Neil Steinberg/Sun-Times
In my 30 years — at the end of January — as a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, I’ve been tasked by readers with many odd missions. One gave me an urn holding a lady’s ashes that he had been entrusted with. I handed the urn to her loved ones. Another reader, a VA social worker, drew me into trying to track down the family of a Marine vet, found frozen to death in a West Side doorway and headed toward a pauper’s grave in Homewood. My column helped locate his family in Alabama, who had been looking for him.