Chicago' Rainbow Beach - Once an Urban Spa, Now a Shooting Gallery

Four shot near Rainbow Beach on South Side
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September 5, 2010
Sun-Times Media Wire
Four people were shot Saturday night while attending a barbecue in a park near Rainbow Beach on the South Side.

About 9:20 p.m., the victims were at a barbecue in a park in the 2900 block of East 77th Street when three gunmen approached and begin firing, police said.

A 20-year-old man suffered a gunshot wound to the lower back and was taken in “stable” condition to John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County, police said. A 39-year-old man was shot in the right side and taken in “stable” condition to Stroger.

A 34-year-old woman was shot in the buttocks and taken in “stable” condition to Stroger. A 18-year-old man suffered a gunshot wound to the right arm and was taken in good condition to Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

No one is in custody.

Calumet Area detectives are investigating

Mid to late 1960's South Side Chicago:

The 79th Street eastbound bus to Jeffery once ferried pale wiry Irish kids laden with blankets, transistor radios and brown paper bags of Velveeta and bologna sandwiches. At 79th & Wood Streets scores of teenagers would board the CTA green limousines for the Urban jostle to the end-of-the-line and a walk of several hundred yards to Rainbow Beach. I used to take the less traveled 75th Street bus, with Terry Smith, Al McFarland, Jimmy Shea, Larry Fiscelli and his Italian cousins and pals from St. Mary of Mount Carmel and Justin Martyr parishes from north of the tracks, Joe Prizzi, Tony DiPolito, and the Angone brothers to South Shore Drive, passing the Synagogues and great corner stores on Yates and Jeffery. As we got older and way cooler, a trip to Astro Lounge on 79th Street might add a couple of cans of Drewrys to our loads.

Take on The Mountie!

The South Shore landmarks for both the 75th Street and the 79th Street approaches were

THUNDERBIRD MOTEL – 75TH AND SOUTH SHORE DRIVE
PEACH TREE RESTAURANT – 79TH AND SOUTH SHORE DRIVE
7000 SOUTH SHORE DRIVE HOTEL
THE SOUTH SHORE RAIL TRACKS

Italo-Hibernian harmony solidified as the bus would cross the racial DMZ at Halsted and the black neighborhoods would dominate our concerns for a race-heated confrontation on the bus that almost never was realized. More Italians, would get on the bus at Grand Crossing on 75th and finally Jewish kids closer to the Lake. In the late 1960's Jewish kids going to Hirsch or South Shore, or Hyde Park tended to dress in the manner similar to the Italian kids from around 69th & Ashland - Greaser Habiliments - black, grey and fawn colored Dago Knit, skin tight black Levis, Rat Stabber ( pointed toes) Stacey Adams shoes and boots and girls in alluringly slutty tight-fitting tops and shorts with cotton-candy Big Hair. We Micks tended to affect the more staid looks of Big Ten Athletes and Jane College sweethearts - Princetons (just barely enough hair to make part), Flat Top or Buzz cuts on boys and Mary Tyler Moore flips for the young Deirdre's and Molly O'Malleys.

Rainbow Beach was a Rainbow of skin tones ( olive, black, tan, ruddy and bone white) and yes there were African American teenagers and families enjoying the Sun and Sand without incident or violence. I remember meeting a bunch of Jewish Kids who attended South Shore and we camped with them on the sand, on a tight patch not dominated by dead Alewives. We crowded together to share the Lord's blessings of the day, in the hope of coaxing a make-out session with a beauty out of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe a Rainbow Beach Rebecca to our 79th & 69th Street Templar Knights -Brian de Bois-Guilbert- what lives by the tracks.

Alewives were a Lake Michigan herring-like fish that turned into Fish-Jerky and stunk up the beach. Seagulls -flying rats were everywhere and Stuka'd more than few french fries from the chubby mitts of toddlers and teens. The huge pavilion served burgers and fries and sun tan lotion - we Irish used Quaker State, as an Irish Tan usually went from Nuclear Pond Scarlet to bubbly crisp brown scabs, followed by weeks of pealing dry epidermis layers and then a return to the full alabaster.

The Jewish kids were great and funny and hip. The Italian kids were very hip and we Irish we about as hip as a Mitch Miller album. Naivete suited us Harps like a Carrol's Red Hanger wardrobe. Beverly Irish dressed better - Lyttons, Baskins & etc. North of 87th Street Irish were more blue collar wallet sizes and we decked out from the Red Hanger at 63rd & Kedzie. We, also, listened to WVON - "You're Standing TALL with the Butter Ball!" WVON - the Voice of Negro - because the tunes were better. No Beach Boys, thank you. JJ Jackson, Sly Stone, Wilson Picket, Soul Survivors, Four Tops and Watts 103rd Street Rythm Band - Do Your Thang!

One Jewish girl who had redder hair than Maureen O'Hara said, to her friend over the blanket, indicating the Goyim Golums sharing the spot -ikh hob moyre which I think meant - "These Guineas and Potato eaters are creepy" - was reassured by by the Pepsodent smile of Tony DiPolito, who looked like James Darren, "We don't even go to church much . . . they do," indicating Smith, McFarland, Shea and Hickey. Ecumenism and WVON! Dipolito eventually coaxed the Redhead into a stroll to grassy park just east of the beach. He took a later bus home to 71st Street.

Rainbow Beach was a wonderful place. In our Post Racial America it is another shooting gallery.

God help us.

David Mamet and Me - Some Things No Longer Apply

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. . . . I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

Playwright David Mamet ( click my post title)

I was reminded of David Mamet's two year old piece in The Village Voice by a woman much smarter than me and in all matters my moral superior. No, not E. J. Dionne, but an Ohio-bred thirty year resident of the hometown to Mamet and me - Chicago. Closer to home David Mamet and I are close in age (Mamet is 63 and I am 58) and south siders - we grew about along 79th Street. I believe he was from around 77th & South Yates. We both swam at Rainbow Beach in Chicago's torrid summers and probably drank quarts of cold Drewry's Beer out on the rocks near the water-treatment intake in close proximity to one another. Mamet is Jewish and I am Roman Catholic. we are both children of the heroic generation that defeated fascism and the Great Depression, but, much more importantly, built the American Standard of Living, after WWII that is the marvel of human history and now being dismantled by the spoiled children of our generation.

Mamet became a world famous playwright, producer, director and film-maker. My late wife Mary and I went to his plays at Victory Gardens Theatre. I had read LakeBoat which I picked up at the old Kroch's on Wabash, in my freshman year at Loyola in 1970-'71. It was wonderful! I read more of Mamet's plays and found that he cursed and profaned like a Catholic! Nothing is more sacred to my literary sensibilities than the discerning application of tasteful obscenties in speech and prose. I became a teacher.

As young men, we could both be considered Democrat liberals. Both of us have become somewhat conservative - I remain a Regular Democrat. We tend to view PBS/NPR as a propaganda organ and generally a bore. We both seem to have returned to our religious roots. While David Mamet is a highly regarded intellectual and artist, I remain a blue collar, working-stiff, helot school teacher - pretty damn good at my craft. While I no longer teach a full load, I still have my chops and fill-in when needed.

I am not ashamed to call myself a Catholic, though I tend to be a horrific sinner. Rather, Catholics need to tell the nitwits who have diminished the Faith to take a seat at the kiddies table and allow the adults to carry on. Our liturgy, our core beliefs and our collective sense of self was corrupted by parsing Progressives and none of us bothered to call them out on their idiocies from 1964 to the present.

Likewise, David Mamet has taken the flail to self-loathing, secularist Jews who dance with The Devil in the hopes that the coming Holocaust will somehow give them a pass. Jews and Catholics have much in common, besides an artificially created antipathy. Created by Progressive Catholics and Secularist Jews.

David Mamet wrote a very powerful dismissal of childish things, that seem silly at this point in our lives, 2008. Barack Obama plotted to be President and liberal world was aswoon! I had met the President on three occasions when he was State Senator and quiet frankly I was unimpressed by Barack Obama. I backed John McCain, much to the contempt of most of my family who are rock-ribbed labor people. I felt that Obama was no friend to labor - other than SEIU and Mandarin Andy Stern -and seem to be proven correct by Obama's history of diminishing labor and shrinking the American Middle Class. Barack Obama and his camp strike me as pampered intellectuals who manage to ridicule anyone or institution that opposes them.

David Mamet confirmed my suspicions in 2008.

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.

To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.

Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.

I found not only that I didn't trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

And I began to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military" of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.

Obama Campfire Girls like E.J. Dionne and the Journolist Orwellians continue to bleat -

The simple truth is that the wealthy in the United States -- the people who have made almost all the income gains in recent years -- are undertaxed compared with everyone else. . . .I'm a chronic optimist about America. But we are letting stupid politics, irrational ideas on fiscal policy and an antiquated political structure undermine our power.

Pampered Pundit E.J. Dionne

Not really, Eugene . . .E. J., read David Mamet.