In the 1970s, my dad had his railroad buddies... Bill, Tony, Ira, Michael, Patrick. Railroad guys who inspected boxcars, sat at drafting tables, looked at blueprints and occasionally took me for rides in switch engines in the train yards.
Irish, Polish, Jewish, Italian names that rolled off the tongue with Chicago grit, but one name didn’t fit the mold…. Omar.
My dad worked with a guy named Omar.
That name always stuck out to me when my dad mentioned him when he got home from work. It wasn’t European, it wasn’t English, it was foreign, maybe even exotic.
What kind of name was Omar? As a kid, I didn’t know what to make of it. All I knew was that Omar didn’t sound like a railroad guy. My dad respected him and that counted and they became buddies.
Omar was from Iran. Where he was born raised and educated. He was a mechanical engineer just like my dad. He moved his family to the U.S. in the early '70s, during a time when Iran was still Western-facing. His wife was Christian and he was Muslim. Their family represented something complex and uncommon to me at an early age. They definitely weren’t like the families from our parish.
They became part of our world for a while. Omar would come over and have a couple beers with my Oldman. They would talk shop, talk about religion, politics and choo-choo trains. He wasn’t a stranger anymore. He was a colleague and became a family friend.
One summer, I remember tossing a baseball with him in the front yard. He asked me about school and what sports I played. He gave a damn and that mattered in the eyes of a twelve year old.
In 1978, Omar and his family came over for Christmas. Our families exchanged gifts, listened to Christmas music and ate roast beef and Yorkshire pud together.
But then came November 4, 1979.
Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 52 American hostages. The whole country watched in horror. Every night, those grainy news clips would roll showing blindfolded Americans and bearded militants shouting in a language that I didn’t understand. The phrase 444 days got tattooed into the American psyche and into mine. I had the poster of a target aimed at the Ayatollah Assohola hanging next to Farrah Fawcett and Walter Payton.
Three weeks later, it was Thanksgiving. Omar’s family came over again, but something had shifted in me. I was 13 and I didn’t see Omar as Omar anymore. I saw him as Iranian, as a mooslim, as the other. A quiet hatred had crept into my young bones, planted by the images on TV, by fear, by ignorance.
To me, Omar was no longer the kind man who talked to me about school and the White Sox. He was a terrorist. Maybe not in action, but by association.
My dad noticed right away that I was standoffish.
He pulled me aside that night….firm, disappointed.
He told me that I was wrong. That Omar didn’t take hostages. That Omar was the same man he always has been. That it was unfair and wrong to let the news poison my mind against someone who had only ever shown me kindness.
But the damage was done and Omar was never the same to me again.
The reason I bring all this up today isn’t just because it’s another 82° June morning in Chicagoland. It’s because the world’s churning again. Iran and Israel are on the brink, and the U.S. is being pulled into it. Headlines are screaming and social media is boiling over.
The same drums, same teams, different decade.
And I can’t stop thinking about Omar.
I never saw him the same way after 1979. Not because of what he did... he did nothing wrong, but because of what I let the world tell me he was.
My dad was trying to teach me that the world isn’t binary. That character matters more than nationality. That people are individuals... not flags, not faiths, not governments.
I was too young to get it then. I’m old enough to know better now.
So today’s quote, “Don’t fight back, fight forward” hits home. Fighting forward means learning from the past, not stewing in it. It means standing against the reflex to hate. It means remembering Omar not as a villain created by headlines but as the kind, intelligent man who once played catch with a 12-year-old boy on a sunny summer lawn in Oak Park.
We can’t undo the past. But we can choose how we tell it. And maybe, just maybe, we can get better at how we live it moving forward.
I learned later that I wasn't the only one that looked at Omar differently. So did his colleagues and the world around him, but not Don Shepley. Don Shepley still went to breakfast with Omar and still had Omar over for an occasional barbecue.
I haven't seen Omar in forty-five years, but he crossed my path for a reason and for a chalkboard session that talks about values and morals. A lesson in hatred and learning to overcome it.
Juneteenth and the markets are closed.
I'm going into the city to buy a cigar at the cigar shop in the Board of Trade. Then I'm going to walk over to Buckingham Fountain and listen to some Tony V and his fiddle songs about weather change.
Be astonished and learn from Omar.
