Newberry Library Book Fair - I am So there!

I am SO evolved and So There!

Saturday, July 25, 2009, from 10 am - 6 pm (Learn about the special festivities planned to celebrate the Newberry Book Fair 25th anniversary!)


I am brushing up my Eccos! This is no south side Pierogi Fest, or Irish beer swill with music. I will dress the part of the 56 year old progressive, hip and still got it baby - man about town! Well, some parts of town.

I want to give off the image that I'm a successful full fledged academic on holiday. Polo shirts with khaki pants won't do and everyone working the stands will be wearing the same thing that gives that Public Television WTTW Pledge Drive but Outdoors impression. Me Too.

First - a trip to John's on 111th to get a near-shave on the noggin - Ala Billy Ayers, Dick Simpson, Moby, Uncle Fester from Smashing Pumpkins and Gay activists. White guys should never shave their heads and Hipsters get close to that but not down to the bone. We middle aged south side close knit ethnic types still tend to the The Princeton or the Boy's Regular haircut. Also, no shave 'til Sunday Mass. You hasta give off the three day growth Old Guy Miami Vice Nubby Stubble Look - Like Billy Ayers and Pete and Peggy Seeger.

Second - Get a stud ear ring. Every fifty-something Hispter that's really with it has one. I might need take a handful of pain killers and couple of Olde English 40's to that. DoooooooooooDe!

Third - Cotton, Cotton Cotton! - Something loose and breezy maybe some sort of faux Tolstoy peasant shirt ( white) belted with a good quality knotted rope from Mount Greenwood True Value. Britches?????? Cargo shorts extra baggy and shin length, or patchwork blue jeans? Hmmmmm. Maybe a standard issue Che T or a Tie-Dyed

Fourth - Footwear - Birkenstocks or Eccos? Sandals or boaters? No socks. Stangkee Feet Caynt Be Beat!

Fifth - Deportment to match the schedule! Yes, yes . . . I have been North of Madison many times and the most important thing to wear is (I agree) a big smile! I'm the customer!!! So Sally and Seth, don't sit behind your table, Duckies, Get off your Lard and come over and be helpful, or I'll get all Catholic school on you! . Stand the whole time and have something to keep you looking busy. "See my smile? I can be passive aggressive too. Don't you think that you might want to have a better attitude and please dont smoke? Did you really wash your hands after handling that Nelson Algren hardcover and you're not going to eat that roasted corn? Is that organic corn? Where's the beer tent?"


Here's the schedule and my expected behavior.

Celebrate 25 years of inexpensive used books at the Newberry's annual Book Fair. We have a record number of books to sell this year! More than 110,000 donated books will be sorted into 70 categories for your browsing convenience. With many books priced under $2, it's easy to replenish your home library's holdings on subjects ranging from antiques to zoology.
Admission is free.

Happy shopping!

Parking: The Newberry Library does not have a visitor parking lot. Limited metered parking is available on area streets. Daytime and evening parking restrictions do apply, so be sure to read the posted signs carefully. Garage parking is also available in the neighborhood. No Hummers; No Buicks; No Lincolns; No Fords and No Chevies.

The following garages offer discounted parking to Newberry patrons ($7 for 0-8 hours; $9 for 8-10 hours). Remember to bring your parking ticket with you so it can be validated by the Newberry security guard. The Sheehan Family at 10857 will let you use their drive way but then you need to take Metra downtown and transfer to the CTA

100 West Chestnut Street (enter on Clark Street)
100 East Walton Street (valet service)

Festivities on Saturday, July 25

9 am – Complimentary yoga presented in Washington Square Park by lululemon athletica - Pass. Where's the beer ticket booth?

10 am – Book Fair opens
10:30 am – Complimentary kids’ yoga presented in Washington Square Park by Get Healthy Chicago
12 pm – Meet the Author: Alex Kotlowitz (book signing) Author of Never a City So Real a wonderful, short study of Chicago. I will leave him alone.

Bughouse Square Debates (1 pm to 4 pm)

1 pm – Rick Kogan Welcome! - " Hey, Kogan, You Bastard! It's Hickey!! Yeah, that's right! You were 'spozed to have me back on your show and talk about my novel! Yeah, I'm heckling! What's the matter? Not so tough when don't have Steve Bertrand to back you up! . . . Terry, in a minute, I . . . no I have not had enough beer. My Mom is in Orland; Okay? Kogan! I'm here allllll Daaaayyyy!!!!!!"

1:15 pm – Presentation of the Altgeld award to High School Teacher Barb Thill - Clap politely.
1:35 pm – Main debate (Abraham Lincoln vs. Stephen Douglas) "Go Douglas! Little Giant Rocks! No Lincoln; No War!"
2:15 pm – Memorial tributes to Studs Terkel, Leon Despres, Franklin Rosemont and Judith Krug - " Hey, . . . why you call the cops on me??????" A wide-eyed Terry Sullivan watches in disgust and mild disbelief. Ms. Sullivan calls Hickey's kids, " I am afriad your father is at Chicago Ave. Police Station. I will post bail, but I am going home. Please, have your Father call me . . . when Hell Freezes!"
2:30 pm – Soapbox Debates ( still in custody)
3:45 pm – Dil Pickle award presented ( still in custody)
6 pm – Book Fair closes for the day


9:45 P.M - Hickey gets released into the custody of his kids. The elegant,polite and beautiful Ms. Terry Sullivan awaits the forth coming apology "Oh, No" Phone call.

The 2009 Book Fair is generously supported by Whole Foods Market, Hallett Movers, and by our media partner, Flavorpill.

Many thanks to the following restaurants for donating lunches to our many wonderful Book Fair volunteers:

Bistro Zinc

Caffe Baci

D'Absolute Caterers

Edwardos

Fox and Obel Food Market

Goddess and Grocer

Go RomaJewell Events Catering

Occasions Chicago Catering

Tri-Star Catering

All kidding aside . . . I am so there! I love books and I love people who love books. I'm a lover.

Newberry Folks! I'll behave . . . Honor Bright!

McCourt's Confession forgot St. Vincent De Paul Society

Tavis: If you were a preacher, what do you think your message might be? What would you be coming back to time and time again?

McCourt: Freedom. Well, you can't do that because a religion by its very nature binds you in. It has its parameters or perimeters so you have to follow a certain doctrine. So I'd call myself an atheist in a way - a spiritual, religious atheist, which is a contradiction in terms.

Tavis: Yeah, I hear you.

November 2007

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200711/20071128_mccourt.html

Writer Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes died yesterday. I was told of McCourt's worsening condition by the man who directed and produced Frank and Malachy McCourt's career making play A Couple of Blackguards
here in Chicago.

Writer, film maker, actor and wit, Mike Houlihan directed the McCourts during the early 1980's in that play. It really put both men on the map here in Chicago and on Broadway.

Mike Houlihan's long-running and hilarious Chicago tour-de-force Going East on Ashland was the nub of his Thursday night show at Jack Desmond's Pub, in Chicago Ridge last Thursday. After his show, Jazz singer Terry Sullivan, boxing promoter lawyer Mike Joyce and I chatted with Houli. Terry raises money for inner city kids who want an education in a value based environment -Midtown Education Center. Mike Joyce, a lawyer, teaches and coaches boxing to inner city kids here at Leo High School and through Illinois Crime Commission. They are Catholics doing good.
Frank McCourt said goodbye to his Catholic Faith, but used it for his work. Mike Houlihan recounted the news that Mr. McCourt was near death.

"Frank McCourt's in pretty bad shape. I talked to Chris Hart ( son of Moss Hart and Kitty Carlyle who directed Going East on Ashland) and he said that Frank is about done," said the gifted Chicagoan. Mike talked about his time with the McCourt Brothers and the success of Frank McCourt. " McCourt said he was an atheist. I never could get my head around that. For all the ugliness in McCourt's book, remember that it was the St. Vincent DePaul Society that kept Angela and her kids from starvation, while the old man boozed it up," Houlihan offered.

Catholics and Faith in God are not so bad, unless your memory is selective.

The St. Vincent De Paul Society is not a Government agency. It is a charitable act of grace funded by Catholics and friends to help the poor in their most difficult times here on earth. Jewish, Lutheran and Dutch Reformed have similar charter groups making direct help to families. They too are the real Faith-vased initiatives and not adjuncts of big government.

Frank McCourt's passing is sad. He was a talented man. He is now meeting the Trinity that bitterness and sadness allowed McCourt to deny.

While we're here. Let's help Angela and her kids. St. Vincent DePaul Society here in Chicago gets things done. Click my post title for the link to that great work.

Prayer of the Vincentian Family

Lord Jesus, you who willed to become poor,
give us eyes and a heart directed toward the poor;
help us recognize you in them --
in their thirst, their hunger, their loneliness, and their misfortune.

Enkindle within our Vincentian Family
unity, simplicity, humility,
and the fire of love
that burned in St. Vincent de Paul

Strengthen us, so that faithful to the practice of these virtues,
we may contemplate you and serve you in the person of the poor,
and may one day be united with you and them in your Kingdom.

Amen.

Czech Please! Klas Restaurant! "The Accidental Army"; Goulash and Great Conversation with Steve Jordan and Elias Crim: Save Our History! Czech Please!

I had a most memorable Father's Day Dinner with Ms. Terry Sullivan; Susan and Steve Jordan of Oak Park; historian, editor and executive network operator Elias Crim and his three beautiful and talented daughters at the landmark Bohemian restaurant Klas in Cicero, IL.

Klas is a family operated restaurant that is a museum of Czech Culture and a delight of Old World service and atmosphere. Klas* is " the largest Czech Restaurant in the U.S.A. and a reminder of Chicago's debt to Bohemian people who brought skilled craftsmanship to the building trades and examples of personal and family thrift as an ethic - too long ignored.

The first Czech in Chicago is reported to have arrived before 1850:

Jan Habenicht in his Czech publication Dejiny Cechüv americkych (History of American Czechs) published in Si. Louis in 1910, categorically wrote that the first Czech settler in Chicago was a Moravian native Dr. Frantisek Adolf Valenta. This claim was generally accepted even by such eminent scholars as Professor Francis Dvornik.

Dr. Frantisek A. Valenta originally came to America in 1849 and, after a brief stay in New York City, he settled in August of the same year on the north side of Chicago. Later on he established a pharmacy on the corner of State and Van Buren Streets. His knowledge of German enabled him to practice medicine especially among Germans. After fourteen years of medical practice, he was quite rich and returned to Bohemia, reportedly with some $50,000. There he purchased a farm and in 1870 he died. Habenicht harshly
criticized Valenta's German orientation, however, if we look at it from a different perspective, we ought to give him credit for his entrepreneurship and be comforted by the fact that his presumed riches did not come from the back of poor Czech settlers.

http://www.svu2000.org/cs_america/chicago.htm

Chicago's Czech immigrants possessed few locally marketable skills, and in the 1880s, working at unsteady jobs, notably as lumber shovers in the “lumber district” adjoining Pilsen, they earned less than nearly all other major ethnic group in the city. Eschewing traditional craft unions, they readily employed the mass strike to better their economic situation, drawing on their dense associational network. Whole neighborhoods joined to keep out strikebreakers, playing a prominent part in street fighting with police and militia in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and other labor conflicts. The event that precipitated the Haymarket tragedy was a violent clash between heavily Bohemian lumber shovers and the police. Led by socialist-leaning freethinkers, Bohemians turned readily to the Socialist Labor Party at the end of the nineteenth century. By the 1910s and 1920s, however, Czechs earned more and worked at a wider range of occupations, including as operatives at Western Electric. Their energies were devoted more to ethnic and neighborhood organizations than to radical or unionist activity.

Early Czech immigrants largely voted for the Republican Party because of their opposition to slavery. However, Chicago Czechs changed their allegiance in local politics after the Democratic Party nominated a Czech for alderman in 1883. Czech support for the Democrats continued well into the twentieth century, peaking with the election of Anton Cermak, a Czech immigrant, as the Democratic mayor of Chicago in 1931.

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/153.html

Klas is located on the street named for Chicago's best known Bohemian - Anton Cermak.

Terry, the Jordan's and the Crims had attended Mass and a play at St. Odilo's Catholic Church, while I had spent a few hours wishing my Dad a Happy Father's Day - "Hell, yes it's Happy - for Crissake, I'm still on top of the grass!"

I dropped my girls off at home and took Cicero Ave. up to Cermak Road and West eight blocks to the massive Klas and and quaffed samples the fine 'Shirley Temples' in the masterfully carved deep dark wooden bar festooned with carved statuary, memorabilia and Bohemian/Moravian Welcome!

The Jordans arrived and so also the beautiful and elegant Ms. Sullivan and Crims of Valparaiso, Indiana!

Steve Jordan is Boston-born banker who was raised Irish Catholic in San Francisco and his beautiful wife Susan is an native San Franciscan. Steve Jordan spent many years in South East Asia - Singapore primarily - and is man with wealth of historical knowledge and eclectic discernment's on all manner of cultural interests - governmental as well as gastronomical.

Steve pointed out the photos of Czech soldiers in Czarist Russian winter gear and identified them as members of the famous Czech Legion (Česká družina). 'These were giants!, remarked the talented Mr. Jordan. "The Czech Legion fought an epic battle against the Red Armies all along the Trans-Siberian Railroad route from Asia to Europe and yet very few people have ever heard of them. They fought an epic paralleled only by the Anabasis of Xenophon and Chosin Reservoir of Chesty Puller - God I love this place! You get a real sense of history here!"

Chicago film-maker Bruce Bendinger has made a film about the Czech Legion - The Accidental Army, which opened here in Chicago on June 20th at the Gene Siskel Center.

Ed Koziarki of Chicago Reader has written a splendid piece about this film and Chicago's debt to the Czechs of Chicago - here is an excerpt of Ed's review:

“Here was a story that almost nobody knows,” Bendinger says. “You pull a thread and the more you pull, the more interesting it got. Even in the Czech and Slovak republics, it’s become a historical blind spot.”

The Chicago connection goes back to 1902, when local plumbing magnate Charles Crane recruited Tomáš Masaryk, a philosophy professor and Czech nationalist who’d served in the Austro-Hungarian parliament, to lecture at the University of Chicago. (A memorial to Masaryk and the Czechoslovak Legion now stands on campus, at the east end of the Midway Plaisance). The Slavs of Central Europe had no state of their own at the time: most Czechs and Slovaks were subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while a sizable minority lived in Russia. Nearly 100,000 Czechs had immigrated to Chicago, giving the city the world’s second-highest Czech population after Prague.

After his summer stint at the U. of C., Masaryk returned to Austro-Hungary and resumed his political activities. When the empire invaded Serbia in 1914, initiating World War I, he fled to England, becoming leader of an Allied spy network and the foremost international spokesman for the Czechoslovak independence movement.

On the day the war broke out, thousands of Chicago Slavs gathered in Pilsen Park at 26th and Albany—in Little Village, then called Czech California—to urge the United States to join the Allied effort against Austro-Hungary and the Central Powers. They launched a letter-writing campaign aimed at getting their relatives in Europe to resist conscription into the Austro-Hungarian army, or to desert and fight for the Allies. “The letters [showed] how people were feeling,” Bendinger says. “Thousands of [Slavic] Austro-Hungarian soldiers surrendered as quickly as they could.” Chicago Czechs and other Slavs “were at the forefront of being on the Allied side in World War I. Their relatives were the ones being killed, or being drafted to fight for the Germans and Austro-Hungarians.”

The first Czechoslovak Legion was a force of 10,000 in the Russian army—ostensibly volunteers, though many were pressured to fight under threat of losing their land. Their ranks swelled after Masaryk convinced the Russian government to allow 50,000 Czech and Slovak POWs from the Austro-Hungarian army to defect and fight for Russia. The Czechoslovak Legion is credited with helping to tie up German forces on the Eastern front, giving the Allies a crucial edge on the Western front. Their service, Bendinger says, also gave the Czech independence movement vital “skin in the game.”

In May 1918, Masaryk went on a barnstorming tour of the U.S. to raise political and financial backing for Czech independence. In downtown Chicago, outside the Blackstone Hotel, he addressed a crowd of 150,000 supporters, demonstrating the independence movement’s political muscle and turning American political discourse in favor of a Czechoslovak nation.

(Standing before a statue of Masaryk in Prague on April 5, President Obama said, “Masaryk spoke to a crowd in Chicago that was estimated to be over 100,000. I don’t think I can match Masaryk’s record, but I’m honored to follow his footsteps from Chicago to Prague.”)

Steve Jordan knew the story. Elias Crim knew the story. I had heard about the Czech Legion, but as with most things in my life managed to place that thought in the top drawer of my Brain Dresser - the one that holds treasures; baby teeth, match boxes from memorable places; ear rings lost and stepped upon & etc.

America needs to open that drawer often. We are losing our sense of History. President Obama has a very poor sense of history** and swats at historical facts like so many flies. Jimmy Carter also took a paddle to the rabbit of Historical sense, and allowed an Iranian Revolution that still seems to hold America hostage. That's history, folks! Learn it or live it . . .over and over again.

Too many Americans like to believe the things that they are told to them by ersatz authorities ( Look, Bill Ayers is called an Academic! Have you ever read his nonsense?)- like America is murderous, racist, greedy, opportunistic, Imperialist. Americans like to embrace icons like Margaret Sanger, who was as twisted a Eugenics racist as Hitler on a bad day, yet she is padded with Planned Parenthood coins in the memory slot; that Jane Addams was more than just a self-absorbed and bitter person; that Saul Alinsky really mattered to anyone while he was alive and that he actually improved the lives of the people that he used.

Open your eyes to history. At Klas Restaurant on Cermak Road it is all around you.
However it also helps to have interested and interesting people like Jordans and the Crims when enjoying the Goulash.

*Klas Restaurant
5734 W Cermak Rd
Cicero, IL 60804
(708) 652-0795


**

Days into his presidency, it should be recalled, Mr. Obama had spoken of his desire to restore to America's relation with the Muslim world the respect and mutual interest that had existed 30 or 20 years earlier. It so happened that he was speaking, almost to the day, on the 30th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution -- and that the time span he was referring to, his golden age, covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American standoff with Libya, the fall of Beirut to the forces of terror, and the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Liberal opinion would have howled had this history been offered by George W. Bush, but Barack Obama was granted a waiver.

Little more than three decades ago, Jimmy Carter, another American president convinced that what had come before him could be annulled and wished away, called on the nation to shed its "inordinate fear of communism," and to put aside its concern with "traditional issues of war and peace" in favor of "new global issues of justice, equity and human rights." We had betrayed our principles in the course of the Cold War, he said, "fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is quenched with water." The Soviet answer to that brave, new world was the invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979.

Mr. Carter would try an atonement in the last year of his presidency. He would pose as a born-again hawk. It was too late in the hour for such redemption. It would take another standard-bearer, Ronald Reagan, to see that great struggle to victory.

Iran's ordeal and its ways shattered the Carter presidency. President Obama's Persian tutorial has just begun.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124563005022735881.html