Son Of The Times: Life, Laughter, Love & Coffee

By John W. Fountain

A son of the times, award-winning columnist John W. Fountain writes about everyday life, from the serious to the sublime. He writes about everything from life and homicide to poverty and hope. He writes about the church, faith and religion. About black women’s hair, fatherhood and old-school mothering. Fountain writes about riding a Harley and getting a pedicure for the first time. He chronicles the conversations of “the roundtable,” a motley crew of middle-age-to-old men at a suburban coffee shop.

Son of the Times: Life, Laughter, Love & Coffee is a compilation of stories and commentary by a world-class journalist at his best. Reading his stories is like having a conversation over a hot cup of good coffee with an old friend or curling up in front of a crackling fireplace, unfolding the Sunday newspaper then losing yourself in the story. As one reader described it, Fountain’s style of writing “is a form of poetry, with a cadence like that of a heartbeat. Your words help and heal.”

Fountain, whose column runs weekly in the Chicago Sun-Times, is formerly a national correspondent for The New York Times as well as a former staff writer for both the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post. He is currently a professor of journalism at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

Son of the Times: Life, Laughter, Love & Coffee captures a mix of the best of Fountain’s columns and also some of his other work from a nearly 25-year career as a journalist. He is a masterful storyteller. And his words will make you laugh, cry, think and feel—no matter what your flavor or politics—because his stories, more than anything else, are simply human.

“Fountain writes with intelligence, compassion and eloquence about stuff that nobody in Chicago writes about but should... John’s general approach as a columnist is to mine the personal to find the universal, a rather dangerous form of journalism that works only if done very well. He does so beautifully well.”
—Tom McNamee, editorial page editor of the Chicago Sun-Times

“His writing is crisp and compelling as he tackles issues head-on, giving his readers a look into his thoughts and feelings.”
—Chicago Journalists Association judges panel

John W. Fountain remembers, and will not let us forget. Chicago born and raised, he has been steeped in the city’s history—a street rep of violence and open-air murder known in gossip, story, song and Frank Sinatra comedy.

Then, in 25 years of work as a reporter, John all too often was covering the slaying of children on city streets, attending their funerals, interviewing their parents, recording the losses that most Americans saw as too minor, too separate, too far away to keep in their memory.
So it was not this year of bloody slaughter on Chicago streets, the videos of unarmed black men gunned down by police, the petty controversy over a movie name, or even the tears of a president that inspired John Fountain’s commentary and calls for someone, everyone to deal with the violence destroying black lives.

It is what he has lived in decades, what we all have lived in those decades, that he will not let us forget.

Encompassing history and breaking news; column writing, rap lyrics and blank verse; scalding memory and present tears, John Fountain’s work as a weekly freelance writer for the Chicago Sun-Times opinion pages stands out for its precision, its eloquence, its intelligence, its breadth and variety and emotional pull.

—Reginald Davis, former editor at the Chicago Tribune

• Language: English
• Publisher: John W. Fountain
• Release date: Jan 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9780981485850

John W. Fountain

A native son of Chicago, John W. Fountain is an award-winning columnist, journalist, professor and author of the memoir, True Vine: A Young Black Man’s Journey of Faith, Hope and Clarity (Public Affairs, 2003) and Dear Dad: Reflections on Fatherhood (WestSide Press, 2011). His essay, “The God Who Embraced Me” appears in National Public Radio’s book, This I Believe (Henry Holt Books, 2006), as part of the nationally acclaimed series initially started by Edward R. Morrow. Fountain is a professor of journalism at Roosevelt University and a weekly freelance columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. In 2015, 2014 and 2011, Fountain received the Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism for columns published in the Sun-Times. Fountain won the Lisagor Award in the category of news column or commentary among daily newspapers with a circulation of 250,000 or more from the Chicago Headline Club—the largest local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in the country. In 2014, Fountain was awarded best column by the Illinois Press Association. His most recent book, “Son of the Times: Life, Laughter, Love and Coffee” was published in 2017. In a journalism career that has spanned more than 25 years, Fountain has been a reporter at some of the top newspapers in this country. From 2000 to 2003, he was a national correspondent for The New York Times. Based in Chicago, Fountain covered a 12-state region. He also has been a staff writer at the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Sun-Times, Modesto Bee, Pioneer Press Newspapers in suburban Chicago and the Champaign News-Gazette.

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Foreword

John W. Fountain remembers, and will not let us forget. Chicago born and raised, he has been steeped in the city’s history—a street rep of violence and open-air murder known in gossip, story, song and Frank Sinatra comedy.

Then, in 25 years of work as a reporter, John all too often was covering the slaying of children on city streets, attending their funerals, interviewing their parents, recording the losses that most Americans saw as too minor, too separate, too far away to keep in their memory.

So it was not this year of bloody slaughter on Chicago streets, the videos of unarmed black men gunned down by police, the petty controversy over a movie name, or even the tears of a president that inspired John Fountain’s commentary and calls for someone, everyone to deal with the violence destroying black lives.

It is what he has lived in decades, what we all have lived in those decades, that he will not let us forget.

Encompassing history and breaking news; column writing, rap lyrics and blank verse; scalding memory and present tears, John Fountain’s work as a weekly freelance writer for the Chicago Sun-Times opinion pages stands out for its precision, its eloquence, its intelligence, its breadth and variety and emotional pull.

This in a city that in 2014 had the highest murder rate of the nation’s three largest cities—more than three times that of New York. In 2015, the number of Chicago murders and shootings victims—mostly black and brown—continued to rise, totaling 473 homicides and 3,000 people shot by year’s end.

John Fountain does not limit his view to Black Lives Matter or Chiraq; gang violence, police murder or gun control, nor the easy public jargon of responsibility and blame. By looking deeply into a community wracked by both death and indifference, he calls on those who live there and those who look in from outside to take action against the attacks against black and brown bodies from whatever direction.

Such a stance has its supporters and opponents. We think you should hear from some of his chief supporters:

Father Michael L. Pfleger, the renowned Catholic priest and pastor of the Faith Community of St. Sabina, has for decades led the cause against violence and murder in Chicago. He writes: "John Fountain has used his gift of writing to force us to deal not just with the reality of the plague of violence that is snatching our children in Chicago and America, but he has challenged us to wrestle with our soul and conscience, which allows it to continue. His writings challenge us to look at the deeper conditions and issues that have allowed violence to become an accepted norm in some communities and to be comfortable with a city and country where the opportunities of life depend on your zip code, race, and class.

John Fountain is one of the few remaining columnists in America that demands us to go beyond the headlines and demands that we address causes and realities that give birth to the violence plaguing us and the tale of two cities that leaves some communities and individuals abandoned, hopeless, and ignored. John has put a name and face on the lives we’re losing. He reminds us that these are not statistics but human lives. John reminds us we are better than this and demand that we do better.

Jay Doherty is president of the City Club of Chicago—a 113-year-old, bipartisan, civic organization widely recognized as Illinois’ premier public affairs forum. He writes: "As President of the City Club of Chicago, Chicago’s longest running civic forum, it is a privilege to acknowledge John W. Fountain’s outstanding coverage of the violence plaguing Chicago. John does not shy away from honesty when writing about the anguished neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. His authentic voice taps into emotions of communities being torn apart by violence. John shares the City Club of Chicago commitment to creating public discourse around the hard truths facing the City of Chicago.  

"When assembling a City Club of Chicago panel on the issues surrounding the term ‘Chi-raq’, John was an obvious choice due to his perspective given, as he writes, ‘born in Chicago but has walked the streets of Chi-raq.’ One of the most powerful moments in City Club history was when John shared his poem, Chiraq: A Tale of Two Cities, a haunting piece that depicts the brutal reality for many Chicago residents. His candor evokes emotion that transcends neighborhood boundaries. His reach goes well beyond his weekly column, as a community leader, John is a role model for youth and an inspiration to all." 

Two weeks after the much-publicized City Club debate in July 2015, covered widely by Chicago media, a proposal by a local alderman to recommend the state deny roughly $3 million in tax credits to filmmaker Spike Lee unless he changed the movie’s title, Chi-Raq, ended with the alderman electing to not even call for a vote.

There is one more voice you should hear. Delphine Cherry is a Chicago-area mother who lost two children to murder. She writes: "My oldest daughter Tyesa Cherry was only 16 when she was shot Jan. 17, 1992, and my son Tyler Randolph was 20 when he was brutally beaten and shot in front of our south suburban home on Dec. 22, 2012. John Fountain didn’t just cover my children’s stories; it was his voice through his articles that did not allow my children’s murders to be in vain.

Although, I am not a writer, he has taught me how significant and powerful our words truly are. There has been many occasions that Mr. Fountain’s work has provided comfort, inspiration, and empowerment.

John Fountain’s writing is a response to those who would most like to blame the victims, to declare a race not worth the effort necessary to end senseless death. John Fountain sees, and says, that neither the situation nor its solutions are simple. He calls for multiple approaches, seeing multiple causes. But most of all and most effectively, he calls on all of us to care.

Reginald F. Davis

Former editor at Chicago Tribune

About Son Of The Times

Voice. It is at the heart of journalism. As a columnist, this couldn’t be any clearer. My voice, my thoughts, my ideas and perspective are what I seek to share with readers each week. I also get to share sometimes the voices of others I encounter on this journey called life. I see each column as an opportunity to think out loud, to try and touch the hearts of readers, to engage them, maybe to help them see the world—even if only a slice of it—a little differently. To evoke not only thought but also feelings.

I seek to wrap my commentary in storytelling. Mostly they are stories about everyday life. I write about society’s moral decline and its impact on us all. About fatherhood and fatherlessness. About gun violence and murder. About faith and religion. I seek to write about the everyday stuff that fills our lives.

You touch topics that most people are afraid to talk about, one reader writes.

I don’t always get to write readers back—between my day job as a professor and what can sometimes seem like a million tasks. But I am deeply appreciative of readers’ responses—the good, the bad, and sometimes even the ugly, which often challenges me to reevaluate. Still, I write what I see. What I feel. What I believe.

I get 600 words. I sometimes wish it were more. But I have come to appreciate the challenge of brevity in storytelling. And yet, writing for a newspaper is still a privilege.

When asked to write a column five years ago, I was hesitant. Honestly, I didn’t think readers would really want to hear what I had to say as a black man. A friend and longtime columnist whom I consulted about the invitation from Tom McNamee, the newspaper’s opinion’s editor, to write a weekly column, suggested that I take it on—for as long as I am having fun writing the column. That didn’t help me much because at the time I didn’t see much fun in the potential of being criticized mercilessly by unrelenting cyber snipers who anonymously trolled newspaper websites, leaving a trail of venomous attacks at the bottom of columns by writers whose opinions differed from theirs. The subject of race matters drew the cruelest of public comments, much of it racist, hateful and unprintable. I understood that being a columnist was not for the faint at heart and that it required development of thick-skinned fortitude.

Greater than any fear or anxiety over the negative feedback some of my writing might draw, however, was my passion and belief in the power of the pen. Greater my love for words that can inform and sometimes move readers, like the melodies and lyrics of songs. So I said, Yes.

The last six years as a columnist have been a rewarding journey in ways I might never have imagined. None is greater than coming to see through readers’ responses our kinship in human suffering, struggles and triumph—whether rich or poor, black or white, male or female. A friend who happens to be white told me that he sometimes shares my columns and his enthusiasm for some of them with his friends.

But he’s black, my friend told me some of his friends have responded.

But his words aren’t, he said he explained. He’s a man.

Readers have reaffirmed, for me, my belief that there really are no white stories, no black stories—only human stories.

…Thank you for being a voice for many who do not have one. Your analysis of the conditions in the inner city are dead on for African Americans and more specifically men who are trying to do something about them, one reader writes.

Writes another: …As a white suburban 60-yr-old professional man, I always love your perspective on ‘Mankind’. It applies to all of us.

…I want to personally thank you for writing this article, a man writes regarding a column on fatherhood. You spoke directly to me as if you had a window into my life. Thank you for giving me hope for the future…

I am the one who is thankful. To readers who have helped reassure me that somebody out there is indeed listening to me—a writer and simply a man. To the Sun-Times for printing my words, and to Tom McNamee for extending to me the opportunity to take this writing journey that has been filled with mostly peaks, especially the joy of hearing from readers, some who say they clip my articles and hang them from their refrigerators or in their cubicles at work, in the teacher’s lounge at schools or in classrooms. In some cases, they are now yellowing news clippings taped to various desks and bulletin boards. I am grateful for the Chicago South Side high school, or the West Side elementary school, where some of my writings are required reading. It is for me an honor, and, admittedly, also often surprising to learn of the impact of my work as a columnist.

Amid the responses—written and sometimes verbally, sometimes in passing from strangers encountered on the street, in coffee shops or other public places—I got to thinking about compiling some of my work in book form. Partly as a readily accessible catalogue for readers—young and old—to perhaps digest, analyze, or study, maybe even extract some hope, direction or inspiration. A book would also allow me to publicly preserve my work as a chronicle of one voice in these times—for posterity’s sake or perhaps some redeeming value for generations to come.

The book is divided into four sections: Life; Laughter; Love; and Coffee—following the book’s subtitle. I confess that not every column fits neatly into each section. Indeed I chose these four themes to help group the topics, issues and stories I have explored as a columnist. I hope you will find my grouping more as an aid than a distraction in searching for and discovering stories within this volume.

This much I know. I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors. Of my grandfather George Albert Hagler who settled in Chicago as part of the Great Migration from the south to the northern Promised Land. Of my great-great-grandfather Burton Roy who was born an American slave and who raised my grandfather. I stand on the shoulders of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., of Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. On the shoulders of my grandmother Florence G. Hagler and the little old church mothers at my grandfather’s True Vine Church Of God In Christ, where they prayed and dreamed and hoped for me. I stand in the spirit of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells in the sense of endeavoring to use my pen and the English language combined with a searing passion for black people—for all people—to someday be truly free. I stand on the shoulders of Chicago columnists before me whose trumpeting I admire: Among them Vernon Jarrett, Leanita McClain and Lu Palmer.

And yet, I stand in my own space—born in the tumultuous sixties. Bred in the waters of urban renewal then urban disintegration of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Shaped by the winds of socioeconomic and political change of the 1990’s and the birth of the first black president in a so-called post-racial America. I stand in these times. With my own perspective, my own voice as a Chicago native son. A son of the times.

John W. Fountain

Prologue

Perry Mason, with his bone-color, stiff-collar shirts, dark suits and ties, and handsome grace, was my idol as a little boy as I sat in our living room on Chicago ‘s impoverished West Side. The television glowed week after week with another episode. And although Mason, played by Raymond Burr, was a fictional lawyer—and white, not black like me—I wanted to be just like him. I was drawn in, in part, by his courtroom presence, in addition to his spit-shined, dapper dress, by the sense that I got early on that lawyers in real life made a lot of money, and also by the sense that lawyers got to make a difference in the world and commanded a certain amount of respect.

It was perhaps a pipedream for a ghetto boy with an alcoholic father who, by the time I was 5, had long abandoned my mother and my sister and me. In hindsight, there was no college fund, no tangible resources that might help me finance college and law school, which were hardly foregone conclusions given my socioeconomic circumstance. So I was dreaming on a shoestring. At least there was no blueprint on how I might turn my dream of a college education and a subsequent career as an attorney into a reality. Nonetheless, this was my dream—at least until my freshman year in college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

There I was introduced to the idea of becoming a journalist, though I had long had a love for writing. In seventh and eighth grade, I wrote made-up stories about talking leaves and such and read them aloud to my class as we sat in a circle. Often, I would look up from my notebook paper on which I had inked my story to see students smiling or laughing and generally entertained. It made me feel powerful to have such a hold on my classmates with my mere words. I loved writing. Even on days when it was too cold to play outside, I amused myself with pen and paper, making up songs and poems. Writing was liberating in the same way that I found reading books. Reading transported me beyond my ghetto confines to explore far away and even imaginary worlds.

As a child, I might have dreamed of the possibility of someday becoming a writer, perhaps even of becoming a journalist, had it existed within the realm of possibility, at least within the scope of potential careers by which to make a good living that were proposed to me by adults in my life. But back then, I didn’t know of any black journalists. Back then—in the 1960s and early 1970s, working for the U.S. Postal Service, or the Chicago Transit Authority, or the telephone company or at a bank were considered attainable jobs for black folks. Mostly blue-collar jobs, they didn’t require a college education necessarily. But with the handwriting on the wall as computer technology was emerging, it was becoming clear that specialization and higher education were the keys to a more prosperous and promising future for young people like me. My mother and also my teachers pushed education. But becoming a journalist, or earning a living as a writer, was not something my mother or my teachers or anyone in my neighborhood or sphere of influence ever talked about as existing within the scope of possible future careers for a little black boy.

Doctor and lawyer were the two primary professions I had heard my mom and other black folks talk about as the target occupations for a ghetto kid dreaming big and of professionally making it one day. And although by high school, I soon became aware of black writers, like Richard Wright, Claude Brown, and Dick Gregory—not to mention a host of poets—writing still seemed more like a passion or perhaps a hobby from which one might make a few dollars, though not necessarily a living, let alone enough to take care of a family. Writing was for me a passion—and it came naturally, the way playing basketball came to some cats in my neighborhood, effortless. But it wasn’t until freshman year in college when my professor had copied my I Am A Shadow essay for several other rhetoric classes to examine that I began again to feel that old familiar sense of the power of writing and to consider the possibility that writing might be my call and vocation. I had written the essay, examining the notion put forth in Ellison’s, Invisible Man, of the invisibility of black men in society. Except, my contention was that inasmuch as I agreed with Ellison’s idea about society’s refusal or unwillingness or inability to see us, I believed that rather than being invisible, we are more like shadows. Hence, I Am A Shadow. I cannot remember my freshman rhetoric teacher’s name, though what I do remember and am eternally grateful for is that she suggested after reading my essay that I consider a career in journalism. Thus began my pursuit and a journalist was born.

Growing up on the West Side amid the crime, violence and blight of my neighborhood and seeing what was wrong all around me was easy. As I grew older and ventured farther and farther from that world, the challenge for me became to help others see that there was more to our world than the bad about neighborhoods like mine that they saw mostly on nightly newscasts and that had come to be perpetuated by lingering stereotypes. I hoped through my writing to shed new light and also capture the stories and voices of those seldom seen and heard, lending to the marketplace of ideas and thereby helping to create a more inclusive and more accurate portrait of black life in America as presented by daily journalism. I hoped to make a difference.

Some years ago, I was at lunch one day with a veteran reporter espousing some of my hopes for making change as a journalist. At the time, I was a reporter-intern at the Chicago Sun-Times. The veteran reporter looked at me, and