Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky riffs on the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty, and interviews politicians, activists, journalists and other political know-it-alls. Presented by the Chicago Reader, the show is available by 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays at chicagoreader.com/joravsky—or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t miss Oh, What a Week!–the Friday feature in which Ben & producer Dennis (aka, Dr. D.) review the week’s top stories. Also, bonus interviews drop on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays.
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Chicago Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky discusses the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty on The Ben Joravsky Show.
ChicagoBears passing woes desperately hurting the team
The Chicago bears through two weeks of play have the worst passing attack in the entire NFL and it’s not that close. Bears QB Justin Fields has just 191 passing yards through two games and serious concerns are starting to arise around the young QB. In the most previous offseason , Chicago Bears GM Ryan poles declined to add a game changing WR, something the Bears desperately needed and that decision is proving very costly to Chicago and the development of their promising QB.
Who in the receiver room has stood out so far for the Chicago Bears
well….frankly nobody. The Chicago Bears leading receiver through two weeks of play is Equanimeous St. Brown with a grand total of 57 yards on 3 catches. The Bears Wide receiver room doesn’t even have someone with over 7 targets let alone catches. Rams WR Cooper Kupp collected 7 receptions in 8 minutes in week 2 for more perspective on how bad the Bears receivers have been so far.
Other teams that made a move for an elite level WR are already seeing dividends
A whopping 11 wide receivers signed new deals this previous offseason worth at least $20 million. The Bears were not able to sign a single one of them.
Look at Tyreek Hill, the guy is one of the fastest athletes on the face of the planet was probably at one point viewed as untouchable during his time with the Chiefs. This past offseason, Kansas City sent Hill packing for Miami in return for 5 future draft picks. Who do you think initiated this trade?
If you guessed the Miami Dolphins you would be 100% correct. The Dolphins desperately needed to add an elite WR to the mix and to pair with their young budding QB. Through Two weeks the Dolphins are 2-0 and Hill leads the league in receiving yards after a monster game against the Ravens in week 2. A game that ended up being the best of Tua Tagovailoa’s young career.
Now let’s look take a look at former Titans WR and now Eagles WR AJ Brown. The Titans basically claimed this offseason that Brown did not fit into their plans going forward and that he was available Via trade. I find it especially shocking that the Bears did not bring Brown aboard because of what the Eagles gave up.
The Eagles traded a 1st and 3rd round pick to acquire the talented AJ Brown. Now while 1st round picks are extremely valuable, I think this is a situation in which the Bears should have jumped at the bit to acquire an established star in exchange for a potential star (1st round pick). Brown through two weeks of play is sixth in the league in receiving yards.
Quarterbacks Derek Carr, Jalen Hurts, and Tua Tagovailoa all had their respective teams add a top receiver in the offseason. They have combined for 12 touchdowns and each have recorded a game in which they threw for at least 300 yards. Their teams are also three of the best performing offenses through two weeks as well. Adding a star WR has also made other WR’s on the team better.
For example, Jaylen Waddle also had a monster game for the Dolphins along side Hill in week two. Eagles former 1st rounder Devonta Smith has had a nice start to the season along Aj Brown’s side. Not adding a star WR not only hurt the development of Justin Fields, but also the development of every WR on the Chicago Bears. It really is a simple concept, when your team has a top notch WR, other teams are going to do everything they can to limit said star WR which ultimately opens up looks for other receivers on the team.
What this means for the future of the Chicago Bears
The Chicago Bears are most likely going to look back at this previous offseason with a sour taste in their mouths. All because they did not add a high level WR. Next offseason there is no prominent WR’s available via free agency due to all the trades and contract extensions shelled out this previous offseason. That especially stings due to the fact that the Bears are projected to have the most salary cap space.
Looks for the Bears to target their WR problem through next year’s draft or via trade in the offseason. Give Fields a true WR1 in the offseason and watch what happens from that point on.
Note: ESPN’s NBArank panel, composed of over 200 reporters, editors, producers and analysts, were asked to rank players based on their predicted contributions — quality and quantity — for the 2022-23 season only.
Note: ESPN’s NBArank panel, composed of over 200 reporters, editors, producers and analysts, were asked to rank players based on their predicted contributions — quality and quantity — for the 2022-23 season only.
Jim Post was one of the most irrepressible stars of Chicago’s folk music scene in the 1970s and 1980s.
He could sing, act, write a hit song and plays, make you believe he was Mark Twain reincarnated, shred on his guitar and reach — and endlessly hold — the high notes with a ringing tenor that would raise goosebumps.
“He was a lovable imp on stage,” said theater producer Richard Friedman, a longtime friend. “He’d do anything to entertain.”
At the end of his shows, he’d tell the audience, “If you keep coming to see me, I’ll never get a real job.”
“He told his life story pretty much in any show,” said musician Randy Sabien, who toured the country and Canada with him.
When the singer first approached him about working together, “He exploded into the dressing room,” Sabien said. “That’s how Jim Post entered any room.”
Mr. Post, 82, died of heart failure Sept. 14 while in hospice care in Dubuque, Iowa, according to his friend Bob Postel, who said he had been in failing health for two years.
Jim Post’s mustache became as much of a trademark of the performer as the way he could seemingly hold a high note endlessly.
Sun-Times file
He made more than 20 records, most of them solo performances but one recorded with his first wife Cathy Post as Friend & Lover, in 1967, for which he wrote his one major hit song: “Reach Out of the Darkness.”
Produced by Joe South and Bill Lowery, its earnest flower-power lyrics have been used endlessly since then on TV soundtracks and in commercials to conjure the ’60s.
“Mad Men” featured the song in its season 6 episode “Man With a Plan.” Its chirpy refrain — “I think it’s so groovy now that people are finally getting together” — was used to jarring effect as the show ended with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
It also was sampled in “People Come Together” by the group Len in the 2003 Steve Martin-Bonnie Hunt film “Cheaper by the Dozen.”
“Jim told me he got the idea for the song when he was at a festival and walking through a crowd and heard a guy say, ‘You know it’s so groovy now that people are starting to get together,’ ” said Lilli Kuzma, host of “Folk Festival” on the Glen Ellyn public radio station WDCB-FM.
The album cover and 45 read: “Reach Out of the Darkness.” But Friedman said the duo sang: “Reach Out in the Darkness.”
“The record company blew it,” Friedman said. “They gave it the wrong name — and that became the name that stuck.”
The hit earned Mr. Post “mailbox money” from royalties.
“He could go to the mailbox once or twice a year and have a hefty reward from that one song,” Sabien said.
The song has been performed nearly 1.9 million times on U.S. radio, according to Broadcast Music, Inc., a company that handles rights and royalties for songwriters.
Before forming Friend & Lover, Mr. Post played in Chicago with the Rumrunners, a Kingston Trio-like group, singer-songwriter Ed Holstein said.
He lived at various times in Chicago, San Francisco, a converted one-room schoolhouse in Stoughton, Wisconsin, and Galena, among other places.
He recorded or shared stages with performers including John Prine, Steve Goodman, Bonnie Koloc, Ed Holstein and Fred Holstein, Michael Smith, Bob Gibson, Anne Hills, Bill Quateman, Steve Wade and Ginni Clemmens. He opened for Cream and hung out with Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia.
Friends say he also spoke of having had a brief meeting while in California with Charles Manson, when Manson was trying to break into music.
Jim Post often appeared at the Old Town School of Folk Music and the Earl of Old Town.
Sun-Times file
He regularly performed at venues including the Earl of Old Town, the Old Town School of Folk Music, Harry Hope’s in Cary and Amazingrace in Evanston, where, in 1978, he closed the place, playing the club’s final show alongside Goodman, Tom Dundee and Corky Siegel, the harmonica and piano-playing leader of Corky Siegel’s Chamber Blues.
Onstage, Siegel said, “He was a wildman. He was my favorite. I think he was just the greatest in the Chicago folk scene.”
“He was a consummate performer,” Ed Holstein said. “His energy was boundless.”
“He always performed with great enthusiasm and hit high notes few others could go for,” Koloc said. “Jim gave many people a lot of enjoyment over a long career.”
Bonnie Koloc, Jim Post, John Prine and Steve Goodman — four of the biggest names in Chicago’s folk music heyday — played one after another one year at the Earl of Old Town.
And he could riff about a piece of furniture onstage and make it “jaw-droppingly funny,” Sabien said.
Young Jim grew up on a farm in Harris County, Texas, about 20 miles outside Houston amid “piney woods and blackberry thickets,” he once said. Though his father had just a third-grade education, Mr. Post wrote about how the elder James Post would beguile the future singer’s mother with extemporaneous poetry:
“Driving down the road . . . with his family with his elbow out the window — drifting through his thoughts — he would start talking to mama. This is when he would be struck by the god of poetry and send my mother’s heart fluttering like a teenage girl. ‘Oh James,’ she would say, ‘You talk like a poet.’ And he would reply, ‘Ollie, don’t make fun of me,’ and she would slide across the beltless seat and whisper in his ear and lean her head on his shoulder. He loved her so that he let her tell him when he could go dancing with whiskey.”
Even when he was little, Jim Post’s talent was apparent.
“I was born with a range of 3 1/2 octaves,” he said in a 1972 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times. “I was a rather successful evangelistic singer, playing over 500 churches around the country until I was 22.”
In another Sun-Times interview, he said: “I learned to sing by bein’ a Southern Baptist. My mother was a singer — just around the house but with a voice just as big as Mahalia Jackson’s. She’d sing doin’ the housework, with tears in her eyes, listenin’ to some fool preacher on the radio. And me milkin’ cows ’bout 1200 yards down he line, singin’ harmony.”
By first grade, he’d won an all-school talent contest and scored a performance on the radio.
“The adoration he received from his fellow schoolmates upon his return to school shaped his life,” according to a biography for one of his plays.
For about 40 years, he lived in Galena, which inspired him to write his first one-man play, “Galena Rose: How Whiskey Won the West.” After a spell at the Civic Theatre at the Lyric Opera House, he walked into the Organic Theater Company and landed a booking there. It was so successful it moved to the main stage, Friedman said.
Jim Post, seen here in 1996.
Provided
Jim Post, seen here in 1996, began portraying Mark Twain after many of his fans told the singer he looked like the great American humorist.
Provided
Proclaimed songwriter-laureate of Galena, Mr. Post reinvented himself in the later years of his career by portraying Twain onstage. He married his original songs with the humorist’s own words in two one-man musicals he wrote and performed: “Mark Twain and the Laughing River” and “Mark Twain’s Adventures Out West.”
He performed the plays thousands of times at venues including the Smithsonian Institution, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and Vienna’s English Theatre in Austria.
Mr. Post was always at home onstage. Once, spotting a friend from Chicago in the audience while performing in Jackson, Wyoming, he did a double-take but never broke character as Twain.
“I know you,” he said. “You’re a silver miner from Virginia City!”
At Chicago’s Organic Theater Company, Mr. Post also did a popular show for children, the “Cookie Crumb Club,” with songs like “Frog in the Kitchen Sink” and “Jellyfish Jamboree.”
“Performing for kids,” he said in 1990, “is like performing for happy drunks.”
He also performed an original play, “The Heart of Christmas,” at the Lakeshore Theater, now the Laugh Factory at 3175 N. Broadway.
In addition to “Reach Out of the Darkness” still being heard in the occasional TV commercial, he appeared in one himself, in the late 1980s, for Wendy’s hamburgers.
He had great memories of the legendary Chicago folk music scene. In 2013, after the death of Earl Pionke, owner of the storied Earl of Old Town, Mr. Post told the Sun-Times: “If I could step back in time, there is nowhere I would rather be than walking through the front door of the Earl of Old Town and hear Earl yell out ‘Post!’ and hug me so hard that I thought he was going to break my ribs.”
“He was married four times,” Postel said, “and I was his best man for three” weddings. “That was a standing joke. He’d say, ‘Bob’s always my best man.’ “
A celebration of Mr. Post’s life will be held from noon to 7 p.m. Oct. 10 at Galena’s Turner Hall, according to his friend Lori Rische, with potluck food, BYOB and music. At 3 p.m. that day, a pastor is to do a tribute, and friends will tell stories, Rische said.
Friedman said he also hopes to organize a musical celebration in Chicago.
In his final moments, the singer was listening to “Three Soft Touches,” a song he’d written about the courtship of his grandparents Jeff and Louella Post and about Jeff Post’s death. He called it the “most sensitive song I ever wrote in my life.” It goes:
Grandpa’s last thoughts came straight from his heart
The White Sox desperately needed a sweep this week.
Instead, it was the Cleveland Guardians who showed their superiority and got one.
With a 4-2 loss Thursday at Guaranteed Rate Field, the Sox (76-74) lost for the third night in a row against the American League Central leading Guardians (83-67) to fall seven games out of first place. The Guardians lowered their magic number to clinch to five, leaving the Sox to contemplate one of their most disappointing seasons in memory with 12 games to go.
“We knew what we had to do this series and we weren’t able to do it,” right fielder Gavin Sheets said. “It’s frustrating, it’s disappointing, but it’s not just this series. We had to play better all season.”
The Sox got an RBI single from Eloy Jimenez in the first and Sheets’ 14th homer in the eighth but six zeros in between against Shane Bieber (12-8, 2.81 ERA). The Guardians, swift and aggressive on the bases, used two infield singles and one to the outfield to score a run against Johnny Cueto (7-9, 3.15) in the first, and got two sacrifice flies from Jose Ramirez for his 116th and 117th RBI.
Cueto allowed eight hits and a walk and struck out three. One of the runs was unearned because of his error on a pickoff attempt.
“That is a very young team,” Cueto said. “They run, and they hustle. They play hard. And they put the ball in play. That’s all they do.”
Cueto, who questioned the Sox’ “fire” on Aug. 10, said “that improved” since then.
“What can I say? I’m just going to speak for myself,” Cueto said. “I was giving my best every single time. And I think I did on the field. I left my best there and to me that’s the only thing I can control.”
The Guardians, who won for the 15th time in their last 18 games, won the season series 12-7 with the Sox, which gives them a tiebreaker they all but certainly won’t need.
The Sox hadn’t lost two straight under acting manager Miguel Cairo until this series.
“Since Aug. 31 [Cairo’s first win], they decide to play, they decide to battle,” Cairo said. “They went and did everything and I’m proud. Just because we lost this series, if you look back from Aug. 31 we won, what [five] series, and they fought. They give everything. We just fell short to a really good team.”
Anderson “feeling fine”
The closer the White Sox get to official elimination from the postseason, the less likely Michael Kopech (shoulder) will return when he’s eligible to come off the IL.
Cairo said he expects Tim Anderson (finger) to return, however. Anderson faced 10 pitches of live batting practice from Davis Martin Thursday.
No Robert
Luis Robert missed his second straight start due to a sore left wrist that has hampered him since a head-first slide into second base on Aug. 12 against the Tigers.
“He’s still a little sore but he wants to play,” Cairo said. “I say, ‘Let’s see how it feels tomorrow and we will figure it out.’ ”
Starters fine
Sox starters own a 2.65 ERA over the last 21 games and rank among American League leaders since Aug. 31 in ERA (first), opponents average (second), WHIP (third) and strikeouts (fourth).
