Andrew Patner: The View from Here

Grant Pick Lives!

When Chicago journalist Grant Pick died suddenly and unexpectedly three years ago, I offered the commentary reprinted below as my "Critic's Choice" piece on 98.7WFMT and wfmt.com.

Thursday evening at the Chicago Cultural Center, Grant's spirit and his work were summoned back to life at a publication event and party for the book of 19 of Grant's feature stories for the Chicago Reader selected and edited by his young son, John Pick. Called The People Are the News: Grant Pick's Chicago Stories, the book includes the brilliant black and white photographs -- many of them by Grant's wife Kathy Richland -- that accompanied the pieces when they originally appeared in the Reader between 1977 and 2004. It's published by Northwestern University Press which is increasingly the go-to source for important books about Chicago and its history.

A panel of three of Grant's friends and colleagues -- Pulitzer Prize winner Hank Klibanoff, author Alex Kotlowitz, who contributed a foreword to the book, and Grant's editor Michael Miner -- read excerpts from Grant's pieces and talked about his personal and journalistic style, character, and values. Son John, an actor and a teacher in the Los Angeles public schools, was the amiable moderator. As at Grant's funeral, the event was standing room only.

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Grant Pick

When one thinks of a Chicago style of journalism, the most common characteristics that come to most minds are a kind of "Front Page" era roustaboutness and the barstool eloquence of the legendary Mike Royko. Reporters in Chicago in its newspapering heyday were known for colorful lives and biting prose, near mythic feuds and a mischievous streak that alternated with the indignation that rightly arises when one lives in a city built, as Chicago has been throughout its history, on corruption.

But there is another side to journalism in Chicago and last week we lost one of its best practitioners. That Grant Pick's name might not be known to you was pretty much as Grant Pick would have liked it. Even when people learned (with no assistance from Grant) that he came from two important and established Chicago families, he once told me, with his trademark and sometimes uncontrollable laugh, "they think that I have some connection with Grant Park." In fact, Grant came from two assimilated Jewish families of industrialists and civic leaders, the Picks and the Blocks. He rarely talked of such things, although he carried no shame in his forebears or extended family. Some people allow their names or social status to define them. Others find such connections and expectations a burden. For Grant, it was all just sort of an accident. He believed in making one's own way and although he, as many who came of age in the 1960s — Grant was born in 1947 — initially had his share of indirection, after graduating from Roosevelt University and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, he picked up his pen and he, quite literally, never put it down until his sudden and unexpected death of a heart attack in front of his Lakeview home as he walked back from lunch to work on a story. He was 57.

A physically unassuming man, Grant did very well with timing, particularly for the kind of journalism he liked to do — stories about people whom you might otherwise have never known or even thought about. People, who, in their versions of Grant's own story, made their own way. And stories that allowed the writer to fade into the background — Grant never called himself a stylist — and let the reader focus on the subject, the person, at hand. Grant was fortunate in wanting to make a full-time career in writing just when a group of young Carleton College graduates were starting a free weekly newspaper, The Chicago Reader, that would become a nurturing home to just the kind of writing that Grant wanted to do. Founder Bob Roth and editor Mike Lenehan were interested in stories much more than the storytellers and that suited Grant just fine. Grant's funeral was, in part, a gathering together of many of the old Reader clan, a number now sporting hair both gray and white — the dogged investigator of torture John Conroy, the outstanding editor and media columnist Mike Miner, chronicler of criminal courts Steve Bogira, veteran editor, writer, and teacher Bob McClory, jazz critic and radio host Neil Tesser, Roth and Lenehan and others — and the younger writers who view such folks, and who viewed Grant, as role models.

Grant was also spectacularly good at being in the right place at the right time for a story. I don't mean that he would be on the scene at a shooting, or in the midst of a riot or a mob hit. But that he would happen to be walking through a neighborhood generally neglected by white-skinned folks when a man with a chain of a thousand keys draped over his right shoulder walked by. Or he would notice someone looking at an empty second-story space in Logan Square and then follow that person's dream to open a dance studio there. A family man par excellence he could talk with people — and even more importantly, he could listen to people — who had never known the warmth of loving parents or who found themselves confused about professional or sexual identity and then write a story about them that did not idealize them but rather respected them and took them seriously.

For someone as passionate about education and about young people as Grant was, his timing was also very good in being a parent of school-age children at just the time that school reform was getting underway in Chicago and he was an active participant observer, serving and leading local councils in the Chicago Public Schools and documenting the ups and downs of changes in local education for The Reader and Catalyst, an important publication dedicated to the subject. And he had good timing in meeting Kathy Richland, his wife and soulmate and the mother of his two talented and poised now-adult children, who emerged as one of The Reader's, and Chicago's, best portrait photographers just as Grant emerged as one of its essential writing journalists. As many of his journalist friends learned at his funeral he had also found the time for a double life — as a leader and president-elect of Temple Sholom, an historic and prominent Reform congregation on North Lake Shore Drive which he nudged in the direction of greater commitment to social justice and action.

In his eulogy of Grant, one that focused on Grant the journalist as others spoke of Grant the father, Grant the Jewish leader, and Grant the friend, Bob McClory told of how he regularly invited Grant to speak to his students at Medill in Evanston. As Grant told them stories of tracking down the man who tracked down items people lost in taxicabs or of those whose small apartments were filled with meticulous collections of odd things, one student would invariably ask, "That's all very interesting, but where's the news peg?" And Grant would smile, take a breath, and calmly tell his interlocutor that in his stories, "There is no news peg. The people are the news." And the people — the ones Grant wrote about and the ones Grant wrote for — have lost a great friend and the gentle, thoughtful side of Chicago journalism has lost one of its most hard-working and playful lights.

I'm Andrew Patner.

Contributions in memory of Grant Pick can be made to:

The Chicago Community Trust, Grant Pick Fund
111 East Wacker Drive
Suite 1400
Chicago 60601

My Room

Across from the bar there is a view to the back of a building on the next street over. At the top of this three-story brick apartment house there is a room that sits all by itself with a light always burning in the night. For the first couple of years that I would look at it, the room's sole window also had an old-fashioned shade pulled part of the way down, with a simple cord of knotted string ending with a small cord-wrapped circle for pulling the shade down or letting it up. I have no idea if this room is a top of a stairwell or some sort of a strangely-placed laundry room and I have never seen anyone standing in the window or any indication -- a shadow, an object -- that there is ever anyone in the room at all. The window, and the window is really the essence of this room, has the rectangular perfection and presence of a Mondrian. From my first sighting it I have thought of it as my room.

Every writer wants some sort of a room of basic simplicity lacking most distractions. In a way, the ideal writing room should be a sort of cell, monastic or penal, with a good sized-window with a view of some sort, whether urban or pastoral. The closest I ever came to having such a room was when I lived as a 20-year-old in Paris in the fall of 1980 and had a top-floor room at the end of seven turns of a spiral staircase in a pension called "Le Grand Hôtel de la Loire," no government stars, sans ascenseur. It sat on the rue du Sommerard across from the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages on the Left Bank in the 5eme arrondisement. This room contained nothing more than a sagging and sloping single bed, a cold-water sink, and a very simple wooden desk. If you stuck your head out the window into the inner atrium/airshaft/garbage chute of the building and turned to look left through the bend of the drainpipe you could see the Eiffel Tower. One day when a French friend drove me back home from a dinner in the suburbs he took one look out of his car at the building and the nameplate with its leters spelled out in script and sneered, "Zees ees not 'grand' at all, nor anywhere near the Loire, nor even an 'hotel'!," before he raced off back out of the city.

I loved that room, it reminded me in many ways of Van Gogh's famous painting of his own room at Arles. I never had, nor did I want, a visitor in that room. It was what people today call "my space." Four years later I found a marvelous room for a month at the Pensione Annalena on the via Romana opposite the Annalena Gate of the Boboli Gardens in Florence. Although it had enormously high ceilings, an adjoining bathroom, tile floors, a small balcony, and was well taken care of, its extremely narrow shape, its whitewashed walls and ceiling with dark wooden beams, and its earlier use as a nun's quarters gave the room a character best appreciated in solitude and one that made solitude splendid.

The Grand Hotel de la Loire was turned into something of an actual hotel a few years after my stay there: Three government stars, air-conditioning, and an ascenseur. I couldn't get myself past the lobby to see what had been done to the interior. And the Annalena, still quite lovely, fancied up not long after my stay there. Lots of mirrors and much more sumptuous furnishings. A happier place, great for couples.

And a month or so ago, "my room" opposite the bar in Chicago also got a makeover adding a new dark-bordered double-paned window and removing the shade and its antique cord.

Pierre Boulez -- encore et toujours

Below is the full version of my review from Saturday's Chicago Sun-Times. Monday night, I also aired the first part of an hour-long interview I had with Boulez on Friday at Orchestra Hall on 98.7WFMT Radio in Chicago and online at wfmt.com. That program will be available online later this week.

I love the concurrence of the three most frequently mixed-up names in classical music in the concert under review.

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Just when you thought that there was nothing more to add to the superlatives that customarily characterize reviews of the concerts of Pierre Boulez with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the highly-respected elder statesmen turned wily magician and pulled two astonishing new rabbits out of his hat last week.

Thursday night in his first Chicago appearance of the season, the CSO's oddly titled "conductor emeritus" offered a new suite of four stunning brief works by his late contemporary Luciano Berio and, with mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, one of our greatest singers, the finest, most revealing performance of the Berlioz 1840-1856 song-cycle Les nuits d'été, this listener has ever heard.

Berio and Boulez were both born in 1925 (Boulez will turn 83 next month, Berio died in 2003) and while their composition careers often intersected -- in Germany in the 1950s, in more recent years in performances Boulez has given with his Ensemble Intercontemporain -- they mostly ran parallel, with Berio focusing on operatic and theatre pieces, highly challenging works for solo instruments, and fascinating reworkings of historic masterworks.

But here Boulez has assembled four occasional pieces from 1978 to 1989 that were rescued by Berio's assistant Brian Roberts and they reveal a strong resonance with Boulez's own venture into large-scale orchestration in his ongoing Notations series. Under the rubric Quatre dédicaces ("Four Dedications"), the suite contains rich and knotty piles of winds brass and strings with unusual subdivisions between solo players and sections and within sections themselves. Festive works of about three minutes each, written for Rome ("Fanfara"), San Francisco ("Entrata"), Dallas ("Festum"), and Rotterdam ("Encore"), they are shots-in-the-arm for the repertoire, collectively and individually.

Berlioz is credited with inventing the orchestral song cycle and his Nuits d'été ("Summer Nights"), Op. 7 has been a part of the standard fare of both orchestras and female vocalists for a century or more. Great artists have sung the six romantic texts of Theophile Gautier at Orchestra Hall and at Ravinia -- Price, Norman, Bartoli, and Graham herself. What made this outing different was Boulez's focus on Berlioz's intent of delicate scoring for a reduced orchestra. From the throbbing of the winds and the quiet layering of the cellos in the opening "Villanelle" through the final measures of the closing "L'île inconnue" ("The Unknown Isle") the work was revealed as both more complex and more ravishing than many might have thought. By having this carefully thought-out context around her, Graham, who can do no wrong, was able further to caress each poem and to hold notes, even the quietest, long enough to create haunting sonorities.

Boulez takes a different approach from most with Stravinsky's great 1911 ballet Petrushka, trying to dial down the hysteria in this story of an ill-starred carnival puppet and let the tensions arise simply from the notes on the page. It's a hard task to carry out and I heard from many reliable sources that it gelled by Saturday night. But this slight dip on Thursday hardly mattered given the miracles of concerts first half.

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Izaak Wirszup, 1915-2008

Friday we celebrated three long and especially fruitful lives but we also learned that afternoon of the death of a unique friend, teacher, and mentor, Izaak Wirszup, 93.

I first knew Izaak and Pera Wirszup through my late great aunt, Alla V. Jesmer, and her husband, Sioma. The Jesmers lived in a quirky penthouse in Lincoln Park on Chicago's North Side where they often hosted salons for fellow émigrés and refugees from Russia, both Yiddishists and Russian speakers. Like my aunt and her sister, my Grandmother Tanya, the Wirszups were from cultured families in Vilna. But unlike my family, which left Vilna between 1905 and 1918, the Wirszups had grown up and started families of their own in that once cosmopolitan city and had come to Chicago after surviving the Holocaust.

Later, in 1977, when I decided to go to The College of The University of Chicago, I applied to live in the Woodward Court dormitory where Izaak and Pera were resident masters. In addition to their many professional accomplishments, they had also earned a reputation for their extraordinary hospitality, interest in and support of the lives of the students at Woodward, and a lecture series they had developed where leading members of the faculty, including, over their 15 years in the dorm , a dozen Nobel laureates, and such invited guests as Izaak's former student Carl Sagan, spoke every couple of weeks to an overflow crowd in the large dormitory cafeteria. Among many other lecturers, I heard Eudora Welty read "Powerhouse" there, Jonathan Z. Smith present his common sense but pariah-making thesis that Jonestown needed to be seen as an event in the history of religion, and Wayne C. Booth try out his first responses to the then-faddish Deconstructionist movement in literary criticism. (He had hoped it would become known as "D-Con.") The Wirszups also paid great attention to the dormitory staff whose members were almost entirely Black Americans. Each year they held a lavish Christmas lunch for them in their dormitory apartment complete with piano accompaniment by another renowned mathematician, the late Irving Kaplansky. I was privileged to be drafted by Kaplansky as his vocalist for leading carols and for Tom Lehrer and Nat King Cole songs as well at this party for several years.

I got one of my first "scoops" as a journalist from Izaak. As professor of mathematics and a specialist in mathematics education, Izaak had become an expert on the teaching of math at the elementary and secondary school level in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. From the examination of hundreds of textbooks and other curricular material he had found an astonishing gap in the method and quality of teaching between the East and the West and he worked tirelessly to bring this to the attention of U.S. leaders. In 1979, when I was editor-in-chief of The Chicago Maroon, the U of C student newspaper, he had been able to reach key members of some Congressional committees and he was getting on the agenda of President Jimmy Carter. "Andy," he would say to me in his distinctive but difficult to characterize accent, "Do you see? This will be beeeger than Sputnik! Andy! They STAHRT with algebra there! Weeth children! And we are faileeng our own students and our own country in these elementary and essential areas. Weeth OUHR huge economy we have still fallen behind and we are wheestling in the dark. We have NO expectations for our children and we are faileeng them!"

He gave me a copy of his prepared testimony "before I am even geeving eet to The New York Times. Do you see?" We ran a front-page copyrighted story that was picked up internationally. And with the help of the Amoco Foundation (now the BP foundation) and government endorsements, in his mid-60s Izaak began yet another career developing new methods and curricula for teaching math in the U.S. Until this month he was conducting teacher workshops and lecturing in these areas. Thousands of teachers and student teachers drew inspiration from Izaak, his ideas, his example, and his unique brand of cheerleading. Ten years ago, at 83, he added insights and texts from Singapore and post-Soviet Russia to the program and a year later began a new summer teachers institute supported by the Polk Brothers Foundation.

In the 1970s, survivors tended not to speak in detail about their experiences in Europe and I did not press the topic. In the early '80s, however, after I had left The College and was working as a staff writer and editor for the old WFMT-owned Chicago magazine, I had dinner often with the Wirszups and over time they shared the full story of how they met after the War on returning to Vilna where they had discovered that they had each lost their entire families, including their spouses and Izaak's young son. The young widow and widower married there and Izaak raised Pera's daughter, Marina, as his own.

Izaak had been in some five concentration and work camps over two years during the War and had lost much of his will to live or communicate until, while in a work camp with a number of captured French resistance fighters, "I learned again something of the meaning and exercise of human kindness. Something that I knew from my childhood but that had left me during these times," he told me.

In a 1996 profile by William Harms, Izaak told The University of Chicago magazine, "When I remained alive, the sole survivor of a very large family, I had to confirm in my own conscience, and before the memory of all my dear ones, that I was doing something valuable, something truly good, and doing it to the best of my abilities, with a life that had been spared me completely by chance.”

After the War, at the invitation of one of the Frenchmen in the camp, he and Pera moved to Paris where this gentleman turned out to be an owner of the Galeries Lafayette. Using his advanced mathematical training and the experience of his family in candy manufacturing in Vilna, Izaak served as director of research for the famed department store. But in 1949, he heard from his teacher at the university in Vilna, the great Polish mathematician Antoni Zygmund. Zygmund, who was not Jewish, had escaped from Nazi-controlled Poland in 1940 and eventually had settled in at the Department of Mathematics at Chicago. "'Izaak,' he wrote to me in Paris. 'It's time,'" Wirszup would recall.

Izaak, Pera, and Marina came to Hyde Park in 1949 and Izaak began teaching in the department, earning his doctorate in 1955 and being named full professor in 1965. His remarkable teaching abilities were already recognized in 1958 when he received the coveted Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Pera herself had success in two careers in Chicago -- as an instructor in conversational Russian at The University and as a buyer for the Peck & Peck branch on North Michigan Avenue. She remains an ageless and elegant lady to this day.

While spending periods of time in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s, Izaak and Pera became early connoisseurs of the modern sculpture of the Makonde people, Bantu Africans who had survived with their culture intact in northeastern Mozambique. In 1967, the Wiszups began to exhibit their extensive collection nationally and it had a prominent place in their apartment at Woodward Court and later in their Hyde Park apartment. "This work spoke to us with its tremendous humanity and its animated embrace of life," they told me.

I last saw Izaak just a few weeks ago when he was a eulogist at the funeral of his great friend and fellow champion of Yiddish, Lyric Opera of Chicago's publicist extraordinaire Danny Newman. Izaak was hale and hearty and spoke from his prepared text with a booming voice in both English and Yiddish. Until his death, Izaak understood the power and importance of doing for and supporting others, of doing mitzvahs.

Upon his formal assumption of emeritus status at Chicago at age 81, Izaak addressed a large gathering of colleagues, students, and alumni: "Pera and I have seen firsthand the desecration of life. We have witnessed the organized annihilation of millions of innocent, wonderful human beings. We have seen giants collapse -- morally and physically -- within days, when subjected to inhuman conditions. But we have also encountered people who would make any sacrifice, heroes whose like we had seen before only in the Scriptures. We have seen how love, friendship, and help can transform the most fragile souls into individuals stronger than steel."

Stronger than steel. Gentler than fine cloth. May the memory and good name of Izaak Wirszup, alav hashalom, be a blessing.

Sto lat!

Salutes to three old friends today who are all actually, um, older than most people.

This morning I'll be having one of my regular tapings at Orchestra Hall with legendary composer, conductor, and new music advocate Pierre Boulez for subsequent airing and streaming on 98.7WFMT and wfmt.com. Boulez, who is in town for his winter residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, turns 83 next month and maintains a demanding international schedule. He has announced that he won't take on any more full-scale opera projects because of the time involved in such things ("Look, I am the age that I am and at this point one has the time that one has," he told another interviewer recently), but otherwise he doesn't seem to be applying any brakes.

At lunch time, Belton Calmese, a veteran waiter at The Cliff Dwellers club, will be retiring -- at age 91. One of the local television newscasts did a nice piece on him this week that you can see here. He is a great character with a gentle manner, a warm heart, and a sly wit whose life experiences include service in the Pacific during the Second World War, 40 years on the railroad as a Pullman chef where he waited on President Truman among others, 22 years at The Cliff Dwellers, and keeping an eye on his mother, now 108, who has voted in every election in Chicago for some 60 years.

Then tonight, my synagogue will be honoring Leon M. Despres on his 100th birthday this week. Len is a remarkable man whose century of life has largely been given over to public service as an attorney and political figure in Chicago, most prominently as the often sole opponent and critic in our 50 [!] member City Council of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley during the two decades from the mid-50s to the mid-70s when they both held office. Northwestern University Press recently published the first volume of Len's memoirs, Challenging the Daley Machine.

More on each of these gentlemen anon. In the meantime, "Sto lat!" May they live 100 years! And, in Len's case, twice that.