Love and the Ironing Board

Dad had dropped out of college to join the Army. He spent about three years as a soldier during WWII, and some time in the Philippines. Like many of his friends, he joined because it was the thing to do and their assignments often reflected their tender age and inexperience. My grandfather, on the other hand, was doing work for the government during the war. As an engineer, he helped develop a stabilizer for signal lights on boats. His work even sent him to Washington a few times.

By the time Dad returned home from the service, my grandparents had started a banquet hall called "The Belvedere," Italian for "pretty view." Actually, the only view from the place was busy intersection of Grand and Austin Avenues, and a number of small storefronts across the street. The neighborhood around this intersection, like many further south in the city where both my parents grew up, had many first or second generation Italian families. Many of the parents, including my grandparents, spoke Italian as their first language. However, my father’s parents recognized the importance of learning English and as a result, Dad and his sister grew up speaking both Italian and English.

The Grand and Austin area consisted of working class families living in small but well cared for homes and apartment buildings. Riis Park over on Fullerton Avenue, a few blocks north, provided recreational facilities such as a swimming pool, basketball courts, softball diamonds and picnic areas, as well as a hangout spot for the local young males who had aspirations directed toward juvenile delinquency. St. John Bosco Church on Austin Avenue was the one of the growing parishes, and where I was baptized.

The storefronts along Grand Avenue featured all kinds of retail endeavors including fresh fish, fruits and vegetables, a restaurant with a counter and a few booths and a body shop. One of them was occupied by Nuti Bakery, started by my great grandfather on my mother's side. At the time, my mother's uncle and cousins ran the bakery which specialized in simple breads and Italian pastries. My mother and her sister Alice spent some time working there and when it came time for Alice's wedding shower, the logical place for it was across the street at the Belvedere.

The story goes that my father was working behind the bar when my mother walked in for the shower, struggling with a large gift - an ironing board. Dad was quick to assist, and the rest, as they say, is history. By the time they married in January of 1950, the only place they could afford was one of the apartments in the back of the Belvedere. My grandparents lived in the other apartment with my father's sister Mary and her husband Swede, whose real name was Donald but everyone called him Swede because he was the only Swedish guy among all the Italians and Irish. Actually, he had very little Swedish blood - mostly German and French. He was a bricklayer by day and helped tend bar at the Belvedere at night, moving in after he and Mary married in October of 1949. By December of 1950, I lived there too.

Everyone worked the banquets. My grandmother cooked, my mother and aunt waitressed, my dad and uncle were behind the bar, my grandfather kept an eye on the operation, even though he had a full time job as a mechanical engineer. One thing everyone joked about was how my grandfather always took on the job of cutting the sheet cakes for dessert. Every piece was cut precisely the same size. The only problem was that he took so long concentrating on the exactness of the procedure that the waitresses were backed up waiting to serve the long awaited dessert to the banquet guests.

As the only child living with my parents, grandparents, aunt, uncle and a variety of friends, busboys and waitresses, it was pretty easy to be the center of attention. My mother says I talked and walked early, taking first steps across the top of the bar for the amusement of the patrons. She also said I was the only one on the premises who wouldn’t get in trouble for knocking over a bottle of scotch if I was playing behind the bar. The only real memory I have is the bright lights of the juke box where I often bounced around under the selection buttons to the tunes of Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney and Theresa Brewer. (at right, Daddy, me and Mom at the Belvedere, my first birthday)

From what I’ve been told, Uncle Swede was a source of constant amusement during my toddler years. No matter what the meal, wedges of lemons were always on the table when the entire extended family had supper in the evening. Swede would offer me a lick of the lemon just to watch my face contort at the sour taste. He would hide the lemon for a while, then offer it again, and again I would eagerly try it, only to make another sour face. He would roar with laughter with would get me smiling again, too.

“Swede! Leave that kid alone!” my mother or aunt would yell, and he did, only until the next time. Another favorite activity of ours was playing on the living room floor after he came home from a hard day of construction. He would be snoozing, flat out on the floor, and I would come along and wake him up. As he sat up, I would “push” him down into a prone position, walk around to his head, and “push” him back up again. Obviously, he was doing situps just for my enjoyment.

Over the years he loved telling the stories time and time again, and if we were at a family party, the sentimentality combined with a bit of alcohol, resulted in great hugs, a few tears and the constant comment, “you kids are all the greatest!”

Swede and my dad were close friends and enjoyed each other’s company. But working at the Belvedere didn't promise too much of a future for my father. By the time my mother was pregnant with Sue, we made the move to Elmhurst and he had switched to working construction - probably the job he enjoyed most. During the winter, the business would slack off and he found other jobs to make up the difference: taxi driver, vacuum cleaner salesman (he sold one, to my mother) and bartending stints as he was needed. The irregularity of his income, two children and DuPage County taxes soon became too much and we were headed back to Chicago after less than three years.

Mom and Dad

3.
Rena married Leno at 21 and had me, her first child, eleven months later. The children continued coming every two or three years until there were five. She was the youngest of three girls and grew up in the Taylor Street area of Chicago.

She was a devoted mother who never stopped worrying about her children. She was passionate about them, wanting them close by and always in line. Never one to hide her feelings, she always spoke her mind particularly with her husband and kids. Hers was not a quiet house with voices often raised in joy as well as anger. The battles she fought over the years - with her weight, her husband, her children, her religion, her in-laws - were sometimes painful but often healthy ones. Fires seldom smoldered within her for very long - loud eruptions either brought them to an end or at least put them out temporarily to be stoked up another time.

Rena kept a clean but disorderly house; she was always doing laundry, giving her kids baths or putting forth monumental efforts to sanitize one room while the others fell into chaos. She was an exceptional cook, able to feed twice as many as the table was set for at any given extraordinary meal.

“If I can cook it, bake it or wash it, I can do it,” she would say. “Just don’t ask me to sew it, draw it or paint it.”

She was as quick with a swat as a hug and worked hard to make sure her children were polite, respectful and unspoiled. She had her pet peeves about discipline and they were often enumerated in her discourses on “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a kid who...” The list expanded well over one thing, but included: “a kid who spits...who says ‘no’ to an adult...who lies (I just hate a liar!)...who is sneaky...who has a big mouth...who doesn’t wash…who listens in on adult conversations... who whines...who throws a tantrum...who gives Indian burns...” Spitters, liars and whiners were probably the greatest of kid criminals in my mother’s eyes, although tantrum throwers were kids we held in complete awe. Whenever we witnessed such behavior in a grocery store or at a party, we would look from the performer to my mother, mouths agape at his stupidity.

We would wonder, has this kid lost his mind? Doesn’t he know what fate awaits him at home when he pulls a stunt like this? Nothing is worth the punishment for throwing a tantrum!

Actually, none of us ever had the nerve to do such a thing because my mother’s threats, from a very early age, were enough to permanently dissuade us. After seeing her reaction to one tantrum, - the flashing eyes, the set jaw - and hearing “Give me just five minutes with that kid and we’ll see if he ever throws another tantrum,” we never tempted fate. It just wasn’t worth it.

Raising and caring for her children was my mother’s greatest joy. Cortland Street was where her family started to grow and where, in a short time, the family passed some of its own milestones. For my father, it was a time of changing from one job to another, still under the watchful and often critical eye of his parents who lived only a mile away.

Cortland Street

Whenever I think of Cortland Street, it is almost always of a hot, sunny day with a dozen assorted kids playing up and down the street. I’m dressed in a sleeveless button-up shirt in red checks with faded shorts and gym shoes with a half-moon of white rubber across the toes. My white ankle socks irritatingly ride into my shoes when I run and I’m always stopping to pull them up. My sister Sue, four years old, is also a member of the neighborhood gang, and though she sticks with the younger kids, she usually has an eye out for me, just in case. Even at this early age, she’s stubborn and won’t admit to needing me for anything. Still, we have a secret understanding that we share without saying - we know we have each other.

Sue looks like me only shorter and fairer. We’re slight, skinny kids with pixie haircuts and big brown eyes. We share the same room and a mutual skepticism about that baby who cries so much. But this is summer - a time for endless play, and we take off each morning for the yard and beyond, while my mother stays in the house. The city heat and humidity gives us all rings of sweaty dirt in the creases of our necks, arms and behind our knees, but we don’t seem to notice. We lived for playing in packs, all day long, roaming from one yard to another. We dreaded the sing-song call of any mother, beckoning any player home for dinner. By summer’s end, most of the grass on the parkways and in many of the yards had been trampled away.

The parkway in front and on the side of our building gave us room for bike riding and the adjoining empty lot, though less than 25 feet wide, seemed like a huge playground. There was never a shortage of kids, games or things to do, only sunny days to do it all in.

Ours was a pleasant, if small, apartment with a non-functioning fireplace in the living room. The front living room windows looked south, down Long Avenue and the one west window gave the view up Cortland. It was the window my mother called us from, the early evening sunlight shining on her like a beacon, as she shielded her eyes and yelled out our names so the whole block knew it was time for our supper.
"Nan-ceee, Su-zeee, come iiinnnn nooowww!"

There was an unheated tandem room, often called a sleeping porch, off my parents' bedroom that was used as a playroom when the weather was warm; a second bedroom, a dining room, kitchen and small back porches for each apartment. In the lot next to the house, my parents put in two diamond shaped flower gardens. Gladioli and carnations grew as best as they could, despite the abuse of kids running over and through the beds. We had a swing set in the back that my father anchored into the ground with cement at each leg. I would push Susie on the swings until she learned to pump for herself, giving her “underdogs” to make her go higher.

We lived on the second floor and my parents rented out the first floor apartment to a couple of different families during the few years we lived there. There was a separate garage at the back of the lot but I can’t remember my father ever putting his car in it. The building itself was not very old and my father’s abilities in carpentry helped to keep it in fairly decent shape.

The alley behind us backed up to a train yard and across the street on the east side was a disposal company - two good reasons right there that might encourage my parents to move. Long before environmentally sound practices were the norm, a time when the smell of burning leaves only indicated a foreshadowing of winter, big red Roy Strom dump trucks regularly emptied their contents behind the company’s fence, much of which they proceeded to burn. Often it was a load of old tires. And it always seemed to be at a time when my mother’s freshly washed sheets were hanging in the back yard.

“It stinks! It stinks!” we would yell to her as we ran into the house, our hands covering our noses and mouths, whenever the burning and smelly smoke interrupted outside play on a summer day. She became fiercely angry whenever this happened and I can still see her storming across the street to the Strom offices, sooty sheets in hand, to give whomever a piece of her mind. She wasn’t a very tall woman, but like a cat encountering a larger enemy, the anger in her eyes and voice made her appear to be a formidable opponent. She had soft brown hair with a little bit of a wave that obeyed her much less than her children. She had a lovely figure in those days, something I’m sure my father noticed when they first met.

Going back to the beginning...

1.

I don’t know if there was just one reason that made my parents want to move from the two-flat on Cortland Street. Thinking back, it was probably a combination of things. Cortland Street was in an active neighborhood with lots of kids and our “house,” as all kids called their buildings, was on a double lot on the corner where Cortland met Long Avenue - about 1900 north and 5400 west in Chicago, just inside the border of the Austin community of the city.

We moved there in the late summer of 1955 after a few years in the suburb of Elmhurst. Our family was actually returning to this part of the city. My parents started their marriage in a small apartment behind the restaurant/tavern/banquet hall that my grandparents ran just a couple miles north at Austin and Grand. They moved to Elmhurst before I was two and moved back before I was five. The property taxes were killing them and they simply couldn’t afford to stay in that cute little ranch home. No doubt my grandfather had a lot to do with finding the two-flat; it was near his own apartment building and with an extra flat to rent out for additional income, it was the answer to my parents’ financial straits. Still, I know my mother had loved that little house, her neighbors and living in the suburbs.

Maybe the white picket fence helped a bit. It was the only fence on the block and surrounded the Courtland property. During the early summer, blue irises grew along the walk up to the front door, which was painted a bright turquoise. Three white diamond shaped designs decorated the door, the top one with a glass insert which I could only look out of if I stood on the landing inside, next to the door of the first floor apartment. The brick of the building was dark brown and the very top, in the front, had a castle-like design that you didn’t really notice unless you were at least half a block away.

It was on the front walk, behind the fence, that I set up my first business endeavor: a petting zoo of stuffed animals in milk crates made to look like cages. I was perhaps six years old and collected anything in the house that vaguely resembled an animal, including my favorite stuffed monkey that my aunt and uncle had brought back from their honeymoon in Cuba.

“Mom, look, I made six cents!” I yelled as I ran up the stairs.

“Where did you get that?”

“From my zoo on the front walk. You have to pay a penny to see it.”

She looked out the window to see my handiwork. To her, collecting money for such a thing was pretty close to shaking down unsuspecting kids - not the best in neighborliness as far as she was concerned.

“Well, you can march right down the block and give everyone their money back. You don’t take money from people for something like that! What were you thinking??”

I would have willingly handed over every penny to her, and then some (if I had it) to avoid facing the six kids I had charged. The embarrassment of payback prevented me from ever setting up a KoolAid stand and, as anyone in my family will attest, I’m still pretty lousy at bargaining, haggling or any kind of retail. Still, I brought the pennies back, mumbling my reasons and quickly darting back down the street.