On August 7, 1974, and on September 15, 1998, the Chicago Tribune editorial board did something that I am still waiting for it to do in 2020: It published an editorial demanding the immediate resignation of the President of the United States.

I dearly want the Tribune to do that now, any day. If we’re lucky, the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board will do so too, as will any number of ed boards around the country, just as scores of papers did in 1974 with President Nixon, and in 1998 with President Clinton.

President Trump’s actions in office this year alone have been far worse than anything Nixon or Clinton did (even Trump agreed with the latter), and yet to my knowledge, only one newspaper in the country has published an editorial in 2020 demanding his resignation. That was the Portland Press Herald in Maine, which wrote on June 5 that Trump — just the third president in U.S. history to be impeached — “lacks the character, maturity and judgment to lead the country in a perilous time.”

That paper cited Trump’s failure in three areas: containing COVID-19, rebuilding the economy during the recession and bringing peace to the protests over the police murder of George Floyd.

The pandemic has only gotten worse. Tomorrow, many Americans will spend Thanksgiving without their full family celebrations so as not to spread or contract the virus, while far too many other Americans will flout medical advice and see family anyhow. I have trouble placing too much blame at the feet of the Americans who get together with family, since many will be following the advice of the president, who one study showed was “likely the largest driver of … COVID-19 misinformation” in the country.

The president’s attack on our elections

The president’s COVID-19 lies became even more dangerous when he mixed them with the election. While the president spent the summer and fall raging against masks, he also raged against mail-in ballots, seemingly hoping that the people who listened to him on one would be the same people who would listen to him on the other. 

Those Americans more inclined to vote for his challenger would also be the ones less inclined to vote in person, and since mail-in ballots would be counted after in-person ballots, Trump would, the thinking went, simply declare victory on election night even when votes were still being counted.

He would do this with preemptive legal action, he said on Nov. 2, the day before the election: “I think it’s a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election. … I think a lot of fraud and misuse can take place … and we’re going to go in the night of, as soon as that election’s over, we’re going in with our lawyers.”

This is, of course, exactly what happened. And this is where the president committed an offense against Americans that is the second worst thing he’s done in 2020, after the nearly 260,000 COVID deaths on his watch: He didn’t simply take baseless legal action or claim that he believed he was going to win — he claimed on election night that he “already (had) won.”

“We were getting ready to win this election,” Trump said in a press conference while millions of votes were still being counted in an election he would end up losing in a historic defeat for an incumbent. “And frankly, we did win this election.”

He baselessly claimed that the election was a “major fraud on our nation” and said he would take his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

“We will win this,” he said, “and as far as I’m concerned, we already have won.”

Fast forward three weeks, and still no newspaper that I’ve seen besides the Press Herald has published an editorial demanding the president’s resignation. I would imagine that editorial boards feel that with Joe Biden winning the election, such an editorial would be pointless. 

Why it matters that the president won’t concede

Yet we now have another problem that demands our journalism leaders: Trump won’t concede.

Donald Trump’s governing principle is simple: Donald Trump is the lone source of truth and anything that objects is fake. The press is fake, negative news stories about him are fake, photos of his sparse inauguration crowd are fake, COVID-19 is fake — and now, the election is fake. 

None of this is funny. The president has attacked our elections ever since he won in 2016, back when he lied and said that he only lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton because of three to five million illegal votes cast solely for her. He launched a commission to investigate voter fraud, and disbanded it a year later when it came up empty. He boomed repeatedly and with no evidence about impending voter fraud in the 2020 election, and now, since election day, his barrage of legal action has strictly targeted states he lost — six of them in all — with repeated attempts to disenfranchise Americans simply because they likely voted against him.

He is losing in court. Badly. Even now as I write this, with Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, approving the formal transition process, Trump is still fighting against the extraordinarily normal act of concession.

The closest he has come to a concession was two days ago, when he tweeted that, “I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same.”

Yet even yesterday, he again claimed that the election was “stolen” from him, a drum he seemingly will beat long into his twilight years, summed up best in an infamous tweet on Nov. 15 in which he wrote in all capital letters, “I WON THE ELECTION!”

When journalism fails, democracy does too

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as the desperate, innocuous ramblings of a man who one way or another will be out of the White House on January 20. I can see editorial boards discarding the notion of an editorial calling for his concession out of the assumption that his departure is a foregone conclusion.

But the effects of his refusal to abide by this previously rote, American norm are proving deadly for both our democracy and our electorate. I’ve heard plenty of people, including friends and family, say that none of these efforts are “working,” citing his court losses as proof of his failure. This depends on one’s definition of “working.” I look at the number of GOP elected officials who, today, still refuse to acknowledge President-elect Joe Biden, and I see a win for Trump. I look at pro-Trump polling and I see a win for Trump.

Last week, a Reuters / Ipsos poll found that 52% of Republican respondents believed that the president had “rightfully won” the 2020 election. This week, according to a CNBC/Change Research poll, that number is even higher, as 73% of all polled Trump voters believe that Trump is the “legitimate winner” of this election.

The longer that the president holds this office and continues claiming that he won an election that he lost, the longer his followers will continue to believe that the American system is rigged against him. 

This is a deep problem for our elections moving forward; mild rebukes from journalists help legitimize this bogus notion that every vote not cast for a given candidate is suspect, and that no election is finished until it has been baseless challenged in court. 

A more immediate problem is in our attempt to at long last contain and defeat the virus. Those who believe Trump “rightfully won” an election he lost are unlikely to follow any safety measures imposed by the rightful president whom they deem a usurper.

Trump is going to be Trump. We all know that. But he did not take this office, and keep it, by virtue of his own lies alone. He had many accomplices along the way, including a range of journalists — local and national, in print and on the air — who too often did not hold him accountable.

Why we need strong newspaper editorials

This is where newspaper editorials come in. No one who has watched this president even a day in the past four years believes he will resign (at least not without some kind of personal benefit) and it certainly does not seem believable that he will ever do anything as noble and humble as concede.

But the purpose of an editorial is not necessarily to lasso a desired outcome. It’s to use your credibility, status and influence to draw a line of acceptable behavior. An editorial demanding that Trump concede and resign, with a splashy headline to share the world round, creates a new environment around the president and his actions. Were the Tribune, Sun-Times or any other major American newspaper to demand his concession and/or his resignation, that action gives cover to other papers to do the same. It gives cover to GOP politicians to do the same. It gives cover to business leaders to do the same.

I might expect less from our hometown papers had they endorsed him, but neither did in either 2016 or 2020. Both papers endorsed Joe Biden this year, while also arguing against Trump’s re-election. The Tribune did so rather meekly in my opinion — (“There is value in electing a president who does not insult, mock or demean. Our country can and must do better.”) — but the Sun-Times came out guns blazing, writing:

“It would be enough for us to argue here for a vote against Donald Trump. Our country can’t take any more of him. If the Democratic alternative were a sock puppet, we’d urge a vote for the sock puppet.”

Both boards have at least published editorials noting Biden’s victory, and the damage that Trump is creating in denying that. The Sun-Times went first, on Nov. 13, with a piece titled, “Every day Trump won’t get out of the way he puts our country in danger.” That was pretty close to a demand for him to concede, with the board writing, “President Donald Trump is throwing up every obstacle to a smooth transition to a Biden administration, in keeping with his refusal to accept that Biden won the Nov. 3 election, and the consequences of his petulance are more than politically unfortunate.”

Three days later, the Tribune board published one titled, “Trump’s baseless claims won’t change reality. He lost the election.” That editorial’s boldest statement is simply that the president lost, and that while he “doesn’t have to like the result … that won’t change the reality.”

These are clear words, but not strong ones. They are certainly not direct and potent enough to combat the president’s assault on our elections, an assault happening at this very moment in Wisconsin, our neighbor to the north, where a conservative group has filed a lawsuit in hopes that Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature might defy the will of the people and instead cast the state’s 10 electoral votes in favor of President Trump. 

With this kind of outrageous battery against voters, neither the Sun-Times’ nor the Tribune’s editorials pack the blunt force of a headline reading, “Trump must concede and resign now.”

A plea to the editorial boards of the Tribune and Sun-Times

We once had that type of strength from our papers of record.

On August 7, 1974, the Tribune concluded its editorial about President Nixon (titled “The case is complete…”) with the following:

“Surely wiser heads in the White House will continue to urge Mr. Nixon to resign. … Getting the matter over with as quickly as possible must now be the first order of business — in the interest of the country and of Mr. Nixon himself.”

Nixon announced his resignation the next day, effective at noon on August 9.

On September 15, 1998, that board was even more direct about the not-yet-impeached President Clinton. Titled “The president’s last chance at honor,” this editorial was published four days after the release of the Starr Report, with the board admonishing him in clear, concise language.

“For now, however, the question before the nation is what to do about Bill Clinton, liar under oath, obstructor of justice — and president. Congress, uncharacteristically sober, is moving toward a decision on whether to conduct an impeachment inquiry.

“Clinton could make all that moot by electing to do the right thing, the honorable thing: Resign.”

Since the middle of the year, I have pushed the Tribune and Sun-Times — and their editorial board editors Kristen McQueary and Tom McNamee, respectively — to publish editorials demanding that Trump resign, and now, concede. I’ve done so via Twitter, email, and with McQueary, a voicemail to the Tribune office, with no response. Incredibly, the conservative Washington Examiner, once squarely in Trump’s corner (and he in its), beat both the Tribune and the Sun-Times to the “concede now” editorial punch.

I don’t believe that McQueary and McNamee, and the boards they lead, have any more or less responsibility to publish these editorials than any other major paper. I merely focus on them because they’re my hometown papers. My family subscribed to both growing up, and I’ve been published by both as an adult.

So my focus is here, in hopes that America can start a wave that will roll back the anti-Constitutional, anti-American insanity of a president claiming victory in an election he’s lost and pushing his supporters to believe that their franchise has been stolen from them, all while presiding over a pandemic he refuses to acknowledge as real even as it kills hundreds of thousands of his constituents. 

I want to see these editorials published by my papers, and no, I don’t care that he has less than two months remaining in office. Even at this late hour, I still want our mightiest institutions to hold Donald Trump to the standard of the presidency, rather than holding the presidency to the standard of Donald Trump.

Jack Silverstein is a Chicago journalist and historian. Here is his ongoing, two-year thread on this presidency.

Welcome to 30 Adoption Portraits in 30 Days, hosted by Portrait of an Adoption. This series will feature guest posts by people with widely varying adoption experiences and perspectives. 

What Will Life Look Like for Him at 21?
By Julie Cowan

Our son Kyle, who we adopted at birth, turned eighteen in February. While most eighteen-year-olds get ready to fly with independence, Kyle’s life ahead is one of uncertainty.

Recently, we had to go to court to establish guardianship, as Kyle will never be able to make decisions for himself. I wrote about his physical and cognitive impairments six years ago for this series. You can read about our adoption experience here.

In June he was graduated from a high school special-needs program. Now he has three years in a transition program ahead of him. Three years for us to decide what life for him will look like when he’s twenty-one, after the routine of school is done.

It might be shared housing with young adults his age, caregivers, and possibly a small job. What we know is that at fifty-six and fifty-eight, we can’t physically care for him forever. We’d be doing him a disservice to not provide him with daily social and peer contact.

Last year in school, he did some greeting at Trader Joe’s and was a big hit. With his smile, he got great feedback. He would hit a vocal switch for example, that said “welcome to Trader Joe’s, get your pumpkins $2.99.”

One woman said she planned her shopping trip when she knew he would be there, because she loved his smile so much. That melted my momma’s heart!

As has been the case for a number of years, both physically and emotionally, he is hard to take care of some days. Physically because he is 154 pounds now and wheelchair-bound, and he needs almost total care.

The hard part emotionally is that as he’s aged, the seizure medication or brain abnormality has caused him to scream more. It’s worse now with social distancing and online school. It’s difficult to hear the screams and it wears on us. We as parent caregivers continue with periodic counseling to help us handle the stress.

Along with him turning eighteen, it came time for the end of our legal agreement with his birth mother to send letters and pictures. She has had no contact with us since he was one year old.

Our letters and pictures were never returned from the post office box, so we assume she was still receiving them. Many times, I struggled with my fierce mother’s love “well if she doesn’t want to respond or know him screw her.”

My husband has always been more even-tempered and compassionate, and he wanted to maintain the connection, so I continued to send letters and pictures year after year, hoping they brought her some happiness. When he turned eighteen, I wrote her a final letter, letting her know it would be the last one she would receive unless we heard from her, asking for further communication.

I wrote to her about how there was one day when Kyle came home with an unsigned note in purple felt pen in his backpack. It said, “Kyle the world would be a better place if everyone was like you!”

I told her, “K, I’m sorry you chose not to know him, it has been a privilege to be his parents. He is a very special young man.” And so, there will be no future relationship for him with her. Something we’d hoped for so long ago with “open adoption” but didn’t happen.

Kyle is still handsome, funny, loves the Seahawks and Huskies and HGTV. He also obsesses about Taco Time, and he still adores his younger sister, Hayley.

We continue to experience a very positive open adoption with Hayley’s birth family. At fifteen, she texts and writes with her birth mom T and birth grandma and occasionally birth dad. Pre Covid, she spent time with them each summer the last few years.

She has enjoyed the opportunity to meet extended family. A year ago, she was able to meet her half birth sister, who is seven years younger than she is. They had a special couple of hours together.

So, when Hayley launches at eighteen, she will have had a solid start at maintaining those relationships with her birth family. We couldn’t be happier!  As we say, “more people to love her!”

Bio: Julie Cowan works as a nurse. She, Randy, Kyle and Hayley live in Bellevue.

* * * *
Carrie Goldman is the host of Portrait of an Adoption. She is an award-winning author, speaker, and bullying prevention educator. Follow Carrie’s blog Portrait of an Adoption on Facebook and Twitter

To continue receiving posts from Portrait of an Adoption, simply type your email address in the box and click the “create subscription” button.

Sundae is an adorable, very active and skittish, six-month-old, male Abyssinian tri-color guinea pig looking for a loving guardian.

Sundae came to Friends of Petraits Rescue when his human went back to college and said she had no time for him. She had bought him and a brother at a pet store, but the brother died soon after their purchase.

So, we think he will enjoy the company of other guinea pigs. Even if he’s living in a home with another guinea pig in another cage, guinea pigs enjoy chatting with each other.

Guinea pigs eat a diet of unlimited Timothy and Orchard hays; a handful of guinea pig pellets, and fresh vegetables including romaine, red leaf and green leaf lettuces, cilantro, cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes, etc. Guinea pigs, similar to humans, can’t manufacture their own vitamin C, so they need to supplement their diet with red pepper and many other vitamin C-rich foods. He LOVES his fresh foods and pulls them under his little hidey hut to enjoy them in privacy.

Please read up on guinea pig care and diet before adopting by visiting this excellent web site http://www.guinealynx.info/

He would love a home with people who will handle him daily, keep him well fed, his nails trimmed, and keep his habitat nice and clean.

If you’re interested in possibly adopting Sundae, please fill out an adoption application at https://friendsofpetraits.com/guinea-pig-adoption-application/.

He is being fostered in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood.

His adoption fee of $35 benefits the Friends of Petraits Rescue. For an additional $75, we’ll include a package of absolutely everything you need to care for him including a large cage, pellets, hay, hidey hut and water bottle.

And, yes … Friends of Petraits is handling masked, minimum contact, socially distant adoptions.

“Do you have a favorite memory of Gus?”

“Oh God, so many come to mind,” Maria replied.

Maria is Gus’ younger sister and the current Owner/Manager of Stella’s Diner here in Lakeview East.

The story of Stella’s Diner begins all the way back in the 1950s with Gus and Maria’s parents. The two immigrated to Chicago from Greece with little to no money. Maria’s Mom, Stella, worked at her uncle’s restaurant in the old Back of the Yards neighborhood. Maria’s Dad, Jimmy, worked as a line cook at the Tribune Tower coffee shop. The two got married and in 1962 opened their very first diner, the one that would eventually become Stella’s.

“Both of them were amazing cooks,” Maria said. “At first it was just a little, little bitty diner, just a counter and an open kitchen. And they worked that together from around 1962 to 1971.”

The original restaurant was called the Wheel-A-Round. The significance behind the name? Nothing really. Jimmy and Stella didn’t have enough money for a sign so they bought one real cheap and hung it up on the restaurant.

Stella would open the diner at 6 am sharp, seven days a week. She’d work the mornings and afternoons. Jimmy would take over in the evenings so one of them was always at home to watch over their three sons and youngest daughter. The Mavraganes family grew up right behind the Music Box Theatre.

In 1972, Maria’s parents moved to their current, much larger diner location at 3042 North Broadway.

“They had a really strong work ethic,” Maria said. “They both worked seven days a week for most of their lives. Customer service was always their first priority. They said the customer’s always right, always take care of the customer. And that’s what we learned as well.”

Maria, Gus, Angelo, and Pete learned a lot from their parents, diving into the restaurant at an early age.

“We all started working there since before we were teenagers,” Maria said. “Started out as dishwashers, then we started bussing counters. Full-time when we were 18 and it was always assumed that we would take it over and we did. Angelo learned to cook. I moved up to waitress and front of the house manager. Gus was all around manager. So we all had our departments that we took care of.”

If you look at the Stella’s menu of 2020, a lot of the favorite go-to meals were around 50-60 years ago.

“The biggest seller for us is the roast turkey dinner because we make the fresh turkey every day,” Maria said. “Everybody loves the fresh turkey because very few places do that anymore. It’s always some kind of deli style turkey and that’s it. But we roast a fresh turkey and a fresh ham every day. We learned from our parents. Everything from scratch. Original recipes. We even do our own hand shredded hash browns, which, you know, nobody does that very much anymore.”

Some customers have been ordering that turkey dinner for decades. One of the joys for Maria is seeing these long-time customers now bringing in new members of their family.

“We’ve got sometimes four generations of people coming into the restaurant,” Maria said. “We have one lady who’s gonna be 90-years-old next year and she’s been coming here since 1972. Or just the other day, this kid came in and he’s looking at me and I’m thinking, ‘Who’s this?’ When he told me his name, I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, I haven’t seen that kid in, I don’t know, 20 years and now he’s 36-years-old and coming in with his wife who was pregnant.'”

Stella’s Diner has even been part of marriage proposals.

“We had one couple, their first date was here,” Maria said. “So we got in on the surprise, decorated the back room. When the girl walked in, the guy got on his knee in front of her family and friends and proposed with everybody cheering.”

Maria credits the Lakeview East neighborhood, how unique it is in Chicago because it feels like a small town.

“I think it’s one of the few Chicago neighborhoods that have a real neighborhood feel,” Maria said. I mean, we have customers that have been coming in here for 40 something years, you know? The majority, I would say 70% of our business is regular customers. Everybody becomes family after a while.”

You can’t talk about the neighborhood feel of Lakeview East without mentioning Stella’s Diner, just like the classic longstanding spots like The Bagel, Monsignor Murphy’s, and Friar Tuck’s. It’s kind of a chicken and the egg situation, do those places make the neighborhood feel like home or does the small town neighborhood help create those places? It’s hard to decide. Either way, Maria’s proud to be part of it.

“A lot of people say how nice it is to come into a place, for someone to know your name and recognize you and talk and ask about your life and your family. That’s what it’s like at the restaurant. It’s not like we’re just some place where you’re just a face and a number. We know most everybody, our regulars, by their first name.”

In 2001, the diner’s name changed from Wheel-A-Round to Stella’s Diner. There was a major overhaul in the restaurant design and the Stella’s Diner you see today is pretty much what it looked like 20 years ago. For the last two decades, Gus, Maria, and Angelo have been running the show (their brother Pete works as a car mechanic). Even with their kids running the show, Jimmy and Stella were still really active, wanting to be there seven days a week. Their work ethic was just as strong into their late 60s/early 70s.

In 2007, Jimmy passed away and two years later Stella joined him on the other side. Both of their memories live on with their kids, grandkids, and their honorary family at the diner.

“People always ask me, are you Stella?” Maria said. “I tell them, ‘Stella Jr.’”

Sadly, last December, Gus also joined his parents, a loss felt deeply in the Lakeview East community.

“I thought of one,” Maria said. “A favorite memory of Gus.”

“I love football, so when Gus was teaching me how to drive, he told me that driving is like football and you got the ball and everybody’s trying to get at you. Let me knock on wood, I have never had an accident because I always think of that, what he told me. He taught me how to drive stick shift in one of his vintage cars. It was a black Riviera. When I finally did get my license, one of his car buddies let me try his classic car for a block. For me being 16, it was a kick even just to drive that car. That one block.”

Gus was known for many things, one of which was his love for classic cars. He’d buy cars and restore them, always had one parked in front of the diner. People would come by and pose for pictures with the cars. This love of cars went all the way back to his teenage years when he and his buddies would go racing.

“I don’t remember where it was, but it was called the incinerators,” Maria said, reflecting on a scene that was part American Graffiti, part Fast & Furious. “It was just a run down industrial complex that hadn’t been knocked down yet. And they would go in there to race cars and they would take me with. They’d tell Mom, ‘Oh, we’re gonna, you know, take her for ice cream or something,’ and then go do some illegal street racing by the incinerators. They’d give me $10 to not stitch, which, you know, when you’re 13, 10 bucks, you’re like, yeah, absolutely. I’m not gonna say nothing. It was fun growing up with all those boys.”

The diner was like a grand stage for Gus. He became this larger than life figure, easily recognizable, seemed like he was everybody’s cool uncle and even if you’d stopped by just one time, chances are you had a conversation with him. Likely right there in the booth.

“You always saw Gus at the front, hopping in booths, talking to people,” Maria said. “He was super welcoming, very gregarious. Just made everybody feel warm and welcomed. And everybody loved it. Especially the little kids in the neighborhood. He really had a knack connecting with children. And, like I said, it’s a real family diner. People come in to have their birthday parties.”

After Gus passed away, a local petition was started by a long-time customer to name the stretch of Barry Avenue between Broadway and Halsted as “Honorary Gus Mavraganes Way.” They needed a few thousand signatures to bring it to Alderman Tom Tunney (who’s also the owner of Ann Sather restaurant), bring it up to a vote. The community flew way past the signature requirement and the plan was approved.

“When they do the dedication, we wanted to have his car club buddies come and do like a cruise around the neighborhood in all their old cars,” Maria said. “But with COVID-19, that’s not something that we want to do right now. We’re hoping by next springtime, if everything’s back to normal, we can do that.”

Life After Gus, Fighting Through COVID-19

Maria is holding the restaurant together with two other managers and their staff as they navigate through this brutally difficult year. We talked back in September, a time when restaurants were starting to open up a little bit. Now, a few days before Thanksgiving, the restrictions feel eerily similar to eight months ago.

“This year has been super tough,” Maria said. “Between just the whole COVID-19 thing and Angelo not being well (currently on medical leave) it’s very stressful because you just don’t know. Every day is something different. The fear of the unknown and what’s gonna happen in the future, how long it’s gonna go on. It’s hard not knowing.”

Maria mentioned how her team was, understandably, nervous back in March and April. They worried about contracting the virus or unknowingly passing it to their family of customers. Maria called a big meeting early on and showed everybody what to do, how to stay safe, how to sanitize.

“So far, knock on wood, we’ve opened safe and healthy.”

When talking about all of the challenges, Maria doesn’t sugar coat things. But she always goes right back into fighter mode a sentence later, sharing why giving up is never an option. Never will be.

“For us, it’s not just a job. I mean, people [on our staff] have been there 20, 30, 40 years. And like I said before, we’re all family here. All the different servers have their different set of regulars that like to sit with them, it’s just a good neighborhood family feel for us. So it’s not like, okay, I’ll lose my job and I’ll go get another one. For us, the fear of not making it through is possibly losing our family’s legacy.”

Part of the neighborhood support comes from the other restaurants on Broadway. No restaurant, from Diversey to Addison, is going through this year alone. And this sense of community amongst the restaurants is something that’s held true all the way back to those early Jimmy and Stella days at the Wheel-A-Round Diner.

“Everybody watches out for each other,” Maria said. “Nobody thinks, ‘Oh, you’re the enemy and you’re the competition.’ It’s nothing like that. Everybody watches each other’s back. I remember when I was young, every time a new business would come into the neighborhood, you send them flowers and welcome to the neighborhood. Mortar and Pestle, our neighbors, sometimes I notice he’ll be getting a delivery on the day that he’s not there and I just tell the delivery guy, leave it here, I’ll give it to him later.”

It’s awesome to hear Maria talk about her neighboring restaurants. She has the same love for them as she does for her own place.

“I love Buena Vista for Mexican. Mortar and Pestle, I think he’s an amazing chef. Everything I’ve ever eaten there is delicious. Caesar’s for their margaritas. Chilam Balam is amazing, the stuff she does, it’s just so good. They take all the Mexican spices and flavors and do so many interesting things with them. She’s great.”

And then the residents themselves. Maria is deeply thankful for everyone in the community.

“I’m so incredibly grateful that the neighborhood’s been super supportive. Through the worst of it, they really came through with delivery and carry out. I remember one night, at one point during the dinner rush, we must have gotten 40 milkshakes to go. I’m so grateful to the neighborhood for helping us survive through all of this.”

I think of Leyla and Ahmet opening Black & Caspian back in January or Deon and Oreste starting Empanada Mama and the Pie Man a few weeks ago, to them, Stella’s is the older sibling down the street. The one who teaches you how to drive. If you’re having a hard week, you can always go talk to Aunt Maria. Her advice to those starting a new restaurant:

“Be prepared for long hours in the beginning,” Maria said. “I was born into it. So it’s like second nature to me. But it’s a very difficult job. But there’s so much good to it. The people you meet, the relationships that you make. I always tell people 95% of the time, I love my job. But then there’s the days when your refrigerator crashes on you and, you know, Comcast goes out, got no Internet or credit card issue on deliveries. You have to let it all roll off.”

Because, at the end of the day, no matter how hard it gets, when you’re doing the thing you were created to do, you’ll find the energy to keep moving forward. For Maria, just like Gus, that thing is running Stella’s Diner.

“We all tried different things, but we always came back to it,” Maria said. “It’s what we call home.”

This article is part of an ongoing series this year featuring local restaurants and businesses all around Chicago. I’ve been amazed at these stories and how the themes are tying together. I’m continuing to follow where the stories lead.

To catch up on previous posts and read about other great local spots, here they are below:

Chefs for Change: Thanksgiving Edition

DryHop: Lakeview East’s Neighborhood Brewery

The Local Baker: Douglas Callegario’s Nourish Foods

Empanada Mama and The Pie Man

Just a City Guy Working a Farm Shift

Inkling in Lakeview East and why we need the little shops

Chilam Balam: What it takes to keep a restaurant open during the pandemic

Taste of New York Bagels & Deli

• The Wonder of Saying Yes and Letting Go (Part 1)
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

Tango Sur

• Chicago, Argentina (Part 1)
• Chicago, Argentina (Kierkegaard intermission)
• Chicago, Argentina (Part 2: The Family Behind Tango Sur)
• Chicago, Argentina (Kierkegaard Finale)

Black & Caspian

• Black & Caspian – Part 1
• Black & Caspian – Part 2

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