Perhaps they should have dug up Garrett Morris for ‘interpreter’ duties

It has been some nearly four decades since actor Garrett Morris did his comedy sketches on Saturday Night Live as the head of the New York School for the Hearing Impaired.

Those sketches were actually written into larger sketches when Morris’ face would suddenly appear in the sketch and he would “interpret” for the hearing-impaired exactly what was being said.

THE GAG, OF course, was that all he did was cup his hands around his mouth and scream at the top of his voice. Which usually got bigger laughs than whatever the original sketch was about!

Because we all know that when dealing with someone who is deaf, it really doesn’t matter how loud (or how slow) one speaks. They still can’t hear you.

Although I wonder if Morris would have been a more legitimate deaf interpreter than the man who actually was on hand to perform such duties at the memorial service held earlier this week for Nelson Mandela.

The world was focused on Johannesburg, with leaders from around the globe on hand – including President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle. A man was on stage going through a series of intricate hand gestures that allegedly were supposed to clue-in the hearing impaired as to just what was being said by the assorted world leaders on stage.

BUT THE REUTERS news wire service reported that officials with DeafSA, a South African organization meant to help hearing-impaired in that nation, were upset. Because the gestures the man made were little more than physical gibberish.

They weren’t any form of real sign language. The group also noted that a real interpreter also uses their face to try to convey the mood of an event – apart from what comes from the mouths of the people who speak.

It also seems that no one is really sure just who this man was. The group claims not to have any recognition of him as a legitimate interpreter for the deaf. It’s almost as though a mystery man managed to get on stage and just take over.

So much for the security for the Mandela memorial service.

I SUPPOSE WE ought to feel fortunate that this man merely felt compelled to wave his arms about, rather than commit some serious act of violence during the event.

OBAMA: Did he realize the signing was gibberish?

Although the odd part is that officials investigating the matter of “Who Is He?” have come up with television clips of African National Conference events during the past year in which the same man did a similar routine in the name of “deaf interpretation.”

Some people are more concerned about the fact that deaf people would have trouble comprehending what happened at the event. Television stations broadcasting the service within South Africa had their own sign-language interpreters on hand to translate for the hearing-impaired.

But activists in London told Reuters that deaf people in the rest of the world essentially were excluded from being able to comprehend the Mandela memorial – an event they want to believe was historic in nature.

NOW I’M NOT downplaying the significance of Mandela. Although my own impression of such large-scale events is that unless you’re actually there in person, they don’t mean much.

It just doesn’t seem like being a part of history that many people the world over watched the same television program. Or in reality, had it on their television sets as background noise.

Unless you were among those in the 95,000-seat stadium, what did you really miss? And if you were there, it was most likely that you wouldn’t have been able to clearly see the interpreter and figure out what the gestures were.

 

Which makes me wonder that if the current incarnation of Saturday Night Live wants to mock this controversy, perhaps they ought to bring back Morris for a redux of his old routine.

  -30-

Be thankful we don’t need highway memorial for ourselves – not yet anyway

Those roadside memorials erected by families who don’t want their lost loved ones to be forgotten always manage to capture my attention.

Not so much because they remind me of the fact that someone was killed (usually in an auto accident) at whatever particular spot is marked. But because of the amount of effort it takes to maintain such a spot.

BECAUSE IF ONE just erects a cross and a couple of pictures, the whole thing quickly collapses into junk. That causes local officials to dismiss the whole spectacle as a road hazard, and they come along and turn the whole thing into trash!

That is an idea that bothers the people who erect those memorials – who’d like to think their efforts are permanent.

Which is why my attention was captured by a Chicago Tribune story published Wednesday about Cook County government’s efforts to help these people.

For it seems that the county Highway Department will erect permanent markers that include a name and date of the person being paid tribute to, along with a message telling people “Please Don’t Drink and Drive.”

I’M SURE SOME people are going to think these blue signs with white lettering are rather generic and impersonal. We won’t get the collections of photographs of the deceased that some of these home-made memorials consist of. We won’t get the personal messages from loved ones left at the scene.

Yet there is the touch of permanence (or at least as permanent as any road sign can ever be) from these new county-installed memorial signs. The fact that they won’t deteriorate into a pile of junk does help enhance the overall appearance (even though they eventually will turn to rust, due to exposure to the Midwestern weather elements).

Unless one is willing to keep paying the county a fee – in which case, the sign will be replaced every couple of years.

That is, assuming the accident victim you want tribute paid to was killed along a county-maintained road. Although it seems the Illinois Department of Transportation has a similar program that was the inspiration for the county effort.

IT WILL BE interesting to see how many people actually take advantage of this new program. A part of me wonders if we’ll get some people who will persist in trying to put up their own home-made memorials rather than pay county government a fee.

Even if that fee is miniscule enough that no one’s going to be able to balance the county budget on the money raised from such memorial signs.

Will we get some people taking on a hard-line attitude? And will we now have government officials figuring that these officially-recognized tributes reduce the home-made tributes to the level of litter – so we’re going to start seeing them torn down at a moment’s notice?

Although I have to admit I don’t think it will make much difference as far as I’m concerned.

BECAUSE THE SENTIMENT I experience whenever I see one of these home-made memorials is to be reminded that life can end at a moment’s notice. There usually isn’t much in the way of warning.

I could die while writing this commentary. Or I could last for another 40 or so years. I should try my hardest to make the most of my life while I still have it.

And the fact that I still “have it” is what I am thankful for on this Thanksgiving holiday. That, and the fact that nobody in my surviving family has had to think about trying to erect such a memorial in my name.

  -30-

EXTRA: What goes through peoples’ minds about King Day these days?

There are times I wonder just how much have we managed to trivialize the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. – all in an attempt to make him more acceptable for society as a whole.

KING: Have we lost the 'real' man?

As we participate in ceremonies all across the country on Monday to pay homage to King’s memory – just what “memory” are we remembering?

BECAUSE MUCH OF what we hear these days – some 44 years after the man’s death – makes him sound like an African-American version of a “peacenik” or “hippie;” images which themselves have been tampered with by the conservative ideologues to try to trivialize their significance.

I can’t help but wonder just how many people of an older generation are gnashing their teeth and silently seething at the very thought of an official holiday (and now, even an official memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C.) to pay tribute to the man whom they once lambasted as an “agitator” and a “Communist” – to use a couple of the nicer epithets that used to get tossed out with regards to King.

I’d like to think the fact that the only people who still use those terms to describe King are Ku Klux Klan members (and even then, only when they’re looking to provoke a brawl) would be evidence of our society having changed to the point where we now realize how thoroughly stupid we ever were for thinking such a thing.

But I can’t be that naïve. Younger generations won’t ever fully appreciate the contempt level once felt for King – which is both good AND bad.

GOOD THAT THEY don’t get the hate first-hand, but bad that they might not appreciate the degree to which King and his followers had to overcome. Because what they sought is really so obvious that only the biggest of nitwits were opposed to him.

Unfortunately, too many of the rest of us who don’t want to be called on our trash-talk of the past were more than willing to sit back and let the ideologues rant and defer to them so as to avoid a confrontation.

It strikes me as so similar to the debate taking place these days whenever immigration reform and the growing Latino population comes up that it makes me think we really haven’t learned much of anything.

What made this thought boil over in my brain was a King Day celebration I attended Monday in south suburban South Holland, where the Rev. Reginald Williams, Jr., of First Baptist Church in University Park (all the way down at the southernmost edge of the Chicago area) gave his own assessment of King’s image – which he calls, “a man taken sorely out of context.”

BECAUSE TOO MANY people reduce King to a few lines of “peace” rhetoric without placing it in the context of just how opposed some segments of our society were to such “peace.”

As Williams put it, “they made him a wimp who held a utopian dream.”

He cited, as an example, the famed “I Have a Dream” speech made from Washington, D.C., where everybody remembers the line about, “My four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

But we then ignore the line in the same speech in which King said that “Negroes” were in the nation’s capital that day to “cash a check” for freedom and unalienable rights, except that, “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’.”

REMEMBERING THE REAL King and his struggles might very well stir up the old resentments. Yet trying to ignore the resentments as though they never existed merely trivializes the whole matter – which is something we should never want to do.

Because then, King’s memory becomes just another holiday – perhaps a black version of President’s Day. One in which some people get some time off without really understanding why, and some businesses concoct special sales to try to get those people to use their days off to shop some more.

It may bolster the economy a bit, yet I can’t help but think that Williams was on to something on Monday when he said, “Corporate America has created an image to use King to sell anything from bedsheets to chicken wings.”

Somehow, I doubt that King – when he wrote his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’—had in mind trying to bolster the bottom line for Shark’s Fish & Chicken!

  -30-

How many people will turn out for Maggie Daley’s Sunday service?

I offer my condolences to the Daley family. And I don’t mean just the former mayor himself.

For while we all knew that Maggie Daley’s health was in decline and newsrooms everywhere were aware that it was time to get their pre-written obituaries of Chicago’s former first lady prepared for publication, it still was a blow for her to die on Thursday.

WHICH FOR THE rest of us was the day that we all stuffed our faces with too much heavy food and sat on our duffs watching too much out-of-town football for anyone’s benefit.

It was Thanksgiving. A holiday we’re supposed to celebrate.

Yet for the Daleys, Thanksgiving will now forevermore be the day they lost their wife/mother/aunt/etc.

That applies even though Thanksgiving does not fall on the same date each year.

SO NEXT YEAR’S Thanksgiving will not literally be the one-year marking point of the date of her death. But I’m sure the holiday itself will forevermore carry a bit of a taint that will make it just that much harder for the family to think of celebration.

I know in my case, it felt just a bit like that – even though I didn’t have anyone die on a past Thanksgiving.

In my case, my mother died last year about a week-and-a-half prior to Thanksgiving. I remember this time last year celebration was about the last thing I cared about. Actually, I don’t really remember much about one year ago – it is just a haze.

This year on Thanksgiving, my mother maintained a place in the back of my mind. In large part, it is because I have been told that among her final thoughts before she suddenly lost consciousness and died within an hour was to think aloud to herself about all the last-minute preparations she would have to do in coming days to prepare herself for Thanksgiving.

FOR SHE HAD it in her mind that my brother and I would spend that holiday with her and she wanted to be prepared for it.

Those preparations, of course, never came to be.

This was, and likely will always be, the one holiday that carries a bit of a taint for me in that I will notice my mother’s absence (periodically, I find myself blurting out to no one in particular, “I miss you, Mom”) moreso than usual.

Which is what I expect will be the same reaction that the Daley family will also experience – although I will be the first to admit that I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of what the Daleys actually did on Thursday or what they are feeling right now.

THIS IS MY attempt at an intelligent guess. Although I don’t think it is much of a stretch of logic to come to this conclusion.

One thing I will state right now is that I was pleased to learn of a public service to be held Sunday at the Chicago Cultural Center for those who feel compelled to turn out in public to pay their respects.

It will be separate from any funeral services held for Maggie Daley, which actually is something I think is admirable. A part of me always thinks it is gaudy for people who weren’t personally connected to the deceased to be showing up for the funeral and turning it into a virtual circus production.

This way lets the family pay their respects in some degree of privacy. And a big overblown funeral service is probably the last thing that the subdued first lady (until May, that is) would have wanted for herself.

I’M CURIOUS TO see just how many people turn out to show their respects for the Daley legacy (even though the Washington Post thinks the “big” story in Chicago on Friday is the Obama presidential re-election campaign locating here). It has me wondering if it will come close to the thousands who felt compelled to be a part of the atmosphere when former-Mayor Harold Washington died back in 1987.

And, oddly enough, he died on the day BEFORE Thanksgiving that year – which meant those holiday ad-stuffed newspapers we bought on Thanksgiving that year had word of Harold’s demise all over their front pages. Not exactly the most festive of events.

Maybe it’s just that the Thanksgiving holiday weekend is not a good time in general for people with Chicago political ties.

  -30-

Santo will remain at Clark and Addison long after Chicago Cubs leave Lake View

The Chicago Cubs erected a new statue Wednesday outside their ballpark – meaning that the image of one-time third baseman and radio broadcaster Ron Santo will join the ranks of people like Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and Harry Caray.

Yet I can’t help but think that the efforts to pay tribute to their one-time infielder who died last year due to complications related to diabetes will become more interesting on Thursday.

FOR THIS IS the day that Santo’s family will take his cremated remains and scatter them.

Where?

At Wrigley Field, on the playing field. Specifically in the area near third base – where Santo patrolled the infield back in the 1960s.

So in a sense, Santo will now become a permanent part of the site that for the past 95 years has been the home of Chicago Cubs baseball. Santo’s essence will remain there.

ALL OF THIS makes me wonder if we’re now going to get people whose Santo love will be so intense that they will try to find ways to get onto the playing field.

I once heard of an older-generation Chicago White Sox fan who, the one time he got onto the playing field at Comiskey Park, insisted on roaming around second base because that is where Nellie Fox played back in the 1950s.

And Fox doesn’t claim his burial place at Comiskey, the way that Santo will now be able to claim Wrigley as his final resting place.

Perhaps it is a bit macabre. But then again, I’m sure there are other people who will find the idea totally appropriate.

FOR ALL I know, they probably think they should have been allowed to sit in the stands while Santo’s relatives scattered his ashes (my understanding is that the family moment will truly be personal – and private) on the infield.

But then again, he won’t be alone. I understand that throughout the years, there have been many people whose families have wanted their loved ones’ ashes scattered in a ballpark.

Although usually, it is just overly-intense fans who seek this, and not the ballplayers themselves.

Which will make Santo unique. His remains will be surrounded by the remains of many Cubs fans – whose eternal souls are probably now elated at the thought that they have something in common with a real-live Chicago Cub.

IT HAS ME wondering if The Dead Ball Era (a website devoted to the final resting places of major league ballplayers) will now start including Wrigley Field references when they write of Santo.

I only hope we don’t someday see something as morbid as someone getting onto the Wrigley Field playing field, digging up the soil around third base, then trying to sell it off by claiming it has the “essence” of Santo.

At the very least, I would hope e-Bay would have the sense to reject such an item, and that no reputable auction house would allow the thought.

So after Thursday, Santo’s remains will be a part of the Wrigley Field grounds. He’s going nowhere (removing him would be next to impossible).

BUT LET’S BE honest. No matter how much some Chicago Cubs fans want to think otherwise, the day will come when Wrigley Field is no longer the home stadium of the Cubs.

It may be a few decades from now (I expect the Cubs in the near future to attempt a renovation to keep the building functional for at least another 30 years), but the Cubs will someday play games elsewhere.

That will mean that Santo’s remains will remain. Who’s to say what will someday exist at the Lake View neighborhood location.

Which could mean that Santo’s ultimate eternal fate will be to have asphalt on top of him, just like everybody who ever had their ashes deposited on the playing field of the former major league ballpark that existed on the north side of 35^th Street at Shields Avenue.

  -30-

Father’s Day more significant to me this year on account of my mother’s passing

It was a surprising turn of events for me. But Father’s Day this year came and went with a bit more personal significance – particularly after having it come but one week after a memorial service for my mother.



My father and step-mother, along with my brother and I, at our mother's memorial service that made me appreciate  all the more the fact that I could celebrate this year's Father's Day with him. Below is the container with my mother's cremated remains, along with a photograph of herself that she always particularly liked. Photographs provided by Christine Yates, a Minnesota-based aunt who is a favorite -- even though there are times I don't tell her that.



Perhaps I am fortunate. I’m 45 years old, and I still have my father alive and well. I can chat with him any time I want by picking up a telephone. A short 10-minute drive by car, and I can visit him.

SO IT WASN’T that difficult for my brother and I to spend Sunday with our father and step-mother, along with other assorted relatives. It was a low-key holiday celebration befitting what is one of the lesser holidays (a new study says we value Mother’s Day more).

Yet I will have to plead guilty to not fully appreciating these facts until just a couple of months ago. Because until about one week before Thanksgiving of last year, I was a 45-year-old man who still had both of my biological parents alive.

It was then that I lost my mother, and I still find myself at odd moments thinking of her and saying aloud “I miss you, mom.”

Now my mother came from a family of eight kids, and she was only the second of them to pass away. Because most of her sisters and brother now live in other states, we didn’t do much of a formal funeral service.

WE WAITED UNTIL her what would have been her birthday anniversary earlier this month to have a memorial service in her honor. Which is why last Sunday, my brother and I were nervous wrecks (although I think my brother was hit harder) as our aunts and uncle, along with assorted cousins and friends of my mother and some of the more distant relatives of the family, all convened to pay tribute to my mother’s memory.

As I tried to tell people in as optimistic a manner as possible, my brother, Chris, and I were not mourning our mother’s memory. We were celebrating her birthday one last time, with her family and friends on hand to join us.

Anyway, that memorial service went well. Thus far, we have heard from many relatives who were pleased with the way we handled the event – which fell just one day short of the seven-month “anniversary” of the date of her death.

The most intensive grieving was already past. We were able to look upon her life more optimistically and think of the good times we had with her.

I’M CERTAINLY NOT engaging in any outbursts such as one that occurred four days after my mother died, when I nearly burst into tears at the sight of a young woman who was doting over her young son (maybe about 3 years old) in a way that I remember my mother fawning over me at that age.

All of this means that I have come to appreciate the fragility of life in a way that I understood intellectually before, but didn’t really sense until now.

It also means I approached this year’s Father’s Day as being more a reason to try to spend some time with “Dear Ol’ Dad” and not just view the family get-together as an ordeal that would take up some time on my Sunday afternoon.

Although in all honesty, the only thing I HAD to do on that particular day was write this commentary, along with a piece for this site’s sister weblog – The South Chicagoan.

I ONLY HOPE I didn’t have my father thinking I was being all morbid during our time together. Although if I had, I’m fairly sure he would have told me so, and added some sort of admonition to, “knock it off.”

For I suppose the reality of life is that I am now counting down the days that I will have my father with me – although his health, while not ideal, is far better than that of my mother. She spent the last decade of her life dealing with all kinds of ailments related to diabetes.

Lupus and Parkinson’s Disease were just some of the issues she dealt with that often left her physically weakened.

I only hope I adequately let my father know how much I appreciate still having him around – even when his nit-picky temperament turns him into an overbearing crank. I’m sure in later years I will remember his fits as aspects that made him a colorful character.

AND I’M ALSO hoping that I’ll be able to wish him a “Happy Birthday” (the end of July) and a happy Father’s Day for several years to come – although one of the things that has been beaten into my brain from years of being a reporter-type person is that death can come for anyone at any time. There’s nothing “fair” about it.

There is one humorous aspect to these two weekends. My brother and I arranged for catered food for our mother’s memorial service, and we had a freezer filled with leftovers – so much so that my brother defrosted them Sunday and took them with us for a Father’s Day feast that the family seemed to appreciate.

Two celebratory “feasts” for the cost of one. Although it means I don’t want to see a piece of fried chicken, a plate of mostaccioli or an Italian sausage sandwich anywhere near me for a very long time.

  -30-

EXTRA: Shane, Come Back!

“Don’t retire, Mayor!”

That was the cry that came from a man attending the funeral services Thursday of Corey Ankum, one of two firefighters killed last week due to a roof collapsing underneath them.

IT WASN’T QUITE along the lines of Joey’s chant in the closing scene of the 1953 film “Shane,” but it was worth noting nonetheless.

The political cry came as Daley was stepping on stage at the Apostolic Church of God to deliver his eulogy for Ankum, whose widow, Demeka, happens to be one of Daley’s secretaries at City Hall.

For the record, Daley got a bit choked up at one point while saying that Ankum was among the rare individuals who deserve to be called a “hero.”

Daley himself didn’t give any indication of hearing the shout, but it caught the attention of many of the nearly 3,000 people who crammed the church’s main chapel. Among those people was former Sen. (and mayoral hopeful herself) Carol Moseley-Braun.

NO WORD ON what reaction she had to the shout, which came in a place that I’m sure she’d like to think is one where her candidacy would be the political preference.

One other notable moment. Rev. Louis D. Jones, while presiding over the funeral service, noted the presence of Chicago Police Commissioner Jody Weis, and offered to alter the program to give him a chance to say something sympathetic about Ankum – who actually worked as a patrol officer in the South Chicago police district for just over one year before quitting to join the Fire Department.

Weis chose silence, which may have saved him from saying something that the rank-and-file cops would mock mercilessly on many future occasions.

  -30-

Park District brings question to my mind – “Are they kidding?” about Payton

In theory, I want to give the Chicago Park District a pat on the back for taking a hard line stance with regards to the family of Chicago Bears great Walter Payton, who want to put a statue of “Sweetness” outside the stadium where the Bears play.

That stadium, of course, is Soldier Field, and it has been owned by the Chicago Park District for decades. It was originally built to be a public facility for sporting events to be witnessed by the masses of Chicago.

IT ALSO WAS to serve along with Navy Pier as a memorial to the military personnel of this nation – Soldier Field and Navy Pier. Now if we could only find something in this city to name for the Air Force and the Marines, we’d have the perfect set.

But it is because of that tradition that the building that seats more than 60,000 people for Bears games eight Sundays each year is a military memorial that the Park District is refusing to allow the Payton statue.

They told the Chicago Tribune that putting up the statue would diminish the memory of the soldiers, even though I’m sure the masses who tailgate outside Bears games probably think more of Payton than any soldier.

It is a nice ideal. I’d like to think that the Park District is sincere in saying such a thing.

BUT I AM one of those people who thinks that the 2001 renovation of Soldier Field killed off any semblance of the building being a war memorial – even though the renovated stadium’s advocates will claim that people can now check out the columns that pay tribute to soldiers.

In fact, any time people mock the Yankee Stadium renovation of the mid-1970s as somehow ruining the historic character of that building, I’d argue that the Soldier Field renovation was worse.

It literally got the building knocked off the National Register of Historic Places, because the changes to put in all those seats that sort of hover over the field (as though it is better to be sky-high than many rows back) obliterated the feel of what made Soldier Field architecturally unique.

So the idea that anyone seriously believes it is a war memorial any longer is absurd, although it probably maintains more character than Navy Pier, which has been turned into a commercial shopping center for the tourist-minded among us.

IN SHORT, CHICAGO has in recent years dumped on what was supposed to be its significant memorials to the military.

So the idea that anyone is now trying to use the military and its supposed presence as an excuse to avoid making some change is absurd.

Particularly since I can envision this rejection managing to offend many Chicago Bears fans who see how so many other new stadiums include among their decorative elements all kinds of statues paying tribute to the top ballplayers in those particular franchise’s histories.

Even in Chicago, just about every other building used for professional sports has these statues – with the best known being that one of Michael Jordan dunking a bronze basketball outside the United Center – and across the street from the Chicago Stadium where his Hall of Fame-quality pro basketball career began.

HECK, EVEN HARRY Caray gets a statue (the one that intoxicated Chicago Cubs fans like to load up with cans of Budweiser) outside Wrigley Field just for slurring his way through 17 years worth of Cubs baseball broadcasts (he really was on top of his game with the St. Louis Cardinals and the White Sox).

So I’m sure there are people who are going to be critical of the Park District and accuse them of disrespecting the memory of Payton, a Hall of Fame football player in his own right.

It turns out that Payton’s widow, Connie, wants this memorial to her late husband (who hasn’t played for the Bears in two decades and has been deceased for 10 years now, time flies too fast).

She’s willing to arrange to have the statue made and to donate it, provided they promise to erect it in a place where it will be seen (and not just become the receptacle for bird droppings).

EVEN THE BEARS themselves (who, let’s be honest, often show a knack for boneheaded public relations moves) are on board, saying they will try to talk some sense into the heads of their landlords to allow for the statue to be erected somewhere.

So I’m wondering how the Park District will wind up backing away from their “military memorial” stance while trying to pretend they didn’t change a thing. For the reality is that modern-day governments build these stadiums (or – in the case of the Chicago Park District – renovate them to the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars), but then give the teams total control over how they are used.

In some cases, they even let the teams have the bulk of the revenues that are earned (parking, concessions) from staging private athletic events in what ostensibly are public buildings.

Just so long as nobody gets the “bright” idea of trying to pay tribute to the memory of the definitely un-immortal Bobby Douglas. For that one, I would be willing to buy the “soldier memorial” excuse.

-30-

Have you seen this face?

You’re not alone in saying “no.”

Police in the southwestern suburb of Tinley Park have received tidbits of information from more than 5,600 people, yet none of it is solid enough that police could go so far as to make an arrest in the slayings of five women at a Lane Bryant store that took place one year ago Monday.

THE “LANE BRYANT slayings” seem destined to go down in Chicago crime lore along with the Brown’s Chicken killings at a franchise in northwest suburban Palatine. People died in 1993, yet it took nearly a decade before people who knew definitively what happened were willing to come forth and cooperate with police.

One can only hope for the sake of the memory of Carrie Chiuso, Rhoda McFarland, Connie Woolfolk, Sarah Szafranski and Jennifer Bishop, someone can speak up a bit sooner than that.

In the meantime, officials in the suburb plan to mark Monday with a special service – to be held at Noon at the Tinley Park Convention Center, located on Harlem Avenue at Interstate 80. The Brookside Marketplace shopping center where the slayings took place is located on just the other side of the interstate highway.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTE: Officials insist they need to move ahead, despite the inability of law enforcement (http://nwi.com/articles/2009/02/01/ap-state-il/d96318mo0.txt) to complete their work on a case that can be prosecuted in Will County court.

It was 50 years ago Monday, that kids became statistics instead of lives

One summer when we were kids, my brother, Chris, and I spent about a week away from our parents and staying with our Uncle Sphinx and Aunt Connie, who lived in west suburban Lombard.

They had a pool in their backyard and allowed us to spend much of our time lounging around it, while also requiring some chores (such as cleaning out the basement where our aunt operated a makeshift beauty shop for neighborhood women).

BUT ONE OF the moments of that week that stands out in my mind (and the moment that my brother most remembers) is when Aunt Connie decided to take us with her on what she saw as an “educational” outing.

We took a drive to the Queen of Heaven Cemetery in nearby Hillside.

And the reason we went there on that day in 1978 was to see the “Shrine of the Holy Innocents” memorial that had been erected there to the children who died on this date 50 years ago at the Our Lady of the Angels School, 909 N. Avers Ave.

What would have become of these children? Illustration provided by http://www.olafire.com/.

Now I had heard of the school fire previously. Occasionally, we’d see snippets of footage of smoke coming from school windows and some bodies being moved about, whenever early December would come up.

WHILE MY MOTHER remembers being in a Catholic school on the South Side when she learned of the fire (nuns quickly led her entire class in a prayer for the children at Our Lady of the Angels), for me, it was little more than an “anniversary story.”

Until that particular weekend with my aunt.

I recall her laying some flowers at the memorial, while also reciting some details of that day’s events to my brother and I, then driving home the point that life is not only precious, it also is temperamental.

It can come, and go, at any time.

IT DOESN’T EVEN have to be anyone’s particular fault that they were in a certain place when something bad happened.

So if it sounds like I’m saying people ought to treasure every moment they have, because they don’t know for sure how much longer they will live (personally, I could die tomorrow, or I could last another 50 or so years – I honestly don’t know what to expect), then it is a worthwhile lesson.

Besides, how many other people can claim to have learned a life’s lesson while visiting a cemetery with their aunt (who, sadly enough, I cannot share moments with any longer – she died this year during the summer)? It definitely is one of those stories I can tell that few people can match.

It also is a memory that has come to my mind because we’re on one of the so-called “significant” anniversaries to justify an “anniversary story” about Our Lady of the Angels.

THE BIG 5-OH.

WTTW-TV last week dredged up the “Angels Too Soon” documentary film about the fire and its aftermath. And I would expect news outlets throughout the Chicago area will be running stories throughout the day – reminding us of the fact that 92 children and three nuns have now been dead for half-a-century.

In the case of the kids, they have been gone for about four to five times longer than they were alive.

But when presented in such a manner, they can become mere statistics.

THAT IS WHY I dredged up the old Chicago American newspaper front page from “the day after,” which literally gives us the pictures of all the deceased children. It is a physical reminder that we are talking about living human beings.

Instead, they’re names engraved on a memorial at a Hillside cemetery that my brother and I checked out some 30 years ago.

So when some people will try to push the angle that the fire started in a stairwell would never have spread so fast if modern-day fire codes were in place, I’d argue that such an angle is kind of trivial.

The fact is that even contemporary fire codes would have had an effect – but the building was exempt because it was so old that city officials thought requiring the Catholic Archdiocese to pay to bring it up to standards would have been an undue financial burden.

SOME MAY EVEN get worked up over the fact that no one was ever successfully prosecuted for having done something wrong to start the fire. Maybe they dream that modern forensics could come up with some evidence that could lead to a criminal conviction.

But when I think back to that day at the memorial, and also look at a newspaper page with pictures, I can’t help but wonder what would have become of these kids – who by now would be pushing into senior citizen status.

They’d be looking back on their lives, trying to figure out just what it was they accomplished and could be proud of.

The fact that they never got to do so is the true tragedy of that day at Iowa Street and Avers Avenue.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: Memories of that day on the West Side will live on, so long as (http://www.olafire.com/Home.asp) the Internet remains in existence.

I’m not alone (http://www.bluejeansplace.com/OurLadyoftheAngelsFireMemorial.html) in having visited the memorial to the fire’s victims, although I did not document it to the degree that this website does. One can find help (http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=8839) in locating the graves of specific people.