Whiting's Pierogi Fest 2015 - Dough Matters & Odzemok on 119th Street

Today is the last day of the Whiting, Indiana 2015 Peirogi Fest - the absolute best street fest anywhere.  I have been going to Pierogi Fest since the 1990's when I lived in Griffith, Indiana. This is a celebration of people manifested in the treats prepared by busha, or jaja, depending upon ethnic origin.  For northwest Indiana, that means Slovak, Polish, Czech. Bohemian, Moldavian, Serbian or Croatian more than likely.  These folks were the manufacturers of American steel and the refiners of John D. Rockefeller's oil for the 100 years of the American Century.

The American Century seems to embarrass too many people today.  That is sad.   Sad people call the tunes too often these days - they are the ones out among the happy people with the 'equality and fairness' tape measures squawking about hurt feelings and feelings not as yet pinched.  Sad people do not celebrate, they berate, ridicule, ignore and forget.  Happy people dance! Happy people eat!  Happy people sing!  Happy people put away as much Pierogi as they can lay hands upon.

I am happy.    I spent the entire day among happy eaters and dancers: earth launched boot slapping Slovakian horn-dogs locking metaphorical antlers with other athletic swains from the valleys and meadows of the Heart of Europe in thick rut for the attentions of gorgeous, black and blue-eyed beauties in bright pink, black, green, orange and yellow dresses whirling wildly enough for this old geezer to remark "I See London; I See France!" Odzemok, Boy-oh! Three Slovak Dance Troupes from Detroit, Cleveland and Toronto wowed me.

I am happy!  I watched hundreds of kids hurling 12" softball at a modestly sized target-trigger in order to sink a little Carmelite nun into a vat of cool water.  For $ 5 you get three shots to Dunk the Nun.. I couldn't dunk a Camelite.  Had it been a Sinsinawa Dominican or a Sister of Mercy, I'd still be peeling off $20s. I donated my five and bought sister a cold beverage of malted grains.  Best believe that, Junior.


I am happy.  I spent some quality time with Mr. Pierogi, his own bad -self.

I am happy.  I spent a few Jacksons on Pierogi prepared by a landsman - Conley's Pierogis!

 I had Taco Pierogis. I had Louisiana Gator Pierogis!  I had Big Daddy's BubbaQue Pierogis.

I am Happy!  I was with people I know and Love! Neighbors who celebrate!  Sad people don't celebrate - they organize, march and howl. Happy people celebrate up a plenty!

The heat and humidity was exquisite and the massive crowd of happy people enjoying the celebration of genuine happiness was courteous to all and sundry.  Even the eight month olds were happy.

Get happy.  Get over to Whiting.



*Odzemok, considered by many to be the "national" or most typical dance of Slovakia, has been well preserved up to the present time. The physically strenuous and virtuoso movements of odzemok, along with its martial elements, make it basically a man's dance that is very special, indeed.

Variants of the dance are known throughout the Carpathian region by various names and are often referred to as "weapon dances." Such dances were originally danced by soldiers, robbers, and shepherds, but later they were also danced by the nobility. Accounts of this dance form survive from the 16th century and by the 19th century information became more profuse. Still, in this century, its vigor is quite remarkable.

Odzemok is found everywhere in Slovakia but is richest in the central and northeast parts, especially in the High Tatra Mountains.

8:30 A.M. July 21, 1944 - Guam Liberation Begins

PFC Patrick E. Hickey USMCR carrying the Tripod for a .30 Cal. Machine Gun - July, 1944 on the ridges above Guam's Red Beach 2.


My father, Patrick E. Hickey, died April 25, 2010. Most of the young men in his WWII Marine Company - Able, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines were wounded or killed on this day.

My Dad's platoon leader Lt. Krawiec of Chicago was wounded and evacuated getting out of the LVT (Landing Vehicle Tracked) on the Red Beach 2. PFC Boyd Curtis Troup of Jones, Michigan one of my Dad's best friends and fellow .30 Caliber Heavy Machine Gun crew member was wounded on this beach and evacuated as well.

The balance of Company A ( Able)including it's heroic company commander "Skipper" was pretty much wiped out over the next seventy-two hours taking Chorito Cliff and Bundschu Ridge ( named for Capt. Geary Bundschu-Navy Cross Skipper of A-1-3). Very few members of Able Company continued through the Guam Campaign, in fact the regimental casualties on the first day of the battle, exceeded the 3rd Marine Division Campaign casulties for the previous Battle for Bougainville ( Nov. 1-Dec. 25, 1943).

Author Scott Carmichael, while researching Bunschu Ridge acount of  my Dad's Company and the battles that he never talked about for the balance of his life, sent me this note about apicture that I had forwarded to him. . I informed him that my cousin Willie had found my Dad's Seabag with the number 312 stenciled next to his name. Mr. Carmichael replied -

Wow. Do you know what the number 312 represents? The men used a numbering
system for their gear. They didn't take their seabags along as they rode
their amtraks onto the beach, of course. Seabags were left behind on the
LSTs, for later retrieval. The men numbered not only their seabags, but a
lot of other equipment and gear. 312 = 3rd Marine Regiment/1st Battalion/2nd
company. The headquarters company was always listed as the 1st company
(311). That made Able company the 2nd company in the battalion (312).
Thanks for the information about the photograph.

The photograph above was confirmed to be my Dad carrying the tripod of the machine gun.


Mr. Carmichael contacted me days after my Dad passed away. He was looking for the few survivors of Able Company. Marine Lt. Krawiec died in January 0f 2010, but the gentle and humorous Mr. Troup still lives with his wife and the horrible and multiple wounds he received on Red Beach 2 Sixty Six years ago. I had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Troup, back in May.

God Bless Every American Veteran!

Rebecca Fried - American Scholar and High School Student Quieted "No Irish Need Apply" Denier from the University of Illinois

Augusta Constitutionalist (Ga) 31 July 1868.

Kids love a challenge and nothing challenges them like a teacher saying something outrageous ( to their experiences) and demanding of them -"Well prove me wrong!"

My students LOVED rubbing my pug-nose in it -deeply and lovingly -and I have to say I loved it too.

I am wrong, early and often, and I will fess up when called on mistakes, misteps and, too often, miss spellings.  I write fast and furious and seem to require a full time editor just to pay the light bill.

A few years back there was a huge Hoo-Ha from a very celebrated American academic at University of Illinois who broadly and  loudly told Irish Americans to believe him and not their lying eyes.  I read his article published by OxFord University ( I'm in there too, under Thackeray BTW) Press and dismissed the professor 'painstaking and careful research' which denied that "No Irish Need Apply" signs existed - ever.

I remember seeing those very signs in the ads of old Chicago newspapers all the way up to WWII.

Well, I never bothered with Professor Richard J. Jensen's thesis and harbored my prejudices based upon emprirical evidence.
A high school student from Brooklyn, NY gutted Professor Jensen two weeks ago from t'aint to gizzard:

 in a piece for the Oxford Journal of Social History – the same journal where Jensen published his findings – Rebecca A. Fried, a  a high-school student at the Sidwell Friends school in Washington, DC,” has found overwhelming evidence that the NINA signs were very real and very prevalent.
In a wonderfully written and researched rebuttal, Fried challenges Jensen’s claim that “the NINA phenomenon is an ahistorical memory to be explained by ‘delu[sional]’ group psychology and ‘the political need to be bona-fide victims’ rather than by the fact of historic discrimination.”
Instead, she writes, “the documentary record better supports the earlier view that Irish-Americans have a communal recollection of NINA advertising because NINA advertising did, in fact, exist over a substantial period of United States history, sometimes on a fairly widespread basis.”


Wanted advertisement displaying the qualification “No Irish need apply.” The New York Herald, Vol. XXVIII Issue 186, Page 11. 7 July 1863.

How about that, youngster!?!!!!! Professor Jensen is being tuned up thanks to kid who was challenged by a teacher . . .not a real nice on it seems from the exchanges Old Doc Jensen is having with Rebbecca.

CPS Gets Claypool; Chicago Gets Another Sound and Thorough Screwing!

Just when one might believe that CPS is up the proverbial creek with the legendary paddle, Rahm makes Forrest Claypool, the chinless wonder of all metropolitan career grifters, to be CEO of CPS.

Well, F Me!

Forrest will serve Chicago's soul-less local cadre of connected venture capitalist as well as he did in every appointment he has enjoyed at the County and City levels of government.

Name a Claypool achievement, success, or non-disaster.

Name one.

I hear crickets.

Ty Warner - You Can't Fake Being a Good Guy

On Friday June 10, 2015, after many months of deliberation in an America that has been programed to boil furiously over whenever a successful person is deemed to be more equal than . . .anyone, the United States Seventh District Court of Appeals ruled that Ty Warner's punishment and sentence was just.

That was a shock to me.  Given our spiritus mundi (can I still say that?),  I expected the reverse, because I have gotten to know Ty Warner a little bit and that little bit leads me to believe that he is a good guy and this is no time for good guys - to paraphrase Cormac McCarthy. Creeps prosper, but good guys seem to take it in the neck.  The Sharptons, The Trumps, The Clintons, The Ayers and the self-made creeps like Dan Savage,Bill Cosby and Rachel Dolezal flourish in the age of Harrison Bergeron.

Every news outlet reporting on this fact strains mightily to get a hissy-slap at the billionaire anyway and that is only to be expected. You see, Ty Warner built his empire. Ty Warner is a man whom the legal cozeners, the academic milquetoasts and media purse puppies want punished, because he built his success.  Can't have that getting around. We are living in a time predicted by writer Kurt Vonnegut decades ago.  In his story Harrison Bergeron everyone must be equal -whatever.        

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal
before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter
than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was
stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the
211th, 212th, and 213 th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing
vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. 

The Handicapper General is coming, unless good guys ( gender neutral, mind) take stock.

Ty Warner has spent a great deal of time here at Leo High School, as part of his probation to be sure, but having a wonderful time of it. I am an old timey English teacher who learned his trade by watching and emulating my betters.  How I engaged my students was how I was assessed, by Father Bob Erickson, Father Jim Fanale, Father Ken Yarno, Nick Novich, Jim Frogge, Dave Raiche, Sister Hellen Kavanaugh and Rich Zinnani.  They told me and taught me that teaching kids required much more than book learnin' - did I like being with people who wanted to learn something; not just people to talk at.  My great mentors taught me that I could not fake it. " Hickey, you can't pretend to be a good guy,"

You is, or you ain't. Only a good guy can be an effective teacher and the State don't issue Type-301 Good Guy Certification.

Ty Warner would have made a superb class-room teacher.

He is patient, witty, prepared, engaged and engaging with willful, occasionally obstreperous and easily bored young men who might not ever become billionaires.  They might not. Ty Warner offers them an up-close and personal opportunity to learn from a man who is a billionaire.

All of Ty Warner's billions of dollars can not make him a good guy, nor can he leave that in his Will.

He earned that sobriquet, just as he did his fortune, on his own.  Ty Warner treats people, who can do absolutely nothing for him, like they are the most important and interesting people on earth.  You can not fake that.

I am very happy that at least one good guy survived our Harrison Bergeron culture and society. Thanks be to God.

Teaching in 2015 - Worm Grunting Until Convicted

“The government I live under has been my enemy all my active life. When it has not been engaged in silencing me it has been engaged in robbing me. So far as I can recall I have never had any contact with it that was not an outrage on my dignity and an attack on my security.” HL Mencken

"That ability to impart knowledge . . . consists, first, of a natural talent for dealing with children, for getting into their minds, for putting things in a way that they can comprehend. And it consists, secondly, of a deep belief in the interest and importance of the thing taught, a concern about it amounting to a sort of passion. A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it—this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy. That is because there is enthusiasm in him, and because enthusiasm is almost as contagious as fear or the barber's itch." Henry Louis Mencken from  Prejudices: third series (publ. A. A. Knopf, 1922)

Henry Louis Mencken knew how to identify cant, insincerity, humbug, bigotry and sanctimony at the horizon.  He did not need to have it legislated before he could snap his galluses, gnaw on his stogy and shout to the helots, " Hey!  Rube! You're about to step in it for fair, Son!"

Being a fundamentally flawed human being, prone to vice but gifted with talents far above those of most mortals must have made the proud German American beer swilling genius feel like Casandra most days.

He could predict cultural disasters from any bar stool and, while amusing all and sundry, go unheeded.

Mencken stood at the dawn of American Progressive thought and shuddered. Research! Inquiry! Settled Science!  Foregone Conclusions and willful assumptions destroyed shared truth.

Americans ignored shared truth and swallowed data tossed by Academics whole and heartily.

From that magic  moment in 1876, Johns Hopkins University preened its purple feathers and waved proudly for inquiry over pedagogy America tumbled. The German architect of infant fascism, Alexander Humbolt, so impressed the Quaker bachelor

The University of Chicago, packed with Rockefeller spondulix, followed suit and the Academic Jackass eclipsed the pioneer, the innovator, the leader, the priest, the warrior, the athlete and genuine scholar in the America pulpit, bank line, battalion, playing field and imagination.

This past week, the United States Supreme Court wholly justified the very Germanic nonsense HL Mencken fought against his whole life.  Johns Hopskins is the core of this evil apple swallowed whole from the late 18th Century to this silly season.  Marriage ain't no more and ObamaCare is going to be as easy to avoid as taxes.

Mencken understood exactly where America was heading. As a very flawed man with some level of wit, I see the very same nightmare.

We are here, Henry!

A male and a female are matter for a court and future litigation.

A family is a group of people.

States rights are what have been agreed upon.

So teaching, especially in a Catholic school is now a dirtier job than Worm Grunting.

Two self-proclaimed American Catholics on the U.S. Supreme Court, Kennedy and Roberts, have effectively made teaching in a Catholic high school ( Catholic Universities long ago struck the flag) is about to become a very dangerous game; unless, of course,  the teacher  is cowed by the threatening realities of pitting shared truth against conveniently manufactured and very pliable doctrines.

I'll continue to grunt and sweat and dig up a few wormy triumphs in the classroom when students pick up on my enthusiasm for millennia of shared truths ( abortion is always murder, a bolt only goes into a nut, water boils at 212 and freezes at 32 degrees, Shakespeare is a genius and Toni Morrison writes stuff) - until the bracelets get slapped on.

Elwood P. Dowd Stops at the "Quiet Man Pub" for a Quick One

EPD - Evening.                  

One of the Lads- Pleasant night.
                 

EPD- I´ll try one of those black beers.

Bartender- Oh, the porter. Yes, sir.                  

EPD- Sir, will you join me? Matter of fact,

I´d like to buy everybody a drink.

                 
Old Fella -I do not believe I heard your name, tall man.
                 

EDP- Elwood . .Elood P. Dowd and this ( gesturing) this is my good friend . . .Harvey                  

Old Fella- And your father´s name?                  

EPD - Pete.  Pete Dowd.

He used to live here, by the Mornin´.            

I just bought the place back.

That´s why I´m here.                  

Old Fella - Then your grandfather

would be Ol´ Proisnas Dowd.
               

EPD - Right. and This (gesturing to right ) and this is my good friend Harvery . . .he's a Pookah

Old Fella- Bless his memory.  (Sotto Voce) The Yanks daft . . .a Pookah indeed.  Well drink up, Lads Waste not Want Not.



 

                 

Berkeley Balcony Tragedy Will Show Political Dry-Rot At Its Core

Many things, for aught I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever. Bishop George Berkely


Six Irish students on summer Visas died when a balcony collapsed and the New York Times saw fit to make a mockery of their deaths. The kids were accused of rowdy behavior and drunkenness and program for which they had applied was called into question.  The New York Times was worried about Berkeley - the college named for the 18th Century Irish Bishop and empiricist philosopher, but George Berkeley has not yet been accused of being 'loaded.'

The New York Times went far beyond the report of the deaths and Ireland demanded an apology and got one from Grey Lady that is similar to Rachel Dolezal's non-apology.

I think the New York Times took a very agitated and worrisome phone call from a political wheel just before print time.

You see political grifters, lawyers, activists and bundlers are deep in real estate.

Chicago readers might remember the death of a little black boy when a rusted gate of slum property fell on him. That property was managed by Cullen Davis, son of Allison Davis - the man who gave Barack Obama his shove into the White House.  Valerie Jarrett controls slum properties.

A tall, rusted steel gate that fell and crushed a 3-year-old boy to death at the Cabrini-Green public housing complex failed a building code inspection Monday, said Bill McCaffrey, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Buildings.
The gate at the Cabrini-Green rowhouses in the 900 block of North Cambridge Avenue fell on Curtis Cooper at about 5:30 p.m. Friday; he was pronounced dead less than an hour later in Children's Memorial Hospital. . . .

The CHA property has been managed for about two years by Urban Property Advisors. The firm is run by Cullen Davis, who is the son of influential city developer Allison Davis.

"If Chicago Housing Authority had been monitoring their properties, public housing wouldn't be in the shape it is in now," Steele said. "If they had been monitoring UPA, that gate wouldn't have fell."

UPA manages properties all over Chicago. The Davis family stands to make millions as part of CHA's Plan for Transformation, the city's ambitious effort to demolish high-rise public housing and replace it with mixed-income communities.

UPA Property Manager Ronald O'Neal and CHA spokesman Derek Hill declined to comment on Monday's failed building inspection.

Property is political capital and slum property is pure gold.  Note the rotted wooden support beams on the Berkley Building

I hope that Irish journalists crawl into the facts behind the rotten owners of the apartments and the amounts of cash they paid out to politicians -City, State and Federal -and bring the truth to light.

The wood rot begins on the pages of the newspapers providing cover for politicians.

At the end of day, I believe that a politician, political bundlers and the New York Times will have much to explain.

Blackhawks ( Management and Team) Prove that Good Guys Can Be Champions . . .Often

I have no Blackhawks jersey, but I really like Chicago's Champions.  From Rock Wirtz to the hoary old man Brad Richards ( a year younger than Marion Hossa) the Blackhawks Tribe is comprised of nice people. Like Duncan Keith and his pal Cammy.




John McDonough, the architect of this sports dynasty and General Manager, visited Leo High School earlier in the school year.  Leo High School students tend to be Arfican American young gents and not given to wearing Hawks Jerseys.  It seems that African Americans are not huge hockey fans, but the do seem to like basketball, or so really smart people like Spike Lee and Rachel Maddow would lead us to believe.

I am a bit of cynic.

John McDonough was impressed by the insightful and sharp questions the Leo student body posed to him at the assembly more than few months back.  In fact two Leo juniors pressed, Mr. McDonough after the students were dismissed.

Mr. McDonough invited both young men and their families to join him in his Blackhawks Skybox for one of the games in the early part of the season.

He did not need to do that.

That is what constitutes a good guy.  Doing something thoughtful and nice for people who do make any impact on one's life, whatsoever, just because one can do that.  It did not cost John McDonough anything.  Not nickle one.

Now two Leo seniors are loud and proud Blackhawks fans, who closely follow the Hawks and the game of hockey.

That is how Championships are made;not by loud, obnoxious, in-your-your-face mega-millionaire mesomorphs, but by good guys who never forget that they share the same oxygen as everyone else.

White Socialists Founded NAACP, So Why Beef That White Girl is Running the Spokane Branch?

A white muck-racking journalist was the founder and leader of the National Association of Colored People and he was a dyed-in-the-whool Socialist.  He was Charles Russell and he detested Booker T. Washington. So did the Niagra Movement, a group of fifty northern born well-eduacted African Americans who believed that Booker T. Washington's demand blacks in south and  the north learn skilled trades, as well as get an education was too slow and demeaning and Booker T. Washington, a man who endured a life-time slavery. unlike WEB Dubois, was an Uncle Tom.

A white law by tyhe name of Moorfield Storey ran NAACP for twenty years from 1909-1929.

In 1909 Russell was among 60 inspirational men and women such as Oswald Villard, William Walling, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jane Addams, and Lillian Wald who worked together to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), formed in the aftermath of a race riot at Springfield, Illinois in August of the previous year.[5] Russell's participation in the founding of the NAACP stemmed from his experiences with violence and racism as a child. One of the most memorable experiences included his father nearly being hanged for simply opposing slavery.[4] Russell served and participated on the board of directors for the NAACP for the remainder of his life. 

Of the sixty founders, only seven were black.

White Socialists detested the greatest African American hero - Booker T. Washington. Therefore, they setabout the task of erasing Booker T. Washington from history.  WEB DUBOIS , a pampered Harvard educated gent born to privilege, like most Progressives, was added to the original pantheon of NAACP.

Today, we learned that a white girl, who could have been a model for St. Pauli Girl beer brands, is running the Spokane, WA branch of the NAACP. What's the beef?

John Kass on Denny Hastert's Day in Court - Pulitzer Worthy Prose That Rises to Poetry

John Kass can work a pen.  He is a masterful penman and never better than when he covers a story so coiled in hypocrisy that keeps lesser artists slack jawed.  This is one of those Gordian Knots -the powerful politico bighted around a predatory pedophile.

John Kass's account of Denny Hastert's day in court rises to poetic heights -

For at least 15 excruciating minutes, the courtroom was silent, Hastert waiting. He'd pull at his lips and he'd cover his face again. Not all of his face, just the half where his mouth was.
He looked all hollowed out, chewed up, like paper. 

It reminded me of when my brothers and I were children on the South Side. We'd run to Leo's corner store to buy penny candy, like those colored dots, hard sugar lumps on paper rolls. Sometimes we'd take a bite of paper with the candy and later spit it out as we talked of the White Sox or what happens to souls in limbo.

That bit of chewed-up paper would dry in the sun, a lump on the sidewalk that had been paper but was now in altered form.

And so it was with Hastert, irreconcilable with the original, an altered man most likely changed by having to tell his family about why the feds had come after him.

Masterful.  The story of the criminal charges is merely crust covering the saga of man who may have used teaching and coaching to prey upon vulenerable kids.  Kass is the man to uncoil this yarn.

Maybe A Few Generations of 'Survivors' of Roe v. Wade Will Put an End to Abortion in America

 

In a sense, every American born since 1973 is a survivor of Roe. Perhaps that explains why, however young people might label themselves, abortion is a choice so few of them are prepared to take. Boston Globe

Abortion is the premeditated murder of a human being.  In 1973, a well-orchestrated campaign, not unlike the very successful one that will very shortly terminate the all sense of what marriage means, changed that fact.

Abortion is now known as women's health care, which is nonsense.

America's slide from the moral high ground to its current place in the moral mud pits can be traced from Roe v. Wade.

However, young people are doubting the narrative about abortion

Young Americans — voters under 30 — were once the most gung-ho in support of unfettered legal abortion. In 1991, fully 36 percent believed abortion should be legal under any circumstances. But by 2010, 18-to-29-year-olds had become more pro-life than their parents — only 24 percent still wanted to keep abortion legal in all cases. More than any other age cohort, in fact, young adults are now the most likely to think abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.

My long-in-the-tooth Baby Boom contemporaries largely bought-in to the willful murder of unwanted children, I am ashamed to say.  We are the Disposable Generation, that created landfills for the Huggies we put on the babies who survived Planned Parenthood and now the Depends we need and added those convenient products to the piles of Schick disposable razors, plastic bottles, cutlery and batteries that powered our music devices that played Jerry Garcia and Carly Simon into the 21st Century.  We were OK with that because we were otherwise thoughtful and sensitive about our fellow man.

We elected Barack Obama, people and Obama is America's abortion President.

Young people have good hearts.


I am confident that the generations to come will end the American Holocaust.

Only then will America climb up out of the mud and crawl its way back up to the peak of the moral high ground.

Good on you, kids!

Chuck Goudie Smears Leo High School

Chuck Goudie makes a very good living off of smearing people.  He works for ABC, the network that will feature a sit com developed by Dan Savage, (a violently hateful Anti-Catholic bigot who parlayed sexual preference into a sitcom) and operates what he calls the ABC 7 I-Team.

I began work at Leo High School in 1995, four years after the Irish Christian Brothers refused to send teachers to this school in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood.  The Irish Christan Brothers taught and operated Leo High School from 1926, until 1991.

In the late 1990's, the priest-pedophile scandal knocked the Catholic Church to its knees, where it remains trying to undo the damage of homosexual and some heterosexual child stalkers who used the Church to prey on children.  This scandal swelled to epic proportons because bishops listened to lawyers.

They still do.  Problems do not go away, but the Irish Christian Brothers did - at least here at Leo.  In the wake of the abuse scandals, Leo High School was asked to provide any and all information it might possess concerning the abuse of youngsters by members of the Congregation of Christian Brothers. I joined the President of Leo High School on two depositions concerning the class action lawsuit against the Congregation of Christian Brothers.

From what I gathered, there were more cases in the United States and Canada of physical abuse allegations, than sexual overtures and triumphs by Brothers to students in their keeping.

The Congregation of Christian Brothers is bankrupt.

That does not mean that lawyers can't find some coin. Hence, Chuck Goudie's I-Team smear.  Chuck, who violated crime scenes in the past ( Miglin Murder), decided to smear Leo High School, even though Leo has no affiliation with the Congregation of Christian Brothers other than history and has helped lawyers bring claims against pedophile hiding behind hard collars.

CHICAGO (WLS) -- The ABC7 I-Team looked into claims by nearly 100 alleged victims of sexual abuse in metro Chicago that the archdiocese and some of its schools are keeping dangerous secrets.

Leo High School is keeping dangerous secrets?  Here they are Chuck !

• Educational experiences for Leo students include speakers of note and field trips.
• One-half of the individuals that work at Leo are Leo graduates.
• No student who wants a good education is turned away. Leo expects its students to succeed and to be the best they can be, as do parents who have a financial obligation.
• Leo’s tuition is $7,000 a year, but no one pays this amount. 50 hours of volunteer work by parents over the course of the school years will lower tuition down to $5,000.  Alumni are also very generous, bringing the average tuition cost down to $4,000 per year. This is in contrast to $15,000 actual cost at Leo High School to educate one student.  Based on 2014-15 published tuition rates, the average tuition of South Side Catholic Schools is $10,000.
• Leo does face competition from other charter schools.  There are five in the 17th ward.
• Leo provides a rigorous college prep program.  Although no direct subsidies are received from a religious institution (Leo does have a chapel), Leo benefit from the Big Shoulders Fund that supplies support to Catholic schools in the neediest areas of inner-city Chicago.  Big Shoulders performs prep work free for Leo students.
• There is a very supportive and interested alumni, loyal and dedicated, who often show up at Leo unannounced. This year’s alumni banquet attracted 700 Leo grads and guests.
• Although the Leo high school building is structurally old and lacks the frills and attractiveness of school buildings located in more affluent areas, the structure is solid and was built to last.  Upkeep and maintenance costs are therefore kept at a minimum.

Chuck Goudie is very well paid and he is not very truthful.

He says this to close Investigations, " The I-Team left numerous messages at , Leo and . . . Schools, but never heard back."

Not true, Chuck.  One lovely young African American single mother of two answers, or takes down every phone message, every e-mail and every carrier pigeon missiive that come to Leo High School, where it has been since 1926 at 7901 S. Sangamon Street 60620, ph.(773) 224-9600 ex. 208 (for me) and fax at (773) 224-3856. E-mail come to admin@leohighschool.org. Also, every commnication with regard to Leo High School goes through a genuine journalist and newsman, Leo President Dan McGrath.  This inquiry, Chuck, would not be Dan McGrath's first rodeo.  We got nothing from ABC, Channel 7, or the I-Team.

Nothing from I-Team and nothing from Chuck. So, that is a smear - saying we do not return phone calls, much less keep "dangerous secrets."

Unless Chuck Goudie is prepared to call a lovely young African American single mother of two a liar, I'd say Chuck should crawfish on his report in a very public manner.

In a really nice world, a Leo Alumnus who has a very public record of going to court and righting public wrongs should give Chuck Goudie an old school legal ass-kicking.

A Savage Murdered Brian O'Malley's Son

Savage Mr. Pitts - Savage :Middle English: from Old French sauvage 'wild', from Latin silvaticus 'of the woods', from silva 'a wood'. - and the boy he slaughtered Kevin O'Malley

Kevin O'Malley was murdered by a savage in Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago, this past weekend.  Kevin is the son of Brian O'Malley, Leo Class of 1972.

Leo High School has had more than its share of blood spilled by the hands of savages - shot, stabbed, or  bludgeoned.

This is not a delicate subject whatsoever. Savages murdered Leo freshman Antonio Davis and put Leo Man Miles Turner in Illinois Rehab for the better part of a year and a wheelchair.  Savages murdered Officers Eric Lee and William Fahey.  Savages murdered Leo Valedictorian and Golden Gloves Champion Jason Riley.  Savages murdered a Leo student from Canaryville's brother in a gangway at 45th & Wallace.  Savages come in every race, creed and of course color.

To say, this is not the case is unjust.

Kevin O'Malley's mother and father, like the thousands of anguished parents and relatives who cry out over the loss of victims of savagery on the evening news, are going to bury their child.  Kevin O'Malley is the same age as my son.

The savage who shot Kevin O'Malley will be considered for  comfort by the people who do not want us to use the noun that describes base, animal humans who only understand impulses.

Our culture makes victims of savagery privileged characters, or, at best, people to be forgotten and turns savages into cult heroes - give the media forty-eight hours and Mr. Pitts will become Mr. Chips, without an opportunity.

That is wrong in every color of the rainbow.

May Christ comfort the O'Malley family and welcome home Kevin OMalley. 

Ireland Always Wanted to be England

Ireland was Ireland/ When England Was a Pup; Ireland Will Be Ireland/ When England's Time is Up ( Old Street Ballad)

We are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be tell the end of the chapter.... A priest-ridden Godforsaken race. JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man


Ireland - not to be confused with Irish People - always wanted to be England.  By that I mean, the Irish who cleaned up good, went to University, got jobs on newspapers, RTE in the Irish government  or elected to the Dáil , or advocated, were never happy being biologically linked to bog men who could crack anvils with pious prayer.

With the Irish Gay Marriage Victory all of that is no longer a problem:

Secularists insist that religious people will continue to receive the protection of the state – and maybe they are correct. But you have to concede that this does amount to a social revolution by statute. Once-upon-a-time you never had to think twice before quoting Corinthians in public. Nowadays, you have to invoke the state’s beneficent protection to do so.

Ireland is finally England!  Ireland is a secular state, unhobbled by any faith -Of our Fathers anyway.

The Secular Marriage for Anyone Victory in Ireland - the country and not the people, necessarily - is a victory for the cleaned-up good, University sampled, employed secularists who PLO over IDF and  Seifreid Nelson Sauvignon blanc 2014 over a pint of Guinness any day. These are the folks who believe in OXFAM over St. Vincent De Paul, admire Khaled Mashal rather than Chaim Herzog and Michael Barron way over Kevin Myers.

We have the same crowd here in Chicago and Illinois - the comfortable activist/investment plunger who watches only WTTW, loves abortion and hates Chick Fil Lay.

Ireland's referendum has nothing to do with gay or straight.  It's only about making sure that the Roman Catholic Church goes to ground for good, just as Henry VIII demanded when he socially engineered religion out of existence in that daffy realm.

Ireland is England.

I think that the Irish People will rethink this referendum in about ten years.  Ireland will object mightily.

Big Shot Rahm and His Chicago Media Purse Puppies Deflect Failure on City Workers

“The video, I think, is there for all to see and make a judgment. … Rahm Emanuel on dozing cop video
Like every bully, sneak and politician, Rahm offers "BUT" with this ". . .You have to look at what the men and women in uniform throughout the city do all day" in order to smear and avoid a subsequent and well-earned ass-kicking from his betters. You know, weasel words.

Rahm Emanuel is a nasty little man, but a Big Shot.  A Big Shot is an inflated ego supported by sycophants and opportunists.  The opportunists will keep the video alive for a week or so, beefed up with bitchy commentary from the likes Mike Flannery, Dane Placko, Chuck Goudie and Carol Marin and sauced with threats to ruin the life of the man in the squad car who closed is eyes. That's the Chicago Way!

Kill the working stiff and make sure that Big Shots stiff us all.  Rahm is a Big Shot and change.

He is also the Mayor of the Cty of Chicago who promised one, all and sundry that he has learned his lessons and will no longer be a nasty little man and a Big Shot.  That was re-call election days and  night. When night passed, and he rubbed the sleep from his dark-rimmed eyes, his feet hit the floor and he strutted to City Hall the same nasty little man and Big Shot we all know him to be. The problem is that the City of Chicago's sophisticated finances are all over the rails.

So, when some cell-phone equipped citizen caught a Five-O dozing in his squad, Rahm had a golden opportunity to deflect outrage at another city worker, instead of doing his job. The pure gold of this opportunity lies in the fact that the police officer is white.

Rahm, like all good Progressives. detests working people.  Working people are Subjects, or Predicate Nominatives used as rhetorical devices, only.

Working people are The Masses, toilers, breadwinners, hard hats, rank and filers who populate neighborhoods and pay taxes used in and for communities where employment is about as common as the White Rhino - the animal, not Senator MARQUE KIRQUE.

Taking a page from the Richard M. Daley playbook, written for that particular  rare reader at the University of Chicago in the mid-1990's, working stiffs, hirelings, boyhood friends, breeders and unevolved Raoman Catholics. became the meat tossed to Chicago's toothlees media lions.

The minute Rahm appointed career gifter and job hopping milquetoast Forrest Claypool to run Chicago's buses and trains, that worthy told Chicago that its transit problems had to do with CTA employees taking a break to urinate.

Amalgamated Transit Workers Local 308 President Robert Kelly fought back and embarrassed the onion-skinned mayor and his stooge at the CTA.  Immediately, the nasty little man and Big Shot and his career grifter stooge from moss-back Illinois began a campaign to vilify Kelly - a working man.

They brought in no less a loud mouth than Pastor Pfleger and and old Black Panther Bobby Rush to paint Kelly as a racist, over paid white devil who hated children and recently released convicted youth.

With Chicago's soaring homicides, why blame it on a dozing cop?

Idiot media creatures make political hay off of stories that expose the hiring of a labor leaders kid, a napping cop, a Streets and San plumber getting paid overtime, or a meter reader fudging her ticket books.  Soon they find themselves appointed to political postings, or Government Watchdog leadership.

Chicago is blessed with hard-working investigative journalists, but they always seem to be harnessed with a Carol Marin, Dane Placko, or Chuck Goudie in the story's travois, which drags no further than where the Big Shots want it to land.

When Chicagoans toss the Tribune and the Sun Times, turn off ABC, NBC, CBS, WTTW and start taking the plight of our City very seriously and talk to cops, firemen, City Workers about the realities of our wasted talents and treasure, then it might be time to empty City, County and State government of the looters, the leaches and the Big Shots.

Until then, . . .boy how about those Cubbies? . . .can't wait to get my Riot Fest tickets . . .sweet!

Hickey's All-Time Ten Toughest Men Ever

One may be brave, strong, cruel, domineering and wildly successful and be a cream puff as a man.  Toughness, I believe, is measured by how much one can take, rather than dish out. Here is my list of all-time real life tough guys. Take the test linked to Toughness
           1. Jesus of Nazareth

 2. Tom Crean

 3. Bishop Walsh 4.Ralph Ellison 5. Booker T. Washington 6. Don Pero Nino 7. Moishe Dayan 8. Samson  9.  Pancho Villa10. Spike O'Donnell

Ten Tough Guys.

America's Dash from 'The Field' to Victimhood

"The Bull" McCabe: The field is mine.

The American: Well we'll see about that won't we? John B. Keane The Field
"You didn't build that!"  President Barack Obama on the stump 2012

John B. Keane was a brilliant Irish writer, storyteller and pub owner from County Kerry.  In 1965, he wrote a play called  The Field that told the story of a rough farmer by the name of The Bull McCabe.

The Bull McCabe worked land adjacent to his own - a field allowed to grow fallow and useless through neglect.  He made the field grow green and fecund by his labors.  In fact, he neglected his own family to make this once useless field of rocks and weeds flourish and become an asset.

The problem being the field is owned by a widow. It's the law.

When the widow decided not to sell the property to The Bull,  he engaged in rural terrorism to force the poor woman to give up and go away.

If The Bull had a lawyer as every serious victim seems to have, he could have made a case in court for himself under the real estate laws of Adverse Possession - A method of gaining legal title to real property by the actual, open, hostile, and continuous possession of it to the exclusion of its true owner for the period prescribed by state law. Personal Property may also be acquired by adverse possession.

The Bull, like most people, was too busy doing his work to give such thoughts only people with too much time on their hands and a few sparks of cunning between their ears their due.

Like most of us, an injustice real or perceived can race the heart to bitterness.  The Bull was bitter, due to the widow's grasp on the land and the widow, bitter about the pranks and taunts visited  upon her by  The Bull McCabe, his slow-witted son and a sneaky leach called The Bird.

The widow determined to sell the property to a Rich American - The Yank - sight unseen.  The play ends in tragedy.

John Keane's wonderful play concerned human labor and property rights at its most basic. Keane's characters played to the fates without a politician to come to aide of either side.

That was in 1965.  LBJ was President. There was a War on Poverty and War in Vietnam.  Victim hood became the greatest revolutionary tool since anarchists international discovered that fused pyrotechnic could shake Bourgeoisie into submission.  Bomb tossing had little effect. Victim hood won the day for the Masses.

America's greatest essayist, wrote a history of Political American Victim hood in the Weekly Standard.  Epstein writes,

Victims of an earlier time viewed themselves as supplicants, throwing themselves on the conscience if not mercy of those in power to raise them from their downtrodden condition. The contemporary victim tends to be angry, suspicious, above all progress-denying. He or she is ever on the lookout for that touch of racism, sexism, homophobia, or insensitivity that might show up in a stray opinion, an odd locution, an uninformed misnomer. People who count themselves victims require enemies. Forces high and low block their progress: The economy disfavors them; society is organized against them; the malevolent, who are always in ample supply, conspire to keep them down; the system precludes them. Asked some years ago by an interviewer in Time magazine about violence in schools that are all-black—that is, violence by blacks against blacks—the novelist Toni Morrison, a connoisseur of victimhood whose novels deal with little else, replied, “None of those things can take place, you know, without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.”
Public pronouncements from victims can take on a slightly menacing quality, in which, somehow, the roles of victim and supposed antagonist are reversed. Today it is the victim who is doing the bullying—threatening boycott, riot, career-destroying social media condemnation—and frequently making good on their threats. Victims often seem actively to enjoy their victimhood—enjoy above all the moral advantage it gives them. Fueled by their own high sense of virtue, of feeling themselves absolutely in the right, what they take to be this moral advantage allows them to overstate their case, to absolve themselves from all responsibility for their condition, to ask the impossible and demand it now, and then to demonstrate virulently, sometimes violently, when it isn’t forthcoming. (emphasis my own)

We are victims waiting for shoes, bricks, bats, bullets and bombs to drop - unless we have a lawyer in our wallets'

Americans have run from The Field.   John B. Keane's character The Bull McCabe would have none of that -things will go very tragically, I am afraid; unless, we snap out of it.

Another Leo Class of Men Set to Graduate, Because of Mr. McGrath, Coach Holmes and Miss Latifi!

Leo High School President Dan McGrath wil J. Robinson 2018



Coach Mike Holmes raises us up!

The Lion Queen, math teacher Miss Aurora Latifi


These are the final examination days for the Leo High School Class of 2015.  
Latrell Giles will go to St. Joe's in Renssalaer, Indiana - million miles from 37th & Rhodes.

I am going to miss these fine young men - one gent will be going to the United States Coast Guard Academy and another will study and play football at St. Joseph's College in Rensselaer, Indiana where Leo Legend Jimmy Arneberg once coached and Chicago Bears held their summer work-out camps.  All have been accepted to at least one good college, or university.  The 2015 Valedictorian wants to opt for the skilled trades, probably the stationary engineers - great trade and vocation that.

Leo Men will go on to proud lives.  These are proud people around this school - proud Alumni, proud leadership, proud parents and families and proud students.

I'd like to credit this pride to three individuals: Leo President Dan McGrath, football coach and Father Figure Mike Holmes and the Lion Queen, Miss Aurora Latifi.

I can think of no trio people who have done more for each and every member of the 2015 and for Leo High School's traditions of commitment and courage.

Dan McGrath spends every waking hour anguishing over Leo High School and young men it serves.  Dan is at every Leo event - academic, athletic or social.  Not an hour goes by that misses a Dan McGrath moment for each and every student under this roof, all the while bringing his many talents to the onerous tasks of meeting payroll, strategic planning, correcting a student's prose, or reaching out to new money.

Mike Holmes raises up young men. Mike takes every student to his massive heart with a father's pride.  He is the most positive, joyful, fierce and sweet-hearted man our young men will ever meet in life.

Aurora Latifi commands love and respect in the math classes she teaches and in halls she patrols. Leo graduates know algebra, calculus, geometry and basic math when they accept a diploma at graduation, because a pretty girl from the mountains of Albania would not allow failure.

Our young men succeed because Leo expects that of them.  No three people set that bar higher than Dan McGrath, Mike Holmes and Aurora Latifi.

Anthony Burgess - How Writers Paint with Words

Better to illuminate than merely to shine, to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate.

Aquinas, Thomas. 13th Century.

Outside, the main doors behind him, he was hit full in the chest by autumn. The doggy wind leapt about him and nipped; leaves skirred along the pavement, the scrape of the ferrules of sticks; melancholy, that tetrasyllable, sat on a plinth in the middle of the square. English autumn, and the whistling tiny souls of the dead round the war memorial.  from The Doctor is Sick* by Anthony Burgess

My God! That man could paint with words. The simple 'he was hit' gets a gloriously imaginative pigments from the full palette of Burgess's final picture. 'He' is hit "full in the chest by autumn."  The happy dog of Fall lands both paws squarely on the old heart box, and leaps and nips and skirrs not only at the man's feet, but also a concrete foot honoring English war-dead.

Like Vermeer before an empty canvass, Burgess has mixed his pigments and slathered them onto the palette of his mind's tongue and allows his hands and fingers to form a mighty scene.

Tell me God's hand avoid human expression.

* The "doctor" of the title is Edwin Spindrift, Ph.D., an unhappily married professor of linguistics who has been sent home from Burma to England suffering from a mysterious brain ailment. While Edwin is confined to a neurological ward, undergoing a battery of diagnostic tests, Mrs. Spindrift amuses herself with some disreputable new friends at the surrounding pubs. Sometimes, to Edwin's distress, she sends these friends to keep her husband company during visiting hours, rather than come herself. Most of the novel is a dream sequence: while anesthetised for brain surgery, Edwin's anxiety over his wife and the company she keeps turns into a slightly surrealistic fantasy in which Edwin leaves the hospital and encounters his wife's friends, with whom he has various adventures.