“He came dressed in an overcoat and civilian clothes and sunglasses and a hat, like some kind of character out of a spy book.”
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“They throwed the cabinet down,” Ruthie May McCoy frantically told the police dispatcher. “They want to come through the bathroom.” By the time the police got there she was dead. The Reader‘s Steve Bogira explained that McCoy’s 15-story building in the Abbott Homes project was designed so medicine cabinets in adjacent apartments backed against each other and were easily popped out. That’s how plumbers reached the pipes in the wall—but kids discovered they could slither past the pipes. “It’s the way to go from one apartment to the next even if you’re not killing nobody,” a janitor told Bogira.
Besides publishing them, the Reader never knew what to do with its writers. It didn’t tout them or run their pictures or plant them on talk shows. Jerry Sulivan wrote the Reader‘s Field & Street column from 1984 to 1993 as an open secret on the back pages. When he died in 2000 it was time enough for me to allow, gratefully, that “he could write a column in which every single piece of information was foreign to most readers, including the name of the bird or beast the column was about, and make it all seem as familiar as our backyards.”
July 17: Woodpeckers are very important animals. The nest cavities they dig, use, and then abandon will be next year’s nests for everything from the great crested flycatcher to the common goldeneye—a species of duck—to the flying squirrel.
