And I couldn’t stop laughing.

Down some water. Laugh. Dip among traffic. Laugh. Cram an energy bar and stop by the tampon boxes, fast food wrappers and museum-pimping statuary that pool along the spot the Roosevelt Road bridge overlooks both river and the vacant Rezkoville and I laugh laugh laugh.

July. Bike ride. Entire length of the city just for funsies and to end the site on a high note. I’ve been posting about it for a week and a half in stories I wrote between August and early October. You’re all caught up.

This is story #1,000. This site will end on Friday. I will miss it greatly. But I’m not ending, nor is Chicago.

I found crime here. I found death and sex and sin and kiddos playing piggy on summer days in the park. I wept and shook here and I laughed and shook here. I got drunk and kissed girls and took boat rides and played croquet. I wore spiked leather bracelets in one life and neckties in another. This town rattled and made me.

North through the skyscrapers, north through the trendy bars, north through gay neighborhoods and wealthy ones and ones where the poverty bleeds and bubbles from the soil itself. North.

The stories, by god the stories. The people I met! The people I didn’t meet! I’ve talked to dancers and magicians, politicians and thugs and drunks. I hit this city with all I had and at the end I told so, so few of its tales. This city threw itself at me and I gave it a pittance, my thousand stories trickle and tinkle against the ocean this Chicago throws back each moment.

In June 1921, Chicago Daily News reporter Ben Hecht debuted “1001 Afternoons in Chicago,” a daily column slicing life in the first quarter of the 20th century. In the preface to the book version, editor Henry Justin Smith recalled the “haggard but very happy” Hecht turning in the first few columns.

“It was clear that he had sat up nights with those stories. He thumbed them over as though he hated to let them go. They were the first fruits of his Big Idea — the idea that just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often flatly and unimaginatively told, lay life; that in this urban life there dwelt the stuff of literature, not hidden in remote places, either, but walking the downtown streets, peering from the windows of sky scrapers, sunning itself in parks and boulevards. He was going to be its interpreter. His was to be the lens throwing city life into new colors, his the microscope revealing its contortions in life and death. It was no newspaper dream at all, in fact. It was an artist’s dream. And it had begun to come true. Here were the stories. … Hoped I’d like ‘em.”

By 1925, Hecht was sick of it. He had written a deliberately smutty novel called “Fantazius Mallare” as a test case on American obscenity law, and American obscenity law won.

He was fired from the Daily News in 1923 but had with a group of friends from the Dil Pickle Club arthouse scene started the Chicago Literary Times, an inspiring, brilliant drain on time and funding. Writer pals were calling about easy money and literary fortune in New York, and Hecht was ready to submit.

These are the final lines of the last 1001 Afternoons in Chicago story, “My Last Park Bench,” in which an older, weary Hecht stumbles across the younger version of himself.

“I catch a glimpse of him following me with his eyes, excited, damn him, over the mystery and romance which lurk in every corner of the city, even on a cinder-covered bench in Grant Park. Let him sit till doom’s day on this bench; he will never see me again. I have more important things to do than to collect cinders under my collar.”

I didn’t know when I started that Hecht was a liar and fabricator, a newsman conman of the era for whom Truth and Fact formed a Venn diagram, and none of it mattered so long as the words sang. He ended up in Hollywood, his gift for witty lies finding a more appropriate setting than a newspaper page.

I just knew I wanted to try what he claimed he was doing.

Since April 2012, I never missed a scheduled post day and, aside from some clearly satirical stories about mascots, Santa Claus and the brainstorming session for “tronc,” I never made up a word. What you read from me over these last six years is Chicago in the 20-tens as seen through my lens and microscope.

Hope you liked ‘em.

I was laughing when I hit the graveyard.

I made it. I made it through my self-assigned task. I made it through Chicago and I made it through, Chicago. My throat was dry and my legs burned white like charcoal ready for meat. But I was laughing.

My side trips and roundabouts added almost 20 miles to the route. Had I stuck to the path, I could have gotten there at 30. Instead the app tolds me I took 49.86 miles to get from Burnham to Evanston, plowing through that town between.

I’m not done yet. Not with my 1,001 stories, not with my half-century ride. Just a touch more to go.

I turned the bike around and headed back into the city, aiming my aching bones, burning legs and slightly chafed uppity bits toward the Howard Red Line stop. Nothing left in me, I slouched toward Bethlehem to be born.

A CTA worker came out of her glass cage to greet me.

“No bikes on the train,” she said.

And I laughed.

…

Read a few of my favorites:

The Rabbi’s Machine is Missing — Whatever happened to Chicago’s last typewriter repairman?

The Human Addict — A begging addict talks about being treated like a person.

Old Joe of Canaryville — Joe sits in his shop waiting for customers, as he’s done for 68 years.

Nuns in a Cash Register Store — Another bit of Chicago is lost.

The Nut Hut — Over soup, a woman recalls her role as a professional tease in a prostitution scam.

Party at Uncle Fun — Customers, staff and Uncle Fun himself say goodbye to the well-loved Belmont gag shop.

The Murderess Down the Block — I find out a 1920s lady gunner lived a few houses over from me.

The Most Sarcastic Child in Chicago Watches a Clown Show — Clowns from Theater Oobleck and El Circo Nacional de Puerto Rico win over a very sarcastic child.

The Steelworker’s Mermaid — How four sculptors hid a seven-foot mermaid for 14 years.

Mama Olaf — An immigrant tale of love and tripe soup.

Miss Sweetfeet Breaks — A breakdancer talks about the need for more B-Girls.

Light and the Rocket — A child I knew just killed a man.

The 16th Artist — One man’s arts center aims to revive Englewood.

The Rabbi, Harry Potter and Too Many Corpses — A rabbi has to tell a little boy some bad news.

Whatever Happened to the High Priestess of the Flappers? — In 2016, I wrote about the head of a 1920s clique of teen glamour girls. In 2018, her granddaughter reached out.

“I just said, ‘Leave her alone. Don’t try to have her stomach pumped — she already did this. This is what she wants.’ So they did. They left her alone,” she said by phone from Natchez, Mississippi.

Kathy’s cousin Marsha Colson missed her call.

“I was in a new job and working hard long hours and the night she died I worked late,” Colson wrote in an email after confirming with her sister that the family is fine with me telling you this story. “I got home and had a message from her saying in a shaky, quavery voice saying ‘Marsha? Mimmy. I love you, I love you.’”

Margaret Persell Marshall — she preferred “Mimmy” to “Grandma” — had taken 21 Darvon. Technically, she only took 10, but she had the pills recapsulated into a larger size because 10 pills would be easier to swallow than 21. She had been planning this. She had been a member of a pro-euthanasia society for 15 years before her death; she had macular degeneration, worsening hearing problems and near-constant pain after falling picking up sticks in the driveway of her home, Lansdowne.

“So she was in some level of pain, going blind and going deaf, and she didn’t like that,” Moody said.

“I’ve always regretted that I didn’t get that message in time to see her and tell her goodbye and hug her and tell her one more time that I loved her,” Colson said, “But her husband and my mother and Uncle George were with her. They found out what she had done but didn’t stop her that time. They just stayed with her until she died.”

The High Priestess of the Flappers was gone.

…

In 1922, Margaret Persell was 17, wild, gorgeous and, as her then 13-year-old brother Ralph told the Chicago Tribune, “nutty”

A Natchez girl whose wholesale pharmaceutical salesman father had been transferred to Chicago, she had sneaked downtown the year before and become a showgirl, until they found out she was only 16. Her parents sent her to boarding school in Florida for that, and the boarding school sent her right back for sneaking out the window at night. She was witty, brilliant, the height of fashion, the bee’s knees, cat’s pajamas and duck’s quack and a blushing violet who knew she was the berries.

She was, in short, a flapper, and the High Priestess of the Royal Order of Flappers.

When I wrote about the Royal Order in 2016, I said the group was organized as a publicity stunt for The Flapper magazine. Based in the former Ogden Building where the 1980s glass UFO of the Thompson Center now sits, the magazine was the brainchild of two decidedly non-flapping former newspaper reporters, Thomas Levish and Myrna Serviss. Whether trying to represent or just make a buck off the fashion trend, Flapper Publishing Co. put out seven issues of the magazine (tagline: “Not for Old Fogies”) between May and November 1922.

However, it appears I was wrong, and that Persell’s teen gang was actually a rival crew, with Levish running warnings in his magazine about the Royal Order, saying they were organized not by Persell, but by a “so-called moving picture promoter and would-be newspaper reporter.” Much of the feud appears to be because Levish couldn’t get Persell and her Royal Order to sign on as his spokesflappers, according to a HILOBROW article from earlier this year.

Whatever was behind the newspaperman’s rivalry with the teenaged girl, the flapper flock’s exploits made fun copy for the papers, who printed such derring-do as the girls charging into Mayor William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson’s office to demand the city stop local ministers from preaching about flappers as signs of moral decay, and who predicted the group’s end when Persell eloped with her boyfriend.

The newspapers moved on with no crew of dolled-up glamour girls to photograph, but Persell’s life continued.

…

The marriage that ended the Royal Order didn’t last.

“After my daddy was born, they came down to Mississippi and her father got him a job [selling pharmaceuticals]. And people wouldn’t buy from him because of his northern accent,” Moody said.

Her first husband returned to Chicago, and the couple divorced.

“I think my father met his biological father once when he was 8 and he took him to the Chicago World’s Fair, which I think was 1933,” Moody said. “Took him on the train, then never saw him again at all. He died fairly young.”

It would be the first of five marriages to four men. George Marshall, who was 12 years older than Mimmy, was both her second and fourth husband, their second marriage lasting until his death. The grandchildren called him “Ampa.”

“Our grandfather was the sweetest, gentlest person on earth,” Colson said by phone from Lansdowne, where she still lives. “I think he gave unconditional love even more than Mimmy did because she was sweet, she was wonderful, she was generous. But she, I think, needed more love. I think she needed love more than our grandfather did. He was there and never expected anything.”

Persell’s grandchildren, now in their 60s, knew Mimmy had been a flapper — they staged a 1920s-themed flapper party for what would have been her 100th birthday — but she never mentioned her brief bit of fun charging into mayors’ offices and feuding with magazine publishers.

They knew she had been a showgirl, and briefly dated a pre-”Tarzan” Johnny Weissmuller.

They knew she taught her oldest to read using adult books, as she couldn’t afford kids books but wanted her children to be as voracious a reader as she was.

They knew about the massive parties, the long beach vacations with the grandkids, trips to Mexico and South America, helping found Natchez’s yearly “Pilgrimage” tours of antebellum homes in 1932. They knew about the “big, huge, fancy antebellum dress with peacock feathers,” Moody said Mimmy wore as Pilgrimage president in the first tableau. They knew about her involvement in the creation of the first subdivision in Natchez that would sell to black people, in 1952.

They knew she had been a high school basketball star and spent years in New Orleans and that a photo of the family ran in National Geographic about “Six Little Girls of Lansdowne,” the book she wrote about the first six of what would eventually be 10 grandchildren.

They didn’t know about the Royal Order until Moody googled Mimmy out of curiosity one day, and came across my 2016 blog post. One of the grandchildren remembered Mimmy mentioning the Order, but 1920s Chicago was one story of many, and Margaret Persell simply had too much going on.

“I keep saying we need to get together at least once a year and just tell stories,” Colson said.

 …

This is Mimmy at 35.

This is Mimmy at 65.

Unfair, really.

When Mimmy died and the grandchildren divvied up personal mementos, Colson took a cashmere sweater and wrapped it around her pillow for a few weeks until the lingering, sweet aroma that seemed to follow Mimmy everywhere faded away. Marsha Colson and Kathy Moody have been wonderful to me, sharing stories of the High Priestess and making me cry one or two more times than I want to admit. I thank them, and want to do right by Mimmy’s stories.

Here’s one last one. It’s from when Marsha was 4. Another big gala had broken up at Lansdowne, but the little girl didn’t care. She was staying with Mimmy that night, and wanted their time together to begin.

“The party was over, somebody was walking around the hall, picking up glasses and napkins and kind of cleaning up, and I was just standing in her bedroom door, waiting for her. She came to the door and reached out her hands, and took me by both hands and pulled me toward her and said, ‘Dance with me! I don’t want to stop dancing!’ That was her. That was her.”

…

[Author's note: If you're on the site today because of the Chicago Reader article, click on this sentence to check out some free sample chapters of "The Chicago Corruption Walking Tour," a book in need of a publisher. Then send it to your publisher friends.]

It’s Tri-Taylor.

B67. Still Desirable. “Jewish infiltration has started along the edges and may be expected to continue because of favorable reputation and location.”

It’s Ravenswood Manor.

D74. Hazardous. “[The then-upcoming Ida B. Wells federal housing project] has the realtors guessing as to what the ultimate result will be when so many of this race are drawn into this section from the already negro-blighted district… Already Washington Park at the south, a very fine park, has been almost completely monopolized by the colored race… Washington Park is doomed.”

I’m reading about the history of America. I’m reading about redlining.

A wonderful, horrifying project from the University of Richmond in Virginia has put 150 of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s “Residential Security” maps online. HOLC was part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, compiling massive national lists of neighborhoods and other areas based on mortgage lending risk.

The program brought together real estate professionals, loan officers and appraisers to determine how likely it was a Depression-era lender would get stiffed if they were dumb enough to loan to someone in a certain region. Then HOLC put the assessments on a series of color-coded maps. Green meant an area was “Best,” and a good place for banks to invest via loans. Blue meant “Still Desirable.” Yellow, “Definitely Declining.”

Red meant “Hazardous.” Don’t loan there.

The maps determined which areas were which colors based on a number of criteria, but the main one that horrifies today is race. Neighborhoods were given the best scores for Northern European whites, less for more “ethnic whites” and down a sliding racist scale to black people at the bottom.

The federal government compiled maps telling banks not to lend to people of color.

I knew this in a sort of squishy liberal enough-history-to-pass-the-midterm-and-forget-it way, but the University of Richmond project has given an unparalleled chance to connect these maps to my actual life, to search and see why my parents’ Rockford house was put in red in 1939 (poor residents and a nearby creek tended to flood), why my sister’s Seattle apartment was blue (recent construction and white-collar Scandinavians) and why the North Center rental I’m typing this in was yellow (older homes an 25 percent foreigners).

What horrifies me is the equivalence of race and just… housing stuff.

C49 in Portage Park was “definitely declining” because “Many of the houses are of a substantial age and those with stucco features of design are not only unattractive but difficult to sell at the present time.”

C66 in Rogers Park was given the same destination despite the real estate agents’ promise “There are only a minimum of Jews.”

Jews and stucco. Black neighbors and being downwind from the stockyards. Anglo whites and convenient shopping. The maps run types of humans through the same formula they use to figure noise, undesirable odor or any other factor in home choice, in no place put more blatantly than D64 in Brighton Park: “Class of inhabitant, noise, and undesirable odors do not tend to any improvement.”

The federal government put out documents putting black people on the same level as a rotting smell, and Jews on par with a momentary downtick in the popularity of stucco.

What also horrifies me is how much these maps look like the city today. When the banks — and the federal government through the G.I. Bill’s zero-interest mortgages for returning WWII veterans — poured money only into the HOLC-designated better areas, the rich got richer and the poor didn’t.

The new interstate system ran highways through poorer neighborhoods, scattering the residents to find new homes. People of color could legally move anywhere, after the Supreme Court killed racially restrictive housing covenants in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) because, yes, until 1948 it was legal to put bans on specific races into your home sales. (The specific covenant in Shelley v. Kraemer banned “people of the Negro or Mongolian Race” from ever owning a particular house in St. Louis.)

When people of color started moving next door, those same highways became pretty attractive ways for white people to move to white suburbs and still get to work in the Loop by 9.

It’s not just Chicago. A National Community Reinvestment Coalition study released earlier this year showed that 74 percent of the HOLC-designated “Hazardous” sections are low- to moderate-income today. 64 percent are still minority neighborhoods. These maps served to strengthen the inequalities they highlighted. They were a self-fulfilling prophecy our tax dollars created.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 supposedly put an end to the HOLC maps’ influence, but the difference too often was banks and other lenders had to find euphemisms and excuses for being more generous with loans in rich, white areas. “Redlining” became a general term, removed from the actual red lines that would wrap around a “negro-blighted district,” to quote D74.

So take a look at the maps. Explore. Play. But remember as you do that this segregated city was made to happen, that there were programs and policies and power dynamics that grouped people by the color of their skin and the contents of their pocketbooks.

Since I don’t want to miss a moment of this, I loaded up the site before we left with Le Tour de Chicago, four bike routes through famous sites in the city’s history. I’m not posting these as thought exercises — get out there and explore this city.

We rode through Chicago’s newspaper history on Friday, and later this week will learn about lakefront encroachment and something I’m just calling “A Warhellride to the Goddess.”

Today’s bike tour is going to go through some of the spots connected to Chicago’s gay and lesbian community

See other LGBTQ landmarks not on this bike route

The purpose, aside from the fact I’ve been all coughing and bronchial and wanted a story I could write from my sickbed, was to get people to explore certain sites I like, including this one, Atlas Obscura, the Chicago Collections Consortium, the Chicago History Museum, Mysterious Chicago and Curious City.

So I made the quiz goldanged impossible. (And Curious City, that thing we talked about? It’s handled.)

From the Fool Killer submarine to park bats to Iroquois Theater Assistant Chief Usher Archie Guerin, here are the answers you didn’t get to the 1,001 Chicago Afternoons Really Difficult Trivia Quiz.

The Answers

1. Assistant chief usher of the Iroquois Theater, seen in news photos following the fire.

Archie Guerin, as seen in this Chicago Collections Consortium photo.

A brief word about the Collections Consortium: It’s awesome.

It’s an online home for the combined collections of 18 local institutions, from universities to libraries to museums to the frickin’ Brookfield Zoo. A big reason for this quiz was for an excuse to tell more people about the site.

…

2. The first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction, located underneath the University of Chicago’s football field, was in a room originally constructed for this sport.

Squash. As in “that sport that’s not quite racquetball but no one can really explain how it isn’t.” As outlined in this Curious City story, Enrico Fermi and his team turned a squash court into the home of the first self-sustained nuclear reaction in 1942.

…

3. Her husband signed away her objections to the Art Institute.

For this we turn to, well, me. Her name was Sarah Daggett and you can find out more about her in #566: The Gray of the Lions.

…

4. A mysterious submarine found in the river, maybe.

The Fool Killer. Maybe.

Adam Selzer of Mysterious Chicago has put in a yeoman’s effort on separating truth from lie in the story of the Fool Killer, which was possibly a scam, possibly a hidden submarine complete with dog skeleton. Check out his whole fascinating site.

…

5. The only newspaper to make deadline after the Great Chicago Fire.

A little blurb in an 1888 listing of newspapers I got as a gift once led me to the story of Myra Bradwell and the Chicago Legal News. It’s one of my favorite stories about the Great Fire. A little girl rescued the mailing list from the legal newspaper created by her mother, who was kinda sorta the nation’s first female attorney, oh you know what? Just read #555: Myra Bradwell and the Fireproof Newspaper.

…

6. This obscure library at the Leather Archives and Museum has a flowery name.

The Teri Rose Memorial Library. See what I did with the hint there? Obscure? Like Atlas Obscura? Like this Atlas Obscura listing of Chicago’s secret libraries?

I’m very clever. The “mysterious submarine” was a hint too.

…

7. The exciting voice of this person appeared at the Cairo Supper Club in this Egyptomania photo.

Manuel De Silva.

Although it’s not part of the quiz, here’s a review I found of him in a review from Billboard in 1948:

“Manuel De Silva, billed as the “New Voice,” loses little time living up to the cognomen. Handsome youth exhibits an excellent song choice and his lusty-lunged barying nets him the show’s top mitt. Manages striking nuances with a cultured piping of Donkey Serenade and surpasses this effort with smart selling of Sorrento, Temptation and When Irish Eyes Are Smiling. Had to beg off. Lad looks like a comer and it shouldn’t be long before he’s rated tops in the field.”

It’s on page 48, where you also learn the “Mary Kaye Trio” was originally the “Mary Kaaihue Trio.” They’re from Hawaii.

…

8. You can find the records of the Jane Dent Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People at this library.

The Richard J. Daley Library Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

…

9. When the Loop addresses were converted to the new numbering system in 1911, the Hotel Princess at 267 S. Clark St. got this as its new address.

331 S. Clark St. For this you have to use the address conversion guides in the Chicago History Museum, Building and House History section.

Both Curious City and I have done stories on Edward Brennan, the force behind the new numbering system, although only I present a compelling case for why he was history’s greatest monster.

I mean, I was super-sleepy the next day, man.

…

10. This Uptown silent movie studio produced both early Sherlock Holmes movies and the world’s first pie in the face.

Essanay. You can find out about the Sherlock Holmes and watch the movie in the room where it was shot in an upcoming joint Atlas Obscura/Mysterious Chicago event. You can find out about the pie from me in story #602: Chicago, the Home of the Pie in the Face.

…

11. Three werewolves from this area of the Baltic are killing time waiting for prey in a South Loop statue. One has a book.

Livonia. As in the Livonian Wolves in this Atlas Obscura entry. It’s a creepy myth of Christmastime and the fattest werewolf.

…

12. “Kitchen Klenzer” was advertised for this much in the storefront window in a 1963 photograph of a drugstore at Drexel and 47th.

Two for 21 cents. I mean, seriously, just play around with the Consortium site. You can find just, just anything there.

…

13. Researchers found this species of bat living under the boardwalk at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Bonus points for finding out from a particular interactive display on a certain radio station’s website.

I was going for the little brown bat, as mentioned in the Curious City interactive display created by Erik Rodriguez of The Illustrated Press, but a sharp-eyed reader (hi, Joann) found in the accompanying article that all seven locally common species have been found under the boardwalk.

So if you said:

• little brown bat
• big brown bat
• hoary bat
• silver-haired bat
• eastern red bat
• evening bat
• eastern pipistrelle
• or the number seven

you should be good.

Anyway, thanks for taking/please forgive me for this quiz. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to get more ‘tussin.

Read a random story that’s most likely not a quiz

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Sure, you know that the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction was at the U of C campus, but do you know what sport the room was originally made for?

Part of this project is to get people interested in the historical resources around us every day, to show that history is a live, breathing thing.

That and the fact my cute little sneezy cold has morphed into a broad, hacking bronchitis and I wanted a story I could write indoors led to today’s challenge, 13 of the most fiendishly obscure questions my cold medicine-addled brain could muster.

This being the Internet, you can find all these answers in seconds with a few well-chosen keywords. But the point of this is exploration, to give you an excuse to crack into the Chicago Collections Consortium’s historical photographs for the Iroquois Theater usher or WBEZ’s Curious City for the location of “Chicago Pile 1.” (Those two are on the house.)

Search within the collections, of course. But while Phineas H. Google has made a heck of a site, this will be more fun for you the deeper in you dig.

All of the answers can be found at one or more of the following sites:

• 1,001 Chicago Afternoons
• Atlas Obscura
• Curious City
• Chicago Collections Consortium
• The Chicago History Museum, Building and House History
• Mysterious Chicago

In disclosure, I contribute to Atlas Obscura for fun (no money changes hands, alas). I also am included in the Chicago History Museum’s ongoing “Chicago Authored” exhibit and am participating in a professional development event for teachers on April 2.

Other than that, I have no connection to any of these sites other than that I like ‘em. And I would straight up kill a man to get a job with WBEZ’s Curious City.

Seriously, who do you want done? One of those WFMT guys? Consider it handled.

Enjoy! Answers Friday.

The Questions

1. Assistant chief usher of the Iroquois Theater, seen in news photos following the fire.

2. The first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction, located underneath the University of Chicago’s football field, was in a room originally constructed for this sport.

3. Her husband signed away her objections to the Art Institute.

4. A mysterious submarine found in the river, maybe.

5. The only newspaper to make deadline after the Great Chicago Fire.

6. This obscure library at the Leather Archives and Museum has a flowery name.

7. The exciting voice of this person appeared at the Cairo Supper Club in this Egyptomania photo.

8. You can find the records of the Jane Dent Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People at this library.

9. When the Loop addresses were converted to the new numbering system in 1911, the Hotel Princess at 267 S. Clark St. got this as its new address.

10. This Uptown silent movie studio produced both early Sherlock Holmes movies and the world’s first pie in the face.

11. Three werewolves from this area of the Baltic are killing time waiting for prey in a South Loop statue. One has a book.

12. “Kitchen Klenzer” was advertised for this much in the storefront window in a 1963 photograph of a drugstore at Drexel and 47th.

13. Researchers found this species of bat living under the boardwalk at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Bonus points for finding out from a particular interactive display on a certain radio station’s website. (Edit 3:34 p.m. March 9: The article connected with the interactive element mentions more species than the interactive element did. Name either the species listed in the interactive, or the number of species mentioned in the article.)

Think you’ve got it? Email your answers to 1001chicago@gmail.com.

Help support 1,001 Chicago Afternoons on Patreon

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Read the original stories from the teaser:

Hunter of Magic

Goodnight Wicker Park

The Smell of Magic

Cockroach on the Factory Floor

A Blue (Line) Christmas

Miss Sweetfeet Breaks

The Evidence of Leather

It was the name of her dead father, so to lighten the mood he asked a funny joke question.

“The question was, ‘Have you ever been arrested?’ And she said yes, so I instantly think — because I’m having fun and I’ve had a couple drinks — oh, it was probably like for underage drinking or something like that. I’m like, ‘Oh, for what?’ And she’s like, ‘Ahhhhh,’ I’m like ‘Were you convicted?’ And that’s when she launched into it.”

Four years in prison and a story that involved an ex-boyfriend, wrong-place-wrong-time and a Mexican drug cartel.

This is speed dating in 2015.

“It was like trying blacksmithing or something,” our stunt dater “X” said of speed dating in the age of OKCupid and Tinder. “It doesn’t really apply anymore.”

For those who don’t know, speed dating is a means for single people to meet tons of potential mates at once. The guys and gals meet at a bar, with one gender getting to sit the whole time while the other revolving from seat to seat in hopes of finding a spark in the brief time allotted for connection.

In this case, 13 nervous guys spent five minutes per talking up 10 female friends of the staff of “a stereotypical North Side bar, unremarkable in every way” off the Red Line in Rogers Park.

“About half of the dozen or so women who were there were somehow affiliated with the bar or knew the host and were friends with the host,” X said. “I think she was trying to fill the ranks.”

For context, X is white, in his early 30s and sort of a dumber, uglier, worse-writing, smellier, weaker, inferior-at-pool-and-all-tabletop-sports and generally lesser version of me. (Except that for some reason, every woman I’ve dated who has met him has commented at one point about him being really attractive, smart and charming. Go figure.)

But my dear friend X (who left a profane message on my digital recorder when I stepped away from the interview to buy another round so I don’t feel too bad about calling him smelly and bad at pool) is our spy into this strange world of anime, drug cartels and a chesty German ex-model who told X he had beautiful eyes.

“It was probably the most interesting conversation I had the entire night, only because it was all small talk and she did it really well,” X said of the German. “Like somebody who has clearly been asked a lot of questions and was fairly rehearsed in how to have a really small talky kind of conversation. Different than most people who will ask a question and not really care about the response.”

They shared lovely small talk and a shot of Fireball, “the alcohol equivalent of the visors that frat boys wear.”

Then onto the next woman of the night.

“They’re very pleasant,” X said of the women. “Even if they’re not interested, they’re very nice and conversational. The men, however — and this is according to the women as I’m going on the speed dates and talking about them — the men were somewhat awkward. A few of them talked about how much they were into anime. A word of advice, if you’ve never been on a date before, if you’re not a big social person: Don’t talk about your anime interests. It’s not a good starting point.”

“One guy had never been on a date before in his entire life. His first date was speed dating on the North Side near Evanston in Rogers Park.”

When the nervous men and roped-in women arrived, they were all given a hand-folded trifold brochure run off a home printer.

“You ever been handed something by the health department? That was basically it.”

The brochure contained suggested icebreakers and everyone’s name. You circle who you like and if that person circled you too, the organizer will make the connection.

Some of his best experiences came when there was no spark, just a safe setting to meet a stranger.

“I ask her what her favorite flavor of ice cream is and this launches a whole conversation about how she doesn’t like ice cream. She’s actually from, uh, not Kenya. Fuck. Some African country originally, so she never really got into ice cream or dessert in general.”

This led to a wider-ranging conversation about Ethiopian food, Tusker Beer and the population of Washington, D.C.

“We had a really fun conversation. I think if you’re willing to talk to people and find something to actually have a conversation about, it can be a fun experience.”

As the night went on and drinks flowed, the scene got weirder. The host kept messing up the prompt times, cutting some dates short of the full five minutes. One of X’s dates was interrupted by a regular bar patron slamming a drink on the table before slouching back to the pool table, an angry gift for the woman he had been chatting up during the break. Another woman simply walked away from a speed date with a different man to hang out with friends who arrived at the bar.

X ended up circling three names, one of whom texted him the night we met for the interview. He might see her, he might not. But if he does, it’s not going to be around 12 nervous guys and Fireball shots.

“I don’t know if this is ever going to be a legitimate opportunity for men and women get together, but it was fun as hell,” said speed dater X.

Meet breakdancer Miss Sweetfeet

Meet a man hunting Cambodian sorcerers

Support these local creators this Christmas

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Followers of the sect known as Christianity celebrate a special day called “Christ-mas” in which trees are slaughtered, cookies are left for fat, flying elvish deer-herders and Irishmen receive massive amounts of birds.

In case you want to purchase a gift for this regional folk festival, here are some ideas that will support a few of the people and organizations I’ve written about in the 150 stories that have appeared on this site so far in 2015.

A Tactile Magic Act

For the past 19 years, 25-year-old Jeanette Andrews has only had one job. Stage magician. And yes, the math checks.

On Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, Andrews debuts her new show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. “Thresholds” will be an immersive magic experience by a woman who considers slight of hand a fine art. The tricks aren’t just designed to fool the eye, but to fool all five senses.

“Thresholds” is free with museum admission ($12 for adults, $7 for students and seniors), but cheapskates delight: The museum is free to Illinois residents on Tuesdays. If your loved ones ask, I’ll tell them it was really, really expensive.

If you like the illustration that accompanied my profile of Andrews, artist Marine Tempels takes commissions.

Psalm One’s Newest Album

She wasn’t mentioned by name, but rapper and Englewood native Psalm One was one of the readers at the “Welcome to the Neighborhood” reading I organized with Rachel Hyman at the MCA in January.

Psalm One’s newest album “P.O.L.Y.” or “Psalm One Loves You” was released in September of this year and can be purchased on iTunes. Psalm One’s smart, breezy style and lyrics have made her one of the freshest voices in hip-hop, pop and soul, not just out of Chicago, not just recently. Period.

If you want to learn where Psalm One gets it from, pair the album with a copy of the coming-of-age memoirs “Old School Adventures from Englewood–South Side of Chicago” by her mother, journalist Elaine Hegwood Bowen.

A Cambodian Sorcerer Hunt

What do you do when you find out your girlfriend’s dad is a sorcerer? If you’re Uptown-based journalist Ryun Patterson, you use the experience as inspiration for an interactive multimedia exploration of the changing world of traditional Cambodian magic.

“Vanishing Act: A Glimpse into Cambodia’s World of Magic” is available on print and Kindle at Amazon and downloadable for iStuff on iTunes for a holiday special of $9.99, down from $14.99.

It’s full of photographs, interviews, videos, interactive maps and pages and pages of nuanced writing detailing how the Southeast Asian nation’s traditional folk healing and fortune-telling is disappearing in some ways, going digital in others. I got it for my dad for his birthday, so I can vouch.

Oh, and Patterson married the sorcerer’s daughter.

Kink Lectures

Formed when museums wouldn’t take a dying man’s gay erotic paintings and interested collectors only wanted to hide them away, the Leather Archives & Museum in Rogers Park has become a home to all things kink and fetish.

There’s a prurient interest to a museum filled with butt plugs, whips, masks and sexy books, but the museum is an intentionally open and free space dedicated to preserving art, craft and writing that celebrates a part of life some see as shameful, dirty, to be tossed away or hidden. Whether it’s your sexuality or not, it’s someone’s.

Although tickets or a membership to the museum could be a fun thing for Santa to leave under the tree, depending on your tree and your Santa, there are also a few upcoming events of note, including lectures on kink and fetish culture and, in February, the museum’s first overnight lock-in.

Superhero Circus

More of a pre-Christmas extravaganza, but this Friday take your loved ones to Acrobatica Infiniti’s last planned show at the Uptown Underground.

Acrobatica Infiniti is a nerd circus, a celebration of all things geek and acrobatic. People tumble as superfolk, juggle as Jedi or cavort as cartoons.

My profile of the group became part of a series of circus performer profiles, with looks at Captain Hammer and his groupie, Mister Terrific and the circus’ resident Catwoman/Dark Phoenix/Breakdancing Yoshi.

And in case you liked that illustration of Dark Phoenix in action, artist Emily Torem takes commissions too.

A Night at the Turtle Races

Bowmanville bar Big Joe’s 2 & 6 has turtle racing. Take your friends.

A Really Good Photographer

OK, I don’t know what you would hire a photographer for. That’s your lookout. But AJ Kane, who did the photography for the interactive exploration of a hidden tunnel running through the downtown, is for hire.

He’s a good guy. Check out his stuff.

Little Stubby

Not to be confused with WWI hero bull terrier mutt Sergeant Stubby, Little Stubby is the nogoodnik kid brother of corrupt Chicago cop Johnny Kelly, who was competing for a tap-dancing stripper’s affections with a guy who pretends to be a robot in a nightclub’s storefront window in the 1953 insane nonsense film “City That Never Sleeps.”

You can rent that insane nonsense (seriously, the City of Chicago itself takes human form to narrate in the voice of Francis the Talking Mule) at Odd Obsession, a Bucktown video store and mecca for all things obscure and cinematic. See about a gift certificate, buy some merch or just drop by the store to check out the exhibit of Ghanaian movie posters.

Dropping my bouncy, light and frankly hilarious tone (that “regional folk festival” line was frickin’ gold), I want to support people who bring me the strange and unique ways people across the planet have expressed themselves.

Hip-hop, magic, journalism, acrobatics, movies, kink, even turtle racing — all these people and groups are the real deal. This “Christ-mas,” go beyond shopping locally. Shop exceptionally. Support the unique and beautiful.

The worst that could happen is you’ll experience something you’ll never see again.

Share your local shopping ideas

Listen to a CTA street band’s holiday song

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“In the late 1980s when Dom [Orejudos] was getting sick with AIDS, Chuck [Renslow] was looking for a place, a museum to house his extensive art collection. Not only the murals in the auditorium, but he had hundreds and hundreds of oil paintings and pencil drawings,” said LA&M Executive Director Rick Storer. “And Chuck was not able to find a museum that would take them first, or would say ‘We can take them, but we can never put them on exhibit because of the subject matter.’”

The subject matter was key, Storer said as we sat in swivel chairs in the volunteer orientation area of the Leather Archives & Museum in a quiet residential slip of Rogers Park. Art museums wouldn’t take sadomasochistic gay erotica.

Under the pseudonym Etienne, or sometimes just as “Stephen,” Orejudos painted larger-than-life murals and figures that celebrated the gay leather scene he and Renslow lived. Often adorning ‘70s and ‘80s leather bars like Renslow’s Gold Coast, Etienne’s works featured leather-clad daddies with massive muscles and massive phalluses engaged in exaggerated bondage and sadomasochism.

“Somebody might fantasize about being locked in a bondage cage for six months straight. Now, obviously, that’s not physically practical, that’s not safe, people aren’t going to do that. But you can explore that through erotic art,” Storer said.

Places that show art wouldn’t take it. Places that would take it wouldn’t show it. And as the 1990s approached and the decade’s AIDS-related death toll approached 100,000, more art, books, papers and other records of an erotic nature were being lost.

“Because so many people were dying, especially gay men, at the time from AIDS, there were a lot of stories of people who had collections, sexual collections. They would pass away and an uninformed family would come in and find these things and say, ‘Oh my gosh, I had no idea my son was into this stuff. We need to throw this away,’” Storer said. “Dumpsters were being filled with history.”

To fight this, Renslow, who formed the International Mr. Leather conference and competition in 1979, founded the Leather Archives & Museum in 1991.

Etienne died that same year. He was 58.

It’s a kink museum, yes. It has butt plugs and fetish gear, leather whips and rubber masks. It has kink-based pulp novels and Tijuana Bibles. And it has individual writings, oral histories, paintings, sculpture and other memorabilia of people society actively tried to sweep under the rug.

That’s not to say only the whips are prurient and only the writings are history. Both are records of an aspect of life often pushed aside.

“Traditional archives and libraries and museums have a track record of ignoring sexuality or oftentimes hiding sexuality,” Storer said. “The vision for the museum was that this part of people’s lives, their sexuality, their sexual identity, shouldn’t be thrown away or hidden. It should be saved and preserved and put on display for people to see and learn about.”

The library has 25,000 to 30,000 books, magazines and films. The museum collection has about 10,000 artifacts and art pieces. And the archive gathers individuals’ and organizations’ various papers, memorabilia and other kink- and fetish-related collections.

“We’ve got about 90 of those collections that vary in size from one box to 75 boxes,” Storer said.

Storer started volunteering at the museum in 1998. He was volunteering on stage crew for International Mr. Leather, building sets at the museum’s former location in Andersonville, a little storefront by Clark and Foster. He became executive director in 2002.

“When the opportunity came to join the staff, I was doing financial reporting for a big insurance company downtown. I loved my job, I enjoyed accounting — I still do. It took a while to reflect on it and get over earning a lot less money than I was, working for a not-for-profit as opposed to a big insurance company, but there was something inside of me just said, ‘Hey, this is an opportunity. You’re probably never going to get something like this again, so go for it,’” Storer said.

The museum now sits in Rogers Park, in a large building Storer estimates they’ll grow out of in four years. Subject matter aside, the museum is still a museum. Space and preservation are the main concerns.

“A piece of paper, if you take care of it the right way, you can really kind of put it in a box and not worry about it. Check on it for bugs occasionally. But leather requires more periodic care,” Storer said.

Volunteer bootblacks come in to help care for the leather. Other volunteers care for the rubber or latex fetish gear, which can dry out if unattended.

The museum’s priority right now is the audiovisual collections. Chemically developed film not only deteriorates, but faces technical obsolescence — imagine having your movie collection on Betamax.

They’re slowly digitizing the audiovisual collection, but money and man-hours are an issue for the small museum. About 20 volunteers and staffers come in to help with the museum on an average week. There’s a pool of about 100 volunteers who come out for big events like International Mr. Leather.

“The type of collections that we have, the sexuality of the collections, certainly turns some grant opportunities away for us,” Storer said.

Part of the museum’s purpose is to build community for leather, fetish, BDSM and kink practitioners. But another part is to fight a cultural mythology crafted “to try to shame people about sexuality,” Storer said.

The museum provides evidence, a term Storer used half a dozen times in our brief talk. Real evidence to fight the myth that people just didn’t do that back then. The museum can hold up a kinkster’s collected writings from the 1800s or the jacket worn by an Eisenhower-era gay biker gang and say yes, yes people did.

“A lot of people, as they’re discovering especially things like fetishism or bondage or S&M, you almost always start out thinking, ‘Well, I’m the only person in the world that enjoys this kind of sexual activity,’” Storer said. “But when there’s evidence, we’ll know that many, many people enjoy the same thing you do, and people have been enjoying that for as long as history has been recorded, then that’s evidence people can use.

“Rather than feeling ashamed about their sexuality, they can feel proud about what they do or what their desires are.”

Visit the museum

Read about Etienne’s life

Read about a different art museum

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