At Walker’s Restaurant

We’re still here, at Walker’s Restaurant.

Oh, the building is gone. As are most of our neighbors. Tucked back across Irving Park Road, you’ll find traces of the Selig Polyscope Corporation—a 200-acre movie studio and lot. Traces of the studio still remain…an archway. A building that once housed lights and stage props and costumes. A crumbling water tower that once loomed over the lots where Mister L. Frank Baum himself would tell the stories of his Wizard of Oz.

That’s when he wasn’t sharing the better parts of the Oz story at a hearty midday meal here with us. Or warming our dining room and tavern in the evenings, with further tales of Dorothy. Speaking while candlelight flickered on red-checked table cloths and winter winds swirled up snows, as darkness fell.

Quite a talker, that Mr. Baum.

Now, it’s a bit easier to find out about him than it is to find anything about Angela and I.

Someone made another movie about Mr. Baum’s Wizard, long after Mr. Selig and his Polyscope machine operation moved west to California. In the other Wizard movie, a young lady from Minnesota once known as Francis Gumm sang a song called Somewhere Over The Rainbow, and no one ever forgot the way she sang that song. So it’s a lot easier to find out about Judy Garland than it is our restaurant.

But you can still find Walkers Restaurant. Even though we’re in no books, no movies or song. You can still find Walkers Restaurant.

You might begin to find us in much the same way Mr. Baum would have us all find Oz. At the end of a meal, chairs pushed back from the tables, the room turning dark, only the sound of the story and the wind. Listen hard. Close your eyes. Concentrate. . . .

And here we are. You’ve found Walkers.

Here’s how you know: it’s because you can still smell the fresh oregano from Angela’s garden. Just a trace, but it’s there. It’s that moment just after the warm summer rain. Just afterwards, for a moment, you think it’s your imagination. But it gets stronger, first the oregano, then basil. Then comes the sun-blessed warmth of the tomatoes. Like life’s abundance itself can take this bursting red juicy form and you can hold it all, right in the palm of your hand.

You begin to see it as if you too were in the restaurant.

She would farm the tiny, green, smiling herbs like da Vinci would draw his preliminary sketches. She’d blend the tomatoes and the herbs into sauces that tasted as if warm rain and summer sun had wrapped a hand around the wooden stirring spoon. The pasta spread out rolled and cut every morning on her table in a white-floured haze. The sausage came from the Lincoln Avenue shops to the east of us. The leafy greens picked from gardens just outside our back door. And the bread? As if heaven was something fresh you could break a piece off of and made even better, as you reached for the creamery butter.

She started every day like da Vinci. She finished with a meal that was the Mona Lisa smile.

For years, before the restaurant, it was just the two of us.

We lived east of Mr. Selig’s Movie Studio. A tiny white house near the factories that lined the railroad chugging celery from our neighbors’ farms down to Chicago, six miles south.

Both Angela and I worked at the stately bank that anchored the corner of Lincoln and Grace. We were safe.

But with time the celery farms got smaller, the honkytonks along Clark Street got louder, and the money that began flowing into our corner of the world, the money started taking a narrower route. Working at the bank meant we could see it more clearly than most.

Chicago was bursting out in every direction. The land became more and more valuable. And those who owned the land, those few, began to get very wealthy. Oh, there were the factory owners. They made choir robes and trumpets and drum mallets here. And there was Dr. Abbott. His idea of making medicine into a tablet made him a tidy profit. There were some world-shakers.

But there was a 1% then, too – those who owned the houses past which the rivers of money flowed. We saw them at our church every Sunday. We were just the ones counting their money, the couple never blessed with children of our own; they were the ones seemingly blessed with it all, families and wealth, property and status.

As the years passed at the church, in the streets, in the bank, as the money and the people flowed in; that 1% with the money began to speak to us politely, but only when they had to.

The celery farms had shrunk and a city was rising. The newly rich banded together. Whether for protection, out of fear, or simply the natural course of things, there were those on the inside and those on the outside of a new circle of wealth.

We were on the outside. We weren’t poor. But we weren’t rich. What does one do with childless bankers?

Then came the anonymous hate letter from the member of the church. Left on our doorstep in darkness. Anonymous only till the next business day, as the author used her full real name. Not the name most knew her by. But the name on her bank account. Available to any banker.

The exact wording of the secret letter, not important. But the message was clear. You’re different. You don’t belong. Get out.

And it was that letter that led us to what would become our restaurant. Because the first thing that we did when we got the letter was go walking. We loved to walk Grace and Byron Streets, over by the movie studio. We saw the lot across Irving Park Road. We both knew it instantly. It was as if that land had a shaft of surprise sunlight all its own. Angela could cook like an angel. I could keep the front of the house. The workers from the movie studio and the quarry just down Western Road would come. It would be like a neighborhood for families of all shapes and sizes. No one would go hungry here.

We would call it Walkers. Everyone thought that was our name, but it wasn’t. We called in Walkers because that’s what we did whenever we had a few free moments.

Back then, there were no restaurants. There was the Buckthorn Tavern, west of us, on Elston Avenue. But the restaurant was different. It wasn’t just a stop along the way. It was a place to rest. To restore.

The beating heart of our place was the kitchen. Open to the dining room, our guests, our community, could see Angela dancing her way into making meals from her families ancient home on the rocky island of Sicily. Our guests, German and Irish, sharing food from a distant world as if the meal itself was a kind of grace. With ballet-like precision, she would present the food as if it were some kind of art, a framed restoration for a weary working soul.

And perhaps I made a few of our guests laugh. Told a story or two. Not like Mister Baum; but I sometimes held my own.

When the restaurant was full, when that smell of oregano would flower in the room and light the faces around each of our 24 tables, it felt holy.

When we filled the very souls of our friends on cold winter nights, those were times of true joy. When we could feed a hungry traveler, sometimes one who had no money, that was fine by us, too.

We stayed on for years after the movie studio went west and the quarry closed, replaced by a television station. Long past the time when the Lutheran Seminary on Clark Street was torn down and they put up a baseball park they eventually called Wrigley Field.

The restaurant stayed open even past our time, mine and Angela’s.

Somehow the ownership fell into the hands of a family that was prominent at that old church we had left to find our new one, our Walker’s Restaurant. I never understood how the ownership change really came about.

I was never very good with numbers. Perhaps that’s why we were never of the moneyed class. All I know is that lawyers were involved, the restaurant stayed open, but no one came to dine there anymore. It became a gray room with just a few light bulbs. A bare electric cord and a light bulb hung from an open wound in the ceiling. A tired old man sitting by himself behind a cash register, reading a newspaper. He’d look up when a stray person would enter, scowl, and the person would go looking for sustenance elsewhere.

I heard the words, from here between the cracks of time where Angela and I are walking now, I heard the words, “This is a business where everything goes through the back door, not the front.”

In time, the man and what had been our place was gone. There’s a Mobil Gas Station where our Walker’s once stood.

But Angela and I, we’re still here. Our story is told in the book of Isaiah. So I guess we found our church after all.

My people will live in a peaceful neighborhood
In safe houses, in quiet gardens.
The forest of your pride will be clear-cut,
The city showing off your power leveled.
You will enjoy a blessed life,
Planting well-watered fields and gardens

The restaurant was our garden.

If you’re hungry, if you’re in the neighborhood and wait for that singular moment just after the rain, you can catch just a trace of oregano on the wind.

You can follow Angela dancing across our kitchen.

And you can know we were here.

Her Foolish Heart

We have a dead body. This is not a whodunit. We know who done it. There’s a known offender and yet no charges.” Judge Michael P. Toomin. April 6, 2012.
The facts of the story are clear. And now, eight years after the punch was thrown and the boy went down on the street in front of the bar, hit his head on the curb and died, there is no argument about who threw that punch.

The relentless reporting on the story by Chris Fusco and Tim Novak of the Chicago Sun Times, the legal team and support from the Northwestern University MacArthur Justice Center have kept the facts clear. Kept the story front and center in the public eye.

And peaking out between every single line of fact is the glinting steel rhythm of Nanci Koschman’s foolish heart.

Nanci Koschman is the mother of the 21 year old man who was killed that night. She’s the one with the foolish heart.

Perhaps you know someone who has a foolish heart like she does. Foolish hearts are rare. But once you’ve seen one, you don’t forget. Because the foolish heart is marked by the absolute iron clad refusal to stop. In the face of odds that leave the word insurmountable in the dust. Against all notions of what’s fair or rational or moral or immoral or any label you want to slap on the situation. The foolish heart never quits. That beat never stops. That reverberation rings on forever. The smart money would give up. But the foolish heart keeps on.

Nanci Koschman needed that foolish heart. After her husband died in 1994, it was just she and David. She was not a wealthy woman. Like a lot of us, she worked a lot of jobs to get by.

Then came that April night in 2004. There was a confrontation. It’s still being debated who hit who first. But the much smaller Koschman went down, hit his head and died 11 days later as a result of the blow.

The other man in the fight left the scene. And in the initial records of the case was never identified.

That’s when what Judge Toomin called “lost file syndrome” kicked in. The judge also cited “procedural irregularities, the absence of recorded police activity, lapses, delays, failures of the identification process and false reports.”

In other words, the kind of massive chain of events unfolding exactly as they should NOT unfold that would wear down and stop so many of us.

But not Nanci Koschman and her foolish heart.

Now, eight years later, the previously unidentified man in the fight has been identified as R.J. Vanecko. The nephew of former Mayor Richard Daley.

So the speculation can of course come easy. The cries of power, and foul are of course even easier.

Mr. Vanecko has not been charged with anything. The only uncontested fact being that he did throw the punch.

So Nanci Koschman’s foolish heart keeps going. The story isn’t over yet.

But it took a gigantic turn in Nanci Koschman’s favor last Friday. The biggest single event since that heart of hers went into overdrive. Judge Toomin called for a Special Prosecutor. A request that had previously been blocked by States Attorney Anita Alverez.

Alverez did not contest the judge’s ruling. Now the case can be shepherded along outside the confines of a traditional justice system that by any known measure has failed.

Now the decision makers will be making room for Nanci Koschman too. Inviting her inside the tent where the golden rich piano chords sing out in shades of spring time hope, the music of a song just for her. A song they call—

My Foolish Heart.

After The Gun Shot

Trayvon Little brother strolls
North from shimmering sun kissed palms
To a new Jerusalem of icy prairie winds.
Anchored by a tower built tall
From the dusty bricks of time.

Trayvon Little brother strolls inside.
Starts to climb
Then stops fast.
His view
His window spilling out grand on to
A sweeping golden sunrise
Streaks of orange and fountains of sparkling lemon sky tomorrow.
This view out his window right now
Stops little brother fast.

He throws open the window
Steps out on a fire escape
Breathes in the cleansing icy air
So alive he can feel it in his feet.
Then slap.
Down slams the window shut.
Trayvon Little brother turns around
Inside he sees these laughing blue eyes
This blonde haired girl on the inside. Warmth like home.
She is playing.
Laughing
Pointing out through the glass saying
Gotcha.

Little brother puts his hands on his hips
Smiles at the blue-eyed girl
Like they both are hearing the very same song.

She throws open the window
He steps inside
Out of the wind
Warm and finally home.

And from the pulsing rhythm of that tower’s heart
Little brother hears the distant song
Of a man named Curtis Mayfield, singing out a call.

“When you wake up early in the morning
Feeling sad like so many do . . . . “

Then little brother looks at the blue eyed girl.
And she says to him,

“Follow me.”

Those Dirty People

On a warm, windy March afternoon, Keisha is wrestling an overstuffed laundry bag almost as big as she is down to the bus stop on Chicago Avenue. It’s Sunday. Reduced bus service. So she has a 15-20 minute wait. And Sunday is the only day free to make the ¾ mile trip west across the Chicago River, the giant printing plant and on to the nearest laundromat. So this is a regular trip for her. She’s smiling. She’s got music. Two babies at home, being looked after by a neighbor. Reason she can find someone to watch her kids is that there is still a little bit of the Cabrini Green community left. The row houses. They were the original Cabrini Green. Even before they started stacking people up in towers in the sky, they built the row houses. And Keisha knows she’s lucky to have one to call home. Waiting list for her was only three years. That’s nothing.

In fact, when the towers of Cabrini Green started to buckle under the tsunami like wave of money rolling in from the east and north to gobble up what could be very valuable land; and when that land grab met the realization that stacking human beings in cinderblock cages on top of each other might not be such a great idea; there was no real plan for answering the question, “Where will the people from the community go, when there is no more community?”

There was a “10 Year Transformation” plan—a maze of good intentions, developer plans, details capable of discussion long into the night, with a sprinkle of community input, all wrapped in the fog of bureaucratic indifference But if you were to say, “What’s the exact address of where this person from the 17th floor of Cabrini’s Red Zone will live?” You’d be hard pressed to get an answer.

Which is why Keisha considers herself lucky. She has a place.

Of course when the developers came in to rehab the original row houses, there were cost considerations. After all, this was public housing. So the developers had to set priorities. And one of the things they eliminated was hook-ups for laundry in the individual units. So the only reliable place to do laundry was a laundromat a bus ride away.

Seems that the sewer system couldn’t handle letting people have their own washers and dryers. That was the story.

But Keisha considered herself lucky. She was taking a full load of courses to be a medical tech downtown. She worked 30 hours a week at Potbelly sandwiches. She had her babies. And deep into the night she did schoolwork. So it wasn’t so bad. Weekly trip to the laundromat never hurt anyone. Gave her some exercise.

The Chicago Avenue bus pulls over. Keisha and her human sized laundry bag get on and take a seat near the front. The bus is crowded.

One stop later, the bus pulls over next to the giant 600 West Chicago building. Home of the internet sensation Groupon. Megan Pauly and Kristi Pierce, briefly glance up from their texting to stick their fare cards in the slot and take the only available seat, right behind Keisha.

Looking up again from their texting, the two young, almost interchangeable, blonde women slowly take in the fact that there is a giant laundry bag, containing a weeks worth of dirty clothes, on the seat in front of them. They look at the bag. One of them giggles. They both roll their eyes. And the other one says, “What. Ever.”

Keisha hears the giggle. Feels some sort of disturbance right behind her. Doesn’t know what it is. And she is too polite to turn around and stare. Much less say anything to the interchangeable women. So she starts to get that warm, tired feeling she gets sometimes. When her manager is yelling at the sandwich shop, then brushing way too close behind her on the line, or when it’s 1:00 am and she’s still got another hour of homework. Or when one of her babies starts coughing and there is nothing, nothing, nothing she can do except to hold her tight and pray. That feeling.

And she remembers an old song. Her own Mama used to sing it to her. There was a part where the song said;

“I had a feeling

I could be someone

Be someone

Be someone.”

What Drives Political Corruption?

Measuring public corruption is useful. But so is looking out your window. And if the Mayor of Chicago were to look out the window of his home at around 7:30 on any even given morning. Or perhaps walk one block west to Ravenswood Avenue. He’d see Cassie. She walks by my house too.

The connection between Cassie and the national measures of public corruption, released in a report this week by Professor Dick Simpson at the University of Illinois Chicago, would not be immediately obvious. The talking point would not jump out. Most of us would shake our heads. Focus on the numbers. Not look out our window and see Cassie walking by.

A former Alderman, Professor Simpson measured the corruption conviction rate of politicians across the country. Between 1976 and 2010, Chicago clocked in at 1,531. To not one single Chicagoan’s surprise: We won! Most corrupt place ever! Woo!

Then a city shrugs its shoulders and wonders what’s on TV tonight.

What could this study possibly have to do with the woman in the dirty brown down coat with the tattered shoes, pulling the shopping cart behind her like some ancient boulder of shame? How could political corruption possibly touch or relate to the woman who never lifts her eyes from the street? Her head always hooded through both bitter cold winds or sweltering blankets of wet heat. Sure, she walks past the Mayors house or a parallel street every day. In the mornings she walks north. At night she goes south. Where she goes, sleeps, or eats, I don’t know. I don’t even know her name. That’s why I call her Cassie. Because doesn’t everyone at least deserve a name?

She shuffles past the Mayor’s house. Her back bent as if she is part of the street itself. The waves of sadness reverberating out like someone just banged a weeping gong.

But measures of corruption? The connection isn’t clear yet. The Simpson study didn’t measure all those who did not get caught. Or break down the numbers to the type of corruption. But that is not a criticism. It’s a call for more study. Because isn’t measuring corruption a bit like approaching an elephant with a tape measure, stretching out the tape as far as your hands can reach, putting your hands on the side of the elephant, and then reading the length of your reach?

And once you’ve recorded how far your arms can stretch, what’s next? Could the number you come up with somehow touch Cassie’s walk? Change her route? Help fight back the demonic strain of thought floated by so many that somehow Cassie’s eternal walk is her fault?

Do the numbers justify blaming the victim? Tying up the problem with a nice little solution bow? Convene a roundtable on how the market will handle human pain?

Or could he real value in the number simply a way to start a conversation that could lead you back to Cassie?

The Simpson political corruption study made the national news cycle. And tomorrow it will fade into the ether where old news stories go. But Cassie will still be walking past the Mayor’s house.

Cassie probably didn’t catch another recent story, one that touches on what’s behind the corruption. And that leads back to her.

In this story, Sun-Times political reporter Fran Spielman offered a clue. That clue involves a thread that connects those who get caught, those who don’t, those who make legal deals and even includes Cassie.

That thread is access. Pure and simple access.

Cassie will never have a conversation with the Mayor of Chicago. It will not happen. And the access needed for her survival? That torn bleeding “safety net” that is somehow supposed to help? Because of course the Mayor doesn’t have time for every homeless person.

Fran Spielman gives a clue as to why that won’t help either. Why Cassie will keep walking.

The clue is in a February 8th article titled. “Rahm’s Inner Circle.” It details exactly whom the Mayor speaks with regularly. Who DOES get the access. The names of those with access in politics, labor, business, African American issues, city council and inside his own administration.

Notice anything missing on that list?

Human Services is missing. Not one name.

Who’s the safety net czar? Who takes care of Cassie? Where’s his or her seat in the circle of power? Where’s the person who has the access to help Cassie?

There isn’t one. And that’s the connection between Cassie and the corruption study. There is a closed loop of power. Access to power. And there is no one to take care of people. The Mayor reaches out to a huge constiteuncy. He has lots of advisors. Some of them return phone calls. Some don’t. But only if you are in that loop of power as well.

The last time I was without a full time job, doing contract work as I am now, I somehow on a fluke because I have no access, got an interview in a nice building on West Chicago Avenue, where Mayor Daley consolidated all the human services functions. There was a federal monitor in the interview. It went well. We all understood that I was a serious candidate for the job, my resume was nice, and I mastered all of the interview questions. I was more than qualified.

And as the interviewers all marched out of earshot at the end, the Federal monitor whispered to me, “That was great. You even had me interested. And I do this all day.” And then he looked at me and said “Sorry.”

Because we both knew I wouldn’t get the job. I have no access. That common thread that runs just below the headlines and the back room smoke of all corruption.

Access.

The story is told first by the respected Judge Abner Mikva. The punch line is so good that it’s a book title and perhaps the single most important truth in the access problem that underlies all corruption and keeps Cassie on the street. Young Abner Mikva looking for his first political job bounds into the ward office and says, “I’d like some work. I can even volunteer.”

The ward boss takes his cigar out of his mouth and says, “Who sent you kid?”

Mikva answers, “Nobody sent me.”

To which the ward boss utters those immortal words that still grace Chicago politics as a foundational truth:

“We don’t want nobody, nobody sent.”

And nobody sent Cassie.

Easy Racism

“That’s the easy kind of racism,” Donnie said.

He and I were having an after work beer at a bar with a dirty red door on the lower level of Michigan Avenue, just north of the Chicago Loop.

These days with everybody either working two jobs or looking for jobs, nobody saw each other as much as they used to. But his seven-year-old daughter Melinda, my god-daughter, and world’s most beautiful kid, gave Donnie and I a chance to get together more than most. We uncles, aunts, godfathers, godmothers take our jobs seriously. A lot more seriously than Donnie took his UPS truck, parked illegally outside the bar, or I took the cubicle where I did the contract corporate job, making the world safe for software.

“What do you mean easy? I said. There’s no such thing as easy racism.”

“I mean easy to see. You’ve seen the news. A November 2009 sales meeting of the German Company Thyssen Krupp. Chicago’s newest corporate citizen. And a guy gets up to do a skit in black face.” That is easy. That’s racist. Everyone can see it. There is no argument. It’s as simple as. . .”

“Black and white?”

We clinked glasses as we had been doing for pretty much as long as I remember. Laughed because that’s all you can do sometimes.

“Hard racism is what you do NOT see.” Donnie continued.

“You mean like how the black guy had to sit in his car alone every day before he went into work. Just to psych himself in to going inside to start his workday? How every tiny pinprick of the culture poked and jabbed at the guy for no other reason than he was black?” I said.

“Yeah cracker north side,” Donnie smiled. Like that. Saying ‘it has nothing to do with him being black.’ That’s where all the bullshit starts flowing. It’s how this guy can’t get phone calls returned. How he works triple time and it’s never good enough. How there is an email joke that goes around and he ain’t included.”

We were quiet for awhile. Then to a subject we both loved more than anything. “What’s going on with my god daughter?” I asked.

“It ain’t easy,” Donnie replied. “Both kids can’t play outside at all. We thought it would get better. But Roger, I got two daughters. Seven and nine. And both of them know that when they hear the sound of guns poppin on any given night, to slip off the couch where they are watching TV, and make themselves small, laying on the floor, because so many times the bullets come through some one’s wall and well. . .you know.”

I nodded

“Tell me again why I bought in Englewood? 25% of the murders in the city. The whole city. And that’s where I live. I am some kind of fool. . .thinking I could get a deal if I bought in there.”

“Donnie. Nobody knew what would happen when you bought the place. And you bought it cause it was cheap! And you being one tight ass cheap. . .”

“Yeah, I know.”

“So you can’t leave, cause you can’t sell without selling those girl’s future. That is one hard choice my friend.”

He nodded. “I don’t know. Maybe it will get better.”

“What about that white guy they just put in as district police commander? You think that’s racism? Having a white guy in charge of the cops. 14,000 police officers in Chicago and they couldn’t find a black guy to run Englewood?”

“Roger, you gotta read the rest of the story. That ain’t racism. That’s the same shit you got living 4 blocks from the Mayor. You know the real problem? It ain’t that the guy is white. He has 26 years experience on the job. He ran a district and he ran gang crimes, which is kinda the whole ballgame. It ain’t that he’s white. It’s that no one from the mayor’s office or the police department made anybody from the neighborhood part of the decision. They didn’t think it was important to TALK with us. It’s not racism. It’s cronyism. That good old boys club. Not letting anybody in that old circle of power. Mayor would have sent some boys over to talk with a bunch of us, asking us, “What do you think?” That would have changed a lot of things.

We know the mayor, the chief, they will make the call. We are fine with that. But when that ole boys club circle just sends down the word the same way they always do everywhere, when they say “This is how it is” that is what puts a bullet in that trust they are always talking about.

“So the guy who is the new commander. . .he is fine and. . .”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But let me have a piece of that decision. We are talking about Melinda being safe. Your goddaughter. And you know I ain’t gonna be taking her to no church! So you are in this too, Mister North Side.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s my job.”

We were quiet for awhile. Like old friends can be. Finally I said, “So there is easy racism and hard racism. Easy you can see. And hard racism. Hard is how our Melinda has to dive off the couch in your living room and hit the floor every time she hears a bullet pop outside.”

“No, hard is that she has to even think about doing that. That’s hard.”

Hitler, Bogart, and The Banker

There was talk of a movie, starring Humphrey Bogart, after the “Ball Bearing” mission to Sweden was completed and Hitler’s war machine was dealt a crippling blow.

Bogart was the name mentioned, in a Washington Times piece, as a likely candidate to play Stanton Griffis. A 57-year-old investment banker who was the central figure in the story, a chapter in the history of World War II now virtually lost outside my family and Griffis’s long out of print book “Lying In State.” And calling him an “investment banker” is a bit like calling Warren Buffett, with whom Griffis shared some interesting traits, “a business guy.”

Before marrying my Grandmother’s sister, Griffis was an Oregon fruit farmer. Then, from way across the whole of the American continent, he heard the siren song of serious money singing about Wall Street.

So goodbye fruit farmer.

Along the way, Griffis popped in and out of public service serving as the ambassador to Poland, Egypt, Spain and Argentina during the time of Eva Peron.

Making friends world wide, his business interests involved running Madison Square Garden, and senior roles at Paramount pictures and Brentano Bookstores.

That and making money.

Within that circle of friends, were some folks from the OSS, the precursor of the CIA. And that’s where Hitler’s ball bearings entered the story.

The German war machine needed ball bearings for just about every weapon of moderate destruction they had. Planes wouldn’t fly without ball bearings. And when the Allies bombed German ball bearing factories, the Swedes took up the slack.

And that’s when “they”—Griffis’s friends who worked outside the normal channels of the State Department—called up and asked if Griffis could do a better job than the State Department at keeping the Swedish ball bearings out of Nazi hands. Griffis answered:

“I couldn’t do a worse job.”

Within 24 hours he and an associate were strapped into a British Mosquito bomber hurtling through the polar night at 400 mph bound for Stockholm.

Unbound the conventions of normal diplomacy, Griffis relates this moment of the negotiations with both the Swedish manufacturers and the Swedish government.

“One of the most effective suggestions occurred when the other side seemed to be making more progress then we liked, So I told them, “You know gentlemen, you have a lot of fog on your coast and you know that our bombers sometimes get lost even going to Germany. It would be a very sad thing if a thousand of our great bombers should loose their way along your coast and mistake Goteborg for Hamburg. It would be a very sad thing to wake up one morning and find your factories missing. We would be very sorry to have this happen and of course we would apologize, and I am sure that many years from now when the war is over and the reparations commissions complete their testimony, we would pay for the damage. But these things take time.”

The negotiations were soon over.

America bought the stock of ball bearings and the Swedes agreed to sell less than 10% of the former quota to the Nazi’s.

And before a hail of official Nazi diplomatic protests could hit the first Swedish diplomat’s desk—Griffis and his associate were back on that British bomber zooming back to London.

The number of Allied lives they had saved by cutting off the supply of ball bearings? Uncountable.

I met Griffis once. A family wedding on the sparkling warm shore of Lake Michigan. He was likely the oldest one there. And I was very young.

Fruit farmer, investment banker . . . .war hero without firing a shot.

All that and a life long, Democrat.

Something Wonderful Coming

You never knew the full story. How I knew you were coming.

It was New Year’s Eve. Two weeks or so before I ventured out under the frozen stars of a Wisconsin sky. From that bone-smacking wind-whipped cold into the chocolate chip cookie baking warmth of your kitchen. Linda Ronstadt singing “Lovesick Blues.” And then to the radiance of your smile I said, “I was just in the neighborhood . . .”

Likely you thought that’s where it started. All those years ago.

But it was two weeks before that New Year’s Eve, when the notion first wound its way inside me like the smell of a wood fire burning, holding back the coldest winter night. The notion that something was coming. Something big. That woodsmoke notion was not a passing thought. It settled in and stayed the night. And what a night!

To have a New Year’s Eve, like grown-ups spend New Year’s Eve. My first. That first time you do something you believe is just about as cool as cool can be. You have arrived. You’ve got the story all planned to tell before it even happens. Because you’re that sure that what you’ve got planned is the best.

See, for me, at that time in Chicago, there simply was no better place to be than The Earl of Old Town. Add to that, the fact that it was New Years Eve. And if that wasn’t cool enough, Steve Goodman was the featured act. Me and a pal, going to the late show.

It was a good story before it even happened.

Standing in the foot stomping line on windswept Wells Street, waiting for the show to start. My pal and I would be counting down the last seconds of the year with Steve Goodman. As we waited for the early show to end so that we could go in, it started to snow.

With the soft snow swirling down across the lights of the icy winter city, we trooped inside the Earl and took our seats; it was like sitting down in the living room of that guy from the neighborhood who we had always wanted to be.

The stage was a tiny riser, the bar along the opposite wall. Tables clustered tightly around, like there was really just one table. We were sitting right in back of Nancy Goodman, Steve’s wife. Told ourselves we were now on “salt-passing terms” with Steve Goodman’s wife. And outside, the snow, a soft reminder of just how warm it was in this living room tonight.

As the bouncing bundle of laconic joy that was Steve Goodman sang, I started to feel that notion. Something big was coming. I had no idea what it was. But it was big.

Wide-eyed, held tight by the show. Those days in Chicago, there was Steve Goodman and Bonnie Koloc and John Prine. If you were there, they used their musical gifts to paint pictures, to take you to places only reached by imagination. The three of them, good beyond belief.

Goodman finished. My pal and I trudged off into the still falling snow, back to his place. Me on the couch alone, still with this notion. That something big was coming.

The next day, brilliant blue-sky-bright morning, when it really hit hard. We were tramping through the snow in Lincoln Park on New Year’s morning, with the place to ourselves. Past the new neighborhood restaurant, RJ Grunts. Just about to walk inside the grounds of the Lincoln Park Zoo.

That notion spoke like the very voice of winter itself. It said; “Your life is going to change. It’s going to change big. There will be something beyond what you’d ever imagined. You don’t know what it is and you don’t know when. But you are growing up now. And there will be a change.”

I remember going from the blue frozen morning into the Lincoln Park Conservatory. Stepping from the arctic into the tropics, a green wet jungle. A miracle when you think about it. How do you go from frigid cold to the beating heart jungle in just a few steps? And having the “plant zoo” as we called it, all to ourselves?

What happened after the Lincoln Park conservatory, the dripping green leaves against the glass that shielded them from the deep blue freeze of the day—I draw a blank. Up to Wisconsin must have happened. I was a college student. I had classes to take. I don’t remember what they were. I remember only two weeks later in the very dead of January venturing outside into the dark and ending up in your kitchen.

The part of the story that you know, too.

Then there was that lifetime. 20 years. Until your garden in Berkeley. Blue ceramic mugs of coffee for a carefully planned half hour visit. Tiptoeing past the closed door where your partner and new son slept in. If I remember right, maybe we said we’ll check in again, when we hit 60. If we all make it that long.

That might happen, but in case it doesn’t…this will have to do. I thought you should know the rest of the story. The part that happened just before we became us.

I wanted you to know what I knew. I want you to know that I remember, after those cookies came out of the oven in that two-weeks-after-New-Year’s kitchen, we walked on to the campus through the cold. Holding hands. And that’s when that notion that something was just about to happen…

Came true.

Growing up.

Hard Times Christmas in Chicago

he Selig Polyscope Company was one of the very first movie studios in the country. Located on a 200 acre parcel in what is now a residential area of Chicago, Selig produced the first version of Chicago native L. Frank Baum’s ‘Wizard of Oz.”

In the flickering candlelight, she sat rocking the baby at the back of the empty dining hall. Smelling the sandalwood candle, with some unknown part of me wanting to leap straight and true right into her eyes, came this thought, I wish I could give her more than Mister Foster’s song.

Which made no sense at all.

First, because there were no women living here. This was 1901. Women don’t live, or even take their meals, in a house on the Western Road halfway between the stone quarry and the Selig Polyscope Company, where they made moving pictures; the place I was lucky enough to find work this cold December of the new century.

But there was more than that. She looked at me as if she was waiting for a fight. As if she knew she could take me. A soul who would, down to her very core, never accept anything from anyone.

As I breathed in the sandalwood, something made me wonder. Just where upon this earth, have I met you before?

I met her defiant and somehow amused gaze. She nodded. Rocking the baby. And I wondered if this is why I was here.

My journey here had begun with a ship. A cold winter ship stuffed with Christmas trees.

Christmas trees from all of our farms across the Door Peninsula, in Northern Wisconsin. Hundreds of Christmas trees. Fruit of our harvest. Bound for Chicago. The chilled mint scent of evergreen like a blanket, as we departed the Port of Sturgeon Bay guided only by uncountable shimmering stars. The harvest was over. There was money to be made.

On the ship is where I first remember the smell of the sandalwood candle. A tiny flickering flame in the captain’s quarters. My job was to bring him his meals. He’d have a sandalwood candle lit. As if the fingernail flame could stand guard against the dark waves of the giant Lake Michigan.

I remember my fear. Why is there fire on this ship full of trees?

Then docking in Chicago. I remember clearly how I got from the smoky grinding sewage-stinking port on the shores of the Chicago River, where we unloaded the trees, on up to Colonel Selig’s Polyscope Movie Studios seven miles north. I walked.

Into the strange city night I walked: beyond the rows of worker’s homes, millionaires’ mansions and miles of wooden shacks inhabited by the very poor. Out to the crossroads of Western Road and a road named for a place called Irving Park. I remember looking up, wondering where the stars went in this strange place called a city, where there always seemed to be some sort of noise and it never really got to the dark part of night.

On through the night, it was just before dawn when I first saw the giant cluster of buildings and fields where the Colonel made his moving pictures. In fact, I remember walking under a sign that said OFFICE and into a room where a man clearly in charge was terrifying a trembling woman at a desk, with the mere volume of his voice.

“I told you, Mr. Thomas Edison is a brilliant man! A lawyer first, a man of science next…but above all, he is a scoundrel! Bless him and his moving picture machine. But his machine is different. My Polyscope is of course the superior contraption. And he will never, ever, ever shut me down!”

On the word “down” he thrust his index finger high above his head, made a grand circle in the air, and then marched towards the door, where I stood open-mouthed. As he huffed by me, he winked so that only I, a perfect stranger, would see him and he whispered, “Of course Edison’s lawyers will never find me here. And if they do? I’ll move all the making of the motion pictures to the western coast. I’ve heard tell of this place called Hollywood.”

There was a beat of silence. I remember the woman behind the desk was also burning a sandalwood candle. She turned to me and said, “Well, that was our employer. Colonel Selig himself. And who, might I ask, are you?”

“I’m William. I come from the north. From the Door Peninsula. My ship is docked now for a month, and I hear there’s work here. May I have a job? All I know is hard work.”

The woman looked at me a moment. Then she moved her shoulder towards a broom in the corner. “Well, there’s the tool you’ll need for the inside. And we shoot outdoors as well, so you’ll need to make the snow go away. There ‘s a roadhouse with rooms a bit south of here. They’ll feed you. You can settle in there.”

“Ma’am when you say “shoot,” I’m afraid I. . . .”

“Shooting the motion pictures. At least 5 or 6 per week. Well, I suppose I’d best show you around. Now that you’ve met the Colonel, I can introduce you to the others. Course, we’re growing so fast, I no longer know everyone’s name. But I know most of them.”

I learned on my tour that the Selig Polyscope studio lot was a sprawling 200 acres. The same size as my Daddy’s tree farm in Door County. There were wooden stages from the vaudeville theaters like the one in Green Bay. Miles of cables and giant lights and Polyscope machines and yelling and commanding and the actors weeping on cue. Easy to fit in, too, what with everybody raising their hands to draw attention to themselves. Blending into the background was as easy as maple syrup dripping from a tree.

Having learned of the roadhouse, that night I took a room. I began taking my meals in the dining room with the other boarders. I was at the motion picture studio at six and didn’t leave till all the winter darkness had been settled in for hours, not till seven or so.

And it was good to just work hard. To jump in cleaning, carrying the rolled up cables, carrying the painted wooden pictures of mountains and saloons from one stage to another. As if I was helping build some kind of brand new world, in these motion pictures.

The days passed quickly at Polyscope Studios. The winter nights came early just like home. I was alone.

But I didn’t mind. In fact no one really did more than nod in my direction, until that morning of December 24th when a man I’d never even seen before, a gentleman, said to me. “Son, I am wondering if you would be good as my Tin Man.”

I wasn’t even close to understanding what that meant. I knew the man’s name. He was Mister L. Frank Baum. A friend of Colonel Selig. He had never spoken to me before, but I’d learned in my two weeks at the Selig Polyscope Studio that it was always better to say something. So I replied, “Would you like me to lift some tin for you sir?”

He smiled. In his white frock coat, a distinguished gentleman. His eyes were kind. “No son. Come with me to the eastern lot. I’ll show you what I mean.”

Mr. Baum motioned me to a chair. For the very first time since I had begun the job, I sat down. And I had watched the making of what he called his “Fairylogue.” The scenes were built around a young girl they called “Dorothy.” Although I knew her by her real name of Romola Remus.

In Mr. Baum’s Fairylogue, he would do something I heard people say had never been done before. He would point the Polyscope machine at the wall. The pictures he had taken of his characters talking would appear on the wall. And Mr. Baum would talk to the pictures! He somehow had sound in these little entertainments. Sometimes he called them “radio plays.” But what they were, basically, was he himself sitting and talking to Dorothy and her friends as they traveled to a place called Oz.

This “Oz” had what Mister Baum called a “Wizard.” And the Wizard knew all.

These were hard, hard times, that winter. Times when it seemed like that tiny sliver of rich folk was just getting richer, and the rest of us had to just make do.

So this Wizard. This Oz. It sounded good to me. Mister L. Frank Baum, I think he understood something about the world that I could not quite put into words…something about how there’s more to the world than what we see. In his white frock coat, with his kind eyes that took in every detail of the world; then somehow tried to paint what he saw in brighter colors, better days.

He told me that the Tin Man, and that would be me, was on the journey to Oz to find a heart. But that the surprise in the story is that once he got to Oz, he’d find that he already had a heart.

I wondered if there’d be surprises like finding hearts for me. If, in this cold winter, maybe something would change.

Or maybe there would always be hard times. Which is why we needed as many songs, as many stories as we could grow.

So that day I made one of Mister Baum’s Fairylogues with him. That day I was the Tin Man.

Tomorrow was Christmas. There would be no work at the Selig Polyscope Company. I’d just be in my room in the Western Avenue road house. And because it was Christmas Eve, Colonel Selig let us all out early. That’s why, when I wandered back to the Road House, the dining hall was still empty. Save for her and the baby.

Seeing the two of them, I didn’t speak; I just walked into the kitchen and told Maureen, the old cook who had taken a shine to me, that a bit of her hot vegetable soup and some cheese with an apple would be just the thing.

Thanking Maureen, I took the food out to the woman; put it down in front of her without saying a word. She began to eat as if it was her very first meal. As she ate, the other boarders started trickling in; some would pay her and her baby no mind. But others would stare, some with malice. And though the woman’s defiance showed, I could feel her slight tremor as I sat across the table.

So I took her hand, and I held on. We still had yet to say a word. But I took her hand. As we sat, holding hands across the table, her cradling the baby in her other arm, I nodded at the baby and she passed him over the table. As I took the baby in my arm, she reached across the table for my hand again.

Dinner was ending and someone started singing Christmas songs. She and I were quiet. Neither of us touched by false cheer.

And it was then I remembered that first thought. It was then I remembered thinking that I wish I could sing her Mister Stephen Foster’s song. It’s not a Christmas song. It’s not a song of false cheer or empty hope. It’s a song that looks the hard times straight in the eye. Just like she did. Like I did.

Hard Times come again no more.

She and I? We started singing. Somehow the harmony was perfect. And before we were done, we had the whole dining hall, lighting up the winter night, with the sad yet hopeful sounds of the music. Not for a moment believing that it wasn’t hard times. But just for a song length, believing through the music that the hard times would come again no more.

And when the echo of the song’s last breath was a memory, we all sat down and she spoke her first words to me.

She spoke the words, “Merry Christmas.”

Ethical Government in Chicago?

Test the actual soil underlying Chicago City Hall.

No one would be surprised if trace elements of ethical lapses were somehow ingrained in the earth.

It’s been that way since the first Indian standing watch one dark night on the shores of the Big Lake watched the first smiling white man jump from the canoe, yell a hearty hello and set the standard price for anything as being ten cents on the dollar.

With a wink and a handshake. It’s always been that way. Because we’ve always been able to pay the cost. Be it in dollars, culture, human suffering, a strange kind of pride or even bottled up rage. We have always paid the cost for turning away from the smoke of the roaring ethical fires.

But now we can’t afford that anymore. The money’s shriveled up. So now it might change.

Yesterday, Mayor Emanuel appointed an Ethics Reform Task Force unlike any ever seen in this city.

A group of four who have made careers based on being ethical.

Their task is to review Chicago’s Ethics Ordinance. And then make it work. Make it stronger.

Cindi Canary will chair the Task Force. Cindi Canary is a groundbreaking force in city and state ethical reform. Her organization is the “Illinois Campaign for Political Reform.” Pore over any tiny or large steps forward in the fight for government accountability in Illinois and you will find her name.

Alderman Will Burns, who along with counterparts like Alderman Ameya Pawar, has been part of the new crop of city leaders. Leaders who focus on social justice organizations ranging from The Mikva Challenge and the Shriver Center for Poverty Law to The Common Pantry—Chicago’s longest operating Food Pantry.

And if there is any concern at all that real political change needs more than sunlight to make it work, Sergio Accosta, the third member of the group, is a former supervising U.S. Attorney specializing in areas like criminal civil rights.

Turns out that civil rights violations are still crimes.

But it’s the fourth member of the panel that brings the golden soul of the city into the mix of this new effort. Her name is Dawn Clark Netsch. She’s a former State Comptroller, State Senator and gubernatorial candidate. All facts. None of which give substance to the story of why she could be the soul of the new ethics machine.

It’s a short story—but its telling.

Back when there were only two telephone companies, I opened up the effort to sell the little telephone company, MCI, into Illinois State Government. I found a partner to help me learn the backstreets, darkened hallways and phone numbers of Springfield, a state political capital that made Chicago look like Andy Griffith’s home town Mayberry.

In the rotunda of the state capital, pretty much every door was closed up tight to me and my little telephone company. Most times no one even wanted to talk. And I mean not even talk about the weather. Everyone but Dawn Clark Netsch.

It was a simple thing. She didn’t know me. I never made a deal with her. Never even a formal meeting. But she was accessible. She talked to anybody. Even me. And that simply didn’t happen anywhere else. Not without access. Not without knowing someone who knows someone else.

Flash forward decades. I’m walking my dog in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago. And she’s walking her dog. She stops. She chats. That regular nodding hello that fellow dog lovers have. She’s still open to the world.

And that would be the first key strategy of the new ethics task force.

Be open to the world.

The Mayor tried to do that in his transition. But he failed. You still had to be in the club. The great blogger driftglass’s 2 rules of Chicago politics:

1. There is a club.

2. You’re not in it.

Those two rules still own the day.

But what if that could change? What next?

Next is a mapping of the problem as a systemic problem. It’s not a problem where catching one rogue rascal with his hand in another’s pocket solves anything. It’s about a system.

And third, it’s about performance standards and measures that sound a bit different from the norm.

Turns out that notions of confidence, integrity, pride and passion really can be measured in the laboratory of opinion.

So the right people are on board. All four of them. Especially my hero, Dawn Clark Netsch.

And the right strategy can be put in place:

1. Accessibility and Transparency from those who serve the public.

2. Mapping the system to really grasp the full problem.

3. Performance standards and measures—to drive the real, concrete action that could produce something none of us have ever seen before, something most of us think isn’t even possible.

A renewed Chicago. Known for the ethical standards we practice.

This group could make it happen. And if they need any help?

I’m ready now.

Course, I don’t really know anybody.

But I’m ready and qualified now.

Do you suppose that matters?