6. Movin’ on up…to the East Side

We kept moving around for the next few years. It seems that we moved about once a year or more often if needed due to fear of “Them”. We were all over the south side, Burnside, South Chicago, Woodlawn. You name a neighborhood, we probably lived for a time.

Then my mom heard from some of her coworkers “at the mill”, that the best neighborhood to live in was a community called the “East Side’. She said that she had heard that they were building a few houses in the area and she said that we might move into one. Three homes were being built on the corner of Avenue N and 97th street. When we went to look at the houses, I noticed that we were right across the street from a railroad yard! How cool was that?

My neighborhood was made famous in the movie “The Blue Brothers”. When you see all those weird railroad bridges over the Calumet river, the Skyway bridge, the 95th street bridge and all the other south side landmarks you know what my neighborhood looked liked.  Mom liked the center house and so she bought the house and the whole family moved. Mom, me, Granny, Gramps and my aunt Helen.

Something else I noticed,  there was a the park right across the street from our new house. The sign on the corner proudly proclaimed the name of the park…Pietrowski Playground. The name that all the kids gave it was “Dago Park”. I think it ended up with that name because the east side was a melting pot of every nationality you could think of. Everyone settled here because of the steel mills.  It was a little hole in the wall corner playground that had one side of a basketball court, one softball diamond (depending  on what time of the year it was), two sets of dilapidated swings, a teeter totter and a slide. Nestled in the center of this microcosm of kid fun as a a small field house that on any given day could provide softballs, bats, basketballs and all manner of athletic equipment for the use of the kids in surrounding neighborhood. This establishment was cared for by an elderly gentleman by the name of Carl. He made sure the kids had the equipment they needed and that they treated each other well.  Carl didn’t tolerate bullies or older kids taking advantage of the younger ones. Carl passed out all the equipment, made sure the ping pong table was in good working order and kept the field house clean. In the winter, Carl would flood Dago Park and turn it into a HUGE ice skating rink. There was always a hot fire going in the pot bellied stove inside the field house so you could warm up. Carl was a kind man. He took me under his wing when I first got there and did his best to not let the other kids push me around.  Dago park was a sanctuary for me when I was growing up. It gave me a place to go so I to didn’t have to go home…I hated going home. I hated being yelled at. When we lived in Burnside I would go up to the Illinois Central station and watch all the trains coming and going. I was perfectly happy to watch people come and go. It was a different time…no one ever asked me why I was there.  I was on a first name basis with all the ticket agents that worked there. Nobody yelled at me there. I think I was around 8.

It was the summer of 1958, mom informed me that in the fall I would be going to a catholic school called St. George. While I had passed the 4th at my old school, the nuns at St. George though it might be beneficial for me to repeat 4th grade when I started school. Mom said she was sure that the priests and nuns at St. George would be able to help me with my “problem” as she had begun referring to it. She said that she had told the sisters all about me and they had informed her that they could fix me.

St George had received some media attention because it was the first school to install a fully functional fire alarm system and conduct organized fire drills after the horrific Our Lady of the Angels school fire where 92 students and 3 nuns died during the fire. All the students were required to wear uniforms. My mom really liked this idea because she said I looked “normal”.

 I was never a great student. I’d grown up being told how stupid I was so I never felt smart enough to learn. I never realized I could be a good student until I was in my mid 30s.

The sisters of St. George were very adept at all forms of corporal punishment when it came to students. I learned to dread simple tools of the classroom like the rubber tipped pointer that sister would use during lessons to point out things on the blackboard. It was a very effective teaching tool when I had to kneel on it for 30 minutes at a time. Wooden rulers became great instructional devices when applied to the face, the back of hands or buttocks of the offending student. Kneeling in the dark coat closet while class continued was always fun. I was told that God does not make mistakes. That I was not worthy of receiving an answer from God or the Virgin Mary because I wasn’t devout enough.

So I prayed to Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary. I became an altar boy, learned Latin and served mass several times a week. I know there was a part of me that liked being an altar boy because we wore such beautiful cassocks and supplice, I felt feminine whenever I served mass.  So I kept praying, I kept asking for the same two things. I got an answer of sorts one Sunday when I came in to serve 6 am mass and found one of the parish priests behind the altar with one of the other altar boys. They weren’t praying…

One Sunday, the priests had delivered a sermon talking about the dangers of gambling, alcohol use,  tobacco use and other sins against God and his church. They had admonished the parishioners to tithe more and to avoid the temptations of the flesh. The following Saturday, all the altar boys were tasked with scrubbing the marble floors of the church and sanctuary on our hands and knees. It took the 12 of us all day to do it. After we were done, Father Jerome, the pastor of St. George, called us all onto the back room of the rectory. He and the other priests of the parish welcomed us and told us what  great job we had done. They were watching a football game on a brand new color TV, they were playing poker, drinking beer and smoking cigars. They appeared to be having a great time. When I looked around the room I thought I had wandered into a bank vault because there was money everywhere! There were three pound coffee cans filled with change that were stacked up on shelves all around the room. There was large stacks of paper money stacked up on the shelves too. Father Jerome said that we could reach into any can of change we wanted and grab all the change we could carry in one hand as our payment for cleaning the floors of the church.

I started seeing things differently after that. The child who was convinced the God, The Blessed Virgin and His church could “fix” him began to have doubts. The child who knew if he just prayed harder, worked harder, was more devout hoping God would answer his one and only prayer gave up. The child who had thought of going to seminary and becoming a priest was gone. I had failed God, my family and everyone that loved me. God gave up on me and I gave up on God. I just wanted to die…

I hated the boy I saw in the mirror every day. I hated everything  about myself. The way I looked, my body, my voice. Every day, my body was letting me know that there were changes coming and that I was not going to be happy when they arrived.

D