A sideline gig if this academia stuff doesn’t work out

My grandfather’s business card from the 1940s. No street address, just rural route 3. And the phone was a party line, but RED254 had its own ring: Two longs and a short.

Happy Father’s Day

Circa 1937: Here’s my dad,Willard G. Duff, the baby in the arms of my grandmother Lillian and grandfather Craig. Dad’s cousin is standing to the right.

Grand Opening Monday for Dorothy’s Can-Do Café at Chicago’s Gateway to Learning

For those of you who live in Chicago and are free on the morning of Monday, June 10th, come by Lincoln Square for the grand opening of Dorothy’s Can-Do Café. The cafe, on N. Lincoln Avenue just south of Foster, is an extension of the bakery project at Gateway to Learning, a special education and training center. I spent Friday morning watching the students at the center prepare for when the café’s doors open to the public. Several of them practiced working the counter, taking and filling orders for coffee and tasty baked goods (all made fresh in the GTL kitchens) and handling the payments and change. Others stocked the cooler with soft drinks and cartons of milk.

They’re excited to open, and I’ll share more photographs of opening morning. Come by if you’re in the area.

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All photographs ©2013 Craig Duff, All Rights Reserved

Meet Henrietta, a Dead, Pet Guinea Worm

This video profile of Dr. Donald R. Hopkins, vice president of health programs at the Carter Center, was released this week on NYTimes.com. I met with Dr. Hopkins a couple weeks ago in the office in his home in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. We chatted about his long career in public health, and he introduced me to his dead, pet Guinea worm — a specimen of a parasite that causes a painful affliction that Dr. Hopkins, along with former President Jimmy Carter, has worked for decades to eradicate. And they are tantalizingly close to achieving their goal.

Click here to read the beautifully wrought profile — Another Scourge in His Sites — by Donald G. McNeil, Jr.

Meet the Polkaholics!

I’m a little late on this, but I spent St. Patrick’s Day at Lincoln Square Lanes (a new discovery/favorite place in my neighborhood), where a trio called the Polkaholics played polka rhythms on rock instruments. Their sets included favorites like the Beer Barrel Polka and the Hokey Pokey, which had the crowd dancing and sweating and screaming and hooting. The three musicians — “Dandy Don” Hedeker (on lead vocals and guitar), “Blitz” Linster on bass and “Stylin’ Steve” Glover on drums — played in a style that’s a delightful mix of Frankie Yankovic and Weird Al Yankovic.

It made me a little nostalgic for Ohio. On Sundays when I was growing up, there was a show on a Cleveland TV station (WEWS) called Polka Varieties. The show’s opening announcement dubbed Cleveland the “Polka Capital of the World.” I used to watch the show with my grandparents in Mecca, Ohio. I don’t think Grandma would have liked the rock-influenced version of the thrashing oom-pah band that are the Polkaholics (not as much as I do), but she probably would have danced anyway.

CORRECTION/COMMENT: Because I was in a hurry (and, well, lazy), I misnamed the band members in my original post because I cut and pasted from an old bio instead of reading my own notes from the evening. Those names have been corrected. Also, at the request of the band, I removed an observation you may see referenced in a comment below. A rather rough couple making an inappropriate gesture was an interesting thing to note in a blog, but on further reflection I can see how one word used to describe the gesture would color this post in a way I did not intend, so I’ve removed it.  

Egg, Where Are You?

On Easter morning, the Community Christian Church of Lincoln Square held an Easter Egg hunt for the kids in the neighborhood at Winnemac Park. I used it as opportunity to get out with my camera on a fine spring morning. Great fun. Cute kids. See for yourself.

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Visualizing Me

One of my favorite lines from the James L. Brooks film “Broadcast News” (and I have many favorite lines from that movie), is when Aaron Altman (played by Albert Brooks) chides his colleagues for including in a news package a scene of a reporter confronting an Army general, mostly to show the journalist being tough:  “Let’s not forget, we’re the real story. Not them.”

I think of that whenever someone wants to do a story about a journalist, especially me. I’m much better at telling other people’s stories than telling my own. So I was a bit shy when Medill asked to profile me for its quarterly magazine. There’s a very good cover story/profile of NYTimes public editor Margaret Sullivan (a Medill alum). A few pages in, you’ll see yours truly.

I’m grateful to Shannon Shelton Miller for her careful reporting, and to Ray Whitehouse for his patience in making the portrait for the story. [I'm also much more comfortable behind the lens of a camera than I am sitting in front of one.] Though, looking at the image, I should have taken the advice offered in another scene from Broadcast News, when William Hurt as anchor Tom Granick says to Brooks’ Altman: “When you sit down — sit on your jacket a little — that gives you a good line.”

Too late now.

At least I’m not sweating like Albert Brooks did in his first anchor appearance in that film.