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.

I Love Cicadas. Here Is Why.

I remember my long-ago childhood in Rogers Park. I’d walk along Farwell, or Greenview, or Pratt Avenues after dinner. My friends and I would stop in a neighborhood park in the early evening as the sunlight faded. We would catch grasshoppers and put them in glass jars with holes punched in the lids. We would chase Monarch butterflies as The Butterfly of Love played on someone’s transistor radio. And we watched as hundreds of fireflies illuminated the darkness.

Most years since then have been pretty uneventful on the insect front. But this year is a special one. Like everyone celebrating a 68^th birthday in 2024, I was born in 1956. That year, like 2024, was a 17-year cycle cicada year. And I am as thrilled as a newly hatching nymph in black dirt about my fifth time crossing flight paths with this septendecimal brood.

I know most people can’t stand the little buggers. My family is no exception. They hate the noise; they hate the beady red eyes; they hate the fluttering creatures landing in their hair. Our neighborhood is filled with spasmodic dance moves as both kids and adults do their best to shake them off.

But while the haters hate, hate, hate, I love the little buggers. How can you not respect creatures with such perfectly tuned bodies that in their somnambulant larval state they can accurately tick off 17 years? And how can you not feel empathy for critters whose entire conscious life is limited to a few weeks?

Are they loud? Sure they are. When one became attached to Cooper’s leash and snuck inside our house, its clacking was astonishingly raucous. But the drone of thousands high up in the trees is calming, almost hypnotic. As I walk through the neighborhood, I find the sound a pleasant backdrop to the words of the novel I am listening to through my headphones. The rumblings of school buses and garbage trucks are much more distracting than the insect’s overhead buzz.

I don’t mind when the rapidly beating wings brush against my arms or legs. It’s fine if the creatures settle onto my shirt for a moment. They won’t bite, sting, or spit on me. They will soon flutter away as they choose a mate from among their millions of compatriots. Speeddating at its finest!

I will be 84 the next time this brood of cicadas reappears. Maybe I enjoy them because they remind me of the many years I still have before I greet them again. And maybe, just maybe, they remind me of those simpler days of my youth, when grasshoppers and butterflies were enough to light my way home.

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.

Let’s Connect With Rogers Park Again

It has been a few weeks since I invited you to try your hand at the version of the New York Times Connections puzzle I created especially for my friends in the Chicago neighborhood of Rogers Park. Hundreds of you tackled the puzzle, and many of you let me know that you had solved it. So it is time for Rogers Park Connections #2! Of course, anyone is welcome to play–no Rogers Park passport is required.

To review, the Connections puzzles test how well you can separate a group of random-appearing words into categories. I’ll give you 16 words, you divide them into 4 categories with 4 entries in each category. Once you solve the puzzle the Rogers Park Connection will be evident. To the best of my ability, I have created this puzzle so that there is one, and only one, correct solution.

Think you have figured it all out? Let me know at chidoc@post.com. Please DO NOT LEAVE YOUR ANSWER IN THE COMMENT OR REPLY FIELD. We don’t want any spoilers!

As Sherlock Holmes said to his companion “Elementary, my dear Watson. Elementary” ^*

Are you ready? Here are your 16 Words.

ACRE———-BOONE————GALE————SCHEME

COLLUSION—TYPHOON———PLOT————CONSPIRACY

CABAL———ARMSTRONG——HURRICANE—-PARCEL

KILMER———FIELD————–ROGERS———TORNADO

Have fun and let me know how you did at chidoc@post.com. And don’t forget, we welcome new subscribers.

^*I know Arthur Conan Doyle never wrote this line in an actual Sherlock Holmes story, but it WAS used in the 1929 film The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

“Connections” Puzzle With a Rogers Park Twist

Have you all been playing Connections? It’s a word puzzle that has been appearing in the New York Times for the last few months. It doesn’t have quite the buzz of Wordle, but so many people asked me if I was doing it that I gave it a try. And as expected, now I am hooked.

How does the puzzle work? Each day there is a new 4 x 4 grid, with each space containing one word–a total of 16 words. The object of the puzzle is to separate the 16 words into four categories with four words placed into each category.

The puzzle sounds simple but there is a catch or two. First, the categories are not given. They are different every day, and one of your first tasks is to figure out what those categories are. Second, and the devilish twist, is that some of the words can be part of more than one category, and you need to figure out which one it belongs to.

For example, as you check a grid you see the words Chrysler, Dodge, Chevrolet, Ford, and Jeep. All seem to be car companies, but only four of the five can belong to that category. You look around and notice the word Kennedy in another grid spot, and realize that Ford might belong to a category of Presidents.

And so it goes until you have all 16 words arranged into your four categories. In the NYT version of the puzzle, you have four attempts to reach the correct solution. If it takes more than that, you are a loser for the day and have to wait until the next day to play again.

Here is my version of Connections, including a shout-out to all my readers in Rogers Park. See if you can separate these words into four categories. You can send your answers to me at chidoc@post.com

Let’s see how many of you can solve this, and how many of you get hooked on Connections!

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Bagesl, Bagels, Bagels. Memories Go Round and Round.

“Should we stop for bagels?” I asked Barb on Sunday night as we closed in on the Touhy exit on the Edens Expressway. It was late, we were coming home from watching “The Lehman Trilogy” a three-hour play at Water Tower Place, and I was tired, so I stayed in my lane and sped past the exit ramp.

The store we bypassed was the New York Bagel & Bialy shop. We passed it this week, but for many years it was a regular Sunday night stop for us. That was family night, as we packed the kids into the minivan and visited my parents and aunt in Rogers Park.

Some nights my mother would cook–her Weiner Schnitzel is still one of my all-time favorite meals — most weeks we would visit a local restaurant. Bones in Lincolnwood was a consistent favorite, and it continued to be one after it was rechristened L. Woods. Or we might venture to Hi Howe for a Chinese feast (something my dad would never have consented to when I was growing up.) And no one ever complained if we drove to Wilmette to enjoy breakfast-for-dinner at the original Walker Brothers location.

Once the seniors were settled back in their apartments, we turned west on Touhy and headed for home. But nine weeks out of ten, just before we reached the Edens entrance I would pull into the narrow parking lot in front of New York Bagel & Bialy.

In those days the store was open 24 hours a day. I’d walk into a steamy miasma, the odor of baking bread filling the air. The same counter woman always took care of me, whether she recognized me I could never tell. I would ask her for a dozen bagels, balancing plain, sesame seed, and poppyseed varieties. And there was always a 13th bagel, the baker’s dozen bonus, for us to split up and enjoy on the rest of the car ride home.

I know my health is better off for my not stopping to grab a dozen bagels last week. And I am pretty sure that the taste just wouldn’t be the same as the melt in the mouth goodness I remembered from 30 years ago. But next time I am driving onTouhy or flying down the Edens I think I’ll make that bagel stop one more time.

Make that bonus bagel a sesame seed, hot out of the oven.

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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.

An Old Bookcase Became My Rogers Park Refuge.

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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You can always get a hold of me at chidoc@post.com Look forward to hearing from you.

Read last week’s blog here.

The Old 151–Circa 1966

The Old 151 bus, I rode it then,
When I was but a lad of ten.

'Twas the magic carpet to take me where
I wanted to go with a kid-sized fare.

A dime and two pennies was all it required
To transport me wherever my young heart desired.

A Rogers Park 3-flat is where I called home
And that CTA bus that would let this boy roam. 

I could catch it on Farwell, at Sheridan Road
And Shazam! it became my get-around mode.

A ride north to Howard would take seven minutes
It was almost as far as the big city's limits.

Up towards Papa Milanos and the new bowling alley
Where the pizza was hot and the downed pins would tally.

Or the field house at Touhy to shoot Friday night hoops
Though most weeks we would walk it, in our dribbling groups.

A short ride to the south was the Loyola El Station
I would hop on the rail by that bus stop location.

For the price of a transfer, a nickel, no more
I'd ride it downtown, to Kroch's/Brentano's bookstore.

Route 151 was how our family traveled
It took us on roads, some paved and some graveled.

We didn't have a car, Dad said "we don't need it.
Public bus and train routes would surely excede it."

With routes in the hundreds and also the nine-six
Chicago's buses were always our family's fine-fix.

And now I'm a senior and not in the city
I don't ride on buses, perhaps it's a pity.

With Double A R P discounts -- I'm sure that they've got one.
A ride on the old 1-5-1 would be quite a hot one.

But alas I now think that it never will happen
In those thoughts and this verse, I'll now put a cap in.

This Is My Favorite Chocolate Treat. What Is Yours?

Cora Lee Orange Peel fulfills childhood memories.

You can have your Raisinets. You can have your chocolate-covered strawberries, your chocolate-covered cherries, your chocolate-covered Oreos. For me, there is only one delicacy deserving a thorough coating of rich dark chocolate, the orange peel.

I am not sure how I first fell in love with these skinny strips of candied peel, but I know it was very, very early in life. Perhaps my parents first bought them for me as we walked home from lunch at Ashkenaz, the iconic Morse Avenue deli in East Rogers Park. The source was the Dutch Mill Candy Store just down the block. Sadly, once a thriving Chicago area chain of confectionery stores, Dutch Mill closed in 1988.

As I grew I kept seeking out my favorite treat. For many years, Marshall Field’s Department Stores were my go-to supplier. Although best known for Frango Mints, most Marshall Field’s stores had a fully stocked candy counter with a variety of fresh chocolates. I would make many Saturday afternoon visits to the lower level of the Field’s store in Old Orchard to pick up a quarter pound of my favorites. When Field’s became Macy’s, those visits came to an end.

Friends who know my proclivity for orange peels have tried to feed my flame. In that way, I have had the chance to try a variety of candy confectioners and chocolate styles. Some have been OK, none great. Either waxy chocolate or dried-out peels have doomed them. And one definite conclusion–bland milk chocolate is NOT the proper coating for the sugary peels.

Fortunately, several years ago Barb discovered a source that fulfills my fruity fantasy. The orange peels from Cora Lee Candies in Glenview duplicate the taste and texture of my Dutch Mill daydreams.

On my birthday or our anniversary, on Valentine’s or Father’s Day, I can usually expect a loving card and a pound of the Cora Lee sweets to be waiting for me on the kitchen island. I put the card on our buffet, pop the candy box in our freezer and then treat myself to an after-dinner chocolate crunch every night for a month to come.

A pound of Cora Lee Chocolate Coated Orange Peels isn’t cheap, but I guess I’m worth it!

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