I’ve known this for years, and now I’m not going to do it.
It came to me 15 years ago when I was riding the Blue Line home from a 4:30 to midnight shift hauling kegs and swabbing decks on a tour boat. I looked around at the motley nighttimers on the train and thought “Alone together, tunneling through the dark.”
That was going to be how I ended these 1,001 stories I’ve told, but now I can’t.
I’ve known for months how I was going to end this, but now I’m not going to do that either. I brought a little red notepad to the hospital, excused its presence by filling it with to-do lists about diapers and Vaseline, but really it was to write this last post the first night you were in the world, my little boy.
But I can’t do that either. The thoughts of a man sitting alone in a neonatal intensive care unit along the banks of Lake Michigan, listening to machines connected to suffering babies ping and beep, praying to a god he doesn’t believe in that the docs were doing right by his wife a floor above — those thoughts should not be preserved.
Alone together, huh Sam? You and me in that darkness, hoping the little ones around us all make it.
You’ve been home two days now, little boy. It’s August. Some people I know and some people I don’t will read this in November.
But for the three of us, it’s forever August. It’s a sunny summer Sunday morning. You’re sleeping in your mother’s lap and we’re watching a documentary. Cicadas sing for us through open windows.
The worst thing parenthood does is make you think you’re profound. It tricks us. Just because what I feel now is laden with a heft I didn’t feel a few days ago doesn’t mean I have anything to say.
I have a good baby I think is great because it’s mine. My love’s not deeper than any stranger’s for his or her own offspring. Those new-parent tales of diaper mishaps and weird faces the kid makes are still insufferable, even if I’m the one telling them.
And I’m telling them.
I tell stories. That’s what I do, kiddo. I just got done with 1,001 of them. They were for you. They were always for you, I just didn’t know it.
The good stories, the bad stories, the funny ones, the raunchy ones and the ones that make me cringe to read now — all yours. They treated me well, but I’ve gotten what I can get from them.
“Yet here, poor fool! with all my lore. I stand, no wiser than before,” Goethe’s Faust wailed at the end of his own studies.
I never read “Faust” — I saw that quote in a comic strip. Your dad’s a bit of a fraud there, kid.
Alone together.
So are we alone in this city, tunneling through the darkness with just enough proximity to keep us from feeling lonely? Or do you, your mom and I form something that means we’re never alone?
I don’t know, Sam, and it’s too bright a Sunday morning to waste time wondering. I’m going to close this laptop now. I have better things to do.
There’s so much I want to teach you. There’s so much I want to share with you. And it all starts here in this city by a lake.
Thank you, Chicago. Thank you for all this.
-30-
]]>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.
]]>That’s not sarcasm, and it’s only a little snarky. It actually pleased me to park my bike among the concrete Duplo blocks slapped down by mismanaged ’60s architects to form the University of Illinois at Chicago.
It pleased me to watch the cosplay the pretty girls and pretty boys played in, knowing that within a few years, deep, committed women and men would put their selfies and fashion aside. It pleased me to watch lovelorn boys sulk and scowl, pleased me to see groups of friends who looked like grownups joke and tease each other the way kids do.
(It did not please me that the Jane Addams museum I had come to see was closed for renovation, particularly since I had just come from an ill-fated side jaunt to the closed-on-Mondays Chinese American Museum of Chicago. I really should have checked the hours first.)
I had come from a coffee shop in the Bridgeport Art Center, where I downed an iced latte with coconut milk and as much junk food as my body craved to keep up the calories. I was starting to flag in my massive bike ride, which if you’re just joining us started last Monday at the city’s southernmost tip and will wrap up on Halloween, when I reach the city’s northernmost.
If you’re just joining, I traveled the length of the city one day in July, and I’m still on the South Side. I’m not yet watching the awful, wonderful, awful college kids, and I’m not yet standing outside a locked museum in Chinatown. I’m still in the Bridgeport coffee shop.
One wall is lined with a DJ station and turntables, another has a drum set and a third has a massive screen set up to play 1990s console games. I play a few rounds of Nintendo’s StarTropics, which I loved as a child but now realize has boring, repetitive gameplay and no interesting characters.
Nostalgia lied, as it does.
The Art Center is a magnificent place, a former catalog warehouse now filled up with event space, artists lofts, a museum dedicated to maritime history and, I find, a funky coffee shop where dance music plays for two men set up on Mac laptops.
This isn’t the Bridgeport people think of, the self-imposed, self-imprisoning nostalgia of working men chopping hogs and climbing up ladders of Irish politics. That’s a wonderful nostalgia and staring at the former Bubbly Creek, I find myself longing for the mass employment we used to have. I long for jobs.
But it’s a false nostalgia. Bridgeport was racist, conformist, confining. The waters roiled with pollution — “bubbly” is not a good adjective for a creek — and those jobs vanished as the world changed. We don’t butcher hogs for the world, don’t stack wheat or play with railroads. Our shoulders aren’t big; they’re hunched over Mac laptops while dance music plays.
I turned off StarTropics, having my fill of repetitive gameplay, coconut milk latte and nostalgia’s lies. I rode off to closed museums, and found myself among concrete Duplo blocks and memories that, if not nice, were pleasing in their accuracy.
It pleased me that college students are still frivolous, irresponsible, brilliant, self-involved, fearful, charming and just awful, wonderful, awful human beings. It pleased me that UIC students are still as horrible as I was.
UIC was where my Chicago began, in a way. I wasn’t a UIC student, but sublet an apartment from a high school friend who had been.
We were both recent grads, thrust out into a world and told we were men. We were given an instruction book. We were given hundreds of instruction books, each with the exact opposite advice from the last one. Do this, do that, go here, go there, go to church, find a girl, find atheism, stay single. The world was our oyster, with our age turning everyone within earshot into a kibbitzing auntie giving us unsolicited advice and opinion on the exact proper way to shuck it.
I really needed to get out of my parents’ house, and Jeff had a sublet. So I came to Chicago.
Nostalgia lies and you grow out of the things of youth. I was pleased to discover college students are still like me when I was awful, but it was time to leave. I pointed my bike north.
It’s time for story #1,000 of 1,001. It’s time to head home.
]]>I read a few more of the names into the recorder I brought with me that ride day in July, but I couldn’t find the good recorder that morning. What tape I have is minutes of crackling and wind. I make out odd words like “pine cones,” “birds,” “Symphony Shores” and “I ask why, but HUSBAND Harry Davies (1880-1949) won’t answer.”
I’m typing this in October and I can’t remember why I found the graveyard so loving.
If this weekslong ramble northward to wrap up the site has a purpose, it’s to find the city’s themes. I found labor and futility where the factories rot. I found community, home and hope in the neighborhoods older relatives have told me never to go to. And here, spurred by a graveyard at 71st and Cottage Grove, I found memory.
Or I found what I can’t remember.
I do remember the tree.
It was, and presumably still is, a large tree floofing out into hefty, weight-supporting branches only a foot or two off the ground. One long branch crooked horizontal for a length of close-enough parameters that a slightly chubbed middle-aged blogger wearing khaki cargo shorts over bike togs could sit in the tree, lay along the branch and stare at a pine cone-filtered sky.
I’m not saying I climbed a tree in a graveyard, Mom, but I’m not saying I didn’t.
As I sat in my tree, I talked into the bad recorder — not bad, per se, but so sensitive and un-windscreened whatever I said was lost between breeze and bird. I remember loving what I said into that recorder. I remember thinking this was good, solid, gave a sense of the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood in a way both accurate and avoiding the white tourism this bike ride risked turning into.
It’s just scratches and wind now, and I think that’s somewhat appropriate.
We live in lost history, with HUSBAND Harry Davies’ entire life crammed in that dash between 1880 and 1949. If we’re lucky, a few words spring through the noise. A name, a date, a moment caught on tape forgetting the fancy word for trees with needles. (It’s “conifer,” I remembered later.)
What better place to remember memory than in a graveyard?
Later, I’d head north. Later, I’d run into the line of crosses a Jesus guy put along Halsted to mourn Englewood’s dead. I ran that story early as #961. Later I’d ring through construction zones, try and fail to find the end of Bubbly Creek (ran that one early too) and ended up playing ’90s video games at a retro-themed hipster coffee shop in Bridgeport. That’s where we’ll pick up on Monday.
I guess Ida B. Wells is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery, the internet tells me later. And Harold Washington, Enrico Fermi, Junior Wells and Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The internet’s a wonderful thing, although I almost fell down a Wikipedia wormhole just now looking up pathologist-poet Maud Slye, forever sharing Oak Woods with the activist and missionary Nancy Green, who funded her antipoverty work by appearing as Aunt Jemima.
But I didn’t know any of that in my tree. I just knew pine cones and conifer needles. Birds, cicadas, airplanes and the honks of both car and the Metra Electric in the distance.
]]>The building itself is Standard American Grade School with gray cement lintels over light tan bricks. Art Deco letters stating the school’s name were poured into cement, striving to make it look like the district hired a stonemason.
It’s an Art Deco starter set of a building, a school designed by someone who once heard of Frank Lloyd Wright. The windows are covered now.
There’s a relatively new but definitely crumbling playground around the back. Some plastic is melted, some chains are bent or broken. Some of the padded foam mats that replaced the mulch and gravel of my era of swingsets are missing. I don’t think children come here anymore. I later find why.
I rode this route July 30 and am typing this sentence meant for Oct. 24 late at night on Aug. 4. It’s massively hot outside and my wife is massively pregnant, lolling on the couch rewatching what, based on Clooney’s hair, is an early-season episode of “E.R.” It’s quiet, which I’m not guessing will last many more days for us.
But now I’m back in July, winding tight circles on my bike and taking mental notes about a swingset.
The homes are lovely by the school. It’s quiet but for birds and the hum of a nearby lawnmower. They’re single bungalows, classic beauties that would be sold in a second in my North Side neighborhood so they could be torn down to be replaced with lot-engulfing megamansions.
Here they sit with manicured yards.
It’s gang turf, I read later, and that makes sense. You look at cars, not houses, to determine a neighborhood’s income level. They’re old and few. It’s Jeffrey Manor GD territory, a website tells me. They beef with the Slag Valley set of the Latin Counts a few blocks to the east, and I wonder if I’m embarrassing myself by admitting I’m the type of man who has to google gang names.
I am that man though. It’s Aug. 5 now, just after 6 in the morning. My wife’s asleep, or at least still in bed. I’m watching cloudy skies roll over tree-lined North Side streets.
Chris Wormley didn’t like the gangbanging at Goldsmith School. It wasn’t Goldsmith by the time he attended the Art Deco starter set on Crandon and 102nd, but “AMIkids Infinity High School,” a Tampa-based nonprofit Chicago contracted with to run the old Goldsmith building as a high school for troubled teens after the Richard M. Daley administration shuttered Las Casas Occupational High School in 2010.
Wormley, 17, was stabbed to death in the school on March 1, 2012. A fight broke out as the students were lining up inside the doors to be waved with the metal-detecting wand. Wormley was killed and another kid was injured. The latter kid sued the district and AMIkids for negligence in 2016.
The news trail for what happened to Wormley’s killer dies after two articles — the news stops caring when the press releases don’t arrive — but I find an Illinois Department of Corrections profile of someone with the same name and, I think, face. The inmate has the same swaggery head-cock and goofy stick-out ears as the kid’s mugshot, but with a shaved head, more tattoos and about 40 extra pounds of muscle. He’ll get out in 2045, if all goes well.
I can’t find when AMIkids left the building, but it’s been up for sale since January 2017, offered alongside a slate of Rahm’s own school closures.
Across 96th Street everything changes. The manicured blocks of lovely homes instantly become a dead strip mall of battered signs and vacant storefronts. One of the sliding doors is absently open — nobody even cares. Across the street, men on ladders tinker with where the awning once was on a Dollar General.
Through an underpass, it’s homes again. But here the weeds grow longer. Here the yards are less maintained, and I hear no lawnmowers. Here there are more people walking up and down those streets — old men with four-footed canes and once-stylish hats, women hauling errand bags, a few kids riding summer bikes.
“Time to Save,” the sign over an old… bank? Church?
“Time to Save,” the sign over a dust-coated brick building at 93rd tells me as I turn onto Cottage Grove. The letters are blue, ringed in neon that will never light again.
Here it goes from run-down to straight-up musty. Empty storefronts of different designs, each decade’s stab at revitalization or urban renewal (“Urban renewal is negro removal,” James Baldwin chides from the grave) sitting vacant next to the last one.
Two men sit outside a store with resurrected Frankenstein lawnmowers. One’s wearing a wifebeater undershirt — the only other name I know for it’s the also-offensive “dago T” — and a straw fedora without a band. A cigarette dangles from his lips. He looks like a photo from the ’20s.
I ride on, faster and faster. I’m hitting a stride here, but traffic’s still busy enough I’m worried about getting creamed by a Honda. I race past bus stops and storefront churches, by little girls playing patty cake and men in dago Ts laughing and joking as they stand around cars. I race by because the road is fast and I’ve hit a good pace for cardio, trying not to think about all the stories I’m blaring by.
The laughter of children playing basketball at a summer school makes me smile. They’re about 9, 10. I slow my pace and find a graveyard, where the next story will pick up.
My mind keeps going back to the lovely homes by Goldsmith. It was peaceful and beautiful there, where the child died.
]]>They’re in construction hardhats and neon clothing loud enough to give the engineer enough time to notice them and feel terrible forever before the train crashes into them. To a man, they’re white and fat. The old ones have burly white beards down to their collarbones. The younger ones, still in training, only have rolls of scruff barely reaching Adam’s apples.
Their morning is beginning. So is Chicago.
On July 30, I rode my bike the entire length of Chicago. On a whim, on a lark excused by the existence of this blog and a desire to go big as I near 1K, I took a day off work to ride from a Burnham golf course to an Evanston cemetery, from the southernmost point of town to the northernest north bits.
I rode past the Hegewisch train tracks, noting a spot where a homeowner had put up sawhorses to keep a spot in dibs, even though it was the dead of summer. I found the first bike path on Baltimore, turning past a military tank set out to honor the veterans and a pizza place called “Pudgy’s.” Hegewisch is bright and suburban, but poor enough to feel comfortable. It’s a place of corner bars, bored teens and a rotting commercial thoroughfare. It’s a small town gone jobless, Mayberry waiting for the factories to return.
About 128th, while unsuccessfully attempting to negotiate a series of no outlet streets, I catch sight of the first industrial structure, a massive rusting or rust-colored steel something looms over the village of cul de sacs and bungalows like a dark wizard’s tower in a children’s book. I stop to record these thoughts by an empty Little League field where teams named after pro teams play feet from a humming power transfer station.
I speak longingly of the industry, not derisively. These are jobs. A chance to build, to provide, to be. But the nature of the area is jarring slapped so close to the industrial parks. A retention pond outside a pallet company warehouse is dappled with lily pads. When I approach, the dark wizard’s tower turns out to be a bridge of the type where the middle raises straight up rather than having two sides split and tilt. There’s a deer crossing sign in front of it.
Where the sidewalk ends, I’m forced to ride alongside screaming trucks and weekday motorcyclists. There’s a hole in the berm to my right. It’s an elephantine tube of corrugated metal running under train tracks — maybe for drainage or to let animals through, but the mud rutted with tire tracks shows its current use. I ride through and find two men fishing the Little Calumet.
They’re both black with beards and floppy fishing caps. One is standing next to his bike, casting into the industrial waters amid bird chirps and leafy trees sneered over by massive metal tanks and silos on the other side of the river. The other, older man is unloading a tackle box from his car.
I should stop them, of course. I should stop them and get their stories, learn their lives, interview them, pimp my blog and otherwise do what I said I set out to do, but they’re so perfect, they’re so pastoral, they’re so wonderful and of that very moment that I just ride in a circle and say to them “Good luck.”
Tall grass leering out into the road lashes my arm as I drive down the three-foot median on the end of 122nd, but I don’t dare veer away from the grass onto the street lest I get creamed by a tanker truck that says “Quest,” one of many that suck me into a momentary slipstream as they scream by. I feel like I’m on a country road. I feel like I’m in a factory. The bike path finds me again at Stony Island.
]]>She sees what it could be.
“This was until the early ’90s a Jewel,” she said, gesturing at the fenced-off land, vacant but for four wooden frames for raised garden beds and three rain barrels painted with koi fish. “As disinvestment was happening in the neighborhood, the Jewel left. No grocery store replaced it, and it was privately owned land until about a year ago. The landowner donated like three-quarters of it two us. There’s still one pocket of it over there that’s privately owned.”
It’s a cold day, and she’s dressed for it. Big stocking cap with a bobble on top, mittens where the fingers pull back. She gestures with a mittened hand and talks about picnic tables, soil remediation tests, possibly putting down a concrete cap or other barrier depending on the results of those tests to separate tainted chemical soil from the organic topsoil they’re going to cart in and lay down no matter what.
She talks about what it will take to make this plot of cracked concrete and abandoned grocery look like the greenery on the other side of the abandoned track — Growing Home’s Wood Street Urban Farm.
Growing Home is a USDA-certified organic, high-production farm. They grew 30,000 pounds of food in just under an acre of land last season, “so we go pretty intensely,” Miodonski said.
They got the initial plot of land in 2006 from the city for $1 and have turned it into a bustling urban farm of hoop houses (basically unheated greenhouses with clear plastic tarps instead of glass) and rows of vegetables. Their second location, adjacent across Honore Street, is technically owned by the NeighborSpace land trust, but they’ve used it since 2011.
The Jewel plot will be their third. So it’s time for the job training program to plan and dream.
That’s right, I said job training program. It’s not just carrots.
The cold day where Miodonski wears a bobble hat and mittens fell in about week 12 or 13 of the 14-week program. The farm is near-vacant, which is what they want at this point in the program. It means their farmers got full-time jobs.
“We’re not necessarily training farmers, because there aren’t ag jobs in the city of Chicago, or not many,” Miodonski said. ”Most people find jobs in the food industry. After working closely with vegetables for 14 weeks, they have a pretty good understanding of working with vegetables, food handling. Everyone gets ServSafe food handler certificates and, if they’re interested, they can have subsidized forklift training. It’s pretty much across the spectrum, from distribution, back of the house, delivery, working in catering companies, kitchens, restaurants, grocery stores. It runs the gamut.”
“You can see under here we’ve got carrots, arugula, a bunch of salad mixes, spinach, Swiss chard,” Miodonski said in one of those plastic-wrapped hoop huts, lifting a heat-trapping tarp spread over the vegetables. “We’ve pretty much finished our summer crops — we have some peppers and a few tomato plants still going — but we’re really into our cooler-weather crops, which is a lot of greens, salad mix, carrots, radishes. Beets.”
The farm takes on 52 workers a year, divided between several cohorts of 15-20 people. During the first 10 weeks of the program, the day is split between farm and classroom; mornings turning earth, afternoons working on resumes, participating in mock job interviews, learning what it means to have transferable skills. The last four weeks have more time on the farm and more time for independent job search. The program participants are paid Chicago’s minimum wage — this year $12 an hour, set to go to $13 next year — whether they have a hoe or a pen in their hand.
Funding and space are what set the number at 52. More than 600 people expressed interest last year, found through local social services groups or visits to “re-entry summits” at correctional facilities. They’re looking for people who, for one reason or another, have been out of the workforce.
“It’s a real range,” Miodonski said of the workers. “Some have contact with the criminal justice system, some let’s say are experiencing housing insecurity or maybe had addiction issues in the past, some are maybe taking care of a family member or a child and so couldn’t be in the workforce, and then some people have just been out of the workforce for whatever reason for a while.”
The food industry is not only booming in Chicago, but is also an industry that traditionally cares less about criminal backgrounds, Miodonski said.
There’s also a small learning garden for school groups, mostly from the South Side, to spend a day learning green. “Anything that’s not eaten by kids during tours” gets donated to local soup kitchens, or used in cooking demos in Thursday’s farmstand at the West Englewood site. That’s one of the four farmers markets a week where Growing Home sells its organic produce.
On Fridays during the season, they go to the Inner-City Muslim Action Network’s Fresh Beats & Eats Farmers Market at 63rd and California. Saturday is the Green City Market in Lincoln Park and Sunday is the Logan Square Farmers Market.
“Green City and Logan Square, those are two premier farmers markets in the city, so we sell all the vegetables at market rate at those two markets and then for Thursday and Friday, the markets here, we sell at about 50 percent under market rate,” Miodonski said.
About 80 percent of the people who start the program finish it. About 84 percent of the people who graduated last year got jobs. It’s not a perfect number, but it’s not a perfect world. Saving lives is a lot to ask of a few radishes and some kale.
But to save any, to give people who were incarcerated, people who struggled with addiction and people who currently face homelessness a job is amazing. To turn a $1 plot and the site of a torn-down Jewel into hope and subsidized forklift training is remarkable. Of all the things they grow on this little farm by the train tracks, a chance is the most difficult and precious to cultivate.
Read more farming-related stories
]]>“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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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]]>I’m staring at a severed head.
It’s an old head, so that makes it better, maybe? It’s from Egypt’s Ptolemaic-Roman period of 332 BCE to 395 CE, the plaque on the glass case tells me. They think ancient grave robbers threw it away after tearing apart the body to get at jewelry, amulets, medallions and other valuables to pawn. The head is completely wrapped but for a section under the nose where the muslin fell off centuries ago. I see a dried, blackened philtrum leather-stretched back over small, flat teeth.
And this seems natural. It seems natural that giggling kids are being hushed among bodies, that this leather-stretched upper lip that once formed words and smiled is now laid on a table for my edification, education, titillation in a way I would find disgusting if the corpse were younger.
“A body that is 200 years old, what makes that any less palatable than a mummy that’s 2,000 years old? Boy,” Egyptologist Emily Teeter of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago said, taking a moment to think. “Boy, I really don’t know.”
The Field Museum of Natural History is tourist attraction, research institution and final resting place for more than 4,000 human beings, ranging from individual toe bones from Native American mass graves, to ceremonial trumpets carved from Tibetan femurs, to the current “Mummies” exhibit running through April 2019. And it’s just one of the Chicago museums and art galleries — from the Museum of Science and Industry’s body slices and plasticized human bits to the International Museum of Surgical Science’s trephined Peruvian skulls — where corpses are the exhibit.
But there are other collections that aren’t on display, relics of days when spectacle trumped education and it was hard to tell sideshow from research institution. Mummies torn to shreds in early 20th century “unwrapping parties.” Native American skulls plucked from graves as souvenir. Or medical oddities from black Chicagoans unfortunate enough to die poor with unusual bodies in the 1800s.
These are the stories of the bodies that don’t go on the museum floor, of the program frozen by the Trump administration that guides Native bodies’ return and of how Chicago institutions handle those people who, through no fault of their own, have a museum for a grave.
The guiding American law for bodies and museums — the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or NAGPRA — relates only to bodies from the indigenous from U.S. soil, but the moral issues don’t stop where the law does, said Field Museum Repatriation Director Helen Robbins.
“Museums and other state institutions have a lot of other human remains too, and they have the human remains of the mentally ill that became medical specimens — or prisoners or criminals. People who don’t have power in the world, that’s what happens. It is a Native American, indigenous issue because of the history of what happened in this country and also in other colonized places, but there are human remains of African-Americans in museums, in universities, in surgical colleges,” Robbins said. “It’s a much broader reality than just Native Americans.”
The Field has repatriated more than 200 people’s remains domestically through NAGPRA and 200 internationally to indigenous groups including the Maori in Tasmania, the Inuit in Labrador and the Haida in British Columbia.
The mummies are staying put, Robbins said, as the Egyptian government is not considered the descendant of the pharaohs. Under Field policy, remains must be given only to descendant communities for proper interment — whatever that means in that culture.
“They could put them in caves, they could put them traditionally in trees or scaffold burials like they did in parts of the Plains. Burial, cremation, out to sea — whatever ‘repose’ would mean to that cultural group,” Robbins said. “But not sitting in a museum.”
Any institution that receives federal funds, even passthrough funds, has an obligation to report potentially Native American bodies to NAGPRA. Pending or recent NAGPRA cases includes museums of course, but also art galleries, universities, state historical societies, the U.S. departments of Defense, Energy and Agriculture and even the office of the San Bernardino County Sheriff-Coroner after a man brought in a box of hundred-year-old Native American skulls and bones he found while cleaning out the house of a recently deceased relative.
NAGPRA Program Manager Melanie O’Brien said when NAGPRA passed in 1990, remains of more than 200,000 Native American people were identified in American museums. Now that number is down to 180,000.
“It’s a human rights law,” O’Brien said by phone from her DC office. “It’s about equating the rights of Native American dead to the rights that everybody else enjoys in this country. There’s a common-law understanding of what happens to your relatives that die, and that common law was not extended to Native Americans.”
All American grave repatriations stopped in May 2017, when President Donald Trump’s new Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke temporarily suspended all Department of Interior advisory committees, including the NAGPRA Review Committee. While existing committees received individual reviews to see if the administration considers them wastes of money, Zinke added new committees such the Hunting and Shooting Sports Conservation Council, the “Made in America” Outdoor Recreation Advisory Committee and the Royalty Policy Committee, which consists of mostly oil, gas and mining industry executives.
Tribes and museums that had already come to terms on transferring ancestral remains had to simply pause, waiting for Zinke to review NAGPRA, O’Brien said. The committee passed muster and will meet for the first time since then on Oct. 17-19.
NAGPRA scared researchers at first, Robbins said. Many were concerned it would open a floodgate of returning valuable scientifics specimens, and not just bodies. NAGPRA also covers the return of sacred objects — like pipes, headdresses and kochina masks — and “objects of cultural patrimony.” Those are objects so central to a tribe’s identity, it’s considered owned by all members; O’Brien uses the original Star-Spangled Banner that inspired the national anthem as her example.
Many scientists feared the slope would slip and NAGPRA could mean turning over insects, fossils, botanicals — and the valuable intellectual property from any medicines derived from such plants.
It wasn’t an unreasonable concern. The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon tried to use NAGPRA to reclaim the Willamette Meteorite — which the Clackamas people called Tomanowos — from New York’s American Museum of Natural History in 1999, as Tomanowos was the traditional site of religious ceremonies. (They came to a deal — the museum kept the meteorite, but tribal members can schedule private ceremonial visits.)
As Field showstopper SUE the T-rex was found on Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation land held in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, those initial concerns of a specimen floodgate hit close. They also largely haven’t come true.
“I’m not worried that we’re going to have a huge request for botanical specimens or insects or certain kinds of things,” Robbins said. “But the world is changing and shifting and people are asserting ownership over items that 100 years ago nobody would have considered to be claimable or anybody’s cultural property or intellectual property.”
Robbins’ job puts her between researchers and indigenous people, sometimes uncomfortably. While the Field offers bodies back to the tribe — there are 300 people’s partial remains waiting to be picked up and another 1,000 offered to NAGPRA with no tribe claiming them — getting back a sacred object or item of cultural patrimony “isn’t a slam dunk,” Robbins said.
“You have to have a certain tolerance for having people yell at you or be upset, whether its from other institutions or from descendant communities,” Robbins said.
No matter how respectable and above board the museum was in its acquisition of a sacred piece, if they got it from a person who got it from a person who got it from a person who acquired it illegally, it’s not the museum’s.
“The closest that you can come to this kind of process or legal process would be the work that’s done around looted Nazi art,” O’Brien said. “Museums have priceless collections of artwork that, through provenance research, can actually be shown was looted in World War II by the Nazis, was bought by the museum and the museum actually doesn’t have good title to that.”
And some of the pieces were most certainly not acquired with consent, whether sacred relics or human bodies.
“Some of the early collectors, they just walked around picking up human remains,” she said about the museum’s collection of Native American dead. “Late 1800s, early 1900s. ‘Aw, I’m living in Arizona, just walk around picking up human remains.’ They weren’t scientists. They just thought it was cool or interesting.”
Repatriating bodies is a global issue. British academics are working to find a suitable resting place in India for the skull of 1850s rebel Havildar “Alum Bheg,” executed by the British in 1857 and found in the back room of The Lord Clyde pub in Kent in 1963. Irish activists including the mayor of Derry have petitioned the Royal College of Surgeons in London to release the body of Charles Byrne, the 7 foot, 7 inch “Irish Giant,” who died in 1783. Anatomist John Hunter acquired the body somehow — the most popular account is that he paid off the undertaker and had his agent fill the coffin with paving stones to dupe Byrne’s friends.
He chopped up Byrne’s body, boiled his flesh off and, while The Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum is closed until 2021 for renovation, has displayed the skeleton ever since. Because Byrne was tall.
Some long-sought repatriations have come to pass.
The Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia returned the skull of World War I soldier Thomas Hurdis to the Australian government last year. Donated by an army doctor, Hurdis spent 98 years as part of the museum’s “dry specimen” collection of skulls and bones. Its “wet specimen” collection is body parts and fetuses — many of conjoined twins, including the shared liver of Chang and Eng Bunker the original “Siamese twins” — preserved in formaldehyde or other fluid.
“Pickled punks,” as preserved fetuses in jars were called, were a staple of 1800s sideshows.
Many medical specimens in museums, colleges and other private or public collections have questionable pasts, Robbins said, referring to the collection of mostly African-American medical oddities Rush Hospital gave the Field in 1900.
“Poorhouses, prisons, mental institutions, almshouses. If you don’t have money and you die, today even, what do you do?” she said.
But the issue, like the world, is complicated.
“It’s really important to understand too that human remains in institutional collections have huge scientific importance. Not only for abstract knowledge like anthropology and archaeology and the peopling of the world and all these kinds of more abstract intellectual things. How do you think people developed artificial knees or hips?” she said. “They did it from using, looking at and working with skeletal collections. But a lot of these skeletal collections are from problematic backgrounds.”
Representatives of the International Museum of Surgical Science on Lake Shore Drive declined to be interviewed for this story.
The Field is working on improving the standard of care for the thousands of human remains, even individual bone fragments, not on display. That includes separating co-mingled bodies from mass graves and, when applicable, storing them in a manner fitting that culture’s funeral customs.
They’re starting with the North American remains, then hope to apply that standard to all the people who rest in peace in the museum’s back rooms.
“It’s our responsibility to care for these individuals no matter how they got to the Field Museum,” Robbins said. “It doesn’t matter whether it was legal, scientific excavation or somebody wandering around in Montana picking up a skull.”
One of the mummies in the collection of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute is “just a bare body that was in a case,” Teeter said. It was a woman who was acquired, like much of the museum’s collection, by Dr. Henry Breasted, many when he and his wife went mummy-shopping during their 1894 honeymoon. She was stripped of all wrappings sometime between 1910 and 1930.
“We have no idea why,” Teeter said.
Teeter thinks the woman might have been used in an “unwrapping party,” a late 1800s, early 1900s entertainment that is exactly what it sounds like.
“This poor mummy, it’s being basically pulled apart for people to just look at it,” Teeter said. “You’d end up with this poor, naked body on a table and then party’s over.”
It wasn’t the most grotesque fate given to the pharaohs’ heirs.
“Certainly in the 1900s and the 1800s, mummies were dealt with in a much more cavalier way. You hear about them literally being ground up for medicine,” she said. “Every small museum needed to have a mummy, so people were going on the Grand Tour and just buying mummies helter skelter without any concern for their context.”
The unwrapped woman is in Oriental Institute storage, as are other unwrapped mummies and mummy parts. Three of the four regularly displayed mummies — 2,800-year-old singer-priestess Meresamun, 2,400-year-old priest Petosiris and 2,150-year-old “Young Boy” — are in full wrappings and, when available, coffin.
Teeter doesn’t expect the unwrapped woman will ever be displayed. A strip of fabric determined which mummies are showpieces, which storage.
“We exhibit mummies to show something about the culture, and showing just a body is not something about the culture,” Teeter said.
But there have been some unwrapped at the Institute.
One of the people — Teeter’s careful never to call them “specimens” or “things” — on regular display is completely without wrapping as part of a predynastic pit burial, when they weren’t wrapped. Similarly, an unwrapped head was temporarily on display as part of the recent “Book of the Dead” exhibit, which ended in March.
The purpose was educational both times, Teeter said. The unwrapped predynastic pit burial “was an important part of the story of mummification.” The decision to temporarily display the unwrapped head came after a more difficult conversation.
“We also want [museumgoers] to understand the full meaning of what they’re looking at, that it’s a beautiful box but the reason the box is there is that there is a mummy inside it,” Teeter said. “This is a person who chose to be, or his family chose to have him, prepared in this very particular way.”
It is “quite subjective,” Teeter said. She had to fight to get the child’s mummy displayed, but she fought against a guest curator who a few years ago wanted to display one of the collection’s wrapped heads.
“I said no. No. No, no, no, no. To show parts of a body, to me that was disrespectful and just plain ghoulish. There’s nothing to be really learned from that display other than [being] kind of creepy,” she said. “It’s a head torn off a body. It’s somebody’s head in a box. It’s like, ick.”
As sensitivities have changed over the years, different museums have reacted differently. Body Worlds, a traveling exhibit that visited the Museum of Science and Industry in 2005, 2007 and 2011 — and whose creators provided the plastinated specimens for the MSI’s ongoing “You! The Experience” exhibit that kept the Jewish boy from seeing Harry Potter in the story from Oct. 3 — trusses corpses up like art pieces.
On the other extreme, the Manchester Museum in England covered all its mummies in cotton shrouds in 2008 out of respect. That lasted two years, when they caved to public demand and re-uncovered the mummies. Other museums display trigger warnings that bodies are present, or put the humans in the collection in side rooms where no one could stumble upon them unaware.
Beyond the Native remains guarded by NAGPRA, there’s little guidance for how human remains can be displayed, said Teeter, Robbins, O’Brien and a few other museum folks who didn’t make it into this article, for reasons you’ll discover Thursday.
Instead, the reasons a pharaoh is science and a pickled punk sideshow is cultural, they said, part of a general shift in terms of what people expect of our museums.
“There should be a purpose,” Robbins said. “It shouldn’t just be ‘Hey, here’s the Irish Giant! Look! Isn’t that weird?’”
]]>She shuffled from the diner counter to the vending machine against the wall.
“My dreams, they aren’t as empty,” The Who wailed from the radio as the woman fed the bills into the Lotto scratch ticket machine. “As my conscience seems to be.”
It was morning at the Huddle House Grill.
It’s a diner, a stock one called straight from central casting. A 24-hour affair with a counter, a few rickety booths and a glass front from which to watch the Brown Line end and high school students hustle north to Von Steuben, south to Theodore Roosevelt. As the woman in the hairnet bought dreams from a vending machine and Roger Daltrey narrated, a short-haired waitress clears a table and called from the counter to ask if I want a brand of hot sauce or the stuff they make there.
“The night guy makes it. They both make it, but mostly the night guy,” she said, walking up with an unmarked squeeze bottle of red. “It’s a 24-hour restaurant so they work 12-hour shifts.”
“And they still make sauce for the whole day?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Right?”
I put a daub of the hot sauce on my finger to taste. It was bright, spicy and delicious. I end up slathering my eventual eggs in it.
But the eggs weren’t there yet, and neither was the morning.
A rumbling, dangerous bass line started. Mick Jagger screamed that he wanted to paint it black and a tall, broad man who, if size can stereotype, looks like he played football in high school and still eats like an athlete in training, walked through the door smiling. He waved at the waitress and line cook and ordered a steak.
A woman whose stocking cap declared she’s a CTA inspector walked in and ordered a cup of grits to go, cackling and at one point bending over in laughter at what the person on the other end of her earpiece tells her. “It’s funny now,” she said, bracing herself on the counter as the waitress counted her bills. The inspector called the woman over to add the earpiece’s order to her tally.
High school students rushed by the window. They were fewer now, and late.
“Your friend’s here,” the woman said to the short-order cook.
He looked over his shoulder at the tall, heavyset man with the crisply cut gray hair and necktie walking up to the glass doors.
“He’s not my friend,” the cook said.
They greeted the man warmly as he came in, but he simply said “Number 2″ and sat down at the counter where he chatted with the cook in Spanish and demanded his favorite seat, favorite condiments, favorite type of the two maple syrups they had and, as the increasingly eerily appropriate radio playlist now playing Billy Idol shouted, “more, more, more.”
It was another boring morning. Another workaday life. Another tale of details and eggs and hustling students and the trains pulling in and out of the Brown Line terminus. The Brown Line doesn’t have two ends, like Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Purple do. The trains pull out, take a loop at the Loop and come right back here to pull out again. 4 a.m. to 1 a.m. each day — 5 a.m. on Sundays and holidays — a neverending neverending in and out past the Huddle House.
God, it’s beautiful. As fresh and bracing as the night shift hot sauce now bathing my eggs.
The woman in the hairnet and I looked out the window, ate eggs, watched the sun rise and dreamed.
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