—by Milo Samardzija on May 31st, 2009
Back in the days when
Jack Daniel and I were close friends, I used to do and say a lot of very stupid things. It wasn’t my fault. I blamed it on the booze. As an anonymous old bluesman once sang, “I was high, baby, when I did you wrong and you know it don’t count when you’re high.”
I remember staggering home one evening from my local swill-a-teria and passing my neighbor’s house on the way. The neighbor, a lovely woman named Amy, saw me rocking and reeling and called out, “Milo, are you drunk again?”
“I am indeed drunk,” I replied, in my usual gentlemanly fashion. “But tomorrow morning I’ll be sober and you’ll still be an ugly old whore.”
The next morning Amy’s husband, a big brute of a man who is 20 years younger than I am, confronted me. “Did you call my wife an ugly old whore last night?”
“Yes I did,” I answered. “And I’m truly sorry about it. It was presumptuous of me to say that. You see, I don’t know what your wife does for a living.”
Instead of kicking my butt, which he had every right to do, Amy’s husband laughed his ass off and invited me over for drinks later that day.
I used to hang out at a bar called
Sterch’s on Lincoln Avenue. It is far from a chic or trendy spot, just a local saloon that has been sensitive to the needs of drinkers since the early 70s. One evening, a little after midnight, a smartly dressed couple walked in, probably by mistake, or else they were just slumming, checking out the local wildlife. They reeked of class, probably had season tickets to the opera and made regular appearances in
Kup’s Column.
It just so happened that the gentleman sitting on the bar stool next to me, who I had been having a lively discussion with for the past few hours, chose that moment to pass out. He rocked back and forth a couple of times then fell forward, his head hitting the bar with a loud thump.
The society matron appeared disgusted by the sight of my friend dozing on the bar. The woman pointed a well-manicured finger and said, “He must be the local drunk.”
“No, lady,” I told her, “We all generally take turns.”
I’ve mentioned my good friend
Bruce Diksas a few times in my posts. Bruce spends most of the year out of the country, in places like
Bali,
Nepal and
Australia. Due to his proclivity for traveling, and his astute sense of the ridiculous, the editors of this blog site have offered him the prestigious and highly paid position of
The Third City’s
Foreign Correspondent. As of this writing,
Big Mike, the Barn Boss of this site, and Bruce’s agent,
Moe Howard, are still dickering over the terms of the contract. The hangup seems to be the company car. Big Mike is offering a
1997 Ford Taurus while Bruce is still holding out for a late model
Buick Electra 225.
Anyway, until Bruce comes on board and provides us with his own unique and informative brand of bullshit, I’m going to steal one of his stories.
Now, Bruce is a guy who enjoys a good drink once in a while. In fact, he has had the the great pleasure of ordering drinks on five different continents. When they open a saloon in Antarctica I’m sure it won’t be long before Bruce is on a first name basis with the bartender.
One day Bruce was sitting in his favorite watering hole on the island of Bali when in walks the biggest man he has ever seen. Not only that, the huge man is accompanied by a six-foot tall blond that would make
Stevie Wonder look twice. When the awesome couple took seats at the bar next to Bruce, he realized that the man was none other than
Luc Longley, the Aussie who was the former center for the Chicago Bulls. Bruce, being a Chicagoan and a Bulls fan, introduced himself and offered to buy Luc and his companion drinks. Luc accepted and shortly afterward reciprocated.
A few hours and quite a few drinks later, Bruce was feeling pretty good. In fact, he felt bulletproof, like
Superman. He felt so good that he challenged Luc Longley to a game of one-on-one.
Luc, who must have faced this situation countless times, graciously declined, claiming a bum knee.
We were having a few drinks, a few months later, when Bruce related this story to me. Maybe it was the booze, or maybe Bruce was just feeling feisty, but he put his own unique spin on the tale. He didn’t outright say it, but he intimated that perhaps, just perhaps, the great Luc Longley chickened out.
“Can’t say I blame him,” I replied. “After all, why would any seven-foot tall former NBA basketball player with three chanpionship rings to his credit want to tangle with a drunk 60-year-old Lithuanian with a four-inch vertical leap.”
“My point, exactly,” Bruce said.
—by Big Mike on May 30th, 2009
I was on the phone with my esteemed colleague, the renowned author Benny Jay, the other day. Somehow the conversation got around to the first concert I’d ever attended. I told him that I’d seen Parliament and War at the International Amphitheater in 1973. There was silence for a moment, then Benny Jay launched into hosannas about my coolness that led me to believe if we’d have been in the same room, he’d have begun salaaming me.
Now, Benny Jay is as wired in to the
Brother Culture about as much as any
white man ever has been. I assumed he’d been in the groove from childhood on. Sadly, he wasn’t. Benny Jay later admitted that way back in 1973, he was still listening to Top 40 songs on
WLS and
WCFL.
In the 60s, these two seminal Chicago rock ‘n’ roll radio stations had introduced me to
Sam Cooke, Otis Redding,
Jackie Wilson and the
Chambers Brothers as well as blue-eyed soul brothers like the
Rolling Stones,
Tommy James and the Shondells, the
Young Rascals and others. I still listen to all of them to this day. But by 1973, the two radio titans had grown stale, reflecting the state of pop music at the time, and my radio dial never again came near either AM 890 or 1000. I refused to listen to the unbearable crap they were playing. To illustrate, here’s a list of some of the top songs of 1973. Read it and try to refrain from retching:
- “Tie A Yellow Ribbon ‘Round The Old Oak Tree,” by Tony Orlando and Dawn
- “The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia,” by Vickie Lawrence
- “Little Willy,” by Sweet
- “Half Breed,” by Cher
- “Wildflower,” by Skylark
- “The Morning After,” by Maureen McGovern
- “Diamond Girl,” by Seals and Crofts
- “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” by Bette Midler
- “Funny Face,” by Donna Fargo
- “The Twelth Of Never,” by Donny Osmond
And some people think waterboarding is torture. Poor Benny. He says it wasn’t until he went away to college that his musical horizons broadened. He became infatuated with
Jimi Hendrix, among many others. Now, I can take Jimi Hendrix or leave him (well, to tell the truth, I’ll leave him, period) but that’s a matter of taste. At least he turned a youthful Benny Jay away from
Tony Orlando and Dawn.
Our conversation got back to that first concert I’d attended. My pal
Whitey and I took the No. 72 North Avenue bus from its western terminus at Narragansett Avenue seven miles east to Halsted Street, where we picked up the No. 8 bus and headed south another 57 blocks to Bridgeport and the Amphitheater. The ride took a good two-and-a-half hours but we both loved War. The song, “
The World Is A Ghetto,” was a brilliant, haunting, 10-minute-long masterpiece. Whenever it came on the radio (by this time, I’d become an habitual
WGLD listener – the low-watt
Oak Park station that later gave way to
WXRT) I became lost in it, cranking the volume up to
Nigel Tufnel’s mythical
11. A bomb could have gone off next to me but I’d take no notice.
Neither Whitey nor I were familiar with Parliament but by the time its opening set was finished, we’d become diehard fans. Since we were a couple of half-broke Northwest Side teenagers, we could only afford cheap seats. We sat somewhere near the upper boundary of the troposphere and viewed the proceedings through a dense haze of legal and illegal smoke. We got back home to Galewood around 4:00am, proud of ourselves for our sojourn into the big, black inner city.
“How many white people do you think there were at the Amphitheater that night?” Benny asked.
“I’d say two – Whitey and me,” I replied.
“So, you were the only two white guys in the whole place, and one of you is named Whitey!” Benny exclaimed, roaring. Then, he added a correction. “
Three white guys – you forgot War’s harmonica player,
Lee Oskar.”
I congratulated Benny Jay on his knowledge of War. Thank the gods, dumb luck or modern pharmacology, his listening to
Donny Osmond hasn’t resulted in brain damage.
—by Jon Randolph on May 29th, 2009
While photojournalist Jon Randolph lolls the days away on a fishing boat in a Canadian lake, we’re presenting pix from his trips up and down US Highway 61. Here’s the second batch. – The Eds.
“Raccoon,” Minnesota
“Celose” (note the sign in the window), Minnesota
“Merchant,” Minnesota
“Country Kitchen,” Iowa
“Yard Sale,” Tennessee
“Mirror,” Duluth, Minnesota
This is a personal look at mid-America that I shot between 1976 and 1985. At the times I shot these pix, the approximately 1700 miles of US Highway 61 roughly followed the Mississippi River from New orleans to Minneapolis, then jutted northeast to Duluth and then along the western edge of Lake Superior to Thunder Bay, Ontario.
This is the second installment – part three will run next Friday. There’s a lot to look at. – JR
Visit The Third City every day for new posts, treats, surprises, words and pictures. We’ll be moving soon! Our new home will be thethirdcity.net. We’re building the site right now – knowing us and our meager technological talents, it’ll actually be up sometime around the turn of the next century. Anyway, we’ll keep you up to date. – The Eds.
—by Benny Jay on May 28th, 2009
I’m driving north on Southport, and my car dies….
I know there’s no good place to stall in traffic, but this place particularly sucks — in the left turn lane, just south of the intersection. I suppose it could be worse. I could, you know, be in the middle of the intersection. Guess I should count my blessings….
It’s noon. Car’s zipping by. Nothing I can do. I try to go through life without swearing. I really do. It shows a lack of discipline and creativity. But, every now and then — FUCK!!!
Ah, now I feel much better….
I have a cell phone. But it’s almost as useless as my car. The battery’s low. The battery’s been low for about two weeks. I need a new battery. As a matter of fact, I was on my way to the cell phone store to get a new battery when my car died. Can you believe this shit?
I figure I have just enough juice in my battery to make one quick call. So I call my wife, who’s really busy at work. And I tell her: Can’ttalklongphonealmostoutofbatteriescardiedintrafficcalltriplea….
Which translates into: Can’t talk long; phone almost out of batteries; call Triple AAA.
Message conveyed, I put on the blinkers, rush to the back of my car, and direct oncoming traffic to go around me. Some doofus in a Toyota honks his horn, like, you know, I’m standing in the middle of the street for some reason other than my car has died.
“My car is dead,” I tell him.
“Fuck you,” he says.
Ah, the compassion of my fellow man….
A guy on a bike pulls over and asks: “Need help?”
I want to hug him. Instead, I say: “Thanks, man….”
He gets behind my car. “We’ll push it through the intersection,” he says. “So you’re not blocking traffic….”
We push, but the car won’t budge. “You have to take it out of park,” he tells me.
“Right,” I say. “I knew that — I really did….”
I hop back into my car. I’m about to switch gears when I see the keys dangling from the ignition. On an impulse, I turn the keys. It works!
“It’s a miracle — the car’s on,” I tell the biker. “Thanks for everything — you’re the man….”
I want to turn left and park on the side of the road. But the light’s red and the car’s quaking, like it’s about to die at any instant. I’m waiting and waiting and waiting for the light to turn green. Ever notice how long something takes when you’re waiting for it to happen?
The light turns green — finally. I make the turn. The car’s like an animal who’s been shot in the leg with a bullet, limping along in pain. I drive it past the no-parking, bus-stop zone. I pull it into an empty space, just as the car dies. Phew!
I get a call from an editor. I tell him I can’t talk — battery low. I get a call from my wife — she tells me Triple A is on its way. My phone dies. All juice gone. What the hell good is it? I toss it on the seat. I feel like the main character from that Isaac Bashevas Singer story who’s on a train from New York City to Montreal in the years just after World War II. It’s modern times and he’s a modern man. But he feels as though with a flip of the switch he’ll slip back to the Dark Ages. That’s how fragile our existence is….
The deep thought passes and I bide the time the way I usually do — thinking about the Bulls. Today’s paper had a picture of Ben Gordon wearing a Blackhawks jersey. I wonder if the Bulls will sign Gordon. I start to call Norm to talk it over, when I remember: My phone’s dead.
The Triple A tow truck arrives. The driver’s named Ed. He couldn’t be nicer. He hitches me to his tow truck, tells me to hop on in and he drives me to the mechanic. Along the way, he says the problem is the alternator — the thing that feeds juice to the battery. It used to be called the generator. He’s giving me a whole lecture when — wham! — the tow truck hits a speed bump that he obviously didn’t see coming.
It feels as though my car was dropped from the sky.
He hops out of the truck to see if my car is damaged. Oh, brother, just what I need.
“It’s okay,” he assures me when he gets back.
He drives me to the mechanic and we walk into office. “We’re here,” I tell the lady at the cash register.
“Now, who are you?” she asks.
“The Ford,” says Ed.
“Oh,” she says. “Your P’s husband….”
“Yeah, the one and only….”
She fills out a form and says: “Who should we call?”
“My wife,” I say. “She’s the brains of the family….”
“Guess you’re the beauty,” she says.
I shrug with Elvis-like humility and say: “I guess that’s what I bring to the equation….”
When I leave the shop, she’s smiling. I’m feeling pretty good, like I’m still quick with a one-liner.
Gonna call my wife to tell her all about my witty exchange. And I remember — the cell phone’s still dead. Aw, man. That’s the thing about technology. It’s one step forward, one step back. Probably all better off without it….
I walk home, get my bike, and peddle on over to the cell phone store.
—by Milo Samardzija on May 27th, 2009
I’ll eat almost anything. The word “omnivore” doesn’t do me justice. If it walks, crawls, flies or swims – as long as it doesn’t have opposable thumbs – I’ll try it.
I’m not saying I’m as adventurous as
Andrew Zimmern, the nutcase who hosts “
Bizarre Foods” on the
Travel Channel but I’ve eaten some pretty odd meals. I’ve eaten bugs, rodents, pig and cow testicles, raw beef and raw fish. I’ve tried fungi, mosses, weeds and leaves from trees. I’ve eaten food that looked great but tasted vile and food that looked disgusting but was absolutely delicious. I’ve had food that’s gotten me stoned (hash brownies) and food that’s sent me to the emergency room (tainted chicken).
That said, there is one meal that I prefer over all others. It is the meal I would order if I was on Death Row and it would be the last food I’d ever taste. I’d go to the gallows with a twinkle in my eye and a song in my heart as long as my face and hands were smeared with sweet, sticky and spicy red sauce.
Yes, folks I’m talking about barbecued ribs, God’s gift to the human taste bud.
I’ve eaten ribs in rib hotspots
all over the country -
Chicago, the
Carolinas,
Memphis and
Kansas City. Each of these places claims supremacy in the art of barbecue. And each has a valid claim. My good friend
Bruce Diksas, tells me that there’s even a rib joint on the island of
Bali, where he lives part of the year. The place is run by an American ex-patriot and advertises Chicago-style ribs.
One day Bruce decided to try the Balinesian ribs. Now, Bruce grew up in
Bridgeport and knows a thing or two about ribs. When he finished the platter, the bar owner asked Bruce how he liked them.
Bruce shook his head sadly and said, “Sorry, pal, these ribs would never make it in Chicago.
One of the first times I ever tasted great ribs was in a small storefront in
Gary, Indiana, called
Shoe’s Ribs and Chicken. Shoe’s specialty was a rib sandwich, which was nothing more than two or three rib bones slapped between two slices of
Wonder Bread, drenched in sauce and served on waxed paper. I don’t recall if napkins were made available. Anyway, those rib sandwiches were delicious. Man, a couple of those and a cold bottle of
Blatz and you were set for the day.
When I settled in Chicago, I thought I found rib heaven. There were good rib joints everywhere. My favorite was a small spot off North Avenue by the Chicago River called
Edith’s. In my opinion, Edith’s ribs were close to perfect. Edith used baby back ribs and the texture was just right. They weren’t wussy ribs that fell off the bone if a slight breeze passed by. You had to work them a bit but it was well worth the trouble.
The best ribs aren’t always found in restaurants. Some of the best ribs I’ve ever tasted have been at backyard barbecues. Two stand out in particular. One old friend, a college buddy named Way Out Willie Bauer, was and probably still is, a rib master. He took infinite care with his ribs, hovering over the grill like a card shark over pocket aces. He constantly adjusted the coals, carefully turned the slabs and watched for flare-ups as intensely as a California park ranger watches for brush fires. When it came time to add the sauce, Willie’s brushwork was every bit the equal of Picasso’s. And Willie would accomplish these magnificent rib feats while consuming huge quantities of booze and reefer.
Another rib master is my neighbor, John O’Connor, who works as an attorney in order to finance his rib habit. John prefers a dry rub to sauce. Although I’m a sauce man I have to admit that John’s dry rub is the best I’ve ever tasted, spicy but not overpowering. He hosts a backyard cookout every summer. I always try to be on my best behavior at his cookouts because I don’t want to get drunk and do something so stupid that he won’t invite me back. His ribs are that good.
A while ago I wrote about visiting Kansas City with Bruce Diksas. We went for a reunion of our old army outfit. Now, Kansas City has a lot of things going for it. It’s not
Milwaukee or
Indianapolis, for one thing. But in my mind Kansas City’s greatest asset, it’s municipal pride and joy, is
Arthur Bryant’s.
For years, Arthur Bryant’s, along with the
Rendezvous in Memphis and
Lexington Barbecue in
Lexington, North Carolina, has been ranked as one of the top rib joints in the country. There was no way on Earth we were going to Kansas City and not visit Bryant’s. It would be like going back to your home town and not visiting Mom.
We were not disappointed. Bryant’s served superb ribs, meaty, al dente and with a wonderful sauce. It was everything I’d hoped it would be. We each had a slab accompanied by French fries and a scoop of slaw. I doubt Bruce and I spoke a word while devouring those fantastic ribs. We just grunted, groaned, belched, slurped, licked our fingers and guzzled beer. When we finished, we leaned back in our chairs, patted our distended bellies and sighed with pleasure.
“Well, what do you think?” I asked Bruce.
“You know, Milo,” he said, “I think those ribs would make it in Chicago.”
—by Big Mike on May 26th, 2009
I have more phobias than I have fingers and toes. My phobic history has even evolved. For instance, I was pretty much incapable of going over a bridge in a car as recently as 15 years ago. In 1992, I essentially had a nervous collapse at the foot of the Second Street Bridge over the wide Ohio River because of my unbearable panic. Now, though, that particular terror has gone into remission. I drive the mile-long span as easily as ordering a medium pizza with sausage and green peppers.
But I still have a healthy (well, unhealthy) collection of hysterias. Probably the biggest of all is bees, wasps and hornets. No, it’s not a sane person’s reasonable caution concerning the sting-y buggers. I have nightmares about them. I can’t even look at pictures of them. Should a nature show on TV suddenly zoom in on a beehive, I dash out of the room. As for those whackjobs who like to wear bee beards, well, they ought to be horsewhipped.
It’s so ridiculous that even typing the word bee makes me jittery. That, my friends, is a phobia.
My lineup of shrinks and skull jockeys has urged me to unearth the genesis of this terror for decades. The best I can come up with is an incident when I was about four years old. It was a sunny summer day. I was fooling around in the backyard without any shoes on.
My father was
mowing the lawn and I was pretending to help him. Apparently, my seemingly futile attempts to drag the bushel basket over to him when it was time to empty the grass catcher were actually of service. Who knew?
Anyway, at one point I took a step and felt a sharp pain. I looked down and saw beneath my pink big toe the mad, buzzing, wing-flapping bee who’d just planted his shiv in me. I shrieked louder than
Janet Leigh in her
Bates Motel room shower and ran inside. Dad either couldn’t hear me or – more likely – chose not to. He didn’t possess an unending reservoir of empathy for the anguish of four-year-olds.
Ma grabbed me and hustled me into the bathroom where she applied a variety of palliatives to my throbbing toe. She yanked the stinger out with a tweezers, washed my foot with soap and hot water, dabbed
mercurochrome on the wound and, for all I know, sprinkled garlic powder on it. At some point during these ministrations, Dad must have called for his bushel basket and found me missing. He was hot.
Dad marched into the house and called my name in that loud, deep, father-voice that’s meant to petrify anyone within earshot. I couldn’t answer because I was still sobbing. He called my name again and the second ensuing silence enraged him. He stomped into the dining room, off of which was the bathroom, and found Ma operating on my foot. “I’ll be goddamned!” he hollered. “When I call you, you answer!”
Ma hollered back: “For chrissakes, Joe! he was stung by a bee!”
What followed was one of their classic donnybrooks. My parents fought exactly as
George Costanza’s parents would on TV some three decades later. Every time I see
Frank and Estelle screeching at each other on “
Seinfeld” reruns, I alternate between convulsive laughter and painful grimaces. It’s as though I’m watching my family’s home movies.
At that age, such brawls scared the bejesus out of me. Ma and Dad would take positions at either end of the house and launch verbal salvoes at each other for what seemed hours. They swore, they called each other names, they goddamned each other and themselves countless times, their faces turned beet red and there was fire in their eyes. Normally, I’d hide in my room until they’d shouted themselves out.
I did so on this particular day, all the while telling myself it was my stupid fault for getting stung by a bee. As usual, after such open hostilities had ceased, my parents would then engage in a Cold War, refusing to speak to each other for days – even weeks – on end. I was, I told myself, a jerk for causing another such stretch of bad blood.
Cut to Friday afternoon. The Loved One announced that she’d discovered a hornets nest under the eave of our house. My blood turned cold. I didn’t even respond, thinking that if I ignored her, the nest and her forthcoming suggestion that I do something about it would simply go away. Mirabile dictu, she didn’t breathe another word about it for the rest of the day. Almost.
That night, about 11:00pm, I was sitting in my boxers and flip-flops at the dining room table, reading celebrity gossip on
dlisted online and feeling my eyelids getting heavier by the minute. That’s when The Loved One, who’d been snoring on the sofa, began to stir. I heard her pad around the kitchen, pouring herself a glass of milk and sneaking a piece of chocolate cake. She joined me in the dining room.
“Mike,” she asked, “would you help me do something?”
“Certainly, my precious angel, light of my life and partner ’till death. What is it?”
“Help me take down the hornets nest. It’s the perfect time; they’re dormant for the night. It’ll be easy.”
My eyes, half-lidded 15 seconds earlier, now were saucer wide. My legs turned to jelly. I responded monosyllabically:
“No.”
“But Mike, we have to do it!”
“No.”
“I need your help!”
“No.”
“You’re so selfish,” she snapped. With that, she stomped out of the room. She refused to speak to me at the beginning of the next day. She eventually warmed back up by noon. Thankfully, she hasn’t brought up the hornets nest again.
For my part, I was prepared to fight a Cold War for days – even weeks – on end.
—by Benny Jay on May 25th, 2009
The strongest memory I have of Donna Reed is as Jimmy Stewart’s wife — Mary Bailey — in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
I’ve seen that movie a hundred times — watched it nearly every Christmas for as long as I can remember. I love that scene where Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed — young and in love — are walking home at night from the dance. He promises to give her anything she wants in life. Just say the word and he’s gonna “throw a lasso around the moon” and give it to her.
Yeah, yeah, I know — I’m hopeless….
I was thinking of Donna Reed cause of a story in today’s New York Times by Larry Rohter. Turns out that during World War II — when Reed was still in her twenties — hundreds of soldiers sent off to the battlefields of Asia, Africa and Europe saw her as a beloved reminder of the life, women and country they missed.
They’d write her letters — hundreds of hundreds of letters — “as if to a sister or the girl next door, confiding moments of homesickness, loneliness, privation and anxiety,” Rohter writes.
“The boys in our outfit think you are a typical American girl, someone who we would like to come home to!!!!!” wrote Sergeant William F. Love. He wrote that letter on August 18, 1944 from the jungles of New Guinea.
Here’s another letter quoted in the story: “Sometimes I wish I was back there with the old gang, able to go the usual rounds of the week. Occasionally, I will set on the fantail and look at the moon, wondering how many of our old friends were doing the same.”
Then there’s this 1943 letter from Lieutenant Norman P. Klinker: “One thing I promise you — life on the battlefield is a wee bit different from the `movie version.’ It is tough and bloody and dirty….quite an interesting and heartless life at one and the same time.”
On January 6, 1944, Lieutenant Klinker was killed in action in Italy.
These letters would have been long forgotten. Except Donna Reed saved them — kept them in boxes — and her daughter discovered them. One thing led to the another and Rohter wrote it up in today’s New York Times.
Here’s the thing: Donna Reed “became an ardent antiwar campaigner” during the Vietnam War. She was co-chairwoman of “a 285,000-member group called Another Mother For Peace,” and she volunteered for Senator Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 anti-war presidential campaign, according to Rohter.
The story quotes her biographer, Jay Fultz, who writes: “She looked forward to a time when 19-year-old boys will no longer be taken away to fight in old men’s battles.”
Anyway, on Memorial Day, I’d like to offer a toast of gratitude to all the men and women who served — my father; my uncles, Milo; my nephew Terry; and John Reeves, just to name a few.
And here’s to all the other warriors — Donna Reed among them — who fought just as hard for peace.
