Home Alone
On school-day mornings, I ate breakfast while sitting by the radio and listening to Don McNeill's Breakfast Club. The Breakfast Club was broadcast nationally and was a lighthearted, popular program that featured comedy routines, popular music, and recipe contests. McNeill opened the broadcast by going into the studio audience and making jokes about what he found in the purses of women in the group. Life was more peaceful then, and he had no need to come up with wisecracks about Mace, pepper spray, and loaded handguns.
Both of my parents worked. Two paychecks were necessary because the garment industry, in which they worked, didn't pay well. Garment work historically has been one of the lowest‑paying trades and is an industry closely identified with sweatshop labor.
In addition, the buildup associated with World War II brought floods of people into Chicago looking for work, and the city developed a boomtown mentality. Rents and the cost of living in general rose, despite efforts of the federal government to control prices.
At times, the combined incomes of my mother and father weren't enough. For a while we took in roomers. Loans from the Household Finance Corporation often kept us afloat, and in one of my parents' most desperate moments they cleaned out my bank account of the hundred‑and‑some dollars I had saved. I was twelve years old when that happened, and my parents were never able to put the money back.
My mother and father had usually left for work by the time I got up. Who tended to me before we moved to North Tripp isn't clear in my memory.. There were few day‑care centers back then, my mother might have worked part‑time, or she might have made arrangements with a neighbor to take care of me until she got home. My sister might have lived with us when I was an infant, but that I don't remember.
After we moved into the Tripp Avenue house, it was up to me to fix myself a bowl of cereal for breakfast, dress, and get to school on time. And when I left for school I carried in my pocket a house key on the biggest key ring my mother could find. Her theory was that big key rings are hard to lose.
We lived in the middle of the block, and the main entrance to Belding Elementary was almost straight across the street. Therefore, my shortest path to school was to simply walk out our front door, veer to the left, and cut across the street.
However, I couldn't get from point A to point B that directly. Instead, from our front door the route led down the sidewalk on our side of the street to the corner, across the street, and back up the other sidewalk to the school's entrance. The school's hard‑and‑fast rule required crossing at the corner, no cutting across the street in the middle of the block.
This route was enforced by the school safety patrol, which was made up of gung-ho eighth‑graders supervised by adults. The safety patrol didn't hesitate for a second in reporting to the principal the name of any child caught not crossing at the corner.
After school I retraced my route home. When the weather was bad, I stayed indoors by myself. My parents would not be home from work for another two to three hours, and until they came home other children were prohibited from being in the house or the yard.
My small collection of toys became more sophisticated over the years. Building blocks were replaced by Lincoln Logs that gave way to Tinkertoys and an Erector Set. My windup train on the floor of the front bedroom eventually was replaced by an electric train on a large table in the basement. During the war, I had a cap pistol and an imitation Garand rifle; the Garand was the basic weapon of soldiers and marines at the time. My parents, who had more common sense than I thought was good for me, said no to my requests for a BB gun and a chemistry set. The nation's toy manufacturers were not going to get rich if too many families were like us.
If there was anything that I disliked about being home alone, it was the noise that a large wooden house makes on cold, windy days. The creaks and groans of the place played on my imagination. Ghosts lurked in the closets. Al Capone's uncaught gangsters were hiding in the basement. Was that a door being stealthily opened by a vicious criminal, or was the door just rattling in the wind?
Outside, I had a huge “front yard”—the playground across the street, where there was always a ball game or a game of tag or hide‑and‑seek, or ice skating or sledding in the winter. And when the playground was crowded, which was often, we played catch or touch football in the brick‑paved schoolyard.
In the Principal’s Office
Playing in plain view of your house is not always the greatest thing in the world, by the way. One day my mother came home from work early and saw me playing catch in the schoolyard with boys she didn't like. They were older boys by a couple of years, and because of their ages they were not good for me, my mother said. This happened after school was out for the day.
Her solution was to haul me into the principal's office. The principal's office, of course, was the dreaded place you were referred to if you committed a high crime or misdemeanor, such as not crossing the street at the corner.
The principal was Mrs. Franco‑Ferreira, who was said to be from Brazil. Her hyphenated Portuguese name did not roll trippingly off the tongues of children named Nelson, Anderson, Sanders, and the like. In our childish impatience, we simply called her Mrs. Ferreira.
She and I had already collided once, literally. School was out for the day, and I was late leaving. In a hurry, I ran down the steps two at a time—the school rule was walk, do not run—turned a corner, and ran headlong into Mrs. Franco‑Ferreira. As a slightly built child I didn't do any damage to either of us, and before I could even think of apologizing, she beamed a warm smile at me and stepped out of my way.
So now I was in the principal's office, tagging along after my mother who was there to complain about my choice of playmates. It's a mystery to me why my mother thought the principal should have any control over whom I hung around with when school was out. As things turned out, the principal's office wasn't too bad a place. We never did get to see Mrs. Franco‑Ferreira but a man whose name I do not remember. He expressed a viewpoint similar to mine, and after he talked with my mother for a while, she let the matter drop.
At the Corner Store
Although the playground and the schoolyard were great places to play, the most memorable gathering place was a small grocery store on the corner at the north end of our block. At the corner store was where I got a lot of my out‑of‑school education, from elementary school through much of high school.
On the grass in front of the store we played marbles. If a boy in the group owned a jackknife, a game of mumblety‑peg would develop. The game seemed to be a lot more fun and more daring if the knife's owner had come by it without his parents' knowledge.
The store's front steps provided an ideal place to sit and drink Cokes and talk. Despite our family's tight financial circumstances, I usually had enough coins in my pockets for a soft drink and a candy bar. Some of the money came from an allowance, and some I earned by running errands for elderly neighbors; as I grew older I had a paper route and, in high school, part‑time jobs. Regardless of the source, the money went for a sugar overdose that was bound to ruin my appetite for supper.
Talk at the corner store was a boy‑only thing. In the playground and school yard we played equal‑opportunity games, girls and boys alike participating. But once we adjourned to the storefront, the girls vanished, probably to do something worthwhile, like learn nurturing skills. Thus, with no girls present, we did the inevitable—we talked about girls.
The influence of testosterone knows no lower age limit, for even as boys our talk about girls was really talk about sex. We listened raptly to any member of the group who had seen a girl naked and could explain for the benefit of the rest of us what a girl looked like with her clothes off. Inevitability somebody would show an eight‑pager, a pamphlet in which a man with a huge erection was making out with some poor, unfortunate girl. Through some of the world’s cheapest pornography, I was introduced to sex long before my parents brought up the subject.
And my parents never did bring up the subject, not together, that is; instead, the task of indoctrinating me on sexual matters was delegated as a solo job to my father. He wasn’t up to the task at all, and after hemming and hawing through a half-assed explanation, he suggested that if I ever felt the need to get laid (those weren’t his exact words but that’s what he meant), he would take me to one of “those places.” It went completely over my head that my own father might know where a brothel was located, for I was distracted by pre-event embarrassment. At my age, ten or eleven at the time, I was frozen by the thought of taking off my clothes in front of a woman who was not my mother.
About the time we hit seventh and eighth grades, we oohed and aahed over rumors about the parties that went on at homes while parents were gone. We wondered what it took to get an invitation to a party like that; we also wondered, mostly silently, if we would know what to do if we went. About that time, we began to tell crude jokes about circle jerks, even though none of us would admit to having participated in one. All of this is proof that testosterone does nothing to improve the quality of talk as a boy grows older.
We practiced belching. The goal was to see who could emit the loudest, longest, most sonorous belch from the deepest recesses of his digestive system. Farting wasn't on our agenda, nor did we even talk about it. Other groups of boys may have passed gas to kill time, but we didn't. Maybe we were more refined than other boys, or maybe the use of flatulence as a diversion was something that we just hadn't thought about. Maybe flatulence wasn't as fascinating then as it is to some people today. Or maybe our diets weren't conducive to the easy production of intestinal gases.
At adolescence, the squeezing of facial pimples began. Zit squeezing was an overpowering, uncontrollable, male coming‑of‑age ritual. The urge to make pus flow was so strong that a boy without zits would knead and poke and squeeze a lump of clear flesh in his fingers rather than just sit there feeling left out.
Our knowledge of Chicago's gangster past caused us to brag to each other, “I'm from Chicago. Wanna see my bullet hole?” We thought we were clever, that we had created the remark. It became our mantra, our mystical invocation, that we never tired of saying to each other.
We also became very good at repeating nonsense such as this:
Ladies and gents, hoboes and tramps,
Cross‑eyed mosquitoes, and bowlegged
ants.
I am standing before you to sit behind
you,
To tell you something of which I know nothing
about.
Next Thursday, which is Good Friday,
There'll be a mothers' meeting for
fathers only.
Admission is free; pay at the door.
Pull up a chair and sit on the floor.
Or:
Marcy is a friend of mine;
She will do it any time.
For a nickel or a dime;
Marcy is a friend of mine.
Or this definition of a humdinger: “A big‑titted woman who can sling the right one over the left shoulder and the left one over the right shoulder.”
Or corny jokes such as this one: “Did you hear about the airline pilot and stewardess who got married so they could fly United?”
Trivia, apparently, stays in my mind quite easily, while a lot of the good stuff has seeped out, gone forever.
We talked about rubbers. At that time, rubber was the common word, the word used by disgustingly gross boys hanging out around a corner store. The polite term then was prophylactic, the word condom coming into vogue since then. Of course, really polite people never talked about such things at all.
Language about this sort of stuff can be slippery. To my father, two generations older than our gang at the corner store, rubbers were ugly black things he put on his shoes in rainy weather. To us, however, rubbers were things that real grown‑up boys, the make‑out artists, kept in their wallets—just in case, you know.
For most boys, “just in case” never happened, so the rubber in the wallet stayed there so long that it became a moldy antique. Had it been made out of metal, it would have rusted. Had it been used for its intended purpose, it might have leaked, and a leaking rubber could have caused all sorts of problems.
When school let out for Christmas break, Easter week, and summer vacation, I had day after day of freedom. There was no Little League then, no youth soccer, and very few other organized activities. I was not interested in Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts, and neither were my mother and father. My parents had better control of their time than do parents of today, and, to my delight, I was pretty much allowed to roam around on my own.
What It Was, Was Supper
The fun and games ended when the police whistle sounded. The whistle was the property of my mother, who had grown exasperated with trying to find me at suppertime. Therefore, when supper was ready, she would step out onto the front steps and let loose one shrill blast after another until she saw me coming.
My mother's whistle was well-known, and if I didn't hear it, my friends would yell: “Hey, Billy, your mom wants you!”
Books on English grammar and word usage describe differences in meaning between the words dinner and supper. Down the street an elitist could be eating dinner, but in the Paxson household we ate supper. With that little bit of commentary out of the way, we can move on to when my mother’s whistle signaled that supper was ready.
For supper my mother specialized in the farm-girl style of cooking. In that style of cooking, a principal utensil is the skillet. The skillet is a quick producer of chops, patties, and filleted or sliced fish and meat—stuff on a small scale that could be fried quickly. For bigger dishes such as casseroles or stews, the main necessary ingredient was a weekend day when my mother had more time to cook.
Otherwise, on workdays she would get off the Irving Park Road streetcar on her way home from her job, maybe stop at a supermarket or butcher, then hurriedly walk home—no time for a break here, for it was necessary to get supper started. Supper would be on the table shortly after my father arrived home from work, and then we would sit down to eat, one of the few times that the three of us would be together.
I never once remember her complaining or even commenting on the pace of the schedule, that she would be at work all day and then come home to what was in essence a second job, and not having a chance to really take a break until after the supper dishes had been cleared and the kitchen cleaned up. She did it, and she did a good job.
20. Fantasyland
Radio Days
Hour after hour my father and I sat at the kitchen table where he drilled me in casino, checkers, and poker. When my mother was not absorbed in her astrology magazines or religious tracts, she joined us for Chinese checkers. Otherwise, I listened to the radio a lot.
Much of my childhood corresponded to what radio buffs call the Golden Age of Radio. From about 1935 until television became popular around 1950, radio thrived and was a major source of entertainment. The airwaves were filled with dramas, comedy shows, variety programs, adventure and mystery and crime thrillers, news, farm programs, soap operas, music of all sorts—something for everyone.
None of that made much difference to my parents. They had spent their early years getting along without radio, and by and large they continued to get along without it, being mostly indifferent to what was on the air at any moment.
Or maybe they were suspicious of it. Many people were. Some were mystified by the technical aspects of radio, while others thought that most of the programs were trash. It is true that much radio programming was entertainment not meant to challenge the mind. A few fine dramas were aired along with an occasional concert or opera, but those programs were in the minority.
Both of my parents, however, did pay attention to the news commentators, especially when news of the war came on. My father might reflectively smoke a cigarette while listening. My mother puttered around, dusting furniture or cleaning up in the kitchen, occasionally challenging the newscaster with “The old fool! What does he know?”
One of the most popular newscasters of the time was Gabriel Heatter. Heatter began every newscast by saying “Ah, there's good news tonight.” Heatter made sure that he did indeed broadcast good news every night, even if only a little, especially during the first year of the war when the United States and its allies were suffering disastrous losses. Heatter often criticized President Roosevelt on the air, an act that endeared the newscaster to my Republican father.
Another popular newscaster was H. V. Kaltenborn. Kaltenborn was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to German‑American parents. He was known by his initials, H. V., and not his first name, Hans, perhaps to play down his German heritage. In those days, most things German were suspect and unpopular.
Kaltenborn had trained himself in the art of total recall, and he was able to commit to memory speeches of political figures after hearing them once. That talent, along with his fluency in German, enabled Kaltenborn to report word for word from the speeches of the German dictator Adolf Hitler. Kaltenborn's fellow reporters dubbed him “the dean of American news commentators.”
The lightweight of news commentators was Walter Winchell. Winchell was a gossip columnist who catered to the public's thirst for sordid details about the private lives of famous people. In those days, censors kept broadcasts from being too sordid, so innuendo was about all that Winchell could broadcast.
Winchell began each broadcast by ballyhooing, “Good evening Mr. and Mrs. North and South America and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press!” He then delivered—in staccato, rapid‑fire succession—news stories and so‑called flashes. The “dit‑dit‑dit” of a teletype machine punctuated his items.
When my father listened to the radio, he preferred baseball games, especially a Chicago Cubs game. If war news or the Cubs weren't on, then as far as he was concerned, the radio was only a box that sat in a corner.
My mother deliberately set aside time for only one program, the National Barn Dance, broadcast from Chicago's Eighth Street Theater on Saturday night. The Grand Ole Opry, broadcast from Nashville, was more popular than the National Barn Dance, yet my mother preferred the Chicago‑based show.
Radio predated me, so in my child's‑eye view of the world, radio was something that had always been around. To me, radio was part of life and listening to it was the most natural thing a person could do. As a listener, I was one of the lowest common denominators whom critics said radio was meant for.
Those of us who were lowest common denominators could be enthralled with twenty or so Western, adventure, crime, and mystery programs. Twenty programs didn't saturate the air waves, because many programs were only fifteen minutes long.
Still I did listen to my share, and some of the programs had unforgettable signatures.
“A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty ‘Hi yo, Silver!’ The Lone Ranger Rides again!” This famous opening introduced one of radio's most popular and longest‑lasting Western series. The story told about a former Texas Ranger who wore a black mask, loaded his six-gun with silver bullets, and fought for law and order in the American southwest. He was accompanied by his faithful Indian sidekick, Tonto, while in the background an orchestra played the overture to Rossini's William Tell.
A joke making the rounds at that time said that an intellectual was a person who could listen to the classical music of the William Tell overture and not think of the Lone Ranger.
Boston Blackie was about a witty, streetwise crime fighter with a big heart: “Boston Blackie! Enemy of those who make him an enemy, friend of those who have no friends!”
The Shadow was a mystery series in which each episode opened with the sepulchral intonation of “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!”
And then, of course, there was Jack Armstrong, the All‑American Boy. Jack Armstrong was a middle‑class American teenager who attended Hudson High School and got involved in one exciting adventure after another. He fought crime, tracked down Nazi spies, rescued people from disasters, and did whatever sort of heroic deed was necessary to keep readers tuning in—and keep them buying Wheaties.
Each program began with the announcer proclaiming “Wheaties, breakfast of champions, presents Jack Armstrong, the All‑American Boy!” The cereal was also mentioned in a famous jingle:
Have you tried Wheaties?
They're
whole wheat with all of the bran.
Won't
you try Wheaties?
For
wheat is the best food of man!
They're
crispy and crunchy the whole year through.
Jack
Armstrong never tires of them
And
neither will you.
So
just buy Wheaties
The best breakfast food
in the land!
Unsophisticated, for sure. The word we used was “corny.” But not to knock success, for the program stayed on the air for seventeen years.
Radio played on the listener's imagination. On The Adventures of Bulldog Drummond, an urbane English detective was introduced with the words “Out of the fog, into the night.” The Inner Sanctum Mysteries began with a squeaking door that opened so that the listener could hear eerie tales of ghosts, ghouls, murder, and mayhem.
If you couldn't imagine fog on a dark night, or if a squeaking door didn't make you perk up, you weren't cut out to listen to radio. You had to concentrate too, and think along with the actors, in essence doing some acting yourself; unlike television, radio didn't spoon‑feed pictures of the action. Moreover, your ears weren't going to assaulted with raw or gross language. Without being raunchy, comedians were funny, and dramatic actors could get the point across.
Variety and comedy shows filled the airwaves, and on Sunday nights I faithfully listened to what I thought was the funniest program on the air, The Jack Benny Show. Benny was so talented and so popular that he stayed on the air at the top of the ratings for twenty‑five straight seasons; he also starred in several movies.
Benny's on‑air persona was that of a skinflint who sawed away at the violin horribly and never got any older than the age of thirty‑nine. In real life, Benny was a very generous man with passable musical skills; and, of course, he aged just like the rest of us. On the radio Benny kept his money in a vault in the basement of his house. The vault was guarded by Benny's pet polar bear, Carmichael, known for eating the gas meter reader. Benny's car was an old Maxwell, in reality a good, low‑priced car. Despite reality, Benny's Maxwell wheezed and sputtered, producing a cacophony of squeaks, knocks, and backfires.
Benny was a master of comic timing, and he knew when to use silence as well as sound. He created his most classic bit when a holdup man stuck a gun to his head and demanded, “Your money or your life!”
Benny, the miser, said nothing, and a few people in the studio audience began to titter. Benny's silence lengthened, and more people began to laugh.
The holdup man, growing impatient, repeated his demand, “Your money or your life!”
After a long silence, Benny finally spoke up to say “I'm thinking. . . I'm thinking.”
At that point, the studio audience laughed for a minute and a half.
The truth of the matter is that I deliberately sought out the comedy shows over all others. What with my father being the original quiet man and my mother deep into her metaphysical quest, our house was very somber, dreary in fact. Accordingly, radio provided a much‑needed dose of laughter.
Besides Jack Benny's show, the funniest programs were those featuring Red Skelton; the comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello; and ventriloquist Edgar Bergen with his dummy Charlie McCarthy, a smart‑aleck who got laugh after laugh by insulting Bergen and the show's guests. Duffy's Tavern, set in a bar and populated with unusual characters, was a precursor to the television hit Cheers. And The Fred Allen Show presented sly, cerebral skits mindful of those heard more recently on Garrison Keilor's A Prairie Home Companion. Then there was Bob Hope, who spent close to two decades on the radio, starred in the movies, and entertained American troops around the world.
Finally, no remembrance of radio is complete without mention of Amos and Andy. Amos and Andy were two black men played by two white men, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll. Another regular on the show was “the Kingfish,” another black man, also played by Correll. These three men and their supporting cast used humor to reveal the universal faults and foibles of all people regardless of color, although a few overly sensitive people charged that the program unjustly portrayed and perpetuated racial stereotypes.
At the height of the
show's popularity, many movie theaters stopped their films and turned on radios
so that audiences could listen to the program.
Some restaurants and department stores played the program over public
address systems so that customers would not miss the program. One of radio's all‑time favorite programs, Amos
and Andy remained on the air from the late‑1920s until 1960, with Gosden
and Correll at the helm all the way through.
At the Movies
Radio brought free entertainment into the home, while for a small price, movies lured people out of the home and into the neighborhood theater. For about fifty cents, I could enjoy a complete Saturday afternoon of entertainment—two features, a newsreel, a cartoon, a serial, previews of coming attractions, popcorn, a box of Milk Duds, and on the way home a lime rickey at the drugstore.
One Saturday I extended my money's worth by sitting through a double feature twice. When I returned home, my mother was standing out in front of the house, hands on hips, glaring:
“You're late for supper, Billy.”
That complaint was followed up by the voice of doom: “I was afraid something happened to you.”
Hell hath no fury like an irate mother, especially one in the grips of a worst‑case scenario, so I never made that mistake again.
Movie theaters of the time advertised two things that we take for granted today—air conditioning and color film. In the summer, many theaters flew from their marquees big banners that said: “IT'S COOL INSIDE! 70 DEGREES!” And the more expensive color process was slowly replacing the old standby of black‑and‑white film.
Like radio, movies offered something for every taste—love stories, sensitive dramas, comedies, westerns, and gangster stories. Most of my movie money went for melodramatic shoot‑'em‑ups—the Westerns and the gangster flicks.
Westerns and gangster films were incredibly popular in the late 1930s and well into the 1940s. Although these movies were increasingly filmed in color, the plots and themes were always black and white. And similar. The Western was a gangster movie set in prairies and mountains, while the gangster movie was nothing more than an urban Western.
Characters were two‑dimensional, and it was easy to recognize the good guys and the bad. The hero was truly a nice guy, heroines were virtuous and placed on pedestals, justice was bound to triumph over evil, crime led to punishment, and punishment was usually a fitting and deserved death.
All that was lacking was a concluding paragraph that said, “The moral of the story is, ‘Honesty Pays.’” My parents tried to impress me with that idea; so did teachers at Belding Elementary. But I think where the message really sunk in was in the fantasyland of the Rivoli theater on Elston Avenue. There it was obvious: The good guys always won, right overpowered might every time, and all bad deeds were punished.
Some shoot‑'em‑ups were unintentionally funny. Audiences snickered when horses and riders, or cars of cops and bad guys, went by the same piece of scenery again and again during the inevitable chase scene; to save money, directors had filmed the scene once and then replayed it several times. Similarly, cavalry charges covered a lot of ground in those movies, but never wearing out the horses, for it was the same ground over and over again. Or viewers elbowed each other and begin counting out loud with each shot after a gunman had fired six bullets from his six‑gun—and kept on shooting without reloading.
It was all very
comforting. Even before moviegoers had
paid their money and sat down in an air‑conditioned movie palace, they knew
that all would be well when the show was over.
21. What I Learned at Belding Elementary
Any person who wants to write well should have a teacher like Miss Moore. Miss Moore taught eighth‑grade English composition at Belding Elementary. Until eighth grade, we were in the same room with the same teacher all day, except for gym. In eighth grade, however, we changed classes every hour, to get us ready for high school.
Miss Moore emphasized composition, not grammar. In her class it was okay to split an infinitive if the sentence sounded better. Ending a sentence with a preposition was all right also. You could get away with these persnickety aspects of grammar. They were venial, not life‑threatening. But you didn't dare ever write a sloppy sentence or an essay that displayed the workings of an empty mind. Those were mortal, unpardonable sins.
Miss Moore stomped—and she did stomp, for she was a sturdily built woman—up and down in front of the class, lecturing, berating us, reading passages aloud, explaining syntax, trying to pump into dense heads the finer points of style. As she talked, a fine spray of spittle flew from her mouth. Because I sat in the front row, I developed the habit of cringing and cowering whenever she loomed toward my desk.
My mother liked Miss Moore because she sent notes home about how well I wrote. My mother cherished Miss Moore's notes and answered with other notes about how much I read and the Anglo‑Saxon heritage that Miss Moore and I had in common. In turn, Miss Moore responded with still other notes in the manner of “Isn't that nice” or “I find that very interesting.” Between Miss Moore and my mother, the two of them wrote more than I did in my composition class.
Belding's gym teacher was Mrs. Kennedy, probably the youngest teacher on the staff. Mrs. Kennedy was a great believer in warming up the body and limbering up the muscles before doing anything strenuous. Therefore, before we got to the fun stuff, like softball, volleyball, and running, her classes began with calisthenics and stretching exercises. We tried to follow her lead all the while marveling at how a woman that old—she must have been all of thirty—could force her aging body into positions that few of us could duplicate.
Belding Elementary offered kindergarten through eighth grade. In the basement a lunchroom served hot lunches. In the early grades we were frequently lined up and paraded through the nurse's office so that she could poke around our scalps looking for lice. Fire drills provided unexpected and often unwanted recesses; most of us were serious students.
Most of us were also well-behaved. We had to be, for each teacher had thirty‑some children in her class; my eighth‑grade class picture shows thirty‑six pupils. Even if we were well behaved, our teachers were still loaded down with work—conducting classes, writing lesson plans, and grading homework for thirty‑some pupils.
All of our teachers were women, most of them being gray‑haired women who went by the title of Miss. Spinsters perhaps, but we had no way of knowing, for our teachers didn't talk about themselves. They were completely dedicated to teaching, an atrociously underpaid profession in the Chicago schools of the day.
They labored at the usual elementary school curriculum—grammar, arithmetic, social studies, science, and history. Under their demanding tutelage we learned the basics. We were relentlessly drilled in the ABCs by a teacher who assured us that we could not get through life without knowing the alphabet. How else, she implored, would we be able to use a phone book or a dictionary or an encyclopedia or an index? How else indeed?
We parsed sentences, shredding them until their phrases and clauses hung down like the entrails of a stick‑figure animal that had been viciously attacked and was about to suffer the agonies of a horrible death.
We practiced our handwriting, always diligently, and almost neurotically, trying to fashion the proper slope for our letters because the teacher said that writing backhanded was a sign of weak character.
We recited multiplication tables, sometimes in unison, sometimes individually, saying them aloud until we were breathless and blue in the face.
The basics are second nature to me now, but they were the most important things, the keys to the kingdom, to my teachers at Belding.
We were taught a class called Home Mechanics. The idea behind Home Mechanics was to make us into self‑sufficient individuals who could do routine tasks that parents normally do, not a bad idea because in many homes both parents worked. Therefore, girls and boys too learned how to use an electric iron, sew a button on a shirt, use a sewing machine to repair a hem or a seam, and make minor home repairs such as changing a fuse or installing a light switch.
Without a doubt, the star teacher at Belding Elementary was Miss Webber, who taught fifth grade. Long before we got to fifth grade, we began hearing about Miss Webber.
“Miss Webber has eyes in the back of her heard. Don't try to get away with anything while Miss Webber's back is turned.”
“Miss Webber knows everybody's voice after the first day. You don't dare whisper to a classmate while Miss Webber isn't looking in your direction. She knows who you are!”
“Miss Webber always knows what is going on. Don't put a tack on her chair if she steps out of the room. It's been done, and Miss Webber knew exactly who did it the instant she saw the tack, and she sent the kid to the principal's office.”
Miss Webber worked hard at hammering into our heads the concept that “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” Of course, Miss Webber didn't mean that we had to memorize law book after law book. What she meant instead was that if you broke a law you could expect to be punished, whether you knew about the law or not.
The hard‑nosed, see‑all Miss Webber was
exactly the right person to teach that subject.
One day in class she explained the library card catalog and the Dewey decimal system of classifying books. Then she told us the two most important rules of using a library: (1) Find the book yourself and don't bother the librarians about anything unless it's a matter of life and death; librarians are busy people. (2) Be quiet; people are trying to read.
Our indoctrination complete, Miss Webber marched us over to the city branch library on Irving Park Road. There we had to look up and find books from lists that she gave us, while keeping our mouths shut and not bothering the librarians. Like a hawk hovering above a barnyard full of chickens, Miss Webber was everywhere, ready to swoop down on the first child who veered toward the librarians' desk or emitted so much as the slightest peep.
When Miss Webber was satisfied that we had passed library drill, we were each given a library card, the most important piece of paper any person can possess.
One lesson was about the Great Fire of 1871. We learned how the fire had been blamed on Catherine O'Leary's cow, which supposedly kicked over a lantern, when in truth no one knows how the fire started. Moreover, there were two great fires on the same night. The other occurred in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and reduced more than 1,000 square miles of forest to ashes and killed 1,200 people. At Chicago, the fire incinerated 4 square miles of urban landscape and more than 17,000 structures, killing at least 250 Chicagoans and leaving 100,000 homeless.
We also learned about the Chicago River, about how it was made to flow backwards. For millions of years, the river had flowed into Lake Michigan. That was all right until people built a city there. Then the river began carrying into Lake Michigan the city's sewage, treated as best as it could be in those days.
Because Lake Michigan provided Chicago with its drinking water, the whole process became a toilet‑to‑tap method of recycling that was fraught with the possibility of disease. That changed in the 1890s, when a huge engineering project reversed the flow so that the river's waters, and treated sewage, headed west and south, into the Des Plaines, Illinois, and Mississippi Rivers.
The Chicago River therefore became known as the only river in the world that flows away from its mouth, and the only river in the world that flows backward.
22. My Own Worst Enemy
At that time, around seventh or eighth grade, I would have had to gain weight to be the 99‑pound weakling in the Charles Atlas body‑building advertisements. An under-eater of the first rank, I was frail and lived on nervous energy. I was also short. Only one boy in my eighth‑grade class was shorter, and all of the girls were taller.
“Don't worry, Billy,” my mother used to say. “You'll grow someday.”
Another boy and I went at each other in the playground one afternoon. Before I knew what was happening, I was face down on the ground, my mouth pressed into the dirt, the other boy sitting on my back, twisting my arm into a position humanly impossible.
I pleaded “uncle” and saved my arm. First things first. Then, as I recovered from the pain and embarrassment, I experienced an epiphany, a Great Awakening: I wasn't destined to win fights so it'd be best if I stayed out of them. I decided that from that moment on I would be nice to people.
As pleasant as our neighborhood was, it still had its bad elements, a few toughs who roamed around beating up or threatening to beat up smaller kids. And there was that whole big city out there, and a person couldn't survive in a big city by making enemies.
So I simply decided that I had framed my own personal Code of the City: “Be nice to people. You never can tell when you're going to need their help.”
That, of course, is a selfish takeoff on the Golden Rule. Where the Golden Rule says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the idea is one of helping others. My credo, however, was one of survival, of treating people right so that they would help me or at least leave me alone. Moreover, I really couldn't take credit for formulating a Grand Idea. Parents since time immemorial have preached similar advice to their children. I'm sure that my parents had worked to hammer the idea into my head whether I remembered them doing so.
Years later I was talking with a resident of Alaska about a certain restaurant on a remote stretch of highway. We both mentioned that the food and service there were terrible.
“But you know what?” he said. “Whenever I'm in the area I make it a point to eat there. This is Alaska, and we try to be nice to people up here because you never know when you're going to need their help.”
23. Scaredest I’ve Ever Been
A man came through the neighborhood hiring boys to deliver the local shopping news. It was a simple proposition: Once a week drop off copies of the shopping news at the addresses provided. No selling required, no collecting, no folding of papers. Just tote the papers around, deliver them, and be paid a small amount.
It worked out fine. For a little effort I earned money to spend on movies or at the corner store. And there was a bonus: The newspaper’s publisher treated its carriers to a Cubs’ game at Wrigley Field.
I was not interested in the game, but it was free, and it was something to do.
I went and arrived at Wrigley Field well before the game started. The gates weren’t open yet, and boys were standing on the concrete apron between the gates and Addison Street. More and more boys arrived, and now I was in a crowd that was anxious to see a baseball game. Yelling began and grew louder. By straining on my toes I could see the tops of the gates. They began to slide open. In a standing position I was being carried toward the gates. I had no choice. The press of boys around me grabbed me, lifted me, and carried me toward the gates. The crowd noise overwhelmed any shout I tried to make. My feet weren’t touching the pavement. All I could do was hope that I didn’t fall.
And then the press of bodies against me was over. We were inside. Boys were scattering toward the ramps and seats. I could feel pavement under my feet. It was the scaredest I’ve ever been.
And you would be right in thinking that since then I’ve never wanted anything to do with crowds.
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