Julie Bosman

At least 530 people have been sickened by mysterious lung illnesses related to using e-cigarettes with nicotine or vaping THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, and at least eight have died. That has sent high schools, the epicenters of youth vaping, racing to give teenagers a new, urgent message: Vaping can be deadly.

Federal health officials have yet to pinpoint an exact cause of the recent illnesses, but the alarming pattern has put principals and teachers into crisis mode. They are holding assemblies to warn students about the dangers. They are getting creative with rules to make it harder for students to secretly vape in school bathrooms, hallways and even classrooms. They are trying to train parents and teachers on the wide array of vape devices, which look like pens or flash drives and which many adults do not even recognize.

During an assembly at one suburban Chicago high school this week, hundreds of students, many dressed in school colors of orange and black in honor of homecoming, saw an X-ray image of a young man’s lungs, cloudy and damaged, on an auditorium screen.

He had recently been hospitalized after vaping and placed in a medically induced coma for a week, a substance-abuse consultant told the students from a stage.

“His lungs are now that of a 70-year -old. He’s in his 20s,” the consultant, Ashleigh Nowakowski, said. “Can you imagine how that’s going to affect the rest of his life? He can’t run. He can’t play sports.”

The students watched solemnly. A few squirmed in their seats.

Administrators at American high schools have long tried to warn students about the risks of vaping, which gained popularity several years ago as an alternative to cigarettes and works by heating liquid and turning it into vapor to be inhaled. But the outbreak of illnesses has brought new level of urgency and attention to the issue. Students who had brushed off the warnings in the past, saying that vaping was relatively harmless, could no longer do so.

After the assembly, at Crystal Lake Central High School, 45 miles northwest of Chicago, some students said they were skeptical that vaping was as dangerous as the presentation suggested.

The students told of a high school ecosystem where vaping devices are easily obtained, and refill cartridges with THC oil, known as carts, are sold for $20 apiece. It is not uncommon, these students said, for seniors to sell vape pens to freshmen, eager to take up vaping.

Opportunities to vape discreetly are everywhere, they said — in an empty hallway, a bathroom stall or the back row of a classroom where a teacher cannot possibly monitor every student’s move. Older students said they tended to leave campus for lunch, vaping in their cars along the way.

“It’s rare to find someone who doesn’t do it,” said Alexis Padilla, 16, a junior. “You can’t go on social media without someone’s videos of them doing it.”

Last week, the Trump administration said it planned to ban most flavored e-cigarettes and nicotine pods, an attempt to curtail use among teenagers. States tend to regulate e-cigarettes like other nicotine products, and laws vary from state to state. At least a dozen states have passed laws restricting sales of e-cigarettes to young people; in Illinois, Arkansas and other states, the legal age for purchasing nicotine products, including e-cigarettes, is 21. In Texas, minors can be fined for possessing e-cigarettes.

But many teenagers sidestep the age restrictions by buying e-cigarettes online or from friends.

In one group of the Crystal Lake students — girls carrying patterned backpacks and wearing tattered Chuck Taylors — three said they personally knew people who had become seriously ill after vaping.

One friend who had vaped nicotine for two years using a Juul, the dominant seller in the market, was hospitalized with a respiratory lung defect, but has recovered, one student said. Another girl who vaped regularly suddenly couldn’t breathe one day, the students said, and she now has to use an inhaler every four hours.

Sophia Scarfe, a 17-year-old senior, said her parents routinely sent her news articles about the dangers of vaping. Many students have moved beyond vaping nicotine, she said, routinely using THC oils instead. “Vaping anything else other than nicotine is way more common,” she said.

Alcohol is still widely consumed among teenagers, they said. But “vaping is the big thing,” said Nyanan Bey, 17, a senior.

One student openly laughed when she heard a widely cited statistic from the 2019 National Youth Tobacco Survey that estimated that 1 in 4 youths between the ages of 12 and 17 have tried vaping nicotine or THC at least once.

“Yeah, that’s too low,” she said. “Literally everyone vapes.”

Health officials suspect that vaping-related illnesses and deaths are underreported, and that doctors have only recently begun to connect vaping to mysterious lung ailments.

And educators said they were beginning to grapple with the reality that a new generation of American teenagers, who would be loath to pick up cigarettes, are now addicted to nicotine through vaping.

There is nothing out of the ordinary about the students at Crystal Lake Central, a school of 1,500 students, said Steve Greiner, student services coordinator.

“The kids in our school are like any other school,” he said. “People are really starting to realize, ‘Holy cow, this was seen as the answer to our prayers to get people off cigarettes.’ Now it’s turned into this.”

Administrators there have stationed teachers in the hallways between classes to deter vaping. Some have worried that Crystal Lake is only 30 miles from a town in Wisconsin where the police this month said they uncovered an illegal vape-pen factory that was producing 3,000 cartridges of THC-laced oil a day, with a distribution network that is believed to have been extensive.

At a separate informational session for teachers in the auditorium after school on Wednesday, another substance-abuse consultant guided teachers through the world of teenage vaping. The numbers “710” — which spell “oil” upside down — are a code for vaping, the consultant explained. Vaping devices might be found in unlikely, out-of-view places — inside the cord of a hoodie or dangling from a key chain. “Girls sew them into their jeans, next to the zipper,” Dave Shutters, the dean of students, added.

In Crystal Lake, the typical response to a student caught vaping is counseling and other efforts to provide information about the dangers. Some schools have tried vaping support groups.

At Nerinx Hall, an all-girls Catholic school in the St. Louis area, students are planning a peer-driven “amnesty week,” where they hope to make an “emotional appeal” to one another and offer a chance to dump vaping equipment at a secure drop-off location, said Meta Stephens, the senior class treasurer.

“We really want it to be no pressure: You will not get in trouble for this,” said Stephens, 17, who is helping plan the event this fall. “We really just want to help you stop if you want to.”

This article originally appeared in

At School, 'Everyone Vapes,' and Adults Are in Crisis Mode

CRYSTAL LAKE, Ill. — In Alabama, a school removed the doors from bathroom stalls to stop students from sneaking inside to vape. In Colorado, a school decided to forfeit a school volleyball game after finding “widespread vaping” and other infractions by the team. And in Pennsylvania, at a school where administrators have tried installing sensors to detect vaping in bathrooms and locker rooms, students caught with vape devices face a $50 fine and a three-day suspension.

That collection could soon be opened to the public after an auction Wednesday in Chicago.

The winning bid came from a group of four major foundations, who in a flurry of phone calls, emails and texts over the last nine days, banded together in a highly unusual effort and bought the archive for $30 million.

Leaders of the foundations — the Ford Foundation, The J. Paul Getty Trust, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — said Thursday that they were determined to save the archive, considered the most significant collection of photography depicting African American life in the 20th century. They agreed to donate the archive to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Getty Research Institute so that it would be widely accessible to researchers, scholars and the public.

Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, said in an interview that the group began to form only last week. He said he was at the Prado Museum in Madrid last Tuesday when he read a news article about the impending auction on his phone. Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, emailed Walker, suggesting — with a great deal of urgency — that they had to do something.

“The narrative that is held in that archive is central to the narrative of America in the second half of the 20th century,” Walker said. “The concern was that it should be brought into the public domain.”

Walker and Alexander talked to leaders of two more institutions and brought them on board. Each foundation promised between $5 million and $12.5 million.

Ebony and Jet, once ubiquitous publications in the homes of African American families, chronicled the lives of black politicians, civil rights leaders, musicians, athletes, writers and everyday people.

The auction was part of bankruptcy proceedings for Johnson Publishing, based in Chicago, which founded the magazines in the 1940s and 1950s. The company, which sold the titles years ago but held onto the photo archive, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in April.

The sale of the photographs is subject to court approval.

Alexander said it was too early to say exactly what would be done with the millions of photos in the archive, but the guiding principle is that the public should be able to see them.

“For decades, people found black life in its full variety in Johnson publications,” Alexander said. “I think we actually cannot even fully measure what it is going to mean to have these images available.”

The news was a relief to historians who feared that the Ebony archive would be acquired by a collector and hidden away.

“It is impossible to overstate the importance of the accessibility of Ebony and Jet archive for not only historians and researchers, for the general public,” said Sarah Lewis, a historian at Harvard. “Understanding American culture means understanding African American culture. This collection, as an archive, offers an invaluable oculus onto black life.”

The archive has been held in a warehouse in Chicago as its fate was being determined. The auction began last week and attracted multiple bidders, continuing until Wednesday. Details of the other bids were not made public.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/us/ebony-photographs-sale.html" id="348ddac4-bb97-355d-ac74-2c4c1222e77b">The New York Times</a>.

Ebony's Photo Archive Goes for $30 Million, for Future in Public View

CHICAGO — For decades, the photo archive of Ebony and Jet magazines has been difficult to access and largely mysterious to scholars, an elusive treasure trove of more than 4 million prints and negatives that documented the lives of African Americans.

“I was freaking out in there,” Traini said, jabbing her finger at the store. “I needed to buy a present for a birthday, so I was forced to go. I was nervous the whole time.”

This is life during a measles outbreak for parents of babies: a maelstrom of fear, isolation, truncated plans and, not infrequently, unfiltered fury.

Children typically do not receive their first dose of measles vaccine until after their first birthday. So parents of infants are trapped in a dangerous limbo. They want to protect their children from measles, an extremely contagious virus that killed 110,000 people around the world in 2017, most of them young children. Yet they have little choice but to chance exposing their yet-to-be-vaccinated babies any time they leave home.

The concern is upending family routines, leaving some parents of infants steering clear of public transit, playgrounds, malls and more. For Traini, 41, who teaches biology at Henry Ford College in Dearborn, going out with Gretha at all felt like a risky move. They live in Oakland County, Michigan, just outside Detroit, which in recent weeks has been the site of a major measles outbreak, mostly in Orthodox Jewish areas. At least 43 people have been reported ill in Michigan.

The number of measles cases in the United States has surpassed 700, the highest figure recorded in any year since the disease was declared eliminated in this country in 2000, federal health officials said.

Many people, vaccinated or not, seem unaware of the particular vulnerability of infants. But current parents of babies have suddenly grown acutely aware, sharing information on playgrounds, in pediatricians’ offices and on Facebook. For many, the days of watching new cases of measles pop up around the country — a reflection of the rise of the anti-vaccination movement and of measles outbreaks in other countries where Americans travel — have been agonizing.

“It’s just maddening, because I shouldn’t have to worry about measles,” said Katherine Jones, 37, a grant manager at an environmental nonprofit group in San Francisco and the mother of an eight-week-old baby.

For people who don’t vaccinate their children, she said, “It’s a choice.”

But she added: “It’s not a choice for me, because my baby cannot be vaccinated. The folks who are choosing not to vaccinate their children or be vaccinated themselves are putting my child in danger.”

Pediatricians say that giving the measles vaccine to children younger than a year old is usually unnecessary and may be ineffective, in part because babies that age still have antibodies from their mothers that could inhibit their response to the vaccine. If their mothers were fully immunized, babies may be born with some protection from measles, but it varies from child to child, said Dr. Annabelle De St. Maurice, an expert on infectious diseases at UCLA.

Giving the measles vaccine at 12 to 15 months of age leads to a higher proportion of protected children than giving it earlier does, she said.

In New York, the site of the largest measles outbreak so far this year, parents are worrying whether their babies should be taken on the subway. Children have been pulled out of day care. Pediatricians have been lobbied by parents to administer the measles vaccine early.

In Michigan, cafes and shopping centers suddenly seem less safe.

“There are just some places that we don’t go,” said Lucretia Sims, 29, as she walked outdoors in Farmington Hills, Michigan, with her 7-month-old son, Ayden, in a stroller. She said she has been keeping him away from other children.

“I think people have gotten a little selfish,” she said of families who believe that vaccines cause more harm than good, despite scientific studies that have, for instance, found no link between vaccines and autism. “We depend on the community to take care of each other. The babies have no options.”

The measles virus is extremely virulent: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “you can catch measles just by being in a room where a person with measles has been, up to two hours after that person is gone.”

“My recommendation has been to try not to go out to public places until this calms down,” said Dr. Matthew Hornik, a pediatrician in West Bloomfield, Michigan. “And asking those people around them, are you vaccinated? Are your kids vaccinated or not?”

Some pediatricians make exceptions to the one-year rule during outbreaks, administering the measles vaccine to children as young as 6 months old. They will also commonly make the same exception for babies who will be traveling abroad. The CDC recommends giving the vaccine early in those situations.

Even so, many parents said they had been denied an early vaccine for their babies, and were instead left to consider whether to take other precautions.

“You can’t put yourself in a bubble,” said Kayli Scott, 28, whose second baby is due in August, adding that she was determined not to alter her routine if measles is still a problem after her baby is born. “We’re still going to go out,” she said.

In the aisles of a Buy Buy Baby store in Oakland County last week, Bridgett Murray recounted her daily routine to protect her three-month-old daughter, Sloane, during the current outbreak.

When Murray gets home each day from her job at a private school in suburban Detroit, she vigorously scrubs her hands with soap and water. Then she changes out of her work clothes into a fresh outfit. Only then will she pick up Sloane.

“It’s definitely scary,” she said. “I contemplated not going back to work after maternity leave.”

Elle Gotham, a lawyer in Detroit, phoned the day care center that her baby, Penelope, attends three days a week to ask whether it serves many children from the northern suburbs, where the outbreak has been most pronounced.

“They said very few,” Gotham said. “If it gets into a day care, it’s a disaster.”

Some friendships between families who vaccinate and those who do not have suffered.

“We have friends who don’t believe in vaccines, and those friendships aren’t going to be maintained at the risk of her health,” said one father, who gave his name only as Mike, as he pushed his 11-month-old daughter down a street in Royal Oak, Michigan. “Anti-vaxxers aren’t allowed in our house.”

Jill Dumme of Grand Rapids, Michigan, the mother of an 8-month-old named Benjamin, said she had tried to avoid the topic with her friends, most of whom do not vaccinate. She said she won’t bring Benjamin near their children.

"They’re so passionate about it, and so anti-vax,” she said. “I love them, so I’m not going to sit and argue with them about it. You do you, I’ll do me. But until my kids are safe, I’m going to steer clear.”

Colleen Serafini, of Pleasant Hill, California, said she has been reading news reports about measles outbreaks late at night, thinking about her daughter, Tess, who is a few weeks away from her first birthday.

It is surreal to be stuck worrying about a once-eradicated disease, she said, recalling a hike she and her husband once took in a state park named after Jack London, who wrote a century ago about a post-apocalyptic America ravaged by plague.

“We were talking about what a scary time it was then to have kids, when they got these diseases,” Serafini said. “To be talking about that again is absurd.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/us/measles-babies-vaccine.html" id="3375bad3-a391-334c-ae3d-5ac3b0f36a1a">The New York Times</a>.

TROY, Mich. — Roberta Traini gritted her teeth through the small talk at the Barnes &amp; Noble checkout, grabbed her purchases and hustled her 5-month-old daughter, Gretha, into the chilly April air, where it was safer to breathe.

Too Young for Vaccinations, With Measles in the Air

“My recommendation has been to try not to go out to public places until this calms down,” said Dr. Matthew Hornik, a pediatrician in Southfield, Michigan. “And asking those people around them, are you vaccinated? Are your kids vaccinated or not?”

Parents of Babies Too Young to Vaccinate Feel Trapped by Measles Outbreak

In the aisles of a Buy Buy Baby store in Oakland County last wee, Bridgett Murray recounted her daily routine to protect her three-month-old daughter, Sloane, during the current outbreak.

On her lunch break in the Loop, Denise Thompson, 54, had a different view.

“We’re making history, sure,” she said. “But a black woman running the city will be just like anybody else.”

On Tuesday, Chicagoans were headed to the polls to vote for a successor to Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Residents were choosing between two African American women, guaranteeing that Chicago will become the largest U.S. city to elect a black woman as its mayor.

Competing in the runoff election are Lori Lightfoot, a lawyer and former federal prosecutor, and Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board and chairwoman of the county’s Democratic Party. Both women beat out 12 other candidates in an election in February, a who’s who of well-known names that made up the most crowded ballot in municipal history.

As the voting began, the historic nature of the election was greeted in Chicago with both pride and nonchalance, a sense that electing an African American woman as mayor would be significant, but not seismic.

Maybe it is because Chicago has already seen such milestones, sending the first African American president, Barack Obama, to the White House; helping elect the first African American woman to the U.S. Senate, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, in 1992; and making Harold Washington the city’s first black mayor in 1983.

“It is tremendous,” said Josie Brown Childs, a civic leader who worked for Washington in the 1980s. “But Chicago has been on the forefront of certain black politics, whether it was with Harold or Obama. We’ve been in the lead on those things.”

In interviews around the city during the run-up to the election, Chicagoans said they were carefully weighing the platforms and promises of Preckwinkle and Lightfoot, watching their performances in televised debates and considering what kind of leader the current moment in Chicago demands.

“For me, personally, I’m asking, ‘Who is going to be the break from politics as usual in Chicago?’” said Jordie Davies, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago whose dissertation focuses on political activism. “I’m excited about two black women. But I’m looking at records. I’m looking at who is going to offer the most holistic platform for addressing problems in Chicago.”

Deidre Baumann, 50, a lawyer who cast her vote Tuesday at a library in the Budlong Woods neighborhood on the North Side, said she would be happy with whichever candidate prevailed.

“Either way, this is a historic election,” she said.

She watched the debates and studied the candidates’ records carefully, she said, deciding in the end to vote for Lightfoot, who she believed would bring her experience as a federal prosecutor to push for criminal justice reform.

“We have to make this city safe for all the citizens and the police,” Baumann said. “On the other hand, we cannot continue to incarcerate black and brown people in disparate numbers.”

In her eyes, Preckwinkle represented an older political model. “I’m disturbed a bit by her ties to the machine,” she said. “She always touted herself as the progressive candidate. She’s had to move away from that as she navigated the political system in Chicago.”

The new mayor must contend with a host of complicated issues in the nation’s third-largest city, including a deep pension crisis, persistent violent crime, reform of the Police Department and the question of how to spur investment and growth in long-neglected and segregated neighborhoods on Chicago’s West and South sides. Under Emanuel, the downtown has boomed, flourishing with tech companies, high-rise hotels, a sparkling riverfront and luxury apartments. But many African American residents have moved out of the city in recent years. Emanuel, who was elected to two terms, did not seek a third term in office.

Polls have suggested that Lightfoot has a commanding lead over Preckwinkle, who entered the race last September after Emanuel announced that he would not run again. Preckwinkle garnered endorsements from powerful labor groups — the Chicago Teachers Union and the Service Employees International Union — and from prominent black leaders including Jesse White, the secretary of state.

Lightfoot had a head start on the campaign trail, declaring her candidacy for mayor in May 2018, when it was widely believed that she would face off against Emanuel.

A relatively unknown figure who has never held elective office, Lightfoot has spent time introducing herself to voters as a candidate who would focus on overhauling the Police Department, curbing street violence and rebuilding neighborhoods beyond the affluent downtown and North Side. Ra Joy, an entrepreneur in Chicago who was a candidate for lieutenant governor in 2018, endorsed Lightfoot early in the race, he said Saturday at a candidate forum at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition on the South Side.

A mayoral contest between two African American women has scrambled the usual political calculus in Chicago, or what Joy called “tribal voting,” in which politicians could count on support from voters of their own race.

“It’s turned that notion on its head,” he said, adding that the successful candidate would have to build coalitions of Latinos, whites and African Americans in a city where the population is almost evenly divided among the three groups.

Celestine A. Strain, 46, a hospital technician, brought her granddaughter Kalicia, 9, to the forum at Rainbow PUSH, hoping Kalicia would someday remember seeing two black women running for mayor of Chicago.

“It’s amazing for her to see,” Strain said, adding that she was hoping Preckwinkle, who has been a familiar face in county government for years, would emerge victorious Tuesday. “I really believe that she has the right experience.”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson offered no endorsement in the race, saying that he hoped to be more of a peacemaker after what played out in recent weeks as a bitter campaign. On stage Saturday, he urged both candidates to sign a statement agreeing to appear together the morning after the election. “I wanted to play a reconciling role,” Jackson said in an interview in his office at Rainbow PUSH. “The campaign ends. Let the healing begin.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/us/chicago-election-lightfoot-preckwinkle.html" id="06a5483b-4742-30b6-ac5f-f80caae86433">The New York Times</a>.

Chicago Votes on a New Mayor. Either Way, an African American Woman Will Win.

CHICAGO — Adrianne Burton, 38, believes that the next mayor of Chicago will have a sharper, more empathetic eye on the public schools. Carolyn Davenport, 62, is confident that the new mayor will be a superior manager, accustomed to running a career and a household without any fuss.

“Every single one of my kids had the chickenpox,” Bevin said in an interview Tuesday with a radio station in Bowling Green, Kentucky. “They got the chickenpox on purpose because we found a neighbor that had it and I went and made sure every one of my kids was exposed to it, and they got it. They had it as children. They were miserable for a few days, and they all turned out fine.”

Experts said that the practice that Bevin described was antiquated, a holdover from the days before 1995, when a vaccine for chickenpox became publicly available. Back then, chickenpox parties were set up to spread the disease from one child to the next, under the belief that contracting chickenpox as a young child was safer than as an adult.

Doctors said the method can lead to dangerous complications or death. Still, Tara C. Smith, a professor of epidemiology at Kent State University in Ohio who studies infectious diseases, said that despite warnings from medical experts and the availability of vaccines, the practice of deliberately exposing children to disease continues.

Many times people have arranged chickenpox parties via Facebook or forced children to suck on lollipops contaminated by a child who has chickenpox, she said.

“Chickenpox can cause pneumonia, it can cause secondary skin infections, it can cause encephalitis,” Smith said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issues regular reminders to the public that the chickenpox vaccine is safe and effective, and in most children causes no side effects. The vast majority of parents in the United States now choose to vaccinate their children against chickenpox.

Since children cannot receive the first of two doses of the chickenpox vaccine until they are at least 1 year old, babies younger than 1 are vulnerable to contracting the disease. It can kill babies, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems.

States have laws requiring school immunizations, but many states allow exemptions for religious reasons and a smaller number also permit exemptions for unspecified personal or philosophical reasons. Some may be connected to a larger anti-vaccination movement, including concerns that vaccines lead to autism, an idea that has been widely debunked.

The issue emerged in Kentucky in recent days after a student at a Catholic school sued the Northern Kentucky Health Department, claiming it violated his First Amendment rights when it prevented him from participating in basketball because he refused to be vaccinated against chickenpox. An outbreak of chickenpox — 32 cases — had been reported at the school, Assumption Academy in Walton, Kentucky.

Filed on behalf of the student, Jerome Kunkel, a high school senior and the captain of the basketball team, the lawsuit argued that banning him from playing violated his right to freedom of religion. Being vaccinated, the suit said, would go against Kunkel’s religious beliefs as a practicing Catholic, because the vaccine contains “aborted fetal cells.”

The CDC says that before the vaccine was available, close to 4 million people contracted the illness in the United States each year. More than 10,000 people were hospitalized; more than 100 died. A person with chickenpox can develop as many as 500 blisters, the agency says.

People who have had chickenpox are at risk of contracting shingles, a viral infection that can lead to vision loss, as adults.

While most people can recall a mild interaction with chickenpox from their own childhoods, Smith’s own family has not been so lucky: An uncle died from chickenpox, and her grandmother contracted shingles when she was in her 80s, which led to pneumonia and her subsequent death, Smith said.

In the radio interview in Kentucky, Bevin, the governor, who is 52 and a Republican, suggested that the government should not be involved in regulating vaccines.

“For some people, and for some parents, for some reason they choose otherwise,” he said of those who avoid vaccinations. “This is America. The federal government should not be forcing this upon people. They just shouldn’t.”

Bevin’s spokeswoman did not immediately return an email seeking comment. Bevin’s wife, Glenna, is a registered nurse, according to his official biography.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/us/kentucky-governor-chickenpox.html" id="e9ab664d-c162-313d-ad5d-bd895fba0b0d">The New York Times</a>.

Amid a renewed national conversation about childhood vaccinations, Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky said this week that he and his wife made sure all nine of their children got chickenpox.

Remember Chickenpox Parties? Kentucky Governor Says He Let His 9 Children Get the Virus

This time around, Preckwinkle, 71, is not sitting another election out. She enters the runoff for mayor as a candidate of contrasts: both an entrenched political insider and a groundbreaker who would be the first African-American woman to lead Chicago.

Quiet and forceful, Preckwinkle has worked within the confines of party politics but has still managed to strike out as a leading progressive on issues such as criminal justice reform and affordable housing.

She has also been marred by scandal in recent months, damaged by her relationship with Ed Burke, an alderman who was charged last month with a federal crime, and her handling of sexual harassment allegations directed at her (now-fired) chief of staff.

Preckwinkle’s deep history in county politics — she has been chair of the Cook County Democratic Party for eight years — has opened her up to attacks from other candidates that she is the establishment and too quick to compromise. She says she is “uniquely qualified” to be the mayor of Chicago.

“Your job always, if you’re in office, is to try to move your agenda forward and get things done,” Preckwinkle told the Chicago Tribune. “You know, I’m not into being Don Quixote.”

Preckwinkle grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, took an interest in politics as a teenager and attended college at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, the liberal neighborhood on the South Side that would become her political base.

After teaching in both public and private schools, Preckwinkle was eventually elected alderman of the 4th Ward.

She has worked to reduce the jail population in Cook County and supported the decriminalization of possession of small amounts of marijuana. As president of the Cook County Board, she pushed through a penny-an-ounce soda tax, which prompted a fierce backlash from critics who said it would hurt the poor. The pop tax was repealed, a political embarrassment for Preckwinkle.

After declaring a run for mayor, Preckwinkle has garnered powerful union support with endorsements by the Chicago Teachers Union and the Service Employees International Union.

She has said that as mayor she would favor overhauling the juvenile justice system, addressing racial bias in policing, and strengthening laws restricting guns. She has also called for a halt to school closings and a focus on environmental health, prompted by the disclosure that thousands of Chicago homes have dangerous levels of lead in their water.

In her television ads, Preckwinkle has fought back against the perception that she is part of the fabled Chicago “machine” because of her long history in city government, trying to turn the image in her favor.

“She’s not from the machine, but she’s a boss,” the ad said. “Toni is ready to take on the old boys club from day one.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/us/chicago-election-toni-preckwinkle.html" id="0ac06ca7-b25d-3d85-a3e7-31491c887260">The New York Times</a>.

Toni Preckwinkle Won a Spot in Chicago's Mayoral Runoff. Who Is She?

Before the last mayoral election four years ago, Toni Preckwinkle was frequently mentioned as one of the few formidable politicians in Chicago who could successfully challenge Mayor Rahm Emanuel as he competed for a second term. She disappointed her supporters by declining to run.

If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote — an extremely difficult bar, given that 14 candidates are on the ballot — the top two finishers will head to a runoff in April. The nine candidates who, according to some recent surveys, stand the best chance to be the next mayor stopped by The New York Times’ Chicago bureau and were asked some essential — and not so essential — questions.

— Gery Chico: Lobbyist and lawyer, chief of staff to former Mayor Richard M. Daley, runner-up in mayoral race in 2011.

— Bill Daley: Brother of Chicago’s longest-serving mayor, son of the second longest-serving. Worked in the Obama and Clinton administrations.

— Amara Enyia: Community organizer, activist, Ph.D., endorsed by Chance the Rapper.

— Lori Lightfoot: Former federal prosecutor and chair of task force that issued blistering report on Chicago police on matters of race.

— Garry McCarthy: Former police superintendent. Emanuel hired him, and fired him.

— Susana Mendoza: State comptroller, former city clerk. Co-chair of Emanuel’s 2015 re-election campaign.

— Toni Preckwinkle: County board president, former alderman and head of the Cook County Democratic Party who has major labor support.

— Paul Vallas: Onetime candidate for Illinois governor who has run school districts in Chicago, Louisiana, Philadelphia and Bridgeport, Connecticut.

— Willie Wilson: Self-made entrepreneur and grade-school dropout who has spent more than $1.5 million of his own money on his campaign.

Rahm’s Tenure, in Three Words

Emanuel stunned Chicago by announcing that he would not seek a third term, but his eight years in office have remained a topic of much discussion for those who want to succeed him. The Times allowed them three words each to describe it. (Emanuel’s office declined to weigh in on their assessments, saying the mayor was not commenting on the campaign.)

Chico: Downtown vs. neighborhoods.

Daley: Turbulent, challenging, entertaining.

Lightfoot: Missed opportunities. (She used only two words, but added: “That’s the kindest thing I can say.”)

McCarthy: Self-centered, failure, mismanaged.

Preckwinkle: (She declined to answer, saying only: “No thanks.”)

Wilson: Disgraceful. Complete failure.

Chicago’s Biggest Challenge

Enyia: The economy, and when I say the economy, that includes economic development and also budget, education and public safety.

Lightfoot: Convincing people that government can actually work for them, not against them.

McCarthy: We’re not going to fix crime until we fix the corruption.

Mendoza: Getting a handle on violence.

Preckwinkle: Strengthening our neighborhoods, strengthening our public schools, addressing the public safety challenges we face.

Vallas: The politicization of the budget.

Wilson: Lack of equality for all 77 communities that make up the city of Chicago.

Dibs* or No Dibs?

*Dibs (noun): the term used by Chicagoans for the practice of putting household items (chairs, tables, couches) out by the curb to save parking spaces they have dug out after a snowfall.

Dibs

Chico, Enyia, Daley, Mendoza, Vallas, Preckwinkle.

No Dibs

Favorite Chicago Skyscraper

Chicago boasts of being the birthplace of the skyscraper, and it fawns over its skyline. But which is the fairest of them all?

Enyia: The Sears Tower. [For the record, the renaming of the famed building to the Willis Tower was announced almost a decade ago, but none of the mayoral candidates who mentioned it called it anything but Sears.]

Lightfoot: One of the most interesting buildings is Marina Tower.

McCarthy: The Hancock building. That’s where Kristin and I got engaged, in the Signature Room. I got down on my knee and she started blubbering and I had to ask her twice. I was like, will you answer the damn question? But she’s a lawyer; she doesn’t answer questions.

Preckwinkle: It’s not a skyscraper, it’s the Cultural Center.

Wilson: The John Hancock building. [In 2018, the John Hancock Center was renamed “875 North Michigan Avenue,” but few mayoral hopefuls — or Chicagoans — seem aware of the change.]

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/us/chicago-mayoral-candidates.html" id="a28d9dbf-e77c-32c6-a18a-8f4096317d5b">The New York Times</a>.

No, Rahm Emanuel isn’t running. But practically every other power player in Chicago is on the ballot on Tuesday in a race that is perhaps the most unpredictable mayoral contest in a generation for the nation’s third-largest city. It’s a free-for-all with no clear front-runner.

What You Really Want to Know About the Candidates for Chicago Mayor

Gary Martin, 45, who died in an exchange of fire with police after a rampage Friday that left five co-workers dead and at least six other people wounded, had already had his state weapons permit revoked because of a felony assault conviction from years earlier, police in Aurora, Illinois, said. Still, they said, his gun was never taken away.

“Some disgruntled person walked in and had access to a firearm that he shouldn’t have had access to,” said Kristen Ziman, chief of police in Aurora, where the shooting took place.

Ziman said that the police were trying to determine why Martin still had a gun.

According to Illinois gun law, a person must be granted a Firearm Owners Identification card, or FOID, to possess a firearm. At least 2 million people in the state have the cards.

But under the law, the process to keep firearms out of the hands of a person whose card has been revoked is weak, allowing many people to keep their weapons with little threat of enforcement or penalty.

That appears to have been the case with Martin, who police said received a card in January 2014. In March 2014, he applied for a concealed-carry permit, and during that background check it was discovered that he had a felony conviction for aggravated assault in Mississippi from 1995.

The Illinois State Police then revoked Martin’s card and mailed him a letter ordering him to relinquish his firearm and card within 48 hours.

It is typical in Illinois, officials said, for local law enforcement to fail to take action at that point and to seize firearms if they are not surrendered voluntarily. In 2016, only about 4,000 of the 11,000 people whose cards were revoked submitted the mandatory reports explaining what they did with their guns, The Chicago Tribune reported in 2017.

Sgt. Bill Rowley, a spokesman for the Aurora Police Department, said the police had no record of being notified by state police that Martin had not volunteered his firearm as required in 2014. It was unclear whether Martin, who lived in Aurora at the time of his death, also lived there in 2014.

A day after the shooting, police gave a fuller account of the deadly events inside the Henry Pratt Co. warehouse Friday afternoon, and identified the five workers — all apparently co-workers of Martin — who were killed.

The victims included some of the company’s most experienced workers but also its newest: Josh Pinkard, who was the plant manager of the warehouse, was killed in the shooting, as was Trevor Wehner, who was a student at Northern Illinois University and an intern in the company’s human resources department. Wehner was expected to graduate from college in May. Friday, when the shooting occurred, was the first day of his internship, according to officials from Northern Illinois University.

Also killed, police said, were Vicente Juarez, stock room attendant and forklift operator; Clayton Parks, human resources manager; and Russell Beyer, mold operator. Officials at Northern Illinois said that Parks had also graduated from the university, in 2014, and said it was offering counseling help to those in need. (The school, in DeKalb, Illinois, was the site of another mass shooting 11 years ago.)

Police first received several 911 calls at 1:24 p.m. Friday, as frantic callers said there was a shooter at the warehouse. Martin had been summoned to what police described as a “termination meeting” at the warehouse where he had worked for at least 15 years. At least two victims were shot at the scene of that meeting.

AURORA, Ill. — An angry worker who opened fire inside a suburban Chicago factory where he had worked for years was barred from having the handgun he was carrying, officials said Saturday.

Julie Bosman

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