Part Six in the Memoir of the Generic Old Man: Coal, Grandma Beuchat, Wendell Willkie, Money

17.  The Junkman Cometh; or, Vignettes From the Age of Coal

“RAGS A LION!”  The shouted words resounded down the alley.  Moments later, a  swaybacked horse appeared, its head bobbing wearily from side to side as it slowly pulled a dilapidated wooden freight wagon piled with junk.  On the wagon's seat a grimy, stubble‑faced man loosely held the reins and again and again bawled what sounded like “RAGS A LION!”

The junkman.  He made his living by collecting and selling other people's cast‑off clothing, old car parts, unwanted furniture, and dead appliances.  Once a month, his plodding horse pulled his wagon through the alley behind our house, the junk man yelling for people to bring him their  "RAGS!  OLD IRON!”

In the Chicago of 1940, the junk man wasn't the only one who used a horse.  The nearby dairy used horse‑drawn wagons, in addition to trucks, to deliver milk.  A few Tripp Avenue families, those who still had iceboxes instead of electric refrigerators, bought ice from a man driving a horse‑drawn wagon.

My parents were born in the horse‑and‑buggy days but never spoke fondly of them.  I think that their reluctance to recall those memories is typical of many people who had to put up with the horse.  For all of the beauty and romance attached to the animal, taking care of one was a lot of  work.  Moreover, many people were afraid to ride horseback. 

And in a big city like Chicago, before the car became popular, horse‑drawn transportation meant that people chose their paths carefully when crossing the street.  Rank‑smelling waste ran brown in the gutters and drew millions of flies.  On dry days, pulverized manure flew in the faces of people. Iron‑shod horses created a cacophony of noise day and night.  And horses were horribly mistreated in those days; in the decade or so before the car came into use, municipal carts hauled off more than 10,000 dead horses per year from Chicago's streets. 

Coal  

At the time we lived on North Tripp, Dobbin was on the way out, and if the horse could go, coal could go too, and even faster, many people wished.  By the 1940s, much of the nation was using fuel oil and natural gas for heating.  Not in Chicago, however, for at that time, Chicagoans were being soiled daily by the soot and grime of one of the blackest rocks on earth—coal.

Collars and cuffs of shirts were black at the end of one day's wearing.  Bathwater turned sickeningly gray.  Sandblasting crews worked virtually year‑round at scouring buildings, removing layers of soot to reveal magnificent brick‑and‑stone exteriors. 

Our house was heated with coal, as were many homes and private businesses and public buildings; coal fueled many of the locomotives on the railroads that served Chicago.  People who had converted their furnaces to fuel oil bragged about how nice it was not to put up with coal.  Natural gas was available—most Chicago homes had gas ranges for cooking—but many Chicagoans used coal for heating.

Coal was delivered by a large truck.  The truck's driver and his helper, two men black from head to foot with coal dust, pushed wheelbarrows full of coal to the house's coal bin, a room near the furnace in the basement.  At a window open to the coal bin, the wheelbarrow was tipped, and the coal tumbled into the bin.  As the coal hit the basement floor, coal dust rose, then settled, waiting to be walked on and tramped around the basement and the house.

Thus, the coal bin door had to be kept closed when coal was delivered.  Otherwise, clouds of coal dust billowed out of the coal bin, migrated around the basement, and settled everywhere.

It was also mandatory to stay out of the coal bin unless absolutely necessary.  Coal dust seemed to have a magnetic property; if you just got near it, it was attracted to your clothing and your skin.  Therefore, the only sensible reason for going into the coal bin was to get a shovelful of coal to throw into the furnace.

Tending the Furnace

One of my chores was that of furnace tender, which is not one of the grandest rituals on earth.  Maybe it builds character, maybe it doesn't, but for certain it leaves a person feeling a heck of a lot better about the whole thing when it's over.

“A job begun is half done,” my mother liked to say when I was slow getting down to the basement.  Right.  Aphorisms are always easy to use on the other person.

The floor near the furnace and the coal bin was covered with old rugs and towels, put there to absorb the coal dust on the soles of the shoes of whoever came down to feed the furnace.  The shoveling of coal had to be done adroitly; to be careless was to raise clouds of coal dust.  When the job of stoking the fire was finished, the shoes were wiped on the rugs and towels near the steps leading to upstairs.  Then and only then could the fire tender return to the house's living quarters.

There was no cheating at this, by the way.  What I mean is that I couldn't shovel in a half ton of coal in the hopes of not having to come back to the basement for hours on end.  Whenever I tried to get away with that, the fire blazed up like crazy, a gusher of hot air rose through the ducting and into the rooms upstairs, my parents began closing registers as the sweat started to drip off them, and my mother muttered at me about the amount of coal money going up the chimney.

The whole process was sort of like going to Hell and back—descending from the coziness of upstairs and into the dark depths of the coal bin, facing the flames of the furnace, and returning upstairs.  And once upstairs, the hands were thoroughly washed at the kitchen sink before the fire tender was allowed to rejoin the civilized world.

Ashes periodically had to be removed from the furnace.  Now the threat was not coal dust black as night but the fine white dust that was left after the coal burned itself out.  Where coal dust was black and oily, the dust from the ashes was as fine as talcum powder.  Where coal dust settled on everything, the dust from the ashes hung in the air waiting to be sucked into a person's lungs.

Removing the ashes was simple.  You first made sure that the door of the compartment under the firebox was completely closed.  Then you grabbed the handle of a rod that extended from outside the furnace to the grate of the firebox.  A few vigorous shakes of the rod caused the ashes to fall through the grate and into the closed‑off area under the firebox.  There they were left to cool for days.  And when you finally did shovel the ashes out, there was no way in the world to prevent raising clouds of a fine white dust that would linger in the air for hours, bringing about hacking and sneezing from anyone who walked through the cloud.

Grandma Beuchat

It was about this time, 1940 or so, that Grandma Beuchat came to visit us.  She was the only one of my grandparents I remember meeting.  I might have met my father's mother, but I have no recollection of it.  As for my grandfathers, both died years before I was born.  As a child born to parents late in their lives, I never had any kind of relationship with any of my grandparents.

A photograph of Erma Miche Beuchat, taken when she was twenty, shows her to be petite and girlish.  Another photograph, taken when she was about sixty, shows a smiling woman, a sprite, who looked like she could be a lot of fun.  Regardless of what the photographs show, Erma Miche Beuchat possessed the spirit and strength of a woman who came to this country, a stranger in a strange land, bore six children, helped her husband operate a dairy farm, ran the household, cooked for her family and the hired hands, raised her children, and outlived two of them and her husband.

When Grandma Beuchat visited us, I can't say that my mother went overboard with preparations such as cleaning the house until it was spotless and telling me time and again how to behave.  Nevertheless, I was more than adequately warned, briefed, and prepped for the grand visit.

Then she was there . . . and gone.  Somebody, one of my uncles, brought her and took her away.  All I remember of her visit was the specter of an old woman hovering around our living room.

Wendell Willkie

And then there was the autumn of 1940, when we staged a feeble, get‑out‑the‑vote campaign on behalf of Wendell Willkie.

Willkie was unique in American politics.  Although he never held public office, he won the Republican presidential nomination in 1940.  A lawyer and a utility company executive, he had been a member of the Democratic party until 1938 when he switched his registration to Republican.  He was a vigorous critic of the economic policies and New Deal programs of his opponent, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was running for his third term.  Otherwise, Willkie was an internationalist who sided with FDR's overseas policies.

For some reason, my mother and father came out for Willkie, and I was drafted into their campaign.  To show our support for Willkie, we pinned to our clothing buttons that said, “We Want Willkie.”  Everywhere we went, we advertised the idea that an upstart Republican was the best man to run a country still struggling to get out of the Great Depression and headed for war.

For years after the election, my red, white, and blue “We Want Willkie” button lay in the dresser drawer where I kept souvenirs and trinkets.  Every time I saw the button, I remembered how funny I felt with it on.  Conspicuous and embarrassed are the proper words.  It was as though I'd daubed a splotch of paint on my shirt.

The button is long gone.  Maybe I should have saved it as a collectible, a relic that would mean something only to another type of relic, a Republican over the age of seventy.

I have no idea why in the world we did this.  My parents were not joiners, except for my father's sole affiliation of being a union member.  He took me to union meetings where we sat off to one side and listened to belligerent, raucous men argue and complain; in the true spirit of Paxson noninvolvement, my father said nothing.

Maybe he was trying to cover all angles.  In Chicago, a Democratic party stronghold, he voted Republican and belonged to a union aligned with Democratic party ideas.   

In all, we were quiet, timid people.  If we'd had a coat of arms, it would have displayed the Latin for “Not me!”

In addition, politics was an area that my parents didn't normally put a lot of effort into.  My father was a Republican who played his politics the same as his cards, close to his vest.  He didn't talk about how he voted or why.  If my mother had any politics, they escaped my notice entirely.

Anything to do with getting a Republican elected in Chicago was an exercise in futility.  Chicago politics of the time were dominated by the Democratic Kelly‑Nash machine, probably the biggest, most powerful, and most corrupt local political machine in the United States.  The machine was named for Mayor Edward J. Kelly and his sidekick Pat Nash.

Under the Kelly‑Nash machine, much of the money intended for schools, city services, and Depression relief went instead into the pockets of politicians and party hangers‑on.  Aldermen and precinct captains occupied fat sinecures while guaranteeing a large Democratic vote.  This they did by buying votes, not always with cash but by providing residents with favors such as jobs, food, and hospital care. 

Perhaps my parents liked Willkie's personality; many Americans did, and he drew great grass‑roots support.  Perhaps the fact that Willkie was from Indiana pushed my father toward him. 

Willkie lost.  Nationwide many voters were suspicious of Republican economic policies.  After all, the Republicans had been in power during the Crash of 1929 and had proven powerless in the face of the Great Depression.  Voters were not about to forget that.

Moreover, the American electorate did not want to change leaders in perilous times.  The German dictator Adolf Hitler had set his armies on a path to conquer Europe and had entered into mutual‑support pacts with the Japanese military and the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.  Mussolini's forces had conquered Ethiopia and British Somaliland and were fighting in Egypt and Greece.  On the other side of the world, the eight‑year‑old Japanese invasion of Manchuria had blown up into a full‑scale war in China.

The United States, though not yet at war, was furnishing weapons to the British and was suspicious of Japanese intentions toward American territory in the Pacific.  Congress had authorized conscription, known popularly as “the draft” and officially by the euphemism “Selective Service.”  Thus, America's young men faced military service in a war that seemed inevitable.

18.  Money Had Something to Do with It 

Once a month, on a Saturday morning, my mother and I went to Six Corners, a large shopping center on Chicago’s northwest side.  It was a trip that I liked to make during the Christmas shopping season when I could roam through the Sears toy department, ogling goodies that I could not have.  We didn’t go to Six Corners to entertain me, however.  Money had something to do with it.

We went so that my mother could make a payment on our loan from the Household Finance Corporation office next to Sears.  The Household Finance Corporation, probably the largest consumer lending company in the nation, offered a repayment installment plan, under which a consumer loan could be repaid through regular monthly amounts rather than a lump sum on the due date.  It also loaned money to people with no collateral, and our family had none—no house, no car, no furniture.

I don’t know why my mother dragged me along, but at some point, the trips ended, leaving me with Saturday to call my own.

Having touched on the subject of money, I’ll mention that no matter how badly my parents were hurting for money, they always came through with a weekly allowance for me.  As I grew older and had part-time jobs, the allowance stopped, and rightfully so, but if the job stopped, the allowance restarted automatically.

They had money problems, for certain, but money woes were never a topic of conversation.  They were working stiffs during the Great Depression with a kid to raise, yet they didn’t complain about their lot.  It was almost as if they were shielding me from the cold, cruel world.

Besides an allowance, I had another source of income, albeit small and spotty—old men who sat on porches.

Up and down Tripp Avenue homes had front porches, and on some of those porches elderly men sat, getting fresh air.  I would pass those porches on my walks to Irving Park Road.  Every now and then, one of those men would beckon me up to his porch, hand me a dollar bill or a few coins, and ask me to bring him tobacco or a pack of cigarettes.  I would do that, and be rewarded with maybe a nickel, sometimes as much as a quarter.  A nickel doesn’t sound like much, but it was enough to pay for a Coke at the corner store.

***

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.

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