When today’s guest blogger Bindy retired, the local public TV channel, WTTW, did a feature on her and her store, Eureka. Click on the image to see it.

I am pleased to feature Bindy Bitterman as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. Bindy owned and managed Eureka, an amazing and eclectic little shop in Evanston, Illinois until 2015, when she retired at age 84. She moved to The Admiral at the Lake after that, and is a writer in the memoir class I lead there via Zoom. This Wednesday, November 11, is Veteran’s Day, so I thought it the perfect time to publish this story Bindy wrote about befriending a few veterans during World War II.

So Long to A Beautiful Friendship with an Unlikely Beginning

by Bindy Bitterman

I wish I could find the Chicago Tribune photo: 5 8th graders in 1944. We’d had a rummage sale, and raised enough money to donate a radio/phonograph to the Jewish USO downtown AND sponsor a breakfast there. What a day that was! Marty, Mel, and Al were there, three sailors from New York who’d been assigned teaching duties at Navy Pier. I never saw Al after that day, but Marty and I would become wartime pen pals as he moved on to other tasks at other destinations. And Mel! Gorgeous, wonderful Mel — our connection lasted until he died this year.

From its beginnings on that Sunday in 1944, our friendship expanded to include parents, spouses, and kids, mine and his. It reached from the suburbs of New York, where my husband Richard and I visited them, to our home in Chicago’s Rogers Park, where they visited us. It still continues with his wife, Helen, and his musician son.

I said gorgeous and I meant it. Mel was gorgeous into his 90s, and maybe he still was when he died. But that’s a minor part of his wonderfulness: he was dear. He was deep. He was kind. He was a great father and a great friend. He took life seriously but laughed throughout it. He and Helen loved kids, and when they came to visit ours, they brought their guitar and their kid-friendly songs and jokes and riddles and tongue-twisters (not all of them music to MY ears; some I thought a bit too vulgar). Of course, my kids loved every one of them. And they adored Mel and Helen.

That first day we met, I had taken the three sailors home with me to meet my parents. My mother, all charm and graciousness, immediately won their hearts. A bond developed. Shortly thereafter, when Mel married Helen and brought her to Chicago, the couple started visiting frequently. During a phone conversation Just a month or so ago, Helen reminisced about my parents and their lovely Chicago apartment.

Yes, we’re still in touch. I drop her a line or two on my prettiest note cards every few weeks now.

Because I didn’t for a while.

When my husband Richard died, Mel and Helen were still healthy. But they moved into an assisted living facility in their Long Island area, and shortly thereafter, Mel began showing gradual signs of dementia. I couldn’t bear to think of either of them, but especially Mel, in that condition, but I kept calling every few months as I had done through the years. After a while, though, it became too painful. No calls, no notes.

Their son phoned a few months ago. Mel was gone. A piece of my heart went, too.

But Helen and I are back in touch. She and Mel were married 77 years, I think. She’s well into her 90s, too, but seems pretty chipper.

Didn’t someone in our group say something about putting your sad thoughts in a basket? I need a trunk!

Today’s blogger, Cam Estes.

To honor what would have been John Lennon’s 80th birthday yesterday, I asked writers in my memoir classes to choose a Beatles song title and use that as the title of their 500-word memoir.  A few writers came back with essays about being “back in the USSR,” one wrote about how they “should have known better, and a few wrote on what might have happened “If I Fell…”. You get the picture.

Today’s guest blogger, Cam Estes, a 76-year-old retired businessman and entrepreneur, was the only one who wrote a piece about his “Taxman.” A mindful meditator and meditation guide to fellow seekers of better trained minds, Cam generously offered to share his honest and powerful essay here with you Safe & Sound blog readers.

Taxman

by Cameron Estes

Gay relationships in the 1980s meant lots of social caution. My lover/partner, Hal, and I lived and worked together as we built a business selling high end calculators mail-order and through a small shop on Lincoln Avenue in Skokie. Within months we had grown the staff, the sales and our plans for the future. We grew exponentially in our personal and business lives. The business growth culminated in taking the company public — mainly to get Hal’s father out of the business.

One year after taking Elek-Tek public, Hal committed suicide.

We had been together 13 years. The unexpected suicide left behind a devastated, PTSD me.

No marriage for gay couples in 1994 so years before we had taken a gamble and left major assets in Hal’s name. After all, he was 10 years younger, and far healthier with no vices to compare with my cigarettes. Suicide introduced me to the taxman, Inequality, and the chaos of conflicting government laws.

If we had been married there would have been no tax. Not having the same rights as heterosexual couples created a great disadvantage. Hal had 2.5 million shares of the stock in his name. Since it was a recent public offering, the stock was labeled SEC144 stock and could not be sold to the public. But the Taxman wanted 50% of the value for estate tax.

I hired the “best” estate lawyers. The attorneys told me how much trouble I was in due to Hal’s death and convinced me to pay the taxman all the cash I could raise, took $500,000 for themselves, and then told me that I was stuck for the rest of my life paying the Taxman due to their “incredible” guidance.

I still owed the taxman millions of dollars, the board forced me out of the company I had built noting that I had too many personal challenges. Eighteen months later the company was bankrupt and I had a worthless stock certificate. The idea of working the rest of my life for the taxman was not appealing. To earn those millions would take a huge effort and might not be successful.

I withdrew.

The taxman went very quiet for years. But then, when I was almost 70, the phone rang and I heard a voice say “this is the taxman.” I felt a flush of sheer black fluid run through my body. Nothing functioned for a minute. And then I responded.

The taxman started proceedings to sue me again. Seven years earlier the taxman had pulled a law suit the day before we went in front of a judge. The agent had told me that the IRS did not want to sue me but they did not know how to end the whole affair. This time the Taxman said, “If you fight and lose, we will take IRA accounts and 1/2 of your social security.” My new attorneys said “the Federalist Society controls the court, your chances are minimal.”

I succumbed to the sweet song of the taxman and gave them my all.

It has come to my attention that the post I Published yesterday about teaching memoir-writing classes was somewhat garbled at the end – sorry about that! Those of you who missed the stunning ending can read it in its entirety below, and as a bonus to this version, I am including a piece of writing Wanda came up with while whiling away the hours sheltering in place these past weeks. “It’s just a squib,” she told me over the phone. “But I think you’ll like it.” I sure do, and know you Safe & Sound blog readers will, too.

The Issue is Toilet Tissue

by Wanda Bridgeforth

Why the run on toilet paper? Is it our solution to be clean after using the bathroom facilities? Is it because we feel there is no substitute for this product?

Today’s water saving commodes clog up on all toilet tissue substitutes, even the beloved Kleenex. Bathrooms of today are mostly cubby holes -saving toilets that accept only toilet tissue, I hark back to the days of the pull-chain toilet.

Back in the pre-depression and during the depression days the substitute for toilet tissue was newspaper, All of the bathrooms were large and their floors were covered with newspaper. I remember lingering in the bathroom reading the newspaper that covered the floor! We crumpled the newspaper and wet it under the facebowl faucet, it was as soft as today’s tissue. I wonder now if any ink print was left on the wiped area?

PS: If the tissue issue becomes acute and the newspaper sales increase? Josephine et-al Man the snakes and plungers.

And now for the reblog of yesterday’s post. Enjoy!

Benefits of Memoir Classes: Teaching Online

by Beth Finke

Over the 15-plus years I’ve been leading memoir classes in Chicago many many people have suggested I offer an online course as well. “You’d get people from all over the country,” they say. “You could charge a lot, and you wouldn’t even have to leave home.”Not leave home? Being with my writers is what I love most about teaching memoir. Hearing Wanda’s classmates scramble to find her a seat when she arrives; sensing the drama of passing a bag of Scrabble tiles around to determine who picks “Z” out of the bag (usually “A” goes first, but sometimes I go backwards!); Bindy’s delight to hear an assignment that inspires a limerick; Janie reading an essay out loud for a fellow writer whose low vision prevents them from doing so on their own; the collective gasp when Bruce recites a particularly poignant phrase; hearing updates on our new Grail Café from writers who stopped there before coming to the class I lead in the neighborhood; taking in the ooos and ahs whenever Michael brings a show and tell to passs around as he reads his latest essay.

“Being right there to sense writers reading their stories in their own voices, watching how trust grows in a group of people who share life stories…to me that’s the most important part of what I do,” I tell the online pushers. “Eavesdropping before and after class tells me a lot, too, and you just can’t eavesdrop like that online.” I thank the friends for the online class idea. “But it just won’t work for me.”

Those online pushers are a determined bunch.

They power on, describe a site or program or app or whatever it is you call it where you can see everyone’s face on the screen. “You can see everyone there and watch their reactions right from home,” they reason.

“But I can’t see!” I remind them. That’s usually where The conversation ends.

Writers join the memoir-writing classes I lead for all sorts of reasons. Some want to hone their writing skills, some hope it will improve their memory, others want to collect their essays as a gift to their relatives. Some like the weekly deadline, some hope to get their essays published, others count on sharing time every week with a group who likes to hear –and share — their life stories. This post written by Dr. Jeremy Nobel in the Harvard Health Blog presents scientific data supporting a benefit many writers don’t anticipate when they first sign up: the idea that writing and sharing stories about your life can be “even lifesaving in a world where loneliness — and the ill health it can lead to — has become an epidemic.” From his blog:

Picking up a pen can be a powerful intervention against loneliness. I am a strong believer in writing as a way for people who are feeling lonely and isolated to define, shape, and exchange their personal stories. Expressive writing, especially when shared, helps foster social connections. It can reduce the burden of loneliness among the many groups who are most at risk, including older adults, caregivers, those with major illnesses, those with disabilities, veterans, young adults, minority communities of all sorts, and immigrants and refugees.

Dr. Nobel did not specify in his blog whether the sharing had to be done in person to fight loneliness, or if sharing online would work just as well.

When it was determined that the Thursday afternoon Village Chicago class would not be meeting in person for their fifth and sixth classes of this session, I decided to try an experiment: send an email with their prompt, assure them I’d still edit essays for anyone who wanted to send their assignments my way, then encourage them to “reply to all” and email their completed essays (whether edited by me or not, that didn’t matter) to their fellow writers to read at their leisure. I would email my comments to every writer who sent an essay, and Comments from their classmates would come to them via email, too rather than in person. I made it clear that students were not required to read the essays they received via email, but I encouraged them to do so and respond to help us keep in touch while classes were cancelled. Results?

• During week one, 20% of the writers sent essays to their fellow writers via email, and 6.66% of writers emailed their classmates with a comment.
• During week two, our final class of this six-week session, 6.666% of the writers sent essays to their fellow writers via email, and 0% emailed that classmate with a comment.

I know, I know. This is just a personal non-evidence-based very short experiment, and maybe it’d work if I used one of those apps, but really, I’m too busy washing my hands and spraying the knobs on the radio to learn how to download one right now. So I’m sticking to my guns. If I’m the one teaching, it’s gotta be in person.

Or so I thought.

I’ve mentioned Wanda Bridgeforth, our 98-year-old memoir matriarch, in this post and want you blog readers to know she is doing well. “I am not really affected,” she told me during one of our phone calls these past few weeks. “I stay home most of the time anyway!”

For the past three years, Wanda has been participating in the University of Chicago Medical Center’s Comprehensive Care, Community, and Culture Program and receives a personal phone call every three months to ask about her health and the quality of care she has been receiving. “But this past week it was different,” she told me over the weekend, marveling at how the doctor who called this time managed to be on the phone with all the study participants at once. “He could answer all our questions about the coronavirus and all that, they had 15 of us all on the phone line at once!”

I had questions. Could everyone on the phone actually hear each other? Wasn’t it scratchy? Was everyone polite? Didn’t people interrupt each other? “Oh, no, it was great! All very clear,” she assured me. “So listen, okay with you if I make some phone calls Monday morning, you know, to se how that works and if we can set something like this up for our class?”

Of course I said yes!

That’s what the web looked like in 1993. Click on the image for a great story in Wired about the excitement Mosaic created.

I just watched a couple episodes of a Nat Geo mini-series that looks back at those heady days of the dot.com boom. Overall I liked The Valley of the Boom more than I thought I would—generally, I think people who’ve had a front row seat for an event that is covered in the news or on the screen find fault in these things.

I certainly did, but more on the fault thing later. What the show captured well was the sense that at the time, it seemed like now all things were possible, all old assumptions and rules were out the window, that the sky was the limit—it bordered on a sort of rapture.  Every staff member at every company woke up every day either thinking they would conquer the world, or go out of business by month’s end, and some days both.

Last year about this time I posted about the 25^thanniversary of the Mosaic web browser. Mosaic was developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The Mosaic browser made the World Wide Web—previously the realm of researchers, government agencies, and large government contractors—available to the rest of us. And the rest is history, as they say.

Charlatans were everywhere, and it was hard to pick them out from the crowd because even the good guys could seem delirious and sort of evangelical sometimes.

One of those good guys was my boss, Doug Colbeth—who’s still a friend, I’m proud to say. Doug turned Spyglass, a scientific software company fighting for survival in Champaign, Illinois, into an unlikely dot.com in the middle of DuPage County that went public in 1995 against all odds.

We really didn’t stand a chance against Netscape and other behemoths located in Silicon Valley, with their access to armies of experienced staff and oodles of capital. But somehow….

Doug knew early that the so-called “browser wars” were a blip. That the browser was a commodity, a valuable one, but in the same way that a screwdriver is valuable. And, that there was not a sustainable business to be built on browsers.

He was right. Spyglass licensed and commercialized Mosaic, then licensed its browser code to Microsoft, and that code turned into Internet Explorer. Which ended up absolutely destroying Netscape Navigator, and, eventually, Netscape. Meanwhile, Spyglass pursued what was to some a hare-brained strategy: That web technology and mini browsers would eventually be built into devices ranging from gas pumps to TVs to refrigerators refrigerators. Spyglass built a highly profitable business and was eventually sold to a TV technology company.

Anyway, I confess to some certain satisfaction during the scene in “Boom” in which the Netscape CEO announces the sale of Netscape to AOL. In essence, it was the end of Netscape. And I took some pride in the knowledge that our little company, a mouse that roared, won that browser war.

As for the show, it does what the mainstream press did in real time: For the sake of story, they focus on the high-profile rock stars. Marc Andreessen, the maladjusted tech wunderkind. Jim Clark, a Silicon Valley icon. And Jim Barksdale, the celebrity CEO.

We love boy-hero stories but advancements are always a collective thing, more nuanced, and more inspiring than the wunderkind stuff, if you ask me. It’s story of steady progress built on brilliance and work and stacked on the shoulders of forbears. This web thing goes back to the likes of  Tim Berners-Lee at CERN

and Vint Cerf. And they built on the work of their predecessors and colleagues.

In any case, “Boom” is a worthwhile watch, well acted, and nicely peppered with interviews with the real players looking back on that insane era. And it was nuts!

Glad I had a front row seat.

That’s Ulrich and Ellen Sandmeyer, a few years back. If you’re on Facebook, click the image to read a beautiful tribute at the Sandmeyer’s Bookstore page.

The spring of 2003 I was without a job—the weekly newspaper I worked for in Champaign-Urbana had closed its doors at the end of 2002. I hung around the office a couple months to take care of the nasty details.

Our son Gus had moved to a facility for the developmentally disabled in Wisconsin a few months earlier.

I was aimless.

Then, Beth’s first book, “Long Time, No See,” was published in April. It was what I can see now as a demarcation in Beth’s life, and in our lives—one of those many lines in a good life that defines “then” and “now.” Suddenly everything was different. A vacuum presented opportunity.

We each grew up in the suburbs. But neither of us had ever lived in Chicago—the city that defined what a city is for the two of us. If not the spring of 2003, then when?

Back when Beth was at Braille Jail (her nickname for the state rehabilitation facility for newly visually impaired people in the near west side of Chicago) her sister and brother-in-law would occasionally spring her for a meal in the nearby Printers Row neighborhood. Beth had fond memories of those bits of relief from living in the blind version of Cuckoo’s Nest.

That was a start for our finding a new home. I did some online research and we made some visits and eventually leased a place a couple blocks from the real Printers Row. That real Printers Row being one block—maybe two if you’re generous—between Ida B. Wells Drive, a major thoroughfare, and the old Dearborn Station, where Dearborn Street ends. Dearborn Station used to be a bustling train depot, but it now houses yoga studios, medical offices, a Montessori school and the like.

Our neighborhood is so named because most of the buildings on our street were originally used by printing and publishing businesses, or those that supported the logistics of those endeavors. (Also, Elliot Ness once had an office in our condo building, but I digress.)

Back in the day, printers relied on natural light to check their work, so the windows in neighborhood buildings are tall and wide. The ceilings are high, too, to accommodate printing presses and other equipment. The neighborhood went the wrong way for a long time, and most of the lovely old buildings were marked for demolition in the 70s and 80s. Thanks to some stubborn preservationists, the visionary architect Harry Weese (D.C. friends, you have him to thank for the design of your subway stations), and pioneering folks who were willing to homestead in Printers Row, the neighborhood was not lost, but found.

Two of those homesteaders were Ulrich and Ellen Sandmeyer, who opened their bookstore long before Printers Row was a sure bet. I first met Ulrich when I was up from Urbana doing a scouting trip. I stopped in to see if Beth might make a promotional appearance for her book there.

“Nein” was the answer. OK, Ulrich didn’t say it in German, but it was firm. Ulrich Sandmeyer hailed from Germany, spoke impeccable English, but you know, once German, always German. He explained that the store is so small it doesn’t well accommodate such events.

But Beth charmed Ulrich (or did he charm her?), who teased her for her unabashed self-promotion. Ellen—who maintains the shelves and window displays in ways that are both artistic and sales-savvy—put “Long Time, No See” in the front window, trumpeting a local author. This, even though Beth had been local for, oh, a couple months. Ulrich also, as they say in the book business, hand-sold a ton of Beth’s books. The German guy was a damn good salesman.

The Sandmeyers, as much as anyone or anything, made Chicago feel like home.

That was, as Humphrey Bogart would say, the start of a beautiful friendship. Sandmeyer’s Bookstore was and is an anchor—the anchor—of what I, totally biased, think is the best neighborhood in Chicago. And the Sandmeyers became the most wonderful kind of friends that one can make as adults. By that, I mean they already had full lives when we met them, as did we. But somehow, they and we found just enough  room for one another.

Sandmeyer’s Bookstore is a polished little gem—every warm, wonderful thing about Ulrich and Ellen courses through it. The wooden floors creak, the radiators clank, the selection is beautifully and intelligently curated with purpose, and there are always witty little novelties at the checkout counter—book lovers’ versions of the candy rack enticing an impulse buy. (My personal favorite was a GW Bush end-of-term countdown clock/keychain.)

Ulrich’s wry sense of humor always astounded me. First, because humor is one of the most nuanced and difficult things to master for a non-native English speaker, and he had mastered it and then some. Second, because like other non-native Americans, he had an outsider’s viewpoint that never failed to open my eyes. I was just another fish in the tank.

He and Beth developed a rich relationship—he came to call the now-closed Hackney’s, our old watering hole—“Beth’s office.” We’d stop by the store just to catch up, talk politics, and have a laugh. We’d run into him outside the store, when he was out taking a smoke break. Like the friendly and crusty beat cop, Ulrich was a comforting, reliable presence to us, and to the whole neighborhood.

Thank you for following along as I get used to using the term “was” when it comes to Ulrich. He died last Friday. I would say “after a long illness.” But, again, humor me: he died of cancer, fucking cancer, goddamn fucking cancer.

I miss him.

I know the drill. I’ll always miss him. The neighborhood will always miss him.

And like the other remarkable people that I’ve been privileged to know, he’ll never really be gone. The last time I saw him was before Amazon announced what cities it would be fleecing for the opportunity to let the company roost. Amazon, let it be said, has not been good for independent bookstores. One of the Sandmeyer’s employees told us the story of how someone once browsed the aisles, picked up a book, and asked, “Do you know how much this costs on Amazon?”

She was astonished.

Ulrich was dispassionate about such things. Or, I should say, he never seemed to take them personally.

I can imagine our talk about Amazon’s decision. I’d get all uppity about it and say good riddance to something we never had.

And I can hear him laughing at me.