Ron Grossman

3 days ago | chicagotribune.com | Ron Grossman

Chicago’s Union Station has borne witness to the gamut of emotions, its cavernous waiting room echoing with everything from raucous laughter to profound despair ever since the first train arrived there 100 years ago this month. The imposing station that sprawls along Canal Street west of the Loop was artistically inspired by the massive ruins of Rome’s Baths of Caracalla.

1 week ago | chicagotribune.com | Ron Grossman

I discovered Gwendolyn Brooks when she won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Chicago’s newspapers applauded her. She was a Chicagoan, a woman, and the first African American thus honored. Recently I dug out the Tribune’s story, which brought back a memory of the confusion it triggered. “Genius among colored people, when discovered, has never gone unrecognized,” Roscoe Simmons, a journalist, activist and the nephew of Booker T. Washington, wrote in the Tribune.

2 weeks ago | chicagotribune.com | Ron Grossman

Fifty years ago, the Vietnam War ended with a chaotic scene on the roof of a Saigon building that housed employees of the United States Agency for International Development. American GIs and the staff of the U.S. Embassy were being evacuated by a fleet of helicopters besieged by Vietnamese desperate to escape the Viet Cong’s capture of South Vietnam’s capital.

1 month ago | chicagotribune.com | Ron Grossman

Chicago’s field of dreams was born on an early spring day in 1938. Mel Thillens awoke to the sight of his kid brother standing next to his bed. Ferdy Thillens said he and his buddies needed a place to play softball. “We put a plate in a prairie, and it just grew from there,” Mel Thillens subsequently recalled to a Tribune reporter. Prairie was Chicagoese for an empty lot. In this instance, it meant a substantial piece of land north of Kedzie and Devon avenues.

1 month ago | chicagotribune.com | Ron Grossman

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” It was destined to be the definitive literary monument of the Roaring ’20s, a decade of fortunes made and lost on Wall Street. Prohibition gave booze the lure of the illicit. But the novel’s debut on April 10, 1925, was a dud. It sold fewer than 20,000 copies. The reviews were generally favorable, if not enthusiastic. But it was trashed by H. L.