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 with me in a road trip from Chicago to St. Louis on the day I left the Sun-Times.

You see I had been at the Sun-Times for 29 years, plus another 3 1/2 years at the Suburban Sun-Times under the helm of the late Lon Grahnke. He was a tough editor, but he did not suffer from myopia.

We all could be ourselves. Isn’t that what you want in any job?

I grew up in a Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News family.

As the newspaper editor at Naperville Central High School, I tried to learn from  the great writers from these papers: Bill Newman–how great a stylist was he?— the balls of Mike Royko, the poetry of John Schulian, Ray Sons, a consummate gentleman,  and many others.

Working at the Sun-Times was a dream come true.

If I had the skills of a good baseball player, filing stories from 401 N. Wabash  would have been the same thing as playing at Wrigley Field.

I remember the magical night of writing my first deadline story in the summer of 1984 (I was on a part-time thing) in the Features Department.

Glenna Syse had just come marching in from a theater review. Roger Ebert was walking around talking to reporters as a warm-up exercise before writing. I think deadlines in this pre-computer age were later than they are now!

I had read Don McLeese in the Reader and his Sun-Times rock criticism had the rare blend of clarity and no-snob-factor that I came to appreciate.  I looked out a window at the Chicago River.

It was not green.

It was gold.

So thanks to everyone for your kind  messages, Facebook posts and most of all for reading my stuff all these years. I have to work on self-promotion and will try to minimize that noise. But I sincerely hope to repay you with measured words, adventures and incongruous looks at this amazing  life.

I will also keep an eye out for a good editor.

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