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Mondays with Mike: One immigrant’s life

June 12, 20177 CommentsPosted in guest blog, politics, Uncategorized

Today I’m happy to share a post by our dear friend Milton Otto. Milton lives in Urbana, Illinois. We met Milt years ago at an Urbana watering hole called the Iron Post. He was running for city council and had just come in from an evening of knocking on doors. We struck up a conversation and ended up writing a check on the spot; we became his first, if not his biggest, donor. I could do a whole post about Milt, but that’s for another day. For now, I’ll share this nugget which he wrote last week upon the passing of University of Illinois Professor Fred Kummerow, and I hope you’ll give it a read.

Fred Kummerow in his lab.

A cussedly stubborn biochemist
by Milton Otto

This morning I had an egg for breakfast and read the obituary of Fred Kummerow in the News-Gazette. He was a giant. He lived to be 102. Honestly, he died too young. Bear with me as I explain what I mean by that.

He was part of the team that identified a deficiency of niacin in the diet as the cause of pellagra. Deaths from pellagra dropped from over 2000 in 1941 to 12 in 1945.

In 1957, he published his first paper on the link between trans fats and heart disease. He then fought a stubborn battle for over 60 years to force the FDA to recognize that trans fats rather than dietary cholesterol were causing our epidemic of heart disease and stroke. It was a lonely fight as his lab struggled for funding against the united opposition of the giant food companies and their powerful allies. But, eventually Fred prevailed.

In 2007, New York City banned adding trans fats to food. There was a lot of sneering and jeering from Fox News and their ilk. But, New York City immediately saw hospital admissions for heart attack and stroke begin to decline.

https://jamanetwork.com/…/jamacard…/article-abstract/2618359

One estimate, based on New York’s experience, showed that a ban on trans fats that are added to food would save 12 lives per year per 100,000 of population.

http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/…/1814/31898/MWP_2014_12.pdf…

In a country of 326 million people, halting the practice of adding trans fats to food would save 39,000 lives per year. That’s the equivalent of eliminating all deaths from traffic accidents. Would you be willing to butter your toast with real butter instead of margarine if it meant no one ever died from a traffic accident again? I would.

In 2014, on the cusp of turning 100 years old, Fred sued the FDA to force them to act and stop food companies from adding this poison to our food. In 2015, the FDA finally agreed with Fred and acted to remove this additive from our food supply by 2018.

Each and every one of us has seen uncles, aunts, parents, grandparents, siblings, and dear friends struck down too soon by stroke and heart disease. How many of those people would have led richer and fuller lives if, in 1957, those with power had listened and verified Fred Kummerow’s findings instead of attempting to silence him.

With any luck, by the time I die, Fred Kummerow’s hard work and cussed stubbornness will have saved well north of 1 million lives. Very few of those people will ever know his name.

So, that is the end of Fred Kummerow’s obituary. But, it’s not quite the end of what I learned this morning.

It turns out that Fred Kummerow was born in Berlin, Germany during World War I. His early childhood was filled with hunger and want. His mother put Fred and his brother to bed on weekends to conserve their energy because they had so little food. Eventually, relatives in America sent money so that Fred’s family could come to Milwaukee.

Fortunately, Fred’s family was welcomed. Although Fred was 8 years old, he was placed in first grade at school because he spoke not a word of English.

By the time he was in 8th grade, he had caught back up to grade level and was winning U.S. History contests at his school.

America was much poorer in 1922 than it is today. It had just survived the most catastrophic episode of organized violence that the world had ever seen in World War I. It had every reason to turn away the family of a soldier who had fought on the other side in that awful blood-letting.

But, America didn’t turn away Fred Kummerow’s family.

And because America didn’t turn away Fred Kummerow, millions of people will live who otherwise would have died.

Donald Rumsfeld, arguing that we should invade Iraq, observed, “there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

What our conservative friends sometimes forget is that Rumsfeld’s logic applies not just to evil, but also to good.

When we are kind, there are good things that we know will result. A child gets to eat.

We also know that our kindness often results in other good things which we cannot predict. That child grows up and becomes a college professor.

What we cannot lose sight of is that sometimes kindness results in good things that no one could have imagined. That child becomes a cussedly stubborn biochemist who hammers away for decades until he has saved millions of lives.

Is one of the unaccompanied minors currently in the Urbana school system the next Fred Kummerow?

I don’t know. I guess that’s an unknown unknown.

But, I’m optimistic.

Two opportunities this weekend to meet memoir-writers you know from Writing Out Loud

June 7, 2017CommentsPosted in book tour, careers/jobs for people who are blind, memoir writing, public speaking, writing

Those of you who have read Writing Out Loud know that essays by the writers in the memoir classes I lead are sprinkled throughout the book. This week you have a couple of opportunities to meet some of those writers in person:

  1. Bruce and Anne Hunt (Writing Out Loud readers will know them from Ch. 65, “The Hunts”)  will each read their essay from Writing Out Loud at a book-launch party The Village Chicago is throwing for us this Friday, June 9 from 2:30 to 4 pm at the Woman’s Athletic Club, 626 N. Michigan in Chicago.Blog readers in the Chicago area can still sign up, you just need to RSVP by the end of the business day today, June 7, 2017 at info@thevillagechicago.org or 773.248.8700. Admission is $12 for Village Chicago Members and $15 for non-members (book purchase separate).
  2. Anna Nessy Perlberg (Writing Out Loud readers know her from Ch. 85, “Anna’s House in Prague”) and Wanda Bridgeforth will read during a panel we’re doing at Printers Row Litfest titled Getting Your Memoir Off the Ground…and Published. Wanda self-published her memoir, On the Move. A number of her essays are also excerpted in Writing Out loud, and on Sunday she’ll read from Ch. 22, “All Aboard with Wanda.”Anna will read a section from her memoir The House In Prague, which was published by Golden Alley Press last year. The panel will be moderated by Nancy Sayre, publisher/editor at Golden Alley Press. This all happens at the Printers Row Lit Fest on Sunday, June 11, 2017, at 10 a.m.in Room 4008 at Jones College Prep High School, 600 S. State Street in Chicago. Advance tickets for the event are free of charge but are sold out. A few extra tickets will become available 15 minutes before the event and they are free of charge too, available on a walk-up basis. Come on down!

PS: Whitney the Seeing Eye dog and I will also be sitting at a table in front of Sandmeyer’s Bookstore, 714 S. Dearborn, from 11 a.m. until noon on Saturday, June 10 during #prlf17 if you want to stop by and say hello. Buy a book, and Whitney the Seeing Eye dog might just add her pawtograph, too…!

Mondays with Mike: Pun names

June 5, 20178 CommentsPosted in Mike Knezovich, Mondays with Mike, Uncategorized

No matter where I’ve lived, and no matter where I’ve traveled, I’ve noticed a commonality, and I’m not sure it’s heartening or not: It’s the love of so-good-they’re-bad punny names for certain businesses.

Not all businesses mind you, but for some reason, certain businesses just bring out the best/worst in their pun making owners.

Photos of porta potty.

There’s a Pepe Le Pew joke here for the taking.

Take the beauty business—hair salons, tanning joints, etc. I can riff off a dozen that I’ve seen just driving around over the years. (From Hair to Eternity is one of my favorites.) But I Googled and it’s really a thing. I mean really a thing. Take this Buzzfeed feature—there are 18 featured altogether, and if you have the nerve, by all means look at them all. Here’s a quick sampling:

Grateful Head

Combing Attractions

Scissors of Ahhhz

There’s something about grooming, because the same thing goes for pet groomers and boarders. Have any doubt? Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is go through this roll call of pun names at AtlasObscura titled A Round of Appaws for America’s Best Pet Care Plans. A few examples:

Noah’s Arf

LaundroMutt

Groomingdales

And of course, there is the porta potty business. Even the tag lines are ripe for exploit—Number 1 in the number 2 business for example. Chicago is well represented in this old but still good AdWeek piece on porta potty company names. Just a few:

LepreCAN

Wizards of Ooze

Doodie Calls

I’m thinking about opening a waxing business. I’m gonna call it Grin and Bare It.

Don’t miss Seeing Eye dog Whitney and me this Saturday at The Bookstore

May 31, 20172 CommentsPosted in book tour, careers/jobs for people who are blind, memoir writing

Whitney the Seeing Eye dog and I will be signing copies of my new book Writing Out Loud from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. this Saturday, June 3, 2017 at The Bookstore, 475 N. Main in Glen Ellyn, one of Chicago’s western suburbs.

Reviews on amazon.com of my new book about the colorful cast of characters in my memoir-writing classes in Chicago (and how I manage to lead them without being able to see what I’m doing) have been positive, and one very important review came in by phone last week as well. Ninety-five-year-old Wanda Bridgeforth, one of a handful of writers featured in Writing Out Loud,, called immediately after she’d finished reading and said, “I’m so full I can’t talk.” Now, that’s sayin’ something!

That's Jenny with the late great Seeing Eye dog Hanni and me a few years back at The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn.

That’s Jenny with the late, great Seeing Eye Dog Hanni and me at The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn.

You might remember my friend Jenny Foucré Fischer from numerous posts I’ve published here about the independent bookstore she’s been working at for decades in Glen Ellyn. Jenny and I have been friends since our teenage years in Elmhurst, Illinois, and she announced her retirement last month. That means my booksigning this Saturday just might be the last one she has set up for The Bookstore. So let’s help her go out with a bang, shall we? C’mon down!

Mondays with Mike: The lingering war at home

May 29, 20173 CommentsPosted in politics

Our friends Jim and Janet will be visiting Vietnam come June. And if they have the kind of experience that seemingly everyone who visits that country has, they are likely to come back marveling at the culture, the food, and the warmth of the people who we were at war with not so long ago.

image of helicopter

Saigon fell in 1975, but Ken Burns thinks we’re still not over it.

After Saigon fell in 1975, though, I’m not so sure those of us at home ever fully reconciled with one another. Just a month ago I was party to an argument that I surely didn’t think I’d be hearing in 2017. It was about Jane Fonda, and her infamous trip to North Vietnam while the war was raging. There are those who despise her as a traitor, and those who will defend her to various degrees. This, more than 40 years after the war ended.

It was an unpopular war, one we lost, so the returning veterans didn’t get any ticker tape parades. And lots have had to fight—or are still fighting—for benefits and treatment that were owed them by the VA.

I was just old enough to remember the strife at home clearly. The war tore open a rift in my mom’s side of the family—one that they all carried to the grave. My sister, who was editor of the high school paper, was nearly expelled after she ran an anti-war poem. Hard-hat construction workers beat up long-haired demonstrators. And Kent State. And, and, and….

I was reminded of all this by a NY Times piece written by filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick titled Vietnam’s Unhealed Wounds. Burns and Novick are doing a documentary on the Viet Nam era that is soon to be released.

Here’s a passage from their article:

For more than a generation, instead of forging a path to reconciliation, we have allowed the wounds the war inflicted on our nation, our politics and our families to fester. The troubles that trouble us today — alienation, resentment and cynicism; mistrust of our government and one another; breakdown of civil discourse and civic institutions; conflicts over ethnicity and class; lack of accountability in powerful institutions — so many of these seeds were sown during the Vietnam War.

I think there’s a lot to the idea that a lot of current divisions are traceable to that time period. The older I get the longer view I take. I’m looking forward to the documentary. But it will be hard to watch.