The Beaches of Rogers Park

the beaches of rogers park

I’ve seen sand in blue and red and brown reflecting the seasonal light,
and waves in red and blue and black and churning white,
sluggish with crusted mandalas of ice.

I’ve seen wind rock the trees, working their many colored falls.
The same trees for years and years,
old trees, new trees, slow growing trees,
elms and maples and catalpas and trees of heaven,
bowing and shaking like wooden rattles
in the charged wind.

On the long, distant side of Pratt Ave. beach,
on the pier’s North side,
three willow trees anchor the sand.
Their branches a home for buzzing insects.

Their roots restrain the rising water,

The rising water of
the lake that owns the coast here,
the lake that rises and takes back the paths and park benches in winter and spring,
the lake that is the spirit of this place called Rogers Park,
this place where I have always lived.

As a child,
As a child,
my feet slapped soft, oozing sand
the length of the lake from the stained-glass catacombs in the basement of Loyola’s Church
to the happy ice-skating place at Tuohy.

As a child, I ran and skipped the length of the lake,
holding my breath while flying past the sign that said

“No Trespassing-Private Beach”

by the brick building at North Shore, where women
with long dark hair
and red nail polish on their toenails sunbathed on their porches
while their dark hairy-chested husbands barbequed
and said “Scram,” if you lingered too long,
hands clasped behind your back,
looking hungry.

At North Shore
At North Shore,
concrete, giant steps
challenged a child’s short legs to descend,
and once you beached on the sand
you faced a long trudge through the burning sinking pebbles
before the slippery, silky water licked your naked toes.

The beaches of my childhood,
the beaches of my childhood soon stretched into adolescence
where the ritual exodus to the lake
gained power with each street crossed in East Rogers Park
as you called to your friends.

“We’re going to Albion!”

You joined one by one, sometimes walking arm in arm, and singing

“Doo, wah, Ditty, Ditty, Dum Ditty, Do!”

until you were a pack,
a pack of 10 or 12 or 18 or even more.
A pack of fresh-faced, chattering Catholic girls.

You walked past two-flats and houses
and past large courtyard apartment buildings

“Forward, east! ”

past furry, crew-cut lawns
and tailored gardens that were always being watered,
and you usually visited silently
the house of a friend grounded by her parents,
pulling yourself up

“Hurry up. Don’t get caught!”

peeking over the tall fence, waving,
then dropping to the ground giggling as you ran away.
Or you traveled the gangways,
tiptoing at the places you knew like traffic lights,
the places where grouchy old people would yell
and startle you for startling them.

You could easily travel only the gangways
each and every one that you knew by heart
and that everybody knew by heart like some secret highway
for high-top Keds, army boots and saddle shoes.

Forward East!

past two flats and houses until the black asphalt stopped
and neopolitan flavors of blue and brown rose to greet you at Lake MIchigan’s edge.

At Albion Beach
At Albion Beach
Budweiser abuse bred violence,
frisbees twirled and spun
all of the day and all of the night,
and the older boys drank too much mescal
and the older girls got into trouble
on the rat infested rocks
watching the submarines.

Before lights were put in to protect the park,
the only protection the boys and girls needed was the hushed sucking of the peaceful waves.
Bonfires were built and burned in the very darkest night
and when the boys and girls swam at night
they would take off their clothes
if they were wild enough
or if they didn’t care what anybody thought
if they were caught naked
in the sweeping headlights of a car.

It was there
It was there
where first cigarettes were smoked,
first whiskey seals broken,
bras first unhooked,
flies first fumbled
and then hands –no heads were ever used
hands busy groping,
groping awkwardly,
groping as they found their way

to the back door knocking at the Granada Theater,
where the ushers were your friends
and they let you in to see the first-run movies free.

There in the gold and red velvet balcony,
boys and girls auditioned to be men and women,
and more whiskey poured from half-pints,
and boys dropped their blue “bomber” jackets
trampling them with their muddy, steel-tipped boots,
soles hard-packed with frozen sand from Lake Michigan’s beach.

And then really drunk,
really drunk.
the boys would hit the streets
falling down and fighting,
brother upon brother,
until the neighboring gangs heard something was up,
heard about the action.

And soon, a hundred, midnight-blue zippered jackets lined up
to fight in the dank fog
at the chilly lakefront,
hitting out with rank rage,
a drunken rite of passage,
a rumble,
the fight between adopted Irish families
that claimed turf limits at Hartigan Park.

One night a stranger, a black man,
wandered onto Patch turf,
and I watched handfuls of his shredded black hair
erupt from a plunging pummeling huddle of blue-jacketed boys
and then drift to the ground where it rolled up the sidewalk,
circling itself over and over like forlorn miniature tumbleweeds.

“Nigger,”

The boys said.

And you knew the world was bigger than Rogers Park,
and things more exciting and romantic
than the submarine races at Hartigan Park would call you,
and many beautiful things would happen
that could blow away the ugly smokey thoughts that rose from Connolly’s Bar
and tarred the racist smiles of the young men there
Their eyes already ached alchoholic red.

And you knew that love knew no color
and that war was wrong
and that adults had heavy hands and even heavier hearts that they’d press on you
to hold you back and down.
If you let them.

There was escape, there was a place.
Past the sea wall at North Shore, past the frat house on Columbia,
past the new breakwater,
lay delicious and different beaches
teeming with older teen-agers
and men with long hair and beards and handsome mustaches,
and women too.

Women who wore peasant dresses,
but no bras or shoes
and slept in the bushes.
They made love in the bushes
and hid from police during the night.
The park was theirs they said.

“Take back the park.”

And they sold all kinds of things during those hot muggy summers of drug love,
they sold illicit goods from the open trunks of their cars at Morse Ave.’s Pill Hill.
They swarmed the close, mossy street like moths crashing in the white street light,
they peddled their wares,
tangled, pungent branches,
leaves and buds
and rainbow colored capsules
in shimmering, see-through sandwich bags,
and micro pieces of puttied sky wrapped in tin foil.
The long-haired mustached men sang.

“Chocolate mescaline, peyote, man.”

And they looked like pirate princes
and the women looked like princesses of a lost promised land,
floating by in their billowing dresses,
bare breasts, soft, pressed against the thin, gauzy cloth,
against the thin, tender cloth of their gowns
native to some distant, crowded place where veils hid women’s faces from men’s eyes.

In the carnival nights at Pill Hill
anything could happen and it always did
and that’s why the police came every night to clear the park
and beat the bushes.

But hiding places were plenty,
and the police couldn’t reach them all.

The black horizon of the lake,
the longest stretch of beach bowing far out from the walk was empty,
and distant from the path of a patrol car,
and the police never used their legs.

So, there,
on a cool, fragrant summer midnight,
you could hide by the ink of the lake, snuggling in sand until morning
when the sun rose flamingo pink and blinding
from the cobalt-turning-turquoise water,

reflecting,
reflecting
the orange light in blinding stripes of gold and silver.
The sun burned spots into your eyes,
spots seered like white flies into your eyes,
fantastic insects caught
in the sticky fiery surface
of the blazing, brilliant horizon.

And in the summer days and dusks,
guerilla theater, and Free Street theater players roamed, handing out props to any who’d play,
and guitars strummed,
and bells rang on ankles,
and incense burned
and often there was a belly dancer,
and hundreds of people – all young and mostly white and long-haired.

And you were one,
one of them, one with them finally.

One night, hundreds of people gathered under the street light and waved their arms in unison,
shaking their fists at the Park District curfew sign.

“Park closed at 10:30”

Hundreds of frustrated fists slammed the air together that green heavy night.
And the sign came down amidst cheers and confusion,
and the sound of police on the bullhorn.
And you ran home after curfew, arriving at your parents’ house
breathless that night,
what a night,
that night you’d kissed a red-haired boy
He had said you were beautiful
You’d held hands with a wigged out girl from school
who’d seen Beethoven’s Ninth symphony expressed
in perfect musical notation in the lightning-filled sky.

You could barely sleep waiting for the morning,
when all the excitement of the promised land would begin again.
And you swore to yourself
that you would toughen your feet so it was easy to walk barefoot,
and wear granny glasses and a floppy hat
and never, ever, ever wear a bra.

You would ditch your shoes behind your mother’s favorite bushes,
tomorrow,
in the morning,
and ready yourself for the world outside,
for the beach in Rogers Park.

Today
I practise Tai Chi in the autumn sun by the lake,
Carry Tiger to the Mountain.
I lift my hands, palms up to the burning mid-day sun,
and then drop them flat, like a gull drops its wings settling in tall, scratchy dune grass.

Around me brown and black and white babies play,
and their mothers speak clicking, clattering
rolling poetry in languages I’ll never know
as they picnic in circled dozens under the trees, Krishna cymbals ringing,
passing dishes of dried fruits and nuts
from hand to brown hand.

On the park benches gold teeth flash.

“Bam, Bam Nyet. Bam, Bam Nyet”

Boomboxes broadcast rap at the basketball courts
where bottles of Night Train pass with no lack of lip,

“Hey Bro! Pass it this way”

bomber jackets and steel-toed boots
replaced by baseball caps and baseball bats and guns.

And you’re filled with wonder at how
love knows no color,
and you know that war is always wrong,
and you lift your hands and heart
lightly
to the sky.

Copyright 200-2001. Sduros Communications.

Send me to Minneapolis – Kickstarter Project #1

Here’s my latest from ChuffPo on Chicago news as an ecosystem and social enterprise. Don’t Chicago’s news blogs have enough skin in the game?

This augments my ChuffPo piece last week State of pay: A Chicago news blog suspense story.

To date, the work I’ve done reporting on the future of Chicago news and its potential as a social enterprise, or L3C, has been pro bono. It’s time folks understand that journalism takes money. All of it — researching, reporting, writing and distributing news takes money. So I am asking the crowd who care to fund my one day trip to Minneapolis to report on the Economic Models for News conference. If I go, I will Twitter live from the event as well as develop at least two article ideas, which I will sell.

I’ve registered this conference as a project with a new website called Kickstarter to see if I can raise $900 to pay for my time and travel expenses. If you check out the site, please let me know if my project is working by making a donation!

Thank you in advance for your support.

Chicago news hounds have put enough skin in the game

Originally published in Huffington -Post
Show us the money.

“Us” being the new newsrooms.

The whole world has weighed in on solutions: Combine online with newsprint, news blogs with legacy investigative reporters, news aggregation with editorial curation, then crowd-fund, throw in some Google analytics, and subscription and accessibility fan clubs.

I’m not making this stuff up. To make your head spin do a Google or Twitter search on future of news or follow my Twitter stream @saduros.

Newspapers are meeting “secretly” and Google, Yahoo and other Web whizzes are conjuring new delivery systems.

I’ve talked at length with Tom Stites, who has worked at the Sun-Times, the Tribune and the New York Times. He has some great ideas for the future of journalism as a co-op that he’s laid out at the Banyan Project.

But as he says:

“The revenue model for making money from online journalism is a Rubik’s Cube that somebody’s got to crack the code on.”
It’s going to happen so let’s be ready.

Ideas float about like so many soap bubbles. It’s time to stick pins in a few and see which ones don’t pop.

There’s been little talk about the “m” word. The real dirty little secret that it takes time (and money) to report and write news.

Finally the respected Jon Margolis, formerly of the Tribune, weighed in gently May 12 on the “m” word and how it relates to professional journalists vs. citizen journalists.

“That doesn’t mean there’s no place for the devoted, or even obsessed, advocate. But let’s save a place at the press table for the professional journalists, careerist though they may be (and those citizens are not? Gimme a break). Not the worst trait, careerism. Wanting to get ahead by doing the job right helps one…do the job right.
“And it is a job. Jobs in our society do and should come with paychecks, bringing us back to our basic questions: How big should the paychecks be? Who or what will finance them?”

As I write, Senate Bill 0239 creating L3Cs (a low-profit limited liability company that can accept grants) is awaiting Gov. Quinn’s signature. Upon its signing, any social entrepreneur will be able to create an L3C in Illinois.
It’s way past time to stop quacking and launch some new newsrooms for Chicago.

Let’s get everybody who has a stake in Chicago’s news world into a room to advocate and put to laptop their brightest ideas. Then let’s launch a competition to seed the most promising among them for start-up or, if they are already going, sustainable growth.

Let’s create an L3C seed fund for new-style newsrooms. And maybe we’ll find a few hardy news-web entrepreneurs who want to go the L3C route, too.

Come on Chicago. Let’s be bold. We gave the United States its first African American president. Why stop there? Paradigms are made to be shattered.

When I say “Let’s” and “We,” who do I mean? I mean Chicago’s philanthropic community, like the Chicago Community Trust, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the McCormick Foundation. I mean family foundations who care. In the L3C, they take on the greatest risk that they will not receive a financial return. Also in the mix should be local businesses that would find an audience for their advertisements on these news vehicles — they represent the second tier of investment.

But I’m betting the seed fund will get a return, maybe some slow money, but money nonetheless. I’m betting the dozens of local entrepreneurs who have so much skin in the game won’t let anybody down.

Let’s build something new that works.

I say this because I have heard enough and seen enough dimness in the news business to last two careers.

Will the light bulbs over the heads of editorial types ever light? Do they really need to be told why their newspapers are sinking faster than slabs of concrete?

On May 21, yet another group of veteran journalists debated the future of news at the IFC Media Luncheon at the Newberry Library. A smart group of good people including my former boss, Don Hayner from the Sun-Times and Carl Bernstein, yes, he of toppling Richard Nixon fame. The end result? Poetic, eloquent mumblings about what used to be and little understanding of future direction, except for this nugget of wisdom that has been thrown at me twice: duck and cover if you are a journalist over the age of 35.

I asked the panel a question. Are there lessons to be learned from the way big businesses have run their newsrooms that could be useful in the future?

The panel response: blank looks.

This in the town where robber barons sucked the Sun-Times dry and Sam Zell is playing monopoly with the Tribune.

Lessons to be learned? No.

No. Of course, no.

For nearly two decades, newspapers have been challenged to evolve into knowledge-based organizations capable of adapting to the innovations of the Web. Instead of progressing, they’ve been traded as chits in a greedy money-grab game by short-sighted media conglomerates. Their mismanagement has buried the papers with debt and forced record staff layoffs.

The big-time editors have got to know this. Likely they don’t want to publicly admit to the corrosive effects of their industrial-age bosses that view newsroom staff as “things” to cut rather than “knowledge workers” to invest in.

Their policies have resulted in what Jane Stevens so rightly calls Zombie newsrooms.

“Definition of a zombie newspaper: a skeleton staff operating in an organization that provides them little support and no room to make a complete transition to the Web, holding a death-grip on the paper instead of modernizing it.”
Our dwindling newsroom staffs and move to wire copy has had an unintended consequence. In response to the dearth of relevant local news, a new ecosystem of Chicago blogs and news aggregators has developed on the web.

Web journalists operating out of passion found it easy to find stories to report.

There are a million stories in the naked city. And there are a million ways to report them on the Web. We are entering a golden age for journalism — right now.

Chicago has brilliant lights like Adrian Holovaty, who with his partners has created Everyblock, which is a digital age “aha”! How does data delivered by Everyblock — crime, zoning, businesses — change the job description for reporters and editors? Chicago is also home to the much-publicized online non-profit newsroom — the Chi-Town Daily News.

Other sites like those I recently wrote about, LISC’sNewCommunities, and the BeachwoodReporter are run by journalists committed to telling the local stories that the legacy newspapers haven’t had the capacity — or the mission — to report. You can see an extensive list of these types of sites at Community Media Workshop’s site.

As I write, all of these valuable newsrooms — and more –are looking for cash to sustain themselves.

These under-reported and neglected areas of coverage are the bread and butter of tomorrow and many of them are running on vapor.

High-quality local information — which is what readers demand– is something the legacy newsrooms have lost sight of as they have jettisoned staff. News is not throw-away wire copy to wrap around ads but real information that provides insight and history. Editors know this, but what to do when papa corporation needs to pay the shareholders? Look at the collective shrug at the IFC event to understand the answer to that.

A lot of smart people have been sitting round the table at the Chicago Community Trust trying to understand how Chicago’s foundation community can assist. Many of us believe that we must evolve a new way to finance newsrooms and we are looking with hope to the new social enterprise hybrid, the L3C.

As Dean Stackman writes in the Columbia Journalism Review on the failure of the business press to cover its beat and alert the public to the systemic Wall Street’s boiler rooms that led to this “economic winter:”

“Never, ever underestimate the importance of editorial leadership and news ownership, for in them rests the power to push back against structural conflicts and cultural taboos fostered by industry, to clear a space for … journalism to do the job it is clearly capable of, the one job that really needed doing.”
Newsrooms are all about mission, and mission is set at the top.

When newspapers start charging for online news they’ll need to recalibrate their value system. And they’ll need to understand their added value.

The added value for newsrooms online and in paper is local news. Local news that serves the audience. And advertising that delivers information to the targeted audience — and that is local advertising. The businesses that own and operate our new newsrooms will have to understand those values.

There’s a conference June 16 in Minneapolis on Economic Models for News, and several local conferences on Chicago’s news future. You can learn more about these on my blog at www.sallyduros.com.

Carl Bernstein, Chi-Town Daily News, Chicago Community Trust, Chicago Media, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Community Media Workshop, Don Hayner, Everyblock, Future Of News, LISC New Communities, Macarthur Foundation, McCormick Foundation, News Blogs, Newspaper Industry, Newsrooms, The Banyan Project, The-Beachwood-Reporter, Tim Stites, Chicago News

Chicago Media Future Conference

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Date: June 13
Where: Columbia College’s Film Row Cinema (1104 S. Wabash)
When: 1:30pm to 4:45pm.

You can register at the conference site.
I’ll be there and so will just about everybody else who cares about making a living in a Chicago newsroom.

Here’s what the organizers say….

The Conference

It’s probably a little pompous to call something “The Chicago Media Future Conference.” After all, who really can say for certain what the future holds for local print and online news publications? And yet, that’s the name we’ve chosen.

February’s Chicago Journalism Town Hall brought tremendous energy, intellectual curiosity and talent together in one room. The discussion sparked many conversations and ideas, online and offline, about a range of topics. Having been in on many of these discussions, we knew the desire for another event was palpable. So we (Mike Fourcher, Barbara Iverson and Scott Smith) decided to hold our own event focused on one of those discussion topics: How news coverage can successfully migrate to profitable on-line distribution. (See below for bios of all three organizers.)

The Chicago Media Future Conference will be held Saturday, June 13 at Columbia College’s Film Row Cinema (1104 S. Wabash) from 1:30pm to 4:45pm. The FREE event will consist of two 90-minute, moderated, five-person panels, with a 15 minute break in between. Each panel’s topic will be introduced by a 10-minute “scene-setting” informational presentation.

The organizers are Mike Fourcher, founder of Purely Political Consulting; Barbara Iverson, talker, blogger, teacher and analyst of all things citizen journalism and digital technology; and Scott Smith, a Senior Editor at Playboy.com.

New Economic Models for News includes Guild, Newspaper Assn president

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June 16
McNamara Alumni Center
University of Minnesota- East Bank
200 Oak Street SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
8:30-5:00

Conference

Join industry leaders in a discussion about the economics of the news industry in this one-day conference! Speakers and panelists will discuss the mission of newspapers, new ways to structure the newspaper business, new revenue models and many other topics. Co-sponsored by the Newspaper Guild and the Minnesota Journalism Center.

Speakers Include:
Bernie Lunzer, president of the Newspaper Guild
Robert Lang, Mannweiler Foundation and creator of the L3C business model
Jennifer Towery, Peoria Journal Star and president of the Peoria Guild
Joel Kramer, founder and CEO of Minnpost.com
John Sturm, president of the Newspaper Association of America
Steve Yelvington, Morris Digital Works
Ted Venetoulis, Corridor Media Inc., 501c(3) concept
David Shribman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Registration is $25 per person and includes the full conference, breakfast and lunch.
The registration deadline is Tuesday, June 9.
Questions? Please email event coordinator Sarah Saubert
Saube014@umn.edu or call 612-626-1723.

Hotel accommodations are available at the Radisson University Hotel at a discounted rate (including parking) until May 31.
To reserve call 612-379-8888 and ask for the “Economic Models” room block.

Check out this link for a head start on content from the Free Press that will be discussed at the conference.

2009 Chicago Media Future Conference

I found this fascinating quote today:

But in a discussion with a couple of other journalism educators, I heard one of journalism’s dirty little secrets — freelancers are second-class citizens. In a time when it is obvious that most of our students will spend large parts of their careers as freelancers, some mid-career journalists admitted that freelancers were looked down on in the news business. They were paid less. They didn’t command the same respect as “real” reporters who worked full-time. No one used to want to be a freelancer.2009 Chicago Media Future Conference, May 2009

“Freelancers are second-class citizens.” Dirty little secret? Hardly. many freelancers are successful. Many are not. I think the dirty little secret is really that once you are tossed from a news organization it is difficult to find your way back into another one.  And then a journalist takes on that blinking status – is he or isn’t he, really doing journalism? Could there perhaps be some PR clients sneaking into his story ideas?

The real “dirty little secret” that’s not so much a secret anymore is the amount of PR passing for journalism in newspapers and magazines these days, simple rewrite work for the “real” journalists on the payroll. 

I hope, as Barb says, that next newsrooms will hold a place of honor for its hard-working, clear-thinking creative freelancers who have the guts to stick to their calling. And even more than a place of honor, I hope next newsrooms have a big fat budget line for paying them.   

You should read the whole article.