Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story:  http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355
© March 31, 2014
It was a six foot by eight foot wooden box
I built it in Chicago
I was nineteen
From the heavy hinged door to the slanted roof
So the snow would fall off
A solitary window slid back and forth
The rain was defeated
The small structure was solid
And eventually I, too, was solid
Because one thing led to another
Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: www.differentslants.com/?p=355
© August 18, 2013
I have something to say about the new movie, “The Butlerâ€. I wonder sometimes why I write anything here, to a seemingly growing group of people I don’t really know and also the disturbingly fundamental fact that I’m not paid for it.
But the movie struck me so strongly and my impression was so different than the somewhat snotty and disdainful recent NPR review that I felt I wanted to cancel them out, in my own obscure microscopic voice. What’s the point of Freedom of Speech if a person has something contradictory and worthwhile to say, but doesn’t bother because there’s no personal reward in it?
Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355
by Robert M. Katzman © August 3, 2013
(Some dates and words updated, seven years later)
When Bill was born, Grover Cleveland was president of the United States. Horses walked the streets of New York City and Chicago. Victoria was on Britain’s throne and seven million Jews lived across Europe, my family among them.
The Spanish-American War was two years away. World War One? Eighteen years in the future. About 65 million people lived in America. Civil War veterans, tens of thousands of them, marched in military memorial parades. Penicillin was decades away and women couldn’t vote until 1920, nor Native Americans until 1924. Great Britain was the most powerful nation on earth, or at least they thought so.
Truman was my first president, April 30, 1950. Hitler was dead five years exactly. My horses were only in the movies. No Interstate Highways yet, but soon, after Eisenhower was elected. Israel was a new country, and Europe was emptied of Jews. But all four of my grandparents were living in the USA. My relatives who couldn’t get here in time, evaporated with the rest of them. Great Britain? Now, an insignificant and irrelevant island, a little larger than the State of Illinois, sitting quietly about twenty miles off the coast of France.
Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355
© May 1, 2013
I came to Hyde Park in April, ’64 from an odd ethnic bubble of only Irish and Jews, mixed together with periodic success on the South Side of Chicago, near 87th Street. Never had any relationships or encountered any Black people anywhere.
There were two Black girls in my last year at Caldwell School whom no one would talk to. It was stunning. I was both appalled by this situation and I was unpopular as well, so I got it immediately and befriended them. They were suspicious of me at first (and who wouldn’t be?), but then visibly relieved that the ice was broken for them. Except it wasn’t broken.
Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355
© April 18, 2013
I used to write on another blog about Hyde Park, a southern part of Chicago six or so miles from the Downtown area, a diverse intellectual community containing many things but most famously the University of Chicago, its experimental K through 12 school, the Laboratory School and the Museum of Science and Technology.
Sometimes I responded to what another person wrote and sometimes that response was reprinted here, because it expressed reflections that might mean something to a larger group of whomever my readers are. How can I know you? Facebook is, illogically, faceless. So, Strangers, see if what I wrote matters to you, possibly in some other context.
There was a significant political person named Marshall Korshak, forgotten today, who was a Chicago Democratic Party powerbroker there in the ’50’s,’60’s and ’70’s. Not everyone loved him. I responded to that expressed feeling in his defense. Marshall, born in 1911, died at 85, in 1996. This is what I wrote about him:
I was reading this thread until I read the part about Marshall Korshak and some not so complimentary remarks about him. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Me, too. But my relationship with him couldn’t have been more unbalanced.