From previous excerpt-- "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."
37. Early Days at Schurz
Now Known as "er, Bill"
Early in my days at Schurz, my friends began calling me Bill instead of Billy, the name by which I was known in elementary school. The latter was a name that my mother liked and I hated. But when she heard my friends call me Bill, she picked it up at home. Except that her mind tended to be cluttered when both my father and I were present, and she often confused our names. Thus, I learned to answer to “Walt, er Bill.”
The Musician
As a freshman at Schurz, I enrolled in Beginning Band and was taught to play alto saxophone. In my sophomore year I moved up to Intermediate Band and ROTC Band. Beginning in my junior year, I played in Concert Band, the highest level.
My grades in band were top‑notch; in all other subjects my grades were barely passing. My homework was slipshod, and I cut a lot of classes, mainly making sure that I was present for home room, the major roll call of the day.
While not majoring in academics and not majoring in being a good student, I also did not major in girls. I was shy, and picky. The only girls I dated were ones I came to know well, either at school or through jobs I held.
I did poorly in high school, except for Band. Band was fun; everything else was boring. My report cards looked like they belonged to a demented person with two personalities, the band musician and the student‑in‑name‑only. The band musician always got an S (“Superior”). In any other subject, the student‑in‑name‑only got an F (“Fair”), the lowest passing grade, or a rare G (“Good”), one step up from an F.
My parents signed the report cards and sent them back to school without question. Perhaps they were influenced by my grades in band, or maybe they decided not to agitate a kid who was staying out of trouble. This is a cliché you hear from a lot of parents: “Well, he's not the smartest kid, but he does stay out of trouble.”
Cliché or not, the boys and girls I hung out with were, in the word of the time, square. No one in our crowd smoked or drank. There were no wild parties. As a group we went to movies and hung out in a North Side landmark, the Buffalo Ice Cream Parlor. In all, we were so well behaved and so law‑abiding that any of us would have qualified for the nickname of Goody Two‑shoes.
Red Scare
Besides being square, we were also pragmatists of the teen‑age species. As teen pragmatists, we reduced life to what was important, having fun that is, and surviving high school; a lot of other stuff got shunted aside.
Consequently, we largely ignored the “red scare” of the time. Politicians, fear‑mongers on the far right, newspaper articles, radio commentators, and movie newsreels were saying: World War II is history. Naziism is dead. But we're still not safe. Now there's a new threat—Communism.
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.
41. A Sweet Job
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.
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.
And I had another distraction, a more important one. That is, I was beginning to wonder what I was going to do with myself—career, work, that sort of stuff. These were things that I should have thought about earlier, I suppose, but until graduation loomed in my face, I had not acknowledged that there would be a tomorrow. And tomorrow was here.
I had no skills, no wish to do anything in particular. I could get a factory job after graduation—anyone could do that—but otherwise graduation was a wall beyond which I had not looked. Having played the saxophone in a high school band was no guarantee that I could play professionally, and I didn't have enough gumption to try to forge a career in a field as competitive as music.
Then there was the matter of talent. In this respect I was lucky enough to know what I did not know. I did not know how to play by ear, and I had little sense of rhythm. I could read music, which helped, but as for rhythm, well, it was a band, and a band has a bass drum. If it wasn't for a bass drummer pounding out the downbeat, I would have been waltzing while everyone else was marching.
My grades were a long way from good enough to get me into college, even if there had been money for tuition and books. Moreover, my mother's acceptance‑of‑things‑as‑they‑are still rang in my ears: “People like us just don't go to college, Billy.”
When graduation came, my parents attended the ceremony as did Aunt Elsie and Uncle Carl. After it was over, my aunt and uncle drove us back to the house on North Kenneth. My parents went inside to go to bed, and Elsie and Carl left for Elgin.
I sat on the front steps. It was a mild June night, quiet and peaceful; even the traffic on normally busy Montrose Avenue seemed hushed for a change. For the longest time I sat there in the dark, literally and figuratively. Other people—Gandhi, Joan of Arc, Jesus, Lawrence of Arabia, to name a few—had gone through similar crises and emerged with an idea or goal that guided them through their lives. But as I sat there I could come up with no plan, grand or trivial. The best I could do was a sort of muted soliloquy: “Hmm. What now?”
I didn't have long to wait for an answer. In North Korea, the Communist dictator Kim Il Sung was massing his troops for an invasion of South Korea. Kim, a native Korean, had fought with Communist forces against the Japanese in the 1930s. When Japan overran Korea in World War II, Kim fled to Russia and remained a guest of the Soviet Union until 1945.
In 1945, at the end of World War II, the Japanese left Korea. By agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union, United States forces occupied the southern half of the peninsula, and Soviet troops occupied the northern half. The dividing line was the 38th parallel of north latitude.
When Soviet troops moved into North Korea, Kim Il Sung returned from Russia. The Soviets maneuvered Kim into power and supported him, helping him build the North Korean Army, and using him in their efforts to institute Communism in North Korea. He was, in other words, the leader of the Soviet puppet government in North Korea.
In December 1948, Soviet occupation forces withdrew from North Korea, leaving Kim on his own to run North Korea. Kim's counterpart in the democratic government south of the 38th parallel was Syngman Rhee. In North Korea, Kim built up a massive, well‑equipped army, while Syngman Rhee's troops were poorly equipped and poorly trained.
By early 1950, Kim had decided to seize control of the entire Korean peninsula. In addition, he wanted to dispose of several South Korean Communist leaders whom he detested, but they were on the other side of the 38th parallel; accordingly, he had to get to them first. Moreover, Kim's economic policies in the north weren't working, so when things aren't going well at home one recourse is to start a war somewhere else.
On June 25, 1950, Kim Il Sung's army invaded South Korea. It was the Sunday after I graduated from high school.
***
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