection Church on the west side. It was Holy Saturday and all four confessionals were doing a land office business, confession back then being a weekly requirement before taking communion the next day. Lines were long to the left and right of each set of boxes and the little lights above the doorways to forgiveness flashed from red to green as sinners concluded their litany, got their penance, and rose from the kneelers inside their compartments. It reminded me of old war movies where the paratroopers had their eyes glued on the light near the door of the C-47, waiting to jump into combat when the light turned green.

Each confessional consisted of three doors, the center door being reserved for the priest, and the two outboard doors for the sinners. The name of the priest inside was on a nameplate over his door, and people had their favorites, much like shopping for a more lenient judge in court. You wanted absolution, but you wanted it with the least amount of guilt and pain.

The priest sat in a chair and pulled open a screen on his side which allowed you, the sinner, to hear his voice and sort of see his shadow. Before he opened your screen, he could be heard mumbling back and forth with the sinner on the other side of the box. You always tried to listen in and catch the other guy’s treacherous failings, or maybe pick up a new, harmless sin you could use next week, but you could never quite make it out. Once your screen opened, it was Showtime and you went into your lines: “Bless me father, for I have sinned. It has been (your answer here) since my last confession.”

I was next up in that line and my father, not the most patient of men, began to fidget; whoever the person was in that box ahead of me was in there for a long time. Each time another light flashed and a door opened in one of the other confessionals, he sighed, looked at his watch, shook his head, looked around. I could sense it building. It was clear that the priest and the sinner were having a long talk, because the poor guy in the box on the opposite side was stuck in there, awaiting his turn. The sinners behind us, eager to get forgiveness and then hit the grocery store, began deserting for shorter lines or faster moving lines. But we were next and so we were stuck.

Finally, his fuse finished burning and he blew. In a voice everyone in the church could hear, he said “Well I guess they got the guy who shot Lincoln!” Those working off their penances, kneeling in the pews, were startled. Some of the older ladies threw him looks of disapproval. Some of the men could be seen shaking with laughter but trying not to show it. Kids had their mouths open in surprise. And me? I wanted to die, but that’s because I was twelve. And the endless conference inside that confessional ended a few seconds later, so perhaps the priest or the sinner took the loud hint from outside.

——————-

Mass always began with the priest standing between two kneeling altar boys, all with our backs to the faithful. The priest spoke first: “Introibo ad altare Dei” (I will go up onto the altar of my God).

We as the altar boys responded in unison: “Ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meam” (The God who gives joy to my youth).

It was Latin, but it might as well have been Swahili or Kurdish. We didn’t understand a single word of it. To become an altar boy, you had to memorize all of the Latin words of the mass on a small four page card and know when to say the words. No English translation was supplied and none was considered necessary.

I’m not sure how much joy to my youth was brought about by serving 6 a.m. mass on a February morning, but I had more than my share of those mornings. Mass came in several flavors for altar boys: early weekday masses (attended by about the same fifteen people every day), Sunday mass, both high mass (longer and with more singing) and low mass (mercifully shorter), funerals (four altar boys required) and weddings (only two required).

My best day as an altar boy was a big Italian wedding, where the best man handed each of us an envelope with $15 inside. The priest asked if we had been paid anything so that it could go to the “Altar Boy Fund” and I and my partner Bill lied through our teeth. Fifteen dollars in 1962 felt like winning the lotto. No one could have more money than that all at one time, and I was, at least for a time, quite wealthy. Anyway, I’d cover the lie vaguely at confession the following week and certainly not to the same priest.

Second best were all of those days when you were called upon for funeral duty. Catholic funerals were always on weekdays, so you got out of class for the hour of the service, and another 45 minutes of goof-off time, which you could easily alibi to the nuns as a service that ran long.

—————-

The Gospels

You remember Martha and Mary, those two sisters of Lazarus who entertained Jesus during a stopover in Bethany? Martha was all about working the event, but Mary just sat at His feet listening to him. When Martha went to file a beef with Jesus about her lazy sister, she got a rebuke from the Man himself. She was too concerned with earthly things, He said. I wonder if He might have been a bit less critical after not getting fed and watered, had Martha not been running the show and looking after her guests.

Every woman in every family knows who the Marthas are and who the Marys are. Marthas plan the parties, clean the house, shop for the goodies, get the meal out, look after their guests and clean up after. Marys sit, drink wine, and chat. Every family is a mix of the two and each side knows it, seems to accept that you’re one or the other by nature and not likely to change. Marthas at a party bond together in their righteousness and volunteer to help each other out. They can be found in the kitchen. Marys won’t leave their chairs unless the wine runs out. They can be found on the patio or in the living room.

You know which one you are, ladies.

————-

You know the story of the prodigal son. Kid asks for an early inheritance, leaves town, blows it all on hookers and booze, then comes home broke and penitent. Good old dad rejoices in his return. Older brother, Steady Eddie, is a bit pissed.

For years, I identified with the older brother, thought that dad telling him “but you are with me always” sounded a lot like “and you’re chopped liver.” Your brother is a jerk, but gets forgiven by dad and even celebrated like he did something right for once in his life. Which he didn’t. Meanwhile, you toed the line, worked the farm, and did everything you were supposed to and nobody is putting fine robes on your back or slaughtering any fatted calves in your honor. Raw deal all around.

This was my take on this gospel story for years, until someone shared their interpretation with me. This person, an experienced dad like myself, said he shared my take for years. But looking back on it all, he now concludes that the true meaning of the story was that raising kids was a pain in the butt. Who am I to argue?

———–

The Homilies

I don’t know how many homilies I’ve heard, but just doing the math it has to be more than three thousand. And only three still stay with me.

The two frogs….

The first was given by Father Flannery, a priest at Resurrection who was also a decorated Marine Corp chaplain and who was wounded at Iwo Jima. I was in first grade and I remember his homily about the two frogs who jumped into a pail full of milk. Both were struggling to keep from drowning. One gave up and did indeed drown, but the other frog had some sort of amphibious faith and kept swimming and kicking and, lo and behold, churned the milk into butter. The butter gave him a solid surface from which to jump free of the pail. Keep kicking was the message I guess.

My brother and the apostles…

Father Joe Mulcrone, a Resurrection guy, said the funeral homily when my brother Bill was killed in a car accident in 1979. We were shattered at the time, numb from disbelief, and in need of some comforting words. Fr. Joe’s homily compared Bill with the apostles. He pointed out that the apostles, like Bill, were no saints when Jesus found them. He concluded that Bill would have been comfortable in their company. His words began the long healing process for all of us and I am grateful to him to this day.

The guys travelling to the next town….

Father Bill Gubbins was a gifted homilist in Queen of Martyrs parish. He told the tale of the traveler who upon arriving at a town gate, asked an old man sitting nearby about the people in the town. “What kind of people live here?” he asked. The old man replied, “How were the people in the last town you were in?” replied the old man. “Awful, terrible people,” the traveler answered. “Well,” said the old man, “I’m afraid you’ll find these people much the same.”

Later on, another traveler came to the same town, and again asked the same old man near the gate the same question. “What kind of people live here?” he asked. The old man again replied, “How were the people in the last town you were in?”  “Kind, wonderful people,” the traveler answered. “Well,” said the old man, “I think you’ll find these people much the same.”

Yes, quite a culture.

 

“Dear Mr. Lapierre,”

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

February 15, 2018

 

Mr. Wayne Lapierre

President

National Rifle Association of America

11250 Waples Mill Road

Fairfax, VA 22030

 

Dear Mr. Lapierre:

 

Yesterday in America we celebrated Valentine’s Day and Catholics around the world also marked the beginning of Lent with Ash Wednesday. We also watched the unfolding nightmare in Florida with 17 dead, brought about by a deeply disturbed young man and his rifle. Like in most mass shootings, the shooter did not break a single law until he chambered his first round and fired it into his first victim.

You know the list better than anyone. Some 26 church-going people in Texas gunned down by a madman using a weapon that used .223 caliber military style ammunition. Another madman in Las Vegas used the same ammunition, plus 7.62 millimeter and a few other types to kill 58 and injure more than 500. Before that it was the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando and 49 dead (9 millimeter and 7.62 millimeter), Virginia Tech with 32 dead, (.223 and .22 calibers)  and Sandy Hook Elementary with 27 dead, 20 of them children (223 caliber). The list is endless, including Columbine’s 13 dead (9 millimeter), Aurora, Colorado, 12 dead (.40 caliber and .223 caliber) and on and on. In most cases, very large quantities of legally purchased ammunition were part of the story.

You, Mr. Lapierre, can help fix this. Your organization is, in fact, the law when it comes to gun ownership. Your organization is all powerful, you control the politicians at any level of government. You are exceptionally well funded and can make or break politicians who oppose your 2nd Amendment position. I’m not naive enough to think that a Republican held House, Senate and White House are going to oppose you on gun ownership. We just wait two weeks until the funerals are over and the news cycle rotates and then we can brace for the next one, and the next one, and the one after that.

But your organization, Mr. Lapierre, was founded on the issue of firearms safety. Why not return to those worthy roots and get behind this simple idea:

Start treating the most deadly ammunition the same way we treat powerful drugs that require a doctor’s prescription. Recognize that certain type of ammunition need to be controlled, because they are overwhelmingly used in homicides and mass shootings. Get them off the retail market, both in stores and online. They include: 

  • 9 MM
  • 7.62 MM
  • .223 CAL
  • .380 CAL
  • .45 CAL ACP
  • .22 CAL

This means that within a defined period of time (90-180 days?), these ammunitions come off the retail shelves and the Internet and enter a federally controlled distribution system. This also means that all other types of ammunition are unaffected by this law. You can buy all the shotgun shells, 30.06 rounds, etc. you want (subject to local regulations) for hunting, sporting clays, whatever. These rounds aren’t the problem; they mostly kill deer, birds, varmints, and clay pigeons.  

 The NRA, and probably only the NRA, could make this happen. And in doing so, you could provide the nation with a solution that its citizens desperately want, but whose politicians are mortally afraid to move on. But not if you were behind it.

There are some practical aspects to the plan, so that we keep the range shooters happy, ammo manufacturers can still sell their product, etc. I wrote up some of the practical steps in an article on a blog site. You can read it at http://uncletommyonline.com/?p=377, if you care to. It says some unflattering things about the NRA, but we’re all big boys, so I think we can get past it.

In a single bold stroke, the NRA could alter its’ image within this country and the world from a polarizing stance of “gun ownership freedom at all costs” to the “champions of public safety.” Your membership would grow considerably, once the polarization was off the table and you were behind saving innocent lives. Hell, I‘d even join.

And you can keep your 2nd Amendment position intact. The Constitution doesn’t say anything about bullets, only the muzzles they come out of.  It’s an opportunity for the NRA, Mr. Lapierre. I’m guessing you must be as tired of counting bodies as the rest of us.

 

Sincerely,

Tom Wogan, Sr.

Private Citizen

Catholic Born

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

You know that part of the scripture they read at Christmas where they recite the lineage from Abraham to Isaac, to Jacob, and then about thirty five others who were all “begot’ until they finally get down to Joseph, the father of Jesus? I once asked a priest that if Jesus was really the result of the ”Virgin Birth,” as I was taught, then aren’t all of those guys on that lengthy list just his step-father’s dead relatives? For some reason, he seemed annoyed with me.

Either through fate, family history, or some combination of parental decisions, personal calls, happenstance, or whatever other forces out there control one’s destiny, I am and always have been pretty Catholic.

Consider the facts. I was baptized Catholic, owe every academic credential I have to Catholics schools, once thought I would be a priest, have worked for priests, brothers and nuns for a collective total of about eleven years (and counting) of my varied career, was active in parish leadership, raised my kids Catholic and, as far as I know, am in good standing with the church. And I married a Catholic girl even more Catholic than me. Who else do you know can recite from memory the list of priestly vestments (chasuble, alb, cincture, and some other stuff), the seven deadly sins (gluttony, sloth, and more bad things you shouldn’t do) and the Memorare? I won’t even go into her devotion to Mary, which is some sort of happy feminist spiritual preference, as if Mary is the only saint who can be really trusted, most of the rest being men.

That old Catholic church that defined much of my youth seems like a distant memory now. I remember it as a Church of ironclad and seemingly timeless rules, the endless list of things we did and said that seem so silly now. Taking communion on your tongue without biting into the host, never touching a chalice (some boy did, we were told, and he died), fasting, wearing scapulars like G.I. dogtags, writing AMDG or JMJ on top of each page of schoolwork, rosaries, novenas, masses with school attendance taken, mortal and venial sins, purgatory, hell, telling your oft-repeated three or four pre-adolescent sins to some guy in a box each week.

Today, I’m not an angry Catholic, just a mystified and somewhat dissatisfied one. Along the way I jettisoned most of the doctrinal baggage so carefully installed by a host of nuns and priests in my formative years. It’s not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing, and it’s not a loss of faith. It’s just that over time I grew to consider it just so much extra unimportant detail to the core of the message.

The list of lost luggage is lengthy and includes the aforementioned virgin birth, the immaculate conception, transubstantiation, the need for male celibate priests, the assumption of anyone’s actual body into heaven, Jesus as something other than an extraordinary man, little cherub angels, purgatory, plenary indulgences that mirrored our federal prison parole guidelines, demons, wood from the True Cross, and the many heads of John the Baptist scattered throughout Europe. And I might do a run-on sentence like this last one, but I don’t do confession.

Some things have added to my cynicism. On my first visit to Rome, I visited the Vatican Museum, a garish monument to the Catholic Church’s rich history of basically ripping off anything of value from Europe or Africa and the Middle East that wasn’t nailed down. After about 200 statues, I had seen enough. I have visited the Knock shrine in Ireland, held so dear by its locals, but which, like Fatima and Lourdes, has evolved into a bit of a religious side show. I have seen the 35 foot-tall silver aluminum statue of Mary as it made its rounds to churches in Chicago, rising like a sort of devotional ICBM from a flatbed truck, the personal penance of some poor guy who once owned liquor stores, or so I heard. It hasn’t exactly deepened my faith.

I have tried to center my faith on the essential meaning of Jesus, a man who came along at a moment in history and told us to love each other, forgive each other, to stop stealing from each other, conquering each other, and butchering each other. Simple enough instructions that we still haven’t mastered, but I can admire and try to follow the playbook well enough.

He came at a time when the world was maybe for the first time ready to start listening, and his message grew from that point onward as a force for good, through apostles, martyrs, and simple people in search of answers. He didn’t need to be anything other than an exceptionally good man of God to start the world in a new direction, and, as so often happens, they killed him for it. His story and his meaning doesn’t require that he be born without human intercourse, that he be some sort of “man-god” or even that he rise from the dead.  I realize that the Church, if they really thought me important enough (they don’t) to single me out for these beliefs, could deny me last rites and burial in a Catholic cemetery, but I have my cremation “get out of jail free” card, so I’ll take my chances. Just scatter my ashes on the 6th hole at Ridge Country Club.

So I still go to Mass most Sundays, perhaps missing during a week when we attend a funeral or if the weekend is too crowded. I go there usually pleasantly, grateful for the quiet comfort of being part of a large group of people whom I assume are of similar thought and belief as me. I go hoping to hear a good homily, but those are as rare these days as political elections that I feel good about. I go to enjoy the music, especially a good choir. I go to spend an hour with my wife at my side where we just “are”.  Sometimes I just go out of a sense of obligation. Sometimes I go when I really do feel the need to pray for something.

But lately I feel like I am a tenant in a building where many people are moving out and no one is moving in. The Catholic Church is in a downward spiral, or maybe a downward spiral with a turn to the right. Fewer churches, fewer active members, some moving to evangelical churches that mange to better answer their needs. As I write this, some 26 Chicago parishes need pastors and only 19 are available.

And of those 19, how many would you feel good about? I lost count of the number of stories I have heard about some Catholic priest denying marriage, requiem mass, or baptism in their church based on attendance at mass or donation records. I recently sat through an embarrassing 30-minute harang by a pastor to an absolutely packed church regarding his personal expectations of the churchgoers in terms of promptness, singing, and leaving early. Bite me, father. An archbishop who I actually went to school with will not bury gay Catholics in his diocese, even though death kind of settles your sexuality issues.  It’s not just quantity, but quality.

Orders of nuns, priests, and brothers are in their sunset years now, with pathetically few younger members. The model that once attracted so many young new leaders, myself included, is broken. And the endless file of the sexually abused and the indefensible cover-ups by the hierarchy have all but snuffed out the flames of devotion in even the most Catholic of Catholics. But the voice of “super Catholics” seems to be on the rise, those homophobic, pro-life, pro-death penalty (I’ll never get that) adherents to Doctrine as defined in Rome. A bleak future, if we change nothing.

Much of this downward spiral, and this is most mystifying of all, is driven by the insistence of a male celibate priest model. We are watching parishes around the country being rolled into other parishes, and not really for lack of enough faithful, as for lack of leadership. The hierarchy tries to fill in the holes with young priests from the third world or Eastern Europe. They might as well try extra-terrestrials, as I have witnessed homilies so out of touch with our reality as to generate good stories at parties. Some zealous kid from Manilla or Krakow, however well meaning, is not the answer. Nor are lay deacons, who do a good job, but who are too few in number.

The solutions are obvious and, I think, probably acceptable to most Catholics not on the extreme right: drop the requirement for celibacy for men and allow women to be ordained. Do those two things, or even one or the other, and your shortage of ministers problem goes away in a few years. Fact is, being a priest is not a bad job and people who are sensitive and compassionate and who want to make a difference will find it a natural calling. I happen to work in a place with some amazing nuns who would be terrific pastors, and a damned sight better at preaching than the last five guys I endured. When it comes to ministry, it’s like we have one hand tied behind our collective backs and our “top down” authority structure shows no sign of movement. Therein lies the dissatisfaction.

I remarked to one of the sisters recently that I often wondered “Why am I still Catholic?”

She shrugged, smiled, and said, “Where else would we go?”

Where, indeed?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tumblers

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

Tumbler gear (noun, Machinery)

A gear in a train of gears, mounted on a pivot arm so that it can be swung into and out of engagement with an adjacent gear.

————

Tumbler gears are remarkable inventions, even though usually being hidden on the inside of things, they are seldom seen.  Picture the inside workings of a bank safe, with tumbler gears so precisely in tune that only when five or six are perfectly aligned, can the door can be opened. Or the tumbler gears inside of an automobile transmission, moving at intensely high speeds and interacting so smoothly with other gears that the driver scarcely notices a gear change. Open up an older wristwatch and you will see a miniature wonderland of gears, all working to keep the minute and hour hands correctly aligned.   Most mechanical tumblers gears are made of metal or plastic, and you can hold them in your hand; but there are other types of intangible tumblers at work in this world. And they live deeply in our consciousness, and are also seldom seen.

A few weeks ago I heard the faint click of the tumbler gears in my mind aligning… someone’s actual event started a gear in motion that engaged another mental tumbler gear, this one in my memory. It wasn’t a very loud click, or even a critical life changing event, but it clicked, nonetheless.

We are entirely flesh and blood physical beings and there are no gears in us a doctor could expose in an operating room; but in our consciousness, our senses, and our memories, an interlocking series of gears is working always. You may start out as infant with only one or two gears…. maybe one for hunger and one for comfort, but the gears get added quickly. Before long you get gears added for most of your needs: affection, recognition, security, ego, gratification, possession. Still later come the gears for social interaction: personal appearance, sexual attraction, standing within your crowd, and personal achievement. And your gears can engage other peoples’ gears. Meet someone and fall in love and some of both of your gears engage. Start a family and pass along some of your gears and a bunch of much older gears ranging back countless generations, soon to be installed in your offspring. Lose someone close to you and your gears go out of sync for awhile, slowly returning to normal as time works its magic on your grief.

Every decision you make and every happenstance that falls your way speeds up or slows down your gears, changing your viewpoint, your convictions, and shaping the person you have become and are still becoming. And all of these gears are turning, and at times aligning with another gear, and when that happens, the two tumbler gears mesh with a soft click. Something resonates within you.

———–

My oldest grandson recently sat for his high school entrance examination at St. Rita High School. It was the same building where some fifty four years earlier I also sat for an entrance exam, only then the school was brand new and known as Quigley South. I’d like to think he sat at the same desk as I did, but fifty four years is a long time for a school desk, so I’ll chalk that one up to whimsy.  I remember my exam day vividly, a cold January Saturday morning, for which I didn’t even mind having to be in a school. All my gears for excitement, nervousness, and adventure were engaged at once. I was moving on to something new and I’m guessing it was the much the same for Matthew.

I remember the priest in a long black cassock who proctored the exam. I remember thinking the exam was easy. I remember seeing the swimming pool and the enormous gym. I remember that they fed us hamburgers and fries after we were done. And the gears from his real life exam day and those from my remembered exam day briefly aligned and it resonated.

He is about to transition, and in so many ways. He will shortly leave elementary school, a world defined mostly by women. A transition from a world characterized by order, adherence to rules, kindness, compassion, and a feminine sense of fairness. He will soon enter a high school world of boys and men. It will be less orderly, less kind, less compassionate, and in many ways more demanding. It will certainly be a bit smellier. And he can’t wait to get there. Like me back then, like most of us, he is impatient to grow all the way up.

He is embarking on a four-year journey that will define the young man Matthew who waits for us in our shared futures.  It is a time of rapidly turning gears, fueled by desire for acceptance, hopes for the future, an overpowering need for independence, and hormones firing away. To be sure it will be a confusing time, a time of higher highs and lower lows, a time of passionate feelings, fierce anger, and sweet joys.

Here’s the best part: he gets to select the man he wishes to be. He will define himself in so many ways…. as a student, an athlete, a friend, a loner or part of a group, maybe a boyfriend to a girl we haven’t yet met.  He will start to think of what he wants to do in life. He will learn to drive a car. He will think about college.  And he won’t be alone in his questions or discoveries. He will have plenty of company from his classmates who will be struggling for life’s answers just as he will.

He will have strong guidance and have to answer to discipline, probably more than he wants. The guidance will come from his teachers, older boys, coaches, the occasional adult who gets through the fog of adolescence with the right question or observation that hits home for him. It will be amazing and maybe a little frustrating to watch this occur, just as I am sure it was for my parents. He will leave his boyhood behind him and grow into a young man and it will happen not fast enough for him and too fast for us.

The beauty of being a grandparent is that you don’t worry like you did as a parent, if for no other reason than you have come to realize how little control of someone else’s life you ever really had in the first place. You can create the home environment, lay down the rules, educate, encourage, cajole, sometimes punish, but there are a lot of gears turning, far too many for you to control.

So I am excited and happy for Matthew, as I will be for his brother and his cousins when they reach that junction in life’s road.  His parents laid down a solid foundation under him and he knows he’s loved, that he is expected to do well, and that this is an important step, but one he anticipates with eagerness.

The tumblers continue to spin. Life is good.

The Art of the Deal

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

A young Ray Kroc, played by Michael Keaton in the movie The Founder, is striking out time after time as he tries to sell his milkshake machines to fast food owners in the 1950’s. He has a snappy pitch and he has a good product and no one is buying. Time after time he lugs his product back to the trunk of his car, growing more and more dejected.

And immediately I understood the reason for his failures, but I suspect most people did not. He was peddling, not selling, and there is a huge difference between the two.

—————-

His business garb was not slick, but rather a study in disorder. Suitcoat rumpled and not sized to his medium bear-sized frame, slacks wrinkled, tie askew. He smoked cigars and seemed to have one sticking from the side of his mouth more often than not. Long before the onset of modern no smoking laws, his office lay under a cloud of cigar smoke. Most of the rest of us smoked cigarettes at our desks, so it was nowhere near the notable offense it would be today.

His name was Don Bickel, and he made me learn the gift that I carry along with me to this day, a gift most people have difficulty recognizing or appreciating. The gift that I brought to many different positions and which sustained me through some twenty-five years of owning a business. He taught me how to sell.

In June of 1973 I was finishing up my second year of teaching English at Mother Guerin High School. I was paid the princely sum of $6,800 per year, with no health insurance, and had more side jobs going than a crazed gypsy. I was driving a cab, teaching auto mechanics in a junior college, getting my commission in the National Guard, among other gigs. I enjoyed teaching, but with a new baby, it was time to change careers. I answered an ad for a sales position with a new offspring product of the Chicago Tribune called the Little Tribune, which later became the Suburban Trib.

I earned an initial interview with Don and a few others, but they were suspicious that I was looking to take the job just for the summer and then return to teaching. They asked me to come back in a week and make a sales presentation to them. Any topic, any idea, just come in and do it. At the time, a few National Guard OCS buddies and I were fooling around with the idea of starting a garage where you could work on your own car using the garage’s tools. You would rent space, buy your parts from us, and have access to things like air compressors, high lifts, power tools, et al. This was 1973, when cars could still be tuned up, and three years before the automotive industry went from mechanical to digital, and the term “tune-up” passed into history.

So I made up my poster boards, typed up my business concept, and went into the room to make my pitch about the “Do-it-Yourself” garage idea to Mr. Bickel and three others. I was nervous, but hyped, and after about 15 minutes, they stopped me. But they were all smiling. “You’re hired, Mr. Wogan,” Don told me. I think they were sold when they saw the work I had put into the pitch and the level of my excitement. They just wanted to see how badly I wanted the job.

So I was now making an incredible amount of money: $14,000 per year and, wait for it, a new company car, an Olds Cutlass, no less. I had arrived. No one could possibly make more money than $14,000.

On my first day, I met the five people who had been hired with me, all about the same age, none of us with any real newspaper ad sales experience. And so school began. Two weeks of learning about all things advertising: agate lines to the inch, gutters, center spreads, page positioning, half tones, premium placement, camera ready art, deadlines, double trucks, tab vs. broadsheet, screening, and more. And the financial language of display advertising: frequency discounts, co-opt deals, commisionable rates for ad agencies, color charges, column inch rates, automotive rates, and contract commitments. We were young and mentally absorbent and a few days later it was second nature to us all.

Now came the real schooling. We were each assigned a suburb for the soon to be published “Area 5” of the Little Trib. These were the northern suburbs, dominated for years by the powerful Paddock publications, and someone in Tribune Tower wanted a piece of their long undisputed revenues. So we were selling a paper no one had yet seen, for rates about the same as our competitors, to customers much older, more cynical, and far wiser than us. You needed your share of Chutzpah, that Yiddish word for shameless audacity, impudence, cheek, guts, nerve, boldness, and temerity.

Don would pick a salesmen each day and ride with him. On my first day with him, he didn’t say much as I made the rounds from retail stores to banks to car dealerships. Most owners would give you a few minutes to explain what it was you were selling, then accept the materials you had brought along, but not offer much in the way of encouragement. Don hovered in the background, but the customers knew I was being trained. Old Jim Jennings of Jennings Chevrolet was the scariest. He chewed up salesmen for breakfast and you really needed to grow a backbone just to put up with his tirades and insults.

It was over a sandwich on my second ride that Don decided to begin my personal education. “You talk too much,” he said and then stopped and took a bite of his sandwich. I was stopped in my tracks, not knowing where this was going. I asked him what he meant and he explained a few fundamentals to me.

“Rule 1 is that you come to your prospect prepared. You need to have questions to ask.”

“Rule 2 is that you wait for the opportunity to ask one of your questions.”

“Rule 3 is that once you ask it, you don’t talk, you listen.”

He went on at great length to explain the simple truth of selling: ask your customer what is important to him, ask why it’s important, and then listen. Your customer will tell you how to sell him. He asked me about the call to Chips Casual’s, an upscale men’s shop in downtown Glenview we had just come from. “Describe what you did,” he said.

“I introduced myself and told him where I was from and what the paper was about,” I said. “What should I have done?”

He went on. “Here’s what he heard: You know nothing about my business, you probably don’t care to learn about my business  and you just want me to buy ads.” I was confused. “I don’t think I was rude,” I said somewhat defensively.

“You weren’t rude. You were just not selling. Want to know what selling sounds like?” I nodded yes.

“Good morning, Mr. Stevenson (which you got from his business license in the window, by the way), I’m Tom Wogan from the Suburban Trib. I was admiring your store.”

“Is this the original location? Let him talk.”

“How long have you been in business? Let him talk.”

“Most of your customer’s local to Glenview? Let him talk. “

“What does a typical Chips Casual customer look like? Let him talk.”

“At some point, he will get tired of talking and then it’s your turn to talk. But now you know what to talk about. If he’s telling you most of his business is local, you can point to our local circulation, which now makes sense to him. If it’s mostly men buying for themselves or women buying for their men, you can point to our readership demographics, which now means something to him. In other words, you’re not selling advertising, you’re selling increased profit. That’s goal number one.”

“Are there other rules?” I inquired.

“Just two more. First, you’re building relationships.” I asked how you did that.

Did you see that Navy League plaque behind his counter?” I had. “Next visit you inquire about his service in the Navy. Again, let him talk. He’s proud of his service and wants to share it. ”

“You said there were two more, that’s only one.”

“Ask for the order,” he said. I must have looked confused.

“Most sales people leave a lot of potential business on the table because they never ask for the order. You need to find the courage to say, in so many words, “Can I have your business?”

————

There were many more lessons to come over the next year and as time went on, I stopped dreading the “ride along” days with Don and began to look forward to learning more and more of his tradecraft. Under his eye and ear, I learned to seek out hints and clues as to what was important to my customers. I learned to ask questions. I learned to listen. I learned to ask for the order by using a “trial close”, which goes something like this:

“Well, Mr. or Ms. Prospect, you’ve told me that price is important to you, that flexibility is important to you and that ability to make last minute changes is important to you, does that sound about right?

Well if I gave you an ad schedule that was 10% less costly, that allowed you to change your ads up to 12 hour prior to publication, is there any reason you wouldn’t give my paper a try for eight weeks?”

More than anything, I learned that building relationships is a two-way street. You had to be bringing something of “value added” service to your customer in order to be distinguishable from your competitors. In that line of work, it might be an unsolicited ad idea done up by our staff artists, or an idea for a promotion you saw work elsewhere. If showed you cared about more than just his billing.

And to this day, I rank anyone in a leadership position by how many questions they ask of their subordinates and customers, and how well or poorly they listen.

I will always be grateful that I was given the gift of a mentor at a young age. God bless you, Don, wherever you are.

The Doorway to the Storm

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

How many doors do we pass through in life? A thousand? Ten thousand, maybe a million? Most often, it’s a familiar door, where there are no surprises awaiting you on the other side. Your front door, your bedroom door, your office door. Sometimes, though, the unknown or even the dreaded awaits on the other side of that door. A job interview, for example, or a doctor’s visit to hear a diagnosis, or calling on someone to whom you are about to break some very bad news. And sometimes it’s just an unassuming door, one you don’t give any thought to as you pass through it; but it is, in fact, the door that moves your life in some totally new and unexpected direction.

————-

It was August, 1967, and my 18th birthday was looming, less than a month away. Back then, all 18 year old males were required by law to register with the Selective Service System, more commonly referred to as The Draft. So on a hot summer morning, I jumped on the Madison streetcar and took a ten minute ride to the corner of Pulaski and Madison, which was still called Crawford and Madison by my father and most people his age. They didn’t like the city renaming their street for a Polish guy, I guess. Three or four doors north was 43 N. Pulaski and one flight up an old staircase was the regional office for the Selective Service System. I opened the glass door and entered.

The office wasn’t much, maybe 14 feet square, fans blowing, no air conditioning. Six chairs against the wall, three of them occupied by my peers. A table with some pencils and a stack of single page questionnaires. At the far end of this little office sat a middle aged lady in a flowered dress, cigarette in the ashtray. She sat at a desk with an old Underwood typewriter, smoking and typing. She told me to sit at the table and answer the questions on the paper and then to take a seat. I would be called. She was pleasant, but it was obvious that this little office was her domain and she apparently ran it all by herself.

So I filled out the form, which included all the items you might guess as well as my current student status. Having graduated from a high school seminary, I was on my way to Niles Seminary on my soon-to- be-sidetracked pathway to the priesthood. When my turn came, she looked over my answers without comment. She began typing on a form from which I could see a small portion of which would become a wallet size perforation card.

She extracted the form from the typewriter and tore off the little card piece, handing it to me and saying “You’re 4-D.” Anticipating my next question, she added, “That means you’re a divinity student. You’re exempt from the draft as long as you stay one.” So I tucked the card in my wallet and left. Nothing happened to me that day, but it did to so many others.

If you went through that door and could prove you were going to college, you left as a “2-S”, deferred as a college student. But if you were a high school grad with no college plans, or just working a job somewhere, you left through that door as a “1-A”. And as a “1-A“ in 1967, you would find yourself within 30-45 days at another door, early in the morning on the day you were informed by registered mail to report for a physical at 615 W. Van Buren Street. You would spend most of that day walking around in your underpants, following a taped colored line on the floor with a bunch of other guys in their underpants. At some point you would be standing in a line with ten other guys all buck naked while some medical type poked around your genitals and made comments to an assistant.

And at the end of the day, you would go home, but you would shortly receive official “greetings” from the Draft Board that you needed to report within a matter of days to a bus depot or a train station or an airport. You could find yourself fighting for your life as an “11-Bravo” rifleman, or grunt, in Viet Nam within as little as four months. Tens of thousands of kids did. And more than 58,000 saw the end of their lives there.

———–

If the recent documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick makes any point about Viet Nam, it is just this: It was a raging twenty year storm that consumed our nation, consumed the lives of thousands of Americans, and continues to haunt veterans, protesters, and in a way all of us to this day. It was a colossal series of misreads, bad assumptions, and outright lies over several presidencies that needed to be exposed. Going through that door at 43 N. Pulaski and all of the 43 N. Pulaski’s around the nation was how most young men entered into that storm.

It is a masterful documentary, told in first person by the soldiers and officers on both sides, now all old men. And in the case of the North Vietnamese, old women, because women fought that war side by side with the men in North Viet Nam, and in great numbers. Their stories are sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes uplifting. The transformation of those at home who became radicalized by Viet Nam is a big part of that story. And then there are those who both fought as soldiers and became radicalized after, and their stories are the most powerful and the most haunting at the same time.

We’ve never needed a “feel good” story as much as we need it now and the Burns documentary is a sobering downer, mostly. All of the bad stories are there: My Lai, the naked little girl running from the napalm strike, the public execution of a Viet Cong guerilla, Jane Fonda telling the camera that U.S. POWs should be executed, Kent State, campus demonstrations at home, the 1968 Democratic Convention, helicopters being pushed off our aircraft carriers, the final defeat. You find yourself shaking your head at how this nation could be so wrong for so long and at the enormity of the sacrifice. Ken Burns has worked on this for years, and I’m sure he didn’t anticipate the current sorry state of American leadership coinciding with the release of this film, but there it is.

And you find yourself a little conflicted, because the intense singleness of purpose and incredible willingness for self-sacrifice shown by the Vietnamese in the North begins to resemble our revolutionary war forefathers. They just wanted us out of their land and we wouldn’t go. The final irony is that after we did leave, and they tried their textbook communism with no luck for ten years, they are now almost a functioning democracy and certainly a thriving economy. Check out your shirt label that says “Made in Viet Nam.”

————-

It was never black and white. There were patriots and heroes and cowards and scoundrels, but who was who? There were thousands who enlisted, true believers eager to fight for their country or to stem the flow of communism, or just looking for some action. Some outstanding combat leaders, career soldiers, stoic POWs, whistle blowers on atrocities, and those who saw it through to its end. But they are the few bright lights in the storm. For most of us, no one wanted anything to do with Viet Nam in 1967. It was a meat grinder and it went on and on, funneling more and more soldiers “in country.” And “The Draft” became the focus for all of us, looming out there as either inevitable or somehow to avoid.

There were ways out. You could enlist in some other branch like the Navy or Air Force or Coast Guard. Even if you went to Viet Nam, it was considerably safer than as a grunt. You could sign up with the Reserves or National Guard, and do your basic training and MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) training on active duty, then six years of weekends and summer camps, but the waiting lists were long and the draft might catch up with you before you got in. You could go to Canada, and some 30,000 did.

You could stay in school, but you better carry a full load and not flunk out, or your 2-S deferment was immediately turned into a 1-A. You could join ROTC in college, look for a safe officer’s MOS, but that boomeranged on more than a few guys I knew after they graduated.

And it wasn’t just civilians who wanted no part of Viet Nam. I knew a draftee who volunteered for Officer Candidate School and did 26 years in the Army. In his retirement I asked him why he chose that route. He told me he didn’t want to go to Viet Nam, although he caught the tail end of it anyway. A college friend did two years as an officer in Korea, and when I asked him why two years, he told me it was to get out of Viet Nam, which he succeeded in doing.

—————-

So now we’re all old men, having made our decisions at that young age, or maybe having those decisions made for us. The Draft is no longer. The medical exam station at 615 Van Buren, once a place for processing humans is now ironically a headquarters for a meat processing company. The office at 43 N. Pulaski is still the middle of the West Side, but now maybe in the most dangerous neighborhood in the city.

Those 1-A kids who fought and somehow made it home have long since earned our respect and they retain the solemn pride that is theirs alone. Those kids who volunteered and went looking for a fight and got through it untouched can bask in their conviction. The wounded, both physical and mental, have to soldier on, missing an arm here, a leg there, their eyesight, maybe some of their sanity. Some of them were taken years afterward by the defoliating chemicals used there. They never made it into their 60’s and they were casualties, too, although their names won’t appear on any monuments. The dead are remembered on a long black wall in Washington, D.C., listed in the order in which they fell, and by those who loved them. And in the end we lost that war, as was foretold by many as early as 1963.

But I think back to that terrible storm that lasted so long and took so many and I think of the nice lady in the unimpressive office at her typewriter and I wonder how many kids took their first step into the storm that day and never knew it.

Such an unassuming door they went through and such an unseen storm on the other side.

Twenty Things I know about Women

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

Having been carried for nine months by a woman, having been raised with sisters, schooled by women for eight years, supervised the work of women, worked for women, been a father to women, and married to a woman for almost 49 years, I feel I have the academic equivalent of an earned PhD in “Insights into Women.”

I hear you laughing, ladies.

The following is not meant to be a guide to what women want or think; no such work is possible and women know this perfectly well. Even if it could be written they would change it because they could. Think of it as helpful hints and observations for guys. Who knows, it might just save your life someday. Feel free to share it with a guy who is engaged or newly married; if he is only half the knucklehead I was as a new husband, it will definitely help.

———

Women like order. They believe men create disorder. How do I know this? Case in point, we are sitting in the condo of friends of ours in Phoenix, AZ. A coffee cake was on the table, partially consumed. I reached for the knife and cut a small uneven corner off of one side. Both my wife and my friend’s wife instinctively reached for the knife to straighten out the coffee cake once again. Both looked mildly vexed at my action, as if the universe had slipped out of alignment until they applied the fix.

———

Women believe in rules. Men not so much. I see a sign that says “Not a Thru Street” and I read “You can get through on this street.” I see a sign that says “Entrance to Lake Shore Drive Prohibited” and I read “Prohibited, yes, but possible.” The highway overpass sign says “Time to 95th Street 16 minutes” and I say to myself “I can beat that time”.  Women don’t believe any of that stuff.

———

No woman has ever liked The Three Stooges. I’m not sure why.

———

Women need to vent without you fixing it. Hardest lesson for guys to learn. We always have the quick fix at our fingertips and are only too happy to trivialize her pain. It never works and it took me years to learn to listen, maybe ask a question, listen some more and wait for her to finish venting.

——–

Women need shoes. As many shoes as possible and in every color. Get over it.

——–

Women own the house rules. It’s not your nest; you are only allowed to eat and sleep there. If you fill the dishwasher, she will refill it. If you exceed your laundry expertise (my personal limit is bath towels), you will invite her displeasure. Use the little towels in the bathroom? See what happens.

——–

Women don’t like you “man-splaining” things. ”Hey, babe, you’re doing it wrong. The way this works is….. “

——–

Women can see a spot or stain on clothing from deep space. They have a personal relationship with their clothing you will never get. They don’t like it when their clothing gets messed up and it would be best if you weren’t the cause.

———

Ruth Bader Ginsberg might have been one of the most important women in America. She most certainly was the most admired.

———

Women can be in combat. Ever see a woman when her child is endangered or insulted? Delta Force and the Navy Seals on their best day couldn’t be more ferocious.

———

Women are better at confrontation. And they know what wimps we are. Take a male manager who needs to address an inappropriately dressed female office worker. It will never happen. He’ll either delegate it to another woman or hope it goes away somehow.

———

Women invented something for themselves to take the place of the neighborhood tavern where the guys hang out. Only they call them book clubs.

———

Women who can fall asleep while you drive the car are paying you a compliment. They are telling you that they feel safe with you.

———

Women process criticism differently than men. A respected basketball coach I know who has coached both men’s’ and women’s’ teams tells it like this: “I gather the team together during a losing streak and let them all know that some of the members of this team are not pulling their weight. The women think ‘He’s talking about me’. The men think ‘Yeah, and I know the guys he means.”

———

All women can be divided into two groups: ones who you can picture (or have witnessed) doing a belly laugh and ones you never could. Marry the first kind, if possible.

———

Women can be severely critical of other women, but some women seem to be liked by all other women for reasons I don’t get: Reese Witherspoon, Ellen DeGeneres, Carol Burnett, Meryl Streep, Sally Field, to name a few. Jackie Kennedy was First Lady at 31 years of age and everyone seemed to love her.

———

Margaret Thatcher was listed as number six in a list of twenty real men in the gag book “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche.”

———

Women need to see all men married. They believe, and there is some research to support this, that they are the only thing standing in the way of you becoming the Neanderthal you would evolve into without her influence. She will introduce you to culture to offset your passion for all things sporty, classical music to enhance the grunts you use in place of language, theater to add dimension to your two dimensional beer and sex-driven life plan. In short, to make you into a Renaissance Man whom she can proudly display to her fellow wives as something she has molded from clay. And not fine clay like a sculptor might use. More like Play-Doh left out in the rain. (OK, this one might be a little snarky, but it was fun to write).

——–

Daughters more than sons end up being the caregivers to their parents. I’ve seen it too many times to deny it.

——–

And finally, Richard Burton as King Arthur in the musical Camelot got it right. “The way to handle a woman is to love her, simply love her.”

Chicago Fire

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

The little 8 inch square red brick stone at my feet had etched into it the words:

“2nd Deputy Fire Marshal Paul H. Conners

October 8th, 1954”

The red brick stone was one of a few hundred in a seldom visited memorial to fallen Chicago firefighters and paramedics just south of McCormick Place, and really only accessible by bike or footpath along the lakefront. The stones are loosely arranged by date and the more recent names I remembered from newspaper accounts or in a few cases because I actually knew them once. Or they were part of my neighborhood or perhaps because members of my family had attended a benefit for their families.

But this stone touched something in my memory. A story my mother told me because my father, himself a firefighter, almost never told fire stories. At least not to his children. And he had been at some of the more famous blazes in Chicago history: the LaSalle Hotel fire, which claimed 61 lives, the Our Lady of Angels fire, which claimed 95 lives (92 of them children), and the Mickleberry Plant fire the same year he died, which claimed 4 firemen and injured scores more. That doesn’t even begin to include the countless fires that had no names, only addresses and memories that disturbed their sleep.

Actually, he did confide one to me, but it was more of an observation than a story. He had been driving the Chaplain, Msgr. William Gorman to a big apartment fire. The good monsignor, not a line officer, had no problems issuing orders to fireman on the scene, apparently, and he told my dad to check around the back of the building for signs of fire. The back of the four story building was a solid brick wall and my dad said he started down the alley, seeing no signs. He told me he had a bad feeling about it, a premonition perhaps, and he stopped and turned to quickly exit the alley on a dead run. The entire wall collapsed, a single brick near enough to knock his helmet off, smashing the bronze eagle that adorned the old leather helmets. I have that helmet, sans eagle, today.

This story, however, did not involve my dad, but his close friend Thomas ”Scotty” McNaughton. I met Scotty once a month, along with my brothers, when my dad drove us down to the old Fire Department Drill School, which stood where the Jane Byrne Interchange now stands. Scotty had been injured in a fire years before and had been given the duty of night watchman at the Drill School until he could take his pension. Scotty was also a barber on the side, and I suspect a better firefighter than a barber. He never asked you what kind of haircut you wanted because he only knew one kind. We sported chopped hairdos for quite a few years, but with eight kids, you cut your expenses where you can.

The old man would sing out something that sounded like ”Oat, Laddie” to let Scottie knew we were there. He was always glad to see us and he talked the whole time to my dad while he butchered our hair. I guess he appreciated the break in the watchman monotony.

——————–

The death of a high ranking fire official would be front page news today. The newspaper account of Chief Conners’ death, however, ran deep in the paper, on page 37 of the Tribune on October 9th, 1954. A single column with a photo, it ran next to ads for Elgin watches and some classified ads. He died heroically, at age 60, after being on the job for 36 years at a fire he didn’t even need to be at. He had heard the calls over the radio and directed his driver to take him there.

The fire on October 8th was at the Streamline Cafeteria, 3648 Roosevelt. The restaurant was closed in observance of a Jewish holiday, so the fire had hours to build inside unnoticed. On the fourth floor, Chief Conners felt the floor giving way. He yelled at the three nearby firemen to get away. One of them, Scotty McNaughton, then 37, of Engine 95 (also my dad’s engine, but not his day to work) told the reporters that “Conners yelled get out quick and then he disappeared.” Three fireman, including Scotty, clutched hoses and were later pulled to safety, though injured. They found the Chief’s body after three pumpers drained the water from the basement some four hours later. That was Scotty’s last day as a working fireman due to his injuries. According to my mother, Scotty followed the pipes in the basement to get to safety, something he had learned in the coal mines of Scotland.

The last time I saw Scotty was many years later when he was retired and working at Brookfield Zoo. He was carrying buckets of water for the elephants that day and I don’t think he knew me.

—————-

We stood, feeling awkward and a bit uncomfortable, in the Council Chambers of City Hall, as my son in law, Kevin Durkin, and another fireman/paramedic were given citations for bravery. They were returning from an ambulance run one night and saw an apartment building on fire. Bailing out of their rig, they banged on doors to awaken and alert the occupants, all of whom escaped. I believe a policeman on the scene wrote it up and they were decorated for saving so many lives.

We are not used to being in the public glare and standing in and among people you see on television can be disconcerting. We endured, however, had our pictures taken with Kevin, who considered the whole event needless and way over the top, the mayor, some alderman types and Fire Department brass. It was, looking back, a proud family moment. I couldn’t help but think of the family link of fire service going back all of those years.

————–

As I left the memorial on the lakefront, two thoughts occurred to me. The first was the sheer number of stones engraved with the names of the fallen; more than a hundred. The second was the number of blank stones still waiting to be etched. Each one will someday mark the loss of a man or woman sworn to protect us and I pray that those stones will be etched as slowly as possible. But I know someday they will all be filled and they will need to add more stones after that.

They take risks every day and do their jobs and, like my father or Scotty or Kevin, mostly keep the scary stuff to themselves, but they know the danger is out there. There is honor in all honest work, but somehow those little red stones speak to an honor of a higher order.

My Year Among the Savages

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

My Indian name was Running Horse. My son’s name was Straight Arrow. We were both members of the Blackhawk Tribe. My son being about ten years of age, someone had suggested that we join the local chapter of something called the Y Guides, a program loosely overseen by the YMCA. It was a father/son thing and we knew a few other families with boys that age and so I thought we would give it a go. Tommy got to pick our Indian names. I got mine because at the time I was jogging. Not sure where he came up with his, although considering he chose politics as his career, where one meets fewer straight arrows than some other career choices, it’s kind of ironic.

The overall “council” was composed of small tribes of about 10 boys and their dads scattered across the southwest Chicago area. Each little group was encouraged to meet once a month at a member’s home. There would be little projects we could work on, some snacks, a beer or two for dads, that sort of thing. There were no uniforms like in scouting, which made it easier.

The first meeting was in one of the dad’s basements in September. This particular dad liked to decorate his basement with posters featuring nude women with breasts that defied the laws of gravity, not to mention their proportion to the rest of their bodies. The boys got to the basement before the dads and it seemed to me they were being unusually quiet. What they were was transfixed by such magnificent displays of fictional female anatomy. We got them out of there over their grumbling and had a little talk with our knuckleheaded host, who insisted that boys had to figure this stuff out at some point. Not at ten years of age, we assured him.

Each meeting also featured a story by the tribe’s “sachem” or wise man. Ours was Pat Rohan, who never disappointed. Among our favorites was the touching story of a young Indian brave and his forbidden love for an Indian maiden; both swam to the middle of a lake to be together and drowned. Pat called the story “Lake Stupid.” It killed the ten year old crowd.

They held a Christmas party for the whole council, where each boy got a present from Santa, always the same item like a backpack or a flashlight. The gifts weren’t wrapped, but dumped out on a table and bulk issued to each tribe, with all of the Christmas magic of a military supply dump. The party resembled one of the rings of Dante’s Inferno, with about 120 little madmen screaming, running, shouting, and crying, as some of them told others the truth about Santa. And Santa himself looked pretty hammered, fake beard drooping and pillow augmented stomach lopsided.

And all the more experienced dads kept talking about the coming of the great spring pilgrimage to somewhere called Camp Pinewood.

———

Camp Pinewood is a YMCA camp facility just outside of Muskegon, Michigan. It was one of the longest three days of my life. We arrived by car, me, my son and another father and son combo after a four hour ride. It started out well enough. A lunch of hamburgers, then a sort of rally with camping songs and exhortations by the staff to “enjoy and be safe”. Off to our little cabins we went. When we got there, I noticed that the cabins windows were just square holes cut into the walls. No glass, no screens, just air. And we were about to find out that we were in the middle of mosquito central. There was no plumbing either, save for a communal toilet and shower point about 100 yards down a hill. Fun at 2 a.m.

But it was still daylight and the fun was beginning. You had your choice of swimming, sailing, archery, fishing, or the rifle range. My son wanted to try fishing, but on the first cast the reel flew off the rod and hit the water. No problem for dad, I waded in and retrieved it. That was when I discovered the leeches on my feet and legs. The lake was leech ridden, which may be why no one was swimming. Thanks for the heads up.

After de-leeching with help of a cigarette, we decided on archery. That was when I noticed that most of the dads were gone. I was to learn later that the main reason the dads looked forward to Pinewood so eagerly was that they could dump junior off at the camp and head into town for a three day bender. So when we got to the archery range, we discovered arrows flying in almost every direction. No staff, no dads, just heavily armed kids turning the range into the Little Big Horn. Unlike Custer, we beat a hasty retreat.

What staff were on hand manned the rifle range, which I guess was the greater of two evils. Here kids were popping away at targets with .22s and pellet guns. I gave them credit for at least getting all the ammo going in the same direction.

We got eaten alive each night by clouds of mosquitos, arose about 4 a.m.to the sounds of the returning dads, who were mostly trashed.

Finally, the finale. The last night featured a visit from the Great Chief himself. There was to be a giant bonfire, which the now sobering dads built all day into a 14 foot high pile of wood. From the top of the woodpile ran a wire which sloped downward from a nearby tree. On the wire, at the tree end, was an oversized wooden arrowhead on a pulley that would allow the arrowhead to be lit afire, then roll down the wire until it hit the woodpile. This was to be the coming of the Great Spirit.

Logs for seating were placed all around the woodpile and at about dusk we began gathering at the site, awaiting dark and the arrival of the Great Chief. We heard the distant drumbeats first, coming from the lake. Then the low chant, indistinguishable at first, but clearly men’s voices. As they came closer to shore, we could see a man standing upright in a canoe, arms crossing his bare chest, the canoe paddled by two others. He was clad in a full chieftain headdress, his Indian loin cloth straining under a most impressive beer gut. Two more canoes followed.

It was the Great Chief himself, actually a neighbor of mine who shall remain nameless in this story, and he and his natives were chanting away. Finally we could make out the words they were chanting: “I want a beer, I want a beer.”

Up the hill they came, the Great Chief scowling and holding his folded arms across his chest. The loin cloth was beginning to lose the battle with the beer gut and his underwear band was showing. Thank God for the underwear at least. And as he reached the center of the circle, someone lit the arrowhead and pushed it with a stick. Now flaming, it slowly headed toward the giant woodpile. And as the flaming Great Spirit reached the pile, the entire woodpile exploded into about forty or fifty burning logs, each one flying out from the center. Dad’s instinctively grabbed their sons and ran backwards as the burning logs landed in and among us. No one was hurt, somehow.

As it turns out, the crew building the log pile wanted to make sure of a good ignition and so were pouring kerosene on the wood pile most of the day. I guess as the beers went down they sort of lost count of how much fuel they added, because they got the kind of ignition one usually associates with a launch at Cape Canaveral.

We packed up for an early escape on Sunday morning, glad to be out of there. The other dad and I talked all the way home, shaking our heads in disbelief and marveling at the entire experience known as Camp Pinewood. We never returned to the group and my son turned to scouting, which was run by moms and run as a pretty tight ship.

————-

I don’t mean to disparage the many good works of the YMCA, which provides affordable housing, recreation opportunities nationwide (their ranch in Colorado must be seen to be believed) and fun camp experiences for thousands of kids each year. I guess if anything, my Y Guides experience was one where the best intentions, left without leadership, can go off in some pretty weird directions. Clearly the inmates were running the asylum.

Men do a lot of things well when it comes to forming young lives. I have always been impressed by the many good volunteer coaches in all sports who dedicate countless hours to teaching their game. I have known scoutmasters who dedicate whole vacations to scouting. But when a void in leadership occurs, when we all hesitate to raise our hands and take on the job, invariably the wrong guys will fill that void and take us places we never thought we would go. Chaos follows in their footsteps.

You can draw all the comparisons you like on this one.

 

The Best of Old Men

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

“How I long for to muse on the days of my boyhood

Though four score and three years have fled by since then

Still it gives sweet reflections, as every young joy should

That merry-hearted boys make the best of old men”

-from the Bard of Armagh, as recorded by the Clancy Brothers.

The three small boys awakened on one of the best days of the year for small boys, and that would be in the woods of northern Wisconsin, where their little family shared a summer home with the rest of their dad’s family. For most boys, as it was for me in my youth, there are too many days in the year where school duties run the house. Too many days of obligation, of homework and tests and a hundred kinds of anxiety. The cottage days, like Christmas morning, were important and wonderful days. Days that tasted like freedom. Days filled with swimming and fishing and boating and campfires. Little boys are made for such days.

That morning, like most cottage mornings, they would awaken to the sounds of water lapping at the shore, of birds singing, and they would be drawn to the water. When you live in a city, awakening to a lake carries its own magic appeal and something in you urges you to get closer to the water, to be part of the lake, to see little minnows, hear the croak of a frog, catch the jump of a gamefish, and take in the sun dancing off the surface. But that morning would contain an added surprise.

For there on the shore was a lone bottle and inside the bottle some sort of note. Excitedly they extracted the note, only to find it wasn’t a note at all, but a map, the edges burnt and ragged. The map indicated an island and on the island the location of a buried treasure. An adventure was afoot! They got their dad and showed him the map. He thought it might be the island in the lake right in front of them and agreed that they should set sail in the family pontoon boat at once and see it they could find this mysterious treasure. Probably left by pirates.

Fairly bouncing with excitement, they boarded, while their dad fired up the engine, docking at the nearby island a few minutes later. Following the map, they soon came upon some white stones which formed an arrowhead and pointed to a spot on the map where buried treasure lay. Digging away as fast as excitement would allow, they soon unearthed the treasure chest. And inside was an incredible trove: fake gold coins, gaudy costume jewelry, play money, eye patches, bandanas, some toy pistols. A true haul of wealth for the imagination of little boys who at that point had bought in 200% to the adventure.

Of course, it was their dad, my son-in-law Luke McKee, who cooked it all up the night before, not even telling his wife. He was recreating the magic someone had created for him as a small boy, I guess. And here’s the beautiful thing about this: you get one chance and one chance only to get this magic right. They wouldn’t fall for it a second time, or if they were older and more cynical. It was exactly the right magic at exactly the right locale and exactly the right ages and it was a memorable bit of parenting genius.

The “Treasure Hunters”, Luke, Tim, and Sean McKee

——————

Grandpa Hayes wasn’t really our grandfather, but we called him that. My family rented a cottage for many years from the Hayes family, and both families grew close. Grandpa Hayes was a retired master pressman, once called all over the world to fix newspaper presses. I only knew him in his last years, but he fascinated me and my brothers with his tales, practical jokes, and outright whoppers.

He had us convinced that old Daniel Boone had somehow made it to Sister Lakes, Michigan, and showed us the tree in which were carved the words: “Dan’l Boone kilt a bar here.” We bought into it. He told my brother Gil that a large flat rock he had found was, in fact, an unfinished tomahawk that some wild Indian didn’t get around to finishing. Gil hung onto that rock for years. He had a hundred stories.

He was an inventor of sorts. When we needed worms for fishing bait, he had developed this device that featured a metal probe at one end and a t-shaped wooden handle at the other. You plugged it into the wall socket, shoved the probe into the ground and the night crawlers came zooming out of the ground to get away from the current. It was as fascinating as it was dangerous. He nailed the heads of large bass caught by his son or grandson to a tree, creating this ghoulish monument which we treated as if it were a sort of holy shrine. If you can recall the famous “Injun Summer” cartoon from the Tribune that they run every year in the fall (or don’t run, depending on the political correctness climate), that old man in the cartoon would be Grandpa Hayes.

—————

The merriest of all dads is a fellow named Pat Rohan. He is in his 60’s now, and shows absolutely no sign that he intends to grow up, God bless him. Pat is my friend and former neighbor on the south side of Chicago, and he moves through life as if it were some sort of amateur hour contest in which the guy with the zaniest idea wins. He is a true local legend, especially on Spaulding Avenue, where he once re-created an Irish Pub, complete with faux-thatched roof, for a block party. One year, with the rest of us obsessing about weed control and good sod, he dug up his entire back yard to create a miniature moto-cross range for radio controlled model cars. His garage will never fit a car inside, but is filled with pieces and parts for a lifetime of outlandish projects yet to come.

Pat doesn’t have a lot of formal education, but I have seen first-hand that he is a conceptual genius. He has the ability to look at a broken device, a construction project, or fabrication need of any sort and see the solution. Once in the early days of my business we were trying to build out a call center, and we needed to find a way to bring voice and data wires down from the ceiling in twelve different locations in a large empty room. Logistical and engineering genius that I am, my solution called for lots of expensive custom wire molding  and looked to cost about $20,000, which we didn’t have. Pat looked at it for about 2 minutes and came up with the solution on the spot. Run plumbing PVC pipes down from the ceiling, hide the wires inside and paint it to match the décor. The solution ran less than $250 and looked great.

Most of us don’t think of heating our home as a hobby, but Pat loved it. One year he had married the gas fired furnace with a wood burning Franklin stove. When the wood gave out the furnace kicked in and the damn thing actually worked, although a strong wind could push wood smoke down the stack and into the kitchen. But he liked the wood smoke smell, so it was a winner.

He and one of his brothers added a second story, complete with diving board, to a pontoon boat in Michigan, but I don’t recall that working out quite as well. He once invented a way to modify my little 5 horsepower fishing motor to accept fuel from an outside fuel tank, using, of all things, a condom. It worked well. He has built theater sets that could rival professional works.

His high holy days are Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day. His costumes take him weeks to fashion, look as uncomfortable as all hell, and he could care less, as long as it gets a laugh. His kids and grandkids worship him for his always unpredictable projects and his unconditional affection for all of them.

Pat with his grandkids

 

There is a world of good dads and granddads out there, each fathering in his own way; I believe there are far more good ones than bad ones. But the really great dads and granddads seem to have the ability to think like a child, to generate delight, to play to imagination and whimsy and to take the time to be silly. That’s where the art of fatherhood moves into the neighborhood of genius.

May we all strive to become the best of old men.

 

Not my Best Moments

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

Yes, I can be like Homer Simpson. Sometimes all of us can.

We can all think, say, and do some pretty dumb things in our lives; make bad decisions, suffer from gullibility, open our mouths at the wrong time, and all that. Kind of like those suddenly lonely Trump voters I know who’d really rather we didn’t bring it up again, if you don’t mind. OK, I feel for you. You’re not bad people, you just make bad voting decisions.

So in the spirit of the eye-popping stupidity that currently defines our Commander in Chief, I’d like to share three of my better “faux pas” moments. If nothing else, it will serve to illustrate that we all have our moments we’d rather forget. It’s just that I would never presume to run for public office based on the following true incidents.

————–

It was a sunny fall Monday on a secondary road between Omaha, Nebraska and Sioux City, Iowa. I had a business in North Sioux City, South Dakota, just the other side of the Big Sioux River from Iowa. I love secondary roads and, time permitting, will take them over highways any day. Secondary roads show you the true beauty of America; highways show you only cold, uncaring concrete.

The 90 mile drive north between Omaha and Sioux City was very pleasant that day. The corn was being harvested, the trees turning golden, and the waves of brown grass on the low hills where buffalo were being raised were gently rolling in the breeze. It was about ten o’clock on that Monday morning when I saw the three school kids walking on the side of the road about a mile ahead of me. Funny, I thought, why aren’t they in school this time of day? These God-fearing Cornhuskers are pretty serious about their childrens’ education.

As I closed the distance on them I could see they had no school books or any other baggage. Odd. And one other thing, why were their heads so small and their butts so big? Members of the same family with similar physiques? These kids needed some exercise.

As I got within about a city block of the three kids, they must have heard my engine sounds, because, as one, they lifted their arms, began to rise from the road and to slowly fly off into the low corn off the side of the road. Yes, they were three adult wild turkeys, who scooted off the road as I came near. Wild turkeys like to walk the road when the traffic calms in Nebraska. Doh.

Not Schoolkids

————————

It was a lovely May morning in Manhattan. The Big Apple can be at its best in May and it is one of the world’s great walking cities. My wife and I were staying in a little hotel off Central Park on 62nd and Central Park East, if you know Manhattan. If was a four day holiday and we had plans to walk all the way down to about 28th to visit a friend who now worked there. Nice day, nice walk.

I got this great romantic notion. I would surprise my bride of some 43 years with a visit to the one New York location every woman who has ever watched “Sleepless in Seattle” gets all teary-eyed about. Yep, the top of the Empire State Building. Got to keep the magic going somehow.

So we walked and walked, taking it all in. New York, especially Manhattan, is a continuous feast for the eyes and it bustles with an energy that even Chicagoans can feel is taking them to the next level. I kept my eye on the top of the Empire State Building to make sure we didn’t veer too far east of west as we closed on this great surprise. Block by block, we were gaining on the objective. At last we were abreast of it. So I casually said “Let’s check out the lobby” and she went along with my whim. This is going to be a great little surprise, I thought. She’s going to love this.

A uniformed man behind a desk noticed us, and asked in a pronounced New York accent if he could help us. “Sure,” I said. “Can you tell me where the elevator to the observation desk is?” He looked at me as one might look at a confused child or someone with mental deficiencies. “This is the Chrysler Building, Sir.”

In the blink of an eye I turned from a savvy, sophisticated big city dweller into a small town goober. I might as well have been dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, sandals with sweat socks, and a camera slung around my neck, along with my conference or trade show credentials showing, so that every pickpocket in town could spot me. I sheepishly thanked him and we slunk out of the lobby. I could almost feel him slowly shaking his head at the sad misguided tourists.

Over wine later, I told Maureen of my original romantic notion. She smiled and patted my hand, as if she knew my intention all along and didn’t have the heart to tell me; she has long recognized my ability to be an occasional dolt, but she appreciated the gesture. Doh.

Not the Empire State Building

————–

I saved the best and the worst for last. In the mid 80’s I was building my business and I made a lot of sales calls. On this particular fall day I was headed in my car to a mid-afternoon meeting in Glenview, a meeting in which I hoped to come away with an order. This was the era of Palm Pilots, not cell phones, if you are old enough to recall that device that once seemed so magical and now seems as primitive as a flintlock musket. I was performing a sort of early texting with the office and my mind was focused on the upcoming conversation with the potential customer.

I didn’t have time for lunch, unless I could grab something quick, and as I headed up River Road, sure enough the Golden Arches appeared in Des Plaines, Illinois. Still pre-occupied, I swung into the lot and found a space between two vintage 60s muscle cars. “Must be one of those road rallies,” I thought to myself. You know, those rallies at drive-ins like Duke’s on south Harlem or SuperDawg on North Milwaukee.

Still studying my Palm Pilot messages, I barely noticed that this McDonalds was set up like an old one, where you stood in line outside. So I took my place in line, about five back from the counter. I could hear laughter, soft at first, then growing in intensity and then some muffled cat-calling from across the street. I looked up and saw that I was standing in a line of mannequins. The one in front of me was a dummy in a brown suit, and in front of him a plaster women dressed like June Cleaver.

The laughter and cat-calling was coming from the real McDonalds on the other side of River Road. I was dummy #6 in the very first McDonalds store, which is now a museum. God, how they were enjoying this. I did a quick right face, got back in my car and roared north, my face, I am sure, a bright red. No way was I going to stop across the street now. Big Doh.

————-

Yes, there have been a few times in my life where I have been intuitive, smart, perhaps even brilliant. Problem is you can’t tell those stories without sounding like a pathetic braggart. Kind of like the Don ….nah, we won’t go there again. So if it’s true that confession is good for the soul, these three little stories probably mean my soul is good for another 100,000 miles. And I might not be done.

Not a McDonalds store

 

“My first husband bombed Osaka,” and other stories of the late, great Rita Wogan

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

The young Japanese girl was living in my sister Terese’s home in the beautiful Partry Mountains in the west of Ireland. She had been sent there to learn English, although the notion of sending the Japanese to Ireland to learn English always struck me as kind of curious. The Irish have put their own twist on the language centuries ago and it’s not mainstream Oxford English or American English, but its own wonderful concoction of unique phrases, words turned upside down, and meanings that are very different to the Irish than they might be to the rest of the English speaking world. Case in point: my mother (she spent several months each year visiting her daughters and grandkids in Ireland) often used the word “fanny” as in “Child, you better start behaving or I’ll paddle your fanny.” However, “fanny” in Ireland translates into the word “vagina”; my nieces had to work up the courage to tell their grandmother that she was talking like a porn star. Another example: my Irish brother-in-law Jim refers to a nursing home as a “home for the bewildered.”  Try that one stateside.

My sister had taken in several Japanese students over the years, allowing them to pick up some of the local culture along with their adopted tongue. This particular girl, perhaps because she was terrified to be in a new country by herself, or overwhelmed by the activity levels in a house filled with six kids, or just being simply a timid soul, had barely uttered a word since her arrival. My mother, Rita Wogan, among the most verbal of people, set out to remedy that situation. She began to query the timid girl, trying to pry out of her a name, which she did, and her age, which she also got. My mother pressed on, asking here what part of Japan she was from. The girl shyly blurted out that she was from Osaka, Japan’s second largest city. Delighted that they finally had something in common, my mother exclaimed, “Osaka, why my first husband bombed Osaka!” Which in point of fact was true back in 1945, but I have tried without success for many years to think up a comeback for that line.

—————–

My mother gave my wife and me the gift of her time when we were both just starting to travel a bit. We would take four day jaunts to various cities once a year or so and she would stay with the kids. They loved her visits, which were filled with stories, lots of baked goods and some pretty goods meals. The meals, just like our lunches at home on a school day, were often accompanied by lectures. Topics varied from the depression, the war, the holocaust (her personal favorite), to issues of morality. On one such visit, my two daughters, then in their teen years, got an earful of her views on the problems with modern relationships. The problem, she stated was the “C” word, of which there was not enough of, apparently.

My daughters were understandably confused, so Eileen ventured a guess as to what she meant by the “C” word. She guessed “condoms”. My mother was horrified and sputtered “Commitment! Commitment!” “How did you girls ever hear about condoms?”

Mom had just learned what the prosecuting lawyers in the O.J. trial had learned the hard way. Don’t ask any question to which you don’t already know the answer.

—————-

My friend Christine Clancy once confided that when she first met me, she thought that there were twenty or more children in my family. A logical mistake, given Rita Wogan’s penchant for giving most of the kids in the Wogan family a nonsense name, or two names, or three. I won’t embarrass them by repeating them here; they have had to suffer with those names all their lives. We often still call each other by those names.

But Minnie, Poodie, Tassi, Soona, the late Binky, and Finn-man, you know who you are. As Herman Melville said in the last line of Moby Dick, “I alone escaped to tell thee.” Oh, and my sister Maureen escaped without a nonsense name, too.

—————

Put the word “teat” in front of twelve year boy and you’re off to the races. During another of my mother’s kid-watching visits while we travelled, she told the kids how she helped a lamb on one of my sisters’ farms in Ireland. Lambs tended to come into the world all around the same time, I guess, and mom loved “lambing season.” One of the adult lambs had a cracked and sore nipple, so she told the kids how she saved the day with her Mary Kaye moisturizer. She sold Mary Kaye products for years, and she honestly believed they had a product that would solve any problem from acne to insomnia.

What she told the kids, with my then 12 year old son in attendance, was that she restored the lamb’s ailing spigot by applying Mary Kaye’s cream to the lamb’s teat. My son lost it in a fit of laughter, which is about what any 12 year old boy would do. My mother, somewhat indignantly, asked him, “Well, what you have me call it?” He lost it all the more.

—————-

She once enlisted the aid of my Uncle Jimmy and some poor nun in stealing a plaque from the chapel in the old Resurrection parish. The bronze plaque, which hung at the back of the Memorial Chapel in the basement of the “Old School”, contained the names of parishioners lost in WW II. Her first husband’s name was on that grim, heroic list. When she heard that the school building was about to be razed, she made a visit to the chapel. Resurrection Parish in that year was (and still is) a lot like a war zone, but that didn’t stop her. She brought her brother Jimmy, a retired copper, for firepower.

She located the plaque, now gathering dust on the floor, and asked the pastor if she might have it. He declined, probably thinking she was a bit off to be hanging about in this neighborhood to begin with. So naturally, she enlisted some poor nun who was formerly at the school and the three of them returned and walked in and calmly loaded the plaque into Jimmy’s massive Mercury Marquis trunk. Mercury Marquis, by the way, are the preferred weapons of choice for senior drivers.

She needed to find it a new home, and learned of a Chicago Firefighters museum that was being planned. So her logic went like this: Resurrection was the parish whose pastor was also the Fire Dept. Chaplain, Msgr. William Gorman. My dad was one of his drivers. So therefore, the Firefighters Museum would want this plaque. When I explained to her that the names on the plaque included dead soldiers and not dead fireman, she was unmoved. The firefighter museum guys were equally confused by this circular logic.

She eventually gave it to the Irish American Heritage Center where it supposedly sits with the other archives from a long ago West Side. She could be stubborn.

——————–

My siblings and their children each have their “Mom” or “Grandma”stories, which we share every time we’re together. She remains a happy point of light in all of our lives, especially looking back. Her many kindnesses, her ability to drive you nuts with her projects, her admonitions to “get over your pity party” to complainers and those feeling sorry for themselves, and her joyous approach to life has marked us all. We all miss our moms, I guess, but they have a way of living on in their stories and those stories take some of the sadness away from their departure. She still makes us smile.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the Moms.

 

Sisters

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

“A soldier of the legion lay dying in Algiers,

There was lack of woman’s nursing, there was a dearth of woman’s tears”

-from the poem “BINGEN ON THE RHINE” By Caroline E. Norton (1808 – 1877)

 

We stood at attention in our platoon formations, four or five abreast, ten ranks deep, all in uniform, on a crisp September morning. Our platoon leader stood in front of our formation, back to us. Other platoons were all around us, same uniforms, with their platoon leaders in front of them. We all faced toward the center of the large asphalt covered yard, toward the empty flagpole. In spite of the great numbers assembled, more than a thousand, it was utterly quiet. You could hear birdsong from the nearby park. Shortly, two drummers and two buglers and a lone uniformed young man came into view. The small detachment marched to the military tattoo being rhythmically played out by the drummers. When they reached the flagpole they stopped marching and drumming. The young man took an American flag from under his arm, unfolded it enough to fix the grommets on the flag onto the catches on the rope.

The buglers began to play and the drummers started a slow roll of backdrop as the flag slowly began to rise to its position at the top. The music stopped. We raised our right hands over our hearts and, all as one, recited the Pledge of Allegiance. When we finished, the platoon leaders led us, formation by formation, into the nearby buildings. Once inside, we could hear John Phillip Sousa’s Washington Post March blaring over the loudspeakers as we marched to our assigned positions.

No, I was not in the Army, at least not yet. I was seven years old and beginning my first day of first grade at Resurrection School on Chicago’s west side.

It seemed a bizarre, scary place to this scared first grader. I came from a big family, but they were all in other grades. I was on my own. It didn’t seem at all like kindergarten I attended the year before at nearby Robert Emmett Public School; that school was only a few hours a day, and offered naps and treats and games and playtime. Not at all like today’s kindergarten programs, which feature foreign languages and in which you may be required to defend your dissertation. This was loud, and crowded and scary, with kids of all ages.

My platoon leader/ classroom teacher was Sister Mary Owen, RSM. She was young and pretty; at least I thought she must have been if you could see past the habit she wore. It showed only her face and hands, that pretty face encased in a framed white starched cardboard headpiece. Her dress was black and she wore a starched white breastplate and wore a large black rosary as both a belt and a sort of accessory running down one side. She wore a black veil over her head. This was the official outfit of a Religious Sister of Mercy. There were other flavors of nuns, I would learn, and they had their distinctive outfits, also. Sisters of Providence, Franciscans, Little Sisters of the Poor, and the Sinsinawa Dominicans, who I always thought sounded like a ball club.

We were about fifty kids to a room (we had a class photo every year, and the proof of those numbers is there), the products of the post war baby boom, when millions of G.I.’s, sailors, and airmen came back with pretty much one idea in mind. And millions of lonely women thought it was a pretty good idea, too. Procreation was practically the national pastime in the late 1940’s and early to mid-50’s and it filled classrooms quickly.

Our uniforms were tan shirts and maroon ties for boys, tan blouses and maroon plaid jumpers for the girls. The girls’ jumpers also carried a patch with the Resurrection logo on it. If you were number one or two in the family birth order, you probably wore new shirts, or blouses and jumpers. Come later to the party and you were probably wearing hand-me-downs from an older sibling or a neighbor. Kids mostly carried their books in book bags or by hand, backpacks being reserved at that time for mountain men, soldiers, and Sherpa guides. When the Chicago weather arrived, you hung your coat in the “cloak room” which ran alongside the classroom and, as I recall, where discipline was sometimes distributed to children whose behavior was unacceptable.

———————-

It seemed to this boy that I had entered into a world run by women, which I believe could be said of most elementary schools. The principal and almost all of the teachers were nuns. The few lay teachers were women. And in such a world those things that are important to most women come to define the rules of the day. Things like order. Things like having a plan and then processing in an orderly fashion. Things like discipline. Things like kindness.

I was scared that first day. So many strange faces, and when Sister Owen called the role, asking each student in turn to raise their hand and speak their name, I could only raise my hand, too scared to speak. She let me off the hook and we set about the business of learning our ABCs, mostly reciting after her.

At some point, my nervousness got the better of me and I had an accident, and not the kind any kid wants to have. Sister Owen was quick to spot it. She swooped me up and carried me to the restroom, then known as the lavatory,  dismissing two older boys with a glare, who knew better than to mess with “Sister“. Like a mother caring for her own child, this young woman cleaned me off, asked me if I was OK, soaked my soiled undies and wrapped them in cellophane (who the hell carries cellophane?) and brought me by hand back to the classroom. I was somewhere between mortified and grateful. I’m not sure the other kids even noticed.

At the end of that first day, she handed me a note for my mother, explaining my little accident and telling me to have a better day tomorrow. I joined the orderly procession out the door, feeling utterly miserable and alone. And that is when I saw my oldest sister Maureen at the top of the stairway. She had on her plaid jumper, her black hair in curls and was talking to the girl next to her. My sister was a “good eighth grade girl” as the nuns would say. “Good eighth grade girls” could be depended upon to perform any task from cleaning the blackboards to tutoring slower students, to probably running the whole school, if asked.

She turned her head and saw me at the bottom of the steps and broke into a wide, welcoming smile. It was the kind of Big Sister smile that says, “I see you. It’s going to be OK. I’ve got you.” And I knew then that I wasn’t alone and that there were people there who cared about me. I was going to be OK. She carries that same smile even today and she has always shared it freely with all who need it.

God bless all sisters, those who took vows to earn that title and those who were members of your family. We’re lucky to have had them.

The Flying Cowboy. First Responders to the Heart.

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

The Italian authorities were going from village to village in the valleys and gorges below the mountains along the Amalfi Coast. They were asking the same questions of everyone…did you see anyone fall from the mountains? Where did you see it? When? Finally after a few days a little boy in one of the villages told them he had seen a man in an American cowboy hat flying through the air one day recently.  There was no flying cowboy, of course, but what he had witnessed was how our new acquaintance Murray had met his death on a beautiful September day in 2007.

Until then, it might have been the best vacation we ever took. Five days in Rome with our more seasoned travelling friends, Dennis and JoAnn, acting as our tour guides. We saw the soaring architecture of the Vatican and several dead popes lying around in their glass caskets, the Coliseum, the Sistine, the Palatine Hill, the Tivoli Gardens, Trevi Fountain and those great open piazzas that seem to show up every few blocks. And everywhere the warm, friendly and incredibly hospitable people of that good country. There was no part of Rome that seemed dangerous and no restaurant that wasn’t delicious and memorable. We walked and walked.

The second part of our trip was further south, past Naples, in the region of the Amalfi Coast. It was a hiking tour and we were tagging along with part of a much larger group of American Airlines employees who had arranged all of this. After an endless train ride with about thirty stops, our group met in a decent little hotel in San Angelo and met our hiking guides. They were English, mostly retired engineers, and were in great shape for this work. Each day offered a different hike and you could assign yourself to easy, medium, or hard trails. Being a guy, I assumed we would try medium, but that only lasted a day. With tongues hanging out, we reassigned ourselves to easy, which wasn’t really all that easy, but we had been training for months in the mountains of Chicago, which of course don’t exist.

We walked up the side of Mt. Vesuvius, down into the lava covered ruins of Herculaneum (also buried along with Pompeii, but less famous) and along an old mountain trade route for mules high over the Mediterranean known as the Walk of the Gods. We walked down the sixty or so stories of the vertical cliff-side town of Positano and had wine and cheese and olives on the beach, only to learn that the single way back up was the way we came down. We slept pretty well those nights.

One of our group was a tall thin attorney from Toronto named Murray. He and his wife Sonia had been on many such hiking trips, but she confided quickly that these trips were all about Murray and his passion for hiking. He was in good shape, always taking the “hard” route and each day wearing his official olive drab hiking pants, shirt and hat, which in the military would have been known as a “boonie hat”, but had sort of the shape of a cowboy hat. Each night he would wash his sweat soaked outfit in the bathroom sink and hang it out to dry for tomorrow’s adventure. He took his hiking and I guess his life pretty seriously.

Like us, Murray and Sonia were not part of the American Airlines s group to which our friends Dennis and JoAnn belonged. Dining seating was your choice and, as groups will do, they tended to gather with fellow employees to share the dinner table. A loose dinner confederation formed consisting of my wife Maureen and I, Murray and Sonia, a very eccentric but hysterically funny octogenarian woman from the Isle of Guernsey, a retired British Air Force mechanic, and a few others.

Over dinner and a few other times, Murray shared with us that he was not happy with the degree of difficulty of our hikes thus far. He had been on many hikes and this one was not pushing him. It was sure pushing the rest of us, but we listened politely. And so it was on Wednesday that we got the day to ourselves. You could go sightseeing, shopping, or, if you were Murray, seek out that more challenging hike. The guides were against him going alone and tried to talk him out of it, but he had already picked the place and made it clear to them that he intended to go. They made him show the location on a map the night before and warned him that their insurance would not cover any misadventure like this. He was the soul of confidence at dinner that night, his last on earth, and seemed pleased that he would at last be on his own, free of less able hikers and guides.

We spent the day in Sorrento shopping, grateful for the break in the activity. At dinnertime back in the hotel Murray had not returned and Sonia wasn’t worried; she was sure he got held up somehow. Cellphones didn’t work too well internationally in 2007, by the way. By 8 p.m. she was nervous, but still sure it was just a delay of sorts. It had happened once or twice before, she said. By nightfall, about 9 pm. in that region, she was clearly worried. Maureen sat with her in the lobby of the hotel while I made pointless trips to the street every 30 minutes or so to spot him if he should come by. I didn’t know what else to do. Eventually, Maureen told me to get some sleep and that she would be up later, but I awoke alone the next morning. Maureen had sat with her all night, the realization dawning more clearly by the hour that something was wrong. Very wrong.

By morning the tour guides were on the phone to headquarters in the U.K., police were in the lobby and the search was on. The hotel management gave Sonia a private sitting room off the lobby and she asked Maureen if she would sit with her. And sit she did, holding Sonia’s hand much of the time. The rest of the group went on a final hike and, upon returning and learning that Murray was still missing, did what people so commonly do when a near certain tragedy is about to befall someone. They distanced themselves from Sonia and the room in which she and Maureen sat. They weren’t comfortable, and to be honest I couldn’t blame them. It can be hard to know the right thing to say, if indeed there even is a right thing to be said.

Maureen sat with Sonia until on Friday we had to leave for Rome and a flight home; we had a big family wedding on Saturday. She made sure Sonia finally made the inevitable phone calls to Canada that made it official. Murray was missing and they needed to come to Italy. His brother arrived the next day.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that Maureen found an online newspaper article written in Italian, but it contained the words Toronto, Murray and the Italian word “morte”. We learned from a letter from Sonia a few months afterward what had transpired.  His body had been located after an extensive search by over 500 local police in a remote valley after a child told his story of the flying cowboy. He had changed his mind about where to hike and they thought he might have climbed above the cloud line where the rock is wet and lost his footing, falling more than 200 meters to his fate.

———————–

A few times in our lives we have learned that close friends have suffered the sudden loss of an adult son or daughter. There may be no greater shock and sadness for a parent to absorb. Like in the Amalfi Coast, Maureen has known exactly where to be and what to do. She insisted we go right now to their homes to be with them. There was no argument to be had, her resolve was that strong and that clear.  Every instinct in my body told me not to do this. We’re intruding. We’re not their closest friends. Their family will resent us.  It’s somehow not the right thing to do.

And she was right each time. It was exactly the best thing to do. Our friends were bleeding and we needed to be there not to stop the bleeding, but to bleed with them. Their bleeding would slow, and eventually stop, but that is the function of time passing. And even time can’t remove the scar that would form and always be there. But when the tragedy first strikes and your friends are at their most vulnerable, the shocked and brokenhearted need their friends closer, not further way.

We honor first responders, the police officers, firefighters, paramedics, nurses, and soldiers who run toward danger while the rest of us run the other way or at least move aside. But there are other, less recognized first responders like Maureen. I think of her and those precious few who share this remarkable quality as first responders to the heart.

I have a hundred reasons for loving my wife, and maybe another hundred more for admiring her, but this is where her light shines most brightly. I don’t have the instinct and I surely don’t have the skill set to offer much comfort at those times, but I am lucky enough to be married to someone who does.