Category: Uncategorized

Google has a fascinatingly creepy tool in their maps that allows you to travel as if you are a movie camera, down many streets. They used to just have the important ones like 5th Avenue in New York. Now they have 6643 N. Kilpatrick in Lincolnwood, IL.

I can see those places, homes, yards that I knew intimately 3o years ago. There is the Lapak house where Jerry spent every Sunday hosing down his ’63 Black Fleetwood after Mass. I travel past the Heinz residence where “Buddha” went down the driveway in his bathrobe every morning to get the Chicago Tribune.

The lawns are just as green, the Google people must have filmed on a May afternoon, because Lincolnwood looks so lush. Actually, Lincolnwood is not lush. It is orderly. This was a town (excuse me, village) where people would call the police if you stepped on their lawn. Lincolnwood always proudly and provincially recalled those glory days of the 1930s when Mayor Proesel gathered the town’s unemployed and with the help of the WPA, planted 10,000 Elm Trees. He later changed the name of the town from Tessville to Lincolnwood.

In the mid 1960s, many of those elms were sick, and I remember as a little boy when they cut ours down. Now the Google virtual tour shows that the trees are back.

We had great adventures in Lincolnwood because nothing important ever happened there. The Chicago race riots, the Vietnam War, the 1968 Democratic Convention, Hillary Rodham’s family dramas in nearby Park Ridge, all the bad weather and tragedies of the US flew right over the skies of Lincolnwood and never landed on our little block.

But we were blessed with characters:

We had Mrs. Marx, resplendent in her Guerlain and orange dyed hair, making her way onto the Edens Expressway in her gold 1969 Coupe De Ville convertible, leisurely traveling to Old Orchard to shop for shoes at Marshall Fields. There was no traffic, not like we have today, and all of Lincolnwood was proud that downtown Chicago was only 15 minutes away.

Mrs. Marx would always have her vodka cocktails at 5pm, dispensed from a large Smirnoff pump on the bar, and she often sent Gus to the Corner Store to buy groceries.

And there was Burton K., a father of a friend of mine, who owned a lot of apartments in Chicago and said cleverly, “Hey, Hurvitz are you working hard or hardly working?”

There was Shirley, our neighbor, who spit on our lawn every afternoon because we befriended her estranged husband.

Mrs. J., in her black knee socks with icy blue eyes that monitored the block and knew every stray leaf that messed her tulip garden. She never opened her curtains in 14 years. She and the girls walked down the block to attend services at St. Johns.

And my mother, who played ball on the street with my retarded and autistic brother. Back and forth, hoping that he might respond with a normal sentence. He never did. She cried on the first day of Kindergarten when all the other children boarded the yellow bus at the corner.

In those days, there were four seasons:

Long summers in Chicago, spent in air conditioning, watching the Cubs play on a 25 -inch Zenith.

Wintertime: when everyone flew to Acapulco, Arizona or Miami Beach and came back in January with freckles and tans.

Springtime: when the bullies were out taunting the weak ones on the baseball field.

Fall: when the smart ones sat erect in Rutledge Hall and paid close attention to stupefying lectures about direct objects in English class.

Anyway, these are just glimpses of life remembered that Google will never be able to reproduce. They are all in my head….