Visit ChicagoCrime.org for access to a crime map centered on Chicago. Kudos to the ChicagoCrime.org team for creating such a clean, clear design.
Printed in Scanlon’s Monthly in June 1970, this piece by Hunter S. Thompson gave rise to gonzo journalism. ['Greetings, Stranger' is a hybrid of oral history and gonzo journalism. - ed]
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All evidence indicates that small acts of kindness occur in cities at the same rate as in rural areas. The world-famous Stanley Milgram–the very same who started the six-degrees experiment–conducted a groundbreaking study in the 70s where he asked increasingly onerous favors of city-slickers and country folk, and the resultant data suggested no correlation between location and willingness to comply with requests for favors of time from unfamiliar strangers.For example, take Toronto, a city with over 2.5 million inhabitants. Here’s the text from a hand-written sign posted on a telephone pole:To Larissa, Gus (?), Nurse with Ice Cream Cone, Man with Cellphone, Woman from La Hacienda with Wet Towels, THANK YOU!! For your most generous care and kindness when I fell off my bike on Tuesday, August 14th. I am fine and my stitches are healing. YOU GIVE ME FAITH IN HUMANITY.
Meet Hugh from Chicago. Hugh is a Political Science major at Columbia College in Chicago, and has experienced his fair share of excitement for his age.At no more than age 26, Hugh is a Greenpeace liberal, and wears it on his sleeve. He claims (and I very much believe) that he has protested over a hundred times, and has been arrested “30 or 40″ times. His arrests, sans conviction, only seem to spur him on, as he has protested in Venezuela (against Taco Bell), Rome (against religion…his friend was being ordained as a priest), and in every one of the continental United States, as well as Mexico and Canada.We ride together for only a short time, but it is enough to get a taste of the vivaciousness of this young man. His concentration in college, he says, is an attempt to actually “Do something” about the things he protests about, which he acknowledges do very little, except to inform others and possibly incite anger from the public. He hopes to be a politician, if “even an Alderman” to be able to make change.He tells one story which had us laughing: at a protest before this semester, he ended up in a fight against the anti-protest protest, and punched a conservative protester (a woman) in the face (albeit, he claims, accidentally). That semester, he showed up to a class he had to take (required for his major) and looked up to meet his victim eye to eye–his teacher! Needless to say, he will probably drop the class because “She will definitely fail me.”He tells a story about crossing the Canadian-American border one time with his friends, and they had a video camera. On camera, they made fun of the fat, balding guard at the border crossing (saying something like “Anyone could do his job”), but didn’t turn the camera off in time. The guard took the camera for “security reasons” and insisted that they review the tape. The friends waited in the car, and when the guard finally emerges he was red in the face with anger. “This job can’t be done by anyone!” he insists, and then says that one of their jobs he bet he could do, too. One of the friends then said “I’m an electrical engineer” and the guard stammered, “Well, you got me there” and let them through.Also, apparently, a friend of his put a “Impeach Bush” sign on his lawn and ended up spending 180 days in jail…His stories sound more apocryphal than substantive, but aren’t all stories brushed up with a little hyperbole? Truthful or not, he made great company. Unfortunately I don’t have a picture to post!Hugh, if you’re reading this, keep up the good work. Protesters may be a dying breed, but they do come in handy.’
I woke before dawn to view the lunar eclipse. An oak tree and light cloud cover obstructed the view outside my apartment, so I hopped into my car and made my way toward the Adler Planetarium at 2200 S. Lakeshore Drive.I found a crowd of roughly two-hundred gathered at Adler. Sixty-four cars and vans lined the Planetarium’s driveway, joined by a half-dozen local morning news crews and a solitary motorcycle. To my chagrin, the clouds were as troublesome at Adler as they were in Hyde Park.The Planetarium staff was busy serving coffee and doughnuts to visitors. After taking a few shots of the gathered crowd, I approached Santiago, an Adler Planetarium volunteer. He was showing a group of seven young males a star that his telescope was pointed toward–a star located over 3 billion light-years away.Casual visitors were seated along a grassy knoll that pointed toward the moon. I noticed a young man sitting by himself on the bottom edge of the knoll.
DC: Is this your first time viewing a lunar eclipse?Tom: Yes, it is.DC: Where are you from?Tom: I’m from Cleveland, OH actually.DC: Oh, wonderful, I’m from around those parts.
Tom revealed that he’s originally from a western suburb of Cleveland. He moved to Chicago on Friday to start his freshman year at Columbia College studying computer animation. He was accompanied by his roommates Nate and Tim. Tim was dressed nearly head-to-toe in black, and he sported a black FCUK hat atop his head. Tim has a talent for photography, so I asked Tim if he’d show me photographs he had taken over the course of the day. He pulled out a beautiful digital SLR camera and flipped through a roll of images he made of downtown Chicago and the eclipse. He also told me about his skill at repairing broken iPods. Working alone, he replaced his 30GB hard drive with an 80GB version.I chatted with Tom until the eclipse reached totality. The moon turned a deep orange-red in response, before turning pitch-black and disappearing completely from view. The news cameras struggled to capture the occasion. How do you represent nothingness on a television screen?When CBS News went live, the moon was obscured behind the clouds, so the production team simply replayed a clip of the moon taken from earlier in the evening. Before its departure, the WGN news van driver slowed in front of the CBS News truck.
WGN Cameraman: “Hey, check out this new van they got for me.”CBS Cameraman (shaking his head): “Wow, new paint and everything.”
All this time, Adler Planetarium staff-members are circulating through the crowd offering answers to any and all questions that were raised. A man in a safari hat conducted a countdown to the eclipse. A video clip of the event is available here.
The Adler Planetarium rocks. If you’re looking for a terrific place to meet new people, try visiting the Adler Planetarium on a starry night. There’s a good chance you’ll find fellow stargazers, particularly for major astronomical events (e.g. lunar eclipse, solar eclipse, meteor showers and the transit of Venus). Adler Planetarium always hosts a small event whenever an astronomical event takes place. Expect at least a dozen telescopes and a bevy of amateur astronomers.
We’re still experimenting with the layout and graphical design of the Greetings, Stranger site. Please don’t be alarmed if the aesthetic undergoes several radical changes over the next few days. It will all turn out for the best.
Welcome!
This weekly blog, titled “Greeting, Stranger”, will document and distribute the stories of strangers we meet on public transit and in public spaces. In the last week, have you spoken with a friendly or thought-provoking stranger on a bus, train, subway or airplane? Did they share a fascinating story?
Check back every Sunday night for new stories. The tales you read will be as fair and balanced as the writers and editors can make them. Just keep in mind that the impressions we form of the friendly strangers we meet are subjective by nature. Quotations are not exact, but they are in spirit.
If you feel inspired to learn more about the stranger sitting next to you on the subway, please, by all means, feel free to register as a contributor and tell us about your experience. The more off-the-wall and spontaneous your story is, the better. We’re particularly interested in stories that cross the racial, political and socioeconomic divide — stories that, in their retelling, foster an enhanced sense of humanity, purpose, and unity.
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