34. The Pleasure of Moving about Aimlessly
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.
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.
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