Stay warm ... unlike us
It's a routine assignment, if not predictable.
It's brutally cold outside, so the task for the morning was to find people taking refuge in warming shelters in Elgin and neighboring towns. It's one of those assignments where you expect to encounter someone a lot less fortunate than you and have to ask him or her uncomfortable questions about how much less fortunate he or she is than you now that it's REALLY cold out.
So staff writer Larissa Chinwah and I headed to the Elgin Police Department, which offers its warm lobby as an oasis from the below-zero air outside. Even the walk from the parking garage across the street was enough to put our cheeks into stage one frostbite. Surely there would be a gaggle of people warming up at the police station.
We found one guy. And he wasn't particularly interested in talking with us. Besides, one person warming up in the lobby of the police station doesn't really make a story about legions of people seeking refuge from the cold.
So we checked a few other spots that seemed likely warming centers but came up empty.
We drove to many of the places around downtown Elgin where I usually search for somebody to photograph in the elements. We finally spotted Steve Udell, a 56-year-old City of Elgin public works employee making his way through downtown in a heated cart emptying garbage cans and recycling containers on street corners.
Unlike our first subject, he was more than happy to give us a minute of his time, but even Steve wasn't terribly cold. He came to work prepared in Carhartt overalls, a winter coat, work boots, gloves and a hat with nifty ear flaps. His response to our story idea was not that it was brutally cold out, but that there was “a tremendous lack of heat.”
Thirty-four years ago while making snow on the job at Villa Olivia ski resort down the road in Bartlett, it was 10 below during his overnight shift. That, he said, was the coldest he had ever been.
We took our cold-weather search to Carpentersville, hoping to broaden our geographic reach for the story, but ran into much the same issue. Nobody at village hall, nobody taking advantage of the fire stations to keep warm. Our story was evaporating as quickly as our breath was crystallizing.
Even the PADS shelter in Elgin didn't materialize into a jackpot of story material about the frigid weather. Executive Director Dennis Hewitt said the shelter has routinely hosted about 45 to 50 people all winter, no matter the temperature. Although the shelter does offer extended hours and will continue to do so through the weekend, PADS has not seen a rise in the number of visitors due to the cold snap.
Before long, we realized that the cold people we were trying to find were ourselves. Realizing the joke was on us, we retreated to the office.
Back at Elgin PADS, Hewitt said, “We'll probably have some kind of football party on Sunday.”
Now there's a story that might just gain some traction.