On the morning of last January 11, Lacy Banks took a phone call that he believes nearly cost him his life.
“Last month, destiny dealt me a triple dose of trauma,” he wrote on May 5, 2008, introducing his subject. “Doctors . . . diagnosed three big problems: Brain cancer, which might require surgery. End-stage congestive heart failure, which definitely requires a heart transplant. Prostate cancer, which also definitely requires surgery.
But neither had happened when he took Sheri Stokes’s call. And he had to wonder, he says, if the Sun-Times, fresh out of bankruptcy and down to a skeleton staff, had decided to cut him loose. Banks left a message on De Luca’s voice mail and took inventory. He was hyperventilating. His chest was killing him. He couldn’t breathe. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, what the hell is happening?’ I said, ‘Let me rest here and try to collect myself.’ But it wasn’t doing any good, so I called 911.” Then he called his wife, Joyce.
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The letter gave Banks 90 days to apply for the lump sum. He took his time. “I wanted to study all my options,” he tells me. “I went to my financial advisers and I had an annuity program all set up.” Prudential received his paperwork on April 7, he says. But the same day or the day before, he says, he got another letter from Prudential that changed everything. Again Prudential laid out his options—but this time a lump sum wasn’t one of them. Under a new law, he found out, the new deadline to apply for that had been January 1.
That colleague was sportswriter Len Ziehm, who retired in June. He tells me his pension was paid him in full.
Banks went on, “I’d rather have a coward than a back-stabber in the fox hole with me any time. At least, I won’t have to waste valuable trust on a coward.”
