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neighborhood

Hope in an Alley

Hope in an Alley

As a pre-teen, I walked down many an alley. I guess it was more interesting than walking on a sidewalk on the street. I saw things people threw out and, as I walked down the cinder strewn path, I was able to look into the back yards of some buildings and see swings and bushes and toys left out overnight. I saw open garbage cans filled with junk and rotting food; I saw rats scurrying out of the way, having their lunch disrupted by the scraping of gym shoes on the cinders, making a crunching sound as I walked past. But I also saw scribbling and writing on the backs of buildings and garage doors; sometimes a piece of crude artwork. I saw hearts with initials within and what appeared to be cryptic gang signs at times, marking the area and perhaps warning others they are in sacred territory.

The alley was a place where pre-teen and teens could hang out behind someones garage and smoke a cigarette and carve their initials on a telephone pole. It was a path you could walk and perhaps find something of value (one man’s trash is another man’s treasure). It was a place adults were rarely seen except when backing a car out of the garage.

As time went on, alleys were paved and garbage cleaned up. But they were still alleys and young folks still walked down them to school or store or just to hang out. Some became unsafe and threatening while others began to express a personality of the neighborhood. Shoes were seen dangling from overhead cables and, replacing scribbles and scrawls, carefully executed artwork began to appear. It was called grafitti, but much of it was beyond the typical defacement, and paid homage to people, places and things. The alleys began to express the desires, frustrations and hopes of a generation of young people.

Today, if you walk down the street, you will see murals, financially supported and produced by artists brought in from outside the area. They are mostly corporate murals designed to attract folks and upscale the community. But if you want to see the personality of the hood and hear the voices of the young folks who live there, then you have to walk down an alley.

Unsanctioned artwork, mostly by self-taught graffiti artists, reflecting disillusionment, injustice and inequality, produced by young people expressing their feelings in a society that offers them little hope of change, these artists pay homage to fallen local heroes, iconic role models who have passed away; victims of brutality and oppression, and they share their feelings and concerns with others who live in the hood. They unify their peers and tell their story on the back and side walls of the neighborhood. Yes, you can look but you also have to listen.

If you want to see the soul of a neighborhood, forget about the butterflies and flowers lining the fronts of buildings on a busy street and take a walk, if you dare, down an alley where the artists are not paid and the subject matter does not need approval. But don’t take too long because the work may be whitewashed over, and another attempt at honest communication, thwarted by gentrification, erased by those who do not wish to see or hear what they are destroying.

My Dad

 

My dad was not a people person. He had few friends and kept his thoughts mostly to himself. He worked long and hard at his job, sometimes accepting long-distance moving gigs which would keep him away from home several days. There was always food on the table and clothes on our backs.

I remember the time he got fed up with the treatment he was receiving at work from his boss and secretary. He had gotten the job as a mover through his father who also worked there. But more than just a mover, I remember driving down with him during the winter months on a Saturday or Sunday, to the warehouse where he would shovel coal into the mammoth furnace. I remember his little podium desk with the sheets of paper on a clipboard of things he had to do as errand boy, janitor as well as mover. He had had enough. He wanted better, and quit. I was 12 years old.

I remember mom teaching us kids a song to sing for dad when he came home from his new job as a delivery driver for Wonder Bread. We stood there and sang it to him as he walked in the door. He continued in that job for less than a year. He could not handle dealing with people on a daily basis.

I realize now it must have been extremely difficult for him to go back to the warehouse basically begging for his old job back. He was a proud man and, with this occasion, it sealed his fate for the rest of his life. They rehired him, but not without his loss of tenure. His dedication as a father and husband outweighed his personal pride and he returned to the job that his father had before him and one that, later on, I would also work at, with him, during the summer months. I dont think he knew how much it meant to me as a teenager to be working side by side with my dad at his occupation.

Later on, when I returned from Viet Nam, he and I would head out early on a Sunday morning to the local flea market and I would help him watch the tables as he set up items acquired from years of people discarding things and giving them to him when they moved. But we rarely talked about important things. Hustle was the name of the game and time was money to him. I wished we were closer.

There are many things about my dad and his upbringing, and our family history, I do not know about. He was distant in his socialization and, basically, lived day to day doing the best he could. I think behind that gruff exterior was a sensitive and caring man, one I never got to really know. I do know he was dedicated, loyal and faithful to mom and us kids. We were, evidently, his reason for living.

Happy Father’s Day, Pop.

Skitching

Back in the late 1950s and early 60s, there were many toys available that could put a pre-teen in the hospital. I had most of them including a BBgun (rifle actually) which, when I was tired of hitting tin cans from the garbage, took aim at alley rats and squirrels, never hitting one. It was another toy that one day disappeared from my inventory. My father had a rule about toys and if they were left lying around, they were confiscated forever. The most dangerous, however, was not a toy but an automobile which was the main ingredient to a pastime we called skitching., which was a word, I believe, constructed from ski-hitching, and that is a fairly good definition of what we did.

Back then, skitching only took place in the winter after a good snow. Nowadays, it is a little different and can involve skateboards and bicycles, but in my day, it was wrapping your gloved hands around the rear bumper of a moving car and hanging on as long as you could.

Cars were built different then and the bumpers were chrome plated steel which extended out from the front and rear of the vehicle. There was room to place your gloved hand over the bumper and hang on for dear life. All went well unless you hit a drypatch and then you immediately were disengaged, usually tumbling or being dragged along the street until you let go.

Skitching was only good if the snow was packed down on the residential streets. Salt trucks hardly ever came down, spending most of the time on the busier main streets. As cars went along the snow laden streets, they would leave a rut and, after several cars, a nice snow packed rut was in place, ideal for your feet. Icy streets afforded one the option of any location along the rear bumper and could accommodate at least four kids. Most of the time, it was two, one on each side riding the ruts.

We were not informed too well of the dangers of skitching. Most of the time, since the street was icy or snow packed, drivers would be going fairly slow. Some were not aware of our clinging to the rear bumper (one objective of skitching was to accomplish your attachment to the vehicle without the driver’s knowledge), others would stop the car and yell out the window at us, while others, usually younger drivers, would sometimes swerve or speed up a little to give us a thrill (or perhaps it was a move to eject us from the bumper). No one I knew every got hurt skitching, but there were problems.

At times, your gloves would stick to the bumper and as you let go, your gloves would ride off into the sunset alone. I always wondered what the driver (or other drivers) thought when they saw the gloves dangling from the bumper! You could also lose a shoe if you hit the feared dry spot and, if you were fated to be dragged along the street, you might have to explain how you got so snow-laden and disheveled to your parents.

You could not skitch wearing rubber boots or galoshes so, at times, it was difficult to leave the house without getting stopped and be told to put on your boots. Sometimes, you would wear the galoshes and take them off once outside, and retrieve them later. It was difficult to explain how your shoes and socks got so wet under the galoshes, but we managed to elude the facts, when explaining – “I stepped into a puddle.”

I don’t think anyone of our parents found out we were skitching. I am certain if they did, the punishment would have been more painful then getting tossed into the curb or lamp post. Skitching only took place a few times during the winter and our involvement only around an hour as we look for a car to latch on to, making sure there wasn’t another one too close behind. We weren’t that stupid.

Or were we.

Back to the Table

 

Back to the Table

In an earlier post, I spoke about how we would use Freddie’s picnic table as a winter fort, covering it with discarded Christmas trees until the needles fell off. This unlocked other memories of that old wood table and how it became a staple in our back yard playing.

Many times, when we gathered after school to play, or in the summer when there was a lot more time to develop our imaginations, we used that table as the main prop in whatever genre of fantasy we were going to engage, which was usually based on some tv program or movie one of us saw recently.

If it was a western, the table became a stagecoach, or a bunkhouse for ranch hands. If we played army, then it became a bunker or a tank and maybe a B-29 bomber. It served as a spaceship, battleship, life raft (if you flipped it over), fort and pirate ship. About the only thing it was not used for was its intended purpose.

Those were the days before cell phones and text messages. If you called someone (and you needed parental permission to use the phone), you hoped they were home when the phone rang. There was no caller ID, so someone had to pick up the phone if they were home. Most of the time, however, we just ran up and down the block and hollered for our friends outside the windows. No one ever knocked on the door.

Of course, we had pre-set times to gather like after school (we put homework off until it got too dark for us to be outside), or, during the summer months, after lunch (lunch was always at noon) and after supper (promptly at six). We never ate lunch together at the outside table as each one of us were responsible for checking in at home for vittles and a trip to the bathroom before returning.

The picnic table was also used for playing board games which we did usually after some adult’s complaint about us being too loud and boisterous. Cootie was the favorite – constructing a bug based on the roll of the die. Sadly, the small pieces sometimes fell through the cracks in the table and landed in the grass underneath which prompted a search party lasting several minutes (the little black eyes were the hardest to find).

For me, nowadays, a picnic table is a picnic table and usually found out back of the local tavern in the patio area, topped with french fries or chips and beer. But there are times while sipping my brew sitting at the table with friends, that I imagine for a few minutes that I’m on a pirate ship quaffing brew with me mateys. They’ll never know.

But then, maybe they could be thinking the same thing. Arrrh.

John L

 

My dad was a warehouse-man and mover and it was one of his jobs to clean out discarded and unclaimed storage lockers. This was a cool thing because he would be bringing home, every now and then, old newspapers (which he would sell to a local comic and magazine shop, among other vintage items for the house.

When I was twelve, my father brought home a box of 28 cast metal small statues of John L. Sullivan, bare chested and in trunks, in the traditional bare fist boxing pose. Mom asked him what was he going to do with them and he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Something.” Little did I know at the time those statues would lead to my musical career in a high school band.

I was in the Boy Scouts and wanted to be a bugler but I didnt have a bugle. No one did. Then, one afternoon, my cousin and I were roaming the neighborhood and I saw a used trumpet in the window of a resale shop.

We went inside and I asked to see the instrument. I couldn’t play it yet, but the valves worked okay so I asked how much. He wanted thirty dollars for it. I had two. As I was slowly walking out the door, I remembered the statuettes, turned and asked him if he would be interested in 28 statues of John L Sullivan and two dollars.

To my surprise, he told me to bring them in so he could see them. We ran home and I asked my father (it was a Saturday and he was in the basement working on something) if I could trade the statues for a trumpet. He told me if the guy would take them it would be okay.

I cannot remember exactly what they looked like. I do remember they were hollow and the greyish casting was sprayed with a gilt paint. Perhaps they may have been made for an award or presentation but there were no bases for the little guys. My cousin and I placed the box in my wagon and off we went, excited and hoping we could make the trade.

The owner looked through the box, satisfied that they were undamaged, told me they were pretty neat and made the trade. He let me keep my two dollars.

I wonder now and then what happened to those 28 statues. I have never seen one since. As I think about it, they may be worth some money nowadays. My trumpet was in sad shape I soon discovered and, even after a cleaning, didn’t sound that good. It was, however, good enough to take on scout outings and camping trips and I got pretty good at playing it by ear, listening to bugle calls on a record I had gotten.

My father saw my interest in playing bugle and other songs so two years later, when I entered high school and began playing in the band, he bought me a new Silvertone trumpet from Sears for my birthday.

Thinking back, I not only owe my musical career but also my interest in trading and selling collectibles, which I am still doing today, to John L Sullivan. As far as trumpet playing, I gave that up some time ago.

I could never hit the high notes.

In The Pines

The holiday season holds a special nostalgia for me. The neighborhood kids would build our winter fort.

Back in those days, before aluminum trees and realistic plastic, everyone had real pine trees of various sizes and type. After Christmas, after New Years, around the end of the first week in January, the alley would be filled with discarded trees. This was the time we waited for.

Freddie, Jose, Rich and I would drag tree after tree from the alley into Freddie’s yard because he was the only one whose family had a wooden picnic table. We would then proceed to toss the trees on top of each other, around and over the seats, until the table was hidden by pine branches on the sides and top. We would then go inside through an opening at one end of the table and hold our meetings.

It was neat. The scent of the trees surrounded us in the interior and sheltered us somewhat from any wind (as long as it wasn’t too strong). What was even better, was if it snowed and covered the trees. Then it was more like an igloo and better insulated. Most trees still had some tinsel or a few overlooked ornaments on them and we would re-hang the ornaments on the inside of the fort to give it some décor.

We would play in the yard and under the table until finally, after about another week or so, the place was littered with pine needles and Freddie’s parents informed us to remove the trees. With all the needles laying around, Freddie had the only green yard on the block!

The removal and relocation of the trees took place the day before the garbage truck came. We carted the trees and placed them along back fences in the alley, not certain which tree belonged where. Apparently it didn’t matter because no one on the street ever complained about our activities.

I don’t see things like that nowadays. Sometimes a beat up aluminum tree is placed in our alley and that’s about it. My childhood memories of the Christmas holidays are no longer seen. Like certain streets where the neighbors each year had the same decorations and dad would take us kids in the car (or we would sometimes walk if the weather permitted, to see Candy Cane Lane, or Santa Claus Street or Reindeer avenue. It was a community street decoration project and, as people moved or died off, there were less and less Santas and candy canes.

But the pine tree fort will always hold a special place in my memories, especially the scent of 10 to 15 trees surrounding a weather warped old picnic table in my playmate’s yard as we sat inside pretending we were wilderness explorers.

And, of course, Freddie’s green yard.

Burning Leaves

leaf-burning

Autumn ain’t what it used to be. The sound of the clickity clack manual lawnmower has been replaced by a super charged gas powered grass eater. And the sound of people raking leaves has been replaced by the jet engine leaf blower that makes more noise than planes leaving O’Hare airport.

Kids in my neighborhood looked forward to Autumn for one reason, and it wasn’t returning to school. It was leaf burning. Not that we kids liked to do household chores, mind you, but there were certain rewards for leaf raking in the 1950s.

On a Saturday afternoon, the neighborhood kids (and a few adults without kids) would rake the leaves from the back of the yard to the front where you could gather them along the curb in front of your house and set them aflame.

Before we would do that, there was the ritual of jumping into the leaf pile first and tossing them up in the air, which required a subsequent re-raking into the curb. It was then that the magic began as we pulled out our book of matches, striking them and tossing them into the mound and watching as the fire slowly spread across from leaf to leaf.

The leaves burned slowly as most were not real dry and brittle (unless you put off raking for a week or so). There was an aroma which permeated the neighborhood as the burning continued. Parking your car was a problem since you didn’t want to be too close to the burning piles. All in all, it took only an hour or so to reduce the leaves into a smoldering heap which then required a good hosing down. You had to be careful with water pressure as not to hose the leaves all over and across the street onto your neighbor’s lawn.

I think the city banned leaf burning around 1960. I cant seem to find the original ordinance about it but I do remember people were told to put leaves in bags and set them in the alley. Thus ended a ritual which now made leaf raking a chore rather than a prelude to minor pyrotechnics in the front yard.

It was a right of passage where the old man (for the sake of not doing it himself) would allow us to have matches, after we raked and piled the leaves, in order to set them ablaze and pretend it was a campfire or burning fort. One time, I remember we tried to send smoke signals by using an old blanket. We were caught before any damage ensued.

Sometimes the wind got a little too strong and spun burning embers into the sky, sort of like when you toss another log on the fire. I suppose this is why somebody (whose roof probably caught fire) got wise and they banned it. Like they did fireworks.

Except folks still set off fireworks. And jump in leaf piles.

Dr. Bonebreak

skeleton

Honest, that was his name.

As I grew older, I wondered why someone would become a doctor with a name like that! I did think it was cool, however, and it always made for some good stories later in my adolescence. Dr. Bonebreak was our family physician when we lived on Fransisco street. His office was down the block on Diversey.

Back in those days, doctors made house calls. If you were sick, you called and the doctor would grab his black bag of paraphernalia and show up at your door hopefully to treat whatever ailed you.

Dr. Bonebreak was within walking distance from our place and I remember him coming over on several occasions. Most of the time, if you could walk, you went to his office, which was also his residence, and waited your turn.

Yes, doctors made house calls, but did not always come if they felt you were not sick enough. Every house had a thermometer so when you called, your parents could give the doctor your temperature and answer a few basic questions. That’s where the expression, “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning,” came from.

I remember one time I was laid up in bed with the flu and Dr. Bonebreak came over. After the examination, and a shot of penicillin in my rear end, he gave my mother instructions which included having some chicken broth and drinking lots of water.

I asked if it could be cola instead (hey, I was a kid) and he said we could mix half cola and half water as long as I would drink it all, which I did. I still cannot drink cola straight and so I add water or let it sit in the ice for a while until it is diluted. Funny how some things stick with you all your life.’

After we moved to our new home, I no longer saw Dr. Bonebreak. And I dont remember the names of the doctors we kids had after that, but none of them made house calls any more.

I remember one incident later in life, where I was really in pain. It turned out to be appendicitis. I awoke in the morning and informed my parents I wanted to go to the doctor. I had to walk from our house two blocks to the doctors office. It was excruciating. I was a teenager at that time which is why, I suppose, my father didn’t feel it necessary to drive me over there. When I did get there, the doctor called my father and off we went to the hospital for an emergency operation.

I wonder, if Dr. Bonebreak had made the house call instead, would he have operated on the kitchen table?

X-Rays Afoot

shoe.ray_

The early to mid 1950s were influenced tremendously by the atomic bomb. No so much in the sense of destruction and desolation, although we did practice hiding under desks at school, but rather in the marketing sense. As we kids drew pictures of war and battles, the landscape now included mushroom clouds and advertising went the same way along with drawings of the atom with neutrons spinning around to sell a modern marvel of the age.

There were atomic sandwiches, atomic milkshakes, atomic bubble gum and comic books, followed by movies with giant ants and grasshoppers mutated by atomic radiation. And, out of the atomic age came the prolific use of another marketing ploy, the X-ray. If atomic bombs didn’t get you, the use of X-rays would.

Even as a kid I wondered when I went to get my teeth checked, why the assistant, after placing a heavy lead vest on my chest, would leave the room while they zapped my skull in order to see my teeth. I guess they were saving my chest for the doctor when I got my lungs zapped on another trip.

If that wasn’t enough, when you went to get a pair of shoes, they stuck your feet in this machine so that your parents could see your foot bones and how the shoe fit. I suppose this was okay if you bought shoes maybe once a year or so but I bet the innovators of that machine never thought about the fact that kids would see it as a fun contraption to play with.

The machine was a large, tall wooden box and you stood on a platform while sticking your feet inside this rectangle opening. The salesman then flipped a toggle switch, you looked into the viewer and there were your bones! My friends and I would take a Saturday walk to the shopping district called six-corners by most folks, and go to Sears where they sold Red Goose and Buster Brown Shoes. We would wait until the salesman was busy with a customer and then go up to the machine, stick our feet in and throw the switch. Also, one of us would stick their hands in there while the others took turns looking. We would do it a few times until we got shagged out of the store.

As a pre-teen, with all the different forms of X-ray equipment used on us at the time, it is no wonder we did not glow in the dark or become mutated like those giant ants and grasshoppers. But I sort of figured out, perhaps, where my foot problems came from.

Guardian Angel

IMG_5701

I believe in guardian angels. I heard mine once when I was eleven years old. Honest!

During the summer months, my cousin Gerry and I would bike our way from my house over to Riis Park on the northwest side of Chicago to go spend an hour or so in the large public swimming pool. You could lock your bike up in the racks provided and they would still be there when you exited the pool.

The pool was arranged in sort of a T design. It had a long rectangle shallow end which then dropped off into the deeper square end, where the diving boards were. You could tell the deep end because it extended beyond the walls of the shallow end, thus forming the T design. And there were huge black letters along the cement designating: DEEP END.

My cousin and I stayed in the shallow end splashing and jumping around and occasionally went just a bit into the deeper part where you had to spring step to stay above the water line. One day, for some stupid reason, not knowing yet how to swim very well, I decided I wanted to jump off the diving board into the deep end for the first time.

I told my cousin to watch what I was about to do as we hurried along the cement side of the pool to the diving board. I don’t think he was really watching too well or he may have noticed that once I jumped into the water, I did not resurface. I stood on the edge of the lower board, took a deep breath, held my nose and closed my eyes and jumped into the water.

My first surprise was that I did not touch the bottom of the pool. My second was that I was still under water. It might seem strange, but I had never opened my eyes under water before, so, as usual, they were shut tight as I floundered around in the dark, in the water, reaching around and above to find the surface.

My lungs were full of air but I could not exhale, knowing I would never be able to inhale until I got out of the water. I was starting to panic and my lungs were aching to breathe as I continued to reach around for something to grab hold of, or break the surface (where I would open my eyes and head for the edge).

It was a long time under the water and I started to realize I just might drown. The panic increased. I was about to give up and release what air I had in my lungs when I suddenly heard a distinct audible voice say, “Open your eyes!” It wasn’t in my head, no, this voice was audible in my ears.

I did so immediately and there, right in front of me, was the ladder out of the pool. I reached for it and drew myself up, expelling the air and inhaling deeply as I held on to the rung. After a few deep breaths, I climbed out of the pool and looked for my cousin.

“I almost drowned!” I exclaimed. He looked at me and shrugged as we walked back to the shallow end.

I was still shaking and decided maybe we should call it a day and just leave.

Reflecting on the incident, I probably was not under water as long as it felt but I sure was in trouble. And, if I had expelled the air in my lungs I would have sunk to lower depths of the pool. Keeping my eyes closed while trying to find your way out of the water just does not work. It never dawned on me to open my eyes until I heard that distinct voice that saved my life that afternoon.

I’ve kept my eyes, and ears, open ever since.