The Bear and me

When I was a teenager, I had a summer job as a film courier for NBC News in Chicago. All the other couriers were off-duty coppers. The NBC Studios and newsroom were on the 19th floor of the vast Merchandise Mart that straddles Wells Street and Orleans Street along the main branch of the Chicago River downtown. On Wells under the L was a storefront where we couriers operated out of.

The coppers rode hogs, for speed and maneuverability, I drove a car that got bumped up pretty good, as I bumped buses to keep them from taking my lane, and as I ran film from northwest side Latino riots one summer and from Marquette Park another summer where a white ethnic mob raged liked stampeding antelopes when Dr. King was marching there for open housing – that’s where he took a brick. And other bump-free stuff, like the suits-and-ties Beatles’ post-“bigger than Jesus” press conference in the swank Gold Coast Astor Hotel.

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Because I was the kid, the courier coppers and our supervisors Scotty McLeod, a slick former Cannonball Harley rider and cigar-chewing Art Schoen would routinely send me to get Italian beef sandwiches – wet and dry, hot or mild – Italian sausage, combos, at Mr. Beef on Orleans a few blocks south of the Mart – the original stand created by Carl Bonavolanto Jr. and Tony Ozzauto in 1963. There were other nearby places with the same menu, but Mr. Beef was the best: that’s what my moonlighting mentors said.

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I was a regular, standing in line at the high counter with my order list, at the same nostalgic location where Hulu’s The Bear was shot and wrapped in probably the best B-roll of Chicago ever shot.

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So that’s The Bear and me.