Three times a week after school, I hobbled out to Cottage Grove from Mendel on crutches. I always got a seat on the streetcar at 111th Street. The Red Rocket went without a transfer all the way to 29th Street. The ride was long, but I had to continue with physical therapy at Michael Reese. All the way up to 63rd Street things were familiar because Mom had taken us shopping to the Sears and Hillman’s at 63rd & Halsted. North of 63rd Street, however, Cottage Grove Avenue became interesting. The neighborhoods progressed from poor to more poor. The store fronts told the story. In the better sections there were a variety of businesses; TV shops, cleaners, butchers, bakeries, flower shops, you name it and you could find it on Cottage Grove in each neighborhood along the way. By 43rd Street the buildings were older, dirtier, the businesses were fewer and those that were there were different. Night clubs, taverns, storefront churches, groceries and drugstores. What impressed me most was the up-keep on the buildings – there was none. Some of the old frame buildings had boards missing or they were loose and hanging. The paint wore away years ago, and the wood was grey from weather. Many windows had boards nailed on, others had metal guards. There were people everywhere, just hanging around. The further north I traveled, the people on the car changed from white to black. By the time I got off at 29th I was the only white left.
I never felt unsafe at any point of those trips. The neck brace and crutches gave me a pathetic look and kept me safe. That section of Cottage Grove was truly what I call a ghetto. So many poor people all living in very crowded spaces with landlords that didn’t care to spend money on upkeep of the buildings.
The three block walk to the hospital after the long ride was a welcome relief. I arrived at the Physical Therapy Department at 3:45 p.m. for my 4:00 appointment. Once in the PT area, I stuffed my duffel bag, crutches, and brace into a locker and donned an Indian style loin cloth for the session.
Each treatment was the same. Walk the parallel bars without crutches, do leg exercises, then follow-up with neck stretches and neck exercise. The therapist always took over my neck. At times, it felt like she twisted my head backwards.. The drill lasted 30-45 minutes and then it was time to go.
On the trip home, I pulled on the handhold and pushed against my crutches to hike up the high steps into a crowded rush-hour Rocket. I learned quickly to take any seat that was available. Many times I stood all the way to 79th Street before a seat became free.
One day I stepped into a very crowded car and squeezed my self away from the entrance to give room for more people to get on. A little white-haired black lady looked up at me and offered me her seat. She looked exhausted and tired. I thanked her but refused. At age fifteen I wasn’t about to take a seat from a senior citizen. That incident repeated itself many times over the course of eight months that I commuted on the Rocket.
The therapy continued throughout the spring and the summer. By the time of my release from Michael Reese Physical Therapy, I was very glad. During that summer I began to lift weights at home to build up my arms and legs. My gym was the back yard. I dressed in swim trunks and looked like the guy who got sand kicked in his face in the Charles Atlas adds. I lifted weights.
By the time school started in the fall, I talked my way into using just one crutch. The therapist didn’t think my hip was strong enough to get off the crutch completely. After only a few steps my hip swung out to the side and I fell into a limp. Eventually, I got rid of the collar, wearing it only when I felt tired.
My physical condition was 1000% better by the time school started at the end of August. The summer of PT and weight lifting did wonders for my muscles. At the same time I was still growing in height.
Yesterday, I posted a story about the gang of kids with whom I went to grammar school. Today, I am beginning a series of stories related to my adventure in high school. The time is September, 1952, the school is in the Roseland community of Chicago. My story is not different from the story of all kids who were born just before and during World War Two. The activities we enjoyed were the same. We all employed the same form of communication; letters and face to face speech. Phones were still scarce within the home, with a few public phone booths scattered about in businesses. Radio was the strongest media format. Television was still a rarity within homes, but catching on quickly. Not every family owned an automobile and public transportation was abundant with trolleys that ran frequently. Kids bought single 78 rpm records to play on their hi-fi players. Portable radios were the size of a large box of Cheerios, and used four to six “D” size batteries. It was a time of my life that I would not trade for anything.
The long summer ended and the big day arrived. Mom packed a lunch for me, and I set off to ninety-third and Woodlawn to catch the street car. I was excited; I didn’t have a buddy with me. I was on my own. The few minutes waiting for the car to arrive made me more anxious. Should I take a chance and walk to the next stop? Just then I spotted the red trolley making the turn onto 93rd Street from it’s journey around the Nickel Plate round-house at Kenwood.
The ride to Cottage Grove lasted all of five minutes. I got off to wait for my transfer onto the Cottage Grove South car. Another wait to make me anxious but there was more traffic to watch on Cottage and it relieved the anxiety a bit. The trolley stopped near the corner and I stepped off the curb to cross the lane to where the long red trolley stood in the center of the four lane street. The pavement was all cobblestone and rough. Once I was on the Cottage Grove line and headed south, I breathed a short sigh of relief.
The Cottage trolley went two blocks before it made a left turn onto 95th street to cut through the via-duct under the Illinois Central (IC) tracks to where Cottage Grove continued south on the east side of the railroad tracks. The IC tracks are elevated from the south suburbs all the way to 47th street. The viaducts passing under the tracks are long, dark and noisy. As soon as the trolley broke out of the viaduct it swung right to head south again. At this point the trolley tracks were between the street and the raised Illinois Central tracks. Because of the separation the motorman could make time between stop signs and cross streets. The electric motors accelerated smoothly, and since the tracks were off the street and there was no traffic in the way, the trolley sped along at 40 miles per hour and more.
At 103rd we had to slow down for the stop light. After that, we slowed down once more for the viaduct at 107th. The 103rd and 107th cross streets were a lot lower than the track bed, so the trolley dipped as it approached these intersections. There was always the chance that a car or truck would break out from the viaduct into the path of the trolley. For this reason, the motorman slowed the trolley considerably to cross the intersections.
I started to get nervous again because my stop at 111th was nearing. The conductor called it out and the car stopped. Many boys of my age got off. Some were on the car when I got on; others joined us at stops along the way.
Again, I crossed over the street to catch the trolley going west. It was waiting there, and I had to run to catch it. I jumped up the stairs with my transfer ticket in one hand and my lunch bag in the other. The trolley took off, and before I could get settled into a seat, we were at South Park Avenue. I got off at the rear door next to Pullman Bank. There, across the street was the gate that opened onto the drive that led to Mendel Catholic High School for boys.
The walk up the drive was pretty because the forty acre school campus was large and well landscaped. At this point there was a crowd of boys all headed in the same direction to the tall, stately building in the center overlooking the pond and 111th street. I ran up the front steps and opened the door to a new world and a whole new segment of life.
One of my best friends and work associate sent me this piece is by Pulitzer Prize winning editorial author Michael Gartner. I want to meet him and thank him for this eloquently written story about his parents.
This is a piece by Michael Gartner, president of NBC News; in 1997, he won a Pulitzer Prize. It is well worth reading, even if it looks too long for you to read right now, and a few good chuckles are guaranteed. Please take a few minutes to absorb the meaning of this
story, and then go hug someone…..Here goes…
My father never drove a car. Well, that’s not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car.
He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.
“In those days,” he told me when he was in his 90’s, “to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it.” At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:
“Oh, bullshit!” she said. “He hit a horse.”
“Well,” my father said, “there was that, too.”
So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars — the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford — but we had none. My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines, would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.
My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we’d ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. “No one in the family drives,” my mother would explain, and that was that. But, sometimes, my father would say, “But as soon as one of you boys
turns 16, we’ll get one.” It was as if he wasn’t sure which one of uswould turn 16 first.
But, sure enough , my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown.
It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn’t drive, it more or less became my brother’s car.
Having a car but not being able to drive didn’t bother my father, but it didn’t make sense to my mother. So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father’s idea.
“Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?” I remember him saying more than once.
For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps — though they seldom left the city limits — and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.
Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn’t seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of
marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.) He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin’s Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish’s two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home.
If it was the assistant pastor, he’d take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests “Father Fast” and “Father Slow.”
After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he’d sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I’d stop by, he’d explain:
“The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored.”
If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out — and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, “Do you want to know the secret of a long life?”
“I guess so,” I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre
“No left turns,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“No left turns,” he repeated. “Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic.
As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn.”
“What?” I said again.
“No left turns,” he said. “Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that’s a lot safer. So we always make three rights.”
“You’re kidding!” I said, and I turned to my mother for support.
“No,” she said, “your father is right. We make three rights. It
works.” But then she added: “Except when your father loses count…” I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing.
“Loses count?” I asked.
“Yes,” my father admitted, “that sometimes happens. But it’s not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you’re okay again.”
I couldn’t resist. “Do you ever go for 11?” I asked.
“No,” he said ” If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can’t be put off another day or another week.”
My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102. They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom — the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)
He continued to walk daily — he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he’d fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising — and he was of sound mind and sound body
until the moment he died.
One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news. A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, “You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred.” At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, “You know, I’m probably not going to live much longer.”
“You’re probably right,” I said.
“Why would you say that?” He countered, somewhat irritated.
“Because you’re 102 years old,” I said…
“Yes,” he said, “you’re right.” He stayed in bed all the next day. That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: “I would like to make an announcement: No one in this room is dead yet”
An hour or so later, he spoke his last words: “I want you to know,” he said, clearly and lucidly, “that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have.”
A short time later, he died. I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I’ve wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long. I can’t figure out if it was because he walked through life, or because he quit taking left turns. ”
Life is too short to wake up with regrets. So — love the people who treat you right. Forget about the ones who don’t. Believe that everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it and if it changes your life, let it. Nobody said life would be easy; they just promised it would most likely be worth it.”
ENJOY IT, BECAUSE LIFE HAS AN EXPIRATION DATE!
Louie,
Thanks for sending this story. It brought tears to my eyes.
