Driving Into Fall

A visit to Ronald Reagan’s birthplace and boyhood home in northern Illinois
Tackling Souls

Mike Singletary is a standup guy. He says so clearly in his book Singletary on Singletary: “If you have a contract with me, written or oral, I will honor it. End of discussion.” Given that resounding assurance of reliability, I am a little surprised that this standup guy appears to have stood me up. An hour after my interview with Singletary was supposed to have started, I am still waiting for him in the lobby of a Barrington restaurant.
Everyone remembers Singletary as the Bears’ Rasputin-eyed linebacker, diving for loose halfbacks in Soldier Field with an expression that recalled Jack Nicholson chopping down the door in The Shining — and a banzai screech that earned him the nickname Samurai. Since he retired from knocking people over, Singletary, 41, has built a lucrative career as a motivational speaker for corporate America. And on the side, he has become a one-man Hull House, aiding athletes at the end of their rope. Sometimes he takes Jesus along to help. In other words, he used to love hitting people; now he loves healing them. In the last weeks of Walter Payton’s life, Singletary spent hours at the dying man’s bedside, praying and reading the Bible to guide his old teammate’s passage into heaven. Two years ago, when Alonzo Spellman melted down and barricaded himself inside a house, Singletary parted the row of police, went in, and came out with his arm around the broken defensive end. Singletary’s power to heal has grown so widely renowned that the Atlanta Braves called him in last spring to talk about the baseball team in the ugly aftermath of John Rocker’s xenophobic remarks in Sports Illustrated. “It was the very best thing we could have done,” says a grateful John Schuerholz, the Braves’ general manager.
All those good works — but no sign of him at the Barrington restaurant. When I get home, though, there’s an apologetic message on my voice mail and an explanation: “I didn’t bring my schedule book with me, and my wife called and asked if I wanted to have lunch across town. I’m so sorry. Give me a call and we’ll see if we can reschedule.”
Even though I’ve been stood up, I’m impressed. The day before, I’d finished reading Singletary’s book Daddy’s Home at Last, a polemic exhorting corporate-climbing fathers to spend more time with their families. Singletary seems to heed his own advice.
I don’t hear back from him for a week and a half. I’m about ready to give up on the story, until I recall these words from Singletary on Singletary: “Don’t be defeated by one defeat. Don’t be discouraged…. Keep your eye on the prize and be obsessive about it.” I decide to purse Singletary with Singletary-like fanaticism.
Finally, on a Tuesday afternoon, I get a terse message: “Meet me at the Marriott O’Hare, 4 p.m.” Singletary will be there to tape an interview for an ESPN special on Payton. At the hotel, I wait in the lobby until he has finished the interview; then we walk out together to his brand-new Silver Acura. He tells me that he’s just flown back from Houston, where he grew up. I’ve been reading about Enron Field, the Astros’ new ballpark, and I pepper him with a few facts about the 315-foot fence in left, the hill in center field. Singletary cuts me off. “I hear it’s nice,” he barks.
Singletary is not in a bad mood. He’s just a man with no talent for, or interest in, small talk. Bill Glass, a pro football player turned prison evangelist who has taken Singletary along on visits to the Cook County Jail, calls him “as serious and intense a guy as I’ve ever seen. I’ve tried to loosen him up a little bit, and he doesn’t loosen. It’s not that he’s angry, but he’s — ‘I’ve got a lot to do, and I want to be with other people who’ve got a lot to do, too.'”
Inside the Acura, Singletary slips oval sunglasses over those eyes that could beat a snake in a staring contest, turns off the radio in deference to my tape recorder, and wheels out of the parking lot. Singletary’s height surprises people — he is just over five feet ten — but his shoulders block out half the horizon, and he’s got thick, neck-snapping hands. He seems monastically self-controlled, able to regulate every emotion, every word that emerges from his monolithic body.
A car interview is perfect for Singletary: It doesn’t steal time from his family, and, because he wears hearing aids — he’s had significant hearing loss in both ears since he was young, caused perhaps by working construction withn his father — it is easy for him to pick up questions from the passenger sitting nearby to his side. I ask about the Rocker meeting with the Braves. Singletary had reportedly drawn thoughtful stares from the team’s white players when he got a black player to talk about being pulled over by suburban cops on the way to a party and forced to kneel in a mud puddle. But Singletary also asked the clubhouse to be tolerant of Rocker, a 26-year-old who had been naïve and tactless enough to express his racism in front of a reporter. “Basically, we were just having the team be aware that this is not something that’s going to go away,” Singletary says in his deliberate, deep-as-the-ocean voice. (His precise, profound pronunciation would make him perfect as the voice of the New Testament for Books on Tape.) “Rather than looking at Rocker and saying, ‘This guy, I don’t want to play with him, he’s stupid,’ I just asked them to really think, to be honest with themselves: ‘He said some things; there’s no doubt about it. But how many of you have thought them?'”
When our conversation turns to Walter Payton, Singletary’s words come more sparingly; the long silences between sentences are filled with the swish of highway traffic. As Bear teammates the two had not always been close. The author Jerry Jenkins, who wrote books with both men, says Payton sometimes chafed at Singletary’s evangelism. “Those guys on the Bears almost looked at him like a clergyman,” Jenkins says. “I think it alienated him a little bit more from Walter because [Singletary] wanted to have a little bit more spiritual impact than Walter wanted.”
Singletary says he tried to give Payton his privacy as he was dying. So many people were calling and writing that “I felt I was getting in the way.” But with a few weeks left, Matt Suhey, a former teammate of both men, came to see Singletary. “You need to be over there,” Suhey told him. “He wants you over there.”
“[Payton] asked me, ‘Mike, I want you to read Scripture with me,’ and I was very excited about that,” Singletary recalls. “He definitely believed in God, and he believed in Christ. Walter wanted to be able to talk about faith, things that he should be doing right now. He wanted to talk about fear, overcoming that.” From then on, Singletary and Payton read the Bible together two or three times a week and talked about the world to come. Payton found particular comfort in Isaiah 53:5, a verse that prophesies the sacrifices of Jesus: “But he was wounded for our transgressions,” it reads, “he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”
Suhey acknowledges that Singletary “challenged people spiritually.” But Payton was ready for that, Suhey says. “I think he felt Mike was very trustworthy, and was of the confidence that his beliefs would be kept to themselves,” Suhey said. “I think the spirituality and the honesty represented something that Walter would be comfortable with.”
Alonzo Spellman, another Bear who got a visit from Singletary at the worst moment of his life, didn’t know Singletary well. They had played together for one season, and Singletary remembered him only as “a big kid, a nice guy.” On March 9, 1998, Singletary was driving home from the post office when he heard on the radio that Spellman had barricaded himself inside his publicist’s house. He called the Bears to confirm the story and was told, “He’s in the house, surrounded by a SWAT team. I don’t think he has any weapons.” Driving straight to the scene in Tower Lakes, Singletary talked the police into letting him go inside. He didn’t know for sure that Spellman was unarmed, but, he says, “I wasn’t concerned at all. I just feel like, if God is saying ‘Go,’ then I’m protected.”
Inside the house, Singletary persuaded Spellman to go to the hospital. “He said, ‘Well, I’m not going to leave unless you leave with me,'” Singletary recalls. “If you go with me to the hospital, that’s the only way I’ll go.’ So he and I prayed together before we went outside, got in the car, and went to the hospital, and then we prayed some more.”
Today, Spellman has straightened himself out and plays for the Dallas Cowboys.
Singletary is just as likely to act as spiritual confessor to strangers. When he is flying to a business meeting or a corporate speech, Singletary often gets into conversations that start, “Didn’t you used to play for the Bears?” Eventually, he maneuvers the talk to what he calls his Million Dollar Question: “Are you happy?” Most of the time, he says, the answer is “No, not really.”
Since Singletary flies first class, he says, his seatmates usually “lead a corporation. I start asking questions. ‘What in your life right now do you really like about your life? What would you do differently, do over again?’ Nine times out of ten, something comes up: ‘I’ve got a mother who doesn’t talk to me.’ ‘I’ve got a son, I know we had a bad relationship when he was a kid, and I just hurt him. He doesn’t want to call me.’ It just goes on and on. Some, we pray together on the plane. Some receive Jesus Christ.”
Every evangelist has his audience. Singletary’s is the man who has everything but Jesus. He talks glancingly of his work with prisoners and inner-city children, but he walks in the corporate world: He lives in South Barrington; he’s a consultant to Fortune 500 companies; he earns roughly $20,000 a night as a motivational speaker.
Bob Williams, president of Burns Sports in Evanston, has brokered dozens of speeches for Singletary. After a year and a half of working with him, the wary Singletary trusted Williams enough to reveal his deepest ambition: He wanted to be the best sports speaker in America. Then you’ve got to be funny, Williams told him. “Years ago, he had no humor in his speech,” Williams says. “He knew he had to do that to get to the next level.”
They said Singletary was too small to play linebacker, but he went to ten Pro Bowls and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1998. They said Singletary was as humorless as the Spanish Inquisition, but he learned standup. I saw him speak to a meeting of drug company executives at another hotel near O’Hare. When he told a story about the moment he realized that his sweet bride, Kim, had turned into a wife, guys were laughing and high-fiving each other with wedding-ringed hands.
“When we got back from our honeymoon, I realized something was different,” Singletary began. “I grabbed a basketball and was going down to the gym to play ball with the guys. She said, ‘Where are you going?’ It was something about the tone of her voice. ‘What time will you be back?’ I felt like I was home again, like I was a three-year-old. I thought, I’d better nip this in the bud. I said, ‘I’ll be back when the game is over.’ ‘No, you won’t. Dinner is at five, and you’re going to be here.'”
The speech — which swung from Cosby-like riffs about marriage to sobering stories of Singletary’s childhood, when he was the youngest among then brothers and sisters — was about commitment, excellence, goals, relationships, vision, blood, sweat and tears. All the things a drug company needs to defeat its rivals. One topic Singletary didn’t touch was religion. He leaves that out of his corporate speeches, although his audience can always tell that he is a believer from the way he talks about family and relationships.
Early on in his speaking career, Singletary says, he “came very close to just totally speaking to churches, and that’s it.” But later he decided to branch out. “I felt like the Lord said, ‘I’ve got people preaching to the choir. I need you to talk about faith and family and forgiveness to people who might not be getting that message every Sunday morning at 11.'”
Recently, Singletary joined an organization called Firm Foundation, a group of suburban businessmen who want to dismantle the welfare system and replace it with church-run work programs. His picture is in the brochure, and a recent meeting, he testified about his mother’s refusal to take welfare after his father walked out on her and the ten little Singletarys. That’s the same self-reliant attitude Singletary wants to encourage.
If welfare can make people shiftless, can’t wealth — a more common affliction in Singletary’s circle — turn them into golden idol-worshipping materialists? Absolutely, says Singletary, who criticizes the wealthy for isolating themselves. This could sound fatuous coming from a South Barrington millionaire, but Singletary has tried to give his seven children a taste of his common upbringing. He actually moved from a larger to a smaller house — it’s 8,500 square feet — so that none of his children would have his or her own bedroom. Growing up in Houston, Singletary shared a room with four brothers.
He also refuses to hire a lawn service. “The thing is not to get sucked into a lifestyle,” he says. “We cut our own yard. Our kids, last year they said, ‘Dad, why do we cut our own yard? Nobody else cuts their yard.’ I told them, ‘I just want you to understand, this is building cameraderie. We pray together, we work together.'”
Ten years ago, when Jerry Jenkins was helping write Singletary on Singletary, he watched his coauthor drill the children to be Christian soldiers. Like a church Singletary’s family has its own creed: Love Jesus; love one another; obey your parents; pray for one another; and put family before friends. And like a business, it has a mission statement, which hangs in the foyer of the house: “This is the home of champions,” it reads. “As Singletarys, we will always strive to do our very best in all we do.” “He was saying something about how his goal is to fill the children with spiritual wisdom every day,” Jenkins says. “I said, ‘How old is the oldest one?’ He said, ‘Four and a half.'” But, adds Jenkins, his kids “just idolize him. They look at him like he’s God.”
Singletary gets off Interstate 90 at the Barrington exit, then drives down a long road that looks as if it leads to a subdivision. In fact, it leads to Singletary’s church. Willow Creek Community Church is one of the immense evangelical houses of worship that have sprung up across the country over the past two decades; in a 1999 article, The New York Times called it “the most influential megachurch in the United States,” and it was here that President Bill Clinton made his public repentance in August. Every week, 17,000 people attend one of its services, which feature pop music and mini-dramas to illustrate the gospel. Singletary is here today to drop off a tape — a recording of him crooning a song called “Twenty Years Ago.” Some of the church’s musicians will dub in instrumentals, and the resulting mix will be a birthday surprise for Singletary’s wife, whom he met at Baylor University in the early 1980s.
As Singletary walks the halls, no one rubbernecks at him. He’s been attending Willow Creek for nearly two decades, since the church’s pastor, Bill Hybels, led prayer sessions for the Bears. Singletary leads a “small group” of eight or so members who read the Bible and discuss spiritual problems. He volunteers in the nursery. The church tries not to abuse his fame, but he does speak at a men’s breakfast and, once a year, to the Sports and Fitness Ministry.
“I think our church had really responded maturely, giving Mike and Kim love, and not expecting him to be a celebrity,” says Hybels.
My visit with Singletary ends at the same place I was first supposed to meet him for lunch: the Millrose Restaurant. Singletary stops in front of the door and tells me the maitre d’ can call me a cab for the ride back to Rosemont. Before I’m dismissed from the car, I ask Singletary his own Million Dollar Question: “Are you happy?”
“Ah, heck yeah,” he rumbles. “I’m so thankful that I’m not lost, that I have a vision, that I know where I’m going and what I’m doing. I’m so thankful that I’m married to a woman who loves me for who I am, and I love her unconditionally. I’m so thankful that I have seven kids that I can teach and mold and help to grow and come into their own. To be great moms and dads and to raise families and to continue to carry on what their mother and I have done.”
I get out of the car. Singletary spins his Acura out of the parking lot and speeds away home. You can understand why he’s in a hurry.
North Country Sage

When I was a boy, I had a premonition that I’d learn my purpose in life when I reached 27. I even had an image of The Moment in my head. It would be like watching a film of a shattering wine glass, run backwards. All the scattered shards would leap up off the floor, and the glass, whole again, would gleam as a symbol of the new life I was about to live.
The great revelation actually came when I was 23, but it felt exactly as I’d imagined it. I was living in San Francisco, 2,000 miles from my home in Michigan, and working as a file clerk in an accounting firm. One night as I was browsing in the basement of City Lights Bookstore, my homesick eye caught this title: North Star Country, by Meridel Le Sueur. It was a history of the Upper Midwest, my turf, told in the voices of Indians, Grange farmers, housewives, striking laborers — all the people who’d been left out of The Oxford History of the America People. The very first sentence, the invocation, was this Norwegian immigrant’s prayer: “Should all things perish, fleeting as a shooting star/ O God let not the ties break that bind me to the North.” That, I realized, as I thought gloomily about the drizzly Pacific winter outside, could have been my nighttime prayer, too.
By the time I finished reading North Star Country, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. Four months later, I left San Francisco, which I figured had too many litterateurs, anyway, and moved back to Michigan, hoping to write a book about the “modern folkways” of the Upper Midwest: deer hunting in November, high school hockey tournaments, apple cider mills, fishing shanties and all the other little customs that made us different from the rest of America.
North Star Country, the book that inspired this pipe dream of mine, was originally published in 1945, as part of the American Folkways series, which was edited by Erskine Caldwell and also included such volumes as Mormon Country by Wallace Stegner and Golden Gate Country by long-fogotten Gertrude Atherton. It lapsed out of print soon after I discovered it, and when Le Sueur died two years ago, I figured it was gone forever. But North Star Country, the best nonfiction book ever written about the Midwest, is alive again, reissued this past fall by the University of Minnesota press.
Its author, Meridel Le Sueur, was one those Depression-era “proletarian” writers, like Nelson Algren and Richard Wright, who got their training working for the Federal Writers Project, and ever afterwards went into the city streets and the small towns to look for material. As a member of the Minnesota project, Le Sueur was given the task of traveling around the state, recording folk sayings. Years later, when she got the commission for North Star Country, she decided to use her collection of tales and proverbs as the basis of a new kind of book: a biography of a people that blurred the lines between fiction and history, sociology and folklore. The explorers, generals and governors who dominate most history books were given cameos, but North Star Country was, at its root, “a history of the people of the Midwest, told from their dimensions in their language.”
In Le Sueur’s book, the commonest settler was given the mythic dimensions of a Bunyan or an Appleseed. There are no statistics on immigration or agriculture in North Star Country. But there is a sketch of the footloose sailor Cleng Peerson, the “Puck Moses” who led the first boatload of Norwegian immigrants to the American prairie. And when Le Sueur writes about corn, the staple of Ojibway Indians and Scandinavian farmers, she has to describe the shucking technique of Ed Doggett, who once represented Freeborn County, Minnesota, at the National Corn Husking Contest, “a greater sport to watch than a Big Ten football game.” To Le Sueur, that crop was the “Corn Mother,” the seed from which the entire Midwest grew.
Le Sueur believed that a writer has to live among her material the way a farmer lives in his fields; she called her work “my life’s crop.” No writer with “distance,” no one who hadn’t felt the turning of season after season, could have come up with this description of summer-into-fall in the North Country:
The fine flesh of farm women smells of summer, of the hot kitchen. Then the harvesters come and there is the odor of sweet summer hay cooked in the blazing sun, of wheat chaff blowing sweet, corn standing tall, wind ripe over the ripe fields and the smell of many kinds of ripeness, seed and the fruition before death.
North Star Country is a pastiche of songs, yarns, sketches and journalism. One chapter is a description of the Minnesota State Fair. The next, a history of the first white explorers. It’s disorganized, impressionistic. She didn’t believe in narrative or biography, at least in the way most historians do. Books in which a few great men drive the action forward were undemocratic, “like capitalism, the good distributed to a few favored players.” The story of the North Star Country was the story of millions, so she tried to meet, and write about, as many as possible. Near the end of the book, Le Sueur marches with drivers in a Minneapolis trucking strike, then rides a milk train, where she meets a farm boy returning to his World War II submarine duty. They talk, and he rewards her with this poetic speech, one of dozens recorded in North Star Country.
‘Lord,’ he kept saying, along with some stronger language, ‘that’s the earth there under the snow. The sea’s like a prairie sometimes on a still night, but the sea you can’t get your spurs into. The prairies now, you can get your knees in. There she is — America!’
Le Sueur spent years away from the Midwest before she learned to see it so. She was born in 1900, in Iowa, the stepdaughter of a radical lawyer who consorted with troublemakers in all shades of red — anarchists, socialists, Wobblies. Originally, she set out to be an actress, and went to Hollywood, but producers there thought he nose looked like a Jew’s or an Indian’s, and asked her to get it bobbed. She refused, and the only work she could get was as a stunt double. (Le Sueur’s cousin, Lucille, was more successful, undergoing the necessary operation and changing her name to Joan Crawford.)
After the falling out with L.A., she moved up the coast to San Francisco, where she worked as a waitress and factory worker and began writing short stories and articles for lefty publications like Masses.
Le Sueur’s writing career was just taking off when the Depression hit, but like many other radical authors, she found the ’30s “a good time to be a writer.” She published her best known piece of journalism, “I Was Marching,” an account of her participation in a Minneapolis truckers’ strike, and her only full-length novel, The Girl. Le Sueur collected material for that book by copying down the life stories of women she and her daughters lived with in an abandoned warehouse.
It’s hard to imagine an earthier writer than Le Sueur, or a more determined one. During the early ’40s, she was still considered respectable enough for a Rockefeller Historical Research Fellowship, which provided the cash to finish North Star Country. But after World War II, the bill for her left-wing beliefs came due. Publishers dropped her books from their backlists, and the FBI did whatever it could to keep her from working. Boarders at a rooming house she ran were told their landlord was a subversive. Le Sueur tried teaching a correspondence course, but the bureau wrote harassing letters to her students. She was even fired from several waitressing jobs because of her red past.
Outside of a few articles in radical publications, her only writing then was a series of children’s biographies about wholesome American heroes like Johnny Appleseed and Davy Crockett. But even with these, Le Sueur made a political — specifically a feminist — statement. One of the books is about Nancy Hanks, Abraham Lincoln’s mother, a woman Le Sueur was distressed to see unmentioned in any monument to the president.
Le Sueur’s writing never made her rich, or even gave her a secure income. To support herself in middle age, she sewed garments in a sweatshop and worked as an attendant in an insane asylum. In those years, she also became interested in the Indians of the Southwest, and lived in an abandoned bus in Santa Fe so she could spend time with them. (The bus was also Le Sueur’s favorite way to travel. She rode it to Kentucky to visit Lincoln’s birthplace, to Washington to march against the Vietnam War. The close quarters and long trips gave her plenty of opportunity to talk to people.)
Le Sueur lived 96 years, long enough to become a heroine again. The women’s movement that arose in the 1960s saw her as a proto-feminist. She won a Wonder Woman Award from a group in New York, and spoke at a U.N. conference commemorating the Decade of the Woman.
Le Sueur was an early feminist, but the independent women she wrote about during the Depression were of a different order than today’s college-educated career women, for whom living alone is a lifestyle choice, rather than a survival technique.
In her 1934 essay, “Women Are Hungry,” Le Sueur distilled the hardscrabble philosophy of the hand-to-mouth women she knew in the Twin Cities: “Keep alone as much as you can, look out for yourself. Keep away from men and marriage, because there isn’t anything in it for a girl but a horde of children to be left with. Lie low, get along, beg, borrow or steal, go a lone wolf’s way.”
Le Sueur went a lone wolf’s way in the literary world, too. She wrote deep into her old age, but she published little new work after 1960, mainly because she had abandoned narrative — linear writing was a male art form, she thought — in favor of an “organic,” feminine style that expressed the cyclical nature of the world, the interdependence of all living things. For years, she labored over an extended work called The Origins of Corn, a series of psalms to the mother food of the Midwest, the kernel that to her was as important as the first atom of the universe. “American corn did not come from Europe or Asia,” reads one fragment. “It is thought and flesh of the Americas, transmutation of communal love, Indian solidarity. Bountiful yields, rich protein, small and portable it could be carried by nation-building people, planted grown milled on new land, in a hole in the forest, migrant up the Mississippi, builder of new cities where wanderers could stop and because they had corn.”
It’s been eight years since I discovered North Star Country, and I haven’t yet written my big book about the Midwest. But Le Sueur inspired me to take my notebook into places I never would have gone before: a “tent city” erected by the homeless on the lawn of the Michigan State Capitol; a neighborhood full of Southern-born auto workers in Flint, Michigan; the headquarters of a striking union in Decatur, Illinois. So maybe I’m writing it in bits and pieces, deposited in little magazines and newspapers all over the region.
“I have waited for younger historians to continue this history of the people beyond the end of World War II,” Le Sueur wrote 40 years after North Star Country was first published. Le Sueur never believed in endings, at least in writing. She knew she would end, but the people of the Midwest would go on and on after her death. Their story would have to be continued. There are hundreds of us working on that, I think. We’re extending her work, a few words at a time.
One-Track Minds

A horseplayer’s apprenticeship
Living the Lansing Dream

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