Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 53

Section 5 Chicago (Tribune Tuesday, June 9, 1 992 By Edward Menaker A crusader ends his struggle By James Ricci hate admitting this to my loyal comrades in arms, but the rumors are true. After years of valiant resistance to the tyrannical conformism of lawn care, I have surrendered. In Illinois and in Czechoslovakia, the memory of a slaughtered village still glimmers lest the Nazis ultimately have their way Even though it goes against every principle we have struggled for, I have ordered a new lawn. I realize we resisters have suffered many casualties in our holy cause of lawn hatred. Many a worthy person has incurred the wrath and low opinion of neighbors by participating in this rebellion.

And I hasten to add that my giving up the Commentary fight in my sector doesn't mean the crusade is not just, or that others in the resistance should now stack arms and turn themselves in to the authorities at ChemLawn. In fact, the movement may be on the verge of a dynamic new phase. Recently it was announced that Nelson Mandela, one of the greatest freedom fighters of all time, will After years Of move from dusty j. Soweto to a leafy sub- Vaiiani urb of Johannesburg. As resistance tO a suburbanite, he'll get a imioiuiiw iv p01gnant iook at the the tyrannical servitude lawns impose conformism of ZJi BIDICE, 111.

Travel 25 miles southwest of Chicago to where the farms begin taking over from the city, to the sprawling flatlands that surround the Stateville Correctional Center, to the tiny town of Crest Hill, and there you will find a simple monument to Lidice memorializing a town, and its residents, erased from the face of the Earth by the Nazis 50 years ago, on June 10, 1942. The inscription on the 8-foot-high piece of granite and sandstone reads: "In memory of the people of Lidice Czechoslovakia, destroyed by barbarism, but living forever in the hearts of all who love freedom, this monument is erected by the free people of America at Lidice Illinois. Then by itself, at the bottom, only two words: "Lidice Lives." Across the street are homes with the windows thrown up on a warm spring day, with lawn chairs on the porches, and gravel driveways leading into small back yards and garages. It is a neighborhood so quiet that you can hear the dogs barking from inside the nouses when the mailman comes, so quiet that you can hear the bells from a church a mile away. There is nothing to hint at what brought this monument here or how it and this small village thousands of miles from Czechoslovakia became a symbol against Nazism to the rest of the world.

Although 50 years have passed since the war, residents of this area of small homes and winding lanes still refer to themselves as being not so much from Crest Hill as they are from Lidice (pronounced LE-deese). There is a Lidice Tot Lot just down from the monument, and even a Lidice bus line. "Yeah, I'm proud," says an older r. sn watching his granddaughter in the tot lot near the monument. "It's a wonderful thing, beautiful.

"That we could do this for all those people who were killed, I felt sorry for all of them. I volunteered to help clean up the monument when it got dirty. It didn't seem right. We even sandblasted it." Most of the people here now are not Czechoslovak and do not know all that happened at Lidice. Time has faded the interest in that memory.

"I watch the war movies on television and all," says Jeff Phelps, 26, who lived with his family in a home directly across from the Tribune photo by John Irvine Crest Hill's monument to the people of Lidice, Czechoslovakia. WW m. A. lawn care, ringing new cry for human liberation. But I know when I'm licked.

Like Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce I have surrendered. Urn I fir 1 A class picture of Lidice schoolchildren taken before the massacre. The town (below) smolders as Nazis go about destroying it. See Lidice, pg. 2 YYCf Mr' Indian tnbe, I know when it's time to fight no more forever again, no matter what anybody says, as long as I live, so help me God.

Defeat came to me in a vision. For years, I'd made a virtue of neglect, refused to fertilize, weed-kill, even water. Lawns were artificial and evil. They required oceans of harmful chemicals. They were the buffer zones that defined the alienation of suburban life.

Then this spring I noticed something funny. Most of my grass did not turn green. It lay there, a wheat-colored corpse on a rumpled catafalque of dried soil. I called a truce and invited a representative from a lawn-service company to come look. Rubber-booted and plastic-gloved against the toxins he dispenses, the man peeled up a thick divot of my turf.

"There's your problem," he said, with contemptuous satisfaction. In the alien world of the subsurface squirmed a half dozen small, pale, shrimp-like creatures. White grubs, curled in fetus-hood, and waiting to emerge into the sunlit world above as June bugs or something feeding on grass roots in the meantime. "We can kill the grubs, but there's not a lot we can do for grass like this," the lawn-tech said. "New sod is the only solution." I looked around.

The entire neighborhood practically shimmered with the green of springtime lawns. In my chest I felt the sinking sensation of property values in decline. The technician sprayed his grub-killer, and drew up a contract detailing war reparations: the costs of stripping out the old lawn, spreading fresh topsoil, installing strips of sod, applying seasonal doses of feed, weed eradicators, crabgrass preventers, etc. Terms of surrender. What could I do but sign? Now my mind reels with thoughts of daily waterings and weekly (instead of monthly) mowings.

I hang my head, thinking, "It's this sort of characterlessness that causes golf courses." Knlght-RWderTribune James Ricci is a columnist for the Detroit Free Press. Bob Greene is on assignment. J'----v IhUf '-wpr vr4' uL IY 4 -itk Yy v- i ii gi a a i Drug-wars novelist is addicted to action Richard Price does research by running with police and pushers By John Blades Southern California, which is the dead center of "feel-good, do-nothing America. It's like I got Ronald Reagan all over me." A novelist and screenwriter of Price speaks almost wistfully of the eight years he has logged in squad cars and tenements, at murder scenes and drug busts. "I became addicted to he says, estimating that he had made "1,001 trips through the Holland Tunnel" en route From his Lower Manhattan loft to New Jersey to gather material for his latest novel, "Clockers," a high-velocity, 600-page dispatch from the as- if i II HidMB Ml I II IN I NAHEIM This is alien territory for Richard Price.

Rather than palms, pastel ranch houses and sunshine, he much prefers the ravaged high-rise ghettos of New Jersey, riding shotgun at night with the homicide cops and the "knockos" (Jerseyese for or hanging out with the "dockers" (drug peddlers). Almost any place, he indicates, even the West Side of Chicago, another of his professional haunts, is preferable to KT: 'TiTlftir'iaMiTiM'aMiliiiMiMTIMMIlllMiBi 'MlMilllWIIIM'lri Video roundup Several video houses offer new releases of TV and film Westerns, including "Rawhide" (above). Page 3. Photo by Joanne RatheBoston Globs See Price, pg. 7 Novelist and screenwriter Richard Price.

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