Introduction
A friend asked me, “Did you like your childhood?”
I was stumped. How
was I going to answer that? The question came from the wife of an air force
buddy of mine. Several of us, all in our
eighties, were sitting around reminiscing, and now someone had brought up the
subject of childhood, with a question directed to me: Did I like my childhood?
How would I know?
That was a long time ago. And
what difference does it make whether I liked my childhood? Life goes on—and I’m happy that it does—regardless
of how I feel about it.
When I think back over my early years,
I can recall dark moments, but all in all, I had a rich childhood, what with
all that Chicago had to offer. My
parents gave me an inordinate amount of freedom, and I used it. An excellent public transportation system
took me anywhere I wanted to go in the city, my bicycle took me out to suburbs
and farmland, and railroads took me to the other worldliness of the Fox River
Valley.
I set out to describe that childhood in
these pages. A week and three pages into
the project I found myself playing solitaire instead of tapping out words. I had written about my childhood in an
autobiography that I wrote a couple of decades ago, and now I was wondering, why
am I doing this again? Maybe my ego is
out of control. What kind of person
writes only about himself?
So I came up with reasons for writing
another autobiography. One, this work
will cover only my boyhood, from birth until I graduated from high school; the
previous work attempts to cover my entire life.
Two, in rereading what I had written before, I realized I had left out
material that could be of interest to readers, so what I plan to do with this
version is to put in the stuff that I left out the first time around. Three—and here I succumbed to a full-blown
attack of arrogance—just about anyone could have had the adult life that I had,
but only I could have had my boyhood.
You can read about it here.
1. Early Stupid Boy Stunts
I
don’t care for guesswork, so let’s start with a few facts:
Who William Charles Paxson
What
birth
When
November 22, 1932
Where Chicago, Illinois
How No abnormalities noted
Why Good question
The world began for me—I remember nothing before this—with a
stupid boy stunt. I don’t know how old I
was. Four would be a good guess. I was running through the house, stiff-arming
against a wall to stop. My parents were
watching, smiling, tolerating my need to burn up energy. Okay, showing off is what I was really doing.
I stiff-armed to a stop against a kitchen wall, pulled back
to turn around and run the other way, and couldn’t flex my arm. The elbow was jammed, and it hurt.
That was not my first stupid boy stunt. At some time before that, as my mother told
the story, I went to a birthday party for some other little kid and came home
sick. My mother called a doctor. Doctors
made house calls in those days, and one came to examine me.
“That boy’s not sick,” the doctor said. “He’s drunk!” Someone at the party had given me beer.
Like any true sot, I recall nothing of the incident.
My mother liked to tell that story, smiling and laughing as
she related how a doctor described her son as drunk. I never did understand why she found it so
entertaining, because she loathed anything to do with alcohol. If she had had a hatchet and lived a few
decades earlier, she could have marched alongside Carrie Nation, destroying
taverns hither and anywhere. Instead, the thought of a blotto toddler in her
own house, no less her own flesh and blood, brought on severe giggles.
2. Lou and Walt. Billy (!)
He called her Lou, she called him Walt. I called her Mother; he was Dad to me. It would have seemed logical if I had said
Mom and Dad, but Mom seemed to me to be too casual a term for the woman who was
my boss.
My parents were old enough to be my grandparents, my mother being
thirty-nine years old when I was born, my father fifty-two. I doubt that I was the product of a midlife,
lust-crazed tussle. Instead, at stake
here was old-style family planning: have children to support you in your old
age.
They called me Billy, a name that I hated. Too many people, especially those who wanted
to tease a little kid, knew the words to a popular folk tune titled “Billy Boy.”
In the song, "Billy Boy" is asked various questions, and the
answers all deal with his quest to marry a girl who has a serious personal
problem:
Oh, where
have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?
Oh, where
have you been, Charming Billy?
I have been
to seek a wife, she's the joy of my life
But she's a
young thing and cannot leave her mother.
Like much folk music,
“Billy Boy” lives on and on and can be heard on YouTube today.
3. Who Were These People?
Lucille Catherine Beuchat
My mother liked to say of herself, “I'm a
Beuchat.” She was French‑Swiss, and
proud of it. A lot of Germans came to
the United States when her forebears did during the nineteenth century. So did a lot of Irish and Poles. None of them, however, could hold a candle to
the French‑Swiss, a minority among immigrants yet the best of the lot, to my
mother's way of thinking.
Some of her kin spelled the name Beuchaw,
others Beauchat. Beuchat, however, is
the spelling shown in the official Swiss records of births and deaths in her
father's family.
She pronounced the name “BEWchat,”
sounding the “t,” as did many of her relatives, saying the name to rhyme
with “few chat.” It was too much to
expect anyone other than a Frenchman to master the Old Country pronunciation,
with that heavily nasalized first syllable and the last syllable somewhere
between “shah” and “shaw,” the “t” being silent.
My mother's father was Louis Celestine
Beuchat. He was born in La Chaux‑de‑Fonds,
in the French‑speaking canton of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on September 1,
1856. Louis's wife, Erma Marie Miche,
was born in Moyenmoutier, in the department of Vosges, France, on February 12,
1860.
They lived about a hundred miles apart in
Europe, and apparently did not meet until they arrived in America, around 1880
or 1881. Family lore has it that she
came here to be a governess, he to visit relatives.
By 1882, Louis and Erma were married and
residing on Long Island, New York. Their
first child was born and died there, living a couple of months short of a
year. By 1886, they were in Illinois,
eventually settling at Barrington, a village thirty‑five miles northwest of
Chicago. There they farmed on 445 acres
and operated a dairy.
It was at Barrington that my mother,
Lucille Catherine Beuchat, was born, on October 13, 1893. She was one of five children, three boys and
two girls, who survived infancy.
My mother's birth date was the subject of
a long‑running sisterly debate. My
mother maintained that her birth year was 1893, while her sister, my Aunt
Elsie, argued that my mother's birth year was 1892. My mother's retort to Elsie's position was
that Elsie was jealous and wanted her (my mother) to be older than she was.
My mother's birth certificate shows
October 13, 1893. However, that birth
certificate wasn't issued until a half century after her birth. The birth date on the certificate was attested
to by one of her brothers, my Uncle Albert.
Albert would have been eight or nine when
my mother was born, depending upon which birth year is correct. At that young an age, it's highly doubtful
that Albert remembered exactly when his sister came into the world; he was
probably out playing or milking cows at the time.
Therefore, when my mother deemed it
necessary to have a birth certificate, Albert probably went along with whatever
birth year she told him.
But the 1900 census shows my mother's
birth date as October 13, 1892. The
census also erroneously records her father's birth year and haphazardly spells
three siblings' names: Marcelle was
written as Marshall, Elsie as Elsa, Lucille as Lucy. It's all too easy to imagine a Yankee census
taker going up to the door of the Beuchat farmhouse, listening to someone
jabber at him in an American‑French patois, and then writing down what he
thought he'd heard.
So the 1900 census was sloppy, and Aunt
Elsie could have been wrong. Besides,
there's little to be gained in lying about a year. Shaving ten years or even five from vital
statistics might make a person feel younger, but dropping a mere year is about
as rewarding as going on a diet by not putting cream in your coffee. In addition, a birth year of 1892 would have
meant that my mother could have applied for Social Security benefits a year
earlier; I'm sure that she would have liked to have used that advantage.
Anyway, the principals are dead, and
truth is relative when a sisterly argument is involved. I sided with my mother: October 13, 1893.
The farm left its mark on my mother long
after she had moved on. She and her
siblings were bowlegged, a feature she attributed to horseback riding as a
child. Some of her happiest moments were
when she talked, bragged really, about how much fun it was for the family to
sit down to dinner with the hired men.
Any farm that needed hired men was a big, important farm, something she
never let anyone forget.
She was married twice before she met my
father. In her first marriage, she had a
daughter named Verdalle, who was born on May 6, 1912.
An excellent seamstress, my mother often
made shirts for me and my father. Like
my father, she worked in the ladies' garment industry. It's possible that she was working in the
garment industry as a seamstress, one of “the girls” as they were known, when
she met my father, Walter Jacquith Paxson.
Walter Jacquith Paxson
The name Paxson
fascinates people who like to translate it into what they think are its Latin parts: “Son of peace.” That translation is a
little shaky. Pax stands for “peace” in Latin; that part is right. But the Latin for “son” is filius.
Therefore, “Son of peace” would have to be written as Paxfilius.
According to Elsdon C. Smith's New
Dictionary of American Family Names (1973), Paxson
or Paxon stands for the “son of Pack.” Centuries ago in England, Pack was a name
given to one born during Easter season; the name Pack was supposed to denote
suffering.
People who imagine the letter t where it doesn't exist often spell and say
the name as Paxton. To be precise, that's not a misspelling but
another name entirely, standing for one who came from “Pack's homestead,” a
name for any of several places in the England of centuries ago.
Since the early 1800s, people possessing
the Paxson surname have lived in America; some have left their mark on the
land. The most famous was the historian
Frederick Logan Paxson (1877‑1948).
Frederick wrote several important books; his History of the American
Frontier (1924) won him a Pulitzer Prize.
In addition, the name Paxson identifies a
spot on the map of Alaska, at the junction of the Richardson and Denali
highways. The spot is named after Alvin
J. Paxson, a pioneer mail carrier in the area.
Alvin established a roadhouse there about 1900; a century later the
roadhouse is still about all that's there.
But neither the historian nor the mailman
can be found in my family tree. Nor can
any of the Paxsons listed in Who Was Who in America or similar
references. As unusual as the name is,
well‑known Paxsons don't seem to connect to my branch of the family. In addition, standard biographical references
show no Beuchats. We are a conspicuously
inconspicuous bunch, a comfortable and safe status.
The Paxsons in my family tree joined the
westward flow of migrants, and one branch settled in South Bend, Indiana. It was at South Bend that my paternal
grandparents were born—William Vesey Paxson, on August 3, 1851, and Mary
Alice Jacquith, on September 16, 1853.
Located seventy miles east of Chicago,
South Bend is one of Indiana's largest cities and is probably best known as the
home of the University of Notre Dame.
St. Mary's College, the second oldest Catholic women's college in the
United States, is at South Bend. For a
long time the city was home to the Studebaker car company and the Bendix
corporation. South Bend is also known as
“Michiana” because it is the trade and financial center of southern Michigan
and northern Indiana.
My father was born in South Bend on March
3, 1880, a dozen years before my mother.
He was one of five children, two girls and three boys. Unlike my mother, he had no children until I
came along.
My father talked very little about
himself. He did tell me that as a young
man he had lived in New York for a time, whether the city or somewhere else in
the state I don't remember. He also
mentioned that when he moved back to South Bend one of his neighbors was Knute
Rockne, the legendary Notre Dame football coach. This was not a matter of name‑dropping on my
father's part. Instead, he had a lot of
respect for Rockne and liked to talk about his accomplishments.
As a young man, my father became a cutter
in the ladies' garment industry. Although called “ladies’ garment industry,”
its factories made clothing for any gender, any age.
He came close to the description of a
cutter that Benjamin Stolberg put in his history of the International Ladies'
Garment Workers Union, Tailor's Progress:
The Story of a Famous Union and the Men Who Made It (1944).
According to Stolberg, at the time that
the union came into existence it consisted of people working in four crafts—cloak
makers, pressers, seamstresses, and cutters.
Each craft, Stolberg said, was populated by people with unique
personalities. The cloak makers were
philosophers, kibitzers, and folk commentators; the pressers were manual
laborers easily satisfied with simple things; and the seamstresses or
dressmakers were “the girls,” young women who sat hour after hour, pumping the
treadles of sewing machines, visions of romance and marriage filling their
heads. As for the cutters, Stolberg
wrote, “They are middle‑class in outlook, like to live well, are good dressers,
and good poker players.”
I remember my father as being an absolute
wizard at poker or any game. He wasn't
bound up in class labels, so he would probably shrug his shoulders at being
called middle-class. He was also a good dresser,
as good stands for clean and neat, but not natty, for he didn't have a lot of
money to spend on clothes. His suits
were nicely pressed, his tie knotted firmly, a fedora atop his head; his shoes
were always shined, their gleam the product of the time, polish, and spit that
he devoted to them. As for living well,
that was limited to enjoying as many baseball games as his money would buy and
drinking whatever beer he could afford and could sneak by my mother.
He and my mother were married in Chicago,
on March 3, 1926. It was on my father's
forty‑sixth birthday that this French‑English alliance occurred. He was short, about five‑four; she was a
couple of inches taller. The first
photographs I have of them together were taken in 1933 or 1934; the photos show
them to be people of no extraordinary appearance. He was pudgy and soft‑looking, with a
rectangular face longer than it was wide; a mustache that he often sported
concealed a slight harelip. She was a
fleshy woman at that time, but a woman who looked lithe and coquettish in a
solo picture taken fifteen years earlier.
When the farm girl and the cutter got
married, Verdalle, my mother's child by her first marriage, was fourteen. So at the age of forty‑six and previously
childless, my father married a woman with a teen‑aged daughter. He was now a stepfather. Six years later he would be a father in his
own right.
Lou and Walt were renters, shelling out money every month to
pay for a roof over their heads. They
rented furnished, a more expensive method of paying for shelter rather than
having your own furniture and renting an unfurnished house or apartment. And renting furnished enabled renters to get
by with little more than the clothes on their backs.
During the eighteen years that I lived at home we moved a
half dozen times. For me to write simply
that “we moved” does not give credit to my parents for doing the hard work of
finding a place to live.
Assuming that my parents had a list of available rentals—obtainable
from Chicago’s several newspapers or by word of mouth—a telephone would help
get more information. But we didn’t have
a phone in the house at that time. Here,
it would be helpful to have a friendly neighbor who would lend a phone;
otherwise, it’s off to find a pay phone (and make sure you’ve got enough change
with you). Then there’s the need to look at the property
before deciding. To perform any kind of a look-see, a car-less family in
Chicago would have to rely on a streetcar, bus, el, subway, maybe all of the
above.
And there’s the required discussion: Would this be the right place for us, can we
afford it, etc, etc?
My father was the least talkative man I have ever known, and
the Quaker in him was not prone to arguing.
He was also an ardent fan of the Chicago Cubs. At some point the Cubs fan in him must have
prevailed, for by the time I entered kindergarten we were living near the Cubs’
home, Wrigley Field.
|
|
In the family archives is an undated photograph cut from a
newspaper. It’s a
picture of my kindergarten class at Chicago’s Alexander Hamilton elementary
school. There we are, twenty bright shining
faces all in our places—with the home address given for each child. Things were different then, for I doubt very
much whether an editor today would print the home address of anyone of any age
unless that address was newsworthy.
We lived in the 3600
block of North Ravenswood Avenue. We
called the place Dirty-six because of the coal ash from trains that ran across
the street. Our house was a few blocks
from the Alexander Hamilton elementary school.
Here the plot
thickens, because Chicago is laid out in a grid of blocks, and in Chicago a
block oriented north-south is twice as long as a block oriented east-west. The general rule is eight blocks equal a mile, provided that you
are counting the long side of the block rather than the short side, so
if I wanted to tell you how far in miles or parts of a mile that I walked to
get to school, the few blocks I walked to school measured 1.8 north-south (long)
blocks and 2.5 east-west (short) blocks.
I didn’t do the math, but I stand by my answer: a few blocks—not far at all. And it was all over level ground, neither
uphill nor down, and I never had to walk it in a blizzard.
But would my parents
have allowed me to walk that distance alone?
That’s a puzzler. The
neighborhood was safe—safety being a factor when talking about Chicago locales—but
I was a puny runt who could have injured himself stumbling over a pebble. How did I get to and from school? Neither of my parents drove, we didn’t have a
car, and the route to and from school was along streets not served by public
transit. The only memory I have of kindergarten
is one day I became ill at school and a girl from a higher grade walked me
home.
 |
| Little Billy Paxson, age 2 years, or thereabouts |
Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, was east of our house. Addison Street, south of our house, ran to the front of the ballpark, Waveland Avenue, north of us, to the bleachers. Bus service ran on Addison to cover the mile to the park. My father knew baseball, and the Cubs were his team. There’s no doubt in my mind that he brought a lot of weight to the choice to live at the North Ravenswood address.
Across the street from our front door were tracks of the
Milwaukee Road—the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad
(CMStP&P). The Milwaukee Road was
the third railroad to connect the Midwest with the Pacific Northwest, following
the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern. Besides serving a transcontinental railroad, the
tracks across the street carried commuter trains to and from Chicago’s northern
suburbs.
Trains at that time burned coal for fuel, and coal is one of
the dirtiest fuels around. Rightly or
wrongly, my parents blamed coal ash in the smoke from locomotives across the
street for the pneumonia that struck me down in kindergarten. That is, I was told that pneumonia was the
culprit, but it could have been any sort of respiratory crud that once every
four years sickened me between Thanksgiving and Christmas and kept me out of
school for a week.
At Dirty-six my bed was in a corner of a room at the front
of the house. For a time, a visitor entering
through the front of the house would be greeted by the sight of a bed with a
sick kid in it. A doctor could offer no
cure for the pneumonia, my mother said, so she called in a Christian Science
practitioner.
Exactly what a Christian Science practitioner does, I don’t
know. From reading online info about the
subject, I gather that it involves prayer and counseling. Regardless, I recovered and went outside to
play in the snow.
Because of the coal ash or for some other reason, we
moved. In a classification scheme of human
migrations, this move could have been labeled an “Inner-city Crosstown Streetcar-assisted
Family Relocation.”
The truth of the matter is that I don’t remember how
we moved, but it could have been performed this way: We walked the short distance from the
Dirty-six house to the Irving Park Road streetcar line, took a streetcar west
to the neighborhood of Irving Park, got off, and walked another short distance to our new home.
No comments:
Post a Comment