Bing! Bing! Bing! Remembering Mark Farano 1965-2003

It was nearly two years ago when I received the phone call at work, two weeks after the fact. Mark was dead & his mother had just now found my work number in his Palm Pilot, so she claimed. It didn’t matter, I still couldn’t believe it and I was still reeling in shock.

It was between February, 2002 to late May, 2003, that I didn’t have a phone due to circumstances beyond my control, which was much debt. It was a critical time in my life. No phone, yet I had an email address & plenty of money to spend on calling cards & occasionally the crazy landlady would let me use her phone.

I had known Mark since my college days, mainly my last two and a half years at Columbia. He was a year behind me. We had met at the school newspaper, in the fall of 1989, both as hungry as ever, looking for adventure and at that newspaper; there was lots of adventure for certain.

At the start of my career at the newspaper, I was the official office boy for the newspaper, via a work-study grant. My previous work-study position was that of a teacher’s assistant for a prestigious director of Columbia’s Center For Black Music Research, though I felt it was more like a glorified envelope-stuffer most times. Although being the paper’s office boy was my official role, it turned out as the rest of the editors would learn that I was a damn good writer too, doing an occasional article or opinion piece, but back to Mark and I for now.

Mark became the paper’s education & financial beat reporter & also one of the many favorites of the newspaper’s advisor. How Mark and I clicked, I’m still not sure how or why, until it was a downstate car trip to the state’s capitol in Springfield, Illinois the following spring (1990). Driving past cornfields and cattle can be boring, but not us, as we traded stories, our secret desires, dreams, goals & ideas. It was at this point I first learned of this character he had made up named “Mulligan Moose,” which I later learned was a term used for moose that could not grow a complete or full set of antlers.

Then I learned of another word he used to blow off steam when all hell broke loose for him. He’d yell, “BING!” at the top of his lungs. So that’s what we did all over Springfield, was yell “BING!” in bars, at the state capitol and out the car window, scaring the living daylights out of innocent bystanders, while we laughed hysterically.

I graduated in June of 1990 & he continued on for another year, until he graduated in June of 1991. Unlike me who took the summer off after graduation, Mark secured a job straight out of college at First Analysis, a financial institute located in downtown Chicago, at Sears Tower, a job he held for 11½ years, rising through the ranks. He started off as a newsletter editor & ended up becoming a senior vice-president & analyst,

Over the years, I’d go meet him downtown at the Tower & we’d go meet for lunch or dinner or just hang out. Before we’d go out, he’d take me up to his office and show me the magnificent view of Chicago’s west side, in particular, the United Center from his window on the 101st floor.

And, he’d come to my job sites too, and hang out with me, including my reporter position at the Des Plaines Journal. One particular morning I had come into work cheery and happy, but my editor Todd Wessell, just glared at me. When I turned on my Mac computer for the day, I saw a little file that was titled, “note to self.” I was curious about it, opened it and saw the note that read, “Smile the end is near.” Todd knew about that note because he had a nasty habit of going through people’s computer files & deleting what he felt what we didn’t need. Pretty nice of him, huh?

When I saw that message, I realized it must have been Mark’s work. Mark was freelancing at the time for the newspaper. I thought it was kind of funny, but the paper’s assistant editor Ted Saylor didn’t think so, as he dragged me out into the hallway away from the rest of the reporters & asked me very loudly, while shaking the printed note in front of my face, “DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS?” I said no, and Ted’s response was, “Todd thinks you’ve gone crazy!”

When both of them found out Mark had done that, he was let go from freelancing for them & was subsequently banned from the newspaper for six months. Years later, Mark & I still laughed hysterically about that incident.

Mark lived with his mother the entire I knew him, his father was never a topic of discussion, so I left it alone. Whenever his mother went on vacation or would go somewhere, I was allowed to come over. His mother never did like me, I could tell in her voice. Mark never spoke about it either way, but also said it didn’t matter what she thought anyway, but I somehow think it did. She thought I was a bad influence on him, giving him all sorts of strange ideas. Oh! If only she knew!

We’d usually have dinner on his condo’s balcony overlooking the twilight and talked about old times, our jobs and our writings. Mark was a prolific writer whose interest was in medieval & historic subject matter, while I was heavily steeped in beat generation stuff and everyday ordinary mundane observations. He was a connoisseur of classical, opera & jazz music, a commonality shared between us, as well as rock and roll too. He also had a love for horses & owned two of them, Big Buster & Red Buster. Often we went riding together.

Fast forward to mid-March, 2003. We had been trying to get together for the past several weeks, but due to his severely busy schedule & my hectic one, it seemed like we never could get together at all. He was out of town almost every week, flying to a different city within the United States for his job. We were determined to meet sometime in April of that year, but that never materialized either.

Finally, we set a date down in stone, Sunday, May 18th, my jazz vocals teacher Jackie Allen was performing down at The Old Town School Of Folk Music in support of her then-new album entitled, “The Men In My Life.”


A few weeks earlier, Mark had told me that he was planning to retire at age 40, build a house in Carpentersville, just west of Chicago, bring his mother to live with him & have a specially built barn for his two horses. It was particularly sad, in light of the fact that his mother was slowly turning blind and only a week earlier on April 29th, she had retired from the high school system where she had been employed for over 20 years.


Unfortunately, that meeting never happened. On Sunday, May 4th, Mark suffered a massive heart attack after swimming several laps in the pool at a local YMCA in Des Plaines, Illinois. He had complained of dizziness & then collapsed. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Mark was only 38 years old.