Chicago And I
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"God made the country, and man made the town."
- William Cowper(1731-1800) Great cities in the world you have visited are like great persons you have met in your life; you want to see them, and after you have seen them you feel close to them and talk about them. You are proud of being acquainted with them. You want to brag about what you know about them. For me Chicago is the one. Everybody knows that O'Hare International Airport is the gate to Chicago, but not many people know that this huge airport was named in memory of Edward B. O'Hare, lieutenant-commander of U.S. Navy, one of the war-heroes in the South Pacific fighting during World War II, who posthumously won the Medal of Honor. And still less people may realize that the problem-ridden Lincoln International Airport in Arthur Hailey's breathtaking bestseller novel, Airport, has been modeled on this O'Hare Airport in Chicago. The novelist is said to have spent three years in and around this airport eating, sleeping, and observing, and writing. Each of the great cities in the world has its own symbolic architectural building or monument that is unmistakably identified with it. Paris comes to us immediately with the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. New York rushes to us with the legendary Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. London, with the Big Ben. Chicago, the Sears Tower. The 110-story Sears Tower, the corporate headquarters for Sears Roebuck and Company, was completed in 1974, and is currently the tallest building in the world. It reaches 1,454 feet (443 meters) surpassing the Empire State Building in New York by 204 feet (62 meters). Since 1931 when the Empire State Building was completed in New York, Chicagoans have lived, it seems to me, in great humiliation for more than forty years, because it was in Chicago, not in New York, that the first 'skyscraper' building in the history of architecture had been erected in 1885. To use a frame of iron, steel, or reinforced concrete, rather than brick-walls to support the vertical load is the simplest definition of a skyscraper. This method has enabled man to construct higher building with more speed and less effort. With the Sears Tower towering over the world the proud Chicagoans ego seems to be fully satisfied for the time being, until another higher one comes. Americans are not only a great builder of tall buildings; they are also an avid and voracious collector of strange and precious items. They love to collect any objects valuable, interesting, and rare in the world with their mighty money, and classify, preserve, and display them in one place with their sheer ingenuity. You do not have to go to Egypt to see the Egyptian mummies; nor to Paris to see the priceless works of art by Monet, Manet, Renoir, or Picasso; nor to China to see the treasures of Tang or Ming Dynasty. Go to the United States. Go to the museum of the University of Chicago. Go to the Art Institute of Chicago. Go to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D. C.. Go to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Go th the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. At Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, one of the world's largest indoor aquariums, you can see virtually all the aquatic animals living on the face of the earth, except for the legendary mermaid and the Loch Ness monster; simply everything that lives in water, can stand captivity, and small enough to fit into a tank without being cramped for space. Knowing that they do not have whales, I asked one of the guards there if they had whales in any of those tanks. "No, not now," replied the guard. "But in the new Oceanarium which is under construction you will be able to watch dolphins dive and whales leap in their new 2-million gallon giant tank," said he matter-of-factly. During my short visit to Chicago I was lucky enough to be present at a baseball game at Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs and one of the oldest and most beautiful ball-parks in the United States. I saw, felt, and verified the inordinate passions Americans have for this sport. I was particularly impressed by the fact that there were so many enthusiastic women fans, young and old. It seemed that most of these women were coming to the game quite regularly to cheer and boost their home team as well as their favorite players. Each seemed to have her own favorite player. My wild imagination told me that some of them must have fallen in love with some of the players secretly and one-sidedly. To support my conjecture Eddie Waitkus, former first baseman for the Chicago Cubs, was shot and wounded by a young woman in the Edgwater Beach Hotel in Chicago in 1949. The lady with a pistol, a total stranger to the baseball player, had admired him from afar, and chose this odd method of expressing her love. This episode found way to the hand of a novelist, named Bernard Malamud, and has been immortalized in his famous baseball novel, The Natural(1952). Most Americans know that the Wrigley Baseball Stadium, along with the Wrigley Building at Michigan Avenue, one of the finest skyscrapers in Chicago, was named after the late William Wrigley Jr., a Chicago businessman who made a great fortune by manufacturing and selling that famous Wrigley chewing gum. In 1899 he added another flavor -spearmint- to his gum, and advertised as if he had discovered a secret aroma that was appropriated only to the angels in heaven. His advertisement worked, and his spearmint gum conquered the chewing gum market in the United States and in the world. Amid the din of excitement at Wrigley Field I unwrapped a Wrigley spearmint gum and tossed it into my mouth and began to chew, and fell momentarily into a reminiscence. Reminiscence took me back instantly to the time when I had tasted American-made chewing gum for the first time in my life. It was around 1951 when the Korean War was at its peak, and I was a poor and hungry boy of eleven or twelve in the war-devastated country. I and my friends were mostly refugees of war, and some were orphans of war. We followed American soldiers and they gave away freely the goodies we had never tasted; chocolates, biscuits, candies, and chewing gums. One day I was very lucky. An American soldier gave me a whole carton of chewing gums. I carried it home, hid it safe somewhere in the back yard, and cherished and relished it's heavenly taste and flavor secretly one by one, until the secret was found out by my brothers. One day I went to my cache and found my trove was gone. I cried bitterly and sadly, probably more so than when my father died several months later. I did not know whether it was Wrigley chewing gum or not at that time. I think it was. What else? (September 3, 1988) |
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