Tag Archives: writing

Buridan’s Blogger

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In the fourteenth century, French philosopher-priest Jean Buridan, a student of William of Ockham, posited the hypothetical story of a donkey that starved to death while situated equidistant from two delicious bales of hay. The fictional donkey was supposedly a victim of indecision and thus the object of intense navel gazing among those who want to debate the existence of free will. No one ever asked, to my knowledge anyway, whether the donkey was mentally ill or simply traumatized and thus incapable of acting on his own behalf. Mental health, after all, was not well understood in the Middle Ages. That’s one of many reasons why the term “medieval” has derogatory connotations.

I mention this because it has nothing to do with why I have produced nothing on this blog for two months. Despite not just two, but a multitude, of topics to choose from, I failed to choose any, but I can certify that I am neither mentally ill nor incapable of satiating my hunger to address the vital issues of the day.

I simply failed to find adequate free time to do so because numerous other personal and professional priorities intervened. This blog has always been the product of a creative mind seeking yet another outlet beyond those provided in other aspects of my life. Put simply, I prioritized other attractions or compulsions beyond a couple of equally intriguing blog topics. Even donkeys are more creative in their choices of food than Buridan’s paradox suggests. But I won’t take the comparison any further.

The simple fact is that this blog is and always has been a sideline activity, subject to interruption by more urgent demands on my time. Over the past two months, my wife and I took a weeklong vacation in which two grandsons, 12 and 17, accompanied us as we circumnavigated the shores of Lake Michigan. I may yet write about that in various ways, but I have not found time. Instead, when I returned, I reported to duty at Northwestern Memorial Hospital for a prostate biopsy. The results were ambiguous, or so I was informed, so I get to do it again in a few months. At least they put you out, so you don’t know what the doctor is doing while he is doing it, but it certainly blows your day. I was also busy on planning consulting work, launching my fall semester University of Iowa disaster planning class before Labor Day, professional volunteer work, and then helping a daughter who became the victim of a hit-and-run accident involving four vehicles on I-80 just after the holiday. She is largely okay, but for a minor head injury that causes headaches, but her car has been totaled, and I just helped her find a replacement. Before I knew it, weeks had gone by in which this blog remained a back-shelf priority.

Multiple bales of great blog topics remain in front of my fertile mind, waiting to be chewed on. Trust me. I’ve been dying to tackle them, but my brain is not starving. Instead, it was overwhelmed by the shiny objects on the other side of the barn. This blog, however, remains important to me as a unique form of public service that seems to be of value to nearly 32,000 subscribers. But it is also a one-person show. I am my own writer, illustrator, editor, and administrator. Ain’t nobody here but me, and Google Ads does not generate enough money for a fast-food dinner, let alone to hire help. As slugger Pedro Cerrano says to his voodoo god Jobu in Major League, before hitting a home run in a playoff game, “I do it myself!” (Yes, I skipped the preceding obscenity. This is a family blog, after all.)

Jim Schwab

Collateral Damage

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For those who have noticed, it has been more than five weeks since I last posted to this blog. It has been a rough stretch, but it could have been much rougher. At least to my knowledge, I never have contracted COVID-19. Not that people weren’t asking, especially relatives.

There were the holidays, of course, and who wouldn’t take it easy for at least a few days?

Then came the call on Christmas Eve, around 8 p.m. CST. It was my younger sister, choked up, reporting that our mother had died about an hour earlier at 8 p.m. EST. It was not entirely unexpected. She was living in a small nursing facility near Cleveland. My younger sister and brother live nearby. At 103, our mother had lived a very long life, overcoming more obstacles and health threats than I could imagine, but time takes its toll on all of us. In her last few days, she could barely speak, was on oxygen, and finally on morphine as hospice nurses took charge of her situation.

My mother, Hazel, at 100th birthday in 2017.

Still, Christmas Eve is not an ideal time for such news. It completely dampened the tenor of the evening at our house, as I shared the news first with my wife, and then with six grandchildren who were present. We all went to sleep that night knowing that my mother, who survived our father by more than 13 years, would no longer be a presence in our lives, though she would certainly be a memory. Losing a parent is almost always a tectonic shift in one’s life. Losing a parent in the midst of a pandemic, even if not to the pandemic, adds an extra element of sadness to the event. Funerals have become small events since last March. There is no need to add to the death toll.

We celebrated a slightly subdued Christmas, but we wanted to maintain the joy for the grandchildren, who range from 6 to 17, and their mothers. There was a more than ample dinner, much of it planned before the news arrived, and the kids played with their new gifts. Nonetheless, two of them, Alex, 11, and Angel, just two days away from his 17th birthday, made clear they wanted to come with Jean and me to Cleveland for their great-grandmother’s funeral. That was already a full load for our 2018 Chevy Malibu.

Christmas, of course, was on Friday, which meant that my siblings in Cleveland would not meet with the funeral home staff until Saturday to settle on plans. Over the weekend, they learned that, because of COVID-19, the funeral home was backed up, and the funeral could not occur until Tuesday, December 29. Their pastor had another funeral Tuesday morning, so he could not arrive until later, so, while visitation was permitted to begin at 11:30 a.m., the service began around 1:15 p.m. Pastor Brad Ross, of Triune Lutheran Church in Broadview Heights, Ohio, kept it reasonably short out of necessity. The cemetery was also backed up, and we would need to complete the interment service no later than 3 p.m. That meant we were all leaving the funeral home no later than 2 p.m. This was a very different environment from the more relaxed and expansive schedule that accompanied my father’s funeral on a sunny May day in 2007. The last pandemic that had ever ravaged the world on the scale of COVID-19 had occurred in 1918 and 1919, just a year or so after my mother was born. I kept thinking of all the changes she had seen in her lifetime, but they were often hard to imagine. The best I could do was try to broaden the lens of my own 71 years, but it never seemed like enough. Cars were new on the city streets when she was born, and she graduated from high school during the Great Depression. Our nation was already sending men into space while I was still in elementary school. We can imagine, but can we relate?

My niece from upstate New York, Cheryl, provided the one family contribution to the service, which was otherwise a short homily and some scriptural readings from Pastor Ross. Cheryl has a beautiful voice. With instrumental accompaniment from a recording, she sang “The Old Rugged Cross.”

Through it all, and it was brief, I had flashbacks to moments of both separation and engagement with my parents, particularly my mother. I was always well aware that she was less than pleased when I said I was moving to Iowa in January 1979, at age 29 taking the helm of a small nonprofit public interest advocacy organization. In her mind, such a move could be justified if I were working for some large firm that wanted to transfer me there, but the type of job I had sought was, in her mind, a waste of time and talent. I stood my ground because I knew already that I was profoundly restless in Cleveland, striving to redefine myself and find a new role in life, and this modestly paid position posed a challenge to my intellect, my moral fiber, and my emerging sense of identity. I was a “child of the Sixties” who believed passionately in positive social and political change, but it was more than that.

Even while in Cleveland, I had often written and spoken in ways that revealed some innate, but not yet well-developed, skills at communication. I had published several op-eds in The Plain Dealer, Cleveland’s major daily newspaper. But I did not feel that anything I was doing was plumbing the depths of my skills and beliefs, so it was time to move on and immerse myself in an entirely new environment. Had I been more daring, I might have joined the Peace Corps, like my long-time college friend, Jim Quigley, who spent two years in the Marshall Islands. That surely would have driven my mother over the edge. “Why do you want to do that?” would have been her first question.

Within three years, I shifted gears in Iowa to become a graduate student at the University of Iowa, pursuing two Master’s degrees in urban and regional planning and journalism that have become the cornerstones of my career for four decades. She first greeted that, too, with some skepticism, wondering why I wanted to “struggle” for a few more years like that, but she acquiesced. She had no choice because it was all on my own dime or with my own student loans. To be fair, however, I must emphasize that both my parents strongly encouraged all of us to attend college.

She may also have feared that I would never return to Cleveland. I visited often, but she was right. Cleveland no longer held much allure. In the end, with Jean, who was from Omaha, I ended up in Chicago. Life offered a far bigger palette here on which to paint my career.

A long-time high school friend of mine who also now lives in Chicago, Larry Barr, theorized recently that middle-class parents of our generation—and my parents were blue-collar middle-class—tended to want success for their children through conventional careers. Getting hired by a big company was a sign of economic security. Many of us Baby Boomers had a more creative streak and wanted to discover who we were. That made our parents nervous about our prospects in life. My extended search stretched into three and a half years of graduate school because I used the journalism training to refine what I had always sensed were powerful writing skills that had not yet been refined and tested, and I wanted to push the development of those skills as hard as I could while also refining a clearer sense of my own values in life. I emerged from the University of Iowa, not a different person, but a far more mature and determined person than when I started. In the years that followed, I turned a Master’s Project in Journalism into my first published book, followed by book tours and a review in the New York Times. I was far more confident than when I had enrolled, and my vision of what was possible grew exponentially.

That was the point, Larry suggested in a recent conversation. Skeptical at first of such personal searches for self-definition and meaning, our parents could nonetheless embrace success when it was staring them in the face. The kid is getting published. He’s an author, and a planner. He must have known what he was doing.

A few years later, a second book emerged, my role at APA had grown, and things just kept evolving. During one visit to Cleveland, they listened as I was interviewed with another panelist on the local NPR station. Not everybody’s kid gets such positive public attention. They reported enjoying the discussion.

There was no denying that, whatever differences of opinion we still had—and there were plenty—I seemed to have planted my stake in the world. I might not have become an automotive engineer for Ford or GM, but their doubts had been resolved. (My father would love to have been trained as an engineer, but college seemed out of reach in his youth, which is sad. He had some amazing mathematical and mechanical skills, and the world would have benefited from providing him such an opportunity. He worked as a truck mechanic in a chemical plant, but was a beacon of stability throughout his life.)

Those are the essential reminiscences after all these years, and they all passed through my mind during the funeral. I was a pallbearer and took my place in the procession with nephews and my brother, but before we left, I asked for a moment to grab my overcoat, as I was feeling a bit cold. We loaded the casket into the hearse, and our parade of cars followed to the cemetery.

It was about 23°F., a damp, chilly day as we reached the cemetery in Hinckley, about a 20-minute drive from the funeral parlor. I was not especially comfortable as we brought the casket to the burial site and listened as the pastor intoned a final prayer before we all left, most of us for my brother Jack’s house, where he and my sister-in-law, Tina, had a casual dinner of sandwiches and pasta salads ready for all of us. They also had a small cake for a joint birthday: Mine had been on December 20, and my other sister, Nancy, who lives in Pennsylvania, was born on New Year’s Eve.

I struggled to enjoy it all, but it soon became apparent to everyone—most notably, Tina and Jean—that something was wrong. I was looking pale, feeling cold, and lacking energy. I sat near the fireplace and simply watched a movie, The Princess Bride, that was on the living room television. It was still early in the evening when we left for our hotel room with Angel and Alex, and I fell asleep beneath the covers not long after 8 p.m., a remarkably early time for me. There was by then no question that I was ill.

The hotel, relatively empty and operating post-holidays in pandemic mode, offered a simple complimentary breakfast of either a bagel with cheese, egg, and sausage, or without the sausage, and orange juice in a small plastic bottle. The dining area had been closed months ago. Amenities were minimal. Alex went to the lobby to get the breakfast for all of us, but I passed on the bagel and simply drank the orange juice because I was feeling queasy. Even that proved a big mistake. By the time we had packed the car and checked out, I was getting nauseous. As Jean, who had committed to driving the entire trip without my help, pulled out of our parking space, I said urgently, “Pull up to the front door.” She looked puzzled, and I repeated, more firmly, “Pull up to the front door!” She did so, and in a moment, I was racing for a bathroom, and the orange juice departed my stomach like a liquid missile. Now I knew I was in trouble, and a six-hour drive down the Ohio and Indiana Turnpikes, plus I-90 in Chicago, lay ahead.

On the way home, we discussed what to do about my situation when we got there. I avoided both food and drink the entire time in order not to test my stomach. If it was empty, there would be no emergency. I was decidedly uncomfortable when we visited service plazas to use the bathroom because the weather was at first rainy and cold, though it improved in Indiana. I used her cell phone to call an urgent care center near our home and was told that, unless I needed a COVID test, I could be treated as a walk-in.

In Chicago, however, I discovered that one needed to get the attention of someone inside the urgent care center for someone to come to the door to let you in, and two ladies standing outside indicated they had been waiting a half hour for someone to respond. I said I would become a wreck if I stood outside that long, so I drove home.

After I rested a bit and warmed up, Jean took me to the emergency room at nearby St. Mary’s Hospital. I expected that they would test me immediately for COVID-19, as they had done last May, but to my surprise, the admitting clerk simply asked about symptoms and referred me to a nurse. Within minutes, I was in a treatment room with a doctor. No COVID test ever happened. Dr. Jorgensen ascertained instead that I had a viral sinus infection. Because the infection was viral, not bacterial, they could not administer antibiotics but would have to let me wait it out, while advising that I continue using Flonase to clear the sinuses and Tylenol for headaches or fever. He prescribed Zofran for the nausea, which I used for maybe two days before that symptom disappeared. An attending nurse attached saline fluids intravenously to relieve dehydration that, no doubt, had materialized from my precaution in not eating or drinking during the trip. “We’re putting the fluids where they matter without testing your stomach,” he assured me.

I spent the New Year’s weekend either in bed or lazily reading newspapers and books until I got drowsy. My siblings and in-laws were calling and texting to find out how I was doing, and to make sure I had not contracted coronavirus. I reassured everyone that no such diagnosis was in the works, but some worried anyway. You never know, and we all know someone who has suffered, and one illness can lead to another. But in my case, it did not.

What it led to is my current anxiety. Work piled up as the first week of January rolled on and I struggled to regain my normal energy level, which happened but far too slowly for my satisfaction. I never lost my sense of taste or smell, a key COVID trait, and when feeling energetic enough, I continued to craft some wonderful meals as my inner chef, another part of my creative identity, reasserted itself. Lord, I would hate to discover someday that ginger/sesame-marinated salmon tasted like paste or wallpaper!

By January 6, I was more or less back to work, albeit at a slow pace. Then came another opportunity to feel sick, but the symptoms were emotional and were triggered by the President himself, inciting an angry, deluded crowd of supporters to attack the nation’s Capitol, killing a Capitol police officer, and creating a new day that will live in infamy, alongside Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That some Americans were proudly doing this to their own country was by far the worst part. I found the news consuming what little free time I had mustered by then. Emotionally, it felt like collateral damage to a political system gone badly awry.

By Friday, a new disturbance arrived, though I was able to take it more in stride. I received a notice from the Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES) that an unemployment claim was filed in my name at a local sheet metal manufacturer, where, of course, I had never worked. It was clearly a fraudulent claim and was followed the next day by a benefits debit card from a bank in Cleveland. I spent Monday of this week requesting cancellation of the claim at IDES, taking other protective measures, and filing a financial fraud report with the Chicago Police Department. I do not believe in letting this activity go unreported. Providing evidence may add ever so slightly to a case against some perpetrator somewhere who needs to be brought to justice. I learned that IDES had been hacked in 2017. If so, although it happened under a prior administration, Gov. J.B. Pritzker needs to take ownership of the solution. Too many such issues in Illinois linger from one administration to the next, with computer systems not updated, problems not fixed, issues unresolved. The avalanche of claims under the current pandemic-caused recession has only exposed existing vulnerabilities. It is time for states and the federal government to get serious about addressing these challenges.

As for me, I am feeling better and getting more done every day, though I am still checking in with doctors in the near term. As for the nation, I hope we can all feel better after January 20, but I don’t envy President-elect Biden or his administration for the work that lies ahead. We have a viral infection in the body politic for which the only vaccines are truth, respect, and common sense.

Jim Schwab

Why I Agree with Mother Jones

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Personally, I would rather be learning or teaching than shouting on any given day.

Last night, I read one of those publisher columns that are often boring and laborious, but this one nailed it. Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein recounted a conversation with a veteran editor she admires who inquired about the partisan bias he perceived in the monthly magazine. Unquestionably, the magazine is known for a left-wing tilt, but it should be better known for its investigative reporting and willingness to ask hard questions. Over the years, after all, Mother Jones has not gone out of its way to spare Democrats, but it certainly is riding herd on President Donald Trump.

And for good reason, although Trump is a symptom of a problem and not its origin. He is exploiting deep divisions and tribal instincts in a nation that seems unsure what it wants, but much of which is troubled by the extent of the deception, corruption, and amorality of the current administration. Bauerlein insists that the media can “stand for something” while remaining fair and accurate in its reporting, and I agree. She also notes that trying to report from the middle while merely relaying contrasting statements from “both sides” of the political spectrum is really reporting from nowhere because it lacks a moral anchor. There are multiple reasons for asking tough questions and engaging in investigative reporting, but two stand out: 1) Public officials often, but not always, cut corners, lie, or shade the truth to advance their own ambitions or protect the tribe; and 2) such questions are the ingredients of serious analysis that gets to the bottom of a problem and advances the quality of our national dialogue. Surely, the latter has been hitting new lows in recent years.

So, my title for this post does not mean that I always agree with everything I find in Mother Jones, nor does it mean that the magazine expects that all its readers will do so all the time. The real point is to advance the quality of the dialogue. And in that respect, I think publications like Mother Jones are essential to the survival of American democracy.

The subject of the purpose of the news media has always intrigued me, in part because, in addition to my M.A. in urban and regional planning from the University of Iowa, I also earned a second M.A. in journalism, way back in 1985. I recall a class conversation with one local newspaper editor. He clearly adhered to a school of thought that held that reporters need to be objectively neutral at all times. When someone asked him about news coverage of third parties, he noted that they got little coverage because they had such limited followings, so the focus was on the “two sides”—the Republicans and Democrats. When that person followed up by asking how third parties would ever get a hearing if all the news media followed that logic, he had no good answer. What we heard was mostly pre-Internet circular logic. We will cover such movements when they matter, and they won’t matter until we cover them. The shallowness of the paradigm of “two sides” immediately struck me: The media seeing itself as impartial mediator was an inadequate framework for finding the truth, which is not always or necessarily located in the middle. (Anyone still believe in slavery?) As Bauerlein observes, the middle moves, depending on how the two sides are defined. It matters whether the right is John McCain or Steve Bannon, whether the left is Nancy Pelosi or the Socialist Workers Party. And no, they are not the same. Where was the middle in Hitler’s Germany? Where was the middle in the segregated, Jim Crow South? Where is the middle when voter rights are being suppressed, so that some less privileged citizens are denied a voice through the ballot box? Whose voice matters (or should)?

Ultimately, it is not partisan to insist on accuracy, truth, human decency, and honesty. It is simply good for democracy and good for society. It is not helpful, on the other hand, simply to accept undocumented Twitter-fed nonsense from a President, a Congressman, or any other public figure without subjecting it to some standards of accuracy, which is why the Washington Post has maintained its inventory of more than 5,000 false or misleading statements by Trump since he took office. It may not be feasible for the Post alone to maintain such an inventory for everyone in a prominent political position, but he is the President, after all, and there are other Internet platforms for tracking political honesty among lower candidates and office holders of all parties at the federal, state, and local levels. These are not partisan sites, for the most part, but they are important tools for voters and activists who want to assess the accuracy of what they hear and read.

One reason I chose to react to Bauerlein’s comments is that they also touched upon  much of my own philosophy regarding this blog. When I launched “Home of the Brave” in April 2013, I had no idea who would be reading it, or how many, but now there are nearly 19,000 subscribers, and probably some smaller number of regular visitors who have not yet chosen to register a subscription. I get virtually nothing out of the enterprise except the deep satisfaction of sharing knowledge and perspectives, but being a veteran planning professional as well as a trained journalist, the quality and reputation of what I publish is central to my identity. I also recognize special responsibilities once a readership grows to that size. While I certainly have a point of view on numerous topics, I have sought to emphasize research and analysis over advocacy. Indeed, given my penchant for taking readers deep into the subject matter in my own areas of expertise, while insistently using plain English, I have been pleasantly surprised at how many people have chosen to read this blog on a regular basis. I would rather slake a popular appetite for truth than simply express opinions. If I get something wrong, and someone can prove it, I want to hear from them. To that end, my reading diet is aggressive, and I try to share what I learn when I think I have discovered something that matters. I am always open to recommendations regarding new books and research reports. All the best journalists I have ever known have been equally ravenous readers. It is their best defense against “fake news.” They are not only not the enemy of the people; they are vital resources for a thoughtful public.

If only we could retrain more of America to step outside its current groupthink and exercise their mental muscles to question, not just react, to be open to new information, and to value independent thought, we might get past our current bumper-sticker debates and engage in some serious, rational conversation. And we might learn to show more mutual respect for what we all have to offer.

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

The Fine Art of Stepping Down

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“The cemeteries are full of indispensable people,” or variations thereof, is a quotation that has been attributed to many, including the late French President Charles de Gaulle, but according to Quote Investigator, actually belongs to an American writer Elbert Hubbard in 1907, using the phrase, “people the world cannot do without” and the word “graveyards.” But QI notes numerous sources over the years, many of which may well have borrowed from or built upon the other. The point is clear: None of us lives forever, and the world finds a way to move on without us. We can make an impact, but so can others. And we can come to terms with those facts long before we arrive at the cemetery.

Although it was not made public until January 9, I decided a few months ago that it was time to leave my post at the American Planning Association as manager of the Hazards Planning Center. There are two other such centers at APA—Green Communities, and Planning and Community Health—each of which has had at least three different managers since the National Centers for Planning were established in 2008 as a means of making clear APA’s commitment to certain leading-edge topics in planning. I have so far been the only manager for Hazards.  More importantly, I built that center’s portfolio atop an existing legacy of work in the field of planning for hazards dating back to 1993, when I agreed to manage a project funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that led to publication of the landmark report, Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction. I did not at first foresee the ways in which that effort would forever alter the arc of my career in urban planning. Looking back, there was nothing inevitable about it. While I was http://www.statenislandusa.com/heavily involved until then in environmental planning, almost none of it involved disasters. Once I sank my teeth deeply into the subject matter, however, there was no letting go. The Blues Brothers would have said that I was on a mission from God. Increasingly, I became aware of the high stakes for our society in properly planning our communities to cope with natural hazards.

One of the special pleasures of my position was the opportunity every summer to attend the Natural Hazards Conference in Colorado. Here, along with my wife, Jean, and daughter, Anna, in 2007, are some visitors from Taiwan whom I had met during a conference there the year before.

One of the special pleasures of my position was the opportunity every summer to attend the Natural Hazards Conference in Colorado. Here, along with my wife, Jean, and daughter, Anna, in 2007, are some visitors from Taiwan whom I had met during a conference there the year before.

That quarter-century tenure in the driver’s seat of APA’s initiatives regarding disaster policy and practice made me, in some people’s minds at least, almost inseparable from the position I now hold. Perhaps in part because I was comfortable in working with the news media, I became the public face of APA in the realm of hazards planning. That may have been amplified to some extent by the fact that, until last year, the only APA employees working directly under me on a regular basis were interns, most of whom were graduate planning students. It’s not that I was a one-man show. I enlisted staff within the research department for specific projects with assigned hours. Given the expertise needed in this area, and my own willingness to listen to and learn from the best, most experienced people available, it was generally productive to contract with those people on a consulting basis or through partnerships with other organizations. Because APA is a professional organization with a membership of almost 40,000, those resources were readily available. I could marshal expertise far greater than any we could have hired for most of those years. Last year, however, we came to terms with growth and added research associate Joseph DeAngelis, who joined us after leaving the New York City Planning Department, where he had worked on Hurricane Sandy recovery on Staten Island. He has become a great asset to the organization.

His ability to span the transition to a new manager was one of several preconditions I had in mind over the last two or three years in contemplating my retirement from APA. More important, but a factor in adding him to our staff, was that I wanted to leave my successor with a center that was in good shape. This meant having projects underway, and funded by agreements with sponsors beyond the immediate few months after my departure. By late last year, we had won project grants from FEMA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that will all end between July and December in 2018. That gives my successor, whoever he or she may be, more than adequate opportunity to complete those ongoing projects, maintain APA’s credibility in the realm of hazards, and explore new options and opportunities that will sustain the legacy that is already in place. I understand that people like me sometimes move quickly to another organization, firm, or government agency because a huge opportunity opens on short notice. With retirement, however, there is no need for such haste. We can take time to plan well.

That leads to another precondition in which I can say that I am greatly aided by the management philosophy of APA’s current executive director, James Drinan. He believes that, when possible, we should seek a managerial replacement who can join APA in the last two or three weeks of the tenure of their predecessor. This allows the opportunity for the outgoing person to share how things are done or even answer questions about how they might be done better or differently. I recognize, for one thing, that my own package of skills is unique and unlikely to be replicated. That is fine because someone new may well be much stronger in some other areas than I ever was. And if so, I am happy for them. It is a fool’s errand to seek replacement by a clone. Ultimately, the hiring choice will belong to APA’s research director, David Rouse, but my input on what credentials and experience are most useful is likely to have an impact. We hope to see resumes from some high-quality candidates in coming weeks.

So what is next for me as of June 1? I look forward to an opportunity to explore some new options that simply have not been feasible until now. Elsewhere on this website, I describe my intended work on some future book projects, most immediately focusing on the 1993 and 2008 Midwest floods, but there are other ideas waiting in the wings. APA would like to use my consulting services as needed to aid the transition beyond my retirement, and I have agreed, but there are and may be some other offers. I will certainly continue teaching at the University of Iowa School of Urban and Regional Planning, at least as long as they wish to continue that relationship, which has been very fruitful. And it should surprise no one if people find me on the speaking circuit from time to time. In fact, I may be much freer to accept such invitations if I am not managing a research program for APA. Finally, I shall have considerably greater free time to devote to this blog. In less than four years, its following has grown from virtually nothing to more than 14,000 subscribers as of this week. It has been a great pleasure to share what I learn through that forum.

The opportunity to spend part of an afternoon just reading a book on a 606 Trail bench beckons.

The opportunity to spend part of an afternoon just reading a book on a 606 Trail bench beckons.

But those are all activities that somehow involve work. I may well involve myself in some volunteer activities with APA divisions and its Illinois chapter, the Society of Midland Authors, and other outlets that I may discover. That too sometimes sounds like work, so let me try harder. I have written about the wonderful 606 Trail near my home; I expect to walk and bicycle there and in nearby Humboldt Park. I may well take a great novel to one of the trail’s benches (or to my front patio) and read in the middle of the day. My wife and I may travel, both as we choose and as we are invited. Anyone reading this blog must already know that I love to get around. Despite all its flaws, the world remains a fascinating place, and I want to explore it while I can. I may never get a gig (or want one) like that of Anthony Bourdain, but I will see enough. And, yes, like him, I love to explore different cuisines—in part so that, as an amateur gourmet chef with new time on his hands, I can try them out for guests at home or elsewhere. Like I said, the world is a fascinating place. Explore it while you can.

Jim Schwab

The Voice of Humility

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dscf3255There are times when we lose control of our plans, when we simply surrender to the power of microbes and let things ride. We may have made promises to get things done, and they will not happen. We must ride out the storm instead.

I have posted nothing new in two weeks not for lack of the desire to do so—indeed, I had several books and documents I planned to discuss on this blog—but because I had to surrender to the reality of pneumonia. I am on the rebound now, and I generally have a long history of quick and effective rebounds, but fever, chills, and the hacking cough that are typically prime symptoms of pneumonia had me in their firm grip for a week and a half, starting just a little less than two weeks ago and petering out just three days ago under the impact of antibiotics. As you can imagine, it was no fun.

It was not just a matter of sustaining this blog. I missed six straight days of work at the American Planning Association, and when you count the weekend between those days, you see the overall stretch of futility that ate up my time. I lay on the couch, on the bed, under blankets, alternately sweating and freezing, arranging for a visit with my doctor, then getting a chest x-ray to confirm the diagnosis. It is, of course, impossible to get comfortable, let alone maintain any significant energy level. I also needed to grade papers for a graduate seminar on disaster planning that I teach every fall for the University of Iowa School of Urban and Regional Planning. The grades are due shortly, yet I had none of the energy or attention span needed that first week to review 15- or 20-page papers that were basically case studies in disaster recovery. I finally got them done in the last few days. Meanwhile, here in Chicago, it was cold outside, not a great outdoor environment for anyone who had elevated temperatures. The fear of experiencing a setback until I was well on the road to recovery kept me from being very adventurous. But by yesterday I was willing and able to shovel snow.

Sometimes it seems that life is piling on. Just as I was descending into illness, without initially knowing it was pneumonia, my 5 ½-year-old laptop suffered the loss of its graphics drive, and the cost of repairs drove me to replace it, but it took me two days after learning this news from the Geek Squad before I could muster the energy to go to Best Buy, which owns Geek Squad, to choose a new computer. Even then, as I stood in the aisle waiting for a sales clerk to complete his business with another customer, I was looking around for a chair for fear I would not be able to stand long enough. But I did, and I chose a new Dell laptop, and then came the business of installing software and transferring my data. I left that to the Geek Squad. But altogether, presuming I would have had much ambition for such things, it meant that I had no functioning computer for almost four days. And then I still had to find the patience to learn how to make certain new features work. But I at least had the ball rolling again.

I will raise my voice again, in this blog and elsewhere, soon enough. But I was reminded that we all have these vulnerabilities. Unlike the Hazards Planning Center at APA, this blog is a one-man show. When that one man is under the weather, it all comes to a halt. But I am back. Happy holidays to all.

 

Jim Schwab

Daydreaming on a Sunday Afternoon

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Take me out to the ballpark. This is Wrigley Field, but I'll go to the Cell too.

Take me out to the ballpark. This is Wrigley Field, but I’ll go to the Cell too.

Have you ever tried to visualize yourself in a prominent, visible role other than whatever you do for a living? Can you see yourself accepting a Grammy, say, or racing across the goal line with a touchdown pass? Most of us at some point have some fantasy about our lives. Such fantasies are largely harmless things. They inspire us to aspire without making us delusional.

Sometime last night before the stroke of midnight in Chicago, some one of you became the 12,000th subscriber to this blog. I mention the point only because, as this audience grows, so grow the odds that someone out there can relate to what I am saying in a blog post like this, when I grow tired of discussing politics or public policy and just itch to let my imagination roam. I know I’m not the only one, as John Lennon once sang.

Several circumstances have converged to inspire this rumination. One is that I have needed to spend time this weekend on some serious technical writing in order to catch up on work I promised to do, some of which was forestalled Friday by family business. I want to break out of the rut. A second fact is that I have joined nearly the whole city of Chicago in pensively following the almost inconceivable set of daily triumphs this spring that have given our generally luckless baseball city the two best teams in Major League Baseball—at least so far, knock on wood, and may I not jinx either one by speaking too soon. When I’ve had the chance, I have watched both Jake Arrieta of the Cubs and Chris Sale of the White Sox as they have mowed down opposing hitters and built enviable records on the mound. I mean, between them, they have a 15-0 record this season and a combined ERA of about 1.0.

Why do I care? Back to the rumination—they are living a fantasy that I am only beginning to understand, now that I am far too old to hope to achieve anything like it. In fact, I am old enough to be their father. When I was their age, I was only beginning to overcome the intimidation in facing pitchers wrought by the fact that I needed thick glasses by the time I was ten, a story I rendered in my very first blog post on this site about four years ago. I did not understand how people threw curve balls at 90 miles per hour, and I certainly did not understand how anyone swung the bat fast enough to hit such pitches. Having never learned the rapid reactions that allow people even to face such pitchers, let alone hit home runs against them, I could only stand there dumbfounded as the ball whizzed past. It did not matter whether I swung. I was nearly 40 before I started to play competent intramural softball. By that age, most professional athletes have seen their best days and are on the way to retirement.

But that is not really my point. It was about then that my cognitive assets began to kick into gear, at least with regard to some sports, to notice from observation just how these athletes managed to do what they do. I started to follow the path of the ball closely, and the arc of the bat, and other central elements of professional baseball. I have come to realize what kind of arm or reflexes it takes to perform at that level. Even if I was never capable of realizing a daydream of launching a ball out of the park—and believe me, I never was—I at least began to realize how they did it, and the strategies behind the confrontation of hitter and pitcher. Because I have a better grasp of what is happening, I enjoy the game now more than I ever have in the past. I appreciate what Arrieta and Sale do in a way I never could before. I have become a student of the game.

That gets me to my real point. Well, sort of. We can be students of many things in our lives and benefit from it all, somehow. At the end of 2013, an exceedingly hectic year in which I racked up 23 business trips connected with my position at the American Planning Association, two more connected with teaching at the University of Iowa, plus some personal travel, I knew that something had to change. I had not gotten to my fitness club for weeks at a time, and I was wearing down. So I switched clubs to XSport Fitness and signed up to work with a personal trainer, having decided the additional expense would be more than compensated with renewed stamina and physical discipline. Then I had to wait about two months before I could start because, on New Year’s Day 2014 at a Barnes & Noble store, I pinched a shoulder nerve by carelessly tossing an overly heavy laptop bag on my left shoulder as I prepared to leave. That reinforced the logic of why I needed such training in the first place.

Mike Caldwell, trainer at XSport Fitness

Mike Caldwell, trainer at XSport Fitness

I have worked since then and made great strides in personal fitness, including, recently, a string of 150-second planks. More important, however, is what I have been learning through the trainer, Michael Caldwell, with whom I regularly discuss why I am doing what he asks me to do. I am thus gaining both intellectually, with a better understanding of physical fitness technique, and physically, by pursuing higher goals over time—and steadily achieving them. It is an important lesson in perseverance. I realize just how much work professional athletes must perform to condition themselves, no matter what natural talents they begin with. Fitness does not just happen.

It is not, however, as if I had never learned perseverance before. I have merely changed the setting or, to put it another way, added a new setting to those that were already familiar. And what I have learned in life is that loving what we do is what makes perseverance seem worthwhile and endurable. For athletes, it is literally the love of the game—that is not merely a phrase—and when that goes away, it is surely time to retire and find something else to do.

Two nights ago, Friday the 13th, my wife and I attended The King and I at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. We both loved the show. Jean, whose father was at one point in his life a music instructor, loves such musicals and enjoyed every minute of it. I mention it because I have never, in my entire life, tried to envision myself as one of the performers for such a show. I have never imagined that I have the kind of voice that it would take to impress a large audience, and my gift for music is marginal at best. For this, I was and will remain merely a spectator, a member of the consuming public. I cannot imagine myself enjoying the process of developing the necessary talent. It is not part of my rumination. I might add that, having purchased the tickets as a Mother’s Day gift, I should have anticipated that Friday the 13th would be a night in which, after the show, we would have to race five blocks through a downpour to the Blue Line to go home, getting soaked even with a raincoat and umbrella between us. (Forget the taxi line at the Lyric; it was hopeless.) I have never daydreamed about becoming a meteorologist either, not even a handsomely paid one on television. Not my thing. But I digress.

Any savvy reader will grasp by now that I am writing this article because I did find my calling, and I did persevere in developing my skills, however convoluted the path I may have taken in life. As early as the third grade, I was attempting to write science fiction stories. I dreamed of publishing them, although today I am glad that those early manuscripts have mercifully disappeared, their pages rotting in some landfill in northern Ohio. The love of writing took many forms over the years, but it has never left me. In high school, I used my electives to include one-semester courses in both journalism and creative writing. I was a co-founder of the Brecksville High School Writers Club. I began college as an English major, switching to political science only as I became drawn to the turmoil of the 1960s and the elusive prospect of somehow changing the world. I wrote for the student newspaper, sometimes well, sometimes poorly. Later I wrote a handful of op-eds for the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, and then I moved to Iowa, and continued to write and publish there. I found my way into graduate school at the University of Iowa, and not satisfied simply to get a master’s degree in urban and regional planning, I prolonged my academic efforts by adding a second master’s in journalism. Then came a fateful day when I had to decide on a master’s project in journalism, and I decided that if I had to do such a project, it ought to become a book. Three years after graduation, it emerged between two covers from the University of Illinois Press as Raising Less Corn and More Hell, an oral history of the 1980s Midwest farm credit crisis. At 38 years old, I finally found myself being reviewed in the New York Times. I had envisioned myself as a published author and cared so much about learning the craft that I never noticed just how much perseverance, how much sweat, how many wrong turns turned around I had poured into this and other projects to reach this plateau. Only in looking back do I realize the level of effort I sustained.

Like Arrieta and Sale, though certainly not with their level of fame, I loved my game and was passionate about succeeding.

The great thing about writing is that, at 66, although my energy may flag more than it did 30 years ago, I can keep going. I will not wear out my arm on the keyboard. Studs Terkel published his last book at the ripe age of 94. I can keep getting smarter about my craft without worrying about its physical toll, at least for the foreseeable future. As for that other degree? It built on my background in political science, in a way, and more importantly, it gave me something truly substantive to write about. I didn’t just want to write. I had something to say. I had another passion.

If you are one of my young readers, find your dream. Persevere with it. Trust me, it is worth it. And if you are older, well, hang in there. Life can still be beautiful if you have a purpose.

IMG_0104By the way, as for that mention of Mother’s Day: By the time I finished graduate school, I had met my wife, and we got married. I learned about passion and purpose from her too. She is retired now, but her passion was teaching. And she was happy last week. At a luncheon for its retirees, the Chicago Teachers Union gave her a lifetime achievement award for her activism. I have seldom seen her more pleased.

 

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

The Milestone of 10,000

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I don’t do this often. In fact, I’ve done it only once before, when this blog reached 1,000 subscribers back in the summer of 2014. But at about 5 p.m. Central Standard Time, the 10,000th reader registered as a subscriber to “Home of the Brave.” I want to take a moment to acknowledge that because I never started this blog nearly three years ago envisioning such growth in readership. I admit to being surprised by it all.

Early on, around April 2013, as I was trying to decide why I was launching this blog at all, a moment of liberation arrived. I realized I did not need to establish a clear genre, such as book reviews or political commentary, because any such choice would betray my own hard-earned identity by tapping only a portion of what I had to offer. Instead, I decided, the blog would contain “whatever I damn well pleased to write,” not to be cantankerous, but as the only clear way to maintain the integrity of my own moral and intellectual contributions to the world. We are all many things, but we don’t always express them well. I would make it a point to focus my literary and journalistic talents on expressing the complexity of subject matters that interested me, as I saw them. If they defy easy categorization, so be it. At least I would have fun and perhaps even learn in the process.

What I honestly did not expect was how many of you would join this journey. After a whole year, there were about 270 subscribers. After that, for whatever reasons, the blog entered an upward trajectory that is still underway. There is only one way to respond–with more of the heartfelt, deeply thought essays that I hope are becoming my trademark. Writing this blog is still an adventure, still a challenge. I want to cause people to think, to care more about their fellow human beings, and to deepen their curiosity. If I succeed at that, the numbers presumably will take care of themselves. I intend to pay attention to what matters.

And thanks to all of you for taking the time to read what I have to say. I am very deeply appreciative.

Jim Schwab

Business of Changing the World

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Last night I watched the CNN documentary, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. It told me much that I already knew, namely, that Jobs was a problematic figure with both a dark side and a light side, a man of genius with deep human flaws, but someone who clearly changed the world, at least on a technological level. We relate to computers and telephones today in ways that were almost unimaginable 30 or 40 years ago. At the same time, the movie filled in some gaps in my knowledge and made me aware of some aspects of his tragically shortened career that were less clear to me before.

DSCF1419

But that is not the most important part of my reaction to the story. In fact, I had this blog post in mind well before seeing the movie in part because it simply reinforced a thought that has been with me for some time: that the shape of our choices is dictated to some extent by the timing of our lives and the circumstances in which we grow into adulthood. Many of us can still change a great deal as our life moves on, but those initial choices in high school and college, in our teens and early twenties, predetermine a great deal of what follows.

I have not yet read the Walter Isaacson biography of Jobs, though it sits on my shelf waiting for me, so I was intrigued to learn that Jobs graduated from high school in 1972, just four years behind me. But he died in 2011, and I am still here, his life ending early at 56 years of age as a result of complications from pancreatic cancer. Four years does not seem like a long time in a full life, but at that formative age, for baby boomers following the Sixties, it made all the difference in the world. It may have been one of the most dramatic periods in modern American history.

I entered college in the fall of 1968. In April of that year, as I was completing my senior year of high school, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis. We barely recovered from that shock when Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, was also assassinated in a hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California primary. Before the summer was over, the Democratic convention in Chicago was disrupted by major protests that were suppressed with major police violence. It was a rather traumatic introduction to four years of higher education and was followed by numerous protests. I attended college in downtown Cleveland, and watched or participated in civil rights, antiwar, and environmental demonstrations.

I mention this because, in the many years since then, especially more recently, I have wondered if I might have benefited from taking some business courses in order better to understand some of the more progressive business phenomena that have evolved on the American landscape. There are now green businesses focused on renewable energy, food businesses catering to new tastes for healthier foods, and environmental businesses focused on cleaning up rather than despoiling the environment. When I was a student in Cleveland, however, the businesses I knew best seemed like an extensive monolith of status quo enterprises, defending the despoliation of the environment, resistant to equal opportunity, with the corner offices almost an unrelenting parade of conservative, aging white men. I may have been a young white man myself, but I most definitely wanted to live a more interesting, purposeful life than those white men.

And so I studied literature at first, then switched to political science, in a quest to change the world, and eventually, by the early 1980s, returned to school to obtain graduate degrees in journalism and urban and regional planning. I did survive three undergraduate electives in economics, which were reinforced by planning-related economics classes at the master’s level, but that is not the same as classes in marketing and accounting and business management. As I said, as I have watched a new generation of business enterprises take new approaches to engaging with the world, I have wondered whether I might have benefited from learning more about entrepreneurship and business principles. But it was not to be because the influences that bore down on me made that less appealing when it might have been more feasible. I wanted to change the world in what I deemed a positive way, and the businesses that might have employed me in Cleveland at the time did not seem like the way to achieve that. Nonetheless, I did work in the business world for several years before moving to Iowa to take the helm of a small public interest nonprofit organization, only after which I pursued graduate school.

It was only as I was completing that graduate education that many of these new enterprises—and Apple Computer, which was a provocative and sometimes perplexing blend of both old and new ideas about how to run a business—burst onto the scene. Meanwhile, I was acquiring a whole new set of skills that implanted me firmly in the public sector, although I have spent most of my subsequent career in a nonprofit professional association. Along the way, I learned that a strong entrepreneurial spirit is a powerful ally even in the nonprofit world. They too must find ways to attract money. In my case, we most often do that in a highly competitive environment, developing proposals for grants and contracts that require significant innovative thinking—the very sort of thing that would probably serve me equally well as a consultant because, in effect, that is to some extent what I have become. I am in a service business, but I have had and enjoyed opportunities to change the world in ways that matter. Small ways, perhaps, compared to the impact of someone like Jobs, but appreciable. I have helped alter the prevailing thinking about the ways in which planners can contribute to the reduction of losses of lives and property from natural disasters. That does not seem like a small thing when I think about it very hard.

My sense of entrepreneurship was enhanced by the fact that I also was writing for a living, sometimes enhancing my income from working as a planner with book royalties and article fees and honoraria for speaking. I learned some marketing because I had to learn how to hone my message and sell books. It’s not nearly as easy as it may seem. In fact, the publishing business can be downright brutal, but I learned to survive.

In the end, my takeaway is that it matters less whether one ends up working in the private sector, nonprofit sector, or public sector, or anywhere else, for that matter, and much more what we ultimately do with the skills we acquire. Entrepreneurship is as much an attitude as a skill, and what we sell matters as much as how well we sell it, but what matters more is why we want to do what we do and the satisfaction we derive from doing it well. Looking back, I have no regrets about the skills and knowledge I developed or about my accomplishments in life. They have not made me a billionaire like Jobs, but the psychic rewards have been high. I took the hand that life dealt me during a volatile stretch of history and used it to make a difference. I will not ask for more.

 

Jim Schwab