White Sox fans Earl and Sharon (Courtesy of Marina Jason)
Earl Pionke always had big dreams.
He was a White Sox fan.
The beloved nightclub owner, mentor to countless musicians of the 1960’s Chicago folk boom and ex-boxer died on April 26, 2013 after battling pancreatic cancer. He was 80.
Earl loved life more than most people and even saw his White Sox win a World Series. In 1993 he left the north side for Pullman, a far south side neighborhood built on the escape of distant train whistles.
He wanted to open a bar in Pullman.
In 1993 Pionke and his long time girl friend Sharon [...]
D. Hoekstra portraits
Crabby Kim’s is a warm and shabby sports bar near the corner of North Western and Waveland avenues in Chicago.
It is the kind of place where the jukebox is muted when basketball games are on. Old Style Tall Boys are $3.
Owner Kim Kirchoff grew up in the neighborhood; he graduated from Bell School in 1964. The sorta Hemingway look alike admits to being crabby. But he hires happy female bartenders who wear skimpy bikinis. This place gives me goose bumps.
And it gives the women goose bumps.
I’ve driven by Crabby Kim’s thousands of times but have never been in the [...]
Jim Stoecker and his antique cash register(Courtesy of Alex’s Washington Gardens)
During this endless winter, Jim Stoecker had to get away from the quaint Italian restaurant he runs in north suburban Highwood. In late January Stoecker drove to New Orleans, hopped on a cruise ship and went to Mexico for five days. He ate pizza on the ship. Every day. It wasn’t good pizza but it maintained his streak that never seems to end.
Stoecker claims to have eaten pizza for 2,450 days in a row.
He is the Lou Gehrig of garlic.
“I don’t get tired of eating pizza,” Stoecker said during a [...]
When the spirit has been dragging like a comb in the hair of Gene Simmons, you find out who your true friends are.
And I’ve been fortunate.
Really fortunate.
This updated website has all kinds of stuff. There’s categories of travel dispatches, baseball stories, things on food-ways and immediate, unfiltered musings on life passages. I’ll also be keeping my eye on breaking Chicago cultural news, issues that are near to me like why the city ignores its musical heritage.
I wanted to share this rather blunt link with my friend and collaborator Paul Natkin of Photo Reserve, Inc., who had the misfortune to be [...]
