Dear Reader

By the time I first visited Chicago, at 18, I already knew I would love it.

I was raised in Northern California, which, despite all the Olympic swimmers it bred, was not exactly a place of broad shoulders. Chicago’s tough counterimage lured me right in.

A favorite song was Lou Rawls’s novelistic “Dead End Street.” “They call it the Windy City,” Rawls recounted, a blues bass dramatizing his memories of winter. “Because of the Hawk ... the almighty Hawk, Mr. Wind.”

By fate, my best friend at college was a Chicagoan, so I began visiting often. That Hawk was something, all right. I can still recall the knife-edged terror as John and I braved 20-below windchill before ducking into one of the city’s warm bars.

Then I fell for a beautiful girl, and she was from Chicago too. On our eventual wedding day— held in February, the Hawk’s big month—snow blew so hard we barely survived the celebratory buggy ride to our hotel.

So ask me why Chicago is called the Windy City, and my answer is as deep in my bones as the infernal shriek under the windowsill of our daughter’s apartment. (Yes, she ended up in Chicago too.) It’s the howling wind, dummy. Except it isn’t. Sharing little-known facts is very much at the heart of RD, but I have to say our cover story, “Fact or Fiction?” takes that mandate to new levels. It’s irrefutable that Christ was born on Christmas, Eskimos have the most words for snow, and ostriches bury their heads in the sand. But not according to our crack fact finders. Enjoy the shocks, starting on page 58. And console me as I break it to those I love most that we’ve had the wrong idea about the city that brought us together.

Talk about you don’t know what you don’t know.