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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 9
On the Rocks
The Lake Michigan water off of 59th Street Beach was very cold, and just the thing during that hot summer of 1940. We, meaning me and my friends Bud, Chuck and Doty, called our special spot “The Rocks”—large chunks of concrete right at the water's edge, where it was quite deep. The perfect place, we thought, to do some serious deep-sea diving.
It was Chuck who had the brainstorm. He fashioned what could loosely be called a “diving helmet” from the upper section of an old hot water heater. He cut one section of it out where he glued a piece of glass so that we could see out of the thing, and he rounded off the open, bottom part, fitting it with padding so that the diver could place the “helmet” atop his shoulders. A rubber hose fit into an opening at the top, the other end of which was connected to a bicycle pump.
Rocks along the lake shoreline near 59th St.
The idea behind our engineering efforts was to safely search the floor of the lake for treasure—or at least some odds and ends that we could exchange for a few nickels and dimes. Despite furiously pumping air into our contraption, it failed as a submersible, and we abandoned what, in the end, amounted to an anchor, feeling lucky that we didn't all drown. I'm sure our creation is still lying there, in the depths of the lake, by “the Rocks.”
Around the time we had given up diving for deep-sea swag in Lake Michigan, my brother-in-law Bill decided he did not like living in the city any longer. He quit his job, and moved us all back, once again, to Winamac, Indiana.
After only a short while in Winamac, I expressed my desire to Bill and Ruth that I wanted to return to the city. They gave me their blessings, but would be unable to drive me back there. Undeterred, and not being able to afford the train or a bus, I nevertheless packed up my few belongings and, after being dropped off by Bill at the highway, I proceeded to hitch-hike the 100 miles to Chicago.
In Chicago again, I moved in with my mother at her home at 51st & Halsted, and soon thereafter enrolled at Graham Grammar School, 43rd & Union. After a few weeks at mom's, my older brother (Oregon) put me in touch with a Mrs. Ragio, who ran a boarding house at 63rd & Eggleston. The $7 weekly rent I paid her got me a furnished room, plus breakfast and dinner. Mrs. Ragio looked after me—I was just going on 14 years old, after all—and my brother checked up me frequently.
Dave attended Alexander Graham Elementary School, 4436 So. Union Ave.
Chuck, unsurprisingly, was also interested in boats and boating. Following up on his diving bell success, he figured, and we agreed, that it was time to invent what he dubbed a “folding boat.” We invested what little money we had into fixing up a garage at 59th & Racine that Bud, the oldest of our group, had rented.
Since it was January and very cold out, we installed insulation and a kerosene stove in our garage. We were ready to begin boat building—we thought. Unfortunately, before we could even get started, we departed our newly-renovated structure one day with the stove burning. Luckily, the owner noticed the smoke in time to save his garage. But, of course, we were immediately thrown out. Our “folding boat” would never come to be.
Well-settled into my new home at Mrs. Ragio's now, I'd gotten a job at the Clearing Industrial District, working the 4:30 to 11 pm. shift for 85 cents an hour. My daily routine: bike to school, have dinner at Mrs. Ragio's, and then head to work aboard the streetcar, on which I'd do my homework en route. This was my day-to-day life all during 1941.
A 1930s-era table radio
December. On a relatively warm Sunday morning, I was visiting my mom. We were cleaning up her small backyard. Inside the house, the radio was playing. I noticed that mom had stopped working, and was looking at me in an odd way. “What's wrong,” I asked. She replied, “Didn't you just hear the radio? The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor.”
I knew about Japan–it was where all the junk stuff came from. But I had no idea what a Pearl Harbor was, or what was significant about the bombing of it. Later, we listened to Franklin Roosevelt's speech, and heard him announce that “a state of war exists between the United States of America and the Empire of Japan.” To me, it was all unreal. An exciting thing to think about. War was every young boy's dream!”
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End of Part 9
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