A.
Her name was Karen. She was seven or eight and I was six or seven. It was 1949 or 50. Our mothers still picked out our clothes, told the barber how to cut our hair, put our breakfast on the table without asking what we wanted and put us out early in the morning to play unsupervised. It was before stranger danger, before rebellious kids who would even dream of leaving the block and yes, there were neighbors who kept an eye out the window, but most of them were too busy with the house work and whatnot to pay us any mind. We hadn’t heard of puberty and no one had heard of playing doctor. We were just a bunch of kids, the little kids, boys and girls, brothers and sisters who played together outside, weather permitting.
We all played Hide-and-Seek and Mother-May-I. The girls jumped rope, but in general we just ran around. Karen wasn’t necessarily a leader, but she was adventurous. She lived in a three-story Chicago-style brick courtyard building, and we lived in the one right next door. She liked to run up and down the back stairs, playing a kind of catch me if you can. She was the one who discovered that if you were careful you could kind of half stretch and half jump from one set of porches to the other and get away scot free. After she did it two or three times, she made us do it. A little encouragement and a little teasing and we did it.
When you’re little, too little to be self conscious, one’s not aware that one’s growing up. People say, “My, look how big you are. You’re so tall.” But day-to-day you don’t notice. It’s the same body, after all, and you don’t pay much attention to your own body. But after we learned to jump from building to building, we realized that we had just passed a milestone. We were almost ready to hang out with the big kids.
And then it happened. Her family moved. She was gone, just like that. I must have known that she was leaving, but I didn’t realize that she was gone until well after she had left. I didn’t really realize until years later that when she left, she left a hole in my life.
Over twenty years later, I gave Karen’s name to my youngest daughter Melissa for her middle name. I did it in Karen’s memory and in memory of that long ago time when little kids were just kids and played happily together in comradeship and good cheer.
B.
When I was just a kid, I didn’t know about social dynamics, war babies and boomers, class and race, demographics and median family income, or religion and gender. My world was my parents’ friends in the building, later the kids in school and the big kids who played baseball with a tennis ball. It was a small world, and I had no idea about all the convulsions a society goes through to create such places. Our building had never been designed for kids, and for twenty years it had always been older, childless couples, widows or newlyweds saving for a bigger place. Things had been put on hold during the Great Depression, but our street had escaped the changes created by the Depression. Nothing on our block was cut up and divided into smaller and smaller units. The southern white immigrants had gone someplace else. But the war froze everything in place.
No one could move, and the folks who would have moved before starting a family started having kids and not moving. Upstairs, Dale would go off to war and come home and have three kids in four years. My father always joked that he was too young for WWI and too old for WW II, but he got serious about having kids and had me in ’43 and my sister in ’44, just in case they started drafting older men. Soon the building had eleven kids under ten. One couple who lived across the courtyard from my parents just said, “Hi and goodbye” until the woman had a baby. Then they became best friends ( until my parents were killed in an auto accident) and the newborn daughter Kathy and my sister Joanne would become lifelong friends (that is, until my sister died of cancer). Joanne even followed Kathy to Clark College in Dubuque twenty years later.
But soon the building started losing the families with kids. Dale, his wife and his three sons moved to a small suburb along the old Chicago and Northwestern RR line. Arlington Heights had a population of about 5,000 people. They moved to a house that dead-ended five blocks from Highway 12. We were impressed by the size of their house, the fields that they could play in (The site of a future development, but we knew nothing about developments), and even a big backyard. I imagine that now the house is considered a tear-down waiting for the market to improve.
My mother kept in touch, and Eunice would come to my parents’ funeral, but I never saw the boys again. My brother reports that they grew up to be typical white suburbanites of their day, so it’s just as well. We also moved; we made it within four short blocks of the suburbs, but we didn’t quite make it to the burbs.
The white movement to the suburbs has been characterized as a flight. I don’t believe it. The folks in my building moved because they needed a second bedroom, an expandable attic, a garage, and a place for the kids to play. At first, at least, people didn’t move for “better schools;” they moved to schools that weren’t overcrowded and new. Our parents wanted new and they were happy to leave behind the old cities. They used to brag (and it was half true) that Edison Park was really just like a suburb, but in the city.) But they also left behind their old friends, the old neighborhood and some of its old ways. Sometimes, now when we look back, we wish that somehow we could recreate those old ways. Some of the grandchildren of those folks who moved to the burbs have moved back; they might not stay, but they are trying to recreate urban life. I have a young friend who grew up in Niles and now lives in an apartment building six blocks from my old apartment building.
