This is the time, if you haven’t noticed, for a summer vacation.
Osgood and I, having spent the previous weeks of this year tracking down, interviewing and writing about some of the city’s aldermen, have decided to give ourselves (and you) a two-week break from politics.
So far, we have brought you 24 of the 50 aldermen. It has been a fascinating adventure, blowing away a lot of preconceptions. We look forward to meeting the rest of this diverse group.
There are still about a dozen holdouts who have not responded to a series of e-mails and letters delivered personally to their offices in City Hall. But we are not suspicious. These people can’t have anything to hide, can they? They must just be very busy. We’ll call them in the coming weeks and if they still don’t want to talk we will just visit their wards, take pictures of whatever we want and interview some constituents.
In the meantime, it’s time for ice-specifically, Italian ice.
There is no telling how many Italian ice stands remain in this increasingly Frappuccino-ed city. The one we know best might be the best: Mario’s, not much more than a shack painted in the happy red, white and green colors of the Italian flag, at 1066 W. Taylor St.
Opened in the late 1950s, it sizzles in the summer, with lines so long that you might think they were giving the stuff away. A lot of people get hooked while attending the nearby University of Illinois at Chicago and you will almost always see a student or three standing in line.
But you will also see an encouraging cross section of people waiting to order and eat one of the operation’s 16 flavors. Listen for a while to the conversations between strangers on the sidewalk and you will find racial, ethnic, religious, age and income lines blurring so agreeably you could be convinced that this is one big happy city.
They are drawn by the simple philosophy expressed one day in front of the Taylor Street shack by Andre Cooper, a minister at a West Side Baptist church who travels to Mario’s with his family at least once a week.
This is what he told us: “You’ve got to have ices in the summer.”
He might have added “and snow cones too.” That’s another favorite summer treat for the Sidewalks team.
They sell a decent one at a stand in Lincoln Park Zoo, but most snow cones are sold by street corner entrepreneurs. We met our favorite in 1999. She had a lovely name, Catherine Pleasant, and worked the 2700 block of West Jackson Boulevard. From her little cart, she offered all the familiar flavors such as grape, cherry and orange. She also had a flavor she called “catfish.”
There was nothing fishy about it. Pleasant explained that it was just a combination of some of the other flavors.
It had also attached itself to Pleasant as a nickname. The kids called her “Catfish” or “Catfish Lady.”
She started her business in 1997 when, because of severe asthma and a long-mending broken ankle, she was unable to continue to work as a certified nurse’s aide. She began selling cones “because I did not want to sit upstairs and watch TV all day. I’m sure not in it for the money.”
It was tough for her to make a buck-cones went for 25 and 50 cents-especially since she would often give cones away to those without money and one weekend paid for the hot dogs and other goodies at a back-to-school party for 65 kids.
“All the kids in the neighborhood love me,” she said.
Who couldn’t?
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rkogan@tribune.com
