Our house was typical.
The exterior was unpainted stucco with a screened front porch that offered
summer sitting and sleeping. The back porch was roofed. The milk bottles
were delivered there and the garbage cans were kept next to the back sidewalk
from the house to the garage. The basement had both inside and outside
stairs. One window opened into the coal bin for the chute from the truck.
You couldn't miss the sound of coal rattling down the chute. There was
a room we called the fruit cellar where we stored canned and preserved
goods. There was a tool room with tool chests and a work bench. It held
at one time a wine barrel with undrinkable wine my father had tried to
make from Concord grapes. There was a large coal furnace and the main
room which had the clotheslines. We used to drop horse chestnuts down
the heat registers so they would explode in the furnace. A clothes chute
from the second floor had two doors from which to extract the dirty clothes.
There were two laundry tubs and a gas plate for heating tubs of water.
Until the late thirties we had a sidearm gas water heater which you lit
by a match. Today's type with automatic controls came just before the
war, along with electric refrigerators. We got our first gas range with
a pilot light after the war.
Once when the parents
were away my brother and I took a revolver from the cedar chest and fired
it into the coal bin. The noise was shocking. We returned the gun, uncleaned,
not realizing that the barrel would be ruined. The damage wasn't discovered
until many years later.
We ate in the kitchen,
using the dining room at holidays when guests came. By today's standards
the kitchen was a disaster. It had only one built-in cabinet. There was
a little pantry used for dish and food storage. It would have felt small
to a midget. The icebox, refrigerator after 1939, was in the "back
room" which was a corridor between the kitchen and the back porch.
There was a living room and a "front room" where the piano sat,
along with a dresser and my father's desk, that held his American Legion
files--he was post adjutant for many years. That desk held the downstairs
phone over which he checked in with the Public
Service for emergency calls.
Before dial phones
he asked the operator for "one thousand, please." When the company
operator answered he asked for "247, please." That was the dispatch
office. Because he was called to fire scenes he had the "secret code"
used by firemen who called the phone company to get the fire location.
The second floor
had three bedrooms and the bath, which came with a tub, no shower. There
were strict rules about cleaning the tub after each use. The house was
poorly insulated and hot summer nights were miserable. We often slept
on mattresses on the floor downstairs or on the front porch. The bedroom
storm windows could be opened out or you could use a little sliding panel
to expose three small holes. The storms were taken down to the basement
in the spring and replaced by screens. The attic stairs led off the bedroom
my brother and I shared. It held army uniforms and equipment from WWI
which we played with. There were bayonets, helmets, gas masks. These,
with some Civil War swords that were kept in the basement afforded hours
of fun.
Through the thirties
mail came twice daily. Our mailman, until he left for the war, was Dick
Schotanus. He wore a uniform with a cap and necktie. My father had known
the postmaster, Ray Kennedy, for years. As kids,
we knew at least the name of' every mailman and inside worker.
At one time our Cub
Scout troop met in our basement. Our mother was a Den Mother. That meant
she kept some degree of order and applied cookies and milk or Kool-Aid.
We had a punching bag and barbell set in the basement. Bob
Gillis, the Presbyterian minister's son, took a roundhouse punch at a
second bag, but it was the clothespin bag. It was a painful mistake.
Those days the radio
was home entertainment. We had a big Silvertone radio in the living room
and a table model next to my bed. Programs aimed at kids usually ran fifteen
minutes each weekday between five and six in the afternoon. Dick Tracy
was big as was Dick Armstrong, the All-American Boy. There were
various cowboys, cops and adventurers. Adults got news from H. V. Kaltenborn
who had an unctuous, somehow official-sounding voice that made listeners
think he knew whereof he spoke. Gabriel Heatter's' horrendous opener was,
"Ah yes, ladies and gentlemen, there's good news tonight."
There was drama:
the Lux Radio Theatre introduced by Cecil B. DeMille, was one of
several. Saturday nights were enlivened by the National Barn Dance
over WLS and Your Hit Parade which ran down the pop hits. Make
Believe Ballroom was on weekday afternoons. Announced by Martin Block,
it purported to be from a ballroom. Records and sound effects helped the
illusion. At that time the networks carried remotes of the big bands;
Glen Miller, the Dorsey brothers' bands, Glen Gray and his Casa Loma orchestra
and many others. The sweet or "Mickey Mouse" bands like Sammy
Kaye, Hal Kemp and Lawrence Welk were broadcast from the Aragon and Trianon
ballrooms in Chicago. Kay Kyser had his Kollege of Musical Knowledge
on a major network in prime evening hours.
Kids were frightened
by the tales on Inner Sanctum and The Hermit. Their sounds
included ghostly howls and creaking doors. I Love A Mystery was popular
and years later, living near San Francisco, I was surprised to find that
its author, Carlton E. Morse, was alive and well and living two towns
down the Peninsula.
Daytime serials abounded:
Our Gal Sunday, Stella Dallas, Vic and Sade, Young
Dr.Kildare, and many others. Some of them ran for years, fifteen minutes
at a clip with lots of commercials. Burns and Allen, Sergeant
Preston of the Yukon, Abie's Irish Rose, Amos 'n' Andy,
The Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy Show, The Abbott and Costello
Show, Orson Welles, Franklyn MacCormack, great names all. Culture
lovers could listen to The Metropolitan Opera with Milton Cross,
all the way from New York.
Football and baseball
were the major sports on radio. When the Chicago Cubs and White Sox were
on the road the games were done by telegraph. Listeners could hear the
clicking of the keys using Morse code, just like what train passengers
heard at the depots. My brother and I were in our bedroom on Sunday afternoon,
December seventh, listening to the Chicago Bears beat the Washington Redskins.
The news of Pearl Harbor interrupted the broadcast and we checked the
atlas to make sure just where the Hawaiian Islands were.
The twice-yearly
arrivals of the Sears and Wards catalogs were events in young lives. In
the summer of 1941 Chuck Jamieson, my brother
Don, Mark Neville and I went to Camp Ma-Ka-Ja-Wan
near Antigo. We slept four to a tent raised on a wooden platform, swam,
canoed, hiked, studied nature. Many of the counselors were talking about
military service because the draft was in place. The summer of 1942 was
the last of the camp for the duration.
Halloween was a big
occasion for kids, if not adults. There was clothesline night, garbage
night, etc., all before the main event. Little kids did trick or treat
and bigger kids rang doorbells, soaped windows and stuffed cow manure
into mailboxes. I don't remember any real, destructive vandalism. Older
boys, it was said, blew up front porch mailboxes with cherry bombs. Wise
householders taped their door letter slots closed for the night.
One year I was part
of a small band that took offense at some hapless resident. He had refused
to play trick or treat so we tricked. We sneaked onto his front porch
to wedge his front door shut with a tree branch, then rang the bell, banged
on the door and vibrated a sewing spool, notched, against his window.
After pushing in vain against his front door the enraged man stormed out
the back door and ran down the sidewalk to the front where he tripped
over an ankle-high cord we had rigged and went sprawling, there to receive
a shower of rotten vegetables from our hiding place in the shrubs. None
of us ever went into that neighborhood for months.
In 1937 there was
a huge storm that produced what was called "the big flood."
The paper ran photos of rowboats on the streets of Mundelein. The Des
Plaines overran its banks and my father rescued Archie
Foss from the roof of his stalled truck in a field near the old iron bridge
at Buckley Road. Archie didn't swim, so my father plunged in with a coil
of rope and towed Archie back to safe ground.
We often told the
"rhubarb pie" story in the family. It concerned an incident
at Does Inn on Route 21 and 45 near Grayslake. The
roadhouse was run by Jack Monroe. They served food
and drink and excellent rhubarb pie. After a couple of drinks Dad ordered
the rhubarb pie, ate it and said, "I like rhubarb pie. Doesn't everybody
like rhubarb pie? I do, so give everybody a slice, on me." Cooler
heads intervened.
After the war and
an unsuccessful attempt at picking up girls at a local hotspot, I came
home very late and tiptoed into the bathroom. To my surprise and dismay,
my father was occupying the throne. I carefully removed my clothes to
drop them down the clothes chute into the basement, but dropped my shoes
instead. It sounded like a bomb going off, but he didn't say a word, so
I eased off to bed. About noon the next day I met my mother in the kitchen,
no father in sight. He was still in bed, somehow not the worse for wear
and rhubarb pie. Later that day he surprised me by asking what time I
had gotten home the night before.
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