. . . 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 to our new home.
6. To Irving Park
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A Little Bit of History
The name "Chicago" is derived
from an indigenous peoples’ word for a wild relative of the onion. Put another way, the place smelled.
The land occupied by Chicago had once
been prairie favored by indigenous peoples who portaged through the area to get
to and from Lake Michigan.
Nothing was going to stop westward
expansion, and Chicago, with its access to waterways, attracted hordes of
settlers.
Chicago was incorporated as a town in 1833
and as a city in 1837, when its population reached 4,000.
Some settlers built a town that became
a Chicago suburb named for the writer Washington Irving.
In that town, on a windy October
evening in 1871, residents sitting in cupolas and at second-story windows
looked across the prairie and watched much of Chicago go up in flames.
The Great Chicago Fire destroyed one-third of the city and left more than 100,000 people homeless. Contrary to popular belief, the cause of the fire has never been established, but Mrs. O’Leary’s cow took the blame for knocking over a lantern (pity the Irish immigrant).
___________
It was a two-stage move. In the first stage, we lived in an apartment building around the corner from the school that I would attend. After several weeks there, we traveled to a house in the 4200 block of North Tripp Avenue. We rented the first floor; the owners lived upstairs. We saw and heard them so rarely that we might as well have had the place to ourselves.
Besides a living room, kitchen, and bathroom, we had three bedrooms. Grocery stores and streetcar lines were nearby, as were several movie theaters and a Sears Roebuck store.
I remember being disappointed. It looked like Dirty-six without the
blackening of coal ash. I don’t know
what I was expecting, something greater maybe, but this was just more of the same. When I think back, I can see that my little
kid’s mind had a lot of growing up to do.
Anyway, we were now residents of Irving Park, and renting a house where we would live for more than a decade.
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7. Irving Park Road: Nomenclature Problems
Irving Park came into being from farmland and for years was a community separate from Chicago. Irving Park Road joined the two communities. Chicago's growth swallowed up Irving Park, and the smaller community lost its identity.
Irving Park Road, however, lived on. It became a major east-west, cross-state
highway in northern Illinois, and when I was growing up it had parking lanes
and traffic lanes on both sides of the street along with streetcar rails down
the middle. Looking down from Google
Earth today, I can see a similar pattern, except that the streetcar rails are
gone.
It would seem traditional that roads are country thoroughfares
while streets and avenues are found in cities, but, no, we had a road inside
one of the largest cities on earth. Many
people, perhaps influenced by the road’s width and amount of traffic, referred
to it as a boulevard.
This is just another little lesson that it is difficult to
be precise in an imprecise world.
And for me to say that we lived in Irving Park is another dose of imprecision, or at least borderline imprecision. Our new home was in Old Irving Park, which “is a neighborhood within Chicago’s Irving Park community,” according to the Old Irving Park Association. That association also says, “These borders were determined by the original two farms that dominated the landscape when the area was first developed in the 1870s.”
8. Tonsils Out:
Snip, Snip
Sometime after we settled into the house
on Tripp, my tonsils were removed.
Having a tonsillectomy in those days was common, a rite of passage like
pimples or the first sexual experience.
If you grew to be ten years old and still had your tonsils, there was
something the matter with you. Or maybe
something was wrong with your parents for not having the operation done.
The operation usually
involved a stay of several days in a hospital.
My parents, however, found a low‑cost clinic where no overnight stay was
necessary. Go in early in the morning,
get gassed, then snip snip, wake up with a sore throat, and go home.
The place was bleak, and the ether mask on my face was frightening. When I woke up, the place looked even bleaker. A neighbor drove my mother and me home. I was wobbly on my feet, and my mother and the neighbor began half‑carrying me, half‑walking me from the car toward the house.
At that point, the two elderly sisters who lived next door came running out, worried and fretting. They asked if I had been in an accident. My mother explained what had happened, they expressed their relief, and I was lugged up the steps and into the house.
The event hung in my mother's mind, which was convenient for me. Years later, when I was filling out a medical evaluation form in the air force, I needed to know when the tonsillectomy had been performed.
“It
was in the summer of 1939,” my mother told me.
“We had it done while school was out.
You were six years old, between first and second grades,” she said, in
the way that mothers have of dispensing more information about their children
than was asked for.
She could not forget the kindliness of the two elderly sisters. We were new neighbors, she commented, and they were so concerned about you. You don't often see that in a big city, she added.
9. Indeed a Nice Neighborhood
You
don’t often see a canary in Chicago. Sparrows
and robins were common just about anywhere I went in the city, and pigeons
soared and swooped around tall buildings downtown.
Next
to us, in the sisters’ back yard, a brilliantly colored red bird sheltered in a
small birdhouse, sometimes perching outside for the viewing pleasure of a small
boy who had only seen such a beautiful creature in a picture book. I always felt pleased when I could step
outside and look across the yard and through the bushes and see this small,
bright red creature.
It was
indeed a nice neighborhood.
Up
and down North Tripp our neighbors lived in one‑ and two‑story houses and in an
occasional small apartment building. For
the most part, yards were neatly taken care of.
Large apartment buildings fronted on streets nearby.
The
neighborhood was populated with lily‑white Protestants and a few Catholics; my
friends possessed Anglo‑Saxon, Scandinavian, and German surnames. Our neighbors worked at levels throughout the
middle‑class spectrum: blue‑collar,
white‑collar, management, and small business owner.
The
neighbor just to the north of us was Montana Pete. He was the guy at square dances who called
out commands such as “allemande left” and “do-si-do.” Besides calling square dances he was an
official in the city’s park department where he used his real name, Ernest
Useman. Ernie and his wife, Tom—she had
been quite a tomboy as a little girl and that ID stuck with her—had two sons a
little younger than me. The family
became the closest friends we had in the neighborhood
Our
house sat in the middle of the block and across the street from Hiram H.
Belding Elementary School. The school
was named for one of the brothers who operated the Belding Brothers Silk
Company. Hiram ran the Chicago branch of
the business. At one time, the company
manufactured ninety‑five percent of the silk thread made in the United States.
Belding
was a three‑story, fully basemented building whose outsides were a testimony to
the imposing, fortress‑like qualities of stone and brick. According to information in the Belding
archives, the school was built in 1901 and expanded in 1902 and 1907; the total
cost of the school and its additions came to $158,666. It was money well spent.
When
I stepped out of our front door, I had my world at my doorstep. Across the street to the left was my school,
to the right a large playground. The
playground had the usual equipment—swings, teeter‑totters, jungle gyms, and two
athletic fields; in winter, playground personnel flooded one of the fields, and
it became an ice‑skating rink. In the
center of the playground there was a large, one-story building—the field house.
If we needed a bat or a ball we could
borrow it at the field house. In bad weather
we could sit inside the fieldhouse and play board games.
In
that playground I earned the distinction of being hit in the head with false
teeth. They were stage teeth, the kind
used in magic or comedy shows. A boy I
was playing with found a set on the ground—who knows where the teeth came from—and
threw it at me. It hit me on the
forehead and raised a welt that went away in a couple of days.
On the south side of our house was a vacant lot. A few trees stood on the lot; it would be overgrown with weeds from spring to fall. The lot was a jungle to me and the boys I would hang out with. Our imaginations took us from the lot to Africa where we hunted wild game; during World War II, the jungle served as a stage on which we won battle after battle against enemy soldiers dug in on islands in the South Pacific.
I
never had to go far to find something to do.
And
I never had to go far to run the necessary errands of life. Two supermarkets—Jewel and A&P—sat almost
side by side on Irving Park Road, a short walk from our house. A
doctor and a dentist had offices above the stores. A block down the street the YMCA offered a
large indoor pool great for wintertime swimming. Two saloons sat across the street from the
supermarkets; another saloon was deep inside the neighborhood. For those of us under the legal drinking age,
a drugstore on Irving Park at the corner with Keeler offered a soda fountain and
was a great place to hang out. There
were restaurants, including a Chinese one, on Irving Park Road.
Then
there was the piece de resistance, the barber shop on Tripp, just off Irving
Park. From an early age my parents gave
me the money to get a haircut without one of them along. The barbershop was small, always crowded, and
always busy. Therefore, I had to wait my
turn while leafing through the pages of magazines strewn about, always issues of
the same magazine—the Police Gazette.
The
Police Gazette was a girlie magazine, pure and simple, its pages loaded
with photographs of scantily clad women.
It did run articles on cops and law
enforcement, but it boosted its sales by featuring female flesh. They were pictures at which I gawked, like
someone just in from the farm.
But,
hey, give me a break. I was just a kid with a lot to learn, soaking up
knowledge wherever I could get it.
The Silent Generation
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A recent trip of mine to the doctor included a lesson in social science. The doctor, when commenting on my birthdate, said that I was a member of the generation that doesn’t complain. That was news to me, and when I got home I checked it out with GOG—Good Ole Google. The doctor was close, but not quite there. A person with my birthdate is a member of
the Silent Generation, a status that does not rule out complaining. Now, before we go any further, I don’t know who gets
credit or blame for naming generations, I don’t know why some people think
it’s important that people be sorted into generations, and I don’t
care. All that I’m doing here is
reporting what I learned because of a remark made to me by a man who was
holding a scalpel in his hand. These are the generation names that I pulled off the
web: • Lost
Generation — persons born 1883-1900. • Greatest
Generation — persons born 1901-1924. • Silent
Generation — persons born 1925-1945. • Baby
Boomer Generation — persons born 1946-1964. • Generation
X — persons born 1965-1980. • Generation
Y — persons born 1981-1996. • Generation
Z — persons born 1997-2012. • Generation
Alpha — persons born 2013-2025. Members of the Silent Generation, I read in Wikipedia,
were so classified for “keeping their heads down and working hard, thus
earning themselves the "silent’ label.” I’ve got a reason I like better. Look at the name of the group that came
after us—Baby Boom. Millions of new
people came into being because of those of us in the Silent
Generation. You can’t be busy making
babies if you’re going yak yak yak. *** |
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