At Dirty-six, Part One of the Memoir "Something to Do," by William C. Paxson

Introduction

A friend asked me, “Did you like your childhood?”

I was stumped.  How was I going to answer that? The question came from the wife of an air force buddy of mine.  Several of us, all in our eighties, were sitting around reminiscing, and now someone had brought up the subject of childhood, with a question directed to me:  Did I like my childhood?

How would I know?  That was a long time ago.  And what difference does it make whether I liked my childhood?  Life goes on—and I’m happy that it does—regardless of how I feel about it. 

When I think back over my early years, I can recall dark moments, but all in all, I had a rich childhood, what with all that Chicago had to offer.  My parents gave me an inordinate amount of freedom, and I used it.  An excellent public transportation system took me anywhere I wanted to go in the city, my bicycle took me out to suburbs and farmland, and railroads took me to the other worldliness of the Fox River Valley.

I set out to describe that childhood in these pages.  A week and three pages into the project I found myself playing solitaire instead of tapping out words.  I had written about my childhood in an autobiography that I wrote a couple of decades ago, and now I was wondering, why am I doing this again?  Maybe my ego is out of control.  What kind of person writes only about himself?

So I came up with reasons for writing another autobiography.   One, this work will cover only my boyhood, from birth until I graduated from high school; the previous work attempts to cover my entire life.  Two, in rereading what I had written before, I realized I had left out material that could be of interest to readers, so what I plan to do with this version is to put in the stuff that I left out the first time around.  Three—and here I succumbed to a full-blown attack of arrogance—just about anyone could have had the adult life that I had, but only I could have had my boyhood.

You can read about it here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.   Early Stupid Boy Stunts

 

I don’t care for guesswork, so let’s start with a few facts:

 

              Who  William Charles Paxson

             What   birth

             When  November 22, 1932

            Where  Chicago, Illinois

               How   No abnormalities noted

               Why   Good question

The world began for me—I remember nothing before this—with a stupid boy stunt.  I don’t know how old I was.  Four would be a good guess.  I was running through the house, stiff-arming against a wall to stop.  My parents were watching, smiling, tolerating my need to burn up energy.  Okay, showing off is what I was really doing.

I stiff-armed to a stop against a kitchen wall, pulled back to turn around and run the other way, and couldn’t flex my arm.  The elbow was jammed, and it hurt.

That was not my first stupid boy stunt.  At some time before that, as my mother told the story, I went to a birthday party for some other little kid and came home sick. My mother called a doctor.  Doctors made house calls in those days, and one came to examine me.

“That boy’s not sick,” the doctor said. “He’s drunk!”  Someone at the party had given me beer.

Like any true sot, I recall nothing of the incident.

My mother liked to tell that story, smiling and laughing as she related how a doctor described her son as drunk.  I never did understand why she found it so entertaining, because she loathed anything to do with alcohol.  If she had had a hatchet and lived a few decades earlier, she could have marched alongside Carrie Nation, destroying taverns hither and anywhere. Instead, the thought of a blotto toddler in her own house, no less her own flesh and blood, brought on severe giggles. 

 

2.  Lou and Walt.  Billy (!)

 

He called her Lou, she called him Walt.  I called her Mother; he was Dad to me.  It would have seemed logical if I had said Mom and Dad, but Mom seemed to me to be too casual a term for the woman who was my boss. 

My parents were old enough to be my grandparents, my mother being thirty-nine years old when I was born, my father fifty-two.  I doubt that I was the product of a midlife, lust-crazed tussle.  Instead, at stake here was old-style family planning: have children to support you in your old age.

They called me Billy, a name that I hated.  Too many people, especially those who wanted to tease a little kid, knew the words to a popular folk tune titled “Billy Boy.”  In the song, "Billy Boy" is asked various questions, and the answers all deal with his quest to marry a girl who has a serious personal problem:

 

            Oh, where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?

            Oh, where have you been, Charming Billy?

            I have been to seek a wife, she's the joy of my life

            But she's a young thing and cannot leave her mother.

 

Like much folk music, “Billy Boy” lives on and on and can be heard on YouTube today.

 

3.  Who Were These People?

Lucille Catherine Beuchat

My mother liked to say of herself, “I'm a Beuchat.”  She was French‑Swiss, and proud of it.  A lot of Germans came to the United States when her forebears did during the nineteenth century.  So did a lot of Irish and Poles.  None of them, however, could hold a candle to the French‑Swiss, a minority among immigrants yet the best of the lot, to my mother's way of thinking.

 

Some of her kin spelled the name Beuchaw, others Beauchat.  Beuchat, however, is the spelling shown in the official Swiss records of births and deaths in her father's family.

 

She pronounced the name “BEWchat,” sounding the “t,” as did many of her relatives, saying the name to rhyme with “few chat.”  It was too much to expect anyone other than a Frenchman to master the Old Country pronunciation, with that heavily nasalized first syllable and the last syllable somewhere between “shah” and “shaw,” the “t” being silent.

 

My mother's father was Louis Celestine Beuchat.  He was born in La Chaux‑de‑Fonds, in the French‑speaking canton of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on September 1, 1856.  Louis's wife, Erma Marie Miche, was born in Moyenmoutier, in the department of Vosges, France, on February 12, 1860.

 

They lived about a hundred miles apart in Europe, and apparently did not meet until they arrived in America, around 1880 or 1881.  Family lore has it that she came here to be a governess, he to visit relatives.

 

By 1882, Louis and Erma were married and residing on Long Island, New York.  Their first child was born and died there, living a couple of months short of a year.  By 1886, they were in Illinois, eventually settling at Barrington, a village thirty‑five miles northwest of Chicago.  There they farmed on 445 acres and operated a dairy. 

 

It was at Barrington that my mother, Lucille Catherine Beuchat, was born, on October 13, 1893.  She was one of five children, three boys and two girls, who survived infancy.

 

My mother's birth date was the subject of a long‑running sisterly debate.  My mother maintained that her birth year was 1893, while her sister, my Aunt Elsie, argued that my mother's birth year was 1892.  My mother's retort to Elsie's position was that Elsie was jealous and wanted her (my mother) to be older than she was.

 

My mother's birth certificate shows October 13, 1893.  However, that birth certificate wasn't issued until a half century after her birth.  The birth date on the certificate was attested to by one of her brothers, my Uncle Albert.

 

Albert would have been eight or nine when my mother was born, depending upon which birth year is correct.  At that young an age, it's highly doubtful that Albert remembered exactly when his sister came into the world; he was probably out playing or milking cows at the time. 

 

Therefore, when my mother deemed it necessary to have a birth certificate, Albert probably went along with whatever birth year she told him.

 

But the 1900 census shows my mother's birth date as October 13, 1892.  The census also erroneously records her father's birth year and haphazardly spells three siblings' names:  Marcelle was written as Marshall, Elsie as Elsa, Lucille as Lucy.  It's all too easy to imagine a Yankee census taker going up to the door of the Beuchat farmhouse, listening to someone jabber at him in an American‑French patois, and then writing down what he thought he'd heard.

 

So the 1900 census was sloppy, and Aunt Elsie could have been wrong.  Besides, there's little to be gained in lying about a year.  Shaving ten years or even five from vital statistics might make a person feel younger, but dropping a mere year is about as rewarding as going on a diet by not putting cream in your coffee.  In addition, a birth year of 1892 would have meant that my mother could have applied for Social Security benefits a year earlier; I'm sure that she would have liked to have used that advantage.

 

Anyway, the principals are dead, and truth is relative when a sisterly argument is involved.  I sided with my mother:  October 13, 1893.

 

The farm left its mark on my mother long after she had moved on.  She and her siblings were bowlegged, a feature she attributed to horseback riding as a child.  Some of her happiest moments were when she talked, bragged really, about how much fun it was for the family to sit down to dinner with the hired men.  Any farm that needed hired men was a big, important farm, something she never let anyone forget. 

 

She was married twice before she met my father.  In her first marriage, she had a daughter named Verdalle, who was born on May 6, 1912.

 

An excellent seamstress, my mother often made shirts for me and my father.  Like my father, she worked in the ladies' garment industry.  It's possible that she was working in the garment industry as a seamstress, one of “the girls” as they were known, when she met my father, Walter Jacquith Paxson.

 

 

Walter Jacquith Paxson

 

The name Paxson fascinates people who like to translate it into what they think are its Latin  parts: “Son of peace.” That translation is a little shaky.  Pax stands for “peace” in Latin; that part is right.  But the Latin for “son” is filius.  Therefore, “Son of peace” would have to be written as Paxfilius. 

 

According to Elsdon C. Smith's New Dictionary of American Family Names (1973), Paxson or Paxon stands for the “son of Pack.”  Centuries ago in England, Pack was a name given to one born during Easter season; the name Pack was supposed to denote suffering.

 

People who imagine the letter t where it doesn't exist often spell and say the name as Paxton.  To be precise, that's not a misspelling but another name entirely, standing for one who came from “Pack's homestead,” a name for any of several places in the England of centuries ago.

 

Since the early 1800s, people possessing the Paxson surname have lived in America; some have left their mark on the land.  The most famous was the historian Frederick Logan Paxson (1877‑1948).  Frederick wrote several important books; his History of the American Frontier (1924) won him a Pulitzer Prize.

 

In addition, the name Paxson identifies a spot on the map of Alaska, at the junction of the Richardson and Denali highways.  The spot is named after Alvin J. Paxson, a pioneer mail carrier in the area.  Alvin established a roadhouse there about 1900; a century later the roadhouse is still about all that's there.

 

But neither the historian nor the mailman can be found in my family tree.  Nor can any of the Paxsons listed in Who Was Who in America or similar references.  As unusual as the name is, well‑known Paxsons don't seem to connect to my branch of the family.  In addition, standard biographical references show no Beuchats.  We are a conspicuously inconspicuous bunch, a comfortable and safe status.

 

The Paxsons in my family tree joined the westward flow of migrants, and one branch settled in South Bend, Indiana.  It was at South Bend that my paternal grandparents were born—William Vesey Paxson, on August 3, 1851, and Mary Alice Jacquith, on September 16, 1853.

 

Located seventy miles east of Chicago, South Bend is one of Indiana's largest cities and is probably best known as the home of the University of Notre Dame.  St. Mary's College, the second oldest Catholic women's college in the United States, is at South Bend.  For a long time the city was home to the Studebaker car company and the Bendix corporation.  South Bend is also known as “Michiana” because it is the trade and financial center of southern Michigan and northern Indiana.

 

My father was born in South Bend on March 3, 1880, a dozen years before my mother.  He was one of five children, two girls and three boys.  Unlike my mother, he had no children until I came along.

 

My father talked very little about himself.  He did tell me that as a young man he had lived in New York for a time, whether the city or somewhere else in the state I don't remember.  He also mentioned that when he moved back to South Bend one of his neighbors was Knute Rockne, the legendary Notre Dame football coach.  This was not a matter of name‑dropping on my father's part.  Instead, he had a lot of respect for Rockne and liked to talk about his accomplishments.

 

As a young man, my father became a cutter in the ladies' garment industry.  Although called “ladies’ garment industry,” its factories made clothing for any gender, any age.

 

He came close to the description of a cutter that Benjamin Stolberg put in his history of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, Tailor's Progress:  The Story of a Famous Union and the Men Who Made It (1944).

 

According to Stolberg, at the time that the union came into existence it consisted of people working in four crafts—cloak makers, pressers, seamstresses, and cutters.  Each craft, Stolberg said, was populated by people with unique personalities.  The cloak makers were philosophers, kibitzers, and folk commentators; the pressers were manual laborers easily satisfied with simple things; and the seamstresses or dressmakers were “the girls,” young women who sat hour after hour, pumping the treadles of sewing machines, visions of romance and marriage filling their heads.  As for the cutters, Stolberg wrote, “They are middle‑class in outlook, like to live well, are good dressers, and good poker players.”

 

I remember my father as being an absolute wizard at poker or any game.  He wasn't bound up in class labels, so he would probably shrug his shoulders at being called middle-class.  He was also a good dresser, as good stands for clean and neat, but not natty, for he didn't have a lot of money to spend on clothes.  His suits were nicely pressed, his tie knotted firmly, a fedora atop his head; his shoes were always shined, their gleam the product of the time, polish, and spit that he devoted to them.  As for living well, that was limited to enjoying as many baseball games as his money would buy and drinking whatever beer he could afford and could sneak by my mother.

 

He and my mother were married in Chicago, on March 3, 1926.  It was on my father's forty‑sixth birthday that this French‑English alliance occurred.  He was short, about five‑four; she was a couple of inches taller.  The first photographs I have of them together were taken in 1933 or 1934; the photos show them to be people of no extraordinary appearance.  He was pudgy and soft‑looking, with a rectangular face longer than it was wide; a mustache that he often sported concealed a slight harelip.  She was a fleshy woman at that time, but a woman who looked lithe and coquettish in a solo picture taken fifteen years earlier.

 

When the farm girl and the cutter got married, Verdalle, my mother's child by her first marriage, was fourteen.  So at the age of forty‑six and previously childless, my father married a woman with a teen‑aged daughter.  He was now a stepfather.  Six years later he would be a father in his own right.

 4.  Renters

Lou and Walt were renters, shelling out money every month to pay for a roof over their heads.  They rented furnished, a more expensive method of paying for shelter rather than having your own furniture and renting an unfurnished house or apartment.  And renting furnished enabled renters to get by with little more than the clothes on their backs. 

During the eighteen years that I lived at home we moved a half dozen times.  For me to write simply that “we moved” does not give credit to my parents for doing the hard work of finding a place to live. 

Assuming that my parents had a list of available rentals—obtainable from Chicago’s several newspapers or by word of mouth—a telephone would help get more information.  But we didn’t have a phone in the house at that time.  Here, it would be helpful to have a friendly neighbor who would lend a phone; otherwise, it’s off to find a pay phone (and make sure you’ve got enough change with you).   Then there’s the need to look at the property before deciding. To perform any kind of a look-see, a car-less family in Chicago would have to rely on a streetcar, bus, el, subway, maybe all of the above.

And there’s the required discussion:  Would this be the right place for us, can we afford it, etc, etc?

My father was the least talkative man I have ever known, and the Quaker in him was not prone to arguing.  He was also an ardent fan of the Chicago Cubs.  At some point the Cubs fan in him must have prevailed, for by the time I entered kindergarten we were living near the Cubs’ home, Wrigley Field.

5.  Dirty-six Days                                                        

In the family archives is an undated photograph cut from a newspaper.  It’s a picture of my kindergarten class at Chicago’s Alexander Hamilton elementary school.  There we are, twenty bright shining faces all in our places—with the home address given for each child.  Things were different then, for I doubt very much whether an editor today would print the home address of anyone of any age unless that address was newsworthy.

We lived in the 3600 block of North Ravenswood Avenue.  We called the place Dirty-six because of the coal ash from trains that ran across the street.  Our house was a few blocks from the Alexander Hamilton elementary school.

Here the plot thickens, because Chicago is laid out in a grid of blocks, and in Chicago a block oriented north-south is twice as long as a block oriented east-west.  The general rule is eight blocks equal a mile, provided that you are counting the long side of the block rather than the short side, so if I wanted to tell you how far in miles or parts of a mile that I walked to get to school, the few blocks I walked to school measured 1.8 north-south (long) blocks and 2.5 east-west (short) blocks.   I didn’t do the math, but I stand by my answer:  a few blocks—not far at all.  And it was all over level ground, neither uphill nor down, and I never had to walk it in a blizzard.

But would my parents have allowed me to walk that distance alone?  That’s a puzzler.  The neighborhood was safe—safety being a factor when talking about Chicago locales—but I was a puny runt who could have injured himself stumbling over a pebble.  How did I get to and from school?  Neither of my parents drove, we didn’t have a car, and the route to and from school was along streets not served by public transit.  The only memory I have of kindergarten is one day I became ill at school and a girl from a higher grade walked me home.

Little Billy Paxson, age
2 years, or thereabouts

Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, was east of our house.  Addison Street, south of our house, ran to the front of the ballpark, Waveland Avenue, north of us, to the bleachers.  Bus service ran on Addison to cover the mile to the park.  My father knew baseball, and the Cubs were his team.  There’s no doubt in my mind that he brought a lot of weight to the choice to live at the North Ravenswood address.

Across the street from our front door were tracks of the Milwaukee Road—the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad (CMStP&P).  The Milwaukee Road was the third railroad to connect the Midwest with the Pacific Northwest, following the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern.  Besides serving a transcontinental railroad, the tracks across the street carried commuter trains to and from Chicago’s northern suburbs.    

Trains at that time burned coal for fuel, and coal is one of the dirtiest fuels around.  Rightly or wrongly, my parents blamed coal ash in the smoke from locomotives across the street for the pneumonia that struck me down in kindergarten.  That is, I was told that pneumonia was the culprit, but it could have been any sort of respiratory crud that once every four years sickened me between Thanksgiving and Christmas and kept me out of school for a week.

At Dirty-six my bed was in a corner of a room at the front of the house.  For a time, a visitor entering through the front of the house would be greeted by the sight of a bed with a sick kid in it.  A doctor could offer no cure for the pneumonia, my mother said, so she called in a Christian Science practitioner.

Exactly what a Christian Science practitioner does, I don’t know.  From reading online info about the subject, I gather that it involves prayer and counseling.  Regardless, I recovered and went outside to play in the snow.

Because of the coal ash or for some other reason, we moved.  In a classification scheme of human migrations, this move could have been labeled an “Inner-city Crosstown Streetcar-assisted Family Relocation.”

The truth of the matter is that I don’t remember how we moved, but it could have been performed this way:  We walked the short distance from the Dirty-six house to the Irving Park Road streetcar line, took a streetcar west to the neighborhood of Irving Park, got off, and walked another short distance to our new home.

 ***

Preview of a Coming Attraction

I haven't posted in a while, been busy putting together a book-length project, a memoir that I'm going to run here in serial form.

Its title is Something to Do:  A Memoir of a Chicago Boyhood, 1932-1951.

The first part will appear on Monday, April 18.  Subsequent parts will appear on following Mondays.

Parts of this memoir have been published before, in an autobiography.  That autobiography attempted to cover my entire life; this memoir will cover only my boyhood, from infancy until I graduated from high school.

It gives glimpses of what life was like during the Great Depression and on the home front during World War II.

Its pages tell of family drama, childhood trauma, and stupid boy stunts.

You can expect to see about five to eight pages a week, on Mondays.  The whole thing will take about tw0 months to go through. 

Comments are appreciated.

***

Ride the L--Virtual Rides in Chicago

Some time back I posted several pieces about public transit in my home town, Chicago.  I have since found that there's more to be said, in this case shown.  Here are videos of rides on the city's L trains, the elevated railways, operated by the Chicago Transit Authority.

The first ride is a trip in the Loop, the city's downtown business and entertainment district.   I particularly like this one because of the camera placement--in the front of the lead car.  The sensation of going around a curve causes momentary wonderment (panic?):  Are we going off the tracks and will we fall to the street below?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oAVx6It5MM

The second ride is a morning, wintertime trip that a commuter might take.  This ride comes with colorful snowflake patterns on the window.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-k5h-SfjNU&list=PL0sTc_CuqtURaOftjTXX5iRMCOasE1M9&index=14

I have ridden both of these routes, years ago.  However, I rarely rode the L to go to the Loop, because the subway was faster as was a commuter train on the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad.

***

Train Time 🚆🚆⛒⛒

In cruising around the web, I came across a site that took me back to a part of my life that I enjoyed tremendously.  It was also a part of American life that has largely disappeared.

The site is chicagorailfan.com, by Bill Vandervoort.

Chicago, my hometown, was and still is the railroad hub of the United States.  You could show this on a map of the U.S. by sketching in train routes, joining them at Chicago, and then dropping a big blob of ink on their common juncture.  It would be an ugly map, one representing some yet-undiscovered species of humongous spider-centipede with spindly legs and a bulbous body.

At one time, eight large terminal buildings in Chicago’s Loop—the city’s downtown commercial and entertainment district—were the arrival and departure points for the passenger trains of 47 railroads.  Many of those railroads are now gone, and half of the terminals have been demolished or put to other uses. 

Of those 47 railroads, I rode on six; I also rode trains that went nowhere near Chicago, including one in England.  I suppose there was a lot to gripe about when traveling by train, but I was always hypnotized by just sitting there, watching the world go by.  And wondering: What is it like to live in that town?  Who lives in that house?   Why have those people let their backyard become a trash pile?   Along with other pointless thoughts.

I was an economy class traveler.  Most of my trips were short, and if I did travel overnight I bought a ticket in coach and got whatever sleep I could sitting up. 

Amenities and creature comforts were better than a stagecoach but somewhat scarce nevertheless.

The cars were heated, but in a commuter train packed full of people a lot of heat wasn’t necessary.   Air conditioning could have existed--that I don’t remember; passengers could open the windows, but at the risk of being pelted by an ember from the stack of a coal-burning locomotive.

Food wasn’t served on the short-haul routes I generally traveled; you had to bring your own or go hungry.  Drinking water was obtained from a tank at one end of the car and consumed from a paper cup that was foldable, reusable, and disposable. I’ve read that in the early days of rail travel, a single community cup was used by all passengers until someone read about germ theory and pushed through a few basic ideas about heath and sanitation.

At one end of the car was a small closet with a lockable door.  Inside was a toilet.  Lift the lid and see … the ground rushing by.  At any given moment trains were crisscrossing the land depositing human waste hither and thither.  I think that passengers were cautioned not to use the toilet when the train was stopped, but I can remember a conductor walking through the car and locking the toilet door as a train pulled into a station.

I had my first train ride when I was eight years old, to go with my parents from Chicago to South Bend, Indiana, for a funeral.  In my teens and until I was about twenty-one, trains were recreation and transportation for me. Then I bought a car.

It was great fun, and I’d do it again, especially since I’m old enough now to use the bar car.

***

A Shot? I've Been Here Before

Earlier this month I spent a few minutes in a large building at Cal Expo, there to get a shot to protect me from the corona virus.  I was surprised at how smoothly the whole thing went—a long line of people slowly moving forward toward nurses who injected each person, scheduled the next shot, and then told each person to sit in a nearby chair for fifteen minutes. If no adverse reactions were observed during that period, we could leave.

I sat down and reminded myself, I’ve been here before.

When I was in elementary school in Chicago, we were told one day in class that we were going to be given a shot that would help protect us from a serious illness.  What exact language was used I don’t remember.  We were little kids in the early grades right after kindergarten, and I doubt that our teachers used words like immunization and inoculation. We were told, however, that it would hurt, but only for a little while, and that we could have our parents there if we wanted.

On the appointed day, the entire student body, close to 300 children, gathered in the school’s basement lunchroom.  Quite a few adults were there, easily visible, towering over the mob of children.  Both of my parents worked, and I had not asked them to be present.

Slowly, inexorably, relentlessy the line moved forward, and in the crush of people—children, parents, nurses, school employees—someone grabbed my arm and I felt a stick.  At least, I guess I felt something stick me, but you have to understand:  That was in the 1930s, a heck of lot of years have gone by since then, my memory might not be the most accurate, and I was a little boy with heroes in the westerns who could be gut-shot by a .45 and walk into a bar and drink half a bottle of bourbon.  I wasn’t about to say ouch.

What disease we were being protected against I don’t know.  I tried to get an answer from the internet, which gave me several choices—smallpox, whooping cough, diphtheria, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and polio.  A vaccine for polio didn’t come along until years later, so it would have had to have been something else. 

Back to the present.  My fifteen minutes at Cal Expo were ended.  I hadn’t yet started frothing at the mouth or whatever kind of adverse reaction I might have had, so a nurse told me I could go.

*** 

Waiting for.....Autumn.... Fall.....Whatever

It's now been 275.31416 5/9 days since rain last fell in Sacramento. That's an exaggeration, of course, but our long, dry summer--except for a few drops of precipitation one August morning--is running its usual course. It's the kind of weather that makes it hard for TV weather folks to think of new and entertaining ways to avoid saying "more of the same."

Before I came to Sacramento I had lived in Houston and Chicago. Houston, besides having hot, muggy summers, gave residents another treat in the winter--the blue norther. I could stand on the flight line, which offered an uninterrupted view to the horizon, and watch a line of clouds colored in blues and black roll in from the north and feel the temperature drop. And that night my buddies and I would drive into town and stand outside a convenience mart drinking beer and people would walk by and ask, "Aren't you cold?"

"Cold? I'm from New Jersey (Connecticut, Boston, Chicago). This ain't cold."

Chicago weather was another story. In a city that offered mile after mile of fine beaches on Lake Michigan and plenty of municipal swimming pools, there were summer heat waves and summer days too cold to warrant a swim.

And then there was a day in February 1951 when the temperature in Chicago dropped to 15 degrees below zero. That day stuck so sharply in my memory that I felt it necessary to verify it with National Weather Service online records.

Did that really happen? Yes. it did. And that was the last winter I lived in Chicago. And to be clear, I left not because of the weather but because some nut in Korea started a war and I enlisted in the air force before I could be drafted.


American River Parkway, October 18, 2020
Fall colors beginning to show.

The air force moved me around, and I eventually arrived in Sacramento early in May 1957. Six months later the air force transferred me again; other moves followed. Ah, but the military works in strange and wondrous ways, and in 1966 I was back in Sacramento, and am still here more than a half century later.

It's a benign climate. For much of the year you can plan a picnic on Monday for Saturday and know that you're going to have good weather. It's hard to say that about a lot of other places.

But it's boring.

By this time every year, I'm ready for rain and clouds; gimme some gloom. I want to need a jacket when I go out. I want to hear geese honking when they fly over the house. A few appear on the parkway, but they could be permanent party who see no reason to migrate anywhere.

As for fall colors--next month.

I'm waiting.

***