It seems as I have gotten a bit on the downward side of life’s hill, I find myself thinking about things, events, people, etc. that were a part of my life as a kid, adolescent, young adult, middle-aged adult and a mature adult. Guess some would question the loose use of the “adult” reference given some of my childish behavior even as I was legally being defined as an adult, but nevertheless, let’s move on.
Being born at a time when the country was moving out of the deep depression of the 1930’s and before the bombing at Pearl Harbor that threw us into World War II, I can recall the rationing that was mandated by the government. I remember, as a little kid, my father saving coupons and bargaining for more so we would have the requisite amount to buy gas for our annual trip to Kentucky to visit his mother and sister. It was about the only “vacation” we ever took, no doubt influenced by the financial plight of the country. My mother did take my brother and me to Washington, DC because we could travel on the train with a free pass. As a family, we were lucky that my father was employed throughout the depression. He was the Station Master for the railroad that ran through the area where we lived outside the Chicago city limits. During the height of the depression one out of every four people were unemployed, thus we were, indeed, fortunate. I do remember that once we got into the war, there would be “black-out” drills where all the lights had to be turned off at night for designated periods of time. The purpose of the exercise was to preclude enemy bombers from bombing our neighborhoods. In school, I also recall having drills where we would go into the hallway, get down on our knees, place our hands over our heads, bend down and stay in this position until the teachers sent us back to the classroom. The purpose of the drill was to protect ourselves in the event we were bombed.
The first six years of school I attended Walsh School and I had two first-grade teachers, Miss Hay and Miss Wright. Miss Hay taught us in the morning and Miss Wright in the afternoon. Miss Hay was a pioneer in the development of reading phonically. I was one of the “chosen few” who she would take around to other schools and PTA meetings for us to demonstrate how we could read and spell using the phonic technique. I felt special when assigned to go with Miss Hay and five or six other students. Miss Hay along with the school superintendent, Charles E. Wingo, wrote a book, Reading with Phonics, that described this new technique. Reading and spelling phonically was a new approach and has been a helpful tool for me ever since the first grade. Going into the second grade, I had Miss Foran as my teacher, and she did not like me. The reason for this was that my father and her brother, Frank M. Foran, were bitter opponents for a seat on the local Board of Education. An event that is indelibly etched in my memory was being one of two second graders who Miss Foran did not choose to participate in the musical program put on by the high school each year. The other boy was a poor kid who lived on the canal bank in our town—an extremely poor, rundown area. Obviously, I have never forgotten this petty slight by an adult toward a child.
Miss Piancimeno was my third-grade teacher and Miss Petropoulos taught the fourth grade. In the fifth grade I had Miss Callahan. She often asked me to go down the block to the store to buy items that were needed for the teachers’ daily lunch. Being selected was viewed as an honor and I recall relishing the attention, even though I had to put up with some of the other kids calling me the “teacher’s pet”. In the sixth grade, Miss Spellman was my teacher, and she was also the school principal. It was during the Christmas break of the sixth grade that my father died. As an eleven-year-old kid, being told that you no longer had a father was hard to understand and hard to deal with. I remember more than once during the night hearing my mother sobbing behind the closed door in her bedroom after my dad died. I also remember that we had a little dog, that was really my dad’s dog. When my dad did not come back home, that little dog left, and we never saw him again. Guess he knew his buddy was not coming back.
When I was ten, I was hit by a car on Archer Avenue, the busiest street in our neighborhood. I remember waking up in my bed with a sore wrist and a headache. I had been unconscious for eight hours, but never was taken to the hospital. I was taken to the family doctor, Dr. Rush, and he told my mother I had a concussion and sprained wrist. She took me home and put me to bed. Indeed, some of this I was told about because I do not remember seeing Dr. Rush. The man that hit me was a devout catholic and said prayers and lit a candle for me every day for several days. He did come by to see me and said that I just rode my bike right out in front of him and he could not stop. He told me that I flew up into the air and landed back down in front of his car. We found a triangular piece of his headlight in my shirt pocket. I crossed Archer Avenue many, many times—had to cross it to go to school and why I rode out in front of him, I do not know. I was hit right in front of the Foran Funeral Home, the business of my dad’s archrival. Not sure what the message is, but it is sort of interesting. A couple of weeks before my accident, I was playing with the Vugrin twins in their garage. A large garage door was learning up against the wall and for some reason, it fell on me and hit me in the head. I ended up with a heck of a “goose egg” on my forehead and maybe that influenced my behavior on the day I got hit.
Other things that I remember happening during the first eleven years of my life, included having my mouth washed out with soap by my mother because my brother tattled on me. He told her I was cussing while playing ball with some other kids. When my dad was still alive, our discipline involved a razor strap on a bare buttock. I will not forget the day he found out that I had gone to the city dump, something we were forbidden to do. When he got home from work and was told what I had done, he marched me into the bathroom, had me take off all my clothes, stood me up in the sink, and “applied” the razor strap to my butt. I did not go back to the city dump. During a visit with my parents to a farm somewhere south of Chicago, my brother and I were playing with a corn elevator. It is used to carry corn from the ground on a conveyer belt up to a silo. The height of the elevator can be altered by turning a crank. I turned the crank but did not know that you had to back the crank up so it would lock. I let go and the handle with all the weight of the elevator behind it came flying back, hitting me in the head. Every time I took a breath, blood squirted out of the top of my head. Had a scar there for the rest of my days. It is all but faded due to the other wrinkles around that area of my head. During the winter we skated on the frozen Illinois-Michigan Canal and played our made-up brand of hockey. Flipping cars when the roads were covered with snow by holding on to the bumper of the car was another winter activity. It was a game to us to see if we could flip the car without being caught by the driver.
At the end of our street there was a family that had a truck farm, and they grew a variety of vegetables. After my brother got too old, I inherited the job of selling vegetables door-to-door throughout the neighborhood, thus was the beginning of my entrepreneurial inclination. In our neighborhood there was very little in the way of organized activities, so we made up our own games. Often, we played after supper and stayed out until my mother whistled us home. That’s how she called us. She could whistle and we could hear her for a couple of blocks. There was also another accident where I went flying over the handlebars of my bike, landed on my head, and ended up with my second concussion. As I reflect on these first eleven years, it is apparent that most of my “accidents” involved injuries to my head. Perhaps, this realization renders some understanding why I behave as I do. Do you think?
Oh well, this begins my journey. As with all of us, there is the good, the bad, and the ugly. Many twists, turns, curves, hills and valleys. Some we have a measure of control over, others we do not. Regardless, all that happens does have some type of ramification. As Popeye would say, “I yam what I yam, and that’s what I yam”.