Uncle Frank's
Diary
Number Seven
 Uncle Frank
Takes a Trip
Uncle Frank’s been to London, to visit the queen.
No, he hasn’t. He hasn’t been anywhere that gives him an excuse
for his long failure to provide fresh fodder in this space. One
thing and another have conspired to quell his customary
compositional regularity, such as it was. In spite of my efforts to
help, I have not been able to find, in local drugstores, patent
medicines that claim to relieve the cramps and bloating of
columnist’s block.
This embarrassing silence may owe to the cold and the dark, to
the sodden squish of wet shoes in midwinter, to the nights that
begin early and linger late, to one more false promise of a spring
that refuses to enter the stage, to that old ennui of snow and ice
we Midwesterners know so well.
Or, it may originate in something darker, colder, and longer
lasting than mere winter.
A few days ago I took the train to Chicago and back. It was a
long day, but worthwhile. I read Steinbeck’s Cannery Row on the
coach, looked out the window while listening to the wheels hum on
the welded rail (long gone the clickety-clack of the old jointed
rail days), and observed my fellow passengers in their curious
manifestations of the human condition.
Steinbeck would be 100 years old this year. I don’t know if he
ever wrote of Chicago, being mostly a California sort, but I think
he would have liked the city. His sympathy with the ordinary man and
woman would have served him well on its crowded sidewalks.
The train pulled into the grand old Union Station shortly after
noon, giving me a good six hours to do whatever I would before
boarding for the return trip. My first act was to dispense with my
plan; the day was too unaccountably pleasant (sunny and in the 40s)
to spend riding buses to one spot and another. I lit out on the
streets, afoot.
Patriotic Barriers
I went first to the Sears Tower, a few blocks north of the train
station. The weather looked good for a view from the observation
deck on the 103d floor.
Signs of the post 9/11 mindset met me directly. Now protecting
the tower one finds innumerable concrete blocks, each a couple of
feet high and maybe as long as an NBA center. All these blocks sport
a cheerful nationalistic motif. Painted in bright red, white, and
blue horizontal stripes, they insist that the passerby notice them
and reflect on their meaning.
We know what they mean. They mean that the authorities have taken
concrete steps to thwart car bombers, and believe that gussying them
up in a guise reminiscent of the American flag will lend that
certain something to the atmosphere.
It does, it does. I would have preferred the discreet charm of
unadorned concrete, gray, unassuming, content to melt into the
background. Red, white, and blue it was, however.
I felt so patriotic as I skirted the perimeter formed by the
colorful barriers.
Once upon a time, visitors to the Sears Tower simply walked into
the lobby, bought their tickets to the observation deck, and headed
on up to see the view. Oh, yes, the program required attendance at a
grossly overloud slideshow puff piece on the city narrated by Oprah
Winfrey, but that was it.
Now: Take off your coat. Slide it, and any packages or other
objects you may be toting, through the x-ray machine. Now please
walk through the metal detector. Step back, please. Do you have any
keys in your pockets?
And so on.
Oh, it’s good; it’s good to know that Precautions Are Being
Taken. I am no more eager than the next gawking tourist to be blown
through the glass of the tower’s observation deck by some earnest
suicide bomber straight out of Conrad’s The Secret Agent. (If you
have not read that book, you’ll find its portrayal of the terrorist
bomber unsettling.)
He Went to the Door, But He Couldn’t Get In
On the other hand, that is the word: unsettling. This is not the
E-Z access to cultural landmarks that American democracy has
afforded us up to now. Other notable buildings in Chicago’s downtown
core present a similar dukes-up readiness to take on the bad guys,
and leave the good guys wondering whether it might not have been
better to visit Galesburg in the springtime, or maybe just stay
home.
Sometimes finding an open door is a major challenge. I walked
almost the entire circumference of the Prudential Building, another
high-rise monument, before I found what was apparently the only
exterior door still in service. All the rest were locked. Once
inside, I came upon what confronts the visitor to so many major
buildings: a phalanx of guards, signs demanding identification, and
an evident willingness to take the careless traveler in hand and
show him the way, the truth, and the light of America’s New War.
That’s what they’re calling it, anyhow. Apologies to Lou Reed,
but this isn’t the beginning of a New Age. It’s the beginning of
something else, and something worse.
Open Your Eyes and Look This Way
Something akin to this constricted psychology also reared its
head on the train. Hankering for a cup of coffee, I set off to the
cafe car, or so I thought. I went the wrong way, and blundered into
a coach occupied only by two train personnel. One of them very
crisply inquired about my intentions. Smooth-spoken as always
(especially before my morning coffee), I attempted to account for my
presence in this forbidden zone.
“Uh, I was, uh, is this the way…?”
“You’re going the wrong way,” he said. “The café is at the other
end.”
I may have resembled a man desperate to wrest control of the
train from the engineer before I revealed my true nature: a man
desperate for some caffeine to clear his befogged brain.
In either case, my chances of reaching the train’s controls did
not look promising. Consider the fact that a few years ago on the
same route, I moseyed freely up to the cab, stood directly behind
the engineer, and chatted with him for several minutes as we sped
down the track. No one questioned my intentions then (which were
nothing but those of a curious traveler and son of a railroad man).
That was back when we lived in an open society. We don’t live
there, any more. The doors are closing. The gates are coming down.
The locks are clicking shut. Names are being taken, and it won’t be
long before retinas are being scanned.
Open your eyes and look straight ahead, please.
A Visit to the Old Library
Is it any surprise that when I visited a library in Chicago, I
went to the library that used to be, instead of the library that is?
I had intended to stop by the new (or almost new) public library on
South State Street. Something led me instead to the old Chicago
Public, now a cultural center. I walked up the old stairs and into
the lobby, where I found at one side a museum devoted to the history
of broadcasting. Incredibly, admission was free, and no one searched
me or x-rayed my belongings.
After wandering among the old radios and other exhibits, I went
back out to the central part of the former public library and
climbed the stairs to what must have been the main reading room.
Such attention to detail graces this old building, erected in the
1890s: The ornate ceilings, the painstaking decorative flourishes
(are those semiprecious stones embedded in the walls? They certainly
look like it, and they’re everywhere. The time that went into
cementing them in place would be unimaginable today.)
Coming back down the steps from the reading room, I thought of
the countless thousands—the millions—of readers whose feet had
pressed upon these stairs, whose hands had touched this marble rail
over the building’s life as a library. How many of these readers
were immigrants, come to America to make new lives for themselves in
this land of hope and—for all its flaws and obstacles—openness of a
kind known nowhere else?
Not a Faceless Crowd
When I walk through the streets of a big city, I like to study
the faces and listen to the voices of the people around me. It isn’t
polite to stare, of course, but you will find, if you try it, that
looking at faces on a busy sidewalk is really very easy. Most of the
people going by are so caught up in their own business that they do
not notice the one observer in the crowd who is looking into their
eyes and thinking about them as individuals, and wondering what
their faces reveal of their lives.
So many faces, such variety, young and fresh, old and weathered,
black, white, brown, yellow… some smiling, some laughing, others
concerned, preoccupied, or otherwise engaged in their inner lives. I
love to watch them.
And listen to them. Within the space of a few blocks, I heard
languages that I recognized, and others whose identity I could only
guess. Spanish, Chinese, Russian… to embrace such a cast of
characters going peacefully about their business: Only a great city
could do that.
And only a great nation can find the courage to remain an open
society in this troubled world. Uncle Frank is not sure that the
United States will be able to do that. Given a choice, he would
probably not mind attending the opening of the old Chicago Public
Library, and going on from there. Maybe it would come out another
way the second time through.
Here, There and Everywhere in Libraryland
Speaking of openness, it would be hard to find a librarian
anywhere who has worked harder or more productively to make library
collections more easily accessible to the average citizen than
Sanford Berman. Berman, longtime head of cataloging with Minnesota’s
Hennepin County Library system, devoted his career to making the
library catalog an aid, rather than an obstacle, to people trying to
find materials on topics of their concern. For decades, Berman
battled to bring catalog language—particularly subject headings—into
harmony with the way most library users think when they go hunting
for something.
Berman finally ran terminally afoul of his administrative
superiors back in 1999. Details of the unseemly circumstances of the
cataloger extraordinaire’s ouster (all right, “retirement”) from the
HCL are available in a nice archived article in the
Minneapolis City
Pages.
According to Rory Litwin in an item in
Library Juice for March 7, HCL plans to scrap the original subject headings that Berman and
crew created over some 25 years, and to replace them with something
close to straight (i.e., frequently non-intuitive, obscure,
user-hostile) Library of Congress subject headings.
Librarians who continue to argue for clarity and accessibility in
their libraries’ catalogs will always owe a debt to Berman,
regardless of what goes on in Hennepin County. Uncle Frank hopes
that librarians in general do not succumb to the retentive
psychology that encircles national monuments with red, white, and
blue barriers by being afraid to open their catalogs to transparent
language.
Bygone visitors of the old Chicago Public would have welcomed
Berman’s hand in their efforts to penetrate the library’s riches.
Let us trust that the retro move apparently afoot in Minnesota is no
more than a temporary setback, and not something darker, colder, and
longer lasting.
Illustration by: K. McGinnis
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P.O. Box 1580