I want to hear your story, your point of view, tell me what happened to you.
Welcome back to Tell Me What Happened to You, the podcast that features folks from all walks of life telling us one true childhood story and how that event, that experience has impacted who they are today.
I'm your host, Jay Rehack. Like you, I've had my share of childhood experiences. Some of them painful, some of them pretty nice.
But I like to think that everything that ever happened to me is maybe a better person.
Now that may not be true, but that's the way I like to think.
Tell Me What Happened is sponsored by Sidelining Publishing, publishers of quality books, including Susan Salivar's classics, I've Got Peace in My Fingers, and One Little Act of Kindness.
Alright, today is season four premiere, and I pulled off a coup. I got the great Ben Joravsky, anybody who lives in Chicago knows who this man is, and probably a lot wider than that.
But Ben Joravsky is a Chicago reader-comgnist, and he's host of the Ben Joravsky Show, a daily podcast.
He's also, and probably most importantly, a friend of mine and a man that I have great respect for.
Welcome to the show, Ben Joravsky.
Thank you, Jay. And let me do some promotion.
Jay Rehack was a guest on my show. So I want everybody to go check it out when you're done listening to this.
Don't take a break. Just go right back and listen to the show where Jay was on. We do a deep dive on pensions.
I promise you, Jay, I will not be discussing pensions on today's show. I know a lot of you out there want me to discuss pensions, and you probably think my earliest childhood memory had to do with pensions.
But that is not true, okay? My earliest childhood memory had nothing to do with pensions. I didn't even know pensions existed until I met Jay Rehack.
So anyway, no pension talk today, Jay.
Alright, Ben, no pension talk, but I'm glad that you did mention your show. I'm a big fan of your show. It's a heck of a lot bigger than mine, but that's, I'm not comparing sizes. That's not fine.
Come on, man. That's fine.
Anyway, let's move past all that.
Yes.
Size doesn't matter. Anyway, Ben, are you ready to tell your story?
Yes, sir.
Now, Ben, what I'm going to do is I'm going to mute myself.
Okay.
And as soon as you're finished with your story, I'm going to come back and ask you absolutely one question. And that one question is this.
How do you think that what happened to you as a child, this experience that you talked about, has impacted who you are today?
So take it away. Ben, Jonowski.
Alright, very good. So when Jay asked me to come on the show and recollect a memory that shaped who I am, I had a lot of memories to recollect, ladies and gentlemen, because I've lived a few years.
I am even older than Jay Rehack, if such a thing as possible.
So a lot of the memories that I have are traumatic ones.
And we live, I was just talking about this with a dear friend. We live in a time where people, I think, are finally coming face to face with the traumas that they experienced in their early ages and early days in their youth.
And this is like a prominent theme in media today. I was telling Jay, I was urging him to watch episode six from the bear.
He dutifully did it. I can credit he did his homework. And in episode six of the bear, it's this horrific Christmas dinner in which the family is exposed to all the toxicity of the other family members.
Everybody's nuts in their own way. Everybody's embittered. Everybody's traumatized.
There's people who drink too much can't control the liquor, etc. and so forth. And it's just like a devilish Peru that poisons absolutely every character.
And I could tell you a few stories like that. I could Jay Rehack, but I decided to go in a different direction and not deal with stories that traumatize me.
But in a sense, a story that sort of shaped me and it's a story I've never told before. But it's a story I've been thinking about because Jay actually I've been thinking a lot about this stuff as I move on with each advancing day.
So this story goes back to the summer of 1965. Ladies and gentlemen, 1965. I was nine years old. But in those days, my family lived in Rhode Island. I used to live in Rhode Island before my family moved to Avonston.
And so every summer, my parents sent me to camp. We were a very middle class family. And that's what middle class families did back in the 60s.
And on top of that, I think my parents just wanted to get me and my sister out of the house for whatever reason. So off to camp we went and we were told it's for your own good.
So I kind of enjoy camp summer camp. You know, I have pretty good memories of summer camp. But there's one particular summer camp. He was in Massachusetts. Positive. It's a Massachusetts. It's been a long time. Ladies and gentlemen, 1965.
And so at the end of the year, there was a campfire. And at the campfire, this very creative counselor who I can't have no memory of the person's face even. It's a long time ago, but I do remember the story.
I told a scary story and the story was called the green.
And in this story, the story begins, the counselor saying, here we are. Forget the name of the towns. Let's say it's Jones Town, Massachusetts. There is no Jones Town, Massachusetts.
Say ladies and gentlemen, okay, just ride with me that it was Jones Town. And in Jones Town, Massachusetts, in the year 1765. 1765.
There was a farmer who lived all alone. And in those days, nobody lived in this area. It was like wilderness.
And this farmer one day, in August of 1765, went out to chop some wood.
He had a very bad accident. And instead of chopping the wood, he chopped off his hand.
And he was screaming in agony.
As he lay on the ground, but there's the wilderness, there's no one around the hero. And eventually he died from the injury and the loss of blood.
100 years later, in that same general area of Jones Town, Massachusetts, more people live there now. It's more settled.
There was another farmer and his wife, and they lived in like the same plot of land where that farmer in 1765 had cut off his hand.
And they were going to bed, were asleep. All of a sudden at two in the morning, there's a tapping on the window.
And they woke from their sleep and through the window like magic came to screen hand dripping blood.
And they were screaming, and it was still wasn't there were a lot of people around and they were looking here to screams wrapped around the farmer's neck and strangled him.
Then the green hand strangled the wife and their body. I'm sorry, people, their bodies were discovered the next day.
And on the window written in blood was the green hand.
And they figured out that the place was cursed. And that every 100 years, that green hand would return to strangle somebody.
And that last time the green hand was there was August 1865.
Well, kids, guess what it is now? August 1965.
That was the story that I told us my memory of the story. I think he probably did a better job. But that's my memory of the story.
I was like, Horrified. I'm so scared of the green hand. The green is going to get me. Oh, no.
That night out there, I tossed and turned a little tent that we had, you know.
Thankfully, there was no green hand by this job.
Next year, I went on to fifth grade young scholar, Barrington Elementary School.
And one day, like four months into the school year, long after was probably 66 by now.
Yeah, J. Rehack. It was probably 1966 J. Reha just like a young J. Rehack in 1966. Listen, listen in the shindig and hullabaloo.
Okay. And the monkeys, he loved the monkeys, man, but I'm not reminiscing about J. Just go 1966 young J. Reha.
1966 fifth grade, the teacher says, calls us in. She goes, All right, class.
Your next assignment is you have to write a story.
You have to write a story just you have to bet, you know, do your own story.
I'm like, I don't know what to write about. I'm not. I wasn't the greatest of all scholars, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm thinking, I'm thinking, finally hit me. Why don't you write the green hand?
You know, that's a story. So it was still fresh to memory. I probably have you a better memory of it than obviously that I do now.
So I wrote it out. I wrote the story at a green hand. I like a page and a half. I turned it in.
And the next day or whatever, whatever it was that the teacher had graded the papers. The teacher did something for me that has never happened to me before since the teacher called me out.
She said, the best story.
I must share this with you is by Benny Jerovsky that everybody call me Benny.
And it's called the green hand. And this teacher read my story to the class.
When she was done reading the green hand, which is essentially the exact same story I told you, ladies and gentlemen, only you got any credit for this.
I changed it from Jonestown, Massachusetts.
And August of 1965. Yeah, incredible. I updated it to like, let's say whatever it's February 66 and Barrington, Rhode Island.
When she was done, the class burst into applause.
Ladies and gentlemen, they clap, they cheered. The story, I was sitting there basking the glory of it all.
I kind of felt like, like what Beatles or something, you know, I was like one time and I'm like people spontaneously cheered.
And I have now spent the last 40 something years of my life as a writer.
And I have essentially done as a writer what I did back as a kid in that class.
I listened. I listened carefully. I recreated what I heard as best I could and I put it in story like for.
And I've been doing that now, ladies and gentlemen, since roughly 1979, J. Rehack, 1979.
I've never had anybody burst in the spontaneous applause for anything I wrote.
I have had a few moments like on a train.
This is any reader writer can tell you they probably had a moment like this.
I'm sitting on the subway and I'm watching something someone reading one of my articles, which is a real trip to do for many different reasons.
But I think I really believe in many ways that my life as a writer as a nonfiction journalist began back in 1965 with my retelling of the story of the Green Hand.
And just to remind you, ladies and gentlemen, I had it wrong. In actuality. The Green Hand lived in Chicago, Illinois.
And it was August. I got to do the math, J. Rehack.
It was August of eight. No, 1723. God, I'm bad at math. Good thing I'm a writer.
So that's my story, J. Rehack, the Green Hand.
Well, Ben, I'm going to look at your stories a little differently from now on. I didn't realize you were a horror fiction fan back in the day.
And were you worried at all that somebody was going to say, Hey, I heard that story before. Was that coming to your head at all or not at all?
In 1965? Never. Absolutely. It didn't occur to me. I was just desperate, man. I had to get something in and I did the Green Hand.
And you know what? It's funny, because years later, not about 10 years ago, I had a conversation with a Chicago guy.
He wanted me to write a book about his life and it never happened. But I remember him telling me like he supplied the stories.
I had the easy job because I just wrote them down. And I'm like, Oh, this is the guy who never listened to anyone.
Okay, I'm not going to mention his name. He never listened to anyone. So I go, it's not hard to listen. I got to listen to you.
And I got to write down what you say. And they got to put it in a coherent order. Oh, that's nothing.
In his mind, it was just like whatever came out of his mouth was the real stuff. You know what I mean?
And so whatever I did is the as told to guy.
Effectively, I was an as told to writer writing the official story of the Green Hand.
I was a Green Hands ghostwriter, if you will. And so I like to believe that there is a certain amount of what talent skill, a craft involved in being the writer who gathers the information processes the information puts into the
some kind of order and then writes it up for people to read.
And I agree with you 100% on that because I've been reading your articles for as long as I can remember I've been in Chicago for since 1984.
I don't want you know, just the reader, you know, whatever. And you sort of make things coherent for the for the regular guy.
I didn't know about the Green Hand. And I do think of you more as a nonfiction writer because you spend a lot of your time ripping on the local politicians and stuff, you know what I mean?
But let me just ask you, have you have you written fiction, just straight fiction of your own?
Yes.
Oh, good. And I'm not good at it. And I realize I'm an obsessive reader of fiction.
Okay.
I read far more fiction than nonfiction.
It leads it's at least four to one. And I'm an obsessive reader anyway, up to 230 or three last night, three o'clock, finishing a book.
And so I read about a novel a week.
Wow.
I know it's my hobby and my I don't know what I would do without reading.
Maybe a meditation or something.
So I read at night I read in the morning, actually. So everything's quiet.
I my phone is nowhere near me. And I just that's the best time for me to read.
And so you would think of having read all that fiction that I would like be good at fiction.
But no, not I get in my way and I stumble and and then the voice if I like the voice that I have in my mind is not.
It's a nonfiction voice.
It's so weird, but it's it's got it like a narrative.
It's got a form.
It's what I'm familiar with.
It's what I know.
And so it doesn't really lend itself to fiction, though I have tried writing fiction, but not for me.
Well, I hope you try it again, but I do love your nonfiction like everybody in Chicago.
So that's pretty cool.
You know what I mean?
And sorry that you haven't written, you know, more fiction, but again, sort of to the benefit of the rest of us because it's sort of muck raker.
You know what I mean?
And I appreciate your story in a way it really does speak to who you are.
And I think in the sense that you are a great listener, I guess, you know, and you put it, you know, out for us after after you hear it.
And that's a skill, of course.
So just in short, yeah, how do you think that that experience definitely impacted who you are today?
Just succinctly.
Well, I think that like any nonfiction writer or any writer, it's it's how I put this.
Writing is very solitary experience.
And it's a strange experience because it's something you do all by yourself, unless you obviously as a co writer, I've had a few more than a few over the years.
But it's something you do very much by yourself.
It's a voice you hear in your head.
It's it's it's a very strange, almost schizophrenic experience to go through to be a writer to hear voices in your head.
And then try to put them get them on the page, like they sound in your head.
And a lot of times, as you know, Jay, because you've done writing, it sounds better in your head than when it comes on the paper.
And then there's the rewriting.
And then part of the joy, in my opinion, of writing is when you've got the piece, the rough draft, like I'll show you right here.
This is rough draft on my next reader column.
And it's there.
So now I'll have the joy of fine tuning it, deleting passages that don't work rewriting passages so that they're tighter, funnier, smarter, etc.
And so forth.
So that process of writing, very solitary process, but then there's the like the letting go.
Yeah, deliver to the audience.
And that moment is a scary moment for me anyway.
It's like, because you have no idea how people are going to respond.
So I was talking about seeing somebody on the train, like one time I remember seeing someone they were reading my they were turning the pages of the reader.
This is like the actual newspaper, the reader, they weren't reading on a phone and they were turning the pages and they came to my page.
And then they turned the page.
I'm like, wait, hold on.
You're missing.
You didn't read.
And then they were like, oh, I know they had already read it.
Who knows.
So but there's that moment when you deliver it and the thing about the green hand, like it.
I recreated what I heard.
I got it on the page.
It's like the first time I've ever done that.
Right.
I got through that moment.
And then I had the response, the spontaneous applause.
Yeah.
And I've never had that.
I mean, I've done readings, you know, where and then people clap.
I know you do.
I do.
Yeah, I'm not there.
I'm like, I literally not on it.
Like if someone's like, this is so good.
This article you wrote about pensions is so good and they're clapping.
But so I feel as though, like in some ways I've been chasing that high ever since, you know what I mean?
Like, where's the spot?
Where's the where's the cheers from the crowd?
But you know, you get it bits and pieces of people tell you how much they like your stuff.
There's a nice, a sunny, a nice email or a text or what have you and, you know, and then it accumulates over the years.
So, you know, you have an impact of people have been reading it and they remember articles you wrote.
So in its own way, it's kind of sort of like that moment in 1966 when.
Yeah, just spread out Ben.
That's all.
You got the intense.
Yeah.
You got the injection back in 65, 66 and now you just, you get it in smaller doses.
But yeah.
Well, thank you.
I love it because, you know, I am a little bit of a writer and I think about what motivates me to write stories, etc.
And I don't write the same stuff that you write.
You're sort of a hard hitting.
I guess, hey, muckrakers, what I think of, you know, you sort of break it down for everybody to understand what's going on in this, this particular town.
And I've always appreciated that because I just get angry and write a mean tweet and call it done, you know, and it's like, I'm not going to write a whole article about this.
This is the whole thing.
You know, I just, you guys are full of it, you know, full of it.
That's it.
And I'm done.
And I wait for you or somebody else to break it down a little bit more specifically and precisely.
So thanks for hanging in there and doing all that all these years.
Because I say that the people in this town know who you are.
I told people this morning, actually, that I was interviewing and they're like, really?
That's so cool.
I'm like, yeah, I know.
I got, I got some big hitters on my, my season four.
So you're my season four opener.
You may know that I like to thank you for being on the show.
It means a lot to me to connect with you and we appreciate you.
Well, thank you very much, Jay.
And urge everyone.
If you're listening to this, if you want to see read some of the stuff I do, that's a little not just not that there should be just not just the heart rate, the muck raking or the investigations or the analysis.
The reader newsletter that are at once a week have fun with it kind of off the wall stuff.
And so I would go ready to find that it's really simple.
Just go to the Chicago reader and you can find any subscribe you get it.
It's a little different flavor, a sort of slices of life.
I enjoyed writing that immensely.
In fact, I got it when we're done with this, I got to get back to it and write it because I got a deadline.
What else?
Another deadline in my life.
Another deadline.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm going to include that link to the Chicago reader the weekly in your bio so that people can get it.
Okay.
And subscribe to it.
Absolutely.
It's excellent.
All right.
And then Jarabski, the Ben Jarabski for being on the show, like to thank my sponsor, sorry, lightning publishing publishers, equality books.
And so until next time, this is Jay Rehack asking you all to please stay safe out there and try not to hurt anybody.
Thank you.