Spent New Year's Eve this year in Chicago, in the Kinzie Hotel downtown along the river. Out my hotel window I could see the Marina Towers, where I spent the night the first time I ever visited Chicago thirty years ago. Back then I was a broke college dropout on a bus trip across the country, grateful for a place to flop in a city that overwhelmed me. I was the guest that evening of the late Cecil Neth, the father of one of my high school classmates. He was a World War II veteran, a retired newspaper man who had been a professor of journalism at CSU during my high school years, and I took a journalism camp seminar from him. But by the time I went to Chicago to spend the night there, he had gone back to live in Chicago and resume his career at the Sun-Times, where he had come up through the ranks as a reporter and editor, in the old school way.
It was an awesome privilege to get to meet him. He gave me a tour of the Sun-Times building, and took me to the Billy Goat Tavern for a beer and "cheezborger," as it made famous on a famous late-night television comedy show.
They don't make guys like him anymore.
Thirty years later it was a great pleasure to be in Chicago now, under my own power, being able to spring for my nice hotel room right next to the old city center. Chicago is much nicer and more accessible now.
America is awesome. Our cities are awesome. We are bursting with energy, and are the great massive train that is driving world culture in ways that most Americans cannot even fathom. Most Americans how no idea how far ahead America is, even compared to the best parts of the rest of the world.
