This weeks toast was supposed to be to our hero. I did that one last week: My Dad. Today I wanted to toast a great friend, Ted Kosmatka. Ted lives not far from the dunes of Lake Michigan in a house shaped, vaguely, like a ship. From the local beach you can see Chicago on the horizon. Over the years, Ted has held down several different jobs, and been held down by several more; he’s fed tigers, and worked in laboratories, and shoveled coke in a steel mill blast furnace. The oldest of four children, Ted was a biology major at Indiana University until his father died and financial realities forced him to drop out. He spent the next several years trying on occupations for size, but he eventually went back to school, taking classes between work shifts when he could afford it. On his days off, he worked at the Chicago Field Museum as a research assistant, studying the bones and artifacts of ancient man. While all this was going on, he was also writing--and getting rejected--a lot. (He h...
Because You Need To Know What I Think. I Think.