A Day at Home Depot Shines A Light On My Past

I sometimes miss the simple life.

Growing up in Rogers Park I frequently accompanied my mother on an important mission. As we walked through the neighborhood, I was trusted to carry a small rectangular piece of stiff white cardboard. The card was not a postcard or an invitation. It was a bill, our monthly chit from Commonwealth Edison, the city’s sole electricity provider.

Mom and I were not out to pay the bill. Like all of our family payments, that duty was handled by my dad, a meticulous bookkeeper who was never late meeting a financial obligation. The journey Mom and I were on was to a neighborhood hardware store, where we could present the bill in exchange for 10 light bulbs.

The bulbs were “free”; their cost was likely built into our monthly bill. At the store, we could choose from any of the available bulbs. And what was available? We had a choice of 60, 75, or 100-watt incandescent light bulbs. Standard light bulb shape, standard light bulb size, standard light bulb base. They were a perfect fit for every fixture of our apartment.

I remembered the lightbulb task this morning while standing in Aisle 1 of the Home Depot store in Northbrook. I was there because a 60-watt incandescent light bulb, one of the three bulbs in the ceiling fixture of our home office, had burned out. My goal at the store was to find equivalent LED replacements for all three bulbs.

Through more than 7 years of service, the incandescent bulb had projected a warm yellow glow through the glass base of the fixture. That’s what I was looking for as I studied about 400 shelf-feet of bulbs at the Home Depot. They were virtually all LEDs but beyond that, the variations and choices were uncountable and unimaginable.

There were long bulbs, short bulbs, round ones and square ones. Candelabra bases, standard bases, and something in between. Bright white, soft white, daylight, and plain white. There were even smart bulbs that changed colors with your mood, your music, or your appetite. Overwhelmed, I chose some daylight bulbs, assuming they would project light with a soft, sunny, slightly yellow appeal.

I was wrong. The new bulbs filled the home office with an unpleasant, glary, harsh, white light. Twenty minutes later I was back at Home Depot exchanging those bulbs and grilling the store clerk on the best bulb for my needs. We chose soft white bulbs and the soft yellowish-white light is just what I like while I sit at my desk typing this post.

We have traveled a long way since those Rogers Park days in the 1960s. Technology has gifted us a wonderful assortment of energy-efficient, environmentally friendly, and cosmetically stylish light sources. But sometimes, in our quest for progress, we lose sight of the small, simple treasures that once illuminated our lives—like a walk with Mom and a bag of light bulbs.

Charles Variety Store vs Amazon. Can You Pick The Winner?

When I was a kid growing up in East Rogers Park, a car ride was a luxury. Spending my weekly allowance meant a walk to Frankfort’s or Mesirow’s, the corner drugstores. I’d buy baseball cards, comic books, candy bars, and the annual Mother’s Day card. When I needed to make a bigger purchase — like a gift to go with the Mother’s Day Cards — I’d walk a little further and spend my money at Charles Variety Store.

Charles Variety was a neighborhood landmark. Set on Morse Avenue, across from the Jewel and just down the street from Ashkenaz, Charles was my Woolworths, Walgreens, and Marshall Fields all rolled into one. At the register, my nickels, dimes, quarters, and crushed dollar bills would tumble out of my pocket as I paid for my necessities and extravagances.

Today when I need something in a hurry it’s a different world. I sit at my desk or at the kitchen counter, log into Amazon, and in five minutes I have placed my order. Simpler, but is it a better way? Let’s compare my purchasing now, to my purchasing way back when.

AMAZON

CHARLES VARIETY

Need to create an account
Credit card on file
Can sit on my butt
Same day delivery
Lots of packaging
Keeps a creepy list of everything I have bought on-line
It’s a solitary endeavor
Look at pictures of items for sale
Lots of phony reviews from influencers
Money goes to super-tech company
Need to worry about hackers, phishers, and Nigerian Princes

I’d just walk in.
It was cash only, I was 10 years old!
I enjoyed nature on the walk over
It was immediate gratification
Everything was in one paper bag.
Charles didn’t keep tabs on every purchase I made
I’d hang out in the store with friends
We could touch the merchandise
I could learn to make my own decision
My money went to a local merchant
A clerk accused me of shoplifting-they were wrong!

Who wins? It’s not even close (though I won’t give up my Prime account!)

I haven’t driven down Morse Avenue lately. I don’t know if any of the old stores still exist. But if they do, look in to see if you can find the 10-year-old kid with a quarter in his pocket and a hankering for a piece of Bazooka Bubble Gum.

A Snowy Night In Chicago –1979

A recreation of that long, cold, walk. Photo created by Dall-E

Looking out at this snowy January day takes me back 45 years, to the very beginning of my marriage to Barb, and to a snowstorm that paralyzed Chicago. The Blizzard of January 12-14, 1979 dumped about 20 inches of snow on the city and surrounding area–and led to one cold and frigid walk through Skokie, a northern Chicago suburb.

I was doing a fourth-year medical school rotation in gastroenterology at Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, while Barb was early in her Occupational Therapist career at RIC, Chicago’s famed rehabilitation center, just off the Magnificent Mile downtown. Knowing that a storm was brewing, we both elected to take public transportation–a walk to the Skokie CTA station for a short journey on the Skokie Swift, a transfer at Howard Street to the main North-South “L,” from which I would get off at Wilson, and Barb continue on to the Chicago Avenue stop.

As the storm approached, I was able to leave my rotation early, and reversing my morning route, made it back to our Skokie home without incident. For Barb, the situation was quite different.

After seeing her last patient of the day, Barb trudged through the falling snow the the subway stop. Following her descent down the elevator to the platform, she found herself engulfed by hundreds of commuters, the daily regulars plus the throngs of people like her who had opted not to drive on that wintery day.

As Barb waited on the northbound platform, two, three, four trains hurtled past, overfilled with passengers and not stopping at her station. Before panic set in, Barb decided to head in the other direction and was able to board a train that took her four stations south. From here, she was finely able to board a northbound train.

More than an hour later, in the black and cold, Barb disembarked from the Skokie Swift and began the half-mile walk to our 2nd-floor walk up on Lavergne Avenue. The snow was blinding and the temperature falling rapidly. Barb struggled as she slowly made her way, huddling in doorways every few minutes to try to regain some warmth in her fingers and toes.

In the meantime, I had called Barb’s parents wondering if they had any idea where she was or if they had heard from her. In those pre-cell phone days, we were all as deeply in the dark as Barb. Finally, close to three hours after she had left the bright lights of the rehab center, Barb made it up the stairs to our apartment, home at last.

Barb vowed that evening never to take a Chicago “L” ever again. Since then we have ridden the subways of New York City, Boston’s famed MTA, London’s Tube, the Paris Metro, and Berlin’s U-Bahn. But I don’t think Barb has ventured onto a CTA platform since that frigid day 45 years ago. Some promises you keep.

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Doin’ The Laundry, The Old Rogers Park Way

1967. The tiny commercial laundry was tucked under the Lunt end of the Morse-Lunt L stop in Rogers Park. Next door was the small variety store where the neighborhood kids would buy gleaming white rubber balls with raised stitching, the kind we would use to play fastpitch with in the schoolyard down the block.

My family’s apartment on Farwell east of Sheridan had plenty of advantages–it was close to the beach, the pier, the tennis courts, and the notorious Farwell Park bubbler — but the building was old and lacked a clothes washer and dryer, even in the musty basement.

On Monday mornings my mother would load our laundry cart, the upright type on two wheels, and pull it the 4 or 5 blocks along Lunt to the laundry. My Tuesday afternoon chore? I was to stop at the laundry on my way home from school, pay the $2.00 charge, and pull our cart, now full of clean, neatly folded clothes back to Farwell and up the three flights of stairs to our apartment.

The proprietor of the laundry was a middle-aged man, though he seemed very old to me. He spoke with an accent I wasn’t worldly enough to place. I recognized that he was foreign, just as my parents were. We would speak a few words as I carefully pulled a pair of wrinkled one-dollar bills out of my pocket and handed them to him. In the summer the heat in the laundry was nauseating, but on cold winter days I would luxuriate in the steamy warmth as I waited for him to retrieve our cart.

I was always careful to make sure no one saw me duck into the laundry. I would hope none of my friends were buying baseball cards or a candy bar at the store next door as I stepped outside to begin the trudge home. I don’t know why I found it so embarrassing, I was just doing a necessary chore, but as adolescents, don’t we find many things embarrassing?

I rarely get to Rogers Park these days. Maybe I will pack the grandkids in the car and give them a tour of the neighborhood I grew up in. I will show them the schools, the restaurants, the synagogues, and the location where my apartment building once stood. If the kids aren’t too bored I’ll include the spot under the L. And hope the fragrant steamy aroma of drying laundry still fills the air.

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Note: Further research indicates that the top photo MAY not be the Morse L station. My apologies for the error and any inconvenience.

A Friend Wants to Know About My First Job. My Story is a Tale of East Rogers Park, Morse Avenue, and “The Jewels.” How About Yours?

A prompt from the website Storyworth has asked me to describe how I got my first job. Like all such prompts, it opens a flood of memories. They are not all specific to the question at hand but all shine brightly in my mind.

We can quickly dispense with the job I held as a 13-year-old, counting shoe boxes in a warehouse for the shoe store chain my dad worked for. What family didn’t skirt child labor laws to have their kids work with Dad?

No, the first job that really counted came when I was 15, in the spring of 1971. And it came at the holiest of holies, the Jewel Food Store on Morse Avenue in East Rogers Park.

To outsiders, the center (social, not geographical) of East Rogers Park was Morse Avenue Beach. Teenagers from the North Side of Chicago, from Skokie, from Evanston, would flock to the golden sand beach with its breaking waves and nearby refreshment stand. Lifeguard towers dotted the shoreline and sunburns were the name of the game.

But if you lived in East Rogers Park, you knew that its true core was Morse Avenue itself, particularly the short stretch from the Morse El stop on the east to Ashland Avenue on the west. This was where the locals ate at cherished restaurants (Ashkenaz, Froikins, DeMars); enjoyed their sweets (Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream, Davidsons Bakery, Dutch Mill Candies); and then shopped for everything else they needed (Charles Variety, Morry’s Mens Wear, Leonard’s Juvenile). The area was a 15-minute city before 15-minute cities became woke.

And at the center of all this was “The Jewels,” the local outpost of the Jewel Food Store chain that dominated Chicago grocery stores. The store at 1425 Morse was the best and for many of the area residents the only option for weekly groceries. The parking lot was small, but that was of no consequence. Most of the clientele walked to the store and had their grocery bags delivered in cardboard boxes by two twenty-somethings in a pick-up truck (Saturdays only) or wheeled their grocery bags home in their own upright wire grocery carts. No fresh meat after 6 pm (Butcher’s Union rules), no liquor before noon on Sunday (Chicago blue laws) but everything else whenever you wanted.

How did I wind up working at such a community centerpiece at the young age of 15? As in most things in life, it isn’t what you know, it’s who you know. Julie, an old grammar school friend of my sister who was the Assistant Service Manager greased the wheels for my application as a bagger. When I applied for the job I was instructed to say I was 16–and Julie made sure no one checked too carefully.

I got the bottom-rung position, was handed a clip-on red bow tie, and began a 5-year long career that helped pay for college as I rose from bagger to cashier to service desk pro.

And the chance to say “I made it big on Morse Avenue!” What more could a Chicago kid ask for from his first job?

Where did you begin? Leave a reply or send me your story at chidoc@post.com

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Do You Remember These Chicago Name Changes?DuSable Drive will be just one more.

Chicago Name Changes. Photos Courtesy of Chicago Tribune

My family always called it the Outer Drive. As a five-year-old, I remember the traffic jam around the S-curve as my uncle swore his way to Hyde Park for a Passover Seder as the Palmolive Building beacon glowed on us.

Aliotta, Haynes, Jeremiah romanticized it and immortalized it–there ain’t no road just like it…slippin’ by on LSD.

And if it changes–if it becomes DuSable Drive, c’est la vie. I will learn to live with it. After all, it is not the first landmark in Chicagoland to endure a name change, and it will not be the last.

Here, in no particular order, are 10 more-or-less successful name changes in our history.

First, the boomerang: The above mentioned Palmolive Building was renamed Playboy Tower in 1965, but is back as Palmolive since about 2001.
The AON Building, that drab white tower downtown? It started life as the Standard Oil Building, and was AMOCO for awhile, too!
Guaranteed Rate Field, quite a mouthful, was originally New Comiskey Park, but is most fondly remembered as The Cell (U.S. Cellular Field,) home to the World Champion White Sox of 2005.
One exception to c’est la vie. Willis Tower will be Sears Tower FOREVER. ‘Nuf said.
Wonder why O’Hare International Airport’s designation is ORD? Goes back to humble origins as Orchard Field. Though shouldn’t that have made it ORC?
What exactly did Mayor Jane Byrne do to justify renaming the Circle Interchange as the Jane Byrne Interchange. Perhaps she could look down on the jammed junction during the month she “lived” in Cabrini-Green.
Northwestern University’s Dyche Stadium, named in perpetuity for the Dyche family, is now Ryan Field. Go ‘Cats!
Will Boystown really become Northalsted? I’m not betting on it.
Been to 875 N. Michigan Ave lately? What a naming comedown for the late John Hancock Building. Why not talk to Lin-Manuel Miranda and sell him the naming rights to Hamilton Tower?
Drive down Pulaski Avenue much. That was once Crawford, a name it retains as it goes through the northern suburbs.

Names come and go. I won’t fret about another name change in the City of Big Shoulders, Windy City, Second City. It’s how you live it, not what you call it.

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George Lucas-I’ve Got Your Museum Right Here!

If you build it…

…he will come.

Field of Dreams-1989

April showers have hopefully faded away. The Cubs and Sox are both in first place. Cinco De Mayo is here. And we are making progress on the house! With carpenters working overtime (but not violating the neighborhood construction restrictions!) the framing and roof construction are near completion. Barb took a climb on a rickety ladder yesterday and tells me the view from the second floor is magnificent. Of course, when all the wallboard is up some of those sight lines will disappear, but we will always be able to look out at our tranquil pond and its occupant swans, Harvey and Sheila (Alan Sherman, anyone?) We have also finalized selection of the exterior stone; a little of this color, a little of that color, then a little more of both. Preliminary sketches for cabinet designs are done. Barb has raised her sights and begun assaying light fixtures.

All this leads me to believe we WILL eventually be moving into our new home. And I have a convenient solution to the problem that has been plaguing Chicago and George Lucas. Where the heck to put that museum? The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has been ejected from San Francisco, evicted from its first potential Chicago site, and now the McCormick Place locale is also being challenged. Mellody Hobson, George’s wife, has pronounced they may look elsewhere, prompting Waukegan to get in on the action.

Waukegan? That’s half way to Wisconsin. And don’t they have something nuclear up that way? A Jack Benny Museum I could understand, but Lucas? I have a much better suggestion. When we move out of our Long Grove home, the Lucas Museum can move in! It’s a revolutionary suggestion, but the pros outweigh the cons.

Pros-

Long Grove is used to crowds-the Apple and Chocolate Fests really pack ’em in. And this could be a bigger deal than Strawberry Fest.
The kitchen is perfectly designed for dishing out American Graffiti Burgers. Just be kind to the marble countertops.
Now that we sold the exercise equipment from the bonus room ((Thanks Wallapop!) there is plenty of room up there for a Millennium Falcon exhibit.
Six bathrooms and no North Carolina type laws restricting their use.
Pretty good cell phone reception, as long as you stick to Verizon.
Long Grove isn’t that far from Harrison Fords hometown of Park Ridge.
Empty lot behind the house is perfect for parking.

Cons-

The Home Owner’s Association Renovation Committee might be picky about exterior signage. No wait, Barb is ON that committee. No problem as Lucas gets it approved before we move.
Long Grove is not known for its public transportation. However, I am sure we can work out a deal with all the landscapers to use their trucks to move folks in and out.
We think Adam Driver is better on “Girls” than he was in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” But maybe he will bring Allison Williams to the Grand Opening, so all is good.

All in all, its a win-win. Mr. Lucas, let’s do this!

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Why You Should Be Reading This Blog

You can check out any time you like…

…but you can never leave.

The Eagles–1976

Another Newbie Blog on ChicagoNow. What is this one all about? Call it a personal adventure if you like. My wife Barb and I are young (in our own minds) empty nesters, rattling around in a big suburban home with Max and Phoebe, our resident dog/cat combo.The kids are long gone. So after months of flip-flopping, U-Turns and a 360 or two, we decided to defy reason and build a new, too large, suburban home. We are losing a bedroom here and powder room there, but it will still be a home dedicated to our lifestyle. We began documenting our progress with the blog downsizemaybe at WordPress. We have developed many dedicated followers there, and look forward to migrating with them to this new, more grammatically correct, version in ChicagoNow.

One thing we discovered when building a home from scratch is that for long periods of time, particularly in the early phases, NOTHING HAPPENS! There is only so much that I could write about the horrors of financing this project or the fun of picking out windows. The blog has therefore evolved into a more open forum for my inner ramblings. Sometimes my mind is on music, from classic rock to Broadway show tunes. Other days you may read about my car, my pets or my family, though not necessarily in that order. Current events? Sure, sometimes.

I try to keep my professional life (I have a full-time career as a pathologist) out of the picture, though one day you may see a sidebar on what pathology is all about. It’s not much like “Quincy” or one of those “CSI” shows, Miami, Chicago or otherwise. And I certainly don’t know any docs like Cathy Martin, the pathology resident on “St. Elsewhere” who liked to lure her lovers underground for energetic morgue sex.

Despite my best efforts, not everyone will love this blog. To make it easy for you to decide, here are four reasons NOT to follow Downsize, Maybe:

If you don’t like having a particular tune stuck in your head all day. One of my partners gave up reading the blog after she complained the opening lyrics in a particular post were driving her crazy and wouldn’t stop. As for me, I can’t stop singing “Hey, Jealousy”, the tune that introduced the last post on the old site.
If you are waiting for Barb to write a post. Forget about it. Unless all of you ask very, very, nicely.
If you need a new post seven days a week. Sorry, but I just don’t have the juice for that. Three or four posts a week should serve all of us just fine.
If you are looking for a ranter. I am a laid back guy, though non-vaccinators drive me up a wall, and some presidential candidates do too.

But if you want a tune filled, mellow and entertaining blog, Chicago but a bit suburban, with an occasional twist or two, this will be the place for you. Any comments, suggestions, criticisms or complaints are encouraged. We even have a Facebook Page Downsize, maybe that you can contribute to.

So welcome aboard. Please keep your arms and hands inside the car while you enjoy the ride.
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