Ten reasons why after living in Dallas for 40 years, Chicago is still my kind of town

This month marks forty years that my family and I relocated from Chicago to Dallas. After being here forty years, I still prefer the “Windy City” over “Big D.” To quote actor Michael Caine who said decades ago the only reason why he did “Jaws: The Revenge” (1987) was for the money, the only reason by comparison that I still live here is the job market, hence the money.

Here are ten other reasons why to this day I still sing the words from that Blues Brothers' song, “Come on…oh baby don’t you wanna go…back to that same old place…Sweet home Chicago.”

The Bike Trails: Unlike Dallas where if you want to ride your bike you got to put it in your car or truck, drive to White Rock Lake and then get your bike out to ride the trails, I could go anywhere in the suburbs from my house on my bike using the Chicago trails. I could even if I wanted to ride my bike to Downtown Chicago. If we had bike trails here like Chicago does, I wouldn’t be overweight and diabetic.

The broadcasters of both TV and radio: Dick Biondi, Jack Brickhouse, Harry Caray, Mary Ann Childers, Bill Curtis, Joel Daly, John Drury, Fahey Flynn, Don Geronimo (Michael L. Sorce), Jimmy Piersall, Tom Skilling. These were the “brand” names of broadcast journalism, sportscasting and radio disc jockeys I often watched and listened to back when I lived in Chicago from 1970 to 1984.



The city doesn’t shut down when two inches of ice and snow or less hit the ground! Anyone from Chicago laughs at Texas in how the residents are nothing more than a bunch of wusses when so much as an inch of ice hits the ground. For most of us Texas residents it means a few days off from work and no school when Dallas shuts down. Up there, they go to work, schools are open and if anyone from work calls in sick it better be because they’re dead. Now how does that make you Texans feel knowing the people up north see you as a wuss? You Texans boast about how you love your guns and ammo, Texas BBQ, your Dallas Cowboys and Republicans but a little ice and snow comes your way, and it becomes a scene out of that 1983 nuclear war TV film, “The Day After”, where everyone rushes to the grocery stores to grab what they can before the missiles launch! I mean when I went to Walmart a day after all the snow and ice melted, they were completely out of milk! Come on wusses!



Downtown: To quote Mr. Wilhelm, from “Seinfeld” who says to George Costanza (Jason Alexander) in an episode concerning his New York Yankees assignment that he needs “to go downtown. It’s all downtown. Just like the song says”, the same applies to Downtown Chicago. Like Disney World where it’s been said it takes a few days to see the whole place, I could spend a few days visiting all the museums near Lake Michigan that include the Museum of Science and Industry, the Adler Planetarium, the Shedd Aquarium, The Field Museum and Sears Tower. Yes, I know it’s now called the Willis Tower, but it will always be the Sears Tower to me.



Haunted History: The "Windy City" is rich with ghost stories from apparitions seen at Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery in Bremen Township, Cook County, Illinois to the souls lost in The Eastland Disaster in 1915 who reportedly still haunt Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios. I am more prone to believing the Chicago legend of Resurrection Mary about a vanishing hitchhiker who is picked up by motorists on Archer Avenue only to disappear once she is dropped off at the gates of Resurrection Cemetery as opposed to “Big D's” ghostly legend of The Lady of the Lake which sounds like some Texas “ghostbuster” stole the same aspects of the Windy City’s legend and called it their own.



The Italian food: Yes, I know with a little bit of searching the Internet and in my case, a heavy dose of patience to justify traveling an hour on my weekend off to Addison to get a Chicago style Italian beef sandwich at Al’s Italian Beef I can for a moment get a taste of Chicago. I don’t have to travel very far, however, to get the ethnic Italian food I could literally live on daily in the "Windy City." There is either a Giordano’s, pizza places (NO, I am not referring to CiCi's Pizza, Dominos or Papa Johns - I'm talking about "real" pizza) and Italian beef sandwich restaurants within a few miles of each other. Speaking of other foods and beer you can’t get here that are only available in Chicago, there are those Dean’s Ice Cream Cake Rolls, Maurice Lenell Cookie assortments and Old Style. Now if I can only find the name of those caramel rice crispy type treats my grandmother bought us that are no longer made anymore. Back in the day, I could devour an entire box after leaving them in the freezer for a few hours.



The Movies: Several movies were shot in Chicago that include “The Sting” (1973), “The Blues Brothers” (1980), “Ordinary People” (1980), “National Lampoon’s Vacation” (1983), “Code of Silence” (1984), “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (1985), “Raw Deal” (1985), “Backdraft” (1990). Do I have to list more???



Svengoolie: As a kid in grade school among the things I did on Saturday afternoons was sit in front of the television while building Legos or playing with my Star Wars figures and watch Chicago horror host Son of Svengoolie (he is now called "Svengoolie". As played by Rich Koz, dressed in black vampire type fatigues and sporting a heavy black moustache and goatee, Svengoolie would come out of his coffin for two hours every Saturday to host another B-grade horror movie in between humorous skits and getting rubber chickens and fish thrown at him off stage. Today Svengoolie can be seen every Saturday night at 9 p.m. central on MeTV and has his own Facebook page, which as of this writing has an accumulated 65,428 likes.



Two Newspaper Town: One of the joys about living in a metropolitan city was the opportunity to get two differing perspectives from two differing newspapers. I don’t have to do any research knowing that the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune have battled financial problems over the years. The fact is “the Windy City” is still a two-newspaper town. Is Dallas? Sorry the Fort Worth Star Telegram does not make Dallas a two-newspaper town alongside the Dallas Morning News.



The writers: True my decision to pursue journalism began in 1991 but my inspiration to write film reviews and columns came from reading Chicago film critics Gene Siskel, Roger Ebert’s movie reviews and columnist Mike Royko.



I am sure everyone reading this will say there are plenty of things to like about Dallas and after 30 years it’s high time I start giving “Big D” a chance. There is nothing anyone in “Big D” can convince me that living in the Lone Star State is so much better than being up north.

The only thing Dallas and Chicago have in common is about aviation disasters. When an American Airlines DC-10 crashed upon losing an engine during takeoff on May 25, 1979, killing 273 passengers and crew and two on the ground and a Delta Airlines L-1011 crashed at DFW airport during a thunderstorm killing 137 and one on the ground, both jets had the flight number 191 assigned to them. Tragic coincidence or a cursed flight number? Call me superstitious but I wouldn’t fly on a plane with a flight number of a previous jet that crashed especially if it’s “191”.

©7/30/24

Why are we so fascinated by the evil that men do?

Why are we so fascinated by the evil that men do, so much so, viewers can’t get enough of the grisly, often unsettling, hour-long crime documentaries and cheap questionable made-for-cable-TV movies of the week on Lifetime. The stories about such real-life villains from Bernie Madoff and Alex Murdaugh to mass shooters and serial killers have been rehashed several times over. What new information could one say about these no-good pieces of shit that wasn’t already revealed when they first happened years or decades ago.

Is it to introduce a new generation to their atrocities so their tales of committing one, if not all the seven deadly sins live on in infamy? Or God forbid, inspire them to commit the same crimes?

I asked myself such questions after viewing the 2016 documentary, “77 Minutes”, which explored the mass shooting at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California July 18, 1984, that left 21 people dead and 19 injured before the gunman was taken out by a SWAT team sharpshooter.

Ironically the time it took for authorities to get the go-ahead to stop the gunman’s rampage forty years ago is the same amount of time police in Uvalde, Texas got the order to engage an 18-year-old mass shooter who during those same “77 minutes” gunned down 19 students, two teachers and wounded 17 others May 24, 2022, at Robb Elementary School. 

Not only are the comparisons eerily similar in law enforcement's failure to immediately engage both gunmen, let alone the time the massacres began to the time they ended, but the number of dead at Robb Elementary was the same number of those killed at the McDonald's.

The mass shooting, like so many that came soon after the past four decades, was another case where evil ALWAYS triumphed over good and though the good succeeded in eventually stopping the perpetrators, or the shooters cowardly took themselves out before battling police, the damage had already been done. Lives are forever ruined. No one from those who were there who lived to tell about it to the viewers who watched the aftermath on the news or on YouTube would ever be the same.

The unspeakable tragedies stay with us long after they’ve become distant memories we hope to never look back on.

In a perfect world the minute these no-good pieces of shit departed there’d be no more retellings of their despicable life stories much to our personal glee. They’d be doing their time in the fires of Hell prior to their meeting with the Grim Reaper and being denied entrance to the pearly gates by Saint Peter and the Almighty.

The reasons why we can’t seem to get enough of hearing about these perpetrators could be numerous. Perhaps it’s because just when we thought we’d seen all the crimes various individuals have committed against society that we question if not admit being a little fascinated looking for answers on what makes someone go off the deep end? That a person with such a hatred for the Hispanic community whose victims ranged from eight months to 74-years-old could, we hoped at the time, would only be an isolated incident. In 1984 perhaps the devil was telling us “normal” people who have a respect for human life, “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

I haven’t dwelled on the McDonald’s massacre since watching the documentary in July nor have I bothered to look up the life stories of other infamous mass murderers the past four decades.

All these monsters are the equivalent of Satan and we’re Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden being enticed to eat the forbidden fruit. I just know crime enthusiasts are salivating over producer Ryan Murphy’s next 10-episode series called “American Sports Story” chronicling the rise and fall of football star, Aaron Hernandez, which airs on FX Sept. 17.

There’s no stopping the entertainment industry and the media from churning out what’s mostly regurgitated often times over sensationalized tabloid trash.

The question is how many curious viewers can keep themselves from a taking a bite of that big rotten apple.

©7/24/24

Reason former President Trump and me are still here has nothing to do with “Divine Intervention”

I shouldn’t be here today writing this blog.

Since 2015, I’ve been hospitalized five times. The result of not taking my insulin and checking my blood sugars three to four times daily before eating and allowing the numbers to exceed to the 700 to 900 ranges since my first diabetes diagnosis in 2006. In one incident, the sugars were so high in the four digits the nurse at the emergency room couldn’t get a reading on the glucometer.

As many times as I’ve been in the hospital over the past nine years now, I wonder if anyone who’d heard about my stints, or cared, would ask me, if not ask themselves, if I got a death wish?

No one has to date.

God is not the reason why I’m still here. God and his angels didn’t send a subliminal message to mom telling her she should get my ass to the emergency room. Her medical knowledge and the fact she and any mother, for that matter, knows her own kid better than the kid knows themselves.



I just thought my moving slow, unable to swallow solid foods unless it was pasta or soup, moving blue spots, recounting certain moments in my life, gulping down three large McDonalds smoothies – one every 15 minutes, seeing traffic lights at night looking like distant stars, and sick to my stomach with an urge to barf every few hours were the result of a severe case of stomach flu.

“Jesus loves you,” said the nurse on my first stint to the hospital back in 2015 the night I was admitted. The nurse told me I was the talk of the floor who said how I looked like Death when I came in, but within a few hours I was almost back to normal - the result of the IV medication fluids.

Mom, not “Divine Intervention”, is the only reason I’m still here today.

Just like “Divine Intervention” didn’t stop the assassin’s bullet from what would have been a successful kill shot last Saturday at a rally held for former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. If Trump hadn’t referenced an immigration graphic, his head turned to the right side instead of directly facing the audience, the Republican Party, let alone the country, would be in as much turmoil as the Democratic Party is right now deciding President Joe Biden’s future as their democratic nominee in August.

As the self-appointed “Mayor of Realville” I don’t believe God and/or his angels kept me from “knock, knock-knockin on heaven’s door” any more than the notion the Almighty is watching over Taiwan, Israel, the Ukraine and America.

The notion God prevents tragedies from happening or keeps them from being worse than what the dire situation is already reminds me of what friend Michael Frazier commented on my Facebook page when I posted a picture of an angel hovering above the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado in 2012 at a memorial service for the victims killed by a mass shooter.

"I believe there are Angels, and they are with us," Frazier wrote. "It is not outside the Lord's preview to perform miracles. I don't believe this is an angel any more than that picture of the twin towers had Satan's face in the smoke after the planes hit. Angels are spirits, not clouds. If they were going to appear to anyone, why would they be veiled in a cloud?"

Yet “God” and “Divine Intervention” was what lawmakers said saved the former president at this week’s Republican National Convention.



Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, said her late mother was watching over her father at last Saturday’s rally. Rep. Cory Mills said, “divine intervention” and the “protective hand” of God saved the Republican presidential candidate.

Would Republican lawmakers still be saying the same thing if Trump hadn’t survived the assassination attempt? Doubtful.

I won’t argue that God is everywhere 24/7. You just have to look. The Lord will always listen to your pleas whenever you need him. He doesn’t hold a grudge. He won’t say, “Hmm, you have not been to Sunday mass for months and years, and now all of a sudden you are asking for my help to bail you out of some personal crisis you are in right now?”

God is as much present in our daily lives as the Devil.

“Our God still saves. He still delivers, and he still sets free. Because on Saturday, the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle. But an American lion got back on his feet, and he roared,” said Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina.

Well, that “American lion” was not the Almighty. It was the former president who got back up after the bullet zipped past his right ear as secret service agents swarmed on top of him. Trump, the “American lion” not God, raised his fist to the crowd as he was whisked away off stage letting them know he was ok.



God didn’t stop “the Devil” from hitting his target. The spectators at the rally who saw the suspect perched on a roof top 150 yards away from the stage were the ones who alerted law enforcement officials minutes before gunfire erupted.

“Someone’s on top of the roof,” said one. “There he is, right there.”

“He’s on the roof!” said another. “Right here, right on the roof.”

A Secret Service sharpshooter, not God, took out the gunman.

If God really, really, really wanted to prove to humanity he is around, Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old retired fire chief of Buffalo Township who died at the rally shielding his wife and daughter would be here.

You are a born liar if you tell me you’ve never asked yourself why God took someone’s life, but spared another. I can’t tell you how many times I felt like pounding my fist through a wall after hearing the latest news of a police officer, newly married, with a baby on the way and just joined the force lost his life in the line of duty in Anytown, USA. It’s like asking why a tornado spared one house but wiped the home next door off the map.

The only answer I can come up with is, life’s not fair. It is what it is. It’s the nature of the beast.

Why horrible things happen to people and others are spared will only be answered when we go before the Almighty and ask him that question. I wouldn’t be surprised if, even in death, he or she won’t like the answer.

There’s only one, and ONLY one reason why I, and former President Trump are still here today.

It’s not our time yet.

©7/17/24

Appreciation: Shelley Duvall (1949-2024)

When an audience member asked Shelley Duvall where she ranks Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic, "The Shining" (1980), in her body of work, the Texas born actress jokingly said, “It’s my Vietnam.”

Duvall, who was born in Fort Worth, Texas and grew up in Houston, recounted her experiences working with the reclusive director whom she called “a genius” before a full house, April 26, 1999, at the USA Film Festival in Dallas following a screening of the film.

Filming "The Shining" took six days a week, 16-hour days and lasted a year and one month.

“I was so out of touch with the world after that film finished that I didn’t know what to do with myself,” Duvall said.

Audiences applauded when Duvall’s name flashed on the movie’s opening credits as a beat-up Volkswagen made its way through the Colorado mountains.

“They say there are a million stories in the naked city,” Duvall began. “Well, there are a million stories on The Shining that I really don’t know where to begin.”

Duvall provided some interesting facts behind the making of the movie.

“Jack (Nicholson) and I weren’t really driving in Colorado or anywhere like most people think. We filmed it all at Elstree Studios in England. That was all second unit stuff; the driving shots in the Volkswagen going up and up to the Overlook Hotel.”

The actual front of the building seen in the film was actually the Lookout Mountain Hotel in Oregon.

“That was built to scale in the back lot,” Duvall added. “The sets inside were huge and covered the entire studio.”

Kubrick never told his cast how to do a scene while shooting the film.

“He doesn’t really give you a whole lot of direction as to doing it this way or that way,” she explained. “As a matter of fact, before we shot my first scene which was in the apartment, Stanley took me aside, told all the other crews to go away and asked me privately, ‘Listen, Shelley, how would Robert Altman do it?’”

The question came up because Duvall had worked with Altman in the past prior to "The Shining" that included "Nashville" in 1975 and "3 Women" in 1977.

“I just looked at him and said, ‘What???’” she exclaimed not expecting a great director like Kubrick to ask her that.

“Stanley never said act this way with Jack,” she commented. “But Jack would give a different take than I would. Working with Robert Altman, I never did more than five takes and that was only one time in the seven films I had done with him.”

According to several articles in Variety and Entertainment Weekly, however, Kubrick was known for shooting more than thirty takes of a scene.

“I was really worried when I first started working with Stanley that by the time the fifth take occurred, I asked him, ‘Am I doing anything wrong,’” she asked. “Stanley just said ‘No. I just don’t print anything until after 35 takes.’”

During the last 40 to 45 minutes of the film, Duvall’s character, Wendy, was seen frantically running around throughout the hotel trying to find her son, Danny. She was frightened, crying, and holding a sharp long knife to protect herself from Nicholson’s psychotic ax-wielding Jack Torrence and fleeing from the resort’s ghostly apparitions.

Director Stanley Kubrick and Shelley Duvall on the
the set of The Shining.

While shooting those sequences, the actress admitted she had to think of reasons to cry.

“I had already exhausted all the deaths in the family, pets and pretty soon, I would just wake up in the morning and cry because I didn’t want to go to work and cry all day,” Duvall added. “It was absolutely physically exhausting. I wondered how long a person could cry before going into shock.”

Filming those scenes, Duvall said she looked like a ghost.

“There was no makeup and the dark circles around my eyes, that was real,” she said. “I don’t think I remember ever having any circles whatsoever before I did this film.”

Though she admits her next movie with Altman, "Popeye" (1980), was “a much happier experience,” Duvall said working with Kubrick was still a fascinating one.

“It was great to work with Jack Nicholson, but it was too bad he had to be mad at me all the time,” she said. “He’s one of those guys who really gets into a part and sticks to it.”

Duvall said she didn’t know where or what actor Danny Lloyd was doing today, who played their terrified son in the film and lived in Pekin, Illinois at the time when he got his first role.

“His father was a train engineer, and both parents quit their jobs and moved to England,” she said. “They were over there six months before Jack, or I were there.”

At the film festival, an audience member asked if Duvall thought Danny was a normal child.

“He was a very normal child when he came in,” she laughingly commented. “He was “Tony” when he came out,” in reference to the boy’s imaginary character in the film who was the devil. 

Another audience member inquired about a final scene Kubrick cut a week after the film played in theaters in 1980. According to author Laurent Bouzereau’s book, "The Cutting Room Floor", the original ending had Duvall’s character in the hospital being visited by Ullman who tells her that her husband died.

The actress, however, admitted she doesn’t remember the sequence ever being shot.

“Jack’s last day of filming was of him freezing to death and when it was over, he was so glad to go home to see his Lakers play again,” she said. “I don’t think Stanley ever wanted the film to end. I don’t think he ever wanted the process to end. He loved making movies.”

Renowned horror novelist Stephen King made it no secret he didn’t like Kubrick’s version of his bestselling 1977 novel when the film was released.

Duvall thought it was because the author would probably prefer his name at the beginning of the title.

“I think it would be because all the videos say, “Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining” and not “Stephen King’s The Shining,’” she remarked.

King adapted a script from his book and ABC remade it into a six-hour mini-series in 1997. Duvall said she only saw about thirty minutes of part two.

“It just wasn’t as good as the original,” she added. “I can’t help it. You have to be honest in your opinions otherwise, what is your opinion worth?”

Duvall died July 11, 2024, at age 75.

©7/11/24