Had I know this was going to be our last assignment together for the SouthtownStar…
No, I’d have done nothing different. We always rocked it.
I have to find the clip where she got chased from a scene by Harvey police. Shot super photos of the menacing crowd, too.
So sorry to see you go, Carol, too. No ladies left in photo now and you’re good ones.
Good luck, girl. I will miss your furtive reporting skills.
Posted in Lamenting, Looking in
Tagged 2010, assignment, layoffs, Mary Compton, photo, SouthtownStar
A Cook County grand jury has indicted Orland Park businessman Allan Kustok on a single count of first-degree murder in the Sept. 29 shooting death of his wife, Anita, in their home.
The indictment was returned Friday and announced Monday during a hearing before Circuit Judge Raymond L. Jagielski.
Allan Kustok, 59, is accused of shooting his wife as she lay in their bed that morning. He insists she shot herself.
Unlike his first hearing shortly after his arrest, Kustok wore glasses on Monday and his hair was neatly combed. He was dressed in a yellow jail uniform with his hands shackled to his waist during the court hearing.
Kustok is being held at the Kankakee County Jail because he formerly worked at Cook County Jail. He’s being held on $2 million bail.
Kankakee County’s chief of corrections, sheriff’s Lt. Michael Downey, said the chains were standard procedure for traveling inmates.
The couple’s son, former Northwestern University quarterback Zak Kustok, and his wife, Nicole, attended the court hearing along with his father’s parents. Sarah Kustok, the couple’s daughter and a Comcast SportsNet reporter, was not in the courtroom Monday.
Prosecutors said Kustok held a revolver inches from his wife’s cheek, pulled the trigger as she lay in their bed and then nearly fired the gun into his head.
Instead, he emptied the revolver into an armoire, according to prosecutors. They said he rolled her body up in his green robe, the top sheet from the bed and the fitted sheet and drove to Palos Community Hospital with her body about 90 minutes after the shooting.
He never called 911.
Kustok told police that he found his wife lying dead on her back with her hands crossing her chest, a gun in the right one. The gunshot woke him up.
He’s scheduled to return to court Nov. 18.
Kustok’s attorney Rick Beuke said the couple’s home in the 10900 block of Royal Oaks Lane remains unoccupied, but his children have been seeing to its upkeep. The two-story, pink brick house and its property, adjacent to a private horse farm, appear to have been well-maintained since the shooting.
Contributing: John K. Ryan
It was a lovely spring morning when a gang of do-gooder buddies arrived at an ancient house in Midlothian and told the old veteran inside the deal:
You can’t handle this mess on your own. The village is going to nail you. We’re here to help.
They took their tools to his cluttered yard on Kostner Avenue to save him from himself.
Some ripped down the teetering shambles of a garage. Some nailed up a 7-foot fence between the yard’s lawn mowers and the sidewalk’s view. Some hauled his RV away.
Some were vets themselves, members of the Midlothian American Legion.
With some donated supplies and their muscles, they bailed out this old vet.
Then they got wind of other veterans who needed a little help, too – some were too old to manage yard work, some were sent back to war, leaving empty houses.
Had the gang heard sooner about the troubles, they’d have sprung into action. They knew that a brother or sister who served this country shouldn’t be left to falter.
So they’re now forming a registry through Midlothian’s veterans committee to match village vets with offers to help.
Like the way they saved John Kinder, the guy living alone with a lifetime of stuff.
Welcome to Fort Kindernook.
Built in 1918, it was a working farm in the days when Midlothian seemed as far out as the edge of the world.
Come up the gravel driveway, past the rusty Ford truck with American flags on the dash.
It’ll take you a solid minute to walk to the property line, a whopping 301 feet back, where Kinder now tends five of at least a dozen tarp-covered piles of wood.
First you pass the house, then the toolshed, which shelters many of his 11 lawn mowers.
Each one cuts the grass of a different senior citizen at $20 a pop.
Next comes a fruit cellar, where Kinder ladies of yore buried fresh apples and carrots in sand to keep them all winter. No, it’s not the barn. That’s a few split-levels down, converted into a respectable white house.
Here’s where black and yellow cherry trees grew, and grapes that Kinder ancestors turned into wine.
Mind the saplings dotting the fence line, wrapped in wire mesh to guard against deer. All those little pill bottles mark low spots in the ground that’ll get leveled with black dirt.
See?
Those few were just filled.
Squeeze past coats hanging off the back porch, racks of brooms, German blessings, a vintage Schwinn and enter the house.
The house is another story. You might call it the sequel.
John Kinder grew up in the gray-sided house just off 147th Street. And in 1959, when he was 19, he told his parents he was leaving for the Army.
He bought the farm after a single tour of duty to settle down and worked as an electrician.
He calls his two-story house “Kindernook” – from the German for “a small place.”
Kinders have lived here since World War II, planting on its acreage their German and Lithuanian work ethic.
And John Kinder has lived like them, building his own windows and mending his own clothes on ancient Singer sewing machines.
He heats the house with a stove stoked with wood he splits himself.
He wastes nothing. Reduced to a pittance of a pension and $20 for mowing lawns of elderly neighbors, he can’t afford to.
Kinder remains, at 70, content to putter about his dilapidated property as it is.
“All of a sudden civilization came and my problems started,” he said.
Somehow the village got wind. Kinder blames the lady next door, but she insists it wasn’t her. She’s learned to live with her neighbor.
She feels sorry for him.
Not the village.
It fined him more than $5,000 over several years for his messy yard and ramshackle garage.
The pensioner couldn’t afford the tickets or the improvements. Nor could he demolish his shambles of a garage on his own. His poverty prevented him from hiring help.
And his house – jammed with useful things from nearly 50 years – is an extension of himself.
Like the shrine to his Army service in the downstairs hallway. Flags and medals cover a skinny wall panel between two bedroom doors.
In an official photo of uniformed young men that has hung in the same spot for decades, John Kinder struggles to point out his own face.
“I know I’m in here. Ain’t that something?
“Isn’t it something when you can’t find yourself?”
Kinder’s friends at American Legion Post 691 listened to his stories. How he showed up to village hearings on his violations in his full fatigues, a toilet brush tucked into his uniform where a soldier would keep a weapon. How he refused to be sworn in.
Kinder’s property was photographed in late 2005, its violations catalogued by the village. Fines piled up.
“Apparently you do not realize that we consider property maintenance a very high priority and are most serious about enforcing our ordinance,” the village wrote to Kinder.
Kinder felt trapped. His small fixes weren’t enough.
Midlothian’s vets would never turn their back on a military brother in need.
They talked Kinder into cutting down some trees. They planned a day to raze the garage. And the post’s commander negotiated the fines down from $5,300 to a $150 check he cut.
Another vet offered to mediate, handing his number to the neighbor whose fence already was toppled by two of Kinder’s trees.
Inside the house, Kinder tells his story over coffee he percolated on an old Magic Chef stove.
The village is off his case now, but he’s still sore about his things.
He was going to cut down the trees on the fence once he needed the wood.
His camper was worth money.
He might need those lawn mower engines. You know they want $500 for a
new one?
“On the farm, you had to do it. You can’t afford to live any other way. It’s just a lost art but that’s the way I was raised,” he said.
“Everything has a place and a time. You may not need it today, but down the road, you’ll need it.”
He doesn’t blame the vets, but his equipment was not junk.
The TVs surrounding the functioning one in his living room have good parts. The Lady Kenmore washer and dryer in the basement still hum as they did in 1964. And both Singers still sew fine, too.
Half the stuff in the basement wouldn’t be there if he still had a garage.
He’s mostly OK, though. The VA takes care of his health and medication, a social worker from Hines Hospital drops in on him, and a Legion buddy keeps an eye on him, too.
Now Midlothian’s band of vets can tend to the next guy.
Posted in Practicing, reporting, Storytelling, Writing
Tagged 2010, help, Midlothian, narrative, SouthtownStar, veteran
Somebody back in photo was trolling the wires and spotted “Oak Lawn” in photos from Afghanistan. I hunted down his family, loved them instantly and enjoyed this writing immensely.
Here’s a prime example of how five minutes’ talking to set up a story structure makes it flow.
War photos from Afghanistan show family this Marine’s ok
This is the new photo of her eldest son Lisa Eckert-Weaver can’t wait to show off: Jon Eckert’s sitting on the rocky bank of a natural pool of water, his new tattoo sprawling across his broad back. With him is Bee, his black lab, her fur still glistening from their swim
together.Then the mother explains the idyllic scene:
The water sits atop a crucial power-generating dam in Afghanistan’s deadly Helmand province that the Taliban itch to wreck.Bee’s a specialized bomb-sniffer, trained to root out roadside bombs.
The tattoo, when completed, will form a peace sign out of large-caliber bullets.
And her son is Marine Cpl. Jonathan Eckert, who patrols the roadside bomb-riddled region around the vital Kajaki Dam that powers a million Afghan homes.
The photo is one of a cluster snapped in recent days by a seasoned war photographer whose work lets Eckert-Weaver know that her 20-year-old son, stationed in the Taliban’s back yard, is still OK.
“I worry about him every day, I check Facebook every day,” Eckert-Weaver said from her Oak Lawn home. “I don’t know a lot of what he does.”
Only now, she can see it for herself.
The shirtless photos show her he’s getting enough to eat.
The one where he’s dodging a firefight tells her he’s keeping a calm head in war.
The shot of him showing his iPod – and a silly “Talking Carl” game – to a cluster of Afghan kids means he’s still acting like his knuckleheaded self.
And all the pictures that include Bee means he’s enjoying his job.
Eckert volunteered to return to Afghanistan attached to the India Battery, 3rd Battalion, 12th Marine Regiment out of Japan; his second tour in two years.
A Marine since graduating from Oak Lawn Community High School in 2008, he chose the military right after 9-11.
Jonathan – known as JT in the family – was 11 1/2 when the towers fell.
He was feeling patriotic, his mom said, but he also wanted to take care of his then-single mom and younger brother, Jeremy, and sister, Jessica, by moving them onto a military base with him as soon as he was old enough.
His mom’s husband, George Weaver, was a Marine. His mom’s father, who died while JT was on tour, also was a Marine. The family named their puppy Semper Fi.
The Marines, his stepdad said, are the guys who get things done. And JT loved that, his sister said.
So while he was still 17, he pre-enlisted with his mom’s permission, spending Saturdays doing exercises with area Marines.
“I figured the more knowledge he had the better because when he was 18, he’d do it anyway,” his mother said.
JT deployed last year as an artilleryman, manning guns on top of tanks.
Back in the states, he got recommended for the dog program and started working with Bee.
He married a hometown sweetheart and volunteered, with a baby son now on the way, for another deployment.
He needs the money.
He enjoys the work.
He adores the dog.
He despises the terrain.
“Greetings from Beautiful Afghanistan,” he drew in puffy letters on the front of a blank postcard. On the back: “I’m safe and I miss you all and I can’t wait to see you all. Afghanistan still sucks … Love you guys, JT.”
His other letters have made requests: Baby wipes to keep the sand out. Beef jerky for snacks. Toys to while away the monotony between missions. Nyquil so he can drop off to sleep between four-hour shifts. And now he asks for, and his mother dutifully sends, bones
for Bee.She’s saved his life a few times already now. On cold nights, she keeps him warm as he sleeps, he said, writing home, “It’s really cold out here, I’m spooning with Bee.”
In about a month, he’ll come home from this six-month deployment to do a lot of things.
He’ll hang out with his siblings. He’ll help his new wife, Mante, move from her Crestwood home to his Marine base in the California mountains. He’ll welcome his baby son, due in February.
And he’ll finish the art spanning his upper back, closing the ring of peace around a triad of bullets.
Posted in Practicing, reporting, Storytelling, Thinking, Writing
Tagged 2010, Afghanistan, SouthtownStar
On Saturday, I tried this muscle and stayed narrow, but went deep. Walked into camp on a gorgeous day and considered: Follow 150 scouts? Or one troop as they tried to build a fire?
Though the sun shone on a bright and warm Saturday afternoon, Paul Gacek and Steve Gries just had to get a fire going.
The tall frame they chose – four sticks standing against each other, kindling underneath – wasn’t catching. Tepee fires might burn the hottest, but on windy days, they’re too open underneath to catch.
So Paul and Steve and the rest of Oak Forest Boy Scout Troop 341 scrambled to change plans. They couldn’t let Midlothian’s Troop 437 beat them.
As Boy Scouts have been doing for the past 100 years, more than 150 south suburban scoutsand their leaders from seven troops camped all weekend in Goodenow Grove Forest Preserve near Beecher.
They called it a camporee.
They mastered outdoor cookery: cobblers and bacon in Dutch ovens, eggs and sweet potatoes over open flame, pizza baked in ovens made from boxes. They walked obstacle courses blindfolded, trusting directions from troopmates to make it through. They slept in tents
and stained their mouths with Kool-Aid and ran around the grounds.And they raced, Boy Scout-style, to see which troop’s fire first could burn through a length of kitchen twine stretched about 2 feet high across metal poles.
So Paul and Steve, and Ian McNamara and Ronan Morrissey, and Andy Marcheschi and Nick D’Agostino, and other boys started over with a shape they knew as the “log cabin.” They laid down thin wooden shivs and skinny branches in a square, one piece at a time going around,
until the slatted box climbed a good foot. Justin Scasny wadded up dry leaves and dead grass and shoved the kindling into the middle.“I have flint and steel!” Steve said, holding up both.
Instead, they lit it with lighters and held their breaths.
A few boys kept watch on the competition from Midlothian, which had built a log cabin. That fire blazed merrily, charring the bottom rope line that limited the height of the firewood.
Remember teamwork, boys, an Eagle Scout from Midlothian advised. And worry about your own fire.
Then the Oak Forest troop’s twine snapped, and its boys cheered.
Their victory, though, came 30 seconds too late.
Midlothian’s fire already had won.
But before the boys headed downhill to cook dessert, before the barrel of water was splashed on the flames, one of the fires let off a dull bang.
The Scouts were delighted: A lighter left too close to one of the fires had blown up.
Saturday assignments, I’ve decided, are for writing practice. I just wish there were an editor present, just in case.
Posted in Looking in, Practicing, reporting, Uncategorized, Writing
Tagged 2010, assignment, newspaper, practicing, Saturday, scouts, SouthtownStar
“What can we do?” Walter Sanders often wonders from his VFW post in Richton Park when calls come in.
A veteran is getting evicted from his apartment.
Another vet’s furnace died in the dead of winter.
Sanders recalls the day he trudged out into a wooded part of Harvey and knocked on the freezing cold door.
“I’m from the VFW,” he hollered to the man inside. “I’m here to help you.”
If helping is what the Veterans of Foreign Wars organization does, then as district commander, Sanders can’t wait to coordinate many of his 2,000 local members to pitch in.
The lifelong Southlander took the job in late June, moving up from vice commander. He’s the first black veteran to lead the district, which is made up of 14 south suburban VFW posts.
“I just happen to be African-American,” he said. “When I was elected to do this job, color was not on my mind. What was on my mind is that veterans need help.”
Sanders wants to use the next year to swell the membership and get the vets out in the community. He wants to grab the hearts of politicians so they’ll be his allies in making sure veterans don’t fall into homelessness, want for jobs or lack proper health care.
“We send out kids to war and when they get back, we don’t support them the way we should support them,” he said.
Now 66, Sanders himself entered the Air Force in June 1963, a day after graduating from Thornton High School in Harvey. His mother raised him and his three siblings in Harvey.
He was sent to Vietnam for a year in 1966 and 1967, where he worked as a “reproduction specialist,” military speak for someone who runs the printing press. He reproduced maps and printed orders and he spent a lot of time flying around the country to other bases.
When Sanders came home, uninjured, he ignored the signs he’d later recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder.
For the next 30 years, Sanders wasn’t an active veteran. He and his wife, Bernice, raised two sons, enjoyed four grandchildren and he logged 34 years with the Chicago Transit Authority as a driving instructor. He took some classes at Governors State University. Some
20 years ago, the family moved to Matteson.
In 2002, he got recruited by the Tinley Park VFW. Since then, he helped found a new post now housed in Richton Park, the Benjamin O. Davis Illinois Post 311.
He worked his way up through the district, serving as a service officer – the guy who helps vets straighten out their benefits – junior vice commander and then senior vice commander.
For the next year as district commander, Sanders is determined to get younger members signed up in the VFW and make sure the organization welcomes female vets and black and Latino members, too.
“We need to dispel the myth that we’re a bunch of old guys sitting around telling each other war stories,” he said. “The VFW does other things.”
Posted in Looking in, reporting, Writing
An excellent writer I admire for her voice told my writing class this summer that when she gets stuck writing, she keeps moving.
The lady types out passages of things she loves to read to keep her hands going and to get the beloved writer’s voice into her head.
Thus I begin, going into the National League Championship weekend, with a sports writer who knocked me on my tush this summer when writing about my number 11:
On paper, the moment will fall victim to the limitations of black-and-white numbers and black-and-white words. But for those who actually witnessed Jimmy Rollins rounding third, who watched him approach home plate deader than a 12-point-buck, who watched Yorvit Torrealba catch and turn for what should have been the latest in a long line of brutal developments, there can be no mistaking the magnitude of what happened next.
Rollins dropped into a slide, twisted his body to his right, and raised his hand, slapping home plate as he sailed past it, Torrealba’s glove reaching in vain for something that wasn’t there.
Safe, the umpire ruled. Win, the Phillies did.
~~ David Murphy, of the Philadelphia Daily News.
Dang, those verbs are tight.
Rollins dropped into a slide, twisted his body to his right, and raised his hand, slapping home plate as he sailed past it, Torrealba’s glove reaching in vain for something that wasn’t there.
Weakest one’s “reaching” since it needs modifying.
But it’s the story’s start that raised my expectations from the get-go, letting me as reader know I was in for something so much more special than the stats would later show.
“Deader than a 12-point buck” could inspire some fun copycatting. Stealing the concept is adaptation. Stealing the words is plagiarism.
Deader than, what then? A moose in the road. A deer in the road. An angus steer. A fatted pig. The fatted calf. Thanksgiving’s turkey.
Though none of these creatures quite capture the majesty of the buck. Murphy admires the heck out of that gutsy little slider.
Posted in Learning, Listening, Practicing, reading
Tagged David Murphy, practicing, writing
Poor Eleanor.
I met her once in person, in the lobby of the Chicago Ridge police station, while hunting down the chief for something else several years ago. I remember mentioning her to him, he explained the deal and that was it.
When I went out to report this story, popping into small businesses and convenience stores, I was struck by how very upset people were. Though not everyone knew Eleanor Benbow’s name, they knew of her and recognized her and cried when I was the one to break the news.
Who cries for a dirty, haggard, homeless woman when she disappears from the streets of Chicago Ridge and the face of the earth?
The folks who gave her scraps of food, cups of coffee and the occasional dollar bill. The kind souls who took her in at night. The sons and brother who couldn’t keep her from living on the streets.
Who mourns the death of the Broom Woman?
Everyone who knew her.
Eleanor Benbow died Oct. 7 of colon cancer at age 59. She had surgery in March at Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn to have tumors removed.
She recuperated a few weeks in an Oak Lawn nursing home, hit the streets again and returned in early October to the nursing home, where she died.
A memorial visitation service will be held at Schmaedeke Funeral Home in Worth, 10701 S. Harlem Ave., from 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday.
‘They embraced her’
Eleanor had lived on the streets for decades. Her belongings, including an ever-present broom, traveled with her in a shopping cart.
“A lot of people, I think, were scared of her until they got to know her,” said Linda Dawson, who runs the Worth Snack Shop, one of Eleanor’s regular haunts. “Once they met her and found that she wasn’t this lunatic, they embraced her.”
Some customers opened their wallets for her. One particular gentleman always left a dollar next to Eleanor when they were in the restaurant at the same time. He cried at the news of her death, Dawson said.
Those who complained about her filth, her smell got a piece of Dawson’s mind.
“She was a human, and she deserved as much respect as the next person,” Dawson said.
Judy Mleczko also counted on Eleanor while working shifts at the Am Pm convenience store, at all hours, by herself, on Harlem Avenue.
“She was truly a genuine person. She was just herself, you know what I mean? There’s nobody like Eleanor,” she said. “I never felt alone because I knew Eleanor was close by.”
Those closest to her, such as her brother, Jim Benbow, called her Ellie.
“A professional survivor,” Benbow, of Oak Lawn, described his younger sister.
Whether because of stubbornness or mental illness, Eleanor refused to be caged in.
One of her sons took her to live with him and his wife in West Virginia several years ago, her brother said.
The son worked as a trucker and left on a run. When he called his wife two days later, he heard the news: Eleanor had bolted.
“She beat him back to Chicago,” her brother said. “I intentionally put her in a nursing home on the North Side so she wouldn’t run away.
“She was back before I was. She’d get it in her mind that she wasn’t going anywhere, and she wouldn’t.”
Taking care of herself
Eleanor Benbow was born in Joliet in 1951 and grew up in Chicago Ridge. The eldest of three girls, she lived with her mother, Rose. Police knew them well, responding to calls about fights between Rose and Eleanor.
She told police one winter in the 1980s that she was sleeping in a washer at the laundromat just so they’d arrest her and let her sleep in a warm jail cell.
She married, had two sons and later divorced.
Eleanor’s family tried for years in vain to keep her under shelter.
Only she wanted to be left alone in the outdoors.
“For the last 15 years or so, we fought with her to get her into different places off the streets, but she wouldn’t,” her brother said. “I’d say, ‘I’m putting you in a home for your own good.’ And she would say, ‘No, you’re not.’ “
In the last few years, she relented to check herself in to a nursing home or other facility when the temperatures dropped but left as soon as it warmed up.
She insisted she preferred taking care of herself that way to life in trailers or rented apartments. She kept a post office box for her Social Security check and cooked her own food over fires she’d build in the woods.
Shops like the PK Pantry on 107th Street paid her a few bucks for sweeping the sidewalk or parking lot or handed over free coffee, manager Mike Salameh said.
“At the White Castle, they’d give her some money, (told her) ‘Stay in a hotel, take a shower,’ (and) she was like, ‘No no, I don’t want nothing,’ ” he said. “I feel sorry for her. She didn’t accept from anybody.”
Tim Baldermann made space in the lobby of the Chicago Ridge police station for Eleanor to stay or sleep back when he was police chief.
People complained to him. She was dirty. She talked to herself. The vestibule stank when she was in.
But she stayed out of people’s way in the public building, he said.
“I thought it was inhuman not to allow her to stay there,” he said.
She never asked for help, she told a reporter from the Daily Southtown in 2005 as he followed her on her rounds.
“I take care of myself,” she said.
Posted in Lamenting, reporting, Writing
Tagged 2010, broom, Chicago Ridge, died, Eleanor, obituary, SouthtownStar
I think this lady sent me her own release about her book. And I was due for a SouthtownStar, a sort of good-news story about a person without any particular news hook. It’s our version of the “Someone you should know” story. I’m a fan. It’s good for sneaking people into the paper that might not have space there.
Turns out her background was more fascinating than the book she wrote. In a word: sharecropping.
Patricia Beck-Muhammad was thrilled to give her daughter, Rachel, a better childhood than she had growing up poor in northern Mississippi with 11 brothers and sisters.
But besides the toys, trips to water parks and sparkly things she could provide, she also wanted to instill in the little girl compassion and generosity.
As a mother who’s always been a scribbler with a daughter who loves stories, Beck-Muhammad dreamed up a lucky little royal character named Princess Feldings.
Feldings’ school would teach the most important things about being a queen, none of which had to do with beauty or glamo
ur.And so Beck-Muhammad wrote “Princess Feldings and the Academy of Queens,” a children’s storybook she published this summer.
Writing the story took her about a month, though she’d been kicking the idea around for a long time. Ideas would strike her after 3 a.m., so she’d run with them.
“One word will open the door for a whole lot of wonderful creative writing,” she said.
Feldings, who got her name from Rachel, who at age 3 thought it up for a baby doll, has to learn about queenship since she’ll one day rule her kingdom. So at 14 she packs up to attend the Academy of Queens with young royals her own age from other countries.
With curly hair and an elaborate purple dress, Feldings shows the other princesses how to be kind to the villagers so they all can graduate.
“The academy did not teach the princesses the queenly wave or how to wear lovely gowns and exquisite jewels,” Beck wrote. “The princesses were not taught how to walk or talk like a queen. The first lesson the little princesses had to learn was how to help the poor.”
“People who are privileged have to, in turn, give things to other people,” Beck-Muhammad said. “It’s about being charitable.”
Beck-Muhammad writes from her home in Chicago’s Morgan Park community where she lives with Rachel and her sister, Stella Beck. When she talks about her story, her cheeks glow, her smile widens.
She decided in the 11th grade in Grenada, Miss., she would be a writer, and moved to Chicago more than 20 years ago with friends from Rust College in Mississippi. By day, she works for the Cook County Bureau of Community Development.
The ninth of 12 children, Beck-Muhammad grew up poor but didn’t realize it. Especially since she got to go to school every day, unlike some of the oldest siblings who worked the fields with their father, a sharecropper.
“We didn’t have half of what my daughter has,” she said. “(My parents) did everything they could to make ends meet.”
Her mother cooked in a cafeteria but ruled the home with a firm, loving hand. The Beck children were raised right, she said, and were taught politeness, respect, compassion.
That’s what she wishes for her daughter and other children who grow up in nicer surroundings, unaware of how good they have it.
She’d like to write three books featuring Feldings, each with a lesson. If “Academy of Queens” is about giving, Beck-Muhammad’s next book in the series will deal with responsibility. The manuscript has been written and awaits editing.
With luck, she hopes Feldings will take off with little girls as a different kind of princess.
“She has a giving heart,” Beck-Muhammad said. “She is a compassionate person.”
Tagged 2010, author, book, Chicago, Mississippi, newspaper, SouthtownStar
Spent the morning as I have all week: With a delightful veteran of World War II, and with his wife of 61 years.
Then the afternoon looking for a delightfully profane Marine in Afghanistan.
Found this (potentially offensive) cache of hilarity. Couldn’t stop laughing.
Look at that handsome face! No, he’s not the point, the caption indicates.
My elderly gents filter their stories and their turns of phrase after so many years, you know? They apologize for their verbal slips or drop their voices when dropping profanity. One made me turn the recorder off so he could talk about circumcisions as medic training.
This young Marine uses no filter in his profile and his frankness is damn refreshing. Enter the corporal and his constant companion, the F-word. He’s a man of few words, carefully chosen. He knows what he likes and who he wants to be with. He won’t apologize to you or anyone.
Here’s another winner. And another. They just keep coming.
