Chicago (Late 1940’s)

[Note: this is the  second in a series on the cities in which I have lived--or visited.]

Making my first visit to Chicago in late August 1945 was a big deal. The train-ride from Texas to there was my first ever experience with rail travel. World War II had ended only a couple weeks earlier. I knew the city would be immense to this 17 year old boy from Walburg Texas. My father who had made the same first-ever train trip some 30 years earlier had given me very detailed instructions on how to use the el to get me to Concordia Teachers College in suburban River Forest. But I was met at the Union Station and my first el ride didn’t come until weeks later.

Yet the el rides help define Chicago for me. As we went by crowded tenements it was a new world for this rural kid. Encountering people of many different ethnic groups and black people at all economic levels was ever eye-opening.

Visiting the Loop was (and still is) always special. Perry Como at the State Theater. New productions (at very low student ticket prices) at The Goodman theater, the Lake front, Buckingham Fountain, Outer Drive, Michigan Avenue, the stockyards, the South side, Maxwell Street (where I reinforced my biased ethnic stereotyping.) Just imaging these still stirs my heart.

And in the middle of the heart is Jane Adams Hull House: a community settlement for “young girls”. We visited that as a class assignment. But what attracted me was not Jane Adams but another Jane who wore a unique pair or earmuffs. I introduced myself and told her I liked those earmuffs. Now 65 years later the earmuffs are long gone but Jane and I still share those memories and five kids and 8 grandkids.

 It was in the Chicago area that Jane and I got certified to be Lutheran teaching ministers. In that role we have traveled the globe and lived all over, yet without Chicago’s Hull House it might never have happened. Together we still visit Chicago and I still love that city. Pick any ethnic food and you know some of the best will be in Chicago. If you need to keep hope alive after decades of evidence to the contrary visit Wriggly Field. Want to see good art look at Picasso at the Art Museum or other ancients and moderns at lots of other places. Look at the exotic sea creatures and enjoy the cafeteria at Shed Aquarium close to Soldiers Field. Listen to good Bach music at worship at St. Luke’s Lutheran.  I can stop by (as close as security allows) at the Obama Chicago Mansion and recall visiting my son when he lived in that very home as a street worker for alienated youth, or go just a little farther south (but lock your car better than I did and it costs me my new expensive camera) and visit Chicago University.

I think O’Hare wasn’t even there in my college days. All subsequent school-time trips were via the thumb of a hitch-hiker until I got my own car. So whether it was or is by train, plane or thumb I am always ready to head there.

Chicago - it’s my kind of town