Chicago Sun-Times: All posts by Neil Steinberg

'Every day that God gives you, use it.'

2025-07-15T10:23:42.774-05:00

Edit Renfrow Smith, who turned 111 on Monday, welcomed visitors. From left, (with backs to the camera) Valeriya Woodard and Feven Getachew, and two recent graduates from Grinnell College, where Smith, Class of ’37, is the oldest living graduate. At center, Rev. Jane Eesley, the new senior pastor at the First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple, where Smith is a member. She stopped by to give Smith communion. At far right is associate pastor Sophia Carno. “You have made my day so very special,” Smith said, after taking communion.

Photo by Neil Steinberg

Loneliness is the curse of old age. Your friends are gone, your family distant, your life's work, a box in the basement. Most seniors struggle with it.

But most seniors are not Edith Renfrow Smith, who at times Monday had a dozen visitors in her room at Brookdale Senior Living on Sheridan Road. And that was before the party celebrating her 111th birthday.

Regular readers might recall meeting Mrs. Smith on her 107th birthday, and learning about her extraordinary life. Born in 1914 in Iowa, she became the first Black woman to graduate from Grinnell College. She pooh-poohs it, but had her share of encounters with the famous, from Amelia Earhart to Muhammad Ali.

Not to forget her grandparents, born in slavery.

Or the boy across the street, Herbie, who taught her daughter Alice to play "Chopsticks" on the piano. Herbie Hancock, the future jazz great.

I joined the crowd, and asked: how did her 110th year go?

"Everything has been fine," Mrs. Smith said, precisely, not mentioning specifics.

Such as in September, when Grinnell College named a dorm after her — Renfrow Hall. Not be confused with Renfrow Gallery, or the Edith Renfrow Smith Black Women's Library, previous tributes bestowed by the college, which granted her an honorary doctorate in 2019.

Two recent graduates, Feven Getachew and Valeriya Woodard, hung on the conversation. Dr. Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, the Department chair of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at Grinnell, observed from a distance.

"I've been listening to Mrs. Smith and realized, she is her family's historian," said Beauboeuf-Lafontant, who is writing a book on Mrs. Smith and her extraordinary family. "She keeps the memories, she inherited the memories from her mother. It's extraordinary she has taken on an old West African role of preserving the memories of your family, your people."

Mrs. Smith seemed content to let conversation flow around her, though I tried to pick out highlights from the past year. I asked if she voted in November, drawing a reaction near outrage.

"I NEVER have not voted," she said.

Does she still bake? Last year we watched her and Alice, 79, bake a pie with, all the drama that can be expected from a mother-daughter pair who have nearly 200 years of life between them.

"Sometimes," Mrs. Smith replied. "Over there on the counter is a pie we baked yesterday. A cherry raspberry pie."

The pie was brought out for admiration. Though the reason for its creation is even more noteworthy — her Sunday helper, Ebony, had confessed that she had never baked a pie. Mrs. Smith thought that a lapse worthy of immediate correction.

"It was the first time she had ever made a pie," she said. "Her mother had taught her to cook, but never to bake. That's why I told her to take a piece to her mother. I like to do things; I don't like to do nothing. She was here to take care of me, and I said, 'Oh, we can make a pie.' So that's what we did. I said, 'You made the pie.'"

Living to 111 is extremely rare. About 3 in 10,000 Americans live to be 100, or 0.027 percent. There are thought to be fewer than 1,000 "supercentenarians" — people who live to 110 — in the world. Making Mrs. Smith not one in a million, but closer to one in 10 million.

I asked her what 111 feels like. She replied:

"It feels just like every day. I say, 'You do what you do every day.' That's what makes life worth living. People let you tell them what you like. This is you. That's me. I like to talk to people. I like people. I say, 'Every day that God gives you, use it.' And you can do that. You can do what you like, because someone has said, 'Oh hey. Try it. Try it and see.' You don't know unless you try. Don't let anybody tell you, 'I can't.' You say, 'I'll try.'' That's the difference between living and not living: 'I tried it, but I didn't like it, so I didn't do it.'

"Don't spend your time doing things not worthwhile. What are you doing that for? 'I don't know. I did it because I didn't know'. That makes every day and every year worthwhile, because you tried it and you did it. If it was good, it was good. If it wasn't any good, you throw it out. Don't hang on to things that mean nothing. Why hang onto something that means nothing to you? God gave us choice. People, they stopped letting individuals have choice. Don't make my choice."

Edith Renfrow Smith, 111, had an eventful year — a dorm was named for her at Grinnell College, where she, Class of ’37, is the oldest living and first Black female graduate. She voted and, oh yes, fractured her pelvis in a fall. .But it was a hairline fracture and, except for three weeks spent unnecessarily in a nursing him, she didn’t let the mishap slow her down.

Photo by Neil Steinberg

'A silent and invisible killer of silent and invisible people'

2025-07-13T09:54:24.228-05:00

"Extremely hot — 106, an all time record. Like being hit with a hammer ... had idea about pulling literary quotes on the heat ... so I spent a pleasant hour in the library."
— Journal entry, July 13, 1995

Normality has a weight, an inertia, almost subject to the laws of physics. "Objects at rest tend to stay at rest." Habit sits there, slumbering, pelted by events, and doesn't want to stir, let mercury or floodwaters rise.

Thirty years ago, a murderous heat wave hit Chicago — 739 people died. Had they perished in Daley Plaza it would be remembered as an epic tragedy — the Great Chicago fire killed less than half as many. There would be a statue.

But the heat wave victims died alone in scattered rooms, windows sealed, air conditioning broken. They were mostly elderly, though two were toddlers who fell asleep in the back of a day care van, forgotten for one fatal hour.

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The government was slow to grasp what was happening. The media was slow. I was slow.

I remember looking up at Cook County Medical Examiner Edmund Donahue doing a press conference on TV and sniffing: "Showboat. He's calling everybody who dies in Cook County a heat death ..."

In our defense, being slow to recognize problems and then fast to forget them is an American folk illness.

"The political lesson of the heat wave was you can deny and ignore and forget the disaster," said Eric Klinenberg, the New York University sociologist whose 2002 book, "Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago" is the seminal text of the disaster.

"You can say it was an act of God. You can blame the victims for not taking care of themselves, and in American politics, that works. An enduring fact about this enormous Chicago catastrophe is that it just disappeared, almost as it was happening, but certainly after it happened."

"Another wildly hot day ... Head off to the NU library where I got some good books. Dinner at the Davis Street Fish House; though I really wasn't hungry — a factor of the heat."
— July 14, 1995

The literary quote story ran that day and haunts me still. Coleridge's "summer has set in with its usual severity." A bit of light nothing whose underlying message was: It's summer. It's hot. Get over it.

In my 2002 review of "Heat Wave," I wrote:

"As I read over my droll little exercise, I couldn't help but think of some Sun-Times subscriber, an elderly man in a strap T-shirt, sitting in his sweltering, closed room on the West Side, reading halfway through, folding the paper, then quietly turning his face to the wall and dying."

"How is this affecting people other than myself?" is not a very sophisticated question. Not rocket science. Though you can argue our political moment is based on the conviction that huge swathes of the American population simply don't matter and should be ignored, the parts of the government that aid them lopped away.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency was about to be disbanded when the Texas floods hit. Those girls who died at Camp Mystic in Texas were sleeping in cabins built by the river in an "extremely hazardous" floodway.

What the Texas floods had was drama, visuals and the kind of victims the media can get excited about.

"What's especially chilling about the Texas floods is, all these children who died; the drama of the parents looking for the children," Klinenberg said.

"We can all relate to the pain of that. The images are terrifying, make us all feel vulnerable. One key difference in the heat wave, the people who died: They were poor, they were old, they were socially isolated, they were disproportionately Black. They were just not people who we value."

"Hundreds of people have died in this. I went out to a CHA home to talk to old people. Sad. Greasy catfish lunch at Wallace Davis West Side place."
— July 16, 1995

The heat isn't the real problem; the social conditions are. Klinenberg called the heat, "a silent and invisible killer of silent and invisible people."

The heat exposed what is usually hidden.

"For one week, suddenly all the background conditions that are so dangerous and so taken for granted became visible and dramatic and consequential," he said. "The city melted down, and all its problems were exposed for the world to see."

"Morning chasing Daley. Sent to the parking lot of the Treasure Island on Broadway — thought I'd miss him but instead found all the media in the world waiting for him. Still quite hot out. Chased Daley to some press conference an hour long, all his brass behind him, trying to get the city off the hook."
—July 17, 1995

100 years ago, the Scopes trial gripped the nation, and here we go again

2025-07-10T10:10:51.839-05:00

Chicago's most notorious attorney, Clarence Darrow, was riding high in 1924. He basked in the national spotlight while defending Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two Hyde Park teens who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks for the thrill of it.

Darrow admitted their guilt — which was undeniable — placing all his chips on saving the smug idiots from the death penalty. It worked.

In the spring of 1925, Darrow was looking for his next mountain to climb. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union was trying to fight the Butler Act, a new Tennessee statute banning public school teachers from discussing "any theory which denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man is descended from a lower order of animals.”

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That law was advocated by another American titan, William Jennings Bryan. Like Darrow, he'd made his name in the 1890s, the "boy orator" who mesmerized the 1896 Democratic National Convention with his "cross of gold" speech advocating free silver. He ran for president three times and lost each time. By the 1920s, he had shifted into religious conservatism, plumping for Prohibition and battling Satan in the form of Darwin's theory of evolution being taught in public school.

To have a case, the ACLU needed a defendant, and took out newspaper ads looking for one. The hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, bit. Hoping to draw attention to itself and maybe make a few bucks, it enlisted a 24-year-old football coach and substitute teacher, John Scopes.

He never taught evolution.

"I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant's chair" Scopes said.

With Jennings on board, Darrow leaped into the fray.

"At once I wanted to go," Darrow wrote. The trial began July 10, 1925.

Limelight can scorch the uninitiated. Dayton, which surprised newsman H.L. Mencken by being "a country town of charm and even beauty," bit off more than it could chew.

"Here was an ... almost a miraculous chance to get Dayton upon the front pages, to make it talked about, to put it upon the map. But how now?" Mencken wrote. "Two months ago the town was obscure and happy. Today it is a universal joke."

Despite Darrow's famous eloquence, the trial's outcome was never in doubt.

"The Scopes trial, from the start, has been carried on in a manner exactly fitted to the anti-evolution law and the simian imbecility under it," Mencken wrote. "The rustic judge, a candidate for re-election, has postured the yokels like a clown in a ten-cent side show, and almost every word he has uttered has been an undisguised appeal to their prejudices and superstitions."

Scopes was found guilty and fined $100.

Bryan won, but also lost. He took the stand himself, poorly. When he died five days after the trial ended, Mencken quipped that God had shot an arrow at Darrow and missed.

Darrow lost, but also won — the Scopes trial cemented his reputation, and he went on to other big cases.

The Scopes trial is important today for reasons that have nothing to do with the case itself, and everything to do with the fact that we're still arguing over how much religion can bigfoot public education.

The answer: a lot. Two weeks ago the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that parents can "opt out" their children from any public school lessons that include suggesting LGBTQ+ citizens should be tolerated, or anything else that conflicts with religious training — which could include evolution.

The court apparently doesn't care that letting one group impose its religious scruples on public education lets all factions do so and gives religious prejudice the whip hand over us all. Religious fanatics now have a veto over literally any subject schools would dare teach.

Mencken predicted it all a century ago, and it's my privilege to defer to the master and give the bard of Baltimore the last word. We were warned:

"Darrow has lost this case. It was lost long before he came to Dayton. But it seems to me that he has nevertheless performed a great public service by fighting it to a finish and in a perfectly serious way. Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience. Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its Bill of Rights made a mock of by its sworn officers of the law. There are other States that had better look to their arsenals before the Hun is at their gates."

At memorials in our nation's capital, lots of DEI ripe for the purging

2025-07-08T12:17:06.628-05:00

WASHINGTON — The statue in the Jefferson Memorial is 19 feet tall, but it's the words carved in stone around the bronze figure that are truly monumental.

Such as these, from Jefferson's Declaration of Independence:

"WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL."

"Again with the equality," I thought, forcing back a smile. And the diversity — "all men"? Really?

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Can't have that. Not in 2025 America, where the same government that went to the expense and bother of erecting this palace to DEI is now scrubbing references to unfavored groups from official websites and giving certain people the bum's rush — out of the military, out of the country.

How long will this offense be tolerated now that intolerance is the latest dance craze? Envision a trio of Three Stooges administration lackeys. The same crew who flagged for removal from Department of Defense pages images of the Enola Gay — the name of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima — because, ewww, "gay."

Imagine them showing up at the Jefferson Memorial in a blare of calliope music, a jumble of ladders and drop cloths and eye pokes, splattering plaster as they efface that forbidden "EQUAL" and slap on a more acceptable sentiment along the lines of "ALL MEN ARE CREATED ... MANLY."

"Nyuk nyuk nyuk, Moe, we soitenly are!"

Hegseth’s ‘DEI is dead’ purge targets images of Tuskegee Airmen, war heroes — and WWII B-29 Enola Gay

Their next stop would have to be the Lincoln Memorial, where the Gettysburg Address covers one wall and goes straight into the DEI weeds: "FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO" (let's revert to lower case. These memorial caps look fine in marble but scream in print) "our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

"Alllllll men"? Yikes! Even immigrants who came here seeking refuge? Can't they be unceremoniously bundled in a van by masked police and shipped to East Africa?

Or men who identify as women? Of course they can be cashiered from the armed forces because ... well ... I'm not sure what the excuse is. They make our leader uncomfortable, perhaps.

Meanwhile, my friends on the left will drill down on "men," pointing out that women weren't included in all this hoo-ha about freedom. Flash: There was no electricity, either.

Are these really our choices? History as George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. "Father, I cannot tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet." Or history as Thomas Jefferson, rapist and enslaver, who also did some other stuff?

Does it have to be celebration or revulsion? Can't we have the full spectrum? Glory and shame?

When I wasn't minding (though not jiggling or kissing) my new granddaughter in her new home, I strolled over to memorials. Not just the Jefferson and the Lincoln, but Martin Luther King Jr., who of course was caught speaking publicly about "dignity, equality and freedom." (I imagine the MAGA stooges will plaster that over with transcripts from J. Edgar Hoover's surveillance tapes.)

The underappreciated and thoughtful Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial — contrast it with the explosion of wreaths, stars and eagles that is the insipid World War II Memorial — seems practically ripped from the headlines.

"In these days of difficulty, we Americans everywhere must and shall choose the path of social justice, the path of faith, the path of hope and the path of love toward our fellow man."

Then there is this, from King's acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize that our president covets and was just nominated again by his buddy, Benjamin Netanyahu:

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."

Let's hope so.

The memorials almost talk to each other. Jefferson's features a letter noting, "Commerce between master and slave is despotism."

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that justice cannot sleep forever," Jefferson writes.

Lincoln sees that justice delivered in his second inaugural, surveying the disastrous Civil War. He prays it ends soon but knows, however long it lasts, we had it coming:

"If God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword ... 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

Back at the Jefferson Memorial, one quote is larger than the rest, running around the interior of the dome in letters 3 feet high:

"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

That sounds like a plan.

Nothing distracts like a new baby, even after the loss of a loved one

2025-07-06T11:10:41.948-05:00

My wife asked if I wanted to cover the mirrors, a Jewish tradition in a house of mourning. At first, I said no. Many pressing concerns had been raised by my mother suddenly dying that morning; her soul becoming trapped in a mirror wasn't among them.

Then I immediately changed my mind and agreed. Rituals comfort. The tradition had been retrofitted for modern times. Now mirrors are covered to discourage vanity among the bereaved. I'm all for that. We could all use less vanity. Imagine where our once-proud nation might be today if fewer were consumed by self-regard.

"Suddenly" is the wrong word. My mother had been steadily dying for years — ailment upon indignity upon deterioration. Every time I'd visit, I'd make sure to kiss her goodbye and tell her I love her because I wasn't sure if I'd see her again. The last time, a week earlier, I'd gone to show her a photo of her newborn great-granddaughter.

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My mother immediately perked up, even phoning her sisters to share the happy news. We agreed that this was the most beautiful, perfect baby ever, and at Thanksgiving she would be personally presented for my mother's approval. Though I doubted that happening, I stood in the doorway, gazing at my mother, until I realized she was staring back at me with a "what are you looking at, bub?" expression. I turned away.

The next time I saw her, she was dead in Bay 48 of the emergency room at Elmhurst Hospital. Not a moment I'd prepared for. I don't believe I actually turned to my wife and implored, "Do something!" But I certainly thought it. My mother sang as a teen — on the radio, in clubs — and to us all our lives. In those last few moments together, I sang a pair of brief lullabies: "Rock-a-Bye" and "My Bonnie," an odd Scottish lament turned into a bedtime song, speaking of retrofitting tradition.

Most of a week was consumed with planning and holding the funeral, plus packing up her effects, donating her clothing.

In timing that would look trite in fiction but life doesn't blush to offer, 48 hours after we buried my mother, my wife and I flew to New York to meet our new granddaughter and help her parents pack up their apartment and move. Because merely having a baby isn't difficult enough.

Babies help. Babies are the definition of humility — helpless creatures that require your full concentration just to keep in bottles and fresh diapers. Young people agonize whether this is even an appropriate time to have children, with the world going crazy. I say it is, and offer up my mother's life as an example of how deceptive the fog of the present can be. My mother was born in 1936 — not a propitious year for Jewish girls to enter the world, generally. But she had the good sense to be born in Cleveland, Ohio, instead of Stawiski, Poland, like her father was.

She would go whistling through the calamitous 20th century, spending 35 years in Boulder, Colorado, an upgrade over Cleveland if ever there were one. Today is not a reliable augury of tomorrow; here, no sure road map to there.

So sure, my granddaughter might go to kindergarten under the benevolent gaze of an enormous portrait of Our Dear Leader. Or in an invigorated nation, freshly reminded of the preciousness of law and human dignity. That is still being determined. I remain hopeful, because of this baby, and because I know my history.

Returning to actual babies. No jiggling is allowed, certainly no kissing. I was told that doing so could make her blind. A stretch, but I'm not calling the shots here — covering those mirrors seems to have had its effect.

Singing is permitted, though, as is continuous talking, a quality inherited from my late mother. I found myself singing "Rock-a-Bye" and "My Bonnie," reflecting, with muted amazement, on the astounding rapidity of life — on Saturday singing to my mother, whose life had just ended, then six days later warbling these same songs to this little lozenge of squirming adorableness, whose whole life stretches before her in all its promise and possibility.

I sang Fats Waller's "Ain't Misbehavin'."

"That was a particular favorite of your Great-Grandma June," I explained. "When she was 16, only a little older than you are now, she crossed the Atlantic Ocean on an airplane — a Lockheed Super Constellation — to entertain the troops in Germany. She was frightened, but she was also very brave. Always remember: You come from bold people, who go places and do things. Who knows where you are going to go and what you are going to do someday?"

Misericordia's Sister Rosemary Connelly, dead at 94, ran Chicago home for developmentally disabled residents

2025-06-20T07:34:55.828-05:00

Catholic women who got pregnant out of wedlock in Chicago 100 years ago would quietly disappear into the Misericordia Maternity Hospital and Home for Infants on 47th Street to bear their illegitimate babies under the care of the Sisters of Mercy, joined by indigent married women and those "of foreign birth or parentage."

They often emerged without their infants. Most of the healthy children left behind would eventually be adopted. But those with disabilities became charges of the Archdiocese of Chicago, which warehoused them "out of sight, out of mind" until they turned 6 and could be delivered to the state of Illinois and its notoriously nightmarish mental institutions, where residents were tied to beds and worse.

By 1954, the Home for Infants housed about 50 children with developmental challenges like Down syndrome and cerebral palsy. In 1969, the task of keeping them alive until the state could take over fell to Sister Rosemary Connelly, a 38-year-old nun from the Sisters of Mercy who knew little of Misericordia but immediately realized she had found her calling.

"I felt God's presence on my very first day at Misericordia," she said. "I could tell that all the children were loved."

They were well-dressed then but stayed in bed all day. They ate there. Sister Rosemary decided these were not inert objects that should just be allowed to languish, but God's children, precious souls, each with the spark of humanity, no matter how buried. That flame had to be nourished, physically and spiritually.

She decided she would provide them with the rich and rewarding lives they deserved. Since programming for such children didn't exist, she created it, in the process becoming the dynamic, irresistible force building Misericordia into the preeminent home in Chicago for children and adults with developmental challenges.

Beloved for the energy, skill, devotion and unwavering faith she brought to Misericordia for more than half a century, Sister Rosemary died June 19 at Misericordia. She was 94.

"Sister Rosemary was the heart and soul of Misericordia for more than 50 years," said the Rev. Jack Clair, president and executive director of Misericordia. "Her love and guidance helped build a community where hundreds of people with developmental disabilities enjoy living the highest quality of life. Sister’s life was a life of faith dedicated to God’s promise of eternal life."

"There are few people in the city of Chicago who have done so much for so many as Sister Rosemary," then-Mayor Richard M. Daley said in 2009 at her 40th anniversary as the head of Misericordia.

Sister Rosemary Connelly at Union Station during one of Misericordia’s yearly Candy Days fund-raisers, in 2006.

John H. White / Sun-Times

"When you think of the number of lives she touched — thousands," said David Axelrod, who was senior adviser to President Barack Obama. "Not just the folks who lived in Misericordia but their families. It changed my daughter's life, and it changed my whole family's life for the better. This whole place exists because of the force of her will."

Rosemary Connelly was born Feb. 23, 1931, on the West Side, the third child of a pair of immigrants from County Mayo, Ireland: pub owner Peter V. Connelly and Bridget Moran. She joined the Sisters of Mercy when she was 18, served as a psychiatric social worker in Aurora and a school teacher in Chicago before drawing the Misericordia assignment.

Why her? Nobody ever explained.

“I don’t know,” Sister Rosemary said on her 90th birthday in 2021. “That’s been a mystery. They always had a nurse in charge. And I had a master’s degree in social work and one in sociology. Maybe that’s why.’”

She graduated with a degree in social science from Saint Xavier University in 1959, received her master's in sociology from Saint Louis University in 1966 and another master's, in social work, from Loyola University in 1969.

One of her inspirations was a nephew with disabilities. Her first order of business after being put in charge of Misericordia was to go to Sears for tricycles and wading pools. Then, she opened a dining room so children could eat together, as a community.

‘I’m overwhelmed with God’s goodness’

Misericordia — the word means "mercy" or "compassion" in Latin — stopped sending children to the state.

"I decided we'd keep them," she said.

That meant the population grew. By 1976, the Misericordia Home for Special Children was too small.

Meanwhile, the largest Catholic children's home in the city, the Angel Guardian Orphanage at Devon Avenue and Ridge Road, had closed for lack of state funding and the rise of foster homes. Sister Rosemary saw its possibilities and talked Catholic Charities into putting the 31-acre campus under her control.

On March 29, 1976, 39 children boarded a yellow school bus for the trip from 47th Street to the North Side. This being a Sister Rosemary Connelly operation, the bus stopped on the way at the Lincoln Park Zoo so the children could visit the animals.

"To put these children in a nursing home is unfair," she said. "We want to help them become caring people. We're trying to break this whole condescending world in which [developmentally disabled] people live."

Sister Rosemary inherited an aged campus of cottages in need of repair and exercised two strengths she showed a positive genius for: mobilizing volunteers and raising money.

"She was the best politician in town," said Axelrod, who was also founding director of the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics. "She knew everybody. You didn't want to disappoint her."

"She looked like a sweet, white-haired nun until you realized she was made of structural steel," said Carol Marin, the former newscaster and former Chicago Sun-Times columnist who is co-director of the DePaul Center for Journalism Integrity & Excellence.

When Marin realized that her son Gideon was "never going to be cured," she went to see Sister Rosemary.

"I was a mess," Marin said. "She just talked to me. She didn't have me tour. The next time, she went around."

Sister Rosemary showed Marin a resident whose mother had kept from interacting with others for years.

"She said: 'Don't you be that person. You're doing it for your son. He needs to have a community. You're doing this for him and not for yourself.' She was absolutely right," Marin said.

Misericordia was not a place where families could park their kids and forget them.

"There is an expectation that all of us to never leave the lives of our children," Marin said. "I'm the bingo-caller at Family Fest. His dad was a full-time volunteer for years and years. Misericordia becomes a second home."

Misericordia's lunches and breakfasts were mandatory stops for the powerful and the wealthy — particularly those who had children in Misericordia.

Axelrod's daughter Lauren is a resident.

"When my daughter was a teenager, we wouldn't have bet that she'd be alive today," he said. "We certainly didn't think she would have as full a life as she does. That would be a miracle, and Misericordia has made that possible."

Sister Rosemary Connelly and David Axelrod, then a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, at a breakfast to benefit Misericordia in 2009.

John H. White / Sun-Times

Sister Rosemary saw that residents interacted with the real world. The Greenhouse Inn, which Misericordia opened in 1989, wasn't an exercise in occupational therapy but a functioning full-service restaurant open to the public, perhaps the only one staffed by waiters and cooks with Down syndrome. The Hearts & Flour Bakery not only gave meaningful jobs to 50 residents but also raised money for Misericordia, with an outlet in Glenview and a regular presence at farmers markets. Many have received a gift tin of its heart-shaped brownie cookies. About 10,000 mail orders a month are filled.

Misericordia's original home, dubbed Misericordia South, remained open until 2005, providing care for severely disabled, non-ambulatory residents. Specialized equipment at Misericordia's main campus made possible advanced therapies, and the buildings had the decor — and cleanliness — of a ritzy North Shore country club or a resort hotel.

Misericordia expanded, built new structures, eventually employing 1,200 staffers for 600 residents, plus another two dozen volunteers a day.

Such an operation hasn't been without controversy. Families of eligible children could languish for years on the 600-person waiting list. The disability rights movement, plus the terrible reputation of group homes in general, caused some to assail Misericordia for not letting residents live independently in regular neighborhoods. Medicaid funding became harder to get for people with intellectual difficulties in group settings. In 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act funneled aid toward community-based homes and away from places like Misericordia.

Sister Rosemary took criticisms to heart and in the 1990s opened the Community Integrated Living Arrangement off-campus, placing residents who could thrive under those circumstances into nearby private homes.

Misericordia residents assembling bakery packages for shipment.

Richard Chapman / Sun-Times

"She saw our kids as people, not as disabilities," Marin said. "There's really a difference. She saw them on equal footing with all the rest of us, as human beings. She always said, 'You don't give them a life; you give them a life worth living.' And she did."

Sister Rosemary received dozens of humanitarian awards and nine honorary doctorates, from the University of Notre Dame, Saint Mary's College of Notre Dame, MacMurray College, Loyola, DePaul, Lewis University, Saint Xavier University, Marquette University and Dominican University.

Survivors include her sister Kathryn and many nieces and nephews.

Marin said she was grateful she was able to speak with Sister Rosemary recently.

"I told her, 'You saved our lives. You saved Gideon's life, which has been a great life.' I was so grateful to be able to have a chance to tell her all the miracles she has wrought. To be a saint, you need three documented miracles. She has a thousand more."

Sister Rosemary Connelly.

Heidi Zeiger

Earl Moses, 'true newsman,' former Sun-Times editor, dies at 94

2025-06-17T10:43:56.137-05:00

A reporter is supposed to cover the story. Not be the story. And one local newspaper typically doesn't report on the entry-level staff hires of another.

But Earl Moses Jr. getting a job was news.

"News Breaks Ice, Employs Negro Reporter," a headline proclaimed in the Indianapolis Recorder, a Black weekly, on Jan. 26, 1956.

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The article begins, breathlessly:

"The Indianapolis News has employed a young Negro as a full-time member of its reportorial staff giving him the distinction of being the first Negro full fledged reporter to hold such a position on an Indianapolis daily newspaper."

The nimble and rigorous city editor that Moses became at the Chicago Sun-Times would have leaped to red pencil that sentence, purging unnecessary verbiage, fixing that passive voice and adding a time element, ending up with: "The Indianapolis News hired the first full time Negro reporter on an Indianapolis daily newspaper earlier this month." All the news in half the words.

Moses, a respected Chicago newspaperman, died May 24 at his home in Torrance, California. He was 94.

He was deeply proud of those who struggled before him, writing a brief family history in 2021.

"In conjunction with Juneteenth," he began. "June 19, 1865, when word of the Confederate defeat finally reached Texas, this seems like a propitious time to revisit the origin of the Moses family roots."

Earl Moses as a young reporter in the early 1950s, sports the requisite fedora with a press card stuck in the hatband and nearby can of beer. He was the first Black reporter on a daily Indianapolis newspaper, and perhaps the first in the state of Indiana.

Provided

His great-grandfather was Henry Sheppard, born in 1838 on the Sheppard Plantation in Georgia — given his last name because he was plantation property. But when he was released from bondage after the Civil War, his great-grandfather chose a name worthy of a free man.

"He decided to shed his slave name and pick a name that bespoke of honor, strength and dignity," Earl Moses wrote. "He chose Moses."

Moses was born in Chicago. His, father, Earl Richard Moses Sr., was a college professor. His mother, Marjorie Banks, a teacher.

The family moved to Baltimore. Moses graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

He joined the Army in 1953, serving as a radio operator and posted in Alaska. He went to Indiana University for law school at night, while working for the Indianapolis News.

"His father insisted: 'You always have a backup plan,'" said Matthew Moses, his only child, who himself wanted to be a writer but became a librarian.

Moses joined the Sun-Times in 1962, rising from reporter to night city editor, then city editor, assistant managing editor, assistant to the personnel director and assistant to the editor before taking early retirement in 1988 after suffering a stroke.

"My dad was a true newsman. The Sun-Times was his life," said Matthew Moses, who remembers his father interacting with colleagues. "Roger Flaherty, Leon Pitt, I remember their confidence. They saw through all the bs going on in the city. It was fun watching them hang out, hearing them swap stories. That made him a superhero in my eyes."

Flaherty, a former reporter and city desk editor, praised Moses' "quiet, even-tempered manner."

"I don't think there was any nightside reporter who didn't like and respect him," Flaherty said. "He made me feel I belong in the newspaper fraternity."

"Earl was probably the most easygoing person I ever met in my life," said former Sun-Times reporter Leon Pitt. "He was articulate, smart and very observant. As city editor, he had complete control over the newsroom and had full respect of everyone. He was never riled, and he knew his profession. He was one of the calmest people I've ever met in my life."

A number of reporters learned their craft from him.

"Earl was a good man, quiet, dignified and smart," said Don Hayner, former editor-in-chief of the Sun-Times. "When I was a young reporter he was always there to help, guide and advise. Every newsroom needs pros like Earl. He was a gentle mentor to many."

In the early 1980s, Moses was president of the Chicago Association of Black Journalists. After leaving the Sun-Times, he became metro editor of the Southtown Economist.

Moses loved jazz and dogs, and had a distinct fun side.

"He was silly; as a dad, he was playful," said Matthew Moses. "He was 48 when he had me, always the dad running around, chasing us in the playground."

It wasn't an accident that Moses lived to 94.

"He, was always quite healthy; he swam a lot," said his son. "He prided himself in his work ethic, something he imparted to me, taking education very seriously."

In addition to his son, survivors include a brother, Michael, and two grandchildren. Services were held in California.

WBEZ, longtime Chicago voice for 'respect and joy,' needs your help

2025-06-15T09:58:02.133-05:00

WBEZ and I go way back. In the mid-1980s, when I was freshly fired from the Wheaton Daily Journal and looking for any kind of work, Ken Davis gave a whistle, and I started filing live reports on his "Studio A" program.

I didn't get paid, of course — taking advantage of the ambitious young is a venerable media tradition. But it was reporting on the radio.

I broadcast from inside the scoreboard at Wrigley Field, watching attendants slide big numbers into place. From a live poultry store, watching a chicken, its throat cut, upside down in a metal funnel, blood running out the bottoms, talons scratching uselessly against the galvanized metal.

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Awkward situations made good radio. I broadcast naked from a sensory deprivation tank — quite the thing in the mid-1980s — on Lincoln Avenue.

After floating peacefully on heavily salted water in total darkness for nearly an hour, imagining myself an amoeba on an ancient sea, the door was ripped open and phone receiver into my hands. Ken asked what I was thinking about at the moment he called.

"How much I have to pee," I replied, blinking.

As the years passed, I'd circle back to WBEZ, first in the creepy old Bankers Building at Clark and Adams, with the radio tower on the roof, and then at their new digs at Navy Pier. For several years, the Tribune's ace columnist Eric Zorn and I would meet on Michigan Avenue every Friday and walk over to the pier to do a rundown of the week's news.

Or I'd be a guest on particular programs — Scott Simon's "Weekend Edition" or "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" or Jim Nayder's "Magnificent Obsession" — a quirky early morning show on addiction and recovery. It was periodically rebroadcast, and now and then I'd hear from someone who caught my segment and was braced in their struggle.

And that's just being on the station. I haven't even touched upon my experience as a listener. WBEZ reflected life in Chicago. Jazz at night in the city that practically invented jazz. Live feeds of important historical events — hearings, trials.

Plus lots of fun — Garrison Keillor's folksy "A Prairie Home Companion," a mix of humor and music. "Car Talk" with Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers — and if listeners today have a hard time imagining WBEZ running a show dedicated to car repair, well, let's say that station didn't take itself quite so seriously.

Then again, these are more serious times.

Last week, the U.S. House chainsawed $1.1 billion intended for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR's parent. The good news is WBEZ only gets 6% of its budget from the feds.

It's much worse nationwide. In swaths of the rural countryside, the NPR station is the only game in town, a key source of important local and emergency news. More than 120 stations get more than a quarter of their funding from the federal government.

I rattle the cup occasionally for the Sun-Times, so I hope they — and you — will forgive me for switching hats to urge you to divert a few coins WBEZ's way — you can give at donate.wbez.org/.

Consider it a vote that Chicago's past will continue to inform Chicago's future.

Article in the Chicago Sun on April 15, 1943, announcing the creation of the Chicago Board of Education’s radio station. Original programming included the latest war news for classroom use and “Through the Eyes of the PTA.”

NewsBank archives.

WBEZ hit the airwaves as the voice of the Chicago Board of Education on April 15, 1943 — another critical time when American freedom was imperiled. There was a lot of news going on, and Chicago classrooms would tune in for current events lessons. They worked.

"When our parents talk about the war news at home, we know more than they do," a sixth grader in Mrs. Floreine C. Ruth's class at Dixon School told the Daily News in 1945. "We have something on them."

Over the years, WBEZ kept the city informed. When National Public Radio was established in 1970, WBEZ was among the first stations to sign up. Lest you think the current war on diversity is anything new, let me quote from NPR's first mission statement:

“National Public Radio will serve the individual: it will promote personal growth; it will regard the individual differences among men with respect and joy rather than derision and hate; it will celebrate the human experience as infinitely varied rather than vacuous and banal; it will encourage a sense of active constructive participation, rather than apathetic helplessness.”

We live in an era of derision and hate. The vacuous and banal are winning, though this weekend demonstrated the mighty desire of patriotic Americans to refuse to surrender to apathetic helplessness but instead raise our voices in favor of the infinitely varied.

WBEZ has always been one of the loudest voices treating differences with respect and joy. Let's keep it that way.

A parade for Trump, but the true patriots will be in the streets

2025-06-12T12:51:03.803-05:00

I love a parade. Give me a crisply uniformed high school marching band, tall hats smartly strapped under chins, horns held high, playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever." A line of fire trucks, lights flaring, sirens whirring. I'm lucky enough to live around the corner from where parades — Memorial Day, July 4, Labor Day — pass by in Northbrook.

My wife and I don't bother with folding chairs. Just stroll over and park our butts on the curb. Though that means we'll have to groan to our feet when the knot of veterans pass, so we can stand and applaud. We're spry. We're still up to it.

Saturday's parade in Washington, D.C. is different. The stated purpose is to honor the 250th anniversary of the Army. But it has — like so much in this country — been seized, retrofitted, and put to work serving the greater glory of one Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, honoring his 79th birthday.

Given how Trump has festooned the Oval Office in gold bling, I can see how the humility of that title, "president," might begin to gnaw at him, and he'll declare himself to be, oh, Emperor of Everything, Supreme King and Gloria Mundi.

Assuming he hasn't already. There's so much to keep track of. You miss important stuff. Trump could have ordered the original Bill of Rights sent over from the National Archives to use as kindling in his fireplace and, I swear, the news would blip for 6 minutes until pushed aside by the next jaw-dropping violation of national norms.

A president, remember, is a governmental official. Elected by the people. Subject to the laws of the nation, running the country as co-equal in power with Congress and the judiciary. Instead the bare Republican majority in Congress is sprawled prostrate, twitching to every whim of Trump, and the judiciary, increasingly packed with handpicked Heritage Foundation nestlings, either sings hallelujah or, when a dissenting voice is heard, can be ignored.

Who dares to enforce a court decision that crosses Trump? To echo a line credited to Stalin: "How many divisions does the U.S. Court of Appeals have?"

Trump has an army, which he's forcing to parade down Constitution Avenue, mimicking his idol, Vladimir Putin — honestly, if they blare, "To Serve Russia," that nation's military anthem, from loudspeakers in Washington Saturday, you might be shocked. But would you really be surprised?

He also has Marines, 700 of whom he sent, along with the California National Guard to Los Angeles this week, over the objections of LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

An academic perfectly summed up what's happening.

"He is declaring utterly bogus emergencies for the sake of trying to expand his power to undermine the Constitution and destroy civil liberties," Ilya Somin, a law school professor, told the New York Times.

Mayor Brandon Johnson, striking a tone I cannot recall a Chicago mayor ever taking in the face of looming unrest, called upon the city to “rise up” and "push back" against the federal government undermining our rights.

"This is a necessary fight," he said at his press conference. "I am counting on all of Chicago to resist in this moment because, whatever particular vulnerable group is being targeted today, another group will be next."

It can't be said often enough: if there is no due process, if there is no legal procedure, then the random kidnapping of people who are supposedly here illegally can shift to those protesting these actions and anyone else. No one is safe.

It says everything that these mass ICE arrests are targeting only Democrat-run cities — as if undocumented workers aren't slaving away in Louisiana. This is about power, not policy.

Protests are expected to take place all over the country Saturday, aptly dubbed, "No Kings Day." Chicago's will run from 12 noon to 2 p.m. at Daley Plaza, though there will be others around the area: in Des Plaines, Mount Prospect, Oak Park, Arlington Heights, Schaumburg, Palatine, Evanston, Highland Park, Elgin, Naperville and Lisle.

This is not the first time people have poured into the streets to decry federal overreach. But if Trump is allowed to portray all protest as sedition — he called the Los Angeles protesters "insurrectionists," which is some world-class gaslighting, given how he gave a tongue bath, then pardoned, the actual insurrectionists of Jan. 6, 2021— it might be among the last. The Constitution guarantees our right to assemble and freely air our grievances. The existence of scattered lawbreakers doesn't change that, just as someone stealing change out of the coffee machine doesn't permit the government to shut down the library.

We need to say, in a clear, loud, steady voice: "You can't have our rights — we're using them."

Park District shuns an anti-hate ad — and ketchup on hot dogs

2025-06-10T17:22:59.411-05:00

Regular readers know that I belong to a widely reviled minority; contempt is increasingly heaped upon us without letup or shame.

I'm referring, of course, to people who put ketchup on hot dogs.

Not that I do it all the time — Friday I biked over to Little Louie's, the beloved Northbrook frankfurter joint, and ordered two chardogs, one with mustard, grilled onions and relish, for my wife, and one with mustard, grilled onions and a pickle spear for me. I don't relish relish.

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So not habitual with the ketchup. But I do reserve the right. And I push back against those riding the you-can't-be-a-Chicagoan-and-put-ketchup-on-your-hot-dog hobby horse. It's an old joke — Bugs Bunny goes to the steakhouse, slathers his steak with ketchup, and an incensed French chef in a tall toque chases him out of the restaurant with a cleaver.

It isn't that Chicagoans don't put ketchup on hot dogs — some obviously do. It's that certain Chicagoans pretend to care about it, deeply.

Why? A stab at sophistication — afraid of being considered rubes, Chicagoans insist upon their gustatory refinement. And a kind of parody of prejudice — we might not be able to mock the folks we once loved to mock, but we sure can still mock you, you loathsome ketchup lover you.

This is a popular gambit among New York advertising agencies trying to spray a whiff of authentic Chicago on their puffery like someone dosing an outhouse with a blast of Febreze.

Which is why I was surprised to see the Jewish United Fund, a venerable Chicago organization — founded in 1900 — launch an ad showing a frank with a single zigzag of ketchup.

"Hey Chicago," it taunts. 'Antisemitism is up 400%. Don't just hold the ketchup. Hold the hate."

Et tu, JUF? We ketchup lovers don't get enough grief? Is JUF now lumping us with antisemites?

"No, no, no," said Elizabeth Abrams, a spokesperson for the JUF. "It's not saying if you put ketchup on your hot dog you are an antisemite. We want to remind and inform the greater Chicago community that antisemitism is a pervasive problem."

They've got that right.

To imagine that the Trump administration is fighting antisemitism by going after universities for their anti-Israel protests is like pretending Donald Trump is against insurrection because he sent the Marines into Los Angeles.

History is clear: Authoritarianism is bad for Jews. Hating Jews feels so natural to some that opposing it seems controversial. The Chicago Park District rejected the organization's sign.

I asked the park district: What gives?

"The District maintains viewpoint-neutral restrictions on sponsorship and advertising agreements," it said in a statement, among other things, "advertising spaces are regulated to ensure they do not become public forums for speech which could result in content that is offensive or objectionable to individuals or groups. These standards are applied consistently and have led to the denial of other requests."

So fighting antisemitism is offensive to some? I suppose it is.

The version of the ad that is too edgy to put at Oak Street Beach spins what I first saw a little differently: "Who gets more hate than people who put ketchup on hot dogs? We do."

That at least has a note of solidarity. And with its bright Vienna Beef yellow, achieves the primary goal of all advertising: to attract attention. It sure attracted mine.

To return to why this is a perilous time for Jews in America, since some Jews, despite our reputed smarts, still don't seem to get it. I'm reading an excellent, thought-provoking book by Dara Horn called "People Love Dead Jews," where she lays out the situation in a single paragraph far better than I could in a page:

"Since ancient times, in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn't necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds. The Jews' continued distinctiveness, despite overwhelming pressure to become like everyone else, demonstrated their enormous effort to cultivate that freedom: devotion to law and story, deep literacy, and an absolute obsessiveness about consciously transmitting those values between generations. The existence of Jews in any society is a reminder that freedom is possible, but only with responsibility — and that freedom without responsibility is not freedom at all."

Ask yourself: Are we being governed by people who take responsibility for their words and actions? Who seem to care about law and freedom? That should tell you how dangerous today's America is for Jews and for everybody else. As for ketchup fans, we'll get by as best we can.