Age, Please?

I haven't posted for a while, and I wasn't planning on posting because I have nothing to say--really, and actually too.

But last Friday I drove my car in for service and went to sit in the waiting area.  As I sat down near a gray-hired couple, the woman got up, went to the coffee pot, and brought me a cup of black coffee.  She asked if I wanted cream and sugar.  I answered her no and thanked her for the coffee.  She sat down next to the man, who introduced them saying, "I'm 87 and my wife is 66." 

And this morning, while running errands, I crossed shopping cart paths with an elderly couple.  The man wanted to chat for a while and said "I'm 83 and she's 67."

Now here we have examples of blabber-mouth husbands who delight in revealing the ages of their women.  

But maybe these are examples of accepted conversation among the elderly.  Maybe to talk properly with old people you must say how old you are..  The numerals that are a hint to your decrepitude also are signs of your qualifications.  Maybe someday we'll be wearing badges with big numerals on them.  

As for me, I'm 89, and my wife isn't. 

I began this post by writing I have nothing to say, and I think I've proved that.

***

The End: The Final Installment In the True Tale of the Early Years of the Generic Old Man

 43.   Boyhood’s End 

I hung around Chicago for another year.  Okay, to be precise, a year plus a couple months. 

For most of that time I attended a trade school that taught me how to repair television sets.  I was there because a salesman had sweet-talked my mother into paying my tuition.   Money for that tuition would have paid for two years at any of the colleges in the Chicago area, but I didn’t raise the point.  As she said, “Our kind of people don’t go to college.” 

The trade school was good at getting part-time jobs for its students, so for close to a year I had a solid income.  But school ended, and so did the job I had.  My parents picked up the slack in my income, which helped immeasurably. 

Beginning about the middle of June 1951 until the early days of August, I made a pretense of looking for work. I left the house each day, rode the el or streetcars, put in a few applications, but mainly just killed time.   I felt defeated right out of the starting gate. Soon I would be eligible for the draft, and no one would want to hire a draft-age kid. 

It impressed me that people on the el and the subway and the commuter trains and the streetcars didn't smile.  The dreariness of their commute was something I didn't notice in high school and elementary school when I used public transportation less than I did now, but I was now riding public transit during the morning and evening rush hours, when the cars were jam‑packed, every seat filled, people hanging onto the straps. 

They were grumps—people who were tired and grouchy and sullen on their way to work in the morning, and in the same mood at night.  It was not a sociable bunch.  Hardly a word was said.  Some riders read the paper, some napped, but most just grimly stared straight ahead, as though hoping to see a divine revelation that would deliver them from another day of the same tiring and tiresome ordeal. 

I didn't want to live like that. 

Then there was my social life, or lack thereof.  There would be no more Dolores‑type incidents, I decided, so when I dated, it was seldom and sub rosa.  If I wanted to call a girl, I went out of the house and used a pay phone, and I left no tell‑tale addresses or phone numbers around the house.  It was a deceitful way to live, and I didn't like it. 

Furthermore, my parents and I were no longer comfortable together.  Rarely did we do anything as a family, even anything so undemanding as sit together on the front porch.  Maybe the problem was the double generation gap that existed, or maybe the personalities involved were incompatible.  If you analyzed the problem to death you would still come up with same answer:  My life at home had run its course. 

And my time at trade school had taught me more than electronics, thanks to many of my fellow students who were former servicemen attending school on the GI Bill.  These men were veterans of either World War II or the postwar armed forces. 

From listening to them, I decided that there was no way in the world I would go into the army or marines and spend my time crawling around in the mud.  From the former navy men, I gathered that I wouldn't care for life aboard ship.  Besides, I was infatuated with airplanes and was attracted to the air force.  And as my ex‑GI classmates told me, being in the air force was as close to having a civilian job as a guy could get and still be in the service. 

I told my parents of my plans, that I was going to sign up before I could be drafted.  This was a family in which conversation was not a high‑order activity (Remember?), and I often was as uncommunicative as the senior residents.  Still, I talked to them several times about my decision to join the air force. 

Regardless of how many times I brought up the subject their reactions were the same.  My father knew I had made up my mind and he maintained his usual Solomonic silence.  My mother, however, offered two of the most inconsequential reasons I ever heard for not going into the military: 

One.  Who'll do your laundry? 

Two.  You can't raid the fridge whenever you want. 

It seemed to me that the first concern should be, gosh, people get killed doing what I was about to do. 

Job search aside, there was no ignoring news about the war in Korea.  Kim Il Sung's North Korean army was overrunning South Korea and had destroyed Seoul, the capital of South Korea.  The United Nations had asked member nations to send troops to South Korea, and the first American units were already in the fight.  As with World War II, it was easy to identify the forces of good and evil—a democracy about to be seized by a dictatorship.  This time, however, the villain wore new clothes, those of Communism. 

Even more to the point was the draft.  The World War II draft, which had been kept in effect after the war, was about to expire when the Korean War started.  But during the same week that Kim Il Sung's troops crossed the 38th parallel, Congress extended the draft. 

American fighting men would be needed to respond to the United Nations' call for troops to defend the South Korean people.  Moreover, right‑wing politicians at the time clamored to stamp out Communism, wherever it existed.  Doing so meant sending men to fight a Communist North Korean Army. 

Thoughts of the draft were inescapable.  In a few weeks I would reach the eligibility age of eighteen.  Sometime after that I would be gone unless I enlisted first.  But there were other options.  Conscientious objectors or people in college or in certain jobs could obtain deferments.  And, of course, a guy could simply avoid registering for the draft and hope not to get caught and sent to prison.  

But in the tried‑and‑true spirit of John Wayneism–-“A man does what a man has got to do!”—I couldn't think about skipping out, legally or otherwise.  And a steady dose of World War II movies had imbued in me some degree of patriotism.  All things considered, it was not a matter of whether I was going in the armed forces but a matter of when. 

And summer was miserable that year, an arctic-type summer.  Seldom did the sun break through clouds that layered over the city.  A cold wind seemed to be blowing constantly.  I don’t remember ever going to a pool that summer, and I sure had time on my hands for a swim. 

I had waffled enough. 

On a Tuesday morning in August, I took the el to the air force recruiting office in the Loop.  By midafternoon I was with a couple dozen other guys on an airplane flying to an air force base in Texas.  My boyhood had ended.

 ***

                 

Part 11 of the Memoir of a Generic Old Man: High School

From previous excerpt-- "Marshall Field's huge, gleaming, brightly lighted department store was also on North State Street.  As I saw it, Marshall Field's was a gigantic wish‑book, floor after floor of window‑shopping and the greatest book department in which I could lose myself for hours.

"Basically, I frittered away a lot of my time in the Loop, just as I frittered away my high school years."

37.  Early Days at Schurz

Now Known as "er, Bill"

Early in my days at Schurz, my friends began calling me Bill instead of Billy, the name by which I was known in elementary school.  The latter was a name that my mother liked and I hated.  But when she heard my friends call me Bill, she picked it up at home.  Except that her mind tended to be cluttered when both my father and I were present, and she often confused our names.  Thus, I learned to answer to “Walt, er Bill.” 

The Musician 

As a freshman at Schurz, I enrolled in Beginning Band and was taught to play alto saxophone.  In my sophomore year I moved up to Intermediate Band and ROTC Band.  Beginning in my junior year, I played in Concert Band, the highest level. 

My grades in band were top‑notch; in all other subjects my grades were barely passing.  My homework was slipshod, and I cut a lot of classes, mainly making sure that I was present for home room, the major roll call of the day. 

        While not majoring in academics and not majoring in being a good student, I also did not major in girls.  I was shy, and picky.  The only girls I dated were ones I came to know well, either at school or through jobs I held. 

I did poorly in high school, except for Band.  Band was fun; everything else was boring.  My report cards looked like they belonged to a demented person with two personalities, the band musician and the student‑in‑name‑only.  The band musician always got an S (“Superior”).  In any other subject, the student‑in‑name‑only got an F (“Fair”), the lowest passing grade, or a rare G (“Good”), one step up from an F. 

My parents signed the report cards and sent them back to school without question.  Perhaps they were influenced by my grades in band, or maybe they decided not to agitate a kid who was staying out of trouble.  This is a cliché you hear from a lot of parents: “Well, he's not the smartest kid, but he does stay out of trouble.” 

Cliché or not, the boys and girls I hung out with were, in the word of the time, square.  No one in our crowd smoked or drank.  There were no wild parties.  As a group we went to movies and hung out in a North Side landmark, the Buffalo Ice Cream Parlor.  In all, we were so well behaved and so law‑abiding that any of us would have qualified for the nickname of Goody Two‑shoes. 

Red Scare 

Besides being square, we were also pragmatists of the teen‑age species.  As teen pragmatists, we reduced life to what was important, having fun that is, and surviving high school; a lot of other stuff got shunted aside. 

Consequently, we largely ignored the “red scare” of the time.  Politicians, fear‑mongers on the far right, newspaper articles, radio commentators, and movie newsreels were saying:  World War II is history.  Naziism is dead.  But we're still not safe.  Now there's a new threat—Communism. 

A vocal minority in the nation brought about the blacklisting of screenwriters who were members of the Communist party.  Blacklisting meant that the writers could not get work in Hollywood.  As a result, talented writers were forced into other jobs or had to write under assumed names.  In addition, several hundred employees of the federal government were forced from their jobs because of their ties to the Communist party.  

Anti‑Communist sympathies in this country were further fueled by developments in Berlin.  Since the end of World War II, Berlin had been controlled by four of the war's allies, the Communist‑governed Soviet Union and three Western powers‑‑the United States, England, and France.  In June 1948, in an attempt to force out the Western powers, the Soviets blockaded Berlin, preventing food and fuel from reaching the city.  An American airlift kept the city's residents supplied, and in May 1949 the Soviets ended the blockade. 

Then the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb, on August 29, 1949.  Until then, the United States had been the only nation able to make a nuclear weapon.  Now, however, a Communist nation had the bomb. 

And about the time of my junior year, a man came to Carl Schurz to speak to the students.  The auditorium could not hold the entire student body at one time, so we were scheduled to attend in blocks.  I was in the first block to hear him.  After he spoke to us, the school canceled the rest of his lectures. 

The speaker was an army captain recently back from China.  He started by describing how the Chinese Communists had seized control of the country.  He then went into an impassioned harangue about the evils of Communism, about how people suffered under Communism, about Communism being a plot to overthrow the United States government and do away with our democratic freedoms, about why we should stamp out Communism. 

The next morning, home room teachers read aloud a letter from the principal.  The letter dealt with the previous day's speaker.  It was a very carefully worded letter.  Not once did it use the words “Communism” or “Communist.”  Not once did it mention the name of the man who had spoken.  The letter simply said that a man had spoken to some of the students on the previous day, that he had expressed but one point of view, and that the students of Carl Schurz should realize that his was not the only point of view. 

The incident mystified me.  Communism to me seemed like a faraway thing, and I had tuned out the speaker early on.  If he was there to tell jokes, I would have sat up straight and paid attention.  If he was showing Jane Russell in The Outlaw—a movie that scandalized people at the time because its principal attraction was Russell's ample bosom (a true double feature)—that would've been worth some interest on my part. 

But from where I slouched near the back, he was just another boring teacher.  And when he started yelling about Communism, I wondered why he was getting all worked up.  Then there was that letter the next day, a letter so mild that it hardly seemed worth the effort.  Of course, what the letter was trying to say was that the speaker was a propagandist for the far right, a point that I hadn't grasped. 

Yes, I was naive at the time, or disinterested, a teenager wrapped up in himself.  And the crowd that I hung around with did not consist of people who argued that Communism would improve the lot of workers enslaved under the capitalist yoke.  After all, we were the children of those under the capitalist yoke, and the accompanying enslavement seemed fine to us. 

38.  Progress, of Sorts 

Phone, Yes; Television, No. 

We got a phone.  Maybe that sentence should read, We finally got a phone. 

That little installation of technology did not herald an investment in a bigger piece of electronic merchandise, a television set.  Those were new on the market, and we couldn’t afford one.

 Ah, Coffee

Friends and I were hanging out one evening after supper, wondering what to do, when one of them said we could go to his house.  We did, somewhat in a state of awe because the boy who suggested that was the son of Schurz’s assistant principal. And it’s not every night you get to go the house of an assistant principal. 

We went to his house and sat in the basement, a fully finished basement with comfortable sofas.  As we were sitting there talking about nothing worthwhile, a woman came down the stairs carrying a tray with a coffee pot and cup-and-saucer service.  She then proceeded to pour coffee for us.

This was heady stuff:  We were being served coffee—being waited on—by the wife of an assistant principal of our high school. 

I had never had coffee before and I told her.  She put a little cream in mine, and I sipped it.  It was like what I imagine a religious conversion to be.  I know, I know, it has a bitter taste, and it can leave a person in a caffeine jag, and it can keep you awake at night, and there’s probably fifty-eleven things wrong with it,

But I liked it.  It became my go-to beverage, even on hot days.  It hasn’t replaced beer or martinis; it’s just an add-on.  Ah, coffee.

No Smoking

I never smoked for the simplest reason of all:  I never wanted to.

Puffing on a cigarette was a fairly common activity among people my age, but I wasn’t interested.  None of my friends smoked.  My mother didn’t smoke and hated the smell of it.  My father lit up a cigarette after dinner for a puff or two, but there might have been an ulterior motive at work here: because my mother disliked the smell of burning tobacco so much, a lit cigarette gave my father an excuse to get out of the house and smoke on the front porch.

Growing Pains?

I grew during my high school years. From five feet tall to five feet-ten-inches in four years, the up-elevator mechanism kicked in.

I had no so-called growing pains, and from inside my body I didn’t sense any changes.

My mother, however, had found something new to worry about.  She fretted about going to the Robert Hall clothing store to buy me new pants, and she took me a doctor who assured her I was okay, and this is what boys can do.

39.   At VanderCook

In my years at Belding and Schurz, the most enjoyable classroom experiences I had were at neither place but at the VanderCook School (now College) of Music.  VanderCook is a private school, and from somewhere in the Chicago public school system the money came to pay for me to attend a six-week-long summer session between my junior and senior years at Schurz.

In the classroom we studied music theory: the whys and therefores of key signatures; why a composer might choose to write a piece in a certain key; the structure of chords.  At VanderCook we were taught how to conduct, that each movement of the baton has its own meaning, although if you watch just about any conductor you probably won’t see those assigned meanings but the conductor’s own particular style.  And, perhaps just to remind us that we were in essence musicians, we had at least one hour per day of band practice.

VanderCook these days is located on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology.  It had moved several times during its early years, and when I attended, it occupied an old brownstone residence and adjacent buildings just one block off West Madison Street, site of one of the worst skid rows in the United States.

That skid row added to my education.  Here I got to see just how low a person can sink.  Bums—today they’d be called homeless people or the unhoused—men unshaven and in dirty clothing, leaned against buildings, milled around, sat on curbs and doorsteps, slept passed out on sidewalks, sometimes in their own urine.  Flophouses rented beds for 25 cents a night, but to be seen going into a flophouse would be an admission that you had money and were now being set up to be robbed, possibly beaten; consequently, the sidewalks were safer for sleeping.   

I made it a point to walk along the skid row during my lunch hour and on my way to the train depot on the way home; I believed it important that I see for myself rather than read about this aspect of the world.  I was never harmed, spoken to, or pestered for money.  And this incongruity:  nicely dressed men and women, employees in area businesses and office buildings, walked to and from on their way to lunch or to do a little shopping, maybe as part of a commute, mingling with the city’s downtrodden.

At the end of the day I went home on a Chicago and Northwestern commuter train.  For variety I came to VanderCook’s in the morning via the el. The el station was about a half mile from VanderCook’s, and on that walk I did feel apprehensive.  The route took me through one of the city’s black belts, and in the morning warmth, whole families—they seemed not to have jobs—crowded onto front porches to breathe fresh air.  And here came this skinny white kid lugging his saxophone all by himself. Nothing ever happened.  I could sense being watched, but no one ever spoke to me or offered so much as a friendly wave.

I enjoyed my time at VanderCook’s.  In all, my brief time there was the ending punctuation of what was a long music appreciation course in high school band.

40.  Paradise Found and Lost

Paradise Found

After I had finished at Vandercook, I moved to Elgin for the rest of the summer.  There my sister provided me with room and board, while I painted the house of my Aunt Elsie and Uncle Carl.  My parents paid my sister for feeding me and keeping me out of their way for the summer, and my aunt and uncle paid me to paint their house.

Elsie, my mother's sister, and Carl had no children of their own, and they tended to adopt me for that summer.  They taught me to drive, which could have been the death of them, for on my first lesson I navigated their Dodge up onto a curb at thirty‑five miles per hour.  Having survived that experience, we often spent Saturday or Sunday touring the Fox River Valley, usually with me at the wheel.

Elsie and Carl were sociable, hospitable people.  Neighbors came to their house for drinks and talk.  There was a lot of laughter in their house, a lot of guests who were good company.  One frequent visitor was a man who lived around the corner and who came to have cocktails with my uncle and complain, in front of me and to my aunt's blushing embarrassment, that his wife didn't give him enough Vitamin F.

One of my mother's brothers, my Uncle Hank, also lived in Elgin.  At that time Hank was a salesman, peddling auto parts to dealers in small towns of northern Illinois. Hank also operated a small—two big rigs—trucking company.  He was a popular guy and very well-liked.  Going anywhere with him was like being with Norm and walking into Cheers.  As soon as he got through that door, I could hear a shouted, “Hank!” 

Every now and then he'd say, “Bill, you don't want to paint that house today, let's go for a ride.”

We'd take off, me at the wheel of Hank's pride and joy, a prewar Ford that had 400,000 miles on it and had been a taxi in Chicago during the war.  The car's front end was as loose as it could be.  Point the car straight ahead, and it might go that way, or it might drift maddeningly toward the shoulder, or it might scarily take off toward oncoming traffic.

We’d make one stop after another at parts dealers, and at each place, from outside in his car I’d watch him enter and hear, “Hank!”

I would start out as the driver in the morning, but after a few miles my inability to keep the derelict Ford in our lane would begin to wear on Hank's nerves, so he would take over.  Through magic or the skill that comes with years of practice or intuitive perception about which way the front end would go next, Hank knew how to steer that Ford.

It was a heady summer.  The city boy was in the country—well, not exactly, for the population of Elgin then was around 40,000 people—but the place was so far removed from the crowds and bustle of Chicago that it seemed to be another world.  And I was among people who laughed and had fun and got out and did things.  To top that off, when I returned to Chicago at the end of the summer, I possessed that mystical, all‑powerful piece of paper coveted by every teenager--a drivers license.

Paradise Lost

I came back to Chicago to learn that my father had accepted a job at Terre Haute, in southern Indiana.  The pay would be better than he earned in Chicago, he told me, and Terre Haute would be a much nicer place to live than Chicago.

The new job called for my father to oversee the establishment of a garment factory.  That is, this mild‑mannered, quiet man was supposed to hire and train employees and do all the things, and experience all the headaches, that go into setting up production lines, organizing schedules, and supervising people. 

Just before the start of my senior year in high school, we moved to Terre Haute.  The house on North Tripp we had rented furnished, so the move was easily accomplished.  All our possessions fit into a trunk and several suitcases.  Off we went on the train.

A month later we were on the train headed back to Chicago.  The job “just didn't work out.”

I had not wasted the month.  I had learned how to shoot pool, courtesy of the boy who lived next door to us in Terre Haute; he introduced me to the game at a nearby tavern.

And the boy next door and his family provided us with occasional bursts of bathroom humor; from our kitchen windows we watched as they ran across their backyard to use the outhouse.  Here it was, 1949, in a university town in the northern United States, a dozen blocks from the city center, and this family did not have indoor plumbing.  To make matters worse, rain fell almost every day we were there; any trip to the outhouse would be a soggy dash.

In Terre Haute I had also learned a lot about basketball.  As in Chicago, I joined the high school band; it played at every one of the school's basketball games, and basketball ruled in Indiana night after night. In Indiana there was no escaping the fact that James Naismith, a Canadian, invented the game in Massachusetts, and it became an almost obsessive sport in Indiana.

Back in Chicago, we had nowhere to live.  The house on North Tripp, our home for a decade, had been rented during our month away.  Consequently, I stayed with Aunt Elsie and Uncle Carl in Elgin while my parents stayed in a hotel and looked for a rental.  After several days, they phoned to say that they had found a flat near Portage Park.

Elsie and Carl drove me to my new home.  It was clean and attractive but small.  Even though I would still be enrolled at Schurz, I would live quite a distance from where my longtime friends lived.  By now, the fruitlessness of the move to Terre Haute combined with the loss of the house on Tripp had gotten under my skin.  Complaining would do no good, however, so I just stood silently in the apartment and worked to conceal my frustration.

Our stay in that small Portage Park rental was noteworthy in my memory for only one thing:  I came down with my usual autumnal respiratory crud, and it was the sickest I had ever been.  I woke up one morning and found my parents gone.  I needed to go to the bathroom; I felt weak and wanted someone to help me, yet no one was there.

This was the only time that I recall being angry with my mother and father for leaving me alone.   Somehow or other I made it to and from the bathroom, got back in bed, and fell sound asleep. I awoke that afternoon feeling better, and a day later I was back in school.   

Before very long we moved again, this time to a house on North Tripp, about a block from where we had previously lived.  Now we were in a square, hulking, two‑story thing right out of a gothic novel, or a slum.  It was a dump, totally out of place on Tripp.

Its exterior paint was peeling in big strips, and here and there gray, weathered siding boards hung loose.  The house was set well back from the street, deep in the trees of a large lot.  A cracked and buckling walkway twisted its way to the front door.  The whole effect from the outside was one of gloom and darkness, even in the bright of day.  And inside, wallpaper and paint were peeling from the walls, and the rooms were small and dingy.

We occupied the second floor.  On the first floor lived a family who specialized in being obnoxious.  If they heard us on the stairs coming or going, one of them would open their door and yell insults at us.

This was the only time I ever saw my father depressed.  I knew him to be pleasant and congenial almost all the time and angry only rarely.  But now he came home from work and sat in the kitchen until bedtime, barely moving, withdrawn, and more silent than ever.

To worsen things for him, I had a run‑in with the law.  A minor scrape, it came about because some of my friends and I went for a hike in the Forest Preserve, cut across a golf course, and stole the flags from the holes.  It was a raw, blustery day, and no players were on the course.  We figured that no one needed the flags.  It was a stupid boy stunt that got us in trouble.

A Forest Preserve ranger caught us, took us to headquarters and lectured us, and then took our names and the names and addresses of our parents.  Before he let us go, he said that our parents would be notified by mail of our infraction.

When I got back to the apartment, my father was home alone, sitting in the kitchen.  I told him what I had done and that he and my mother would be getting a letter in the mail.

“Don't tell your mother,” he said.  “See if the letter shows up first.”

It didn't.  Because we moved again within a couple of weeks, the letter might have gotten lost in the mail, but I doubt it.  My friends' parents didn't get letters either, so I suspect that the ranger knew he'd latched onto a bunch of scared kids and let the matter drop.

41.  A Sweet Job

The next time we moved, we traveled a short distance to a pleasant house in the 4300 block of North Kenneth, off busy Montrose Avenue.  We had the one‑story house to ourselves.  The owners, who lived next door, also operated a bakery on Irving Park Road.  They offered me a job cleaning the bakery in the afternoons.

I accepted, and it turned out to be a sweet job.  My walk home from Schurz in the afternoon took me by the bakery.  I stopped in, spent a couple hours scraping and washing pans and sweeping the floor, then went home.  My pay was fifteen dollars a week.

Pete and Ginny, husband and wife in their early thirties, owned the bakery and did the baking.  They worked long hours, from about four in the morning until I came in in the afternoon.  They had no children.  Ginny’s dad, a widower, lived with them in the house next door to us.  Many Chicagoans did this—owned more than one house in the city—the additional house providing rental income and being a source of retirement money.

I called my work in the bakery a sweet job, and it might seem to readers that there’s nothing sweet about scullery work.  Well, the job had aspects beyond drudgery.  Pete showed me what he wanted done, how to do it, then left me alone.  I didn’t have to punch a clock; when I’d cleaned the place for the day, I could leave. 

And it was a sweet job because of Dolores, the girl who waited on customers in the front of the bakery.  She was also a senior at Schurz; we’d both be graduating at the end of this semester, but in a graduating class of hundreds of students, we’d never met.  We talked to each other at the bakery, became friends, went to a couple movies together.  She was fun to be with, and she gave no sign of shattering into a thousand fragments.

A handbill announcing a square-dance class came into the bakery.  We decided that we would go.  Dolores stipulated that we go Dutch.  Her reasoning was that it wasn’t a real date but a class.  So we went, riding the Irving Park Road streetcar to within a few blocks of where the class was being held, and walking the rest of the way.

The class was fun, and when we left to come home, we stepped outside into a warm winter night, and in one voice said let’s walk home.  So we did, on a night lit by streetlights and the glow from front windows of houses and apartments.  Close to an hour later we were home, safe and sound, despite having spent all that time walking on Chicago streets. 

I don’t think that I would make that same walk today.  During the year that I spent writing this memoir, three people were wounded by gunfire in a store two blocks north of our house on Tripp, and a man was robbed at gunpoint three blocks south of our Tripp address. Nothing like that happened in the decade that I lived there.  And when I checked Chicago violence on Google, I learned that citywide 800 people were shot to death in 2021.

42.  What to Do

As the first semester of my senior year was about to end, in January 1950, I was called into a counselor's office.  My parents were there, and in their presence I received the reprimand that I should have received earlier.  The counselor's style was gentle but to the point:  My grades were terrible.  My class cuts had not gone unrecorded.  All of this was a shame.  Aptitude tests, intelligence tests, and elementary school records said that I could do much better.

Then the clincher:  I had accumulated so few grade points that I was in danger of not graduating come June.

In less time than it takes to tell about it, I went through all the major negative emotions—shame, guilt, embarrassment, self‑disgust, fear, and a few others whose labels escape me. 

 By the end of the week I had dropped out of band and revised my spring schedule so that I would be in academic classes the entire day—8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.—with one period off for lunch.  When the spring semester started, I quit wasting my time, and when mid‑semester report cards came out, I was on my way to earning more grade points in one semester than I'd earned during my first three years in the place. 

Then Dolores stopped seeing me.  Dolores told me that my mother had called her and said not to go out with me anymore.  Dolores worked in the bakery with me and was also a senior at Schurz.  She was a good student and a decent, straightforward person who could have found another way to end our relationship without blaming my mother.

Confront my mother?  Confrontation was not something I was good at, and arguing with my mother was pointless.

My mother and I had had run‑ins before, usually over my choice of friends, and I knew from experience that all I would get was her usual cut‑off line: “Don't argue with me.  I know I'm right!”  Case closed.  Conciliatory or explanatory discussion was not her long suit.

And I had another distraction, a more important one.  That is, I was beginning to wonder what I was going to do with myself—career, work, that sort of stuff.  These were things that I should have thought about earlier, I suppose, but until graduation loomed in my face, I had not acknowledged that there would be a tomorrow.  And tomorrow was here.

I had no skills, no wish to do anything in particular.  I could get a factory job after graduation—anyone could do that—but otherwise graduation was a wall beyond which I had not looked.  Having played the saxophone in a high school band was no guarantee that I could play professionally, and I didn't have enough gumption to try to forge a career in a field as competitive as music.

Then there was the matter of talent.  In this respect I was lucky enough to know what I did not know.  I did not know how to play by ear, and I had little sense of rhythm.  I could read music, which helped, but as for rhythm, well, it was a band, and a band has a bass drum.  If it wasn't for a bass drummer pounding out the downbeat, I would have been waltzing while everyone else was marching.

My grades were a long way from good enough to get me into college, even if there had been money for tuition and books.  Moreover, my mother's acceptance‑of‑things‑as‑they‑are still rang in my ears: “People like us just don't go to college, Billy.”

When graduation came, my parents attended the ceremony as did Aunt Elsie and Uncle Carl.  After it was over, my aunt and uncle drove us back to the house on North Kenneth.  My parents went inside to go to bed, and Elsie and Carl left for Elgin.

I sat on the front steps.  It was a mild June night, quiet and peaceful; even the traffic on normally busy Montrose Avenue seemed hushed for a change.  For the longest time I sat there in the dark, literally and figuratively.  Other people—Gandhi, Joan of Arc, Jesus, Lawrence of Arabia, to name a few—had gone through similar crises and emerged with an idea or goal that guided them through their lives.  But as I sat there I could come up with no plan, grand or trivial.  The best I could do was a sort of muted soliloquy: “Hmm.  What now?”

I didn't have long to wait for an answer.  In North Korea, the Communist dictator Kim Il Sung was massing his troops for an invasion of South Korea.  Kim, a native Korean, had fought with Communist forces against the Japanese in the 1930s.  When Japan overran Korea in World War II, Kim fled to Russia and remained a guest of the Soviet Union until 1945.

In 1945, at the end of World War II, the Japanese left Korea.  By agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union, United States forces occupied the southern half of the peninsula, and Soviet troops occupied the northern half.  The dividing line was the 38th parallel of north latitude.

When Soviet troops moved into North Korea, Kim Il Sung returned from Russia.  The Soviets maneuvered Kim into power and supported him, helping him build the North Korean Army, and using him in their efforts to institute Communism in North Korea.  He was, in other words, the leader of the Soviet puppet government in North Korea.

In December 1948, Soviet occupation forces withdrew from North Korea, leaving Kim on his own to run North Korea.  Kim's counterpart in the democratic government south of the 38th parallel was Syngman Rhee.  In North Korea, Kim built up a massive, well‑equipped army, while Syngman Rhee's troops were poorly equipped and poorly trained.

By early 1950, Kim had decided to seize control of the entire Korean peninsula.  In addition, he wanted to dispose of several South Korean Communist leaders whom he detested, but they were on the other side of the 38th parallel; accordingly, he had to get to them first.  Moreover, Kim's economic policies in the north weren't working, so when things aren't going well at home one recourse is to start a war somewhere else.

On June 25, 1950, Kim Il Sung's army invaded South Korea.  It was the Sunday after I graduated from high school.

***

Part 10 of the Unrelenting Saga of a Boy from Chicago: Wanderings

 34. The Pleasure of Moving about Aimlessly

 I suppose I should write something about the wanderlust that gripped me.  Wanderlust—that’s a good word.

In the old days if a person was curious about a word, the ultimate authority was the Oxford English Dictionary, sized at 20 thick volumes and these days priced at $1215 on Amazon.  I, however, have the microprint edition of two massive volumes which, when I bought it years ago, cost a lot less that twelve hundred bucks and came with a magnifying glass.  Even better, the marvel of electronics has today given me a little clicker thingy with which I can go searching the internet until, out of the millions of definitions, I find one I like.

So it is that back in the mists of time, people used the Old English word wandrian to mean "move about aimlessly, wander” and lust to stand for “pleasure.”  

So it is here that I will write about wanderlust, the pleasure of moving about aimlessly, as I experienced it.

I decided one morning that I would ride the Montrose Avenue bus to the eastern end of its line, near Lake Michigan.  It would be the first of my longer ramblings out of the neighborhood, and it would be memorable because I chose a miserable, lousy, freezing-cold day.

Anyway, off I went, grabbing a window seat on the curb side of the bus so that I could get a glimpse of the Chicago River.  For certain, the Chicago River is no Nile, no Mississippi.  Downtown in the Loop the Chicago River does have enough width and depth so that excursion and pleasure craft can plod through it.  But out here in the hinterlands, as I was soon to see, a glimpse of the river equals an eyeful.

On the bus a bridge showed up, and then we were on it, and then we were off it on the other side, and I had glimpsed the Chicago River, at least the part of it that flows in this area of town, and what I glimpsed was a murky, narrow canal.  Later I learned that I had not seen the river proper but a fork or a branch, I’m not sure which.

I was doing this in April, the off season.  It was cold and windy when I got off the bus at its turn-around point on Marine Drive.  I had the place pretty much to myself.  No one was in the water (whitecaps and rollers)—no surprise there.  A few people were walking dogs, and some sturdy souls were out on the sand, strolling, while doing what is a common activity in Chicago, leaning into the wind.  I walked to the harbor, took in one quick view of the boats, and decided it was time to go home.

Some of my aimless roaming wasn’t so aimless.  I needed an innertube for my bike, and I could have bought one close to home.  But the Montgomery Ward catalog showed one, and there was a Monkey Ward catalog store near downtown.  To the fine people at Montgomery Ward, it’s not a store but a “Catalog House.”

A Milwaukee Avenue streetcar took me to Montgomery Ward’s Catalog House, located along the North Branch of the Chicago River, which looked a lot like the same murky, narrow canal I could see miles to the north.  I placed my order and hung around, awaiting someone to appear with my bike’s inner tube.  Soon someone did, a man who handed me a box and ushered me to a booth where I could sit in a chair, place the box on a table, and “examine my purchase.”

“Examine my purchase?”  What’s to examine with an inner tube?  I was being treated like a prized customer, not some off-the-street high school kid.  And I really couldn’t tell if the inner tube was any good unless I pumped air into it, and I didn’t see a compressor or an air hose and air chuck anywhere around, so I told the man it was fine, paid my money, and left.

One the way to and from Montgomery Ward’s, the streetcar rolled through one of the largest Polish enclaves in the world.  For block after block after block, the people, the language, the newspapers, the shops—all were Polish.

My favorite place on any streetcar ride was the back platform where people got on and where the conductor collected fares.  Even though the back platform was noisy and drafty, quite a few riders liked to stand back there, and talk was louder and more animated there than in the main part of the car.

In the Polish neighborhood, I couldn't understand a word of the conversations that floated around the back of the streetcar, but I was impressed.  Awed is probably a better word.  Here were these people, uprooted from their homes, but they had brought a piece of their homeland with them.  What did it take to do that?  I wondered.

For the price of seven cents adult fare, up from the three cents I paid when I was under thirteen, the Milwaukee Avenue streetcar took me through Little Poland, a foreign land but safe because it was on the North Side.

I also rode the Milwaukee Avenue streetcar the other direction, to its turn-around point at the far northwestern corner of the city limits.  Here the streetcar trundled slowly around a small semicircle before heading back to Little Poland. 

At the turn-around point there began a stretch of something that was pure genius when it comes to urban planning, one of Cook County's Forest Preserves.  In the laying out of a great city, the powers that be had set off land to be left untouched.  This land, stretches of dense woods along the Chicago and the Des Plaines rivers, became the Forest Preserves.

Indian tribes had lived among the trees that became the Forest Preserves, and it was still easy to play Indian in the woods and along the river.  Families and troops of Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts held outings in the Forest Preserves.

Near the end of the Milwaukee Avenue line were two other popular sites, a toboggan run and a large public swimming pool.  In the summer, on hot nights, I would come to the pool and splash around to cool off.  In the winter my friends and I would rent a toboggan at the warming hut and—yelling and laughing—career down an icy run to slide to a stop just sort of the trees at the end. 

From the end of the streetcar line, I walked alongside the winding North Branch of the Chicago River, following the current toward the heart of the city.  Sometimes the North Branch had plenty of water; other times it was so shallow that a person could step across it on rocks that jutted up from the bed.  And it was hard to think that this was the same river as the murky green canal I saw elsewhere.  Here, when I walked across the river on rocks at its shallowest places, I could look down at my feet and see the bed, shiny pebbles glistening in the water.  

Suburbs to the left, the city to the right, millions of people out of sight.  In the woods, it was hard to imagine a great metropolis a mile or so away, just beyond the edge of the trees. 

Still, there were artifacts.  Not animal bones cast off by a tribe of Indians after a great feast, but instead a beer bottle here, a condom there, remnants of a modern-day tribe known as the Indifferent Slobs.

After a walk of about four miles, I arrived at Gompers Park.  At Gompers Park, I took the Pulaski Road streetcar south to my neighborhood.  Gompers Park was named for Samuel Gompers, founder and long-time president of the American Federation of Labor; Pulaski Road was named for Casimir Pulaski, a Polish nobleman who fought for the American colonists in our revolution.  The Irish ran Chicago, but the unions and the Poles were not about to be overlooked.

Incidentally, I could've stayed on the Pulaski Road streetcar for another half hour and been in the South Side.  That, of course, was taboo.

I should mention that I was a “primitive” hiker in that I had no special equipment that is commonplace today.  I wore the same clothes that I wore to school, with loafers or sometimes gym shoes on my feet. I carried no food or water; if there was such a thing as a water bottle, I probably didn’t know about it.  I simply stepped out my front door and went.

I also did some of my aimless moving about on a bicycle. When I was fifteen or thereabouts, a neighbor boy and I took off on our bicycles for a ride through northern Illinois. This was a stupid boy stunt, for our supplies consisted of nothing more than a little money and a blanket each—no water, no food, no map—we obviously suffered from common-sense deficit disorder. Three days after leaving home, we were back, having eaten wherever we could buy food, and sleeping at night in the open, a great adventure for a couple city kids.

As my mother said, I had ants in my pants.

Chow Time

When it comes to eating, I made these jaunts on the cheap.  Supper at home was the meal of the day, unless I had money.  When I could afford it, I’d treat myself to a burger at a White Castle, but that wasn’t always for certain because the closest White Castle was on Addison in the 3200 block, sometimes off my route for the day.

Incidentally, a white Castle is still there today, same place, all these years later.  I recommend the bacon jalapeño cheeseburger; that’s my favorite, and I’m still here, all these years later.

But where I really liked to eat when I was on my own was at one of the street vendors.  You saw these at many major intersections on streetcar and bus routes, a man standing by his cart.  Steam billowed up from the cart signifying the presence of hot dogs, or at the cart across the intersection, hot tamales.

I would get off the streetcar at Montrose and Milwaukee, order my favorite deluxe cuisine according to my adolescent palate—a hot dog with onions, mustard, and relish—and sit on the curb or in the doorway of a nearby business to eat it.  At that moment, that was all in the world I needed. 

I don’t want to get too carried away here because something better came along.

One night, two other boys and I, having finished our duties at the factory where we worked, were walking along Belmont talking about getting something to eat.  They stopped, turned to me, and asked if I ever had had pizza. 

Ahead of us was a neon sign: “Pizzeria.”

I answered No to their question, and we went in.  They ordered from a woman at the front who was punching keys on the cash register and answering the phone.  We paid and sat in booth near the back where a man was throwing dough into the air and sliding pans into and out of an oven.  Our order came, and we ate it.

God!  It was delicious!  Two kinds of hot—hot out of the oven and spicy hot—far tastier than the skilletized dishes I got at home.    

As I wrote earlier, I don’t want to get too carried away, but it really was a great experience.

From: chicagomag.com/city-life/9-stereotypes-about-chicago-that-are-no-longer-true/

“We eat deep dish pizza: When Jay Leno broadcast a week of the Tonight Show from Chicago in the 1990s, one of his gags was a hotel that left a deep-dish pizza on the pillow instead of a mint. Yes, deep-dish pizza was invented in Chicago, allegedly at Pizzeria Uno, which opened on the Near North Side in 1943. And Chicago is still the capital of deep-dish, the staple offering not only of Uno, but of Lou Malnati’s, Giordano’s, and Gino’s East, to name four tourist trap restaurants. 

“Most Chicagoans prefer thin crust, tavern-style pizza, which has its own Chicago origin story: here pizza was served mostly in taverns, often as an enticement to drink alcohol. Since taverns didn’t have silverware or plates, the owners sliced the pizza into little squares, which could be set on napkins. Chicago tavern owners hand-rolled their dough, instead of hand-tossing it, eventually using mechanical sheeters, which produced an even thinner crust.”

35.  Moving about Aimlessly with Max

Max introduced me to a part of the Fox River Valley more rustic than the built‑up area around Elgin.  Max was a year older than me to the day.  We met in high school band.  He was the American‑born, adopted son of German immigrants.  He and his parents were Turners, members of the Turnverein, a German athletic and social club.  The Illinois Turners operated a summer resort on the Fox River.

During summer vacation, Max and I would spend a few days at his parents' cabin at the Turner resort.  To get there we rode the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, getting on at the Irving Park Road station near our homes.

The Northwestern operated coal‑burning, steam‑powered locomotives.  These were black behemoths that sported a menacing cowcatcher up front, a bell and whistle near the smokestack, pipes and tubes for lubricating oil and sand for traction, and enough wheels and pistons and connecting rods and sundry other gadgets and mechanisms to make a person wonder how the whole thing worked.  Truly it was an engine with a personality. 

The engineer always seemed to be leaning out his small window, his jaw set in square lines, his eyes staring straight ahead, his hand on the throttle or brake or whistle rope or bell cord.  At his side the fireman furiously shoveled coal from the coal car into the flaming maw of the boiler.

The Northwestern was peculiar in that its trains ran on the left side of the road; it was a “southpaw” railroad and the only such railroad in the United States.  This subject came up from time to time in articles in Chicago newspapers and in books about the railroad.  These sources never explained why the trains ran on the “wrong” side but presented two theories: (1) the early British influence in financing and planning the original line, and (2) an unplanned growth when the original single‑track line was converted to double‑track.

The train that Max and I took quickly left the city and its northwestern suburbs and then rolled across farmland; the train passed through Barrington where my maternal grandparents had operated a dairy farm.  Our destination was Fox River Grove, a village famous for the Norge Ski Club's international ski jumping contest.  The area around Fox River Grove was strictly rural, with pleasant country roads great for ambling along on a warm summer day.

At the Fox River Grove station, Max and I got off the train, walked a short distance on a paved road, then cut across a farmer's pasture to get to the Turner resort.  This shortcut fell under the heading of stupid boy stunts, for rumor had it that the farmer kept a bull in his pasture (we never saw the bull).  At the Turner resort, we would spend several days lolling about in the sun, swimming in the Fox River, and indulging in other useless activities.

My parents were more housebound than I was.  My mother seldom left the house other than to go to work, do the family shopping, or go to the Household Finance Company office where she made the monthly payment on the current loan.  My father was more mobile, going to ball games, and taking me to union meetings with him.  On the occasional Saturday when he worked, he would invite me to eat lunch with him at Pixley & Ehler's, a well‑known cafeteria in the Loop.  If I wanted to kill an entire Saturday when he was working, I went to the factory with him.

Watching him work fascinated me.  At one end of a long table a spindle held a bolt of cloth.  He would grab the end of the cloth by hand and walk the length of the table, the cloth unrolling from its bolt, billowing up, then slowly settling on the table.  At the far end of the table he would reverse his steps, now using his hands to smooth wrinkles out of the cloth as he walked back to the spindle.  There he would take a large scissor, cut the cloth off its bolt, and begin all over again, often putting a bolt of a different color on the spindle.

He seemed to glide back and forth alongside the table, not paying much attention to what he was doing, maybe chatting with another employee.  And while I was distracted by his effortless movements, the pile of cloth rose.  Soon it was time to overlay the pattern onto the cloth, then cut the cloth.  Cutting was done with an electric knife resembling a jigsaw.  The blade whirred up and down, close to his fingers that held the cloth flat.  After decades as a garment cutter, he still had all his fingertips.

Occasionally, during the summers of my years at Belding, my father and I went to the Montrose Avenue Beach for a swim. We were an odd couple on the beach, the scrawny runt of a kid and the short, potbellied, gray‑haired man.  While I splashed around in the shallow water, he waded out until the water got too deep for him to walk in. Then he flopped onto his back and floated, his white, round belly sticking up out the water, looking like some sea creature about to breach.  

36.  Confessions of a North Side Snob

Every place that we lived in Chicago was on the North Side, that is north of Madison Street.  Madison Street established not only a geographic dividing line but also a baseline of urban snobbishness.  That is, Chicagoans who lived north of Madison Street looked down upon Chicagoans who lived south of Madison Street.  For all I know, people on the South Side felt that those of us on the North Side were the dregs of the earth.

 In my youth, the North Siders whom I knew boasted about their pleasant neighborhoods and looked down upon the South Side as being mile after mile of shanty Irish and slum‑living blacks, the “smoked Irish.”  If someone mentioned to a North Sider that a black belt existed north of Madison Street, the response would be, well, that's true, but it's small, not nearly as large as the one “down there.”

North Siders tended to ignore the South Side's fine residential areas, beautiful parks, and world‑renowned institutions—the Museum of Science and Industry, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago.

Those are nice places, a North Sider would say, but they are “down there.”

If someone mentioned to a North Sider that a heck of a lot of white folks, besides the Irish, lived on the South Side, the response would probably be “So what?”

You see, we North Siders were like humans everywhere:  Facts bothered us.  Facts were things to be ignored unless they served our purpose.

When a definite, well‑defined need arose, travel in the South Side was acceptable.  Here “a definite, well‑defined need” means that there was simply no other way to do it.  For instance, a school‑sponsored field trip to the Museum of Science and Industry was okay, although I'm sure that a lot of North Side parents wished that the museum was not “down there.”  And anything to do with airline travel back then necessitated a trip to Midway Airport, several miles southwest of the Loop, “down there.”

Or like when my sister’s first husband died.  The body was brought from Elgin to Chicago so that the proper services could be conducted in the Irish neighborhood—on the South Side—where he grew up.  My parents and I went to the funeral.  He might have been Irish and a South Sider, but he was also family, so we were obligated to go.

A North Sider need not fear eternal damnation for going to Soldier Field, the Field Museum, or any of the other recreational and cultural sites in Grant Park.  Though technically in the South Side, they were in the Very Near South Side and considered by us elitist North Siders to be stimulating islands of plenty in an otherwise impoverished wasteland.

The streetcar fare and a transfer also took me via streetcar and el to downtown.  A ride on the el was dispiriting.  Trains roared and clattered by apartments, so close that you could look in through the windows and see people going about their lives amid the racket.  Because the trains ran day and night, I wondered how the occupants got any sleep, how they had any privacy.  In truth, they had little, except for those who nailed plywood on their windows, shutting out the light, and turning their apartments into urban caves.

Because I didn't like taking the el downtown, I often rode a Northwestern train.  The price of a train ride, about fifty cents I believe, was steeper than the el trip, but the train got downtown a lot faster.  The ride ended at the Northwestern's Madison Street station, a giant granite edifice covering three blocks and just outside the Loop. 

Hundreds of thousands of workers, shoppers, and tourists passed through the Loop each day, people from all parts of the world and all parts of Chicago.  Chicago's boosters liked to say that if you went to the Loop and stood at the intersection of State and Madison Streets long enough you would sooner or later see everyone you knew.  That's stretching a point, of course, but it's not stretching a point to say that if you did stand where State and Madison cross, then as today, you would be standing at the center of Chicago's universe.

The city's financial district—a world banking center—is three blocks west of State and Madison, near city, county, and state administration buildings.  Three blocks east of State and Madison is Grant Park, Chicago's “front yard”; a short stroll through Grant Park takes you to the shore of Lake Michigan.  Many of the city's most important cultural and historical attractions are within easy walking distance of State and Madison.  Stores on State Street offer some of the best shopping in the world.

To me, the North State Street part of the Loop was one of the best places in the city.  There was a South Side to the Loop too, but I thought that it looked dark and ominous.  That was sheer bunk, of course, for the entire Loop was dark and ominous.  Tall buildings blocked out sunlight and created gloomy canyons.  Canyon walls echoed the incessant din of el trains, car horns, emergency vehicle sirens, and all the other noises that swarms of people create.  Sandblasting equipment hissed and grated day after day, cleaning away the coal-ash grime that built up on canyon walls. 

Ah, but the Loop’s North Side!  The Chicago Theater was on North State Street, the Oriental Theater a half block off.  Besides showing movies, both theaters featured stage shows with famous movie and radio stars.  There were too many times that I sat in the balcony at the Chicago Theater, laughing at Jack Benny or Victor Borge or some other comedian, when I should have been sitting attentively in class at Carl Schurz High School. 

Marshall Field's huge, gleaming, brightly lighted department store was also on North State Street.  As I saw it, Marshall Field's was a gigantic wish‑book, floor after floor of window‑shopping and the greatest book department in which I could lose myself for hours.

Basically, I frittered away a lot of my time in the Loop, just as I frittered away my high school years.

***