On Columbus Day 1960, a few hours after my birth, my parents peered out of the window of my mother's room on an upper floor of Loretto Hospital. Below, in a small crowd a hundred feet away, Mayor Richard J. Daley cut a ribbon to open the extension of Congress Expressway west of Central Avenue. What event could better have captured the Chicago into which I arrived? The man proudly initiating this automobile Amazon to the suburbs was about to put Kennedy into the White House with Cook County votes. His brick-and-mortar, precinct-captain confidence made the fate of the Crosstown Expressway and the 1968 Democratic Convention unimaginable. And the road he opened led straight out to the bungalow suburb of Maywood, where I spent my first thirteen years.
No doubt we rode the fresh pavement home from the hospital, my parents taking delight in the progress and in the smooth speed that brought us quickly to the 9th Avenue exit. Just a block west and two blocks south of that exit was the house my parents had moved into a year earlier. 1930 South 10th Avenue was a two-bedroom white-stucco-and-brown-trim house, with a one-car white frame garage out back on the alley. Like most of the houses on that street, it had probably been built in the 1920s, when postwar prosperity enabled blue-collar workers to buy modest detached dwellings along the Aurora & Elgin line. The railroad was gone by the 1960s, but the right-of-way, stripped of tracks and left vacant, still made its overgrown, inviting way through town several blocks north of the Expressway.
In my earliest memories, 10th Avenue was paved in concrete, crisscrossed with lines of tar dribbled on to patch the cracks that the change in seasons had opened. On hot summer days, the tar was great for prodding with sticks or small fingers, having softened to a glistening plastic mass under a thin dull crust. In the fall, the concrete became a hearth for numerous piles of burning leaves. When snow fell in the winter, the street became a poor man's hockey rink. We packed down the snow and shuffled and slid around in our boots in an imitation of skating, slapping around a puck with our hockey sticks just like Bobby Hull. In our more daring moods, we put on leather-soled shoes and went skitching, hanging onto the bumper of a moving car and sliding down the street while trying to hide from the driver.
Coming home from school on thaw days, I tarried at the gutters, where trickling meltwater was sculpting alien crystal landscapes. The water flowed between snow banks, under snow bridges, through snow tunnels, and around snow towers, and the snow was sometimes ice, or one of those myriad unnamed gradations between snow and ice and water. I lovingly inspected the delicate features of that landscape, and then, often enough, destroyed them. But I did not destroy to destroy, no more than toddlers eat stones and sticks to eat. Just as the toddler's mouth is a tiny sensual laboratory, my feet were calibrated instruments, the means of learning something more about those features, from the way they yielded or refused to yield under my rubber boots, and the sounds they made in the process. And sometimes the sounds themselves were the satisfying thing. There is nothing quite like the dampened crackle of thin ice over shallow water when a small foot steps on it, creating a doormat-sized deformation.
The street was also the site of the most dramatic construction event of my childhood, the installation of new water mains and the paving of the street in asphalt. The asphalt paving machine, as wide as half the street, was a breathtaking piece of equipment, demanding the attention of a whole staff of workers as it inched down the block.
The succession of features from sidewalk to alley followed a familiar suburban pattern. Between the curb and the sidewalk was a parkway planted with mature maples and elms. The tree trunks served useful functions in various games we played: hiding place, safe home, boundary marker for a playing field. After the sidewalk came open front lawns, houses, backyards, garages, and then the alley. The backyards were usually fenced with an open, low fence that corralled kids and dogs but was not meant to create privacy. Looking down the row of backyards, I could easily see the cross street three or four houses away. Our fence, like those of many of our neighbors, was constructed of white wooden posts and top and bottom beams on which heavy-gauge twisted-wire fencing was tacked, sporting a row of loops along the top that in all likelihood was meant to imitate older, costlier wrought iron.
A toddler's-eye vantage point is indispensible to recall some of the objects that populated my Maywood childhood. Automobiles look different from that height. The bulbous curves of our first two cars -- a powder blue 1954 Ford, and a green 1951 Chevy -- extended way up out of reach, as monumental as the back of Half Dome. Closer to eye and hand was the bountiful chrome of hubcaps, bumpers, and grille, flecked with tiny rust blooms that betrayed its age and the then-current state of plating technology.
There were plenty of kids near my age on South 10th Avenue -- a baby-boom crop -- and playing outside with them was a common after-school and weekend activity. When seeking a friend, the custom among many of the neighborhood kids was to enter the backyard of the friend sought and yell their name, prefaced by "Yo," in singsong. When looking for my next-door neighbor John Schram, I would stand by his back porch and yell "Yo-oo John!" In the age of double or triple-insulated windows and air conditioning, this practice may no longer work, but in those days the chant usually reached its target through an open or screened window.
Along with kids, the neighborhood was filled with stay-at-home moms, who supported an industry of door-to-door salesmen. Although I remember Fuller Brush men and Avon ladies, in retrospect the most extraordinary neighborhood peddler was the knife sharpener, who pushed his sharpening wheel down the street wheelbarrow-style, ringing bells to announce his arrival. Thinking back on it now, I imagine our peripatetic knife sharpener to have been of the last generation in a proud knife-sharpening family, his great-great-great-grandfather having sharpened knives with exactly the same equipment in the cobblestoned passages of eighteenth-century Budapest or Naples.
With the sights and sounds of '60s Maywood came also smells. Prominent among them were cooking smells. Cheaper cuts of meat, longer cooking times, commercial spice and sauce mixtures, and open kitchen windows made those smells different and more intense than the cooking smells in my neighborhood now. Pot roast topped with Lipton's Onion Soup Mix, simmered for an hour or two with potatoes and carrots in an electric skillet, would create the kind of smell I have in mind. Another frequent contributor to the neighborhood's smells was laundry, in a time when many housewives still used backyard clotheslines rather than dryers.
Other smells were intermittent and seasonal. Maple incense from smoldering leaf heaps was one the greatest treats of those environmentally innocent autumns. The smell of late spring was the smell of our backyard peonies, full, packed blossoms, golf-ball sized buds, crawling with ants, delicate, sweet, heady. Less savory was the stench which came from the distant Sanitary and Shipping Canal, brought in by infrequent southerly winds. And in some summers mosquito spraying brought the pungent, sickly sweet odor of pesticide, dramatically delivered at night from the back of a slow-moving truck. The big clouds, lit by a floodlight installed on the truck, would disappear into the leaved canopy over the street, and after an instant puff out of the leaf walls, momentarily obscuring the trees altogether.
The neighborhood Catholic church and school, Saint Eulalia's, was a block up and over on 9th Avenue. The sanctuary was a well-lit modern box that cheerfully renounced side aisles, wings, apse, mystery, reverence, and awe. The light came from rows of clerestory windows on either side of the box, tucked in under the concrete arches that marched from back to front. At ground level, thick abstract stained glass windows were tucked into the blonde brick walls. Like others, I spent countless hours of my childhood trying to flee boredom by creating patterns and mysteries in the banal surroundings that trapped me. Bathroom floor tiles, cracked sidewalks, acoustical ceilings, and weathered wooden railings became the focus of intense imaginative scrutiny. My efforts of flight often led me to the blue distortions in St. Eulalia's stained glass. The trick was to keep my focus short enough that I would not recognize the anemic patches of grass outside. My success was never complete -- I am not one whose daydreams can be as satisfying as the real dreams of night -- but that never stopped me from trying.
Much of greater Chicago was a mystery to me, but there were a few places and routes I knew well. My parents had a small sailboat anchored in Burnham Harbor. The mid-1960s Chicago skyline, still heavy with brick, limestone, and terra cotta, was familiar from outings on Lake Michigan. For me, the skyline of that era is woven into the compound odor of the lake water, bologna on white bread with French's mustard, Sea n' Ski suntan lotion, slightly musty canvas lifejackets, and the gas-and-oil mixture used for outboard motors.
We often visited my grandparents at their two-flat on Altgeld Street just east of Cicero, taking the Expressway east to Cicero and Cicero north to Fullerton. I always waited for three landmarks along Cicero. First came the huge red neon lips advertising Magikist's carpet cleaning business, moving and blinking high in the air next to the Expressway exit. Second came an airplane -- an airplane! -- that had been parked in a corner lot on Cicero near Augusta and turned into a restaurant. For a boy like me who had never been in an airplane (except once as an infant of which I had no memory), the appearance of one right on Cicero, and the chance to eat in it, was an amazing thing. I think we may have actually eaten there once, as a result of my many pleas, but I imagined eating there so many times and with such intensity that now I'm not sure whether we really did. The final landmark was the tangle of overhead electric bus wires at the intersection of Cicero and North. It was extraordinarily thick and complicated because it had to enable busses to enter the regional car barn on the southwest corner of the intersection and to navigate a jog in Cicero. The steel web looked as if it had been spun by some giant mutated arachnid escaping from enslavement at the Gary mills.
Because we had cousins in northern Indiana, I also knew the route down the Dan Ryan Expressway and east over the Chicago Skyway. On the way back from a Thanksgiving or Easter dinner, impossibly late at night, I would keep myself awake to catch a glimpse of the green neon dinosaur sign for Cities Service Oil Company, glowing next to the Dan Ryan. Then I could curl up in the back seat of our Chevy and surrender to the engine's lullaby, knowing that I would soon be carried, in the magic of half-sleep, into my bed, in my house, on 10th Avenue, Maywood, Illinois.