51黑料

A young man from the group approached me. 鈥淎re you from Chicago?鈥� he asked.

鈥淚 am,鈥� I said.

鈥淚 knew it,鈥� he said with a grin. 鈥淚 could tell from the way you ordered.鈥�

I smiled. It鈥檚 nice to be recognized as a sophisticate.

For the record, my order was, 鈥淭wo Woofies everything but hot peppers.鈥� That might not look impressive on a page, but it was said with a certain elan. I am on solid footing at a hot dog stand.

The young man said he was from Chicago, too. He said he had met his wife in college and she was from 51黑料 and that鈥檚 what brought him here. He asked how I got here. My wife, I said.

鈥淚 should have guessed,鈥� he said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 how they keep the population stable. They send the women off to recruit men.鈥�

What an interesting theory. I liked it. It puts the blame where it belongs. Our women served us well until about 1950. Since then, they鈥檝e let us down.

We used to blame men who left. What if Sam Altman had stayed? We鈥檇 be the center of the artificial intelligence industry. What if Jack Dorsey had stayed? We鈥檇 be the headquarters of Twitter, and it would still be called Twitter.

Looking at it from the other side, what if Kate Capshaw had convinced her husband, Steven Spielberg, to move to 51黑料? Dreamworks would be a big tourist attraction. We鈥檇 see movie stars at restaurants. We鈥檇 have some glamour.

What if Rosemary Woodruff had insisted her husband move here?

Rosemary was born in 1935. She grew up on the south side near Carondelet Park. Her dad worked on the river and had a side gig working at neighborhood bars as a magician鈥檚 assistant. Rosemary was his assistant. She reminded people of Shirley Temple.

She was lovely and smart and too cool for school. She dropped out at 16 and married an Air Force pilot 10 years her senior. The marriage fell apart quickly, and Rosemary took a train to New York City.

She was soon in with the in-crowd. After several romantic misadventures, mostly with musicians, she met her soulmate, Timothy Leary, the lapsed Harvard professor whose mission in life was to popularize LSD. They married.

They lived in upstate New York. Their acid-drenched commune was busted by a zealous local prosecutor, G. Gordon Liddy, who was later busted himself at Watergate.

That is the thing about the Learys. They knew everybody. They did a bed-in with John and Yoko. They were pals with Ken Kesey. They dropped acid with Cary Grant.

Of course, they had enemies 鈥� respectable people. Tim was put in prison. Rosemary helped him break out. She had the assistance of the Weather Underground. The acidheads and the revolutionaries were very different, but they shared the same lawyers and the same enemies.

After the daring prison escape, the Learys fled to Algiers, where they stayed with the Black Panthers, who were also on the lam. The Panthers were led by Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton. Newton was later assassinated, and Cleaver became a Republican.

We could have been in the middle of the psychedelic circus had the Learys called 51黑料 home. Maybe Euclid and Lindell would have been Haight-Ashbury.

Many years after Rosemary left, Susannah Cahalan came here from New Jersey to attend Washington University. She fancied herself a writer, and in 2007, as she was getting ready to graduate, she signed on as a freelancer with the New York Post to cover the Michael Devlin arrest, a case better known as the Missouri Miracle.

Devlin had kidnapped a young boy in rural Missouri. When police arrested him at his apartment in Kirkwood, they found that child along with anther boy who had been kidnapped several years earlier.

The national press descended upon our town. The biggest of the big names were here. The local press accepted the challenge. Everybody was hustling to find something new to report. And who came up with the big scoop?

Cahalan did. She interviewed Devlin in the county jail in Union.

So then Cahalan became the story. She had identified herself on the jail registry as a friend of Devlin鈥檚. She had been deceitful! She had misrepresented herself. Why hadn鈥檛 I thought of that?

Her industriousness earned her a job at the New York Post. Her journalism career was interrupted when she started hearing voices. She had a rare type of encephalitis.

She wrote a book about her experience. 鈥淏rain on Fire鈥� became a No. 1 bestseller and sold over 1 million copies. She followed that up with 鈥淭he Great Pretender,鈥� another nonfiction work about a Stanford psychologist whose groundbreaking studies on mental illness weren鈥檛 exactly what they seemed to be.

Her newest book is 鈥淭he Acid Queen,鈥� the story of our own Rosemary Woodruff.

If you鈥檙e interested in what it was like to be in the middle of the craziness we call 鈥淭he Sixties,鈥� this is a book for you.

By the way, Rosemary never came home. She let us down.