Showing posts with label Morgan Park and Mount Greenwood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Morgan Park and Mount Greenwood. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 20, 2019

House Sold, Emptying A House and Cooking My Slumgullion for the Last Time




I sold my house.  I am delighted.  My children have been gone from the house since 2014 and the place is too much house for me. I engaged a neighborhood realtor. For two years my local realtor was unable to sell this raised ranch in need of work, because " It is too close to the CSX railroad tracks."

In January, I hired Doug Perry, a tall elegant African American gent,  of Property Consultants and he sold this "as is" property in three days, after conducting ten house visits.

A young neighborhood couple will move in here after March 8th and begin their adventures.  Mine are pretty much over.  Now, I spend my days bagging, boxing and shedding two decades of toys, books, clothing, furniture, utensils, bri-a-brac and bills.  I hired the Schuch Brothers of Total Clean to haul away - everything. They are outstanding.   I also make daily trips  with loads to the wonderful Goodwill site at 93rd & Western, which features a drive up bay to shed memories and household detritus.  Adios, to all that.

Mine was a single parent home, since July 1999 and I bought the place from a single mother of two boys.  Being a single parent is no bag of popcorn.

By the grace of God, my offspring are solid citizens living their own lives.

I tried to make their lives comfortable and helpful - the jury is out on that and will listen to opposing arguments from family and friends.

One of the things that I managed to do well was feed my family.  They had three squares a day and a roof over a heated, lit and cabled set of rooms.

One of my standard meals was Slumgullion.




As I wrote some time back :

Slumgullion is the food of the working people who built America!  Not Howard Zinn activists and trust funded hair-shirts of the 21st Century American History textbooks, but the real people, former slaves, black, white, brown, yellow and tawny.  They are Edna Ferber's Midwestern Jews, Bohemian, Alsatian immigrants; they are John Dos Passos' Portuguese, Irish, WASP, and Belgian adventurers; They are Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas and James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan.  They are slumgullion eaters.
Slumgullion is a varietal staple that can include Chinese five spices, Mexican cumino, Japanese ginger, Hungarian smoked paprika, or just salt and black paper.
You need a cauldron, Dutch oven, iron pot or slow cooker of some volume.
Beef and Pork are the usual cuts of meat, but chicken, squirrel, turtle, or fish will work as well.
Root vegetables, or macaroni, pasta, rice or noodles will add substance to savories.


My Aunt Margarite was a master of this dish, which she often served to the denizens of the old St. Rita Augustinian Monastery at 63rd & Claremont Avenue.  Those black robed Austin Friars tucked away handsomely, back in the day.

I made her recipe with my own variations.

In celebration of my exit a a homeowner, soon to live a Spartan few decades in single room apartments, I will whip out my Slumgullion.

                                            Pat Hickey Slumgullion
two lbs - of Chuck Beef-cut like Fajitas - dredged in three good tablespoon of flour, smoked paprika and cilantro
One 1/2 cup of Mire Poix( celery,onion and carrots)
Five medium potatoes peeled - I use three Golden Yellow and two Russets
Five sprigs of Rosemary and five sprigs of thyme
One 16 oz. Can of Crushed Tomatoes and one small can of tomato paste
Two long dashes of Worcestershire sauce
A pinch of crushed Red pepper flakes
One five quart Hamilton Beach slow cooker
One skillet with three tablespoons of Olive Oil
Methode: À la manière de Hickey
In a large plastic bag add flour, smoked paprika and cilantro; Mix well and add the beef and roll it , bounce and knead the hell out of it  and let sit for about ten minutes.Add beef to the skillet and brown it.  When good and brown make room for the mire poix and saute and them blend all together, Cook until all vegetables are tender-ish
Peel and coarsely cut five potatoes and place them in the bottom of the slow cooker.
Pour meat and mire poix mixture over the spuds.
Add 16 oz. can of crushed tomatoes and then the tomato paste and mix them together over the meat and spud.
Squirt five dashes of Worchester and sprinkle crushed red peppers over the tomatoes
Layer rosemary and thyme sprigs and mushrooms on top.
Cook on low for twelve to 24 hours.  

 Image result for cornbread in pie tin


Serve with Pat Hickey Iron Skillet Cornbread -
Preheat oven to 425 degrees
2 cups of Aunt Jemima Corn Mealone Jumbo eggone can of creamed corn2/3 cup of milk two tablespoons of sugar, one tablespoon of good vanilla extract. Mixed and poured into a greased cast-iron skillet and baed for 25-30 minutes. 

Free at last! 

Sunday, April 15, 2018

The Sun Times in the 19th Ward? Don't Buy It

Image result for Sun Times publisher and editorial board


The Sun Times has a perfect right to smear a whole neighborhood and I defend its right to do so. 

In the same way, the people who live in Beverly, Morgan Park and Mount Greenwood have a perfect right to ask that the Sun Times no longer be made made available for purchase.

My neighbors do not deserve to be regularly treated to this race-baiting editorial nonsense:

Like a match set to dry tinder, the slur set in motion a chaotic, Wild West-style melee on a sunny Saturday in November. Punches being thrown, bystanders forced to hide under restaurant tables, guns drawn and taunts called out?
That’s a scene that belongs in 19th Century Dodge City, not 21st Century Chicago.

This nonsense followed a fatuous cut-and paste job on Mount Greenwood by Frank Main and Sam Charles as an hors d'oeuvre to the above cited Sunday editorial.  People going to services at Mount Greenwood Community, Mount Greenwood Lutheran,St. Christiana, St. John Fisher, Queen of Martyr churches can pray for strength and a spirit of forgiveness.

After church and over breakfast maybe people can have a neighborly conversation about asking businesses in this neighborhood to stop carrying the Sun Times.

The Sun Times always wants to have a "conversation."


It goes like this , people who live in Mount Greenwood are hateful racists and  should accept any and all behavior - take it and like it and shut up about it. 

Fair enough. Well, in that spirit, sell your papers any where but here.

I pray that gas stations, franchisee-owned convenience stores located in and around the 19th Ward ask that Sun Times stop making delivery, because residents no longer want to read malignant nonsense from the Editors, Neil Steinberg, Mark Brown, Mary Mitchell, Jesse Jackson, Fran Spielman, Michael Sneed and the Watchdogs.

The people of my neighborhood will never, ever get a fair shake from the owners of Sun Times ( ChicagoReader et al) and they never have to this date.  The Chicago Reader called Mount Greenwood the worst neighborhood in Chicago - 'The Upside Down.'

I stopped buying the Sun Times years ago.

Where are our leaders on this?


Monday, December 25, 2017

Merry Christmas, 2017! We Are Blessed!

'Merry Christmas!  I would especially pray for those of us who are suffering the loss the loved ones, health and hope for God's loving grace to fall in showers upon them and their families.  I am blessed more than any man deseves.  Be safe in travels and be joyful!'Image result for Pat Hickey Chicago Snow blower

Just finished shoveling the powdery precipitation.  For all of you Currier and Ives junkies, enjoy!

At Sixty-five and change, I tend to miss the glorious Yule beauties in expectation of greater, wetter and more back-challenging avalanches, but I must admit to this Christmas Day's wonder. sunlight and bracing blizzard bite on what passes for my nose.

Christ is smiling on Chicago, in spite of its secularist silliness and sanguine savageries.

As I completed my shoveling, I was greeted by my fireman neighbor and his puppy,  "Mass at Sacred Heart (8:30 with Father Gallager)?"

"Went last night. Couldn't sleep.  We had a family get-together with my Mom at Victorian Village in Homer Glen, so I popped in at St. Christina's on the way home." I replied.

My granddaughter ( 10 months old and all eyes and thighs) gave a detailed exhibition of all of her baby-ticks, vocal ranges and snuggles to my most appreciative mother and the baby's Great-Nana.  No other gifts required.  My kids burned up Snap Chat and their app numbers recording Christmas 2017.  I had to go give thanks to God, before my native sloth kicked in.

Cold, the fireman retorted

Bracing, said I.  I had been waiting for someone to offer that observation in order to quote the great Charles Laughton from the movie adaptation of O Henry's "The Cop and the Anthem (1:29)"
Image result for salma hayek massage
Small Christmas gifts like that do more for me than a gift certificate for  a full body massage from Salma Hayek, or a guest solo in CSO's Messiah.

This day is about hope, renewal and love.  I was gifted all three of the above and only a fireman showed up on my lot this morning. I can't wait until a cop and a Streets and San worker stop by - collect from all three!

Blessed.

Saturday, December 23, 2017

Neighbors, Merry Christmas ! 2017 in the 19th Ward

Image result for Christmas stroll in Mount GreenwoodImage result for Christmas stroll in Mount GreenwoodRelated imageImage result for Christmas stroll in Mount Greenwood

I am blessed.  I live and work in this wonderful neighborhood.  I live in Morgan Park and work at Brother Rice High School.  Children grow up centered, respectful  and industrious.  This is a neighborhood of families.  It is strong.



The many churches are places where these families draw their strength - Quaker, Lutheran, Methodist, Unitarian, Episcopal, Baptist and very large Catholic parishes nurture what is learned in the home.

A very hateful article by the editor of the Chicago Reader - sponsored by the Sun Times News Group and edited by Jake Malooley, the author of the piece - took the opportunity to stir up race hate for Christmas.

The Chicago Reader is a free press and has been for as long as I care to remember. It's slant is far left of center.

The Chicago Reader is only following exactly what the Chicago Tribune, Sun Times, WTTW, WBEZ and the now dead DNAinfo Chicago have done for decades without challenge.

Why challenge people who are wrong, hateful, bigoted and wildly unfair.

People in this neighborhood are welcoming - that is how journalists ooze into the confidence of people.  They violate welcome.
Image result for Maya Dukmasova
A very pretty female journalist found welcoming bar stools and chatty drinkers in the saloons of Mount Greenwood, in order to make a case that this neighborhood's vote for Trump was solely due to race hate,

Her editor used her dubious report to do the same,  "No demogorgon roams this netherworld, but a majority of its electorate did back the man who's been called the swamp monster: President Donald Trump. Jake Malooley editor Chicago Reader"

Demogorgon?  Homage to Statius' Thebiad or Dungeons and Dragons?  I think the later, The last pretentious hypocrite to smear the neighborhood is a wife beater.

Neil Steinberg did so after breaking bred with a crowd of 19th Ward people.  After being made welcome he insulted and villainized his hosts as Aryan Nation racists, "But if I know you — and I do — about now you’re asking yourself: “Hey, wait a second. This guy’s a Jew. Why would a Jew be looking out for the best interest of the Iron Fist of Righteous White Anger, Mount Greenwood Corps?” Neil Steinberg Chicago Sun Times 2009"

 Steinberg was just joking, when I called him on it and his hypocrisy.  Steinberg is busy equating square dancing with cross-burning this Yuletide.

I have yet to read a news alert that young people from 60655 were stealing Christmas deliveries from UPS, FedEx and USPS routes in Roseland, Gresham, Englewood, West Lawn  or Garfield Heights.

On Halloween thousands of residents strolled with their children along the 111th Street business route.  Last week they did the same for Santa's Visit - all sponsored by local businesses and Aklderman Matt O'Shea.

No violence , as in Hyde Park.

No hate.

Christmas lives here every day, unless a few reporters manage to misquote and misrepresent the good people of this neighborhood.

Merry Christmas, everyone and everyday!

Merry Christmas, Maya and Jake!

Friday, November 03, 2017

DNAinfoChicago R.I.P.: Ye Hardly Knew Ye.

Image result for Joe Ricketts and DNAinfo Chicago


I read DNAinfoChicago from the get-go.   It was, at first. a great news aggregate that offered local coverage.

I gotta go with Joe about its demise, Joe Ricketts, that is, the Cubs' Grandpa, “And while we made important progress toward building DNAinfo into a successful business, in the end, that progress hasn’t been sufficient to support the tremendous effort and expense needed to produce the type of journalism on which the company was founded.”

News coverage of local events became less devout and political hack-work seemed to ooze from every column.

DNAinfoChicago somehow morphed into the detested MEDIA.  Same old, same old.

Solid writers like Mark Schipper and Ed Komenda disappeared and activist group-think writers dominated the coverage.

Most telling for me was the awful coverage of the idiot who pulled a gun on people after he was asked to not block the entrance of the firehouse on 111th Street.Image result for Joshua Beal,

The idiot was shot and killed, when he aimed his weapon at people.

The idiot had been celebrating a relative's funeral by weaving in and out of the heavily trafficked lanes of 111th Street, the commercial district for the Mount Greenwood neighborhood.  Traffic stalled and the Hossier Hothead acted out with his weapon and his mouth.

I had had my haircut on the site of the violence and where the dope met his demise, only an hour before the folly.

However, DNAinfoChicago  reporters, Joe Ward especially. conflated identity politics, race-baiting and social justice warfare with what had taken place - Marist high school was placed in the cross-hairs and community scab-yanking over imagined and occasionally accurate racism became the menu all of the month of November 2016, until the facts un-Pflegered the story.  Joe Ward never once considered covering the Revolutionary Communist Party's orchestration of the post shooting protests.  That would have chopped his narrative.
Image result for Joshua Beal, pfleger

The DNAinfo Joshua Beal mythology can be found here, because the archived yarns are shut down.
Joe Ricketts owned the site and Gothamist and decided to close shop.

Conflated coverage of the news is what the detested American media is all about.  People want to know what is happening in their neighborhoods.  DNAinfoChicago tried to do that and ended up being another detested outlet for prefabricated opinions.

The Sun Times, owned by the public service unions, did a hit piece on the news of DNAinfoChicago's demise, not unlike the covergae of the late Mr. Beal:

A week before the shutdown, the Gothamist and DNAinfo newsrooms in New York voted to join the Writers Guild of America East, which released a statement Thursday saying “it is no secret that threats were made to these workers during the organizing drive.”
In a September post entitled “Why I’m Against Unions At Businesses I Create,” Ricketts wrote on his personal blog of his belief “that unions exert efforts that tend to destroy the Free Enterprise system.”
“I believe unions promote a corrosive us-against-them dynamic that destroys the esprit de corps businesses need to succeed,” Ricketts wrote. “And that corrosive dynamic makes no sense in my mind where an entrepreneur is staking his capital on a business that is providing jobs and promoting innovation.”
According to a New York Times report, 115 reporters from the websites who are now out of a job will receive three months of paid “administrative leave” at their full salaries, along with four weeks of severance pay.
Joe Ricketts was right.   Joe Ricketts gave his employees a pretty decent severance package.  More than an SEIU janitor can expect when all of the public funding has dried up.

So, we say goodbye to DNAinfoChicago.  Goodbye.

Thanks for the shot at news coverage Joe Ricketts.  It was appreciated by people like me, until the good writers disappeared.

Next time you set up shop, hire writers and tell the 'journalists' to get a union card and get fitted for a purple T-shirt.






Saturday, September 02, 2017

Chance the Rapper Cleaned My Gutters and Made Me Breakfast This Morning!!!!

Image result for Chance the Rapper on the roof


I have been really cynical.  That's harsh.

I read most papers and most Chicago papers offer at least one account of Chance the Rapper

  • Hands out money for arts programs at 20 CPS schools
  • Raises $ 2m for CPS
  • Grand Marshalls the Bud Billiken Parade
  • Grills Chicken at Nando's for charity
  • Explains 'becoming upper-management' to CNBC
  • Announces free concerts ( hourly)
  • Lectures Rahm Emanuel at La Lapalooza
  • Gets Props from Obama as needed
  • Changes the trajectory of North Korean missiles away from Guam, Japan and the Philippines.
  • Swims the English channel
  • Cuts every tree in the Sahara Forest
  • Eats Kyptonite with soy milk
He does these mighty deeds and produces many dope tunes and videos



The guy is prodigious and what do a I do with my life?

Teach.  Go to Mariano's and Brother Rice Freshman football games.

I thought that Chance the Rapper was merely the figment of a public relations man's genius.

Was I wrong. 

This morning I woke to the sound of footsteps on my roof.  No it was not Santa!  It was better.

Chancery Bennett, better known as Chance the Rapper was atop my home in the Morgan Park neighborhood of Chicago, armed with 55 gallon plastic garbage bags and cleaning my gutters of branches, Maple tree whirlybirds, bottle rockets from 4th of July and other air-born gutter chokers.

The young man worked my roof like the crowds at the Apollo in Manchester, UK on November 26, 2016.

I called up to him, " What are you doing up there, young fella?"Image result for Chance the Rapper on the roof

He smiled, " I think it's so dope that I'm here in Chicago and contributing to the music scene that's thriving. People are so happy Chicago's shining that everyone is willing to say 'I represent Chicago.' That wasn't always the case."

" No, I meant specifically, Kid.  Why are you doing my gutters?"  I replied. 

The Rapper shrugged, "Music can kind of make you one-dimensional. People see what's on the surface and what you rap about, and they make their decision on who you are from there." He finished the job, emptied the plastic bags into environmentally friendly brown yard waste bags, placed the black plastic bags in a haversack for re-use, carefully took down the extension ladder and attached it to the frames of his Escalade and asked to use my bathroom.

When Chance the Rapper had given his hands a good scrubbing with Lava - the hand soap - He immediately went to my ice-box and prepared to make me a slap-up breakfast of 

  • Monkey-Bread Danish. Danish meets monkey bread. ...
  • Red Velvet Pancakes. Sexiest breakfast ever. ...
  • Onion & Arugula Frittata. ...
  • Sweet Crepes with Caramelized Pears. ...
  • Candied Bacon. ...
  • Homemade Toaster Pastries. ...
  • Yogurt Biscuits with Honey Butter. ...
  • Green Smoothie with Avocado and Apple.
I asked Chance the Rapper to join me and tuck-into the great feed that he had prepared.

With his thumb he pushed up the flat over-sized brim of his # 3 White Sox cap and with a quizzical smile said, "The whole point of 'Acid Rap' was just to ask people a question: does the music business side of this dictate what type of project this is? If it's all original music and it's got this much emotion around it and it connects this way with this many people, is it a mixtape? What's an 'album' these days, anyways?"

What, indeed?

With that, he vanished between chews.Image result for Chance the Rapper on the roof

Am I cynical?