Chicago Stories - Growing Up In the Windy City

families.

Prologue

Tim was born at St. Joseph Hospital just off north Lake Shore Drive on a cold, snowy winter day in 1950. He was the fourth and last child born to Irish immigrants. His parents had met at the Holiday Ballroom, a popular meeting place frequented by north side Irish. Their families had immigrated to America in the 1920’s and 1930’s. They came in stages. A few came and settled, finding jobs and apartments. Others joined them as money and job opportunities permitted. Both families found jobs connected in one way or another with the City and its patronage driven political system dominated by Irish Catholics.

There was nothing remarkable about Tim’s birth except his size. He was eleven pounds at birth. His head was unusually large with a broad high forehead, a trait that came from his father’s side of the family. Maybe the extra-large head provided room for the grey matter that gave him an exceptional gift for memory. Tim had a remarkable ability to recall the past in vivid detail. It gave him a powerful edge in an elementary and high school system that placed heavy reliance on rote memorization for learning.

Childhood memories of growing up in Chicago were a favorite topic in Tim’s mind when he had time to day dream and let his thoughts wander. There was never a pattern to his trips down memory lane. Some were triggered by sights, sounds or smells. Others were merely the product of serendipity. Either way, as Tim grew older he found comfort in the journeys back to the Chicago of his boyhood. When he found the luxury of time to open the door in his mind to revisit his childhood friends, schools, neighborhoods and experiences, he smiled and let himself drift back to a simpler place and time.

Chapter 1

Paper Routes

Tim often recalled his experiences as a paperboy. Cold winter days always brought those memories to mind. He had frostbitten several of his fingers rolling papers as he worked his paper route. Temperatures below freezing turned those fingers numb and painful, taking him back…

Tim was a paperboy for several years. First he had an afternoon paper route after school. He delivered the afternoon newspapers, The Chicago Daily News and Chicago’s American from the paper barn on Clark Street on his bicycle. He delivered to homes and apartments in the Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago’s north side just west of the Uptown area. It took some time and a number of spills to learn how to steer and balance the bike with dozens of papers stuffed in a large canvas sack balanced on the handlebars. The older boys, like Tim’s brothers before him, became so good at balancing their bikes that they could roll and throw papers from their bikes as they pedaled.

When boys grew up, usually around age 10-12 depending on their size and maturity, they moved up to morning paper routes. Morning routes were larger with many more papers. Consequently, they paid better and offered better opportunities for Christmas tips. Papers were stacked in large three wheeled push carts, with some routes having over 300 Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribunes to deliver. Boys had to be big and strong to push the carts when they were fully loaded, especially in the winter with snow and slush to plow through.

The paper barn was a small building where newspaper trucks delivered hundreds of bundles of papers. The paper delivery business, Murphy’s, broke the bundles down and sorted them by paper route in stacks on a waist high shelf along the inside walls of the building. Beside each route’s stack of papers hung a metal ring with small paper cards listing the names and addresses of the delivery customers and the paper(s) they subscribed to. The cards were arranged in the order of the suggested layout of the paper route, which most of the boys followed in their daily deliveries. After a while though, many boys knew their routes by heart and only referred to the cards when there was a change notice attached to the ring. The paperboys were expected to be at the barn to load their bikes or push carts no later than 4:00 pm if it was an afternoon route and 5:00 am for a morning route.

Tim’s first morning route was along a number of nice streets in the Ravenswood neighborhood like Paulina and Hermitage. In the early 1960’s these were wide streets with spacious lawns and majestic elms that spanned the streets forming a canopy like a massive knave in a cathedral. There was a mixture of elegant old clapboard homes and tidy red brick and yellow brick (or Cream City Brick as it was called), apartment buildings with everything from 2 and 3 flats to 18 or 24 apartments or more.

One morning in mid-December, Tim pushed his cart through a few inches of freshly fallen snow. It was a cold morning. The snow crunched beneath his feet as he rolled the paper cart along the sidewalk. The streetlights cast broad circles of light on the street, parked cars and part of the sidewalk. Soft puffs of snow floated through the light as it blew off the arm of the streetlight and nearby tree branches. In between the circles of light were stretches of dark pierced by occasional light from the front porch of a house or a lamp at the entrance to an apartment building. A feeling of solitude enveloped Tim like a warm blanket in the cold. He was a quiet kid, introspective for his age, who sometimes found solace in his thoughts.

Most of the papers delivered to apartment buildings were thrown on porches in the back of the buildings. This often meant walking through dark gangways on the sides of the buildings. These passageways were like tunnels from the front to the back of a building. Gangways were the only way to go from the front to the back when buildings were constructed right up to the lot lines. Tim hated walking through a gangway because he was afraid of what the dark might hold. To get up his courage he hummed or sang softly as he entered and walked through a gangway.

Tim was big for a preteen, but he still had the pudgy face and body of a boy raised to always clean his plate at mealtime. He had not yet developed muscles and agility like his older brothers, who were three and six years older than him. He was the baby in an Irish family; doted on by his mother. This had made him softer than he should have been. Throwing papers up to the first or second floor was not a problem for Tim, but occasionally there was a third floor porch he couldn’t make; a porch that was either too high, or along the side of a building with no space to get an angle for a good throw. On Sundays, the problem was made worse by the increased size of the papers. For these third floors he had no choice but to walk up to the landing between the second and third floor and toss the paper up to the third floor.

The week before Tim had distributed Christmas calendars to his customers. This was the traditional way to indirectly solicit holiday tips. Tim had gone around to his customers at dinner time to increase the odds of them being home. A one dollar tip was common, sometimes two, and very rarely five dollars was given. Occasionally there was no tip or thank you, or no answer at the door even though people were home. Tim quickly learned that people who appeared to have less than others often gave more generously. If no one was home or there was no answer, Tim left a calendar by the door with a Christmas card in the hope the customer would send him a tip in the mail.

Tim came around to the back of an apartment building with a high third floor he knew he could not reach from the walk. There were papers to be delivered on the all three floors. He trudged up the stairs. As he passed the second floor on the way up to the next landing he glanced down to his right into a lighted kitchen. A woman was rummaging through her purse at the kitchen table. Tim reached the landing and tossed the last paper up to the third floor. He turned around and began back down the stairs.

When he reached the second floor, the woman in the lighted kitchen cracked her back door and said, Oh paperboy, please wait a minute I have something I want to give you. Please come in out of the cold.

Tim knew this was a customer who was not home when he had made his rounds with Christmas calendars. She seemed friendly enough so he stepped into her kitchen. She closed the door behind him. He felt a little nervous and self-conscious standing in the woman’s kitchen all bundled up in his winter clothing.

The kitchen was similar to the one in the apartment he lived in. A small room with an old off-white gas stove with four burners, a small off-white Frigidaire refrigerator, and an off-white sink with a built in drain board. The floor was dull, worn linoleum. In the middle of the kitchen floor was a small dinette set like the ones advertised by Polk Brothers, a popular discount furniture and appliance store. It was a shiny metal trimmed table with four metal frame chairs with plastic covered seat cushions and backs.

The woman had turned to her purse on the table. She was dressed in a robe over a nightgown with fluffy slippers on her feet. Being a preteen, Tim was very interested in what women and girls were really all about, but in a shy, awkward way. He cast a furtive glance at the woman noticing that she was very shapely under her night clothes. She had deep black hair, rich cream colored skin and a pretty face with a slightly turned up nose which gave her a youthful look.

He thought she must be quite a bit younger than his mother, but quite a bit older than his sister who was 20 years old. His glance turned into a stare as he wondered what she looked like under her clothes.

As she closed her purse she said, I am sorry I missed you when you left the calendar. I want to give you this present for Christmas. She turned quickly and caught Tim staring at her body. A soft smile formed on