Here’s my husband Mike Knezovich back with another guest post.

Chris Sale stands 6’7” tall, weighs less than I do (I’m 5’ 10”) and when he’s on the mound pitching for the Chicago White Sox on a windy day, his uniform flaps around him like a loose nylon jacket on a

Mr. Bones, comin’ at ya.

speeding motorcyclist. Legendary Los Angeles Dodgers baseball announcer Vin Scully refers to him as “Mr. Bones.”

And I love him. Chris Sale that is. He’s won 15 games and lost five. He makes great hitters look like me when I was a little leaguer. And he is the quintessential White Sox story—that is, a great story, but still somehow not the story.

This Sunday night on ESPN, Sale will be on the mound against the Detroit Tigers’ Justin Verlander—last year’s American League Cy Young Award winner and Most Valuable Player. For true blue baseball fans, it’s a match made in heaven. For lots of casual fans, it will be the first they’ve heard or seen about Mr. Bones. That’s just the way it is with the Chicago White Sox. They’re like the solid big brother to their shrill drama queen little sister on the North Side.

I grew up in a household where both Chicago teams were always on the radio and TV. My mom and dad were both baseball fans, but my mom was the greater influence – Esther was the type who talked and yelled at the radio or TV during games. She grew up near Pittsburgh and worked summers as a waitress in Cleveland. An independent-minded woman who embodied feminism before that word existed, she was a fan of the great Bill Veeck, who owned the Cleveland Indians and eventually, the White Sox (in fact, he owned the White Sox two different times). Veeck put up the exploding scoreboard and (gasp) added players’ names to the back of their uniforms while he was here in Chicago. He also got Harry Caray to sing “Take Me out to the Ballgame” at Comiskey, introduced uniforms that included shorts, and oversaw the debacle/triumph known as “Disco Demolition.” He was not boring.

Veeck was a renegade who irked the establishment. Exactly the kind of person my mom adored. Between that and our proximity (when I and other school patrol boys got a special outing to a ball game, it was to Comiskey Park on the South Side), the Sox became mine, and I became theirs.

Almost heaven. Me at Game 1, 2005 World Series.

A friend who works in baseball once said to me, “It’s important to care deeply about something that doesn’t matter.” That’s how it is with baseball, and for me, with the White Sox. There has been heartbreak (Damn Yankees and others in the 50s and 60s, Oakland As during the 70s, the strike in ‘94) and indescribable joy (2005!).

Back in 1983, I introduced Beth to my parents at a game at old Comiskey Park. The day after our wedding, Beth and I and some dear friends who had traveled in from Washington, D.C went to a game. In July of 1985, just before our first wedding anniversary, Beth and I visited her eye doctor for a follow-up visit after a last-gasp surgery to save her eyesight. We learned that she would not see again.

Before heading back to Urbana to face our new reality, we drove to Comiskey to have a Polish sausage with onions (“wit” onions is the correct pronunciation), and take in a ball game. Twenty years later, in 2005, Beth and I and her Seeing Eye dog Hanni got seats in the handicapped section for the playoffs against Boston. Later, I sprung for game 1 of the World Series.

This year the White Sox are defying low expectations and leading their division. They’ve had a parade of rookie pitchers come through in the clutch. They have a rookie manager who’s never managed at any level before. A starting pitcher who is excelling after unprecedented surgery to fix a gruesome injury (a chest muscle tore free of the bone). They have Yankee castoffs (Jose Quintana and Dewayne Wise) and a Red Sox throwaway (Kevin Youkilis) starting. A guy from Cuba nicknamed “Tank” starts in left and one of his countrymen, Alexei Ramirez (“The Cuban Missile”) plays a sparkling shortstop.

It can be irksome, the way the White Sox story routinely gets lost in the shuffle. Then again, on a whim, Beth and I can decide to get on the Red Line, get off two stops later, get tickets at a decent price, have some great food, and see this phenomenal baseball team. So really, it’s just about right. They’re not a media sensation. They’re a baseball team. My baseball team.

P.S.

If you want to learn a little more about the White Sox, past and future, I hope you’ll read one of my favorite writers–Roger Wallenstein–at one of my favorite Web sites–The Beachwood Reporter. 

Some updates on the people you read about this past summer here at the Safe & Sound blog:

• Let’s start with my husband Mike’s guest post about White Sox pitcher Chris Sale. Last night Mike and I took the El down and got cheap tickets at the last minute to see Sale face Detroit’s Cy Young winning Justin Verlander. Alas. A rain delay. We were left to enjoy our beers and polish sausage while watching the Bears game on the JumboTron at White Sox Park instead. In the end, the game was postponed altogether. We still have Love for Sale, though.
• A cousin in Ohio read the post I wrote about my brother Doug bringing his trombone along on a visit to Chicago and sitting in with some jazz bands here. He forwarded the post to his son and daughter-in-law in Chicago, and Jason and Keely surprised us at one of Doug’s gigs. Friends from the neighborhood came, too, and I had great fun showing off my big brother.
• When Chicago trombonist Tim Coffman taught at that Jazz Camp for adults that I attended in July, I had no idea he knew my brother Doug. The post I wrote about jazz camp described the difficult time I had keeping up with the other jazz campers, and Tim’s reaction when he ran into me at one of Doug’s gigs confirms I was not exaggerating. “You’re Doug Finke’s sister?”
• If you read Sandra Murillo’s guest post about her friend who competed in the 2012 London Paralympics, well, Anjali Forber-Pratt’s races did not go as well as she’d hoped. “I proudly wore my Team USA jerseys,” she said when asked about returning home without a medal. “And I had the experience of a lifetime racing in front of sold out crowds of 80,000 in the stadium.”
• After I mentioned in a post here that Molly Ringwald’s father is blind, her proud dad (and fantastic jazz pianist) Bob Ringwald sent me a link to another Interview she had regarding her new book. Molly is currently on a 15-day book tour, and my brother Doug may be playing with her dad in San Francisco later this month.
• After a guest post by Sue Martin was published here, another guest post she wrote was published on the blog of the Veterans Health Administration’s Office of Health Information during National Suicide Prevention Week.
• If you were intrigued by my post about the essay I recorded for Race: Out Loud, they’ve archived the content created for the series. You can hear all of it now by linking to the WBEZ web site.
• I had such fun with the six-year-old great niece I blogged about in July that we invited her back. On her second visit, “Baby Flo” went on a field trip to the Old Town Aquarium store with her Great Uncle Mike. And I mean that word “Great” in every sense of the word.
• And lastly, speaking of great, a blog reader forwarded my post about chef Laura Martinez to an executive chef at a downtown Chicago restaurant. The chef had Laura in for an interview right away. From all accounts, her interview went well — she especially nailed it when asked how she handles challenges in the kitchen. The executive chef is looking to find a spot for Laura on his staff, and in the meantime, she is teaching a cooking class!

I’ll leave you here with the information about Chef Laura Martinez’s class. Sure wish I were 21 again so I could sign up. I could stand to learn from her knife skills!

Chef Laura Martinez is still hoping for a full-time gig. In the meantime, she’ll teach a cooking class for young adults.

The Chicago Lighthouse Vision Rehabilitation Center proudly presents cooking classes with
Chef Laura Martinez
Mondays, 5:00pm-7:00pm, September 24 – December 12
222 Waukegan Road, Glenview, IL 60025
Ages 13-21

Learn to cook: Chinese fried rice; pizza; brioche; couscous; “not your boxed” macaroni and cheese; Grandma’s recipes, and student requests.
Explore: the history and culture of the food of the week; menu planning; seasonal fruits and vegetables and budgetary factors.
Laura Martinez is a graduate of the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu culinary program at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago. She is totally blind, and excels in knife skills and in her use of herbs and spices, through her senses of touch and smell. Her finished product is as accomplished as any young chef, although Laura had the prestigious honor of being a chef at one of Chicago’s highest rated restaurants, Charlie Trotters.
To register contact:
Pam Stern, Manager of Youth/Senior Programs
847.510.2054 or pam.stern@chicagolighthouse.org

Good news! Soon all of the memoir-writing classes I lead will be back in session, which means our “Senior Class” feature will be back in full swing, too.

I’m getting the ball rolling by introducing Al Hippensteel as our guest blogger today. After a long career in the printing industry, Al retired, appropriately, here in the Printers Row neighborhood of Chicago along with his wife, Donna. When I assigned “Taste” as a prompt for the Zoom memoir-writing class he attends, I was prepared for writers to come back with essays about food, restaurants, recipes, people’s interest in books, literature, music, art, clothing, that sort of thing. But Al surprised me by weaving many different tastes into one 500-word tribute to Chicago.

Al and Donna enjoy a Rainbow Cone at Taste of Chicago.

Taste

by Al Hippensteel

A week ago, my wife and I walked over to the Taste of Chicago, a summertime tradition featuring an array of food booths, each one showcasing a different city eatery.

In previous years “Taste,” as we locals call it, has been located in Chicago’s Grant Park. This year it was set in the shadow of Buckingham Fountain.

You can find just about anything to suit your taste at Taste. Donna and I headed directly to Rainbow Cone, a Chicago favorite. Orange Sherbet, Pistachio, Palmer House, Strawberry, and Chocolate. But what interested me most this year was the diversity of food and combinations, like Indian Tandoori Chicken served as a taco. Thai food served as a taco. Who knew a taco shell could turn out to be the perfect carrier for other ethnic food? Folks transporting their finger food around were always perusing their next “taste.”

Earlier, on a drive to Michigan, we stopped by a local produce stand that was having a garage sale that day. A stack of old vinyl albums was included in the sale, and my wife zeroed in on Hair, the Musical. It reminded me of the magical time when we, the youth of the late 60’s, yearned for a more egalitarian world. The songs spoke of love, drugs, and acceptance of all people: black, yellow, red, white. I’m afraid a lot of it turned out to be youthful enthusiasm: Generations that preceded us did not accept Aquarius. When we went out into the world, many of us experienced push back against our long hair, our beards, our taste in clothes.

Now, as retirees, we live in various places as elder statesmen, or is it statesperson? Some have chosen to live in retirement communities. Some choose famously large and Disney-like ones.

But our preference? Donna and I want to age in place in the high-rise condo building we live in now, near downtown Chicago. We live in a vibrant city that has more cultural stimulation, restaurants and sports events than any retirement community could offer. And guess what? I’ve realized an unintended circumstance while living here.

It’s Aquarius! If not a building filled with free love and seniors high on gummies, an incredibly diverse building of owners and renters, a constantly evolving stew of folks of all ages and stages in life. Black, brown, yellow and white — immigrants who have chosen America, college students, retired people, young families having babies. We have different tastes, different religions, different ways of dress. We share a gym, a laundry room, an outdoor swimming pool. We volunteer to tend our gardens and sort packages in our package room. Everyone is invited to social events. Even our maintenance staff gets into the act by buying donuts and coffee for special events like the annual cross-town classic when the Cubs and the White Sox, our two baseball teams, meet.

Life here in Chicago isn’t perfect. Crime is higher than we would like. Local politics can drive you crazy. The city is coping with an influx of migrants, but Chicago has long been a city of immigrants. A large vibrant Chinatown is just two miles away. Large lively Hispanic communities are close by. The largest Ukrainian community in the United States is here in Chicago, and so is the largest Polish population outside of Warsaw. We know what migrants mean to the city. It means people who will fit in and work hard. So is it any wonder we have a veritable ethnic feast of food at a festival called “Taste of Chicago?”

In August of 1978, I was newly returned to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from an internship in Washington, D.C. And, for the first time in my life, I was a little cocky. I’d lived outside of the Chicago area! I knew stuff that you didn’t’! I’d lived in Washington, D.C. dammit!

I held hopes that I’d land a job back in D.C. as the result of that internship, but I had one year plus a summer of college to go.  And let’s say I wasn’t the most serious student for my senior year + a summer.  U of I had something called “new student week” back then. It was a full week of orientation in August. In its time, that meant a lot of debauchery, so old students came down to enjoy, too.

I learned a new club was opening on Green Street in Campustown, which was the main campus drag. The place was called Mabel’s. A university bigwig who handled its money decided Champaign-Urbana could use a New York-style jazz club. And Mabel’s was born. He’d  bought a bunch of antiques and curios at an estate sale for someone named Mabel, and the club was strewn with those relics.

It was a long flight of stairs up to the first floor of the club. And another shorter flight up to a balcony seating area.

I took a job there as a cocktail waiter. I didn’t care much about jazz, but well, it looked fun. Being a male server at a campus bar was sort of earth shaking back then, when just down the block young women servers dressed in skin tight Danskins. (Which all seems quaint in these times.)

Mabel’s first floor near the stage was quite the hip deal: It was big pillows on the floor. People laid on the floor propped up by those pillows. So I’d bring drinks out and set them on little weighted “tables” in the midst of the pillows. Back then, all you needed was a university ID to get into a bar, so we got lots of 18-year-olds on dates drinking strawberry daiquiris. At closing, some couples would be in oblivious liplocks. The manager would pump out the 1812 Overture as loud as it could go and that was that.

I digress. What I didn’t realize was that I was already a jazz fan, but didn’t know it. My favorite band at the time was Steely Dan, and the album Aja was hot as a firecracker. And my favorite part? The title song, and a solo by jazz great Wayne Shorter. Wayne was my gateway drug.

The University of Illinois has always had a vibrant jazz program in its music department, but perhaps never more vibrant then back then. There was UI Jazz Band #5, #4, #3, #2, and the vaunted #1. They were all good but #1 had ringers who were down from Chicago or other places as adjuncts.

The program was led by John Garvey, a character who regularly rode a mo-ped around campus while smoking a pipe. He had a thing for all kinds of music, including Russian folk, and he founded a Russian folk group as well as leading the jazz program.

The first time I heard #1’s horns crank it up, powerful, in complete synchronization, I was floored—and hooked. You can feel that shit, and it ain’t electrified like, say, The Who. It’s humans moving air.

The Mabel’s owner had done his homework and was a true jazz lover. He managed to book greats like the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra (if you have to ask, you can’t afford it). And Gary Burton on the vibes. All this in a college town in East Central Illinois.

Tonight we went to Jazz Showcase to see the Chicago Jazz Orchestra, an umpteen-piece band that took me back, and reminded me why I love a big jazz band. If you’ve never experienced a jazz big band, try it out. The arrangements, the musicianship, in my view, are unequalled.

1978 turned into 1979. Mabel’s waitresses didn’t need Danskins, they were just gorgeous. I fell in love with one of them; it was the first time I felt that way. (Not the last.) We had a sultry, carefree summer. I moved back to D.C. to take that job in August.

Oh, also, because I was out of sync with the Journalism calendar, I took basic reporting late. A young woman named Beth was in that class. We became friends.

On my last night working at Mabel’s on the day I handed in my graduating paper  (I was bartending by then), Beth came to help me celebrate. I gave her what would be my work number in D.C. should she ever be in town.

So yeah, I love a big jazz band.

I am pleased to introduce Lola Hotchkis as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. Lola’s cousin Nancy is a friend of mine and describes Lola as “the writer in the family.” Retired after a successful career in business, Lola lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband and joined our class once I started teaching via Zoom. This week’s assignment (in honor of COVID-19 vaccines) was “Shots” and prompted Lola to write this sweet slice of Americana.

Editor’s note: I am fortunate to have a few dear friends named “Nancy” — read closely and you’ll discover which one of them is Lola’s cousin.

Fred Gaier’s Shots

The hand cream recipe.

by Lola Hotchkis

My father Fred earned his pharmacy degree at the University of Illinois Chicago in 1940 and worked in a neighborhood drug store until drafted by the U.S. Army in 1942. Safely stationed in a Skagway, Alaska, hospital pharmacy, his memories of war time were good ones.

After the war, all Dad wanted was his own drug store. He found a store for sale, borrowed money from his uncle, and Gaier Drug Company, Inc., was established in 1947 at the southwest corner of Rockwell and Leland in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood.

Young Mary Faust’s uncle Bill sold insurance to the Gaier family. Knowing that Fred was single and a good catch, he brought his niece Mary to the store for a soda. The rest is history: Fred and Mary got hitched in September 1948. The drug store became the family business and the family fun.

Mom’s sister Jackie also had a family business. Uncle Eric rented organs and Jackie would play for events. Aunt Jackie recognized the talent in their daughter Nancy and trained her in the profession. To attract Christmas business, Eric would move an organ into the drug store window and grade-school-aged Nancy would play.

One of Dad’s friends dressed as Santa to entertain neighborhood children. He was positioned in a back corner in front of the public telephone booth and close to Dad’s domain in the back. Dad kept a bottle of bourbon conveniently located among the medicine bottles.

When he saw winter on the horizon, Dad brought home flu vaccine to his family. He would boil needles, carefully fill a syringe, and each of us received an annual flu shot. That’s why I’m not shot adverse.

Dad also made his own hand cream to sell in the store. The family helped produce it in our kitchen. Dad boiled the ingredients on the stove, then poured the hot liquid into thick white jars. Each family member was assigned a share of jars at the kitchen table. Our mission: Stir the liquid in each jar with a wooden tongue depressor until it solidified. We’d keep asking Dad, “Is it solid enough yet?” When the answer was affirmative, he’d give us new jars of liquid to stir while he capped and labeled the finished product.

Dad’s health suffered over the years with that bottle of bourbon in the back. His friends loved to come and visit. Each was offered a shot of bourbon. Each had one shot, but Dad had one shot with each friend.

Dad loved his store but the competition from Walgreens and Osco won out. No one would buy a corner drug store in 1968, but Osco came calling with a job offer. The district manager was smart. He helped clean out the store, bought the inventory that could be used, and placed Dad in the Osco closest to Rockwell and Leland. His customers followed, but I’ll never forget the day Dad put the key in the door for the last time.

He cried.