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Fragments of the West Side
Cód:
491_9781478715627
I consider myself lucky to have grown up on Racine Avenue in the Lincoln Park area of Chicagos near west side. It was the late 1940s, the beginning of an exciting new era and, in my opinion, the perfect place and time to be a kid. More and more families were buying their first TV, their first car and some of the lucky ones even were getting central heating, eliminating the need to pour fuel oil into the stoves used to heat their homes. Like many Italian families, ours was top heavy with aunts, uncles, cousins and close friends we considered as extended family. Whether it was Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter or the rare St. Josephs Table, our house would be bursting at the seams with family and friends. Of course, being Italian, each holiday came with time-honored traditions which had to be followed to the letter. Dad, being a home movie fanatic, thoroughly documented these special times in his endless reels of 8 and 16 mm film. Dad was a worker for the Bureau of Sanitation in Chicago and was the bread winner in our family, but Ma was its heart. She cleaned, cooked, took care of us kids and kept Dad in-line, all while working a full time job. How she did it, I have no idea. As kids, our top priority was having fun. Whatever the season, we were outside as much as our parents and daylight would allow. We played hard and we played rough. Sure, we scraped our knees, got cuts, bloody noses and, on occasion, had to make a trip to the emergency room at St. Josephs Hospital to set a broken bone or, in my older brothers case, have his tongue sewn back on. We took all it in stride. If that was the price we had to pay, so be it. Schools back then had little tolerance for kids who acted up. There were rules to follow and we were expected to obey them. If one of us caused trouble, it was a guaranteed trip to the principals office or, in some cases, getting suspended for a few days. Recently, I visited the various neighborhoods where I grew up on Chicagos west side. Memories
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