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During the 1990s, a few years before my father, Dave, passed away in December of 2000, he wrote a 35-page autobiography. Excerpts from it will be published here, as companions to the diaries my mother, Dorothy, kept in 1945 and 1946—the year she met Dave. My dad was born in 1927, in Hamilton, Ohio. The family eventually moved to the south side of Chicago.
Part 20
Newlyweds
Dorothy and I loved our little apartment at 61st & Harper. Soon after we'd settled in, however, the apartments were turned into condominiums. Unable to afford to purchase our place, we moved in with Dorothy's parents, Louie and Pauline, at 61st & Normal Boulevard. Their home, on the second floor of a two-story, corner apartment building, was quite large, and we had a nice room all to ourselves.
Newlyweds Dave and Dorothy lived here with Dorothy's family
It was 1948, and Dorothy and I were, I recall, the first in our families to own a television set. Aunts, uncles, and cousins came over to enjoy this new wonder. We'd line up chairs in the living room to watch wrestling, Ed Sullivan, and Howdy Doody, on a tiny, 6-inch, black-and-white screen. Even the commercials were fascinating, and we never left the room during one.
To enhance the experience even further, and to keep the audiences coming, we purchased what was called a "screen enlarger and colorizer”—a curved, water-filled plastic thing which clamped on to the set, and had strips of red, green and blue on its surface. Voila, big-screen, color television!
Late 1940s tv set with 6-inch screen
Most of our leisure time was family-centered. Card games with Dorothy's sister Louise (“Sis”), and her steady boyfriend Vert, or shopping in the neighborhood with Louie and Pauline, and, of course, lots of movies and parties. Vert and I, along with Chuck, spent a fair amount of beer drinking time together at the various taverns along 63rd Street as well.
One Saturday, Chuck and I drove out west, beyond the city limits, to the drainage canal at Rtes. 83 & 50 (Cicero Avenue.) Our mission: duck hunting. Taking turns with Chuck's .22 gauge rifle, and after hours of waiting just for one duck, and then missing it, we were just about ready to retreat when I heard a shot, and saw Chuck jump up. “I got one!,” he shouted excitedly.
Of course, it was way out in the middle of the canal. For whatever reason, I decided to jump in, swim out, and retrieve the poor thing. Having salvaged something out of the afternoon, we departed. Chuck took the duck home, where he and his mother had a delicious dinner. I never got so much as a taste.
Working so close to home, I would often walk home for lunch from Englewood Electric. What a surprise one day to see fire trucks parked just outside our home. It turned out that Dorothy had somehow lodged her head between the spokes of our brass bed and couldn't extract herself. I don't recall who phoned the Chicago Fire Department for help, but thanks to those firemen, they managed to get Dorothy out of her predicament.
We had a nice life during the spring of 1948 with Louie and Pauline, and with Louise and Louie Jr., and they'd been very kind to let us stay, but of course we wanted to get our own place.
Dave, 1948, in what looks to be a newly-wallpapered room
Apartments were still difficult to come by during this post-war period, when so many GIs had returned home from the service, and the war. Luck was with Dorothy and I, however. In the mid-summer of '48, we found one, and quickly snatched it up. As with our previous rental at 61st & Harper, we again painted, cleaned, wallpapered, and picked up enough second-hand furniture to make our house a home. There was one catch. Our apartment was above a tavern. Loud music, featuring such tunes such as The Blue Skirt Waltz, from the establishment below would began at 8 a.m., and continue throughout the day and evening, until nearly dawn.
The noise, the drunks, and the bugs at last became a little too much for us to cope with, and so, reluctantly, we moved back in again with Louie and Pauline. We were nearing Christmas time, 1948. Dorothy was two months pregnant when we decided it was time for the two of us (or, the three of us) to have a little vacation: West to California, via Route 66.
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End of Part 20
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