Category — Leonard Pierce

The new episode of Smart City™, a wonderful public radio program covering urbanism and city life, features a reading by Leonard Pierce of one of his pieces from The City Desk.

It is even referred to as a “special treat.” But of course it is. We all knew this.

So- listen on your local station or go and listen online and let them know if you like it.

Also on the program is Shawn Micallef, editor of Toronto’s excellent Spacing magazine which you really ought to check out.
- RJ White, Editor

9:42PM, November 4, 2008

Ladies and gentlemen, members of the press, Bill – hey, Bill.

I’ve been asked, in light of the fact that I appear to have lost the race to become mayor of our fair city, to make a concession speech. This I am all to happy to do, as I have no recollection of having filed papers to run for mayor, and have done my best over the past few months not to campaign in any way whatsoever.

However, my aides tell me that I have somehow managed to accumulate 592 votes [He ended up with 3,025- Ed.], and I feel that I should thank all of you who showed me such confidence personally, as well as ask you why you would do such a thing. I highly enjoyed my time as chairman of the Fifth Ward’s Democratic organization, a position I have long attributed to poorly informed voters and the inability of former chairman Robert Hesselman to hold his liquor, but I have neither sought higher office, nor been able to discern how I became a candidate for same.

I realize that Mayor Wilders has made a poor showing of it lately, a fact he seeks to attribute to me when he makes dark references to “outsiders” who seek to “disruptively divide the loyalties of our citizens”. It is hard to know how to respond to this, since I have spent the entire period of my candidacy watching Korean monster movies and drinking martinis at Lonegal’s Tavern. I suppose some people might resent Mayor Wilder’s wild accusations, but I always thought he was an asshole, so it’s not like I think any less of him.

While it is, on a certain level, disappointing to know that the city will be denied my leadership for the next…hey, Bill, how long does the mayor serve here? It’s five years, right? Two? Two years? That doesn’t sound right. It is right? Okay, two years. [It is four- Ed.] What was I saying? Okay. Anyway, it’s probably for the best, as I was only vaguely aware that I was running in the first place, and had made no actual plans concerning what to do if elected beyond throwing a big party, which, as you can see, I am doing anyway, despite having lost.

I’d like to thank Tony Bellarosa at the Broadsider both for endorsing my campaign and making me aware of its existence; Commissioner Dugan for spelling my name correctly on the ballot; and Trudy Haines at Lonegal’s for making great martinis. I would also like to add that while she has turned me down for a date several times before, I would like her to reconsider in light of the fact that nearly 600 people think I am somehow qualified to run a city.

Congratulations to our next mayor, whoever they are. Take it easy, folks, but take it.
- Leonard Pierce

10:57PM, November 4, 2008

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow citizens, Democrats of our fair city, and all of you who have worked so hard with me these last four years: it is time to move on.

We extend our congratulations to Councilwoman Cosgrove, who fought a hard campaign and achieved victory after initially being considered a serious underdog. Of course, our Democratic ticket was split, and it’s easy to get people on your side when you have a kid like that, but that doesn’t make any difference now. Ms. Cosgrove beat us in a fair fight, and all we can hope is that she takes her role as the new leader of this city as seriously as she takes her role as chairwoman of the Upper West Bridge and Ornithological Society.

The challenges Ms. Cosgrove will face as the new mayor will be many and varied. The decline of our environmental standards, a faltering economy, and a major shift in leadership at the national and state level will only exacerbate the existing problems of running a large municipal area such as this. Additionally, there were a number of crises towards which, once it became clear that my re-election was in doubt, I chose to take a ‘hands-off’ approach, so that my eventual successor would be able to jump right into the swing of things right away. Our people demand more from their leaders than a wasteful ‘honeymoon period’. I would love to offer my services to the new mayor should she wish to take advantage of my two terms’ worth of experience, but unfortunately, my lovely wife Jean and I will be called away to Aruba to help our son Geoffrey train for the Olympics for the next two and a half years. We do wish her all the luck in the world, though, and would like to remind her that there is no shame in resigning rather than hurting your job performance with bad decision-making.

In my two terms as mayor, I have sought to elevate our fair city to its rightful place as a crown jewel of American cities. To that end, I have visited dozens of foreign cities to see how they are run, to take with me their good policies (wrought iron, portion control, solar lawnmowers) while rejecting their bad ones (kidnapping, fascism, overpriced mai-tais). I have vigorously fought for food safety, paperwork reduction, and a stationary bike in every home, a goal I feel we could have achieved by 2010 if given the chance. Some, like my honorable opponent Mr. Armstrong (the Libertarian one), claimed that I was spending too much time away from home. To this I reply: I spent so much time away only because it made me ever more eager to return. Others, like Mr. Pierce of the Fifth Ward, asked me who I was and what I did for a living. To which I proudly say: I am Joseph Wilders, and I was once the mayor of this city.

I thought there’d be more applause for that one.

Anyway, there are those who say my policies were too radical. There are those who say the city didn’t need a goat wrangler. There are those who say that there is nothing that Acapulco could teach us that necessitated a six-week fact-finding tour. There are those who say that issuing municipal bonds in my own name is against the letter as well as the spirit of the law. But I will tell them what I told those who supported me all these years: everything I have ever done as mayor, I have done to help this city. So if some of the things I have done have been questionable, or unethical, or a fire hazard, you should really be blaming the city, not me.

Thank you for the opportunity to lead. I look forward to writing you many postcards. Good night.
- Leonard Pierce

As a public service, The City Desk periodically offers up selected items culled from local police reports. (Note: More violent, standard items do not frequently show up here, as they are covered in the local papers with regularity.)

7:29 AM
700 block of Westmont Street: 26-year old man found sleeping in backyard hot tub of ex-girlfriend.

10:41 AM
1300 block of Farmer Avenue: Vandals have swapped prices on lot models at Uvalde’s Used Autos. Police are unable to locate perpetrators, but successfully quell a public disturbance when a number of customers all insist on purchasing a 2005 Lexus sedan that has been marked at a price of $29.99.

10:58 AM
1600 block of Villers Street: Assault and battery reported at Lula’s Hair-Did beauty salon. A 28-year-old female is taken into custody and charged with attacking another customer with her artificial fingernails.

11:14 AM
1400 block of Eudora Way: Police, acting on tips from an informant who has been working with them for over eight months, break up a gambling ring operating out of the basement of a residential home. Eleven people are charged with illegal betting, RICO violations, and animal cruelty for operating the city’s largest kitten racing racket to date.

12:51 PM
Corner of Landon and Montana Streets: Man reports 1985 Dodge Aries station wagon stolen. While in a heated argument with a man and woman over the price of a stereo system purchased over the Web site “Craigslist,” two other individuals got into his car and drove it away. The theft occurred two days before the victim filed a report. The man and woman apparently have no involvement in the car theft.

2:10 PM
1700 block of Whittier Way: A suspect is taken into custody after having exposed his sexual organ to a number of visitors to a gas station restroom. Officers are unconvinced by his claim to be Batman, conducting important investigation into a case involving the Royal Flush Gang.

2:54 PM
2400 block of Moncton Avenue: Officers issue multiple citations in a five-car pile-up. What would ordinarily be a routine traffic accident is legally complicated by the fact that the initial collision, between an extra-long stretch limousine and a Cooper Mini, caused the second vehicle to careen nearly a block and come to rest after knocking over a pedestrian on the 300 block of Kells Way, which is technically in the jurisdiction of the neighboring suburb of Goliad.

3:31 PM
1600 block of Terwilliger Park Avenue: Police are dispatched to break up a gang fight. Upon arrival, officers discover a group of well-dressed young men who, three days ago, had been encountered by officers after a previous report of gang violence, but who were released without charges when they claimed to have been rehearsing dance numbers from West Side Story. After questioning, however, it becomes clear that this was simply a ruse to cover up for actual fighting. Seven are arrested, two are detained and then released, and one confused young man from a local theater company is held until his mother can come get him.

5:19 PM
100 block Hayes Lane, President Heights: Dog in tree.

11:00 PM
200 block 15th Street: In ParkSafe ramp adjacent to the Academy Theater, 63 cars are broken into, GPS devices stolen.
- Leonard Pierce, RJ White

This week, the News celebrates the 50th anniversary of its longest-running feature, the “I Make the Odds” column penned since July of 1958 by Harvey Preakston.

Preakston, a graduate of City College and the son of former rugby impresario Reginald Preakston, joined the paper in 1955 as a young sports reporter who was assigned to cover Mighty Elms games. However, he soon proved to be somewhat uncanny as a prognosticator, and his reputation as being able to lay astonishingly precise odds on upcoming sporting events soon spilled over from the office to his column. So accurate were his predictions that he was thrice investigated by the city’s police department and once by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who compelled him to sign a statement that he was not acting in cahoots with any organized crime syndicate. After correctly predicting the winner of every World Series from 1955 to 1958 within one month of the start of the season, his astonishing ability to figure the odds netted him his very first column.

Thanks to ongoing suspicions regarding the pernicious influence of gamblers and other shady criminal types, the News was obligated to include, at the top of every “I Make the Odds” column, the now-legendary ‘FOR AMUSEMENT ONLY’ disclaimer, originally printed in red ink at considerable cost to the paper. (Rumors that they recouped that cost through judicious betting on Harvey Preakston’s odds have never been confirmed.) After the initial blush of novelty wore off, it began to be reported that Preakston’s sporting predictions were correct only around 68%-75% of the time, depending on the sport; his oddsmaking was nearly infallible with baseball, basketball and women’s tennis, while he inexplicably struggled with football and cricket. After this, law enforcement interest in his work began to wane – apparently, it went unexplained to officers of the court that this was still well in excess of the percentage dictated by chance. The disclaimer reverted to black ink, but Harvey Preakston kept on predicting.

As the years went by, he proved equally adept at laying odds on events that had nothing to do with sports: he correctly predicted the results of the 1960 presidential race, down to the deciding state and the number of electoral votes won by Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy; and he also proved correct that the Russians would launch an orbital spacecraft before the U.S., but also that the Americans would land a man on the moon before 1970 (an event upon which he first laid odds in 1962). Subsequently, the “I Make the Odds” column became a venue for his bookmaking on all sorts of events, sports-related and otherwise: from the winners of local city council races to the ages at which his friends’ daughters would get married (a tendency which earned him at least one black eye from editorial director Ken Marsh), he laid odds on it all.

Some of his predictions were better than others. While he’s legendary for his World Series picks, his correct prediction that Kissinger High would go without a football victory from 1972 to 1978, and his astoundingly precise oddsmaking on the weight of the prize catch at the American Bass Anglers Association tournament in 2002, few people today recall his dismal record predicting World Cup victors (as in 1966, when he put the odds of victory at 2:1 for the Canadian national team, which was not in the tournament), or his having laid 7:1 odds that, following the Blizzard of ’89, civilization would permanently collapse, never to recover.

However, through it all, he has been known as a good-humored, friendly voice, a confident oddsmaker always willing to hand out tips to anyone who would ask for them, and, in recent years, a beloved fixture in the city’s journalistic scene. Preakston, now 73 years old and believed to be one of the wealthiest men in the city despite his claim that he never gambles or in any way acts on his own odds, will celebrate his anniversary this Saturday night with a large party for friends, colleagues and members of the press at the Typesetters’ Club on Landon Avenue. Preakston announced in yesterday’s column that the odds are 1:1 that he will “leave the party three sheets to the wind.”
- Leonard Pierce

As a public service, The City Desk periodically offers up selected items culled from local police reports. (Note: More violent, standard items do not frequently show up here, as they are covered in the local papers with regularity.)

7:23 am
3700 block of Pennsylvania Avenue: A group of students are arrested after carrying Davidson High School principal Stephanie Allen’s 2007 Mini Cooper into the school’s second-floor cafeteria. The students, who are all underage, are charged with grand theft auto, operating a motor vehicle without a license, disorderly conduct, local and state hazardous-materials infractions, vandalism, property destruction and a parking violation.

9:02 am
1700 block of Marway Lane: Tandem bicycle reported stolen.

9:27 pm
2000 block of Dunn Avenue: Gupta’s Stop ‘n’ Pop calls in a shoplifting incident. When police arrive, suspect claims that Gupta offers free in-store refills on fountain drinks. Mr. Gupta explains that the policy was never meant to be offered in perpetuity, and the suspect, who has been continually refilling his 44-oz. Mountain Dew since 1:30 PM the previous day, is violating the spirit of the contract. No charges are filed, but suspect is politely asked to leave.

12:52 pm
2100 block of Villers Street: A 22-year-old suspect is taken into custody after having waved a firearm in a threatening manner on the public thoroughfare. He is quickly released, however, when it is discovered that the gun is carved out of a potato.

1:30 pm
2100 block of Villers Street: The 22-year-old suspect is rearrested when dispatcher informs officers of an extant law prohibiting the duplication of illegal weapons out of vegetables.

5:12 pm
6800 block Saint Clair Avenue: A woman reports that her 1963 Studebaker Lark has been stolen.

8:12 pm
4700 block of Humber Avenue: A man reports that three chairs and a pitcher of lemonade were stolen from his front porch.

9:15 pm
200 block of Nebraska Avenue, A woman reports that someone has placed honey in the lock of her front door.

10:22 pm
1400 block of Pacific Street: A man reports that someone has trimmed his bushes without authorization.

11:03 pm
1300 block of Newbury Street: A woman reports the loss of her cell phone in a taxi.

11:33 pm
John Paul Jones Park: Officers recover a 1963 Studebaker Lark from the playground. Police report that it was the same vehicle reported missing earlier.

3:32 pm
300 block of Coffey Street, Emergency Services Unit officers rescue a male child who had his head stuck in a fence.
- Craig Gaines, Leonard Pierce, Hoyt Schermerhorn

Ever since its inception in 1952, the Hjalmar Marklund Annex to the Central Branch of the Municipal Public Library has been a point of pride for the city’s library system, and one of the United States’ leading collections of Swedish-American art and literature. Occupying the entire fourth floor (with the exception of the Pal Hutley Forbidden Books Vault) and containing thousands of volumes, important artworks and sculptures, photographs and sheet music, the so-called Marklund Collection – named after the famed yachtsman, financier, and philanthropist who moved to the city just after the Second World War – has long been a selling point to researchers, ethnographers, and tourists from Scandinavia.

Unfortunately, recent revelations about Hjalmar Marklund have put the entire future of the collection in jeopardy, and could presage a long and difficult series of lawsuits.

Three months ago, while researching a biography of Hjalmar Marklund, local journalist Peg Boatwright (author of He-Brews: How the Jewish Community Helped End Prohibition) made a stunning discovery. By going through birth and travel records, and piecing together identity documents that had been sealed since the war, she learned that Marklund was not, in fact, Swedish at all, but rather an Italian named Eugenio Zanzotto. As a young Communist, he fled his homeland in 1922, fearing persecution at the hands of the Fascists, and settled in Sweden, where he made a fortune and rode out WWII thanks to the nation’s neutrality. Moving to the United States, he retained the assumed identity in hopes of evading questions about his past during the post-war Red Scare. Since he never married (his status as a lifelong bachelor made him a frequent target of jibes from local wags, and there was a longstanding rumor that he was romantically involved with the famous jockey Loxey Pederewski), the ruse was never discovered until Boatwright learned the truth.

The revelation that the city’s most prominent Scandinavian-Americans, and the owner of one of the largest and richest collections of Swediana in the country, was in fact born in Trento, Italy, has caused shockwaves in local society, and cast grave doubts about the future of the Hjalmar Marklund Annex. The initial suggestion, by library administrator Monty Daniels, that the collection – which contains, among other things, a full collection of Pippi Longstocking books, a set of first editions of August Strindberg plays, the world’s largest collection of Johan Tobias Sergel sculptures and the original outfits worn by ABBA on the occasion of their Eurovision Song Contest win – simply be renamed the Eugenio Zanzotto Annex was dismissed as “silly” by the Library’s board of directors.

Other suggestions made at a public meeting held two weeks ago included swapping the entire collection for New York’s Campanella Collection of Italiana; attempting to expand the collection to include the works of Italo-Swedish artists, if any can be found; and forgetting the whole thing and pretending it never happened. Although a number of lawsuits have already been filed, a recent poll in the Journal-Clarion indicates that the issue may not be as divisive as it seems on the surface: fully 46% of those polled were unable to distinguish between Sweden and Italy, and 18% believed they were in the same country.
- Leonard Pierce

Our city’s reputation for somewhat slipshod urban planning is as much a part of its character, for better or for worse, as is government corruption in Chicago, gridlock in Los Angeles, and chili with spaghetti in Cincinnati. The city particularly seems to lose its grip around New Year’s:

:: In 1994 at the Artemis Nightclub, the oversized mechanical silver apple and full moon contraptions, which are traditionally raised to the top of their housing at midnight on New Year’s Eve, somehow became entangled with one another, stalling halfway up the main shaft and making a calamitous grinding noise while the gears tried to work loose. Workmen finally fixed the problem at 1:33am, but by then, everyone had gone home.

:: Icy roads and a higher-than-usual number of highway accidents in 2003 led to a citywide shortage of champagne, and a number of bars and clubs resorted to handing out 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor to their patrons on New Year’s Eve.

:: In 1981, City Hall, using state-of-the-art satellite TV technology, intended to let the public in on a simultaneous New Year’s Eve celebration with Maracaibo, Venezuela, one of our former sister cities. Unfortunately, no one seemed to be aware that Maracaibo is in a time zone one half-hour ahead of the city, resulting in triumphant revelry followed by standing around looking awkward for embarrassed South American dignitaries.

:: In 1997, the Lyric Opera enlisted Italian tenor Federico Rutilli to give a special performance on New Year’s Eve. A new employee in the marketing department, however, unintentionally booked Italian porn star Federico Rotelli, who gave a rather different sort of special performance.

:: 2004’s New Year’s Eve concert by Green Day was marred by a computer error which resulted in all printed tickets reading “December 30” instead of “December 31”. Nearly 40,000 fans waiting outside of Nabisco Arena in five-below weather were not pleased to be told that they should come back tomorrow.
- Leonard Pierce

This week, the Journal-Clarion will mail, free to its subscribers, a small soft-cover book entitled The Kringle Memoranda. The book is a handpicked collection of children’s letters to Santa, which the newspaper has been printing in a special supplement in the week before Christmas since 1922 (when it was still the Journal-American).

The volume, with art by Journal-Clarion editorial cartoonist Jack Belinsky, will no doubt appeal to the children and parents who are its primary target, but to long-time connoisseurs of urban strangeness, it’s more noteworthy for what it omits than what it includes. The letters bound within the red-and-green covers alternate between po-faced sincerity and kids-say-the-darndest-things humor, and entirely ignore the fact that, for almost seventy years, the letters-to-Santa supplement of the newspaper was where one could find some of the city’s strangest manifestations of subversive art and unexpurgated oddness.

In 1926, Journal-American publisher R. Darren Mingers’ 6-year-old granddaughter Claire (who would later rise to fame as a director of sentimental melodramatic films in Hollywood, and who organized the first Founders Day Film Festival in 1972) wrote a letter to Santa, which was not published in the supplement. (Though no reason was ever given – the editor in charge of selecting material for the section was immediately fired – the original letter survives, and presumably its banality and numerous spelling errors were the cause.) Outraged that his favorite grandchild had been snubbed, Mingers declared that, from that point forward, all letters to Santa would run unedited, and, with the exception of removing intentional vulgarities (a policy that began in 1933, when members of a hobo gang known as the Landon Avenue Bonus Army inundated the paper’s offices with profanity-laden missives), unexpurgated.

Naturally, a major metropolitan newspaper announcing a policy that once a year, it would run any letter anyone cared to send in unexpurgated brought out the cranks in full force. Each supplement would feature dozens of letters of the ‘Dear Santa, why won’t our government admit that the moon landing was fake?’ or ‘Dear Santa, camper for sale, $300 or best offer’ variety. More interesting, however, were those who used it as an opportunity to produce a strange sort of public art. A number of people (including Ben Kliegman, who would be named the city’s Poet Laureate in 1966) submitted short stories, poetry, and, in one memorable case in 1957, a full-length novel in the form of a letter to Santa. In 1954, Michèle Bernstein of the French avant-garde Lettrist International used it as a platform for some anti-Papist ranting and a demand that the city embrace “a new psychogeography”; and Raymond Queneau, who first learned of the letters-to-Santa section in 1960, when he attended the local premiere of Zazie dans le Métro, declared it to be “a new communal art form, full of delightful possibility”, and for nine years after sent whimsical formalist fiction to Santa via the paper’s editorial office.

Perhaps the oddest manifestation of the non-child usage of the Children’s Letters to Santa supplement was in 1947, when members of the Tucetti Mob sent out a series of coded instructions for carrying out a major armored car heist in the form of letters asking for various popular toys of the day. The robbery, which took place on January 4, 1948, netted nearly $2 million and was never solved until 1979, when Charlie Hesselman, a local junior high school math teacher and amateur cryptographer, noticed an unusual pattern in some of the letters. By the time he cracked the code, the statute of limitations on the crime had passed, and Jimmy ‘Olives’ Tucetti, the only member of the heist gang still living, was feted on local talk shows telling the story.

Unfortunately, in 1991, citing the city’s growing population and the cost of printing such an increasingly large supplement, the Journal-Clairon suspended the practice of printing essentially anything people sent them with the words “Dear Santa” at the beginning. It now exists only in crumbling newsprint, dusty microfiche, and the memories of a stranger time.
- Leonard Pierce

All large cities feature that staple of stand-up comedy, the retail storefront which seems to change hands every few weeks, and our own is no exception. The left-center unit of the Pioneer Square strip mall, currently S.E. Huang’s Kenpo-Karaterie, was a Spanish-language tax preparation service catering to the South Street area’s large Ecuadorian population as recently as last November- and, in the summer of 2006, it was a boutique specializing in salsa-related merchandise. Lot 47 in the Galleria at Woldman Heights is particularly infamous in this regard; in the last three years alone, it has been a Wittman’s, a Sunglass Hut, a Gap for Seniors, a Dobbins Farm Dairy outlet store, and a shop where one could commission tailor-made potato chip varieties.

Perhaps more curious, however, is the diametric opposite of this phenomenon: the retail store that has remained exactly the same, regardless of market forces or consumer trends, defying all known rules of shopping for astonishing periods of time. There is no more stubborn an example in the city than that of Gillard’s Electric Typewriter Service, which has occupied the same spot at 2704 West 31st Avenue since 1911.

Located on the ground floor of what was once a necktie factory but was converted into budget apartments in the early 1940s, Gillard’s has weathered the changing of its neighborhood from industrial to commercial to residential and from nearly uninhabited to fashionably hip to working-class. It has seen its nearest neighbor change from a chemical plant specializing in dry cleaning agents to a middle school to the city’s only cricket grounds to, currently, an Estonian Orthodox Church. When it opened for business in February 1911, William Howard Taft was president, the neighborhood – now Furleigh Park – was known as Badgerton, the Chicago Cubs were a mere three years from their last World Series win, and the founding of the IBM Corporation (as the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation of New York City) was a good four months away.

IBM, of course, would play a rather large role in the fortunes of Gillard’s Electric Typewriter Service – with the introduction of the IBM Selectric in 1961 came their greatest period of success, a twenty-year span during which they made so much money repairing and supplying downtown businesses with electric typewriters that they were able to advertise for the first and only time in their history. Anyone who was a regular radio listener in the late 1960s and mid-1970s remembers the “Gillard’s gets it done” jingle, accompanied by a harpsichord and sung in an unidentifiable accent. Just as difficult to pin down was how, exactly, Gillard’s stayed in business the fifty years prior to the invention of the Selectric; the number of electric typewriters in the entire city prior to the mid-fifties could not have exceeded a few hundred, and Gillard’s opened its doors only two years after the invention of the Krum Machine, a teletype device, at which time the electric typewriter was scarcely known outside of a few industrial development laboratories.

There has been even more curiosity about how Gillard’s has remained in business after the widespread popularity of word processors and personal computers has relegated the typewriter to the status of the buggy whip. In 2005, the New Press (the city’s leading alternative weekly prior to its purchase earlier this year by a west coast conglomerate which converted it to a coupon book) launched an investigation into the baffling persistence of Gillard’s; they discovered the shop had a 99-year lease on its current location, but yielded very little information about its ownership, learning only that it was registered as a holding of the Gillard’s Electric Typewriter Service Corporation, traceable to a post office box at the Willow Avenue postal station. The only regular employees are a Slovakian immigrant couple and their teenage son, none of whom appear to speak English and who spend most of their work day playing preferans, and the walls are lined with only a few electric typewriters and a large number of nesting dolls. Gillard’s has not advertised since 1979, its tax records indicate that it has been a money-losing operation for at least three decades of its existence, and on top of everything else, it is only open Monday through Thursday from 11AM until 2:30PM. Still, Harvey Preakston, who writes the for-amusement-only “I Make the Odds” column in the News, gives better chances to the Cubs winning a World Series by 2010 than of Gillard’s closing its doors.
- L. Pierce