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 Random Thoughts Of A Tired Old Man

It’s hard for me to get an accurate timeline of events back then but working from the fact I was born in 1939 I would be 5 or 6 years old while the war in Europe was still going on. My older brother Stewart took me everywhere. I remember vividly coming out of the Ramova theatre one afternoon and seeing  a a full color poster of a German soldier complete with Stallhelm helmet holding up a baby above his head with the bayonet on the end of his rifle. The poster was pleading to buy war bonds to help fight the barbaric Hun. During the late war years my brother an I explored Chicago fairly comprehensively. We went to the Planetarium, theAquarium, visited the stock yards where my brother worked part time driving cattle between locations. We went eveywhere by street cars. Street cars in Chicago were amazing. They ran virtually everywhere, were dirt cheap and a couple of quarters and a few transfers could take you anywhere you wanted to go. For the young people out there street cars were totally electric and emitted no greenhouse gases. They lasted forever and were dirt cheap to run. If you had a copy of the timetables nowhere in Chicago was more than a couple of blocks from a street car line. One of my favorite places to visit was Navy Pier. The had fabulous army/navy surplus stores. The war was already winding down in 1945 so the military was dumping surplus stuff by the train load. Halsted street had a huge surplus store. The only restriction we had on our travels was dark. We had to be home when the street lights came on. Other than that we were gone from early morning to dark. There were no mommy copters back then to apply salves, ointments and a trip to the emergency room if you skinned your knee doing something stupid. Life was good. We were dirt poor but the thing of it was we didn’t know it. There was no televisions showing us how the beautiful people lived, everyone was in the same boat on the block and the school kids all camp from poor backgrounds. If you don’t know you are poor and how the other half lives you are content. More on that later. The place we lived was called a 4 flat. It had two apartments on the first floor and two on the second floor. We lived in the back ground floor and my grandmother lived above. I never knew who lived in the ground floor front but the upstairs front was occupied by the owner of the building. His name was Bill Packanowski and he had a son, Danny and a daughter Rosa. Danny and I were the same age so we bummed around a lot. We roamed all over a 10 to 12 block area and made our regular rounds. On any given day we would visit the Veterans Park which was a park built and dedicated to the Veterans of WWII. Another favorite spot was what we called Indian Rocks which a huge pile of broken statues made of concrete. The statues were of Indians over every description. We never knew where they came from but in later years I surmised they came from an amusement park of some sort. In any event they were great fun because of the way they dumped them they were full of little hidey holes and litle tunnels to crawl around in. Another favorite was Comiskey park which has all kinds of swings, slides an olympic size swimming pool and monkey bars. There were a couple of abandoned factories to explore which were always good to keep the imagination juices flowint. More to come.