Laila Maali owns Grape Vine in Orland Park, Ill. She’s part of the region’s large Palestinian diaspora.

Grape Vine stocks middle eastern delicacies like butter ghee, red lentils and pickled turnips.

The Prayer Center mosque in Orland Park was built in 2004 to accomodate the region’s growing Muslim community.

Chicagoans are fond of saying that there are more Poles here than anywhere outside of Poland. But did you know there are more people of Palestinian descent living in Chicago’s southwest suburbs than in any other city in America? I didn’t either, until I went to Orland Park last week.

Orland Park, Ill. is a town of about 56,000 sandwiched between routes 55 and 57.  It has a big mall, and a lot of smaller strip malls, many new housing developments and a ton of beautiful, wooded forest preserve land. And, along with neighboring suburbs like Bridgeview and Oak Lawn, it has a sizable Arab American population.

For the past few weeks, my boss has been sending a different web producer and reporter from the broadcast side of things out to the suburbs to explore, discover, report etc. We’re supposed to go in not knowing much, but then we’re supposed to find a quick-turnaround story and report it in one day. Last week it was my turn; I went out with Michael Puente, who normally covers Northwest Indiana for us — and is super awesome.

Michael actually worked at the Orland Square Mall — in a formalwear store! — when he was in his early 20s. But I knew nothing about Orland Park. I had heard that the southwest side of Chicago around Marquette Park used to be a landing pad for Arab immigrants (I learned this from the Arab American Action Network after I did a story with them in 2010 for my series Dear Chicago), but I had no real concept of what that community was like. I certainly had never heard that Chicago was home to the country’s largest population of Palestinian immigrants.

But when Michael and I went to Grape Vine, a small middle eastern bakery and grocery, we met the owner, Laila Maali, as well as her landlord and her friend/handyman. Her landlord, Edward Hassan, told us that all three of them came from the same village near Ramallah and that there were more people from their village living in Chicago now than there were left living in the village!

That claim obviously caught my ear; I knew when he said that there was probably a story there, one that I had not heard before and one that surprised me very much.

Hassan’s claim turned out to be exaggerated, but true in its nature; his home village, Beitunia, has traditionally been the largest feeder village of Palestinian immigrants to Chicago.

Hooked yet? I hope so. You can read the full story here. And check out my appearance with Michael Puente on the Afternoon Shift here:

Coincidentally, the story I was working on last week tied into another project I’ve been working on — the Curious City podcast. I took over podcasting for WBEZ recently, and I’ve started working more closely with Jenn Brandel by helping edit the podcast every week.

Last week’s episode featured a story reported by Odette Yousef, our North Side bureau reporter. It deals with the resettlement of refugees on Chicago’s North Side, and answers the question: What is the most diverse neighborhood in the city?

The part that really caught my ear was when Curious City/Bureaus editor (and my pal) Shawn Allee connected the dots between U.S. immigration policy and the physical makeup of the city. When our immigration policy allowed more people from one country to come and settle together, you got neighborhoods like Argyle Street, home to Chicago’s Vietnamese community. But when we let only fewer numbers of people come to the U.S. it was harder for them to make the kind of neighborhood impact that’s easy to see from other ethnic communities. (I’m probably bastardizing Shawn’s words a little bit, but luckily you can listen to the audio above.) I had never made that connection before, and I found it really interesting.

Palestinians immigrants living here are not refugees in that the U.S. government does not recognize them as such. But they and Chicago’s other Arab immigrants have clearly left their mark on the region, whether it’s in the form of the new mosque in Orland Park or the businesses along Lawrence and Kedzie on the Northwest Side of Chicago. Next though, I want to go to Bridgeview, Ill. It has the oldest and most established Arab American community in the Chicago area, and the oldest mosque. I think it is also more densely populated and urban, as it has its center between 79th and 87th along Harlem. (How that is not a part of Chicago I don’t know.) The expert I interviewed for my story, Louise Cainkar of Marquette University, said she once counted over 100 Arab-owned businesses in that one mile stretch of street!

Burnham Park landfill, 1925 (Courtesy of Chicago Park District)

Burnham Park landfill, 1928 (Courtesy of Chicago Park District)

This is just one of the surprising ways Chicago’s lakefront has changed over time. Did you know that Grant Park was once a disgusting lagoon filled with dead livestock and other debris? Or that the Gold Coast was once a sandbar filled with brothels and saloons? Or that we once sold the lakefront to a railroad company? Or that Richard J. Daley wanted to build an island in the lake 20-miles long? Chicago history is full of politics, surprises — and a lot of dirt.

I’ve been reporting this subject for WBEZ’s Curious City, and my story is finally out today. Check out the story here, the rest of the incredible photos here and an amazing collection of historic maps provided by The Newberry here. Other than coming away with a much better grasp of Chicago history, and a renewed appreciation for how complicated planning and development always is, one of  the best part for me was talking to the Chicago Tribune‘s architecture critic Blair Kamin, and to Lois Wille, who wrote the book Forever Open, Clear and Free. Both Kamin and Wille are Pulitzer Prize winners — and great interviewees.

I’ll also be on the Afternoon Shift with Rick Kogan today at 3:45 p.m. I’ll post the audio later, but tune in if you’re around! Miriam Reuter, the woman whose question spawned the story, will join us as well.

Update 12/13/12: If you missed it, here’s the audio from my appearance on The Afternoon Shift. Editor Shawn Allee described me afterwards as sounding “geeked.” I think he’s right!

Barbara Davis: Hyde Park lunch line veteran from WBEZ on Vimeo.

Kitchen Close-ups is a new new multimedia series I’m editing for WBEZ.org. That’s right, editing! It’s one of my first times, professionally in the editor’s seat. In this context, editing means working with freelance producers Meaghan Glennan and Jason Rizzo, helping them shape the overall vision for the series as well as the narrative arc and execution of each individual story. I also helped them come up with the name.

The series provides intimate portraits of characters in Chicago’s restaurant scene. So far we’ve visited fancy places, like RL Cafe, and more accessible eateries, like Valois in Hyde Park. Today I have my second edit with the pair on a profile of a barrista at Wormhole Coffee in Wicker Park.

You can watch the whole series here.

Me and Paul Tough in WBEZ’s Green Room before our appearance on the Afternoon Shift with Steve Edwards. (Photo by Bill Healy)

Reporter Paul Tough has a new book out about education. How Children Succeed builds on the work he’s done for the New York Times Magazine and an earlier book about Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone. He was a guest on the Afternoon Shift with Steve Edwards in September, and I was invited on to discuss my reporting at Chicago Jesuit Academy. Take a listen to my conversation with Steve, and hear Paul’s portion of the conversation here.

I’m pretty excited. I was a finalist in 2007, for the story I did about the Palace Theater in Gary, Ind. I lost that time around, rightly so, to a fabulous documentary my colleagues from WBEZ produced about Mexican migrant workers living in the U.S.

Our competition this time around is…interesting. There are two other finalists in our category. One is a well-produced and touching piece from the Times of NWI about a restaurant in Hammond, Ind. closing after nearly 6 decades. It’s pretty good, and I wish them well in the competition.

The other, though, puzzles me. It’s an expose by a London-based reporter for Bloomberg News, looking into allegations that Victoria’s Secrets unknowingly sourced some of the cotton it uses in its clothing from people using African child labor.

There’s no doubt it’s a compelling piece of journalism. What, though, is the Chicago connection here? I thought the Lisagors were supposed to be for reporting done in the Chicago-area; the only Chicago connection I can see here is that the reporter cites the cost of a pair of Victoria’s Secrets underwear for sale at Water Tower Place. I’ll be a little peeved if we lose to this piece.

Neither Shannon nor I can go to the awards ceremony tonight, unfortunately, but we’ll have colleagues looking out for us. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Update: No, we did not win the Lisagor. Yes, the guy from Bloomberg won. Oh well! We’ll try again next year.

Dave Diehl’s 8th grade algebra class at Chicago Jesuit Academy.

When it comes to education, how do you teach all the things tests can’t measure?

One Chicago middle school thinks it has the answer. There, life skills and character matter as much as geometry and algebra.

The school is Chicago Jesuit Academy, and I spent a week there reporting in November. The story was edited by WBEZ’s City Desk Editor, Cate Cahan. It originally aired on WBEZ 91.5 FM in February of 2012.

The audio is above. Here’s the print version.

* * *

In education, sometimes it’s the oldest questions that matter most:  What makes a good teacher?  How does a school get test scores up? But, these days, educators are also asking this question: How important are all the things tests can’t measure?

A middle school on Chicago’s West Side thinks it has an answer. We take you to Chicago Jesuit Academy, a school that teaches—and grades– life skills right up there with book learning.

Eighth grader Brandyn Snow and his mom have this morning routine: As he makes his way to school, he has to call and let her know he’s safe– four different times.

I’m headed towards Lake now,” he tells her, as the 85 bus passes underneath the Green Line. “I’ll call you at Jackson, then when I get on bus, then when I get to school.”

“At first I thought she didn’t trust me,” he says. “But she’s just trying to protect me.”

“What is she protecting you from?” I ask him.

“Well, danger,” he replies. “People trying to hurt other people.”

Like that group of older boys who beat him up in elementary school.

Or those guys who shot and killed those two teenagers waiting for the bus back in October.

People like that.

Brandyn calls his mom a fourth time as the bus lets him off at the corner of Laramie and Jackson, at Chicago Jesuit Academy. Ninety-six 5^th through 8^th graders go to school here– all boys, mostly from rough West Side neighborhoods like Brandyn’s.

Teaching character in a morning handshake

When Brandyn walks into CJA’s spare but sunny atrium every morning, he sees Dave Diehl, the Dean of Students, standing by the door, holding a clip board.

Brandyn knows the rules: First, take off your jacket. Then, look Mr. Diehl in the eye and shake his hand.

“Good morning Mr. Diehl.”

“Good morning Mr. Snow,” Diehl answers, checking off Brandyn’s name. “Do you have your belt on?”

“Yes.”

“You may head up.”

These rules are an explicit part of the school’s culture. But they’re also triage – a check for any problems the kids might be having.

“Do the students often forget their belts?” I ask Diehl. “I noticed you asking each of them if they have it on.”

“They forget it occasionally,” he tells me. “It’s more of a check for them– it’s an indicator. If they’ve forgotten that they’re forgetting other things.”

Discipline and dress codes aren’t new in education. But here, there’s an additional question: Can you teach middle school kids practical life skills and character– along with math?

High expectations

CJA is expensive: $17,500 per student per year.  But kids go here basically for free—most of the tuition is paid by private donors, and the school only takes kids whose families don’t make a lot of money.

Most of the students went to poorly performing elementary schools before they applied to this 7-year-old school, which is part of a loose national network of faith-based schools called NativityMiguel.

CJA administrators insist they don’t “cream the crop” during admissions by taking only boys with good test scores– they say they’ve admitted  students who perform as low as the 10^th percentile nationally.

But they do look at other things: Parental involvement, for instance, and behaviors that suggest how a boy might cope in a demanding environment. That’s because students are expected to leave here testing above grade level.  Last year’s 8^th graders tested, on average, at the 11^th grade level.

The goal is for them to get into top high schools, with scholarships. Then, for them to compete at those schools, to thrive– alongside more privileged classmates.

Lessons learned

Tom Beckley is the principal at CJA. He’s a former Navy man, who sometimes greets his students like new recruits—with a handshake and a hearty “welcome aboard.”

In his cluttered office, tucked in a corner of the main atrium, Beckley says the school didn’t always emphasize character and behavior the way it does now.

At first, they mainly pushed students academically, trying to make up for time lost in failing elementary schools. That approach seemed to work: Many of their first graduates had strong test scores and got into good high schools – Loyola, St. Ignatius, even East Coast boarding schools.

But then, Beckley says, they did not do well in 9^th grade.

“They went to high school and struggled right out of the gate,” he says. “We scratched our heads and said, but look at their test scores! We realized, boy, that’s only a small part of the equation.”

At CJA, students are called by their last names—‘Mr. Snow,’ instead of ‘Brandyn.’ The school tries to treat these kids—as young as 9—like adults. (WBEZ/Robin Amer)CJA stays in touch with all of their graduates, and these days those first grads have settled into their college prep high schools and are doing pretty well. But as freshly minted 9^th graders they had bad study habits and made bad choices: Their homework folders were a mess; they always chose gym over study hall. And, they had attitude problems: Beckley says these kids couldn’t control their impulses, and no one could tell them what to do. He says pushing them academically hadn’t been enough.

Beckley says he realized that when you look at grades, it doesn’t say attitude, organization and math. It just says math. So about a year and a half ago the school put in place a new grading policy, one that took attitude and organization more seriously.

Now at CJA, it’s not enough to master Y=X.  Now, 70 percent of every grade a student gets here– on every spelling worksheet, every book report – is based on behavior and habits that CJA calls executive function.

Beckley rattles off some of the expectations involved: “You are doing every single problem of a mathematics assignment regardless of whether or not you have gotten each one wrong. You know how to put down objectives in your notebook and you always have a heading on your paper. You’re always contacting your teacher outside of class at least once in a week.”

“Those are the most important skills they need,” he says. “What we see over and over, is that students with average academic aptitude can really be successful if they have an excellent set of executive function skills.”

So if student is failing at CJA, that doesn’t mean they don’t get the math. They just might not have their act together.

“It’s possible here – theoretically,” Beckley says, “for a student to never get a single math problem or spelling word or vocabulary word correct and still pass with a 70 percent if they have tried their hardest and done every single piece on their rubrics for executive function.”

“But what we know as educators,” he says, “is that while that’s theoretically possible, the student who’s doing all those things – who’s engaged, paying attention, who’s asking for help, who’s talking to their teachers outside the classroom, who’s turning things in on time – that guy learns.”

Not everyone was convinced, at first. Beckley says that when they adopted this new grading policy, even the school’s own teachers were skeptical– “really worried,” he says, about what would happen. Some parents were skeptical, too. Like Brandyn’s mom, Tina Jackson.

“I was like, oh, this is not going be good, because this is too much for a young child,” she says. “Why go through all this? You gotta make sure you have your belt on, your shoes are tied, they have to be a certain color.”

And it was too much for some kids. In the past year and a half, 12 students have been asked to leave the school because of academic or behavior problems. And 8 were withdrawn by their parents, who thought the school was too demanding or who disagreed with their approach.

Experts weigh in

In the classroom that doubles as a lunch room 7^th grade math and social studies teacher Matte Durkin rings the lunch bell with three crisp strokes of the gong. The room falls silent as he calls their attention to the white board, where the school has written up the day’s menu.

“Please take three meat balls,” he says. “Make sure you grab some cauliflower and fruit. Get all those on your plates. Please take one piece of bread. And make sure to drink your milk.” At his signal, the students take their seats.

Education researchers don’t argue that behavior and good study habits, like the kind CJA emphasizes, are important. But they say it isn’t clear yet what tactics are best for teaching the kind of behaviors and attitudes that lead to student success.

These points are among the conclusions in a survey the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research will release next month. The study looks at the existing research on non-cognitive assessment –all the stuff tests don’t measure.

They haven’t looked at CJA specifically, because they don’t study private schools. But a lot of schools are trying to teach this stuff. That includes a New York school that gives students separate report cards that measure character. And schools that emphasize what researchers call academic tenacity, or grit: If I fail …do I try again?

But Beckley is convinced CJA’s focusing on the right stuff to help kids transition to high school. He says they have to treat kids – as young as 9 – like grownups, now. It’s why they’re called “Mr. Snow” instead of “Brandyn,” and why they’re held to such high standards.

“One thing I think is very, very unfair,” he says, is “if you’re growing up on the West Side of Chicago, and you want to be able to access a first rate private high school, by end of your 7^th grade year that’s a done deal. I know I wasn’t ready for that in 7^th grade, and yet, they have to be.”

He says that since they’ve started using their new policies CJA’s teachers have come around. And Brandyn’s mom says the structure has helped her son get his act together.

“I honestly don’t think Brandyn would be in 8^th grade,” if it weren’t for the school’s rigor, she says. “I think I’d be dealing with a child that didn’t want to go to school.”

Support: The other side of the equation

One thing researchers say we do know is that especially for middle school kids, two things are critical: clear expectations and a lot of support.

Beckley teaches Formation, a class to help eighth graders deal with the pressure of their young, complicated lives.

“So yesterday I asked for some honesty,” he says, addressing the class from the front of the room.

“I’d argue that all of you have fear or stress about what? Raise your hand if you remember.”

The answer is high school choices. Chicago area high schools send out their acceptance letters starting this week, and the topic is on every 8^th grader’s mind.

So this week he’s asked them to think about the very best and very worst things that have ever happened to them– to establish a scale. He wants them to think in this way: If that thing I went through before was worse than this stress now, then I can get through this stress ok.

They’ve started with essays on the worst thing that’s ever happened to them.

“No one has anything to be ashamed of,” Beckley reassures them, and calls the first student to the front of the room.

Some of today’s “worst experience“ stories have happy endings: One boy describes how scared he was the time he accidentally lost track of his 4-year-old brother on the CTA, even though the brother turned up okay.

But other stories belie traumatic experiences: One student describes the day his uncle was killed– stabbed in the neck. Another explains that his mom’s boyfriend is serving a life sentence in prison for murder, after a fight with an upstairs neighbor escalated.

After each essay, Beckley asks the class to evaluate it, according to a three-point scale he’s handed out before class.

“Guys, honesty?” Beckley asks.

The boys cry out in unison: “Three!”

“Is there an exceptionally strong sense of audience and voice?”

“Three!”

Then Beckley calls Brandyn’s cousin Davion up to the front of the room.

He faces the class and begins to read: “When I was four months old my dad got shot and so he’s paralyzed.”

As he continues, his voice begins to waver. “It really pisses me off to know that the man who shot my dad is still walking around somewhere in the world. The man who took that away from me I want to kill him when I get older.”

He begins to cry. “But I don’t want to because I don’t want to go to jail.”

“Davion, you can have a seat,” Beckley tells the boy.

Davion does sit down, but he’s still crying. Brandyn goes over to comfort him.

Then Beckley gets up and stands in front of the class. His head is bent; his lips are pursed– like he’s struggling to figure out what to say.

“I’m proud of you guys…every day,” he says, finally. “Let’s get to work. Go ahead and pack your things.”

Davion is still crying when he walks into the hallway, but adults walk with him to see the school’s social worker. I’m not allowed to follow him into her office, but I see him later that day, and he seems to be okay.

High school persistence

Ten hours after he said good-bye to his mom this morning Brandyn sits behind his drum set for jazz band practice. Today they’re rehearsing the jazz standard “Mood Indigo.”

Brandyn would really like to go to one of Chicago’s arts high schools.  He’s auditioned for two. He’s also taken the entrance exams for Loyola and for selective enrollment public schools like Whitney Young. His mom, Tina Jackson, says his motivation makes her proud.

“In the beginning he just wanted to graduate,” she says. “Now he wants to go to college and knows which one and how much it costs.”

But she says she also knows how hard it will be for Brandyn to be on that path – and how hard it will be for him to stay there.

We produced the story for Front & Center, WBEZ’s reporting initiative covering issues in the Great Lakes region. Shannon and I shared responsibilities evenly here, each taking part in recording sound, taking still photos and editing the whole piece together.

The old saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” may be a tired cliché, but the operators of small business incubator on Chicago’s Southwest Side hope this mantra will help them turn spent grain into money and fish waste into jobs.

Tucked away on a dead-end corner of 46^th Street, the Plant is a collection of food-related small businesses working together in a kind of entrepreneurial ecosystem whereby the waste from one company – spent grain from the brewery, for example – becomes literal fuel – charcoal briquettes – for the bakery upstairs.

Plant founder John Edel, who colleagues describe as a “benevolent mad scientist,” says that by “following the waste” and finding the inefficiencies inherent in any manufacturing process, he and his team can create jobs and rebuild the economy of a neighborhood that was once home to the Union Stockyards and countless related jobs. The Plant received a $1.5 million grant from the state to help create 125 jobs in its 93,000 sq. ft. facility, which they hope will put a dent in replacing the estimated 400 jobs lost when Peer Food Products shut down their meat processing operations at the site in 2006.

Front & Center visited the Plant in October to see how Edel and his team are trying to pioneer a new model of business ecology and job creation. You can see what they’re up to in the video above.

Artist Deb Sokolow at work in her Chicago studio. (Robin Amer)

I produced a lot of stories this past fall and winter, but did a bad job of sharing them here. I’m finally getting to that, so you’ll see a few posts from me today.

Here is the first. Art/Work is a monthly profile series I launched in September 2011. Each piece features a contemporary visual artist exhibiting in Chicago talking about the inspiration and perspiration behind their creative endeavors.

Coming as I do from a visual arts background, this series has been especially fun to produce. I love spending time in peoples’ studios, and I love demystifying art and artists for a public audience. I think a lot of people have this notion that art is something that just emerges fully formed from the mind of some “genius,” rather than something that takes a ton of labor to create. Making art is work, and it takes a lot of trial and error and a lot of experimentation to get something right. It can take years for ideas to percolate, crystallize and develop.

Here are my four favorite pieces from the series so far. They include a primate-obsessed photographer who secretly wishes she was a scientist, a painter with a sense of humor and bona fide conspiracy theorist. I’ll post the next few as I produce them.

If you have trouble with the Vimeo links, you can see the whole series as it first appeared on WBEZ.org here.

Spaghetti and ‘Cubist cokeheads’? Artist Scott Reeder seduces with humor.

With his “Cubist Cokeheads” and spaghetti on canvas, Scott Reeder is a funny painter, following in the footsteps of modern artists like Duchamp who challenged the art establishment with humor. But his new show at the MCA is less a challenge to – and more of a conversation with – the great painters of the past.

Art? Yes. Conspiracy? Maybe. Artist Deb Sokolow makes conspiracy theories come alive in graphic style.

Chicago artist Deb Sokolow creates giant narrative drawings that explore conspiracy theories great and small. Is she paranoid? Maybe. That doesn’t mean your postman isn’t really a drug smuggler.

With ordinary objects, artist Laura Letinsky instills – and questions – photographic desire

Through still life images both lush and disorienting, photographer Laura Letinsky explores her own love-hate relationship with images of domestic perfection.

Through primates, the evolutionary origins of war

In her photo series The Four Year War at Gombe, artist Alison Ruttan follows the roots of human conflict back to our primate ancestors.

Abraham Levitan performing at the Third Coast Festival awards ceremony in 2010.

3:02

Have you ever seen Shame That Tune, the musical game show that happens every month at The Hideout?

Three participants read embarrassing stories about their lives. Then, host Brian Costello interviews them for a few minutes. By that time, pianist Abraham Levitan has composed a song based on their story, in a musical genre determined by spinning a musical Wheel of Fortune. (When I went, options included “Good Aerosmith,” “Bad Aerosmith,” and “Muppets.”)

Let me tell you – Abraham Levitan makes this show. He is so talented, so quick and so funny! Seeing him perform in Shame That Tune, one feels the pleasure of recognition, watching him weave little details from each story into the song; delight, in his ability to mimic almost any musical style; and amazement that he has done it all SO FAST.

So imagine my delight and amazement when I learned recently that, unbeknownst to me, I had been Shame That Tuned! Well, sort of.

I’m embarrassed I didn’t know this sooner, but here’s what I learned: The lovely ladies of the Third Coast International Audio Festival’s program Re:Sound will, on occasion, commission Abraham to write and record a song based on the radio pieces they present in that week’s episode. And they had commissioned Abraham to write a song for their episode called The Lost Show, which features my story Ghosts of Gary.

I heard a rebroadcast of the show when I was driving home from somewhere a few weeks ago. It’s always fun to turn on the radio and hear your own story pop up (never gets old for me, actually) but I was totally surprised and enthralled when I heard Abraham’s song.

Along with my story about the abandoned Palace Movie Theater in Gary, Ind., the show features stories about Hopi teenagers struggling not to lose their language; an episode of Nate DiMeo’s excellent podcast The Memory Palace about two sisters who discover they can speak to the dead, and a story about a nursing home for actors. From that Abraham wrote a song, which to my ears sounds like a waltz, called We Were Beautiful When We Were Young:

May you die in Act five, Scene three
May your kids learn the native tongue
My sister and me haunt the streets of Gary
We were beautiful when we were young

Me and my sister, we talk to the dead
We find out exactly how Sam Beckett read
We break into the Palace
Where performing live
It’s the ghosts of the Jackson Five

When our dead brothers come back we’ll all form a line
If we can speak their language they’ll let us off fine
But just when they’ll appear, don’t nobody know
It’s like waiting for Godot

May you die in Act five, Scene three
May your kids learn the native tongue
My sister and me haunt the streets of Gary
We were beautiful when we were young

I fell asleep in the lobby
And didn’t get home until four
Dance my dreams with Dillinger’s ghost
Man, my mother was so, oh…

So I died in Act three
So my kids never learned my tongue
My sister and me haunt the streets of Gary
We were beautiful when we were young
We were beautiful when we were young

The audio is above. Please listen to it! Aside from the novelty factor, it’s really very haunting and beautiful, with Abraham’s plaintive vocals and the resonant sounds of the organ. I also love all of his little touches, like the eerie “ABC…1-2-3…” after the verse about the ghosts of the Jackson Five.

Recording on the deck of Excalibur. Photo by Karen Hoffman.

6:20

At the start of the Race to Mackinac I was several miles out from the shoreline, photographing competitors from the press boat. Occasionally a missive would come across the radio from the race committee.

“Argo this is Breaker, we see 19 boats.”

“Copy that Argo, we also see 19 boats.”

Once all the starters from that category had been accounted for, the race committee would sound the starting cannon and they would be off, colorful spinnakers raised to the wind. The next line of boats would advance from the starting area.

But occasionally a boat would not be accounted for, and the race committee would radio back and forth trying to find them. In the middle of the afternoon we heard this on the radio:

“Where’s WingNuts?”

If you’ve been following the news or heard my recent story on the subject, you probably know that WingNuts is a 35 ft. sailboat out of Saginaw, Mich., that would tragically and shockingly lose its skipper another crewmember before the weekend was out.

The Chicago Yacht Club’s Dockmaster, Ryan McPheeters, who was driving the press boat, smiled and shook his head when he heard the race committee was looking for WingNuts. “That boat is wacky,” he told me.

“What do you mean?”

He reiterated. “That boat is wacky and her crew is wacky.”

He pointed out the sides of the hull that swooped out at the deck to make what looked like wings. This was apparently somewhat unusual. I got the impression from the rest of the conversation that when he called the crew wacky he meant they were fun loving and well-liked.

When I came into work Monday morning, preparing to finish what was supposed to be a light-hearted multimedia story about the race, and heard that two competitors had died, I was really stunned.

I remember walking over to my co-worker’s desk in a daze.

“They were from Wingnuts…?”

I couldn’t believe that people had died. I couldn’t believe I had seen them. I was worried for the other people I knew in the race, and I knew I couldn’t complete the story I had originally intended to produce.

Going through my tape was like listening for ghosts. I found moments I had forgotten about: the crew of Excalibur reading their Sail Flow charts and pointing out a storm that was likely to hit at 1 a.m. Sunday night; running into Sociable on our way to the start and hearing their crew joke around with Excalibur’s about how they were heading the wrong way, as they went to drop me off at Monroe Harbor.

It was very eerie.

Since I’ve finished the story I’ve gotten some interesting feedback from people in the sailing community. In my reporting, I heard people raise questions about the role of the Coast Guard in the search and rescue operation. Later I heard from a sailor who is also part of the Beneteau fleet that counts both Sociable and Excalibur in its ranks. “Spending the night monitoring the VHF transmissions from Sociable was one of the worst experiences of my life,” he told me. He also said this:

“I don’t know if the expectation of rescue is something more concentrated on the [Great] Lakes or if it comes from inexperience, but I started hearing that around from some sailors who were newer to the sport and none had left the [Great] Lakes. On the Pacific, on shorter races than the Mac, we are regularly out of rescue range for days on end…

Anyhow, the lack of divers certainly didn’t make any difference in the outcome. No chopper could have launched in that storm and it would still take 45 min. to an hour to reach them. After that long unconscious and under water, a diver can’t help anyway. It’s still terrible, but there is no reason to blame lack of rescue. Only to praise the efforts of Sociable and the others who responded.”

This came from a WBEZ listener who heard the story when it aired on 848:

“The USCGC Mackinaw does indeed follow the race, but is there as a courtesy escort. The thought of one boat being expected to ensure the safety of over 300 boats, of different speeds, scattered throughout the lake, is ridiculous, and it’s disturbing to hear that a sailor expected this. Sailing is a challenging sport, and most boaters realize that the responsibility for the their safety ultimately lies in their own hands.

Counting on the Coast Guard to behave like a safety net is a dangerous attitude to bring on the water. Sailing on our Great Lakes is an incredibly rewarding pastime, but the challenges that make it so come with risks that we sailors must accept and take responsibility for.”

I plan to stay on this story, although I don’t relish the next step: talking to the Charlevoix County Sheriff’s office when they get back the coroner’s report some time in the next few weeks.