Bill Harnack’s son, Marcus, (episode 7) is twenty-three years old.  After high school Marcus elected not to continue his education and took a job in the foundry where his father works.  It’s a difficult job, but at $11.50 an hour it pays better than most other jobs available to those with only a high school education.  Marcus is a good kid.  He’s honest and hard working.  He values his independence and doesn’t like to rely on his parents for anything, except perhaps the free Packer ticket his father gives him every fall when they make their annual pilgrimage to Lambeau field.  Marcus lives by himself in a small apartment about a mile from the foundry.  There’s no girl friend yet, but Marcus is always hopeful!

His apartment is small.  The bedroom is smaller than Susan Johnson’s suburban walk-in closet, with just enough room for Marcus’ single bed.  He stores his clothes in a primitive cabinet in the hallway.  The bathtub has been pulling away from the wall for several years, stretching the caulk, which is now laced with green mould.  The linoleum in the bath is faded and cracked.  It has started peeling up in the corners of the room.  The kitchen has an apartment-sized stove.  Marcus lifted up the top once and found so much burned macaroni and cheese underneath that he just shut it back down in disgust.  The refrigerator color is avocado green, which doesn’t match the faded white stove.  The tiny living room has brown shag carpet right out of the 1970’s.

The windows don’t stay open because the sash cords broke long ago.  He’s asked the landlord to fix the cords but the landlord says that this would involve removing the window trim and prying open some sort of angled piece in the frame before re-attaching the window weights; a very time-consuming process.  Instead of repairing the windows the landlord gave Marcus a couple of boards to prop up them up.  The heating system works sporadically in the winter but Marcus has a small space heater he uses in the bedroom to keep out the chill.  There is no central air conditioning.  Marcus uses an old window unit that he got from his parents when they installed central air two years ago.

The plaster walls are cracked, but solid.  In the summer, when the humidity is high, Marcus can smell the poignant, musty smell of the wallpaper and paste that was applied over seventy years ago.  In the back hallway some of the plaster has fallen out, exposing the wooden lathe.  Clinging to the lathe are small pieces of horsehair, which was added to strengthen the plaster in the 19th century.  Marcus marvels at the skills of those plasterers, observing how smooth they could get the walls.  He wonders how many hours a day they had to work back in 1895.  What were their names?  Where did they live?  Did they work harder than he works in the foundry?  Were they happy?

Last Saturday Marcus’ 1991 Chevrolet Cavalier started leaking water.   Marcus was hoping it was a hose, but it was a worn-out water pump.  Unable to afford a new one, Marcus got a rebuilt pump from the salvage yard.  He spent four hours trying to install it on Sunday and by the time he bought the right wrench he had spent another $20.  If Dad hadn’t come to the rescue with additional tools and lessons from his own bitter experiences replacing water pumps, Marcus’ day would have been even bleaker.  By 9 p.m.  Sunday evening Marcus was finally done, just in time to get some sleep before his 5 a.m. shift at the foundry.

Marcus’ high school buddy, Frank Rogers, didn’t hang around Hubbard after high school.  He went over to the University of Minnesota and graduated with a degree in finance.  They have kept in touch during the years and always hook up when Frank comes back to Hubbard for Thanksgiving and Christmas to see his family.  Frank has been out of college for a year now.  He has a job as a business analyst with Price Waterhouse Coopers in Minneapolis.  In October Marcus went up to Minneapolis for a weekend visit with Frank.  He rents a cool loft downtown, right across from Chipotle and Starbucks.  His neighbors consist mainly of women and men in their early to mid-twenties, all with a heck of a lot more money to spend than Marcus.  They drive new Hondas and Toyotas, not yet being able to afford a Lexus or an Acura.  They don’t spend any time changing water pumps.  They play golf instead.

Marcus really likes Frank and the feeling is mutual.  Frank never asks Marcus why he didn’t go to college and he never mentions the income disparity between them.  Marcus is happy for Frank and his success, but once in a while Marcus feels envious.  After all, he works a lot harder than Frank for a lot less money.  Frank never has to worry about cruddy stoves, stinky carpets or leaky windows.  Frank hangs around with cool chicks that are good looking and classy.  Marcus’ female friends hang around Hubbard’s neighborhood bars on the weekends; a scene that Marcus doesn’t appreciate or enjoy.  The sad part is that Marcus and Frank have increasingly less in common as the years go by.  Marcus longs for the old days when they were both on the high school football team.  What great times those were!

At the foundry there is a metallurgical engineer named Paul Kedzic.  He has taken a liking to young Marcus and they have spent some time at lunch discussing the properties of various types of metal.  Paul has even discussed with Marcus the chemical components of metals, discussing the molecular structure of various elements.  Marcus is genuinely interested and Paul has noticed that Marcus seems to have a capacity to understand some fairly difficult concepts.

Last Wednesday after lunch Paul took Marcus aside out in the back yard of the foundry where the scrap castings are stacked.  He encouraged Marcus to enroll at Hubbard State University this January and take an evening course in college chemistry.  Marcus told Paul that he really didn’t think he was a “college kind of guy” but Paul continued to encourage him.  After about a week of anguish, Marcus made his decision, but he never mentioned it to Paul.  His first day of class is Monday night, January 9th.

Lately a lot of politicians, mostly democrats, have come out of the woodwork to criticize George Bush for lying to the American people and leading us into an unjust war in Iraq.  Most of them, armed with the same shaky intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, voted in favor of the war.

Apparently everyone is entitled to twenty-twenty hindsight but the President.  Fortunately, he doesn’t much care about his critics, who have blamed him for rising gasoline prices, global warming, hurricane Katrina, and God knows what else.  In this respect the Bush haters are no more constructive now than the Clinton haters were during the alleged Whitewater scandal, but the stakes are much higher this time.

My take on the Iraq war is that someone in the Arab world had to pay for 911 and the logical response of the United States was to base troops in the Middle East to make sure that radical Arabs and their sympathetic governments got the message.   The Taliban in Afghanistan were a logical first target.  Next came Hussein and Iraq.  The world intelligence community believed that Hussein was developing a nuclear weapons program and had little doubt that he possessed chemical weapons, largely due to the fact that he had already gassed the Kurds.  Hussein was a loose cannon.  He was becoming more dangerous.  He had to go.  We took care of him.

While the United Nations and the French stood by, criticizing us while they took their food-for-oil kickbacks from Hussein, the United States did what had to be done.  The international community was largely unsupportive and critical of the United States.  What else is new?  Real leaders with guts and purpose are always resented and despised.  If you are in the software business and your name is Bill Gates, plenty of people will resent your success and call you a greedy monopolist.  If you are a retailer and your name is Wal-Mart, you’re hated by plenty.  The United States is the world’s undisputed military and economic super power.  It is human nature that our first-place status results in resentment from many of the world’s peoples.  After all, doesn’t everyone enjoy seeing the big guy on the block get a bloody nose?

The Iraq war has been messier than we had hoped.  Radical Muslims from all over the Middle East and Africa have flocked to Iraq to harass our soldiers.  Most of these terrorists have paid with their lives and many more of these radicals will line up and die beside their irrational colleagues.  So be it.  If the world’s radical Muslims want to come to Iraq and be killed, it is much better that we kill them in Baghdad than in New York.

Our largest mistake in Iraq has been to bend to political insistence that this war be fought in a “sanitized” fashion.  How dare we kick the Koran of a confessed roadside bomber!  After all, don’t those who kill innocent women and children by planning the bombing of markets and schools deserve the same humane and dignified treatment as a shoplifter in Cincinnati?  We should have been much tougher from the beginning, making it clear to all Iraqis that anyone caught with a weapon or bomb would be shot on sight with no trial and no detention.

Over the past two weeks George Bush and Dick Cheney have gone on the offensive, pointing out the reprehensible harm that is done to our troops and our country when politicians continually spew negativism and call for a deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.  This has irritated the Bush haters.  The counter attack by the Bush administration has finally flushed out left-leaning democrats for what they really are, pathetic quitters who shamelessly display the flag of surrender.  They are championed by Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha, who called this week for the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq!

Most of our brave soldiers who have returned from Iraq tell us that that the US media has skewed what is really happening there and that despite many difficulties we are doing good in that country.  This is ignored by the democrats who’s supreme goal is the embarrassment of George Bush, even if it comes at the expense of the withdrawal of our troops, victory for Al Quaeda, and the spread of international terrorism.  In a recent communiqué the leader of Al Quaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, declared to the world that the US doesn’t have the stomach to finish the job in Iraq and that it is not a question of if the US we will cut and run, but when!  With each negative pronouncement and criticism of our efforts in Iraq, the democrats shamelessly fuel al-Zarqawi’s expectations.

Maybe al-Zarqawi is right.  Perhaps we, the people of the United States of America, don’t share the steely resolve of our commander in chief.  Unlike our predecessors who defeated the Nazi’s and Imperial Japan, maybe we don’t have the guts to finish the job.  Maybe we should just listen to Murtha and al-Zarqawi and leave Iraq.  Maybe we should pull out of Afghanistan as well and have no military presence in the region.  Perhaps we should go back to our past administration’s policy of “containment” of radical Muslims.  After all, if we leave them alone, they won’t hate us anymore.  They will be peaceful.  They will stop teaching hatred in their schools.  They will no longer bomb trains in Spain, subways in London, and skyscrapers in New York.  Let’s give them one more chance to be good guys.  Maybe this time they will be nice to us!

Twenty years ago, while visiting Sweden on business, I ended up spending a couple of hours with the wife of one of my business associates and her two female friends.  They were going shopping and wanted me to go along.  Shopping is the last thing in the world that I have ever wanted to do, but my business was done and I was bored, so I agreed.  That was my first encounter with a place called IKEA near Stockholm.  Since then I’ve been to an IKEA in the United Arab Emirates, their new store in Bloomington, Minnesota and an IKEA store in Schaumburg, near Chicago.  The Swedes have built IKEA’s all over the world, so they must be doing something right.

Before I launch into my thoughts about IKEA, remember one thing.  I HATE shopping.  That’s why I got married in the first place, to get someone else to do my shopping for me.  Boy did I succeed!  But that’s another column.

For me, a confessed non-shopper, IKEA is like walking into a hellish maze.  Once I’m in the place I don’t know where I am or where I’ve already been.  There are no windows or doors so you cannot reference the direction you are going.  I’m pretty sure that the Swedes purposefully designed IKEA so all their customers feel lost in the place.  Heck, I even lose track of what floor I’m on.  I’m not sure but I think that IKEA really stands for “Idiots Kept Everlastingly Ambling”.  After wandering through an IKEA store for what seems like hours, going around and around in circles, I finally arrive at the Promised Land, the checkout area!  I am elated because there are windows and doors.  I see light coming from the street outside.  I am so excited!  Through those windows I can see the parking lot, and freedom!

Then there is that famous IKEA merchandise. In addition to knick-knacks of all kinds, IKEA sells all kinds of furniture including tables, chairs, bookcases, closets, beds, and virtually anything else you can sit on, lounge on, eat off of, or sleep on.  But there is one catch; none of it is assembled.  You see customers loading flat boxes full of monstrously heavy veneered fiberboard panels into their vans or pickups.  These boxes contain well-engineered panels, fasteners, and a detailed 90-page instruction book.  As the customers leave with excited smiles on their faces they are unaware that their IKEA experience is only beginning.  Depending on which furniture item they have purchased, they may be spending up to 5 additional hours at home assembling the thing.  On second thought, maybe IKEA stands for “I keep endlessly assembling”.

If you think you’re a handyman, take the real test.  Try assembling a Rakke wardrobe closet in less than four hours!  I’ve heard from credible sources that even skilled cabinetmakers and carpenters have been known to see shrinks after trying to assemble one of those Rakke wardrobes.  There are wooden dowels, aluminum turn pins, posts that are grabbed when the pins are turned, door mounting hardware, hinges, slots, grooves, and over 250 pounds of panels and pieces to assemble.  A psychologist friend of mine told me that at the last meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, they had a session on “assembly frustration”, which is now officially known as “IKEA Syndrome!

To further add to the confusion the Swedes give everything in the store a weird name.  I assume the product names are in Swedish, or perhaps they come from some Star Trek episode.  Either way, these names are downright weird.  For example, a rug is called an “Amorf”.  A bathmat is a “Toftbo”.  A wall clock is a “Svid” and a clear glass bowl is called a “Blanda”.  Blanda?  The only Blanda I ever heard of was George Blanda, a legendary NFL kicker!  I believe that these confusing names are probably some diabolical Swedish plot.  The Swedes are apparently trying to teach the world how to speak Swedish.  Not realizing that they have miserably failed to establish Swedish as the international language of business, they are now trying to teach our mothers and daughters this strange dialect, hoping that we will all end up speaking Swedish.  Or, God forbid, we might end up thinking like Swedes.  If that happens we will wake up some morning thirsting for a 70% marginal income tax bracket and salivating as we brag about our 26% sales tax!  But our health care will be FREE!

Few people know it, but Dave (Episode #5) has a passion for the city of Chicago.  He’s read many books on the history of the place from Marquette’s first exploration to the present day.  Even though he now lives in Hubbard, he’s caught up in the energy of Chicago, from the poignant odor in Chinatown grocery stores, to the bustle of shoppers on Wacker Drive, to Indian sari-clad women on Devon Avenue, to the chatter of recent Polish immigrants eating dinner at Angelica’s restaurant on Milwaukee avenue.

Having worked in Chicago for many years before coming to Hubbard, Dave fell in love with the city as a young man.  He figured that his fortune was to be found in a large city rather than a small town and Chicago didn’t disappoint him.  He prospered there and began his main hobby, buying classic Chicago apartment buildings.

Dave simply loves historic buildings, particularly Chicago’s classic greystone Victorian three-flats.  If a brownstone is the quintessential New York building, then surely the greystone is Chicago’s equivalent.  Chicago’s greystones are made of a distinct grey-colored limestone from Bedford, Indiana.  Hence, the name “greystone”.  No one knows how many greystone three-flats Dave owns, but some estimate that he owns about twenty of them.  He snapped most of them up in the 70’s, paying less than $50,000 for them.  Today, due to the “gentrification” of North Side neighborhoods and their proximity to Lake Michigan and the “EL” they are worth over $1,000,000.

Although Dave has fancier, more elegant buildings on the north side, his sentimental favorite is his first purchase, a simple yet beautiful stone-arched three-flat at on Roscoe street.  Located just four blocks from Wrigley field, the brown line elevated railway (the “EL”) runs behind the building in the alley as it slows down to merge with the Red Line.  The neighborhood, called “Wrigleyville”, with it’s elevated railway, shops, and restaurants, is so urban that it literally oozes the word “City”.  When referring to 1036 West Roscoe Dave either calls it his “baby” or “Roscoe”, as if the place was a human being.

The front of Dave’s Roscoe three flat is pure limestone that was worked and carved with the hands of skilled craftsmen over 110 years ago.  The stone steps lead to a beautiful arched entry with classic Ionic columns.  The sides and back of the building contain literally thousands of bricks.  One can only wonder how many bricks were laid in Chicago between 1885 and 1905.  It has to be in the billions because nearly 20,000 Greystones were built during those 20 years.  Greystone lots are typically 25 feet wide and each flat consists of one story.  All of the woodwork and doors are crafted from red oak.  The exterior doors are two inches thick.  The interior six-panel oak doors are 1 5/8th inches thick.  If one were to replace Roscoe’s 47 doors today it would cost between $40,000 and $50,000.   Today the building is as solid as the day it was constructed in 1895.

In the beginning, Roscoe was inhabited by the owner, who lived on the first floor, renting the other two stories to tenants.  Lakeview was a working class neighborhood for relatively high paid craftsmen, artisans, and small business owners.  When the 1950’s arrived, urban neighborhoods fell out of favor and there was a lot of suburban flight.  Property values stagnated and lower income tenants painted some of the oak woodwork and tore out built-in hutches and other original features in many greystones.  Dave intervened and saved Roscoe from further decline, painstakingly working to restore the interior to its original condition.  Today he rents it to young professionals who pride themselves on their good jobs and affluent lifestyles.  His tenants enjoy the sports bars, restaurants, and theaters that dominate modern-day Wrigleyville.

Now that his inventory of greystones has substantial value you would think that Dave would want to sell them and cash in on his investment.  He has no intention of doing so.  They are like the children he never had.  He believes that greystones are the ultimate urban building and in Chicago, a city known for its big buildings, Roscoe fits right in.  Roscoe is imposing, magnificent and impressive.  Dave likes it that way.