I Write About When I Was A Kid
By Fred Owens
This
is what I remember about when I was a kid, not what actually happened. In this
part I write about the trees and the games and the neighborhood.
I
was born in Evanston, Illinois, the summer of 1946, the fourth
child. My parents were renting a house on Prairie Avenue right off Central Street. It
was no longer big enough, so they bought the house in Wilmette
soon after my birth. The old house on Prairie
Avenue stayed in the family because Uncle Ted and
Aunt Bea rented it after we moved out and they lived there for many years. We
didn’t visit them very often, because Uncle Ted was boring – at least that’s
what I thought. He had such a big nose. Aunt Bea had a tiny nose and a sharp
mouth, and the food wasn’t any good. My cousins, Dick, Rosemarie and Jerry,
were much older than me and they didn’t play.
Uncle
Ted was the oldest of Mom’s four brothers. His real name was Ambrose. He had
been a stock broker in the 1920s and was making a good living until the Crash.
After the Crash he put every last penny back into the market thinking it had
reached the bottom. He was wrong, of course. Uncle Ted had no more confidence
in himself after that. He would not take any leadership role in our family,
even though he was the first born. He just got some nondescript job and kept
quiet. He might have been sad. I didn’t notice – I had a lot of uncles.
But
the old neighborhood always meant something to me. Mom still liked to do her
shopping on Central Street.
She would take me with her to the butcher shop and they would give me a slice
of liver sausage. We bought our shoes at Vose’s every year. The salesman always
had a nice smile and said, “Good Morning, Mrs. Owens. How are you?” New shoes
were fun, especially sneakers, because I felt extra jumpy when I got them. The
salesman would kneel down in front of me, making me feel special and important.
He brought out the silver-metal plate with sliding pieces that measured the
length and width of my feet. This was a very positive experience, to have
growing feet and to be needing new shoes, and to have a nice mother who always
got them for me when I needed them.
The
best thing about Central Street
was the parade every Fourth of July, followed by the fireworks at nearby Dyche
Stadium, the home field for Northwestern
University. The parade
and the fireworks was a very big deal for me, and the rest of the year, when
Mom took me there, the street would resonate in anticipation of the big parade.
Not
forgetting Prairie Avenue,
because the way from our house in Wilmette to Central Street was
down Prairie Avenue,
and I always looked at the old house when we drove past. It was a stucco
bungalow with dark green wood window trim. Stucco was the right and truest way
to build a house, because our house in Wilmette
was stucco. Everybody else’s house was different and maybe just as good, but
stucco was my standard.
We
moved to the new house in August, 1946, six weeks after I was born. The address
was 1612 Forest Avenue.
I didn’t have a stronger connection to the house than my brother or my three
sisters, but I always felt that I was the reason we bought it – because we need
the room.
Forest
Avenue was well-named. The
oak trees and elm trees towered over the house and made a canopy of shade all
up and down the street. I knew at a very early age that this was better than
what other people had, that a good neighborhood had good trees. They were huge
at the trunk, even three feet in diameter for the elm tree in our front yard,
although it wasn’t exactly in our yard, but between the street and the
sidewalk.
Not
for climbing, the trunk of the elm tree soared up to the sky in mighty
strength, and the high branches spread out in graceful symmetry. I knew it was
beautiful. The oak tree was right in the center of the backyard. It was
stronger, the bark was rougher, the limbs more twisty than the smooth curves of
the elm. The oak tree was not beautiful but it was awesome – so big and so old,
and part of a company of giant oaks in the neighborhood. There was an oak next
door, and another one across the alley. We were all under their protection.
For
wildlife we had grey squirrels, robins and blue jays. There were acorns. There
was a horse chestnut tree a block away that was of some interest, because we
could gather the smooth dark-brown chestnuts, just to feel them and throw them
away after a while.
We
had a great climbing tree across the street, a maple with a short trunk and
many horizontal branches. You could jump up, grab one of the low branches and
swing up your feet. The bark was smooth and worn smoother because all the kids
played in it. I was competent and graceful in the tree branches, never
reckless. I shinnied up to a certain height, I never tried to test the limit.
It was a good tree, nobody ever fell out.
I
hardly noticed the weather, except when it was fun. Summer was good for
thunderstorms and lightning. I loved the boom and the crash and the flashing
blue light. We might stay out in the downpour and get all wet and jump in
puddles, but usually we were shuffled indoors and just got to watch. The night
crawlers came out on the sidewalk after the rain, very big fat worms, sprawled
out and lazy in a warm puddle. You could fill a jar or a can with them,
although there wasn’t much else to do with night crawlers except cut them in
half and squash them in various ways. I had only a mild interest in worm
torture.
My
parents didn’t make me wear shoes in the summer. Basically from when school let
out in the middle of June and until school started again in September, I was
barefoot, except on Sunday at church. They were more permissive in this regard
than some other parents. I had really great feet. I could walk or run anywhere
in bare feet, fearlessly, even on gravel, although that was tough.
The
best part of summer in our neighborhood was getting to play outside after
dinner. That was never allowed during the school year, not just at our house,
it was a neighborhood rule. But in summer, after being excused from the dinner
table, we could go out and play until the street lights came on. That was a
good standard because there was no arguing. When the lights came on, the game
was over. Our street light, and I pretty much thought it was ours, I knew we
didn’t own it as such, but it was still proprietary to me, because it stood
square in the center of our yard next to the curb. It was our beacon, cast iron
in a six-sided column, fluted, with three sides that curved inwards and three
sides that lay outward and flat, rising to a pretty tower of light with six
panes of mottled glass, and each pane tilted outward slightly, and the light topped
by a crown and spike. The street lamp was beautiful to me, and I knew it was
better than what other people had. It was the home beacon, Mom and Dad never
had to call out in the darkness, we always came home.
The
games on summer nights were great. There were a lot of children on our block
and we played in the street. Forest
Avenue was paved with dark-red bricks, as smooth
as porcelain, warm or cool to bare feet, with little bits of green moss or tiny
blades of grass growing between the cracks. We played Kick Ball, that was sort
of like baseball in that someone pitched the soft red ball to a kicker who
booted it and then ran some bases, but girls could play. We also played Kick
the Can.
I don’t remember the rules or how it was played. The most fun was Hide and Go
Seek, and we used the big elm tree for Home Base. Come to think of it, the
games always centered in front of our house and not down the block. I think
that was because we had the most kids. The Giambalvos lived across the street. Jimmy
Giambalvo – that made a rhyme -- was two years older than me, and Paul
Giambalvo was one year younger than me. Jimmy was dark like his Italian father.
Paul was freckled and red-haired like his mother. They were nice people, but
their house was kind of sad and subdued. Mrs. Giambalvo was an alcoholic but we
didn’t know that at the time.
The
Tuttles lived next to the Giambalvos. Their two kids, Sally and Lynn, were much
older. Lynn was
a strong, masculine type of fellow. He had a canoe. Lynn was not a regular boy’s name, to my
mind. There were not too many people who were different than us, so I noticed
this.
The
Wolfs lived on the other side of the Giambalvos. Mr. Wolf owned the hardware
store in the village. This was cool because of all the stuff they had there.
They had a girl Christine who my younger sister played with, and a boy named
Charlie who was much younger than me, but still a lot of fun, and we used to go
over to their house a lot and read comics and watch TV. Plus the climbing tree,
the maple, was in their front yard. So really the focus of the games was in the
middle between our house and a little bit to the right, where the Wolf’s lived.
Mom was even friends with Mrs. Wolf, and sometimes Mrs. Wolf came over to our
house for a visit. Mom was friends with the other neighbors, but it was more
like cordiality.
The
Steinbrechers lived next door on our side of the street. Two kids, Marcia and
Richie. Marcia was bosom buddies with my sister Carolyn. The Steinbrechers
moved away to another part of Wilmette, but we
still stayed connected. They were Protestants. The Lynches moved in after the
Steinbrechers. The Lynch kids – David, Katy, Molly and several others – were a
ton of fun, but they didn’t stay long. Mom really liked Mrs. Lynch. After that
the Soderstroms moved. They had only kid and it was boring.
Kick
Ball was fun, but it was like weeny baseball and we let the girls in, although
the girls didn’t see it that way, because it was understood that street games
were never just a boys’ thing. Girls had
jump rope and Hop Scotch. Boys threw baseballs and footballs around although we
never organized regular games because there wasn’t enough room or enough boys.
Hide
and Go Seek was the most important game because it was full-time for boys and
girls. If you were It – I loved that word, It. – That was the beginning of
philosophy for me, because I used to ponder the status of being It and how it
was used in various games. You didn’t want to get caught and become It, of
course, but the good part of being It was being the center of attention, and
playing the next game well enough so that you would no longer be It.
If
you were It in Hide and Go Seek, you covered your eyes and leaned your face
against the elm tree – the biggest and most glorious elm tree on the block,
which was Home Base and there was never a question about that – and counted to
one hundred, while the other kids ran away and hid, usually not too far away,
behind a car or a bush, or around the corner of one of the houses.
When
you finished counting you called out, “Here I come, ready or not.” You might do
this in a sing-song style for effect. And you began to look for the other
players, the idea being to tag them before they could run Home and tag the
tree, in which case they were safe. As soon as you caught some other kid and
tagged him, then they became It for the next game. Of course there still some
kids hiding, so you called out “Allee, allee income, freedom free,” also with
style.
The
back yard was white-fenced in rectangles of two-inch wide strips with a cap
rail that you could walk on like a tightrope. The oak tree was smack in the
middle of the yard, which was square. The yard just wasn’t big enough for
baseball, but we had various pitching games, using the house as a back stop. It
was too easy to hit one over the back fence and into the alley, or even further
into the Johnson’s yard. Mr. Johnson was a grouch, and if we dug in his flower
beds searching for a lost ball, he got mad. We weren’t scared of him or
anything.
The
big game was badminton. The back part of the yard was just the right size for a
court. This was also boys and girls. We put up the net in early summer and kept
it there through the season. We played so much badminton that we wore a
six-foot circle in the grass on each side of the net. I loved to slam it and I
loved to hit high looping floaters. We played until 21 points, and then we
played again.
Mom
had peonies and roses against the back fence and roses, but too many children
to do much gardening. We respected her garden patch, but she was fairly
easy-going about it. If you trampled something you didn’t get a big scolding.
We
had a hammock hung between the oak tree and the garage. It had a soft, cotton
texture, and mildewed, outdoorsy scent.
The
alley was cool. It wasn’t paved. It was the wilderness and the underworld. Day
lilies – we called them tiger lilies – grew in a riot between the back fence
and the ruts of the cars. They just grew by themselves. We burned the trash in
a wire can, so there was debris and ashes around like blackened tin cans. When
we were older we went alley-hunting around the neighborhood looking for junk.
A
special quiet place for me was the north side of the house, a shady grove where
violets and lilies of the valley grew untended. I would sit there on the ground
and pick a bouquet and bring them to Mom, purple for violets, and that special
tiny white color of the lilies. This may have been why I liked that book so
much, the one called Ferdinand the Bull.
Ferdinand was the most powerful bull in the pasture of Spain, but they
could not get him to fight. He only liked to sit under the cork tree and smell
the flowers. As a child I wanted to be strong like a bull, but I didn’t want to
fight, I wanted to smell the flowers. Not entirely true. I used to fight and
scream with my sisters a fair bit. I never got into punching fights with the
other kids, although one time, when Scottie Soderstrom had just moved in next
door – he was my age and went to the public school – I punched him really hard
in the stomach, I don’t know why. He just ran into the house to get away, and
after that his mother wouldn’t let him play with me. Scottie was an only child
and he just didn’t know how to act.
That
was the yard and the block we lived on. The yard and the block were fundamental
markers. The outer boundaries were the through streets with traffic lights and
white stripes down the middle. Green
Bay Road was two blocks towards the lake and the
train tracks went by on the other side of the road. When I was really young the
choo-choo trains got me really excited with big towers of white smoke, but the
diesel engines came in when I was little older and I was more blasé about that.
Shimoneck’s was on Green Bay Road.
That was the gas station. I could buy an orange soda for a dime. My allowance
was twenty-five cents a week. I was friends with Billy Hoak for a few years
when I was about ten. He was pudgy and quiet and he had red hair, but the great
thing about Billy was that he could get two dimes from his mother almost
anytime and we went to get sodas.
Lake
Street was one block from Forest Ave. We
didn’t cross that. It was paved with black tar – that was fast for bike riding.
Our brick street was cool, but it rumbled under the bike tires. Lake Street was
fast in general with cars that clipped along, and it went east to Lake Michigan, one mile away.
Ridge
Avenue was three blocks to the west. This was major. The eponymous ridge was
only twenty to thirty feet in elevation, but it was the only hill we had and
the only hill I knew about. You could ride your bike down the hill and go fast
and take your hands off the handlebars and be coasting a long way.
St.
Joseph’s church and grade school – St.
Joe’s -- was at the intersection of Lake
Street and Ridge Avenue, just a short walk from the
house, but it was up on that ridge and the church was very tall and imposing.
The school building was huge too, facing the church across Lake Street. The drugstore was at the third
corner at the intersection. We could buy popsicles and candy bars there.
The
last boundary was three blocks to the north. It went Lake Street, Forest Ave, Walnut Avenue, Elmwood Avenue, and then Kenilworth, where the rich people lived and the houses
were much bigger
That was my territory, within that grid.
Everything was the way it was supposed to be, and it was always that way. The
oak trees and the elm trees covered everything with a summer canopy. Nothing
ever happened.
In
the fall the leaves came down and there were huge piles and raking teams, us
kids, on Saturday morning, raking them all to the curb and burning them in the
street. But first we made a big pile and jumped in it. I loved burning the
leaves, seeing the first curly whisps of smoke and watching it build and then
get dense with rich thick white smoke like whipped cream billowing upwards, and
then flames leaping, getting hot, roaring, and then it would die down slowly, or
we would dump more leaves on it and start the white smoke again.
In
the winter we had snow, snow men, snow forts, snowball fights, and lying down
to make angels. Snowmen we outgrew pretty quickly. Snow forts could happen
under the right conditions, with plenty of good packing snow and enough kids to
build one or two forts and then start a war. It was stupid to get cold fluffy
snow that you couldn’t pack. There was no point in having snow if you couldn’t
pack it and make snowballs.
The
ideal was good packing snow and enough to get out of school for the day. That
was heaven, throwing snowballs. When we were older we used to throw them at the
icicles hanging off the eaves of the houses, to knock them down. We would go
hunting for big ones and keep throwing until we got it. Even older we got into
the riskier games which were to throw snowballs at the street lamps with six
panes and knock them out, but usually just one of the panes, because then we
had to run away. If we really wanted to be hairy we could go over to Lake Street and
throw snowballs at cars driving by. The coolest shot was to land one on the
windshield. This could bring the cops around.
And
the craziest thing was skitching. I didn’t do it, but the Ridge Boys did. I
just wasn’t that wild. You did it on a slow street when it’s packed with snow.
You waited until a car came by, then you ran behind it and up to it. You
quickly squatted down on your heels and grabbed the rear bumper and went for a
wild ride until you fell off and went sprawling.
I
didn’t envy those Ridge Boys too much because I was already having a lot of fun
and to get into a little trouble was enough for me. Besides that, we lived in a
better house. Mom and Dad and the other parents, always Mr. and Mrs. – I had no
overall objection to their rule. I knew it was wholesome and it felt good. The
world inside that neighborhood was more than enough.
The end of Part One. Coming soon in Part Two I write about my relatives...."My grandmother wore a black Persian wool coat..."
Frog
Hospital used to make money, maybe $700 or $800 a year. That was when I
sold subscriptions at $25, but somehow the readership fell off and
people stopped paying for it and I kind of gave up. But now I think,
well, I need the money. And all I have to do is put the solicitation at
the bottom of the newsletter when it comes out. To write a check for $25
or more and mail it to Fred Owens, 1105 Veronica Springs RD, Santa
Barbara, CA 93105...... or hit the PayPal button on my blog and do it
that way.
That's
the blog with the PayPal button on the side. The blog is simply the
archive for the newsletter. Every issue of the newsletter becomes a post
on the blog, so it stores some hundreds of back issues. Frog Hospital
has been in business since 1998, so there is some longevity in it,
although Facebook and other social media outlets seems to be
overwhelming. Yes, overwhelming, but we ain't giving up and the Frog
Will Roar Again.
