My friend Bill Green can see a little bit. I can’t see at all. The two of us have known each other for years, and a trip to Chicago’s Pullman neighborhood three weeks ago marked the first time we’ve actually worked together.

If you call getting a personal tour of Chicago’s new Pullman National Monument work, that is.

Let me explain. After learning of our involvement with the Chicago Cultural Access Consortium, The President & CEO of Museum Partners in Virginia emailed each of us, introducing herself as a museum consultant. She said she was working with an exhibit fabrication firm, and that firm had created an audio-described tour for the Visitor’s Center at the National Park Site.

”They would like it tested by two people,” she said, explaining that the site would be having its grand opening on Labor Day this year ,and they needed one tester to have low vision, the other to be totally blind. “They primarily want feedback on the directional aspect of the tour, she wrote. “But any feedback is welcome.”

Exhibit fabrication? Museum consultant? “Directional aspect” of a tour? I had no idea what those words meant, but I knew I qualified in the “totally blind” category. And once I got to the part of the note that said, “We will provide lunch,” I was in. During our six hours there, I learned :

• How the U.S. National Park Service ended up opening a site in Chicago’s historic Pullman neighborhood, (President Obama designated Pullman as a National Monument on February 19, 2015)
• Pullman was the first model, planned industrial community in the United States
• In its time, Pullman Company was one of the most famous company towns in the United States, and
• In the late 19th century, Pullman was the scene of the violent 1894 Pullman strike.

My ability to retain all that information three weeks after my visit supports the idea that the “directional aspect” of the tour works, don’t you think?! Before our visit, all I really knew about Pullman was that they were the ones who hired the Pullman Porters, the sleeping car porters Wanda bridgeforth talks about in stories she writes for our “Me, Myself & I” memoir-writing class. Pullman was the largest employer of Blacks in the country when she was a kid, and the greatest concentration of Pullman porters lived in the neighborhoods she’d grown up in on Chicago’s South Side. “Pullman only hired Black’s as Porters,” she told me, and on my visit to the national site I learned that, in its heyday, Pullman was the nation’s largest employer of African Americans.

What? Pullman had strong beliefs in social justice? Afraid not. He’d simply reasoned that newly-freed slaves and their sons and grandsons would make excellent servicemen who would work for long hours at little pay. Exhibits at the national site talk about the formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and how they became the first Black labor union in the United States chartered under the American Federation of Labor, an extremely important step in African American Civil Rights.

That I have retained a lot of what I learned at the Pullman Porter exhibits should tell you the audio description was pretty good, too. Still, most of what I know specifically about the Pullman Porters comes directly from Wanda Bridgeforth.

Wanda’s father and her five uncles grew up near the train station in Jackson, Mississippi, and Wanda writes how the Pullman Porters’ practice of bringing copies of The Defender,  — Chicago’s Black weekly — encouraged her relatives to migrate north (they’d find out about available jobs and housing in Chicago by reading the paper).

Porters were happy to deliver goods from the south to friends and family north of the Mason-Dixon line, too. Wanda loves to share how her Grandma Lula Johnson in Jackson would regularly bake birthday cakes for her offspring in Chicago and send them north with a porter. Wanda’s favorite uncle, Hallie B., would head to Chicago’s 12th Street Station on every birthday, collect the cake, and hand-deliver it to the birthday party here in Chicago. “The porters all knew my Grandma Lula,” Wanda laughs.

The National APR Pullman Porter Museum at the National Pullman Monument is dedicated to African American labor history. My time at the National Pullman Monument reminded me what a privilege it is to learn history directly from the people who lived it. Like Wanda.

PS: At 6 p.m. tonight (Thursday, August 26) you can Zoom in and hear a 2018 StoryCorps Chicago conversation I had with Wanda Bridgeforth  followed by a live Q&A with emcee Nestor Gomez asking me about my friendship with her. All free of charge, and all part of the StoryCorps Chicago Listening Event Finale tonight from 6 pm to 7:30 pm. Tune in!

A view of the park from our unit. The trees at the top are hiding the fountain.

When we moved into our condo in Chicago’s Printers Row neighborhood in 2004, there was a mangy little parking lot just to the south of our building, immediately below our window. But a mangy little parking lot was OK. Some of our neighbors bought a place with a view only to have it blocked by new hi-rises. Before we moved here, some developers had proposed a hi-rise on that space, but a group of committed neighborhood residents fought it and won. As a result, our unit still has a nice little view.

In 2009, the Chicago Park District, which bought the mangy lot, combined it with a tiny little plaza to the south that was the site of a decorative fountain. The result: Printers Row Park. In fact, it’s more of a plaza. It’s got benches and a little green space and some greenery and its landscape architecture is a clever homage to the days when the neighborhood was home to printers and adjunct businesses. Plus, the Park District refurbished the fountain—which had seen better days, and that alone was quite an improvement.

The park has always been a welcome addition–on Saturdays in spring, summer and fall, it’s the home of a farmers market. Beth and I have always been regulars at the market, but otherwise, she and I mostly walked by it rather than stop and sit and use it.

Until the pandemic lockdown. Then it became an oasis for us and our friends. With camp chairs and portable tables and maybe a festive beverage or two (it’s technically not allowed in parks), we’d gather for outdoor get togethers. We weren’t alone—groups regularly gathered with lawn chairs—it was a social oasis.

The fountain.

It didn’t stop when winter arrived—more than once we put our down jackets on to meet with friends at the park.

If we got one good thing out of the pandemic, it was a change in habit. Now we regularly use the park for get togethers. For some of us, that’s out of necessity. Two couples have to essentially act as if the lockdown is still on. One friend has two transplanted lungs and a transplanted kidney. He’s vaccinated, but vaccines are less effective in folks like him who take immunosuppressants. The stakes are high, so he and his wife have to be more careful than the likes of me a Beth.

Same goes for another friend, who is being treated for cancer, and her husband.

With very specific exceptions, we only see these people outdoors, and the park is a godsend. Last night was a summer potluck with a gourmet green bean salad, a caprese salad, fresh fruit, cheese, and salami.

Oh, and wine.

Beth was pouring herself a glass of white when one of our friends said, “Uh oh. There are two cops headed straight toward us.”

Beth said out loud, “Oh, I gotta put this away quick…”. As she scrambled to put the bottle back into her bag, one of the officers, a barrel-chested guy, said, quietly, “Not quick enough.” (He seemed to get a chuckle out of it.) But he and his partner walked right by us toward a group of kids who were doing skateboarding tricks on a ramp they’d set up. They were videotaping each other’s feats. The cops politely broke it up. (Lest you think it was heavy handed, there’s a very cool skateboarding park nearby. And the kids use one of the benches as a prop, scraping it up.)

As they walked past us back to their cruiser, the same cop said, “You’re gotta to be quicker next time,” with a smile on his face, and they got in and drove away.

P.S. The Printers Row Fountain needs another round of cosmetic and mechanical restoration. The Printers Row Park Advisory Council, a group of local citizens, is raising money to help with the costs. If you’re a local, or if you just like fountains, you can chip in here.

Here’s a story with a sad beginning…and a happy ending.

A letter I received late last Spring from the good folks at the Chicago StoryCorps booth alerted me to yet another change to accept here in Chicago.

That’s Wanda Bridgeforth and me after recording our StoryCorps conversation. The two of us are always happy to be together, can you tell? Photo courtesy StoryCorps.

Dear Beth,
We’re writing to share that after eight years at the Chicago Cultural Center, this September we will be ceasing operations at the Chicago StoryBooth.

Since we first opened in 2013, StoryCorps Chicago has recorded and preserved more than 4,000 facilitated interviews, including yours.

We are grateful to the Chicago Cultural Center and DCASE; to our Chicago-based funders; to WBEZ, our local station partner, and producer Bill Healy; to the many organizations we’ve partnered with which have enabled us to preserve so many voices of Chicago; and of course, to the Chicago participants like you who have shared their stories with us.

With gratitude,
The StoryCorps Chicago Team

In the eight years that StoryCorps was located here in Chicago, three conversations I recorded in the StoryBooth aired on Chicago Public Radio. Two were conversations with writers who were in the memoir-writing classes I lead:

1. In 2017 I interviewed Giovanna Breu. a retired journalist who had a long career with Life, Giovanna had covered the funeral and burial of President John F. Kennedy for the magazine in 1962.
2. In 2019, StoryCorps recorded a conversation I had with Wanda Bridgeforth. Among many other things Wanda talked about during that interview, she outlined the boundaries she grew up with on Chicago’s South Side. “When I was a kid, if you crossed east on Cottage Grove Avenue, a policeman would come out of nowhere, ask where you were going and escort you right back across the street.”

And then in 2019, when StoryCorpscontacted my friend Nancy Faust, the renowned retired White Sox baseball organist to see if she’d be willing to let them record a conversation with her in the Chicago StoryCorps booth, Nancy agreed “as long as Beth Finke is the one who interviews me.” What fun that interview was, and what an honor to be the interviewer Nancy Faust insisted on. The conversations with Wanda Bridgeforth and with Nancy Faust are now featured in two separate posts on their StoryCorps blog.

But wait. There’s more! Yesterday I received additional good –and very flattering – news.Here’s their letter:

As you may know, the Chicago StoryCorps booth has now closed its doors for the public at the Chicago Cultural Center, and we’re moving on with a final listening event. We chose to feature your conversation with Wanda and other memorable stories for this closing virtual event on August 26th from 6:00pm -7:3-pm hosted by Nestor Gomez. Would you be available to join us for a Q&A for this event?

No specifics yet about how you can tune in to the listening event, or what I have to do to participate, but You know me: I said yes. I also mentioned that while I haven’t been face-to-face with Wanda since March of 2020, we do keep in touch by phone. You Safe & Sound readers already know I have Wanda to thank for us getting so much positive attention from StoryCorps –she’s a superstar!

My appreciation goes out to Amy Tardif, Regional Manager of the Chicago StoryBooth for listening, to Bill Healy, the talented producer and great guy who put together the StoryCorps conversations that aired on WBEZ, and to the entire StoryCorps Chicago team. Thanks for the memories!

I’ve always thought “Field of Dreams” was kind of a bad movie with some irresistible features.

Bad because, well, a lot of the story arc just kinda doesn’t make sense. And because a lot of the dialog is clunky, overwrought, soap opera stuff.

Irresistible because when it came out we still lived in Urbana, Illinois and cornfields were as enmeshed in our lives as skyscrapers are today. And yes, because every time Kevin Costner asks  his reanimated father if he wants to have a catch, I cry. I think of my father and I can see his ridiculous baseball glove, a deep mahogany piece of leather that really looked like a glove—virtually no padding. He’d had that thing since he grew up in coal country in southwest Pennsylvania, about 40 miles from Pittsburgh.

So, in advance, I wasn’t sure how I felt about last week’s Field of Dreams baseball game between my White Sox and the Yankees. It had the makings of a, pardon the pun, corn fest. As in corny, schmaltzy, and overwrought like the movie itself. It was played not in the actual Field of Dreams from the movie, but a temporary stadium adjacent to the movie field. A lot could go wrong.

I wasn’t able to see the first half of the game—I had a work function to attend. But I got home in time for the last few innings. And I was completely enrapt. Somehow the whole damn thing worked, including the game itself.  And at the end, when White sox shortstop Tim Anderson hit an opposite field walk-off home run, I cried, just like when I watch the movie itself.

Yesterday, my nephew Aaron and his son Kieran drove up from Champaign, Illinois and joined Beth and me at Sox park to see the White Sox and Yankees play the third game of the Field of Dreams series. It was a beautiful day, hot in the sun, cool in the shade, breezy. The park was packed.

For several of his formative years, Aaron lived with my mom and dad. My sister was a single mom and at some point, living with our folks was the best way to build some stability. My sister was able to finish college at night school, and the two of them kept the same address for longer than they had previously been able to.

My sister died the day after her 60^th birthday—breast cancer. I lost my only witness to our upbringing—but because Aaron lived with my mom and dad, he and I have a certain kind of bond. We can joke about his grandparents’ many quirks.

Aaron’s son Kieran turned 19 on the day of the Field of Dreams game. He celebrated his birthday by watching the game with his two little sisters and Aaron. For those of you who didn’t see the game: the White Sox blew a three-run lead in the top of the ninth inning before Anderson’s heroics saved the day. Losing that lead left Aaron’s two daughters, who are not big baseball fans, crying, and wondering out loud why anyone watches baseball. The home run left them all hoarse from cheering.

And then they stayed up and streamed the movie.

P.S. The first walk-off homer by the White Sox against the Yankees was by … Shoeless Joe Jackson, in 1919.

My dad danced with my wife on July 28, 1984.

Last Wednesday, Beth and I celebrated our 37^th wedding anniversary.

I used to think it was strange to celebrate lengthy anniversaries. I mean, just lasting? That’s a thing?

Turns out it kinda is. Not that I think people should stay together just to stay together. If they’re not happy, or worse, if they’re in an abusive relationship, they should not stick it out.

Speaking for myself,  37 years means I have been lucky. Lucky to have experienced how great it can be in the good times and use that to push through the tough parts of life together.

We’ve had some tough parts. Beth losing her sight, yeah, that’s still tough. Gus having a rare genetic disorder, that’s still tough.

But some of the toughest tough parts have been more garden variety. Money and how we do or don’t spend it. My hanging my jackets on the backs of chairs instead of hanging them up. And myriad other habits that grate on one another.

A big tough one—for both of us—has been my mental health. I pretty much have a handle on it, but realize in retrospect  that for years, it made things hard on me and Beth. Harder than they needed to be.

Which is all to say, from the outside it’s pretty obvious the ways I help Beth—our lives are just mechanically different than most people’s. What gets lost is how much she has helped me during our time together. Talking me off various ledges. Getting me to go easier on myself, and on others. Teaching me to appreciate goodness in general. Giving me a reason to try to be a better man.

Here’s to our 38^th.