Harry Cawley was a veteran train man, a conductor for the North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad, when the opportunity came along to try a different trade: the hardware business. He didn’t know much about it, recalls his son, Dan Cawley, co-owner of Harold’s True Value. But Harry was handy and industrious, and in 1951 he bought an existing store, Noyes Hardware and Paint, just west of the el station. He did well enough to take over two more hardware stores in Evanston. In 1977 the family opened at their current location, 2912 Central St., buying out the existing proprietor, Harold Moshen, who had been at the site since 1953. Later the other two stores were closed. The Central Street site expanded to its current 6,000-square-foot space when they took over a barber shop next door in the early ’80s. Harold’s sells both to businesses and individuals, and stocks an enormous inventory of more than 50,000 individual items. “It was a lot to learn,” Mr. Cawley concedes. “We [the family] kind of got thrown into the mix. But you’ve got to survive, so you figure it out.” Mr. Cawley, 82, still works most every day at the store, which is open … Continue reading →

Evanston RoundTable, Oct. 31, 2019 A high school classmate of mine, diagnosed with end-stage cancer, wrote that in his despair he went online searching for the best end-of-life joke. This is what he came up with. “Guy walks into his doctor’s office feeling a bit under the weather. The doc checks him out and says to him that he has cancer and has six months to live. The patient is understandably upset and says, Doc, what should I do? The Doc’s answer:  Leave your wife, go to Kansas or some other God-forsaken place, find an ugly woman with seven kids who will yell at you all the time. But Doc, says the patient, how will that help? It won’t, says the Doc, but it will be the longest six months of your life.” Not the most PC joke, perhaps, but my classmate reported that it brought a smile to his face, and got him to thinking. “I laughed at this,” he wrote, “and it kept popping into my thoughts. Why was this funny? It seems to me it is amusing because it is the exact opposite of what we want from life. We do not want to prolong life in a way that is not satisfying. We … Continue reading →

Evanston RoundTable, Oct. 3, 2019

For the first time since 2014, the Cubs will be missing the National League playoffs. In the end it wasn’t even close. They finished the season nine games behind the Nationals and five games behind the Brewers for the two Wild Card playoff spots.

Worse yet was the crushing way they were eliminated, losing their last four home games to the rival Cardinals. It was the Cards’ first four-game sweep at Wrigley since 1921.

More humiliation? The Cubs lost their last five games at Wrigley by one run. You’d have to go back to 1915 to replicate that sad streak.

All this when they had a 3½ game lead in the division as recently as Aug. 9. Despite having a fabulous lineup . . .

Evanston RoundTable, Sept. 5, 2019

Once every hundred years the village of Brigadoon, nestled deep in the Scottish Highlands, emerges from the mists of obscurity to restore and enrapture the villagers, who laugh and fuss, fall in and out of love, and celebrate the wonder and beauty of life during its brief flicker of time.

That at least is the premise of Lerner and Loewe’s great musical of the same name, which premiered on Broadway in 1947.

So it is here in Evanston, where one day every year, cars are magically banned and people emerge to renew old friendships and frolic on their lawns, sidewalks, parkways and pavements. Time for the annual block party! So far this summer, there have been more than 150 in Evanston.

We held ours, our 41st, two Saturdays ago and as always it was delightful. We have a long block, with 37 homes, plus we invite households around the corner and on the next block. With additional friends and family members the turnout can easily exceed a hundred people.

My 10-year-old grandson Ben, an avid block partygoer, and I started out as we do every year . . .

Evanston RoundTable, Aug. 8, 2019

A 2013 exhibit at the Field Museum about the ancient paintings at Lascaux devoted a wing to recreating part of the original caves. Greeting museum visitors as they entered were two full-size fiberglass models of Neolithic people, a man and a woman, dressed in their finest animal furs and jewelry. There they stood, peering out incredulous at the passing museum crowd, doubtless thinking: what slobs!

Sad but true. “Dressing down” has become our national passion. We’ve regressed from “casual Friday” to “constantly scraggly.” Anywhere one goes in public, there they are: the scruffy and unkempt, flaunting their torn jeans, pajama bottoms, baggy pants, cut-off shorts, flip-flops and rumpled and ripped T-shirts.

This is a new stage in our sartorial evolution. Sumptuary laws going back thousands of years dictated how people should look. The great American panjandrums of a century ago—Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Warren Harding—went camping together in their suits and ties. Old photos show Chicagoans of a century ago thronging the Loop or Wrigley Field in their best clothing.

And recall the iconic Robert Young in the midcentury TV series “Father Knows Best,” sitting down to dinner with Mom, Princess and Bud in his gray suit, dark tie and white shirt and carefully folded pocket square. . . .