Did Hugh Downs Make Me What I Am Today?

My boyhood TV hero died this week. You probably think I am talking about Carl Reiner, who passed away June 29th. After all, Reiner created The Dick Van Dyke Show, one of my favorite TV shows of all time. But as a pre-school kid, I just knew the faces in front of the camera, and Mr. Reiner’s portrayal of Alan Bradie, funny as it was, was just a small part of the show. He wasn’t even as important as always dumped on Mel Coolie. And I could only watch the show once a week; no binge-watching back then. So Reiner didn’t really make much of an impression on me in the early 1960s.

No, the man I watched on TV day in and day out, the man this young kid aspired to be when I grew up, wasn’t an actor or a writer, and certainly no comedian. My hero was Hugh Downs, who died July 1st at age 99.

If you know the name and if you remember him at all, it is probably for his stints as host of Today or possibly 20/20, ABC’s news magazine answer to 60 Minutes. In a New York Times obituary discussing his career, one can learn a lot about his time on those two shows, as well as his years as the announcer and second banana to Jack Paar on Paar’s iteration of The Tonight Show.

But you must read way down to the 16th paragraph of the article to find a brief one-sentence mention of the 11 years Downs spent as host of the TV game show Concentration. But for me, that was Hugh Downs. That is where I met him every morning.

It was a simple game, call out some numbers, match some prizes, solve a simple rebus puzzle, and go home a winner. No need to know trivia, or how much a week’s supply of Alpo dog food cost, or what a survey said. It was the perfect show for a five-year-old with a good memory and an innate ability to solve word puzzles. It would be the launching pad for my life of TV game-show appearances (It’s Academic and Jeopardy!, the Family Feud near-miss) and Password games with friends that are as bitterly fought as a Bears-Packers game in the Halas days. And Mr. Downs was the perfect low-key host. He never got in the way of the game

So Hugh, while I salute all the other great TV work you did, when I write my book Concentration will never have to wait until paragraph 16! I’ll put it right there at the top.

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DePaul Gets It Right, Doesn’t Cancel Police

“You can’t separate the person from the career. It doesn’t matter that there are good cops.” So says Aneesah Shealey, a student at DePaul University, quoted in Tuesday’s Tribune. Fortunately, the administration at Depaul recognizes that part of a college education is learning that not everything is black in white, not every position should be absolute.

What is this all about? Some students at Depaul object to DePaul offering educational programs to–Oh My God– officers of the Chicago Police Department! These programs include a Master of Jurisprudence Degree in Criminal Law, a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Business Administration, and a Writing Fellows Program. The courses are taught at the Police Academy, not on the DePaul Lincoln Park campus.

It would seem to me that officers familiar with the law would be more likely than more legally naive ones to treat the citizens of Chicago fairly and respect their rights. It would seem to me that those officers who are schooled in the nuances of management would eventually rise in the ranks and provide positive leadership. It would seem to me that officers enrolled in a writing program would be open to the world of literature and the arts, and be most likely to embrace the diversity of humanity.

And it seems to me that Shealey and friends, instead of trying to get the programs banned, could fight for the programs to be as good as they can be. The students could insist that the curriculum includes an emphasis on diversity, the recognition of human rights, and the danger of bias. They could advocate that the courses could be on one of DePaul’s campuses so that students and officers could mingle and try to understand what makes their opposite numbers tick.

But according to Shealey, the goals and all the positive aspects of the program are irrelevant. If you are a cop you are tainted with the sins of the hierarchy and your fellow officers, and a university should have nothing to do with you. Talk about the arrogance of youth!

DePaul, via an announcement from Provost Salma Ghanem has made the right decision by refusing to discontinue the academic program for the Chicago Police Department, by not bowing to “cancel culture.” Yes, the Police Department needs to change, but it is not going to go away. What better way to improve it than educating the women and men whom we should expect to preserve and protect all of us?

Thank you, Provost Ghanem and DePaul University.

Illustration courtesy of: http://clipart-library.com/officer-cliparts.html

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COVIDERATA (discovered deep under Stonehenge)

Coviderata

Always remember to cover your nose,
Or your mask is malarky.
You might never again shake someone’s hand,
but you may kiss the air around their cheek.
George Carlin was half right,
those more cautious than you are not maniacs,
but those less cautious ARE idiots.
Take care in crowded and indoor locations,
the person on your left might sneeze,
and his elbow is pointed at you.
With Facetime and Zoom you can be blessed.
But 5-hour meetings are tiresome, especially with your grandmother.
If pro soccer is canceled this year and next,
why would America care?
Gray roots are fashionable. If you live in England they are grey.
The loss of a school year for our children,
works best for the braniacs
who don’t need second grade.
If you have products to sell don’t be gouging,
for Karma will find you in time
and Yoko can be a bitch.
Injecting unproven pharma
can be a prelude to embalming,
but might interest some people.
Most of us are in this together,
Unless you have fled to New Zealand
or to Gilligan’s Island with the Professor.
Funny COVID song parodies have had their time,
but are no longer timely
and rarely funny.
If the NBA can play in a bubble,
can Little League play in a Sno-Globe?
Vaccines = good,
especially on a triple-word score.
Be at peace with your friends, your family, and the uninformed;
just remember there is always an “Unfriend” button.
This is what happens when no one hosts the Oscars.
Ricky Gervais would have saved us,
or maybe Kevin Hart.

Be happy, and never again eat a bat.
You are a friend of the universe.

With appropriate apologies to
Max Ehrmann, Desiderata, Copyright 1952.

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photo credit: jjamv 1-P1290747 via photopin (license)

A Memory, A Diner, and A Reacquaintance

Maybe it is a sign of the times, but looking backward at what we know seems to be more fulfilling than looking forward to what we can only guess at. So a random thought about a long-gone restaurant on what some people call Throw Back Thursday set off a cascade of memories for a lot of folks.

When I was 6 or 7, my family moved from one Rogers Park apartment to another, about three blocks away. On moving day, my older sister and I were sent on a mission to a diner around the corner to buy a hamburger lunch for the family and the moving men from 7 Brothers Moving And Storage Company. Back in 1962, there was nothing unusual about an 11-year-old and 6-year-old handling that chore.

The diner was a small greasy spoon, which in my memory was named the Huddle House. The place wasn’t much; a counter with 4 stools and a cash register in the front, kitchen in the back. Basic, but the burgers were delicious. Lunch went well. Sadly, within a year or so the diner was demolished (lost their lease? closed by the Department of Health?) and an apartment building replaced it.

During a moment of weakness, I posted my story on the Facebook Rogers Park page, unaware that I was opening the flood gates as each reader piled on. “No such place as Huddle House.” “I think it was Toddle House.” “No way, it was Townhouse.” “No way was it Townhouse.” “I’ve got the phone book–it didn’t exist.” “They had a train delivering the food.” “Trains were at the Choo Choo in Des Plaines.” “I lived in that apartment building.” “I lived across the street.” “My third cousin was the janitor there.”

You get the idea. Everyone wants the chance to reminisce, we are all just waiting for the cue. When the “votes” were in, Huddle House had defeated Toddle House as the likely name, and even the deniers were believing that this wasn’t just a false memory of mine. I wish I could convince people so easily about other things, like vaccines, and politics, and White Sox.

I got one additional surprise from my posting. One reader recognized my name and the Rogers Park location and told me she had been my sister’s friend a million years ago back in the hood. I remembered her name (at least the maiden name) and even an image of her face. She was aware my sister had passed away; it was nice to be able to fill her in about my sister and her family.

Maybe next Thursday I will throw out another memory, from another time and place. And anticipate the days when looking forward will once more be as much of life as looking back.

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Virus Visions. Does the Past Repeat?

I am sitting in our sunroom, beams of light pouring through the jalousie windows. Our cat and a visiting pup alternate turns lying in the sun, neither willing to share space with the other. It is a crystal clear and brilliant day. I should be outside enjoying it before the crushing heat returns. But my stomach has been doing flip-flops for the last 24 hours or so, and I feel more comfortable on the sofa, book in hand, gazing out onto the street.

Barb designed this room for days like today; one set of windows facing our backyard; the second opening onto the pond, where only one of four of our newly hatched cygnets has survived the demonic snapping turtles in the water below; the final set of windows giving a view of the street, where we live at the back end of the loop the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare makes as it meanders through the subdivision.

I can people-watch unseen as I flip the pages of my novel. It’s a day made for strolling and all our neighbors, nearly homogenous in their ethnicity, are out. Many proceed as family units–mom and dad on bikes, baby in an attached carrier, young daughters struggling to keep up astride their two-wheelers, bouncing side-to-side on the training wheels. Pairs of neighborly couples stride along, 6-foot distances narrowing, then swelling again as someone remembers. In-line skaters, dog walkers, and loud phone chatters weave in and out to complete the tapestry.

The novel beside me is one that Barb gave to me from her stack on her nightstand after I finished reading the last book in my library pile. The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai alternates between modern-day Paris and Chicago in the 1980’s, the Chicago scenes taking place in an area that would become known as Boystown. It is the story of a great pandemic, though the disease at the story’s center is not COVID-19, the virus is not SARS-CoV-2.

It was early in my medical career when we first became aware of a deadly illness that was striking gay men with the unusual disease combination of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Pneumocystis Pneumonia. Medically, it struck home. I had given a presentation on KS in med school and pneumocystis was the organism that had ended my father-in-law’s battle with leukemia.

I remember the heated arguments over whether or not this disease, soon to be named Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, was an infectious disease and if so what the transmitting agent could be. Then came the discovery of a virus, originally titled HTLV-III and eventually renamed HIV. Methods of transmission were identified. Rock Hudson became a symbol, Ryan White a hero.

To protect ourselves in the morgue we began wearing chain mail gloves while doing autopsies, at least until my Laboratory Director discovered a unique and clever way to avoid our performing post-mortem exams on known AIDS cases. He told the hospital medical staff that we pathologists would be glad to do those autopsies, as long as the clinicians “scrubbed in” and pointed out the areas in which they had the greatest concern. Autopsy requests melted away just like the T-lymphocytes that had disappeared under the onslaught of the virus.

I recall the controversy over blood testing for the disease, as well as the emergence of AZT, the first drug to have some success in slowing down the progression of AIDS. And I remember the lost medical school classmates, members of a repressed class that was decimated.

And now, as BLM reminds us, once again a repressed class is being decimated, both by a virus and by inequality. It is time to move beyond looking out the window. For me, it will be in a medical context. How about for you?

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When Words Fail Me

1,584,862. That is the number of words the Grammarly online grammar and spell checking program has reviewed for me over the past 3 years. Most of those 1,584,862 words have been used in writing the blog, then rewriting it, and editing it. Words are not what I do for a living, I don’t have that ability, but they are what I do for pleasure, writing them down here, reading them in books and magazines, spelling them out in Scrabble and Words for Friends.

I used to be able to write with some objectivity, even in the face of what I feared could be a natural tragedy. I could write about the wonders of my profession and the weirdness that sometimes was associated with it. I have praised valuable tests and bashed the useless ones. I used to be able to write with some humor–Barb was rolling on the floor reading this old post that came up Sunday on her Facebook memories page.

But words have deserted me in the past month or so. Every time I sit down to write a blog post I am stymied. COVID has worn me down, even while it has been a topic for some of my most popular posts. The state of the democracy is so nightmarish I have given up trying to write about it, at times turning to pictures to tell the story.

And the tragedy of the past week, the death of George Floyd, the responses, the responses-to-the-responses, has left me numb and once again wordless. I start to contrast the knee of Colin Kaepernick to the knee of Derek Chauvin but what more is there to say about that? If we had listened better to the former, we would not be suffering the repercussions of the latter? That type of writing is facile and easy, it is just a juxtaposition of two symbols.

When I will again find joy in writing, feel pleasure in adding to my 1.5 million words. Maybe when our country has refound its mission and its humanity. Maybe when we have all been inspired. Maybe when we are post-pandemic and putting our best effort at solving the other plagues we face–poverty, inequality, and environmental catastrophe are but the first three that come to mind.

I know I won’t stop writing the blog, not as long as ChicagoNow allows me to continue. I just long for the time when it will be fun again, for you, and for me.

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photo credit: airlines470 STATUE OF LIBERTY via photopin (license)

Public Service Ads Through The Years. Keep Going Until The End.

…and the state of things today

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A Puzzling Broadway Puzzle–Help Us Please!

Can you help us name these shining stars?

Friends, Readers, and Countrymen, I need your help! Like many of you, Barb and I have been looking for indoor entertainment during this long semi-lockdown. Early on, I reported on our jigsaw puzzle near-success (no, we still haven’t received the replacement for the missing piece). We were itching for the opportunity to do another puzzle to break up the nightly routine of Netflix streaming and online Mahjong and Scrabble, but all the puzzles we wanted to get were sold out.

And then…

Last Saturday we celebrated a 6-day belated Mothers Day. All the kids and grandkids on our back deck, each family at separate tables at least 6 feet apart. Each person had their own box from Superdawg (4 dawgs, 4 burgers, 1 chicken sandwich) and all the kids understood that Nana and Baba were off-limits for hugs and kisses, the only sad part of the day.

Of course, there were gifts and to our delight, Laury had found a site that had in stock the jigsaw puzzle you see in the picture above, Broadway’s Brightest Stars. It arrived at Laury’s house in that 6-day gap between the actual Mothers Day and our celebration–perfect timing.

If you have been reading the blog for long, you know Barb and I are huge Broadway fans. In Pre-COVID days we visited NYC theaters at least annually and were planning our next visit to coincide with Hugh Jackman starring in The Music Man. With that trip on indefinite hold, the puzzle serves as a perfect connection to the Great White Way.

But this puzzle is hard! We finished the border and the next interior row, but after that, things have bogged down. When broken down into tiny pieces, everyone’s lips and eyes, and lots of their hair, look the same. And to make it more challenging, despite our Broadway acumen, we are having a hard time recognizing lots of the brightest stars. That makes it harder for us to cooperate. “Hey, Barb, have you seen another piece of the blue shirt on that guy over there?” It would be easier, and more fun, if I knew that guy’s name!

Yes, we know some of the faces. You can’t miss the Man Who Is Everywhere, Lin-Manuel Miranda. Julie Andrews is easy to pick out for an old geezer like me. And though we just missed seeing Ben Platt on Broadway in Dear Evan Hansen we did recognize him in the upper right. But a lot of the others have us stumped.

So I ask for your help. I have numbered each actor, 1-20. Tell me, tell me, tell me who they are. A virtual high five and curtain call to all our helpers.

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Disasters are Not New. Why Does This One Feel So Different?

In my seven decades, crises have come and gone…but this one feels different. Is it because we are older, and have grown no wiser?

Six Presidential Quotes and 62 Million Reasons Why

Five Hollywood Presidents...and one real one. — Five Hollywood Presidents…and one real one.

Five serious men who were never really President, and one who is. Which ones inspire you?

President James Marshall (Harrison Ford) Air Force One: Real peace is not just the absence of conflict, it’s the presence of justice. And tonight I come to you with a pledge to change America’s policy. Never again will I allow our political self-interest to deter us from doing what we know to be morally right. Atrocity and terror are not political weapons and to those who would use them: your day is over. We will never negotiate. We will no longer tolerate, and we will no longer be afraid. It’s your turn to be afraid.
“President” Dave Kovic (Kevin Kline) Dave: I think there are certain things you should expect from your president. I had to care more about you than I do about me. I had to care more about what’s right than I do about what’s popular.
President Thomas Whitmore (Bill Pullman) Independence Day: Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. “Mankind.” That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests.
President Richard Dreyfuss) Fail Safe: Men are responsible for what they do. Men are responsible for what they make. We built those machines, your country and mine. We put them in place. Two *great* cities will be destroyed. Millions of innocent people will die because of us. What do we say to them? “Accidents will happen?” I can’t accept that. What do we do, Mr. Chairman? What do we say to the dead?
President Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas) The American President: Being president of this country is *entirely* about character…That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections. You gather a group of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family and American values and character. And wave an old photo of the President’s girlfriend and you scream about patriotism and you tell them, she’s to blame for their lot in life, and you go on television and you call her a whore…We’ve got serious problems, and we need serious people, and if you want to talk about character, Bob, you’d better come at me with more than a burning flag and a membership card. If you want to talk about character and American values, fine. Just tell me where and when, and I’ll show up. This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your fifteen minutes are up. My name is Andrew Shepherd, and I *am* the President.

President Donald Trump (Donald Trump) The American Nightmare: We are building, right now, incredible military equipment at a level that nobody has ever seen before. We have no choice. We have to do it — with the adversaries we have out there. We have a — I call it the ‘super-duper missile.’ And I heard the other night, 17 times faster than what they have right now

Movie Quotes courtesy of IMDB

Trump Quote courtest of Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and 62,979,879 American voters.

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