Home

By Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune

Cindy Morgan, daughter of Chicago, now permanent resident of the movies, died last month. She was 72. It’s OK if you’ve never heard of her. She was never a brand-name actress. Or a character actress, flitting in and out of roles, vaguely familiar. She was more like a lot of actors in movie history whose names never appeared above titles. She had medium-sized parts in a couple of well-known movies that never faded out from our heads, and therefore, she never really faded, either. She became like that random stranger in the background of a family vacation photo, incidental to the memory, yet having been in the right place at the right time, forever a part of the family.

Cindy Morgan was born Cynthia Ann Cichorski in Bucktown, in 1951.

Her mother was German, and her father was from Poland and emigrated to Chicago during the Great Depression. After graduating from Northern Illinois University with a communications degree, she mailed out two sets of resumes, some as Cynthia Ann Cichorski, some as Cindy Morgan. Only Cindy Morgan got interviews. Cindy Morgan was sharp and sly and knew how to impress, and Cynthia Ann Cichorski was never heard from again. A few years after kicking around radio and TV stations in Illinois, Morgan left for Los Angeles. She wanted to be in commercials. Maybe even movies. She had no acting experience, yet, eight months later, she auditioned for a comedy.

“‘Animal House’ on a golf course” — that’s how producers described it.

They asked Morgan if had any acting experience or training. She told them she studied at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, though, in reality, Morgan wasn’t sure where the Goodman was. She read for the role of Lacey Underall, the niece of the founder of a snooty country club. The part was small. She was eye catching, more or less. A temptress.

She was hired to smolder, little more.

Except, the way Morgan played Lacey Underall in the movie — her first movie, eventually titled “Caddyshack” — she was sexually nonchalant, confident, smart, skeptical, funny, slinky, tough and indelible. It was more of an achievement than moviegoers knew. The film, made by Harold Ramis, was often improvised and cobbled together, one stoned, hungover day after the next. Asked by Chevy Chase’s bachelor what she does for fun, Lacey says “skinny skiing.” Then adds, “going to bullfights on acid.” She held her own alongside Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight, Bill Murray.

She died alone at her home in Florida, less than an hour from the Ft. Lauderdale golf course where “Caddyshack” was mostly filmed. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement it’s unclear when she died, but the reason was likely natural causes.

Her career never did soar.

Though she landed movies and TV shows less than a year after leaving Chicago, though she became the face of Irish Spring soap commercials, by 1982, during an appearance on “The Tonight Show” to promote the Disney adventure “Tron,” even Johnny Carson didn’t remember she was in “Caddyshack,” then only two years previous.

“Yeah,” she replied, deadpan, with a bit of Lacey, “I was ‘the girl,’ again.”

Morgan played the girl in “Tron.” It would be her last major big-screen appearance. She almost got Kim Cattrall’s role in “Police Academy” and almost got Linda Hamilton’s role in “The Terminator.” But no. Instead, if you watched a lot of junk TV in the 1980s, you saw her occasionally, in “The Love Boat,” “Matlock,” “Falcon Crest,” “The Fall Guy,” “Vega$,” “CHiPs,” usually playing “the girl.” She had champions. Doug Kenney, who cowrote “Caddyshack” and “Animal House,” was convinced of Morgan’s potential for transcending one-note femme fatales. He asked Warner Bros. to screen “To Have and Have Not” for her, so that she could study Lauren Bacall and fine-tune her verbal pingpong. Less than a month after “Caddyshack” opened, Kenney fell to his death in Hawaii.

Morgan — who attended Mother Theodore Guerin High School in River Grove (then an all-girls school, now closed), and was working late in her life on a memoir titled “From Catholic School to Caddyshack” — was rarely comfortable playing a seductress. She stuttered so much at NIU that she was initially placed in a speech class. In Chris Nashawaty’s definitive history, “Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story,” the author compares Morgan’s first scene, at a pool, wearing a black one-piece and high heels, to Jayne Mansfield “swishing and shimmying” in “The Girl Can’t Help It.”

And yet, after the movie became a classic and Morgan was sought by fans and journalists, she would point out that, when that film was shot in 1979, she was legally blind without contacts, a bad swimmer and afraid of heights (but dove from a ladder).

She radiated glamour, laced with a native Chicagoan’s self-deflation.

In another life, she might have been Jennifer Lawrence. As a teenager, for work, Morgan soldered snowmobile circuit boards at a Stewart-Warner manufacturing facility in Chicago, a job she landed because her father was a plant manager. She was a straight-A student at Mother Guerin, yet, uneasy at how few women attended an open house at Illinois Institute of Technology, opted for NIU. She started out as a “weather girl” for a Rockford TV station, but was so bad, she told WGN radio, that after a newscast, her boss would take a Sharpie and write “Pacific” and “Atlantic” on the maps.

Her confidence grew once she returned to Chicago and settled into WSDM-FM (later WLUP “The Loop,” now WCKL). She spent five years as a morning drive-time DJ and engineer, until one day a station manager called during her shift: Overtime was being eliminated. She hung up and, while a record was spinning on the turntable, walked out.

She headed to Los Angeles, certain she would find herself among true professionals — serious filmmakers and intimidating cinematographers and only the finest screenwriters.

She found herself making “Caddyshack,” a seat-of-the-pants production she described as “a wrap party, every night,” a hedonistic ’70s bacchanal. As she told Nashawaty, the morning after Murray’s first day of shooting, she and Murray woke up naked on a beach.

That job, a defining event of her life, was rough.

Without her knowledge, producers invited Playboy to the set to photograph her nude scenes; though still in her 20s, working in Hollywood for the first time, she refused to play along. She also said that after Chase insulted her lack of experience, the two had to be coaxed into scenes together. Even after being hired, she was unsure if she was staying: producers really wanted Bo Derek or a young Michelle Pfeiffer for the role.

What details there are of her death are lonesome. Morgan was last seen alive just before Christmas. She had a roommate who returned home on Dec. 30 and reported a foul smell coming out of Morgan’s bedroom, where police found the actress dead. Details on surviving family were not immediately available.

Sad as that sounds, she always had appreciators. She spent years as a familiar face on the comic book and fan convention circuit, signing autographs, happy to regale fans with behind-the-scenes gossip. She knew, that if the fans happened to be middle-aged men who could quote “Caddyshack” all day long, she was seared into their memories. She liked to say that they would approach her, a woman of a certain age, but soon an image of Lacey Underall would come into focus and Cindy Morgan was almost famous again.

Update: This story has been changed with new information about Morgan’s birthdate and age.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

This story was originally published in the Chicago Tribune on Jan. 10, 2024.

By Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune

John Boyer, as they say around Hyde Park, is UChicago famous.

North of 51st Street, if you were to spot him zipping past on his Schwinn, you might assume he was an eccentric aging hipster, a blur in a white mustache and spindly Ichabod Crane frame, with far-off eyes behind thin eyeglasses and a dark suit too large for his gangly dimensions. But on the University of Chicago campus, where he has been Dean of the College for undergraduates since 1992, he is Mickey Mouse and Mr. Chips in one 6-foot-four-inch package of tweediness, regardless of whether he is wearing tweed. “He’s become a true creature of the University of Chicago,” said John McGreevy, provost at the University of Notre Dame and former dean of that school’s College of Arts and Letters. “I doubt there is anybody alive who functions quite as effectively as a symbol of the University of Chicago as John Boyer does,” said Agnes Callard, associate professor of philosophy at U. of C. “I mean, it’s tough to imagine a universe without a John Boyer.”

Obscure or not, his impact is hard to overstate.

The average dean of an undergraduate college serves about five years. Boyer, who is leaving the post on June 30 to serve as adviser to U. of C. president Paul Alivisatos, has been dean for four decades. He is, in fact, the longest-serving dean in the 133-year history of the Hyde Park institution. He’s been dean for so long because, as he says, if he left the position after 10 years, the College of the University of Chicago would have never climbed out from beneath a growing tangle of train wrecks. Things had gotten ugly.

Boyer, 76, lives on 57th Street, a few blocks from campus.

When he rides to work each day, he moves west toward Woodlawn Avenue, then south to 59th Street, then west again, stopping at Harper Memorial Library, which holds his two offices. As he peddles, he passes Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, as angular and jutting as Darth Vader’s beach house. He passes the Booth School of Business and the spires of Rockefeller Chapel. A historian by training, he sees his daily six-minute commute as a tour of architectural milestones, the offices of 15 Nobel Prize winners for economics, and, in its neo-gothic gravitas, a reminder of the Protestant Reformation.

Every day, same as the last — since he was a graduate student here in the 1960s.

But as immutable as U. of. C. appears, it is not the school it was when he became dean in 1992. Back then — as hard to believe as this may be — the college’s acceptance rate was 77%. Today, it’s 6%. (Callard, who was an undergraduate in the college about the time as Boyer became dean, says she would never have been accepted today.) Back then, the college was losing 13% of its freshman class at the end of its first year. Students were very unhappy, according to the university’s own surveys. As its infamous, unofficial motto reminded: “University of Chicago: The School Where Fun Goes to Die.” Yet at commencement this month, 99% of the class of 2023 graduated. In the 1990s, undergrad enrollment at the college was around 3,500; today it’s 7,000. Some of those stats are mirrored by a national rise in enrollment at highly selective colleges. At least at the University of Chicago, Boyer often gets that credit.

“I found the school rigorous and socially enriching and I think that’s because of Dean Boyer, who proved it’s no longer the place where fun has to die,” said Rodrigo Estrada, who graduated in 2021 on a full-ride Odyssey scholarship and worked at the White House through the Metcalf internship — both of which are programs that Boyer helped create.

“I don’t think it’s too much to say John changed our entire outlook,” said president Alivisatos.

Indeed, Boyer is so popular here, an alumni donation of $130 will buy you a Lego of Boyer on his bicycle. (Boyer himself likes to complain the toy doesn’t move upright nearly as well as he does.) They also sell Boyer scarves and Boyer tote bags; next year, the school plans to open a Jeanne Gang-designed University of Chicago John W. Boyer Center in Paris, as a tribute to Boyer also having revamped the study abroad program.

And so, as you might guess, the months leading to the end of his deanship have been a love fest. Yeah, that is true, Boyer mumbled. Sort of like something out of Soviet Russia.

Last month, on a cool May morning, among the many white tents erected around campus for Alumni Weekend, was a tent dedicated solely to a celebration of John Boyer. Inside, to reflect his also being a leading scholar on the Habsburg Empire and Austrian history, the tent was a sort of coffee house of large copper pots and Viennese pastries, arranged around a chandelier. A video screen recounted Boyer’s achievements. On tables were souvenir white mustaches and stationery asking alumni to write their favorite Boyer memory. The only thing missing from this all-Boyer commemoration was Boyer.

“Is he here?” a staff member asked.

“I don’t see the bike,” another said.

A half-hour later, the bike arrived. Boyer parked it on the grass alongside the tent — kickstand down and unchained, because who would dare steal the bicycle of Dean Boyer? Soon, a line formed for pictures. Boyer, before the white glare of a ring light, smiled and shook, smiled and shook. One after another. Alumni. Current students. Faculty. Parents of students. Nobody noted the controversies, the memories of faculty revolts, the claims that Boyer, in changing the college, was killing a century of tradition.

As he told me later, “Years ago, if you had said that someday this school would want to name buildings after me, I would have probably asked you: ‘So what planet are you from?’”

A week earlier, as school wound down for the year and finals loomed, Boyer sat in a conference room on 59th Street. Spring lawn mowers roared in the distance. He moved a finger around the open lid of his coffee, listening to Metcalf students and Odyssey scholars relay success after success. About 30% of his students are attending on an Odyssey scholarship. They spoke of internships at the Hague, weeks in New Delhi urging Indians off fossil fuels, eye-popping first times in Europe and, frequently, internships in financial companies. Boyer had been on something of a victory lap tour of programs he created — an “ego tour,” one staffer called it — and even he admitted later these kids “were straight out of central casting.” But that didn’t mean they weren’t sincerely happy. They spoke in corporate lingo and recalled “experiences” they “would carry with them” in their careers.

And these students were impressive.

They also pointed toward a question lingering over liberal arts colleges right now. Was this still a university that believed foremost in “the life of the mind,” as that ideal is mentioned often around here, or was it turning into a factory that prepped students for professional futures and large salaries?

Boyer gets asked this a lot.

The most popular major in the college is economics. After all, this is the legendary home of the Chicago school of economic theory. But among Boyer’s changes at the school has been an active drive for more internships and professional experiences. A popular financial markets program at the college now offers a three-year curriculum of training, internships and recruitment lessons. He noted the philosophical elephant in the room and told the assembled: About 25 years ago, similar universities didn’t offer stuff like this. “Some people told me liberal arts colleges should be buying more library books and not investing in this stuff,” he said. There were chuckles. “So, are we endangering the reputation of this school? Are we crossing some imaginary line about not going out into the world?”

No, the students said, shaking their heads at the thought.

But it is a concern, one wrapped up in a steep decline in interest in liberal arts courses nationwide. Rakesh Khurana has been having this conversation with Boyer since Khurana became dean of Harvard College in 2013. “I think we both have seen standard residential four-year college experience, once embedded in liberal arts, become increasingly niche in higher ed, majors become increasingly professional minded — and also this growth in the student who takes five or six years to finish,” he said. “We talk about the role and the function and we share a skepticism of people who recommend online educations for other people’s children but — of course — not their own. And we come back time and again to: How do you renew liberal arts and sciences in a way that speaks to students, parents and children of immigrants? Because the fact is, despite how much many of believe in the liberal arts, they weren’t growing.”

McGreevy at Notre Dame said, indeed, “Everyone is more professionally oriented these days, but John was early at thinking that way. Because he knew parents were anxious.”

Boyer told me that he didn’t feel “professional development is a danger to anything. In my judgment, this is the best way of protecting the liberal arts degree. They can embody the life of the mind and still help them to prepare for their futures. Some people at this school and others might not like to hear that answer, but it is an answer.”

An answer that, in a way, is about balancing history with a need to stay relevant. To an extent, it’s a self-selecting answer: As Callard said, “There was this image here of nerds and weirdos, and that is just not true anymore, because to get into a school like this now, you need to be really polished and conformist. Yet at the same time, we don’t want to become just another Stanford, some highly competitive preprofessional finishing school.

“So I guess we don’t know what our identity is anymore.”

Boyer’s tenure has provided clues. “We will ultimately be judged on how well our students do after college,” he said. “It’s important to take care of faculty and invest in books, but this is a human capital institution. We will be judged on not only how well people think after they leave, but how successful they are. It’s not a binary. It’s not either/or. If I had to start this again, I would do it again. History is full of people who try to live off their history and end up with mediocrity. I have enormous respect for the ‘life of the mind’ rhetoric — what we call our special mission. But Loyola has a special mission, too. I went there and Jesuits spoke of improving society for the glory of God. Harvard talks about training civic leaders of the future. Every school has a story it tells about itself. OK, but what’s the next sentence?”

John Boyer grew up in Roseland, alongside Pullman. His parents were “lifelong blue collar centrist Democrats who hated a lot of Democrats, but would never ever vote Republican.” His mother was a secretary at a nearby steel mill; his father drove a truck and worked as an electrician and repairman. John graduated high school in 1964 just as area steel factories went into decline. Most of his friends had planned to work in those mills. But as a child, Boyer devoured encyclopedias his mother bought at supermarkets for 50 cents a volume. He was always headed to college, but having graduated from a Catholic high school (Mendel Catholic Prep, which closed in 1988) he had a choice of DePaul or Loyola. Looking outside Chicago “was not a part of our mental world.”

He studied history at Loyola and met his future wife there, Barbara Boyer, a Chicago teacher and novelist. He planned to continue and do his masters at Columbia University in New York, but in the spring of 1968, Columbia was being occupied by Vietnam protesters. To receive a college deferment and avoid being sent to Vietnam, he went with his backup school: The University of Chicago. He didn’t know that much about it: “It wasn’t quite hostile to working-class South Siders, but it did resemble another world.”

As the largest landowner in Hyde Park (which is still true), it resembled a city-state within Chicago, albeit one that, as Boyer learned later, “didn’t really start thinking of itself as an intellectual hothouse until the 1930s and ‘40s, with (president) Robert Hutchins.” When the school was founded, social mobility had been a primary goal. But with Hutchins, who famously pulled the school out of the Big Ten Conference and killed its football program, “the ‘life of the mind’ rhetoric, which had always had substance, became a major branding strategy — an extremely successful one.” But by the 1960s, that translated into a university that resembled more of a Ph.D. factory than a traditional college experience. The average U. of C. student, he said, “was probably a 29-year-old graduate student.” Even today, of its 17,000 students, more than half are graduate students.

Boyer, then and now, was a hybrid: He was an intellectual who recognized college as a tool for social mobility. He joined the history faculty in 1975. Ralph Austen, a professor emeritus in the department who occasionally taught with Boyer, recalls: “John was a very good teacher and extremely solid member (of the history department), but he also arrived here from Loyola! And was from the South Side! None of which is typical of the background here. It made some of the older, senior faculty suspicious. They assumed he wasn’t, you know, cultured enough for this place. Later, some faculty said he was dumbing down everything. I guess you could say John had to prove himself. So he did — no problem.”

Boyer’s office on the sixth floor of Harper overlooks the Midway Plaisance and Woodlawn. The best way to reach it is to have a key that opens an elevator to the sixth floor (which is why he keeps another office of the second floor). The windows in the office are curled stone, marked by knife-like medieval ornament. On his desk are photos of his nine grandchildren held proudly by his three children. On a meeting table in a corner are two busts, one of Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, one of Napoleon, the latter a tourist tchotchke. He turns it over to reveal an orange price tag ($14) still stuck to the bottom.

The office was willed to him, more or less, by its previous tenant, Edward Levi, a Chicago native who had been President Gerald Ford’s attorney general then returned here to run the law school. We’re surrounded by walls of books, floor to ceiling, several by Boyer himself — on the history of radicalism in 19th-century Vienna, the history of the Austrian empire, the history of the University of Chicago. He’s explaining to me that this is where he comes to write “huge books no one but my wife and three others read” when Chris Skrable, executive director of the Chicago Studies program, comes in and sits down.

“Nonsense!” he says to Boyer. “I read your Chicago book!’

Boyer waits for more.

“But OK, not the Austria book,” Skrable adds.

Boyer cuts to the chase. He wants to know how the Chicago Studies program is going; he helped launch it a decade ago. Once a semester, Boyer leads a bike tour of the South Side to get cloistered students into the city. The Chicago Studies program is more; what began as civic engagements only tangental to the curriculum, now offers dozens of courses. “Do you think this an easy sell these days?” Boyer asks Skrable.

Registration for these classes, Skrable says, is “disproportionate” to what class sizes can handle. A class on the history of Black Chicago, for instance: “You can’t get near it.” Skrable tells Boyer he would like to study if there is a connection between students who take these classes and choose to stay in Chicago.

The office door opens.

“Emily!” Skrable says.

“Sorry I’m late. I was in the downstairs office!” says Emily Lynn Osborn, deputy dean of the Office of Research and Teaching Innovations. She takes a seat. Skrable tells her they were discussing how engaging with the city itself might become part of the curriculum, how “organizing on 63rd Street or chasing an internship downtown” has the potential to challenge a student’s assumptions. Osborn nods: “You do want a kind of nimbleness, right? We can talk professional development versus liberal arts all day, but the best way, broadly, is to make (students) nimble. I mean, we do not know what the world will be.”

“Besides, once ChatGPT moves in here …” Skrable says.

Boyer, with a smile, adds: “I’m on the sixth floor. The elevator doesn’t always work.”

Chicago Studies, as Skrable described later, is a fine example of Boyer thriving for years despite making big, sometimes sweeping decisions. “He didn’t see a department like this as public relations or want it subverted for those goals. He never told me that, but I think he wanted it firmly part of the college to protect it.” Among the university’s earliest missions was engaging with the city to learn. Skrable’s department is now in the midst of a long project on urban renewal “and who it crushed. I doubt our Office of Civic Engagement is thrilled, but then, thanks to John, I don’t answer to them.

“Some disagree with John about everything, but then when you have been John Boyer for this long, you can make executive decisions without a whole lot of input from others.”

As Boyer explains: Soon after becoming dean in 1992, he was attending a conference and speaking with an older dean of another college who said what became a kind of personal mantra. “He told me, ‘My best advice is do your job, don’t try to save your job.’”

That came in handy during the first years of his tenure.

The then-university president asked for a revamping of The Core, a good name for what others call “the guts of Hyde Park,” the foundation of every U. of C. undergraduate education. Created in 1931, The Core was requirements — broadly, classical subjects like civilization, math, languages — that, by the 1980s, became more than half what a student needed to graduate. Boyer proposed shrinking The Core to two years and filling the remaining two years with electives, professional development, dual majors, study abroad. What sounds like a plan already fairly common at many other universities became a five-year fight between Boyer and faculty who loudly declared he was destroying a century of Hyde Park tradition.

“Basically, I felt (The Core) was too much and could be made smaller and leave room for other studies, too,” he recalls. “We were telling ourselves stories about our virtues that simply were not true. Some people cherished that world. It had been successful. But 13% of freshman were dropping out. You have parents moving kids into dorms and then moving them out months later. You had unhappy kids. Some thought they wanted a ‘place of the mind’ only to find out, when they arrived, that excluded a social life.”

The Core is now about two years of classic courses. In 1992, the college was receiving less than 6,000 applicants a year. Today, the pool of possible freshmen is about 38,000.

“We would be in a precarious state if The Core remained the way it was,” said Eric Slauter, deputy dean of humanities at the college. “We’d be drifting away from general ed toward a focus on majors. Now English and economics may be the most popular dual major. What happened in the 1990s really created a sustained place for liberal arts. I think that’s because John decided to strip away our pieties and myths.”

Twenty years ago, before the university opened a $51 million athletic center, Boyer was in San Diego at an alumni lunch. “This woman stops me: ‘I heard you’re building an athletic center. Does that mean you’re getting rid of The Core?’ To build an athletic center was now a signal of dumbing things down. I said, ‘I think we can swim in the morning and study Heidegger in the afternoon.’ She was only somewhat relieved.”

At the end of the Ego Tour, Boyer met with students from the study abroad program. They filled the room and left their backpacks in a tidy row against a wall and regaled him with stories from Spain, Greece, Italy, of going on scholarship, of cultural differences and of playing the designated American in a group. Study abroad programs, nationwide, have boomed, but at U. of C., studying abroad hadn’t been big until relatively recently. As Boyer tells it, the attitude was: If a student made it to Hyde Park, why ever leave?

Their world was here.

Partly because of Boyer’s advocacy, partly because of trends in higher education, that parochialism vanished. More than 60% of the student body now does some overseas study; in 1992, less than 50 students total took part. The program has since expanded into Marrakech, Cairo, Dakar. Boyer took its success as one more thing to cross off his to-do list.

He began an actual list 30 years ago, just after becoming dean. I asked if there was anything left for him to cross off. He couldn’t think of anything. The next dean — Melina Hale, a vice provost and professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy — will develop a plan of action soon, he said. “Ask admissions what three questions they get from parents, and one of them is always ‘Is it safe?’ The issue of security within the city will be inevitable for her.”

As for Boyer, he will be less visible around campus. As an adviser to the university president, he will be surrounded daily by the school that he changed — a school that will change again, and again. “I hope some things I did don’t get undone,” he said, then shrugs. Because, as any historian will tell you, that’s history.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

This story was originally published in the Chicago Tribune on June 30, 2023.

By Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune

Bert I. Gordon, who died earlier this spring at 100, was the absolute worst filmmaker who ever lived. Or so some might argue. You’ve heard Ed Wood was the worst. Or Roger Corman. Or maybe Michael Bay. But Gordon was not lousy for one or two decades. He was a terrible filmmaker for about 60 years, and when he got around to writing his memoir in 2010 (“The Amazing Colossal Worlds of Mr. B.I.G.: An Autobiographical Journey”), it was the absolute worst book ever written by a filmmaker. To borrow from the lurid posters for his movies, his talent, such as it was, screamed: Amazing! Towering! Beyond Description! Just not in a good way. You could say I’m unkind. But there’s poetry to this life: Bert I. Gordon was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, seven years after Orson Welles was born in Kenosha. That’s the universe pranking us.

Or God laughing.

Before his name fades from memory (Gordon died within days of the Oscars this past March, yet somehow didn’t make the in memoriam), before his couple dozen feature films get submerged forever into the digital abyss of YouTube (the best place to catch them today), someone needs to deliver an honest appreciation of the man behind “The Amazing Colossal Man,” “War of the Colossal Beast,” “Attack of the Puppet People,” “Empire of the Ants,” “King Dinosaur,” “Village of the Giants,” “Earth vs. The Spider,” “The Cyclops,” “Picture Mommy Dead” and “Satan’s Princess.”

Because everyone is mediocre at something.

But to be singularly terrible is a feat.

Gordon was so bad at his job that “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ used eight of his films. At times, he seemed to be a veritable co-creator of the cult show. As one of its robot hecklers quipped: The “I.” in Bert I. Gordon probably stood for “I am so ashamed.” In fact, it stood for Ira, and Gordon, to judge by the persistence of his output and total lack of irony in his book, was anything but ashamed of his filmography and abilities. Later in life, he would tell interviewers he was never a fan of MST3K. He believed in his talents.

You’d have to if you made “Beginning of the End.”

As a teenager, on weekends, Gordon would take the train from Kenosha to Chicago, stop for his accordion lessons, then sneak off with a 35 mm still camera into the burlesque shows in the Loop. You know, to get comfortable with making art. Later, after he got a 16 mm film camera for his 16th birthday, his father would drive him to the North Side and ask newsreel companies if they could spare any slivers of unused film.

In his 30s, at his creative peak in 1957, well on his way to drive-in immortality, he made “Beginning of the End,” which plays like a salute to Chicago. It tells the story of mutated grasshoppers that scramble out of Texas into the Midwest. They make fast work of the Illinois National Guard, then Paxton. Then they invade Chicago. Marines arrive. Surely, it’s too cold for grasshoppers in Chicago, a commander asks. (“Not this time of the year,” comes the reply.) Surely, we nuke Chicago now, to save humanity. (“You can’t drop an atom bomb on Chicago,” is the answer.) So, Peter Graves, a decade before starring in TV’s “Mission: Impossible,” hatches a plan: Somebody (just not him) should sit in a PT boat off the coast of Lake Michigan and broadcast a grasshopper mating call, luring the monsters out of the city and drowning them.

It works!

But not before Gordon commits 73 minutes of cinematic faux pas: As Chicago is evacuated, stock footage of Lake Shore Drive shows only a light rush hour. There are images of State Street devoid of anyone (and now reminiscent of the pandemic). Gordon took time to shoot on location in Lincoln Park, asking extras to flee his giant grasshoppers, but the scene is so awkward he appeared to leave in the second before he yelled “OK, now run!” Still, the resulting film shows a knowledge of Chicago geography only a local would appreciate: When monsters attack, they hit the Museum of Science and Industry then head for the Loop.

The thing is, for years Gordon was an independent filmmaker, and even after he worked for MGM and American International Pictures (a drive-in assembly line and home of Roger Corman), he worked cheap. He didn’t have money for any innovative Ray Harryhausen stop-motion (“The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”), so instead of destroying a miniature Chicago, he bought hundreds of grasshoppers and postcards of Chicago landmarks. He had the images blown-up. Then he placed the bugs on the pictures and cut between shots of the military and shots of the bugs crawling over a static image of the Wrigley Building. When the soldiers hit their targets, Gordon would tap the postcard and grasshoppers would fall from the building, so to speak.

It looks as bad as it sounds.

Still, as a child, I loved it and had regular nightmares about giant, jittery grasshoppers. Later, I read an interview with the indie filmmaker John Sayles, who recounted his own sleepless nights after seeing this.

Gordon’s movies were as stone-faced and indelible as a bad dream. They were marked by beach parties and enormous barking canine heads and pale desert expanses and scientists brooding. They were also constructed of ‘50s atomic nightmares and a fear of science run amok. He gave us giant chickens, giant rats, giant spiders, giant wasps, giant cows, giant produce, giant teenagers and a giant named Glenn. (Forrest Ackerman, founder of the monthly mag Famous Monsters of Filmland, inspired by Gordon’s initials, gave him a nickname: “Mr. B.I.G.”)

His movies tended to lose money, but for a period in the late ‘50s through the early ‘60s, he was a minor box office draw, synonymous with drive-ins. By the time I was a kid, he was a UHF channel god and familiar credit on weekend marathons with names like Creature Double Feature.

Now and then Gordon would get a review that admired his imagination and spunk, but he rarely received the serious-minded consideration that directors received. Roger Ebert once found a perfect way to write about Gordon. His review of “The Food of the Gods,” Gordon’s loose H.G. Wells adaptation, doesn’t offer a single outward opinion, just simply describes the plot, pausing only to insert dialogue such as: “When you’re a rat and you suddenly weigh 150 pounds, you have got to learn all over again how to swim!”

As Ebert wrote of another deliriously memorable B-flick (not made by Gordon): When they no longer make movies like this, a little light will go out of the world.

Indeed, though Gordon’s legacy may well be generations of knowingly cheesy flicks like “Sharknado,” the real deal generally comes with sincerity and pride. In his memoir, Gordon remembers his giant grasshoppers looking pretty scary and convincing as they scaled Chicago. Though the book was published only 13 years ago, long into our contemporary age of computer-generated special effects, Gordon wrote that if “Beginning of the End” was made these days: “The live grasshoppers would be ‘filmed’ against a blue or green screen backing, and then, in the computer, combined with the actors’ live-action scenes.”

Oh, Bert. No one ever told you, did they?

He was forever of a generation that still constructed its fantasies by hand, using tangible materials. I don’t note this to be snarky or cruel, but to remind you persistence doesn’t always make room for good sense. It’s a quality shared by the very finest filmmakers of memorable junk: They were unrelenting and doe-eyed. There’s a scene in Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” when the director of “Plan 9 From Outer Space” (played by Johnny Depp) is on the phone with a Hollywood executive. We only hear Wood’s side of the conversation: “Really? Worst movie you ever saw? Well, my next one will be better!” Gordon, like Wood, made movies because he had to. Nothing slowed him. He just happened to be bad at it. Not that he wasn’t warned repeatedly: Gordon once said a friend told him he had no business writing screenplays. A Universal executive, upon meeting him, told him, gently, to go back to the Midwest, immediately. Gordon wrote in his book: “There wasn’t one friend or relative” who supported his dream of moving to Los Angeles and being a filmmaker.

Did Bert I. Gordon listen?

We would be poorer if he had.

We wouldn’t have “The Cyclops,” in which a woman searches for her vanished fiance, only to find he has become a 30-foot-tall cyclops on a deserted island. We wouldn’t have “Earth vs. The Spider,” which promises armageddon only to deliver a bug that never makes it beyond New Mexico. Gordon, who was enamored with the carnival barkers and freak shows that visited Kenosha each summer, once shot a movie in “Perceptovision,” which was not a real thing. He made “King Dinosaur” using a cast of four and a live iguana for the title monster. When his salad days slowed in the mid-60s, he tried children’s movies, police procedurals, sex comedies. He didn’t direct his final movie (“Secrets of a Psychopath”) until he was 93.

It was not an inconsequential career. You probably know some of his movies even if you haven’t seen one: “The Amazing Colossal Man” alone (his biggest hit) left some of our most recycled images of midcentury black-and-white kitsch. Not to mention, its story of a man caught in a nuclear blast who goes mad and grows large, sounds suspiciously like Marvel’s Hulk, created not soon after.

A little political trivia: Alfred C. Baldwin III, a lookout for the Watergate burglars, was so engrossed by a TV showing Gordon’s “Attack of the Puppet People,” he failed to notice the police on the scene until it was too late. (“Attack of the Puppet People” itself, about a toy-maker whose dolls plot an escape, even plays like a precursor to “Toy Story.”)

Gordon also worked with real actors — Ron Howard, Joan Collins, Ida Lupino, Beau Bridges — though usually at the start or a low point in a career. In 1972, he even came full circle and cast homie Orson Welles as a cult leader who raises the dead in “Necromancy.” While they were shooting, Gordon was instructed by Welles’ entourage: Never ever mention “Citizen Kane” or even say the words “Citizen Kane.”

That was probably wise.

What Gordon offered was not exactly filmmaking, but, in retrospect, something like the raw materials of our cultural future. He was not stylish, clever or original; shooting low to the ground so a monster looks big was his signature move. But he left blueprints for Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron and others to flesh out. His was an imagination on a tight budget, primed for a Cold War ecosystem of drive-ins, horror comics and nuclear nightmares. As we head into a new summer movie season, remember Bert I. Gordon. If you have ever doubted your own talents, be inspired. He really did think those grasshoppers looked scary.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

This story was originally published in the Chicago Tribune on May 5, 2023.

By Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune

Thomas Kong, who died on Monday at 73, was the owner of Kim’s Corner Food in Rogers Park, a longtime bodega-style convenience store that doubled as a kind of personal art epiphany and chaotic argument of art for art’s sake. He didn’t start making his works until 15 years ago, when he bought Kim’s and realized how depressing its shelves looked. So he cut shapes and objects out of construction paper and cardboard and covered the cold metal. Then he kept going, covering beverage coolers and chairs, ceiling beams and windows. Even the outside facade. Soon, his art covered every surface.

Within a few years, the charm and oddness from this unassuming geyser of creativity found admirers. By the time S.Y. Lim, executive director of the 062 Gallery in Bridgeport, contacted Kong in 2018 to do an exhibition of his work, the bodega held some 10,000 pieces.

“It’s up to around 30,000 by now,” she said. “You would walk in and there would be just art everywhere. Which sounds confusing. And it was confusing, but also very pleasant.”

Once, she got around to asking: Why are you doing all this?

I like it, he replied.

Kong rarely explained his compulsion to make art out of the materials around him. But he made at least a dozen works a day, recycling whatever spare packaging and shipping containers came into Kim’s Corner Food. During the pandemic, “his work didn’t stop, we’d get several texts a day of pictures of new pieces,” said Nathan Smith, managing director of the Roman Susan gallery in Rogers Park, which included Kong’s art in about a dozen different exhibits over the past decade. Kong worked 12-hour days, seven days a week, always. He worked so much that when the Chicago Design Museum organized an exhibit of his art last year, Kong didn’t come to the opening. He couldn’t leave the store.

“I never knew how (his art making) started,” said Edward Kim, a nephew, “but I spent a lot of time in the car with him, especially this past year, driving him back and forth from doctor’s visits, and he definitely had a way of seeing life differently than the rest of us.”

Kim said his uncle “definitely” thought of himself as a working artist.

Whenever you walked into the store, you would find him at the counter register, hunched over new work, white hair hanging, flanked by a tape dispenser and Elmer’s glue, scissors in hand, and a cigarette stuck between his lips. His son, Marshall Kong, a radiologist who lives in San Diego, said his father died of complications from leukemia.

Marshall asked his father to work less. “But he didn’t want to.” Marshall asked him to quit smoking. “He wouldn’t. Since I was 7, it was a struggle. We fought over it a lot.”

He said he never did know much about his father’s art, only that “he did not arrive in Chicago with aspirations to become an artist or anything like that. He came here as an immigrant with an amazing work ethic, did odd jobs and became a business owner.”

Thomas Kong was born in North Korea in 1950, just before the start of the Korean War. His Korean name was Tae Kwon. As he recalled to the Chicago online magazine Borderless, when he was an infant, his father was kidnapped by North Korean communists and murdered; his family was instructed where the body had been dumped for retrieval. Soon after, his mother loaded Tae Kwon and his five sisters into a boat and escaped to a small island off the Korean peninsula, where they lived for three years before moving to South Korea. Kong said he never took a single art class. He had no formal art training. He attended college in Seoul and studied English literature, showing a particular fondness for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Arthur Miller. For several years he worked as a flight attendant for Korean Airlines. Then at 27, he left for Chicago on a family visa, encouraged by one of his sisters, who had moved here to become a nurse.

Initially, after moving to the Midwest, he was embarrassed at being an English lit major unable to speak much English. He worked at a gas station and did odd jobs. He also started a small shoe repair business in Hammond, Indiana. That blossomed into another shoe repair business in Skokie. And a liquor store in Burbank. And a dry cleaning service in Streamwood. He lost money when those businesses declined. In 2006, he bought Kim’s Corner Food from another Korean transplant, retaining the store’s name.

Though Kim’s is at street level — specifically, on the corner of Estes and Glenwood avenues — it felt subterranean. So much art covered the windows, the light was mostly artificial and a haze of constant cigarette smoke lent the small space a bit of surreality.

Kong would seem shy and guarded at his counter, smiling fast, then turning back to his art. When Lim of 062 Gallery first met him, she said he didn’t seem to “have other Korean friends in Chicago.” Being Korean herself, they would speak Korean exclusively. At the peak of the pandemic, when Kim’s needed merchandise, she would grocery shop for items he could resell. She also began to display his art in her gallery, paying him for anything she showed. She took it to art fairs in Tokyo and Taipei. She gave him the full proceeds of anything that sold — though he rarely wanted more than $20 for a piece. At Kim’s, if you wanted one of his works, Kong often asked only that you pay whatever you could afford.

For years he kept a small gallery at the back of the store, mainly to display other local artists. His own work, meanwhile, was shown often in local art spaces — and in galleries throughout Asia. He became a cult favorite in Rogers Park and the Chicago art scene. He gathered a small degree of serious art-world consideration. A critic for the online art forum Hyperallergic once described Kim’s mash of commercial items and handmade art as “a graveyard of the American Dream where the dead are reborn.” Tanner Woodford, founder of Chicago Design Museum, saw themes of mass production and climate change in Kong’s recycled pieces. “He saw the beauty in the most mundane thing right in front of you, then found any way to be inspired and flip it into his own vernacular art.”

“What was inspiring about Thomas was, like many artists, being creative was necessary to his well-being,” said Nathan Smith of Roman Susan. “It drove his days. He worked in this really meditative, almost prayerful way, and believed he was beautifying his world.”

That was reflected in the “Be Happy” stickers he attached to his art and most of the surfaces of the store. He saw it as a tidy, two-word summation of Jesus’ proverb-like Beatitudes.

Sandy Kong, his wife, said Thomas was attracted to religion 30 years ago, “when he was going through rough periods. The businesses were not doing well. He was dealing with vices (including a drinking problem), which got to the point where he wanted to change.” He converted to Christianity through a brother-in-law who worked as a Seventh-day Adventist pastor, though Kong saw himself as more of a denomination-less Christian.

“Thomas had a very difficult life,” Sandy Kong said. “But he worked hard and eventually he found a lot of pride and happiness in making his art.” As a way of clarifying the uncertain future of all that work, Lim began a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for Kong’s funeral and maintain Kim’s. (Within hours of launching, it had already raised more than $2,000.)

A funeral will be held Wednesday at the Smith-Corcoran Funeral Home (6150 N. Cicero Ave.) in Sauganash, with visitation at 10 a.m. and a service at 11 a.m. Kong is survived by his wife Sandy; son Marshall; five grandchildren; five older sisters, and many nieces and nephews.

He also left behind tens of thousands of small handmade reminders of restless creativity, in a quiet corner bodega, tucked beside the Red Line, on a sleepy stretch of Rogers Park.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

This story was originally published in the Chicago Tribune on May 2, 2023.

By Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune

This is a love story. But like many, it’s long and lopsided. Kathy Lyons loves writing romance novels. And the romance novel industry — which claims a sizable percentage of the fiction bought in this country — only loves Kathy Lyons when it’s convenient. You might consider this an unhealthy relationship. Or at least, a long-term codependent affair, marked by frustration and only a glimmer of the exhilaration true love promises.

Kathy Lyons, faithful scribe of Champaign, definitely would.

The romance between Kathy Lyons and the romance novel industrial complex is so complicated, fickle and undying — albeit typical for many romance novelists — she has changed her name several times. She has remade herself into what she thinks the romance novel business wants her to be. Not once. She was born Katherine Greyle and first wrote as Katherine Greyle. When she married, she became Kathy Grill, but “Grill” wasn’t especially romantic. So she wrote as Kathy Lyons. Playing off her Chinese heritage, she began writing books as Jade Lee. Last year, she eased into diversifying her resume and started writing children’s books, which meant adding Cat Chen to her aliases. She learned to rebrand: Jade Lee uses green and gold colors in her marketing; Kathy Lyons uses red and white. In a genre of vampires, unexpected babies, bodice rippers and frontier librarians, she’s even tried a few grizzly-bear paranormal romances.

She started 25 years ago, and she hasn’t stopped.

Since 1998, she’s has been on USA Today’s bestseller list for one week. That’s her high-water mark. She has written more than 80 books and sold about a million copies. She has fans and the respect of peers. In return, publishers have remained mostly indifferent. Which makes her average for this profession. Sara Reyes, who runs Fresh Fiction, a popular online gathering spot for romance readers, knows Kathy well. “She is very typical for this world. She hangs in there. She knocks out two or three books a year. Sometimes more. She does not get much notice but she’s also the backbone of a business, providing stories readers look for. How many of these writers can support families doing this — that’s another thing. But they are chasing a dream, and I hate to use that phrase churning it out, but it is true.”

Kathy Lyons, from her home in an upper-middle-class subdivision of Champaign, writes 2,000 words a day. Roughly eight pages of a novel. She does not allow herself days off.

She says, bluntly, that if it wasn’t for her husband’s salary — he’s the vice president of a large company that manages apartment complexes across the Midwest — what she makes annually on her romance writing would place her uncomfortably below the poverty line. She budgets about $15,000 a year for promotion — advertising, author appearances — all of which comes out of her pocket. Because many of her books now appear first as e-books, a typical one will sell for only about $2.99. A standard pricing scheme for a new romance series can be even queasier: The first book often goes for $.99, the next is $1.99, and so on.

And yet romance publishing, as we know it — just poke your head into an airport bookshop if you’re not familiar — is a booming $1.4 billion business that, according to NPD Group research data, is also the fastest growing category of publishing. The genre is thought now to make up about 25% of all fiction books sold.

Not that being an author in a growth industry makes it easier.

Kathy’s story will sound familiar to anyone who makes a living on their imaginations. Yet being a romance novelist is a special hell. The die is cast: No matter the story, a happy ending is required. Or some version of happy. Industry jargon distinguishes a HEA (Happily Ever After) from a HFN (Happily For Now). According to a 2021 study of 4,270 romance novelists conducted by a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, 17% earn north of $100,000 a year, but the median income is closer to $10,000 a year. Major successes — such as the “Bridgerton” novels of Julia Quinn that became a smash Netflix series, and the sorta romance novels of Colleen Hoover (the biggest-selling author of 2022) — fuel hopes, but odds are long. So much so that a Tennessee romance writer made headlines last month after emerging on Facebook two years after faking her own death; the pressure drove her to it, she told the New York Times. Indeed, to stay relevant, Kathy needs to write a new book every three months.

“The thing is, (romance novelists) who take off often have nothing to do with talent and mostly to do with luck,” said Brenda Chin, a former editor at Harlequin who edited Kathy’s work at three publishing houses. “Kathy tries different things to make her stand out, she has the goods, but a publisher puts money behind a few people and if you’re not one of them? You’re in trouble. I’d say 90 percent of (romance writers) fit into that. On the other hand, ones I know who have made it are exhausted. They can’t keep up.”

The first time I heard the name Kathy Lyons was about eight years ago. I called a novelist in Champaign and said I was interested in writing about the reality of a romance novelist, but she was headed out of town. Her novels had taken off at last and she was moving. It was February and the “Fifty Shades of Grey” franchise was hot. She mentioned Kathy, who, being thrown a bone by a more successful friend, liked the idea:

“Holy (expletive)!” she shouted into the phone when I called.

Then quieter, she added: “Sorry, but holy (expletive).”

Kathy isn’t thrown enough bones. When we first met, her publisher at the time had asked her to write about shape-shifting grizzly bears who seduce bakers and accountants. Werewolves were feeling passe. Her editor said, think of it like Smokey the Bear’s hotter cousin.

Kathy was not excited. One afternoon soon after, I visited Champaign. We were in her kitchen and her husband, Dave Grill, came in wearing a short-sleeve polo and, without a word, moved toward a small mound of cat vomit and began cleaning. He asked what we were talking about. She had just decided not to be competitive, she said.

“OK,” he said, having heard some version of it before.

“And also, I have decided to stop doing this for financial gain.”

“Huh,” he said, cat puke in hand.

“From now on, I will write because I like to write.” Her voice broke a bit and she stood and walked to the front door and adjusted the American flag in front of the house then returned to the table. “Dave,” she said, “I guess I decided — sexy grizzly bears? Really?”

He nodded, he knew.

“I mean, if I’m going to continue, I’m going to have fun for once.”

Eight years later, having put her story aside several times, I realize I have heard some version of Kathy’s “I’m done, I’m doing it my way” speech four or five times. Dave has heard it more. But Kathy will not quit. She doesn’t want to quit. She turns 60 this spring. She recently signed a three-book deal to write children’s titles for an imprint of Penguin Random House. She has a multigenerational (non-romance) novel on the burner. But every time she quits the romance game, she returns. The most recent time was during the pandemic. She retired from the business entirely. That lasted six days.

“That time, I had my come-to-Jesus moment,” she said. “I hadn’t broken out at any publisher. I played in historical romance. I played in paranormal romance. I played in contemporary. I played in mystery, which I am bad at. I did a straight fantasy. But I missed romance.” She thought of leaning into Asian romance. “But what story do I tell? I’m Hoosier on my dad’s side and Chinese on my mom’s.” This was before the #OwnVoices movement swept publishing, insisting that authors from underrepresented groups write characters of their own backgrounds. Kathy, as Jade Lee, wrote historical romance set in China.

“But nobody bought them just because they were representative,” she said.

Her long-term problem was the same as nearly every writer in the genre: When every book in your section of a bookstore looks literally like every other book, how do you distinguish yourself? Since she started, she’s written sports romance, regency romance, time-travel romance. She’s written “50 Ways to Ruin a Rake” and “One Rouge at a Time,” “Lady Scot” and “Lord Scot,” “Wedded in Sin” and “Wedded in Scandal,” “Her Wicked Surrender” and “His Wicked Seduction,” “What the Bride Wore” and “What the Groom Wants.” She did, in fact, finish six grizzly bear romances, including “For the Bear’s Eyes Only” and “The Bear Who Loved Me.” When her Jade Lee persona gained some traction — especially her Tigress series — she wrote “White Tigress,” “Hungry Tigress,” “Desperate Tigress,” “Burning Tigress,” “Cornered Tigress,” “Tempted Tigress.”

Sales-wise, there’s been some smoldering, but no raging infernos.

Her husband finally said, “Honey, look, just break even.”

The cool thing, he told me, is that “Kathy has writers who look up to her now as a mentor. She has author friends who aren’t even as successful as she is. But I think early on there was more optimism about this. Now I tell her: Write what you want, don’t worry.”

Easy for Dave to say.

Kathy, who took her first steps into writing romance around 1988, has been trying to write a happy ending for herself ever since. It took about a decade just to get published. She’s been doing this so long that her two daughters, now adults, are no longer easily embarrassed teenagers in high school, horrified that their mother writes erotic fiction.

If everyone in the world could meet Kathy Lyons, they would want to read Kathy Lyons. She’s optimistic and cheerful and quick, even when she recognizes things are trending downward. Her dark eyes water behind big smiles. Her hair is practical and she seems mom-like, but very hard to keep up with; before blowing her knees out, she was a pro racquetball player. The first time we met in person, she was seated in her car, outside the offices of Sourcebooks in Naperville, a large independent publisher. She was going to visit her editor. It was winter, her windows were rolled up and though we had only spoken on the phone, I knew it was her: Her car was overloaded with boxes of books and she waved her hands and laughed, presumably talking to someone on a phone. Later she said she was talking to herself, practicing arguments.

Inside the building, editors, marketing people, everyone Kathy encountered, they were polite and harried. They had given her a fair amount of promotion, but her books were selling less than 3,000 copies each. Kathy felt a chill. She wanted them to just come out and say they were done with her, but no one did. She pitched them good ideas, but she figured, at this point, any new book ideas needed to be brilliant.

A year later she was dropped by Sourcebooks.

Deb Werksman, a close friend of Kathy’s who edits fiction at Source, said she cringes at that word — “dropped.” She said her door is always open to new pitches. But she always sensed Kathy “wanted to write more deeply, in a more literary way. She’s a pretty strong writer and a natural storyteller, and there’s something more in there.” At the same time, “an author also has to think of their brand and what they are known for.”

Lyons went to the romance publisher Entangled, “but they would give me requirements on the number of sexual scenes I had to include. A 70,000-word book needed at least five. And I never could do five. The point was that any conflict would be worked out sexually. When I was starting (in the business), a typical Regency romance was all above the neck. By the time I did my first Regency, everything was super sexual. ‘Fifty Shades’ changed the math. I do know how to write sexy, but bumping and grinding gets tired.”

One Saturday afternoon she settled back in her chair with her laptop. Her husband sat on the couch reading the newspaper. She pecked at keys. Stopped, pecked, stopped.

“Dave! I don’t get it,” she shouted finally. “I don’t get spanking.”

“Honey,” he said, “I have no need to spank you.”

“I don’t mean you! I mean these books — I can’t write this (expletive).”

“Well, why do you need to?”

“Because I like money.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “we have enough money and you don’t need to write spanking?”

That’s love, right there.

They own a nice ranch home in a neighborhood that people in witness protection would consider kind of ordinary. They are doing fine. Kathy has some inherited wealth from her father, who made a fortune on real estate and shopping centers. She can afford to write broad romance fiction with nuance that doesn’t hem to the same formula book after book. She knows how to keep the door shut during sex scenes, as she puts it. But she prefers to keep it open. She is not much for the Clean-and-Wholesome niche, “the usual meet-cute, antic, antic, antic, then ‘I love you.’” She likes goofy heroines and romance that involves mutual support beyond the crisis of the moment. She doesn’t write Sugar Daddies or S&M heroines. Her typical character is an outcast who will endure a lot but eventually find her home.

But Kathy’s take on romance doesn’t sell quite as well.

Around her workspace at home, taped to walls and desk tops are reminders to post on social media, reminders of self-care, reminders of self-affirmation. For a time she tried a “spiritual experiment” and would say out loud that she is whatever she wanted to be in this life. “I knew royalty checks were coming that week, so for a while I said ‘I am successful, I am successful …’ Then I opened one of the checks and it was for $1.82.” It was not a shock. She was picked up by Dragonblade, an independent romance publishing house that has had major success with e-books, a growth area for the genre. Except, profits for authors of e-books, generally, are significantly smaller. Advances tend to be tiny — about $1,000 a book, or more typically, nonexistent. Since she’s been a published author, her books have sold wildly different. Some have sold only 100 copies; some have sold 85,000. She used to make around $18,000 per book, particularly with Harlequin. Now it’s closer to $5,000 a book, and that’s over the lifetime of the book.

That royalty check couldn’t pay for a Starbucks latte, and yet, she had written well that week. She finished a new book. “It didn’t matter if it was $1 million. I felt successful.”

The romance genre is arguably the last genre you can be openly snobbish about. Science-fiction, horror, detective, crime novels, they all have their champions and literary cred. Romance, less so. Its writers — mostly women, writing for women — accepted this long ago. A casual sexism has stalked it from the very beginning. George Eliot herself set the tone in 1856, anonymously publishing an essay titled “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” defining the books as “The frothy, the prosy, the pious and the pedantic.” Never mind that Jane Austen and the Brontës (or Sally Rooney now) snugly fit the contours of the genre. What we know as the romance novel today, though, really started in 1972 with Kathleen E. Woodiwiss’ “The Flame and the Flower,” which combined a Happily Ever After with graphic sex scenes. Dovetailing with the sexual revolution, the romance novel took off by word-of-mouth.

Or rather, whispers.

Kathy found romance novels as a teenager, when her older sister quietly handed down copies. It was a Champaign family of five girls, with a mother, born in Shanghai, who ran a strict home, Kathy said. “Most of us got master’s degrees, but my mother was always disappointed that we didn’t get Ph.D.s.” The second youngest works at Apple; the oldest was at Nokia Bell Labs. Kathy — who studied English at the University of Michigan — was the weak link, she said. “Until the day she died, my mother insisted I wrote ‘cheap trashy romances.’ She could never concede I could be happy if I wasn’t making millions.” Initially, Kathy planned to write TV and film scripts; she moved to Los Angeles to study screenwriting at University of Southern California. Because she wasn’t “getting anywhere with that,” she started writing romance novels as a way to ease the stress.

She had met Dave Grill as an undergraduate at UM, but after graduate school at USC, they returned to Illinois for his work. Once she sold her first book, she found herself tumbling through a strange, robust genre with its own language and pace. She took training classes with the Texas-based Romance Writers of America, which, once influential, has been roiled for years by racism accusations. Membership (like readership) was 80 percent white; the industry itself avoided Black or Asian heroines. Kathy found herself thinking in tropes and jargon. An “F2L” was friends-to-lovers. A “Regency” was romance set in 19th century England. “Dubcon” was dubious consent. “Mpreg” romances had male pregnancy. It was a world of conferences, endless marketing and, most startling, a ceaseless writing treadmill. The core fandom might buy a couple dozen books a month, and read nearly that many.

Harlequin alone publishes more than 800 books a month in 19 countries.

“I don’t like thinking of it this way, but it is an assembly line,” said Kathryn Le Veque, who parlayed her successful, independently published “Dragonblade” romance series into the successful California-based Dragonblade Publishing, which publishes Lyons.

Being considered lowbrow “hardly matters at this point,” Le Veque said. “If ‘Bridgerton’ can’t give it legitimacy, I doubt it’ll break out (of that reputation). No one reads romance, yet it’s a huge chunk of the market? As long as I pay my mortgage — and I’m talking to you from a multimillion dollar mansion — the publishing world can look down its nose.”

There’s a saying among romance novelists:

Bank before rank.

Cindy Dees likes that. She and Kathy, who were friends as undergraduates, rose through the industry together. Except Dees, a former Air Force pilot and spy, now pulls six figures from romance writing. She also recently sold a story — albeit, a thriller — to Netflix. She’s heard Kathy announce she’s quitting too many times to believe it. But she understands her frustration: “The top romance indies are making millions at this. But Kathy is more restless. She’s the vanguard, the one experimenting with new types of stories in this genre, before the rest of us get there. She’s written about the slave trade, Chinese concubines. Her gay romances are more about zany humor than sex. She’s become influential in this market, but she’s always a little ahead of the readers.”

What Kathy Lyons will not do is write a sad ending.

Or even a bittersweet one.

She doesn’t have it in her, she says. She believes the fundamental contract between a romance reader and a romance novelist is that things will work out. She’s too positive to write anything else. She admits she’s a bit jealous of Cindy. She said the first time one of her books was published only as an ebook, and the publisher told her they could only offer her what they pay a beginning writer, “it was a huge ego blow.” Friends and family used to ask her about the business and pitch her ideas for new books, but that’s years ago. They no longer ask. It’s still hard for her to talk about being dropped by publishers.

“I decided I am the equivalent of the B-list actor. I can get steady work just about anywhere, I can get a contract easily, but I have given up the dream of being popular.”

A year ago she got a call from Joyce Sweeney, an agent for children’s book authors. She needed ideas for new books. She asked Kathy to write about 50 kids books — about 200 words each — and see where that leads. “She was a natural,” Sweeney said. “A lot of writers in this area don’t take it seriously as a career but to Kathy, it’s a job.”

They landed a three-book deal; plus, advances for children’s books are about five time as large. The first title arrives next spring.

But Kathy hasn’t sworn off romance.

She wakes up daily at 6 a.m. and writes in her gratitude journal, then finishes another 2,000 words of a romance novel. She’s been talking to a spiritual guide, who suggested that she adopt a mediation. “They said I should remind myself that writing was the ‘whetstone of my soul’s refinement.’ That what’s important about my books is how they change me. And that selling my books is actually incidental. Which is so nice to hear. It helped confirm my sense all along that I should just be doing this for myself most of all.

“But then again, it also pissed me off so much I didn’t meditate for a week.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

This story was originally published in the Chicago Tribune on Feb. 16, 2023.

By Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune

Someone has to play the bad guy.

Someone has to play the Nazi.

Otherwise, how do you teach history?

I heard this a lot. Whenever I would ask anyone portraying a German soldier at Rockford’s annual World War II Days about why they had chosen to reenact a soldier on the Axis side of the war, eventually, almost to the person, after offering many different reasons, they would adopt a sheepish grin and say:

Because someone has to.

Besides, they would usually add, they were not playing the bad Germans. They were playing schmucks, the lowest of the low, conscripted men who feared what would happen to their families if Hitler won and they had avoided service. Most said this. They were here as actors. They were playing a part.

“It’s a costume, man,” one guy in an SS uniform told me. They were also here as educators, as amateur historians. They also played Nazis because they thought the costumes were cooler, the equipment and vehicles more interesting — many compared it to being a child and how it’s always more fun to play Darth Vader than a humble Jedi.

Some mentioned they had family who fought in the German army (though many more said they had family who fought for the Allies). Some chose the German side to better understandthe German side. Many said they wanted to use reenacting to ensure “nothing like this” takes place again.

Then they would add they are red-blooded Americans, with no sympathy for Nazis or fascist ideology. In fact, they didn’t want to talk politics. It gets too heated, they would say, a surreal point coming from someone in a Nazi uniform. Again, they were playing German. Ask about their “role in the war” and prepare to be there a while. They were sincere, thoughtful and knowledgeable.

But the swastikas on those costumes get distracting.

You start to notice how simultaneously deep and shallow their understanding can go.

I’ve been attending World War II Days in Rockford for about six years now, on and off, as a spectator. It’s the second-largest World War II reenactment in the country. For 26 years, in early autumn, it’s attracted about 1,000 reenactors, give or take a few hundred. It runs for three days — one for student groups, two for the public — on the 148-acre campus of Rockford’s Midway Village Museum, among faux-historic buildings. About a third of registered reenactors play on the side of Axis powers.

Whenever I would tell friends I attended, they would respond that they only knew of Civil War reenactments, and then, after a beat, a shock would kick in and they would ask:

Wait, so they have Nazis? Who would play a Nazi?

This was such a good question I returned to World War II Days earlier this fall to ask German reenactors why — particularly in an age of Proud Boys, resurgent white nationalism and fascism-friendly populists — are you still playing a Nazi?

Or more importantly, how?

The answer, of course, is complicated. And often, not altogether satisfying. In short: They look the part. They take fidelity to their roles very seriously, obsessively so. Dave Fornell of Elgin, scarily convincing in a green wool German lieutenant uniform and cap, adorned with the swastikas and eagles and insignia of the Nazi military, sat on the porch of the Axis-occupied headquarters and surveyed the fields in front of him. Though it wasn’t intended, his 5 o’clock shadow and dark eyes suggested tired days of battle.

“The idea is we’re in a French village and we have taken it over and this is German division headquarters,” he said, pointing out the extent of the occupation. The field hospital over there, the guy who pays salaries over there, the guy who tends to horses (played by real horses), the cobbler who actually repairs the boots of Axis reenactors.

Most of the reenactment sprawled across the land behind the museum, mingled in among the faux-historic structures. On one end was an Allied camp with soldiers; on the other, this Axis occupation. But people do need to eat and the Axis side had taco and barbecue vendors, so period Jeeps full of American soldiers rolled slowly past the enemy and stopped for plates of al pastor. It’s a clash of images. A child in a Nazi uniform clearly too big for him suggested the desperation of a losing side. A man playing a Nazi officer with a German shepherd — its mouth clamped tight behind a metal muzzle — walks by two women cosplaying as Andrews Sisters. German paramedics shoot the breeze with Allied war correspondents.

Fornell, for years, has been a lead organizer of World War II Days, and was briefly president of the World War II Historical Reenactment Society, which has 1,200 members, primarily in the Midwest. Like many WWII reenactors, sometimes he plays an Allied soldier, though usually he plays a German lieutenant. He prefers to play a German. Reenactors call this an “impression,” and usually they have clothing and gear for several different impressions.

“There is a lot of baggage in doing a German impression,” he said. “My elevator pitch on why I do German has to do with their surrender in World War I, hyperinflation in Germany, the polarization of far right and far left. A lot of people bought into the idea to make Germany great again. A lot of people who do Germans at events want to wrap their heads around that German psyche, why they fought for Hitler, how atrocities could have taken place. At the end of the day, we deliver a story, say what happened, who these people were.”

On the grass in front of the headquarters were dozens of weapons from WWII, many owned by Fornell. A man in a German soldier uniform explained them to spectators.

A man in a bear costume fell into a chair beside Fornell. He was playing the Fanta bear, the mascot of the soda company created in Germany after Coca-Cola pulled out of the country. The man tugged the head off. Sweat ran down his face. Authenticity extended here, too. The bear was ratty, and the teeth were real, courtesy of a taxidermied grizzly.

In the wooded trails beyond the village, smoke from campfires curled through trees.Scattered among foxholes and tents were German and American troops, but also reenactors playing Austrian, Cossack, Italian, Ukrainian. Some take part in large, loud battles in a nearby field, but not unlike in real war, many wait around their camps, which resemble living historic dioramas. They eat only food these soldiers would eat. Some model their posture on archival photos, occasionally sneaking a peek at their cellphones.

Ask an Axis soldier in these woods why they chose an Axis power, they share fairly lockstep answers: Really, they’re playing a common soldier, apolitical cannon fodder, a guy who probably knew nothing about atrocities, never mind took part in death camps. They themselves, in real life, are security guards and bank workers and tech workers and delivery guys and stay-at-home dads and journalists and engineers and veterans. Some say the appeal was researching the specific real-life unit they are portraying. One guy said he was a (real) U.S. Marine and didn’t “want to put on an Army uniform.”

But generally, as a soldier in an Austrian mountain division (who didn’t want his name used) explained: “You’re just a dude living in a hole, hating life. The shared experience of war.”

Some do get confronted by spectators who mistake them as Nazi sympathizers. Dan, who would only identify himself as an O’Hare International Airport employee, said: “Yeah, we get people who assume we think like (Nazis), but really there’s zero tolerance in these circles for anything like that.”

And yet, those uniforms, those swastikas — it’s startling.

“At the end of the day, to do war reenactments, maybe people should feel discomfort,” said Christian Lachtara of Kankakee, playing a Finnish soldier. “Feels appropriate, yes?”

Actually, yes, said Goldie Pekarsky, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Rockford, which has presented lectures here on the Holocaust for several World War II Days. She thinks of the event “as kind of like a big play.” That said, when she attends she never leaves the physical museum building or visits reenactments. Her parents were Holocaust survivors; she herself was born in a refugee camp in Germany. “Though I think maybe people should feel uncomfortable,” she said. “Maybe that’s only wise.” Driving a cart around the grounds during World War II Days, Laura Furman, the museum’s curator of collections and education, said they need to be able to educate people on all sides of history, while being sensitive. “Unfortunately, it feels relevant now.”

Still, Allison Hayden, dressed in a floral print dress and thick midcentury eyeglasses, wondered how much of an understanding of World War II these people actually share.

The theme of this year’s World War II Days was the Holocaust. This played out primarily through a series of talks in the museum and via two information areas on the reenactment grounds. One, organized by a small group of Wisconsin women, tackled the Warsaw Ghetto. Across the path from them, just inside the doors of the village’s faux bank, was Hayden, behind a table of books about the Jewish resistance, answering questions on the Holocaust for anyone who stopped. A spectator told her it was hard to imagine how a massive genocide happens.

Hayden explained as thoroughly as anyone might approach a subject so large.

The spectator asked if there was “a basis” for antisemitism.

Hayden, who tracks acts of antisemitism in Wisconsin for the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, gulped. You never knew what someone is implying with some of these questions. Hayden politely reached back hundreds of years, succinctly as possible. She’s been coming to World War II Days for years. She’s also a reenactor, mostly in a Yugoslavian infantry division. But one of the things that always bothered her about World War II reenactments was how comfortably they sidestepped moral questions. So she asked the organizers if she could have an information booth on the Holocaust.

It’s been interesting, she said.

The day before a reenactor playing a German soldier told her a gas chamber joke; his commanding officer made him apologize. For a while, at other reenactments, the same German reenactor would greet her with a jokey shout of “Sieg Heil!” But in general, she said, other than one or two German units, “the worst part is most of these guys don’t want to acknowledge what Germans did. They find it depressing or don’t know enough to speak knowledgeably. If you’re playing German, you need to know more about their role in the war than what their uniforms looked like. I understand wanting to go deep on the material culture of all this and the guns and tanks, but if you just do that you’re missing the social context and why you are here in the first place.”

You’re purporting to teach history while ignoring the ugliest elephant in the room.

Hayden added: “It’s not like I’m expecting everyone here to be a Holocaust historian, and of course families at events like this are not anxious to discuss genocide. But for reenactors to always be playing a so-called innocent soldier is avoiding stuff on purpose. You hear things like only the SS participated in killing the Jews, and that’s just wrong.”

Peggy Wright, who was taking questions nearby about female spies and the Warsaw Ghetto, said she was surprised that WWII reenactors get asked to intentionally avoid mentions of politics or ideology.

“I mean, isn’t this whole thing political?”

The war reenactment, as a sort of edu-tainment form, goes back millenniums. Romans staged reenactments of key battles. Closer to this century, veterans of the Civil War restaged pivotal skirmishes during reunions with their fellow soldiers. Living history, as it’s sometimes called, removed from the darker causes of a conflict and streamlined back into a series of action sequences and artifact exhibitions, is not new.

World War II reenactments started in the mid-1970s and have spread worldwide — though in Germany, portraying Nazi soldiers is not allowed. In this country, there are roughly 10,000 or so reenactors who take part annually in WWII reenactments, which is about three times fewer than the number of Civil War reenactors.

Paul Durica, director of exhibitions for the Chicago History Museum, himself an acclaimed reenactor of (typically 19th-century) local history, said Civil War reenactors often face similar issues as World War II reenactors. Namely, Civil War reenactments tend to shy from acknowledging that a battle is being fought over the right to enslave another human. It hasn’t helped the hobby. A few years ago, an annual Civil War reenactment in Wauconda was briefly canceled when president of the Lake County Forest Preserves District (which hosts the event) objected to using Confederate flags, among other reasons.

Durica said, “Reenactments have a duty to reflect history accurately to an extent it’s possible, but also, to put stories in context. As someone fascinated by this form, I’m always looking at where it falls short, and consistently you see them losing sight of larger context and meaning behind an act of memory. With the Civil War, for instance, there’s emphasis on clothes, military maneuvers. I don’t know the solution here, but there’s a problem when you separate a battle from reasons it’s being fought.”

Luke Fredrickson, director of marketing at Midway Village, said: “It’s not the role of the reenactor in a soldier’s uniform to educate viewers on an ideology. This is a battlefield environment, and you’re presuming that the average German soldier was political.”

But Charles Bolanis III, the Indianapolis-based president of the World War II Historical Reenactment Society — which describes itself as focused on military activity — said a number of younger reenactors in the hobby have been “wanting to have the conversation,” wondering how to weave the Holocaust and moral depravity of Nazism into the hobby.

Living in America in 2022, he said, it’s just harder now to avoid some of this stuff. “So of course, it’s gotten difficult to play German,” he said. “Not unbearable, just difficult. I have had to emphasize to German reenactors they bear more responsibility now. There’s no room for even appearing to be a Nazi apologist. If they want to do this they need to bear in mind they are portraying one of the most hated regimes in history. But I understand some units have a policy to avoid those discussions for fear it will be taken out of context. There is this underlying fear of the media. And some of these guys, they might be smart historians, but they don’t always have the best public-relations skills.”

Absurd as it sounds, there isn’t much diversity in Nazi reenacting.

Or really, in war reenactment in general. Like many hobbies, it’s pretty insular. Finding reenactors to play Japanese soldiers is rough. Likewise, though Vietnam War events are becoming more popular among reenactors, Vietnamese soldiers are rarely represented. Mostly, it’s all white men.

Things started to change because of Rich Iott, Bolanis said, referring to the scandal that erupted in 2010 when Iott, a Republican candidate in Ohio for U.S. Congress, was shown by the Atlantic magazine to be portraying a member of the SS for a WWII reenactment. Iott, whose candidacy soon collapsed, offered familiar reasons: He was merely playing a slice of history; someone has to play a bad guy. Bolanis, who also plays German, was a member of Iott’s unit. Bolanis even made recruitment videos, later shown and mocked on “The Daily Show.” Bolanis said the group had rarely been questioned about the politics of their hobby, so when Iott made headlines, German reenactors “never saw it coming.”

Irresponsible. That’s how Kelley Szany, vice president of education and exhibitions at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Skokie, characterizes the handling of German reenactments: “It’s stunning, reenacting this on our own soil, never mind not fully understanding their role itself. Nazism infiltrated all levels of the (German) military. It’s a massive misconception that the so-called ordinary men were not complicit or had any connection to crimes. It does a disservice to avoid that. Ultimately whether we like it or not, the Holocaust was committed by ordinary men and soldiers. Just because you don’t wear this or that patch doesn’t mean the uniform itself doesn’t represent ideology.”

I told her that what often draws people to reenacting Nazis is the aesthetics.

She laughed. “Yeah, fascist aesthetics. This was an ideology through and through.”

Hayden said that a kind of moral relativism among German reenactors, a reflexive butwhataboutism, has hurt a hobby that’s full of thoughtful people, seriously interested in acting as stewards of history. Whenever she’s pushed a WWII reenactment to include a modicum of Holocaust history, she hears inevitably from outraged German reenactors that if they include the Holocaust then Stalin’s genocide in the Soviet Union needs to be included too. Indeed, when I asked Tom Novosel, a retired steelworker from Indiana playing a commanding officer, why he chose a German impression, he said: “Because Germans got screwed at the Treaty of Versailles. I agree Jewish people were scapegoated. But who isn’t? Right now we have President Biden making scapegoats of Trump voters!”

A German reenactor at World War II Days is not without restrictions. Again, organizers ask them not to wear anything political, or perform a political act — though what this means is, at best, unclear. Because the Holocaust was the theme this year, the museum discussed whether it should allow reenactors to portray Jewish prisoners wearing yellow stars. But ultimately — no. Also, goose-stepping is considered political. Reenacting the role of Hitler is definitely not allowed. Wearing black Nazi armbands is political. Swastika flags are political. But incorporating Nazi symbols into uniforms is fine. “There is no way to have historically accurate uniforms without that,” Furman said. “History can’t be one-sided.”

White nationalism is a fear among German reenactors. Because the hobby attracts vintage gun collectors and anyone willing to slide into Nazi boots for a weekend, it’s not an unfounded fear. Fornell said the FBI once infiltrated a unit of German reenactors on the assumption they were a militia. “We are worried, yes, because we’ve had problems,” he said. “Not many, but it happens. We’ve had to toss people who are too far, far right-wing, so to speak. They show sympathy to Nazis, it’s a red flag.” Likewise, German reenactor units say if they spot any white nationalist slogans or symbols tattooed on a member, they’re gone. But again, it happens. Rick Pennington, a Quad Cities social studies teacher and member of a unit reenacting the German 716th infantry division, said they feel new members out. “‘Is this person here for the right reasons?’ You have to ask. Still …” — he looked around at World War II Days’ elaborate German tableaus — “a reenactment this large, you got to assume there is some white nationalist sympathy.”

Bolanis urges new WWII reenactors to explain their hobby to employers; everyone here has heard stories of reenactment photos getting back to an unsettled HR department. He also suggests that members get some work as TV or film extras, a fairly common gig for many reenactors. That and an IMDb page could help remind friends or colleagues that it’s acting.

Plus, like many hobbies, it’s expensive, an investment.

The cost of playing army — assembling authentic gear, recreated clothes with the correct thread-count and wools, etc. — is about $1,000 on the low end, but roughly 10 times that for many of these guys. And that’s before they start buying vintage vehicles.

The result is that walking around World War II Days is an immersive mash of history and commitment. Kids playing Hitler Youth wrestle in the grass a stone’s throw from a faux-USO office. German motorcycles rumble past vendors selling watercolor prints by Hitler. The pop-pop of rifle blanks reach in from surrounding fields; women stroll by in period hairdos, their costumes smelling faintly of estate-sale mothballs; German officers step lightly around puddles. A Finnish unit looks composed of war-movie character actors. A U.S. soldier sits in a folding chair and a dummy grenade tumbles from his coat. A pair of Germans plan an ambush. “Wait, no, hold on,” one says, “I forgot, there’s no shooting in the village.”

Authentic as this all looks, as much as it claims to teach history, it feels weightless.

Fornell told me if no one is playing Confederates or Germans, history is lost; he likened playing German to being assigned to make an argument in debate club that you disagree with. But ironically, perhaps, they don’t go far enough. Walking around and discussing World War II with German reenactors is to get a sense that they are recreating a nonexistent war in which everyone involved can claim a degree of innocence. No one says it outright, but many come close to saying there were very fine people on both sides.

As Durica said, “A lot of reenactors study primary historical materials, do due diligence and see this as public service — but they can also seem disconnected from the larger context.” Szany wondered, “Is there a way to do this that’s acceptable? That would mean having difficult conversations with everyone involved.”

Before I left World War II Days, I stopped at the command center for German officers. And they looked impressive, believable, very scary. They carried themselves with the proper smugness.

Ted O’Sullivan, a retired bank employee from Arizona, leaned back against a bench. A Panzer driver stood nearby, chatting with a U-boat commander. O’Sullivan said he rarely gets asked about the politics or responsibility that comes with playing a Nazi officer. He does it, partly, because he has a little German blood. That said, he also has a brother who doesn’t think he should do this.

He sighed and laced together his fingers.

He only plays a Nazi from spring until the early fall, he said. The rest of the year, he’s Darth Vader.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

This story was published originally in the Chicago Tribune on Nov. 3, 2022.

By Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune

We forget we are in a conversation with public art until something happens.

Then we are reminded that, in a sense, we never stop talking. We never stop admiring or flinching or scowling or puzzling over or, more likely, failing to even notice public artwork anymore (itself a response). That’s the burden of public art. It is the wallpaper of our lives, and most of us are unaware we’re in a conversation.

But then a week ago, a mural of Kanye West on Lake Street in Fulton Market was painted over by artist Jason M. Peterson, who had created the mural and collaborated with West on projects and was known for his monochromatic aesthetic. Peterson was tight-lipped on the alteration, but he told the Tribune that Scott Wilson, the founder of design company MINIMAL, which owns the building, asked that something be done about its north-facing wall. So Peterson painted a silhouette over the Kanye part. You heard about this. It made news last week, then was just as quickly sucked into the hailstorm of responses to West’s antisemitism.

What you didn’t hear was how Peterson gave his work more poignancy.

When I visited the mural, the day after it was painted over, I looked and thought, I like this. I liked it more than the ’70s-esque Shaggin Waggin, photorealistic custom van-style portrait of Kanye that had been there. Minus its subject, but not the details that surrounded West, it now resembled an American flag overrun with the ye-olde font of a Yeezy brand T-shirt. And in place of West, there was only his silhouette, a sad cave entrance of an empty space. It contained anger, melancholy, profound disappointment.

If you’re a fan of West — if you’ve been proud West is a product of Chicago but felt his recent remarks have been a bridge too far — this new mural seemed truer to the man himself.

Now it held pride plus recent history.

Or rather, love plus rejection.

But then, in the week since Peterson altered his mural, the chatter has only ping-ponged. Not about West’s personal grave-digging — many artists and Chicagoans were quick to denounce him — but around the repainting itself. Last weekend, the blocky, bulbous lettering of old-school graffiti was tagged to the bottom of Peterson’s silhouette.

Now added is a large “F.DUB,” and in tiny lettering, a rebuttal: “West FOREVER …”

The conversation goes on.

Indeed, a few blocks away on Fulton Street, there is another piece of Kanye art, painted a while ago, that now finds itself in a quiet conversation with the Kanye mural on Lake. It was painted by Chris Devins, who, unlike Peterson, was not working on a commission from the owner of the building. His street-art image — Kanye in a dapper suit, with a squared handkerchief, flashing a Rolex — is there because Devins had thought of West the way many of us have for decades: as an influential, multi-hyphenate whirlwind of creativity and provocation. His Kanye, he told me, came out of a dinner with a friend who was collaborating with West on an opera. They were eating at the Time Out Market down the street, and immediately after, inspired, Devins grabbed his paint and created the Kanye. Peterson’s Kanye mural went up last year, and Devins’ was painted just last summer.

After the Lake Street mural was silhouetted, Devins said he refused to alter his Kanye.

He was uneasy at the idea of one artist erasing the image of another artist. He told me, “This guy has had a major impact on music and art and fashion, and it’s too meaningful to cover up.” Yet, he added, he was also open to the ongoing conversation around this.

That was wise, because soon after Peterson altered his mural, someone came along and touched up Devins’ painting. It was less dramatic, but like Peterson’s changes, it brought an added depth to West’s image that was closer to a lot of conflicted feelings.

Someone painted — vertically, down West’s suit — the word: “TRASH.”

I stood in front of this and called Devins and he said, “Well, that’s too bad. But then again, it iskind of cool. It’s a public conversation that should be had. I’m conflicted because it’s a problem for me, but ‘TRASH’? Vertically no less? It’s sort of interesting…”

Yup.

Then a day later Devins painted over “TRASH.”

I wish he hadn’t altered the graffiti that was painted over his own graffiti. Not unlike Peterson’s silhouette, “TRASH” said far more than a plainly hagiographic act of civic pride. “TRASH” could be read proudly — as a resilient pushback of cancel culture — or more literally, as the value of a once-beloved artist who reduced himself to junk status. Plus, this wall is on an empty building and is considered something of a “permission wall” by Chicago street artists, meaning their paintings and images (sophisticated and often colorful and even sweet) are preferable to emptiness; there’s been no move to erase them.

Here is an ongoing dialogue.

One firmly in line with art history. Artists painting over the art of other artists — in protest or commentary, usually to create a new piece of art — is far from unheard of. Most famously, Robert Rauschenberg erased some of his own drawings only to decide that something was missing from the act. So he asked Willem de Kooning to lend him a new work that had been finished. This was in the early 1950s when de Kooning was making his greatest pieces, and yet de Kooning agreed and gave Rauschenberg a drawing so dense de Kooning doubted Rauschenberg could erase the whole thing. But he did, and “Erased de Kooning Drawing” stands now as one of Rauschenberg’s best-known works. The wealth of examples is bottomless. A few years ago a cultural heritage scientist at Northwestern University proved Picasso’s 1902 oil painting “The Crouching Beggar” was not only painted over another Spanish artist’s work but had incorporated parts of it.

Of course, it’s understandable why MINIMAL — itself a design company full of artists — wouldn’t want its very facade covered in a billboard of Kanye. Just as it would be understandable for street artists who find themselves alongside Devins’ Kanye to have second thoughts. Irony of ironies, Devins’ Kanye stands alongside the familiar street art of Rich Alapack, known for his simple declarative rainbow message of solidarity: “WE ALL LIVE HERE.”

Alapack, who lives in Fulton Market and passes these walls daily, started his “WE ALL LIVE HERE” campaign in 2015, partnering with Chicago schools and libraries to spread a gentle note of unity through public art. That message is now ubiquitous across the city, found on walls in hundreds of places. He calls Devins a talented painter but was not thrilled his Kanye went up alongside a “WE ALL LIVE HERE.” Alapack said: “Part of what ‘WE ALL LIVE HERE’ means is different people and different ideas exist and are allowed to exist, and sometimes things happen that are not what we agree with but we allow it. That said, when (Kanye) crossed into hate speech, it’s no longer free speech.”

He expects the wall, and building, to be demolished.

Still, right now, however informally, the results are richer than they were a month ago, when all we had was a couple of celebrity likenesses splashed across Fulton Market.

As I stood in front of the Lake Street mural, a guy in a Blackhawks sweatshirt snapped a picture of the Kanye silhouette with his phone; this was before it was tagged. He said he understood why the building owners would be upset and not want to look at this every day, “but it’s like you can’t say anything anymore. I hate that this is happening but I feel there’s truth behind what Kanye says. It’s all crashing down, but the guy’s always said outrageous things. I heard he was going to start his own city. Which sounds like Kanye.”

As he continued, I felt someone behind me.

I turned. It was another guy photographing the silhouette. He asked me if I was the artist who erased Kanye. I said I was not. He said, “Oh — because I was going to thank you.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

This story was published originally in the Chicago Tribune on Nov. 1, 2022.

By Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune

Highland Park, located on the North Shore of Chicago, sits between the suburbs of Highwood and Glencoe. On the Fourth of July, after a gunman killed and wounded dozens during the holiday parade here, social media was alive with expressions of shock and grief, outpourings of sympathy and surprise at where this happened ― but also reminders that Highland Park is one of the wealthiest suburbs in America. But actually, Glencoe, to its south, is much richer. And Highwood, to its north, has a poverty rate only slightly above Chicago’s. Comparably, Highland Park is well-off. Pretty wealthy, just not as uniform as some of the suburbs that surround Highland Park. It is a town shouldering some misconceptions — of what a Midwest suburb looks like now, and what sheltered still means.

Despite appearances and that smell of fresh-cut flowers wafting through its neighborhoods, this has never been a monolithic place. Indeed, before national media portrayed it as a gentle Mayberry, international press fixed affluent to its name and front pages somehow imagined a utopia — “Nowhere is safe,” screamed one Washington Post headline — Highland Park had long been lumped in with the rest of the North Shore. It was a nice problem to have. Trace a finger on a map, moving north from Evanston to Lake Bluff, along the Lake Michigan coast, though Winnetka, Kenilworth, Lake Forest, you pass from one manicured bedroom community to the next. Though at Highland Park, differences stand out. As a Lake Forest resident once explained to me:

“We don’t honk here. In Highland Park, they honk.”

First off, with 30,000 residents, this is not a village but a small city, at least three times as large as its neighbors. Like many rich American suburbs, it was established in the 19th century as a retreat for the business class, a refuge from the messier, growing metropolis within commuting distance. But unlike other rich suburbs, it was also established partly as a refuge for marginalized — namely, Jewish — families who weren’t welcome elsewhere on the North Shore. Ironically, America has known a version of Highland Park, without knowing what it was looking at. Here, Tom Cruise, left alone in his parent’s palatial home, danced in his underwear for “Risky Business.” Here, John Hughes returned often for WASP-y images of comfort in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” in “Sixteen Candles.”

“The truth is, there are always many Highland Parks,” said Peter Orner.

He grew up here and became an acclaimed novelist and essayist. His mother, Rhoda Pierce, the chair of the Illinois Arts Council and a trustee of the North Shore Water Reclamation District, was marching in the Fourth of July parade; his stepfather, Daniel Pierce, who died in 2020, had been the mayor of Highland Park for 12 years. He describes an adolescence spent walking to the lake with friends, smoking weed, delivering pizza, even marching in the parade himself as a Boy Scout. Nothing remarkable, really.

“Highland Park is not Mayberry,” he added later. “It’s not even close. Everybody doesn’t know each other. It’s fairly ordinary in this way, nor perfect, not idyllic. It’s not Anywhere USA. Too wealthy for that, but it’s not a pristine enclave, either.”

Highland Park begs for taxonomy. It is bordered to the south by Glencoe golf courses. Heading north on Sheridan Road, you arrive on residential streets of no discerning difference. Here is one of several very nice parts of town. The same tasteful colonial and Victorian two-stories and austere stone facades defining the North Shore stand back from shaded roads lined with landscaping trucks. Homes of white-painted brick. Traffic islands dressed with antique toy wagons holding American flags. Thick canopies of green held in place by tall oak and ash trees cast emerald patches on streets.

Nearby, that old brown wooden archway of the Ravinia Festival, a reminder this was an amusement park when it first opened in 1904, before focusing on music (and a few decades later, becoming the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra). You’re also reminded by many no-parking signs on residential streets that it’s a mixed blessing.

A few blocks away, early on a muggy July morning, men in suits wait beside Metra tracks, coats in their arms, neckties tugged slightly down. There’s no sound but the hiss of wind in the trees and the clang of railroad crossings. This is the Ravinia Business District. Aging office complexes advertise medical practices that have been here forever. Midcentury brown brick developments offer violin shops, dry cleaners; a brief jog away, there’s a longtime sushi restaurant and a relatively new craft brewery. A convertible BMW parks by a Lamborghini, itself beside an old pickup being unloaded.

Across the street, Anne Bolotin sits behind an information table at the weekly farmers market. She hands out paper bags for the produce. She moved here 30 years ago for its Jewish day schools. She’s annoyed how the media are describing Highland Park.

“ ‘Affluent’, they write!”

But it is affluent, I say. According to the U.S. Census, the median home value is $535,000, though even a cursory glance at real-time real estate prices shows way higher.

“Yes, but the connotations,” she says. ” ‘Affluent’ has all sorts of meanings. Besides, who cares how rich people are if they’re being shot at? They’re people. It suggests we’re protected from the world. Plus, we’re not fancy! There are little, teeny homes here, too!”

There are.

Heidi Smith, executive director of the Highland Park Public Library, moved here with her husband 16 years ago and they bought on the south side of town, “but also the cheapest, smallest thing we could find.” Being Highland Park, they also moved in next door to an architect, who helped them expand.

Highland Park, which occupies 12 square miles of Lake County in Moraine Township, is shaped like Michigan — like an oven mitt. Its western border runs alongside the North Branch of the Chicago River; the lake is a natural border to the east. To the north, the city shares a border partly with Lake Forest and partly with Highwood. Here is where the majority of Latinos live in Highland Park, not far from Highwood, which itself is home to a Latino community. Highland Park, however, is 90% white and 9% Latino, according to the U.S. Census, its largest minority. When residents mention Highland Park’s “diversity,” they often mean Latino.

“There is so much right in Highland Park, but it’s also not an easy community for everyone, because of haves and have-nots,” said Bobbie Hinden, director of Family Focus Highland Park, which works to help low-income families become better included into the community. Her staff, many Latino, some of whom grew up here, are not shy about noting the racism they occasionally experienced in the local schools.

“But there has been a push to bring Latinos onto more boards and into city positions,” Hinden said. “And it’s not lip service; it’s also somewhat the history of the place, too.” She noted that Andres Tapia, who grew up in Peru and served as Highland Park’s housing commissioner, was elected to the City Council last year, the first for a Latino here.

Mike Guadarrama is co-owner of Pound4Pound BoxFit, a boxing gym on the north side of the city that he opened with friend Genaro Mendez in 2012. He was born in Mexico, and for years now, has trained many children in Highland Park. “Though we come from different backgrounds, I’ve always felt welcome. I always felt real love from the town. I’m hearing now from so many people — they want me back and they will do what they can to help.”

He began crying.

He’s referring to his immigration status. He was brought here illegally from Mexico when he was 5 years old. He’s 34 now. At 18, he was arrested for possessing less than a gram of marijuana. At 19, he turned to boxing. Despite letters of support from families around the Highland Park community, his immigration visa was denied — on July 5. He’s living in Mexico City today, meanwhile his wife and four children are home in Highland Park.

Highland Park was founded in 1869, partly replacing two towns, St. Johns and Port Clinton. Potawatomi and other Native American tribes lived here once. After the 1833 Treaty of Chicago opened up the land to white settlement, Walter Gurnee, a former Chicago mayor, purchased the land for residential housing. In 1899, Highland Park absorbed the village of Ravinia. There were farms here long into the 20th century and lots of undeveloped forest. More importantly, there were Baptists and they prided themselves on being the descendants of Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island on a mission of religious tolerance. “They had this idea of Highland Park as welcome to different religious groups and particularly the many Jewish families who were being shut out of other places along the North Shore,” said Nancy Webster, archivist for the Highland Park Archives and Local History Collections.

Around 1900, Wildwood, a Jewish summer resort, was established; Highland Park itself then was still considered by many a warm-weather retreat. Within a few decades, more Jewish country clubs were founded as well as synagogues.

Today, the legacy of that founding as a more seasonal colony remains evident. As when it was a summer place, many of its wealthiest still live by the lake; farmers and shopkeepers lived on the west side of the railroad tracks, though now, those homes are generally middle- and upper-middle class.

As for the population itself, it’s hovered around 30% Jewish for decades, Webster said. After World War II, she explained, like many suburbias, Highland Park expanded exponentially.

Laurel Feldman’s parents moved here from Chicago in the 1950s. She’s lived here since she was 7. She’s 73 now, an interior designer, married to Arthur Feldman, former director of the Spertus Museum in Chicago (now the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership); he owns an antiques business in Highland Park specializing in Judaic religious items. “It was a remarkable place to grow up,” Laurel said. “A real community. Even now, you see everyone at the same restaurants. It’s calm, generational and sheltered.”

She rethinks that last part:

“Sheltered in the sense that … you felt so safe, you didn’t think about it. Now, forget it. Our synagogues have to be guarded against antisemitism. Just like everywhere else.”

Highland Park gets its name from its geography. The east side of the city is literally highland, overlooking the lake from a roughly 100-foot-high bluff. Bridges cross picturesque ravines here. Roads slope down to a handful of beaches like luge runs, and at Rosewood Beach, a pleasant stone staircase winds down to the water.

A marine smell hangs, replaced by warm floral scents as you walk west. But mostly, you smell money. A lot of houses stand quiet, no cars in the driveways. If this was once a seasonal retreat, you picture its residents now spending July in other summer homes.

A couple of days after the shooting, not far off the parade route, Marlena Jayatilake stood in her spice and tea shop, Love That Spice, listening to a regular customer talk about her recent travels. She just returned from Ireland; she needs to return to Europe, ASAP.

“Always traveling,” Jayatilake said.

“I know, but this country!” the woman said.

When she left, Jayatilake whispered: “Pretty common kind of conversation here.” Then: “But, look, yes, there’s a lot of money, and I’m more impressed by the hearts of even the richest. Seriously.” Jayatilake owns the only Black-owned business in Highland Park; she opened in 2012. Her regulars leave her Christmas presents, invite her to weddings, bar mitzvahs. She comes in every day from Evanston. She grew up in Englewood. As a teenager, she would borrow her mom’s car and drive up Sheridan to Highland Park, to soak it in. She dreamed of living here. “But the taxes,” she said, leaving it at that.

She shook her head slowly.

“People were shot over the Fourth in Chicago, too,” she said, “and it’s not that nobody cares as much down there, but the sad thing is nobody is surprised there. And the truth is, you can’t be surprised anywhere now.” A couple approached the shop. Jayatilake watched through the window. “OK, look at these beautiful people,” she whispered to me. “Now they are filthy rich, and yet still —” The door swung open and the woman threw her arms around Jayatilake and they hugged, and held it there a while, for a long, quiet moment.

Somehow it seems significant that Robert Reed was born in Highland Park. He grew up in Des Plaines, but that the birthplace of Mr. Brady, patriarch of the Brady brood, is here makes a larger sense. As you cross the railroad tracks in downtown Highland Park and go west toward Route 41, homes more closely resemble the modest split-ranch midcentury ease enshrined by “The Brady Bunch.” If the median annual household income for Highland Park ($147,067) sounds weirdly low, it seems more sane on the west side. Here are the usual strip malls and the shell of an old Toys ‘R’ Us and the schools that look like they were built during the Nixon administration. There are visible trash cans and fiberglass deer posing in the gardens of a home or two.

It’s classic American suburbia, and thrives in pockets for a few blocks or so, then real estate turns remarkable again: The homes boast ivy-covered turrets and lovingly restored vintage barn doors replace white metal garage doors. This is true particularly near the golf courses that meander through the center of the city, two of which are still known for not welcoming women to play alongside men.

Still, the ordinary, even prosaic, suits Highland Park.

For a while, it was home to Solo cup. The industry titans who lived here ran businesses synonymous with postwar America — Florsheim (men’s shoes), Hoover (vacuums), Kimball (pianos). Later it became known as the home of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen as well as Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan (who owned a cafe here). But its best-known born-and-raised figures — singer Richard Marx, actor Rachel Brosnahan, figure skater Jason Brown — don’t project cool so much as unpretentious Midwestern humility. Same for the downtown, now familiar to the world.

Here are the usual mishmash of architectural styles that mark progress — notably Port Clinton Square, built in 1984, at the center of Central Avenue. But you also get a sense that no one is rushing to forget. You hear pained regrets over the loss of the old movie theater, the old barbeque place, the old Saks Fifth Avenue, which closed in 2012. Even the old five-and-dime and the general smaller-town feel that proceeded Port Clinton.

Old and new, the rich and less-rich, to an extent, they all meet in the middle, at Sunset Foods on Green Bay Road, which has an old supermarket smell of cold and polished floors and the comforting vibe of not being too radically upgraded in the past 40 years.

Which is how people like it here.

I heard from at least two different locals that much of their high school class eventually moved back, by choice. Heidi Smith, who runs the library, said it’s a relief to be a librarian in a place where she doesn’t expect to face book bans. Highland Park is majority liberal. So much so that Bobbie Hinden of Family Focus, who attended the July Fourth parade, said that while she was hiding with her 3-year-old, she wondered if whoever was shooting hated Democrats or Jewish people.

As the worst week in Highland Park history concluded, a hush fell on the streets, in restaurants, driveway chats, in every huddled group speaking quietly. The town had entered uncharted waters. Mayor Nancy Rotering told the “Today” show the city was “never going to recover from this wound.” A home on St. Johns Avenue, one of the primary streets in Highland Park, was flying its American flag upside down.

Those killed were, demographically, a fairly representative cross-section of the town: Two men originally from Mexico, a young couple, grandparents, beloved familiar faces.

But part of the shock was recognizing, after a few days, that they were not shocked.

The writer Orner, who lives in Vermont now, watched the news coverage and recognized storefronts around Central Avenue he used to visit, but also he realized his internal map of his hometown is out of date. It looked different, and yet it didn’t. Which is true of the tragedy itself: “I was appalled, not shocked. There is nothing special about Highland Park. Nothing special about what happened now. Except it’s a place I happen to know.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

This story was originally published in the Chicago Tribune on July 9, 2022.

By Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune

Every now and then the Illinois Department of Natural Resources puts out a public request for sightings of armadillos, anywhere in the state: Folks, if you see something, say something. And periodically, yes, they do get a handful of reports of armadillos, scattered here and there. But when they asked again in February, they received more than 400 reports in 24 hours, from across the state, though (mostly) southern counties. Illinois, you’re seeing armadillos beneath your sheds. You’re seeing armadillos in your gardens. You’re even seeing them waddling across your lawns in the dying light of winter afternoons. You’re seeing them on warm summer nights and, increasingly, on cooler spring days.

Last summer, one was found (dead) behind a Kia dealership in Springfield.

Legal experts: Supreme Court decision on school prayer erodes protections for students against religious coercion

Jeff Holshouser, who lives just south of Carbondale, found five recently in his yard. “I eradicated them,” he said. Meaning? “Meaning, I removed them unwillingly, without offering a chance of continued life support. You’ve got to — they’re getting thick down here.”

In many cases, the response to a live armadillo in Illinois has been confusion — just what in the long-snouted, armored-shelled hell am I looking at here? In the central Illinois town of Pekin, not far from Peoria, a schoolteacher named Mindy Wendling caught one in her flower pots.

“My daughter says there’s something in the window well. Whatever it was, it was hard to see. It was throwing rocks and dirt at the window as it dug, so much that we had to climb on a step stool to look down. And it’s pouring rain out. My daughter says, ‘It’s an armadillo.’ My husband and I are like, ‘OK, sure. Illinois is not Texas.’ But she’s like, ‘No, really.’ And the next night, it’s back and it is throwing so much mud at the windows. So I shined a light on it, and this thing, it jumps straight up into the air. I called the DNR. They asked me if they could trap it and I said, ‘Whatever you want — but wait, why do I have an armadillo in my window?’

“It’s like a tiny prehistoric creature, so you think, whoa, that’s out of place.”

Or as many Illinois residents in the southern half of the state have concluded: That’s also climate change in action, in real time — a known resident of the South pushing north, into a warmer Midwest.

Wendling soon heard from nearby farmers who said armadillos were tearing into their fields. Be on the lookout: Beast about the size of a cat, sand-colored, with a shell, anteater snout, head in the dirt. They’re acquiring a nickname around Illinois: possums on the half-shell. Even though, as a subtropical species culturally associated with the southern United States, they had a nickname: Texas speed bumps. Indeed, if you do see one, it’ll probably be dead. Tom Brantley, who owns a wildlife control business in Jackson County, told me a joke: “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get a look at that dead armadillo.”

Increasingly, however, you may see one alive.

Chicago — armies of armadillos are one of the few things we don’t have to worry about. For the moment.

The center of Illinois armadillo activity is Carbondale, and in the past 30 years, there have been only two credible reports of armadillos in Cook County (as well as two in DuPage County). Generally associated with Central America and first established in the United States in the 1850s, it’s taken armadillos 170 years to settle into Illinois. But as our springs become wetter and our winters milder, as the soil stays warmer throughout the year (allowing insects to live longer) — all ideal conditions for armadillos — biologists expect a northward march, sniff by sniff. It’s not unusual now to hear reports of armadillos (which do not hibernate) on a snowy field, nose in the air, smelling for food.

Right now, they’re still a local novelty.

In December, Gov. J.B. Pritzker noted the presence of armadillos in a tweet celebrating Wildlife Conservation Day. Eric Schauber, director of the Illinois Natural History Survey, characterized them as “a visible new species in the state,” thankfully “not causing ecological harm.” Since they made it to Illinois largely on their own four feet and were not introduced by people, they’re not even classified as “invasive.”

But in North Carolina and Virginia, where armadillos are also relatively new additions, they are becoming a routine source of ripped-up gardens and lawns. Same for southern Illinois, where homeowners with similar problems told me their honeymoon with the cute creature is over.

“They’re burrowing under foundations, porches,” said David Easton of Easton’s Wildlife and Mole Control in Jackson County. “They don’t have sheer numbers yet to be widely destructive, but I bet the population is bigger than we know.”

And the situation itself, is more serious.

For starters, biologists are watching the settling of armadillos across Illinois as more than a lawn-care issue. “It’s a living illustration of the insidious effects of climate change,” said Trent Ford, Illinois state climatologist. “When you talk (climate change), you really have to tailor it to your audience, but even someone ideologically conservative (on the subject of climate change), when they see an armadillo in Illinois, walking around their backyard, they tend to recognize, OK, something’s different now.”

Driving into Carbondale, headed for the main campus of Southern Illinois University, where the majority of research on armadillos in Illinois has been happening, you realize, in spring, before the bloom has begun, you are looking for a beige mammal foraging through a beige backdrop of beige grass, against a landscape of beige buildings. Such as the Life Science II building, where the armadillo is being studied intently, in the zoology department on the third floor. Or rather, was being studied intently. Carly Haywood, a former graduate student from western Illinois now spending her time on tortoises in the Nevada desert, conducted many of the recent armadillo studies and expeditions. Her mentor, Agustin Jimenez, had been following the northward march of armadillos for years, but he’s got his hands full.

He’s an assistant professor and biologist focused on the relationship between parasites and animals, and in his office, the stress and irony are evident: We’re discussing armadillos while wearing masks due to a pandemic often associated (however inconclusively) with the mingling of animals, humans and disease.

Which is not unrelated here.

Armadillos can carry leprosy. They’re one of its few sources. It’s a rare occurrence for an armadillo to get someone sick, scientists say, and difficult for someone to contract leprosy from an armadillo; generally, you’ve got to eat an armadillo undercooked or be infected by an exposed cut. Leprosy is hard to pass on.

But it’s not impossible.

Jimenez says he worries about the day when someone in Illinois goes to a doctor with a strange rash and has leprosy but the armadillos here are never considered because — why would they be in Illinois? It all sounds quite improbable. Right now, he’s more concerned about the proliferation of nasty new species of Southern ticks throughout Illinois. Though the steady immigration of armadillos is never far from his mind.

For many decades, his research has dovetailed with the movement of armadillos into the Midwest. A native of Mexico City, he studied the animal mostly in Latin America; when he arrived at the University of Nebraska in the 1990s — to study parasites and co-evolution, as part of his Ph.D. program — armadillos were already there.

“People in Nebraska were surprised then. They would assume it escaped from a zoo or was a released pet.”

But scientists knew: Years of reports have long suggested the animal’s range was expanding north. By the time Jimenez came to Carbondale 14 years ago, “I couldn’t believe it, but they were here too.”

He told colleagues to spread the word: If they saw an armadillo, even dead, he wanted it. He became the Southern Illinois armadillo guy.

The door of his office now has a yellow “Armadillo Crossing” sign. At the back of the long room, otherwise cluttered with research papers and data sheets, there is a small shrine of sorts to the creature — figurines, sent to him by his mother and family members, by friends, some just by fans of his research.

And beneath that, the mother lode, a binder thick with reports around Illinois:

Armadillo spotted on Potters Road.

Behind campus.

Outside Rendleman Orchards.

Off Old Route 13.

The Illinois DNR gets the occasional sighting of a cougar or a black bear or even an elk in the state, often just passing through. But its gathering of armadillo sightings started in the early 1990s, then slowly increased for 20 years, and now, within the past few years, sightings are becoming routine. To be specific, Illinois has the nine-banded armadillo — of the creature’s 21 species, it’s the only one in the U.S.

Jimenez is convinced that armadillos, which are good swimmers and can hold their breaths for long periods, have been following river banks and creeks north out of Texas.

After a few years in Carbondale, Jimenez was seeing enough of them to start carrying a bucket in his car, so he could scoop up dead armadillos and bring them to SIU and test for leprosy. “My daughters and wife hate it. I take pictures, so my phone, now it’s like family pic, family pic, dead armadillo, family pic, dead armadillo …”

He didn’t expect armadillos to last many Illinois winters. “But I have been wrong several times with these animals.” At first, he was not convinced that climate change was driving them north. “And again, wrong. As one of my colleagues told me, this isn’t some side effect of climate change, this is climate change.”

He said that for a while, the state wasn’t interested. However, by 2016, curious about where armadillos were headed, his department started to receive research funds from the DNR, via the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act. Lynn Robbins, a biologist at Missouri State University who studies bats but grew fascinated by the growing armadillo population there — which he characterizes as “very stable and expanding” — reports a similar thing. He would ask Missouri DNR for a statewide survey, “I’d hear ‘We don’t have armadillos.’ They told me they were released pets! A year later they called me back: ‘Still interested in armadillos?’”

Haywood grew up near Starved Rock State Park, in the small town of Ottawa. She spent 2 ½ years of school on armadillos, the focus of her graduate degree at SIU. “They were endearing,” she said. “They’re clumsy, they didn’t care if they were making noise, they have horrible vision, and people see them as a desert animal when they are closer to a swamp creature. I learned a lot from them.”

She built on the work of Joyce Hoffman, a now-retired mammalogist with the Illinois Natural History Survey, who first looked into local armadillo populations two decades ago. Hoffman collected 80 sightings in 22 counties; she found reports that went back to the 1970s, then long stretches of silence. She decided they were arriving on barges or using bridges to get across the Mississippi River. They had some human help, however unintentional. She just wasn’t sure they would establish a population here.

She also never saw a live armadillo during her research. But Haywood trapped a dozen, even fit a few with trackers. She staked out spots near SIU in state parks and set up a Facebook page for tips that led to a windfall of sightings. But the range of those transmitters was limited. Funding wasn’t great, and the number of armadillos trapped is still too small to estimate the size of their population in the state. Still, in a paper she co-authored with Jimenez recently for the Journal of Parasitology, the Illinois armadillo was established as one of many species globally going through “range shifts,” spurred by a warming planet.

“We tend to gloss over the biological implications of climate change, and the armadillo in the Midwest is a perfect example of that overall shift,” said Thor Hanson, a Washington state biologist and author of “Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change.” “Estimates now are that 25% to 85% of all species of plants and animals in the natural world are shifting their ranges in response to the climate. Even if it’s the lower end, 25%, that’s a tremendous shift in our ecology. And you start mixing up that many species, you receive all sorts of consequences.”

Southern species of flying squirrel colonizing Michigan.

Coupled albatrosses, typically monogamous, flying separate ways.

Alaskan grizzlies, so fond of salmon runs, now preferring berries that ripen sooner.

When the Illinois State Museum in Springfield introduced a new exhibit on climate change this month, the armadillo was included as an example of climate change happening in our backyards. According to climatologists, Illinois has grown slightly warmer and wetter in the past 120 years; in particular, Illinois winters have warmed a few degrees. Jimenez says this has given the armadillo a reason to tiptoe north. Even if one or two bad winters decimate a population, they creep forward again. They have an outsized resilience. Some local scientists — such as conversation biologist Anant Deshwal at Bradley University, who recently began his own research on the Illinois armadillo — suspect land development in the Southeast U.S. nudged them north, and that climate change accelerated that journey.

While there is more immediate concern for invasive kudzu vines and species of carp, there is still a lingering concern: Newly introduced species can bring diseases to a region.

This is why Haywood screened every dead armadillo she found for leprosy and Chagas disease, which armadillos are known to carry and can cause swelling and heart failure. That duty falls now to Jimenez. No armadillo tested at SIU carried either disease. But again without more funding, their sample is small.

Just last year, Jonathan Dyer, a dermatologist at the University of Missouri, contacted Robbins at Missouri State about an odd case. He was treating an elderly man in southern Missouri who tested positive for leprosy. Rare as it is, most patients in the U.S. who test positive have newly arrived from countries where leprosy is more frequent or are military members who served. This man was neither. “But he was being exposed to lots of armadillos now,” Dyer said. “His dog was catching and bringing them back to his house all the time.”

A positive Midwest case would not be a shock: In 2015, scientists at a Louisiana lab that serves as a national hub of leprosy research concluded 16% of armadillos in Florida have leprosy. Dyer thinks often of something he heard at a recent dermatology conference: Wherever armadillos travel, leprosy follows.

“They are not going to be where we want them to be, when we want them to be,” said Jimenez as we climbed from his car to stalk wild armadillos. They prefer dark, and it was early afternoon. On the plus side, the temperature gauge in his car read 79 degrees and it was only early March. Armadillos might take advantage of that heat to forage; on the other hand, they don’t get active in Illinois until late spring.

Jimenez lowered himself down the side of a muddy bank.

The air was cool with incongruous pockets of warmth.

“Oh they love this,” he said, noting the tree cover, decomposing wood, soft ground for tunneling, even better for bugs. Still, he rarely sees an armadillo that’s not dead. He held a branch aside and stepped slowly: “We’d see them alive more often if they didn’t jump.” Armadillos, when surprised, can leap high into the air — straight up, like a Looney Toons character. Picture one nosing along a highway at night, a large truck comes along. Scared, it jumps … straight into the undercarriage.

Jimenez, back in his lab, has buckets and plastic bags full of smashed armadillo proof. In fact, Jimenez said, that we would be more likely to come across a black vulture — itself a relatively prolific new addition to the local ecosystem — feasting on dead armadillo. Or perhaps an armadillo (remember, bad eyesight) would just walk right into me. Happens around SIU — they bump into startled students from time to time.

The Mr. Magoo of the animal kingdom.

When the Illinois DNR asked the public for reports last winter, it noted the armadillo was “very distinct and is not easily confused with any other animal found in Illinois.” That’s not entirely correct. From a distance, they might resemble a house cat or possum. Still, culturally, historically — yes, they’re definitely out-of-towners.

They have leathery shells, a comical waddle. Their burrow holes can be so large and perfectly round as to look paranormal — a wildlife control worker in North Carolina told the Guardian newspaper, in a story on the mid-Atlantic armadillo explosion, “It’s like hunting aliens.” They can stroll along the bottoms of rivers. They live up to 20 years. They give birth in fours. But no, they don’t curl up into a complete softball; or rather, only the three-banded armadillo (endemic to Brazil) is able to do that.

For decades, received wisdom was that any weirdly out-of-place animal in the Midwest such as an armadillo was a mistake, a hiccup — an unwanted pet or misplaced zoo animal (indeed, in Florida, there is evidence that escapees of a roadside animal attraction gave birth to that state’s population). But broadly, armadillo immigration started in Texas in the 1800s. Depending who you ask, besides climate change, as land was cleared for ranches, as Native Americans (who sometimes hunted armadillo) were killed and forced from their homes — or likely, a combination of those factors — armadillos continued on.

To Arkansas, Louisiana, Colorado. By the late 1980s, Missouri had a decent population.

Today, the range of nine-banded armadillos extends from Argentina to Illinois; in the east, to Virginia, though researchers expect Pennsylvania to be the eventual new threshold. A recent paper, co-authored by Bruce Patterson, curator of mammals at the Field Museum, decided the armadillo is thriving here because it’s flexible with environment and food. Not ideal for Midwest winters, but just insistent enough.

A kind of living metaphor for the approach of climate doom, albeit in an adorable, eccentric package.

“They’re so ugly, they’re adorable,” said Melissa Gibson, owner of GRS Wildlife Control in South Carolina. “But they’re everywhere and they’re ruining our landscape.”

Closer to Carbondale, Karen Fiorino walked outside one day to find her dogs playing tug-of-war with an armadillo. “Poor creature. Still, kind of surreal.”

Jim Martin, a naturalist in Murphysboro, west of Carbondale, has been watching armadillos on trail cameras he’s installed around the state. (He captured the image at the top of this page.) “Sex among these things is the craziest thing you’ve ever seen! And they know to move among us undetected — while half-blind!

“As soon as you see them, you know: This world is changing. You see them, you have no doubt.”

Again, Chicago is probably too far north at the moment to get an armada of armadillos, said Seth Magle, director of the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo. “But then I would not be shocked if we did. And we shouldn’t be surprised. We should be prepared. We have this mindset that we built cities and excluded everything but rats and pigeons but if you know how natural selection works, animals find a way to make use of space.” He noted a recent survey of birds in Lincoln Park that found, though bird species have come and gone in Chicago, about the same number of species were there 100 years ago.

Wildlife diversity, of course, is essential.

Brett DeGregorio, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Arkansas, said the armadillo doesn’t receive credit for creating deep, habitable burrows recycled later by other species, such as raccoons. Still, right now, armadillos are not protected in Illinois. If they’re in your garden, you can remove them.

If you do, contact Agustin Jimenez at SIU. Or call the DNR.

They really don’t know how widespread the armadillo is yet, but they suspect, from anecdotal reports, there are far more than they know.

If only I saw one. I saw dead ones, splattered, pancaked, even one that appeared to be sleeping — as long as you ignored that half its body was gone. But no live ones. I followed Jimenez down the bank of another creek on the western edge of campus. “You are not lucky,” he told me. “Deer are like ducks here. And today, no deer, either. But if we saw an armadillo, you might think I planted it.”

We listened to the stream gurgle.

He peered into a hole beneath a fallen tree. He stood, transfixed. Squirrel nest. Raccoon tracks. He shook his head. “They are here,” he said, “just not here.” We stood in silence for a few more minutes. You know, he said, back when he lived in Mexico, he ate quite a few. They’re good barbecued, he said, but added quickly, he wonders if someone around here will eat one, and it’ll be the wrong one — and boom, leprosy.

Is armadillo meat worth the risk?

“To be honest,” he said, still scanning the woods, “tastes like chicken.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

This story was originally published by the Chicago Tribune on May 14, 2022.