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Random Thoughts Of A Tired Old Man

The South Side of Chicago back in the late 40's was very ethnically structured. Go a few blocks in one direction and the residents were mostly Italian. Go in another direction and they were eastern European mostly Poles. We called them Bohunks. There is no such word but I assume it was a slang expression for Bohemian which is what we thought of eastern Europeans. There was an Irish section and of the course the area where we lived was predominately German. The nice think about that arrangement was you could go a few blocks to a Polish butcher and get some great Polish sausages or lunch meats. The same was true of the Italian section. I recall going to one neighborhood which was heavily Spanish and getting Hot Tamales. The guy had one of those street corner vending carts with an umbrella. A Hot Tamale wrapped in a corn husk was 5 cents back then. I used to walk down there frequently just to get the Tamales. The German bakery on the corner made wonderful loaves of black bread. The German Black Bread was very dense and heavy with a very hard crust. Cut a couple of slices of that, smear it with butter and put some Polish lunch meat and some German Muenster cheese between the slices of bread and you had a full meal. The Germans also made good lunch meat but the poles made better sausages. Lord I wish you could buy food like that today. The bread now days is a light, fluffy tasteless concoction of spun flour and topped off with chemical preservatives. The sausage you buy in the store has no taste, flavor or texture and is mostly artificial chemicals. For some reason I never visited the Italian section very much. Back then we considered the Italians as dark and mysterious. We were told they all carried knives and we were warned not to go there. We had a butcher shop on the corner of our block owned by a guy named Mitchell. Don't recall ever hearing his last name but he made a small fortune during the war. During the war everyone was on rations. You had a little book filled with stamps that could be used to purchase staples such a meat, flour, oils, etc. If you went to Mitchell's you could use your ration stamps to buy meats like chicken and beef or pork. OR, for a few dollars more you could buy chickens and horse meat sold as beef. Apparently, Mitchell had a deal worked out with some Illinois farmers for chickens because he seemed to have and endless supply of them. I have no idea where he got the horses from. We didn't have gangs in the sense we have gangs today but the kids from each neighborhood back then were very territorial. If a group of kids from an adjoining neighborhood wandered into our territory they were confronted. It usually amounted to no more than a lot of posturing and stupid questions like " What Are You Doing In Our Neighborhood" ? A couple of times it actual moved on from routine shoving and actually broke out into a fight. On one of these encounters one kid threw an ice pick at me and it hit me in the corner of my eye right next to the nose. I was lucky as it caused no damage to the eye but I have a black spot where it hit to this day in the white part of my eye. The second time I got injured a kid threw a piece of glass from the bottom of a glass bottle at me. It hit my left hand. There is a large vein that runs between the first and second finger after the thumb. It cut that vein. It's amazing how far blood can squirt from a severed vein. I had the good sense to take my shirt off and wrap it tightly around my hand. I went home to Grams who got Gramps and we piled into the Studebaker that Gramp owned and rushed off to the nearest doctor. In the panic Gram forgot her purse and when we got to the doctor's office they refused service because we didn't have cash. We were told to go to the county hospital which serviced welfare patients. We rushed back home to get Grams purse and then off to the hospital where they sewed me back up. By the time we got there I was getting light headed from loss of blood. I never liked doctors after that and I was 60 before I would go to one and that was only because I was having a gall stone attack.