Once touted as the Mother Road, Route 66 is a shadow of its former self. Rick & co-pilot Frank Gerwer take the journey to find out what remains along this nostalgic pipeline.
U.S. Route 66, also known as the Will Rogers Highway, was one of the original highways constructed by the U.S. Highway System in 1926. Route 66 is over 90 years old and definitely, a road less traveled. There are plenty of weird attractions to be seen along this iconic road that starts in Chicago and ends in Los Angeles. While much of Route 66 has disappeared following its decommissioning as a major American highway in 1985, there remains plenty of evidence to be seen and cherished by historical and pop-cultural lovers. Large chunks of Route 66-related memorabilia have been preserved at the Route 66 Association Hall of Fame and Museum.
An exploration into the underlying fundamental functions, structures, and principles of rap.
Wasalu Jaco, professionally known as Lupe Fiasco, is a Chicago-born, Grammy award-winning American rapper, record producer, entrepreneur, and community advocate. Rising to fame in 2006, following the success of his debut album Food & Liquor, Lupe has released eight acclaimed studio albums, his latest being Drill Music In Zion, released in June 2022. His efforts to propagate conscious material garnered recognition as a Henry Crown Fellow, and he is a recipient of an MLK Visiting Professorship at MIT for the 2022/2023 academic year.
In this clip, Eddy Curry talked about some of the earlier days in his career before running into cardiac problems. Eddy described the situation as a stressful one as his career hung in the balance. He recalled the NBA offering him $400K annually for 50 years if he took a DNA test that showed he was more likely to develop heart problems. However, Eddy explained how his agent at the time showed him the negative precedent he would be setting for future Black players.
An R. Kelly associate took a plea deal Monday for trying to silence a witness in the R&B singer’s racketeering case by setting her SUV on fire.
Michael Williams, 38, copped to one count of arson for destroying the vehicle, rented by the woman’s father, which was parked in front of the Kissimmee, Florida, home where she and her family were staying.
In exchange for his plea in Brooklyn federal court, prosecutors have agreed to drop the witness tampering charge against him. He faces a minimum of 60 months in prison and a maximum of 71 months under federal sentencing guidelines.
“The plea agreement is fair in that the witness tampering charge as it relates to R. Kelly will be dismissed at sentencing,” said defense lawyer Todd Spodek.
Two hours before the June 11 blaze, Williams, a longtime friend of the jailed “Ignition” crooner, used his cellphone to search for the Florida address.
After the car was set alight, there was an explosion. A witness stepped outside and saw “an individual fleeing from the scene whose arm appeared to be lit on fire,” the complaint alleges.
Fire investigators also found accelerant on the edge of the property, court papers charge.
Williams’ distinct GMC Yukon, which has damage to the front and side and no front license plate, was captured on toll plaza cameras traveling from his home state of Georgia to Florida before the arson, then returning, the complaint states.
Ten days later, Williams Googled “How do fertilizer bombs work?” The purpose of that search wasn’t immediately clear.
He also searched the phrases “witness intimidation” and “case law for tampering with a witness,” according to court papers.
Kelly is locked up awaiting trial in Brooklyn federal court on more than a dozen criminal counts of sex trafficking, racketeering, coercion and other raps related to the abuse of six women and girls.
The three-time Grammy Award winner faces a separate indictment in Chicago, where he is charged with producing child pornography and destroying evidence.
Its hard to predict whether Dick Gregory will be most celebrated as a path-breaking comedian or a trailblazing civil rights activist. Its impossible to imagine the history of either movement without him—or without his unique blending of the two. In the early 1960s, he became one of the first black comedians to perform before integrated audiences. In 1967, he ran for mayor of Chicago against Richard J. Daley, and a year later for president as the Freedom and Peace Party candidate. The author of and contributor to many politically charged books, Gregory is still a staunch, wry political voice across a range of issues as varied as nutrition, social justice, and the environment. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Laura Washington interviews the provocative and always unpredictable Gregory.
It’s no secret Chicago takes its egg rolls very seriously.
The Tribune has extensively chronicled the history behind the iconic Chicago-style egg roll, defined by the addition of peanut butter in the filling. The dish has been a fixture at Chicago’s Chinese restaurants for decades, popularized by Chinese American restaurants large and small.
As former Tribune writer and current WBEZ reporter Monica Eng explored in a 2013 Tribune article, “Though dim sum chefs in Hong Kong produce a similar snack called a spring roll, the egg roll, as we know it, is a creation of early Chinese American restaurateurs who used local ingredients to create Chinese-ish foods that would appeal to American diners.”
But if you wander around predominantly Black neighborhoods on the West and South sides, you’ll notice a completely different kind of egg roll — one that uses the same wrapper, but then leaves nearly everything else behind.
The most common filling for these egg rolls is jerk chicken, and since it began to pop up in the city five years ago, it has become nearly ubiquitous on menus of Black-owned restaurants and dozens of non-Chinese establishments across the city.
Here are five great egg rolls from Black restaurateurs you can find around the Chicago area.
1) Dinkey’s Lucky Rolls at Bobby’s Video Poker and Slots
One of the people most responsible for the current egg roll boom is Ernesta Berry, who goes by the nickname Dinkey the Egg Roll Lady.
“Egg rolls have been a family thing since we were kids,” Berry said. “My grandmother used to make ground beef egg rolls all the time.”
When Berry and her sister, Lekia Lowery, opened L&B Soul Kitchen in suburban Bellwood in 2012, they served egg rolls that were similar to the ones their grandmother used to make. As Berry explained in an October article by Mike Sula for the Chicago Reader, “I called them soul rolls.”
But by 2015, she realized that soul food sales were lagging, and her customers became far more excited about Caribbean-rooted jerk chicken. “Soul food was going so slow,” Berry said, “but I noticed everyone was loving jerk chicken, so we decided to put it in an egg roll.” The jerk chicken egg roll was born.
When fresh from the fryer, the crackly wrapper is dotted with delicate bubbles from the oil. The chicken filling is both juicy and intriguingly complex, with just enough chile heat to perk up each bite.
Berry didn’t stop at jerk chicken. She has continued to come up with new filling ideas year after year. “I make 79 different flavors of egg rolls,” Berry said proudly. With Greg Hudgins, she and her sister helped open Tastee Rolls, though Berry eventually decided to strike out on her own.
Currently, you can order Berry’s egg rolls at Dinkey’s Lucky Rolls, located inside Bobby’s Video Poker and Slots in suburban Hillside. But Berry is getting ready to open a new restaurant at 3652 W. Chicago Ave. within the next two weeks called, appropriately enough, The Egg Roll Lady.
2) Tastee Rolls
The tiny restaurant that popularized the jerk chicken egg roll is still bringing in the crowds. Though her sister left, Lekia Lowery is currently manager and head chef of Tastee Rolls.
Owner Greg Hudgins couldn’t be more bullish about the future. He’s already opened a second location in Chatham, and he hopes to expand out of state soon.
Each location offers dozens of different fillings, from shrimp and cheese to garlic Parmesan chicken. The iconic jerk chicken egg roll ($4.25) is the bestseller, and a worthy place to start. But my favorite option is actually the Italian beef egg roll ($4.75), which is stuffed with tender beef, gooey cheese and spicy giardiniera.
3) BigCity Cheesesteaks
Brian Hicks, owner of BigCity Cheesesteaks, said he opened the restaurant in Hammond, Indiana, to serve (as the name suggests) cheesesteaks. It was his wife who initially persuaded him to start serving egg rolls.
“I was skeptical,” Hicks said. “I hadn’t seen a restaurant around here serve them.” But once he added the dish to his menu in January 2020, he never regretted it.
“My customers love them,” Hicks said. “I sell roughly 400 to 600 on Saturdays. I have to get in at 6 a.m. to freshly roll them.”
You won’t find jerk chicken here. Instead, Hicks said the most popular egg roll is the cheesesteak ($3.75), which arrives stuffed with sauteed beef, molten cheese and chopped bell peppers. But he’s also proud of the gyro egg roll ($4.50) and the BigCity egg roll ($4.50), which is filled with bacon, pepper jack cheese and hot peppers.
Hicks said he’s always trying to come up with new fillings. “I’m actually trying to come up with a new one right now, maybe a seafood one,” Hicks said. He’s also considering opening another restaurant that focuses exclusively on egg rolls, because business has been so good.
4) Jay’s Backyard BBQ
Even barbecue restaurants are getting into the egg roll game. Jay’s Backyard BBQ in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago serves a variety of smoked meats, from tender rib tips to jerk chicken. But the shop is probably best known for the Obama sandwich, a righteous combination of jerk chicken and jerk steak covered in Provolone cheese and heaped together on a bun.
So it makes sense that while the shop serves a very good jerk chicken egg roll, what you really want is the Obama egg roll ($4.55). The crispy covering shatters with each bite, giving way to a deluge of cheese and plenty of juicy, spicy meat.
5) 3Kings Jerk
You can find egg rolls at essentially every jerk chicken restaurant in Austin, and there are a lot of them. But I’m partial to the ones served at 3Kings Jerk. Like at the best places, the egg rolls are fried to order, leaving the wrapper extra crispy, not greasy. Obviously, jerk chicken is the most popular option, but that’s just the beginning. You can also score egg rolls stuffed with cheesesteak, jerk shrimp, and shrimp and broccoli.
A video showing an elderly Asian man being slapped across the face as he hands some money back to a young man and his friends staying at his Airbnb in Chicago has been circulating on social media.
The footage, first posted on Dec. 7 at 10 p.m., shows an elderly Asian man handing some cash back to a group of friends before being slapped by one of them.
The elderly man was visibly taken aback by the assault.
Social media users initially believed the location of the incident to be a store in Chicago after the original uploader of the video, “Slick Getem,” wrote in the caption, “Somebody said Made his ass think abt the cat he put innat Chinese food.”
One of the people who claimed to be in the group involved in the incident told NextShark that the man was the owner of the Airbnb they were staying at in Chicago.
They claim the elderly man hit their friend and that the video was blown out of proportion. They added that they can’t make their page public after receiving hate and threats. The Facebook user has since deleted their page. The user who originally uploaded the video also changed his name to “Sli Ck.”
Comments on a Facebook post criticizing the group claimed they were kicked out of the rented Airbnb for being “loud and smoking.”
TikTok user KarmaChibana, who has more than 800,000 followers on the platform, caught wind of the video and reacted to it.
“That is not an excuse to use racial stereotypes against him and slap him in the face,” Karma starts off.
“Just like how the Asian and other communities were there for our movement, why can’t we do the same for them? To my Black brothers and sisters, we have to do better. We need to stand up for our Asian brothers and sisters. I know there’s anti-Black within their community, but we shouldn’t generalize.”
NextShark reached out to the Chicago Police Department which could not verify the location of the incident.
Only four players in league history were teammates with both Jordan and James: Scott Williams, Larry Hughes, Jerry Stackhouse and Brendan Haywood. HoopsHype was able to connect with all four of them.
“I don’t think it would be fair to give a comparison on them,” Stackhouse, who only played seven games with James in 2010, told HoopsHype. “I played with LeBron at the prime of his career and I played with Michael in the last year of his career. I just think both are unbelievable players. They’re probably one and two in the history of the game. That’s where I’ll leave it.”
WHAT WERE YOUR EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF MICHAEL JORDAN?
Brendan Haywood: It was a learning experience. You got to see up-close what made him who he was. He was like 40 years old. He didn’t have anything to prove. But he was still one of the hardest workers. I would watch him teach Bobby Simmons the footwork to score in the mid-post. Everything he did was calculated. Nothing was done by accident. He was reading your lead foot. He understood where to go and how to get you off balance and get to his pull-up jumper and how to get your arm off of him if you were trying to be physical. Watching him, you got to learn a lot.
Larry Hughes: For me, growing up, I played basketball because of MJ. When I got a chance to play with him, I watched all of the small things that you don’t get to see when you are a fan. How did he conduct himself with the media? What time did he go to treatment? I learned how consistent he was with the game-planning and understanding how to get the job done even at an older age. He may have lost a step but he was still effective.
Scott Williams: One of the things that he liked to do was add aspects to his game. During my first two years in the league, he wanted to improve his low-post and back-to-basket game. We played a lot of 1-on-1 after practices. He would have someone throw the ball to him and he would catch it with a pivot foot on the block. He was working on trying to get around bigger, stronger players knowing that he would have no problem with someone his size. He had to learn to shoot with a hand in his face. I never beat him in one of those one-on-one sessions.
WHAT WERE YOUR EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF LEBRON?
Larry Hughes: As a young player, Bron had a good thought process. He was going to listen and apply the things that made the most sense to him. I can remember LeBron having conversations with a number of teammates on the plane and in the locker room, whether it be veteran guys or guys who were just joining the team. He kept a clean perspective on how everybody saw the game.
Scott Williams: He was always very strong, that’s for sure [Laughs] I remember early days in training camp, I prided myself on my defensive play. I only knew one way to play. I was often playing opposite LeBron during practice. One time he tried to drive down the middle of the lane and I stepped in front, off of my guy, to take a charge. I was clearly in position. He ran into me with a force that I had not felt in quite some time. My first thought was that I hope I didn’t hurt this kid. My next thought was that I hope this kid didn’t hurt me.
Brendan Haywood: When I was in Dallas, LeBron was thinking about going to Miami. Before he went to the Heat, he was recruiting guys to come to Cleveland. I get a text from a number that I don’t know. It’s LeBron. He says: “What’s up, this is King James.” It was a little weird he called himself King James but I kept going. He told me he was trying to get guys to come to the Cavs. He said he knew that they could not give me what I was going to get in the market. But he wanted to know if I would be willing to take a pay cut to be a part of something special. I wouldn’t have taken a pay cut to play with the ’92 Bulls. Buddy, you’re making $100 million off the court! This is my last hurrah! I hadn’t made enough money in my career to take a pay cut and chase a championship. I’d played so many playoff series against him that I saw him as another player. If you play in the league, you look at guys a little differently. He was younger than I was. I looked at him like he was anybody else.
HOW DID MICHAEL JORDAN IMPACT WINNING FOR YOUR TEAM?
Scott Williams: I saw him MJ go from no championships to three. He had mellowed some. [Laughs] Not to say that on game day he didn’t have that smoldering beast side of him. But it wasn’t that all-encompassing thing where every time you were around this cat it was like in October 1990. I’d be curious, for the guys who played with him in Washington, what he was like when he was in practices. I don’t know if it was anything like he was when I was in training camp my rookie year.
Larry Hughes: MJ played in the triangle offense. His attention to detail was understanding angles at a high level. If he didn’t operate the triangle, the job didn’t get done. Bron is similar in his ability to remember and break down the plays. When he is able to see those things, whether it is at a timeout or at halftime, he is able to rely on the information that he downloaded to execute what is needed to happen. It is different based on where they were in their careers when I played with them.
Brendan Haywood: We were a team that based our whole offense around a 40-year-old, aging superstar and we were trying to make the No. 8 seed in the playoffs. At the time, I was thinking that I was just out there hooping. But as I got older, that may have been one of the dumbest ways to ever build a team. You should be featuring your young guys, letting them play, take their knocks and lumps and letting them develop.
HOW DID LEBRON IMPACT WINNING?
Brendan Haywood: The thing that they most have in common is that they impact winning. But they go about in totally different ways. That is why it’s so unfair that LeBron is always compared to Mike. He doesn’t play like Mike! He wasn’t trying to fully dominate like Mike! LeBron wants to play an overall floor game. Bron is more like Magic Johnson but with next-level athleticism. That allows him to do incredible things. LeBron wants to get the 8, 9, 10 assists. He wants to get the rebounds. He wants to get his 26, 27 points. He isn’t just worried about scoring, though. He’s not trying to destroy you. He’s not worried about how many buckets he gets.
Scott Williams: This was an odd year. 2020 sucks. Let’s just get it straight. But with the disjointed season, it threw a lot of the teams off of their games. That’s the thing about LeBron and his leadership. When it did start back, he was able to get his team re-energized and re-focused. The players on the floor have the biggest impact on how hard a team is going to play every night. The coaches will draw up the plays but if the guys aren’t locked on, let’s just face it, some of the execution is sloppy. When you have a stud like that who’s got that championship pedigree, and you have a thirsty young player in Anthony Davis who has yet to wear that ring, you can really get everybody on the same page.
WHAT DO YOU SAY WHEN YOU ARE ASKED ABOUT COMPARISONS?
Brendan Haywood: One of the more interesting things is that I had the GOAT conversation with LeBron. We were on the plane and I told him: “I love you, brother, but I have to go with Mike.” I told him my reasons. I’ve had this conversation with him face-to-face. Six rings. Six MVPs. The guy has had two different three-peats and has never been to a Game 7. He was MVP and Defensive Player of the Year in the same season. I played with both of them and what LeBron has slowly but surely turned into from a confidence standpoint, MJ was that the first time he walked in the league. LeBron has gotten so much better at that. He has grown into a guy that close out games. Michael always had that ability. Michael always competed defensively. Both of those guys are incredible competitors. They do things differently. The biggest difference is that MJ is a cold-blooded killer. He is an assassin. LeBron is more respected and loved. He is loved by his teammates and he is respected by his opponents. So when we had the GOAT debate, LeBron was just kind of nodding his head. He didn’t really say much. Mike Miller and James Jones said some things on his behalf. I don’t think LeBron agreed with me. But at that point, he hadn’t beaten Golden State. He didn’t have the ring he just got with the Lakers.
Scott Williams: The thing that I hate the most is that comparisons are being drawn and I don’t care which way you stand on it. They are two absolutely phenomenal players and I hate when someone says that one is the GOAT and one isn’t. It’s almost like a knock on the one that you say is not the GOAT. I don’t really like to get into that game. I’ve been forced into that corner where I’ve had to make that choice a few times and I will say Michael is the greatest of all time, in my opinion, from being in the locker room with both of them. But I didn’t get LeBron at the top of his game. I got him when he was still developing. We’re not as close but I still consider LeBron a friend. As a basketball commentator and as a fan, obviously, I have followed LeBron. It doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate all that LeBron has done and overcome.
Larry Hughes: LeBron had the same attention to detail that MJ had. He was focused on the things that happened before him and how he could enhance the game that was played before him. He was a student of the game. He understands how basketball players play and how they get their job done. The opportunity to have played with both of those guys was amazing. You see similarities in how they pay attention to detail. It’s film. It’s muscle memory. They had the ability to make adjustments based on what happened.
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