You Were Never in Chicago by Neil Steinberg

Author:Neil Steinberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

8

“How long is it supposed to last?”

The morning my son Ross was born, a yellow school bus stopped at a red light with its back end hanging over railroad tracks in Fox River Grove and a train hit it. When the phone rang, we thought it was the doctor returning our call. It was the city desk, telling me to get over there now. I was walking Edie back and forth in our bedroom, wristwatch in hand, timing her contractions. “My wife’s having a baby,” I told them. So they sent someone else to the Northwest suburb; many people, it turned out.

Meanwhile, we walked up Broadway, Edie stopping to brace herself against a parking meter whenever a contraction hit. But instead of getting stronger and closer together, the contractions grew weaker and further apart until they stopped altogether. By midmorning, Edie was at the apartment of an artist neighbor, cooing over her birth announcement designs, and I started to worry that the paper would think I had shirked the assignment—the baby wasn’t due for two weeks. Another reporter had dodged a story and gotten into trouble. Still, I dithered like Hamlet until Edie said, “Honey, I’m not having this baby right now. Go to work.”

I walked a block east to Sheridan Road and caught a cab to the paper, babbling to the driver about the baby on the way. At the office, reporters at the Fox River Grove crash scene fed me information to weave into the story. Seven students on the bus died.

We put the newspaper to bed at 1 p.m., the late afternoon edition that the Sun-Times still hawked to commuters on their way home from work. On my lunch break, I strolled up Michigan Avenue and stopped in the F.A.O. Schwarz toy store to contemplate a Steiff toy dog. My beeper went off: a call from Edie. I walked back to the paper—an unbelievably leisurely thing to do, given the circumstances—and phoned home. “How far apart are the contractions?” I asked. “I don’t know!” Edie wailed. I quickly gathered my things, gazed hard at the office commotion, then left and didn’t come back to work for a year.

. . .

Directly due to Ross’s birth, I went from being a reporter chasing news at any editor’s whim to a regular columnist, with my picture in the paper and everything, free to choose my own topics and write about them in my own way, and no career advancement was ever achieved in a more accidental fashion. It happened like this: in 1995, after years of trying, Edie became pregnant. Being in the Chicago Newspaper Guild meant we were subject to union work rules, and at some point in the free-to-be-you-and-me 1970s, someone stuck a clause in our contract stating that not only could mothers take up to a year unpaid maternity leave after the birth or adoption of a child, but fathers could too. Of course management would agree to that—the provision cost them nothing, and how many guys

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