Social athletic clubs like the Regular Fellas had all but disappeared by the time I started my freshman year at Von Steuben High School in the fall of 1970. Many of us, especially if you were the oldest child in the family like I was, had no idea these clubs had once made up a […]
I love how this photo captures the way seventh-grade teacher Mr. Wahle always was at the center of our attention.
In my memory, the walls were painted a pale institutional green and the lockers were milk chocolate brown. To a first grader, the hallways of Peterson Elementary School were like a cave, dark and endless with voices and footsteps echoing in the distance.
In the sixties and seventies, if little kids didn’t get hurt running around the gravel and asphalt playground at Peterson Elementary School, they had a good chance of banging up theirs knees or noses on the metal play equipment.
Three old Hollywood Park businesses, each with deep connections to the neighborhood.
In January 1929 Chicago real estate developer Erick Nelson Linn put on the market 50 Hollywood Park duplex homes, more commonly known as two-flats. It must not have seemed like much of a risk. Linn had been putting up the same buildings in the area for nearly ten years.
A week ago I reviewed Hollywood Park, a novel that takes place in a Chicago neighborhood during the Depression. The author, Martin Marcus, and I grew up in that neighborhood during different times, so I asked Marty to share some of his memories. He gave me this recent photograph of his friends from Peterson Elementary […]
John Erickson, an Illinois physician who grew up in Hollywood Park during the 1930s and ’40s, provides a glimpse of my childhood neighborhood during the years when residents were keeping the wolf from the door and local businesses were more Swedish than Jewish.
In part two of my interview, I asked Jerry Pritikin about his lifelong passion for Chicago baseball, “the official language of the kitchen table” in his childhood home. Here again, our memories matched up despite the 20-year difference in our ages. The only difference was my father, a Cuban immigrant, talked to me incessantly about […]
Recently I met photographer Jerry Pritikin, who grew up in Chicago during the ’40s and ’50s. Even though he attended Von Steuben High School about 20 years before I did, we remember many of the same neighborhood institutions and landmarks.
