Sunday January 23 2005
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
Jordan Brunett showed all the qualities of an extraordinary mind at a young age.
At 3, he could name the U.S. presidents in chronological order. He knew all the planets in the solar system. He could count in Spanish.
Yet his mother, Rhonda, sensed there was something not quite right about her son. She had trouble getting his attention. He wouldn't play with other kids. He would sit with a pile of blocks in front of him, swinging each one from ear to ear for hours.
The Carol Stream mom shed many tears of frustration before discovering the cause of her son's behavior. The diagnosis came at a preschool screening just before his third birthday.
Jordan, now 12, is autistic.
After getting over the initial bewilderment, Brunett's next step was figuring out how her son could best be educated.
On a larger level, it's the same struggle schools in Illinois are facing as they see the number of autistic students grow yearly.
According to the state board of education, there are about 7,000 autistic children in Illinois schools, up from 2,305 seven years ago. The same trend can be seen in local school systems.
In Palatine Township Elementary District 15, for instance, the autistic population has doubled in the last five years to about 80 students. Lombard Elementary District 44 has gone from seven to 16 autistic children in a similar time. In Arlington Heights Elementary District 25, growing numbers of autistic children prompted the administration to look at adding a class just for them to augment intensive services already provided.
While experts and lay people alike debate why, educators are working to secure the training and money to meet the demand and the special needs of autistic children.
Jordan Brunett was lucky. His early diagnosis began a process that resulted in an individualized learning plan.
"The school knew what to do," Rhonda Brunett said. "They had that knowledge, but I didn't know anything. So I started to educate myself."
One of the challenges of educating autistic children is that each is different. The syndrome is a lifelong disability that can involve trouble with learning abstract concepts, communication problems, emotional meltdowns when a routine is changed and social isolation.
At Jordan's school, Elsie Johnson in Hanover Park, special education teacher Angelina Summers first came upon autism by chance. While studying to be a mainstream teacher, she had no training in autism until her first student-teaching job.
"I saw a kid who clearly wasn't like the others," she said. "I asked the teacher, and she said, 'Oh, that's autism.' I was like, 'What is that?'"
Now Summers has a class of nine early childhood special-needs students, some of whom are autistic. The current growth of autism has her preparing for up to three more students next year.
Summers' classroom is decorated in brightly colored ABCs and 1-2-3s. Without the students, it's indistinguishable from a "regular" classroom. Yet the class instruction is noticeably different.
Summers doesn't stand in front of the room lecturing to students in desks. Mostly, she sits at a little table with one student at a time while her five aides work with the other kids.
Autistic children can be over-stimulated by large groups and are sometimes uncomfortable sitting near others. For some, a light touch can feel like a slap. A hug can be smothering. A slight flicker of a light can entrance.
In Summers' class, each activity has a picture associated with it to help guide students through the day. Visual aids are nearly a necessity.
"If I were to go a whole day with some kids and not use a single picture, it would be a rough day for some of them," she said.
Meltdown Control
Some people unfamiliar with autism may associate the disorder only with what's known as the meltdown. That might occur when an autistic child is pushed too hard too fast, and the mind becomes jumbled.
"Everyone has warning signs," Summers said. "If you choose to ignore those little sparks, you're going to have a big fire on your hands. If you keep pushing, eventually you'll see the kid with their head on the table not doing anything."
It's not because autistic students are disobedient. Their minds just don't work the same way as other children's.
Despite the challenges, it's not uncommon for autistic children to be placed in regular classes, often with aides.
Others can't function in regular classes. For instance, about 40 percent of children with autism don't speak, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"These are smart kids," Summers said. "I treat them like normal kids because, in my mind, they are. You can't completely define a child by their difficult moments."
Just defining a child as autistic can be a struggle. Meeting the needs of high-functioning autistic children can be particularly tricky because their learning is very similar to "regular" students, but their social behaviors are different.
Teachers often sit on the front line in spotting such disorders, since autism can easily be confused with behavior problems. Teachers who aren't trained to spot the disorder can make the same mistake.
Wendy Williams remembers teachers having little patience when her son started school.
"I actually had a teacher come up to me and say he was annoying, and if I didn't do anything ... he was never going to amount to anything," the Wheaton mother said.
Like Jordan, Williams' son displayed talents early, walking at 9 1/2 months, reading on his own at 3. His thirst for knowledge was such that she had him in four different preschool programs to keep him busy.
"I thought the kid was a genius," Williams said.
But odd behavior was there, too. He was afraid to walk barefoot on grass. Loud noises caused extreme trauma. He wouldn't play with other kids.
At 6, he was misdiagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and placed on medication, to which he had a severe reaction. Eventually, tests confirmed what Williams' own research led her to believe: Her son, now 9, had Asperger's syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism.
"I always thought something was missing because everything the doctors were doing was not working," she said.
Suburban educators are working to prevent repeats of Williams' story while also cringing about past students written off or misdiagnosed.
Disorder old and new
Autism was first described in the 1940s, according to the Autism Society of America. But many educators are only becoming familiar with it as autistic students come into their schools in larger numbers.
"At least now we're recognizing it as a disability," said Naperville Unit District 203's Kitty Murphy, assistant superintendent for special education. "Hindsight is 20/20, but we try not to look back. We try to look forward."
Looking forward is going to look a lot like the recent past, she said. The district doesn't have a full count, but Murphy said it's had about 40 more autistic kids enroll every year since the 2000-01 school year.
That isn't uncommon.
Elgin Area School District U-46's autism numbers have grown to 140 children, large enough for the district to host a weeklong summer training session for staff to have hands-on training with autistic kids. The training is so popular, U-46 plans to extend it to two weeks next summer.
Likewise, District 203 has reorganized staff to provide a regular, in-class immersion for autistic children in the morning. In the afternoon, they go to another building for social skills and language training. The district even created a parent support group because so many parents wanted answers and information about the condition.
Yet despite such advancements, Illinois Autism Project Director Kathy Gould contends that many school systems in the state are still not fully prepared for autistic students.
"I get phone calls every day from parents who say, 'My child is going to school every day, and no one is trained to help him,'" she said. "Teachers and administrators will call and say, 'OK, we've got two kids with autism coming in, and we don't know what to do.' "
Gould's group, based in La Grange, provides intensive training and assistance to schools trying to educate students with autism and other developmental disorders.
To date, only about 11 percent of Illinois districts have received the training, and that puts Illinois behind the curve, Gould said.
Many states have provided autism training for 30 years. Illinois has offered it for only seven because state funding for disabled kids is low and the special education community hasn't created a lobbying effort powerful enough to change that, she said.
In East Maine Elementary District 63 in Des Plaines, there are 24 autistic students - a 50-percent increase in two years. Special Education Director Brad Voehringer said the district is finding the staff and materials to meet the growing need, but money is scarce.
"Special education has never been fully funded," he said. "We have a lot of students with significant needs, and to provide for them we have to have the resources to do that. We're doing it now, but we have to take money out of other programs' pockets to put it into special education."
Beyond that, Gould contends that local universities typically don't offer classes to specifically train future teachers to deal with autistic kids.
"They're just not prepared for the kids," she said. "It's a shame that it's not required training because it's essentially the fastest-growing disability in Illinois."
But the rules of the game are changing. Certification of special education teachers has been revamped since a lawsuit against the Chicago Public Schools over the segregation of disabled students. Before the lawsuit, special ed teachers were certified in a specific area to work with a specific disability. Now, they must have a general certification that enables them to work with all types of disabilities, said Illinois State University Assistant Professor Julia Stoner.
ISU reworked its entire special education curriculum to meet the changes, and the first graduates with the new certification are just now entering the work force. Another 700 current students will follow. Yet, even in the current curriculum, there's no course that focuses purely on autism unless a student goes to graduate school. Mainstream classroom teachers have one special ed introductory course that touches on autism.
But ISU is responding in other ways to reach teachers already out in the field. ISU runs a center that focuses on developing technology to help special education students. It has also opened the Autism Spectrum Institute, which is working with the Illinois Autism Project to provide materials, a reference library and training in autism.
"I don't care what area of teaching you're in, you have to try to keep yourself up-to-date," Stoner said. "We're trying to provide those opportunities because there is definitely a need out there."
The Illinois State Board of Education is tapping into that need with a pilot program it's kicking off this month.
The program, run with the Autism Training Center in West Virginia, places a consultant with a family who has an autistic child and with the child's school. Through training, assessment and consultation, a long-term learning plan is developed for the student.
Fewer than 50 participants - far beneath the demand - will be selected for the pilot program, said state board spokeswoman Becky Watts. When the state board announced the program, "the phones just went crazy," Watts said. "It wasn't just schools, but parents saying, 'I want my child to be part of this pilot project.' It speaks to me of the need that is out there in the state."
The state board is currently setting its funding priorities to present to lawmakers. Watts said the increase in autism will be a consideration.
No easy answer why
Perhaps the only thing harder to find than funding is an explanation for why a child has autism or why the numbers are growing.
"If you read the research, it's all over the place," said District 15's Deb Zech, director of student services. "There's speculation on everything from environmental causes to genetics and just issues with the brain. And, perhaps we're just better at identifying the disorder."
In Jordan Brunett's case, his mother's growing understanding of autism has helped her get over thoughts like, "God, what are you doing to me?" Instead, her concern is, "What can I do for Jordan?"
That attitude has helped him grow into an all-star in Carol Stream's youth baseball program. He's honed his bowling skills enough to earn him a spot on a travel team. And, he has the friends his mother always dreamed he'd have.
"Kids like to be around him," Rhonda Brunett said. "They respect him, but that didn't come easy. That was with perseverance. Everything turned out right for him."
Monday
(Part 4 of 4-part series) 'Engine 55 has a friend for life'
Tuesday September 03 2002
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
On looks alone, Joe Cantafio is an unlikely hero.
No cape trails him as he limps through the streets of New York. With knees that should belong to a retired linebacker instead of a stockbroker, it's Cantafio who is often trailing the pack when the firefighters walk Manhattan.
"Wait, where's Joe?" They quizzically stop and look around.
Cantafio's knees aren't made for walking with guys in such good shape. But when he's in New York, he's on his feet at least seven hours a day.
So his pals only smile and razz him while they wait patiently at the stoplight for him to catch up.
Cantafio, a Barrington resident and Oak Park native, is nearing the end of his yearlong concert tour to raise money for the families of Engine Co. 55's lost men.
The Let Freedom Sing tour is inching up on about 100 performances, many of them a machine-like four hours in length. Some are played with his band Jade; others with just his guitar and an old fire boot for donations.
Through it all he has made Engine 55 the Chicago suburbs' most popular Sept. 11 charity, collecting tens of thousands of dollars here that he gives directly to the firehouse for the families.
* * *
Cantafio spends a lot of time on the road, shuffling his daughters to family members supportive of his cause. He worries about not being there enough for his four girls, but when he plays locally they are his best roadies.
Stocks are now little more than an activity he squeezes in between half-hour naps. He sleeps in 10-minute cab rides. He has no time for it.
"You know what I mean, Joe?" asks John Olivero, wrapping up a thought while driving Cantafio to a nightly show.
Cantafio's closed eyes gaze up at the dome light, arms folded on his chest. A snore is his only reply. Olivero smiles and shuts up. Later, on a ferry ride to the Statue of Liberty, Cantafio dozes off on a bench. The other guys grin and leave him alone.
"I've figured out that I need five hours of sleep to get my voice right for a show," Cantafio says of the catnaps. "It doesn't matter how I get it as long as it's five hours total."
When he isn't singing or sleeping, he's planning, mapping out shows, scheduling venues. He keeps all his contacts in an orange book. It's the closest thing he has to a secretary.
But why all this for people he never met, faces he'd never seen and a city 900 miles away?
It began with fury.
The morning of Sept. 11, Cantafio sat in front of his television and watched the planes hammer the twin towers of the World Trade Center. First one, then the other, and again, and again, and again as the replays looped throughout the day. Cantafio's fists tightened, his teeth clenched. He was transfixed, horrified and, in the end, changed.
During Desert Storm, he was a big talker, watching the war from his couch and bad mouthing the Iraqis.
"I'd come home from work and tell the kids, 'Let's watch the war,' " Cantafio recalls.
Not this time. This time the war hit too close to home. His firm did business with Cantor Fitzgerald, whose offices and work staff were all but eliminated in the holocaust. He had acquaintances at Mainstay Funds. He was working on a deal with a Korean bank and a German bank, both in the World Trade Center. All pulverized and gone.
Firefighters buzzed around the scene, directing people out of the towers in waves, ascending to the hell fires of the upper floors even as the steel continued to weaken. Screaming people ran out. Firemen raced to get in. It was inspirational.
Cantafio has firefighters in his family - cousins, his brother-in-law, a nephew. They weren't in New York, but he was never prouder to have them in his bloodline.
Those competing emotions battled for release, and in a catharsis Cantafio turned to the medium he knew best - music. Cantafio has played the guitar ever since he learned the six strings from Sister Mary Rose at St. Catherine of Siena School in Oak Park.
In 1973 at Oak Park River Forest High School, Cantafio put together his first band. They scored a gig playing '50s tunes for a "flashback day." Soon other schools had the band performing throwback sock-hops. The Jade 50s were born.
The band went on tour nationally with "Dick Clark's Good Ol' Rock and Roll Show" and "Wolfman Jack's Rockin' Oldies Show" for the bulk of Cantafio's 20s. Those were the good old days.
Fast forward to 2001. Cantafio gave up the road years ago and built a decent career in finance, rising to be vice president at Chicago's One Financial Center. He has custody of his four daughters and a nice house in Barrington.
Following Sept. 11, he went a little nuts. First, he tried to join the Army. At 47, that was no go.
So, searching for good feelings again, his guitar was a natural crutch. Only this time, he played songs like "Dust in the Wind" and "In My Life" instead of '50s tunes.
His shoulders relaxed. His red face returned to a natural tone. The tears dried up and his mind started working.
The first tentative shows brought in $10 a pop and were played to as few as seven people.
"Is this an audience or an oil painting?" he dead-panned to his smaller, quieter crowds.
But a show here, a show there, and a tour was started.
It needed direction. Cantafio called the New York Fire Department where he was directed to www.fdny.org and a list of 343 dead firefighters and their pictures. He printed them all out, tears tumbling down his cheeks as he looked into their faces.
The names went into a hat. He picked one: Chris Mozzillo, Engine Co. 55. The men of Engine 55 would get the money he raised.
He wrote letters to Engine 55, explaining his plan. For a while there was no response. Then, finally, an e-mail came from Olivero.
"We all are very excited and impressed with what you are doing for the families of our fallen brothers," Olivero wrote.
It was the beginning of a bond that would carry Cantafio through his mission. But no e-mail or phone call could hammer home the deep emotion behind Cantafio's efforts. He had to go to New York. The firefighters needed help. They had been duped by various charity efforts and only prayed Cantafio was real.
To seal the deal, Cantafio brought the firefighters to Chicago so they could see his shows firsthand. By then, he was organized. His shows were packed. In March, he even had Engine 55 men marching with President Bush in Chicago's St. Patrick's Day parade. Thrilled, afterward Cantafio called his mom.
"Did you see me shake hands with the president?" he demanded.
During Fourth of July celebrations from Bartlett to Barrington to Naperville, Engine 55 men were the guests of honor. There was no doubt that Chicago loved and admired the courage of New York's bravest. It was time to take the show to New York.
At Cantafio's shows at neighborhood pubs in New York, the firefighters are at ease. He doesn't raise much money, but in New York, it's not entirely about raising money.
The firefighters hit the stage and sing along on "American Pie," the nightly show stopper. They huddle around, arms on each other's shoulders, and scream into the microphone.
Cantafio makes a nightly lyric substitute at the end:
"And the three men I admire most - Charlie Ferris, Olivero and Bobby Yost - they took the last train headed for the coast. The day the music died."
The names are those of three living Engine 55 firefighters. He rotates the lyrics among the men, but his admiration is genuine. They are his heroes.
The guys do Elvis and Mick Jagger impersonations while Joe sings. Hips gyrating, peacock struts. At one show a visiting fireman from Pennsylvania surfs the table during a Beach Boys tune. They toss back beers and dance. They are at ease.
So is Cantafio. The sweat beads on his forehead. He plays from a back corner of the bar, dimly lit and partially obscured by tables and poles.
He doesn't drink alcohol. Water quenches his thirst but his gulps are always followed with an "Ahhhhh ... Budweiser," or whatever beer is on tap to help sales.
Behind the music, Cantafio is a counselor. During a ride to another show, Paul Quinn, the only surviving member of the engine's original response team to the World Trade Center, confides in him. Quinn is alive because one man always has to stay with the truck. On Sept. 11, that was him.
He dove under the rig when the South Tower came down. Rescue workers later found him wandering and covered in dust, unable to remember how he got there. Dazed but alive. When the North Tower came down 29 minutes later it buried the rig 40 feet underground.
Quinn has spent months dealing with the confusion and guilt and grief.
"Do you think I'm crazy?" he asks Cantafio. His friend shakes is head.
"No. Whatever's going on in your head, God bless you," Cantafio responds.
That night, Quinn sits front row and smiles. By the end of the night, he's calling out requests and singing solos. Crazy doesn't look like this.
Cantafio is an angry man. His cries for revenge are frequently sprinkled into monologues with his audiences.
Tuning his guitar for the next song, he launches another volley.
"You know, I think we should nuke the whole country over into glass," he says of the war in Afghanistan. "Then we can put all the survivors and war prisoners to work grinding it up into sand again."
When he visits ground zero, the veins in his neck and forehead become visible. He grips the fence tighter and shakes his curly head.
He hugs a complete stranger, Mary Ann Carne, who lost dozens of friends at WTC and now comes to the site once a month to grieve. She lets it all out in deep sobs and trembling tears.
There is another woman, nearly frantic, who scrunches her face and cries. She is from Boston and is guilt-ridden because some of the jets used by the terrorists took off from her city. Her arms wave as if blindly searching for something to embrace. Cantafio reaches out.
* * *
Come fall, the tour will be officially over. It must be, from exhaustion if nothing else. Cantafio's four daughters, Kim, Laura, Jennifer and Danielle, need his good Samaritan example, but they also need him at home.
If terror strikes again, Joe will play again. If any of the grieving families of Chris Mozzillo, Bobby Lane, Lt. Peter Freund, Stephen Russell and Faustino Apostal need someone to talk to, his number is on speed dial. And, if the firefighters of New York ever need a hand, they have a new brother.
"I think I have a friend for life," said John Olivero. "Engine 55 has a friend for life. So does New York."
-30-
View the accompanying Web journal and photo gallery that ran with this series here: http://www.dailyherald.com/special/91102/journal.asp
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
On looks alone, Joe Cantafio is an unlikely hero.
No cape trails him as he limps through the streets of New York. With knees that should belong to a retired linebacker instead of a stockbroker, it's Cantafio who is often trailing the pack when the firefighters walk Manhattan.
"Wait, where's Joe?" They quizzically stop and look around.
Cantafio's knees aren't made for walking with guys in such good shape. But when he's in New York, he's on his feet at least seven hours a day.
So his pals only smile and razz him while they wait patiently at the stoplight for him to catch up.
Cantafio, a Barrington resident and Oak Park native, is nearing the end of his yearlong concert tour to raise money for the families of Engine Co. 55's lost men.
The Let Freedom Sing tour is inching up on about 100 performances, many of them a machine-like four hours in length. Some are played with his band Jade; others with just his guitar and an old fire boot for donations.
Through it all he has made Engine 55 the Chicago suburbs' most popular Sept. 11 charity, collecting tens of thousands of dollars here that he gives directly to the firehouse for the families.
* * *
Cantafio spends a lot of time on the road, shuffling his daughters to family members supportive of his cause. He worries about not being there enough for his four girls, but when he plays locally they are his best roadies.
Stocks are now little more than an activity he squeezes in between half-hour naps. He sleeps in 10-minute cab rides. He has no time for it.
"You know what I mean, Joe?" asks John Olivero, wrapping up a thought while driving Cantafio to a nightly show.
Cantafio's closed eyes gaze up at the dome light, arms folded on his chest. A snore is his only reply. Olivero smiles and shuts up. Later, on a ferry ride to the Statue of Liberty, Cantafio dozes off on a bench. The other guys grin and leave him alone.
"I've figured out that I need five hours of sleep to get my voice right for a show," Cantafio says of the catnaps. "It doesn't matter how I get it as long as it's five hours total."
When he isn't singing or sleeping, he's planning, mapping out shows, scheduling venues. He keeps all his contacts in an orange book. It's the closest thing he has to a secretary.
But why all this for people he never met, faces he'd never seen and a city 900 miles away?
It began with fury.
The morning of Sept. 11, Cantafio sat in front of his television and watched the planes hammer the twin towers of the World Trade Center. First one, then the other, and again, and again, and again as the replays looped throughout the day. Cantafio's fists tightened, his teeth clenched. He was transfixed, horrified and, in the end, changed.
During Desert Storm, he was a big talker, watching the war from his couch and bad mouthing the Iraqis.
"I'd come home from work and tell the kids, 'Let's watch the war,' " Cantafio recalls.
Not this time. This time the war hit too close to home. His firm did business with Cantor Fitzgerald, whose offices and work staff were all but eliminated in the holocaust. He had acquaintances at Mainstay Funds. He was working on a deal with a Korean bank and a German bank, both in the World Trade Center. All pulverized and gone.
Firefighters buzzed around the scene, directing people out of the towers in waves, ascending to the hell fires of the upper floors even as the steel continued to weaken. Screaming people ran out. Firemen raced to get in. It was inspirational.
Cantafio has firefighters in his family - cousins, his brother-in-law, a nephew. They weren't in New York, but he was never prouder to have them in his bloodline.
Those competing emotions battled for release, and in a catharsis Cantafio turned to the medium he knew best - music. Cantafio has played the guitar ever since he learned the six strings from Sister Mary Rose at St. Catherine of Siena School in Oak Park.
In 1973 at Oak Park River Forest High School, Cantafio put together his first band. They scored a gig playing '50s tunes for a "flashback day." Soon other schools had the band performing throwback sock-hops. The Jade 50s were born.
The band went on tour nationally with "Dick Clark's Good Ol' Rock and Roll Show" and "Wolfman Jack's Rockin' Oldies Show" for the bulk of Cantafio's 20s. Those were the good old days.
Fast forward to 2001. Cantafio gave up the road years ago and built a decent career in finance, rising to be vice president at Chicago's One Financial Center. He has custody of his four daughters and a nice house in Barrington.
Following Sept. 11, he went a little nuts. First, he tried to join the Army. At 47, that was no go.
So, searching for good feelings again, his guitar was a natural crutch. Only this time, he played songs like "Dust in the Wind" and "In My Life" instead of '50s tunes.
His shoulders relaxed. His red face returned to a natural tone. The tears dried up and his mind started working.
The first tentative shows brought in $10 a pop and were played to as few as seven people.
"Is this an audience or an oil painting?" he dead-panned to his smaller, quieter crowds.
But a show here, a show there, and a tour was started.
It needed direction. Cantafio called the New York Fire Department where he was directed to www.fdny.org and a list of 343 dead firefighters and their pictures. He printed them all out, tears tumbling down his cheeks as he looked into their faces.
The names went into a hat. He picked one: Chris Mozzillo, Engine Co. 55. The men of Engine 55 would get the money he raised.
He wrote letters to Engine 55, explaining his plan. For a while there was no response. Then, finally, an e-mail came from Olivero.
"We all are very excited and impressed with what you are doing for the families of our fallen brothers," Olivero wrote.
It was the beginning of a bond that would carry Cantafio through his mission. But no e-mail or phone call could hammer home the deep emotion behind Cantafio's efforts. He had to go to New York. The firefighters needed help. They had been duped by various charity efforts and only prayed Cantafio was real.
To seal the deal, Cantafio brought the firefighters to Chicago so they could see his shows firsthand. By then, he was organized. His shows were packed. In March, he even had Engine 55 men marching with President Bush in Chicago's St. Patrick's Day parade. Thrilled, afterward Cantafio called his mom.
"Did you see me shake hands with the president?" he demanded.
During Fourth of July celebrations from Bartlett to Barrington to Naperville, Engine 55 men were the guests of honor. There was no doubt that Chicago loved and admired the courage of New York's bravest. It was time to take the show to New York.
At Cantafio's shows at neighborhood pubs in New York, the firefighters are at ease. He doesn't raise much money, but in New York, it's not entirely about raising money.
The firefighters hit the stage and sing along on "American Pie," the nightly show stopper. They huddle around, arms on each other's shoulders, and scream into the microphone.
Cantafio makes a nightly lyric substitute at the end:
"And the three men I admire most - Charlie Ferris, Olivero and Bobby Yost - they took the last train headed for the coast. The day the music died."
The names are those of three living Engine 55 firefighters. He rotates the lyrics among the men, but his admiration is genuine. They are his heroes.
The guys do Elvis and Mick Jagger impersonations while Joe sings. Hips gyrating, peacock struts. At one show a visiting fireman from Pennsylvania surfs the table during a Beach Boys tune. They toss back beers and dance. They are at ease.
So is Cantafio. The sweat beads on his forehead. He plays from a back corner of the bar, dimly lit and partially obscured by tables and poles.
He doesn't drink alcohol. Water quenches his thirst but his gulps are always followed with an "Ahhhhh ... Budweiser," or whatever beer is on tap to help sales.
Behind the music, Cantafio is a counselor. During a ride to another show, Paul Quinn, the only surviving member of the engine's original response team to the World Trade Center, confides in him. Quinn is alive because one man always has to stay with the truck. On Sept. 11, that was him.
He dove under the rig when the South Tower came down. Rescue workers later found him wandering and covered in dust, unable to remember how he got there. Dazed but alive. When the North Tower came down 29 minutes later it buried the rig 40 feet underground.
Quinn has spent months dealing with the confusion and guilt and grief.
"Do you think I'm crazy?" he asks Cantafio. His friend shakes is head.
"No. Whatever's going on in your head, God bless you," Cantafio responds.
That night, Quinn sits front row and smiles. By the end of the night, he's calling out requests and singing solos. Crazy doesn't look like this.
Cantafio is an angry man. His cries for revenge are frequently sprinkled into monologues with his audiences.
Tuning his guitar for the next song, he launches another volley.
"You know, I think we should nuke the whole country over into glass," he says of the war in Afghanistan. "Then we can put all the survivors and war prisoners to work grinding it up into sand again."
When he visits ground zero, the veins in his neck and forehead become visible. He grips the fence tighter and shakes his curly head.
He hugs a complete stranger, Mary Ann Carne, who lost dozens of friends at WTC and now comes to the site once a month to grieve. She lets it all out in deep sobs and trembling tears.
There is another woman, nearly frantic, who scrunches her face and cries. She is from Boston and is guilt-ridden because some of the jets used by the terrorists took off from her city. Her arms wave as if blindly searching for something to embrace. Cantafio reaches out.
* * *
Come fall, the tour will be officially over. It must be, from exhaustion if nothing else. Cantafio's four daughters, Kim, Laura, Jennifer and Danielle, need his good Samaritan example, but they also need him at home.
If terror strikes again, Joe will play again. If any of the grieving families of Chris Mozzillo, Bobby Lane, Lt. Peter Freund, Stephen Russell and Faustino Apostal need someone to talk to, his number is on speed dial. And, if the firefighters of New York ever need a hand, they have a new brother.
"I think I have a friend for life," said John Olivero. "Engine 55 has a friend for life. So does New York."
-30-
View the accompanying Web journal and photo gallery that ran with this series here: http://www.dailyherald.com/special/91102/journal.asp
(Part 3 of 4-part series) Suburbs helping heal New York firehouse
Sunday September 01 2002
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
On Sept. 11, New York lost 343 firefighters and gained a city.
The connection that grew between New York and Chicago in the days and weeks following 9/11 is a rope made of many individual threads.
Chicago area police officers sped to the Big Apple to join the rescue and recovery effort, direct traffic or do whatever was needed to keep New York operating.
Firefighters from Chicago and the suburbs grabbed their helmets and gear and headed east. Some, like Schaumburg's Lt. Rick Kolomay, dug into the pile of rubble alongside the New Yorkers. Others, like nine from Bartlett, Hanover Park and Streamwood, packed their Class A uniforms and went to as many funerals and memorial services as they could fit into a week of vacation.
Throughout the fall, our citizens collected money, by the penny and by the pound. We gathered emergency supplies and personally drove them out East. We held blood drives, organized memorial services, made Christmas ornaments for children's trees.
And Joe Cantafio picked up his guitar again.
* * *
Cantafio, a Barrington area stock trader, was torn up at the devastation and the loss of life on Sept. 11, chiefly the sacrifice of the 353 firefighters who ran up the World Trade Center stairs instead of fleeing.
He neither wanted nor needed to deal with the financial issues the large charities were having. Instead of throwing money into a boot, this brother-in-law of a firefighter would donate a year of his life and bring the Chicago suburbs along for the ride.
He put the names of all the lost firefighters into a bowl and picked one at random. Chris Mozzillo, one of five from Engine Company 55 who died, came out. Engine 55 would benefit from Cantafio's efforts.
For nearly a year, that mission has included concerts, singing at festivals and clubs, urging people to give whatever they could to benefit the families of the five Engine 55 men killed at the World Trade Center.
Mixing with local firefighters, suburban community groups and Chicago-area musicians, Cantafio has been on a Forrest Gump-like tour of good faith and helping hands.
"'Let Freedom Sing' has been driven by patriotism, kept together through faith and spawned from pure fate," says Cantafio of his mission.
In the process he's met President Bush, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, Chicago Fire Chief and "Backdraft" movie inspiration Robert Hoff and shook the hand of Cardinal Francis George.
Local talents Ronnie Rice of New Colony Six fame; Jon Brandt, formerly of Cheap Trick; Jay Geppner of the Beatle Brothers and Dick Biondi of Magic 104.3-FM have all stepped to the microphone to inspire donations at various concerts.
But beyond the political bigwigs and rock stars is the infusion of the cause into local homes, garages and firehouses. It's the contribution of the local man, woman and child that has completed the melding of the Hudson Bay with the Des Plaines River.
April 19, 2002, was officially FDNY Engine 55 Day in Chicago. Engine 55 firefighters were grand marshals at Chicago's St. Patrick's Day parade, as well as July 4th parades in Bartlett, Barrington, Palatine, Morton Grove, Naperville and Skokie. New York firefighters clamber onto the stage when Cantafio sings at suburban events, joining in loudly and sometimes badly off-key.
The Engine 55 men carry stories back to New York of Schaumburg kids collecting $44 in change in a big athletic sock and how tears still flood the faces of Midwesterners at Cantafio's shows.
Initially, the New Yorkers couldn't understand that outpouring of emotion so many miles away from ground zero.
But after thousands of hand shakes and hugs, the message from Chicago and its suburbs is clear. New York and Washington, D.C., alone were not attacked on Sept. 11 - America was, and that's a bond that bridges any distance.
"I used to hate Chicago," said Manny Gonzalez, a New York medical technician who does health checks on the firefighters. "But not after this. You guys changed my heart."
Now, whenever Engine 55 firefighters need to fly to Chicago for a benefit concert, American Airlines' Caroline Formoso and United Airlines' Susie Gindo find the seats.
Whenever they need a bed to sleep on, Joe Pinto at Itasca's Wyndham Hotel makes sure there are rooms, no questions asked.
At all of Cantafio's performances, The Berghoff's Joe Gleddus supplies beer to the venue and donates all the money from the bottles sold to the cause.
"Much like everyone else, we were just sitting around stunned, wondering what we could do to help," Gleddus said. "Then I got a call from a business partner about his friend organizing a fund-raising event. It's a good cause, and we do what we can in whatever small way we can help."
Cubs tickets? No problem. An Engine 55 firefighter wants to throw out the first pitch when the White Sox play the Yankees? Done. Dinner for 30? Have a seat.
Wherever Cantafio plays, there are local people who design, print and sell T-shirts to raise money for the widowed families. Others print and pass out flyers.
Cantafio said the night when Engine 55's Paul Acciarito tossed the first pitch at the White Sox game represented a culmination of all his efforts.
"The crowd erupted when the 'FDNY Engine Company 55' logo went up on the screen in center field," Cantafio recalls. "There were 30,000 fans at that game, and it gave me chills to see Pauly whiz a strike over the plate.
"The Engine Company 55 T-shirts that my friends Roy and Lynda Hervas printed up for us were scattered on the backs of patrons all over the park."
If Cantafio has a show in New York, Barrington firefighter Ron DeAville packs the guitar and stage equipment in the back of his pick-up truck, drives the nearly 900 miles to New York and sets it up for him at every venue. Northbrook firefighter Tim Olk is right by his side.
Why?
"I just wanted to help, no questions asked," Olk said.
Part of the bond stems from the firefighter culture. Dedication, tradition, loyalty. Those are the facets of the firefighter creed. It's that same bond that's helped them heal.
"Those with losses need to talk about it, get it out in the open to heal," Cantafio said. "When the firemen come here, we all need healing too, so it's a perfect marriage.
"Someone will politely ask firefighter John Olivero if they can ask him about Sept. 11th. John always says, 'You can ask me anything you'd like.' I can remember a time in March when that wasn't the case for some of the guys at E-55, but they all have seemed to follow John's lead."
Chicago-area firefighters who volunteered in New York said the love affair is mutual. Lines of people would vanish whenever they needed a bar stool or a booth at a restaurant. New Yorkers spontaneously cheered them just walking by.
As the anniversary approaches, Cantafio's tour will wind to a close and the strains of "American Pie," his theme song, will fade away.
Still, every year for the rest of his life, Cantafio will have at least one meal with the men of Engine 55 and those who helped the cause.
Maybe he'll even strum up the song he plays every concert as the New York firemen join him on stage: Bye-bye, Miss American Pie. Hello, brotherhood.
"(Firefighter) Tommy Hogan summed it up every night he was on tour with us," Cantafio said. "He always told the crowds the real twin cities aren't in Minnesota, they are New York and Chicago!'"
-30-
View the accompanying Web journal and photo gallery that ran with this series here: http://www.dailyherald.com/special/91102/journal.asp
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
On Sept. 11, New York lost 343 firefighters and gained a city.
The connection that grew between New York and Chicago in the days and weeks following 9/11 is a rope made of many individual threads.
Chicago area police officers sped to the Big Apple to join the rescue and recovery effort, direct traffic or do whatever was needed to keep New York operating.
Firefighters from Chicago and the suburbs grabbed their helmets and gear and headed east. Some, like Schaumburg's Lt. Rick Kolomay, dug into the pile of rubble alongside the New Yorkers. Others, like nine from Bartlett, Hanover Park and Streamwood, packed their Class A uniforms and went to as many funerals and memorial services as they could fit into a week of vacation.
Throughout the fall, our citizens collected money, by the penny and by the pound. We gathered emergency supplies and personally drove them out East. We held blood drives, organized memorial services, made Christmas ornaments for children's trees.
And Joe Cantafio picked up his guitar again.
* * *
Cantafio, a Barrington area stock trader, was torn up at the devastation and the loss of life on Sept. 11, chiefly the sacrifice of the 353 firefighters who ran up the World Trade Center stairs instead of fleeing.
He neither wanted nor needed to deal with the financial issues the large charities were having. Instead of throwing money into a boot, this brother-in-law of a firefighter would donate a year of his life and bring the Chicago suburbs along for the ride.
He put the names of all the lost firefighters into a bowl and picked one at random. Chris Mozzillo, one of five from Engine Company 55 who died, came out. Engine 55 would benefit from Cantafio's efforts.
For nearly a year, that mission has included concerts, singing at festivals and clubs, urging people to give whatever they could to benefit the families of the five Engine 55 men killed at the World Trade Center.
Mixing with local firefighters, suburban community groups and Chicago-area musicians, Cantafio has been on a Forrest Gump-like tour of good faith and helping hands.
"'Let Freedom Sing' has been driven by patriotism, kept together through faith and spawned from pure fate," says Cantafio of his mission.
In the process he's met President Bush, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, Chicago Fire Chief and "Backdraft" movie inspiration Robert Hoff and shook the hand of Cardinal Francis George.
Local talents Ronnie Rice of New Colony Six fame; Jon Brandt, formerly of Cheap Trick; Jay Geppner of the Beatle Brothers and Dick Biondi of Magic 104.3-FM have all stepped to the microphone to inspire donations at various concerts.
But beyond the political bigwigs and rock stars is the infusion of the cause into local homes, garages and firehouses. It's the contribution of the local man, woman and child that has completed the melding of the Hudson Bay with the Des Plaines River.
April 19, 2002, was officially FDNY Engine 55 Day in Chicago. Engine 55 firefighters were grand marshals at Chicago's St. Patrick's Day parade, as well as July 4th parades in Bartlett, Barrington, Palatine, Morton Grove, Naperville and Skokie. New York firefighters clamber onto the stage when Cantafio sings at suburban events, joining in loudly and sometimes badly off-key.
The Engine 55 men carry stories back to New York of Schaumburg kids collecting $44 in change in a big athletic sock and how tears still flood the faces of Midwesterners at Cantafio's shows.
Initially, the New Yorkers couldn't understand that outpouring of emotion so many miles away from ground zero.
But after thousands of hand shakes and hugs, the message from Chicago and its suburbs is clear. New York and Washington, D.C., alone were not attacked on Sept. 11 - America was, and that's a bond that bridges any distance.
"I used to hate Chicago," said Manny Gonzalez, a New York medical technician who does health checks on the firefighters. "But not after this. You guys changed my heart."
Now, whenever Engine 55 firefighters need to fly to Chicago for a benefit concert, American Airlines' Caroline Formoso and United Airlines' Susie Gindo find the seats.
Whenever they need a bed to sleep on, Joe Pinto at Itasca's Wyndham Hotel makes sure there are rooms, no questions asked.
At all of Cantafio's performances, The Berghoff's Joe Gleddus supplies beer to the venue and donates all the money from the bottles sold to the cause.
"Much like everyone else, we were just sitting around stunned, wondering what we could do to help," Gleddus said. "Then I got a call from a business partner about his friend organizing a fund-raising event. It's a good cause, and we do what we can in whatever small way we can help."
Cubs tickets? No problem. An Engine 55 firefighter wants to throw out the first pitch when the White Sox play the Yankees? Done. Dinner for 30? Have a seat.
Wherever Cantafio plays, there are local people who design, print and sell T-shirts to raise money for the widowed families. Others print and pass out flyers.
Cantafio said the night when Engine 55's Paul Acciarito tossed the first pitch at the White Sox game represented a culmination of all his efforts.
"The crowd erupted when the 'FDNY Engine Company 55' logo went up on the screen in center field," Cantafio recalls. "There were 30,000 fans at that game, and it gave me chills to see Pauly whiz a strike over the plate.
"The Engine Company 55 T-shirts that my friends Roy and Lynda Hervas printed up for us were scattered on the backs of patrons all over the park."
If Cantafio has a show in New York, Barrington firefighter Ron DeAville packs the guitar and stage equipment in the back of his pick-up truck, drives the nearly 900 miles to New York and sets it up for him at every venue. Northbrook firefighter Tim Olk is right by his side.
Why?
"I just wanted to help, no questions asked," Olk said.
Part of the bond stems from the firefighter culture. Dedication, tradition, loyalty. Those are the facets of the firefighter creed. It's that same bond that's helped them heal.
"Those with losses need to talk about it, get it out in the open to heal," Cantafio said. "When the firemen come here, we all need healing too, so it's a perfect marriage.
"Someone will politely ask firefighter John Olivero if they can ask him about Sept. 11th. John always says, 'You can ask me anything you'd like.' I can remember a time in March when that wasn't the case for some of the guys at E-55, but they all have seemed to follow John's lead."
Chicago-area firefighters who volunteered in New York said the love affair is mutual. Lines of people would vanish whenever they needed a bar stool or a booth at a restaurant. New Yorkers spontaneously cheered them just walking by.
As the anniversary approaches, Cantafio's tour will wind to a close and the strains of "American Pie," his theme song, will fade away.
Still, every year for the rest of his life, Cantafio will have at least one meal with the men of Engine 55 and those who helped the cause.
Maybe he'll even strum up the song he plays every concert as the New York firemen join him on stage: Bye-bye, Miss American Pie. Hello, brotherhood.
"(Firefighter) Tommy Hogan summed it up every night he was on tour with us," Cantafio said. "He always told the crowds the real twin cities aren't in Minnesota, they are New York and Chicago!'"
-30-
View the accompanying Web journal and photo gallery that ran with this series here: http://www.dailyherald.com/special/91102/journal.asp
(Part 2 of 4-part series) 'The money becomes the person' For families, donations keep memory of 5 firefighters alive
Monday September 02 2002
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
Cliff Russell knew he could not find peace until he found his little brother.
It was Sept. 11. Engine Company 55 was responding to a gas leak just a few blocks from the World Trade Center when the first jet smashed the North Tower.
They were among the first rescue teams to arrive and four of the men ran into the tower. One stayed outside with the truck, as was procedure.
By the time the day was over, 353 firefighters died, but helped save 25,000.
The dead included five from Engine 55, including 40-year-old Stephen Russell. His body was buried with the rest of his fire fighting corps in that apocalyptic pile of concrete, twisted metal and human flesh.
Cliff Russell, an operations engineer and Stephen's older brother, lacked the training to work on "The Pile," where rescue teams already gingerly picked their way around the shifting rubble. But he knew where to get it. To find his little brother, he must become his little brother.
Russell never spent much time at Engine 55, but he knew where it was. Knocking on the door, he introduced himself and was taken to the captain. Capt. Tom Toomey stared at the hard-eyed visitor. Toomey, a gritty man with a take-charge attitude had already bucked protocol that morning, tired of waiting for orders that were slow in coming. With the firehouse only eight Chicago-blocks from Ground Zero, he sent his men back to the site to begin rescue and recovery.
"You want to look for your brother?" he said finally. "OK."
Cliff Russell took Stephen's boots, pants, coat and helmet from his brother's locker and put them on. He was in the same 6-foot range as Stephen. His gut protruded a bit farther over the belt, but the gear was nevertheless a good fit.
Toomey and the available firemen put Cliff through a crash course. He wouldn't have to become a firefighter overnight, just pass as one. When they finished, his newly acquired lingo and manners paired well enough with his brother's gear to get him past the police guards and onto the site. For a month and a half, Cliff Russell dug alongside the crew from Engine 55, wondering from moment to moment if the next severed hand, battered leg or crushed head he uncovered would belong to his little brother.
* * *
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Those words never painted a more accurate picture than they did on Sept. 11. In the weeks and months afterward, people rushed to donate money. Meanwhile, the recipients learned money never meant so much and so little at the same time.
In the year since Sept. 11, the Chicago area has raised tens of thousands of dollars for the families of the five fallen Engine 55 firefighters.
Residents here have supported the efforts of Barrington singer and stockbroker Joe Cantafio, who embarked on a year-long concert tour to raise money directly for the families of Engine 55 instead of routing it through established charities.
One of the men had a wife and young children. Another was already a grandfather. The others had parents, sisters, nieces and nephews. And all of them left behind their brothers at Engine 55.
Chris Mozzillo was the youngest member of the firehouse to die. He never reached his 28th birthday.
His lineage mapped out both his future and love of adventure. His father, Mike, now retired, was a New York firefighter. Chris's toys were die-cast fire trucks and little fire helmets. His idea of a good time included feeding sharks while swimming with them or pounding anyone who gave his sister, Pam, a tough time.
He could get up a staircase in full gear in seemingly a single bound. The men of Engine 55 believe Mozzillo climbed higher up into the towers than the rest of their crew.
That may be the reason his body is still missing, the only Engine 55 man not recovered.
Bobby Lane, 28, was always in motion. In addition to being a fireman, he was a Special Olympics volunteer, a member of the department's hockey and softball teams and a former college football player. When he wasn't doing all that, he loved to cook.
He hammed it up in firehouse photos, in one donning little, pink-rimmed sunglasses for the sake of a laugh.
The families of Mozzillo and Lane will use the money they receive to establish scholarships in their sons' names.
Faustino Apostal was the senior member of those lost. He rode in Engine 55 for more than two decades but was recently transferred out. On Sept. 11, he arrived at the scene, saw his old rig, grabbed a 55 helmet and raced into the burning towers behind the three who were already inside. He never came out.
He was a family man who married his high school sweetheart. A grandfather at 55, he would baby sit and mow the lawn. He couldn't bring himself to hang up his gear even as his colleagues retired. Firefighting was just too much fun. His family will likely use the money they get to establish a college fund for his grandchildren.
Lt. Peter Freund was also a family man. In his younger days, he was a hippie and never lost his kind, gentle ways. On the day he died, at age 45, he was known mainly as Daddy by his three young children.
In the confusion that marked the days after Sept. 11, Freund's colleagues were tormented by several reports that he was sighted working in the wreckage.
All proved bogus when his body was later discovered.
His wife, Robin, is thinking about using the money she gets to buy an athletic field and name it after Peter. A touching gift, but some of the firefighters worry what she'll do when the money is gone.
Lastly, there is the man they called MacGyver for his ingenuity around the firehouse. As the towers burned Sept. 11, Marie Russell stepped out onto the dock behind her house in the Rockaways section of Queens. Stretching out into Jamaica Bay, it provided a clear view of the fiery twin towers.
Peering through the viewfinder of her hand-held video camera, the white-haired, spectacled woman knew her son would be there, saving lives. She would make a video scrapbook of his bravery during a historic moment.
Then, one by one, the towers fell.
Marie went inside and closed the curtains. The windows remained shrouded for weeks. Her baby was gone.
* * *
For seemingly endless days, Cliff Russell chased ghosts. Somewhere in this unnatural graveyard was his brother.
The area to search was extensive and treacherous. Metal and concrete were not meant to lie this way. In some areas it rose as high as 50 feet above the street. Debris created chasms and mountains so steep that rescue workers had to sit and slide to get anywhere. Some pockets still blazed with fire, others radiated intense heat coming from no visible source.
But Cliff Russell avoided the most dangerous tasks. All he wanted was a shovel. If Steve was mixed in with the steel and blood, he would find him or go crazy trying.
For a week after Sept. 11, Cliff Russell worked every day. After that he came back several times a week, whenever he could, digging and bagging body parts.
In the early morning hours of Oct. 22, the call came.
"Engine 55, get up here!"
Steve was found. He was dead, but Cliff could finally begin to live again.
Cliff Russell's basement is filled with mementos. In one corner is a large, homemade poster. On the right side is a photo of Stephen Russell in his fire gear, smile on his face. On the left side, a photo of Cliff Russell wearing that same gear, fatigue on his face.
The relics he collected from the site are priceless in memoriam. A chunk of glass from a World Trade Center window sits near a small, round, polished box with Steve's name on it. It contains dirt from ground zero, and there are only about 3,000 like it in the world, each with a different name.
"It's what you have and if you were never recovered, it's still all you have," Russell says of the box.
Then comes another box.
Out of a small plastic container, Russell pulls out a hand-sized, Africa-shaped chunk of cement. It's part of an area known as stairwell 6b. It feels chalky. Visitors sniff the rock gingerly, like checking something in the refrigerator. A bitter taste shoots up the back of the tongue and remains for several seconds, like sucking on a hot penny. The smell is comparable to lighting a thousand sparklers and letting them burn all the way down at once while holding them.
It is the odor of 3,000 dead people mixed with molten metal and pulverized concrete.
To complete the journey, Russell displays an album of photos he took with disposable cameras. Everything in the pictures has an inch of powder on it, an unseasonable snow. There is a fire truck sitting in the middle of West Street with no tires on the rims. Melted.
Russell found bodies in various conditions depending on their location.
"Just like sleeping men," Russell said of one group of dead firemen.
Of another set of photos, he says, "On this day it was really bad because that's when we found legs, arms, torsos, and nobody ever had a head. Nobody in the street ever had a head."
"There's a lot of things that were answered," he added about the day they found Stephen. "He's not wandering around. He's not in the hospital and doesn't know who he is. I know where he is and we got him back and I can put him to rest. I made my peace. I don't have to talk to the ghosts that I used to talk to every morning."
As he flips through the album, music plays in the background. It's "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd. Cliff Russell looks sleepy, yet he bounces around with great energy. His heart is numb, but the mind still remembers. There is no full recovery, just acceptance.
It seems to be more than his parents have.
"People who lost somebody are not going to want to ask for money," Russell said of the charity efforts, Cantafio's included. "My mother gets a check, she gets upset. If the money that was in the check ever gets spent in its total, she's going to be very upset.
"There's a connection. Now the money becomes Steve. Everything becomes the person. It's whacked."
Steve had a bungalow apartment connected to his parents house. Now, Cliff Sr. and Marie tend to it, watering the plants he left behind but touching nothing else. Except for the contents of the refrigerator, the interior is frozen in time. The calendar in the makeshift office still reads September. Steve was scheduled to go skydiving the week of the 17th.
Cliff Russell and his mother spend several minutes arguing about the disappearance of a card from the desk. It was yellow with a cat on it and a depiction of the World Trade Center towers burning - a joke card created before Sept. 11.
"It's there, but then it's not there," Cliff Russell says to his mother, miffed about the disappearance. "Somebody moved it."
"Nobody moved it," she responds, rifling through drawers. "It's here."
The money becomes the person. So do his belongings.
In the middle of the living room is a huge plant, more like a tree. It is 30 years old, an offshoot of a plant Steve gave to his mother when he was just 10. Mrs. Russell only enters the apartment to water the plant and look over the many trinkets reminding her of her son.
"I die every time," she says.
It is to that realization that the charity efforts go. It keeps the memory alive. For some, it keeps their dead loved one alive.
The Russells also have established a scholarship in their son's name. A part of it will never be spent. It would be like losing him all over again.
* * *
There is guilt among the surviving firefighters. They've helped the fatherless, sonless, brotherless families as much as they can, emotionally and financially, but they can't do it forever, not for a lifetime.
Such is the life of the families of Engine 55's lost men. Death is life. Newspapers, television, countless books and memorial after memorial hammer home the loss on a daily basis. It is an endless funeral.
For the majority of the world, 343 firefighters died. For these families, it was Chris Mozzillo, Lt. Peter Freund, Faustino Apostal, Bobby Lane and Stephen Russell. Five family members wiped out.
At some point, the organs will stop playing and the charity will cease. But for the Mozzillo, Lane, Freund, Apostal and Russell families, the smoke from the World Trade Center has yet to clear. The money fuels memories both good and bad. The scholarships and other gifts and purchases in the name of the fallen firefighters carry on their legacy as men devoted to helping others.
The money will not bring their loved ones back, but, in hearts turned desperate from death, it will keep them alive.
-30-
View the accompanying Web journal and photo gallery that ran with this series here: http://www.dailyherald.com/special/91102/journal.asp
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
Cliff Russell knew he could not find peace until he found his little brother.
It was Sept. 11. Engine Company 55 was responding to a gas leak just a few blocks from the World Trade Center when the first jet smashed the North Tower.
They were among the first rescue teams to arrive and four of the men ran into the tower. One stayed outside with the truck, as was procedure.
By the time the day was over, 353 firefighters died, but helped save 25,000.
The dead included five from Engine 55, including 40-year-old Stephen Russell. His body was buried with the rest of his fire fighting corps in that apocalyptic pile of concrete, twisted metal and human flesh.
Cliff Russell, an operations engineer and Stephen's older brother, lacked the training to work on "The Pile," where rescue teams already gingerly picked their way around the shifting rubble. But he knew where to get it. To find his little brother, he must become his little brother.
Russell never spent much time at Engine 55, but he knew where it was. Knocking on the door, he introduced himself and was taken to the captain. Capt. Tom Toomey stared at the hard-eyed visitor. Toomey, a gritty man with a take-charge attitude had already bucked protocol that morning, tired of waiting for orders that were slow in coming. With the firehouse only eight Chicago-blocks from Ground Zero, he sent his men back to the site to begin rescue and recovery.
"You want to look for your brother?" he said finally. "OK."
Cliff Russell took Stephen's boots, pants, coat and helmet from his brother's locker and put them on. He was in the same 6-foot range as Stephen. His gut protruded a bit farther over the belt, but the gear was nevertheless a good fit.
Toomey and the available firemen put Cliff through a crash course. He wouldn't have to become a firefighter overnight, just pass as one. When they finished, his newly acquired lingo and manners paired well enough with his brother's gear to get him past the police guards and onto the site. For a month and a half, Cliff Russell dug alongside the crew from Engine 55, wondering from moment to moment if the next severed hand, battered leg or crushed head he uncovered would belong to his little brother.
* * *
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Those words never painted a more accurate picture than they did on Sept. 11. In the weeks and months afterward, people rushed to donate money. Meanwhile, the recipients learned money never meant so much and so little at the same time.
In the year since Sept. 11, the Chicago area has raised tens of thousands of dollars for the families of the five fallen Engine 55 firefighters.
Residents here have supported the efforts of Barrington singer and stockbroker Joe Cantafio, who embarked on a year-long concert tour to raise money directly for the families of Engine 55 instead of routing it through established charities.
One of the men had a wife and young children. Another was already a grandfather. The others had parents, sisters, nieces and nephews. And all of them left behind their brothers at Engine 55.
Chris Mozzillo was the youngest member of the firehouse to die. He never reached his 28th birthday.
His lineage mapped out both his future and love of adventure. His father, Mike, now retired, was a New York firefighter. Chris's toys were die-cast fire trucks and little fire helmets. His idea of a good time included feeding sharks while swimming with them or pounding anyone who gave his sister, Pam, a tough time.
He could get up a staircase in full gear in seemingly a single bound. The men of Engine 55 believe Mozzillo climbed higher up into the towers than the rest of their crew.
That may be the reason his body is still missing, the only Engine 55 man not recovered.
Bobby Lane, 28, was always in motion. In addition to being a fireman, he was a Special Olympics volunteer, a member of the department's hockey and softball teams and a former college football player. When he wasn't doing all that, he loved to cook.
He hammed it up in firehouse photos, in one donning little, pink-rimmed sunglasses for the sake of a laugh.
The families of Mozzillo and Lane will use the money they receive to establish scholarships in their sons' names.
Faustino Apostal was the senior member of those lost. He rode in Engine 55 for more than two decades but was recently transferred out. On Sept. 11, he arrived at the scene, saw his old rig, grabbed a 55 helmet and raced into the burning towers behind the three who were already inside. He never came out.
He was a family man who married his high school sweetheart. A grandfather at 55, he would baby sit and mow the lawn. He couldn't bring himself to hang up his gear even as his colleagues retired. Firefighting was just too much fun. His family will likely use the money they get to establish a college fund for his grandchildren.
Lt. Peter Freund was also a family man. In his younger days, he was a hippie and never lost his kind, gentle ways. On the day he died, at age 45, he was known mainly as Daddy by his three young children.
In the confusion that marked the days after Sept. 11, Freund's colleagues were tormented by several reports that he was sighted working in the wreckage.
All proved bogus when his body was later discovered.
His wife, Robin, is thinking about using the money she gets to buy an athletic field and name it after Peter. A touching gift, but some of the firefighters worry what she'll do when the money is gone.
Lastly, there is the man they called MacGyver for his ingenuity around the firehouse. As the towers burned Sept. 11, Marie Russell stepped out onto the dock behind her house in the Rockaways section of Queens. Stretching out into Jamaica Bay, it provided a clear view of the fiery twin towers.
Peering through the viewfinder of her hand-held video camera, the white-haired, spectacled woman knew her son would be there, saving lives. She would make a video scrapbook of his bravery during a historic moment.
Then, one by one, the towers fell.
Marie went inside and closed the curtains. The windows remained shrouded for weeks. Her baby was gone.
* * *
For seemingly endless days, Cliff Russell chased ghosts. Somewhere in this unnatural graveyard was his brother.
The area to search was extensive and treacherous. Metal and concrete were not meant to lie this way. In some areas it rose as high as 50 feet above the street. Debris created chasms and mountains so steep that rescue workers had to sit and slide to get anywhere. Some pockets still blazed with fire, others radiated intense heat coming from no visible source.
But Cliff Russell avoided the most dangerous tasks. All he wanted was a shovel. If Steve was mixed in with the steel and blood, he would find him or go crazy trying.
For a week after Sept. 11, Cliff Russell worked every day. After that he came back several times a week, whenever he could, digging and bagging body parts.
In the early morning hours of Oct. 22, the call came.
"Engine 55, get up here!"
Steve was found. He was dead, but Cliff could finally begin to live again.
Cliff Russell's basement is filled with mementos. In one corner is a large, homemade poster. On the right side is a photo of Stephen Russell in his fire gear, smile on his face. On the left side, a photo of Cliff Russell wearing that same gear, fatigue on his face.
The relics he collected from the site are priceless in memoriam. A chunk of glass from a World Trade Center window sits near a small, round, polished box with Steve's name on it. It contains dirt from ground zero, and there are only about 3,000 like it in the world, each with a different name.
"It's what you have and if you were never recovered, it's still all you have," Russell says of the box.
Then comes another box.
Out of a small plastic container, Russell pulls out a hand-sized, Africa-shaped chunk of cement. It's part of an area known as stairwell 6b. It feels chalky. Visitors sniff the rock gingerly, like checking something in the refrigerator. A bitter taste shoots up the back of the tongue and remains for several seconds, like sucking on a hot penny. The smell is comparable to lighting a thousand sparklers and letting them burn all the way down at once while holding them.
It is the odor of 3,000 dead people mixed with molten metal and pulverized concrete.
To complete the journey, Russell displays an album of photos he took with disposable cameras. Everything in the pictures has an inch of powder on it, an unseasonable snow. There is a fire truck sitting in the middle of West Street with no tires on the rims. Melted.
Russell found bodies in various conditions depending on their location.
"Just like sleeping men," Russell said of one group of dead firemen.
Of another set of photos, he says, "On this day it was really bad because that's when we found legs, arms, torsos, and nobody ever had a head. Nobody in the street ever had a head."
"There's a lot of things that were answered," he added about the day they found Stephen. "He's not wandering around. He's not in the hospital and doesn't know who he is. I know where he is and we got him back and I can put him to rest. I made my peace. I don't have to talk to the ghosts that I used to talk to every morning."
As he flips through the album, music plays in the background. It's "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd. Cliff Russell looks sleepy, yet he bounces around with great energy. His heart is numb, but the mind still remembers. There is no full recovery, just acceptance.
It seems to be more than his parents have.
"People who lost somebody are not going to want to ask for money," Russell said of the charity efforts, Cantafio's included. "My mother gets a check, she gets upset. If the money that was in the check ever gets spent in its total, she's going to be very upset.
"There's a connection. Now the money becomes Steve. Everything becomes the person. It's whacked."
Steve had a bungalow apartment connected to his parents house. Now, Cliff Sr. and Marie tend to it, watering the plants he left behind but touching nothing else. Except for the contents of the refrigerator, the interior is frozen in time. The calendar in the makeshift office still reads September. Steve was scheduled to go skydiving the week of the 17th.
Cliff Russell and his mother spend several minutes arguing about the disappearance of a card from the desk. It was yellow with a cat on it and a depiction of the World Trade Center towers burning - a joke card created before Sept. 11.
"It's there, but then it's not there," Cliff Russell says to his mother, miffed about the disappearance. "Somebody moved it."
"Nobody moved it," she responds, rifling through drawers. "It's here."
The money becomes the person. So do his belongings.
In the middle of the living room is a huge plant, more like a tree. It is 30 years old, an offshoot of a plant Steve gave to his mother when he was just 10. Mrs. Russell only enters the apartment to water the plant and look over the many trinkets reminding her of her son.
"I die every time," she says.
It is to that realization that the charity efforts go. It keeps the memory alive. For some, it keeps their dead loved one alive.
The Russells also have established a scholarship in their son's name. A part of it will never be spent. It would be like losing him all over again.
* * *
There is guilt among the surviving firefighters. They've helped the fatherless, sonless, brotherless families as much as they can, emotionally and financially, but they can't do it forever, not for a lifetime.
Such is the life of the families of Engine 55's lost men. Death is life. Newspapers, television, countless books and memorial after memorial hammer home the loss on a daily basis. It is an endless funeral.
For the majority of the world, 343 firefighters died. For these families, it was Chris Mozzillo, Lt. Peter Freund, Faustino Apostal, Bobby Lane and Stephen Russell. Five family members wiped out.
At some point, the organs will stop playing and the charity will cease. But for the Mozzillo, Lane, Freund, Apostal and Russell families, the smoke from the World Trade Center has yet to clear. The money fuels memories both good and bad. The scholarships and other gifts and purchases in the name of the fallen firefighters carry on their legacy as men devoted to helping others.
The money will not bring their loved ones back, but, in hearts turned desperate from death, it will keep them alive.
-30-
View the accompanying Web journal and photo gallery that ran with this series here: http://www.dailyherald.com/special/91102/journal.asp
(Part 1 of 4-part series) 'My goal was to keep their lives normal' Husband of Arlington Heights native focuses on their children as a way to cope
Sunday September 08 2002
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
NEW YORK - Marc Wieman is not a man who likes to look back. The last time he did, he watched his wife die.
Now, with his new life as a widower and a single parent, he faces economic uncertainty and the unmapped journey of becoming whole again.
From his Manhattan office at insurance giant American International Group Inc., Marc Wieman has a view common to many New Yorkers, that of another office. But strewn with pictures of his wife, brothers, children and pin-up artwork that only a child's hands could create, his 8-foot-square space has the unmistakable touch of a family man.
He used to be able to take a short elevator trip up to the executive floor to see the World Trade Center and spy the tiny window that marked the office where his wife, Mary, worked. Home was never far away.
On the morning of Sept. 11, he and Mary talked on the phone to catch up. Mary Lenz Wieman was a 43-year-old insurance marketing executive with Aon Corp and an Arlington Heights native. She had stayed in Manhattan overnight to prepare for an early business meeting on the 105th floor of the South Tower.
Marc went back to the couple's Long Island home to be with the kids, Chris, 13; Allison, 9, and Mary Julia, 7. Mary had a late dinner with clients and was at the office early to prepare the conference room, right down to dusting the furniture, as she was wont to do.
Mary Wieman was a busy executive, but she fit the gym, her job and her family into most every day. She was bright and social, loved parties, dancing and cranking the music up.
This morning, the phone call was just a quick catch-up. Good morning. How did the kids behave? What's on our calendars? As Marc remembers, nothing specific or important came up. They hung up in anticipation of seeing each other that night.
The work day had just begun in Manhattan when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. As word spread, Marc and his co-workers scrambled out in front of his building where the smoking tower could be viewed from an alleyway.
He could see it was not Mary's building. Nor was it the first time the World Trade Center had been rocked with explosions and fire. Still, it was close, too close, and Marc Wieman hustled back to his desk to call his wife.
There was no answer at Mary's office. He tried her cell phone. If people were evacuating, it was possible she didn't hear her husband's call. Or, maybe it was off because she was conducting her meeting just then.
At that moment, in fact, Mary Lenz Wieman was making her way down the stairs of the South Tower. It was easily a 50-minute journey from the height she began from, hindered by the sheer number of people and the confusion of the moment.
At the 78th floor, her co-workers told Marc later, Mary Wieman got impatient with the slow journey and decided to take the elevator. That was the last time anyone can say for sure that they saw her.
As Marc was leaving his message, New York shook a second time. It was 9:03 a.m. The South Tower had been hit by United Airlines Flight 175, which plowed a course between the 78th and 87th floors. Outside the World Trade Center, New York was waking up to the fact this was not a fluke accident, but a planned holocaust.
The city, along with American International Group, began the clumsy process of evacuating. But not before Marc made one last call to Mary's cell phone. No answer.
Driving was out of the question, and public transportation was non-existent. Marc Wieman began the long walk home, joining the streaming masses in a diaspora across the Brooklyn Bridge. He would walk all the way to Brooklyn, to the Long Island Rail Road that would take him to a cab and eventually bring him home.
Wieman didn't say much during the walk. As a pedestrian crossing that storied bridge, he could have turned and had a magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline and the East River in a fashion not available to people for more than a century. With nothing but water below and sun above, the Brooklyn Bridge offered an unobstructed view of the wounded towers. But Marc Wieman's thoughts were elsewhere.
"It's going to take a miracle now," Wieman said aloud, marching along with his co-workers. They knew what he meant, and offered words of comfort, but nothing could stop the smoke from billowing out of the towers.
At 9:59 a.m., less than an hour after the Boeing 767 missile blew through Mary's tower, a wave of gasps and screams shot through the escapees on the bridge.
Marc Wieman turned just in time for a last look at the giant falling to the pavement in thunder and ash.
"I could hear people screaming, and I turned and saw Tower Two collapse," Marc Wieman said. "It was a horrifying moment. It still is."
The moment is worsened by not having anyone to say goodbye to. Mary Lenz Wieman never was recovered from the ruins of the World Trade Center.
Since the attacks, Wieman has mustered enough strength to go to the site a couple times - once with his children because they wanted to see what was left, once for the final day of the cleanup, and once at lunch, by himself for his own personal moment.
"That was a huge mistake," Wieman said. "I went up to the viewing platform and when I came down, all the names were there. Once you see those names, you just start going down the alphabet until I got to the W's. It was just a huge mistake."
Now Marc Wieman slowly finds himself having to become his wife, take over her role and be two parents, one person with two full-time jobs.
The main task is to keep his children going, and, in losing himself in their lives, he's kept himself going.
That meant going back to work and sending the children to school the very next day. It meant doing all the paperwork to get the charity money that might help sustain them for several years, to help fill in for Mary's missing breadwinner share of the household income.
"From day one, my goal was to keep their lives normal," Wieman said of his children. "We don't spend a lot of time sitting around the house crying. It's a very adult lesson for them to learn that there are no answers to this."
The answers Wieman seeks involve dealing with loss. He's talked to priests, family and consulted books, but nothing takes the pain away completely. For some things, out of sight, out of mind is the only answer.
Wieman has decided to trade in his wife's car because it's a constant reminder every time he pulls into the driveway that she's not coming home.
"It's a piece of her," he said. "That's Mommy's car. I was crying in the driveway last night cleaning it out."
Wieman now wears a silver bracelet on his left wrist in memory of Mary. The jewelry replaces his wedding ring, an item he removed for the last time in October. The couple celebrated 20 years of marriage Sept. 5.
"I don't know if that was the right thing to do," Wieman said of taking off the ring. "I have to get used to the fact that she's not around. You have two choices. Either you can get on with your life, or you can wallow in it. I know plenty of people who wallow in it, but what sort of example does that show your kids? You get up in the morning, you gotta look in the mirror. You still have to be Dad."
Wieman struggles to make the decisions that he and his wife used to make together. Should Chris get braces? Can I risk keeping the girls in Catholic school?
It's the last item, the issue of finances, that hardens his face for a moment. Wieman received some money from the Red Cross, but since he earns "a lot less" than his wife did, he's not certain how far the money will go.
It adds further uncertainty to his life. And there is perhaps a touch of anger toward the people who murdered his wife. He takes his children to church every Sunday, but it's hard to turn the other cheek.
"You read these articles about these prisoners in Guantanamo not being treated right," he said. "Big deal. I don't care what happens to the people over there."
As his city debates what should become of the World Trade Center footprint, Wieman, like many who lost family, wants the land treated with reverence. He'll accept some commercial development because the businessman in him recognizes the economic realities. It's been reported that the gross national product created by that one stricken area of Manhattan equals the entire output from St. Louis. But ignoring the souls there would be sacrilege.
"Like Mary, there are people who've never been recovered," Wieman said. "There are body parts somewhere in there. Whatever you do, it's a cemetery."
The loss has brought him closer to his wife's parents even as they grieve 800 miles away in Arlington Heights. The relationship with his father-in-law, Lionel, is softer, more loving. Lionel's Republican ideals no longer clash with Marc's Democratic values.
What happens now to the Wiemans is unknown. Marc has no thoughts of leaving New York. Seeing his wife reflected in each of his children as they grow will be a haunting pleasure the rest of this life. He works from home one day a week now to be closer to his family and assist in the adjustment.
There's a faint smile battling against the weariness on his face as he relives it all. Wieman doesn't let himself cry when he speaks of his wife. He looks at her picture and those of his children even as he speaks of what life will be like from here on out.
Different but the same. In her memory, Wieman said life will go on, not looking back at what could have been, but how she would want it to be.
"She was a dynamo," he said. "I live my life everyday. I go to work everyday. I go home and I take care of the kids. That's my life. I miss her. I miss her everyday."
-30-
View the accompanying Web journal and photo gallery that ran with this series here: http://www.dailyherald.com/special/91102/journal.asp
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
NEW YORK - Marc Wieman is not a man who likes to look back. The last time he did, he watched his wife die.
Now, with his new life as a widower and a single parent, he faces economic uncertainty and the unmapped journey of becoming whole again.
From his Manhattan office at insurance giant American International Group Inc., Marc Wieman has a view common to many New Yorkers, that of another office. But strewn with pictures of his wife, brothers, children and pin-up artwork that only a child's hands could create, his 8-foot-square space has the unmistakable touch of a family man.
He used to be able to take a short elevator trip up to the executive floor to see the World Trade Center and spy the tiny window that marked the office where his wife, Mary, worked. Home was never far away.
On the morning of Sept. 11, he and Mary talked on the phone to catch up. Mary Lenz Wieman was a 43-year-old insurance marketing executive with Aon Corp and an Arlington Heights native. She had stayed in Manhattan overnight to prepare for an early business meeting on the 105th floor of the South Tower.
Marc went back to the couple's Long Island home to be with the kids, Chris, 13; Allison, 9, and Mary Julia, 7. Mary had a late dinner with clients and was at the office early to prepare the conference room, right down to dusting the furniture, as she was wont to do.
Mary Wieman was a busy executive, but she fit the gym, her job and her family into most every day. She was bright and social, loved parties, dancing and cranking the music up.
This morning, the phone call was just a quick catch-up. Good morning. How did the kids behave? What's on our calendars? As Marc remembers, nothing specific or important came up. They hung up in anticipation of seeing each other that night.
The work day had just begun in Manhattan when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. As word spread, Marc and his co-workers scrambled out in front of his building where the smoking tower could be viewed from an alleyway.
He could see it was not Mary's building. Nor was it the first time the World Trade Center had been rocked with explosions and fire. Still, it was close, too close, and Marc Wieman hustled back to his desk to call his wife.
There was no answer at Mary's office. He tried her cell phone. If people were evacuating, it was possible she didn't hear her husband's call. Or, maybe it was off because she was conducting her meeting just then.
At that moment, in fact, Mary Lenz Wieman was making her way down the stairs of the South Tower. It was easily a 50-minute journey from the height she began from, hindered by the sheer number of people and the confusion of the moment.
At the 78th floor, her co-workers told Marc later, Mary Wieman got impatient with the slow journey and decided to take the elevator. That was the last time anyone can say for sure that they saw her.
As Marc was leaving his message, New York shook a second time. It was 9:03 a.m. The South Tower had been hit by United Airlines Flight 175, which plowed a course between the 78th and 87th floors. Outside the World Trade Center, New York was waking up to the fact this was not a fluke accident, but a planned holocaust.
The city, along with American International Group, began the clumsy process of evacuating. But not before Marc made one last call to Mary's cell phone. No answer.
Driving was out of the question, and public transportation was non-existent. Marc Wieman began the long walk home, joining the streaming masses in a diaspora across the Brooklyn Bridge. He would walk all the way to Brooklyn, to the Long Island Rail Road that would take him to a cab and eventually bring him home.
Wieman didn't say much during the walk. As a pedestrian crossing that storied bridge, he could have turned and had a magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline and the East River in a fashion not available to people for more than a century. With nothing but water below and sun above, the Brooklyn Bridge offered an unobstructed view of the wounded towers. But Marc Wieman's thoughts were elsewhere.
"It's going to take a miracle now," Wieman said aloud, marching along with his co-workers. They knew what he meant, and offered words of comfort, but nothing could stop the smoke from billowing out of the towers.
At 9:59 a.m., less than an hour after the Boeing 767 missile blew through Mary's tower, a wave of gasps and screams shot through the escapees on the bridge.
Marc Wieman turned just in time for a last look at the giant falling to the pavement in thunder and ash.
"I could hear people screaming, and I turned and saw Tower Two collapse," Marc Wieman said. "It was a horrifying moment. It still is."
The moment is worsened by not having anyone to say goodbye to. Mary Lenz Wieman never was recovered from the ruins of the World Trade Center.
Since the attacks, Wieman has mustered enough strength to go to the site a couple times - once with his children because they wanted to see what was left, once for the final day of the cleanup, and once at lunch, by himself for his own personal moment.
"That was a huge mistake," Wieman said. "I went up to the viewing platform and when I came down, all the names were there. Once you see those names, you just start going down the alphabet until I got to the W's. It was just a huge mistake."
Now Marc Wieman slowly finds himself having to become his wife, take over her role and be two parents, one person with two full-time jobs.
The main task is to keep his children going, and, in losing himself in their lives, he's kept himself going.
That meant going back to work and sending the children to school the very next day. It meant doing all the paperwork to get the charity money that might help sustain them for several years, to help fill in for Mary's missing breadwinner share of the household income.
"From day one, my goal was to keep their lives normal," Wieman said of his children. "We don't spend a lot of time sitting around the house crying. It's a very adult lesson for them to learn that there are no answers to this."
The answers Wieman seeks involve dealing with loss. He's talked to priests, family and consulted books, but nothing takes the pain away completely. For some things, out of sight, out of mind is the only answer.
Wieman has decided to trade in his wife's car because it's a constant reminder every time he pulls into the driveway that she's not coming home.
"It's a piece of her," he said. "That's Mommy's car. I was crying in the driveway last night cleaning it out."
Wieman now wears a silver bracelet on his left wrist in memory of Mary. The jewelry replaces his wedding ring, an item he removed for the last time in October. The couple celebrated 20 years of marriage Sept. 5.
"I don't know if that was the right thing to do," Wieman said of taking off the ring. "I have to get used to the fact that she's not around. You have two choices. Either you can get on with your life, or you can wallow in it. I know plenty of people who wallow in it, but what sort of example does that show your kids? You get up in the morning, you gotta look in the mirror. You still have to be Dad."
Wieman struggles to make the decisions that he and his wife used to make together. Should Chris get braces? Can I risk keeping the girls in Catholic school?
It's the last item, the issue of finances, that hardens his face for a moment. Wieman received some money from the Red Cross, but since he earns "a lot less" than his wife did, he's not certain how far the money will go.
It adds further uncertainty to his life. And there is perhaps a touch of anger toward the people who murdered his wife. He takes his children to church every Sunday, but it's hard to turn the other cheek.
"You read these articles about these prisoners in Guantanamo not being treated right," he said. "Big deal. I don't care what happens to the people over there."
As his city debates what should become of the World Trade Center footprint, Wieman, like many who lost family, wants the land treated with reverence. He'll accept some commercial development because the businessman in him recognizes the economic realities. It's been reported that the gross national product created by that one stricken area of Manhattan equals the entire output from St. Louis. But ignoring the souls there would be sacrilege.
"Like Mary, there are people who've never been recovered," Wieman said. "There are body parts somewhere in there. Whatever you do, it's a cemetery."
The loss has brought him closer to his wife's parents even as they grieve 800 miles away in Arlington Heights. The relationship with his father-in-law, Lionel, is softer, more loving. Lionel's Republican ideals no longer clash with Marc's Democratic values.
What happens now to the Wiemans is unknown. Marc has no thoughts of leaving New York. Seeing his wife reflected in each of his children as they grow will be a haunting pleasure the rest of this life. He works from home one day a week now to be closer to his family and assist in the adjustment.
There's a faint smile battling against the weariness on his face as he relives it all. Wieman doesn't let himself cry when he speaks of his wife. He looks at her picture and those of his children even as he speaks of what life will be like from here on out.
Different but the same. In her memory, Wieman said life will go on, not looking back at what could have been, but how she would want it to be.
"She was a dynamo," he said. "I live my life everyday. I go to work everyday. I go home and I take care of the kids. That's my life. I miss her. I miss her everyday."
-30-
View the accompanying Web journal and photo gallery that ran with this series here: http://www.dailyherald.com/special/91102/journal.asp
(Health feature) Living life while dying For woman with ALS, love and friendships provide a lift each day
Sunday September 19 2004
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
Marlene Humay rose from her seat and slowly walked to the stage. The music cued up. Linda Ronstadt belted out a tale of a mother's love. Humay embraced her youngest son, Joe, and started to dance.
The wedding party wept. Even the caterers. The tears were flavored with the bliss of a perfect moment and the sorrow of impending pain, like a last hug before a loved one leaves on a long trip.
Soon Humay's legs would betray her. Her arms would hang limp. Her voice would vanish. Every swallow would carry the threat of choking.
She knew this would be her last dance. She was dying in her son's arms even in that moment.
More than a year later she's still dying, but not without hope, not so much for herself, but those who come after her.
Humay, a Wheaton resident and retired teacher, has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease. It attacks nerve cells in the brain, resulting in a gradual paralysis of the entire body, including the lungs. Most people die in two to five years.
Humay was diagnosed two years ago.
Losing the horserace
The Humays have a long baseball tradition. Marlene Humay's husband, Jim, played professionally and coached for many years. Their son Joe played at Creighton University.
It was on a trip to watch her son play that the signs of the disease first hinted at the future.
At a postgame dinner, Humay's speech slurred slightly. She thought it was from dental work.
Humay went back to the dentist. After she left the office, but before she got back home, the dentist called her husband.
"You know, this is not anything related to dental work," Jim Humay recalled the dentist saying. He recommended a trip to the doctor.
That first visit suggested a small stroke. Tests would be necessary - a lot of tests.
"We went through everything imaginable," Jim Humay said.
There is no direct test for Marlene Humay's ailment. Six weeks of eliminating everything else left only ALS. The wife and mother of baseball players now had a disease named after a baseball legend.
"We weren't sure what this exactly meant," Jim Humay said. "You hear about multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's, and somewhere out there was Lou Gehrig's disease."
A second opinion confirmed the diagnosis. That's when the couple got their first glimpse of what was to come.
"Imagine there's a horserace," the doctor told them. "The horses all start out, and you get to the first turn. You take a picture, and somewhere in there is you. Your position will never improve in the race. As the race continues, you'll never stay even or catch up. You'll continually fall behind."
Each day Humay slowly lost the ability to do something she'd done all her life.
Her speech went first. Three months after the diagnosis, she was using an electronic device to communicate. She could still write and walk, even exercise.
"I thought, 'This isn't so bad,'" her husband said. "It was a big adjustment, but it was something that was OK. We could get by like this."
By March 2003, Humay was still walking about a mile a day.
"Then one day, all of a sudden, Marlene fell," Jim Humay said.
By the end of March, she was using a cane. By the end of April, she was using a walker. Her son's wedding was three months away. Humay was determined to share a mother-son dance at the wedding.
She made it.
"That was probably the most determined I'd seen her in awhile to walk on her own," Joe Humay said. "It was an amazing moment for us to have that one last dance. It's still hard for me to watch the DVD."
By last September, one year after her diagnosis, Marlene needed a chair-lift at home to use the stairs. Two months later, she was in a wheelchair.
"Arms and hands still worked a little," Humay recalled.
But her legs were useless. She now needed help getting out of bed and getting dressed.
Soon after, the Humays found they could no longer eat out. It was too hard for Marlene Humay to chew and swallow.
"Until you can't do something, you don't recognize what you were able to do," her son said.
Just before Mother's Day, doctors inserted a feeding tube.
Now all Humay has is limited head movement. She can scribble notes if someone puts a pen between her fingers. And she can laugh. It's not the belly laugh of many women like her in their 60s. It's more internal, like laughing with her lungs.
Silent laughter, tears
There's no shortage of laughter.
Friends and family visit Humay often. A neighbor sends her get well cards twice a week. Others bring tapioca pudding, her favorite.
There's video night with a group of gal pals known as "Mar's Angels." Friends even set up a potted-plant garden for her because it's harder for her to get outside now.
Those are the things Humay says make each day something she cherishes.
"I'm lucky to have good friends," she writes.
One of those is Sue Lessing. The two teachers became close as they both prepared to retire from Wiesbrook School in Wheaton.
"I don't know why this friendship developed, but it did, and it's a special one," Lessing said.
That's played out in some adventures the two have had since Humay's diagnosis. There was the time the two went out for lunch on Halloween. The waitress wore a vampire costume.
"She didn't know Marlene had ALS," Lessing said. "When she asked Marlene what she wanted, Marlene didn't answer because she couldn't talk. The waitress said that her costume must have left her speechless. We just laughed and laughed."
It's not always like that. Humay doesn't have much movement, but she can cry. Her bottom lip pokes out. Then the tears come.
"She doesn't cry often," Lessing said. "When she does I'll just say go ahead and cry. We'll both sit here and cry. I don't know what else to do."
Lessing is also the woman who persuaded Humay to go public with her struggle as a way to leave a legacy of hope and awareness to all those affected with ALS in the future. But Lessing's personal mission has been to retain communication with her friend. She's tracked down letter boards for Humay to spell with and special pens that are easy to hold. Small things are communicated through blinking.
"My prayer as this was happening was, 'Please, God, let her be able to communicate,'" Lessing said. "Then when she couldn't speak it was, 'God, let her keep her hands.' Now it's, 'God, please find ways for us to communicate each day.'"
Why is that so important to Lessing?
"Because I love her," she said. "I can't say this is my lifelong friend, but I sure wish she had been."
With eyes and smiles
Marlene and Jim's relationship is mostly unspoken now. They always seem to know implicitly what the other is thinking, without words.
"We communicate ... with eyes and smiles," Jim Humay says.
Silence has strengthened their love, not stripped it away. Humay smiles and scrawls "the queen" on her pad regarding how her husband treats her.
"Yeah," Jim Humay grins as his eyes glass over. He reaches over and smoothes the hair on her forehead. "I know you are."
Then he snaps back to being strong and steady. He's a firm believer that those who love his wife can't let ALS beat them. The emotions creep out now and then in the trickle of a tear or a yell of anger when he walks their dog, Madison. There's guilt in those moments of release. It's an unfair advantage.
"Marlene doesn't have those outlets," he said.
Jim Humay is her sole caregiver. He dresses and bathes her, adjusts her in chairs, gets her up and down the stairs, makes sure she's got all her daily nutrients. He's with her in all her moods, powerless against the deterioration of the woman he's loved for decades. Eventually the disease will get to the muscles surrounding Humay's lungs. When they stop working, she doesn't want to be on a ventilator.
"There's a little bit of denial each day," Jim Humay said. "A little bit of anger each day, some bargaining and some depression. And, every once in awhile, there's some acceptance. We just get the best out of each day that we can."
This year, on Sept. 11, while the nation mourned loss, Marlene and Jim Humay celebrated hope. The couple, along with more than 100 of "Mar's Angel's," participated in the ALS Walk4Life in Chicago. Humay completed the walk in her chair with her husband pushing and their dog leading the way. "Mar's Angels" alone raised more than $10,000 for the cause.
"Not for me," Marlene Humay writes. "(For) other moms and dads. (So) they can dance with (their) sons and daughters, too."
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
Marlene Humay rose from her seat and slowly walked to the stage. The music cued up. Linda Ronstadt belted out a tale of a mother's love. Humay embraced her youngest son, Joe, and started to dance.
The wedding party wept. Even the caterers. The tears were flavored with the bliss of a perfect moment and the sorrow of impending pain, like a last hug before a loved one leaves on a long trip.
Soon Humay's legs would betray her. Her arms would hang limp. Her voice would vanish. Every swallow would carry the threat of choking.
She knew this would be her last dance. She was dying in her son's arms even in that moment.
More than a year later she's still dying, but not without hope, not so much for herself, but those who come after her.
Humay, a Wheaton resident and retired teacher, has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease. It attacks nerve cells in the brain, resulting in a gradual paralysis of the entire body, including the lungs. Most people die in two to five years.
Humay was diagnosed two years ago.
Losing the horserace
The Humays have a long baseball tradition. Marlene Humay's husband, Jim, played professionally and coached for many years. Their son Joe played at Creighton University.
It was on a trip to watch her son play that the signs of the disease first hinted at the future.
At a postgame dinner, Humay's speech slurred slightly. She thought it was from dental work.
Humay went back to the dentist. After she left the office, but before she got back home, the dentist called her husband.
"You know, this is not anything related to dental work," Jim Humay recalled the dentist saying. He recommended a trip to the doctor.
That first visit suggested a small stroke. Tests would be necessary - a lot of tests.
"We went through everything imaginable," Jim Humay said.
There is no direct test for Marlene Humay's ailment. Six weeks of eliminating everything else left only ALS. The wife and mother of baseball players now had a disease named after a baseball legend.
"We weren't sure what this exactly meant," Jim Humay said. "You hear about multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's, and somewhere out there was Lou Gehrig's disease."
A second opinion confirmed the diagnosis. That's when the couple got their first glimpse of what was to come.
"Imagine there's a horserace," the doctor told them. "The horses all start out, and you get to the first turn. You take a picture, and somewhere in there is you. Your position will never improve in the race. As the race continues, you'll never stay even or catch up. You'll continually fall behind."
Each day Humay slowly lost the ability to do something she'd done all her life.
Her speech went first. Three months after the diagnosis, she was using an electronic device to communicate. She could still write and walk, even exercise.
"I thought, 'This isn't so bad,'" her husband said. "It was a big adjustment, but it was something that was OK. We could get by like this."
By March 2003, Humay was still walking about a mile a day.
"Then one day, all of a sudden, Marlene fell," Jim Humay said.
By the end of March, she was using a cane. By the end of April, she was using a walker. Her son's wedding was three months away. Humay was determined to share a mother-son dance at the wedding.
She made it.
"That was probably the most determined I'd seen her in awhile to walk on her own," Joe Humay said. "It was an amazing moment for us to have that one last dance. It's still hard for me to watch the DVD."
By last September, one year after her diagnosis, Marlene needed a chair-lift at home to use the stairs. Two months later, she was in a wheelchair.
"Arms and hands still worked a little," Humay recalled.
But her legs were useless. She now needed help getting out of bed and getting dressed.
Soon after, the Humays found they could no longer eat out. It was too hard for Marlene Humay to chew and swallow.
"Until you can't do something, you don't recognize what you were able to do," her son said.
Just before Mother's Day, doctors inserted a feeding tube.
Now all Humay has is limited head movement. She can scribble notes if someone puts a pen between her fingers. And she can laugh. It's not the belly laugh of many women like her in their 60s. It's more internal, like laughing with her lungs.
Silent laughter, tears
There's no shortage of laughter.
Friends and family visit Humay often. A neighbor sends her get well cards twice a week. Others bring tapioca pudding, her favorite.
There's video night with a group of gal pals known as "Mar's Angels." Friends even set up a potted-plant garden for her because it's harder for her to get outside now.
Those are the things Humay says make each day something she cherishes.
"I'm lucky to have good friends," she writes.
One of those is Sue Lessing. The two teachers became close as they both prepared to retire from Wiesbrook School in Wheaton.
"I don't know why this friendship developed, but it did, and it's a special one," Lessing said.
That's played out in some adventures the two have had since Humay's diagnosis. There was the time the two went out for lunch on Halloween. The waitress wore a vampire costume.
"She didn't know Marlene had ALS," Lessing said. "When she asked Marlene what she wanted, Marlene didn't answer because she couldn't talk. The waitress said that her costume must have left her speechless. We just laughed and laughed."
It's not always like that. Humay doesn't have much movement, but she can cry. Her bottom lip pokes out. Then the tears come.
"She doesn't cry often," Lessing said. "When she does I'll just say go ahead and cry. We'll both sit here and cry. I don't know what else to do."
Lessing is also the woman who persuaded Humay to go public with her struggle as a way to leave a legacy of hope and awareness to all those affected with ALS in the future. But Lessing's personal mission has been to retain communication with her friend. She's tracked down letter boards for Humay to spell with and special pens that are easy to hold. Small things are communicated through blinking.
"My prayer as this was happening was, 'Please, God, let her be able to communicate,'" Lessing said. "Then when she couldn't speak it was, 'God, let her keep her hands.' Now it's, 'God, please find ways for us to communicate each day.'"
Why is that so important to Lessing?
"Because I love her," she said. "I can't say this is my lifelong friend, but I sure wish she had been."
With eyes and smiles
Marlene and Jim's relationship is mostly unspoken now. They always seem to know implicitly what the other is thinking, without words.
"We communicate ... with eyes and smiles," Jim Humay says.
Silence has strengthened their love, not stripped it away. Humay smiles and scrawls "the queen" on her pad regarding how her husband treats her.
"Yeah," Jim Humay grins as his eyes glass over. He reaches over and smoothes the hair on her forehead. "I know you are."
Then he snaps back to being strong and steady. He's a firm believer that those who love his wife can't let ALS beat them. The emotions creep out now and then in the trickle of a tear or a yell of anger when he walks their dog, Madison. There's guilt in those moments of release. It's an unfair advantage.
"Marlene doesn't have those outlets," he said.
Jim Humay is her sole caregiver. He dresses and bathes her, adjusts her in chairs, gets her up and down the stairs, makes sure she's got all her daily nutrients. He's with her in all her moods, powerless against the deterioration of the woman he's loved for decades. Eventually the disease will get to the muscles surrounding Humay's lungs. When they stop working, she doesn't want to be on a ventilator.
"There's a little bit of denial each day," Jim Humay said. "A little bit of anger each day, some bargaining and some depression. And, every once in awhile, there's some acceptance. We just get the best out of each day that we can."
This year, on Sept. 11, while the nation mourned loss, Marlene and Jim Humay celebrated hope. The couple, along with more than 100 of "Mar's Angel's," participated in the ALS Walk4Life in Chicago. Humay completed the walk in her chair with her husband pushing and their dog leading the way. "Mar's Angels" alone raised more than $10,000 for the cause.
"Not for me," Marlene Humay writes. "(For) other moms and dads. (So) they can dance with (their) sons and daughters, too."
(Consumer/Business feature) How you can fight junk fax overload Law helps you turn the tables on unsolicited ads
Sunday May 11 2003
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
A fax comes through your machine advertising a service promising to "jump start your love life" if you just fill out a form and fax it back.
You've never done business with this company before. You never asked to receive this information. It's your fax machine. Your expensive toner. Your paper. Your lost time.
You now have several options. You can call the removal number at the bottom and hope they respect your wishes. You can fill out the form and fax it back for a chance at finding true love. You can call the Federal Communications Commission and complain. Or, you can use the fax to become at least $500 richer.
Receiving unsolicited fax advertisements, a practice known as junk faxing, is a growing problem for anyone with a fax machine. Many fax owners are looking to deliver a permanent disconnection notice to bulk fax senders in court.
Just last August, a California man sued Fax.com, a commercial faxing company from California, for $2.2 trillion because he received more than 100 unwanted faxes at his home.
In Illinois, Naperville resident Robert Bulmash became so annoyed about all the junk faxes, calls and letters he received that he began Public Citizen Inc. The company puts clients on a do-not-call list for a fee and then helps sue companies when they violate the list and the law.
A federal law, known as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, makes it illegal to send an unsolicited commercial advertisement from a fax machine. People receiving these faxes can sue for at least $500 per fax, with some courts awarding up to $1,500 per fax. Even one fax can be enough to sue successfully.
Consumers are becoming both more annoyed and more informed of their rights.
FCC statistics show the agency received nearly 7,500 complaints last year from consumers about perceived violations. Beyond that, it logged more than 25,000 calls from people seeking information about the law.
The FCC has issued dozens of citations, including some against businesses in Lake Barrington and Lisle.
It's also levied some hefty fines against bulk faxing companies for incessant advertisements. The largest to date totaled nearly $5.4 million against Fax.com for 489 fax violations. Each fax cost the company the maximum federal fine of $11,000.
But Fax.com and others send out many more faxes than that on a regular basis. Soulmates, a dating service based in Schaumburg, said it sends out about 10,000 fax advertisements per week through a bulk fax mailer, which it declined to name.
A marketing employee at Soulmates said the company was not aware the practice was illegal but also couldn't say it would stop now that it did. Soulmates provides an opt-out number at the bottom of its faxes, but courts have ruled that is not enough to make the practice legal.
The reason people sue is because of the out-of-pocket costs of receiving the fax and the general nuisance of the problem.
Dan Edelman of the Chicago law firm Edelman, Combs & Latturner LLC has brought about 30 successful suits against junk faxers in Cook, Kane and DuPage counties. Some of his clients bring class action suits, and others are individual cases, including one in which a business received more than 18,000 junk faxes over several months.
Edelman said many of the faxes advertise investment scams created by "fly-by-night" companies consisting of a phone and nothing else. The worst thing to do, he said, is to call the removal number.
"All the removal number does is cause you to be put on a sucker list," he said. "It ensures someone that you are, in fact, looking at the fax. It's a nuisance. It's like conducting direct mail, but getting the recipient to pay the postage involuntarily."
Bulk fax companies generally defend the practice as a legitimate, free-speech method of acquiring customers. That argument has only prevailed in one court and the decision was recently overruled.
Private Citizen's Bulmash said the free speech defense is the weakest of all.
"Let's say I want to print an ad in the paper and I walked in and said, 'Stand aside, stop using your press, I'm going to use it.' It's absurd. Yet these firms are using my fax machine as their printing presses," Bulmash said.
Since the late 1980s, Bulmash's company has collected more than $2 million in lawsuits for its 4,000 members. The amount collected only reflects the severe annoyance of the problem, he said.
"It's like spray painting an ad on the side of my home without my permission," he said. "It's my telephone. It's my fax machine. It's my home, my final sanctuary and I determine who's speech can enter my door. If you want to sell me something do it outside of my home and not on my personal property."
Help with junk faxes
- Federal Communications Commission: (800) CALL-FCC.
- Private Citizen Inc.: (630) 393-2370; www.privatecitizen.com
- Illinois Attorney General: (800) 386-5438.
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
A fax comes through your machine advertising a service promising to "jump start your love life" if you just fill out a form and fax it back.
You've never done business with this company before. You never asked to receive this information. It's your fax machine. Your expensive toner. Your paper. Your lost time.
You now have several options. You can call the removal number at the bottom and hope they respect your wishes. You can fill out the form and fax it back for a chance at finding true love. You can call the Federal Communications Commission and complain. Or, you can use the fax to become at least $500 richer.
Receiving unsolicited fax advertisements, a practice known as junk faxing, is a growing problem for anyone with a fax machine. Many fax owners are looking to deliver a permanent disconnection notice to bulk fax senders in court.
Just last August, a California man sued Fax.com, a commercial faxing company from California, for $2.2 trillion because he received more than 100 unwanted faxes at his home.
In Illinois, Naperville resident Robert Bulmash became so annoyed about all the junk faxes, calls and letters he received that he began Public Citizen Inc. The company puts clients on a do-not-call list for a fee and then helps sue companies when they violate the list and the law.
A federal law, known as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, makes it illegal to send an unsolicited commercial advertisement from a fax machine. People receiving these faxes can sue for at least $500 per fax, with some courts awarding up to $1,500 per fax. Even one fax can be enough to sue successfully.
Consumers are becoming both more annoyed and more informed of their rights.
FCC statistics show the agency received nearly 7,500 complaints last year from consumers about perceived violations. Beyond that, it logged more than 25,000 calls from people seeking information about the law.
The FCC has issued dozens of citations, including some against businesses in Lake Barrington and Lisle.
It's also levied some hefty fines against bulk faxing companies for incessant advertisements. The largest to date totaled nearly $5.4 million against Fax.com for 489 fax violations. Each fax cost the company the maximum federal fine of $11,000.
But Fax.com and others send out many more faxes than that on a regular basis. Soulmates, a dating service based in Schaumburg, said it sends out about 10,000 fax advertisements per week through a bulk fax mailer, which it declined to name.
A marketing employee at Soulmates said the company was not aware the practice was illegal but also couldn't say it would stop now that it did. Soulmates provides an opt-out number at the bottom of its faxes, but courts have ruled that is not enough to make the practice legal.
The reason people sue is because of the out-of-pocket costs of receiving the fax and the general nuisance of the problem.
Dan Edelman of the Chicago law firm Edelman, Combs & Latturner LLC has brought about 30 successful suits against junk faxers in Cook, Kane and DuPage counties. Some of his clients bring class action suits, and others are individual cases, including one in which a business received more than 18,000 junk faxes over several months.
Edelman said many of the faxes advertise investment scams created by "fly-by-night" companies consisting of a phone and nothing else. The worst thing to do, he said, is to call the removal number.
"All the removal number does is cause you to be put on a sucker list," he said. "It ensures someone that you are, in fact, looking at the fax. It's a nuisance. It's like conducting direct mail, but getting the recipient to pay the postage involuntarily."
Bulk fax companies generally defend the practice as a legitimate, free-speech method of acquiring customers. That argument has only prevailed in one court and the decision was recently overruled.
Private Citizen's Bulmash said the free speech defense is the weakest of all.
"Let's say I want to print an ad in the paper and I walked in and said, 'Stand aside, stop using your press, I'm going to use it.' It's absurd. Yet these firms are using my fax machine as their printing presses," Bulmash said.
Since the late 1980s, Bulmash's company has collected more than $2 million in lawsuits for its 4,000 members. The amount collected only reflects the severe annoyance of the problem, he said.
"It's like spray painting an ad on the side of my home without my permission," he said. "It's my telephone. It's my fax machine. It's my home, my final sanctuary and I determine who's speech can enter my door. If you want to sell me something do it outside of my home and not on my personal property."
Help with junk faxes
- Federal Communications Commission: (800) CALL-FCC.
- Private Citizen Inc.: (630) 393-2370; www.privatecitizen.com
- Illinois Attorney General: (800) 386-5438.
(Profile) Ted Olbrich refuses to let a few death threats stop him from converting all of Cambodia to Christianity. His persistence appears to
Tuesday December 02 2003
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
Ted Olbrich is the head agent on a quest some might call missionary impossible: He wants to convert the entire Cambodian nation to Christianity.
The former Woodstock pastor isn't asking for much - just an entirely new set of beliefs for every man, woman and child in a country that's 95 percent Buddhist.
No one specifically asked for his help, and the occasional death threats and stones through his church windows suggest some Cambodians do not want him in their land.
Yet Olbrich, 52, said he does it because so many Cambodians lack hope. They are worn down after 30 years of war and civil strife.
"When you get up in the morning to go to the market to get food ... you never know if the guy driving your motorbike taxi might be the person who killed your mother or sister," Olbrich said. "Imagine living like that and what the impact would be on something like trust, or compassion or simple joy."
Jesus Christ may not be a superstar in Cambodia, but Olbrich isn't giving up. In fact, he's actually making headway.
Since arriving five years ago, the former pig farmer has built more than 700 churches. In the process, with a little help from a Rolling Meadows charity, he's become the "big daddy" to more than 2,000 children in more than 50 orphan homes.
Successes like these are the reason he willingly suffers through life in an impoverished land, and risks his own murder for people he never met in a country that does not welcome him.
"It's my calling to do this," Olbrich said. "When I got there it was a swirling chaos. I looked around, and I did not like it. Right then I was convinced and committed to do something, or die trying. No one deserves to go through all that."
Pigs and princesses
Olbrich likes to think of himself as the "Forrest Gump of missionaries." Like the Tom Hanks film character, he has an uncanny knack for stumbling onto success.
He fell in love with the church as a student at Iowa State University in response to a deep sense of emptiness.
Before long, he decided to enroll in seminary, a path his father labeled a "waste of a good life."
But the government had other ideas. Uncle Sam wanted him to fight in Vietnam.
"I won the only contest I ever entered," Olbrich said. "The draft lottery."
There was, however, one way out. With his degree in agronomy, Olbrich landed a job with the U.S. government in Laos to help with rice production.
Forrest Gump was only getting started.
On his first day in Laos, Olbrich met Sou, a princess of the ancient kingdom of Iampa, part of which includes modern-day Cambodia.
Olbrich and Sou fell in love, married and returned to the United States to build a farm of their own. With more than 7,000 hogs and several thousand acres, Olbrich was soon a millionaire, at least on paper.
But those were rough times for farmers. Sky-rocketing interest rates cost him his farm. Once he got it back, it wasn't worth nearly as much.
So he gave it up to go into business. After about eight years of white collar misery, Olbrich found happiness in another collar.
While attending a couples' social group at his local church in Woodstock he rediscovered the fever to preach he'd left behind at his father's command. Soon, he became a pastor in his own right. He'd finally found a profession he loved. But he was restless.
At night he'd find himself sitting alone, reading his Bible for guidance. He'd pray and ask God to help him find what he was lacking.
"It was 10:29 p.m., Aug. 29, 1982," Olbrich recalls. "That's when everything changed. I was thanking God for giving me my wife. And he told me, 'I have given you this woman not so the two of you can enjoy life together, but so you can serve me, first in your country, then in her country."
Olbrich had spent 12 years serving in Woodstock. It was time to go to Cambodia. The was no plan. No money. No roadmap for success.
"I did not have a clear vision of what I was supposed to do," Olbrich said. "When I arrived in Cambodia I couldn't even say 'hello.' I was honestly at a loss. But I knew God would equip me with what I needed."
Buddha vs. Jesus
Olbrich suddenly found himself in an entirely different world. Gone were the telephones, computers, cable TV, clean drinking water, paved roads and the comfort of being able to walk freely without fear of landmines.
He was surrounded by desperation.
More than 1 million people have died in Cambodia as a result of three decades of civil war. Of the 13 million living there, 220,000 have HIV/AIDS, one of the highest infection rates in Asia. Only 70 percent of the population can read and write.
All that fuels an "anything goes" atmosphere in Cambodia, Olbrich said.
"Every Cambodian suffers from one of two things," he said. "They are either so full of bitterness about the things done to them in the wars that they can't forgive. Or, they are so full of guilt about what they did, they can't forgive themselves."
The solution, Olbrich said, was to give them a faith with a figurehead who believes in forgiving. He began preaching about the life of someone who "got it right." Not anti-Buddha, but pro-Jesus.
"When you boil Buddhism down, it tells you that you get what you deserve, so accept it and be happy," Olbrich said. "I keep asking Cambodians if they're happy. They keep saying 'no.' So I tell them, well, we've got this guy named Jesus. If Buddha would have been around when Jesus was alive, he'd have signed up, too."
Not everyone agrees.
Olbrich's pitch about Jesus being the "guy that got it right" sounds like propaganda that wouldn't sit well with many Buddhists, according to professor John C. Holt, a Buddhism expert at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Christian missionaries aren't typically popular in Buddhist nations, he said. In fact, many are finding they're less welcome than ever before.
"It is really becoming a major issue," Holt said. "Traditional Buddhist societies used to be very assimilative. I think that's changing now. The resistance to missionaries is part of the wider resistance to globalization. It reflects a growing antipathy to outsiders coming in."
A tough sell
The Cambodian government makes it clear that Jesus isn't part of the spiritual sandwich delineated in the national motto, "Nation, Religion, King."
Teachers lobby to have all references to "God" removed from textbooks, saying it's unconstitutional. Most national holidays are related to Buddhist observances.
Needless to say, criticizing Buddhism would not curry favor with the Cambodian government. If Olbrich's churches were going to survive, he'd have to get creative. Agreeing to pay a $700 licensing fee for each church proved to be just the ticket.
"They like that," Olbrich said.
The next hurdle was even easier. Churches and missionaries often fail in Cambodia because only Cambodians can own land. No land, no church. But Olbrich's wife, Sou, has Cambodian citizenship. All the property for the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel is in her name.
Olbrich had found a way to please the politicians. Now he'd have to persuade the people. He started with a house of prostitution.
He turned a brothel into a church, and began preaching to women, including many widows who were prostituting themselves just to survive. From inside the converted house of prostitution, he told them if God could exist in what used to be a den of sin, then surely he had a place for them, too.
"We found that people wanted to be part of that because it gave them hope," Olbrich said.
His first prostitute convert laid the groundwork for what was yet to come.
"After a sermon in 1999, she came to the altar weeping with the joy of the Lord," Olbrich recalled.
But she returned the following Sunday with a different problem.
"She told me she had 25 people that wanted to be Christians after she told them about what she had learned," Olbrich said. "So a few days later we went to her home to meet these people. There were 40 people waiting to be baptized."
The next week she had 60 more people ready to convert. In life, she was a practicing thief who sold her body to survive and carried a loaded gun in her purse for protection. But she also had an uncanny knack for memorizing church sermons and delivering them with power.
"I told her, 'Well, you got us into this mess. I guess you're the new pastor,'" Olbrich said.
He used the same formula to spawn hundreds of churches with pastors trained in the same fashion.
Once again, the Forrest Gump of missionaries had fallen into success. Then something unexpected began to happen.
Slowly, babies and small children began to appear on the church doorstep. First one, then six. Olbrich took them to local orphanages. But they were already bursting with children. So much so, they wanted Olbrich to take more children back with him.
"We were there to plant churches," Olbrich said. "This wasn't part of the mission."
But now he had 40 orphans to raise. He was only one man. It was time to take stock of his capabilities.
"You have to use the people God gives you," Olbrich said. "Never allow fear, or lack of resources to keep you from doing the right thing."
Before long, the former prostitutes were acting as pseudo-foster moms and the Foursquare Gospel was gaining notoriety as "the church that loves children."
Helping hands
Olbrich's name and church are well-known in Cambodia. Officials at the U.S. Embassy there said the church is extremely active. And it's growing.
Olbrich opened an official training center for followers and orphans last year. The center will help make the orphans self-sufficient. Nearly 70 percent of them want to be pastors just like Olbrich.
But the process of building a new legion of Cambodian Christians isn't cheap. By the end of his first year of work, Olbrich had accumulated $15,000 of credit card debt trying to keep the churches running and the orphans fed.
"You can't ignore the social and economic sides of mission work," Olbrich said. "Do you expect the people to respond to the Gospel while their children are dying and they don't have enough to eat? If there's a key to the success, it's probably being desperate."
Letters of begging and word of mouth eventually hit the right people in their pocketbooks. Wealthy bankers and rich humanitarians would give millions to Olbrich's work after flying out to see it first-hand.
One of them was Craig Muller, a businessman who now runs the orphan home operation from Rolling Meadows, raising money for whole-home sponsorship (see related story). But there's no doubt who is responsible for the overall success of the mission.
"Ted makes it work because he really is a Gump," Muller said. "God has given Ted a unique skill set perfect for this work. He can preach in the morning. He can manage in the afternoon. And in the evening, he can castrate hogs."
Olbrich's making progress, but he has his setbacks as well.
Every year some of his new pastors succumb to temptation. Money is stolen from orphans. Converted prostitutes fall back to old habits. Lust conquers.
"It's like the Wild West out there if you have money," Olbrich said. "It's easy and everyone's doing it. I fear pride more than death."
Still, Olbrich remains determined to pierce the cloud of hopelessness hanging over Cambodia.
"It'll be years and years before that happens," Olbrich said. "I just assume I'll die in Cambodia doing what I'm doing now."
GRAPHIC: A few facts about Cambodia
Location: Southeastern Asia, bordering the Gulf of Thailand, between Thailand, Vietnam and Laos.
Size: Slightly smaller than Oklahoma
Population: 13 million
Median Age: 19.2 years
Infant mortality: 76 deaths per 1,000 live births
Government: Multiparty democracy under constitutional monarchy
Religion: 95 percent of the population is Buddhist
Poverty rate: 36 percent of people earn less than $1 per day, the international standard of poverty. That's three times higher than the poverty rate in the United States.
Source: 2003 CIA World Factbook
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
Ted Olbrich is the head agent on a quest some might call missionary impossible: He wants to convert the entire Cambodian nation to Christianity.
The former Woodstock pastor isn't asking for much - just an entirely new set of beliefs for every man, woman and child in a country that's 95 percent Buddhist.
No one specifically asked for his help, and the occasional death threats and stones through his church windows suggest some Cambodians do not want him in their land.
Yet Olbrich, 52, said he does it because so many Cambodians lack hope. They are worn down after 30 years of war and civil strife.
"When you get up in the morning to go to the market to get food ... you never know if the guy driving your motorbike taxi might be the person who killed your mother or sister," Olbrich said. "Imagine living like that and what the impact would be on something like trust, or compassion or simple joy."
Jesus Christ may not be a superstar in Cambodia, but Olbrich isn't giving up. In fact, he's actually making headway.
Since arriving five years ago, the former pig farmer has built more than 700 churches. In the process, with a little help from a Rolling Meadows charity, he's become the "big daddy" to more than 2,000 children in more than 50 orphan homes.
Successes like these are the reason he willingly suffers through life in an impoverished land, and risks his own murder for people he never met in a country that does not welcome him.
"It's my calling to do this," Olbrich said. "When I got there it was a swirling chaos. I looked around, and I did not like it. Right then I was convinced and committed to do something, or die trying. No one deserves to go through all that."
Pigs and princesses
Olbrich likes to think of himself as the "Forrest Gump of missionaries." Like the Tom Hanks film character, he has an uncanny knack for stumbling onto success.
He fell in love with the church as a student at Iowa State University in response to a deep sense of emptiness.
Before long, he decided to enroll in seminary, a path his father labeled a "waste of a good life."
But the government had other ideas. Uncle Sam wanted him to fight in Vietnam.
"I won the only contest I ever entered," Olbrich said. "The draft lottery."
There was, however, one way out. With his degree in agronomy, Olbrich landed a job with the U.S. government in Laos to help with rice production.
Forrest Gump was only getting started.
On his first day in Laos, Olbrich met Sou, a princess of the ancient kingdom of Iampa, part of which includes modern-day Cambodia.
Olbrich and Sou fell in love, married and returned to the United States to build a farm of their own. With more than 7,000 hogs and several thousand acres, Olbrich was soon a millionaire, at least on paper.
But those were rough times for farmers. Sky-rocketing interest rates cost him his farm. Once he got it back, it wasn't worth nearly as much.
So he gave it up to go into business. After about eight years of white collar misery, Olbrich found happiness in another collar.
While attending a couples' social group at his local church in Woodstock he rediscovered the fever to preach he'd left behind at his father's command. Soon, he became a pastor in his own right. He'd finally found a profession he loved. But he was restless.
At night he'd find himself sitting alone, reading his Bible for guidance. He'd pray and ask God to help him find what he was lacking.
"It was 10:29 p.m., Aug. 29, 1982," Olbrich recalls. "That's when everything changed. I was thanking God for giving me my wife. And he told me, 'I have given you this woman not so the two of you can enjoy life together, but so you can serve me, first in your country, then in her country."
Olbrich had spent 12 years serving in Woodstock. It was time to go to Cambodia. The was no plan. No money. No roadmap for success.
"I did not have a clear vision of what I was supposed to do," Olbrich said. "When I arrived in Cambodia I couldn't even say 'hello.' I was honestly at a loss. But I knew God would equip me with what I needed."
Buddha vs. Jesus
Olbrich suddenly found himself in an entirely different world. Gone were the telephones, computers, cable TV, clean drinking water, paved roads and the comfort of being able to walk freely without fear of landmines.
He was surrounded by desperation.
More than 1 million people have died in Cambodia as a result of three decades of civil war. Of the 13 million living there, 220,000 have HIV/AIDS, one of the highest infection rates in Asia. Only 70 percent of the population can read and write.
All that fuels an "anything goes" atmosphere in Cambodia, Olbrich said.
"Every Cambodian suffers from one of two things," he said. "They are either so full of bitterness about the things done to them in the wars that they can't forgive. Or, they are so full of guilt about what they did, they can't forgive themselves."
The solution, Olbrich said, was to give them a faith with a figurehead who believes in forgiving. He began preaching about the life of someone who "got it right." Not anti-Buddha, but pro-Jesus.
"When you boil Buddhism down, it tells you that you get what you deserve, so accept it and be happy," Olbrich said. "I keep asking Cambodians if they're happy. They keep saying 'no.' So I tell them, well, we've got this guy named Jesus. If Buddha would have been around when Jesus was alive, he'd have signed up, too."
Not everyone agrees.
Olbrich's pitch about Jesus being the "guy that got it right" sounds like propaganda that wouldn't sit well with many Buddhists, according to professor John C. Holt, a Buddhism expert at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Christian missionaries aren't typically popular in Buddhist nations, he said. In fact, many are finding they're less welcome than ever before.
"It is really becoming a major issue," Holt said. "Traditional Buddhist societies used to be very assimilative. I think that's changing now. The resistance to missionaries is part of the wider resistance to globalization. It reflects a growing antipathy to outsiders coming in."
A tough sell
The Cambodian government makes it clear that Jesus isn't part of the spiritual sandwich delineated in the national motto, "Nation, Religion, King."
Teachers lobby to have all references to "God" removed from textbooks, saying it's unconstitutional. Most national holidays are related to Buddhist observances.
Needless to say, criticizing Buddhism would not curry favor with the Cambodian government. If Olbrich's churches were going to survive, he'd have to get creative. Agreeing to pay a $700 licensing fee for each church proved to be just the ticket.
"They like that," Olbrich said.
The next hurdle was even easier. Churches and missionaries often fail in Cambodia because only Cambodians can own land. No land, no church. But Olbrich's wife, Sou, has Cambodian citizenship. All the property for the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel is in her name.
Olbrich had found a way to please the politicians. Now he'd have to persuade the people. He started with a house of prostitution.
He turned a brothel into a church, and began preaching to women, including many widows who were prostituting themselves just to survive. From inside the converted house of prostitution, he told them if God could exist in what used to be a den of sin, then surely he had a place for them, too.
"We found that people wanted to be part of that because it gave them hope," Olbrich said.
His first prostitute convert laid the groundwork for what was yet to come.
"After a sermon in 1999, she came to the altar weeping with the joy of the Lord," Olbrich recalled.
But she returned the following Sunday with a different problem.
"She told me she had 25 people that wanted to be Christians after she told them about what she had learned," Olbrich said. "So a few days later we went to her home to meet these people. There were 40 people waiting to be baptized."
The next week she had 60 more people ready to convert. In life, she was a practicing thief who sold her body to survive and carried a loaded gun in her purse for protection. But she also had an uncanny knack for memorizing church sermons and delivering them with power.
"I told her, 'Well, you got us into this mess. I guess you're the new pastor,'" Olbrich said.
He used the same formula to spawn hundreds of churches with pastors trained in the same fashion.
Once again, the Forrest Gump of missionaries had fallen into success. Then something unexpected began to happen.
Slowly, babies and small children began to appear on the church doorstep. First one, then six. Olbrich took them to local orphanages. But they were already bursting with children. So much so, they wanted Olbrich to take more children back with him.
"We were there to plant churches," Olbrich said. "This wasn't part of the mission."
But now he had 40 orphans to raise. He was only one man. It was time to take stock of his capabilities.
"You have to use the people God gives you," Olbrich said. "Never allow fear, or lack of resources to keep you from doing the right thing."
Before long, the former prostitutes were acting as pseudo-foster moms and the Foursquare Gospel was gaining notoriety as "the church that loves children."
Helping hands
Olbrich's name and church are well-known in Cambodia. Officials at the U.S. Embassy there said the church is extremely active. And it's growing.
Olbrich opened an official training center for followers and orphans last year. The center will help make the orphans self-sufficient. Nearly 70 percent of them want to be pastors just like Olbrich.
But the process of building a new legion of Cambodian Christians isn't cheap. By the end of his first year of work, Olbrich had accumulated $15,000 of credit card debt trying to keep the churches running and the orphans fed.
"You can't ignore the social and economic sides of mission work," Olbrich said. "Do you expect the people to respond to the Gospel while their children are dying and they don't have enough to eat? If there's a key to the success, it's probably being desperate."
Letters of begging and word of mouth eventually hit the right people in their pocketbooks. Wealthy bankers and rich humanitarians would give millions to Olbrich's work after flying out to see it first-hand.
One of them was Craig Muller, a businessman who now runs the orphan home operation from Rolling Meadows, raising money for whole-home sponsorship (see related story). But there's no doubt who is responsible for the overall success of the mission.
"Ted makes it work because he really is a Gump," Muller said. "God has given Ted a unique skill set perfect for this work. He can preach in the morning. He can manage in the afternoon. And in the evening, he can castrate hogs."
Olbrich's making progress, but he has his setbacks as well.
Every year some of his new pastors succumb to temptation. Money is stolen from orphans. Converted prostitutes fall back to old habits. Lust conquers.
"It's like the Wild West out there if you have money," Olbrich said. "It's easy and everyone's doing it. I fear pride more than death."
Still, Olbrich remains determined to pierce the cloud of hopelessness hanging over Cambodia.
"It'll be years and years before that happens," Olbrich said. "I just assume I'll die in Cambodia doing what I'm doing now."
GRAPHIC: A few facts about Cambodia
Location: Southeastern Asia, bordering the Gulf of Thailand, between Thailand, Vietnam and Laos.
Size: Slightly smaller than Oklahoma
Population: 13 million
Median Age: 19.2 years
Infant mortality: 76 deaths per 1,000 live births
Government: Multiparty democracy under constitutional monarchy
Religion: 95 percent of the population is Buddhist
Poverty rate: 36 percent of people earn less than $1 per day, the international standard of poverty. That's three times higher than the poverty rate in the United States.
Source: 2003 CIA World Factbook
(Courts) Man gets 55 years for murder Bartlett man killed friend in Arlington Hts. office
Thursday December 11 2003
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
Peter Grens sat motionless in tan prison scrubs Wednesday as he awaited his sentence for murdering his best friend.
He wore the same stoic expression he maintained throughout the trial in which he was convicted of the first-degree murder of 32-year-old Louis Kehrer in October 2002 over an alleged $20,000 debt.
After all the reasons for and against a long sentence were presented, Grens, 45, had one last chance to repent. Three of Grens' 10 siblings nuzzled close on their bench as their brother made his offering.
"I'd like to apologize for the wrong that I did," Grens, of Bartlett, told a packed courtroom. "I'm sorry for all the pain. I don't know what else to say."
The dryly delivered statement proved too little, too late.
"From a law-abiding citizen you became a cold, calculating murderer," responded Cook County Judge Thomas P. Fecarotta Jr. "I believe Mr. Grens deserves a harsh sentence. As I look at him, I'm not so sure he's sorry."
Fecarotta then sentenced Grens to 55 years in prison. Grens received 30 years for the murder and an additional 25 years for using a gun as the murder weapon.
Grens pumped seven shots into Kehrer's head and torso as the victim sat at his desk in an Arlington Heights tool and die shop. He used a .357 Magnum handgun, reloading once to deliver a head shot while Kehrer collapsed onto the floor.
The sentence calmed several members of Kehrer's family, including his parents, brother and fiancee, who cried quietly together in the gallery throughout much of the sentencing. Several family members read statements to the court about the pain and difficulty of raising Kehrer's children without him.
Kehrer, of Streamwood, had two sons: Gavin, 1, conceived with his fiancee, and Jacob, 10, from his first marriage. Jacob has received counseling to help him accept his father's death. He still does not speak of it openly, according to his mother.
Kehrer's older brother, Bill, unleashed his anger on Grens.
"You are, in one word, a murderer," Bill Kehrer said. "My only hope is that you are incarcerated for the rest of your miserable life."
Outside the courtroom, Kehrer's relatives smiled and embraced prosecutors, rejoicing in the sentence.
"Considering Pete's age, it's basically life in prison," said William Kehrer, Louis' father. "We're glad it's over."
-30-
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
Peter Grens sat motionless in tan prison scrubs Wednesday as he awaited his sentence for murdering his best friend.
He wore the same stoic expression he maintained throughout the trial in which he was convicted of the first-degree murder of 32-year-old Louis Kehrer in October 2002 over an alleged $20,000 debt.
After all the reasons for and against a long sentence were presented, Grens, 45, had one last chance to repent. Three of Grens' 10 siblings nuzzled close on their bench as their brother made his offering.
"I'd like to apologize for the wrong that I did," Grens, of Bartlett, told a packed courtroom. "I'm sorry for all the pain. I don't know what else to say."
The dryly delivered statement proved too little, too late.
"From a law-abiding citizen you became a cold, calculating murderer," responded Cook County Judge Thomas P. Fecarotta Jr. "I believe Mr. Grens deserves a harsh sentence. As I look at him, I'm not so sure he's sorry."
Fecarotta then sentenced Grens to 55 years in prison. Grens received 30 years for the murder and an additional 25 years for using a gun as the murder weapon.
Grens pumped seven shots into Kehrer's head and torso as the victim sat at his desk in an Arlington Heights tool and die shop. He used a .357 Magnum handgun, reloading once to deliver a head shot while Kehrer collapsed onto the floor.
The sentence calmed several members of Kehrer's family, including his parents, brother and fiancee, who cried quietly together in the gallery throughout much of the sentencing. Several family members read statements to the court about the pain and difficulty of raising Kehrer's children without him.
Kehrer, of Streamwood, had two sons: Gavin, 1, conceived with his fiancee, and Jacob, 10, from his first marriage. Jacob has received counseling to help him accept his father's death. He still does not speak of it openly, according to his mother.
Kehrer's older brother, Bill, unleashed his anger on Grens.
"You are, in one word, a murderer," Bill Kehrer said. "My only hope is that you are incarcerated for the rest of your miserable life."
Outside the courtroom, Kehrer's relatives smiled and embraced prosecutors, rejoicing in the sentence.
"Considering Pete's age, it's basically life in prison," said William Kehrer, Louis' father. "We're glad it's over."
-30-
(Sports feature) Beware the Orange Krush You think Illinois' basketball team is dominating? Check out these fans
Thursday March 17 2005
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
It's Feb. 25, 2003, and the 18th-ranked Fighting Illini are battling the fiercely hated Indiana Hoosiers at Assembly Hall.
The Hoosiers are losers in six of their last nine games, but they just won't give up.
The Illini are up by nine at the half, but only because of a late run. This is unacceptable. In the audience, sophomore John Malysiak of Wheaton wants total annihilation.
As halftime drills begin, it's time for Malysiak to take advantage of his 6-foot-7 frame and his seat just behind the Hoosier basket. The target? Malysiak's most hated Hoosier, Tom Coverdale.
Malysiak launches a barrage of insults at the guard that would send anyone with a fragile ego into therapy.
Coverdale misses his next lay-up, slams the ball to ground, turns directly to Malysiak and, with a face as red as his hair, screams, "Shut up!"
The Hoosier guard goes on to score only nine points, his team shoots a dismal 32 percent in the second half, and Indiana loses by 16.
Meet the Orange Krush. It's one of the most feared and respected student cheering sections in college basketball, with a membership whose dedication goes way beyond standing in line for seats hours before a game.
For Malysiak, the Krush is also a family tradition. His father, Ed, was instrumental in the Krush's founding.
The Illini head into the NCAA tournament today with the highest of expectations. Its road to the Final Four will run through Indianapolis, Chicago and St. Louis, all close enough for the team to count on the Orange Krush to fulfill a mission that began in 1975.
That was the year Lou Henson took over as coach. Wins were rare, and fan enthusiasm couldn't have drowned out the buzz of a fly.
"Go look at yearbooks from back then, and you'll see basketball crowds of about 4,000 people," said Ed Malysiak, who worked in U of I Associate Dean Willard Broom's office at the time. "You could hear the echo of the ball bouncing throughout Assembly Hall."
Henson wanted to start a student group to drum up excitement at games and get the home crowd cheering. That brought him to Broom's office. Back then, Malysiak was a fraternity adviser for U of I. He got the assignment.
He immediately turned to the campus' large Greek population to recruit just a few students to buy some tickets and regularly attend the games.
"We couldn't get it done," recalled Malysiak, now a financial adviser living in Wheaton. "Nobody had an interest in Illini basketball at that time."
Henson agreed to the only backup plan Malysiak could think of: give the tickets away.
Each fraternity received two free tickets to each home game as long as members promised to show up faithfully. They did, and the Orange Crunch was born.
That's right. Orange Crunch was the original name of the Illini student cheering section, Malysiak said.
It wasn't until the soft drink Orange Crush gained popularity that school officials changed the name. When they couldn't get the soda company to become a sponsor, the university changed the first letter of the last word, and the Orange Krush began its reign of terror on opposing teams.
"Once students were able to see there was a group of kids down there on the floor, practically in the game, having fun, we didn't have to give the tickets away anymore," Malysiak said.
The Krush now numbers more than 1,100 students - the most ever - and fills three Krush-only sections of seats surrounding the court. Perhaps even more impressive is that most of them are freshmen.
Even now, there is charity associated with the Krush. In order to be a member, a student must commit to getting pledges of $1 to $3 per three-pointer, depending on where the student wants to sit. The Illini sunk 269 three-point shots in 30 games, meaning the Orange Krush will raise a record amount, possibly as much as $500,000, to spread among local charities and two athletic scholarships.
"There are not very many student groups who do as much as the Krush does for the community," said Illini Athletic Department spokesman Kent Brown. "People really want to be involved, and somehow everyone seems to attach themselves to the Orange Krush."
The students are getting the job done in Assembly Hall as well. The Illini have tallied the best home record in men's college basketball, 77-3, during the past five seasons.
John Malysiak, now a junior majoring in political science, said his Illini passion goes way back.
"I grew up loving Illinois basketball since I was 2 years old," he said. "I know probably more than is healthy about the team. Growing up, watching the fans on TV and seeing how close they get to players at the games, I just knew I was going to be (a part of) Orange Krush."
Whether they're doing the roller-coaster-motion cheer, or screaming "Chris Rock! Chris Rock!" every time lookalike Wisconsin guard Kammron Taylor touches the ball, John Malysiak and the rest of the Orange Krush are ready to create a river of orange from Indianapolis to St. Louis.
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
It's Feb. 25, 2003, and the 18th-ranked Fighting Illini are battling the fiercely hated Indiana Hoosiers at Assembly Hall.
The Hoosiers are losers in six of their last nine games, but they just won't give up.
The Illini are up by nine at the half, but only because of a late run. This is unacceptable. In the audience, sophomore John Malysiak of Wheaton wants total annihilation.
As halftime drills begin, it's time for Malysiak to take advantage of his 6-foot-7 frame and his seat just behind the Hoosier basket. The target? Malysiak's most hated Hoosier, Tom Coverdale.
Malysiak launches a barrage of insults at the guard that would send anyone with a fragile ego into therapy.
Coverdale misses his next lay-up, slams the ball to ground, turns directly to Malysiak and, with a face as red as his hair, screams, "Shut up!"
The Hoosier guard goes on to score only nine points, his team shoots a dismal 32 percent in the second half, and Indiana loses by 16.
Meet the Orange Krush. It's one of the most feared and respected student cheering sections in college basketball, with a membership whose dedication goes way beyond standing in line for seats hours before a game.
For Malysiak, the Krush is also a family tradition. His father, Ed, was instrumental in the Krush's founding.
The Illini head into the NCAA tournament today with the highest of expectations. Its road to the Final Four will run through Indianapolis, Chicago and St. Louis, all close enough for the team to count on the Orange Krush to fulfill a mission that began in 1975.
That was the year Lou Henson took over as coach. Wins were rare, and fan enthusiasm couldn't have drowned out the buzz of a fly.
"Go look at yearbooks from back then, and you'll see basketball crowds of about 4,000 people," said Ed Malysiak, who worked in U of I Associate Dean Willard Broom's office at the time. "You could hear the echo of the ball bouncing throughout Assembly Hall."
Henson wanted to start a student group to drum up excitement at games and get the home crowd cheering. That brought him to Broom's office. Back then, Malysiak was a fraternity adviser for U of I. He got the assignment.
He immediately turned to the campus' large Greek population to recruit just a few students to buy some tickets and regularly attend the games.
"We couldn't get it done," recalled Malysiak, now a financial adviser living in Wheaton. "Nobody had an interest in Illini basketball at that time."
Henson agreed to the only backup plan Malysiak could think of: give the tickets away.
Each fraternity received two free tickets to each home game as long as members promised to show up faithfully. They did, and the Orange Crunch was born.
That's right. Orange Crunch was the original name of the Illini student cheering section, Malysiak said.
It wasn't until the soft drink Orange Crush gained popularity that school officials changed the name. When they couldn't get the soda company to become a sponsor, the university changed the first letter of the last word, and the Orange Krush began its reign of terror on opposing teams.
"Once students were able to see there was a group of kids down there on the floor, practically in the game, having fun, we didn't have to give the tickets away anymore," Malysiak said.
The Krush now numbers more than 1,100 students - the most ever - and fills three Krush-only sections of seats surrounding the court. Perhaps even more impressive is that most of them are freshmen.
Even now, there is charity associated with the Krush. In order to be a member, a student must commit to getting pledges of $1 to $3 per three-pointer, depending on where the student wants to sit. The Illini sunk 269 three-point shots in 30 games, meaning the Orange Krush will raise a record amount, possibly as much as $500,000, to spread among local charities and two athletic scholarships.
"There are not very many student groups who do as much as the Krush does for the community," said Illini Athletic Department spokesman Kent Brown. "People really want to be involved, and somehow everyone seems to attach themselves to the Orange Krush."
The students are getting the job done in Assembly Hall as well. The Illini have tallied the best home record in men's college basketball, 77-3, during the past five seasons.
John Malysiak, now a junior majoring in political science, said his Illini passion goes way back.
"I grew up loving Illinois basketball since I was 2 years old," he said. "I know probably more than is healthy about the team. Growing up, watching the fans on TV and seeing how close they get to players at the games, I just knew I was going to be (a part of) Orange Krush."
Whether they're doing the roller-coaster-motion cheer, or screaming "Chris Rock! Chris Rock!" every time lookalike Wisconsin guard Kammron Taylor touches the ball, John Malysiak and the rest of the Orange Krush are ready to create a river of orange from Indianapolis to St. Louis.
(Breaking news) Trapped in a trench Rescuers dig out son, but father doesn't survive
Tuesday June 07 2005
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
Herman Calloway Sr. and Jr. both earned their livings getting their hands dirty as construction workers. On Monday, one of them gave his life to the profession. The other gave his father.
The father-and-son team were buried at Wheaton Warrenville South High School in Wheaton when a wall of asphalt, rock and dirt collapsed on them while they were digging a trench for the school's expansion project. Students had already been dismissed when the collapse occurred.
Three workers, including the elder Calloway's second son, Kevin, immediately began scratching away at the mound of earth with shovels and hands.
Emergency personnel arrived soon after a 911 call came in at 2:52 p.m. They removed the three construction workers who were digging and began the effort to extract the Calloways. It was soon evident that only one of them would come out of the hole alive.
"At this point in time, we're considering it a recovery and not a rescue," said Wheaton Fire Chief Greg Berk, shortly after the younger Calloway, 51 and of South Holland, was airlifted to Good Samaritan Hospital in nearby Downers Grove.
Emergency workers never saw or heard signs of life from the elder Calloway. Still, it took nearly seven hours to extract him from the depths of the 15-foot-deep trench to make the final call.
A chaplain consoled family members as they watched from behind yellow police tape and vacuums and an air knife stripped away the rubble. The pit was too unstable for emergency workers to enter, requiring the dirt to be removed by hand from an adjacent storm sewer pipe.
An effort to pull the elder Calloway out through that 36-inch pipe was eventually aborted, adding to the delay.
The DuPage County coroner's office pronounced Calloway, 74, of Chicago, dead by 7:22 p.m., but his body was not completely freed until about 9:21 p.m.
Both men were trapped inches from one another, according to Berk. It's unclear why the younger Calloway escaped with only a possible pelvis fracture, but Berk said it appeared from the positioning of the elder Calloway's body that he took the brunt of the collapse.
Why the collapse occurred at all will be investigated by Wheaton police and the Office of Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
What is known is the safety apparatus typically used in trench work, a 10-by-10-foot steel box, was not down in the 25-foot-long trench. Instead, it was topside, next to the trench and not in use, according to Wheaton police Cmdr. Terry Mee.
It's not clear why it was not in the trench.
The coroner's office will perform a postmortem exam of Calloway today at about noon to determine the exact cause of death.
Bovis Lend Lease is the general contractor for the school's expansion project and did not speculate on the cause of the accident in a statement released by the company. The Calloways worked for a subcontractor, Hamilton Construction, hired specifically to install the storm water pipes.
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
Herman Calloway Sr. and Jr. both earned their livings getting their hands dirty as construction workers. On Monday, one of them gave his life to the profession. The other gave his father.
The father-and-son team were buried at Wheaton Warrenville South High School in Wheaton when a wall of asphalt, rock and dirt collapsed on them while they were digging a trench for the school's expansion project. Students had already been dismissed when the collapse occurred.
Three workers, including the elder Calloway's second son, Kevin, immediately began scratching away at the mound of earth with shovels and hands.
Emergency personnel arrived soon after a 911 call came in at 2:52 p.m. They removed the three construction workers who were digging and began the effort to extract the Calloways. It was soon evident that only one of them would come out of the hole alive.
"At this point in time, we're considering it a recovery and not a rescue," said Wheaton Fire Chief Greg Berk, shortly after the younger Calloway, 51 and of South Holland, was airlifted to Good Samaritan Hospital in nearby Downers Grove.
Emergency workers never saw or heard signs of life from the elder Calloway. Still, it took nearly seven hours to extract him from the depths of the 15-foot-deep trench to make the final call.
A chaplain consoled family members as they watched from behind yellow police tape and vacuums and an air knife stripped away the rubble. The pit was too unstable for emergency workers to enter, requiring the dirt to be removed by hand from an adjacent storm sewer pipe.
An effort to pull the elder Calloway out through that 36-inch pipe was eventually aborted, adding to the delay.
The DuPage County coroner's office pronounced Calloway, 74, of Chicago, dead by 7:22 p.m., but his body was not completely freed until about 9:21 p.m.
Both men were trapped inches from one another, according to Berk. It's unclear why the younger Calloway escaped with only a possible pelvis fracture, but Berk said it appeared from the positioning of the elder Calloway's body that he took the brunt of the collapse.
Why the collapse occurred at all will be investigated by Wheaton police and the Office of Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
What is known is the safety apparatus typically used in trench work, a 10-by-10-foot steel box, was not down in the 25-foot-long trench. Instead, it was topside, next to the trench and not in use, according to Wheaton police Cmdr. Terry Mee.
It's not clear why it was not in the trench.
The coroner's office will perform a postmortem exam of Calloway today at about noon to determine the exact cause of death.
Bovis Lend Lease is the general contractor for the school's expansion project and did not speculate on the cause of the accident in a statement released by the company. The Calloways worked for a subcontractor, Hamilton Construction, hired specifically to install the storm water pipes.
(News feature) Followers will miss Graham's leadership
Friday June 24 2005
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
If Jesus is the hand of God incarnate, then the Rev. Billy Graham has arguably been the fingers, touching an estimated 200 million people worldwide with an evangelical message of redemption.
Now 86 and in poor health, Graham embarks on a crusade in New York today. It will likely be his last in North America, a final sign-off to the trademark of his ministry.
When it's over, the voice of evangelical Christianity will grow quieter with the loss of its most recognizable figurehead during the past 50 years, say representatives of organizations central to Graham's roots.
From Wheaton College, where Graham earned a degree and met his wife, to Youth For Christ, where he established the format for his crusades, to Christianity Today, a publication he founded, the sentiment is the same:
There may never be another Billy Graham.
The impact of his life is immeasurable, say local fans who have particular ties to him.
The legacy of those local roots begins at Wheaton College, where Graham was a student from 1940 to 1943.
The school became both "a spiritual and intellectual turning point" in Graham's life, according to his autobiography.
He earned an anthropology degree, got his first recurring preaching job as pastor of Wheaton's United Gospel Tabernacle as a sophomore and fell in love with his wife, Ruth, while reading tombstone epitaphs in a Wheaton countryside graveyard.
Those were the days of a young Billy Graham trying to find his place in the world. Soon the world would find him as well.
His fame first began as a guest speaker at Chicago-based Youth for Christ rallies during World War II.
"Evidently, he must have done a pretty good job because he became the first full-time staff member," said Dick Norton, executive director of Metro Chicago Youth for Christ. "The beginnings of Youth for Christ and the beginnings of Billy Graham are very tied together."
Indeed, those rallies laid the groundwork for the future format of Graham's crusade rallies.
Those who have attended a crusade, and often multiple crusades, all speak of them in the same way. It's not about the gathering. It's not even about Graham. It's the visible impact.
"It's not flashy. It's not flamboyant. In fact, it's not particularly memorable," said Wheaton College Chaplain Stephen Kellough, who has attended two crusades. "Yet the memory of the man and the message of Christ remains with you after.
"It's because we see Christ in Billy Graham at those crusades," Kellough continued. "We know that we have had a touch with God in that experience. Billy Graham is the embodiment of God and people are led to Christ through Billy Graham."
Judy Gill can testify to that. She works for Christianity Today, a Carol Stream-based publication known in its upper ranks as "Billy's magazine." Gill has attended five crusades.
The call at the end of every crusade for those touched by the message to come forward and profess their faith is the electric moment for her each time.
"Thousands come down," she said. "They just keep coming and coming. It's the truth of the message. I don't think it's Billy Graham. It's the Holy Spirit. God is using him."
Perhaps the true testament to that notion is that Graham has remained nearly beyond reproach all his life, during an era when heroes often fall when the curtain of their lives is pulled open for all to see, fans said. Graham is humble. He always gives credit to the people and organization around him. He can't walk past someone, be it a janitor, child or average Joe on the street, without shaking his or her hand.
Those qualities are simple, just like his style of preaching. Yet they are rare when accompanied by so much fame, said Bob Schuster, archivist at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College.
"He's human," Schuster said. "Trying to present him as being without flaw, or as some plaster saint, really isn't true. But who else is there with so high a record that is still held in such high regard by so many people?"
The answer for Christianity Today CEO Harold Myra is no one. Myra has corresponded with Graham throughout the years and often asks himself in his professional life, "What would Billy do?" It's inspired Myra to co-author a new book about the secrets of Graham's leadership ability.
"Billy Graham is battling for souls," Myra said. "He's uniquely anointed. He always led with love for everybody. I don't think we're going to see another Billy Graham step into the limelight."
The end of the crusades is a personal loss for Myra and millions of other Christians. For them, Graham is a teacher who led by example through divine guidance.
Now Graham fans like Lisle resident Elaine Jordan wait with quivering smiles and somber souls for one final lesson. She said the most exciting moment of her life was meeting Graham in 1994 at the rededication of Wheaton College's Billy Graham Center Museum.
"It's kind of bittersweet to see someone so near the end of his career, but we also see him as one step closer to the Lord," she said. "He'll just continue teaching people valuable lessons, not only about how to live as a Christian, but how to die as a Christian."
James Fuller Daily Herald Staff Writer
If Jesus is the hand of God incarnate, then the Rev. Billy Graham has arguably been the fingers, touching an estimated 200 million people worldwide with an evangelical message of redemption.
Now 86 and in poor health, Graham embarks on a crusade in New York today. It will likely be his last in North America, a final sign-off to the trademark of his ministry.
When it's over, the voice of evangelical Christianity will grow quieter with the loss of its most recognizable figurehead during the past 50 years, say representatives of organizations central to Graham's roots.
From Wheaton College, where Graham earned a degree and met his wife, to Youth For Christ, where he established the format for his crusades, to Christianity Today, a publication he founded, the sentiment is the same:
There may never be another Billy Graham.
The impact of his life is immeasurable, say local fans who have particular ties to him.
The legacy of those local roots begins at Wheaton College, where Graham was a student from 1940 to 1943.
The school became both "a spiritual and intellectual turning point" in Graham's life, according to his autobiography.
He earned an anthropology degree, got his first recurring preaching job as pastor of Wheaton's United Gospel Tabernacle as a sophomore and fell in love with his wife, Ruth, while reading tombstone epitaphs in a Wheaton countryside graveyard.
Those were the days of a young Billy Graham trying to find his place in the world. Soon the world would find him as well.
His fame first began as a guest speaker at Chicago-based Youth for Christ rallies during World War II.
"Evidently, he must have done a pretty good job because he became the first full-time staff member," said Dick Norton, executive director of Metro Chicago Youth for Christ. "The beginnings of Youth for Christ and the beginnings of Billy Graham are very tied together."
Indeed, those rallies laid the groundwork for the future format of Graham's crusade rallies.
Those who have attended a crusade, and often multiple crusades, all speak of them in the same way. It's not about the gathering. It's not even about Graham. It's the visible impact.
"It's not flashy. It's not flamboyant. In fact, it's not particularly memorable," said Wheaton College Chaplain Stephen Kellough, who has attended two crusades. "Yet the memory of the man and the message of Christ remains with you after.
"It's because we see Christ in Billy Graham at those crusades," Kellough continued. "We know that we have had a touch with God in that experience. Billy Graham is the embodiment of God and people are led to Christ through Billy Graham."
Judy Gill can testify to that. She works for Christianity Today, a Carol Stream-based publication known in its upper ranks as "Billy's magazine." Gill has attended five crusades.
The call at the end of every crusade for those touched by the message to come forward and profess their faith is the electric moment for her each time.
"Thousands come down," she said. "They just keep coming and coming. It's the truth of the message. I don't think it's Billy Graham. It's the Holy Spirit. God is using him."
Perhaps the true testament to that notion is that Graham has remained nearly beyond reproach all his life, during an era when heroes often fall when the curtain of their lives is pulled open for all to see, fans said. Graham is humble. He always gives credit to the people and organization around him. He can't walk past someone, be it a janitor, child or average Joe on the street, without shaking his or her hand.
Those qualities are simple, just like his style of preaching. Yet they are rare when accompanied by so much fame, said Bob Schuster, archivist at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College.
"He's human," Schuster said. "Trying to present him as being without flaw, or as some plaster saint, really isn't true. But who else is there with so high a record that is still held in such high regard by so many people?"
The answer for Christianity Today CEO Harold Myra is no one. Myra has corresponded with Graham throughout the years and often asks himself in his professional life, "What would Billy do?" It's inspired Myra to co-author a new book about the secrets of Graham's leadership ability.
"Billy Graham is battling for souls," Myra said. "He's uniquely anointed. He always led with love for everybody. I don't think we're going to see another Billy Graham step into the limelight."
The end of the crusades is a personal loss for Myra and millions of other Christians. For them, Graham is a teacher who led by example through divine guidance.
Now Graham fans like Lisle resident Elaine Jordan wait with quivering smiles and somber souls for one final lesson. She said the most exciting moment of her life was meeting Graham in 1994 at the rededication of Wheaton College's Billy Graham Center Museum.
"It's kind of bittersweet to see someone so near the end of his career, but we also see him as one step closer to the Lord," she said. "He'll just continue teaching people valuable lessons, not only about how to live as a Christian, but how to die as a Christian."
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