1921 was a very good year: Wanda Geneva Johnson was born that year! If you’ve followed our blog for a while, you know Wanda Johnson by her married name, Wanda Bridgeforth. Witty and talented, Wanda had been attending the memoir writing class I led in downtown Chicago for nearly two decades before coronavirus hit.

What you might not know about Wanda is that she is an immigrant: she was born in Canada. Hamilton, Ontario to be exact. The woman Wanda has always affectionately called Mama is the woman who adopted Wanda as an infant and loved and raised her on Chicago’s South Side. To celebrate her 99th year, we’re publishing an essay featured in my book Writing Out Loud. Wanda wrote this piece to describe the resilience and determination that guided her family through the Great Depression — and has influenced Wanda’s own life ever since. Sheltering-in-place in her apartment now, Wanda fills her days with episodes of Jeopardy!, naps, meals, and visits from Wanda Jr. The rest of the time you’ll find her looking out the window, amazed at the beauty of Lake Michigan and the sky above. “And sometimes I just close my eyes and reminisce,” she says. “It makes me happy.”

Memories of the Great Depression

By Wanda Bridgeforth

Chicago was especially hard-hit by the Great Depression. Men couldn’t find jobs, especially Black men. Here was my father, with a degree in chemistry, and he could not get a job. He was humiliated. And really, that’s when he started to fall apart, and that’s when Mama started working “in family.” She told me that this was the way it had to be. We either survive doing it this way, or we don’t do it and we don’t survive. So I went to live at Uncle Larry and Aunt Gert’s house.

My neighborhood was known as the Black Metropolis. Louis Armstrong had lived there, and Ida B. Wells. Uncle Larry was actually a cousin, but we called him uncle as a term of respect because he was the head of the household.

Uncle Larry was a big Black man that had been injured in WWI, where he fell in love with a White German woman named Gert. He married her and brought her home to the Black Metropolis.

Aunt Gert was a very heavy woman but had very small feet, I think she wore a size three-and-a-half shoe. All her shoes were too big on her, so we could always hear her clomping down the hall.

I had to learn to share. Nineteen of us lived in Uncle Larry’s six-room apartment. The grownups had the bedrooms. Where we slept, in the daytime it was a dining room. We each had a roll-away bed, really a cot on rollers with a cover. At night we took the leaves out of the dining room table and took down our roll-away beds. That was our all-purpose room. We ate in that room, did homework at the table, played cards there and slept there.

Some of the people in the apartment were on relief. Everybody but Aunt Gert would go out every day to try and find work somewhere. Aunt Gert ruled the household. She did the cooking and sent us out.

Every Saturday, some people living there would get ration cards. We would take baby buggies to a warehouse and use the ration cards to get our vegetables, fruits, and dairy goods. Auntie Gert baked a pound cake every Saturday and whipped the batter with her hands. We just loved it when we heard her slapping that bowl. We knew we were in for a treat.

She formed committees, and I was on the committee to churn the ice cream. We would always fight over who would get the dasher. Aunt Gert would bake the cake, but we didn’t get it right after dinner. After dinner the boys were sent to the kitchen to clean the linoleum floor.

Once they were done cleaning the floor, she would sit in the corner and play the guitar. That’s when the rest of us would know to take our shoes off and come in our stocking feet to spread the wax and wax the floor. She’d say “Clarence, get over to that corner, it needs more wax!” We would make so much noise that others in the building knew it was time to join us. Nobody reported us for being too noisy because they were all involved. In the summertime Aunt Gert would play her guitar on the porch and we’d dance in the yard.

We were kids, and we didn’t know we were poor. And actually, we weren’t poor, we were po’.

And today, thanks to Wanda’s fabulous memory and tremendous writing, we are all richer for knowing her. Happy birthday, dear Wanda.

Did you know that today, October 15, is National White Cane Safety Day? Me, neither. Not until the supervisor at my job moderating the National Easterseals blog pointed it out to me. I was glad she did, because it got me reminiscing about a school visit I especially enjoyed at Eastview Elementary School in Algonquin, Illinois long before the pandemic hit.

With so many elementary school children learning at home these days, new Seeing Eye dog Luna and I haven’t made a school visit since March. I miss being with the kids, but time off gives me a chance to think about visits we’d done in the past.

Like that one to Eastview. I was told ahead of time that three students at Eastview were blind, so I arranged to have Braille copies of my children’s book, Safe & Sound sent there before our visit. I’d use one myself to show the kids at different grade levels what Braille looks like and how it works, and the other three copies would be given to Miguel, age 10, and Seth and Ethan, both age 8.

I didn’t expect that these three little blind kids would be able to read the Braille books on their own, I just thought that if the other kids at Eastview might be getting books, these three should get a copy they’d be able to read someday, too.

The Braille version of Safe & Sound was produced in contracted Braille, a form of Braille I’ve never been able to master. Contracted Braille has a bunch of shorthand symbols (contractions) for commonly used words and parts of words: there’s a cell for the word “and,” another for the word “the,” and so on. Most of the letters of the alphabet are also used as shorthand for common words, such as “c” for “can” and “l” for “like.” Kind of like texting, only you can’t make as many mistakes!

When I met the vision teacher at Eastview, I apologized that my book was only available in contracted Braille. “No problem,” she said. “That’s the only Braille these guys read!” Sure enough, the little buggers were Braille experts.

Really, all the Eastview kids seemed to have a strong interest in reading. The school’s principal, Jim Zursin, emphasized reading with all the students, and with the help of his staff and the PTO they were making sure reading wouldn’t end when summer began. Every child who participated in Eastview’s summer reading program and reached their goal would be marching in the Founders Day Parade that summer, each star reader wearing a sandwich board with a drawing of the cover of his or her favorite book on the front. “There’ll be hundreds of books marching down the street,” Mr. Zursin exclaimed. You didn’t have to be able to see to know there were stars in his eyes, just thinking about it. Kids who read that summer would be invited to a community pool party, too, where Mr. Zursin promised to jump off the high dive – with his clothes on!

That’s Miguel on the left and one of the twins in the center. Photo by Andi Butler, www.mrsbillustrations.com.

I’m pretty confident Seth, Ethan and Miguel marched in the parade that year. They’d be swimming at that pool party, too. They love to read, and turns out they can write in contracted Braille, too. Seth, Ethan and Miguel each wrote a poem for me, and they had to work hard to hold back their laughter as I stumbled through some of the contractions when I tried reading their work out loud. They were happpy to help me through, and in the half hour the four of us were able to spend together in their vision resource room we became fast friends. Miguel showed me how his talking watch worked, and Ethan and Seth, twin brothers, counted off their favorite rides at Disney World. We all laughed at how other kids find Space Mountain so scary. “It’s in the dark,” we said. Big deal.

The boys had lots of questions about my Seeing Eye dog, and I told them that in order to train with a Seeing Eye dog you have to learn good orientation and mobility (white cane) skills first. “Knowing where you are by what you hear, how the ground feels, which way the wind is blowing – you’ll need those skills when you get a Seeing Eye dog, too,” I told them. You can’t train with a Seeing Eye dog until you’re 16 years old, so they had a lot of time to perfect their white cane skills before then. “The Seeing Eye wants you to get good with your white cane before you train with a dog. People who know orientation and mobility and can get around with a white cane are the ones who do best with Seeing Eye dogs.”

Later on one of their teachers expressed how glad she was that I’d said that. Apparently the boys hadn’t been using their white canes as much as they should. “Now they’ll have an incentive.”

Before I left their room, each boy proudly presented me with a special collar he had made for my Seeing Eye dog. “We strung the beads ourselves,” Seth said, proud of their work. The collars were made of ribbon, and in addition to the beads, each ribbon had a big bell on it, too. “That’s so you’ll always know where your dog is,” Miguel explained.

The three of them came up after the all-school assembly at the end of the day to say goodbye. When I reached out to shake Seth’s – or was it Ethan’s? – hand, I felt a rubber handle. He was using his white cane!

An earlier version of this post appears on the Easterseals National blog

Unfortunately, it’s permanently closed.

This past weekend in our Printers Row neighborhood was Chicago autumn at its most glorious. Radiant sun and chilly breezes all at once. There was less produce at our little farmers market, because you know, that’s how it goes here. People were out in droves, and except for masks, it felt a lot like last year at this time. In fact, if anything, it was more bustling. There are three businesses that weren’t here last year—a great little market called Totto’s (pronounced like Dorothy’s dog) on the corner of Polk and Dearborn , a pizza restaurant directly across the street from Totto’s, and a lovely little café named The Grail the middle of the block.

Sadly, there is one business missing. Standing Room Only (SRO) — a great little local fast food kind of place except it wasn’t that fast and it was really good — is gone. COVID shut it down for a while like it did other restaurants. But looting killed it.

SRO’s theme was Chicago sports, and it was drenched with Chicago sports memorabilia. I’d come down to order turkey chili or a Chicago style hot dog or a Greek salad and while I waited, I looked at jerseys and photos autographed by the likes Walter Peyton, Dick Butkus, Michael Jordan, Ernie Banks, Minnie Minoso and Frank Thomas.

Today, memorabilia is an industry. There are holographic stamps of authenticity, shows where you pay to get in line to get a signature, and well, I don’t really like it. I’ve been around long enough to know that the stuff in the owners’ collection was not purchased at such shows. The people who worked at SRO were salt of the earth, Hispanic, and neighborhood fixtures. The owners opened the place when the neighborhood was iffy and it was a big gamble.

SRO piped jazz through its speakers indoors and out, and it was a homing signal for Beth and her dogs. SRO sat right next to our building’s entrance, so Beth knew exactly where she was when she heard Miles or Thelonious or whoever playing.

On May 30^th of this year, a George Floyd protest was exploited by lawless idiots who systematically looted lots of downtown businesses. SRO’s cash register was found in the next-door park, busted open. The memorabilia was either stolen or destroyed.

I was dismayed in the aftermath to hear apologists for the looters say that it wasn’t violence against a person, it was violence against property.

I call bullshit. Anyone who has operated a small business knows better. Those looters committed violence against SRO’s owners, employees, and customers. SRO and its employees were our neighbors. We miss them.

I’m not equating the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd to the looting of SRO. But if we can get out of our binary thinking, we’d see that not empathizing with businesses that suffered for the looting is exactly the kind of thing we’re trying to change.

Our neighbor Al Hippensteel generously publishes a local journal called the Dearborn Express. In a recent edition, he wrote about SRO. I couldn’t say it any better:

It appears by the sign on the window that Standing Room Only is gone for good. The looters tore its guts out. It’s one thing to break a window to steal a mass produced coat or cell phone. What they removed from SRO was love. Love of the game. The autographed memorabilia stolen from the popular eatery is irreplaceable. SRO withstood the down times that inevitably occur to a long standing business: the downsizing of the financial district, a big part of their draw. Restaurants closed after 911. Not SRO. The “Great Recession” laid claim to many struggling businesses. Not SRO.

Covid 19 was a setback to all restaurants. But it was the looting, the removal of the SRO persona that was the final out in the 9th inning. The final field goal attempt with no time left on the clock.

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.

Certification from the City of Chicago that I was no longer radioactive after a week in the hospital and three nights at Hotel Covid.

Back in April, while I was still hospitalized for COVID, Chicago Tribune columnist Heidi Stevens wrote a piece about Beth’s plight, and my own.  Back then it took three tries for me to get a test, and I only got the result the day I checked into the emergency room.

I just reread it, and here’s the money shot:

Knezovich said it’s frustrating to watch the news from his hospital bed and hear President Donald Trump deny that the United States lacks sufficient tests.

“Setting aside partisanship,” he said, “That’s really insulting. It’s insulting to be lying here and hearing that. It’s insulting to me, but also to all the people working here so hard and having to figure out who to give tests to and who not to, because they don’t have enough of them.”

Since then, some things have improved. Testing is more available, we know more about the spread, and masks work. Vaccines are in the works.

But man, some things haven’t gotten any better. As in leadership at the top. As in there is none. That Rose Garden debacle is a fresh insult. Leadership isn’t barking at people. It’s leading by example. What lousy examples we have in the White House. And I mean literally, after that Rose Garden event for the SCOTUS nominee, they went INSIDE. Check out the pictures. (BTW, giving a lifetime appointment to a person who apparently can’t make even simple judgments correctly seems like a very bad idea.)

But no. And so we have a rogue’s gallery of infected high mucketty mucks, including the President of Notre Dame, Fr. John Jenkins.

We all have heart-wrenching stories. Not being able to visit our parents. Our children. Friends hospitalized without the benefit of outside visits. People dying with no funeral or memorial service.

But these selfish, self-important ass wipes had to have a party. And many of them flew from other states to attend.

I mean.

Heidi Stevens put it better than I can in a social media post she made today:

I see the photos and videos from that Rose Garden ceremony and think about the dozens of people I’ve interviewed since March who’ve canceled their weddings, forgone funerals, said final goodbyes to loved ones over FaceTime, missed out on graduations and otherwise sacrificed joy, comfort or ritual to help slow the spread of this virus and I’m just filled with sorrow and rage.

Argh.

PS: Heidi Stevens ended up writing a full column around the topic of that social media post. Give it a read!