The Gyro’s History Unfolds

CARVED Gyros with tzatziki at the Kronos Foods factory in Chicago.










Mr. Tomaras opened Kronos in 1975 and sold it to a private equity firm in 1994. But he returned to the plant, on a dead-end industrial road in Chicago’s southwest side, to explain how gyros are made. It’s a show and tell that is not for the squeamish.

It is a mystery meat.



PRE-PITA Chris Tomaras, the founder of Kronos Foods, with uncooked gyro cones.








The question is: Who is the Henry Ford of the gyro? It turns out there are a handful of contenders, all of whom know one another and have been friendly competitors for decades. They include George Apostolou, who says he served the first gyros in the United States, in the Parkview Restaurant in Chicago, in 1965, and nine years later opened a 3,000-square-foot manufacturing plant, Central Gyros Wholesale.

another contender, Andre Papantoniou, a founder and the president of Olympia Food Industries, says the gyro plant was actually the brainchild of the improbably named John Garlic.

This initially sounds like a joke, but Mr. Papantoniou swears that during the rotisserie-making phase of Mr. Parthenis’s career, one John Garlic showed up in Chicago in search of a partner in a gyro plant he’d started in Milwaukee.

It’s true, Mr. Parthenis said in a second call, though he remembers little about his former partner, except that the guy looked like a hippie. Who Mr. Garlic was and why he made gyros are questions that Mr. Parthenis can’t answer: “He was like a phantom. He came out of nowhere.”

There is little about John Garlic in news archives, aside from a 1978 story in The Milwaukee Sentinel, in which a John J. Garlic discusses his plans to keep trained dolphins in a former municipal pool he’d bought in the city and wanted to turn into a restaurant with a kind of Sea World sideshow.

Unfortunately, Mr. Garlic is no longer around to discuss matters; he died of kidney failure in 1994. But his wife, Margaret Garlic, can provide answers.

So, who was John Garlic?

“He was this big guy,” she said, “like 6 foot 2 inches tall, dark curly hair, couple hundred pounds. A former Marine. A super intelligent, super entertaining man. My brother used to say, ‘When John Garlic enters a room, you know you’re going to have fun.’ ”

And he was Greek?

“No, no,” she said. “He was Jewish.”

YOu can't make this stuff up.

A Gangster With Star Appeal

In truth, there is no secret to Dillinger's appeal. "He was what he seemed to be," says researcher and historian Sandy Jones, who once owned Dillinger's death mask and his 1933 Hudson Essex-Terraplane 8, now on display at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment in Washington. "He was an Indiana farm boy who loved baseball." (He was also a Chicago Cubs fan, so you knew that he would some day come to a bad end.) "He wasn't a Robin Hood, but he was living a revenge fantasy that millions of Americans dreamed about during the Depression. If he was alive today, he'd probably be going after Wall Street brokers."

It's fitting that John Dillinger was killed after an outing to one of his beloved movie houses. The last film he took in was "Manhattan Melodrama" with Clark Gable and William Powell. But his favorite movie gangster was James Cagney, who, according to legend, he actually met in a Chicago tavern. Lucky for Dillinger, he didn't live to see the star of "The Public Enemy" (1931) become -- literally -- a poster boy for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI in the movie "'G' Men," released a year after his death.

You can't make this up

Boy’s Impersonation of Chicago Officer to Bring Discipline for 7 on Force

Seven police officers here will be disciplined for failing to detect a 14-year-old boy’s impersonation of a police officer for five hours, including driving a patrol car and pulling a suspect’s arm behind his back so officers could handcuff him.

These cops must be real putzes, if they worked with a 14-year-old and didn't realize he was a teenager.

The Chicago police superintendent, Jody P. Weis ... said the teenager slipped past officers at the Grand Crossing police station on the South Side on Jan. 24, arriving in a store-bought uniform with neither a badge nor identification. The impersonation ended at 7:40 p.m. when the teenager’s identity was questioned and he was arrested.

Good thing someone was awake.

The department has posted the photographs of the accused police impersonators on its Web site, www.chicagopolice.org, with the exception of the 14-year-old.

Norm Van Lier, Three-Time N.B.A. All-Star

The Bulls’ Norm Van Lier in a 1973 game against the Knicks


Get a look at those shoes; no fancy duds. And the shorts.













February 27, 2009
Norm Van Lier, Three-Time N.B.A. All-Star, Is Dead at 61
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHICAGO (AP) — Norm Van Lier, an All-Star guard and standout defensive player for the Chicago Bulls in the 1970s and later a sports broadcaster in the city, was found dead on Thursday in his home in Chicago. He was 61.

Firefighters went to his home, just blocks from United Center, the Bulls’ arena, in response to a request for a well-being check. They found him unresponsive and pronounced him dead shortly before 1 p.m., a Chicago Fire Department spokesman said. The Cook County medical examiner’s office confirmed his death. No cause was given.

Van Lier, who grew up in Midland, Pa., was drafted by the Bulls in 1969 out of St. Francis College in Pennsylvania but was immediately traded to the Cincinnati Royals. In 1971 he led the league in assists.

After three years with Cincinnati, he joined the Bulls and spent more than six seasons with them, becoming a fan favorite and gaining the nickname Stormin’ Norman for his fiery, tenacious play alongside teammates like Jerry Sloan and Chet Walker. A memorable moment came Jan. 19, 1977, when he made a full-court shot against the San Antonio Spurs.

A three-time All-Star, Van Lier played on five playoff teams and was named to eight National Basketball Association all-defensive teams in his 10-year career. He finished his career with Milwaukee in 1979, retiring with career totals of 8,770 points and 5,217 assists. Among Bulls, he ranks third only to Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen in career assists and steals, the team said.

After retiring, he covered the Bulls as a television and radio analyst in the Chicago area and had a supporting role in the 2002 movie “Barbershop,” playing a customer. Information on survivors was not available, but an oral history project in 2003 referred to his having a wife, Susan, and two daughters at the time.

Chicago rules

Blagojevich is the issue of the day -- or, maybe was, now that an Iraqi pair of shoes have been thrown at President Bush.

The turd tossed by Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich into Barack Obama’s punch bowl had been floating there for 48 hours when the president-elect stepped to the podium at his press conference last Thursday morning. Obama’s initial response to the astonishing—and comical, and nauseating, and DSM-worthy-crazy—corruption case had seemed wan, perfunctory. His call for Blago’s resignation had been issued through a spokesman. But Obama’s handling of the matter at the press conference was more sure-footed. Beyond the substance of what he said, his tone and bearing were pretty much pitch-perfect: saddened, disgusted, denunciatory, not the least defensive. And his oblique reference to being called a “motherfucker” by Blagojevich (“I won’t quote back some of the things that were said about me … this is a family program, I know”) earned him extra points for humor.

It really seems a tempest in a teapot (well, maybe in a fucking teapot). That Blago denounced Obama and his camp for not paying him off seems enough evidence. But, the media needs something to chew over, and that punk remains good copy.

For Obama, one question is whether all this will be damaging or merely distracting. And another is whether Blago’s will be the last grasping, clawlike hand to reach up from the Illinois swamp and try to seize Obama by the ankles.

There seems to be an attempt by some of the media to ignore the murky side of politics, to cast this incident as a besmirching of the otherwise virginal land of politics. Poppycock.

Nobody doubts that Obama was with the reformers in Illinois, both in terms of the legislation he helped pass in the State Senate (including on campaign finance and ethics) and in his philosophical orientation. But Obama was hardly some sort of anti-Establishment firebrand. He is close to the Daleys—Mayor Richard and brother Bill—and Emil Jones, a longtime leader in the State Senate. He assisted Blagojevich in getting elected in 2002, and though they have been estranged for some years, he supported Blago for reelection and refused to condemn him (or Mayor Daley) when they became ensnared in corruption contretemps, a fact that left some reform-minded supporters “feeling alienated and angry,” according to Lizza. And, of course, there was his alliance and friendship with Rezko.

Of course Obama isn't pure. Purity goes nowhere in politics. PTA, school board, library board; any and all organizations require maneuvering, positioning, alliance-building, and more, to be effective, get anywhere, get things done.

In all of this, Obama calls to mind Bill Clinton. Clinton’s various entanglements in the Razorback State’s quasi-feudal political and business cultures came back to haunt him during his time in office, most glaringly in the case of Whitewater.

At first, this seems a stretch. Clinton's wife had a lot of baggage, too: Rose law firm, and so on.

That Whitewater was a trumped-up tin-pot scandal in which WJC was never proved to have done anything illegal is beside the point—or, more accurately, is precisely the point. The investigations Whitewater spawned were more intrusive than a thousand colonoscopies. They consumed countless news cycles, drained away political capital, inflicted horrendous legal bills on dozens of innocent bystanders, and energized the Republicans and their allies on the fringes of society and in the mainstream media. And for what? For nada.

A little reflection, though, shows that it isn't much of a stretch. Whitewater became the hook for a lot of anti-Clinton activism by the extreme right wing. Clinton added fuel to the fire: Hillary didn't want to bake cookies, Zoe Baird hadn't paid nanny taxes, don't ask-don't tell.

Could Blagogate do something similar to Obama? Already one “prominent Chicago Democrat” is telling Politico that the mess poses the risk of “Whitewater-type exposure” to the president-elect. “What will splatter on to Obama is he is to some degree a product of this culture, and he has never entirely stood against it,” said this person.

The contention that it shouldn't matter much, that the problems we face are so immense that minor stuff such as this should not even be on the radar screen misses the point: that is how politics work, and to ignore that is, at best, naive. Yet Obama being from the Chicago machine is not in itself a crime, legal or political. Every politician comes from a machine of one sort or another.

It’s obviously pertinent here that no one is accusing Obama himself of any sort of wrongdoing—quite the contrary. (Equally so that Patrick Fitzgerald is no Ken Starr.) And if it turns out that Team Obama’s hands are clean, the political danger for the incoming administration will be significantly reduced. But even then, it’s safe to assume that any transitionite who spoke to Blago or his chief of staff, no matter how innocently or appropriately, will have to lawyer up in preparation for the forthcoming trial. The GOP is already seizing the opportunity to hammer Obama; they are likely to cling to the slimmest reed in an effort to keep the story alive.

Let one crisis begin, or let one of Obama's initiatives catch fire, and the GOP will have to, and need to, stop appearing obstructionist.

There are no shining cities (or states) on a hill in local American politics. Some are nastier, sleazier, and uglier than others, but none are what you’d properly call pretty. Winning the presidency promises, among other things, an escape from all of that. But few presidents in recent memory have been able to avoid a Michael Corleone moment: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” This is the first such moment for Obama. For his sake, and, Heaven help us, for ours too, let’s hope it’s his last.

American, or any other, politics has no shining cities on a hill. That Reaganite metaphor is, and always was, nonsense. Reagan had dead Marines in Lebanon, voo-doo economics, ballooning deficits, and Irangate. His myth is based on ideological loyalty from, and the stupidity of, his supporters.

This will not be Obama's last major administrative problem. That is not the challenge (to avoid such problem); the challenge is to handle them properly.