A vocal minority in the nation brought
about the blacklisting of screenwriters who were members of the Communist
party. Blacklisting meant that the
writers could not get work in Hollywood.
As a result, talented writers were forced into other jobs or had to
write under assumed names. In addition,
several hundred employees of the federal government were forced from their jobs
because of their ties to the Communist party.
Anti‑Communist sympathies in this country
were further fueled by developments in Berlin.
Since the end of World War II, Berlin had been controlled by four of the
war's allies, the Communist‑governed Soviet Union and three Western powers‑‑the
United States, England, and France. In
June 1948, in an attempt to force out the Western powers, the Soviets blockaded
Berlin, preventing food and fuel from reaching the city. An American airlift kept the city's residents
supplied, and in May 1949 the Soviets ended the blockade.
Then the Soviet Union tested an atomic
bomb, on August 29, 1949. Until then,
the United States had been the only nation able to make a nuclear weapon. Now, however, a Communist nation had the
bomb.
And about the time of my junior year, a
man came to Carl Schurz to speak to the students. The auditorium could not hold the entire
student body at one time, so we were scheduled to attend in blocks. I was in the first block to hear him. After he spoke to us, the school canceled the
rest of his lectures.
The speaker was an army captain recently
back from China. He started by
describing how the Chinese Communists had seized control of the country. He then went into an impassioned harangue
about the evils of Communism, about how people suffered under Communism, about
Communism being a plot to overthrow the United States government and do away
with our democratic freedoms, about why we should stamp out Communism.
The next morning, home room teachers read
aloud a letter from the principal. The
letter dealt with the previous day's speaker.
It was a very carefully worded letter.
Not once did it use the words “Communism” or “Communist.” Not once did it mention the name of the man
who had spoken. The letter simply said
that a man had spoken to some of the students on the previous day, that he had
expressed but one point of view, and that the students of Carl Schurz should
realize that his was not the only point of view.
The incident mystified me. Communism to me seemed like a faraway thing,
and I had tuned out the speaker early on.
If he was there to tell jokes, I would have sat up straight and paid
attention. If he was showing Jane
Russell in The Outlaw—a movie that
scandalized people at the time because its principal attraction was Russell's
ample bosom (a true double feature)—that would've been worth some interest on
my part.
But from where I slouched near the back,
he was just another boring teacher. And
when he started yelling about Communism, I wondered why he was getting all
worked up. Then there was that letter
the next day, a letter so mild that it hardly seemed worth the effort. Of course, what the letter was trying to say
was that the speaker was a propagandist for the far right, a point that I
hadn't grasped.
Yes, I was naive at the time, or disinterested,
a teenager wrapped up in himself. And
the crowd that I hung around with did not consist of people who argued that
Communism would improve the lot of workers enslaved under the capitalist yoke. After all, we were the children of those
under the capitalist yoke, and the accompanying enslavement seemed fine to us.
38. Progress, of Sorts
Phone, Yes; Television, No.
We got a phone. Maybe that sentence should read, We finally
got a phone.
That little installation of technology did
not herald an investment in a bigger piece of electronic merchandise, a
television set. Those were new on the
market, and we couldn’t afford one.
Ah, Coffee
Friends and I were hanging out one
evening after supper, wondering what to do, when one of them said we could go
to his house. We did, somewhat in a
state of awe because the boy who suggested that was the son of Schurz’s
assistant principal. And it’s not every night you get to go the house of an assistant
principal.
We went to his house and sat in the
basement, a fully finished basement with comfortable sofas. As we were sitting there talking about
nothing worthwhile, a woman came down the stairs carrying a tray with a coffee
pot and cup-and-saucer service. She then
proceeded to pour coffee for us.
This was heady stuff: We were being served coffee—being waited
on—by the wife of an assistant principal of our high school.
I had never had coffee before and I told
her. She put a little cream in mine, and
I sipped it. It was like what I imagine
a religious conversion to be. I know, I
know, it has a bitter taste, and it can leave a person in a caffeine jag, and
it can keep you awake at night, and there’s probably fifty-eleven things wrong
with it,
But I liked it. It became my go-to beverage, even on hot
days. It hasn’t replaced beer or
martinis; it’s just an add-on. Ah,
coffee.
No Smoking
I never smoked for the simplest reason of
all: I never wanted to.
Puffing on a cigarette was a fairly
common activity among people my age, but I wasn’t interested. None of my friends smoked. My mother didn’t smoke and hated the smell of
it. My father lit up a cigarette after
dinner for a puff or two, but there might have been an ulterior motive at work
here: because my mother disliked the smell of burning tobacco so much, a lit
cigarette gave my father an excuse to get out of the house and smoke on the
front porch.
Growing Pains?
I grew during my high school years. From
five feet tall to five feet-ten-inches in four years, the up-elevator mechanism
kicked in.
I had no so-called growing pains, and
from inside my body I didn’t sense any changes.
My mother, however, had found something
new to worry about. She fretted about going
to the Robert Hall clothing store to buy me new pants, and she took me a doctor
who assured her I was okay, and this is what boys can do.
39. At VanderCook
In my years at Belding and Schurz, the
most enjoyable classroom experiences I had were at neither place but at the
VanderCook School (now College) of Music.
VanderCook is a private school, and from somewhere in the Chicago public
school system the money came to pay for me to attend a six-week-long summer
session between my junior and senior years at Schurz.
In the classroom we studied music theory:
the whys and therefores of key signatures; why a composer might choose to write
a piece in a certain key; the structure of chords. At VanderCook we were taught how to conduct,
that each movement of the baton has its own meaning, although if you watch just
about any conductor you probably won’t see those assigned meanings but the
conductor’s own particular style. And, perhaps
just to remind us that we were in essence musicians, we had at least one hour
per day of band practice.
VanderCook these days is located on the
campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology.
It had moved several times during its early years, and when I attended,
it occupied an old brownstone residence and adjacent buildings just one block
off West Madison Street, site of one of the worst skid rows in the United States.
That skid row added to my education. Here I got to see just how low a person can
sink. Bums—today they’d be called
homeless people or the unhoused—men unshaven and in dirty clothing, leaned against
buildings, milled around, sat on curbs and doorsteps, slept passed out on
sidewalks, sometimes in their own urine.
Flophouses rented beds for 25 cents a night, but to be seen going into a
flophouse would be an admission that you had money and were now being set up to
be robbed, possibly beaten; consequently, the sidewalks were safer for sleeping.
I made it a point to walk along the skid
row during my lunch hour and on my way to the train depot on the way home; I
believed it important that I see for myself rather than read about this
aspect of the world. I was never harmed,
spoken to, or pestered for money. And
this incongruity: nicely dressed men and
women, employees in area businesses and office buildings, walked to and from on
their way to lunch or to do a little shopping, maybe as part of a commute, mingling
with the city’s downtrodden.
At the end of the day I went home on a
Chicago and Northwestern commuter train.
For variety I came to VanderCook’s in the morning via the el. The el
station was about a half mile from VanderCook’s, and on that walk I did feel
apprehensive. The route took me through
one of the city’s black belts, and in the morning warmth, whole families—they
seemed not to have jobs—crowded onto front porches to breathe fresh air. And here came this skinny white kid lugging
his saxophone all by himself. Nothing ever happened. I could sense being watched, but no one ever
spoke to me or offered so much as a friendly wave.
I enjoyed my time at VanderCook’s. In all, my brief time there was the ending
punctuation of what was a long music appreciation course in high school band.
40. Paradise Found and Lost
Paradise Found
After I had finished at Vandercook, I moved
to Elgin for the rest of the summer.
There my sister provided me with room and board, while I painted the
house of my Aunt Elsie and Uncle Carl.
My parents paid my sister for feeding me and keeping me out of their way
for the summer, and my aunt and uncle paid me to paint their house.
Elsie, my mother's sister, and Carl had
no children of their own, and they tended to adopt me for that summer. They taught me to drive, which could have
been the death of them, for on my first lesson I navigated their Dodge up onto
a curb at thirty‑five miles per hour.
Having survived that experience, we often spent Saturday or Sunday
touring the Fox River Valley, usually with me at the wheel.
Elsie and Carl were sociable, hospitable
people. Neighbors came to their house
for drinks and talk. There was a lot of
laughter in their house, a lot of guests who were good company. One frequent visitor was a man who lived
around the corner and who came to have cocktails with my uncle and complain, in
front of me and to my aunt's blushing embarrassment, that his wife didn't give
him enough Vitamin F.
One of my mother's brothers, my Uncle
Hank, also lived in Elgin. At that time
Hank was a salesman, peddling auto parts to dealers in small towns of northern
Illinois. Hank also operated a small—two big rigs—trucking company. He was a popular guy and very
well-liked. Going anywhere with him was
like being with Norm and walking into Cheers. As soon as he got through that door, I could hear
a shouted, “Hank!”
Every now and then he'd say, “Bill, you
don't want to paint that house today, let's go for a ride.”
We'd take off, me at the wheel of Hank's
pride and joy, a prewar Ford that had 400,000 miles on it and had been a taxi
in Chicago during the war. The car's
front end was as loose as it could be.
Point the car straight ahead, and it might go that way, or it might
drift maddeningly toward the shoulder, or it might scarily take off toward
oncoming traffic.
We’d make one stop after another at parts
dealers, and at each place, from outside in his car I’d watch him enter and
hear, “Hank!”
I would start out as the driver in the
morning, but after a few miles my inability to keep the derelict Ford in our
lane would begin to wear on Hank's nerves, so he would take over. Through magic or the skill that comes with
years of practice or intuitive perception about which way the front end would
go next, Hank knew how to steer that Ford.
It was a heady summer. The city boy was in the country—well, not
exactly, for the population of Elgin then was around 40,000 people—but the
place was so far removed from the crowds and bustle of Chicago that it seemed
to be another world. And I was among
people who laughed and had fun and got out and did things. To top that off, when I returned to Chicago
at the end of the summer, I possessed that mystical, all‑powerful piece of
paper coveted by every teenager--a drivers license.
Paradise Lost
I came back to Chicago to learn that my
father had accepted a job at Terre Haute, in southern Indiana. The pay would be better than he earned in
Chicago, he told me, and Terre Haute would be a much nicer place to live than
Chicago.
The new job called for my father to
oversee the establishment of a garment factory.
That is, this mild‑mannered, quiet man was supposed to hire and train
employees and do all the things, and experience all the headaches, that go into
setting up production lines, organizing schedules, and supervising people.
Just before the start of my senior year
in high school, we moved to Terre Haute.
The house on North Tripp we had rented furnished, so the move was easily
accomplished. All our possessions fit
into a trunk and several suitcases. Off
we went on the train.
A month later we were on the train headed
back to Chicago. The job “just didn't
work out.”
I had not wasted the month. I had learned how to shoot pool, courtesy of
the boy who lived next door to us in Terre Haute; he introduced me to the game
at a nearby tavern.
And the boy next door and his family
provided us with occasional bursts of bathroom humor; from our kitchen windows
we watched as they ran across their backyard to use the outhouse. Here it was, 1949, in a university town in
the northern United States, a dozen blocks from the city center, and this
family did not have indoor plumbing. To
make matters worse, rain fell almost every day we were there; any trip to the
outhouse would be a soggy dash.
In Terre Haute I had also learned a lot
about basketball. As in Chicago, I
joined the high school band; it played at every one of the school's basketball
games, and basketball ruled in Indiana night after night. In Indiana there was
no escaping the fact that James Naismith, a Canadian, invented the game in Massachusetts,
and it became an almost obsessive sport in Indiana.
Back in Chicago, we had nowhere to
live. The house on North Tripp, our home
for a decade, had been rented during our month away. Consequently, I stayed with Aunt Elsie and
Uncle Carl in Elgin while my parents stayed in a hotel and looked for a
rental. After several days, they phoned
to say that they had found a flat near Portage Park.
Elsie and Carl drove me to my new
home. It was clean and attractive but
small. Even though I would still be
enrolled at Schurz, I would live quite a distance from where my longtime
friends lived. By now, the fruitlessness
of the move to Terre Haute combined with the loss of the house on Tripp had
gotten under my skin. Complaining would
do no good, however, so I just stood silently in the apartment and worked to
conceal my frustration.
Our stay in that small Portage Park
rental was noteworthy in my memory for only one thing: I came down with my usual autumnal
respiratory crud, and it was the sickest I had ever been. I woke up one morning and found my parents
gone. I needed to go to the bathroom; I felt
weak and wanted someone to help me, yet no one was there.
This was the only time that I recall
being angry with my mother and father for leaving me alone. Somehow
or other I made it to and from the bathroom, got back in bed, and fell sound
asleep. I awoke that afternoon feeling better, and a day later I was back in
school.
Before very long we moved again, this
time to a house on North Tripp, about a block from where we had previously
lived. Now we were in a square, hulking,
two‑story thing right out of a gothic novel, or a slum. It was a dump, totally out of place on Tripp.
Its exterior paint was peeling in big
strips, and here and there gray, weathered siding boards hung loose. The house was set well back from the street,
deep in the trees of a large lot. A
cracked and buckling walkway twisted its way to the front door. The whole effect from the outside was one of
gloom and darkness, even in the bright of day.
And inside, wallpaper and paint were peeling from the walls, and the rooms
were small and dingy.
We occupied the second floor. On the first floor lived a family who
specialized in being obnoxious. If they
heard us on the stairs coming or going, one of them would open their door and
yell insults at us.
This was the only time I ever saw my
father depressed. I knew him to be
pleasant and congenial almost all the time and angry only rarely. But now he came home from work and sat in the
kitchen until bedtime, barely moving, withdrawn, and more silent than ever.
To worsen things for him, I had a run‑in
with the law. A minor scrape, it came
about because some of my friends and I went for a hike in the Forest Preserve,
cut across a golf course, and stole the flags from the holes. It was a raw, blustery day, and no players
were on the course. We figured that no
one needed the flags. It was a stupid
boy stunt that got us in trouble.
A Forest Preserve ranger caught us, took
us to headquarters and lectured us, and then took our names and the names and
addresses of our parents. Before he let
us go, he said that our parents would be notified by mail of our infraction.
When I got back to the apartment, my
father was home alone, sitting in the kitchen.
I told him what I had done and that he and my mother would be getting a
letter in the mail.
“Don't tell your mother,” he said. “See if the letter shows up first.”
It didn't. Because we moved again within a couple of
weeks, the letter might have gotten lost in the mail, but I doubt it. My friends' parents didn't get letters
either, so I suspect that the ranger knew he'd latched onto a bunch of scared
kids and let the matter drop.
The next time we moved, we traveled a
short distance to a pleasant house in the 4300 block of North Kenneth, off busy
Montrose Avenue. We had the one‑story
house to ourselves. The owners, who
lived next door, also operated a bakery on Irving Park Road. They offered me a job cleaning the bakery in
the afternoons.
I accepted, and it turned out to be a
sweet job. My walk home from Schurz in
the afternoon took me by the bakery. I
stopped in, spent a couple hours scraping and washing pans and sweeping the
floor, then went home. My pay was fifteen
dollars a week.
Pete and Ginny, husband and wife in their
early thirties, owned the bakery and did the baking. They worked long hours, from about four in
the morning until I came in in the afternoon. They had no children. Ginny’s dad, a widower, lived with them in
the house next door to us. Many Chicagoans
did this—owned more than one house in the city—the additional house providing rental
income and being a source of retirement money.
I called my work in the bakery a sweet
job, and it might seem to readers that there’s nothing sweet about scullery
work. Well, the job had aspects beyond
drudgery. Pete showed me what he wanted
done, how to do it, then left me alone. I
didn’t have to punch a clock; when I’d cleaned the place for the day, I could
leave.
And it was a sweet job because of Dolores,
the girl who waited on customers in the front of the bakery. She was also a senior at Schurz; we’d both be
graduating at the end of this semester, but in a graduating class of hundreds
of students, we’d never met. We talked
to each other at the bakery, became friends, went to a couple movies together. She was fun to be with, and she gave no sign
of shattering into a thousand fragments.
A handbill announcing a square-dance class came into the
bakery. We decided that we would
go. Dolores stipulated that we go
Dutch. Her reasoning was that it wasn’t
a real date but a class. So we went,
riding the Irving Park Road streetcar to within a few blocks of where the class
was being held, and walking the rest of the way.
The class was fun, and when we left to come home, we
stepped outside into a warm winter night, and in one voice said let’s walk
home. So we did, on a night lit by
streetlights and the glow from front windows of houses and apartments. Close to an hour later we were home, safe and
sound, despite having spent all that time walking on Chicago streets.
I don’t think that I would make that same
walk today. During the year that I spent
writing this memoir, three people were wounded by gunfire in a store two blocks
north of our house on Tripp, and a man was robbed at gunpoint three blocks
south of our Tripp address. Nothing like that happened in the decade that I lived
there. And when I checked Chicago
violence on Google, I learned that citywide 800 people were shot to death in
2021.
42. What to Do
As the first semester of my senior year
was about to end, in January 1950, I was called into a counselor's office. My parents were there, and in their presence
I received the reprimand that I should have received earlier. The counselor's style was gentle but to the
point: My grades were terrible. My class cuts had not gone unrecorded. All of this was a shame. Aptitude tests, intelligence tests, and
elementary school records said that I could do much better.
Then the clincher: I had accumulated so few grade points that I
was in danger of not graduating come June.
In less time than it takes to tell about
it, I went through all the major negative emotions—shame, guilt, embarrassment,
self‑disgust, fear, and a few others whose labels escape me.
By the end of the week I had dropped out
of band and revised my spring schedule so that I would be in academic classes
the entire day—8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.—with one period off for lunch. When the spring semester started, I quit
wasting my time, and when mid‑semester report cards came out, I was on my way
to earning more grade points in one semester than I'd earned during my first
three years in the place.
Then Dolores stopped seeing me. Dolores told me that my mother had called her
and said not to go out with me anymore.
Dolores worked in the bakery with me and was also a senior at
Schurz. She was a good student and a
decent, straightforward person who could have found another way to end our
relationship without blaming my mother.
Confront my mother? Confrontation was not something I was good at,
and arguing with my mother was pointless.
My mother and I had had run‑ins before,
usually over my choice of friends, and I knew from experience that all I would
get was her usual cut‑off line: “Don't argue with me. I know I'm right!” Case closed.
Conciliatory or explanatory discussion was not her long suit.
