Part Five in the Memoir of the Generic Old Man:: "Getting around in Chicago, Christian Scientists, and Canaries" (?)

 

15.  Getting around in Chicago

Hail to the Grid

We—the boys and I who hung out at the corner store—played a game that elevated our activities above stupid boy stunts.  The game used Chicago’s layout, a grid. 

The game’s rules were simple:  Starting from the corner store, each player had to name as many north‑ and south‑running streets as he could and name them in the proper order.  When each player had finished with the north‑south streets, we applied the same rules to the east‑west streets.  The winner was the boy who named the most streets in the right order.  It was a game without prizes, the only reward being the chance to do what boys do well—show off, in this case knowledge.

The grid is a planning tool, a means of organizing urban growth.  It is also a map, a systematic ordering of streets and addresses that help a person get around in Chicago.  The explanation given here is one I took from the Chicago Studies project at the University of Chicago: 

Chicago streets run either N-S or E-W.  Exception: there are a few diagonals.

Every street has a PREFIX—N-S or E-W—to tell you how it's oriented.

The street grid has a CENTER at State and Madison, downtown, in the Loop

Street numbers go up as you move AWAY from the center.

Address numbers increase by 100 per BLOCK.

Eight Chicago long blocks equal one mile.  A short block is one-half the length of a long block.     

EVEN numbers are on the North/West side of the street.

Chicago's street SIGNS reference the grid, with the name of a street and its prefix

MAJOR streets mark each mile away from the center.

About diagonals:  Diagonal streets--there are few of them--follow trails of indigenous people.  Other diagonals are not streets but interruptions and barriers—embankments of railroad tracks and expressways. 

 Streetcars, and More

Streetcars, buses, subways, and els (elevated trains) took me from my home to anywhere else in the city. 

When I was growing up, Chicago had an excellent public transportation system.  I’ve read that it still does, and Bill Vandervoort, on his Chicago Transit and Railfan Website, makes a point that is just as true today as it was decades ago: “Chicago is an area where public transportation is extensively used, even by those who can afford automobiles.”

Our family did not have a car, and among neighbors who did own a car, it was a thing left parked during the workweek, in a garage, or sitting by the curb, stationary, like a chrome and steel altar, worshipped from across the front lawn until it could be fired up for a weekend drive to the country or used just to go for a spin.

So we walked, from our house to the streetcar line on Irving Park Road two-and-a-half blocks south, or one-and-one-half blocks north to the bus stop on Montrose Avenue.  These were north-south blocks, each one an eighth of a mile long.  An east-west block was half that distance.

The Irving Park Road streetcar line was a major thoroughfare with grocery stores, clothing and department stores, restaurants, and bars.  The Montrose Avenue bus was good for trips to the beach or a fishing pier at Lake Michigan.  Both routes offered frequent service and connected to other routes and types of public transit.

We lived seven miles northwest of downtown—the Loop—but you couldn’t get there from here.  A transfer was necessary, to the el from a streetcar or bus line.  Some el trains dove underground and became subway cars.  The subway went under the Chicago River, and puddles of water were visible from subway car windows, allowing a rider to wonder if the tunnel was leaking, and, if so, would the whole thing collapse?

The trip to downtown from our front door took forty minutes to an hour via the city’s system of public transit.  An alternative was a Chicago and Northwestern Railroad commuter train, from a depot in our neighborhood to its terminal just outside the Loop.  The train was faster, more expensive, and didn’t run as often.

A streetcar was driven up front by a motorman—that was his job title, although it sounds like the name of a cartoon character.  The conductor stood on the back platform and collected fares and handed out transfers.  The conductor also had the task of hooking up the trolley pole at the back of the car if it became disengaged from the overhead wire, which sometimes happened, especially when making turns.  Electrical power of 600 volts DC was supplied via the trolley pole from an overhead wire.

When I was a kid I paid seven cents to get on board a streetcar and obtain a transfer.  The transfer was a coupon that allowed its holder to do an unlimited amount of riding and transferring in the system.  Prices have gone up since then, and I read today that the fare system is a complexity of zones, turnstiles, transit cards, and separate fees for fares and transfers.

When I was young, I got a kick out of a streetcar ride.  As an adult I have ridden public transportation in Chicago, other U.S. cities, and England, and it's easy to find fault with it, but there is always one aspect of it that I truly like today—I can leave the driving to someone else.

“Don’t go to the South Side”

At some time during my years at Belding, I developed a serious case of wanderlust:  I simply had to see what was beyond this place called Irving Park, so I traveled.  I walked a lot at first, then used public transit as my excursions grew longer.  To return home, I usually did the simplest thing—retraced my path.  No map, no great navigational skill needed.

My parents gave me an inordinate amount of freedom.  They never questioned where I’d been, what I’d been doing.

Only once did they lay out any kind of rules for me: “Don’t go to the South Side.”

That was, and still is, fairly common advice about Chicago, and it’s advice that needs to contemplated before blindly following it.  It’s advice meant to keep a person alive and safe, for bad things did happen to people on the South Side.  And, rightly or wrongly, the bad things seemed to be associated with the South Side’s racially segregated neighborhoods.

But the South Side is the largest chunk of the city, and it’s virtually impossible to live in the city or to be a tourist visiting it without going to the South Side.  In the South Side are major universities, teaching hospitals, beautiful parks, great museums, a major league ballpark, and the longest stretch of Lake Michigan beach in the city.  The South Side also has enclaves of the wealthy, neighborhoods of ethnic and cultural diversity—and pockets of poverty, despair, and crime. 

As a child, I obeyed my parents’ rule and did not go to the South Side—except one time when, as a joke for my own amusement, I stepped across the Madison Street dividing line for a few seconds, just to say to myself that I’d been to the South Side.  I also went with school-led field trips to sites on the South Side.  And as an adult I drove my family into the South Side so that we could go to the Museum of Science and Industry, one of the best educational bangs-for-the-buck anywhere.

But as Little Billy Paxson, I did what my mother and father told me to do.

16.  Our Sunday Morning Ritual 

We had a Sunday morning ritual that began with church.  My mother was the major domo of everything in our family, including religion.  From religion, we went directly to the Harz Mountain Canaries.  Sounds like quite a jump; no problem.  

Onward Christian Scientists

My mother opted for Christian Science.  Or the little storefront church on Central Avenue.  Or the church on West Cullom that performed immersion baptisms.  Depart she did, but she always came back to Christian Science.

Christian Science was the creation of Mary Baker Eddy (1821‑1910).  Eddy injured herself by slipping and falling on ice in February 1866.  To heal from the fall, she recuperated by resting in bed and reading the Bible.   

As a result of that experience, Eddy claimed that her religious beliefs and not medical intervention cured the injuries that she had sustained.  Thereafter, she devoted herself to teaching the healing aspects of Christianity.  To name her version of Christian healing, Eddy coined the term Christian Science.  To have a pulpit, she founded the Church of Christ, Scientist.  To spread the word, she wrote Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875).

Rooted in the Bible, Eddy's beliefs derive from Christianity.  But how does the word “Science” fit in?  Or the job title “Christ, Scientist”?

It's hard to imagine the world's best‑known hippie leaning over a beaker or timing rats in a maze.  Of course, that's a perspective taken well after Eddy.  Still, it's even harder to flash back to Eddy's time and lump Christ in with scientists whom she should have known of—Darwin, Pasteur, Mendel.

Eddy wrote in Science and Health that “The term Science properly understood”—meaning the way Eddy understood it— “refers only to the laws of God and to His government of the universe, inclusive of man.”

Well, of course.  Nothing says that you can't define terms any which way you want to.  Here Eddy had the support of the authoritative Humpty Dumpty, in Through the Looking Glass: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, “it means what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” 

 Science and Health omits any reference to laboratory science or the systematic pursuit of knowledge via the scientific method.  That kind of stuff is for the literal, logical mind, not the mind of the true believer.  Or maybe I missed a key definition, which would be easy to do, considering that Science and Health is cursed hard reading, thick with page after page of assertions, non sequiturs, and abstract ideas. 

Science and Health anticipates the skeptic: “Because the Science of Mind,” another of Eddy's terms for the healing power of her faith, “seems to bring into dishonor the ordinary scientific schools, which wrestle with material observations alone, this Science has met with opposition; but if any system honors God, it ought to receive aid, not opposition, from all thinking persons.”  The back of her hand to the nonbeliever.  If you don't believe in Christian Science, if you don't see the light as lit by Mary Baker Eddy, you are not a thinking person.

Christian Science especially appeals to people who do not like the idea that an all‑powerful God allows sickness and death.  According to Christian Science, God is wholly good and is a God of love; that is the only reality.  Sickness and death are not real.  Therefore, faith in God will help a person rise above the seemingly real aspects of sin, sickness, suffering, and death.  

Christian Scientists who carry their faith to extremes are the ones who refuse medical attention when deathly ill.  Those are the Christian Scientists who make headlines.  Other Christian Scientists go to doctors, the use of which is not forbidden by church doctrine. 

Christian Scientists develop and strengthen their faith by prayer and reading.  A daily lesson is important to Christian Scientists; the lesson consists of passages read from two works—the Bible and Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health.  

The church operates reading rooms that provide access to Christian Science publications.  Church services are largely devoid of ritual and are conducted by members elected to serve as readers.  The church has no clergy, but it does have a cadre of practitioners who devote full time to healing via prayer and counseling. 

My mother the skeptic bought into Mary Baker Eddy's creed.  But my mother had another approach, besides the healing aspects, to Christian Science: “There are so many well‑to‑do people who are Christian Scientists,” she liked to say.  Maybe she was hoping for some of that wealth to rub off on us.  She simplified Christian Science beliefs into the catchphrase “mind over matter.”  To the Christian Scientist, mind and God are the same.  To be more precise, there are, or could be, two minds—the human or Mortal Mind, and the real or divine Mind.  Noting the capitalization is important for anyone who wants to follow Eddy's references to Mortal Mind and Mind.

The Mortal Mind doesn't count, according to Eddy, for it is “Nothing claiming to be something. . . the opposite of God, or good.”

However, Mind, the divine Mind, is “the only I, or Us, the only spirit, Soul, divine Principle, substance, Life, Truth, Love; the one God; not that which is in man, but the divine Principle, or God, of whom man is the full and perfect expression; Deity, which outlines but is not outlined.”

Now that explains everything.  And makes me wonder, in my crabbiest moments, whether Mary Baker Eddy hit her head when she fell on the ice.

If I stubbed my toe, my mother would say to me, “Just tell yourself it doesn't hurt.  It's all mind over matter, Billy.  The toe doesn't really hurt.  You're just letting yourself believe that it hurts.”

Cursing and grunting “Ouch!” were frowned upon; neither provided the true cure, and cursing, of course, was vulgar.

By my mother's expedient credo of mind over matter it was not necessary to pray over the sore toe or read something written by Mary Baker Eddy; all I had to do was stop wincing and tell myself to believe that “It doesn't hurt.”  Go through this often enough, and you build up a pretty good tolerance for pain.

Despite my mother's good health, she complained of always being tired.  “I'm so tired,” she'd say, and in a few days she'd be off to see a doctor or buy a new and different medicine.

She was picky about doctors.  A doctor had to find something wrong with her and prescribe a suitable medicine.  Most doctors understood the unspoken rules and complied.  Otherwise, those who told her that nothing was the matter with her, would be abruptly dumped.  Away from the doctor's ears my mother would deliver her valedictory: “The old fool.  What does he know?”

And despite her belief in “mind over matter,” her dresser top was a clutter of vials and bottles of nostrums and potions.  Some of the stuff was prescribed, some she'd read about or saw advertised, and some she'd heard about from a fellow sufferer.

From time to time, my mother went shopping for religions.  We were Presbyterians for a while, and occasional attendees at a storefront church where the pews were folding chairs and where the music and services were very energetic, to say the least.  But no matter where she strayed, she always came back to Christian Science, bringing along my father and me, who followed meekly in the footsteps of our shepherd.

Now, About Those Canaries

In the grand scheme of life-and-stuff it is truly propitious that we were Christian Scientists while we lived on north Tripp.  Timing was everything.  When services ended at church, we hurried home rather than miss a minute of a radio program that starred . . . canaries.

Canaries singing on the radio were popular from the 1930s into the 1950s.  The most popular singing canaries were a breed called Roller.  A little of their story is told in this excerpt from the website Old Time Radio Catalog.        

“Coal miners probably brought the birds into the mines so their song could help brighten their dark environs, but they soon discovered that the tiny birds were especially susceptible to the poison gasses which collected in some mines. As long as the canary kept singing the miners were safe, but if the bird expired it was time to get out. Miners in Germany's Harz Mountains were able to breed a canary [the Harz roller] whose song was so melodious that the birds became too valuable for use in the mines.

“Germany was still reeling from the economic ravages of the First World War in 1926 when ambitious Max Stern realized that German thrift and industry would serve him well in America. He set about collecting on old debts to finance his trip to the New World when one friend, a pet shop owner, said that he could only repay with 5,000 Harz roller canaries. Stern accepted the birds and negotiated free passage to New York aboard the Hamburg-American Steamship Line. Although he arrived in New York not understanding a word of English, he managed to sell his singing birds at the Astor Place John Wannamaker Department Store.

 “After opening an office at 36 Cooper Square, Stern returned to his native Germany several times, returning each time with more and more of the colorful, melodious birds which he sold to Sears-Roebuck, Woolworths, R.H. Macy, and other retailers. By 1932, Stern was the largest livestock importer in the United States and began supplying feed with the Hartz Mountain line of pet products [with a t added to the name].

“A small craze graced the radio waves in the form of Singing Canary programs. One of the earliest examples was the Mutual Network offering, American Radio Warblers on Sunday afternoons from 1937 to 1952. The program was sponsored by American Bird Products, a birdseed supplier, and featured organist Preston Sellers with canaries in cages near the organ. The Hartz Mountain Master Canaries began broadcasting from WGN Chicago. Since the Hartz Mountain line had expanded beyond birdseed, the program featured sketches of other pets pitching products like dog chews and cat toys.”

So our Sunday ritual ended to the tune of the chirping and singing of canaries, accompanied by an orchestra or organ playing well-known classics.  It was a cheerful ending to a solemn morning.

***

 

To Irving Park Part Two of "A Memoir of a Chicago Boyhood, 1932-1951"

 

. . . 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 to our new home. 

6.  To Irving Park 

____________

A Little Bit of History

The name "Chicago" is derived from an indigenous peoples’ word for a wild relative of the onion.  Put another way, the place smelled.

The land occupied by Chicago had once been prairie favored by indigenous peoples who portaged through the area to get to and from Lake Michigan.

Nothing was going to stop westward expansion, and Chicago, with its access to waterways, attracted hordes of settlers.

Chicago was incorporated as a town in 1833 and as a city in 1837, when its population reached 4,000.

Some settlers built a town that became a Chicago suburb named for the writer Washington Irving.

In that town, on a windy October evening in 1871, residents sitting in cupolas and at second-story windows looked across the prairie and watched much of Chicago go up in flames.

The Great Chicago Fire destroyed one-third of the city and left more than 100,000 people homeless. Contrary to popular belief, the cause of the fire has never been established, but Mrs. O’Leary’s cow took the blame for knocking over a lantern (pity the Irish immigrant).

___________

It was a two-stage move.  In the first stage, we lived in an apartment building around the corner from the school that I would attend. After several weeks there, we traveled to a house in the 4200 block of North Tripp Avenue.  We rented the first floor; the owners lived upstairs.  We saw and heard them so rarely that we might as well have had the place to ourselves. 

Besides a living room, kitchen, and bathroom, we had three bedrooms.  Grocery stores and streetcar lines were nearby, as were several movie theaters and a Sears Roebuck store. 

I remember being disappointed.  It looked like Dirty-six without the blackening of coal ash.  I don’t know what I was expecting, something greater maybe, but this was just more of the same.  When I think back, I can see that my little kid’s mind had a lot of growing up to do. 

Anyway, we were now residents of Irving Park, and renting a house where we would live for more than a decade.

7.  Irving Park Road:  Nomenclature Problems

Irving Park came into being from farmland and for years was a community separate from Chicago.  Irving Park Road joined the two communities.  Chicago's growth swallowed up Irving Park, and the smaller community lost its identity. 

Irving Park Road, however, lived on.  It became a major east-west, cross-state highway in northern Illinois, and when I was growing up it had parking lanes and traffic lanes on both sides of the street along with streetcar rails down the middle.  Looking down from Google Earth today, I can see a similar pattern, except that the streetcar rails are gone.

It would seem traditional that roads are country thoroughfares while streets and avenues are found in cities, but, no, we had a road inside one of the largest cities on earth.  Many people, perhaps influenced by the road’s width and amount of traffic, referred to it as a boulevard.

This is just another little lesson that it is difficult to be precise in an imprecise world.

And for me to say that we lived in Irving Park is another dose of imprecision, or at least borderline imprecision.  Our new home was in Old Irving Park, which “is a neighborhood within Chicago’s Irving Park community,” according to the Old Irving Park Association.  That association also says, “These borders were determined by the original two farms that dominated the landscape when the area was first developed in the 1870s.” 

8.  Tonsils Out:  Snip, Snip

Sometime after we settled into the house on Tripp, my tonsils were removed.  Having a tonsillectomy in those days was common, a rite of passage like pimples or the first sexual experience.  If you grew to be ten years old and still had your tonsils, there was something the matter with you.  Or maybe something was wrong with your parents for not having the operation done.

The operation usually involved a stay of several days in a hospital.  My parents, however, found a low‑cost clinic where no overnight stay was necessary.  Go in early in the morning, get gassed, then snip snip, wake up with a sore throat, and go home.

The place was bleak, and the ether mask on my face was frightening.  When I woke up, the place looked even bleaker.  A neighbor drove my mother and me home.  I was wobbly on my feet, and my mother and the neighbor began half‑carrying me, half‑walking me from the car toward the house. 

At that point, the two elderly sisters who lived next door came running out, worried and fretting.  They asked if I had been in an accident.  My mother explained what had happened, they expressed their relief, and I was lugged up the steps and into the house. 

The event hung in my mother's mind, which was convenient for me.  Years later, when I was filling out a medical evaluation form in the air force, I needed to know when the tonsillectomy had been performed. 

 “It was in the summer of 1939,” my mother told me.  “We had it done while school was out.  You were six years old, between first and second grades,” she said, in the way that mothers have of dispensing more information about their children than was asked for.

She could not forget the kindliness of the two elderly sisters.  We were new neighbors, she commented, and they were so concerned about you.  You don't often see that in a big city, she added. 

 

 9.  Indeed a Nice Neighborhood

 

You don’t often see a canary in Chicago.  Sparrows and robins were common just about anywhere I went in the city, and pigeons soared and swooped around tall buildings downtown. 

 

Next to us, in the sisters’ back yard, a brilliantly colored red bird sheltered in a small birdhouse, sometimes perching outside for the viewing pleasure of a small boy who had only seen such a beautiful creature in a picture book.  I always felt pleased when I could step outside and look across the yard and through the bushes and see this small, bright red creature.

 

It was indeed a nice neighborhood. 

 

Up and down North Tripp our neighbors lived in one‑ and two‑story houses and in an occasional small apartment building.  For the most part, yards were neatly taken care of.  Large apartment buildings fronted on streets nearby.

 

The neighborhood was populated with lily‑white Protestants and a few Catholics; my friends possessed Anglo‑Saxon, Scandinavian, and German surnames.  Our neighbors worked at levels throughout the middle‑class spectrum:  blue‑collar, white‑collar, management, and small business owner.

 

The neighbor just to the north of us was Montana Pete.  He was the guy at square dances who called out commands such as “allemande left” and “do-si-do.”  Besides calling square dances he was an official in the city’s park department where he used his real name, Ernest Useman.  Ernie and his wife, Tom—she had been quite a tomboy as a little girl and that ID stuck with her—had two sons a little younger than me.  The family became the closest friends we had in the neighborhood

 

Our house sat in the middle of the block and across the street from Hiram H. Belding Elementary School.  The school was named for one of the brothers who operated the Belding Brothers Silk Company.  Hiram ran the Chicago branch of the business.  At one time, the company manufactured ninety‑five percent of the silk thread made in the United States.

 

Belding was a three‑story, fully basemented building whose outsides were a testimony to the imposing, fortress‑like qualities of stone and brick.  According to information in the Belding archives, the school was built in 1901 and expanded in 1902 and 1907; the total cost of the school and its additions came to $158,666.  It was money well spent.

 

When I stepped out of our front door, I had my world at my doorstep.  Across the street to the left was my school, to the right a large playground.  The playground had the usual equipment—swings, teeter‑totters, jungle gyms, and two athletic fields; in winter, playground personnel flooded one of the fields, and it became an ice‑skating rink.  In the center of the playground there was a large, one-story building—the field house.  If we needed a bat or a ball we could borrow it at the field house.  In bad weather we could sit inside the fieldhouse and play board games.

 

In that playground I earned the distinction of being hit in the head with false teeth.  They were stage teeth, the kind used in magic or comedy shows.  A boy I was playing with found a set on the ground—who knows where the teeth came from—and threw it at me.  It hit me on the forehead and raised a welt that went away in a couple of days.

 

On the south side of our house was a vacant lot. A few trees stood on the lot; it would be overgrown with weeds from spring to fall.  The lot was a jungle to me and the boys I would hang out with.  Our imaginations took us from the lot to Africa where we hunted wild game; during World War II, the jungle served as a stage on which we won battle after battle against enemy soldiers dug in on islands in the South Pacific.

 

I never had to go far to find something to do. 

 

And I never had to go far to run the necessary errands of life.  Two supermarkets—Jewel and A&P—sat almost side by side on Irving Park Road, a short walk from our house.   A doctor and a dentist had offices above the stores.  A block down the street the YMCA offered a large indoor pool great for wintertime swimming.  Two saloons sat across the street from the supermarkets; another saloon was deep inside the neighborhood.   For those of us under the legal drinking age, a drugstore on Irving Park at the corner with Keeler offered a soda fountain and was a great place to hang out.  There were restaurants, including a Chinese one, on Irving Park Road.

 

Then there was the piece de resistance, the barber shop on Tripp, just off Irving Park.  From an early age my parents gave me the money to get a haircut without one of them along.  The barbershop was small, always crowded, and always busy.  Therefore, I had to wait my turn while leafing through the pages of magazines strewn about, always issues of the same magazine—the Police Gazette.

 

The Police Gazette was a girlie magazine, pure and simple, its pages loaded with photographs of scantily clad women.   It did run articles on cops and law enforcement, but it boosted its sales by featuring female flesh.  They were pictures at which I gawked, like someone just in from the farm.

 

But, hey, give me a break. I was just a kid with a lot to learn, soaking up knowledge wherever I could get it.

The Silent Generation

A recent trip of mine to the doctor included a lesson in social science.  The doctor, when commenting on my birthdate, said that I was a member of the generation that doesn’t complain.   That was news to me, and when I got home I checked it out with GOG—Good Ole Google. The doctor was close, but not quite there.  A person with my birthdate is a member of the Silent Generation, a status that does not rule out complaining. Now, before we go any further, I don’t know who gets credit or blame for naming generations, I don’t know why some people think it’s important that people be sorted into generations, and I don’t care.  All that I’m doing here is reporting what I learned because of a remark made to me by a man who was holding a scalpel in his hand.  These are the generation names that I pulled off the web:  •           Lost Generation — persons born 1883-1900. •           Greatest Generation — persons born 1901-1924. •           Silent Generation — persons born 1925-1945. •           Baby Boomer Generation — persons born 1946-1964. •           Generation X — persons born 1965-1980. •           Generation Y — persons born 1981-1996. •           Generation Z — persons born 1997-2012. •           Generation Alpha — persons born 2013-2025. Members of the Silent Generation, I read in Wikipedia, were so classified for “keeping their heads down and working hard, thus earning themselves the "silent’ label.” I’ve got a reason I like better.  Look at the name of the group that came after us—Baby Boom.  Millions of new people came into being because of those of us in the Silent Generation.  You can’t be busy making babies if you’re going yak yak yak. ***