Escape From Lincoln Park
Nothing makes us more uneasy than the tales of big-city journalists who escape to the country and find happiness. Life is always hard in the hinterland, but it’s also full of meaning and harmony. Ruddy, well-rounded children usually figure in the picture. Our own lives seem shoddy by comparison.
They also visited her father, a former Paris correspondent for the Sunday Times now living in retirement in a 12th-century rock house in western France. The Dordogne River runs by his front door. “He looked totally happy. He said, “My only regret is I didn’t do it 25 years ago,’ which would have made him my age. It really stuck with us.”
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So it came about that soon after they returned to Chicago, the Murpheys left. “I assumed my career as a journalist was effectively over, and I would find another life,” she tells us. “But as we were going through these growing pains I was unable not to put it on paper, and I offered a column to the local paper, the Brown County Democrat. I offered them a column called “Murphey’s Lore,” which was a city view of country life, and it was completely unpressed and great fun.
And end-of-the-20th-century technology is heaven on earth. It allowed her to leave behind not only the deep interpersonal connections of an armed robbery, but much human contact of any kind. A number of rustic Hoosiers have figured prominently in Murphey’s new life, especially in pulling Greg through an abscessed appendix that laid him low without a penny of health insurance. But what’s startling is the number of people she simply doesn’t face. To this day she has never met her literary agent, and she didn’t meet the editor of her book until it was finished.
Produced by the Community TV Network, The End of the Nightstick was picked up by P.O.V., the series whose initials stand for “point of view.” You can’t miss Nightstick’s–it’s that the police are a brutal occupying force in Chicago’s black and Latino neighborhoods. “On the whole, a terrifying and useful document,” wrote Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who saw an earlier screening.
Burge’s attorney, William Kunkle, raced back to court with a new issue, a legal principle called judicial estoppel. He argued that the city had switched sides for its own convenience: first it aligned itself with Burge in federal court, insisting he’d acted in the line of duty; after both parties were exonerated it turned against Burge in the disciplinary proceedings, while at least promising to cover his damages; finally it reneged on that promise.
“We’re in the ironic position where we agree with the way Burge characterizes the city’s action,” Haas said. “We don’t agree the remedy is for him to get his job back. Our primary interest is to make sure he doesn’t get his job back. Our secondary concern is, we want to win in federal court. If you can prevent the attorneys who for eight to ten years do this work from getting anything, and the lawyers for the police get paid, who’s going to do it again?”
