Escaped Notice

Resolutions forgiven and forgotten

2011-12-16T22:02:00.003-06:00

"Forgive yourself." There's usually a story behind morning-after advice like that, but it was a mystery to me. I woke for my morning run, poked my head out the door and there it was, graffiti on my parkway planter.

"Forgive yourself." One thing's clear: At least one tagger forgives himself for vandalism. These words have been appearing on Chicago buildings and sidewalks for at least a year.

From its placement, this tag seemed aimed at people leaving the tavern next door. I could have told the tagger that the bar's clientele needed no prompting to forgive themselves for overindulgence. I would have just pointed out the vomit behind the fence. It isn't obvious when frozen.

But I wasn't asked. The tagger thinks it's better to ask forgiveness than to beg permission. So this editor started work early, not with a blue pencil but with a can of Goof-Off Graffiti Remover. Every Chicago home should have a supply.

The graffiti soon was gone, but the advice left traces all the way to the office. "Forgive yourself." I must have been the last person in Chicago to get that memo. The woman next to me on the L swatted me with her backpack, then stood back while I tried to unravel her umbrella snagged on my coat. I missed my stop. She forgave herself.

"Forgive yourself." Still, the tagger is on to something. Every year about this time I'm making resolutions not to be so selfish, so self-destructive, so imperfect. Why don't I just forgive myself? It's not as if the New Year's list is going to last till Three Kings Day.

We all can forgive ourselves for making resolutions that don't stick. We all want to make big changes, but can marshal only modest resources. In business we learn that time, resources and scope will limit any project. If we give ourselves a week to make changes, and the budget of, say, a health-club membership, we're only committing to changes around the margins. Hardly enough for changes around the waistline.

So I'm making realistic changes this year. Like that resolution to try not to win every argument. My partner and I are too competitive. We both want to win, so we take a 90 second change and hash over it all night. Getting in one final dig and charging out the door gets me nowhere. I might forgive myself, but eventually I have to come back home and beg.

Here's how I plan to proceed, and you may want to consider this strategy yourself: Forgive others. Don't insist on the last word. Concede a small point and see where it leads you.

There are plenty of reasons to blame yourself for putting on the extra pounds. Forgive your partner his taste for burgers and fries, and you start to address why you can't make a diet stick. Soon you will find an approach you can both live with.

Forgive your alderman and your congressman for trying to deliver more than your taxes will pay for. They'll stop promising the moon for once. It could spark a revolution in politics.

Will this approach help you save the world? No, but it give your personal plan a scope that's both broader and more realistic. You cannot change what you cannot see. Giving others some slack helps you think about their limitations, about how they compare to your own, and how you can move both in a better direction.

It's an approach that works for me. If you find it unrealistic, forgive me.

Rahm touches the third rail, gingerly

2011-11-14T12:07:00.000-06:00

When Rahm Emanuel was in the White House, he called immigration "the third rail of American politics," which probably set some heads scratching. Not many politicians come from districts with an electrified rapid transit system. But his meaning was clear: It's a charged issue. Don't even touch it, or you'll get a jolt you may not survive.

Now Emanuel has a new job and a new third rail. Last month as mayor he made plans to cut Chicago services next year. His first budget closes three police stations, one at 29th and Prairie in Bronzeville, another in Roscoe Village at Belmont and Western and another at Augusta and Wood, a quarter-mile from where I live in East Village. In making the announcement, Emanuel called closing police stations "the third rail of Chicago politics."

This time he wasn't steering clear; Emanuel made it a centerpiece of his budget even before his police chief could say where the cops would park their squad cars. So has it really been such an untouchable issue?

As you might expect, neighbors are opposed to the police station closing, and I can tell you how that's playing out. But it's not the only issue that can get people charged up. Pretty quickly I started seeing e-mails about cuts in library hours and 9-1-1 dispatchers. A letter from aldermen wants money put back into graffiti removal. A week before the City Council votes on the budget, I'm hearing about the six mental health clinics that would close.

I'm not hearing the high-voltage sizzle of the third rail in any of this, just a lot of static. Closing squadrooms is only one of his budget gambits, and not even the one that has gotten the most buzz.

Let's look more closely at the East Village closing. Even before Emanuel produced his budget, newspapers were identifying the 13th District as the unlucky one to lose its station house. But what does that mean? Many Chicagoans aren't quite sure what neighborhood they live in, much less which police district. When police arrested four men in a Wicker Park foot chase, the 13th District got online kudos, even though Wicker Park is not in the 13th District.

About all the station house determines is where officers show up for roll call at the beginning of their shift. The Wood Street squadroom is built like a 1950s fallout shelter but showing its age. The lockup was shut down four years ago and prisoners are transported elsewhere. In closing the station house, police move to a new building with efficient heating and new computers.

Neighbors fear what would happen without police showing the flag in their backyard, yet the city's own crime statistics show nearly as many incidents near the Wood Street station as elsewhere in the district, maybe just a bit quieter just for being located on a side street.

It's more telling how many police are on patrol, and here's where Emanuel's third rail begins to look more like an extension cord. Emanuel pledged to “put 1,000 more police on the streets” but the budget sends 50 new recruits will enter the police academy, a number that won't even offset the number of cops nearing retirement. The city has reassigned street teams into the beats, which hasn't put new cops on the street.

With the police taking $190 million in cuts, about the best Emanuel can say about manpower was that he isn't larding the budget with positions he had no intention of filling.

In this environment, one neighborhood fear about merging police districts has some merit. The remaining cops are more likely to be shifted to where there's more crime. It's hard to get upset over that. But the city has been moving cops around the city for years, so we have some idea where that might lead. When Taste of Chicago borrows cops from the neighborhoods, we literally see fireworks: Every Fourth of July our neighborhood lights up with bottle rockets, Roman candles and firecrackers set off in alleys. None of this is legal in Illinois. It's an open question whether other crimes will be tolerated the same way.

If Emanuel were serious about changes in crimefighting, he would have to put up money for crimefighters. He can't do it with spare change. But none of the city's budget cuts have had anywhere near the impact of the prospect of new taxes. Water and sewer fees are rising. So are taxes at parking garages and hotels. Street-corner cameras soon will start tracking drivers for speeding. And the mayor already has caved in on one of the aldermen's hot-button issues: the prospect that city stickers would cost more for SUVs than for economy cars.

The real problem with these taxes is that they bring so little to the table. Somehow Emanuel plans to find $25 million by putting billboards on bridge houses, blue bins, garbage trucks, snowplows, light boxes and lifeguard towers. Selling ads to pull out of a financial jam is no sure thing. Just ask around at the Tribune.

Read my lips: Raising taxes have always been the real third rail of politics. Emanuel has been giving a wide berth to this danger zone. He may live to regret it.

Chicago Reader can't go home to 21 Jump Street

2011-10-13T14:33:00.016-05:00

It was news to a neighbor that the local community group no longer spends time at board meetings folding paper and licking stamps: The newsletter is locked up and delivered online in the time it would have taken just to phone the printer. Nostalgia for those days isn't lost on me: Collating involved at least a bit of wine and a lot of friendly chatter. But none of us would go back to the days when hyperlocal journalism involved Letraset type and library paste.

Even so, it was fun to sit back with the Chicago Reader 40th anniversary retrospective in print Wednesday night before it was let loose in cyberspace, though the issue took up less time than skimming a 1980s cover story. The nightclub and sex-shop ads were still there, so the experience hasn't changed that much.

Actually the entire Internet has followed the original Reader formula: Launch with a hazy business plan, and carry on when the plan falls apart because at least it seems like progress. Yet even though the sky's the limit (or at least the cloud) for computer space, the Reader's storied 21-page-jump expositions will never be duplicated in Web postings: In the future, every one will be world-famous in three paragraphs, or 120 characters.

I can only hope that future digital media will model the more incisive Hot Type format. Michael Miner has called me once or twice in pursuit of a story, and his keyboard clacking in the background would stop me mid-sentence: Where is he going with this? Readers ask the same question, and that's the point of the whole enterprise.

They tried to make me stop the rehab

2011-09-06T12:30:00.000-05:00

Irony alert: There is no 12-step group for compulsive renovators, and I spend much less time remodeling than trying to forget about the last remodeling.

Hello, my name is Stephen and I'm a remodeler. I'm here this afternoon to help all of you who share my affliction: home improvement. What a cruel phrase. Renovation is a literal home wrecker. It hits you where you live, rips it apart and leaves you with nothing but the taste of sawdust.

Looking at all of you, I see the bruised thumbs, the odd burn marks, the hair flecked with paint spatter. I hear the wheeze of lungs beat down inhaling plaster dust and paint thinner. I know I'm the presence of recovering renovators. And in this mutually supportive environment I'm prepared to make a searching and fearless inventory of my compulsion.

How does it begin? We all know the pressures of life in Chicago. Workers in a high-pressure environment thirst for fellowship, and in early evening you see them rushing out of the high-rises to gather in dank basements. They say they just need to raise a few, but we know what's going on. They'll be raising more than just a few sheets of drywall cleaning up their musty, flooded rec rooms.

Reporters especially face cruel deadlines, hear gruesome stories. At the end of the day they want to let off some steam, and letting off steam is the only way rid yourself of ugly, flocked wallpaper. In one night I'd go home and finish off a couple of cans, but I was convinced I would quit as soon as I got the paint color right. As you’ll see, I was just making excuses. The walls would never look right.

Years ago I confided to my editors about how I'd go home frustrated and start pounding holes in the wall. Today this would send you straight into an employee assistance program, but newspapers had more of an old-school approach back then. I got an assignment to write about how simple it was to build a niche in your wall to display art or collectibles. For years I continued to write about destructive behaviors – teardowns, reconfigured floor plans, emerald ash borers. My enabling editors kept me from facing the consequences, till I finally hit bottom: the big kitchen remodel.

It started simply enough. The kitchen was always the job I was going to do next, except I couldn’t really start on the kitchen till I had finished the basement, and I couldn’t keep a dry basement without first doing some tuckpointing, but once I started replacing the masonry I knew water was seeping in from the top down, and it was time to tear off the roof. And as long as I was working up there, wouldn’t it be great to add a deck and a bedroom with vaulted ceiling!

Once I was finished with the deluxe master suite and its whirlpool tub with skylight views of the O’Hare flight pattern, I had to address the fact that there was not an inch of granite in my kitchen. Homebuyers in the trendy neighborhoods are stone in love with granite -- it must be something in the ultrapurified water. Cable TV channels throw the word granite into conversation every few minutes just to keep viewers hooked: “Chef Bobby Flay scores extra points for presentation by setting his bowl of albondigas soup on that beautiful granite countertop.” “Accessorize the outfit with this designer purse, which has the luxurious sheen of a granite countertop.” “Dartmouth’s front four allowed only four sacks all season for the Granite State.” “Meanwhile, on the far side of the island, the Mishegoss team was taking their good fortune at Tribal Council for granite.” Granite would be the rock upon which I would build the ultimate kitchen. I had already built the penultimate kitchen, and by the time I finished the new bedroom, deck, roof, brickwork, drain tiles, sump pump and rec room, the cabinets were out of style.

I needed new cabinets that stretched to the ceiling, with a separate stairway to the top shelf. I needed storage for the everyday dishes, and the occasional dishes, and the thought-it-was-a-good-idea-at-the-bridal-registry dishes. I needed a double oven and a triple-track lighting system and quadruple GFI outlets in satin nickel. I was blind to a compulsion I I couldn’t control even with an X10 home automation system, an iPhone app and a Bluetooth-enabled refrigerator that sent Peapod an order whenever I was low on chicken nuggets.

I sold my furniture, my books, my music collection – I had to make room for the new appliances while I was installing the hardwood floor. Rooms were stacked floor to ceiling with cabinets waiting to be installed. Fortunately they were big enough to store the kitchen table in the meantime. My house looked like the final scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” I managed to clear a path to the door past the power tools and scaffolding. My wife was making Christmas cookies on a hot plate. Yet a new kitchen was nowhere in sight. As I wired the 50 amp service for the convection oven, I realized I was powerless. I needed help. Finally, I surrendered to a higher power: a general contractor.

I realize my environment is beyond my control. Such is the power of the Home Depot. My room addition addiction is now in the hands of others, and I will wait for them to show up for work, one day at a time.

Walter P. Rynkiewicz, 1930-2011

2011-06-08T22:09:00.002-05:00

Walter P. Rynkiewicz, of Elm Grove, Wis., a respected corporate lawyer in Milwaukee for more than four decades, died peacefully June 7 at Aurora VNA Zilber Family Hospice, Wauwatosa. He was 80.

"He was an attorney and a man of the highest integrity," said James W. Mohr of Hartford, Wis, at one time a fellow lawyer with Mr. Rynkiewicz at Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek. Mr. Rynkiewicz worked at the Milwaukee law firm from 1957 to 2005. "In a profession where integrity was not a long suit for a lot of people, everything he did he did honestly and forthrightly," Mr. Mohr said. "He was one of those people you could trust with anything.

"He was also very compassionate," Mr. Mohr said. "He took people's legal problems and handled them as is they were those of his closest friend or family member. He was always very empathetic about every problem. And of course he was very skillful. He knew estate planning, he knew business law and had enormous respect among people who worked with him. I referred friends to him, I sent clients to him, and knew they would be represented fairly, well, compassionately and honestly."

Mr. Rynkiewicz specialized in mergers and acquisitions during a time that greatly expanded options for small business owners. He was involved in many of the acquisitions of Universal Foods (now Sensient Technologies Corp.), whose chairman John L. Murray died April 18. Mergers included the sale of Thorp Finance Corp. to ITT Financial in 1965 and Pfister & Vogel Tanning Co. to Beatrice Foods in 1971.

"Walter and I were very close friends for nearly 60 years," said Robert Gorske, retired Vice president, General Counsel, and Board Member of Wisconsin Electric Power Company (WeEnergies). "We were law School classmates, associates with the same law firm, and near neighbors in Elm Grove and in Arizona. I was always in awe of Walter's ability to take very complex legal problems and to make them look easy. He will be missed by many."

Mr. Rynkiewicz chaired the State Bar of Wisconsin business law section from 1985 to 1987, and from 1986 through 1990 a state bar subcommittee to revise merger laws.

"Walter was a terrific lawyer and cut across many fields," said Robert LeMense, another Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek colleague. "He wasn't a tax specialist but sure knew a lot of tax stuff. He knew a lot about business, not only the law but a lot of the internal operations. If you said, 'Can you help me with this?' he would, and he would think of things you wouldn't think of. It just came across that he was one smart guy."

Mr. Rynkiewicz also was a director of several local companies he represented, including Price Erecting Co. in Wauwatosa, and Merit Gear Corp. in Antigo. Other clients he served were Cleaver-Brooks in Milwaukee, Heritage Mutual Insurance in Sheboygan, Stoelting in Kiel and Applied Power Inc. in Butler.

"Walter served on the board of directors of companies a lot more important than our little company," said James Ziperski, an attorney for Schwerman Trucking Co. in Milwaukee and a client of Mr. Rynkiewicz. "He was 200 percent in representing us all the time. He was everything we could ask for. When I had a question on corporate law I would turn to Walter and he always came up with the answer. If he didn't have the answer he got the answer, and it was always right. He was as good as they come."

For almost two decades Mr. Rynkiewicz was a director and officer of the Layton Art Collection and Layton School of Art trusts, which fund scholarships and lectures at Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD), Milwaukee Art Museum, Marquette University, Lawrence University, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Mount Mary College, Cardinal Stritch University and Alverno College. MIAD awarded him an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree in 1987.

Since 1965 Mr. Rynkiewicz has lived in Elm Grove, where he served on the Police and Fire Commission and the Building Board. At St. Mary's Visitation Parish he was a lector and cantor active in the Holy Name Society and Potawatomi Area Troop 32 of the Boy Scouts of America. He also was a director of the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, Sullivan Chamber Ensemble and Marquette University Alumni Association.

Mr. Rynkiewicz was born in Milwaukee July 4, 1930, and graduated from West Allis Central High School in 1948. The debate team sparked his interest in the law and music teacher Damon H. Shook cultivated an interest in the arts. A member of American Federation of Musicians Local 8, Mr. Rynkiewicz played trombone and was the longtime announcer at West Allis Concert Band summer performances.

"He won a major science award in high school and I would not have been surprised if he went in a science and mathematics direction," said classmate Claude Kordus, a business consultant in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. "He's very precise and meticulous," Mr. Kordus said. "When he talks he's very measured, and that has value in the law too."

Mr. Rynkiewicz passed up scholarships at the University of Wisconsin and Carroll College to enter Marquette University, studying English and mathematics. There he met Catherine Van Hercke in an American Literature class in 1951. It was love at first sight: He said he immediately moved two rows closer. The two were married in 1954, with Mr. Kordus as best man and Prof. Joseph Schwartz, the American Lit instructor, in the wedding party.

At Marquette Mr. Rynkiewicz earned a Bachelor of Science degree cum laude in 1952 and a law degree in 1955. He was admitted to the Alpha Sigma Nu national Jesuit honor society, as well as Delta Sigma Rho, Sigma Tau Delta and Pi Mu Epsilon. The late Kenosha County Circuit Judge William Zievers was a fellow debate partner.

"Walter worked harder than I did and had a knack for mathematics," Mr. Kordus said. "At one point the question was, was he going to law school or was he going to be an actuary."

Before joining Whyte Hirschboeck & Dudek, Mr. Rynkiewicz was a litigator at Quarles, Spence & Quarles in Milwaukee and Puhr, Peters, Holden & Schlosser in Sheboygan, Wis. "Whenever I heard him speak, he was extremely good," said Alfred A. Heon of Fredonia, a fellow Marquette undergrad who joined him at Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek.

In retirement he and Catherine spent winters in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Other survivors include sons Stephen (Brenda Russell) of Chicago, Robert (Heidi Boehlke) of Minneapolis and Paul (Karen Lindholm-Rynkiewicz) of Wauwatosa, daughter Lynn (Mark) Rakestraw of Rochester, N.Y., and grandchildren Evelyn (Brian Page), Jacob, Emma and Matthew.

The family appreciates the conscientious care of Dr. Paul Ritch and the Hematology/Oncology Clinic staff at Froedtert & The Medical College of Wisconsin.

Visitation is Wednesday, June 15 at St. Mary’s Visitation Church, 1260 Church St. Elm Grove, from 9:30 a.m. until the Mass of Christian Burial at 11 a.m. The family requests memorials to Marquette University Law School, Friends of the Elm Grove Library or St. Mary Visitation Parish.

Rynkiewicz, Walter P.

Of Elm Grove, WI and Scottsdale, AZ, died peacefully June 7 at age 80. Beloved husband of Catherine (nee Van Hercke). Loving father of Stephen (Brenda Russell), Robert (Heidi Boehlke), Paul (Karen Lindholm-Rynkiewicz) and Lynn (Mark) Rakestraw. Proud grandfather of Evelyn (Brian Page), Jacob, Emma and Matthew. Walter was an attorney for 44 years at Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek in Milwaukee, long active in church and civic activities. Visitation Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at St. Mary’s Visitation Church (1260 Church St. Elm Grove) from 9:30AM until the Mass of Christian Burial at 11:00AM. Memorials to Marquette University Law School, Friends of the Elm Grove Library, St. Mary’s Visitation Parish. The family appreciates the conscientious care of Dr. Paul Ritch and the Hematology/Oncology Clinic staff at Froedtert & The Medical College of Wisconsin.

Becker Ritter Funeral Home
14075 West North Ave.
Brookfield, WI 53005
(262) 782- 5330
www.BeckerRitter.com

Father's days: In praise of Walter Rynkiewicz

2011-06-07T22:11:00.000-05:00

Walter & Catie Rynkiewicz, 2010

My father Walter died this morning.

I've been spending a lot more time with Dad. The whole family has been hanging out, and we're seeing a few people we haven't seen in years. Dad had a chance to recall past exploits, and indulge in frozen custard, marching-band music and other guilty pleasures. It's a shame this all came to pass because he's been dying.

He entered hospice May 5 and I visited again just yesterday. It looks a bit like a country club: Rooms trimmed in dark wood overlooking a forest preserve. Patio doors lead out to a garden where yellow finches gather around a bird feeder. A beautiful place, but all the residents would rather be someplace else, maybe Dad especially. He kept nursing home visits brief, was uncomfortable at wakes, and resisted hospital trips — even the one that landed him in intensive care. But fate has a way of making us face our fears. He had time to come to grips with his death, and for us to come to grips with his life.

Walter was named for his dad, who owned a tailor shop and helped start a savings-and-loan. Walter Sr. worked long hours and died when his son was 28. Dad found him a bit of a mystery. I was 3 when he died, and Walter's path was potentially even more time-consuming than his father's: He was a young lawyer in hard-driving surroundings. I think he found family life just as important as career, and resolved to make sure I would find him less of a mystery in 25 years.

So I remember doing a lot of things with him. He took his children to his law office to watch the Milwaukee circus parade from the 21st floor, and we went behind the scenes at the park bandshell where he moonlighted as announcer for West Allis summer concerts. (Probably this scene comes to mind because he would be smoking Parliaments and talking about quitting.)

When we joined the Boy Scouts, Dad was one of the fathers who camped with us. We did woodworking projects together using his father's tools; he also passed on his father's Polish curses. Even in my mid-20s, he and Mom were driving to Chicago to see me in church musicals. My girlfriend Brenda was not sure what to make of it at intermission when Mom and Dad were necking.

Perhaps Dad could make time for us because he wasn't as career-driven as his peers. His clients were mostly small businesses, although some like Red Star Yeast grew into big businesses (Universal Foods, then Sensient Technologies). I've been calling his clients and peers because Dad gave me an hospital-room assignment, as the reporter in the family, to prepare his obituary. Peers and clients said he was a smart guy, but also curious about everything and everyone. In the days before consulting was a big business, his clients were picking his brain for ideas on not just their legal strategy but their entire business.

And he empathized with everyone he met. Dad could talk with anyone: Eric Schumann, owner of Merit Gear Corp., recalls a business meeting where in the course of a few minutes Walter engaged in two genial conversations, strikingly similar in tone, with a shabbily dressed woman in the hotel and with Sen. Herb Kohl. Even as a young lawyer working on car insurance claims in central Wisconsin, Walter would quiz farmers about machinery and the price of milk before getting around to taking their deposition. Throughout his career he cared about his clients, and this brought a lot of steady business without a lot of political gamesmanship.

He was good at corporate law, and led the state bar's panel on corporate practice. A large law firm was the place for him, even if he lacked the sharp elbows that seem to go with the territory. Without prompting, fellow lawyers told me about his ethics, as if ethics were unusual among attorneys.

He also took on his share of nonprofit work, notably setting up the Layton art-school scholarships and lectures. And he was able to mix business with pleasure — I recall sailing in central Wisconsin with a client's family. An even keel was Dad's career course, and he could picture himself happily working as a corporate lawyer in a small town. Fortunately I think, Mom couldn't.

No environment could have been stress-free for Dad. He could obsess over not only his work, but also the crowds on the beach, or our safety running the lawnmower. In the past few years when he spent winters in Arizona, I would take him out to the ballgame, but he never really would take to the crowd. Mom told friends about an excursion to Sedona when their tour bus had a flat tire, and he spent the rest of the trip curled in his seat, concerned that the spare might not get him home.

He'd relax talking about his high school and college days, and wrote about them before his cancer was spotted four years ago: Dad presented me and my brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews with three-ring binders. They held an 88 page autobiography, and an assignment: "READ THIS." I used to ask Dad questions about his father that he could never quite answer, and didn't want us in the same position. Not to worry: The stories were already familiar, particularly all the jobs he worked through high school and college.

Who could keep them straight if they weren't written down? Paper boy, messenger, window washer. Clearing catch basins for the City of West Allis, with a municipal snow shovel in my brother Paul's garage as proof. Coaching baseball two summers at Jefferson School, not bad for someone who cooled his heels in right field. Manning the counter at Mechenich's pharmacy, which on occasion filled a doctor's prescription for the drug placebo. Playing trombone in 3rd Ward Milwaukee street parades, scenes out of "Godfather III" with fireworks and dollar bills pinned to a Virgin Mary statue. Tutoring geometry, checking mortgage paperwork. Selling women's shoes and men's ties. Shooting Polaroids at the Auto Show. Cleaning up at the florist before Valentine's Day. Laborer on construction sites, for the mason who poured the patio on his dream house. A third-shift foundry job, oiling cranes and hoists, followed by a class in Elizabethan Literature alongside early rising nuns. With no time to shower.

Dad has been retelling a lot of the stories, especially how he met my mother: in American Literature class at Marquette. Dad says it was love at first sight, and he had to move up four rows for her to take notice. However, the details vary in the telling. The saying in Chicago newsrooms is, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." She did, and she does, but I'm still trying to nail down their courtship story. One version is that a few months earlier in 1951 Walter was producing a TV show for Channel 4. (I like it that my father worked in new media.) He was recruiting panelists for a game show, and someone pointed out Katie in a crowd. Dad did not follow up on that lead. Maybe it was love at second sight. In the Rynkiewicz line, good ideas take awhile to percolate. As Dad tells it, being rejected would have broken his heart, and I would have felt the same way if Brenda had spurned my advances.

It was strange to write an obit and run the results past the subject. (I should have run the obit past a spell checker first: Dad's a precise editor.) But it pleased me to learn that his good clients were still good friends in retirement. And I enjoyed how he chatted with everyone at the hospital, even knowing the banter was tiring him. A volunteer who distributed communion at the hospital told Mom he was a better person for having talked to him.

When father's days were numbered, he faced them bravely. He wasn't quite quoting Ecclesiastes, but he'd say this is just another phase of his life. Knowing it was the final phase brought the family closer. That's an outcome he wanted, in the same way he would plan for and relish family gatherings on the Fourth of July, his birthday.

I've been reading scripture to plan a memorial service, and although the family bible has no bookmarks in the Book of Wisdom I think he aspired to be a just soul. He taught his sons and daughters that service and work well done were their own reward. St. Paul says each of us shall give an account of himself. Dad left very comfortable with how his story turned out.

Encouragement from the family bible

2011-05-22T06:52:00.006-05:00

A typewritten letter to my father is filed in the hardbound bible on his bookshelf (apparently at a random page, 2 Esdras 6). Walter P. Rynkiewicz was 28 when his father Walter V. Rynkiewicz died at 1 p.m. May 25, 1959 at St. Francis Hospital, Milwaukee. Michael J. Dunn was an attorney for whom my father had done legal work.

Milwaukee
May 28, 1959

Dear Wally:

Mrs. Dunn and I were indeed surprised when we learned of the death of your father and she joins me in extending our sympathy to you.

You face a rather unusual experience. A few days ago you were a son with a father with whom you could discuss problems and upon whom you could call for advice. Now, however, it will seem as though a veil has lifted, you must make your own decisions and now you take over solely as a father.

You will miss your father very much but don't forget, Wally, that you are well on the road to success. You have an excellent reputation and a good future, all of which your father shared with you and, no doubt, pleased him immensely. That meant a great deal to him and should ease your grief very much.

Sincerely yours,

Michael J. Dunn

Helen Thomas on deadline: Like age, credibility is fleeting

2011-03-04T12:33:00.000-06:00

The Chicago Reader's anniversary features have been getting nostalgic about the days when readers had attention spans. Articles sprawled across many pages of newsprint, in an era that supported many pages of newsprint. So props to Mike Miner for playing it old school and writing at length about the dénouement in the Helen Thomas saga.

Still, I'm intrigued that there's so little light shed on a hot topic, the hazy boundaries between crisp, thank-you-mister-president deadline reporting (Thomas' claim to fame) and political bloviating (her claim to infamy). Thomas' attitude was bracing in Nixon's pressroom but a WTF moment on YouTube. A lifetime of achievements can be like that.

The Society of Professional Journalists has an enlightened view of advocacy journalism: Ethics are defined by responsibility, not partiality. Here it has muffed another chance to delineate the boundary between engaging an audience and pandering to it. Reaching out to its own members on the Helen Thomas Award would have been a start.

Still, it's easy to see why the society would find it hard to deal head-on with one of its icons. Thomas does not present a simple case for debate. Her wire-service reputation was built not on how she could use her tart tongue but how she could keep it in check. Perhaps she has earned the right late in her career to let 'er rip. But trust can be long-earned and still quick to flee. A lifetime can be like that.

In classic Reader style — a long road with an obvious but unstated end — Miner's narrative sets the stage for an intervention that never happened. Helen Thomas is a matriarch whose kids won't take away the car keys. That's a hard truth.

Time out: Leisure reading for the hurried

2011-01-11T21:06:00.016-06:00

If you bought books at the Friends of the Oak Park Public Library book fair last summer (or vinyl at Reckless Records, there's a good chance you have something from my collection. When my basement library became an exercise room, I had to revise the Zero Book Growth policy that barely kept my library confined to my bookshelves.

When I did the math, the solution was to shrink the book cave to closet size. Reading a dozen or so books a year, I wasn't going to finish what waited on the basement shelves in this lifetime. Even if I went nuclear purging the excess, I could still hit the much bigger stacks at the new West Town library branch.

What do newspaper folks make time to read between morning and evening newspapers and a few dozen websites? Not much, I suspect. The proprietor of the Trib Nation blog was asking around the newsroom what people were reading. Good luck with that.

I keep track of my CTA reading at Goodreads.com. Looking over the list reminds me of my father's reading habits at my age: mysteries, short stories and plays that could be read in short bursts of spare time.

Half my reading is non-fiction but it's just as episodic in nature. Last year, Jerome Loving's Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens, a lucky find at the Harold Washington library, has a short-chapter format like one of Twain's subscription novels, which nicely fits a subway commute. Twain's crotchety late years remind me of legendary wire-service reporter Helen Thomas in this year's YouTube dustup. God knows what I'll be ranting about at age 90, but I'm sure I wouldn't want it to define my career.

Harold Evans' They Made America, which filled out my airline reading, could have been titled "Lives of the Innovation Saints." Self-help books also fit the bill as quick reads: Judy Carter's The Comedy Bible, was an unexpected recommendation from a friend in Toastmasters: a book on the mechanics of being funny. (Yes, the man needs a book to figure out funny.)

Funny-strange how my book choices read more like biopics. Fiction included Gore Vidal's JFK potboiler "Washington, D.C.", Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon", which was kind of like an art-house buddy flick, George MacDonald Fraser's "The Reavers" (same but more PBS) and A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (two scientists meet cute).

Some great recommendations came from obscure sources. Barbara Kingsolver's "Pigs in Heaven" was listed in an Arizona guidebook. Jim Lynch's "Border Songs" was blogged by one of my ex-students at Columbia College Chicago.

And a postcard from the author sent me to the hard-luck omnibus "American Salvage." Turns out my neighbors know Bonnie Jo Cambpell. So I have high hopes in starting "The Memory of Running." Ron McLarty's book was an oblique joke on HBO's "In Treatment" – recommended reading from a self-unaware shrink. Can't get much more obscure than that.

Should you be paying more for news?

2010-09-08T22:36:00.006-05:00

My spouse got a sales lead the other day. At least the caller seemed like a good prospect. His product was written up in the magazine she publishes, and he must have recognized how well the magazine fit his product: He was asking for copies to circulate at his sales meeting that week.

So she packed up the magazines, put her account number on the air bill, and sent off the samples. Next week, her prospect called with a great idea from the sales meeting: If she gave him her magazine's circulation list, he could send her readers information all about his product.

This is the fate of the media company: to remind other businesses about this nifty thing called advertising.

It's no small feat to find just the right audience for a product, and potentially quite costly to scratch for that audience, much less pay to send that audience regular promotions in the mail. Media have a head start, and a thrifty way to piggyback on our skill at attracting a crowd. It won't even require a trip to the post office for stamps.

Last month the Chicago Reader claimed to have found a
"top secret" Tribune project to publish a weekly magazine of its most ambitious stories. I don't know that such a project actually exists, but it's no secret that media companies are looking for new ways to get paid. As my spouse found, marketers are unclear on the old ways we get paid.

A few days ago the New York Times described how its reporters are teaching online courses in their areas of expertise. Reporters often are as knowledgeable as professors, and they engage in daily feats of public education. But it's unlikely that candidates in this fall's election will call on taxpayers to support a daily report on how their government is doing. Considering how government is doing lately, very unlikely.

So government isn't raising cash for its civic watchdogs, and as my spouse found, business isn't necessarily seizing on cheap ways to drum up business. I'm going to propose that the audience should man up. That's you, class. If the paper is looking a little thin these days, you probably aren't paying enough for your news.

You need information, about any number of things. How the local schools rate. Where the city is spending your taxes. Ways to stay healthy. Ways to save money. Every day, what you don't know can cost you. If not money, maybe just time wasted on bad movies or bland food or boring TV.

There's no monopoly on that information, but research takes time too. You can search the public library, but hours are getting shorter and the time I'm waiting for book or a disk to arrive at the West Town branch is getting longer. Most of us don't think twice about going straight to the bookstore, or the iTunes store.

A Sunday newspaper costs less than a cup of coffee. Whether you think the Tribune more like Starbuck's or Dunkin Donuts, either way you're getting a good deal. If you paid more for the newspaper there would be more room for cream.

The cream of the newspaper for you might be more of the good parts, whatever you find most valuable. Or it could be a package that you can keep around longer, or gets topped off with more frequent updates.

An e-book might work for you over lunch, and a podcast on the way home. The reporter's online course could be the best way to dig deep into a subject, like researching a college or a car purchase. The more is at stake, the less you want to leave to chance.

These are all great ideas, but I don't expect all of them will work for you. If news is like any other consumer product, 20 percent of the customers consume 80 percent of the goods. So I don't expect all of you will pay for an ad-free newspaper. But if you had just the coupons, or just the help-wanted ads from your field, you'd use them more often.

Customized advertising is getting a lot of attention online. Social networks have the potential to focus the advertising on not only your interests, but your friends' recommendations. But even more useful ads have a cost. The reviews you get on Yelp are hit-or miss. The reviews on Angie's List, you're paying for. This week Facebook users are up in arms about how few of their actions stay private. Even if you're not paying more, there's still a cost.

So I'm making a simple suggestion. If you have a favorite gadget, an iPhone or Kindle or Blackberry, see if it makes news easier to handle. If you don't, pick up a magazine or newspaper or broadcast you're not normally using, and see if it makes more sense than what you're tuned into now. The news business isn't what it used to be. But maybe it can become what you want it to be.

Iron-deficiency chef: Let the battle begin!

2010-09-07T23:30:00.022-05:00

I'm in training to become the next iron chef. As long as the contests do not involve actual ironing. Or actual cooking.

My quest in the ultimate gourmet challenge started as do most dreams, falling asleep at the TV.

My nose was stuck in a copy of Men's Health when I heard swordfight sounds onscreen. Well, I like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and I thought this must be the scene where Indiana Jones meets scimitar guy. But when I look up it's not Harrison Ford drawing his gun but men in loose-fitting white uniforms running around with knives in their hands.

Hmm, I think, that's an unusual approach to cross-training. Maybe I can learn something for my fitness routine, or maybe one of these guys will wind up like scimitar dude.

As usual, I'm just oblivious. These guys running with knives are chefs in a hurry, and this household is about to get hooked on another cooking reality show.

Since we're dieting in this household, staring at food seems not as much addictive as pornographic. And with the cheesy music swelling, this must be the sexy scene. Sure enough, the food was being stretched out on the plate. Just ... so. The camera lingers on the shot, then cuts to a commercial for something to quit smoking.

Cooking on TV is never what it seems. If it's not a substitute for sex, it's a competition sport. Same thing.

This fall the cable guide is full of macho food-sport choices like "Iron Chef," "Throwdown," "Dinner: Impossible" and "Glutton for Punishment." I don't know what's on "Dinner: Impossible," but I get this picture of Tom Cruise trying to make good on a half-hour pizza delivery guarantee. Papa John will disavow any knowledge of his actions. If the spies can't get it done, there's "Cupcake Wars," which is a contradiction in terms that not even the Pentagon can resolve.

And if I look away I'll be jolted back with more explosions than a spy movie too, although they turn out to be closely miked encounters with hot oil. Talk about selling the sizzle, not the steak. The cooktop sounds are so intense that the TV remote needs a button for the exhaust fan.

Anyway, I can relate to this competitive environment as an off-hours cook. The minute I'm home from work, the clock starts on how quickly I can cook dinner. My wife is either waiting there hungry, or coming back from the gym hungrier. So just like the cooking shows, the doomsday clock from "24" is always ticking away. If the cook can't jack up the grill in time, Jack Bauer grills the cook.

Mystery ingredients are a big part of performance cooking. That's when a roomful of chefs discover they have to make an entree using peanut butter, cream cheese, gummi bears and garbanzo beans. Hasn't everyone made that meal? When you can't get to the Jewel, you work with what you have.

In my case, I go to the Jewel without a shopping list and come back with macaroni and a couple cans of tomato sauce. This likely is what got my wife started on cooking shows, in self-defense: By planning menus her evening wouldn't start with my Garbanzo Bean Helper with crushed potato-chip topping.

So now I get to work with a shopping list of those impossible-to-find food-magazine ingredients. Sherry vinegar. Vegetable chutney with garlic. Prepared mango salsa in the special 14.25 ounce size. It's obvious that this is clever product placement by the Distilled Vinegar Council, which is supported by companies that sell food in 14.5 ounce jars. I'm pretty sure I can just substitute catsup. But my wife has seen the movie for this dish, and she wants it just ... so.

Shopping is not so much Food Network, more HGTV. You have to choose from three different jars of salsa. One's from an upscale neighborhood, one needs fixing up with chopped cilantro leaves and one looks like your grandmother canned it in 1987. At check-out, you pray you get your loan.

Back in the kitchen, the "24" clock starts ticking again. The first event in competitive home cooking is to match the ingredients from the shopping list with whatever recipes inspired them. The beef needs thawing, the fish needs marinating and the chicken needs grilling. The path to my best time ever is clear: Become a vegetarian.

Although I often talk up the vegan lifestyle, I've exhausted the meatless options early in the week so tonight I will have to play with a handicap and check the seafood pages of Cooking Light.

The actual recipe isn't obvious even though it's bookmarked: All marinades were placed by the Distilled Vinegar Council. I may get halfway through before hitting a catsup-substitution moment. That's when I have to face a man's most agonizing question: Should I just drive on, or ask my wife for directions?

I might be able to back off that precipice with a risky maneuver that eats precious minutes off the clock: I can read the recipe before starting to make it. Here's a warning to competitors: TV producers hide ingredients just to make the contest more interesting, and food magazines have set obstacles to make the race more challenging.

There are secret instructions, words invisible to most chefs. So when you the recipe calls for ¼cup plus a pinch of salt, do not, repeat do not overlook the secret word "divided." Choose wisely whether the sauce needs the pinch of salt or the quarter-cup.

Iron chef is not an elimination event. You don't get to work on the side dishes, wait for the judges' scores, then return after a commercial and start the entree. It all has to be timed perfectly to Jack Bauer's clock. So our fish menu today is the ultimate challenge. Do we dare prepare the salad while the fish is baking, and risk pulling a smoldering mass of shoe leather from the broiler?

In this contest the family takes the judging roles, and all judges are Gordon Ramsay, the "Hell's Kitchen" enforcer: If you've burned the glaze, you will be hazed. No wonder as we await the verdict, the chefs back in the kitchen are hitting the cooking wine.

Can you hear the music? The dinner hour is mere hours away and soon iron chefs will enter the heat of battle. Your time starts now.

Click here

2010-07-06T21:56:00.001-05:00

News that the Chicago Tribune will start a digital consultancy comes 15 years after the Trib launched its flagship website. Fifteen years is the span between the movies "King Kong vs. Godzilla" and "Star Wars," or the distance from "Star Wars" to "Jurassic Park." Enough time for a concept to grow from a curiosity to a killer.

Fifteen years ago, the few people working in new media would write a page of code, and then test to see if it would display in both Netscape Navigator 3 and Internet Explorer 3. Subtlety was our enemy, not our friend. Just two words held the keys to click-through. As in the headline here, they just don't hold the same magic.

These days most editors and sales people work simultaneously in print, broadcast, web and mobile publishing. Not that they're kings of all media, but reaching an audience takes any means necessary. All hands on the digital staff are essentially their in-house online consultants. Advertisers need the same help to figure out Twitter or Facebook, or niche websites, or any of the pages that follow "click here."

This economy could turn any of us with a job specialty, whatever the profession, into a consultant for hire. So there's much to gain in cribbing the techniques of successful sales consultants. They're not pitching a product or service as much as listening to a client. Before any money changes hands, the buyer will have realized there's an unmet need, and a need to take action.

The wrong choice has consequences; extra expense, lost customers, trouble with the boss. So a successful sale requires some level of trust. The best sales people level with their clients about what they can and cannot do, and customers feel that everyone's on the same team. This is the difference between beating your chest like King Kong and being a Jedi knight. If the strategy works, everything clicks.

Chi whiz: Why clutter holds sway

2010-05-30T08:28:00.010-05:00

Feng shui was in the stars for me this weekend. I haven't quite aligned my home's chi with heaven and earth. But I have been clearing clutter, which for me can be like moving heaven and earth.

All the rage a few years ago, feng shui is a Chinese concept that places buildings in relation to the stars. Older Chinese expatriates seemed to see it as a silly pseudo-science, the way I think of astrology — why would the alignment of the planets have more effect on me at birth than the alignment of the doctor's hand slapping my butt?

But interior designers discovered feng shui and liked the idea of an ancient wisdom that gave everything a proper place in the world. Newly rebranded as feng shui consultants, the decorators would tell you the best place to put a door to concentrate the energy or "chi" in the room.

That does seem a lot like the astrologist who predicts the result when a Libra tries to get it on with a Pisces. (The Libra would say, "If it was good for you, it was good for me." The Pisces would say, "What was your name again?")

In feng shui, clutter is said to make you tired, cranky and unfocused. I do not need a feng shui master to tell me that. My wife would say that describes me perfectly.

There's no dispute that clutter is an irritating distraction. Every room of my house has some reminder of an uncompleted project: Extra furniture. A boxed ceiling fan. A running toilet. Gaps in the floorboards, holes in the wall.

It's dangerous watching cable TV, because the home transformations on HGTV or TLC or the Style channel invariably start with "before" scenes that look like the "after" in my household. Every show seems to inspire another trip to the Home Depot to start a newly unfinished project.

A friend suggested the path to serenity: Turn off the TV set.

Clutter can be a compulsion, but fortunately there's a help line for everything that ails you. When the voice on the phone said, "For help with compulsion press 1," I pressed the button. I pressed it again. And again.

Not that I'm a hoarder. The Chicago Tribune printed a harrowing story about a reclusive couple who collected a houseful of stuff, floor to ceiling. When neighbors complained they weren't taking out the trash, the city discovered they had been literally trapped by their trash and firefighters had to break into their home to free them.

I can't say I'm anything like that. Well, it did take awhile to find the Tribune clipping. And I'm from a long line of pack rats. You knew I was into a serious relationship not when I took a girl home to meet Mom and Dad but when I let her see the basement. That was always an adventure, finding our way back upstairs.

No, my issue is that everything stacked up at home is a reminder of more work. The only way to do them is to manufacture more hours in a day. This is how insomnia was invented, and although it has proved a boon to the Internet, insomnia does not get things done.

As managers we're used to breaking down tasks and taking at least the action that inches the ball another yard toward the goal post. With luck the goal posts don't move. What business has that's lacking in a home life is the way that profit can identify a losing proposition.

Unprofitable habits don't run out of money, they just wear their way into your life like dirt in a rug. At some point you have to go "NYPD Blue" with such a habit and start beating it out. That's usually when my habits lawyer up.

It's great to have friends if you have such habits. They stage an intervention of sorts: Their visit forces you to clean up. This weekend gave Brenda and I motivation to start getting organized before a Memorial Day cookout. We went through the house throwing out heirloom crossword puzzles and antique shopping lists. Most things easily sorted themselves into two piles: trash or compost.

Now the loose organic matter is pickling in a trash bin and surfaces are scrubbed with bleach. Chlorine at the YMCA turned my hair to straw, so I still find bleach a bit scary. A good splash of bleach will turns my wardrobe into rags, so I do treat it with the respect I would give a mob enforcer. But it seems to scare tea stains into submission.

Feng shui would hold that clutter traps energy as surely as it imprisons compulsive hoarders. Now I'm waiting for all the positive chi to move in, although with luck I won't have to wait longer for the shower.

Will we be able to keep this up? They say time is the best teacher, although it kills the students.

I'm told the ying and yang of energy are constantly shifting, which I guess means it could go either way. It's like when you first try yoga. A couple of bad sessions and you start whining to your instructor, "This is terrible. I get distracted, my back aches, I start nodding off. I can't stand it."

The teacher calmly answers, "It will pass."

Then just a week later everything clicks. You go to the teacher and say, "This is great! I feel so aware, so peaceful, so alive!"

The teacher calmly answers, "It will pass."

Friend me, I'm a musician

2010-02-28T10:54:00.007-06:00

What does a YouTube phenomenon do for an encore? David Choi is getting nightclub gigs. Web-analyst friend Matt knew his opening act at the Beat Kitchen, Mia LeBlon, so we took in their all-ages show after work. ("Then I'll split," my younger friend told his office mates at the bar, "because I'm old.")

Choi gets enough YouTube love to parlay into a CD and (his Facebook bio says) commercial work. I thought that was all I needed to know about his song "You Tube (A Love Song)," but like John Mayer, Choi has a light, date-friendly repertoire. He's so earnest that Matt detected no irony in a song about an online crush. These lovers aren't ready for "I love you too."

Both LeBlon and Choi pepper their sets with references to Facebook fandom, which was strong enough to fill the room with Naperville teens (Choi patter: "Did you say Neighborville?"), Northwestern students and a few idly curious wage-earners. After Matt left for greasy appetizers at the front of the house, Choi sang "Happy Birthday" for anyone who might be there to celebrate, and took crowd shots on his cellphone. It was just goofy fun, like YouTube.

Fast ride on a slow election

2010-02-16T01:32:00.006-06:00

I'm Grumpy, with the clip art to prove it. After voting in the Illinois primary I left town for a trip to Disney World, and the election followed me into Fantasyland.

How many people voted Feb. 2, and how many watched "Lost" that night? About 13 percent of TV sets were tuned to the "Lost" premiere, and 15 percent were were listening to contestants sing "God Bless the USA" on "American Idol." In the polling booth, at least I know I'm free. Yet two TV shows can capture more interest than voting. A scant 27 percent of registered Chicago voters were tuned in to the candidates, a record low for a non-presidential primary. Statewide totals were reportedly even lower.

Two weeks later, the election is still not quite locked up. The top Republican candidate for governor, Bill Brady, had only a few hundred votes to spare and the results are not final. Not many people know Brady, a state senator from Bloomington. And the lieutenant governor's race had enough mystery to rival Oceanic Flight 815: First we voted, then we learned about the candidates.

Today the Democrats are pulling Scott Lee Cohen off the ticket. He ran a typical campaign theme: Successful entrepreneur wants the state to benefit from his business acumen. Then we learned that he has had trouble keeping his business going, particularly the part about paying taxes. He also has an ex-wife who filed a protection order against him, and a girlfriend who filed a battery charge. The Republican nominee, Jason Plummer, had the same pitch with few troubles and few experiences. Internships were still on my resume too when I was 27. But I was working in an industrial park in Elk Grove Village, not running for high office.

None of this Illinois news made it to Florida. National media were building up a speech by a former governor, Sarah Palin, who enthralled Tea Party conventioneers in Nashville by the hundreds. Tomorrow the Emergency Nurses Association will draw twice the crowd to a leadership conference in Chicago, without a hint of hype. But saving lives doesn't have the allure of saving on taxes.

When it came to electing an actual governor, we did not stream to the polls -- at 7:30 a.m. I was the third voter in my precinct. But it's not like the candidates did much to draw them out. Every hopeful for governor had a great plan for shoring up the state finances, but none had a great plan to get the plan through the Legislature. The Democratic race for governor seemed to be about the blame for misdeeds at Burr Oak Cemetery -- not a major issue for anyone in government other than the state prosecutor, who was running unopposed for another term. Polls say she would have beat all comers for governor.

Contests lower on the ticket obviously didn't demand much attention. The lieutenant governor's seat is vacant now, and there wasn't a lot there for the last one to do. For his $135,000 salary at least Pat Quinn did newsrooms the favor of holding press conferences on slow news days. Given the odds that an Illinois governor will end up in the hoosegow, maybe we should be watching the lieutenant governor more closely. As governor, Pat Quinn is still getting in front of cameras on Sunday mornings. Is that what voters reward in a politician?

If I want a show, I'll go to Disney World. It's easy to enjoy the landscape and its well manicured ponds, and not think about how shallow they are. Just about everything at Disney is gloss. The Italian exhibit at Epcot is not as imposing as Doge's Palace, but well scrubbed. Disney has adorable city streets, but they're Hollywood Studios backlots where no one lives. Thrill rides are packaged as research at the Dinosaur Institute or the Yeti Museum. Abominable Snowman: Fact or Fiction? You're at an amusement park. It's all fiction. Yet the boy ahead of me at Expedition Everest was excited at the prospect of actually seeing a yeti! Tourists make quick work of the mountain, no sherpa required. At Disney World, the fantasy is enough.

Frankly I was glad to be on the plane home to a real-world destination but was confronted by more fantasy. In the Sky Mall catalog Hammacher Schlemmer offered a faux security camera -- a battery-powered canister that does nothing more than swivel back and forth. A faux security camera is great if you're looking for faux security. I'd feel more comfortable if police were involved. But security cameras are costly, and cops are costlier still.

Government seems more willing these days to settle for the Disney version. Airport security is on the alert for terrorists, yet bombers slip past the hair-gel inspectors. Police departments vow to keep cops on the streets, but they have to think twice about arresting someone because it will mean a crosstown trip to the nearest lockup. And schools claim to leave no child behind. So why is it that city parents pull every string they can find to avoid enrolling their kids in a local school?

A better system couldn't help but cost more. But somehow we expect every politician to lower our taxes. We'd rather think every complex problem has a simple answer, and all we need are politicians who can run government like a business. Maybe there's some truth to that. Disney runs a collection of tidy villages in Florida. But getting into the park is $80 a day. Having been presented the bill at Disney, I cannot share the tea partiers' anger about their tax bills. Call me Grumpy, but good government is complicated. Getting it will mean all of us paying more attention. Anyone who says otherwise is just Goofy.

Joy in a jar

2009-12-18T13:34:00.000-06:00

If only we could preserve happiness and ship it to friends and relatives to draw on in the new year. Our Christmas crafts projects are a start: Tins of cookies, Mason jars of spiced nuts and pound bags of muffin mix.

It's hard to re-create the Martha Stewart gloss with such infrequent practice, but nevertheless we want perfection from the start. Even the magazine projects from Real Simple aren't all that easy. But we work through enough missteps that the recipient finds the craft tolerable and the food edible. If only because we're keeping the sugared cranberries that didn't quite work out.

Dad wrote us, NO CHRISTMAS PRESENTS, PLEASE. But he did ask for a list of three things or events that bring joy or happiness. For me they're the ingredients of these craft gifts:

Caring. Life is so solitary an activity these days. I need to think about what others need. Few worthwhile things come out of pure self-interest.

Creating. Taking an idea from start to finish is still the greatest way to make a living, and I'm thankful this year I've been able to do that.

Sharing. Brenda's focus and persistence have been tested this year, so it's a joy to see her plans, for these gifts and her come out well. As we pack them up, we wish we could deliver them in person and wrap up a little more joy to the world.

The future of news: Tough it out

2009-06-11T21:01:00.006-05:00

Have newspapers forgotten how to sell themselves?

A century ago, newspapers were literally beating competitors. The Chicago Tribune and Chicago Examiner hired thugs to rough up their rivals, giving gangsters Dion O'Banion and Bugs Moran their felonious start. Fourteen news dealers were murdered in Chicago's circulation wars.

These days newspapers are only being studied to death. (Some of these studies are produced at USC and Penn colleges funded by heirs of Moses Annnberg, who hired O'Banion's sluggers.)

This weekend in Chicago there's a conference at Columbia College on the future of news (not the first in Chicago). On Wednesday came a report on what Chicago nonprofit agencies think of online news. The Tribune's media critic read the study and concluded they wanted something like mainstream media.

And Northwestern University the same day launched a website for collaborations between students in journalism and engineering, not the kind of collusion that was O'Banion's specialty. Broadly stated, all this effort starts from a single premise: The daily newspaper's profits are eroding, and new business models are slow to take hold. People in the media business can fill their schedule with many earnest panel discussions of the grave effect this will have on society.

Outside observers might conclude this is another example of media bias. Bigger companies than the Tribune and Sun-Times are failing, and there are few signs of a compulsion to examine whether the automobile is obsolete or if there's any future in banking. Perhaps this is a shared preoccupation of the media and the foundations that study civic progress. Their endowments are under the same pressures as are newsroom budgets.

The days of a dozen Chicago dailies are ancient history, and now companies that held a comfortable local monopoly have a worldwide web of competitors at their door. Welcome to my world. For a dozen years now I've worked in online media, and for more than a dozen years before that at one of the nation's few underdog print dailies.

Employing street gangs to gain market share is no longer an option. Marketers now try to understand their customers' problems and how they can be part of the solution. Newspapers of course have studied this too, and have identified a half-dozen needs that newspapers meet:

Enlighten the audience on issues they find important.

Educate consumers to make better decisions.

Enrich them with time-saving or money-making ideas.

Entertain them or ward off boredom.

Engage people who share interests or views.

Empower them to act on things that matter.

None of these are exclusive properties of newspapers but they're all powerful motivations. If news enterprises have to work harder these days to justify their worth, they're in good company. They can start by convincing themselves of their staying power.

6 steps to street-smart projects

2009-05-17T22:20:00.008-05:00

Consultant John Connellan tells of a client who was teaching his 4-year-old son Anthony how to ride a bicycle. Anthony was riding in the street for the first time and he kept drifting to the middle of the street.

"Stay close to the curb", the father warned. But Anthony kept weaving away from the sidewalk. Finally Dad lost patience and said, "if you don't stay close to the curb, I can't let you ride in the street anymore."

Anthony stopped his bike, turned around and looked straight at Dad. He said "What's a curb?"

There are all sorts of stories about children learning their boundaries. I like this one because it deals with our role in making the ground rules clear. I don't have kids but I face this all the time managing work projects. We all play roles in our company's success. But it can be hard to curb your enthusiasm and follow the game plan. If there is one.

In business, project management itself is misunderstood. People charged with keeping a project on track likely don't have final say in how much money it gets, or even who gets to work on it. Here I'm taking a few minutes to lay some ground rules for putting down ground rules.

Everyone needs goals but not everyone thinks about the role of spelling them out. Four years ago I became a student of this process when my boss put me on project work and gave me a copy of "Project Management for Dummies." Don't be offended, he said, it's actually one of the better books on the subject.

A few more projects and a few more bosses later I was getting coaching from the head of the Project Management Office. He had me go out and get "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Project Management." So you see how I've progressed. (Don't be offended, he said, it's an easier reference than the PMBOK Guide. Those are the certification documents, and the Celebrex fine print is easier reading.)

Now, complete idiots may not know a what makes a good set of project goals, but the developer building Trump Tower and the developer building your accounting software will tell you the same three things about goals:

Goals must be specific. Any idiot should be able to understand them. That's important because in this climate, the project could be out of your hands and left for some other idiot to figure out. Till then, you need to be able to explain the task to managers without them getting antsy and checking their messages.

Goals must be realistic. You don't need a work example here. Go to Borders and look at the magazine racks. There are dozens of titles about building the perfect kitchen. I'm never going to be able to afford the perfect kitchen. When I remodel I'll be lucky if the electrical system is capable of running the perfect 5-quart mixer. Either way, the dough does not just make itself.

Goals must be measurable. Part of keeping it real is putting down goals you can track. My bosses may expect perfection from me if I haven't sold them on the previous point. But at least my projects have to define what's good enough. Otherwise contractors don't know what to bid, and when they're finished you can't say whether they earned it.

To stick to these goals, three other things must be clear at the outset:

Goals must have deadlines. The more deadlines, the better to move things along one step at a time. I ran status meetings for a boss that liked a one-line summary of each project, with just an end date for each. It wasn't too surprising when those ending dates kept getting revised later and later.

Goals must have consensus. Sometimes it seems my main role running a project is just setting up meetings and taking notes. That would frustrate me till I realized that if you don't get everyone on the same page, things quickly get creepy, as in "scope creep." There's power in spelling out how far a group will take a . The first step in setting the agenda turns out to be sending out the agenda.
Goals must have owners. If you've seen an e-mail from me you know what I mean. I get so many emails "FYI" that it's hard to know I'm actually being asked to do something. Almost every sentence in my emails starts with someone's name -- Joe, can you do this task? Chris, can you automate it? To get a job done it's not enough to just ask. I have to ask someone.

These half-dozen rules can help keep any project from sliding off the rails. Take a blank sheet of paper and devote it to any project that's giving you fits, at home or at work. Write down what you're trying to do, why you're trying to do it, and how you'll know when it's done. You'll end up with a much better grasp on the situation.

There are so many things we have to deal with in a day that it's hard to make much progress on any of them. But it's like riding a bicycle: Once you've learned how, you can pick it up at any time. If you know where to point yourself, it's easier to move straight ahead.

25 edited things about me

2009-03-17T19:43:00.013-05:00

Brenda is God's most marvelous creation. Not that you aren't awesome too.

My mom studied communications. My dad studied logic. I'm studying them.

My bookshelves are flouting Zero Book Growth policy.

Newspapers will die when laptops are cheap enough to leave on the L.

Ed il mio bacio scioglierà il silenzio che ti fa mia.

Playing softball on asphalt, I couldn't understand why anyone would slide into home.

My 7th-grade chemistry class at St. Mary's: Watching the teacher handle test tubes.

I shot news stories on a Bell & Howell Filmo.

I wrote Fortran for a Univac 1110.

I played in a band with Clark Terry.

Why did I have to learn penmanship from Ditto but slide rule from Mimeograph?

Time to break for coffee.

If I don't cry at the opera, it's bad opera.

Brenda calls me a raisinholic, but I can stop eating anytime I want.

Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spirito tuo.

How did Tall become the small size? In clothing, I mean.

Best part of my desk set: My grandfather's pica pole.

I sang at Cardinal Cody's funeral.

I set type on a Compugraphic.

My studies changed from art to journalism because my paintings all had text.

My favorite color is gray.

Games are meant to be played, not watched. Except playing baseball is mostly watching.

Marvel Comics taught me Yiddish. That's meshuga.

Less Facebook time means more face time and more book time.

Sto lat, sto lat. Niech zyje, zyje nam.

The best part about the web is that it will count to 25 for you.

Prairie style: White Sox at home on the Phoenix range

2009-03-09T21:38:00.009-05:00

Chicago red hots are a tasty mystery in Phoenix. As our kosher dogs were groomed at the White Sox' new spring training home, the vendors asked if they were doing it right. And except for the celery salt covering more pickle than wiener it was picture perfect, right down to the kelly green relish. An empty container was labeled "TIPS" in Magic Marker so we primed the pump. That's the Chicago way.

The White Sox are working to get it right at Camelback Ranch Glendale, the new park the team shares with the Los Angeles Dodgers on the northwest edge of Phoenix. Vienna Beef dogs and Connie's Pizza lend Chicago flair to an otherwise indifferent menu, but pub brews from Gordon Biersch and Deschutes Brewery are a heady reminder that you'd really rather be spending March in the Western sun. I'll pass on the Lemon Chill, thank you.

We saw the Sox as nominal visitors in a split-squad game with the Dodgers March 5. The A-team was squared off against the Cubs in Las Vegas, which gave us a good look at non-roster players, some of whom like lefty slugger Miguel Negron were playing without names on their jerseys. Jack Egbert struck out 4 in three innings as a starter before Adam Russell (wearing #46) came in and gave up two runs to make things too interesting. Kelvin Jimenez lost the game 5-4 in the ninth.

We returned with my parents the next day for a non-Cactus League exhibition vs. Australian minor-leaguers warming up for the World Baseball Classic. Neither game made the Phoenix papers, but the lopsided 10-3 WBC warmup put more prospects in play. Gordon Beckham got cooking in a potential bake-off at second base, as the hinge in a 6-4-3 double play, and Brian Anderson stroked a solid opposite-field homer to improve his odds in the center-field derby.

Despite the comfy scenery, the Sox risk being visitors in their new ranch home: L.A. fans show up in quantity no matter who's playing, and although the teams share a Playbill-size gate handout I was toning up my flabby scorekeeping in a Dodgers program, the only scorecard available. But home-plate seats were available and affordable, and the outfield lawn's up-close bullpen view was an $8 bargain. And while the Herbie Hancock sample from US3's "Cantaloop" became an earbug between innings, it could not beat hearing again the Sox' opening "Pirates of the Caribbean/Thunderstruck" medley.

Another day of third-base wind and sun would have been perfect, along with a chance to stroll the practice fields beyond the outfield wall, which include park-dimension facsimiles of both Dodger Stadium and the Cell. Sadly, that was not to be. One consolation: Sox season tickets were awaiting the return to Chicago. Spring, bring it on.

25 songs on my iPod (Randomly chosen)

2009-02-02T21:26:00.002-06:00

Gideon Kremer/Keith Jarrett: Part, Fratres

Thelonious Monk: Monk's Mood

Kronos Quartet: The Cusp of Magic

Maurizio Pollini: Chopin Nocturne #15

John Moulder: Freedom

Martha Wainwright: So Many Friends

Rufus Wainwright: Release the Stars

Joan Baez: Oh Happy Day

Frank Kimbrough: Wig Wise

LaVerne Baker: Without a God

Michael Bates' Outside Sources: Prodigal

Ron Sexsmith: Brandy Alexander

Belle & Sebastian: Sukie in the Graveyard

Ahn Trio: Oblivion

Vic Chesnutt: Virginia

Bob Mintzer Big Band: Swangalang

Cedar Walton: Clockwise

Cynthia Felton: Long as You're Living

Dropkick Murphys: Rude Awakenings

Boston Pops: Gaite Parisienne

Jimmy Cobb Quartet: Never Let Me Go

Duke Robillard: When Your Lover Has Gone

Dandy Warhols: Bohemian Like You

Calexico: Inspiracion

R.E.M.: Gardening at Night

Another Frank Lloyd Wright affair

2008-11-29T19:21:00.021-06:00

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright was once the proverbial prophet without honor in Oak Park. Early in his career, Wright showed bad form in skipping town with a client's wife. Last year a writer from Oak Park, Nancy Horan, found the story intriguing enough to imagine it from the woman's perspective. I read her book Loving Frank as my wife and I planned our own intimate association with Wright. We would live in one of his houses, if only for a day or two.

When I first came to Oak Park 30 years ago, Wright was re-emerging from obscurity nearly 20 years after his death. His turn-of-the-century early work were known mostly as the inspiration for the ranch house, and neighbors told me that for a long time his sprawling single-story commissions were viewed as no different from any other home in the comfortable Chicago suburb. Except that local roofers kept patching their leaks.
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But in 1978 the village had seen enough tourism potential in Wright to publish a guidebook to his homes, and a housewalk was organized to show Wright buildings that were on their way to becoming museum pieces. In the local weekly newspaper, the Oak Leaves, I reported with some fascination that "they have color TVs and children and dogs, like other homes." In Oak Park it was easy to buy into the Wright mystique.

In the '70s Wright's architectural office was being restored and opened for tours. That's where volunteer docents told me of the Cheney scandal, which did not involve Haliburton, an energy task force or a quail hunt. Wright built a low-slung rambler of a single-story home on East Avenue for Edwin and Mamah Cheney. Then he left his wife and split with Mamah for Europe, where he would publish a portfolio that influenced the emerging Bauhaus designers. Horan paints the couple as hounded by scandal-mongering press, which struck me as 21st-century embellishment until I read the actual news coverage. In 1909 the Chicago Tribune called the affair "an affinity tangle of character unparalleled even in the checkered history of soul mating."

Oak Park is home to 34 Wright structures, according to the most recent catalog of his homes, plus another 11 in neighboring River Forest. Wright designs had a name, the Prairie School, with carpenter-Gothic examples scattered throughout the Midwest. Wright moved his architectural practice to Wisconsin so I saw a lot of Prairie homes growing up. The Prairie School had a required reading list of Emerson and Thoreau, the better to recognize patterns from nature in his art-glass windows. There was even a typography based on his drawings, which influenced the Oak Park map I drafted for my wedding invitations.

Wright originals were not particularly lucrative for the architect. A running theme of Horan's book was Wright's continuous borrowing to finance a globe-trotting lifestyle and high-profile divorce. The architect made ends meet selling art prints he picked up cheap in Japan. Wright also designed massive wood furniture in the Arts & Crafts style, which in the 1970s was eagerly being bought up by Domino's Pizza baron Thomas Monaghan. Craftsman sofas built like workbenches were an acquired taste, though, and I had found one of its mass-market descendants for my college apartment at the Goodwill shop off campus.

The townhouse Brenda and I bought in Oak Park was across from the Unitarian church Wright designed, and we considered selling postcards to tourists scaling our front porch for a better camera angle. We could imagine living in a Wright house — the oak benches actually were pretty comfortable — but not paying for one. Wright homes now all have million-dollar price tags, even the so-called bootleg houses Wright designed while moonlighting from the Louis Sullivan firm. A Phoenix house he designed for his son is listed for $4 million.

This past March, Brenda spotted a New York Times article about Wright homes available for overnight rental, and was taken with the idea of living in a Wright house, if only for a couple of days.

So we planned a road trip through Pittsburgh to visit Fallingwater, Wright's best known house — a river runs through it. We booked a tour of another Wright curiosity: Kentuck Knob is maintained by the British lord who once owned Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House south of Plano. He lives there only a few weeks a year but keeps Claes Oldenburg sculpture and a piece of the Berlin Wall on the premises.

And we'd stay in a Wright home somewhere off the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Acme, PA. Mapquest could get us to the Dairy Queen in Donegal, where we could call for directions: turn right at Brady's Restaurant, when you see a fork in the road bear right, open the gate yourself and don't kick up too much gravel.

At the end of the rocky road was a ranch house on steroids, very long and low. We parked under the carport and let ourselves in. It was a time trip to the 1950s: a red Formica kitchen with built-in oven; a greatroom with stone fireplace and shag carpeting, and not Wright built-is but House of Teak knockoffs. This wasn't a museum piece, it was Graceland. What had we gotten ourselves into?

Owner Tom Papinchak arrived and filled us in. We had just taken a coals-to-Newcastle trip: Duncan House was built outside Lisle in DuPage County.

Wright's engineer in the 1950s, Marshall Erdman, was one of the early manufacturers of prefabricated homes. Duncan House was a 1957 attempt at a Wright prefab, a ranch house on steroids but modest by Wright standards. The Wright prefabs were a failure: Multiple changes to the stock plans ate up Erdman's profits. Only 11 were built.

Elizabeth Duncan saw the prefabs in a magazine and convinced husband Donald, an electrical engineer, that they could afford a stripped-down version in cinderblock instead of limestone. After Don Duncan died the 2-acre lot was subdivided, and four years ago the house became another DuPage County teardown. It escaped demolition, though. Crews dismantled the house, labeled the parts and packed them on semitrailers for a 500-mile trip East.

There the pieces sat for two years. An attempt to reconstruct the house as a museum ran out of money. (See a pattern emerging?) Papinchak, a contractor in the rebuilding effort, finally bought the warehoused house and spent a year piecing it back together, upgrading to a stone facade in the process.

He rebuilt Duncan House on the grounds of yet another failed Wright project, a subdivision of Wright homes that stalled after the architect's death. This would be the third house, joining two designed by a Wright apprentice. A year after the home was completed, Papinchak's plan to turn the grounds into a conference center appeared to be faltering as well. Catering supplies and gift-shop goodies were packed in the basement.

Secluded it was, but not exactly a resort. We could use the microwave and toaster oven but not the wall oven or range. The mattresses were hard. The wireless connection worked if the computer was docked against the wall. Cabinets were bare but for odd pieces of trimwork, its location labeled in Magic Marker.

Yet, spending time there, it was obvious the architect knew how his homes would be lived in. Thirty years ago, the owner of one of those Oak Park Wrights told me about "a constant play of light through the windows." It kept changing day and night. Learning firsthand what she meant made this an affair to remember.

"Am I Here," He Asks, as City Goes Wild with Frenzy of Joy

2008-11-17T05:32:00.012-06:00

Watching Barack and Michelle Obama tonight on "60 Minutes," I'm struck by the pace of events. This spring I could walk past the Obama household on the way to the 57th Street Art Fair. Now in mid-November, the Obamas are laying claim to a much bigger house, with what Michelle slyly calls a really big home office. And after a walk-through with the current occupant, the next tenant is reviewing his closing-day list with Steve Kroft. Obama seems relaxed. Inauguration is two months away, but he's ready to seal the deal now.

Obama's every day seems groundbreaking. As he reviews his agenda for Day 1, Brenda is choking up. "Look," she said, pointing to the screen. "He's the president."

History is usually coming at me from my blind spot. Ten years ago, as database whiz pressed into service as election-night reporter, I had to divide my time among three contenders in a state senate primary race. I spent probably more than I could afford with one of the Bronzeville challengers. I was curious whether he viewed the University of Chicago incumbent as a dilletante. Finally the assignment editor called and said the 13th District was looking like a lock. So I rushed toward Hyde Park, where Jesse Jackson is holding court before a perfunctory acceptance speech from the victor, Barack Obama.

I missed my chance to go one-on-one with the future president. But I'm more in my element as a concerned citizen than a political reporter. And my job makes it easier to take sides in preservation than in politics. When a historic district was proposed for East Village three years ago, I testified in its support. When the city's landmark commission recommended the proposal, I stayed to thank the alderman and a group of commission members. Later I find that table of Daley appointees included the wife of the junior senator from Illinois, Michelle Obama.

So I've covered him, lobbied her. But I keep missing the mano a mano moment. So much for my eye for up-and-comers.

Brenda too had seen Obama only from a crowd. Still, on election night we want to be close to the event. As do a million other people. The scant information available on the Grant Park rally is front-page news. The party seems like an invitation for supporters to spend time camping in line rather than escorting voters to the polls. When Brenda is offered tickets, she put me on notice that I'd be holding her place.

In fact she wraps up canvassing and is queued on Balbo before 3 p.m. on Nov. 4. I stop to bring for sandwiches and Starbucks when Brenda phones. The line is moving! I grab a cab and soon am introducing myself to her new friends, a police lieutenant improvising a series of entry lines, and a pair of student photographers, shooting for publication in Facebook. Brenda makes a break for the bathroom at the Hilton and the line starts moving again. I go through the checkpoint without her, surrendering the sandwiches and Starbucks, and by phone talk her back to my new location, the closed-off intersection of Congress and Columbus.

One of the Facebook photographers asks me, OK, is the press really in the tank for Obama? Well, it's like the pressbox at a ballgame. Of course you have favorites. But, no cheering. This is more like the crowd in the box seats, and everyone is in high spirits showing off their Obama paraphernalia. We wonder how the women with the long jacket covered in campaign buttons is going to get through the metal detectors. And I'm concerned about getting even that far: Beyond the barricades, the police are huddling. Do they know how they'll keep the penned-up crowd from turning into a stampede? One of them peels off and talks us down with a bullhorn. When we move the sawhorses, stay cool and wait for our signal.

Sure enough, there's no mad rush when we're let loose, just a brisk walk to another holding area. Here we get two choices: Turn toward the lake and the concession stands, or toward the stage and get searched. It's dusk and we've only eaten the crackers I managed to get past the first checkpoint, but we're all in. A mass of Secret Service screeners is lined up under a canopy west of Hutchinson Field, and in no time at all we're through their metal detectors.

We're close to the stage, but no closer than I can afford seated at Lyric Opera, and not as close as Oprah will get tonight: a half-dozen rows beyond bunting that marks off the VIP area, behind three press photographers who thought they too should be much closer. A man from the campaign comes through every so often as a courier for their memory cards.

The VIP area extends the width of a football field, marked off by network reviewing stands, rows of press tables under bright lights, and to our left the stage, with a big-screen TV airing scant but encouraging CNN returns. The drama builds despite the network's odd serenade from Hank Williams Jr. and an even more head-scratching in-studio projection of Will.i.am.

CNN teases a big projection at 10. The sound system is cranked up and the network's election theme blares. Then then we see Obama's photo onscreen, and the announcement is drowned in cheers. A couple hugs beside me and my wife covers her mouth and cries. We keep reliving this moment, partly because we're still in the photographers' sights and Brenda's 10:01 p.m. gasp goes out on the Reuters wire.

The crowd's roar seems to continue for hours, quieting only for the victory speech. It's simple, it's commanding, it's everything I missed hearing at close range 10 years ago. Thanks to the TV coverage, you can picture the scene. Bright lights in a dark night, the Chicago skyline framing waves of people, happy to be in Grant Park just then.

The headline is authentic history, borrowed from the Chicago Tribune report of Charles Lindberg's 1927 transcontinental flight. Does election night in Grant Park measure up? I'm no judge of the historic moment. But it was a grand night in Chicago. That's big enough.

Stephen Rynkiewicz, man of letters

2008-08-12T20:27:00.014-05:00

I wanted the letter-perfect career. So how did I end up making alphabet soup?

It all started with my first creative writing assignment: drafting my resume. All those years of making up exam answers were preparation for this task. My other college accomplishments were unexceptional, except for building my dorm-room sound system. Yet now was the time to turn my odd assortment of summer jobs and after-class hobbies into signs of upward mobility, at least on paper.

By the end of the page, I was reaching the limits of my BS degree, and the best chance of making my resume look good was finding handsome paper stock. Among the loose ends that filled out that page was a Radiotelephone Operator License, now known in the halls of government as the General Radiotelephone Operator License or GROL. It was proof to the FCC of my minimal competence in Ohm's Law as a college DJ. I set about turning this into proof of my ability to overcome resistance.

Such dizzying spin may have qualified me for only one job: public relations. Luckily, this resume caught the attention of Harold Bergen, Chicago PR executive and recovering engineer, whose daughter is now covering the Olympics for the Trib. Hal wasn't quite sure what a Radiotelephone Operator did, but he liked the sound of it. I am forever grateful that Bergen hired me as a writer in the Midwest office of the Ruder-Finn agency. My job: to represent professional societies for the near-professions.

By this I mean organizations like the International Fabricare Institute, for which I wrote pages of bullet points on laundry and drycleaning, tailor-made for lifestyle magazines. The best tip, of course: Save the tough stuff for a professional drycleaner. Maybe you've never thought of drycleaning as a profession. Think again. The IFI, now the Drycleaning & Laundry Institute, runs a laboratory that tests "Dry Clean Only" instructions. This is a true vocation, to make a sweatshop come clean.

Not only do they dress your family in rayon and linen, your fabric-care professional also drapes his or her name with initials. The institute bestows the credentials CPD (for Certified Professional Dryleaner) and CPW (Certified Professional Wetcleaner, a starchy way of saying launderer). In the garment trade, ED is not erectile dysfunction, and certainly no call for a Viagra prescription. It's the designation for a Certified Environmental Dry Cleaner. Nothing dirty about it.

So you see, the lowly GROL really was a roaring start to my new world of employment. Clients also included the National Board of Boiler and Pressure Vessel Inspectors, which provided engineers with critical knowledge to keep their projects from blowing up. The National Board (I couldn't quite come to use its initials) provided certification in EB (Electric Boilers), CIB (Cast Iron Heating Boilers) and UM (a particularly sought-after designation these days, Unfired Media).

After representing professional drycleaners and professional boiler inspectors, I was nearly ready to become a professional reporter. What sealed the deal was that I could set type too, thanks to jobs as a Compugraphic and MTSC operator. MTSC is Magnetic Tape Selectric Composer, an early desktop publishing system that if memory serves involved stone knives and animal pelts. This high-tech experience served me well at the Chicago Sun-Times' suburban bureau, where "computer storage" was a pegboard where we rolled up and hung tape from the Teletype machines.

By that point, my resume was beginning to look like Mark Twain's. Young Sam Clemens also started out as a typesetter, and in his 20s he joined a militia, piloted a riverboat and searched for gold. None of those jobs panned out. "By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity," Twain said. "Another man's, I mean." Certainly at this point I had retained the two characteristics that Twain's guarantee of success: ignorance and confidence.

After gathering credits like GROL and MTSC, reporting solidified my true vocation: collecting acronyms. Journalism's professional society started as a Depauw University fraternity, and when I joined its legacy pledges had managed to keep the greek letters alive. The group was known as the Society of Professional Journalists, Sigma Delta Chi or SPJ,SDX. If you know anything about editors, you know one of them insisted on the comma.

SPJ-comma-SDX was just the umbrella organization for journalism. I also became involved in specialty groups — IRE, NAREE, SABEW, ONA and since I was briefly a college instructor, AEJMC. Plus a few joint broadcast projects with INBA and RTNDA, and awards from the publishers' groups (IPA, NAA, E&P). Trust me, they all stand for something.

My portfolio had expanded far beyond reporting by the time I was assigned a boss who was a PMP. Not that she was pimping for me, although I did need a good word with the general manager. My boss was a Project Management Professional. This was not just a new acronym to conquer, it was a revelation: I could get certified in getting things done!

Newspapers value this skill highly -- notably the new owners of the Tribune, who try to keep projects from being talked to a slow death. They have an acronym for their philosophy, AFDI, which means to actually do it. The F is just for emphasis. With this incentive, and with coaching from the PMO (the Project Management Office), I joined the PMA (Project Management Association) and started networking with software developers, commercial real-estate developers and a few engineers like my sister at Kodak, the film developer.

Finally, to help navigate all these new relationships and new acronyms I initialized one more project: I rejoined Toastmasters International, a group for professionals sharpening their persuasive skills. TM also has its own series of certications in speaking and leadership. Now I can address you now as Stephen Rynkiewicz ACB/CL, member PMA, SPJ....

Hope there's enough space on the business card.

Free jazz! Free Mandela! Chicago Jazz Philharmonic at Millennium Park

2008-07-21T21:35:00.007-05:00

"Is it an orchestra?" Orbert Davis asked from the bandstand. "Or is it jazz?"

The leader of the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic posed the question tonight at a Millennium Park concert dedicated to Nelson Mandela. The unasked question: How does mixing European symphony and American swing produce a tribute to South Africa?

With a gospel choir, it turns out. With orations that recall Copland's "Lincoln Portrait, performed with fervor by actress T'Keyah Crystal Keymah. (An windbag introduction by cable documentarian Bill Kurtis underscored what fortunate casting that was.) And in a nod to a Grant Park perennial, Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture," with extended quotes from a national anthem that brought the pavilion audience to its feet, some listeners with fist raised.

That and an African National Congress marching anthem, performers stomping in time, were the few obvious African references in the premiere of Davis' score, "Hope in Action," performed as a 90th-birthday salute to Mandela. Speaking from the conducting platform, Davis said he was inspired by Mandela's autobiography and from the PBS travelogue "Grannies on Safari." That alone should have told listeners they would not mistake the proceedings for a Mahotella Queens concert.

Davis' program notes suggests his inspiration was not literal. He offered the ensemble as a metaphor for the fight against apartheid: "When musicians are willing to create outside their personal and musical boundaries, they in essence produce a new genre and creative aesthetic."

Political themes in summer concerts tend to be flag-wavers, and the music that accompanied Mandela's quotations was, well, quotidian. But the rhythm section of Ryan Cohan on piano, Stewart Miller on bass and Ernie Adams on drums seemed particularly sharp in supporting the modal flights of Zim Ngqawana on alto and soprano sax and Ari Brown on tenor. They bespoke freedom in a way the recitations could not match.

The rest of the program struggled for its footing in this tug of war between classical and jazz idioms. But jazz arrangements with strings are so rare that it's always a pleasure to hear the Chicago Jazz Ensemble take them on. Dee Alexander reached for common ground in folk with two Miriam Makeba tunes, and got just comfortable enough with her lead sheets for a Dinah Washington flirtation in the Sid Wayne-Quincy Jones confection "Relax Max."

Davis' remaining charts were part Stravinsky, part Gil Evans. They included "100 Questions, One Answer," in which Brown and Ngqawana took freestyle solo turns with Nicole Mitchell on piccolo and Davis on a Leroy Anderson-style trumpet that reminded me of when I played "The Toy Trumpet" behind Clark Terry in a high-school clinic, and ended with a too-short quartet that held the potential for operatic drama.

Personal note: My time as a backup music critic in the provinces is long gone. Back then I enjoyed the luxury of writing the next day and did not have to sprint for the exit with the final note. Arriving just in time at the Pritzker Pavilion, I found a good seat next to Chicago Tribune colleague Howard Reich, with whom I have had occasional newsroom and lunchroom chats. We couldn't talk this time because he had to make himself scarce to write his review. I've never told him how highly I regard such deadline improvisation. It's a salute to his subjects, and this review is a salute to him.