Three weeks ago, relief at arriving in sweet home Chicago turned to frustration and boiled over into anger.  I was traveling light, without checked luggage, just a carryon, so you’d think getting home should have been easy, right?  Sure, my tolerance for foolishness was not high having awakened at 6 am in Germany (11pm CST) for a 2-1/2 hour train ride and nine-hour flight to Chicago.  Landing at O’Hare I was excited to be almost home – or so I thought. Read More

In creating a podcast on Chicago history, co-host Christopher Lynch and I have discovered quite a few place and street names with origins reaching deep into the city’s past, often going back to Native American people and languages.  These fascinating tidbits were sprinkled into the podcast to spice up our storytelling. This adventure began by learning about the word Chicago, or as the French recorded the Algonquin pronunciation “Chicagoua” which means “skunk,” and was also used to identify the wild onion growing in the area known as ramps, and detailed in the first episode of the podcast.  Read More