"Eddie's message lives on"

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: Eddie's message lives on : Eric Zorn | Change of Subject | Chicago Tribune : February 5, 2009 : --------------------------------------- : : Not long ago, I was cleaning out my e-mail and came across a folder labeled "Eddie Mail." : "Eddie" referred to Ed Schwartz, the Chicago radio legend who died Tuesday at 62 after a long illness. : He had his own folder because messages from him used to arrive at such a furious pace that if I didn't have a filter to automatically set them aside, they'd disappear off my screen before I had time to read them all in a bunch. : Schwartz hadn't had a radio job since 1995, and the suburban newspaper chain where he'd freelanced a regular column had dropped him in 2005. But he was still brimming with ideas and crackling with opinions, so he sent his tips, links, observations, questions, gossip and rants to the only audience he had left - me and at least several other people in local media who counted him as a friend. : I tried to get him to write a blog - even went so far as to set one up and give him instructions on how to post entries. But he said no, he preferred to wait for a bigger gig, a gig he always hoped was just around the corner. : My "Eddie Mail" folder was empty. The deluge of missives from him had stopped abruptly in the fall of 2005 when doctors diagnosed him with severe kidney disease. He was in and out of hospitals and nursing homes - mostly in - ever since, and he had very little access to the Internet. : I'd visited him once in a nursing home and spoken with him every so often on the phone. He was a sad, frustrated and frightened man toward the end. He was broke and felt like hell. : But one of the reasons conversations with him could be so excruciating was the sense that he was suffocating - that being cut off from interactivity was, for him, like being cut off from oxygen would be to someone else. : Ed Schwartz lived for the give-and-take, the plugging in, the reaching out. : He had a very full life as "Chicago Ed," the big man on top of everything in the big city. And as far as I know - dating back to 1982 when we first met - it was pretty much his only life. : His old pals in radio had an on-air fundraiser for him in 2006 to help him with medical bills. : But in retrospect, they - or, I, for that matter - should have figured out a way to set him up with a laptop and an Internet connection. : Too late for Eddie, it occurs to me that many people now in institutional care need the Internet as much or more than the rest of us. A TV and a phone isn't enough. Not anymore. : It's not right to plunge the ailing and the elderly back into the last century and still expect them to feel vital and connected. You don't have to be a former radio star with flickering dreams of a return to the limelight to want to trade ideas with your friends and learn new things every day. : Not to say Eddie Schwartz would have lived a day longer if he'd been able to keep filling up my "Eddie Mail" folder. But the days he had would have been brighter.

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