While sheltering in place I’ve been receiving daily updates called “Chicaago History at Home” from the Chicago History Museum. Monday’s message alerted me that legendary photographer and Chicago native Victor Skrebneski had died on April 4 this year. How’d I miss hearing this back then? Oh. Wait. That was the day Mike came home from the hospital, clear of COVID. I was a bit pre-occupied. From the message:

Victor Skrebneski was known for his striking images of models in advertisements and portraits of celebrities, extraordinary editorial photography, as well as numerous breathtaking books and catalogues. He also had a varied and exciting association with the Costume Council of the Chicago History Museum through the years.

Why would a blind woman have a fondness for a photographer? Well, I wasn’t always blind, and the Victor Skrebneski photos I saw when I was a teenager were mesmerizing.

Let me explain. One of my best friends from high school was Matt Klir. We met when I was 16. Seventeen years later, He died of AIDS. He was 33 years old. The COVID 19 pandemic we’re going through now has me thinking back to the horrific AIDS pandemic. And sadly, when I think of AIDS, I think of Matt.

Matt was a year younger than me, we were in the high school band together, and when he signed up for “summer band” after his freshman year we discovered we’d both be bicycling from miles away to attend. We started riding together. A friendship was born.

When neither of us could land a date for a school dance one year we pooled our money and bought Elton John tickets instead. Front row. I wore a polyester red, white and blue halter-topped bridesmaid dress, and Matt wore a powder blue leisure suit. He brought a dozen roses along, and when I handed them to Elton John’s lyricist at the end of the concert, Bernie Taupin said, “Thanks, love.” Matt and I congratulated ourselves all the way home, confident we’d had a wayyyyy better time than anyone at that dumb dance.

Matt’s house became my second home. He and his two sisters were beautiful. His parents were divorced, and the three of them lived with their young vivacious mother in a fancy 1970s sprawling home. Every single time I visited (and that was lots of times!) I’d venture into their dining room and gawk at the huge black and white Victor Skrebneski photos displayed on the walls.

Matt and his two sisters had been childhood models, and when I called Janine and Crystal to ask if either of them still had a copy of the huge b&w photo Victor Skrebneski took of Matt, they knew immediately which one I was talking about.

“I remember when Matt was at that shoot,” his older sister Janine wrote in an email. “Victor’s studio was so home-like. Lots of ladies and other people hanging around, comfy couches, along with his impressive photo studio in the main room.” Janine had found the photo of Matt in her basement workshop. “It was rolled up in a box with other old pictures.” She’d had the photo straightened, she scanned it for me, and here it is.

Click the image to expand. That’s Matt on the lower right.

I can no longer take in the photo Victor Skrebneski took of Matt back in the early 1960s for a Marshall Field & Company Christmas ad, but hey, Victor Skrebneski photos are memorable. Matt is there in the lower right hand corner, still a youngster, sporting a safari hat and surrounded by stuffed animals.

Thanks to Victor Skrebneski’s gift and his keen eye, I can still picture young Matt.

What a gift.

I hope you’ll watch it.

After NFL player Colin Kaepernick famously took a knee to protest police abuse of Black people and broader racial inequality, some fellow athletes spoke out in support. A lot of people responded by saying “Stick to sports.” That always happens to sports figures who speak up about things outside of the sports realm. (A Fox commentator once admonished LeBron James, “Shut up and dribble.”)

Same thing went for a lot of sports media. Jemele Hill lost her job at ESPN for speaking out. WSCR, the local leading sports channel once featured Dan Bernstein (a white guy) and Jason Goff (a black guy). They used to dive right into the intersection of American society and sports. I found it enlightening and spontaneous and honest. The then-ownership of the station disagreed. Goff was fired, Bernstein was matched up with a new (white) partner. “Stick to sports,” they said.

Fast forward. WSCR has new ownership. Bernstein is still on, solo from 9 a.m. to noon, and getting after it. From noon to 2 each day, Laurence Holmes has been dishing out his viewpoint as a Black man (the only Black host at the station) in addition to talking sports, or what little about actual sports there is to discuss. It’s actually been some of the best, most thoughtful, sometimes uncomfortable coverage I’ve seen or heard in any medium.

Since our move to Chicago, I’ve learned more about the Black American experience on a barstool talking to friends than I learned in elementary, middle and high school combined. That was the era of “Slavery ended with the Civil War, and so did racism. Please play along.” Hell, I didn’t know what Reconstruction and Jim Crow were until college. I’ve learned a lot about what I’d call a sort of passive racism. Which is to say, you don’t have to be a cross-burning KKK member to be part of the problem.

In sports, that can mean that as a white general manager, you might see in a potential first round draft pick a younger version of yourself. Someone with similar background, someone you can relate to without any special effort. And that can affect decisions. Example: the Chicago Bears drafted quarterback Mitch Trubisky (white) ahead of Pat Mahomes (Black, just won the Super Bowl) and Lamar Jackson (Black, electrifying and revolutionizing the NFL). Trubisky is fighting for a job when the games start back up. Maybe it was just a case of bad scouting, or maybe it’s the Bears being the Bears, but it sure makes you think.

A point of pride as a White Sox fan is that its owner has pushed diversity in front office management and managers in his organization. The current Executive Vice President is a Black man, Ken Williams. He previously served as General Manager of the White Sox, and he’s the exec who assembled the 2005 World Series winning team. He is Black, one of a very few such execs in baseball (Marlins owner Derek Jeter the most notable).

Williams has always been self-assured and very executive-like, cool and calm, sometimes to the point of cocky. I’ve never heard him, until now, speak about being Black. Being vulnerable. In baseball. In life.

Last week he sat down for an interview that turned into something of a therapy session—for him and for viewers like me. I implore you to watch it. It has nothing to do with sports, it has everything to do with American life and the role race plays in it.

Williams has a fascinating background. His Godfather is John Carlos, one of the two Olympic athletes who raised the fisted Black Power symbol when they received their medals at the 1968 games in Mexico City. (They were told to stick to sports way back then.) Williams’ biological mother was in the Black Panthers. Williams spent his early years in Oakland, but the family moved to San Jose when his father successfully sued the city fire department to get a job as a fire fighter.

I can’t do the interview justice. It’s about a half hour, but it’s worth every minute.

And it emphasizes a phenomenon that I’ve experienced since the Minneapolis murder: Black people are feeling freer to talk about what they’ve experienced. They’ve been given license to not put my comfort with them in front of their own experience.

Williams projects pain, anguish and utter relief at being able to talk about his experience. I have the distinct feeling that he, like our Black barstool fans, are feeling freer to be honest.

Because, at last, they feel like white guys like me have their backs.

Bill Gordon

I am pleased to feature Bill Gordon as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. Born and raised in Kansas, Bill lived all over the country during his nearly 50-year career in library and association management. When he retired in 2002, he was the Executive Director of The American Library Association, located here in Chicago, and has called Chicago home ever since.

Nearing his 84th birthday, Bill says life so far has been “a great adventure.” Lucky for us, he enjoys remembering it through his participation in our Monday memoir-writing class.

My flexible assignment “One Crazy Summer” allowed those who needed/wanted to write about the summer ahead of us to do so. Those who preferred escaping to the past could do that, too. Bill often knows exactly what he’ll write about the minute he hears the prompt, and this piece about “Picnic” was no exception.

One Crazy Summer

by Bill Gordon

Rumors were flying that summer. Could it be true? A major studio was going to make a movie in Hutchinson, Kansas?

No one in my circle of friends knew for sure. We did know that William Inge, a Kansas playwright, had won a Pulitzer Prize a year earlier for his play, Picnic. When local newspaper articles started coming out about Inge and his play, we started getting suspicious. Could the movie be Picnic? Maybe the rumors were right, but we still didn’t have any proof.

That summer I was working Monday through Friday as part of the maintenance crew for a local bakery. On Saturdays I delivered flowers for Justice-Mercer Florists, located on Main Street just around the corner from the Baker Hotel, Hutchinson’s newest and tallest building and pride and joy of the Chamber of Commerce. I reported to work early on Saturday to find the other employees in what could only be described as a “dither.” Even the owner, Mr. Shepherd, seemed unable to control his excitement.

“Can y’all work tomorrow,” he asked me. I told him sure, and then I had a question of my own. “But why on Sunday?”

“Several bunches of flowers need deliverin’ to important guests arrivin’ at the Baker Hotel tomorrow,” he said. Before I could say anything, Mr. Shepherd said in an uncharacteristically high squeaky voice, “For the picnickers! Rosalind Russell, William Holden, Kim Novak, Susan Strasberg, Cliff Robertson, Joshua Logan — they’s all stayin’ at the Baker!”

So, it was true! Picnic would be filmed in Hutchinson, Kansas.

When an advertisement for extras and musicians appeared in the local paper, several friends filled out applications for jobs as extras. I applied for a job as a musician. I had been a member of the Musicians Union since I was fourteen. I had performed clarinet solos in practically every church in town, I was a paid member of the Municipal Band, I had been a substitute clarinetist for the Wichita Symphony for three concerts, and I had won several awards in contests supported by the State of Kansas.

I thought I had a competitive performance record.

I auditioned for the combo that would be playing Moonglow in the scene where Madge and Hal (Kim Novak and William Holden) dance provocatively at the Labor Day picnic celebration.

The audition was difficult. I had to play the same things over and over as they tested my tone and technique. The audition team seemed unimpressed, but a week later they called me back and tested me again, putting me through new musical exercises.

Much to my delight and surprise, I was hired. We rehearsed relentlessly to blend together as a musical unit and to be perfect for the Moonglow scene. The scene took eighteen takes — one week’s work, $30 an hour for rehearsals, $50 an hour for performing. Remember, this was the 1950’s. I made more money that week than I did all summer from my other jobs combined. The experience also gave me a fresh perspective on the less than glamorous lives of movie stars and the tedious business of movie making.

But it was a summer to remember.

That’s all he wanted/needed.

When I was growing up with Type 1 diabetes (we called it “juvenile diabetes” back then) my mom, Flo, made me carry a medical card with me whenever I left the house. “I AM NOT DRUNK,” the card declared in all capital letters. “I AM A DIABETIC.” It went on to explain that if I was acting woozy, unable to speak clearly, or unresponsive, it was due to low blood sugar and I should be given a glass of orange juice. Only seven years old at the time, I thought the card was silly. “Mom, everyone knows I never get drunk!” She insisted I have that card with me, though, and you don’t mess with Flo.

I hadn’t thought about that little card in years, but a disturbing story RadioLab aired last week brought it back to mind:

On a fall afternoon in 1984, Dethorne Graham ran into a convenience store for a bottle of orange juice. Minutes later he was unconscious, injured, and in police handcuffs. In this episode, we explore a case that sent two Charlotte lawyers on a quest for true objectivity, and changed the face of policing in the US.

Dethorne Graham worked for Charlotte’s Department of Transportation back then. He had Type 1 diabetes, and he was Black. On that day in 1984 he felt the onset of an insulin reaction and asked a friend to drive him to a nearby convenient store for a bottle of orange juice. While his friend waited in the car, Mr. Graham ran inside and grabbed a bottle of OJ. The waiting line at the cashier was so long, that Mr. Graham gave up, set the orange juice back down, ran back to the waiting car and they took off.

A squad car was nearby, and after seeing Mr. Graham run in and out of the store like that, the police officer pulled them over and talked to the driver. Just as the officer was radioing in to get a hold of the convenience store to see if anything had happened there, Mr. Graham got out of the passenger door, stumbled along the car, sat down on the curb, went into convulsions and eventually passed out. Four more officers arrived, and you can probably guess what happened next. One officer rolled Mr. Graham over and handcuffed him. Another grabbed him by the handcuffs, lifted him off the curb from behind, and shoved his face into the hood of the car. In and out of consciousness at this point, Mr. Graham tried to tell the officers he was a diabetic and had a medical card in his wallet. They didn’t believe him. From an AP story:

Then four officers grabbed Graham and threw him head-first into the police car. Once police confirmed no crime had been committed inside the convenience store, they dropped Graham off at his home and left him lying in the yard with his handcuffs still on.

Mr. Graham recovered from his insulin reaction with a glass of orange juice at home, but this encounter with police left him with a broken foot, cuts on his wrists, a bruised forehead and an injured shoulder. Stories on RadioLab are an hour long, so I can’t give you all the details here. What I can say is that Mr. Graham sued the Charlotte Police Department in 1985, and the local jurisdiction ruled against him claming the officers did not use excessive force.

When RadioLab asked his son, Dethorne Graham, Jr. whether his dad talked about all of this much. He said no. “I mean, I don’t know his, his way of trying to deal with that…I don’t know. You know, when you are dehumanized like that, when another individual… when someone who has authority just, it’s like they take something away from you. When someone does something like that to you, it strikes at your core. It strikes at your very being. And I think you lose a part of yourself that you can’t get back.”

Mr. Graham did not give up. His case ended up in the Supreme Court, Graham v. Connor, and the highest court in the land ruled in his favor, emphasizing the overriding function of the Fourth Amendment is to protect an individual’s personal privacy and dignity against unwarranted intrusion by the government. The Court decision requires careful attention to the facts and circumstance of each case, including the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect posed an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether the suspect was actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.

Mr. Graham was 38 years old when he was beaten by cops for needing a glass of orange Juice. He died in 2000, at age 54.

I strongly urge you to listen to the RadioLab story in its entirety – you can tell they put a lot of work into researching court cases for the story and I couldn’t do it justice here in 800 words.

During the dot.com craze I worked for a tech firm. Together with my colleagues, we alternately experienced exhilaration, a sense of triumph, and a sense of doom. Sometimes all within 24 hours. At moments, we believed we would one day rule the world. Then, some news would make us wonder whether we’d still be in business in three months.

Stress weighed on everyone—especially at the top. But even plebes like me suffered from it. There were moments when I thought my head was going to explode right there at my desk. You likely know the feeling.

On a flight home from a business trip, I sat next to a serviceman and got into a long strangers on the plane discussion. The guy had an enormous intellect and had a deep interest in Buddhism and Eastern medicine. As we stood up to file out, he handed me a little paperback called “Living Buddha, Living Christ,” by Thich Nhat Hanh.

“Are you sure,” I asked.

“Just promise me you’ll read it,” he said. We wished each other well and that’s the last I ever saw of my seatmate.

I’m a skeptic by nature, and often a cynic. I’m not particularly religious, though I believe there’s a big force out there that most of us are trying to understand. On my own, I would’ve never been inclined to read such a book. But the thoughtfulness of the gift was compelling. And, well, I made a promise.

I read it, and I’m glad I did. The book itself is a kind of meditation, and it includes simple breathing and meditative exercises.

I read it back in oh, 1996. When I’d feel the pressure and stress building and could picture it bursting out of my chest like the Alien, I’d close the door to my office (oh, for real offices again), sit, and practice these little exercises. It only took five or 10 minutes to slow my pulse, and presumably lowered my blood pressure.

And for years since then, I’ve used those exercises whenever necessary. On June 2nd of this year, my birthday, Beth gifted me a book entitled “Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art.” She and I had listened to a radio interview with the author, James Nestor.

Years earlier Nestor wrote a book called “Deep” about free divers—people who can hold their breath and swim underwater for 10 minutes at a time. When Nestor learned that they’d trained themselves to increase lung capacity, he was fascinated.

Motivated also by his own chronic maladies, including respiratory and sinus issues, he went on a 10-year personal research crusade.

In “Breath,” he takes the reader around the globe, meeting cutting edge breathing experts he calls “pulmonauts.” Some are credentialed researchers and scientists. Others came from all walks of life, and had been helped by one or another breathing technique and were driven to learn more.

The author signs up for a harrowing experiment that requires him to breathe only through his mouth for 10 days, then normally for 10 days, then only through his nose for 10 days. The physiological results for nose breathing compared to the other methods were stunningly improved.

He also crawls deep beneath Paris in its catacombs to study…skulls. Turns out mouths used to be a lot bigger than they are now. When our ancestors learned to cook and otherwise process food, they chewed less, and over time, our mouths got smaller. Our airways also got smaller, and…our teeth got crooked. Skulls before that uniformly showed perfectly straight teeth, all without braces.

As it turns out, people have been studying and practicing intentional therapeutic breathing techniques pretty much forever across cultures, religions and geographies. And they arrived at strikingly similar conclusions about how to breathe. From the book:

In 2001, researchers at the University of Pavia in Italy gather two dozen subjects, covered them with sensors to measure blood flow, heart rate and nervous system feedback, then had them recite a Buddhist mantra as well as the original Latin version of the rosary, the Catholic prayer cycle of the Ave Maria, which is repeated half by a priest and half by the congregation. They were stunned to find the average number of breaths for each cycle was “almost exactly” identical, just a bit quicker than the Hindu, Taoist, and Native American prayers: 5.5 breaths per minute.

But what was even more stunning was what breathing like this did to the subjects. Whenever they followed this slow breathing pattern, blood flow to the brain increased and the systems in the body entered state of coherence, when the functions of the heart, circulation, and nervous system are coordinated to peak efficiency.

Lately, breath and breathing (and the denial thereof) have been headline subjects on more than one front. After my bout with covid19, I’ve had a hard time filling my lungs to their fullest. I can’t climb flights of stairs like I used to, and the shortest of walks can leave me winded. After some exercise and using techniques from this book, that’s improving.

It’s easy to take breathing for granted. I never will again.