Category: Music

Help Save Eden Place Farms! Benefit Concert this Friday 10/15

Dear lovers of good music and supporters of urban agriculture in Chicago: this Friday 10/15 at Eden Place Farms, local musicians Wyatt Waddell and Headed Home will perform at 6:30pm in a livestreamed benefit concert. Located in the heart of the Fuller Park community at 4911 S. Shields Ave., Eden Place Farms is an iconic family-run urban farm on Chicago’s South Side.

To view the concert and support Eden Place, please make a donation at this link. After your donation, you will receive a link for the livestream event. No donation is too small! If you prefer your live music in person, admission is free and donations are accepted/encouraged; just be sure to bring your mask and proof of vaccination. Doors open at 6pm at the Farm.

The story of Eden Place is as inspiring as it is improbable. Eden Place Nature Center was founded on the site of an illegal waste dump by community activists Michael and Amelia Howard, who built a Nature Center in the late 90s and established their Farm about 15 years later. Eden Place has been a longstanding community hub and green oasis in the Fuller Park neighborhood, and is seeking to raise money to help recover from the Covid-19 pandemic and continue its mission to provide fresh organic produce and environmental education to its community. Though it has experienced setbacks this past year, Eden Place is a resilient and high-impact institution known throughout the US and beyond for its urban conservation work here in Chicago.

Roosevelt University has deep ties to Eden Place, as well. Since 2014, RU students each fall semester have worked onsite at the Nature Center and Farm through Prof. Mike Bryson’s SUST 350 Service & Sustainability class. Students from all walks of life learn what it’s like to work on an urban farm and in return provide their labor and ideas to the staff at Eden Place in a process of reciprocal learning and cooperation. This summer of 2021, five student interns with the Mansfield Institute’s Fellowship for Activism and Community Engagement program have worked 10 hours per week at Eden Place helping to cultivate and harvest crops, build and repair structures, and work productively as a team. We in the Sustainability Studies program at RU are grateful to have Eden Place as a community partner and look forward to many more years of collaboration.

Thanks to the Roosevelt students of SUST 350 for helping organize this concert, and to everyone reading this for all for your past support of Eden Place! Please spread the word to everyone you know who appreciates healthy food and good music.

SUST 350 students help build a hoop house at Eden Place Farms, Fall 2019 (M. Bryson)
SUST 350 students harvest veggies, Sept 2021 (M. Bryson)

Pete Seeger, Legendary Musician and Activist, Dies at Age 94

Last night I had trouble sleeping, and found myself tossing and turning in the wee hours. When I got up to get a drink of water hoping to settle myself down, my night owl spouse solemnly greeted me with sad and wistful news. One of our musical heroes, Mr. Pete Seeger, had just passed away at the ripe old age of 94.

Pete Seeger atop the sloop Clearwater, which he used to promote the environmental cleanup of the Hudson River, along which he lived for many years in Beacon, NY (photo: AP)
Pete Seeger atop the sloop Clearwater, which he used to promote the environmental cleanup of the Hudson River,
along which he lived for many years in Beacon, NY (photo: AP)

It’s almost impossible for me to imagine a person who lived life as joyously, as productively, as meaningfully as Mr. Seeger. Chronicler and performer of folk music, advocate for social and environmental justice, celebrant of ordinary life’s victories and sorrows, political activist who stood up to the nasty oppression of McCarthyism — Pete Seeger was these things and many more during his lifetime, during which he never wavered from his ethical convictions and love of music.

For me, he’s best known in our household as “Pete” — as when I say to my two girls, “Hey, let’s listen to some Pete.” We put on a record or CD of his recordings for children, for which he is justly famous; and we sing, dance, and let the song stories he so effortlessly and skillfully wove fill the room. It’s as if he’s sitting there, on one of our old chairs, playing his banjo and singing to us. We love to imagine Pete dropping in at one of our schools here in Joliet and playing some songs for the kids and teachers — something he did hundreds of times at schools all across America during the course of his long and colorful life.

Pete, I never had the great fortune of meeting you; but I’m so glad you gave your music to the world. Thank you! You will be missed but never forgotten.

Jon Pareles, “Pete Seeger, Songwriter and Champion of Folk Music, Dies at 94” (NY Times 28 Jan 2014)

Back to School in Joliet: Reflections on Junior High

As Labor Day recedes sadly into the distance and we come to grips with the fact that, yes, another school year has officially begun, I can’t help reflecting on the pervasive and damaging myth within American educational culture that junior high is a terrible place to be — something to be survived, not enjoyed.

Sure, the sheer size of a big junior high school is intimidating at first. Yes, there are bullies, and they hit harder than they did in grade school. And there’s no doubt that adolescents can be obnoxious and hurtful, especially when it comes to teasing and tormenting their weaker, geekier, or more awkward peers.

But junior high also can be a place for kids to have fun, to mature into their new minds and bodies, to make new friends, and to relish that time of innocence before the reality of working a part-time job or sweating over college applications. Junior high is, in fact, the last sweet time of true childhood — a realization that occurs to me now as a middle-aged parent.

Hufford Jr HighI suppose that my rosy view of junior high is somewhat colored by my own mostly positive experiences growing up in Joliet, where I attended Hufford several, um, decades ago. As a short kid who wore goofy-looking glasses, favored brown corduroys, sported hair that refused to “feather” properly by late 1970s standards, and was universally known as a bookworm, the odds of my fitting in and avoiding physical trauma weren’t exactly favorable. So how was it that I actually enjoyed my junior high school years, let alone survived them with all of my teeth intact?

Here’s the secret.

Early on in sixth grade, I joined the school’s long established and much-ballyhooed Drama Club, which convened during school hours just like band, orchestra, or choir. Every day thereafter, I lived for tenth period, when our teachers Jack Prendergast and John Nordmark brought us into what to me seemed like an entirely different and wonderful place: the World of the Stage.

Sixth through eighth graders worked, learned, and joked together in this alternate world. We practiced monologues and scenes; competed in speech contest every fall; tried to one-up each other at every audition; and put on a fall play and a full-blown spring musical each school year. In the process, we honed our oratory and acting skills and . . . perhaps most importantly . . . learned how to mount the stage with confidence, take risks, and deal with failure.

To this day, I have had few tests of personal courage that matched that of having to kiss the leading lady in our Spring 1981 production of “Bye, Bye, Birdie” in my eighth grade year, while 400 screeching and hooting adolescents raised the roof of Hufford’s auditorium in hormone-fueled delight at the spectacle.

Bye-bye-birdie

So here is my advice to all the junior high schoolers out there, assuming you’re precocious readers of this blog:

(1) Join something. Band, orchestra, choir, drama, scholastic bowl, chess club, basketball, volleyball, cross country — whatever it is, try it out and see if it suits you. This is a good way to make some friends outside of the hot lunch line.

(2) Be yourself. Just because you join a group doesn’t mean you have to become a sheep. Hey, America is all about celebrating the individual! So I say, go gonzo with that Mohawk.

(3) Don’t take any crap from bullies. Even if you’re small. Remember, little guys are dangerous, especially if they’re smart enough to make big/older friends. (See #1 above.)

(4) Enjoy your time there. I’m sad to report it’ll be over in a blink of the eye. And when you get old like me, you just might miss it.

I am a 1981 graduate of Hufford Junior High School, where I first learned to diagram a sentence, bake a cake, operate a jig saw, draft designs for a building, give a speech, solve algebra equations, and square dance. A version of this essay will appear on 15 Sept 2013 as my regular op-ed column in the Joliet Herald-News.

Toward a Sustainable Future: Why Science and Policy Need the Environmental Arts and Humanities

Recent reports in the popular media would have it that the humanities are embattled: waning in popularity among students, deemed irrelevant by the general public, and viewed by legislators as expendable luxuries in today’s rapidly changing higher education environment. In truth, though, the humanities in general — and the environmental arts and humanities in particular — have never been more important and necessary, both to the academy and within the culture at large.

First, a bold claim: the arts and humanities, broadly conceived, are the most exciting and diverse sources of creativity, intellectual speculation, and cultural critique we have. Together with the empirical methods of the physical and biological sciences, as well as the critical tools of the social and behavioral sciences, the arts and humanities do a great deal more than provide us with amusing diversions or a well-rounded college education. They literally define us as a species. They embody the best of our capacities as human beings.

Just as importantly, the three Es of sustainability — Ecology, Economy, and Equity — dictate a vital role for the environmental arts and humanities in envisioning and working toward a more sustainable future for humanity as well as for the millions of fellow species on our beautiful yet vulnerable planet. Thought-provoking ideas, artwork, architecture, poetry, stories, historical accounts, ethical frameworks, theater, music, theology, and films are necessary complements to the production of ecological data and development of progressive environmental policy.

Why? Because ideas and vision matter. Compelling narratives, whether literary or visual, can bring scientific facts to life and change hearts and minds. Ethics must guide our thinking to ensure that social equity and environmental justice are not marginalized or ignored in the pursuit of the next great clean energy source or wastewater treatment process or organic food production system. Environmental and economic sustainability thus cannot be achieved without the full participation and engagement of the arts and humanities.

Consider just one issue: climate change, arguably our most pressing and seemingly intractable global problem. Decades of compelling scientific evidence on global warming, glacial retreat, increasing severe storm frequency, rising ocean levels, and more have not yet produced the sea change in values and priorities needed to create effective national climate change mitigation laws. Neither have the voluminous policy analysis, political lobbying, and other efforts by social scientists and activists.

Science and policy do matter, of course. But they are not enough. This is where the environmental arts and humanities — those areas of inquiry and creative expression concerned with the natural environment and our place in it — come into play, not in opposition to the empirical findings and systematic methodologies of the natural and social sciences, but in concert with them.

In a truly sustainable society, an ethic of stewardship would reside in each individual as well as be a pervasive value within the community. Such an ethos, though, is seldom adopted in a fully rational way based upon mere apprehension of scientific data. It must be embodied and inspired by stories, arresting images, powerful metaphors, enduring questions; it should be felt as well as comprehended. It is not surprising, then, that the scientist-writers I have researched and greatly admire — Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Loren Eiseley; and in the present day, E. O. Wilson, Sandra Steingraber, and others — articulate this synthesis in their work.

Influenced by these and other artists, writers, and scientists, my own journey as a scholar and teacher have affirmed for me the capacity for art, storytelling, history, music, and poetry to enrich and energize the conversations we must have about environmental science and policy. All of these endeavors, properly integrated, can help us work toward the long-term sustainability of our planet.

A Tribute: Remarks at My Grandmother’s Funeral

If you had met Millie Bryson for the first time in the last few months of her life, it would have been easy to underestimate her. She was 98 years old, blind, hard of hearing, and increasingly forgetful. She lived in a humble and charmingly disordered house that hasn’t changed much over the last few decades. She moved around gingerly, by feeling her way along furniture and walls, and she slept a lot. One of the surest signs to me that she was finally slowing down in her late 90s was that she stopped following every inning of every game of her beloved Chicago Cubs.

But such observations would belie my Grandma Millie’s many accomplishments and talents, as well as the humor, passion, knowledge, and wisdom she shared over the course of her long and influential life.

First and foremost, Millie Bryson was a true force of nature possessed of both tremendous energy and a winning personality. Fiercely independent and strong-willed, she had a quick wit and delightful laugh — qualities she retained even after going blind late in life. And she was smart. A sharp thinker, an avid reader, a skilled crossword puzzle-solver, she had brains to go along with her impressive command of the English language.

Speaking of English, Gram was a stupendously energetic talker. She perfectly embodied the phrase “having the gift of gab.” In her prime, which lasted from the moment she started talking to well into her 90s, Gram could pretty much dominate any conversation she happened across. Once she became partly deaf in her later years, she could turn her hearing aids down low and happily keep on going and going without ever being troubled by an audible interruption.

I’ll never forget one summer when she was in her 80s and my wife and I drove her up north to Michigan for one of her final visits to the Bryson summer home. For about nine straight hours, she talked non-stop, including through the two meals we took along the way. I don’t think Laura and I spoke more than ten words the entire trip. After we arrived and the evening wore on, she began a violent and loudly percussive series of coughs and throat clearings that went on well into the middle of the night. “I don’t understand why my throat is so sore,” she said, much to our amusement. “I must have caught a little bug or something.”

Gram’s passion for conversation bespeaks her role as the oral historian of the family. She was the repository of family lore, and with her amazing memory could recite dialogue from a 1930s afternoon gathering word-by-word at the drop of a hat. Besides her vast knowledge of Bryson and Hicks genealogy, she possessed a seemingly limitless supply of fascinating family stories, as well as an arsenal of memorable sayings that usually surfaced spontaneously within the appropriate social context. A few chestnuts from these aphorisms include:

“First the worst, second the same, last the best of all the game.”

“Wish in one hand and spit in the other, and see which one gets filled up faster.”

“Why? You want to know why? Because the boat leaves Friday, that’s why.”

“What for, you ask? For cat’s fur, to make you kitten britches.”

Millie also was a terrific musician who was born into a musical family — her father, Leslie Hicks, played banjo and guitar in Charlie Formento’s Dance Band during the Depression years here in Joliet. Gram became an accomplished pianist who could sight-read expertly. She had a lovely alto voice and was equally at home singing in the church choir or directing it. She instilled a profound and lasting love of music within her family, and was a nifty dancer to boot.

Faith and church involvement were foundational to Gram’s life. Long a member of First Baptist Church on Joliet’s East Side, she was a founder and charter member of Judson Memorial Baptist Church on the West Side in 1955. For decades she was a respected leader in church affairs at Judson, particularly music, education, governance, and mission outreach. Millie played organ and piano, directed the choir, served as deaconess, taught Sunday School, raised money for mission work, led women’s Bible studies, and performed countless other services for the church community. She lived her faith through deeds more than words, and many of us benefitted from her example.

Gram was an amazing cook who was generous with her skills, knowledge, and recipes for those eager to learn (including my mother). Family dinners at her home on Oneida Street were legendary. She routinely prepared elaborate meals singlehandedly in her miniscule kitchen, and she was a skilled confectioner of pies, cakes, rolls, donuts, cookies, and a special chocolate sauce.

Besides her cooking, she was an expert seamstress. For many years she made her kids’ outfits as well as most of her own clothes. I have it on good authority that her embroidery work was nothing short of exquisite.

More significant than these many talents is that she stepped up when she was needed. As the Bryson matriarch and a beloved mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, Millie was utterly devoted to her family. For over two decades she took care of elderly relatives in her small home even as she raised her own children. Most people would find this difficult to do for 24 days, if not 24 hours — she did it for 24 years.

As that previous example shows, Millie often sacrificed her own comforts and conveniences for the sake of others. She could see the bigger picture and act accordingly. Consider that tiny kitchen I mentioned before. Back in 1960, she and my Grandpa Abe decided to use the money they had long saved for a kitchen expansion/remodel to instead purchase a small rustic cabin in the north woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. No-one could deny that a talented and hard-working cook like Millie surely deserved a bigger and better theater for her daily labors. But to my knowledge, she never regretted that decision for a second.

Ever since, the Bryson cabin at Crooked Lake has been a treasured vacation site for four generations of the Bryson and Laury families. And though she was city bred and couldn’t swim a stroke, Gram came to enjoy camping out, and learned how to handle a canoe in rough water and pitch a tent in the rain.

Speaking of dealing with adversity, Gram knew the meaning of devotion, heartbreak, and deferred gratification. By this I mean she was a Cub fan. I’m talking Hack-Wilson-is-your-favorite-Cub-of-all-time type of Cub fan. Gram dated her devotion to baseball to the summer of 1929, when she began hanging out with the menfolk at picnics listening to ballgames on the radio. It wasn’t very lady-like behavior according to some tongue-waggers, but Millie didn’t truck with convention if it didn’t suit her. She followed her beloved Chicago Cubs on the radio “through thin and thin,” as she often noted wryly — year after disappointing year, decade after excruciating decade, century after spirit-crushing century.

She borrowed this memorable phrase “though thin and thin” many years ago from her soon-to-be son in law of 50+ years — Everett Laury of Danville, Illinois — who uttered it upon meeting Millie at her house for the first time. From that point on, once she knew Ev was a fellow Cub fan, he was A-OK in her book. Another special moment in her baseball life was when Cubs radio announcers Pat Hughes and Ron Santo paid a lengthy tribute to her on the air during her 90th birthday. I’ll never forget the look on her face as she listened to their humorous patter, and then said, “Gee, that was dandy!”

Many times over the past few years, when I would bring my two daughters over to her house for a visit, Gram would say to me, “Oh, I don’t know why I keep hanging around so long. I’m just a burden to people. What do I have to live for at this point? Why am I still here?”

For me, the answers to her rhetorical questions came easy. To hear the Cubs play another game, and maybe, just maybe, win the pennant at long last. To share love. To teach us. To bring joy. To appreciate an earthly life well lived, and anticipate the eternal life to come.

Speech delivered at the memorial service for Millie Bryson (1914-2012) held at Judson Memorial Baptist Church, Joliet, IL. (pdf version)

A Remembrance: Millie Bryson, 1914 — 2012

My grandmother Millie was one of the most important and influential people in my life, and it was a distinct honor to write her obituary this week. Here is the full text, which is reprinted in today’s edition of the Joliet Herald-News, along with a few vintage photographs.

Millie Bryson in 1999

Mildred Edith Hicks Bryson, 98, of Joliet died peacefully on July 11, 2012, of natural causes. She was at home with her family by her side.

Mildred “Millie” Hicks was born at home May 17, 1914, on the East Side of Joliet, IL, the daughter of Leslie Timothy and Margaret Edith (Nicholson) Hicks. She married Abel Hurst Bryson on June 17, 1935, in Joliet. He died on November 4, 1987.

Millie was a lifelong resident of Joliet — first on the East Side, where she lived with her family near Hickory Creek; and later on the West Side, where her parents built a home in 1925 on Reed Street, then the city’s far western boundary. She graduated from Farragut School and Joliet Township High School (class of 1931); completed teacher’s training at Joliet Junior College in 1933; and subsequently taught in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Will County near Manhattan, IL.

Abel H. Bryson married Mildred E. Hicks on 17 June 1935.

After her marriage in 1935, she left teaching (as was customary in those days) and worked diligently thereafter as a homemaker, mother, elder caretaker, and church volunteer. Once her children were grown, she was in high demand as an accompanist in the Joliet area, particularly for short-notice funeral services. She also cashiered for several years at Plainfield Road Pharmacy. No matter the job, Millie was a hard worker who valued getting things done the right way, preferably “in a jiffy.”

Born into a musical family — her father Leslie Hicks played banjo and guitar in Charlie Formento’s Dance Band during the Depression years — Millie was an accomplished pianist who could sight-read expertly, and she was a nifty dancer to boot. She possessed a lovely alto voice and instilled a profound and lasting love of music within her family.

Faith and church involvement were foundational to Millie’s life. Long a member of First Baptist Church on Joliet’s East Side, she was a founder and charter member of Judson Memorial Baptist Church on the West Side in 1955. For decades she was a respected leader in church affairs at Judson, particularly music, education, governance, and mission outreach. Millie played organ and piano, directed the choir, served as deaconess, taught Sunday School, raised money for mission work, led women’s Bible studies, and performed countless other services for the church community. She also was a longstanding member of The King’s Daughters and Sons international Christian service organization.

A family portrait from 1941: Abe and Millie with Ralph (front left) and Margaret (aka “Molly” and later “Peggy”)

As the Bryson matriarch, Millie was utterly devoted to her family and for 24 years took care of elderly relatives in her small home even as she raised her own children. She was a beloved mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, as well as an expert seamstress and cook (though by her own admission an indifferent housekeeper). For many years she made her kids’ outfits as well as most of her own clothes, and her embroidery work was unparalleled.

Family dinners at her home on Oneida Street were legendary. She routinely prepared elaborate meals singlehandedly in a miniscule kitchen, and she was a skilled confectioner of pies, cakes, rolls, donuts, cookies, and a special chocolate sauce.

That kitchen gained a special place in family lore when she and her husband Abe decided in 1960 to use the money they had long saved for a kitchen expansion/remodel to instead purchase a small rustic cabin in the north woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Ever since, the Bryson cabin at Crooked Lake has been a treasured vacation site for four generations of the Bryson and Laury families. And though she was city bred and couldn’t swim a stroke, Millie came to enjoy camping out and learned how to handle a canoe in rough water and pitch a tent in the rain.

Millie and Abe Bryson out on a “night on the town” in Chicago, sometime in the 1940s.

Anyone who came to know Millie Bryson would attest that she was a force of nature possessed of both tremendous energy and a winning personality. Fiercely independent and strong-willed, she had a wonderful sense of humor, quick wit, and delightful laugh — qualities she retained even after going blind late in life. She was an avid reader and skilled crossword puzzle-solver. A devoted baseball fan since 1929, she followed her beloved Chicago Cubs on the radio “through thin and thin,” as she often noted wryly.

Surviving are her son, Ralph A. Bryson, of Joliet; her daughter, Margaret “Peggy” D. Laury (Everett), of Danville, IL; six grandchildren, Michael A. Bryson (Laura) of Joliet, David P. Bryson of Chicago, Laura E. Bryson of Crest Hill, Ann E. Luciani (Paul) of St. Louis, MO, Susan K. Laury of Atlanta, GA, and Catherine D. Wiese (Donald) of Danville; and four great-grandchildren, Lily and Esmé Bryson of Joliet, and Libby and Jacob Luciani of St. Louis, MO.

Millie Hicks (age 20) and her younger sister Doris (18) in their backyard in Joliet, wearing matching dresses made by my Great-Grandmother Edith Hicks Bryson (1934). These were later worn by the bridesmaids in Millie’s wedding.

She was preceded in death by her husband; her parents; her siblings, Leslie C. Hicks, Doris E. Holman (Harold), Roy A. Hicks, and Barbara L. Hicks; and her daughter-in-law, Patricia K. Bryson.

A celebration of Millie’s life will be held on Tuesday, July 17, 2012, at Judson Memorial Baptist Church, 2800 Black Road, Joliet, IL 60435. Visitation with the family will be at 3pm; services will start at 4pm. A church dinner will immediately follow the services.

In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to Judson Memorial Baptist Church or to Joliet Area Community Hospice, 250 Water Stone Circle, Joliet, IL 60431. Arrangements are being handled by Carlson Holmquist-Sayles Funeral Home of Joliet.

Readers who wish to post a memory of Millie or a note to the family may do so here on the Carlson Funeral Home website. Also see this essay I wrote about Gram last week for my monthly op-ed column in the Joliet Herald-News.

Free Old-Time Music Concert at RU, Feb. 11

This coming friday, my friend and RU colleague Greg Reish is giving his annual recital in Roosevelt’s historic chamber music concert space, Ganz Hall, at 8pm. This is a free concert, and not one to be missed! Greg is an accomplished guitarist and banjo player, as well as a music historian / musicologist who is a recognized authority on American folk, country, and blues music. Check out his website, and better yet, see him in person if you’re free on Friday night!