Alumni Essay

Summer/23

A film professor reappraises
his childhood approach to performing magic.

Three years ago, I was all fired up to teach a new freshman writing seminar called Special Effects in Cinema History. Then came the inevitable questions: How to structure it? Where to start? How to begin the course without falling back on a chronological list of special effects through the decades? Simply promising how-they-did-it explanations for each new technological advance wouldn’t speak to the idea of special effects—how they create a coherent, concrete visual world and yet never convince us that it’s real. Special effects, and those who study them, have wrestled with this question at least since 1896, when French illusionist Georges Méliès morphed from stage magician to cinematic conjuror.

After a few weeks of second-guessing and a lot of coffee, I began the class with something simple: a magic trick. I used a gimmicked (altered) deck of playing cards to create the illusion that, no matter which card students chose or where they cut it into the deck, it instantly reappeared on top. After a few variations on this effect, I flipped through the whole deck to show it suddenly contained nothing but multiples of a single card, the eight of hearts. Then I squared up the deck and riffled it one more time … and every card was different once again.

This effect has been a staple of kids’ magic sets for decades. Magicians call it a self-working trick, meaning it requires no sleight of hand skills (an imperative for me because I had no such skills to contribute). But it can be startling to those who haven’t seen it before. Luckily for the course, my students were indeed startled, or at least inclined to humor me.

Then came the really fun part, for a film history nerd anyway. I asked the class: What does this trick have in common with a filmic special effect like a star destroyer overtaking a tiny ship in outer space, an emaciated humanoid running on all fours, or a giant ape punching a giant lizard into New York Harbor? Compared to such effects, what does my gimmicked deck make you think you see? What means could its inventor have employed to alter the way that decks of playing cards normally behave? Does anyone believe the deck truly changed, and if not, why are we still surprised when it suddenly contains only duplicates of the same card? And if we know that King Kong is really an animated 18-inch puppet covered in rabbit fur (in 1933) or a digitally rendered chimera (in 2021) but never a living creature, why do we feel suspense over whether Godzilla or Kong will win the skirmish?

The magic trick was a gamble—I worried that the students would find it corny—but it paid off. Everyone had responses and concrete examples from films to support their opinions. As the conversation shifted to the hidden mechanics of both cinematic visual effects and magic, I went so far as to reveal the secret of the trick, thus breaking the magician’s oath (though the pedagogical payoff was worth it). I have another secret, however, one that I didn’t reveal to the freshmen that day: Performing the trick also scratched a decades-old itch of mine. For I was a grade-school magician. At least, I thought I was.

My magic career began in 1976, when I tore a prepaid postcard out of an advertisement in a kids’ magazine. The card, plus a check for a few dollars per month, was my ticket to the Young Magician’s Club—not a real club but a subscription service that shipped one magical effect every 30 days. Each white box contained a gimmick (magicians’ general term for a trick’s hidden apparatus) and a booklet containing instructions and patter, the verbal accompaniment meant to ensure that, even though he might fumble the trick, a third grader would sound witty while doing it.

I still have every one of those gimmicks and nearly every booklet, and even remembering them now gobsmacks me with a memory of a botched performance so embarrassing that no amount of wistfulness could varnish it.

That Halloween party has since become a family punchline. It ended—and I mean ended—with my magic act. Lacking even rudimentary foresight, I invited a classmate named Eric to the party—my frenemy before frenemies were a thing—who loudly reported that he knew every trick in my routine. My intense self-consciousness (coupled with an equally unendearing petulance) brought the act to a screeching halt, followed by a shouting match consisting mostly of “Do not!” followed by “Do so!” for several rounds. How this battle of wits ended I don’t recall, but it surely brought an end to the party.

As I look back now, after reading up on magic history and theory to prepare the special effects seminar, the cause of the fiasco seems obvious: I misunderstood magic’s function as an entertainment. To me at age eight, magic represented something I knew but others didn’t, something I could feel superior about despite being an unathletic A student—read, a nerd. All I cared about was impressing, and possibly intimidating, kids like Eric.

What I couldn’t have understood then was that to “fool” an onlooker with a magic effect (as the title of Penn and Teller’s reality series Fool Us would have it) is not synonymous with making the onlooker look foolish. According to Eugene Burger, Jamy Ian Swiss, Juan Tamariz, and other thoughtful magician-theorists, to raise magic to the level of art, the performer must engage the audience, not as targets of a con game, but as witnesses with the magician to the wonder of an event that can’t happen in reality as we know it. Rather than lording their skills over spectators, magicians can present themselves as sharing in the spectators’ surprise and wonder.

There’s a generosity about this approach to magic as something done for and with an audience, not to it. When my card trick arrives at its big reveal, our certainty that buried playing cards can’t jump to the top of a deck has to confront the sight of a buried card doing just that. Even a trick this simple is an opportunity to engage spectators in an experiment in utopian thinking, during which we entertain the possibility of occurrences deemed impossible by our rational selves.

A well-defined, well-practiced, and well-performed magic effect can simulate a rearrangement of physical reality that defies natural limitations. It could even prompt us to consider how human-made limitations we encounter in our reality might be rearranged, discarded, or replaced. At least, that’s the ideal.

I’d like to think I was faithful to this ideal when I used the gimmicked deck to introduce freshman writers to special effects in film. I hope the trick nudged them to regard special effects not as add-ons to fantasy or science fiction films but as a phenomenon fundamental to the experience of cinema. Special effects are a concept, one that uniquely illuminates a defining tension that cinema and magic share: the tension between the inflexibility of reality and the power of each medium to transform it.

As a personal bonus, I now have a side hustle in common with one of my cinematic heroes, Orson Welles. Some months ago, after as much practicing as I could squeeze in, I put on a magic routine for the kind and patient patrons of a local senior center. If they invite me back, perhaps I’ll bring my all-eights trick deck and strike up a discussion about cinematic special effects too. Magic is magic, after all.

Paul Young, AM’92, PhD’98, is associate professor of film and media studies at Dartmouth College. The author of The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and Frank Miller’s “Daredevil” and the Ends of Heroism (Rutgers University Press, 2016), he is at work on a book about women filmmakers of the 1910s and ’20s and their roles in the development of the feature-length fiction film.

Magic

Graduate alumni

Carolyn Purnell, AM’07, PhD’13

Monochromatic blues

rsmith — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 02:51:32 +0000

rsmith Tue, 08/08/2023 - 21:51

A colorful selection of samples from the Forbes Pigment Collection housed at the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Harvard Art Museums. Photo: Caitlin Cunningham Photography; © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Summer/23

Why there’s nothing neutral about gray.

If I were to ask for your favorite color, you might say blue, green, or yellow. If you’re a person who marches to the beat of a slightly different drum, you may go for orange or purple. But unless you’re a true radical, I doubt you would say gray.

On a gut-reaction level, gray gets a bad rap. It’s gloomy and dull. The color of concrete and elephant hide. A melancholy reminder of Soviet-era architecture or dreary winter days. It’s such an ambivalent word that the English-speaking world can’t even agree on how to spell it.

Gray doesn’t seem to have much going for it, but somehow it has crept into our lives with impressive stealth, pollinating our homes, closets, and offices at an alarming rate. In 2020 the UK-based Science Museum Group analyzed more than 7,000 photographs of everyday objects from its holdings. This motley collection, consisting of everything from cameras and clocks to telephones and board games, revealed a surprising trend: since 1800 the variety of colors in everyday objects has sharply declined, and gray has come to reign supreme. The plummet has been steepest between the years 2000 and 2020. Where warm golds, reds, and browns used to sing, now gunmetal gray, charcoal, and silver announce their “sleek” glory.

Industries such as interior design and automotive sales have witnessed similar shifts. According to the Drive magazine, more than 70 percent of cars today are produced in white, silver, gray, or black, whereas in 1996, that number hovered around 40 percent.

As a historian who studies color in Europe and the United States, I wanted to explore this surging neutrality and understand what’s fueling the gray wave. Why has vibrant color seen such a striking decline in recent decades, and why has Technicolor’s promise faded into a notably dull palette?

For starters, that promise itself might be partially to blame. Nineteenth-century industrialization created a magical fairyland of color. For millennia, pigments and colorants came from natural sources: insects, minerals, and plants. They were bound to the times and tides of geography, and access to the brightest colors was often limited to those with fat pocketbooks or aristocratic blood. But the 19th century brought the rise of new technologies, including the petrochemical industry and its progeny: synthetic colors. For a few pennies, even the most down-and-out could afford trinkets dyed with vibrant arsenic-based and coal-tar-based colors. Magenta ribbons, violet stockings, electric-blue paper flowers with wickedly green stems—colorful items flooded the world with wonder and delight.

Over time, though, that wonder faded to a casual familiarity. Mass production had a devaluing effect on color, and in 1956, the writer Aldous Huxley succinctly explained the widespread apathy for vibrant palettes: “We have seen too much pure, bright color at Woolworth’s to find it intrinsically transporting.” Today’s gravitational pull toward gray, beige, ivory, and white signals disillusionment with the modern, hypersaturated world.

At the dawn of the 20th century, hypersaturation went hand in hand with hyperstimulation, and social theorists such as Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin described modernity as a constant barrage of sensory shocks. Cities surged with traffic, chemical dyes drenched textiles and walls, and lurid advertisements cried for attention at every turn. The 19th-century writer Pierre de Lano warned, “Color … is a modern taste, born certainly of the nervousness that torments our imagination.” Some of his contemporaries likewise described modern palettes as “anarchic,” “piercing,” “insane,” “vulgar,” and “bewildering.”

Nevertheless, the so-called modern taste continued apace, and over the following century, we added electronic colors to the visual roster. Screens blast radiant wavelengths throughout the day, entrancing and exhausting us by turns. Our schedules and brains are such hotbeds of disorder, people long for an environment that reads as a blank slate. In large part, the hunger for white walls and sleek, minimal interiors has emerged as a response to overstimulation.

Neutral colors offer a possible antidote to mass exhaustion. Humans may not be able to control the wildness of the world, but we can exercise restraint on our surroundings. An uncluttered space can lead to an uncluttered mind, the thinking goes, and there seems to be a collective assumption that gray offers the eye a chance to rest. In the minimal interiors of today, neutral colors have become a kind of shorthand for absence: this room is clear of disorder, uncertainty, stress, and the messiness of life.

Yet it’s worth asking why other colors have become synonymous with clutter. What do gray walls offer that sunshine yellow or royal blue cannot? Likewise, why do we so readily view colors like oatmeal or ash as “neutral” in the first place? As the art theorist David Batchelor wrote in 2000, the aversion to color runs deep: “In the West … color has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished, and degraded.”

Over time this marginalization of color has led to collective chromophobia, or fear of color. In such a worldview, a pop of color is acceptable, but bright swaths seem “loud,” “garish,” or “tacky.” Chromophobia appears in full force when it comes to home resale values. A 2018 Zillow report reveals that homes with a charcoal-colored door sell for $6,721 more than expected, and houses with a greige (light gray/beige) exterior can boost a home’s value by $3,500.

Scholars like Batchelor and anthropologist Michael Taussig have compellingly argued that chromophobia can be linked to deep-seated economic and racial fears. After the initial excitement of the chromatic turn, many elite Europeans associated the new, vibrant colors with otherness, degeneracy, and intellectual inferiority. By the end of the 19th century, the middle and upper classes often treated abundant bright colors as a mark of disgrace, suitable only for unsophisticated people who couldn’t appreciate subtler shades.

The satirical British publication Punch drove the point home in an 1877 cartoon where a hostess wishes to introduce a stylishly lispy gentleman to an eligible young lady. The gentleman declines, because “I weally couldn’t go down to suppah with a young lady who wears mauve twimmings in her skirt, and magenta wibbons in her hair!” As outlandish as Punch made such prejudices seem, they were prevalent enough to provoke cultural comment, and these stereotypes had remarkable staying power. Increasingly, good taste became linked to “quiet colors.” For example, gentlemen adopted dark suits, and demure women never wore red.

Over time neutrals became an indicator of social and moral superiority, and vestiges of these ideas still exist today. Google “expensive interiors,” “luxury interior design,” “high-end aesthetic,” “chic clothing,” or “classy fashion,” and you’ll be greeted by a desaturated palette. If you want to witness an exercise in true restraint, check out Kim Kardashian’s $60 million mansion, swathed in ivory, white, and natural wood. The new opulence is decidedly abstemious.

Given that color preferences lie at a complex juncture between personal preference, cultural symbolism, collective psychology, historical developments, and economic imperatives, it’s unsurprising that many people have an ambivalent relationship with color. Nevertheless, shouldn’t we be at least somewhat enthusiastic about the colors in our lives? Our homes, workplaces, and hangouts are more than just backdrops—they’re the environments in which we grow, love, thrive, fail, and challenge ourselves. Rather than minimizing the influence of colors on our lives, we should start thinking about how they can amplify our feelings or bring ornamentation to the dull daily routines that, arguably, already add enough grayness to life.

Carolyn Purnell, AM’07, PhD’13, is the author of Blue Jeans (Bloomsbury, 2023) and The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses (W. W. Norton, 2017).

Called to the game

admin — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 14:52:52 +0000

admin Wed, 02/08/2023 - 08:52

(switas/iStock)

Bob Levey, AB’66

Kim Allan Williams, AB’75, MD’79

Winter/23

Lessons from a life of bridge.

The University of Chicago has given me many things. A degree that makes people go, “Oooooh.” A grade point average that makes people go, “That bad?” Deep respect for ideas, rigor, and black coffee, not necessarily in that order.

And … bridge.

No, not the kind that carries roads over gullies. The famous card game. Which I learned to play in the late lamented Pierce Tower in 1963.

On a cold winter’s night, the clock was about to strike midnight. I was trying (and mostly failing) to read a textbook in my room.

From down the hall, a voice bellowed: “We need a fourth for bridge!”

That sounded like more fun than studying (it still does). I had never played before. I pulled up a piece of mattress alongside a shipping trunk and unfurled the 13 cards I had been dealt. I’ve been unfurling ever since.

After 60 years of bidding slams and finessing for queens, these are my credentials: National champion. Thirty-one-time regional champion. Holder of nearly 10,000 master points (only a few hundred players have ever amassed more).

I write about bridge, teach it, sometimes play it professionally. At 3 a.m., when she feels me stir, my wife is likely to say: “Stop thinking about the hand you blew and go back to sleep.”

“Yes, dear,” I will reply, dutifully. But I won’t reenter dreamland until I reconstruct and replay the horror hand from memory, card by card. Sometimes twice.

So many nonplayers think that success at bridge is all about math. Learn the odds and you’ll soar. In fact, this truism needs to be turned upside down. Yes, fail to master the math piece and you will certainly fail. But overall success depends just as heavily on a spry memory and that elusive quality called table feel.

Your opponents often sprout inadvertent tics—a curl of the eyebrow, a nervous lick of the lips—when the pressure is on. To experienced players, these tells are as comprehensive as the textbook I once lugged to Humanities 1.

Recognizing tells is also famously part of a poker player’s arsenal. But the similarity between the two games ends there.

There’s no betting in tournament bridge. Uttering so much as a sound is forbidden. To kibitz a table at a serious tournament is to wonder whether the four players are drawing breath—that’s how stone-faced and locked-in they are.

Bridge has produced some of the more epic, antic true stories I’ve ever heard.

Story one: At a large tournament in Pennsylvania, a top-line player failed in a contract he could have made. He punched a wall. His hand crumpled into a bloody mess. He was driven to a nearby emergency room.

The doctor asked what happened. “Well, I had five spades to the king, three clubs to the ten …,” the man began.

Story two: A very accomplished—and very bridge-obsessed—couple retired to their hotel room after an evening bridge session in New York. “Darling,” said the man, “do you want to make love first or discuss the hands first?” (Both people verify the story—for those who care, bridge discussion went first.)

Story three: At a home match in the 1930s between two couples, one husband was ragging on his wife unmercifully. Nothing she could do was right. He kept it up for more than an hour.

Finally, she excused herself, went to her bedroom, fetched a pistol, and shot her husband dead.

The jury acquitted!

Why bridge and not hearts or canasta? Because bridge demands (and rewards) total attention and total stamina. Luck is very much secondary.

National events have been lost in the 16th hour when a player blanked briefly and couldn’t remember whether his partner had played the five of spades or the six. As we bridgies get older—I promise you, we all have, do, and will—the ability to summon maximum brainpower is a comfort and a touchstone.

Also, a medical plus: bridge literature is stuffed with articles by doctors who have detected relatively lower rates of dementia and Alzheimer’s among those who play.

At late-night post-tournament sessions around the bar, bridge players love to debate the deeper meaning of the game. What lessons does it teach? What, if anything, makes a bridge player a better person?

The answer, for this addict, is easy. Bridge is always played with a partner. How you treat that humanoid across the table, and how he treats you, is central to success. Building collaborations is a life skill, for sure.

When constructing a serious partnership, two people will often spend hours agreeing on a system of special-coded bids. My favorite partner and I play 47 “conventions”—bids that are legal but often artificial and that describe something very specific.

For instance, if one of us opens the bidding with four diamonds, we’re not saying anything about diamonds. We’re indicating a hand with at least seven good hearts and an ace in one of the three other suits. It’s not cheating. It’s just better preparation.

Alas, bridge has suffered a decline in recent years. Committed World War II–era players began to die off. Younger people have not replaced them, especially Gen Zers, partly because they clog their heads with video games, partly because they are busy with school, sports, and so much else. Meanwhile, the pandemic has driven a stake through in-person bridge. Attendance has not returned to anywhere near previous levels. It may never.

Then there’s the length of the bridge runway. As a fellow teacher says when he opens yet another beginner’s class: “You will all be bad at bridge for a long time.”

But then …

A newbie bids a grand slam (all 13 tricks) for the first time and brings it home. Nice!

He doubles the opponents and defeats their contract, collecting a hefty 800 points. Cool!

Meanwhile, a grizzled vet lounges around the scorer’s table after the final session of a national tournament, sensing that he has a chance. Suddenly, one of his pals calls out: “Hey, you won!”

That happened to me in Reno, Nevada, in 2010. A national title! My beaming partner—also an apparent adult—grabbed me by the shoulders. I grabbed him by his. We proceeded to bunny-hop around the hotel ballroom like deranged pop-up toys. No one who saw us had to ask why.

Yes, I could have been curing cancer all these years. I could have written more books, volunteered more often, helped more old ladies cross the street.

But something inside me bubbles up with pleasure when a fellow player asks if I have a second, and begins: “Tell me what you’d bid. You hold four spades to the ace-jack, three hearts to the king …”

Bob Levey, AB’66, is a retired columnist for the Washington Post. He had prizewinning parallel careers as a radio and television personality. He has taught journalism at six universities. President of the University of Chicago Alumni Association (now the Alumni Board) from 1998 to 2000, he currently serves as a trustee at Montgomery (MD) College.

Return service

rsmith — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 23:37:05 +0000

rsmith Wed, 11/02/2022 - 18:37

The University of Chicago tennis team in 1975. From left: Daniel Hayes, AB’78, MBA’79; Robert Smartt, AB’76; Terence Lichtor, AB’75, PhD’80, MD’80; Kim Williams, AB’75, MD’79; Wayne Threatt, AB’75; Kenneth Kohl, AB’79; and Coach Chris Scott. (UChicago Photographic Archive, apf5-03736, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library)

Fall/22

A coach’s lessons went well beyond tennis.

Some called him “St. Christopher.” My nickname for him is one I never shared with him—or anyone else—until now: “Chris Scott scientia; vita excolatur.” I used to say that to myself jokingly, but if we go back 50 years, it’s clear that Christopher Scott and my University of Chicago experience were so intertwined that it makes perfect sense.

It started in the summer of 1970, before my senior year of high school, when, along with about 60 other inner-city kids, I participated in the Office of Special Programs’ NCAA-sponsored tennis camp at Stagg Field. It was the initial year of that program, and the director, Larry Hawkins, had recruited Chris Scott to teach tennis. After finding out that he was the U of C’s varsity tennis coach, I approached him during a break and asked what it would take to become a student at the University. I told him that I had always wanted to attend but had been warned by my high school guidance counselor not to apply because the University of Chicago did not take kids like me from the Chicago Public Schools system. As an honor student, I had been told, I might be able to get in at University of Illinois Circle Campus.

Chris paused the tennis class for a few minutes, walked across the street to a pay phone, came back, and told me that after class I should go to an address on Woodlawn Avenue. It turned out that, without any hint, preparation, or warning, he had arranged for me to have a college interview at my dream school.

Fast-forward 16 months, and I was a 16-year-old UChicago freshman trying out for Chris’s varsity tennis team, thinking I was a tennis player because I had won a few high school matches. Chris was very clear about one thing—there was no way I was going to make that team with my experience. But if I worked really hard, maybe I would make the team as a junior, after the “big four” (Allen Friedman, AB’73; Jonathan Rosenblum, AB’73; Dan Rosenhouse, AB’73; and Alex Terras, EX’73) had graduated.

I thought I could prove myself to Chris by winning the intramural tournament for my dorm, Upper Rickert. But I lost in the first round, 6–0, 6–0 to another freshman, Terence Lichtor, AB’75, PhD’80, MD’80. Terry went on to win the tournament and was slotted for number five singles behind those four upperclassmen. My response was to study the sport and to practice as much as I could, sometimes for six hours on a given day. By spring I had challenged my way up to number seven, but in college tennis only six players are in the starting lineup.

In the first varsity match of the spring, I played as a sub at sixth singles, but the next day I beat our number six player, Dean Krone, AB’74, JD’85, in a challenge match. That put me in the inner circle—the starting lineup—and Chris began to mentor me more intently. He challenged everything about my game, both mechanically and mentally. I remember asking team captain Alex Terras, after a particularly difficult practice, why Chris was so tough on me. Nothing I did was ever good enough, it seemed. I was singled out for every little mistake or unforced error. I never forgot Alex’s answer: “Don’t you realize he’s given up on the rest of us? You’re the only one who has a chance!”

After that varsity season, Chris introduced me to the African American tennis scene in Chicago. The Chicago Prairie Tennis Club, one of the oldest US tennis organizations, sponsored me to play Chicago District Tennis Association (CDTA) tournaments in the 18-and-under category. I lost all eight tournaments in the first round. But after a full year of “the life of the mind,” recognizing that I could learn more than a bit from losing, I stayed at each tournament to watch the top seeds play. I gathered information about stroke mechanics, tactics, and strategy.

That fall I came back to the University of Chicago, and I never lost a challenge match for the rest of my college career. As I was now the number one singles player, Chris was able to secure my invitation for the CDTA’s 18-and-under Super Excellence program, where I could play with ranked players. With his demanding mentorship, in a tough athletic environment, I excelled. I qualified for the NCAA in both my junior and senior years and achieved high rankings in both the US Tennis Association and its African American counterpart, the American Tennis Association (ATA). More important, I gained life lessons and developed problem-solving and strategic-thinking skills—including a high level of frustration tolerance—that became the underpinnings of my medical career.

Throughout this time, Chris was pushing me for more and better. My best year of tennis came after my first year of medical school, when I achieved the number one national ranking in the ATA. Chris had by then served as my coach, mentor, professional doubles partner, and surrogate father. He tried to convince me to defer my second year of medical school and play on the professional tennis circuit. It was fortunate, in retrospect, that a back injury at a qualification tournament for the 1976 US Open derailed my professional tennis aspirations. I continued my medical training and settled for local and regional prize money to help defray educational expenses.

After medical school, I trained in internal medicine at Emory University, and I got to see Chris play in the 1979 ATA national tournament in Atlanta. He didn’t look good. He appeared short of breath and lost to a less-skilled player. It turned out that this was the first manifestation of his severe multivessel coronary heart disease and congestive heart failure. He underwent bypass surgery but never recovered enough to play competitively.

After I returned to the University of Chicago to complete cardiology training, he came to me for advice. I referred him to a senior colleague since I’m not a fan of treating family members, which he essentially was. But we had extensive conversations about nutrition, eating habits, and their effects on health. It was just a few years later that I received the fateful call from the emergency room at Chicago Osteopathic Hospital: Chris had sustained a cardiac arrest on the tennis court and could not be resuscitated.

Chris never got to see the full effects of his mentorship and how he essentially created a pathway through a simple phone call and constant badgering—more accurately, inspiration—for a socioeconomically deprived inner-city kid from the South Side of Chicago. He inspired me to become a medical school professor, one of a very few African American chiefs of cardiology or medicine department chairs, a scientist, a clinician, an educator, a health policy advocate, and a guideline author, now internationally known for promoting the field of cardionutrition in order to prevent premature cardiac events. Like his.

Kim Allan Williams, AB’75, MD’79, is the current chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of Louisville School of Medicine and editor in chief of the International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention. He served as president of the American Society of Nuclear Cardiology from 2004 to 2005, board chair of the Association of Black Cardiologists from 2008 to 2010, and president of the American College of Cardiology from 2015 to 2016.

Go figure

rsmith — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 23:16:30 +0000

rsmith Thu, 07/29/2021 - 18:16

Stan C. Kimer, MBA’79, performing a routine to “Mele Kalikimaka.” (Photo courtesy Stan C. Kimer, MBA’79)

Stan C. Kimer, MBA’79

Summer/21

Finding a new passion at age 59, or my journey to become a competitive adult figure skater.

It is never too late to discover a new passion.

Just shy of my 59th birthday, in 2014, I posted on Facebook that I had decided—with no prior experience on the ice—to pursue the crazy dream of becoming a competitive adult figure skater. Unintentionally, I made this pronouncement on April 1, so most people chuckled and posted comments like “yeah right, April fools” or “that’s too funny.”

So how did I get to this decision?

I had always enjoyed watching sports. I spent most of my final MBA quarter in the $2 Wrigley Field bleacher seats, becoming a lifelong Cubs fan. Another one of my favorite sports to watch is figure skating. I love its unique combination of artistic beauty and pure athleticism. After retiring from a 31-year career at IBM, I decided to start attending live competitions instead of watching on television.

In January 2010 I traveled to my first string of 10 consecutive US Figure Skating National Championships. In 2013 and 2014, I won the US Figure Skating’s Champs Camp charity auction and got to attend the organization’s late summer training camp, where I started building friendships with some of the nation’s best skating athletes and coaches.

Watching the 2014 Winter Olympics proved to be a tipping point. “These skaters look like they are getting so much joy flying across the ice and performing,” I thought. “I need to get off my couch and do this myself.” When I discovered Dorothy Hamill’s Figure Skating Fantasy Camp for adults, I knew it was time to start.

I found a local rink with a pro shop run by two former competitive pairs skaters, who fitted me with skates and blades. They also recommended a coach who would not mind teaching an “old man” from scratch. They connected me with Paula McKinley, who is still my head coach.

My first time on the ice was a rude awakening. I thought I could just jump on and start gracefully gliding around. Instead, I discovered that this was 100 times more difficult than it looked, and I was going to have to build basic skills slowly and patiently. I started with simple two-foot gliding—slowly.

By the third lesson I could glide on one foot. It took about six weeks to start skating backward. I still remember pushing myself off the rink barrier, willing myself to go backward, and after a few more weeks I could do it. It took almost a full year to master the basic skills of turning from forward to backward, spiraling, spinning, and doing a simple half-revolution waltz jump.

In a new venture, having a good coach or mentor is so important. Paula has that perfect combination of pushing me to do better and correcting my errors, yet praising and affirming me when I work hard to learn a new skill and perform well. She taught me enough of the basics to be able to attend Dorothy Hamill’s camp that fall, where I met several other adult skaters.

I also made two major discoveries.

First, I found a tight community of supportive peers. The adult skating community is a strong one that welcomes newcomers and supports each other along the journey. We are an eclectic group doing something many people think only children and young adults do. (Check out US Figure Skating’s Adult Skating Program.)

Second, I found that this is indeed what I was destined to do. The camp ended with our group putting on a little show for the local community, and I found great joy in performing and hamming it up in front of a crowd. I had not really acted since high school drama club but found I still have that performer personality.

That Christmas I played the role of Clara’s father in my hometown rink’s annual performance of Nutcracker on Ice, with my coach skating as Clara’s mother. My parents, who were then in their mid-80s, attended, sitting aside all the other parents in their 20s and 30s watching their kids perform. My father found it so funny seeing me hobble onto the ice on skates, he couldn’t stop laughing.

I entered my first competition the next summer, and as the only adult male competitor, I was in a group of one and won the gold medal. Still, I was pleased that I performed all of my elements correctly in front of spectators and a panel of judges. I was the fan favorite, with several children bringing me flowers and cheering wildly during the medals ceremony.

Journeys like this are not without perils and setbacks. In my third year, I had a very bad fall and fractured my hip. Many thought that would be the end of skating for me, but I was not going to let the accident derail my newfound love. After eight weeks on crutches, I was back on the ice in November. My coach predicted that it might be three months before I was up to form and that I would be unable to skate in that year’s Christmas program. I was determined to prove her wrong, and after two weeks I was strong enough to start rehearsing for Nutcracker on Ice.

Another setback came when I took a series of tests to advance to a new level. Two of the three judges gave me barely passing scores with a balanced analysis of what I did well and what I needed to improve. The third judge was totally harsh, implying I was a terrible skater who should just quit. It made me both angry and sad, but I needed to lay it aside and appreciate the affirmations.

I remember when a different judge remarked after a competition that I was a joy to watch and that people like me keep her continuing to judge adult competitions. In 2017, when I did my “Mele Kalikimaka” holiday number prior to Nutcracker on Ice, one woman told me that my program alone was worth the price of admission.

I continue to attend skating camps and competitions, and now compete at the East Coast Adult Sectional Championships. At my fourth, in 2020, before the pandemic shut things down, I won my first sectionals gold medal.

It indeed takes a village. I have a team of coaches, in addition to Paula, with complementary skills who help me grow and improve each day. Her son is helping me learn ice dance and a third coach works with me on jump and spin technique.

This does take hard work and dedication. At skating camps, many call me the hardest worker, since doing this in my 60s is more challenging than if I were 30 or 40. But it is also so rewarding. I am in the best physical shape of my life. And winning a gold medal at a major competition recently by beating a more athletic man half my age was the cherry on top.

Just this May I passed the final qualifying test to compete at the US Adult National Championships in 2022 at the age of 66. I can’t wait.

Stan C. Kimer, MBA’79, founded Total Engagement Consulting by Kimer, a diversity and career development consultancy, after a 31-year career at IBM. You can watch him skate at the Stan Kimer YouTube channel, and you can learn more about his skating and his company at totalengagementconsulting.com.

Economics & Business

Graduate alumni

The patient’s tale

admin — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 17:11:52 +0000

admin Tue, 02/16/2021 - 11:11

(Photo courtesy Rey Bosita, MD’96)

Rey Bosita, MD’96,

Winter/21

What a surgeon learned from illness and grief in a pandemic year.

Sometimes new life lessons are learned in subtle whispers and gentle nudges. In 2020 my learning came more like a simultaneous punch in the face and kick in the stomach.

In medical school I learned that the foundation of everything we do as doctors is the doctor-patient relationship. Maintaining the sanctity of this relationship has been, and always will be, my highest priority. But the events of 2020 cast a new light on this sacred tenet.

Twenty-four years after medical school and 18 years into my career as an attending spine surgeon at Texas Back Institute in Dallas, I have seen more than 10,000 patients. Yet here I was learning how vulnerable patients really are.

In March and April the COVID-19 pandemic shut down my medical practice as we waited for guidelines for treating patients safely in this new environment. Two weeks turned into seven—the longest time I have not set foot inside a hospital to see a patient since the beginning of my third year of medical school in 1995.

For the first time in my career, life slowed down. I enjoyed the opportunities to love my wife and children more and to learn new skills like baking French bread and cooking pork tenderloin. I missed interacting with patients and the camaraderie of the operating room, but with patience everything would be OK.

May rolled around, and it was time to return to work. Life would go back to normal, I thought. But a few weeks later I woke up and felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest. My oxygen saturation was in the low 90s at rest, with dips to the high 80s when I tried to talk. Fearful of exposing my family any further, I drove myself to the hospital and knew what my diagnosis was the moment I saw the characteristic cotton ball images on my chest X-ray. The results of the painful nose swab were a foregone conclusion: COVID.

Anger, denial, bargaining, acceptance—all in 20 minutes. No time for depression; fear was setting in. Would the doctors be able to prevent me from dying?

My COVID experience taught me how patients feel when uncertainties surround their disease diagnosis and treatment. I was alone and I was afraid. I had a new disease for which there was no clearly defined treatment protocol, no certain prognosis, and no predictable disease course. All I could do was pray to God that I would recover and see my family again.

My starkest recollection is the personal loss of freedom necessary to maintain a safe working environment for the nurses and doctors who were taking care of me. Personal protective equipment was still somewhat scarce, and some of the staff wore the same masks and face shields every day. During my five-day hospitalization, I was strictly confined to my room. A converted old-school ICU room, it did not have a shower. I felt like a prisoner. But I was alive.

I tried my best to be a model patient, including coaching a young nurse on how to draw blood properly from my veins when she hit a valve by accident. I was a young med student once, and I remembered when patients showed me grace, back in the 1990s in Hyde Park.

Subconsciously, I competed with unseen COVID patients in other rooms, gathering HIPAA-compliant information from nurses to see where I stood with regard to oxygen saturation, medications, and even volume inhaled on an incentive spirometer. COVID hospitalization is a race to survive and leave the hospital. Losing means intubation, the ICU, or worse. Winning means going home. This was a race I was not going to let myself lose. So many people depended on me. My wife and I had plans for the rest of our lives.

All of that was now in doubt as we learned more than ever about remdesivir, steroids, convalescent plasma, and hydroxychloroquine. In this situation, knowledge was not power. Knowledge was paralyzing.

Over the next few days, I turned the corner. My voice improved from two to four to eight words at a time before coughing to catch my breath. I never got intubated, and finally I drove myself home. From the moment I arrived, I was exiled to the other side of the house. From 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., I stayed on the back porch to keep the air inside as clean as possible, interacting with my family only through the windows. I still felt like a prisoner, but at least I had a shower now.

With two weeks in quarantine waiting for my COVID status to change, I had time to reevaluate my life. After getting over a potentially fatal disease, I concluded that there is nothing in life that makes me happier than being a husband, father, and surgeon. God has blessed me with a family life and career that make me unbelievably happy and fortunate—much more than I deserve.

COVID was done. I had survived. Time to get back to work, right?

Just as my practice was getting back on track, my hands started falling asleep. In September I underwent carpal tunnel surgery on both hands simultaneously. I got better—again.

In the three weeks before surgery, though, I went through successive waves of thoughts and feelings: enthusiasm to feel better; uncertainty about complications and lost work time; rationalization, when symptoms were light, that I was getting better; intellectualization upon considering my classic disease presentation; and finally acceptance that surgery was the best choice for me. My experience is unique, but, like contracting COVID just a couple of months before, it gave me new insight into what my patients experience when they see me.

By now it was fall, and we all started looking forward to 2021. The vaccines would come and life as we knew it would return to normal. What else could happen?

Well, people I cared for started dying.

First, it was my beloved Aunt Elena in the Philippines, the matriarch of my mother’s family, from COVID. Then it was my father, Renato Sr., the quintessential selfless provider and expert grill master, from dementia. Then it was Berta, my medical assistant of 10-plus years, and KT, trusted friend and mentor, both of whom taught me about the importance of treating people right all the time, both from COVID.

I was forced to reevaluate my life for the third time in just a few months. This time I was awestruck by the legion of people who shaped my mind and showed faith in me over the course of my life: orthopedic surgery attendings; medical school, business school, and college professors; high school and grade school teachers; leaders and role models.

These people, especially my father, had invested time, energy, and love in me. Now he and others were gone. They had sacrificed for me, and there was no way to repay them. My only option is to pay it forward and invest myself in mentorship and fellowship. No one is an island, least of all me.

The unexpected obstacles of 2020 forced me to confront situations that were completely foreign. I experienced the unmistakable difference between looking at mortality numbers on a spreadsheet and learning that I would not ever again see someone I loved. My core beliefs and values were shaken, but the lessons I gained from grief and illness have become part of my continuing medical education—an education that began at Pritzker 25 years ago and remains an active, dynamic entity.

I probably still have a lot to learn.

Rey Bosita, MD’96, is an orthopedic spine surgeon in Dallas.

Science & Medicine

COVID-19

I tinker, therefore I am

admin — Sat, 23 May 2020 02:44:40 +0000

admin Fri, 05/22/2020 - 21:44

Sudran leads one of the workshop’s “take-it-apart, put-it-together, figure-it-out, do-it-yourself tinkering adventures.” (Photography by Vincent Leddy)

Dan Sudran, AB’66

Spring/20

How an activist and technician found himself at the Mission Science Workshop.

Take a shy, somewhat bright but neurotic, Jewish teenager, with left-leaning iconoclastic UChicago alumni social worker parents who lived through the Red scare in Kansas City, Missouri. Add the soul-crushing years of the mid-1960s, when young men his age were being sent to the killing fields of Vietnam while he wended his way through the University, majoring in modern European social history, hopeful for a life living up to the world-repairing vision he was raised with. Combine with the father’s successful project of raising his son to be fluent in Spanish. You get a recipe for a life full of surprising possibilities.

Fast forward to 2020, and you will find that teenager (me) at 76 years of age hunched over a workbench in the converted old auto shop at San Francisco’s Mission High School, desoldering the speaker wires of a Panasonic model 2400D AM/FM radio. Tinkering with this ancient device provides an opening for my students at the Mission Science Workshop to explore the wonderful three-dimensional world of electromagnetism, sound, and light.

How did I get here? It took three years as a law student, two years as a VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) lawyer helping migrant farmworkers, and four years as an organizer under Cesar Chavez. Then, in an unexpected excursion to the engineering department of City College of San Francisco, I learned to use my hands and mind in new ways and—perhaps in unconscious defiance of my father’s intellectual, hands-off approach to life—undertook a 10-year career as an electronics technician.

In 1990, after repairing and calibrating my 50th Telequipment vacuum tube–based oscilloscope, it was time for a change. I opened the door of my home garage in the inner Mission District. Neighborhood kids (mostly Spanish speaking) came in to play with microscopes, oscilloscopes, and more. In six months, with the support of the chancellor of City College, that garage moved to a public space, creating something new in the world: a community science workshop.

It wasn’t all electronics. In the early days of the workshop, animal bones helped build the concept of active neighborhood-based science. Rather than holding out for full skeletons, I collected partials from roadkill out in the country. Regardless of condition, almost every spine was pretty sure to yield either a complete cervical, thoracic, lumbar, or caudal sequence of bones. Legs could be assembled from incomplete remains of horses, cows, deer, elk, and antelope.

Now summer vacations had a new purpose: scouring the California landscapes for bones—rocks and fossils, too, to share the story of animal structures, evolution, an ancient Earth, and its artifacts. Whale bones from nearby beaches were packed into a donated truck and shared with schools, where children could themselves help assemble a 30-foot-long skeleton.

Geology, which had always seemed the dismal science to me, came to life as well with the help of local geologists who shared my dismay at the gap between public understanding of Earth and its history and the specialized, often inscrutable vocabulary their profession has developed. The sea cliff at Mussel Rock became my local Grand Canyon. Its abundant fossils and virtually continuous exposure of shallow to deep water sedimentation provided evidence of three million years of sea level fluctuations along the San Andreas Fault.

Further afield, sites in Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming opened a window into “deep time” that had been enshrouded in jargon for me. Southeastern Idaho provided beautiful Paleozoic horn corals (300 million years old); Utah’s Cambrian trilobites (500 million) were available in amazing abundance in the House Range; and Wyoming’s Green River Formation held the largest deposit of freshwater fish fossils in the world. The friendly manager of a private quarry there was excited to provide his partials in limey shale. Back home, with small dollar-store wood chisels, students themselves uncover the 50-million-year-old fish from these partials.

Only three years ago did I begin to look at all those years of hands-on curiosity, discovery, and sharing in a new light: as tinkering. It happened when a friend donated some discarded speakers to the workshop.

Every speaker has a magnet surrounding the copper windings of the voice coil. The magnet pushes and pulls on the coil as electrical oscillations cycle through from a radio or other sound source. In my first self-conscious act of tinkering, I pried away the magnet of a very small speaker, leaving the voice coil attached. Then I disconnected an old radio’s output wires from its own speaker and connected them to the isolated voice coil of the small speaker. While bringing either pole of the separated magnet back up to the coil, I was amazed to hear sound. At a good inch distant from the magnet, the coil and its attached speaker cone began to vibrate and transmit a radio station signal, with my favorite raucous norteña music, right to my ears.

We can read about Michael Faraday’s discovery of the electromagnetic force, or see James Clerk Maxwell’s elegant field equations setting out the variables and how they relate. But producing that force with one’s own hand is an incomparably deeper experience for body and soul. I want to bring that kind of experience to as many people as I can.

So today I’m still whacking away at all sizes and styles of speakers—and so are the children, parents, and teachers who visit Mission Science Workshop. We do every manner of take-it-apart, put-it-together, figure-it-out, do-it-yourself tinkering adventures. We may even be rescuing ourselves from the increasingly addictive and abstracted digital world.

Tim Wu has called it “the tyranny of convenience”—when we are so accustomed to having machines take care of everything that we’re in danger of losing any understanding of how and why things work as they do. When Ernest Rutherford was asked how it was that so many Nobel Prize winners had worked in his lab in Cambridge, he said, “We were just like children taking a watch apart to see how it worked.” Except, of course, their watch was the atom.

When I see kids with their computers, tablets, and cell phones, I fear they have little notion of why their movements are producing the desired results—that is, of the workings of the real three-dimensional world they’re part of. That understanding is important, not only to keep things working, but also for our very souls. Rachel Carson had the soul in mind when she said this: “If I had influence with the good fairy ... I should ask that her gift to each child in the world would be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

Tinkering is a powerful antidote.

Dan Sudran, AB’66, is the founder of San Francisco’s Mission Science Workshop.

Learning

College alumni

The right way to run a college athletics program

admin — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 22:17:25 +0000

admin Fri, 08/09/2019 - 17:17

Jay Berwanger, AB’36, presents the game ball to Bruce Montella, AB’86, MD’90, at the 1985 homecoming game. (UChicago Athletics)

Lester Munson, JDʼ67

Summer/19

For sports editor Lester Munson, JDʼ67, UChicago strikes the right balance of academic and athletics excellence.

Early in September 1985, our son’s first year at the College, my wife, Judy Munson, AB’66 (Class of 1963), and I found ourselves traveling downstate to Galesburg, Illinois, on a cold and rainy Saturday. We arrived just in time to watch him and his football teammates finish their warm-ups for a game against Knox College. (The University of Chicago resumed intercollegiate football in 1969 and has grown into a program with 93 young men in uniform last season.)

The field at Knox nestles within grassy slopes. The rain was running down to the field and leaving puddles of water and mud on the playing surface, perfect conditions for the Maroons’ star running back, Bruce Montella, AB’86, MD’90. While the Knox defenders were sliding and falling in the mud, Bruce pounded through them for big yardage.

I grew up in a family with season tickets to the Chicago Bears. I saw Gale Sayers at Wrigley Field and Walter Payton at Soldier Field. Neither Sayers nor Payton ever achieved what Montella achieved that day. There is no official record of the number of times he carried the ball, but my recollection is that he ran at least 25 times and maybe more. It is official that he ran for a total of 305 yards. That’s an incredible 12 or more yards per carry. It was a historic performance that put Montella in a group of University football greats that includes Jay Berwanger, AB’36, a running back who won the first-ever Heisman Trophy in 1935.

A week after Montella’s performance at Knox, we joined other football parents for the lunch hosted by the director of athletics, at the time Mary Jean Mulvaney, before each home game. A crowd was gathered around Montella’s parents. “Isn’t that nice,” I thought. “They’re congratulating the Montellas on the awards and recognition Bruce received after the Knox game.” These honors included, for instance, Sports Illustrated College Player of the Week.

I walked over to offer my own congratulations. To my surprise, the other parents were not talking about the Knox game. They were congratulating the Montellas on Bruce’s early admission to the University’s Pritzker School of Medicine.

The breathtaking performance on the field and the admission to medical school demonstrate what a college athletics program ought to be. The University’s program is part of what is known as Division III in the nomenclature of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the governing body of college sports. Within Division III, there are 443 schools offering intercollegiate competition in 25 sports. The students who compete engage in a pursuit of excellence in academics, teamwork, discipline, perseverance, and leadership.

At the other end of the spectrum is Division I, in which large universities stage massive spectacles for public entertainment. Within Division I, 130 schools play big-time football and 353 schools compete in men’s basketball. These two Division I intercollegiate sports have become a major American industry that produces billions of dollars in revenue each year. There is nothing like it in any other culture.

It is increasingly difficult to see any connection between these Division I extravaganzas and the objectives of higher education. The driving force in Division I is money—money in the form of television contracts, corporate sponsorships, ticket revenue, skyboxes, shoe contracts, sideline apparel contracts, naming rights, and other deals and gimmicks designed to increase revenue.

The income from these two sports has produced salaries for coaches and administrators that can be incomprehensible. Top coaches are paid as much as $10 million per year. A contract with a manufacturer to wear its apparel in televised games can produce additional hundreds of thousands of dollars each season. There are now at least 20 assistant football coaches who are paid more than $1 million per year, two or three times the salary of their schools’ presidents.

In addition to the Brobdingnagian coaches’ salaries, the schools are investing huge sums in workout facilities, dormitories, and other amenities for the athletes. The phrase “arms race” is frequently used to describe the rush to build these palaces. Attempting to justify such expenditures, some suggest that the income from Division I sports supports the school’s academic efforts. But economists who have studied the budgets of these universities have concluded that only 20 of the schools produce athletics income that could be used elsewhere in the university. The others struggle to break even on athletics; many of them suffer losses and must be subsidized by student fees and other budgetary maneuvers.

The outsized revenues prompt many to ask why some of the money cannot be paid to the athletes who produce the income. It’s a good question. The NCAA insists that its athletes must remain “amateurs” to preserve the wholesome image of college sports and to continue to draw the vast TV audiences that these games enjoy.

Players and former players have tried to use American antitrust laws to obtain a share of the money. They have a strong argument. The NCAA is clearly a monopoly (as the only game in town, it’s actually a monopsony), and its rules against payment are an obvious restraint of trade. But the players have been rebuffed in two major court decisions.

The US Supreme Court had a chance to address the issue a few years ago. Although the matter involves hundreds of colleges and universities, thousands of athletes, and millions of fans, the court inexplicably declined to accept the issue for consideration.

The student-athletes of our university and all Division III schools do not receive athletic scholarships, although they may be the beneficiaries of grants based on academic merit or need. Their training, practice, and performance are a proportional part of their lives on campus. If there is a conflict between a class and a team practice, the Division III athlete goes to class. That is often not the case for football and basketball players at Division I powerhouse schools.

UChicago athletes go to class, and they graduate. Bruce Montella’s big day at Knox College was an indication of what was to come as the University began to attract student-athletes in multiple sports. Under the leadership of director of athletics and recreation Erin McDermott, the University has become one of the nation’s most successful Division III athletic programs.

The NCAA maintains standings for the 449 schools competing in Division III. The University’s success in its 20 sports has put it in the top 20 for the past six years, and it is now ranked ninth among all schools for 2018–19.

For the past 16 years, I have served as the master of ceremonies at the annual induction ceremony for the University of Chicago Athletics Hall of Fame. Each year we award this honor to several highly successful former student-athletes. The achievements of these elite athletes in competition are remarkable, but what they have done after graduation is equally impressive.

Our son, Lester Munson III, AB’89, for example, played left tackle for four years on the offensive line. With his political science degree, he went to Washington and worked on Capitol Hill for 25 years, concluding his career as staff director to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is now a principal in BGR, the lobbying firm founded by Haley Barbour, the former governor of Mississippi and longtime chair of the Republican National Committee.

What is it about competing in Division III sports that puts the student-athletes of the University on a pathway to success? For four years, they practice, they train, and they compete at a demanding level while succeeding in one of the most challenging academic programs anywhere. They show up, they work, they help others on their teams, and they learn leadership. Along the way, they wake up one morning and discover that they have become educated men and women, ready for citizenship in full.

In short, they demonstrate what a college athletics program can and should be.

Journalist Lester Munson, JD’67, has served as a senior editor at ESPN.com and Sports Illustrated. He lives in Chicago.

Bernard Brady, AM’83, PhD’88

Up and down Halsted Street

admin — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 16:40:55 +0000

admin Wed, 02/13/2019 - 10:40

(Illustration by Anna and Elena Balbusso/Theispot)

Winter/19

The view from a CTA bus driver’s seat took in the range of human experience—including the most heartbreaking.

My years as a grad student in the Divinity School’s ethics and society program in the mid-1980s were intellectually formative. The education was demanding and comprehensive. Yet for two summers during this time, I unexpectedly found myself in another “university” of Chicago. In search of a job where I could earn a bit more than my friends did stacking books in the Reg, I was hired as a CTA bus driver and thus enrolled in a street seminar on ethics and society. Halsted Street replaced Swift Hall.

I was assigned to the Limits Garage, or “barn,” on North Clark Street and usually drove north–south routes. Then and now, Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country. Crossing a busy street or driving beneath a viaduct often brought me into a distinct neighborhood. Most of my fellow drivers were black, as were the passengers on my bus. I was a member of the majority community going to and coming from work, but a minority at work.

The other drivers often said, “Your job is to drive that bus up and down the street and bring it back to the barn.” I got lost on Lower Wacker (too many turns, too many columns), and I got stuck on a curb on Michigan Avenue—all I could do was put the bus in reverse, blindly hoping for the best. It seemed like I brought home a story after every shift. One night on Halsted, around 35th Street just past Wendt Furniture in the heart of Bridgeport, I saw a police car responding to a call. As I approached the intersection, police cars came from all four directions, targeting the corner so fast that they crashed into each other—a scene from The Blues Brothers played out in real time.

And there were heartbreaking moments. A passenger boarded and told me, “I’m going into detox. Right now, tonight.” He said he was a Vietnam veteran. A few minutes later, our conversation was upped a notch. “They called us ‘baby killers,’” he said. I mumbled some sort of response. “We didn’t kill babies!” he said with some passion. “No, I know, you didn’t kill babies,” was all I could say.

“One time I was out on patrol with my partner,” he continued. “We came across a kid in the field. We went up to him and my partner put his gun up to the kid’s head—right to the side of his head. I said, ‘Come on, Jim, put the gun down.’ He didn’t. ‘Jim, put the gun down.’ He refused. ‘Fucking Jim, put the goddamn gun down.’ He didn’t. I took out my gun and yelled at him. He didn’t listen, so I shot him—dead.” Those were the last words we exchanged that night. He got off a few minutes later, somewhere presumably by the detox center.

One late afternoon near Cabrini Green, a girl with a baby in her arms boarded and asked, “Does this bus go to Children’s Hospital?” “I can drop you off about a block from the hospital,” I told her. “This is my sister’s baby,” she said. I glanced over to see that she was young, perhaps 14, more likely 12. For the rest of the short ride, the girl was quiet, and so was the baby.

I told her when we got to Fullerton and pointed toward the hospital. As she got off, I realized the baby was wrapped up head to toe. The girl carried but did not cuddle the baby. To this day, I can still feel how deep my heart sank when I realized she was bringing her sister’s dead baby to the hospital. What strength she had to do this, yet how young and vulnerable she was. In her voice and her posture, she seemed to reach out to me as I drove that crowded bus down the busy street. She too needed to be held, perhaps just with an affirming word, but that didn’t occur to me until three blocks later.

There was a popular night club just a bit south of the Chicago River. One night as I approached it, there was heavy traffic and police cars. People were in the street and all around the area. As the bus inched by, I saw a man’s body on the sidewalk. I had missed what appeared to be a murder by a few minutes. I continued my drive south. A few hours later, around three in the morning, I passed the club again. The street was empty. On the sidewalk, under the streetlight, I could see the bloodstain and the chalk outline where the man’s body once lay.

A few hours later, I drove back south and passed the club again. The sun was coming up. An old man was in front, hosing the blood and the chalk from the sidewalk, removing all evidence of violence and grief. A few hours later, I drove north and passed the club again. The sidewalk was clean and dry.

During my last month on the job, on August 9, 1985, seven young people, aged 15 to 21, were driving from Joliet, Illinois, to a Bruce Springsteen concert at Soldier Field. Heading south on South Lake Shore Drive, the driver of the car suddenly changed lanes. A No. 6 Jeffery Express, a 36,000-pound articulated bus, collided with the car and drove over the top of it. All seven passengers were pronounced dead at the scene and some 60 bus passengers were injured.

I had driven on the Drive with traffic weaving and bobbing from impulsive and excited drivers. I could have hit that car. The driver, a 25-year CTA veteran, was black. After the accident, he was charged with reckless homicide and two traffic violations, although many eyewitness reports at the scene said he was not at fault. Injured, he spent time in the hospital handcuffed to his bed. (The charges were later dropped.) To this day, I wonder if I would have been treated the same way.

I moved a lot of people up and down the street those summers—mostly people going about their daily lives without incident. Still, the U of Halsted Street taught me much, expanding my heart as much as Swift Hall expanded my mind. All those people on my buses had at least two things in common: everyone was like me and everyone was different from me in important ways. The first task of ethical reflection was for me to wrap my mind around the particulars of both.

Bernard Brady, AM’83, PhD’88, is a professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota). He is the author of several books and articles on justice, love, human rights, and Catholic moral theology. He has high hopes that with the publication of this article, his family and friends will finally read something he has written.

City of Chicago

Divinity School

The steps to 55 Steps

admin — Fri, 09 Nov 2018 18:43:58 +0000

admin Fri, 11/09/2018 - 12:43

(Illustration by Brian Stauffer/theispot)

Mark Bruce Rosin, AB’68