‘I ever refer to myself as a Chicagoan’
Author, commentator and New Jersey transplant Jonathan Alter says he still considers himself a Chicagoan — with good reason
You can take the boy out of Chicago, but if that boy grows up to be the eminent author and political commentator Jonathan Alter, you quickly realize that Chicago remains part of the man.
“I left a very long time ago, but I ever refer to myself as a Chicagoan,” Alter said, on the phone from his home in New Jersey. It is a house he shares with his wife, television producer and executive Emily Jane Lazar, and where they raised their three now adult children.
The home also has three sculptures — a bear, rabbit and goat made from car bumpers — crafted by the late Jack Kearney, a Chicago artist of great renown and ebullient personality.
It is that goat that Alter chose as an inspiration and “model” for his latest media foray, a newsletter available on Substack called “Old Goats: Ruminating with Friends.”
“Jack and his wife, Lynn, were great friends of my parents,” Alter said. “These sculptures are among my most prized possessions.”
They had a lot of friends, Jim and Joanne Alter,
raising Jon and his three siblings in a large Victorian on Hawthorne Place on the North Side. They were lovely people and both politically active and civic minded and the house was often visited by such movers and shakers as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Edward Kennedy, Harold Washington, U.S. Sens. Paul Simon and Dick Durbin. In 2003, the couple hosted an early fundraiser for Barack Obama’s 2004 senate campaign.
Jon, his two sisters and one brother, have fond memories of their parents reading to them every night and allowing them to be part of any political discussion taking place.
“We talked about anything and everything,” says Alter. “And when it wasn’t quite fashionable, my parents always let us accompany them to events they thought were important.”
In 1972, Joanne became one of the first two women elected to the board of the Metropolitan Sanitary District (now the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago).
Jim Alter and others created Friends of the Parks, the nonprofit organization that acts as a watchdog and environmental advocate for Chicago-area parks and forest preserves, and served as its president and chairman of the board for many years. (Joanne died in 2008, he in 2014).
Jon has never been reluctant to explore new avenues of communication. As successful as he has been as an author, political commentator and columnist for a quarter century at Newsweek, it is his latest venture that is most intriguing. “Remember blogs?” he asked. “They have gone out of fashion. Podcasts also have limitations. Substack is to be taken seriously.”
He has not abandoned other writing, contributing to various publications and recently publishing “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life” (Simon & Schuster), the first full-length biography of the 39th president. A New York Times review called it an “important, fairminded, highly readable … not just an authoritative introduction to Carter’s feats and failures but also insight into why a man of such intelligence, drive and noble intentions floundered in the White House as haplessly as he did.”
He has been a frequent and articulate commentator on television for decades and took to the creative side in 2013 when he became executive producer of “Alpha House,” an Amazon Studios production of a Garry Trudeau (“Doonesbury”) inspired comedy which ran for two seasons.
A TV triumph came when he was one of the three writers/producers (with John Block and Steve McCarthy) of a terrific 2019 HBO offering “Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists.”
This film had its roots in Alter’s past. “I grew up worshipping (Mike) Royko,” Alter says. “He was the original inspiration for this project.”
And it was another bygone local columnist who provided a spark for “Old Goats.”
As Alter writes on the site, “When I was a kid growing up in Chicago, we had a legendary local columnist named Irv Kupcinet — ‘Kup’ — who hosted a weekly local talk show devoted to what he called ‘the lively art of conversation.’ As a reporter in my mid-20s, I went on the show once — can’t remember the topic — which was proof that Kup was interested in people who were not quite as famous as earlier guests like Dwight Eisenhower, Bob Hope and Malcolm X.”
“Old Goats” is not a blog and it is not a podcast (more at oldgoats.substack.com).
The first “old goats” are lifelong and influential Chicagoans. Of one of them, advertising executive Tom Burrell, founded here in 1971 what would become the largest and most prominent Black-owned advertising agency in the world. He says: “It takes time to gain experience, perspective, independence. I’m not selling anything. I’m not looking for anything. I don’t have any ulterior motives. I’ve got a wonderful family, wonderful wife. And I can do what I want to do. I can say what I want to say. That’s how you get to wisdom and are free to impart it.”
“I don’t refer to these encounters as interviews but rather as conversations,” Alter says.
The other subject is Newton Minow, a high-powered and well-connected attorney for many decades, with a short break in the early 1960s when President John F. Kennedy appointed him to serve as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, a role during which he famously referred to television as “a vast wasteland.”
Of Minow, Alter writes; “I’ve known Newt Minow for most of my life — my parents were old friends and neighbors, and he has been an invaluable source of counsel to me and so many others. He is the last link to the Democratic Party of Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy and knew both men well, which we talk about.”
He tells some good and lively stories, but he also says this, chillingly, “I’ve never seen the country as divided as it is today, and I’ve lived a long time.”
Minow has lived 95 years, and counting.