For us Blue-Liners, the Holiday Train will roar through our neighborhood, Dec. 12. 13 and 14. Full schedule is in the article below.
Photo by my old STMG colleague, and excellent photographer, Joel Lerner.
Story by Ro Coleman, Chicago Sun-Times
The Chicago Transit Authority announced the return of its annual CTA holiday fleet, starting the week of Thanksgiving and spreading good cheer throughout the holiday season.
The Allstate CTA Holiday Train will be on its merry way starting Friday, Nov. 29. Commuters can expect a festive, six-car train filled with holiday scenes, lights and Santa following along on all CTA rail lines.
Then the Allstate CTA Elves Workshop train — first introduced to the Holiday Fleet in 2016, its halls decked with winter scenes as elves onboard share candy canes with riders — will follow right behind the holiday train.
The Allstate CTA Holiday Bus will make its debut Saturday in the annual Magnificent Mile Tree-Lighting Parade before it hits the streets Tuesday on 15 different bus routes throughout Chicago.
“Ralphie the Reindeer” — and his bright green nose — will light the way around town on the exterior of the bus.
In addition to festive artwork by students at Perkins Bass Elementary School, the inside of the bus will feature a mini-village, lights, holiday-themed seating and Santa and his sleigh.
If you will, read this interview of Wilfred McClay, a history professor, who wrote ‘The Land of Hope: And Invitation to the Great American Story.’ It’s about gratitude – in its purest form.
Thank you! And have a happy Thanskgiving.
Fundamental American values manifested in the story of Thanksgiving centuries before the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, explained Wilfred McClay, author of Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story and professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, in a Tuesday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
Mansour invited McClay’s assessment of criticisms of the November holiday among left-wing teachers calling for students to “unlearn” a “feel-good” Thanksgiving “myth.”
McClay said of leftist contempt for Thanksgiving, “I think it’s a reflection of what — for some people — is the obsession with the politicization of all aspects of life, and everything has to be brought into conformity with some kind of ideological worldview.”
McClay continued, “It’s almost like a kind of revolutionary religion, like in the French Revolution, the way they abolished the calendar, and tried to reinvent civilization from the bottom up. It’s the kind of mentality [against] something that really … is one of most admirable holidays imaginable. Of course, we aren’t the only ones that have Thanksgiving in the world, but it is integral to our essential practises, and it’s an expression of gratitude.”
“It has religious roots,” said McClay of the history of Thanksgiving. “In the 1620s — there’s some debate over when the first Thanksgiving was, whether it was in Virginia or whether it was in Plymouth, but it’s in the 17th century — it had religious overtones, particularly with the Pilgrims in 1621.”
McClay added, “It is an amazing story. Of course they had come in pursuit of freedom to practise their religion and raise their children as they saw fit. They had come from the Netherlands, where religious liberty was available to them, but it was a hard place to live for various reasons, and particularly for their children, to have them grow up not speaking English and all of that, so they got on the Mayflower and came on over.”
“It was a terrible, brutal first winter,” stated McClay. “They suffered from disease and exposure, and about half of them died. Many of them never came off the ship because they saw the landing as so dangerous, but they did have favorable contacts with some of the native tribes, the Patuxet Tribe [and] Squanto, and he taught them how to cultivate corn, what plants to eat and what plants not to eat.”
“[Squanto] was an intermediary,” explained McClay. “He helped [the Pilgrims] form relationships with the Wampanoag Tribe. … They had this celebratory feast in November 1621 to celebrate a successful harvest of corn that Squanto had helped show them [how] to cultivate. So that’s seen as the historical origin of it, and it was, by all accounts, by everything we know about it, and we don’t know a lot.”
McClay remarked, “Puritans were great about keeping journals and diaries. They saw success or failure as evidence of the degree to which they were being faithful to God. … That’s what their settlement was all about. They saw this as a mission, this errand into the wilderness.”
“Ten years later, John Winthrop, who led the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which became Boston — he gave this magnificent speech … where the phrase ‘city on a hill’ comes from — makes it very clear this was a religious enterprise, so they’re grateful to God [for] the success in finally getting through — or at least having the materials to get through — the coming winter,” added McClay.
Fundamental American values were being developed by the early colonists, explained McClay.
“What they did was enact social compact theory that had been sort of kicked around in Europe — especially in Britain — for awhile,” McClay noted. “They created a body politic out of the consent of those who were aboard the ship, and they had the foresight to realize they should [and] could do that … two centuries before the Declaration of Independence, the idea that government is based on the consent of the governed, which of course is one of the fundamental American ideas. So all of this is prefigured by the Mayflower Compact.”
McClay said, “There’s a kind of audacity about these [first colonists] that we miss, I think, in the historical accounts. Their journeys were dangerous. The habitats into which they were coming were brutal, and they lost many lives, and yet they had this sense that …. they were on a mission of God, ‘The eyes of all people are upon us.’ … They were so deeply committed to the vision of what they were doing, and that was the germ of what became, ultimately, a great nation.”
The Puritans sought religious restoration via their settlement enterprise, explained McClay.
“[The Puritans] wanted to just have a faithful remnant of a church that they thought had become corrupt in England, and in Europe, in general,” McClay shared. “What they really wanted to do was recreate what [William Bradford] called, ‘the primitive church,’ and that doesn’t mean people running around with spears and that sort of thing. It meant a church that resembled the church of the time of the apostles and Jesus and immediately after Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, the early time of the church, when it was simpler, when you didn’t have a lot of pomp and ceremony and popes and bishops running around in fancy robes and the accumulation of wealth and worldly power.”
McClay added, “It’s proper, I think, that we really trace Thanksgiving more to the Puritans, to a kind of reverent Thanksgiving.”
“[Left-wing criticism of Thanksgiving] doesn’t touch the validity of the holiday for us, because we don’t necessarily ground what we value of Thanksgiving in that historical episode. It’s not like the founding is, where it really matters what the language of the [Declaration of Independence] and Constitution was, and we want to try to stay as close as we can to the original intent of those documents. We don’t have that same kind of relationship to the first Thanksgiving, so I think it’s kind of a phony charge, what it does reflect to me is this pervasive politicization of American life, particularly from a left, radical, critical perspective.”
McClay described Thanksgiving as an “aspirational” holiday.
“A myth, properly understood, is not a falsehood,” McClay said. “We say that we believe all men are created equal. In some literal way, of course that’s not true, so what do we mean? Do we mean all men are created equal in the eyes of God? Maybe, although secular people might object to that formulation, but we certainly mean we have a kind of aspiration towards recognition of — in some ultimate way that’s very hard to define — the equal worth of all individual people. That’s really, I think, fundamentally religious. It’ s hard to imagine that existing out of a Juedo-Christian understanding of human beings.”
McClay went on, “We have this day because we aspire to reconciliation to one another and a recognition of just how profoundly indebted we are to those who came before us, to our parents, to our surrounding society, to our neighbors and friends, that there’s so much that we take for granted every single day.”
“How are you going to go through life?” asked McClay. “How are you going to go through the world? Are you going to go through it thinking that everything is your due and everything you don’t get [means] you’re being cheated by the world? Or do you think, ‘Why do I have something rather than nothing? Isn’t that great?’”
McClay continued, “The Christian view — I’m sweeping widely, here — is that we don’t really deserve anything. Our sinful nature is that we don’t really have anything coming to us, that it’s God’s graciousness that is the source of all these good things that we really don’t deserve.”
“It is a time in which we recognize our own insufficiencies, that we are not islands unto ourselves and that we depend on others, and that there are so many people in our lives to whom we owe profound gratitude, and just the bounty of existence,” determined McClay. “These are all reasons for gratitude.”
McClay contrasted gratitude and ingratitude.
“Gratitude is the proper disposition of a healthy human soul, and it’s the proper disposition of a good citizen in a democratic society,” assessed McClay. “If we lose those things and we become, sort of, brats — and I’m not meaning to say all the radical critiques of American society are bratty, most of them are, but not all of them — brattiness is a kind of ingratitude and a feeling that, ‘I deserve it all and whatever I don’t get is a form of expropriation.’ It’s the seed of other good things, other forms of mutual appreciation and reconciliation that can occur, and to take that away atomizes people.it leaves people without a means to reach out to one another.”
Left-wing critiques of Thanksgiving are generally a part of a broader political campaign to undermine America’s founding, concluded McClay.
Egg yolks are not our enemy. For the selenium alone. And cholesterol is not bad for you.
I’ve searched for the most nutrient dense foods, where a little goes a long way. Power foods. I found the answer – eat what you eat, but eat smaller. And go for a walk.
Michael Medved was just on Dennis Prager’s show. He’s got a book out about God’s continuing providence in America. He said the lead bomber for Japan in the Pearl Harbor attack, confessed that he saw God’s hand on America and Pearl Harbor – during the bombing. He became a Christian, moved to America and appeared at crusades with Billy Graham.
There would be no good without evil because there would be no way to gauge either. But for all the free will, there would be neither without the consequence and rewards of choice established in God’s natural order.
If you customize it, the Fender Mustang is better than the Gibson SG.
Walter Becker and Donald Fagen went to Bard College, and became true bards. They were Jack Londons, postbeat. Call of the Urban Wild.
If you eat enough Lactose free ice cream, it’ll effect your system just like regular ice cream. In some cases (ahem) in the middle of the night.
[Radio commercial – lady’s voice, husky, hoarse, a bit of a southern drawl.] “Ah used to have these brown, scaly creepy things all over mah face. They was ugly, I tell ya. But then I took this pill, this one l’il pill with all this food in it, so they say. Ah swallowed it, and all of a sudden, ah looked like a supermodel and became as rah-pay-sheeous as a 20-year old! Ah do cartwheels all day long now an’ only stop tah take another pill! Ahm gonna live for-ever! Whoo!” [Voices fades, announcer’s voice fades in.] “For only $130 bucks a month – and if you give us every bit of private information your own, we’ll drop that price down to a special $125.99 – you too can have this highly reaserched, highly developed, fountain of snake oil. Give us your phone number and all your passwords, NOW!”
Black Friday conceals the fact that the blacker the Friday, the redder the Saturday for consumers’ checking accounts.
Have a great Thanksgiving, everybody. I have to make green beans and croutons for the celebration at my sister’s house tomorrow.
Fed my pal, the female squirrel (aka Little Buddy) in the rain. Well, squirrels have to eat too. (pix coming)
Two happy errands today. Picked up my bro-in-law Steve’s favorite coffee (Christmas gift) at the Starbucks on Lawrence/Central. The Central Ave. 85 northbound bus smelled a LOT like the inside of a hot dog stand.
My friend Carol P. had a special birthday today. Carol lives in my building and works as a cashier at Jewel Foods, right across the street from the Starbucks. Had some shopping to do anyway, so I crossed the street – which was heavily under construction – and headed, beneath threatening skies, to the Jewel.
I tried not to let Carol see me until I was in line. Bought a Happy Birthday balloon, and a chocolate bar that I hoped she’d like (she did). I got my other groceries, then got in line. “Is that balloon for me?” she said, as soon as she spotted me. “Shh,” I said.
It took forever to get up there, but Carol appreciated the balloon and candy. She told me I had to ring out cashier presents (she must get a lot of them) at customer service, which I did when we were done.
As Carol rang me up, I announced to all who were around – and there were plenty of folks, many regular customers who knew her – not too loudly, but loud enough, that our cashier, Carol “is having a very special birthday. It’s a milestone for her and she’s turning 40! Forty!” I was 20 years off on purpose, but Carol looks great and is putting in really long shifts for the holiday.
“So, if you don’t mind, folks…” They were ahead of me. “Happy Birthday, to you…”
Haha! That was fun. I told Carol it put a little color in her cheeks.
Back home on the bus. The cloudy skies opened and I was drenched – waits between buses were pretty long. Two buses later, the rain was on and off, so I decided to stay outside and smoke my pipe. I walked a couple of blocks north to see if the squirrels were out. They were – even when the rain came hard again. I had a hood – all they had was fur. Guess it worked for them, they were happy to grab a shelled peanut, stuff it in their mouth, and and scamper off to bury it as usual.
I put some peanuts in a hole up in the big Maple tree for Little Buddy. She took them first. It’s a sheltered spot, inside the tree. She even walked the fence plank get the roasted ones; the ones she likes for ‘dinner’. Sometimes, it’s English Walnuts.
Finally I came home. I often stay out as long as I can ’cause I don’t feel like coming in – until I hear my mom’s voice: “Get inside already, it’s raining cats and dogs!” Or, “it’s dark out. What are you waiting for, a special invitation?” Thanks, Mom. Miss those words.
Laundry, drying clothes, cooking a cornish hen – almost time to check the oven. Gotta go!
PS – Whatever happened to Bill Granger’s November Man? Bill used to write for the Sun-Times, edited the DePaulia before that. ’63, if I remember. We shared that distinction – my time as editor came in ’70-71, right after Kent State. Bill led the students through the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, the end of Camelot, and the cultural turbulence that began to form with VietNam and the events that led to the Kennedy Assasination. Bill had a stroke and died way too early. He wrote a weekly column for the Times and later, the Daily Herald. Over the years, he also penned the November Man series.
Mr. Clifford, 98, worked on the monument, which was completed in 1941, for 14 years. He was hired as a teenager because he was able to use a jackhammer. He is survived by his wife, Carolyn.
Look this one up if you get a chance. True tale by Mike Rowe – the dirty jobs guy – told in a podcast on Christmas Eve, 2017. You’ll learn things about a famous movie I bet you never knew.
Evening rush hour commuters had a tough go navigating our record 3″ snowfall on Veteran’s Day last Monday (11/11/19). The temp was in the high 40s today and it will remain reasonably warm through most of next week.
Ice GrippersJewel Foods did a good job of keeping the sidewalk clear.
There was no one like him. He had stories. He was born in 1916 on the south side and could tell me first hand, about the Stockyards.
His father worked there. And he told me about his father, who died a year and a month before I was born. Grandpa Mike (Mikhail – he was from Russia) was, among other things, a cooper. I thought of him as I used tools I inherited – passed down to my dad from him. A cooper is a barrel maker – that’s one of the things he did at the Stockyards. Ages later, I sharpened up his two-handed draw knife and fit in a piece of flooring, perfectly. He had a real monkey wrench, too. And a gun he’d always shoot straight into the air on New Year’s Eve, Dad told me.
I still have the last letter he wrote to my dad in Jan. 1950 – right before he died.
Grandpa owned a grocery store/butcher shop around Roosevelt and Damen, from the 20s to the 40s. When Dad was a little kid, Grandpa would fire up the Chandler, and he’d accompany him to South Water Market, where they would pick up fresh meat and groceries for the store. The business and Grandpa’s investments are what saved the family from the worst of the Depression. In the late 40s, he and Grandma left for sunny Phoenix, where my uncle and his bride lived. He died there at 67.
The memories lived on in my dad, and he passed them on to me. Dad grew up in the Al Capone era, where he was sent off with a bucket to a back door establishment and would return with the bucket filled with beer. The Cubs were good then, and were often in the World Series. Dad was at Wrigley, age 16, selling ‘unofficial’ score cards, when Babe Ruth called his famous homer. Dad didn’t see it – he told me he was avoiding Andy Frain, who eventually caught up with him and his friends and not-so-gently, kicked them out of the park.
Dad and his buddies, particularly Willy Patete – a short, blond- haired Italian whose mom would serve up gigantic bowls of pasta – would hop on the back of fruit trucks and steal watermelons for a forbidden treat in the summer.
He was in a club. They met in one of the kid’s basements. These days, the members might be called gang bangers. I don’t know that they did anything really bad, outside of what you’d see in the Dead End Kids or Bowery Boys films, but the hierarchy of the local clubs graduated into the 42 Gang, which was Triple AAA for Al Capone’s big league.
Did you know Al Capone dearly wanted to buy the Cubs? He wanted Babe Ruth to manage.
Dad joined the Navy when the War came. He wanted to be a Marine, but was just past the age limit. He went to Hawaii, Okinawa, fought in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. He told me the stories. I remember him and my uncles exchanging war trials and tribs, over and over at family gatherings.
Now Dad’s ship – the USS Preserver (before it was scrapped, it’s last mission was salvaging the remains of the space shuttle, Challenger) – was in fact, hit by a torpedo while it was in dock. Harrowing. Afer Dad passed, I found a journal I hadn’t seen, documenting his experience. ‘War is hell,’ he would tell me, over and over.
The little book justified that. I never learned how right he was. In college, I fought for peace (high lotto number – I’d signed up for the Naval Reserves, but optioned out before I committed), a.k.a. avoiding VietNam.
But Dad, grim reality aside, tended to trump up his experiences to look even larger than life than he already was, in his little boy’s eyes.
I was about five – we had just moved into the new house – which stayed in the family 48 years. One Sunday, I climbed onto the couch to be with my hero, who was relaxing in his shorts and dago-t. Mom wasn’t far away, washing dishes in the kitchen.
“Daddy, what are those marks?” I inquired, as a younster would, pointing at three scars on Dad’s leg.
“That’s where Daddy got shot up in the war,” he explained, about to fade into War reverie.
“No he didn’t!” I heard my mom’s voice. “Don’t believe him – he’s full of baloney.” She came in, drying a dish. “Those were boils he had on his leg. He didn’t get shot up in the war.”
Dad smiled.
When he retired, we used to shoot pool at a local tavern on Thursday nights and have a few beers. That’s where we really bonded.
I’m glad I ran the video camera one night at the kitchen table, while dad just talked. Mom was gone already, and his last stories flowed freely.
He taught me how to play ping pong. He took me to Maxwell Street near Hull House, where street vendors sold everything they could get their hands on, and famous blues musicians picked and wailed in every doorstep. He loved the Three Stooges and went downtown to see them play music and work out their act before they started to make films. He was a boxer and fought Golden Gloves as a teen. He taught me how to ride a bike and play baseball. He had a way of throwing and catching that hailed back to when he was a kid in the 20s and 30s, and, btw – that was when his dad took him to Maxwell Street. He made sure I towed the line – the best, and hardest thing of all. His sense of humor was great, and he passed that on to me, too.
And he gave me (or tried to), the best of that Greatest Generation – his wisdom. See you later, Dad. Sigh, not too long, either.
I love observing people. Pipe Guy gives me a chance to do that, and I enjoy some fine tasting tobaccos at the same time.
Pipe Guy
My favorite place to go is the train station. The other is outside the Jewel entrance – a grocery store for you non-Chicagoans. That spot is partly sheltered, then again, so is the Metra Station. I stand across from the tracks, across the parking lot of the steel pipe factory, under a huge, old, maple. There are other trees there as well.
The squirrels have befriended me. I feed them – I should have said that first. They’re so persistant, they’ll fidget by the cuff of my jeans, daring to crawl up. Or, they’ll walk along wooden fence top where I stand, edging nearer, ready to climb into my jacket pocket or my side pack to see if I really have no more peanuts, like I told them.
The most well-fed squirrel in the city.
Peanuts?! Almonds, walnuts, sunflower seeds. Between the nuts and pipe tobacco, this is an expensive hobby. Lately, my investment is buried in the grass along sidewalks or stored in trees. Occasionally, they’ll sit about a foot away from me and chow down.
I hope to keep going out everyday, even through the winter. Stayed inside way too much last year and the fresh air and walk feels good.
The train people – commuters – notice me feeding the squirrels. It took weeks, if not a month or more, to become non-verbally accepted. You know how invisible commuters tend to be. I used to be one when I worked downtown. Say nothing to nobody, mind your business and go home.
And there’s the stigma of the pipe. Not socially acceptable, you would think, especially with all the laws against it (I smoke where it’s legal). But being somewhat of a benign presence, not too close to the traffic, and also feeding the wildlife, slowly, I noticed a change.
As people got off the train, they started noticing me. I’m there for almost an hour in the warmer weather and see many trains stopping in rush hour. Eventually, I seemed to have become a touchstone – I noticed it when I was absent for a few days. They glanced, quickly, like, ‘Oh, there’s Pipe Guy, it’s OK.’
One young gal even smiled when I threw the squirrel a peanut. Good thing. I was saying, “Hi baby! C’mon, c’mon!” To the squirrel.
And I notice the people, too. It’s like a little drama, a soap. All summer, a guy who got off the 4:00, went to his car, which had a load of pallets tightly tied to the roof. He got in and drove away. He did this day after day with the same pallets.
And the gal, slightly heavyset, nice blond hair, well dressed, and wearing red sneakers, who walks with a fast stride, usually leading the rest of the pack to their cars.
I always hear one guy who doesn’t ride the train, but comes around the corner, heading south. I heard him today. Instead of athletic shoes, he wears a pair of light brown dress shoes. They’re the old-fashioned kind with leather soles and hard heels. You know the sound. And he wears work clothes.
Then there’s the couple who must work in the same place, and ride the train home together. They stand on the corner and talk for 10 minutes or so, before going their separate ways. I don’t hear their words, but their tone is very friendly, like maybe they’re at the start of something.
I’m good buddies with the crew who work at the pipe factory. ‘Pipe factory’ – ironic, isn’t it? When it’s warm, they gather after work and drink beer at the spot where I smoke. It’s their spot and I try to stay out of the way when they’re there. But they always invite me to hang with them. I think I’m an honorary employee. I clean up around there and push the carts customers leave along the sidewalk back to the factory for them.
My adventures are shortened now by the cold and early sunset. As I start home, I always stop to enjoy the wind chimes a guy has in his yard. He keeps them up year ’round and they sound like little church bells.
Mid-block – a hello to the Chihuahua, who barks meanly at me if I don’t wave at her, and then if the neighbors aren’t out to chat, I head to the Jewel and home.
Been away for awhile, busy, and doing the learning curve on the Blog. Meanwhile, the first snow came early in Chicago. Way early! Here are some photos from my neck of the woods (E. Portage Pk. – Chicago), Halloween, Oct. 31.
