When you are young, the seasons turn like a pinwheel.
Seasons slow over time and become a paddlewheel in muddy water. As you grow old you try to hang onto something. The last flower from a garden. A John Prine song about summer’s end.
Or a place you may never see again.
On the steamy Fourth of July weekend, 2012, I visited the Tommy Bartlett Show in the Wisconsin Dells with my award-winning videographer Jon Sall. The homespun big top on water was celebrating its 60th anniversary and there was a reunion with a dozen Bartlett skiers from the 1950s and 60s.
Jon shares my eye for the simple beauties of Americana and this was something [...]
Ronny’s Steakhouse closed over Labor Day weekend in Chicago’s Loop.
It was another signal in the shift of the urban community as a result of the pandemic. At one time there were six Ronny’s steakhouses in downtown Chicago. The last one standing was on the ground floor of the Thompson Center building. Government workers came to Ronny’s. Bank tellers ate there. There were wayward tourists. The late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was a fan, most notably stopping in around 2010 when he was directing the “Long Red Road” at the nearby Goodman Theatre.
They are all ghosts in 2020.
Ronny’s was a place out of time during its time, which helped explain [...]
Mary Frances and Bill Veeck on March 10, 1959 when Bill purchased 54 % of the White Sox for $2.7 million. (Photo courtesy of the Veeck family.)
Mary Frances Veeck is surrounded by a garden.
She is sitting with her daughter Marya on a mid-August morning in the patio of her Hyde Park retirement home. There are red begonias, sunflowers, and gold daisies. A visitor brings yellow flowers, just as he used to do with his mother. Mary Frances’s life has been a bouquet of joy, dancing, tears, and long summer nights. She was married to Baseball Hall of Famer Bill Veeck from 1950 until he died in 1986.
Mary [...]
For no reason at all, looters and arsonists destroyed the historic Central Camera Co. store, 230 S. Wabash during the May 30 Chicago protests following the murder of George Floyd. Not long after the store was ruined, third-generation owner Don Flesch began a personal journey to see if there was anything he could salvage from his upstairs office.
Maybe he would find a lost letter from his grandfather Albert Flesch.
Or, a family photograph, of course.
Instead, he found sweet music hidden in a distant shelf.
During the early 1900s, Central Camera had a record label. Flesch discovered a cracked, smoke-tinged 78 by Peluso’s Orchestra. It [...]
