Big Mike & The Loved One
That’s Michael G. Glab, according to my drivers license. As for The Loved One, she’s not as much of an exhibitionist as I am. So she’ll remain mysterious herein.
We arrived in Bloomington in the fall of 2009. Now it’s home.
The Loved One is an ace graphic designer and email marketing maven. She has served as an image creator, art director, and marketing specialist for a variety of publishers, ad agencies, and other companies. She doesn’t want you to know what she looks like.
I, on the other hand, am shameless. Here’s what I look like:
The Loved One is rolling her eyes as I type.
I’ve been a journalist and author for — yikes! — more than 35 years. I’ve written for a bunch of local and national newspapers and magazines including the Reader, the Tribune, the Sun-Times, Chicago magazine and many more. I’ve written a ridiculous book about baseball and clinical depression that was so bad I’m not even linking to it here. I started the communications colossus, The Third City, with my then-lifelong friend, the ace journalist Ben Joravsky. We’re not talking anymore. I forget why.
I lived solely within the Chicago city limits for the first 51 years of my life. Then The Loved One dragged me to Louisville, Kentucky as she chased ad agency bucks. We could take Louisville or leave it. So we moved to Bloomington, Indiana.
We love it here. So this little island of blue in the middle of one of the reddest states in this holy land plays a huge part in just about every Pencil post. I peddle reading material at the Book Corner, this town’s last independent bookseller. I’ve written for and served as the online editor for The Ryder, another Bloomington communications powerhouse. I write for the Limestone Post, penning the Big Mike’s B-town column. I’m host and producer of the WFHB (91.3 FM) radio interview show, Big Talk.
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Awesome site Mike. I’ve added it to my favorites! Will be in for coffee next week. John
Big Mikey!
The site looks beautiful, can’t wait to read everything!
Love from The Windy City. Ari
Way to go Moe!
K., looks super!
Sophia
Oops, that last commet was me.
S.
OK, something is wrong. Arianna wrote a commet and was deleted when I entered mine.
One more time:
Way to go Moe!
K., it looks great!
Big Mikey! The site looks wonderful, can’t wait to read everything.
Love from the Windy City.
Ari
Just testing the entries.
S.
Don Miguel, I love this site! Very especially of course because of your kind shout out regarding Lola and the Parrot, and all those other sweet words. What can I say … I’m still there in spirit, rustling the announcements on the Soma bulletin board. You’ve made me feel nostalgic ….
Anna
Big Mike,
Nice to see you today at Soma. I can’t find the blog entry about woo religions. The Energy Czar and I are dying to know more. Google is no help.
Thanks,
The Water Princess
Great to see you back in the simplified format. XO
Your name popped into my head, so I wondered…how the hell is Michael Glab doing.
Indiana…didn’t see that in your future…ever, only because it’s outside of the city limits.
Hope you’re doing well. Pop a line or two if you’re up for a chat.
Cheers!
Mike,
Your stories of growing up on the northwest side remind me somewhat of my childhood in the Chicago area. My parents lived near on Oriole south of Devon. When I got to be school age they looked for an integrate suburban place but in the end they found a house they could afford and schools they liked just north of Barrington. Me and my best friend in eighth grade were the only two McGovern supporters out of like 140 eighth graders. In suburbs at that time people were more circumspect about their racism and only said the kind of overt things you describe when their guard was down. I eventually went to Northwestern, met wife who was from the south side (originally near 69th between Ashland and Racine) but moved to 79th and Central (Burbank). Somehow we landed in this blue dot in 1990 after thinking that we could never leave Chicago but we love it here. I still miss the Sun-Times and WXRT. That’s my wife to the right of Steve Volan in the photo on your entry about the FDR ball. My parents were wire-to-wire Democrats from FDR (Truman for my dad who was relaxing in a German POW camp during the 1944 election) to Obama. On election day I got called away from an Obama call center to meet my dad at Bloomington Hospital. When I went into his cubby in the ER, he clearly had the EKG of a person who was not going be buying any life insurance. His first words to me are not “How bad is it?” or something similar but “Obama’s gonna win – right?”. I was very glad to be able to say to him something like “You can bet the house, the farm, whatever – he’s gonna win.” Both the nurse and doctor were Romney supporters and disagreed but I had been reading Nate Silver so I knew I was right. Dad died a few weeks later secure in the knowledge that Obama had won.
Anyway I love your column which I found searching to find out what whether Daryl Neher’s conversion was real or not.
Fred
So Michael, congratulations on the Cubs going to the World Series!
I hope you are doing well-