Part 9 Of the Memoir of the Generic Old Man: "On to High School; the Family Mule"

 28.  Party Time 

In the real time of today, Christmas 2021 has come and gone, and with it a nudge to write something about the holidays in the Paxson household on Tripp.  That’s easy to do. 

It’s easy to do because our Christmases were modest, largely influenced by a shortage of money, and largely devoid of much to write about.  I don’t remember ever having a tree or ornaments hanging about.  My parents and I did exchange gifts, on Christmas Day.  As a child I received toys; later I got items of clothing.  What I gave them I have no idea.  

I also had a birthday party, after I pestered my mother for one.  My friends were having birthday parties, and I wanted one too.  I was about seven or eight at the time.  Her response was one, and only one.  She took an afternoon off work and we had my birthday party.  It was well-attended and fun.

29.  A Job!  A Real Job!! 

In June of 1946, when I was finishing elementary school, Eddie K told me that I could get a job as an usher at the Rivoli theater. 

Eddie K was a classmate at Belding and a member of the boys-only group that hung out at the corner store. Eddie and his parents were unique among us: they were immigrants—all the way from Turkey. 

When Eddie told me about this job, I was then picking up a small amount of money by delivering a neighborhood shopping news once a week.  Being an usher at a movie theater would pay more and be a “real” job, a step up.

“I'm only thirteen,” I said.  Something stuck in my mind about having to be sixteen to legally get a job.

“I am too,” Eddie said, “but they hired me.”

He introduced me to the owner, who didn't bother to ask how old I was.  A busy man, he curtly told me that he couldn't hire me unless I had a Social Security card.  My mother, from getting her own Social Security card, knew the drill.  She took me and my birth certificate to the Social Security office. There I got my Social Security card and went back to the Rivoli and was given my uniform and shown the storeroom where I could change clothes.

I now had a job, a job where I got paid while watching movies!  Okay, I wasn’t hired to watch movies, but most people took care of themselves to find a seat and didn’t need my services.  It was the first of several jobs that I held during high school.  Of them, being an usher at the Rivoli was the best.

At a wage of fifty cents an hour, the minimum wage at the time, I believe, I had to help people down an aisle or station myself at the door and take tickets.  Otherwise, I stood around, gawking at all the movies I wanted, four hours a night, two or three nights a week, and eight hours on either a Saturday or a Sunday.  And if I saw a double feature twice, my mother couldn't chew me out:  I was just doing my job.

Except for the owner and the projectionists, men in their fifties, the crew was young.  The manager, the assistant manager, and the woman who sold tickets were in their twenties.  The girl behind the candy counter and another usher were in their late teens.  My classmate and I were just about to go into high school.

We were not only young, but full of fun.  During gunfights in the Westerns, the assistant manager would walk down the aisle shooting a cap pistol over his head.  Once a month we'd pile into a couple of cars after closing time and have a late-night picnic in a nearby park.

Cops came into the theater regularly, getting in for free.  Most of them were plainclothesmen who'd flash their badges at whoever was taking tickets.  In uniform or not, they sat for a while, maybe to rest their feet and watch the movie, but usually to look for child molesters and men who exposed themselves.

Despite the presence of cops, nothing was done about the Rivoli's two boy ushers.  Either there was no minimum age requirement to work, or a big city's political machine turned its back on the law so that a kid could get a job.  The way Chicago operated in those days, the latter was probably correct. 

30. “Billy, people like us don't go to college.”

Summer came to an end, and I kept working at the Rivoli, not giving a whole lot of thought to starting high school.  My mother took me aside.  She told me that I could handle high school however I wanted, that it would be the last of my education.

“There's no money to send you to college,” she said.  “Besides, Billy, people like us don't go to college.  Our families never have.  It's just something we don't do.”

I was simply too much of a child to question her statement.  It reflected an old way of life, one that said college was strictly for the upper class, but I never once questioned that way of thinking. 

Driven by my mother’s motivation, I started high school. 

31.About Schurz

The high school for our neighborhood was Carl Schurz.   Although only thirty‑six years old in 1946, Schurz was a school already rich with traditions.

Its sports teams regularly won city and regional titles.  Its band, orchestra, and chorus earned “Superior” ratings in competitions against similar groups from other Chicago‑area high schools.  The school's musical groups entertained Chicagoans with concerts, operas, and a Christmas‑season performance of Handel's Messiah, complete with a pipe organ, a prized rarity for a high school.  During World War I, shop classes made equipment for the Red Cross and hand grenades and trench torches for soldiers.  During World War II, 151 Schurz graduates were killed in combat. 

And there was Carl Schurz (1829‑1906) himself, a man of achievements on two continents.  In Germany, Schurz led a student movement during the Revolution of 1848‑49, served as a staff officer in the revolutionary army, and engineered the daring escape from Spandau prison of Gottfried Kinkel, an intellectual leader of the revolution; this last was an escapade of personal heroism that placed Schurz at great risk. 

In the United States, Schurz became a lawyer, a journalist, and an active and very visible member of the Republican Party.  He served as President Abraham Lincoln's minister to Spain, as a general in the Union Army during the Civil War, as a Republican Senator from Missouri, and as Secretary of the Interior under President Rutherford B. Hayes.

The school named after him was in the main a three‑story building with a center core section five stories high.  Over the years, wings had been added until the whole thing sprawled out over several blocks.  The building was so big that although the main entrance was a mile from our house, I could shave a quarter of a mile off my walk to school by entering through a back door.  That was something worth thinking about during Chicago winters.

Bill, in high school

When I went to Schurz, the school had an enrollment of 5,000 students; during World War II, enrollment had peaked at 8,000.  Wartime classes were held in shifts and in buildings off campus.  After the war, a part of the building was set aside for returning veterans who had not finished high school.               

32.  On to High School

It was the fall of 1945, and I was a freshman at Carl Schurz High School. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Schurz, the man, “pressed for high moral standards in government in a period of notorious public laxity.”  In other words, he was out of sync with his times. 

In my own way, I was out of sync with what my contemporaries expected of me.  For my freshman year at high school, I registered for French.  I was told by my friends, no, no, no.  Spanish is easier.  I went to gym classes and was told by my friends, no, no. no.  Take band; you’ll get out of gym, and you can get to go to football games free.

Well, I stuck with French, because I hoped to learn something about my mother’s background.  As for the gym-band dilemma, I knew nothing about music or football, but I was told that the band teacher would take care of teaching me how to play an instrument, and even if I didn’t know or care about football, in band I would be at the games spending Saturday afternoons with friends.

Therefore, at semester break, I signed up for band, dropped out of gym, and all was settled.

Overall, the transition from elementary to high school was painless.  School was still school, only now in a different building.  I still walked to school, but now instead of just crossing the street I had seven blocks to go—step out my front door, turn right, and seven blocks later go in a back door at Schurz. 

The walk to and from school was something that I liked.  As a nonathletic, uncoordinated runt, walking was a physical activity that I could do well.  I even developed the exercise of trying to lengthen my stride by going heel to heel from one sidewalk expansion joint to the next. With a ruler I measured the distance between expansion joints as thirty inches (assuming I remember correctly); if I could make my stride that long, I’d be in a class with one of my radio cowboy heroes, who was tracked across the prairie by desperadoes measuring his stride. He escaped; I never got anywhere near that long-legged.

Chicago being Chicago, the weather during my twice-daily walks could have been something to contend with, but it wasn’t.  No blizzards, no torrential downpours, no blasting winds—at least not in my memory.   The only foul-weather experience I remember is one morning the fog, and fog was rare in the Windy City, was so dense I could not see across Irving Park Road.  A streetcar came gliding by, its lone headlight appearing and vanishing in the eerie mist, like a light bulb floating past. Somehow or other I got across the street.

Schurz had a dress code—for girls:  they had to wear dresses except for one day a year, posted on the school calendar, when they could wear slacks or jeans.

Boys were ungoverned in the matter of what we wore, and I decided the time had come to assert myself.  I started to wear blue jeans.  In our group, I was the only jeans-clad boy, and I caught a little flak about it.  But, hey, it’s high school, time to move on. 

 

33.  I Was a Mule on the Third Rail

My sister, Verdalle, was having disastrous luck with men.  Her first husband had gone into the hospital to have his appendix out, then died there of pneumonia.  Her second husband was hauled off to prison for evading the draft.

At the time that the FBI arrested her second husband, Verdalle was the mother of four children ranging in ages from infancy to seven years old.  With her husband gone, she and her children depended upon county welfare and relatives for support.  The Paxsons of North Tripp contributed packages of canned goods and clothing.  These had to be taken out to my sister's house in Elgin.

Because my parents were far more home‑loving than I was, it became my responsibility to transport our care packages to my sister.  I took the third rail.

The third rail was the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin Railroad (CA&E), an electric, interurban line that served communities in the Fox River Valley of northern Illinois.  It was called the third rail because it drew its electricity via a metal shoe that rode on a rail laid next to the rails on which the train's wheels rolled.  Other electric‑powered trains used overhead trolley poles and wires such as those used by streetcars and buses.  Besides being called the third rail, the CA&E was also known as “The Sunset Line.”  That nickname came about because the trains took homeward‑bound commuters west, into the setting sun.

I had recently turned fourteen when I became the family mule, loaded down with shopping bags, which in Chicago were called “Polish luggage,” “Irish luggage,” “German luggage”—choose your immigrant nationality.  On the appointed day, a Saturday or Sunday, I took the shopping  bags and rode the streetcar to the el and the el to the Wells Street stop in the Loop.

The el's Wells Street stop was also the Chicago terminal for the CA&E, which used el tracks in the city.  In all it was a simple matter to get off the el, take a few steps across the platform, and be in the CA&E terminal.

This terminal was a miniature version of a large railroad station.  The ground floor contained a restaurant, newsstand, checkroom, telephones, and a barbershop.  Upstairs, at the same level as the El platform, were the ticket office and waiting room. 

Rail travel can have a certain amount of romance connected with it, but when you rode the CA&E out of Chicago you had to wait for the romance.  During the first few minutes of the trip, the view was of grimy brick structures—office buildings and factories towering ten or more stories above the tracks, blocking out sunlight.  The brick walls gave way to an urban trainside of alleys, the dingy back ends of apartments and businesses, and the unkempt backyards of homes.  This same sort of dismal scenery continued in the city's western suburbs, where the train descended from the el tracks via a long ramp to ground level. 

At Wheaton, a little more than twenty miles from the Loop, the CA&E split its line.  Tracks going on from Wheaton fanned out toward towns in the Fox River Valley—Aurora, Batavia, Geneva, and Elgin.  The train that I took rolled northwest toward Elgin.

Now we were in open country, and the view out the window improved immeasurably.

Pastures and meadows and groves of trees undulated with the gently rolling landscape, which was spotted here and there with farmhouses and barns.  The crowds and concrete of civilization were left behind.  Cows and an occasional horse were the chief residents of the landscape, which would be green much of the year and pristine white after a fresh snow.  The scenery was meant for poets and painters. 

As the train neared Elgin, the tracks veered north to run alongside the Fox River.  In Elgin, the first stop was National Street, near the Elgin National Watch Company's factory, a major business for Elgin and the nation.  When I was growing up, it seemed to me that every one of my Elgin-based relatives had worked for the watch company at one time or another.

A nearby historical marker provides commemorative info: “From 1866 to 1966 this site was occupied by the Elgin National Watch Company. This was the first watch factory built west of the Alleghenies and grew to become the world's largest. During its lifetime over 60 million 'Elgin' watches were manufactured here. The building was highlighted by a 144-foot-tall clock tower containing dials with numerals three feet in length—a foot longer than those of London's 'Big Ben.' Located nearby was an observatory built for astronomical time determination before the advent of national standards. The observatory is now used as a planetarium by School District U-46. (Erected 1989 by The Elgin Heritage Commission and the Illinois State Historical Society.)”

After leaving the National Street stop, the train rolled a few blocks north to the end of the line, at Chicago Street.

From the Chicago Street station, I toted the shopping bags to my sister's house.  When my visit with her and her children was over, I walked the few blocks to my Aunt Elsie and Uncle Carl's house, or Elsie and Carl drove over to my sister's and picked me up.  After supper with my aunt and uncle, they drove me to the CA&E station where I caught the next train to Chicago.

Until these visits, I never had any real relationship with Verdalle or Elsie and Carl. My parents rarely traveled, and it was up to me to go to the places I wanted to go, either alone or with friends.

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