Lilac season: A delightful few weeks of garden splendor

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Evanston RoundTable, May 24, 2023 Bitter cold winters seem to be shrinking, getting warmer and less burdened with snow, dreary as ever but a pale reflection of the fierce winters of half a century ago, which was the subject of my last column. This year’s usually splendid spring season seems to have shrunk too, a few nice days mixed in with weeks of rain, gray skies and cool temps, threatening to bleed directly from drab winter to a blazing Chicago summer without so much as a proper how de do. Then there is lilac season. It lasts just a few weeks – but how the lilacs sanctify and endow this time of year with their sublime beauty and rich aroma! No surprise that lilacs have a revered place in literature. Perhaps the best known is Walt Whitman’s poem When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d that mourns the assassination of Lincoln (“O powerful western fallen star”), which took place during lilac season 1865. Whitman wrote: “In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d palings, Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green, With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love, With … Continue reading →

Vanishing winter

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Evanston RoundTable, May 11, 2023 The season between fall and spring, formerly known as winter, is due for a reassessment. That’s because there hardly is a winter anymore. We need a new name for it: maybe drabby (which it is outside) or crabby (which we are inside). My friend Judy suggests doldrums. I hate to sound like those geezers who put their grandkids into a state of stupefying boredom with memories of bygone hardships (“You should’ve been here the winter of ’67!”), but you should’ve been here the winter of ’67! A winter storm dropped 23 inches of snow over Chicago in 24 hours, starting on Thursday morning, Jan. 26. By Friday afternoon traffic had ground to a halt. Cars everywhere were immobilized and abandoned, even on Lake Shore Drive. “We walked past the Edgewater Beach Hotel to the Outer Drive,” wrote a blogger on the Chicago History Museum site. “We stood in the middle of the Drive and all we could see was snow and bumps in the snow where cars were buried. On the way back we passed a snow drift that was 15’ high covering a bus.” At the time I was living in Hyde Park and … Continue reading →

Remembering Evanston’s ‘splendid’ Nazi resister

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Evanston RoundTable, April 25,2023 After the second world war, Traute Lafrenz Page didn’t talk much about her heroic resistance to the Nazi regime in her native Germany. Her four children didn’t even know about their mother’s courageous past until they were well into their teens. Page, a 40-year resident of Evanston, passed away March 6 at the age of 103, the last member of the White Rose, a small group of idealistic Germans – mostly medical students – who circulated anonymous leaflets calling for the overthrow of Hitler and the Third Reich. On April 14, 1945, she was three days from trial and probable execution in Bayreuth, Germany, when American troops captured the city. Six of her fellow conspirators ¬had already been executed. Renee Meyer, oldest of Page’s four children and a physician on Yonges Island, South Carolina, where her mother resided the last 17 years of her life, speculated her mother didn’t discuss the past because “she was unwilling to sacrifice the everyday joys of living.” Plus, there were other Nazi resisters, many unknown and unsung. Meyer described her mother’s outlook as, ‘I did a little part, let’s think about them.’” “I was a contemporary witness,” Page told the … Continue reading →

The key to a healthier, happier life

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Evanston RoundTable, April 7, 2023 One of the most thorough studies of human development ever conducted, based on an 85-year multi-generational study of thousands of Americans of all ages and races around the country, bolstered by multiple studies in other countries, points emphatically to one overriding factor that determines happiness. In their new book The Good Life, co-directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development report that, “Through all the years of studying these lives, one crucial factor stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health and longevity … It’s not career achievement, or exercise, or a healthy diet. These things matter (a lot), but one thing continuously demonstrates its broad and enduring importance: Good relationships.” If starting, maintaining and strengthening personal relationships is demonstrably the key to happiness and healthy longevity, how can we ensure that happens? The book offers numerous tips, including urging experienced employees to take a mentorship role in their workplace. But here’s a tip that incorporates The Good Life’s recommendations with one of my own: serve yourself and your community by volunteering. This is a good time to start: April is Volunteer Month. According to the Mayo Clinic, … Continue reading →

In the stands and in life, the Liss family shows up for Hank

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Evanston RoundTable, March 25, 2023 When I asked Evanston Township High School senior Hank Liss to pose for a photo on the baseball diamond, the ace pitcher cradled his glove against his chest and assumed a fierce gaze, almost glowering, as if I were taking his mug shot. “Can you try a little smile,” I said, laughing. “Ballplayers don’t smile,” Liss mumbled, without changing expression. I snapped another picture, then he dashed off to join his teammates for the National Anthem before the start of the second game of the ’23 season on Wednesday, March 22. The Kits won 10-2, evening their record to 1-1. Liss, 17, is the team’s star pitcher and when not on the mound he patrols center field. This is his third year on the varsity squad. He’s won 11 games and lost only three on the mound his last two seasons, and batted a highly respectable .315 in 2021 and .335 last year. On June 7, 2021, as a sophomore, in what he calls “the biggest highlight of my career,” he threw a no-hitter in an Illinois High School Association regional tournament game against Loyola Academy with his older brother backing him up at third … Continue reading →

Evanston’s sweet spot

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Evanston RoundTable, March 7, 2023 Jean Kroll comes from a long line of entrepreneurs. Her great-grandfather on her mother’s side owned and operated movie theaters in central Wisconsin, as did her grandfather. Her paternal grandfather ran a general store in Dodgeville, Wisconsin. Her mom ran a clothing store in Wausau, Wisconsin, and her dad ran an automotive service center. Her sister is an executive consultant. So it was no surprise when in 1997 Kroll, a longtime Evanston resident and Loyola University graduate in economics, started her own business. Partnering with a friend, she made and sold freshly baked cookies to Northwestern University students. Her friend worked college campuses on the east coast. “My grandmothers were fantastic bakers,” she said, explaining her career choice. In 1999, Kroll split off on her own and established Sugar & Spice, now known by the brand name I Love Sweets. Kroll’s first operation, just a thousand square feet, was located under the Foster Street el station in Evanston. “We started out hand-scooping cookies,” she recalled. “It was hard work and highly inefficient.” Aside from Northwestern students, she sold to local outlets such as Café Express, D&D Finer Foods and several White Hen Pantry stores. With … Continue reading →

The bully in the bird feeder

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Evanston RoundTable, Feb. 22, 2023 A year or two ago we bought a clear plastic bird feeder and attached it outside on our family room window. The idea was to observe our avian friends at close hand, to admire their grace and beauty and appreciate their swift and incredibly intricate landing maneuvers. We loved watching the delicate way they used their tongues to turn the seeds in their mouths and their beaks to crush them to get at the nuts. It was a wonderful education into these ubiquitous flying creatures, our lifelong if mostly unobserved and underappreciated aerial friends. How marvelous to see them so close, within a few feet. The primary visitors to our bird feeder are local sparrows and a pair of cardinals, male and female, whom we believe have long nested in our backyard. House sparrows, we learn, are native to and abundant in Illinois. They are, to my taste, rather dull-looking birds, even with their striated gray and brown plumage. The large, long-tailed cardinal is the state bird of Illinois, and the male cardinal is one of the most beautiful birds in the avian constellation, with a brilliant red crown and chest and black mask and … Continue reading →

The happiest place on earth

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Evanston RoundTable, Feb. 2, 2023 There are lots of claimants to the title. Of course, it has been said of Disneyland so often I’m surprised they haven’t copyrighted the phrase. Having never been there, I can’t say. I have my own favorites. There is Portobello Road market on a crisp weekend morning. The main concourse of Grand Central Station with the light streaming through the vast overhead windows. Strawberry Fields in Central Park. Concert nights at the Pritzker Pavilion downtown. Any cross-country train leaving Chicago’s Union Station, heading northwest to Seattle or southeast to New Orleans. (Or anywhere else.) But the local title, by my vote, goes to the weekend family gym sessions at the McGaw YMCA. There you will find hoopsters going long for their threes, taking the rebound on one bounce and executing a slick move or two for a nice layup. Nearby, watched by their moms and dads, are dozens of kids, hooting and hollering with joy, tooling around on little tyke bikes, scooting down the bouncy house, spinning their hula hoops, diving over the soft foam blocks and dodging each other and the errant basketballs and just generally having the time of their little lives. Does … Continue reading →

The Write Stuff

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Evanston RoundTable, Jan. 18, 2023 Along with the winter solstice come annual new year resolutions, a tradition said to be thousands of years old. The most popular resolutions are exercise more, lose weight and get organized. These are all fine and worthy goals. But I have another – more demanding perhaps but arguably more valuable: consider writing for the RoundTable. In most daily RoundTable newsletters we include the following encouragement: “Join our team: The Evanston RoundTable is growing! Check out our jobs page for opportunities in editorial.” Why would you, dear reader, want to write for our news site? Two reasons. Serve your community. It has been said that “Evanston is heavenston,” a phrase sometimes attributed to Frances Willard, although A Brief History of Evanston says it derives from the city’s historically “strong Methodist influence.”   If so, we need to work to maintain and strengthen our celestial status, because even heaven has its problems. In the afterlife, said Nietzsche, all the interesting people are missing – reason enough to work for its improvement. More seriously, there are the problems we see and write about all the time: the long history of racism, the current challenge of fixing fundamental issues, the city’s huge disparities … Continue reading →

Highly resolved, in 2023…

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Evanston RoundTable, Jan. 4, 2023 Each succeeding year demonstrates to me how much less I know of the universe than the year before – going right back to when I was 18 or so and knew pretty much everything. Nevertheless, from the depth of my ignorance I am free (and indeed encouraged) to do what I can for the common good. As the Mishnah, the codification of Jewish oral law, states: “It is not required that you complete the work, but neither may you refrain from it.” A good time to declare that work is now, around the first of the year, in the form of a traditional New Year’s resolution. Common sense suggests we have a better chance of realizing our annual goals if they are few in number, achievable and reasonably significant. So here are three: 1. Work to improve myself. This one is simple but challenging. Be a better spouse, father, grandfather, friend, colleague. Control my ego. Learn when to speak and when to stay silent, when to stand up and when to stay seated. I need to push myself with my writing. I must not let age, pain or exhaustion provide an excuse to be lazy, shallow or … Continue reading →