I am a better driver today: a certified graduate of the AARP course for over-50. It is guaranteed to shave a few dollars off of the insurance, and that’s why I took it. Or, I should say, I took it because my wife badgered me for months to take it to cut a dollar or two off of the insurance.
I should add that mine was a four-hour refresher course. I took the full eight-hour course, over two days, four or five years ago.
My wife, though, was so busy harping on my taking the courses that she has not taken either one herself. But she will, I’m sure. Why should I have all the fun?
My classmates, I noted, as I looked around the room while the instructor was telling us how cars have changed over the years, included the old fella’ who nearly got me when he turned into the parking lot and another one, a guy I’m sure I’ve seen on the expressway traveling a safe 35 miles an hour. At another table was the little old lady from down the street who drives a giant Mercury and whose view of the road ahead is limited to what she can see between the dashboard and the top of the steering wheel.
The instructor, a volunteer, told us all about “them new things” on cars--things like turn signals and alarms that warn us if we are about to back into another car. Then he told us how we have changed. For one thing, we are older. That means we may not see as well in bright sunlight, on shady days or at night, so we ought to have our eyes checked and get glasses if we need them. We may not hear as well as we used to, so we ought to have our hearing checked. If noise distracts us, we should tell the person sitting next to us in the car not to talk until we reach our destination. I almost raised my hand to ask if he had tried that with his spouse and, if so, if that was why he had the scar on his cheek, but I did not want to jeopardize my chances of graduating.
The instructor read to us a lot from the instruction book. I thought about suggesting that he was ready to graduate to PowerPoint presentation, but by that time we had moved on to an exercise involving the class. He had each person on the front row read a unit title and the section titles that followed. So at least eight people got to participate by reading aloud to him. I was sitting on the back row, and that’s how I learned that my hearing is not what it used to be.
It took us two hours to get though a film and the first unit. Then he went around the room to collect the tuition--$12 for AARP members, $14 for non-members. “What if I’m a member but don’t have my card?” Someone asked. “That’s okay,” he said. “I’ll take your word for it.” “What if I’m a member but don’t have my card?” someone else asked. “That’s okay,” he said. “I’ll take your word for it.” The third time I heard the question, I figured my hearing was improving.
Then we took a five- or ten-minute break. When we were back in session, the instructor went through the succeeding units, one by one, reading the titles and pointing out some of the more important instructions in the text. Things like, “if you’re taking medication, you probably shouldn’t drink alcohol before you get behind the wheel,” and “hold the steering wheel with both hands at the 9 o'clock and 3 o'clock positions or the 7 and 4 positions, because if you have your hand on the top of the steering that air bag will break your arm when it comes out when you crash.”
We got through all that in about 20 minutes, then he passed out forms we were to fill out with name, driver’s license number, date of the course, and other important data, “but don’t start filling them forms out yet because we are all going to fill them out together,” which we did--"Print your name in the box where it says 'Name.' Has everybody done that? Now, fill in your driver's license number. Has everybody done that?"
When everybody had done them things, he dismissed us, saying that he hoped we were all “smarter” than we got there.
I know I was. I raced for the parking lot so I could get out of there before all those old people started backing into each other. And I drove the speed limit all the way home with my hands at 9 and 3; I didn’t want that air bag breaking my arm when I crashed.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Haiku on haiku
of poet Billy Collins’
“Midwinter-evening”
Mid-winter evening,
alone at a sushi bar-
just me and this eel.
--Billy Collins
Poet pens paper,
Scrawls seventeen syllables,
crafts fishy haiku.
Poet's morning chore--
take one shoe to be repaired
just me and this heel.
Down-at-heel poet
munches on cheap eel sushi--
electric soul food.
Poet can't decide--
Billy club or Tom Collins.
Either knocks him out.
Gray-haired professor
packs up yellowed lecture notes--
red wine limns sunset.
“Midwinter-evening”
Mid-winter evening,
alone at a sushi bar-
just me and this eel.
--Billy Collins
Poet pens paper,
Scrawls seventeen syllables,
crafts fishy haiku.
Poet's morning chore--
take one shoe to be repaired
just me and this heel.
Down-at-heel poet
munches on cheap eel sushi--
electric soul food.
Poet can't decide--
Billy club or Tom Collins.
Either knocks him out.
Gray-haired professor
packs up yellowed lecture notes--
red wine limns sunset.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Hugh Gaine: Enlightenment Printer
In press:
Hugh Gaine (1726-1807) was printer-editor of the widely-circulated conservative newspaper The New-York Gazette; and the Weekly Mercury from 1752 through 1783 and one of the most important and prodigious book publishers in the late colonial era and the earliest years of America’s independence. In both roles, he served to further the American enlightenment by putting his printing press at the service of its authors. He also changed sides in the first year of the Revolution, from the Americans to the British, and thereby earned the opprobrium of many of his contemporaries and the reputation in history of being a turncoat.
Gaine was born in Portglenone, a village about thirty-four miles northwest of Belfast, and at the age of fourteen he began a five year apprenticeship at the Belfast printing house of Samuel Wilson and James Magee. On becoming a journeyman in 1744, he emigrated to New York, where he found work in the shop of James Parker.
In 1752, Gaine opened his own printing shop and on August 3 of that year he issued the first number of The New-York Mercury. According to the New York historian James Grant Wilson, The Mercury “became by far the best newspaper in the colonies.” Like other publishers of the day, Gaine was a printer-editor; he had no staff of reporters and he rarely wrote for the newspaper himself; to fill the newspaper’s columns, he reprinted items from other colonial newspapers and, especially in the early years, those from England. Readers found stories of fires, crimes and natural disasters, proclamations of the governors, reports of parliamentary debates, declarations of the king and minor court gossip. For businessmen, he printed commodity prices and a list of the latest ship arrivals and departures. He printed columns of advertising that supported the newspaper, including notices for the goods of his own shop: stationery items, medicines, and books he printed himself and those he imported from England.
A staple of Gaine’s Mercury, as for other newspapers of the day, was the familiar essay. He reprinted many that had appeared in other newspapers, both English and colonial, and printed original essays offered to him by local writers on all manner of subjects, especially scientific topics, religion, philosophy and relations between the sexes. Perhaps because of favorable reaction to those, in mind-August of 1754 he attempted to establish a literary magazine, The Plebean, but it died within the year.
Gaine originally resisted involvement in political battles, but inevitably in the charged atmosphere of the day, politics was forced upon him. In The Mercury’s first year, the colony’s Presbyterian faction attacked him for supporting the Episcopalian faction in a dispute over the financing and administration of King’s College (later Columbia University). Subsequently, however, he sold space on the front page of The Mercury to the Presbyterians to carry out a year-long propaganda assault on the Episcopalians; he was “a fickle fellow, and easily intimidated,” one of the Presbyterian writers observed. At the same time, however, he opened the pages of the newspaper to counter arguments from the Episcopalians.
In the long propaganda war on Britain that began with opposition to the Stamp Act, Gaine and The Mercury followed an erratic course. He printed essays condemning the Stamp Act, and after the act became effective on November 12, 1765, he defied it by printing his newspaper throughout the month on unstamped paper with the heading “No Stamped Paper to be Had.”
Following enactment of the Townshend Acts in 1766, he printed the eloquent series “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” by John Dickinson, and he supported the nonimportation agreement to boycott British goods. But when duties on all goods but tea were repealed, he opposed continuation of the boycott.
In 1768, he was named public printer of the province of New York. He changed the name of the newspaper to The New-York Gazette; and the Weekly Mercury and began publishing political essays with a more conciliatory tone toward Britain. As Whig responses to Britain’s efforts to tax America grew more violent, he ignored riots in New York and Boston or printed Tory versions of the incidents.
With passage of the British East India Company Act in 1773, Gaine gave perfunctory support to the resistance movement, but he reacted to the violence of “tea parties” in New York and Boston by printing essays abjuring violence and advocating an accommodation with the mother country. When the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, he carried essays that continued to argue for accommodation, but after the battles of Lexington and Concord, he filled his columns with essays that supported Whig positions.
In 1776, he was a fence-sitter on the question of independence until Congress passed the Declaration of Independence. He printed copies of the document for distribution in New York printed essays on behalf of the independence movement in The Mercury. When the British were preparing for their invasion of New York, he fled to Newark with his family and printed the newspaper there for two months before returning home. In the meantime, Ambrose Searle, secretary to Admiral Lord Richard Howe, had taken over Gaine’s shop and had been printing a pro-British Mercury, and he retained editorial control until sailing with Howe’s fleet in 1777. Gaine’s change of sides and his whole-hearted conversion to the British cause won him the hatred of Americans and he was denigrated viciously in print; even Philip Freneau satirized him in his “Hugh Gaine’s Life.” James Grant Wilson expressed succinctly the enduring view of him: “When with the Whigs, Hugh Gaine was a Whig; when with the Royalists, he was loyal; when the contest was doubtful, equally doubtful were the politics of Hugh Gaine.”
At the end of the war, Gaine ceased printing the Mercury and devoted himself to job printing and to publishing books. In 1802, he teamed with the bookseller Matthew Carey of Philadelphia in founding the American Booksellers Association and was elected its first president.
Hugh Gaine (1726-1807) was printer-editor of the widely-circulated conservative newspaper The New-York Gazette; and the Weekly Mercury from 1752 through 1783 and one of the most important and prodigious book publishers in the late colonial era and the earliest years of America’s independence. In both roles, he served to further the American enlightenment by putting his printing press at the service of its authors. He also changed sides in the first year of the Revolution, from the Americans to the British, and thereby earned the opprobrium of many of his contemporaries and the reputation in history of being a turncoat.
Gaine was born in Portglenone, a village about thirty-four miles northwest of Belfast, and at the age of fourteen he began a five year apprenticeship at the Belfast printing house of Samuel Wilson and James Magee. On becoming a journeyman in 1744, he emigrated to New York, where he found work in the shop of James Parker.
In 1752, Gaine opened his own printing shop and on August 3 of that year he issued the first number of The New-York Mercury. According to the New York historian James Grant Wilson, The Mercury “became by far the best newspaper in the colonies.” Like other publishers of the day, Gaine was a printer-editor; he had no staff of reporters and he rarely wrote for the newspaper himself; to fill the newspaper’s columns, he reprinted items from other colonial newspapers and, especially in the early years, those from England. Readers found stories of fires, crimes and natural disasters, proclamations of the governors, reports of parliamentary debates, declarations of the king and minor court gossip. For businessmen, he printed commodity prices and a list of the latest ship arrivals and departures. He printed columns of advertising that supported the newspaper, including notices for the goods of his own shop: stationery items, medicines, and books he printed himself and those he imported from England.
A staple of Gaine’s Mercury, as for other newspapers of the day, was the familiar essay. He reprinted many that had appeared in other newspapers, both English and colonial, and printed original essays offered to him by local writers on all manner of subjects, especially scientific topics, religion, philosophy and relations between the sexes. Perhaps because of favorable reaction to those, in mind-August of 1754 he attempted to establish a literary magazine, The Plebean, but it died within the year.
Gaine originally resisted involvement in political battles, but inevitably in the charged atmosphere of the day, politics was forced upon him. In The Mercury’s first year, the colony’s Presbyterian faction attacked him for supporting the Episcopalian faction in a dispute over the financing and administration of King’s College (later Columbia University). Subsequently, however, he sold space on the front page of The Mercury to the Presbyterians to carry out a year-long propaganda assault on the Episcopalians; he was “a fickle fellow, and easily intimidated,” one of the Presbyterian writers observed. At the same time, however, he opened the pages of the newspaper to counter arguments from the Episcopalians.
In the long propaganda war on Britain that began with opposition to the Stamp Act, Gaine and The Mercury followed an erratic course. He printed essays condemning the Stamp Act, and after the act became effective on November 12, 1765, he defied it by printing his newspaper throughout the month on unstamped paper with the heading “No Stamped Paper to be Had.”
Following enactment of the Townshend Acts in 1766, he printed the eloquent series “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” by John Dickinson, and he supported the nonimportation agreement to boycott British goods. But when duties on all goods but tea were repealed, he opposed continuation of the boycott.
In 1768, he was named public printer of the province of New York. He changed the name of the newspaper to The New-York Gazette; and the Weekly Mercury and began publishing political essays with a more conciliatory tone toward Britain. As Whig responses to Britain’s efforts to tax America grew more violent, he ignored riots in New York and Boston or printed Tory versions of the incidents.
With passage of the British East India Company Act in 1773, Gaine gave perfunctory support to the resistance movement, but he reacted to the violence of “tea parties” in New York and Boston by printing essays abjuring violence and advocating an accommodation with the mother country. When the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, he carried essays that continued to argue for accommodation, but after the battles of Lexington and Concord, he filled his columns with essays that supported Whig positions.
In 1776, he was a fence-sitter on the question of independence until Congress passed the Declaration of Independence. He printed copies of the document for distribution in New York printed essays on behalf of the independence movement in The Mercury. When the British were preparing for their invasion of New York, he fled to Newark with his family and printed the newspaper there for two months before returning home. In the meantime, Ambrose Searle, secretary to Admiral Lord Richard Howe, had taken over Gaine’s shop and had been printing a pro-British Mercury, and he retained editorial control until sailing with Howe’s fleet in 1777. Gaine’s change of sides and his whole-hearted conversion to the British cause won him the hatred of Americans and he was denigrated viciously in print; even Philip Freneau satirized him in his “Hugh Gaine’s Life.” James Grant Wilson expressed succinctly the enduring view of him: “When with the Whigs, Hugh Gaine was a Whig; when with the Royalists, he was loyal; when the contest was doubtful, equally doubtful were the politics of Hugh Gaine.”
At the end of the war, Gaine ceased printing the Mercury and devoted himself to job printing and to publishing books. In 1802, he teamed with the bookseller Matthew Carey of Philadelphia in founding the American Booksellers Association and was elected its first president.
Journalism and Jesuit Mission
This piece was published in Conversations, No. 35 (Spring 2009), the bi-annual magazine of the National Seminar on Jesuit Higher Education.
Close your eyes for a moment.
Recall the faces of those hundreds of people, most of them black, whom you saw on your television screen suffering in humid August heat outside New Orleans’ Morial Convention Center in the week after Hurricane Katrina.
They had been unable to leave the city, and in the days after the storm, after the levees had burst and the deluge had flooded their homes, they had walked to the Convention Center seeking what they vainly believed would be shelter and transportation out of their devastated city.
Hear in memory the words of an uncharacteristically subdued Wolf Blitzer on CNN: “You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals. . . . So many of these people. Almost all of them that we see are so poor and they are so black, and this is going to raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story unfold.”
Questions, indeed.
Sadly enough, the first was, “Who are these people?” We who live in New Orleans knew there was poverty in the city; we had seen the dilapidated projects, the unemployed standing on the street corners; we had read the statistics. But the sight of all of those individuals in that place and all of those those crammed into the Superdome just a mile and a half up Poydras St. shocked us.
As I watched the story unfold from my air-conditioned refuge hundreds of miles away, it struck me that journalists had failed them and us by not bringing them to our attention long before. And as an educator of journalists in Jesuit universities for 36 years, at Marquette and Loyola New Orleans, I questioned what responsibility all of us who teach journalism in Jesuit institutions might share.
One is tempted to respond that our role is to teach the nuts and bolts of news reporting and writing, how to cover news when it occurs. But this is not 1920, when the philosopher and journalist Walter Lippmann sniffed dismissively in Public Opinion that schools of journalism were trade schools, “intended to prepare men and women for a career.” We have more profound responsibility.
In his 2000 address at Santa Clara University, Father General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach told us that the role of faculty members at Jesuit colleges and universities “is tirelessly to seek the truth and to form each student into a whole person of solidarity who will take responsibility for the real world.” He made no distinction between disciplines; he was directing his words at us journalism professors as well as at our colleagues in theology, philosophy and literature.
What truth do we seek as we study our field and lead our students in seeking?
Prof. David Host of Marquette’s College of Journalism came up with an excellent answer 40 years earlier, in 1960, in an essay marking the fiftieth anniversary of the college. Host stated that he and his colleagues there pursued truth in two ways: “truth about journalism as a work to be done and truth about the news media as social instruments through which the work is done.”
The same could be said of today’s journalism instruction in Jesuit institutions, as evidenced by our curricula. We all teach students the basic principles of the work and the essential techniques of gathering news and preparing it for publication; it is the grasp of those underlying principles of the work that will enable our graduates to adapt readily to changes in the field. At the same time, as did the Marquette faculty of the last century, we attempt to bring our students to a knowledge and understanding of the role of mass media as social instruments: how they have developed over time, how they are changing, how they affect the public, and journalists’ ethical responsibilities to their readers and viewers. And if we are doing our work as we should, we are bringing our students to know not only how media operate today but to view them critically and consider how they ought to operate.
We have all firmly rooted our programs in the liberal arts in order that our students have that broader knowledge and understanding of the world that is crucial to their development as human beings. For us, as for the Marquette faculty of Host’s day, it is inconceivable that journalists should not be “educated precisely in those persisting questions of the nature and end of man and of the most pressing of his common worldly circumstances with which humanistic studies are traditionally concerned.”
Fr. Kolvenbach also said at Santa Clara that university knowledge, while valuable for its own sake, is also “knowledge that must ask itself, ‘For whom? For what?’” The answer, as we are frequently reminded on our campuses, is “the service of faith and the promotion of justice.”
The year before Fr. Kolvenbach was on that campus, a Santa Clara audience had heard Joseph Daoust, S.J., president of the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, take up the same theme. He pointed out that the 34th General Congregation of the Jesuit Order had specified that promotion of justice could be accomplished by direct service to the poor, social activism, or “developing awareness of the demands of justice and the social responsibility to achieve it.” Neither soup kitchens nor political mobilization campaigns, while laudable activities for our students, are central to the academic enterprise, he argued. But “developing social consciousness and conscience, or conscientization as the Latin Americans call it, is of the essence of Jesuit education. A university which does not, in its main educational activities, concern itself with this mission is not . . . in the Jesuit or Catholic tradition.”
It is here that we face our greatest challenges. How do we help shape our students to develop social consciousness and conscience for their work in the mass media—to be men and women for masses of others? How do we “form each student into a whole person of solidarity who will take responsibility for the real world” as journalists—especially, in a media environment in which the trivial is too often promoted to an audience that is increasingly indifferent, if not hostile, to serious public affairs? How can we better educate our students for the positions they ultimately will have as editors, general managers, and publishers (recalling Joseph Leibling’s book dedication, “"to the foundation of a school for publishers, failing which, no school of journalism can have meaning)? How do we adequately prepare each one to revolutionize the mass media on behalf of social justice?
We need to ask such questions in our periodic curriculum reviews, when we write our syllabuses each semester and as we craft each lecture. And I would suggest that we journalism faculty members in the Jesuit colleges and universities, perhaps under the auspices of the AJCU Communication group, collectively begin a serious and pointed conversation focused on them.
Close your eyes for a moment.
Recall the faces of those hundreds of people, most of them black, whom you saw on your television screen suffering in humid August heat outside New Orleans’ Morial Convention Center in the week after Hurricane Katrina.
They had been unable to leave the city, and in the days after the storm, after the levees had burst and the deluge had flooded their homes, they had walked to the Convention Center seeking what they vainly believed would be shelter and transportation out of their devastated city.
Hear in memory the words of an uncharacteristically subdued Wolf Blitzer on CNN: “You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals. . . . So many of these people. Almost all of them that we see are so poor and they are so black, and this is going to raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story unfold.”
Questions, indeed.
Sadly enough, the first was, “Who are these people?” We who live in New Orleans knew there was poverty in the city; we had seen the dilapidated projects, the unemployed standing on the street corners; we had read the statistics. But the sight of all of those individuals in that place and all of those those crammed into the Superdome just a mile and a half up Poydras St. shocked us.
As I watched the story unfold from my air-conditioned refuge hundreds of miles away, it struck me that journalists had failed them and us by not bringing them to our attention long before. And as an educator of journalists in Jesuit universities for 36 years, at Marquette and Loyola New Orleans, I questioned what responsibility all of us who teach journalism in Jesuit institutions might share.
One is tempted to respond that our role is to teach the nuts and bolts of news reporting and writing, how to cover news when it occurs. But this is not 1920, when the philosopher and journalist Walter Lippmann sniffed dismissively in Public Opinion that schools of journalism were trade schools, “intended to prepare men and women for a career.” We have more profound responsibility.
In his 2000 address at Santa Clara University, Father General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach told us that the role of faculty members at Jesuit colleges and universities “is tirelessly to seek the truth and to form each student into a whole person of solidarity who will take responsibility for the real world.” He made no distinction between disciplines; he was directing his words at us journalism professors as well as at our colleagues in theology, philosophy and literature.
What truth do we seek as we study our field and lead our students in seeking?
Prof. David Host of Marquette’s College of Journalism came up with an excellent answer 40 years earlier, in 1960, in an essay marking the fiftieth anniversary of the college. Host stated that he and his colleagues there pursued truth in two ways: “truth about journalism as a work to be done and truth about the news media as social instruments through which the work is done.”
The same could be said of today’s journalism instruction in Jesuit institutions, as evidenced by our curricula. We all teach students the basic principles of the work and the essential techniques of gathering news and preparing it for publication; it is the grasp of those underlying principles of the work that will enable our graduates to adapt readily to changes in the field. At the same time, as did the Marquette faculty of the last century, we attempt to bring our students to a knowledge and understanding of the role of mass media as social instruments: how they have developed over time, how they are changing, how they affect the public, and journalists’ ethical responsibilities to their readers and viewers. And if we are doing our work as we should, we are bringing our students to know not only how media operate today but to view them critically and consider how they ought to operate.
We have all firmly rooted our programs in the liberal arts in order that our students have that broader knowledge and understanding of the world that is crucial to their development as human beings. For us, as for the Marquette faculty of Host’s day, it is inconceivable that journalists should not be “educated precisely in those persisting questions of the nature and end of man and of the most pressing of his common worldly circumstances with which humanistic studies are traditionally concerned.”
Fr. Kolvenbach also said at Santa Clara that university knowledge, while valuable for its own sake, is also “knowledge that must ask itself, ‘For whom? For what?’” The answer, as we are frequently reminded on our campuses, is “the service of faith and the promotion of justice.”
The year before Fr. Kolvenbach was on that campus, a Santa Clara audience had heard Joseph Daoust, S.J., president of the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, take up the same theme. He pointed out that the 34th General Congregation of the Jesuit Order had specified that promotion of justice could be accomplished by direct service to the poor, social activism, or “developing awareness of the demands of justice and the social responsibility to achieve it.” Neither soup kitchens nor political mobilization campaigns, while laudable activities for our students, are central to the academic enterprise, he argued. But “developing social consciousness and conscience, or conscientization as the Latin Americans call it, is of the essence of Jesuit education. A university which does not, in its main educational activities, concern itself with this mission is not . . . in the Jesuit or Catholic tradition.”
It is here that we face our greatest challenges. How do we help shape our students to develop social consciousness and conscience for their work in the mass media—to be men and women for masses of others? How do we “form each student into a whole person of solidarity who will take responsibility for the real world” as journalists—especially, in a media environment in which the trivial is too often promoted to an audience that is increasingly indifferent, if not hostile, to serious public affairs? How can we better educate our students for the positions they ultimately will have as editors, general managers, and publishers (recalling Joseph Leibling’s book dedication, “"to the foundation of a school for publishers, failing which, no school of journalism can have meaning)? How do we adequately prepare each one to revolutionize the mass media on behalf of social justice?
We need to ask such questions in our periodic curriculum reviews, when we write our syllabuses each semester and as we craft each lecture. And I would suggest that we journalism faculty members in the Jesuit colleges and universities, perhaps under the auspices of the AJCU Communication group, collectively begin a serious and pointed conversation focused on them.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Christmas at Billy Goat's
Once upon a time, during a Christmas season many years ago (it was 1963), the Chicago bureau of United Press International and UPI's National Broadcast News Department, normally shortened to "national radio." celebrated Christmas with a festive office party--the company may even have picked up the tab-- and although I have forgotten the specific details, if I ever had a firm grasp of them, that is a party that haunted me for years after.
In that season, the Chicago bureau and national radio were housed in what was then the Uptown Savings and Loan Building, across Michigan Avenue from Tribune Tower, having moved earlier in the year from offices in the old Daily News Building on West Madison. Those of you who watched the sitcom in which Bob Newhart played a psychologist, Dr. Bob Hartley, will remember the Uptown Savings building as the one in which Bob had his office and into he which walked after meandering around the area north of the Loop in the opening sequence.
Into the basement of that same building a few months after we moved in came one of Chicago's great characters, William "Billy Goat" Sianis, who set up a saloon. Billy Goat had also moved from West Madison Street, where he had had a saloon across from the Chicago Stadium. Generations of Chicago newspapermen had trod into Billy's after (or before) covering the Bulls or the Blackhawks or Sonia Henie or Jersey Joe Walcott or Gorgeous George or whatever other act was playing the Stadium, and they had become friends with the proprietor.
Billy was a Greek immigrant with a pet goat and a gift for furnishing columnists with copy, especially on slow days, and with their complicity he gained a measure of fame. One episode alone was enough to insure his newsprint immortality: eighteen years earlier, in 1945, Billy had tried to take his goat, Billy Jr., into Wrigley Field to watch a World Series game, and the two were thrown out. In retaliation, Billy (Sr.) put a hex on the Cubs, which he never lifted and which has continued in effect through every long northside baseball season since. Later, when John Belushi and the Second City gang made it to "Saturday Night Live," it was Billy Goat's they satirized in their "hambooga, hambooga, hambooga...Pepsi, Pepsi, Pepsi" routine (according to Tribune columnist Dave Condon, Billy Goat's was the home of the meatless hamburger).
As you can imagine, we Unipressers upstairs were overjoyed to have Billy Goat's in the basement, and we made good use of it from the start--we invested more there than in the savings and loan, certainly (Dolores Deasy, the teetotaling UPI receptionist spent the first dollar in the place, and that dollar was destined to hang above the cash register--may still even be there). Because of its proximity, the joint was the hands-down choice for the Christmas party in that year when we were new neighbors. Alas, four of us on national radio had to work that night from four to midnight (or thereabouts), and we would miss the party.
In other circumstances, one or more of us might have called in sick. But we weren't entirely stupid. In fact, we were Unipressers, and resourceful, and we hadn't been at our typewriters long that evening when we came up with an idea that would allow us both pleasure and business.
Each night, one editor would be in charge of assigning stories for the five-minute world in brief (wib) broadcasts we sent out most hours and editing and filing them. Another would be in charge of the 15-minute world news roundups (rup) that we sent about every three hours. Two writers would write for both editors. But on this prelude to the holy season, if all of us shared the writing of every wib and roundup, we agreed, we could get the newscasts out and spell each other in going to the party.
And that's what we did. Two of us at a time went down the back elevator, hustled through the parking garage, squeezed through a half door that was designed for deliveries and jumped three or four feet to the floor of the tavern. We'd have a couple of drinks and a sandwich and go back up to let the other two party for a while. It was a wonderful system.
The broadcast stylebook admonished broadcast writers to use what was called the "bar stool method" of writing. Just tell the story to your typewriter as you'd tell it to the guy on the next bar stool, the lesson read. Trouble was, we got to the point at which the typewriter no longer understood what the hell we were trying to say.
The drawer of the main desk held a pair of scissors, however, and we had paste, and a file of the wibs and rups that had gone out earlier in the day, and even if we couldn't write we still had some manual dexterity and skills we'd carried with us from kindergarten. With a newscast coming up, one person would clip a story from the third wib while another was hacking at the fifth and another choosing an item from the seventh or eighth. One of us would paste everything on a sheet of copy paper, do a little penciling and hand it to the teletype operator.
It was only the next day that we realized that what we had done might have gotten us into some trouble. Had a client called to complain about getting the same stories hour after hour, or had one of the managers gone through the report critically the next day, or had someone noticed all the pasted-up copy in the bundle of raw copy. Or? There were too many "ors" to think about with the heads we were carrying around, and so we went about our work as if nothing out of the ordinary had gone on, and, blessedly, no one questioned us.
But the guilt was there, festering. My own Ghost of Christmas Past. And I never told the story. Not until more than 30 years later, when I was having dinner at the home of Tom and Adele McGann one night. Tom had been one the top editors on national radio and became a good friend. Caught up in good will and reminiscence, I confessed what we had done. Even then, I was hesitant.
Tom laughed. "You think you were the only guy who ever did that?" he said.
I was deflated. But, at last, I was absolved.
In that season, the Chicago bureau and national radio were housed in what was then the Uptown Savings and Loan Building, across Michigan Avenue from Tribune Tower, having moved earlier in the year from offices in the old Daily News Building on West Madison. Those of you who watched the sitcom in which Bob Newhart played a psychologist, Dr. Bob Hartley, will remember the Uptown Savings building as the one in which Bob had his office and into he which walked after meandering around the area north of the Loop in the opening sequence.
Into the basement of that same building a few months after we moved in came one of Chicago's great characters, William "Billy Goat" Sianis, who set up a saloon. Billy Goat had also moved from West Madison Street, where he had had a saloon across from the Chicago Stadium. Generations of Chicago newspapermen had trod into Billy's after (or before) covering the Bulls or the Blackhawks or Sonia Henie or Jersey Joe Walcott or Gorgeous George or whatever other act was playing the Stadium, and they had become friends with the proprietor.
Billy was a Greek immigrant with a pet goat and a gift for furnishing columnists with copy, especially on slow days, and with their complicity he gained a measure of fame. One episode alone was enough to insure his newsprint immortality: eighteen years earlier, in 1945, Billy had tried to take his goat, Billy Jr., into Wrigley Field to watch a World Series game, and the two were thrown out. In retaliation, Billy (Sr.) put a hex on the Cubs, which he never lifted and which has continued in effect through every long northside baseball season since. Later, when John Belushi and the Second City gang made it to "Saturday Night Live," it was Billy Goat's they satirized in their "hambooga, hambooga, hambooga...Pepsi, Pepsi, Pepsi" routine (according to Tribune columnist Dave Condon, Billy Goat's was the home of the meatless hamburger).
As you can imagine, we Unipressers upstairs were overjoyed to have Billy Goat's in the basement, and we made good use of it from the start--we invested more there than in the savings and loan, certainly (Dolores Deasy, the teetotaling UPI receptionist spent the first dollar in the place, and that dollar was destined to hang above the cash register--may still even be there). Because of its proximity, the joint was the hands-down choice for the Christmas party in that year when we were new neighbors. Alas, four of us on national radio had to work that night from four to midnight (or thereabouts), and we would miss the party.
In other circumstances, one or more of us might have called in sick. But we weren't entirely stupid. In fact, we were Unipressers, and resourceful, and we hadn't been at our typewriters long that evening when we came up with an idea that would allow us both pleasure and business.
Each night, one editor would be in charge of assigning stories for the five-minute world in brief (wib) broadcasts we sent out most hours and editing and filing them. Another would be in charge of the 15-minute world news roundups (rup) that we sent about every three hours. Two writers would write for both editors. But on this prelude to the holy season, if all of us shared the writing of every wib and roundup, we agreed, we could get the newscasts out and spell each other in going to the party.
And that's what we did. Two of us at a time went down the back elevator, hustled through the parking garage, squeezed through a half door that was designed for deliveries and jumped three or four feet to the floor of the tavern. We'd have a couple of drinks and a sandwich and go back up to let the other two party for a while. It was a wonderful system.
The broadcast stylebook admonished broadcast writers to use what was called the "bar stool method" of writing. Just tell the story to your typewriter as you'd tell it to the guy on the next bar stool, the lesson read. Trouble was, we got to the point at which the typewriter no longer understood what the hell we were trying to say.
The drawer of the main desk held a pair of scissors, however, and we had paste, and a file of the wibs and rups that had gone out earlier in the day, and even if we couldn't write we still had some manual dexterity and skills we'd carried with us from kindergarten. With a newscast coming up, one person would clip a story from the third wib while another was hacking at the fifth and another choosing an item from the seventh or eighth. One of us would paste everything on a sheet of copy paper, do a little penciling and hand it to the teletype operator.
It was only the next day that we realized that what we had done might have gotten us into some trouble. Had a client called to complain about getting the same stories hour after hour, or had one of the managers gone through the report critically the next day, or had someone noticed all the pasted-up copy in the bundle of raw copy. Or? There were too many "ors" to think about with the heads we were carrying around, and so we went about our work as if nothing out of the ordinary had gone on, and, blessedly, no one questioned us.
But the guilt was there, festering. My own Ghost of Christmas Past. And I never told the story. Not until more than 30 years later, when I was having dinner at the home of Tom and Adele McGann one night. Tom had been one the top editors on national radio and became a good friend. Caught up in good will and reminiscence, I confessed what we had done. Even then, I was hesitant.
Tom laughed. "You think you were the only guy who ever did that?" he said.
I was deflated. But, at last, I was absolved.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Forty years and a new world
Barack Obama’s election as President of the United States was a thrilling moment for me, and I was electrified by his eloquent words to the tens of thousands of people in Grant Park who celebrated his victory Tuesday night and the millions of us watching on television.
As I listened to him, I thought back to the tumultuous week of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and that small army of young people, members of the Youth International Party—“Yippies,” they were called—who had come to Chicago from all over the country to have their concerns heard by the delegates. Their protest was aimed primarily at the prolonged war in Vietnam. But they also targeted the undemocratic way in which Democratic presidential candidates were chosen, a government that seemed to ignore its citizens, and the national shame of denying civil rights to black citizens. In sum, they wanted to call attention to the great gap they saw between what America was meant to be and what it was.
The Yippies gathered night after night to try to march on the International Amphitheatre, the convention hall, only to be met by police wielding nightsticks and spraying Mace. The police attacked them indiscriminately, beat them, and threw them into paddy wagons. The only retaliation by the media-savvy Yippies was the repeated chant, “The whole world is watching. The whole world is watching.”
I was working summer relief in the national broadcast news department of United Press International and wrote the convention story all week. After midnight on Thursday, the last night of the convention, I walked down Michigan Ave. to the Conrad Hilton Hotel, the main convention hotel. Yippies had struggled with police for control of streets around the hotel, and many were camped in Grant Park, across the street.
Only a few of the blue-helmeted Chicago police were around when I got there, and they stood in the doorways of the Hilton checking room keys and convention credentials and occasionally exchanging light banter with some of the youths who had been their antagonists for five nights.
I entered Grant Park through a line of National Guardsmen about the same age as the Yippies. The young men and women still left in the encampment were subdued and gathered around a campfire. With them were a few newsmen, some curious onlookers and a handful of delegates wearing buttons of the two unsuccessful peace candidates for the Democrats’ presidential nomination, Sen. Eugene McCarthy and Sen. George McGovern. The Yippies were singing around the campfire. I could hear the anti-war song “Where have all the young men gone?” as I neared their clearing. And then, over and over, they sang the anthem of the civil rights movement, “We shall overcome.”
It was the memory of those Yippies that held my imagination late Tuesday night as I watched and listened to Barack Obama speaking in that same park. Was his election not clear evidence that so much that they were protesting has been washed away over the past 40 years? Was it not a sign that the gap between the America that was meant to be and the America that is has narrowed greatly?
Of course, we have not fully become what we ought to be. But listen to those voices together, the Yippies singing in counterpoint to Obama’s repeated refrain of “Yes we can.”: “We shall overcome. Yes we can.” We know that now.
And listen for the echo of the Yippies’ chant: “The whole world is watching.”
As I listened to him, I thought back to the tumultuous week of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and that small army of young people, members of the Youth International Party—“Yippies,” they were called—who had come to Chicago from all over the country to have their concerns heard by the delegates. Their protest was aimed primarily at the prolonged war in Vietnam. But they also targeted the undemocratic way in which Democratic presidential candidates were chosen, a government that seemed to ignore its citizens, and the national shame of denying civil rights to black citizens. In sum, they wanted to call attention to the great gap they saw between what America was meant to be and what it was.
The Yippies gathered night after night to try to march on the International Amphitheatre, the convention hall, only to be met by police wielding nightsticks and spraying Mace. The police attacked them indiscriminately, beat them, and threw them into paddy wagons. The only retaliation by the media-savvy Yippies was the repeated chant, “The whole world is watching. The whole world is watching.”
I was working summer relief in the national broadcast news department of United Press International and wrote the convention story all week. After midnight on Thursday, the last night of the convention, I walked down Michigan Ave. to the Conrad Hilton Hotel, the main convention hotel. Yippies had struggled with police for control of streets around the hotel, and many were camped in Grant Park, across the street.
Only a few of the blue-helmeted Chicago police were around when I got there, and they stood in the doorways of the Hilton checking room keys and convention credentials and occasionally exchanging light banter with some of the youths who had been their antagonists for five nights.
I entered Grant Park through a line of National Guardsmen about the same age as the Yippies. The young men and women still left in the encampment were subdued and gathered around a campfire. With them were a few newsmen, some curious onlookers and a handful of delegates wearing buttons of the two unsuccessful peace candidates for the Democrats’ presidential nomination, Sen. Eugene McCarthy and Sen. George McGovern. The Yippies were singing around the campfire. I could hear the anti-war song “Where have all the young men gone?” as I neared their clearing. And then, over and over, they sang the anthem of the civil rights movement, “We shall overcome.”
It was the memory of those Yippies that held my imagination late Tuesday night as I watched and listened to Barack Obama speaking in that same park. Was his election not clear evidence that so much that they were protesting has been washed away over the past 40 years? Was it not a sign that the gap between the America that was meant to be and the America that is has narrowed greatly?
Of course, we have not fully become what we ought to be. But listen to those voices together, the Yippies singing in counterpoint to Obama’s repeated refrain of “Yes we can.”: “We shall overcome. Yes we can.” We know that now.
And listen for the echo of the Yippies’ chant: “The whole world is watching.”
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Election Day, 2008
Another exquisite day here, and sunshine and blue skies may well get voters to the polls. Obama is unlikely to win Loozerana. But Mary Landrieu will keep the Senate seat for the Democrats.
At about 8:30, clutching the latest New Yorker to read in line, I swung by the school where we vote. A line outside was fairly long but didn’t discourage me, and I headed toward the end when two neighbors came out. “There’s no line at our precinct,” one said, and she was right. I flashed my driver’s license, signed the book, and one of the judges pointed to the voting booth. I was in and out in about 10minutes.
Another judge asked, “Are you related to Larry Lorenz?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you his brother?”
“No, I am he.”
“Well, you sounded just like him.”
Turns out she was a student of mine more than 20 years ago. I remembered her name but would not have recognized her, even to ask if she were her sister.
“You taught me ‘the medium is the message,’” she said. “I’ll never forget that.”
How nice it is to be remembered for something.
At about 8:30, clutching the latest New Yorker to read in line, I swung by the school where we vote. A line outside was fairly long but didn’t discourage me, and I headed toward the end when two neighbors came out. “There’s no line at our precinct,” one said, and she was right. I flashed my driver’s license, signed the book, and one of the judges pointed to the voting booth. I was in and out in about 10minutes.
Another judge asked, “Are you related to Larry Lorenz?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you his brother?”
“No, I am he.”
“Well, you sounded just like him.”
Turns out she was a student of mine more than 20 years ago. I remembered her name but would not have recognized her, even to ask if she were her sister.
“You taught me ‘the medium is the message,’” she said. “I’ll never forget that.”
How nice it is to be remembered for something.
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