Category Archives: Humanities

Acting in Good Faith

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How does one portray the life of a man whose ultimate fate was a hanging at the hands of the Gestapo, with just four weeks left until the German surrender in World War II? Even an experienced professional actor might find that role daunting. I played that role last Friday evening in what amounted to my amateur acting debut, complicated by a Zoom platform in what we all hope are the latter stages of a pandemic. I’m certainly accustomed to being on a stage in front of an audience as a public speaker, but in those situations, I am speaking for myself. Portraying a historical figure of the magnitude of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a very different matter.

The collective performance of volunteers mostly from Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park in Chicago occurred on the anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s execution in 1945, at the Flossenburg concentration camp near the German border with Czechosolvakia. One suspects the SS, whose Judge Otto Thorbeck condemned him to die the day before the hanging, must have been in a hurry. Just two weeks later, American troops liberated the camp.

Script cover for “The Beams Are Creaking”

My intent in discussing this in a blog post is not to review the play, The Beams Are Creaking, by Douglas Anderson, but to reflect on what I learned from taking on this role in the first place. It is also the case that several rehearsals—and rereading the script a few times—occupied enough of my time to explain my hiatus from blog writing in recent weeks. It was only as we practiced our parts that I began to realize what I was trying to accomplish, but I was hooked. The play begins in 1933, with Bonhoeffer returning from the United States to Germany at the dawn of the Nazi rise to power. There are several biographies of Bonhoeffer, the most notable probably being that written by his close associate, Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, originally published in Germany in 1967, and later translated into English.

The necessary brevity of a play, if done well (and this is), condenses essential points and makes them more visible not only to the audience, but to the actors as well. I quickly realized from the full scope of the script that Bonhoeffer was not entirely the same man in 1945 that he was at the outset of the drama, when a streak of naivete about the German future still shaped his outlook. Born in 1906 in what is now Poland, Bonhoeffer returned from America with decided impressions about the injustice perpetrated on the American Negro, but not disposed to compare their situation with the plight of Jews in Germany, in part because he simply did not believe that Germany could succumb to the appeal of Adolf Hitler. Confronted early in the first act by Hans von Dohnanyi with the possibility of the Nazis gaining power, Bonhoeffer simply replies, “It couldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen in Germany.” By now, of course, the most observant among us are aware of a few too many historical developments that “could not happen” but did.

Photo of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, reproduced from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer was soon disabused of his initial perspective, particularly when he dares to give a radio speech implicitly criticizing the Fuhrer. The Nazis silenced the radio station before he could finish. And that is the first of many steps that lead him steadily, inexorably, into a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler—a conspiracy that failed with dire consequences for those involved. When the play ends, he is sitting in Tegel prison, but Gestapo agents have come to transfer him to Flossenburg, which all around him know to be a death sentence.

The challenge for me in playing Bonhoeffer was to transfer to a Zoom screen that sense of the gradual but inevitable shift from a 27-year-old idealist, steeped in faith as a trained theologian and pastor, to a 39-year-old man who has come to terms with the deepest meaning of faith at the darkest moments in anyone’s life.

This struggle for almost anyone involves a powerful mixture of personal circumstances and challenges and some sort of deep faith that undergirds the transition that his life undergoes. One key turning point, midway through the play, involves the planned emigration of his sister, Sabine, and her Jewish husband Gerhard, to escape the coming Holocaust. In the play, this is the point when, having been approached by others who are involved in the plot against Hitler, he decides, “I will be a conspirator.” This is not a line that I shouted from the rooftop; it was one that I delivered with a heavy heart, realizing what will likely be demanded of Bonhoeffer in the coming years.

The second and final act opens later with Bonhoeffer in prison, chatting with a friendly guard, musing over his role as a thorn in the side of the Gestapo. The middle of the act consists of a monologue, Bonhoeffer with a mop talking to the floor, articulating his frustration with the official church in Germany, its betrayal of principles and purpose, ultimately concluding that it has driven the thinking man from the church because, “It honesty doesn’t know what to say to him.” One might call it a sense of despair, but it is also a lonely note of defiance.

One cannot gainsay the role of faith in Bonhoeffer’s life and how it affected his decisions. For a 39-year-old man facing death, he left behind some of the most meaningful spiritual writings of the 20th century, including his letters from prison, but also the classic The Cost of Discipleship, which begins with the theologically famous line, “Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.” Bonhoeffer was not about to lie to anyone about the high cost of confronting evil power.

That is the background. What did I learn from this volunteer dramatic effort? First, there was the challenge of presenting this on Zoom, as pandemic restrictions made a live stage presentation problematic. We practiced on Zoom, which was never designed for presenting plays, and learned to work with its limitations. These included the need for all of us to wait at strategic points to deliver our lines until Nancy Goede, pastor of Augustana, who conceived of this operation in the first place, secured the licensing rights to present it, and acquired the scripts for all of us, could produce sound effects (such as knocking on a door or a phone ringing) at points where that otherwise would have been a background stage noise. On Zoom, however, our talking would have filtered out such sounds, so we had to master the timing to allow those sounds to occur. There are scenes where the historical context emerges from radio announcements, and certain people had to provide those, speaking into makeshift microphones of the era, and so forth. In many ways, despite the visual presence on Zoom, our production resembled an old theater of the radio, and with a story set in the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps that aided the dramatic impact. But taking all the emotional impact of the story I mention above, and framing it within Zoom, was an interesting challenge and ate up a significant amount of time in rehearsals.

Given that almost no one had the spare time to learn every line by heart, this was “Readers Theater,” in which people used the script during the performance. However, to increase the impact of Bonhoeffer’s presence, I mastered the art of essentially hiding the script below the screen, that is, out of sight of the webcam, while also anticipating lines that I could deliver without even looking at it. On stage, all of this would have been impossible, but then Zoom made other things impossible, such as Bonhoeffer hugging or kissing his fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer, when she visits him in prison. Live theater online involves its own fair share of compromises.

I would love to provide some photos here of the performance, but licensing rights prohibited recording. I have chosen to make do with other approaches to make this more visually interesting.

Me, as Bonhoeffer, in “studio” in clerical garb for scene with Hermann Goering and Bishop Ludwig Muller

In addition to the invisible but important influence of people like the pastor, I must mention that no performance like this operates without serious teamwork. Much of what I did gained from the adroit counterplay of other actors. Dan Friedrich, who played multiple roles, was a remarkably cynical Hermann Goering, making very effective use of Goering’s perverse sense of humor, as in a meeting between himself, Bonhoeffer, and Bishop Muller of the German national church. When Bonhoeffer offers to show that his opposition movement has some 6,000 pastors objecting to some new Nazi policy declarations, Goering laughs it off by noting ominously that “we already know who they are.” Both my role and Dan’s demanded an effective foil on the other side. I learned how to use such foils to the benefit of the portrayal of my own character. On

Theresa Fuchs in downtown Chicago

the other hand, Theresa Fuchs, a visitor from Germany working at the Goethe-Institut, played a very convincing and sincere Maria. Her soft German-accented English lent an air of linguistic reality to the play, but more importantly, she also schooled the rest of the cast on the proper pronunciation of German names (though it didn’t always take, as one might expect).

Andrea Holliday

Dan Friedrich played both sides: General Hermann Goering and the anti-Nazi conspirator Schlabrendorff. That is, when not also playing an American correspondent at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

As for Dan, a software developer who has a serious sideline hobby in comedy improv, he can take credit for introducing us to Andrea Holliday, who provided the narration where Zoom made certain stage effects either difficult or impossible.

In the end, this experience taught me a deeper respect than I already had for what professional and even community theater actors attempt to do all the time. It involves investing some of your own emotional energy in the portrayal of the character, and in the case of a character like Bonhoeffer, some significant willingness to try to achieve an understanding of that person’s world view and faith. Frankly, after this 2 ½-hour online presentation was over, I felt a significant need to unwind and recover from what I had just done. Acting is a unique artistic enterprise in the way it demands that you embrace another person’s perspective, especially when that person is a historic figure, rather than the product of a creative author’s mind. It stretches one’s mind and heart in special ways.

Jim Schwab

P.S.: For a blog perspective on the presentation by Pastor Nancy Goede’s husband, Jim Vondracek, click here.

Touching Sky and Sea in Norway

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For three months, I have been intermittently aware that, back in August, I shared two phases of a trip to Norway that my wife and I took in July—and that I promised to complete the story with two more. At the same time, I was laying the groundwork for an entirely new phase of my career. Having left the American Planning Association (APA) at the end of May, I was planning book projects, establishing a one-person consulting firm, preparing to teach my fall course at the University of Iowa, and undertaking periodic speaking engagements. This was all part of my “five-point retirement plan,” of which the remaining piece is this blog.

Soon enough, however, given my professional focus on planning for disasters, real life overwhelmed my intentions. Even as I was laying the groundwork for Jim Schwab Consulting LLC, my consulting operation, Hurricane Harvey was blasting the Texas coast. Harvey was soon followed by Irma in Florida, then Maria in Puerto Rico, then wildfires in California. Though I have not been involved in recovery from Irma and Maria, people in Texas solicited my attention, and later I spoke at conferences in North Carolina and Utah. I am participating in a planning group for Harvey recovery, and I have undertaken some other work as well. Before I realized it, the semester was over, the holidays were upon us, and I had utterly failed to write about the rest of the Norway venture. And I do like to inject some travelogues into this blog. All disasters and policy disquisitions and no fun can make for a dull blog. (Some readers may disagree, but my mixture of subject matter seems to have broad appeal.)

Railway station in Oslo (Jean in foreground)

So. About four months ago, I left our story in Oslo after a busy Monday. Jean and I stayed overnight, packed our bags again, and got ready to travel to Bergen. The trip between those two cities is one I would recommend to anyone with the slightest appetite for dramatic scenery. But first we had to move from our hotel, the Radisson Blu Scandinavia, to the railway station. One truly neat feature of Oslo is the tram, which was included in our Oslo Pass, as was all other public transit including the subway system. The tram stopped right behind the hotel, and the railway station was only a few stops away. We had a pleasant early morning ride down the middle of the street, then crossed the street with our luggage and entered a very modern-looking station that would put us on our train to Bergen. It all seemed very convenient and well organized.

The train from Oslo to Bergen, however, is more than just well organized. Norway in a Nutshell notes that the Bergen Railway is “Northern Europe’s highest-altitude railway line.” The passenger cars indicate the altitude at each stop, so you can track your progress upward as well as across the country and downward again to the sea. The highest reading I recall was 1,224 meters, roughly 4,000 feet, but a glance out the window made clear the mountains around us touched the clouds at a slightly more rarefied level.

Once the train departs the urban environment of Oslo, the scenery changes rapidly, passing lakes and rivers and entering the interior of Norway to reveal small lowland farms in the shadows of green, often forested hills. Over a 6 ½ hour journey, the train finds its way into numerous small communities along winding valleys and into the mountains until you begin to witness snow on the peaks, even in July, where the combination of altitude and latitude make clear that Norway is never entirely green. Knowing the long history of this nation, one can only imagine how the challenges of traversing this landscape influenced first the Viking, then the medieval, Reformation, and even Enlightenment Norwegian mindset, and why the law of primogeniture combined with meager prospects for agricultural prosperity to send waves of young people to America in search of a better life. Of course, in modern times, Norwegians have found prosperity through other means, including energy development and a highly educated work force, but for many centuries most people endured a hardscrabble life in a relatively unyielding environment. That gorgeous landscape did not make life easy for those trying to survive by breeding livestock and growing crops. Even though we did not leave the train until we reached Bergen, one could feel the chilly air when the doors opened at small town stations, and knowing it was July made one wonder how cold it might be in January.

And yet there was no question that the views were strikingly beautiful–unless you were passing through one of several tunnels beneath the mountains. We were not there in the right season to attest to this, but I have read repeatedly that winds and snow in the winter make this mountainous terrain a challenging environment in which to maintain year-round train service. The Norwegians, however, are as prepared for such challenges as anyone. They keep the train moving.

In due course, of course, one reaches the peak of the journey, and the downhill ride begins, ending near the sea in Bergen, the second-largest city in Norway behind Oslo. Because of prior arrangements by Bill Mitchell at Conlin Travel, we were greeted upon our exit from the train by a local driver who turned out to be a retired police officer, a fact he revealed in the process of insisting that we buckle up before he took us to our hotel, about 15 minutes away along the harbor. From him, we learned that Bergen is a city of nearly 300,000 people, with half as many more living in the entire metropolitan area. As first-time visitors, we were about to learn just how much Bergen has to offer.

Our modest but well-appointed Clarion Hotel Admiral offered a marvelously serene waterfront setting, supported by a flotilla of sail boats, fishing boats, and larger commercial craft. Somewhere further along the coast were the large cruise ships, such as the Nordnorge, on which we would be sailing by the next evening. Bergen is largely defined by its status as a seaport on a fjord near the Atlantic Ocean, but that location makes it as scenic as any city would want to be. From a crowded waterfront, homes and other buildings seem to radiate up the slopes until they thin out and the insistent lush forest takes over. We were also lucky. We were told it had been raining for most of the month before our arrival, but that, with the emergent sunshine after some initial misty cloudiness, we had “won the weather lottery.” We were grateful for the photogenic result.

For Jean and me, after checking in and relaxing in our room, our first order of business was to meet up with personal friends who would join us on the cruise. Two of my colleagues at APA had also retired within the last few months. Carolyn Torma, formerly education director, left at the end of November 2016 and had already been traveling on her own since then. Deene Alongi, the meetings and conferences director, retired on July 12, just a few days before our trip. She and I had met over dinner about some business matters back in January, and in discussing our plans, discovered we both intended to cruise the fjords of Norway during the summer. She and Carolyn had already been making arrangements for a cruise with Hurtigruten, a Norwegian cruise company, through Mitchell, an acquaintance of Carolyn’s cousin, Carol Wargelin. Why not join forces, we decided, and book the same cruise? Using the same travel agent allowed us to connect at the same hotel, even though our three friends were arriving separately after flying straight to Bergen, letting us visit Oslo first on our own, something I wanted to do so that Jean and I could ride the train to Bergen.

In front of the downtown mall in Bergen. From left, Deene, Carolyn, Carol, and Jean.

By late afternoon, I met Deene in the lobby as she entered the hotel. Later we met Carolyn and Carol, and the five of us enjoyed dinner in Admiral’s very pleasant restaurant. Our conversation revolved around plans for the following day, for we would have until 4 p.m. to wander the city before boarding a bus to the dock to enter the cruise ship.

Although our plans evolved, Bergen made it easy to enjoy the day. We discovered the Kode museums, which line one edge of a charmingly picturesque public park anchored by a pond with a fountain but also including a gazebo and lush lawns. Using a single pass, we visited all four museums by late afternoon, punctuated by lunch at a reasonably classy diner adjoining one of them. The museums offer five daily tours in English, in addition to Norwegian. Kode 1 offers the Singer collection, a combination of Chinese porcelain, period furniture from the 16th and 17th centuries, and classic paintings, among other art, plus a splendid display of silver and gold artifacts created in the city over the past half-millennium, and the H.M. Queen Sonja “Underway,” displaying graphic and ceramic artworks sponsored by a royal who seemed to relish the chance to sponsor sculpture and craft works.

 

The silverwork section of Kode 1.

Kode 2 was not then open, preparing a new exhibition that opened in October. Kode 3 featured the Rasmus Meyer collection, an assortment of Norwegian paintings from 1880-1905, which is surely the golden age, with works from landscape and other

Part of the Rasmus Meyer collection.

painters like J.C. Dahl, Harriet Backer, and Theodor Kittelsen. I will not claim to be any sort of expert on the subject; in fact, I learned about some of the artists for the first time in this visit. But viewing these works up close filled me with admiration for their skills and the cultural perspectives they conveyed. There can be little doubt that Norway experienced a remarkable flowering of artistic talent in the late 19th century. And that is before we even mention the substantial display of work by Edvard Munch. The iconic The Scream, for which he is best known (and of which there are four versions), is only the beginning of Munch’s lifetime of productivity, punctuated by some tragic interludes that no doubt profoundly influenced some of his artistic idiosyncrasies. However, it would be a mistake to think that all, or even most, of his work is affected by the mental illness that ran through the family, including his father, or was dark and depressed. Indeed, there is an entire strain of cheerful nature painting within his oeuvre. Munch was clearly Norway’s artistic genius.

Finally, Kode 4 branches out beyond Norway to include numerous modern European and other artists, including Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Diego Rivera, and Joan Miró. But as one might expect, time ran out, and we all had to stroll back to the Admiral Hotel, retrieve our stored luggage, and await transport to the Hurtigruten dock to embark on our cruise, which will be the focus of the final installment in this series.

Jim Schwab

Park that Transformed Downtown Chicago

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Ed Uhlir died Wednesday, not living long enough to enjoy another Thanksgiving because multiple myeloma overtook him at 73. But the entire Chicago region can be thankful for his quiet service to the city and for his major accomplishment as both an architect and a public servant.

In a world of “starchitects,” those designers with rock-star name recognition in their highly visible profession, his creativity was of a different and far less flamboyant sort. He succeeded in orchestrating the contributions of numerous rich, powerful, and sometimes difficult personalities to produce an outcome that changes people’s perceptions of what a major public space can be. He spent six years, starting in 1998, as the project director for Millennium Park. Mayor Richard M. Daley persuaded him to take on the role shortly after he had retired from the Chicago Park District, with plans to enter the private sector. Daley told him the job would last a couple of years. It ended up being six, but Uhlir stuck with the task until the 26-acre Millennium Park opened in 2004, completely transforming the lake side of Michigan Avenue for several blocks south from Randolph St. to Monroe St. In the process, it also transformed everyone’s sense of downtown Chicago.

During those six years, I watched from a bird’s-nest view of what is now the park because the American Planning Association (APA) was situated across Michigan Avenue from the Art Institute of Chicago and catacorner from the park’s edge. I have regretted to this day not having had the foresight to start shooting daily photos from that 12th-floor vantage point to create a record of its progress toward completion. I had the corner office closest to the action. But who knew?

Well, some did. In late June of this year, I attended, on an intermittently rainy day, a tour of Millennium Park, co-sponsored by the APA Illinois chapter and the American Society of Landscape Architects Illinois chapter. The program began in a meeting room behind the park’s amphitheater with a series of short presentations led by Uhlir, who was remarkably candid about the process of creating the park. But retirement can do that to you.

What Uhlir began with was a park design by the firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM) that he found unsatisfactory, he said, in part because it was not completely accessible, though it was based on “an extension of details from the Burnham plan.” Exactly what that meant historically was laid out by Benet Haller, who had been with the Chicago Department of Planning and Development, but now is a transit manager for Cook County. He followed Uhlir’s presentation with a discussion of the history of the downtown lakefront area that Grant and Millennium Parks now occupy, which more than a century ago grew from landfill, much of it derived from subway tunneling as the city’s transit system was built. Haller noted that the Chicago lakefront has been evolving for decades, with features like Grant Park’s iconic Buckingham Fountain emerging in the 1950s. Evolution is, of course, precisely what one would expect of a dynamic urban area. Michigan Avenue, now several blocks from the lake, gained its name from originally being along the lake. Also along that lakefront was a stretch of railroad that still provides passage for many riders into downtown along Metra’s Electric Line, now ending below ground in a station under Millennium Park.

Terry Guen explains nature in the park to those in the APA/ASLA tour.

As Terry Guen, a local landscape architect who also spoke, noted, city lawyers discovered by 1998 that the city owned in fee simple the land between Randolph and Michigan, easing the task of leveraging use of the land from railroads that opposed its use for a park. In addition to the Metra station, the space below the park also contains a parking garage, making the park above, as Guen observed, “the world’s largest publicly accessible green roof.”

Achieving that status required a discreet but confident man with a sense of humor who could patiently weather the tug of war between wealthy donors (such as Penny Pritzker), who underwrote many of the most significant improvements to the park; world-famous architects like Frank Gehry; Maggie Daley, the mayor’s wife; who insisted on accessibility for the entire park; and civic and business leaders. After the initial design failed, Uhlir shifted the approach to a design competition that attracted some of the best ideas that found their way into the final scheme, including the proposal from Anish Kapoor for “Cloud Gate,” aka “the Bean,” one of the most popular aspects of the park since its opening because it allows visitors to see both themselves and the city skyline in the reflections on the perfectly buffed metal. Despite early criticism about cost overruns, the park has become the leading tourist attraction in Illinois, outpacing even Navy Pier with approximately 13 million visitors annually. It is a dynamic combination of features—the water fountain, the amphitheater, a winter skating rink, the “Bean,” and gardens that blend into an effective whole that seems always to be greater than the sum of its parts.

Part of the magic, according to Guen, came from tapping the local wisdom of “plant people, contractors, and others who knew so much about Chicago,” bringing wildflowers and prairie plants that bring an explosive mix of colors while allowing “little weed growth because the ground is so packed full of roots.” The botanical features of Millennium Park can keep a native plant enthusiast busy all summer long, even as the built features attract audiences seeking cultural experiences. For instance, the Harris Theater, on the northeast corner, attracted my wife and me on our anniversary one year to hear Roberto Bernigni perform a comic monologue followed by a recitation in Italian from Dante’s “Il Inferno.” We returned on my birthday to join a “do-it-yourself Messiah,” in which audience members participate in singing assigned parts of Georg Friedrich Handel’s famous work.

All Ed Uhlir did to make this happen was keep all the egos in check, harness them toward a common goal, and leave Chicago with a lasting civic treasure where people can rest, recreate, and relish the best the city’s culture has to offer. If that is the only legacy for which he is remembered, it is far more than most of us will ever claim. Millennium Park is now an indelible part of Chicago’s identity.

Jim Schwab

Words That Move America

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Chicago, a city that has spawned at least its fair share of writers and attracted many more, has spawned a national museum dedicated to people who propagate the written word. The American Writers Museum (AWM) opened May 16 at 180 N. Michigan Avenue, situated amid a dense ecosystem of museums, parks, and other cultural attractions that make living in Chicago such a stimulating experience. Let me just state the basic premise up front: If you live in Chicago, or you are visiting, and you care about or have any curiosity about literature, this is worth a visit. It is not a huge museum, at least not now, and you need not worry that it will take all day. You can spend all day, but you can get a great deal out of it in two or three hours if you wish.

Literature, in the context of AWM, does not only mean fiction or poetry. One point that was immediately obvious to me during a visit last week was that the museum takes a broad view of both “writers” and what constitutes “writing.” Communication comes in many forms, and the museum seeks to explore how those forms change in response to numerous changing conditions in American society. AWM President Carey Cranston reinforced that point with me during a brief walk-through when I arrived, before turning me loose to make my own assessments of the exhibits. Thus, in the various displays one can encounter Charles M. Schulz, the author of the “Peanuts” comic strip, which made points about life, love, and laughter just as surely as Jane Jacobs, discussing the status of urban planning in the 1960s in The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Jean Toomer in Cane, an intriguing mix of fiction techniques that shed life on African-American life in the early 20th century. Creativity is not bounded by genre. It helps define genre.

Hold that thought for a minute while I explore with you the big question that drove me to visit in the first place. It is obvious enough how some other museums dedicated to natural history (Field Museum, e.g.) or technology and science (Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, or the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.) make their subject visual and sometimes even tactile with displays of dinosaur skeletons or space capsules, accompanied by videos that help patrons relive the experience of exploring the moon. How does one take the words of poems, novels, memoirs, and other types of written expression and make them come alive in an institutional setting? After all, any library can create a display of the ten best novelists by simply stacking the books along a display counter to draw attention. As readers, we engage with these works by buying or borrowing the books and, well, reading them. So, what makes an American Writers Museum a vivid encounter with its subject matter?

One answer lies in the timeline that greets you just to the right of the front desk after you enter. Running from 1490 to the present, it is not, as Cranston noted to me, a display of the best writers America has ever seen, but instead provides an emblematic display that allows you to see the relationship of major themes in American history to the writing American authors have produced. The United States of America, an independent nation for only half of that time and a maze of Spanish, French, Dutch, Russian, and British colonies as well as native societies at various times before and since, is rich in historical themes that have inspired literary responses. The vastness of a continent new to Europeans . . . . the interaction of cultures . . . . Civil War and its aftermath . . . . the struggle for civil rights . . . . the fight for dignity and identity for American Indians . . . . immigration and the assimilation of new peoples and cultures . . . . industrialization and its impact on a formerly agrarian nation . . . . America’s emergence on the world stage. One could go on, and one could navigate the endless subthemes and nuances of each topic, which is precisely what American writers, whatever their origins and perspectives, have done for more than five centuries.

Opposite the timeline, and complementing it, is a wall with the names of prominent writers on small boards built in that one can turn for additional information. Many, though not all, feature short videos one can launch with a finger touch that illustrate important points. I played with one for Ray Bradbury, one of my own favorites dating back to high school. The video quotes part of Fahrenheit 451 while showing a pile of books being consumed by fire. Alongside Bradbury’s name is a theme, in his case, Dystopian Literature; this occurs with each writer to help show the range of genre that American literature has produced, how it has responded to both contemporary and larger issues, seeking to excite the visitor’s imagination. Whether intentional or not, it excited mine simply by introducing me to writers previously unfamiliar to me, which is saying a lot. There are American writers of whose work any of us may know little or nothing but who have the potential to stir our thoughts and prod our consciences. That has always been the mission of good writing.

Near all that is a current, periodically changing exhibit, the Meijer Exhibit Gallery, which demonstrates some of the most potent creativity the museum has on display. Its first exhibit displays the work of poet W.S. Merwin, about whom I confess I knew nothing, but who is now a source of fascination for me. The small room one enters for “Palm: All Awake in the Darkness,” features a haunting 12-minute video with no human presence except for the soft voice-over of narrators reading from Merwin’s work dealing with the complex and problematic relationship of humanity and nature. The video features the view from inside a cabin in the Maui rainforest, redolent with the sounds of birds and insects and the abundance of life beneath the forest canopy. You may stand or sit on a simple bench and contemplate this immersive adventure into the mind of a poet. Merwin, now 89, has produced more than 50 volumes of poetry, according to the brochure that complements the exhibit, which discusses writer Gregory Bateson’s concept of an “ecology of ideas,” the network of impressions and perspectives that form our conscious and subconscious minds. Since the late 1970s, Merwin has lived in Hawaii on an old pineapple plantation he has restored to its natural state.

As a Lutheran, I found one other thing haunting. Merwin is a practicing Buddhist, and the brochure contains a typewritten, hand-edited draft of a poem called “Place.” It begins:

On the last day of the world

I would want to plant a tree

Curiously, for years, I have known that Martin Luther is reputed to have said, “If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree.” The 500th anniversary of the Reformation is upon us, and I know these two men came from very different places to express the same thought. But if a 16th-century religious reformer and a 20tt-century Buddhist poet can reach the same conclusion about the resilience of our commitment to the earth and the stubbornness of faith, perhaps there is hope for us all, after all.

AWM will be sponsoring events in a modest meeting room that features another challenging exhibit, “The Mind of a Writer,” which explores the connections between writer and audience. Professional writers clearly cannot earn a living without an audience, and the practical questions are both how to define and shape that audience and how to reach that audience. The “reach” forces us to explore the role of technology and institutions in facilitating those connections, which clearly have evolved over time. Displays make us think about the evolution of the book shop, starting with the Moravian Book Shop, launched in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1745, largely to import religious publications, but continuing into such modern innovations as Oprah’s Book Club, using the medium of television to connect viewers with writers; bookstore chains such as the now defunct Borders; and Amazon, allowing people to order books through the Internet. Of course, writers have also used periodicals, which in their heyday relied very much on the efficiency of the U.S. Postal Service, as well as other media. Playwrights do not expect people to read their writing, but to hear it on stage. Screenwriters reach people through televised performances of their scripts, and so on. All of that got me wondering whether AWM missed a beat by not discussing the Internet not only as a mechanism for selling printed works but as a medium in itself for digital publishing. After all, the very premise of my visit was to review the museum not in print but online, by blogging. Maybe I missed it, but where was the discussion of blogging as one of the most modern innovations in audience creation? Anyone out there? Judging from the list of subscribers on my admin site, it would seem there are thousands. In the aggregate, probably hundreds of millions. It’s a brave new world. But I suspect it may not be long before AWM addresses this phenomenon.

Just beyond this area is a section where you can sit at an old-fashioned typewriter and play. The staff each day places sheets of paper in a tray with the opening lines or fragments of famous quotes. Your job: start pecking away to fill in the blanks with your own thoughts about how the quote should end. For writers like me who are almost preternaturally oriented to the computer screen, it is slightly disconcerting to hit keys that sometimes skip, but the experience is indisputably tactile, though arguably less so than perhaps using a quill pen. In any event, there is a wall with clips. You are invited to hang up your work when you are done. I did not get around to asking what the staff does with these at the end of each day. Maybe you should ask when you visit.

I hope you are more dexterously agile than I appear to be with one other exhibit that allows you to move any of a number of drifting images across a screen for a surprise exploration of an individual writer’s work. One of several lines of inquiry allows you to hear a short oral reading, but I had trouble triggering that feature because my index finger seemed not to hit the precise part of that line that activated the recording, at least not on the first try. I found myself a little frustrated, but a generation that has become adept at using its thumbs to tap out smartphone messages may be more adept in this respect. I was never very skilled with video games, either. We all have our limitations.

There are other features, including one on Jack Kerouac that includes the “scroll manuscript” he pasted together for On the Road, and a room on Chicago writers, since the museum lives here. I am sure there will be more in the future. The museum leaders appear to have built out their infrastructure of sponsors and board members, and if you’d like to know more, you can visit the website. That is not my mission here. As an active American writer, I hope I’m offering you reasons to visit the museum itself.

 

Jim Schwab

Salute to Studs

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Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren, Mike Royko, and a "woman friend no one has identified. Photo provided by Richard Bales, given to him by Algren's "first bibliographer."

Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren, Mike Royko, and a “woman friend no one has identified.” Photo provided by Richard Bales, given to him by Algren’s first bibliographer, Ken McCollum.

I’ve been holding on to this piece for a week. It’s not that I wrote it and then sat on it, but that I am writing it now based on an A&E feature I encountered in the Chicago Tribune last Sunday. I didn’t actually finish reading the article until today. My real reason for delay is that I spent the week going to work, participating in seven job interviews for a new position at APA, trying to finish work on a manuscript, all while slipping not so quietly into a diagnosis by Friday of acute bronchitis. In short, at the end of each day I had no energy to write anything. So thank the antibiotics and the inhaler. I’m on the mend, but still less than robust and vigorous. But I can get this done.

The article, “Studs forever,” by Rick Kogan, a long-time WGN radio host and journalistic observer of the cultural scene, tells the story of a remarkable and worthy effort by a team of relatively young archivists led by Tony Macaluso at WFMT-FM, which long hosted the Studs Terkel Show, to digitize some 5,600 recorded radio shows that Studs Terkel left the Chicago History Museum after his death in 2008, at age 96, after decades on the air on WFMT-FM in Chicago. Terkel led an amazing life, leading an early television show in the 1950s, hosting his hour-long interviews on a daily basis, and producing 18 books, mostly of oral history, but also some remarkably literate commentary on music, the arts, and other topics. In 1985, he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Good War, his oral history of World War II. He was both an activist and a Renaissance man. When he wasn’t busy with all that, he appeared in the occasional movie, such as Eight Men Out, the dramatization of the 1919 Chicago Black Sox World Series scandal. Studs’s intellect covered the waterfront.

The article notes that only 400 of those hours of tapes are digitized so far. You can find them at www.studsterkel.org, and more will be coming, but additional resources are needed for such a gargantuan task. What is being saved for public consumption is a treasure trove of insights solicited by Terkel, in his unique interviewing style, from some of the leading lights of his time: Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Bob Dylan, Jacques Cousteau, Cesar Chavez, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mike Royko (one of his closest friends), Bill McKibben, and who knows how many others prominent in their day. The interviews are more than just routine; they are the probings of a very curious, passionate mind, drawing the best from his subjects. They are lively elucidations of topics that remain vital: the role of art in the modern world, civil rights, free speech, racial justice, and the environment.

I say all this because I feel I owe Studs Terkel a great deal myself. He shaped how I saw my job as a writer and interviewer—not that I ever matched his skill and prolific nature—just that I learned.

Sometime in early 1984, maybe late 1983, I’m not sure, I showed up in the office of my adviser for the Journalism master’s program at the University of Iowa, John Erickson, to discuss my master’s project. At the time, I was the only person in the entire university with the oddball aim of getting two master’s degrees simultaneously in Journalism and Urban and Regional Planning, both of which were completed in 1985. The Midwest farm credit crisis was beginning to manifest itself substantially by then, and I told Professor Erickson that I wanted to produce and publish an oral history of the farm crisis. Erickson, aware unlike me that no one in the program’s history had yet turned a master’s project into a published book, never batted an eye. He suggested some resources on oral history and interviewing techniques and encouraged me to get to work. Lacking Amazon in those days, I visited Prairie Lights Books and placed a special order for the recommended reading, which showed up about two weeks later. And I got busy.

Along the way, I discovered this trailblazer in oral history named Studs Terkel and began reading his books: Working; Hard Times; and Division Street: America. I could not put them down. They remain classics, in my opinion, part of the American literary canon. And I learned both the value of asking the right questions in an interview and the art of shaping that interview into an engaging piece of literature. Aided by that inspiration, I turned that master’s degree into a book: Raising Less Corn and More Hell: Midwestern Farmers Speak Out (University of Illinois Press). But that was not until 1988, three years after I left Iowa, after Erickson and others on the comps committee told me my first 140 pages were enough, you’re graduated, do the rest later, and after my planning background helped me turn much of the same material plus other research into a consulting study for the Iowa General Assembly. But that is another story, involving another professor, John Fuller, in the School of Urban and Regional Planning, who was then employing me as a graduate research assistant. It was also in the course of my travels in conducting dozens of interviews that I met my future wife, Jean, in Omaha.

Image from Wikimedia (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Studs_Terkel_-_1979-1.jpg) By New photo (ebay) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

That would be enough to give Studs an honored place in my memories, but after my second book (Deeper Shades of Green: The Rise of Blue Collar and Minority Environmentalism, Sierra Club Books, 1994) was released, he invited me onto his show. In view of the unquestionable prominence of so many other Studs Terkel guests, this was for me a huge honor. When someone with his track record and guest list, such as it was by 1995, brings you to his radio show, someone like me, a minor author at the time, is likely to feel this is a golden opportunity. And it was.

Studs, I learned, would not take me or my book any less seriously than any of his other guests. I was part of numerous radio and television interviews about both books, so I know how most interviewers work, and Studs was nothing like them. My book sat there alongside him, well thumbed, with post-it notes hanging from numerous pages, making clear he had read it thoroughly and knew what he wanted to ask. No one needed to give him cues; he had marked it up, backwards and forwards. I was impressed. I felt I had joined his pantheon, worthy or not. I responded in kind. I don’t know; I may have been good or I may have been mediocre. It’s twenty years ago now. But I was there.

About two years later, I began a two-year stint as the president of the Society of Midland Authors, of which Studs Terkel was long a member (as is Rick Kogan). SMA was another group that had honored him for his contributions. The radio show was ultimately not the only time I met him, but certainly the most important occasion.

So now I realize the scope of the legacy of which I became for one day an infinitesimal part, but one treated that day by Studs as just as important as every other guest, because that was his way. On the way out of the studio, he insisted on giving me an autographed copy of Race. He was as genial as they come, a great human being—with that probing mind that seemed to know no limits. This is one archive that deserves to live on.

It will take a while to complete the museum’s project, which benefited initially from a $60,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, but will probably need more before it is done. Kogan notes that you can also find videos at www.mediaburn.org.

 

Jim Schwab