Johnny Yen's Chicago: The Abbott Mansion and Factory

Last week, I found myself walking by the handsome Brundage Building near Lincoln and Belmont and it occurred to me to have a new series of posts where I feature things of interest in my hometown of Chicago. I'll have a post soon on the Brundage Building, which you may have seen in a movie. Today's feature is the Abbott Mansion and the old Abbott factory.

On the days that I ride my bike to school (it's about a two mile, ten minute ride, and not too bad even when the weather is bad), I ride a couple of blocks north to ride along Wilson Avenue, which has a bike lane and leads, literally, directly to my school, which is right on Wilson Avenue. I pass by many handsome buildings, of many ages and in many different styles. As I near my school, I pass by a beautiful Queen Anne style mansion-- The Abbott Mansion.



Here's a picture I took last June, on my way to a summer school anatomy class that shows the mansion in its summer glory. You can tell by the sign in the first picture that it's since gone on the market.



The six thousand square foot, 17-room Abbott Mansion was built by Wallace Calvin Abbott, the founder of Abbott Laboratories, the drug company. University of Michigan graduate Wallace Calvin Abbott was a physician and drugstore owner who was one of the first Americans to adopt a process that had been developed in Europe for extracting alkaloids, the chemicals with the medicinal properties, from plants, in 1888. This paid off handsomely and quickly for him-- he built his mansion in 1891, just three years later.

Today, Abbott Laboratories is a $29 billion dollar a year business, with a main manufacturing facility in North Chicago, Illinois, a suburb to the north of Chicago. Back in the late 1800's, it's main manufacturing facility was just a few blocks away from Dr. Abbott's mansion, at Ravenswood Avenue, just north of Lawrence Avenue (across the railroad tracks from the Sears on Lawrence, for all you Chicagoans). These pictures were also taken last June.





Fortunately these handsome old brick buildings have been preserved-- they now have condo lofts in them.

Coincidentally, the old factory is just down the street from the site of an epically failed bank robbery that I posted about some time ago in this post, in which the robber failed to realize two things: one, that banks put dye packs in with the loot, and two, if your getaway involves jumping on the nearby commuter train, it might be a good idea to coordinate the robbery with the train schedule.

The "Sigh of Relief" Friday Random Ten

Last year was an unexpectedly difficult year, between the general recession (and consequently less money at my waitering job), my wife being out of work for 5 months and the auto accident I had in June. I realized that I had to manage my debts somehow until I finished school. After researching debt management companies, I finally made a call to the one I chose. Within a half hour, everything was straightened out. I'll be making a monthly payment that is about half of what a bunch of minimum payments would have been. When I'm done with school, I can pay the balance off without a penalty. I'm quite relieved to have a plan.

Later today, at the suggestion of a classmate, I'm also going to hang a sign at the local Whole Foods offering tutoring. I figure that parents may be willing to pay pretty well to have a certified former elementary school teacher to tutor their kids. Keep your fingers crossed.

1. The Long Black Veil- Johnny Cash
2. Good Vibrations- The Beach Boys
3. Smiling Faces- The Dramatics
4. Centerfold- The J. Geils Band
5. Darling Be Home Soon- The Lovin' Spoonful
6. A Fool For Your Stockings- ZZ Top
7. Slow Ride- Foghat
8. Daddy's Tune- Jackson Browne
9. Come Running- Van Morrison
10. Spitting In The Wind- The dB's


Notes:
1. Today would have been The Man In Black's 78th birthday. Following a Facebook thing that's going on, I'm wearing some black today. Of course, I wear a black t-shirt almost every day of my life, so that's not too difficult...
2. The instrument on this song is not a Theremin, contrary to popular belief, but a very similar homemade instrument.
3. These guys were a 2-hit wonder-- they had another hit with "Whatcha See Is Watcha Get."
4. In his 1980 book "The Rock Book of Lists," rock critic Dave Marsh listed the J. Geils Band as one of the top ten great rock bands to never have a #1 hit. The next year, they released their smash hit record "Freeze Frame" and had a #1 hit with "Centerfold." And then they broke up. Damn Marsh for jinxing them.
5. This lovely song might be my favorite love song ever. I've included a live clip I found on Youtube at the bottom.
6. Saw that "Little Ol' Band From Texas" on the tour for Dequello, the album this was on, in 1980.
7. Two of the three bands I saw in my first concert, at the Superbowl of Rock in Soldier's Field are represented on this list. One was Foghat, and another was J. Geils Band. The third was the one-hit wonder Climax Blues Band ("Couldn't Get It Right")
8. This is tied with Steve Goodman's "My Old Man" as my favorite father song.
9. From the great Moondance album.
10. Nobody was happier than I was when the dB's' 1984 "Like This" album was rereleased on cd a few years ago-- it had been out of print for a long time. Along with the Replacements' Hootenanny and Let It Be albums, it was a mainstay during my college years.

When You Know

I had my once-weekly clinical yesterday. As I've mentioned, I'm working this semester at in the cardiac ward in a hospital that is considered to be one of the best in the country. I had a really interesting and productive time there.

Yesterday, it was my turn, along with my friend Justine's, to administer meds. My instructor got ahold of the "MAR," the list of meds and dosages for my patient. It was four pages long.

My patient, as it turned out, was a 60 year old African-American man who was suffering from a number of ailments, the chief among them being congestive heart failure. He was also suffering from severe asthma, gout and a bad cold-- he'd been admitted for shortness of breath. He was also morbidly obese-- he weighed nearly 400 pounds.

I spent about 45 minutes filling out a med chart for him-- I had to look up all of the meds he was on, their use, their possibles complictions, etc. I was astonished at how many medications he was on. I was a little surprised that he was not diabetic, one of the few patients I've worked with who wasn't.

When I finished, I checked in with my instructor, giving her a little overview. I told her that I was going to give my patient a "head to toe" exam, and would get her when I was ready to administer the medications.

When I got to my patient's room, he was working with a respiratory therapist. I introduced myself to him and to her and asked if I could observe. She did better than that-- she invited me to help her.

My patient walked about 40 feet down the hall with a Pulse Oximeter attached to his finger-- a device that uses infrared light to measure the oxygen saturation of the blood's hemoglobin. He struggled on his walker down the hall and sat down. His oxygen saturation was 88 %; under 92% is cause for concern. He rested and his saturation got up to an acceptable level. We walked him back to his room and checked his oxygenation again. It was once again low-- even on oxygen, which he is on full time.

When the respiratory therapist finished with him, I gave him his head to toe. He had severe edema (swelling) in his ankles and "wheezing" in his lungs. It was the first time I'd heard this in a patient and known what it was.

I got my instructor and we administered his morning meds-- all 10 of them. Afterward, I asked if there was anything else I could do for him. He answered yes: could I just sit with him for a while.

I asked my instructor if there was anything else she needed me to do, and if I could honor his request. She told me to go ahead and stay with him.

I pulled up a chair and started chatting with him. We talked about our lives and kids. I asked about his hobbies-- he told me that he loved to sew, but couldn't anymore since he'd lost most of the sight in one of his eyes (probably from arteriosclerosis). He told me about taking old clothes and scraps and re-sewing them into new clothes for his kids. He loved to play chess on the computer.

And then he opened up about how scared he was. He had so much wrong with him, and just struggling to breath was frightening to him. I remembered last year, when I spent three days coughing, wheezing and gasping for breath-- how frightened I was after three days of that. I'm able to eliminate it now with one puff of albuterol; that's just one of the nearly two dozen meds he is on, and he still struggles.

I stayed with him until he had to work with the respiratory therapist again. Later, at the end of my day, I popped in to say goodbye to him. And I had two thoughts. The first is that as I cruise into middle age, I'm glad that I made the decision, when I was about 15, to start taking care of myself-- to eat well, exercise, etc. It's way easier to do little things over a long time, rather than take drastic measures later on. And secondly, I'm glad to be entering a profession where I get to help people.

Johnny Yen's Chicago Stories: Lucky and Unlucky Gangsters

When I was doing the research for a post on the "whacking" of gangster Allen Dorfman on January 21, 1983 in a hotel parking lot not too far from my home, I discovered that another notorious gang hit-- or non-hit, as it turned out-- happened around the same time: the attempted gangland murder of Ken "Tokyo Joe" Eto.

Eto was an oddity in the Chicago Outfit-- a Japanese-American in a world dominated by Italians, Irish and Jews. The Tacoma, Washington native had learned gambling on a troop train on the way to his deployment as a soldier in World War II. It turned out that he had a knack for gambling, and after the war he migrated to Chicago, where eventually began to run the mob's "Bolito" rackets on Chicago's North Side. Aided by several thousand dollars a week in payoffs to the police, Eto was handling $150,000-$200,000 a week.

The FBI caught on to Eto's operation, and Eto was convicted of running the illegal gambling operations. Like Dorfman, the mob was afraid that Eto would become a government witness rather than face prison time. Just a few weeks before his sentencing, Eto was called to a dinner meeting. While sitting in his car in this spot, in front of the now-demolished Mont Clare theater (this is a southward view), Eto was shot three times in the head by John Gattuso and Jasper Campise. In a sign of how corrupt Chicago was then, Gattuso was a Cook County Sheriff's deputy.

Incredibly, the .22 calibre bullets bounced off of Eto's head. He got out of his car and made his way into a nearby pharmacy, where he called for help.

(Here is a picture of the same area in the early 1970's, with a view to the north. You can see the Mont Clare Theater to the far right)

Eto saw the writing on the wall. He immediately fingered the two gunmen. Unfortunately for them, the mob got to them before the police. On July 14, 1983, they were found beaten and strangled to death in the trunk of a car in suburban Naperville, Illinois.

What had happened? It turned out that the gunmen had packed their own ammunition in order to reduce the chances of the ammunition being traced back to them. They'd put an insufficient amount of powder in their bullets, which had bounced relatively harmlessly off of Eto's head. They paid for this mistake with their lives.

And what of Eto? No fool, he entered the FBI witness program. He died of old age in Georgia in 2004.

The location of the attempted hit was interesting: the northwest Chicago neighborhood of Mont Clare. Mont Clare abuts the Chicago suburb of Elmwood Park, home of many mobsters over the years. By gentlemen's agreement, the town was generally off-limits to hits: in fact, one of notorious mob henchman Anthony Spilotro's most infamous and brutal murders came in retaliation for a hit that violated this agreement. The site of Eto's attempted hit was literally within sight-- but just outside of Elmwood Park. Apparently there was still honor among thieves back in those days.

Two years later, there would be less honor in another more successful hit just about a mile away, just on the other side of the border of Elmwood Park and Chicago, of Charles "Chuckie" English. A lieutenant of Sam Giancana, his star fell somewhat when Giancana was murdered in his Oak Park, Illinois home in July of 1975. Still, he soldiered on, working as a bookie in Florida, but eventually returning to Chicago, where he allegedly badmouthed Giancana's successors. It all caught up to him February of 1985, when he was whacked outside of Horvath's, a then-popular and now-demolished restaurant.

This time, the hitman, who was probably Charles Schweihs, who was also probably responsible for the murders of Allen Dorfman, Sam Giancana, Anthony Spilotro and Michael Spilotro, shot English in Elmwood Park, though just barely so; Harlem Avenue, where the restaurant was located, is the dividing line between Chicago and Elmwood Park in that particular location.

These days, there's a Staples office supply store where Horvath's used to be. Across the street, on the Chicago side, nothing has changed; the building that was there back then serving as a warning to English, Eto and all the other mobsters is still there:









The Galewood Funeral Home.

Late Friday Random Ten

I spent the day running some errands, doing a little work on a family project and doing the legwork for a future "Chicago Tales" post when I should have been studying. I'll try to make it up during the week.

My son has a band event tomorrow, so he's at my ex's. We'll get together on Sunday and catch up over a Chinese meal or barbecue.

1. Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars)- R.E.M.
2. Bang A Gong- T. Rex
3. Bodhisattva (live)- Steely Dan
4. Lord Have Mercy On My Soul- Black Oak Arkansas
5. Planet Claire- The B-52's
6. Brandy- The Looking Glass
7. One Less Bell To Answer- The Fifth Dimension
8. Will The Wolf Survive?- Los Lobos
9. Istanbul- They Might Be Giants
10. Running Up That Hill- Kate Bush


Notes:
1. From R.E.M.'s terrific first record, the EP Chronictown.
2. Elton John played the piano on this one.
3. A rarity that I'm going to post soon on Boxnet-- a live performance in the early seventies, in Santa Monica, where the band brought on a wino to introduce them. Very funny.
4. Downloaded this one after hearing it while watching "Dazed And Confused" with my son a few months back.
5. The B-52's beat the sophmore jinx with their second album "Wild Planet."
6. I know it's bubblegum, but I love this song.
7. One of many great pop tunes from this band.
8. Los Lobos are one of the last acts left to fulfill on my "must see" list.
9. Love this band!
10. This song reminds me of a punk bar I hung out with on the Southwest Side of Chicago after college. Grist for a future post.

"It's Bad Luck Just Seein' A Thing Like That..."

Recently, my son and I watched one of my favorite movies, Quick Change. I was fishing around Youtube for a scene from the movie and came up with this one, in which the main characters, who are trying to get to the airport after robbing a bank, stop to ask for directions.

Sears Tower

This is a picture I took of the Sears Tower, er, I mean the Willis Tower last weekend. The reason I could snap a nice picture of it was because my son was driving the car.

Tales Of Sonny Boy: The Turning Point

A couple of months ago, while looking through a box of old pictures, I came across this picture of my son, which was taken in 1996, when he was 2 years old. It's quickly become one of my favorites. It shows his personality very well-- sunny and good-natured. It also reminded me that there was a time, shortly after this picture was taken, that those qualities disappeared temporarily.

After my son was born, I moved in with his mother. I was hoping that she would overcome her lack of communication and basically passive personality (or so I thought) and we could be a happy couple raising our child together.

The old saying "watch out what you wish for, you may get it," applies here. Soon after we moved in together, she became hell on wheels, regularly following me around screaming, assaulting my character, frequently throwing and smashing household objects. Afterward, she would cry and swear it wouldn't happen again. And of course it eventually would. It was classic abuse behavior.

When Adam was about a year old, I decided I needed to move out. I was going back to school to finish my teaching certification and knew that I would not be able to finish school with my self-esteem being constantly battered. I left the possiblity of reconciliation open-- if she would get counseling. She never did, and eventually I started dating someone.

She erupted in rage at this. She filed a paternity suit, though I'd never contested paternity-- and filed for sole custody of our son. She began taking counsel from a trashy friend of hers who had 6 children by 7 different fathers, and lived off the child support from the various fathers. She apparently imagined that she was going to get a bunch of money from me.

A bruising custody fight ensued. I hired a lawyer and, mirculously, started working a web design job that paid very well. My friend Mark, who was shot to death in a robbery nearly four years ago, secured this job for me. I was eternally grateful. It paid for a lot of lawyer time.

Things quickly got ugly. At one point, she broke into my apartment and attempted to take my son out of the place while I had time with him. I called the police, who asked if I wanted her arrested. I declined. I had to contact the police and phone company-- she was making harassing calls.

I began dealing with the court process, which sucks. Your child is basically treated as a piece of property that is the subject of ownership dispute. We were put into remediation. It did little good.

In the meantime, his mother was able to use procedural manuevers to try to keep me from seeing my son. I did not dispute paternity, but until the papers saying this were filed, she could technically keep me from seeing him. The people who owned the day care center he attended saw this, and saw that it was distressing him not to see me-- I'd been the primary caregiver-- and began letting me in to see him every day.

When my son's mother figured this out, he pulled him out of that school and put him into the preschool at the New City YMCA.

As things dragged on, it became apparent that the people at the YMCA had figured out what an ass my son's mother was. Several times, when I went to pick my son up, after my lawyer had been able to force his mother to give me time with him, documents were left "accidentally" for me to see-- this helped me anticipate the often-ridiculous moves his mother was making.

This whole thing wore me down. I'd married the woman I'd been dating, but she suddenly asked for a divorce when it became apparent that this was going to drag on for a while. So much for "stand by your man."

I was doing my student teaching, the final step for my teaching certification, working full time as a waiter and trying to spend time with Adam. One day, I got a call from the school. I just had enough time to stop in and talk to them on my way to work.

It turned out that as distressing as this whole thing was for me, it was even worse for Adam. He gone from the good-natured, friendly kid to one who was defiant, argumentative, and had even hit other kids at school. I'd been called in, along with his mother, to discuss counseling. I met the counselor, Dr. Carl Hampton and quickly agreed to the counseling.

I saw my son sitting near the room and hoped he didn't see me-- I knew he would want to come home with me, and I had to go to work afterward. Unfortunately he saw me and jumped up and shouted "I'm going to dad's house?" I tried to explain to him that I couldn't-- that I had to work. He cut me off, turned away and said "Go. Go, Dad." He refused to talk to me. I had to fight back tears-- it was probably the most heartbreaking moment of this whole sorry process.

It was at that moment I realized that this could not go on any longer. I called my lawyer the next day and told him to settle this as quickly as he could.

Adam began working with "Dr. Carl," as he was known at the school. I was later to find out that his likeness was used for a children's book by his friend and neighbor, illustrator Michael Hays, for the book "Kevin and His Dad." (Hays is probably best known for the children's book he wrote with musician Pete Seeger, "Abiyoyo.") I wish Adam remembered his talks with Dr. Carl-- I would love to know what they talked about. What I do know is that I am eternally grateful to Dr. Carl. My gentle, friendly kid quickly returned.

I do also know that my ex-girlfriend was regularly telling my son what a bad person I was, and calling me things like "asshole." He does remember that. For my part, I kept my promise to my old friend Tasneem, who'd dealt with her parents' bitter divorce, where each parent had bad-mouthed the other. She secured a promise from me to never do that. I kept that promise.

Over time, things have become calm. My ex-girlfriend was diagnosed with a degenerative thyroid disorder, which probably explained her behavior, though according to my son she still yells a lot, despite taking medication for the condition. He's learned to shrug it off. He and I are very close, despite his mother's attempts to keep that from happening.

In a little over two years, he will turn 18, a few months before he finishes high school. He has already started making plans for moving out of his mother's house on his 18th birthday and into my home.

I try not to dwell too much on it all. As an old friend advised me, "Don't rent her free space in your head." But once in a while I think about that evening I made my decision, and realize that the moment I decided to do what I thought what was best for my son, despite what I wanted, was the turning point.