John McCormick

I woke up to find the governor allegedly wanted me fired.

For all the talk about our children's being prematurely hardened by movies, videogames and a culture of gun violence, the last few weeks have reminded us of how profoundly most kids abhor war.

The high jinks began on "Animal House" Night: 12 new Phi Gamma Delta pledges at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were ordered to watch the iconic Belushi flick while downing beer and Jack Daniel's.

It sure isn't one of those how-great-I-am books that other executives write. Before page 35, we're caught up in the racism of the Korean War military--and an assault by a pedophilic black preacher.

Randolph Cassell hustles down a dark stairwell that smells of fresh urine and stale whisky. He's a role model at Chicago's squalid Robert Taylor Homes--one of the few residents who have jobs.

On the night of Oct. 18, two men wearing bulletproof vests approached 29-year-old Huey Rich on Chicago's South Side. The men claimed they were cops and said they wanted to ask him some questions.

The sport may not command much TV time or pay athletes big bucks. But to several million rabid fans who live inside the triangle formed by Minnesota, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania, it's a religion.

Ron Safer felt his bright future as a federal prosecutor sliding into the abyss. His supervisor, Dan Gillogly, was talking up the rich possibilities of a new case.

Over the past four years, someone has been raping, strangling and bludgeoning women in a desolate, two-mile-by-two-mile patch of Chicago's South Side known as Englewood.

Chicago police supt. Terry Hillard got the first call in his car the evening of Friday, June 4. One of his 13,500 cops had just shot and killed LaTanya Haggerty, a 26-year-old computer specialist for Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The plywood, only a bit of it exposed, looks suspicious. Who would have wedged the 5-foot-by-2-foot sheet here, between the roots of a giant evergreen on an island north of Seattle, and covered it with dirt?

IT'S NOT EASY TO DIGEST A DISASTER at 8:30 a.m. on a Sunday. Sitting with his top executives at a conference table in Chicago on a spring morning in 1997, Arthur C.

OPPONENTS OF THE DEATH PENALTY have never had a clear-cut martyr: of the 513 men and women executed since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, not one has later been proved innocent.

LATE LAST TUESDAY NIGHT DR. Paula Mahone sat staring at a telephone. A team of doctors and nurses at Iowa Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines had been waiting for this moment since the day in early October when 29-year-old Bobbi McCaughey entered the hospital with seven fetuses in her womb.

THE WOMAN WE'LL CALL AMY GOT the picture soon after she took a job at the Mitsubishi plant several months ago. She'd heard all the accusations of sexual harassment--lewd comments, explicit photos, groping of women on the assembly line--at the Normal, Ill., auto factory.

DID SOMEBODY SAY MCDOOMED? Story after story lately has reported on the fate of McDonald's Corp.--and most have cataloged disaster. McDonald's marketing ploys--the Arch Deluxe, the 55-cent burger--have been a laughfest.

EVER WISH YOU'D BEEN present at the creation of a really boneheaded business strategy? Travel back 50 years to the mahogany-paneled office of Sewell Avery, then chairman of Montgomery Ward & Co.

ON A BITTER JANUARY MORNING in 1974, Charles Kuralt and his CBS crew were setting up on a remote hilltop west of Dubuque, Iowa. They were there to do an ""On the Road'' segment on farmer Bill Bodisch, who hoped to sail his 58-foot homemade yacht around the world.

No youngster gets into Holy Trinity High School each day without getting past Brother Philip Smith. He's there every morning at 5, pushing the papers around his desk before heading for the front door.

WELFARE mothers, informed that they will lose their monthly checks if they don't go to work, can become abusive at the Milwaukee Job Center North. Many case managers have little red diamonds on their computer screens, panic buttons they can press t o call security.

BARELY A YEAR AGO, ENGLEWOOD Academy was one of the worst public high schools in Chicago. Street gangs ruled the hallways. Security guards extorted bribes from students.

AT THE BISHOP'S SCHOOL IN THE posh San Diego suburb of La Jolla, Andrew Cunanan was regarded as way over the top. An openly gay teenager, he would whistle at the boys on the water-polo team, and he once came to a school dance in a tight red jumpsuit with an older man as his date.

He's best-known as perhaps the finest young golfer in history. But to his parents, it's more important that Tiger Woods is a fine young man. It took love, rules, respect, confidence and trust to get there.

Five days before his death, in his weekly Bible study, Jeffrey Dahmer pondered the Book of Revelations. At Christ's second coming, Chapter 9 prophesied, scorpions would so torture sinners that they would beg for death.

The Smith case captured the nation's attention, at first because it played on every parent's fear of a stranger abducting a beloved baby. That proved unfounded; the incidence of such stranger-kidnappings is, in fact, quite rare.

THE REPORT OF DRUG PEDDLING was already stale, but the four Chicago police officers decided to follow up anyway. As they knocked on the door at 219 North Keystone Avenue near midnight on Feb. 1, it was snowing, and they held out little hope of finding the pusher they were after.

TWENTY YEARS AGO, AN angry young lawyer named Patrick Murphy wrote a book that exposed an injustice: state social workers too often seized children from parents whose worst crime was poverty.

First she introduced herself as Ann from Sacramento. Then she helped other protesters distribute leaflets outside the Wichita, Kans., clinic of Dr. George Tiller, one of the few U.S. physicians who perform late-term abortions.

How much slaughter is enough? For Chicago the limit seemed to have been reached last October, when a sniper's bullet killed 7-year-old Dantrell Davis as he walked to school with his mother.

Something is happening in Dubuque. It's not often that we'll pause to tell you that; this is a city that the flyover culture usually ignores except to say that we don't edit for the proverbial little old lady who lives there.