Touring Mr. Baer’s Neighborhood (Evanston) with the host of WTTW’s new ‘The Great Chicago Quiz Show’

On my way to meet Geoffrey Baer, the affable Chicago public television personality, historian and vice president of original content production for WTTW and whose face is splashed across buses advertising “The Great Chicago Quiz Show” — well, a man flipped me off. I stopped for a mother and her children to use a crosswalk, and the man was not happy. At the risk of sounding like a bad driver, a moment later, an elderly man passed on the right, cut me off and when I pulled alongside at the red light and gestured “What the heck?!” he reached beneath his seat and showed me a pistol. But then I met Baer, who greeted me with the same twinkling smile he holds on “Chicago Tonight,” explaining how such and such suburb got its name or why some building or another is important.

He did not flip me off.

He was polite, smart, considerate, wildly digressive in his enthusiasm for local history and I liked him very much. You have to like Geoffrey Baer. Everybody likes him. He is the grinning avatar of Illinois anecdotal history, telling you stuff you didn’t know about Chicago, reminding you why you bother to live here, even when the elderly wave guns.

We met near his home in Evanston, and Baer noted almost right away, with a considerable degree of sheepishness, OK, look: He wasn’t always sold on living in the suburbs. For a long time, he never wanted to leave Chicago. He’s not entirely convinced his wife wouldn’t move back to the city tomorrow. He just doesn’t want to suggest you shouldn’t live in Chicago. It took him a little while to warm to the idea of Evanston, and now he’s all in — just loves it here, he said.

He gestured around, to Mr. Baer’s Neighborhood.

“The houses, you see, are modest, not mansions. Most of them date to about the early 1900s. I’m pretty sure that one, that’s late 1800s. Our house is sort of a bungalow, in a way. I did research on a lot of the neighborhood houses. Ours is 1906. These four houses here were developed by someone who subdivided the block but didn’t actually build himself. There used to be a house here, and here, a church was here — actually, not a church, a convalescent house. An alley ran through there. My suspicion is the city took over this park and when they knocked down (the convalescent house), they piled the debris under that hill right there, a neat little sledding hill. I mean, our alley is gravel, and I love that! To put my urban planning hat on, when rain comes, the water doesn’t go downhill toward the Gulf of Mexico, it soaks into the ground. The “L” is four blocks that way, Metra is two blocks that way. I grew up in Highland Park and this train went by my back window every night. I would run to watch it go by. It’s a theme in my life.”

Being with him is like being in one of his history segments, or on one the countless WTTW shows he’s hosted and created, stretching back 26 years at Ch. 11, “Hidden Chicago” and “Seven Wonders of Chicago” and “Foods of Chicago” and “Chicago by ‘L’ ” — and on, and on, and on. He’s casual, an open faucet of facts. “The Great Chicago Quiz Show” fits the mold nicely, with the charming addition of lending Chicagoans near equal time. Baer quizzed them on Skype and they quip, groan, cheer, ponder. There are locals, well-known locals and very well-known locals (Lupe Fiasco, George Wendt). At least within the borders of northwest Illinois, Baer is a well-known local. Which means, he is a cheerleader of sorts, with familiar sorts of concerns.

“I’m a confirmed city person and we lived in Lincoln Park for many years and it was a model neighborhood, but frankly, the school options were fraught. Every conversation you have with parents veers into gaming the system, the difficulty of getting your kids into a school you’re happy with. And I don’t want to seem like I am trashing CPS, but we just had a lot of difficulty getting two kids into the same school. At the same time, we had all the stereotypes Chicagoans have about the suburbs. This is a little Wilmette-y for Evanston, farther north than we wanted. But now we’ve been here 10 years and in some ways, we hit the jackpot. This park is a huge reason we came here. It’s kind of the collective backyard. We have block parties and Easter egg hunts here. The neighborhood kids meet all the other neighborhood kids here.”

A pair of children twirled languidly on swings.

“It’s a close-knit neighborhood, in part to this park. I live on what we jokingly call the media block. My neighbor is an ad agency guy, the woman in that house was a book editor, this guy has a media marketing business, that guy there owns (a software business). The couple here, the wife’s at Medill (School of Journalism at Northwestern). These people landscaped last year now they’re digging it up. This was one property — this was a coach house, now it’s two different properties. They’ve done a great job. OK, I hear myself and I’m sounding like a suburban jerk. And I love cities! There’s a certain privilege to a suburb perhaps, and I don’t like projecting that. I hope I don’t sound snobby or clueless about other’s choices. I am not judging other people’s choices.”

A Metra train clanged past.

“I love that sound,” he said.

We stopped before a parking lot full of random cars.

“And this,” he continued, “this is actually car repair — Hey, Peter! Peter! How are you?! — but it was originally a roofing company and they used the roof to demonstrate their products, which is why there are all different kinds of slates on the roof. It was a kind of demonstration house. The fake shutters are supposed to look English cottage rural.”

Baer grew up in Highland Park and Deerfield and said he didn’t know much about Chicago. Other than visiting grandparents or the Art Institute, the city was unknown. That couldn’t be less true now. After seven or eight years of producing Baer’s specials, you understand there’s nothing forced about Baer’s actual knowledge, said WTTW’s Eddie Griffin. “You can take on-air talent and if they have an on-camera presence, you might be able to hammer them into place, but Geoffrey’s curiosity with Chicago is that kind of sincere curious where you don’t actually need cameras around.”

We passed beneath the train tracks. Baer pointed out a mural, then a bakery, then another bakery. We crossed Green Bay Road and strolled along Central. “I have not walked this in a year, and two-thirds of the storefronts look empty. OK, that is sobering.”

As we passed, people nodded, nudged each other, discretely noting Baer.

He gets stopped a lot, occasionally to correct him on some detail in one of his shows. He takes pride, he said, in assuring that the disputed fact was triple checked. The new quiz show, in fact, is a spinoff of Baer’s public speaking engagements. At the end of those talks, he quizzes the audience. He works an audience well. Before appearing on Ch. 11, for eight years, he led boat tours with the Chicago Architectural Foundation.

Other fun facts about Geoffrey Baer:

He’s a competitive sailor.

He studied at Second City.

He taught theater at Chicago Academy for the Arts.

But as for Chicago history, the thing he’s known for, Baer learned it partly on the job, partly in the classes that Architectural Foundation docents are required to take. One day, while leading a tour, Baer was discovered. He was plucked out of the river and plunged into (local) stardom. It was coincidence: After a boat tour, a man peppered Baer with questions. That man was John McCarter, the new chairman of WTTW (and later CEO of the Field Museum). Baer, by then, was also working as an associate producer at WTTW. McCarter called Baer’s boss and suggested Baer turn his boat tour into TV.

It was a hit, and 26 years later, Baer has one or two new shows a year on Ch. 11 (not including the “Ask Geoffrey” segment he’s done on “Chicago Tonight” since 2008).

Today, in many ways, he is the smiling face of WTTW, Chicago’s public TV mascot.

He is not — at least, in any formal, diplomaed sense, Baer notes — a historian.

“But I consider him a colleague,” said Julia Bachrach, a local historian and former planning supervisor for the Chicago Park District. “His knowledge is impressive, his ability to sift primary and secondary sources for viewers is impressive. Frankly, there are times I’ve figured out something because of Geoffrey.” When Chicago cultural historian Tim Samuelson retired in December, he asked for Baer to emcee the (virtual) farewell.

Baer said this with satisfaction.

Then he made his way back into Mr. Baer’s neighborhood, past homes built during the Wilson administration, and past a football stadium originally named for an Evanston mayor, and past a city park still named for the first female justice of the peace in Illinois.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com