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Scary Movie

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I was ten years old. It was a summer’s afternoon in 1955 when my Aunt Bonnie visited my mom. My cousin was with my uncle (I’m not sure where, although it could have been the milk route) and she was by herself.

The reason was because the Will Rogers theater was showing a film, “Not as A Stranger.” It was a melodrama, kinda love story mixed with the medical profession, and starred Robert Mitchum, Olivia DeHaviland and Frank Sinatra. Back then, matinees were 50 cents for adults and a quarter for kids.

No need to wonder that Aunt Bonnie (as well as mom) would go see the movie even if it were a comedy for a dollar, if that’s who was starring! I believe Aunt Bonnie was trying to persuade mom to go with her but failed since my two sisters were around someplace.

As a ten year old kid, a chance to go to the movies was a blessing, so I asked if I could go and mom said yes after Aunt Bonnie said it was okay. That was her big mistake.

Not knowing what the movie was about, sitting in the darkened theater with my box of popcorn, I was happy just to be there. But not for long.

The movie was in black and white, shadowy, a film noir genre, but even that was okay, it kinda gave an ominous feel to the experience. Unfortunately, for Aunt Bonnie, it was not too long into the film when my senses were shocked by a medical autopsy scene.

The covered body was rolled down a corridor and into a room which turned out to be an arena of interns. The old doctor comes out and announces he is going to dissect the corpse, flipping the sheet and exposing the body. I really didnt want to see that. I hid my eyes.

As I imagined what was taking place on the screen (which was probably worse than the actual images), I kept telling Aunt Bonnie I wanted to get out of there. She tried to persuade me that the scene was over and I could relax and watch the rest of the movie (I’m certain she really didn’t want to leave).

I think I started crying and said I would wait outside for her. This was her cue to give up and escort me out of the theater, still clenching a half empty box of popcorn.

I dont remember what we talked about on the walk back to my house. I think she was trying to reassure me that they didnt show the internal organs of the patient and that it was all just make believe. For me, make believe was giant ants and grasshoppers sneaking up behind unsuspecting victims, not real dead people in a hospital.

Even today, when I think about it, I robbed my aunt of a rare day to herself where she could have immersed herself in the adult themed movie, enjoying the actors and actresses transporting her to a fictional world of drama for an hour and a half. I ruined that for her. I hope she went back and was able to see it without the interruptions of a scared ten year old who never should have gone in the first place.

I decided I would stick to Saturday kids features and cartoon frolics. And…stay out of hospitals as much as possible.

Secret Place

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Elementary School was not an enjoyable experience for me. Besides the nuns meting out physical pain for infractions, there were the class bullies. And there were a few of them.

In the classroom there was no problem, but at recess they plied their trade of picking on anyone they thought would not stand up to them. I was one of the unfortunate victims of peer abuse.

One year in particular it was difficult to avoid confrontation. I was in fifth grade when the bully group decided it would play Civil War after reading about it in history class. Their idea was very simple. They would come up to you and ask if you were North or South. It didn’t matter which side you declared since they would automatically be on the opposing side, declare you the enemy and pummel you around a bit before confronting another unfortunate straggler.. It didn’t take long to realize you couldn’t win.

One day, when I saw them approaching, I ran off around the side of the school, past the rectory and into the alley in the hopes of eluding the enemy. As I rounded the corner into the alley, I saw the news cart used by one of the parishioners on Sunday to house and sell newspapers to people leaving the church.

It was up against the rear of the school and as I pulled it slightly away from the wall, opened the doors at the bottom where newspapers were stored, found that it was empty and would house a kid my size. I crawled inside and shut the door.

The cart was perhaps five feet long and five feet high and was on rollers. It had the storage area below and an upper part which the newspapers could be displayed and an awning above to keep our rain or sun. And it all folded up into a compact unit when closed. I declared it my secret place and retired there often during recess and lunch period in order to avoid the roving bands of Civil War enthusiasts in the playground (which was actually a parking lot and the street in front of the school).

When necessary (like getting back from lunch too early and wanting to avoid confrontation in the playground), I would sneak around to the back of the school and climb into my little fortress where I would munch some penny candy and read a comic book until I heard the warning buzzer sound for the resumption of classes.

This went on for several weeks, maybe a few months, until one day I arrived to find the doors padlocked. My secret place had been discovered, no doubt because I had left telltale candy wrappings and/or comic books within. It was okay, however, because the Civil War was winding down and things would be quiet until a different method of bullying was employed. I would just have to make sure that I didn’t return to school after lunch all too early.

Perhaps I could watch a little more of Lunchtime Little Theater or Uncle Johnny Coons and eat a bit slower from now on.

Good Humor

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One of the sounds of summer I remember as a little tyke, besides the clickity-clack of the manual lawnmowers, was the gentle wafting rings of the bells on the Good Humor truck as it headed down my street. There were a series of (I think) four bells strung across the front windshield of the truck, attached to a cord that the driver would be constantly pulling on with one hand while steering with the other.

Unlike the scratchy recorded chicken dance music that bellows from a cheap speaker on the faux-ice cream truck of today, pasted with stickers of a variety of vegetable fat concoctions, the Good Humor truck slowly wound its way along the side streets of the neighborhood and we could gauge, by the approaching bells, how much time we had to run into the house and ask our parents for money and get back on the street as the truck rolled closer to our location. On occasion, one of us was designated to stop the truck and delay the driver by pretending to make up his mind what he wanted, while we ran in and out of our houses with the cash.

During the summer months, the Good Humor Man, dressed in white shirt and pants and a cap, Would ride down the street in the afternoon but many of us were out playing in the parks, or swimming and missed his rounds. It was in the evening, just after suppertime, around 7:00pm when the bells were heard and the possibility of father popping for the after dinner treat were at high expectations.

Good Humor ice cream bars cost a nickel more than the store bought kind, but there were reasons (besides home delivery) such as the variety of bars available. My favorite was the chocolate malt bar and the only way to get it was off that truck…and to get the fifteen cents off my old man, which was not always easy (unless he was in the mood for one himself) because of my two sisters who would also be included which meant a purchase of five items (six, if Grandma was downstairs at the time) totaling seventy-five cents. I do not recall there being sales tax charged at that time.

All playing stopped for fifteen minutes as we sat on the front stoop of someone’s house and ate our bars as the melting ice cream leaked out the bottom cracks of the chocolate coating onto our hands.

With the changing times, growing safety concerns (for drivers as well as kids) and cost increases, Good Humor eventually went into the freezer compartments of the food and grocery stores and the trucks and carts slowly fazed out. I feel we lost something there along the way of progress.

The offerings off of the trucks today, in my opinion, cannot compare to the taste and delight of having an ice cream bar from the Good Humor Man of the 1950s. And, of course, as Poe so aptly put it: “the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells —
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.”

Pirates

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Around 1954, my folks bought me a special toy. I had seen it on display in Zappa’s corner store and could not stop talking about it. It was a pirate ship, but not just any toy ship. It was Ideal! This boat, named the Jolly Roger, had it all: masts, sails, rigging, gangplank, cannon, lifeboat, anchor, crow’s nest and a crew! And, it could be pulled along on wheels or float in water. It was the ultimate plaything as far as I was concerned and I wanted it. At the time it was around five dollars, a costly item to own.

I played with it out in the front yard, back porch and bath tub. My crew of white plastic pirates looked for buried treasure and towns to plunder. I could place the crew on deck, in the rigging or lifeboat; even make them walk the plank if necessary. I really enjoyed that ship and took good care of it.

The next year, we moved to our new house on the northwest side of the city. The pirate ship came with me and provided some connection to our old apartment. I would come home from school, after being taunted as the new kid, and take out the Jolly Roger to direct my crew to sail on and discover a tropical island somewhere away from the bullies.

My youngest sister had been recently born (the reason I believe for the move – as it would have gotten crowded in the old place!) and I remember one sunshine summer day while mom was out in the back yard hanging the laundry up on the clotheslines, it became my duty to watch her.

I took out the pirate ship and headed for the bathroom where I plugged the drain and began to fill the tub with water to sail the boat. While the tub was filling, and my little sister was at the edge of the tub watching the swirling water encompass the ship, I went to the back porch window to ask my mom something (which I don’t remember), perhaps when lunch would be or something.

She became excited and asked me where my sister, who was not quite one year old, was. I told her and she yelled for me to get in the bathroom and watch her so she didn’t fall in! I really didn’t think that could happen since she could hardly walk and the walls of the tub were high for her, but I said okay and headed back.

To my horror, my sister had fallen into the tub, and I found her flailing about on her stomach trying to keep her head above water. She had managed to lean over the rail of the tub, probably to touch the boat, and slipped over the edge. Thankfully, it must have been only a few seconds, since the water was only about 2 inches high, but I was terrified as to what would happen next. I grabbed her and took her out of the water, grabbing a towel to wipe her down. I remember saying something to her like, “don’t tell mom what happened!” Certainly I would be punished for this! But I wasn’t.

When mom came in, very shortly after, she saw my sister in her wet diapers and me with a look of “I’m really sorry,” on my face. I realized then that my little sister, within a matter of seconds, could have drown in the shallow water of the bathtub had I stayed in the back window a bit longer. Mom must have had a sixth sense of what was about to happen.

I do not recall, after an immediate admonishment from mom as she changed my sister’s wet clothes, any more being said about the incident. I know my father was told about it because after that day, my pirate ship disappeared, never to be seen again. I figure there was no punishment because I didn’t do anything wrong or intentional, I was just 10 years old and not ready to be a baby sitter for mom.

But the Jolly Roger made its last journey, no doubt, to the concrete mausoleum in the back yard.

Cinder-Alley

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When I was growing up, there were no paved alleys. They were comprised of cinders and no one had any idea how the city was able to get that many cinders (fire residue) to cover all the alleys, but they did somehow. Speculation was that they were remnants of the Chicago Fire and were transported from various locations such as downtown’s lakefront, where most of the debris from the fire was used as landfill, and the old Ashland (appropriately named) avenue dumps including the Riverview area around Belmont and Western.

In those days there were no plastic bags either and when mom went shopping at the food store, all the groceries were packed into handle less paper bags. They were not easy to carry (especially the heavier ones), but most of the time mom made it home without any of the bags ripping. Milk and juices were delivered to our homes and shopping was at least twice a week in order to carry all the meats and groceries.

The paper bags were saved and used to collect the family garbage. All the table scraps and left over trash were placed into the bags and daily transported to our huge cement garbage containment locker located in the back of our yard.

This mausoleum was huge, and had a heavy metal flip top where we kids would throw the bags of garbage which would be picked up once a week by the sanitation department. The men who collected the trash were then simply known as garbage men, and they would open the bottom front of the cement behemoth, facing the alley, and shovel out the bags of trash into the truck (a messy job it was).

The entire process was not as sanitary back then as it is now. The cement blockhouse would occasionally be hosed out by my father onto the cinder strewn alleyway, but most of the time the thing stank with the remnants of the week’s (if not years) dinner remains and expired foodstuffs.

Part of the excitement of emptying the garbage was to see if you could make it from the house to the bin without the grease and oil soaked bags falling apart in your arms as you carried them to the back of the yard for disposal. Usually, the bags would give way as you lifted the metal top and hoisted the bags up to drop inside. Many a time I had to shovel the dropped fruit cores and rinds along with chicken skins and beef fat off the grass and sidewalk and dump it into the cement depository, followed by a hosing down of the outlying area.

Winters were not all too bad for garbage but the summer months brought on all the flies which accumulated around and inside the bin, attracted by the pungent odors which emanated from the crypt. In an effort to disguise the behemoth, my mom took out her paintbrushes and drew plants along the outside of the concrete container which looked okay, but the area certainly did not smell like flowers in the least.

I don’t remember exactly when the city assessed homeowners in our neighborhood for the new, improved concrete alley which would replace the old cinder way, but I remember it was $300 per home and most of the neighbors, including my father, were not too happy about it. A short while after the alley was paved, homeowners also had to start using lidded garbage cans and give up the concrete crypts which for so long had plagued the area with ominous odors and unwelcomed pests and vermin.

Even though we no longer used the cement contraption, I do not remember it being destroyed and, thus, could possibly still be there in the back of the yard like an old World War Two bunker, long forgotten as to its necessary use, but still visible to history buffs who like that kind of garbage.

Hooky

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It was a dismal, overcast morning as I headed off to school. I had just started second grade. The rain had held back as I approached St Francis Church. It got very dark and suddenly started to rain again so I took shelter under the front doorway of the church. I did not have my raincoat or umbrella for some reason that morning. I guess mom thought the weather was clearing before I left the house. Another kid, a few years older than me also ran for cover in the doorway. We talked about getting wet and possibly being late for school.

The rain really started pouring down so we stayed under the doorway to wait until it let up. It was a bit chilly and I had a jacket but if I got wet I would have to remain in school with soggy (I thought) clothes. I stayed there until after the first and second bell rang. Classes had begun and I was outside still.

The rain finally let up and the sun began to shine through the parting clouds as I decided to leave and head for the school. The kid who was with me said we would get in trouble if we went in now so maybe it would be better if we just played hooky that day. He said his parents were at work so we could go back to his house and wait until school was over. It sounded like a good idea, after all, older was supposed to mean smarter, so we went back to his house.

The kid lived on the same street about half a block down from my place. I would sometimes run into him on the way to school and we would walk together (he once offered me a rotten walnut). I didn’t really know him well but felt comfortable that we would have a good time playing in his house. He had lots of toys and for a few hours, I was having a good time. It was getting a bit uncomfortable, however, because he was acting bossy and deciding what we would do and I had to go along with it.

After we had eaten lunch (mom would make me a sandwich and I would eat in school), I developed a sense of guilt and foreboding, and wanted to leave and go back to school…or maybe home and confess, after all, it was my first offense and I might get off easy. I announced to my friend I was going to leave.

We were sitting at the kitchen table and he got up and went into a counter drawer and pulled out a steak knife. He pointed it at me as told me I wasn’t going anyplace and to sit down. He sat across from me and proceeded to stick the knife through the plastic table cover announcing he would do the same to me if I tried to leave. He said I would have to wait until school let out and then I could go.

The next two hours were terror filled for me as he led me around holding the knife while we continued to play games he wanted to play. I forget what they were entirely. We went to his room, played and then went back to the kitchen where we played some board games at the table. He stuck the knife through the table cover a few more times just to impress me with his ability if I should try to leave.

Three o’clock could not have come fast enough as we went to the front room and peered out the window waiting for the first indication kids were on their way home. Finally, as the kids appeared he said I could leave. He opened the front door and looked left and right and then said, “Okay, now.”

I hurried out the door and headed home wondering if I should say anything at all (he had warned me not to), but I did not know the school had called my mom asking why I wasn’t in class that day. She confronted me when I got home.

To the best of my ability, I explained what happened and how I could not leave and was held prisoner for the day. I don’t think my mom believed me at first and I do not remember the specifics of our conversation although we waited until my father got home and he would decide the course of action and my punishment.

Upon hearing my story, dad decided we would go over after supper and pay a visit to the kid and his parents and settle the question of my defense. I don’t remember too much at all about the confrontation other than my folks repeated my story to the kid’s parents and they did not believe me. They asked the kid who, of course, denied everything (while giving me one of those, “I’ll get you for this” looks). My defense was kind of flimsy, my word against his, until I remembered the tablecloth. I went over to the drawer and pulled out the knife and told them he had run it through the tablecloth several times. They checked, and found the slits which were made. There was dead silence as his parents and mine looked at each other, at the kid, and back at each other in disbelief. I was exonerated.

We left and went home, my parents leaving it up to them what to do with the kid. I never heard anything more about the incident, nor did I ever see that kid around the neighborhood any more. We moved the following year and I never did find out what and if anything happened to that kid, or if my parents followed up at all. Soon, I had forgotten about the incident and my parents never mentioned it after that meeting. I do remember being told about the hazards of playing hooky and getting into trouble like that. I learned my lesson well. I never did it again. I do not remember being punished at home or at school the next day.

What remains until this day, is my aversion to knives. I am very uncomfortable with anything larger or sharper than a butter knife. For a time, I didn’t know why until the incident was recalled years later.

I hope that kid got help.

You Can’t Go Back

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A few years ago, on a lark, I decided to visit the old neighborhood where I spent the first eight years of my life. It turned out to be a bittersweet experience as places I remembered were no longer in existence and those that did remain had changed.

The old apartment building on the corner of Francisco and Diversey looked about the same although the old windows had long been replaced and there was an iron fence around it now. Many of the old buildings had survived and there were new ones (built after I had moved) dotting the street. The vacant lot where we used to gather and watch the fireworks now had a building and the big side yard by the alley where we used to play for hours on end was now a private parking lot for tenants and what remained of the back yard was fenced off so I could not see in.

I walked along the alleyway noticing the back yards where we played also were gone, replaced by garages. As I walked back up the alley to Francisco, I tried to peer between the wooden slats of the fence to see if the hole we began to dig back in 1950 to reach China was still there. It wasn’t.

Although the food store on the southeast corner was still there, it was no longer Edmund’s but changed to Logan Square Grocery. The tavern where my dad used to get his empty milk bottles filled with beer was still there but beer had now changed to cerveza.

Gone were the bakery, fish market, Johnny’s meat market and, sadly, Zappa’s Confectionery. Many of the businesses along my old childhood route were gone and the buildings rehabbed. Only the cleaners down the street and the grocery looked about the same.

I looked northward down Francisco and wondered if the path I took to school every weekday was still navigable. That street held both good and bad memories, like the time I bit into a rotten walnut, or my school chum who held me at knife point the day we played hookey. All stories I hope to eventually relate to you.

The path was blocked now by the Kennedy expressway so I had to turn down Richmond and head back to Diversey where I took it to Albany and headed north toward the steeple of the old church as a guide.

When I got to the church and school where I had graduated kindergarten and transferred out of the 3rd grade when we moved, I discovered that the old parish, St. Francis Xavier had, in 1991, combined with another and became known as Resurrection. The church itself was locked and I could not see in to determine if the interior was much like I had remembered, but on the outside it appeared the old stained glass windows were still there.

I walked down the side and behind the school, rectory and convent where I took a few months piano lessons, and into the playground. Indistinct shadows and voices surrounded me as the memories of the past became more vivid in my imagination. As I walked back down the street to my car, I noticed the building which housed the old penny candy store where I hoped to one day get a pink peppermint (another story), was still standing, looking the same except it was shuttered and boarded.

As I got into my car, a young Hispanic women exited the church rectory and, as she turned onto the sidewalk, she caught sight of me and smiled. I smiled back. It was her neighborhood now and I was merely the past, but I felt, in that instant, the generations had been bridged and it felt satisfying.

I headed back to Francisco for one more quick look hoping to gain entry to the rear of my old apartment building to see if the book of matches me and my buddy Johnnie hid under the porch stairs was still there. The gates were locked and the porch appeared repainted several times. The matches were well hidden, tucked between the risers and maybe one day they will be discovered and someone will wonder what the heck they were doing there. Or maybe Johnnie went back later and recovered them.

Come to think of it, I dont remember why we hid them in the first place (I was only six). But I do remember what they were used for. I had a toy steam shovel and we could stuff paper and twigs in the rear boiler section and watch the smoke come out as we pretended to excavate the dirt in the front of the building and maybe, if there was time, dig a hole to China.

Toy Soldiers

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Freddie, Jose, Rich and I would play “war” at least twice a week after school. We played war in two different ways and the question we asked before starting was, “Do you want to play little or big?”

If we played “little,” the rubber toy soldiers were gathered out of their bag or box and assembled in the battlefield of dirt, rocks and popsicle stick fences near the old apple tree in my back yard. Back then, we could buy assorted soldiers in various poses in a bag of 50 for around a dollar. You could buy them in green or grey and sometimes other colors so you could tell which soldiers belonged to whom. They were the same soldiers and the only difference were their color, and we had hundreds of them ready to engage in battle in a designated area along the fence line where there was more dirt than grass.

There were rules when playing “little.” As we tossed small clumps of dirt or pebbles at each others forces, they toppled over when hit. If the soldiers landed face up, they were only wounded and could engage in the next battle. If they landed face down, they were out of the action and laid there until one or the other army was still standing. There is a toy cemetery in the backyard near the tree which still contain the rubber bodies of scores of rubber soldiers who no longer could stand on their own and were given burial.

When we played “big,” the yard became “no man’s land.” We used our cap pistols or Mattel tommy-burp weapons to dispatch each other. Our parents preferred our playing “little” instead of “big” because of the running and shouting and noise we would make as we yelled, “I got you!” and “No ya didn’t!” and, of course, the verbal and guttural attempted sounds of the weapons we were firing.

Getting shot and having to fall down in Jose’s yard was difficult because he had an old dog named Sandy whose only outdoor activity was crapping anywhere in the yard she felt like. Many a time a truce was called while one or more of us went home to wash the dog poop off our arms and hands. We died in battle many times over and, in the end, when our mothers called us in for supper, we would resurrect ourselves from the battlefield, prepared to fight another day. After all, it was pretend.

Ten years later I was in Viet Nam. A real soldier in a real war.

We had uniforms, helmets, flak-jackets and weapons. I carried and fired a single barrel double-aught buck shotgun, an M-79 grenade launcher, an automatic M-14, several hand grenades and a boot knife. My playmates would have been impressed. I could cause some serious damage!

This was real war. Dog poop was replaced with feces covered punji sticks, soda pop cans we used as kids for grenades were replaced with cans filled with explosives for booby-traps. Tommy-burp guns were replaced with 7.62mm rounds of ammunition, AK-47s and M-16s. And when people got shot it hurt. When people died, they stayed dead. No one’s mother yelled out a window telling them to stop and come home for supper.

I wondered if any of my fellow soldiers, and even the enemy, played with toy guns and rubber soldiers when they were 10 years old. Were they the backyard heroes and platoon leaders who led their men to victory with water balloons, wooden swords and clumps of dirt?

Today, you don’t see kids playing war in the neighborhood. They can’t. People would be calling the police if they saw half a dozen kids chasing each other with (toy) weapons. And there is always the fear that someone would shoot back, only it would not be playing around.

Maybe it’s time we stopped playing war altogether.

Sawdust

There is something about the smell of sawdust that always reminds me of the butcher shop in my old neighborhood during the early 1950’s.

It was just one of several stops on mom’s weekly shopping agenda. I stood off to the side, kicking the sawdust with my feet into little piles and then spreading them out again to occupy my time while mom placed her order.

Mom would point to the cut of raw meat in the refrigerated case and ask the butcher to slice a piece to a particular thickness for the dinner steak we would be eating. He would take the meat over to a band saw, cutting it to order and then walk over to the pounding table.

The huge square wooden block, around two feet across, was located in the center of the floor where Johnny (everyone knew the names of the shop owners and they knew their regular customers) the butcher would take the steak or chops you ordered and proceed to pound them out on both sides with a large wooden mallet, thus tenderizing the meat.

This was standard procedure back then before meats were pre-soaked in tenderizing agents. It was a time you could watch the proprietor ply his trade, slicing, trimming, grinding, pounding to order, all within plain view of the customer. If you wanted chicken or fish, you had to go down a few stores to the live poultry and fish market because Johnny only sold meat.

Johnny would have some prepared ground beef in the case, but like most customers, mom wanted to pick out her slice of round steak or sirloin. Johnny the butcher then took the steak, trimmed off the excess fat and shove it through the grinder located behind the counter but still in plain view. All this was included in the price per pound. The meat was then wrapped in white paper and tied with a string. The butcher would write in pencil what was inside the package if you had more than one.

Back in those days, a kid could be fascinated watching the butcher’s cleaver whack down and separate pork into butterfly chops, or wipe his hands on the blood soaked apron stained from a day’s work. Nowadays everything comes prepackaged and you can buy everything in one mega-stop store. You probably could pick out a steak and give it to the guy behind the meat counter to grind up for you, but it will be taken into the back room and you wont see what is going on which is part of the fun.

Even when our family moved ten miles away, until he retired, mom would order her weekly cuts of meat from Johnny and he would deliver. That’s how much people trusted their local shop owners and the kind of loyalty shop owners and customers had toward each other.

Gone, for the most part, are the local family owned butcher shops, bakeries, grocer and dairy stores. But more importantly, gone is the loyalty that once existed. Oh, and the smell of sawdust!

Green Turds and Zappa’s

Mr. Zappa was a stocky, bald man with a small mustache who was very kind to us rowdy neighborhood kids. I was eight years old and in third grade when we moved out of the neighborhood but I have, at times, returned and walked around the area remembering the now gone stores and places I frequented during my first decade of life.

Zappa’s was a confectionery, a combination of candy, ice cream and bottled soda pop but also housed toys, comic books, notions and other household items in a dimly lit, high ceiling storefront on the corner of Fransisco and Diversey in Chicago. In those days, stores were family owned and uniquely individual, most owners knowing their local patrons by name.

A grocery store, fish market, butcher shop, bakery, tavern (where my father could get beer in washed out milk bottles to bring home), hardware, five and dime, dry cleaners and on the corner, Zappa’s. Saturdays usually consisted of mom taking me up and down Diversey as she did her shopping in various stores and we would end up at Zappa’s for a candy bar or Eskimo Pie on a stick.

Many of my toys were purchased at Zappa’s. When I had stitches in my knee (another story), I was confined at home for several days and received this neat plastic TV repair truck with tiny TV, tools, and other paraphernalia which fit in the back of the truck. When I had my tonsils out, I received a plastic Pirate ship with blue deck and red hull which had a gangplank, cannon, pirate figures, treasure chest, row boat, masts, crows nest and anchor. You could roll it along the floor or it would float in the bathtub.

If it wasn’t Christmas or your birthday, you had to be sick or injured to get a new toy in my house!

Asked by my parents what I would like to have for my 7th birthday, I requested a dollars worth of nickels in a bag. I never held that much in my hand at one time and, to me, a dollar was a fortune.

The big day came and I got my wish. Twenty nickels and they were all mine to do with whatever I wanted. I had already decided it would be a shopping frenzy at Zappa’s.

I took my best friend, Johnnie, over to Zappa’s and bought candy bars, popsicles (all of which cost five cents each) and a comic book. When Mr. Zappa, in his thick Greek accent asked me, “Hey keed, you find buried treasure?” I explained it was my birthday present and, as a gift, he allowed me to pick out a free comic book, for which I thanked him.

Johnnie and I sucked on root beer and banana flavored popsicles but in addition, a rare treat was that ten cent candy bar in the opaque wrapper called Mars bar. We split that, never having a dime candy bar before and it was a luxury. But I had my eye set on the biggest of the big. Something I had seen advertised on the television and longed to try. I wanted a box of Clorets chlorophyll gum.

Clorets looked liked Chiclets, small square candy coated pieces of gum in a box but they were three times the price, fifteen cents and they were green. The commercial said it made your breath smell good but I didnt care, I just wanted to taste the only green gum in existence. So I placed my three nickels on the counter and purchased the Clorets, an extravagance, but it was my birthday.

Mr Zappa informed me it was a gum for adults, “hey keed, you aint got no lady to need this!” However, I insisted. Anticipation mounted and my friend and I walked back across the street, sat down on the front stoop to our apartment building, and opened the box.

I gave Johnnie two squares and proceeded to add square after square into my mouth until I looked like a chipmunk storing food. I don’t remember the taste sensation that well, perhaps a little minty, but I do remember vividly the results of eating the entire box of gum.

By the time my father got home from work, I had but one nickel left from my morning hoard. Dad was disappointed that I didn’t save any of the loot, “You had enough to buy a candy bar every day for twenty days!” Too late, I was broke. But that was what I wanted to do, splurge, have a good time, treat my friend, and celebrate. It was a great day! Until that evening.

Because of all the candy, popsicles and other stuff I crammed into myself that day, the need arose to make a fast trip to the bathroom. The shock came when I got off the throne with a sigh of relief, gazed into the bowl and saw green colored turds floating in pea soup. I got scared, thinking I might turn green myself, and called my parents into the room.

I explained about the Clorets, and they began laughing as they looked into the toilet bowl. It was one of the rare occasions I saw and heard my father laugh. Needless to say, the story of my green turds was spread throughout the entire clan and neighborhood…including Zappa’s.

Yeah, my folks had to tell kindly Mr. Zappa, and from then on, each time I entered his establishment, he would chuckle and say, “Hey keed, you want some more green gum?” Then burst into laughter.

I never had Clorets again. Never.