The apartment was on the third floor of a Rogers Park six-flat, on Farwell Avenue east of Sheridan Road. My family lived there in the 1960s, wedged between a small orthodox shul to the west and a foreboding-looking nursing home to our east.
My bedroom was at the front of the apartment. French Doors opened onto a small balcony, the perfect site for calling out to friends waiting below or for launching snowballs at slowly moving cars after the Blizzard of ’67.
My narrow room was barely wide enough for a single bed and my bookcase. A Chicago White Sox poster and a near-life-sized rendering of Alfred E. Neuman adorned the walls.
It was my wooden bookcase that I remember most fondly. I don’t know where my parents found it and I doubt that it was new when they made the purchase. Always economical, even their own bedroom set was purchased via the “Used Furniture” section of the Sun-Times Classified Ads. Old or new, the bookcase contained almost all that I cherished.
The top of the bookcase, at a little over waist high, was covered with knickknacks–a coin bank, a gold-plated Empire State Building, a kippah from a cousin’s wedding. Cool, but the best stuff came on the shelves below.
Ninety percent of the top shelf was filled by my collection of the Tom Swift Jr. book series. While most other kids I knew were reading the Hardy Boys, I was getting my introduction to science through Tom and his buddy Bud Barclay. On each birthday my parents would add another volume of the hardback yellow-orange spined books to the shelf. Soon those contributions were outpacing the rate at which new books in the series were published. After 33 books the series and my collection came to a halt.
After the row of Swifties came shelves and shelves loaded down with over 100 books, predominantly paperbacks gathered throughout my childhood. I carefully curated them, filing each in alphabetical order, by author. There were Agatha Christie whodunits followed by Beverly Cleary books for kids. Arthur Conan Doyle had a place, as did a book of mathematical games written by Scientific American’s Martin Gardener. After Gardner came two volumes from German author Erich Kästner, courtesy of Uncle Herbert in Switzerland.
Ngaio Marsh’s Artists in Crime, a British mystery much too sophisticated for my youngish eyes, must have originated on my father’s reading table but found a permanent home among the “M’s”. John Tunis’s baseball sagas were well represented as well. And somehow I found space for a few joke books, along with biographies of Helen Keller and Thomas Edison.
The bottom shelf was for treasures. Oversized books of Greek mythology from my Aunt Paula and Uncle Poldi lay next to stacks of dog-eared, folded-in Mad Magazines. A shoebox held my 1964 Topps baseball cards, just a Dal Maxvill card #563 shy of a complete collector’s set.
In 1970 our family moved to another apartment, across the street on the south side of Farwell. As a classmate of mine put it, we were moving to a better neighborhood. I don’t remember why, but my bookcase and most of my beloved books didn’t make the half-a-block move with us.
I don’t have much of a bookcase anymore. I read loads of library books and indulge in way too many online articles, so there is no need for an old bookcase with sagging shelves. But I would love one more crack at the bookcase of my youth–and a final chance to find that Dal Maxvill collectible!
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