Ash heap. Burden. How peculiar that our collective imagination about history is organized to its weight rather than its joys.
Here at the Magazine, we are unrelenting in our efforts to provide a course correction. This is the third year we have devoted an issue to the past, and we think it’s our best yet. Our first issue contained an excerpt from “Devil in the White City”-and, yes, we accept the congratulations-before it leapt onto the best-seller list. Last year, we focused on Chicago a century ago. This time, we aspired to inhabit the quadrant of our brains that holds the more recent past–that which many readers of this newspaper were alive to experience–before it is fully metabolized by memory.
Our tour guide this week is writer Rick Kogan, whose parents, the late, legendary journalist Herman Kogan and wife Marilew, raised him on the streets of Chicago. “There was not a day growing up that I didn’t find myself, through my parents’ stories and memories, transported to the past,” says Rick. “Driving or walking around, I learned that the city is alive with history, some of it horrific, some of it hilarious, but all of it important to understanding and appreciating this place we call home.” Rick and his father collaborated on “Yesterday’s Chicago,” a pictorial history of the city from its birth until, ironically, 1955.
Two of Herman’s books-“Lords of the Levee” and “Big Bill of Chicago”-had languished out of print, but will be reissued this spring by Northwestern University Press, proving that good history can come in and out of fashion but ultimately prevails.