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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 8
The Summer of '40
The summer of 1940. Bud, Chuck, Doty and I had become the best of friends. We went everywhere, and did everything together.
Many of our Sundays were spent at the Southtown Theater, a beautiful movie palace, fairly new at the time. Built in a Moorish, or Spanish style, it had iron grillwork, and nooks that held antique furniture, decorative urns, and assorted statuary. As if that wasn't enough, seven, graceful white swans in a pool greeted patrons in the lobby.
Lobby, swan pool, and mezzanine of the Southtown Theater
On the second, mezzanine level were tall, Chinese-lacquered chests of drawers, lined up along the walls like museum display cases. One of them showcased a depiction of the great Chicago fire of 1871, with red lights replicating flames, and cotton wisps for smoke. The theater ushers wore blue and gold military-style uniforms, with pill box hats and gloves.
My friends and I made a practice of trying to get into the theater for free. We had a number of ways we'd studiously worked-out in order to accomplish this.
One was to use a coat hanger to reach and pull open the panic bar on one of the emergency exit doors. Usually we'd have a crowd of 10 or 12 subsequently rushing in as the door opened, scattering this way and that into seats, attempting to look as tho we'd been sitting there for a while. My three good friends and I had the best chances, as we had the “tools,” and were always first in. The problem, as you may have guessed, was that in the daytime, when the door opened, the auditorium would flood with bright light, giving the game away. The ushers would come running, catching most of us in the act. Out the door we would go, with a warning not to try it again.
Bud, Chuck, Doty, in the mid- to late-1940s
However, we had other plans and other strategies. Such as showing the person at the ticket booth the old lettuce leaves we'd retrieved from the garbage cans in the alley behind Carl's Groceries. “We are here to feed the swans,” we'd say. This tactic worked. At least until the lettuce began to accumulate in the pond. The swans could eat only so much.
And so, plan C. This one was a desperate move, as it meant one of us handing the ticket taker a dollar bill. As he took the money, another five of us would run in before he could grasp what was happening.
Around this time, my friends—Chuck, Bud and Don Doty—all got bicycles. There was me, without a bike and feeling left out. The solution: stealing one. That was easy, for me. The problem was that I didn't have enough sense to repaint the bike, or alter the thing in some way. I had a great time riding it with my pals—for about a week. That's when there was a knock on our door. My sister greeted two Chicago cops at the door who were interested in my new wheels, and in me. I found myself taken to our friendly neighborhood police station at 63rd & Wentworth. My mom's brother had to come and collect me there, after I'd received a stern lecture from the authorities.
The upside of this is that it made me a local hero. I was the first one of our little group to become an outlaw. Eventually, I was able to legally obtain a bike of my own, for the grand sum of $5. Now I could bike along with my pals. We spent many a day cycling out to Midway Airport, or to the Museum of Science & Industry, and nearby Jackson Park. Our favorite trick was to grab onto the rear of a streetcar so we could be pulled along, until the car stopped and we backed away, trying to look innocent.
The Museum of Science & Industry
Later that summer, my friend Bud ran away from home. Not far though. Three blocks, to be exact, where he rented a one-room furnished apartment, which we quickly set up as a new hangout, where we could play poker and lay around.
One evening, having nothing better to do, we decided we'd break into the corner newsstand. The objective: “girlie” magazines that we knew were locked in a drawer. In that drawer we also found condoms, or “rubbers,” as they were known. We were on our way.
When we returned to the apartment, we figured we'd have some fun with these things. Unscrewing the pipe by the gas stove, we filled approximately 50 of them with gas, went out on the street and released the entire lot, one at a time. They flew everywhere and at everything, including right at our landlady. Threatening to call the police, she evicted Bud right then and there. He collected his things and walked the three blocks back home. And that was the end of our hideout in the summer of 1940.
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End of Part 8
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