My Life As It Was At Age Eight

by Howard Robert Hardie

October 5, 1918 -- October 19, 2004

Written during the winter of 1998 - 1999.

 

The day would begin for me by hearing noises in the bedroom of my parents as my father got up and went to the basement. There he would light the gas-fired water heater and stir up the coals in the furnace, shake down the ashes, and add more coal or coke with which our house was heated. I then could hear him in the kitchen preparing a roast or fowl for the oven in preparation for our Sunday dinner.

I was expected to be up then, washed and dressed, and ready to go with him to get the usual Sunday breakfast of fresh bakery. He and I would usually, at this time of the year, shovel out a pathway to the stable/garage to get our car. It was then an old roadster that belonged to my Aunt Agnes but which we were using because her husband, who had died, had had a peanut machine route, which my father had taken over for her.

We then would drive a mile over into Berwyn to get a baker's dozen of danish and sweet roll buns that were warm and fresh from the oven and which cost 23 cents. These, with a glass of milk and a half of a grapefruit or juice, would be my breakfast. My mother and sister would join us at the kitchen table, and at this time our conversation might be about our plans for the day or about what Lindberg was doing after his historic flight. We had heard about what he had accomplished from our neighbor, Mr. Vieth. Lindy from then on was my hero and model and fostered my lifelong interest in aviation.

I was expected to straighten up my room and put my dirty clothes down the clothes chute in the bathroom. They went down into a basket under the chute in the basement. My mother washed them in the basement at the laundry tubs once a week using the wringer and a Maytag washing machine. Lines were strung there for drying them near the heat of the furnace. In fair weather, of course, they were dried out doors.

We only had Aunt Agnes' car for a short time as it went with the business when she sold it, so we were without any car for a long time. We went to church every Sunday without fail, and to get there the four of us (I had a sister, Wilma, who was two years younger than I) would walk half a mile to catch a Berwyn/Lyons streetcar to go into Cicero to the newly organized Cicero Bible Church. The cars of the trolley were then heated by a coal stove which the motorman or conductor tended. At age eight, I was always expected to be a "good" boy and, except for my Sunday School class, stay close to my parents. I was thoroughly indoctrinated in the tenets of the Christian religion.

On returning home, we would prepare for our grand Sunday dinner that my father had prepared with some help from my mother and sister, Wilma who were responsible for setting the table in the dining room. About once a month we would have Grandpa Hardie over to eat dinner with us. He usually came from Forest Park, where he lived with Aunt Agnes, by way of the La Grange streetcar. There were few houses then in that part of Riverside, Illinois where we lived, so we would look out of our kitchen pantry window to see him walking the mile or so from where he had gotten off of the trolley. It was always a pleasure to me to have him with us. The aroma of his corncob pipe, his mustache, his Scottish brogue, his mannerisms and his loving interest in my sister and me are fond memories. He never ever went to church with us but kept his eye on the roast in the oven and made himself at home while we were gone to church. He had been soured on church, we learned, long before he left Scotland. The parson there had accused him of attending only to partake of the wine tasting. He spoke glowingly of his work as an iron molder over there and of the beauty of the countryside in Scotland.

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Reminiscinings

It is common in the Orient, among people under the influence of Confucianism, to consider a newborn child to be already one year old. This seems to me to be a very logical and reasonable way of looking at it. It leads us, I think, to consider more carefully the beginnings of our earthly existence when the genes and passions of our parents were generating the molecules and juices that would unite to incarnate us in a body of human form.

During the time of my mother's pregnancy, she went by train back to the southern Illinois town of Oakford, not far from Springfield and on the Sangamon River, to visit her mother's family. My mother was named Mary Cornelia Duff Hardie, and her sister was named Susan. At their tender age of four and six, the mother of these two little girls, Emma Jane Lounsberry, died and left my grandfather James Monroe Duff with two little girls to care for. He was an ordained minister of the Methodist Church, and as is their custom, he was relocated to a new place to minister every few years. To return to Oakford for the funeral of his wife, he took them by train. As they were riding along, a woman fellow passenger noticed this man alone with these two little girls and asked, "Where is their mother?" To which Grandpa answered, "She has passed away and is in the baggage car ahead." This incident, and these words, were used in a very popular ballad song that was often heard on phonographs during the 1920 era. While visiting there in Oakford, Mother and Aunt Susie went on a picnic to a farm where Uncle Carl, Susie's husband, was working, and while there had a watermelon feast. Uncle Carl warned my mother not to eat too much watermelon, as it might be harmful to the baby that she was carrying.

As a child, and all through life, I knew without any doubt that my mother's love for me was unconditional. My father's love, however, I always felt, was conditioned on my behavior and on my attainments. He came from an immigrant Scottish family of twelve children and had had only an eighth grade education. I was an only son, while he had been one of six boys in the family and had become quite a success in the business world. My parents were very frugal and had saved for several years to make possible the purchase of a modest house out of Chicago in the western suburb of Riverside. We moved there when I was six years old, so at eight I was learning about the surrounding area, as a boy would.

One day my sister and I went for a walk up along Harlem Avenue to the north. We strayed away for about half a mile to where a group of laborers were preparing the roadway for the paving of Riverside Drive. The men were not working at the time, as it may have been the noon hour, but they had gathered in a shack in which there was a stove for warmth and where they were having a roisterous time of playing a game of craps. We wandered in and stood a while, wide-eyed at this rowdy bunch of smoking, drinking, swearing men. I had never seen such before, and finally decided that I should take my sister and get ourselves back home. This, too, was something I never mentioned to my parents.

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Once a month it was my mother's duty to go downtown to the Loop of Chicago to make a payment on our house mortgage. The house had cost six thousand dollars. Mother most often took Wilma and me along with her on these trips, and we were always eager to go. We walked to the Berwyn and Lyons streetcar at Harlem and Stanley and took it to the end of the line where we transferred to a Chicago 22nd Street car. On this we went down into the city and mingled in traffic with autos, crowds of people, and also horse drawn wagons and carriages. On the way, before getting into the Loop, we went through the West Water Street Market area. This was an interesting place because it was where the farmers came with their wagonloads of produce to sell, and where many peddlers got their store of goods to sell. Beyond this, the streetcar went down into a tunnel, which carried us under the South Branch of the Chicago River – very exciting for an eight-year-old boy.

We made our way, after leaving the trolley, to the basement of the Great Northern Trust Bank where Mother made the mortgage payment. It was a grand place of polished brass and marble. Sometimes she would take us with her when she had occasion to go into the vault to use the safety deposit box there. The vault doors were huge, and we were told that they were operated by a time clock and were thus able to keep our things perfectly safe.

From there we would go to State Street where the ten-cent stores and department stores were. We shopped at both Woolworth's and Kresge's for things, and then went to the basement of Kresge's where the lunch counters were. They were often very crowded during the middle of the day, and we had to stand behind a seated person until they were through until we could get their seat. My favorite was a small baked dish of spaghetti that had melted cheese on top. A special treat also was a soda or a malted milk.

If it was a nice day, or especially if we had someone like my Aunt Susie or my Uncle Elmer from northern Wisconsin with us, Mother would take us into the Boston Store. Here we would ride the elevator up to the top floor where we could walk up a ramp and out of a doorway onto the roof of the twelve-story building. We would then walk across the roof to a steel fire-tower-like structure that we climbed to take us up another forty feet or so where there was an observation deck from which to view the city from this vantage point. Back then, the only building higher in Chicago was the Masonic Temple Building a few blocks away.

The department stores that were on the east side of State Street down in the Loop in those days were: Marshall Field, Carson Piere Scott, The Boston Store, and the Lion store, which later became Sears. On the ninth floor of The Boston Store they had the toy and farm supply departments. I was especially intrigued by the electric trains, and the baby chicks that were sold there in the spring of the year. Later, when I was about fourteen, I bought six baby chicks there and raised them.

One Saturday afternoon when I was about eight years old, I had my attention drawn to some rather loud talking by my parents who were down in the basement. From the top of the stairs I could see that they were having a heated discussion about whether or not we should leave the Methodist Church which we had been attending in downtown Riverside,

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and start attending the new Cicero Bible church in Cicero. We had been there once or twice at the persuasion of my Uncle Leonard Edwards. As I remember, my mother was for the change and my father was not. In any case, we did make the move, which was to affect our lives greatly in the future.

As a small child attending summer school at Cicero, I had, for a time, a teacher by the name of Jenny Winters. She and her husband Warren were missionaries to China who were home on furlough. For a while they lived with us in our home, as did a large number of other missionaries and visiting pastors and evangelists, from time to time. Mother kept a book in our home for friends and visitors to sign. Wilma, my sister, and I were thus exposed to a variety of deeply religious evangelical Christians. Warren and Jenny Winters later were in China when the Communists took over the country. They were offered the choice of leaving or conforming to the new rules. Jenny came home and was provided with an apartment near the church, but Warren chose to stay and was never heard of again.

One day when I was in the third grade at school, I was in the room in the basement of Central Grade School where we went to eat our lunch. I carried my lunch in a brown paper bag that my mother had prepared for me each day. We could buy a half pint of milk to go with it for three cents. The table at which I sat faced a window that I think was open during fair weather at the time. All at once we heard several gunshots in downtown Riverside, about a block away. We then heard some shouting and knew that something had happened. After school, I went over there and learned that the Riverside National Bank had been held up. People were looking at a spot in the masonry where a bullet had hit, and soon paperboys who had gotten a special edition of the Chicago Daily News from off of the suburban train that stopped at the station there, were shouting, "Extra; read all about it." It was all very exciting for a small boy, and I had something important to tell at the dinner table that night.

These are just a few of the many experiences that come to mind now, that a pre-pubescent boy had back in the Year of our Lord, 1926.

Howard R. Hardie

Medford, OregonDecember 24, 1998

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My mother had a half brother who lived at Cederville, Wisconsin, which was ninety miles north of Green Bay. About the middle of December every year we could expect the mailman to deliver to us a burlap-wrapped fir tree to have for the holidays. We put it up and decorated it in the customary way. father would build a fire in the fireplace that we seldom otherwise used, and the home seemed a more cheery place. Winters in the Chicago area can be long and dreary as well as severely cold and harsh. After a snowfall, we could sometimes hear sleigh bells which told us that the men who worked for the village were passing with the snowplow to clear snow from the public sidewalks using an "A" shaped plow and a team of horses. We lived a mile from the schools in downtown Riverside, so we were glad to have the walkways cleared so we could walk to school. Busses for children were unheard of when I was eight.

One year at Christmas time when I was about this age, my mother took me with her to visit her father my Grandpa Duff, and her brother Uncle Elmer. We traveled by way of the Milwaukee Railroad and got off at the flag stop of Cederville, which is no longer in use. Grandpa met us there with a horse and sleigh for transporting us to their house about two miles away. I remember that, though the weather was very cold, we were comfortable under a large robe and with a lantern down at our legs. Sleigh rides are always something to be remembered.

Another event when I was eight was when Mother took Wilma and me down to visit her relatives in Oakford, Illinois. This was a small town on the Sangamon River southeast of Springfield, not far from New Salem where Abraham Lincoln had lived. We traveled by way of the Wabash Railroad and the thing of it that I remember was that the railroad cars for that line, and perhaps some others, were all painted yellow. Many cars then were still being used that were made of wood. Like all boys, I really enjoyed train rides, and Chicago was a great railroad center where many lines all came together.

The church we attended then was very strong on sending out missionaries to foreign lands. A big affair was made of sending them off at the downtown Union Station, which is a huge building with great large halls of marble in which the sounds are amplified and in which they echo and re-echo. When the arrivals and departures are announced the sound reverberates and adds to the excitement. I found the noise, the rushing of the crowds, the Redcaps dashing about, the smell of the steam and stale tobacco smoke all made an impression on this young lad. After a street-meeting type of gospel service, we would walk our departing friends out into the train shed and along the engines and cars to where they would board and final goodbyes would be said amid smiles and tears. Air travel has done away with all such as that now.

My father, with the encouragement of my mother, became quite a devout evangelical Christian, so when I was about eight years old, he took me to a special, for men only, meeting that was held in the movie theater in downtown Berwyn, Illinois where the then-famous Billy Sunday was to give a talk. I had never been in a movie house before, so the décor and plush seats were new to me. I of course sat next to my father and listened intently to the firey oration of the most famous public speaker of the time. Of all that he said, I have long remembered what he had to say about the rich man who, if he could,

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would take his riches with him when he died, only to have them melt in hell. Our pastor at the Cicero Bible church that we regularly attended in those days, Rev. William McCarrell, delivered his sermons, especially at the Sunday evening service, much in the style of Billy Sunday. He punctuated his points of emphasis with gyrations and shouts designed to shake one loose from their lethargy. As a young lad, I received the whole indoctrinating treatment.

The house we lived in was a modest three bedroom, one bath, brown shingled bungalow with white trim located at 468 Shenstone Road at the far east side of the village of Riverside, just two houses in from Harlem Avenue. What later became York Road (at 31st Street) was the alleyway behind. The house had been built prior to World War One, when not many people yet had automobiles, and so was also provided with a carriage house that also served to house a cow, a horse, and a flock of chickens. A stairway along one wall led up to the loft where feed and hay could be stored. It was a good place for a small boy to rummage around. It was not used for much by our family until later when we got our first 1929 Chevrolet car. It then became our garage and later as a teenager I made the loft into my gymnasium.

Under the back porch of our house there was an entryway to the basement and also a space under the porch floor under which was where our father placed a sandbox for Wilma and me to play. We spent many hours there doing what small children do in sandboxes. It was an ideal place to play as it was out of the weather in case of rain, and our mother was glad to have us amusing ourselves where she knew we were safe and close by.

Back then in the 1925-1927 period, Harlem Avenue, which is 7200 West as Chicago area streets are numbered, was not yet a paved road. As such roads were in bad weather, it was in poor condition and by the time spring came, it was really a mess having been churned up by the cars and wagons. It was paved in the late 20’s, and I can still remember seeing the sparks made at night by the horses’ iron shoes. Street lights then had not been erected, and in the darkness these sparks were quite visible.

Riverside then, and even yet, had/has old fashioned gas street lamps. It has always been its pride to emulate an old English Village. It was a regular daily sight to see the old lamp lighter come and turn up the light of the lamp in the evening before dark.

For a few years after we moved to Riverside, which was in 1924, my father became an active member of the American Legion. I remember that on one or two occasions he put on his uniform and paraded with them. One of their projects at the time in which he participated was the painting of the cannon that were in the park next to the railroad depot. For some reason he gave up meeting with them. My father was not a “joiner”; he devoted his time to his work and his family and took his responsibilities seriously. As long as I could remember he was in management at “the oil house”. This was the D. A. Stuart Oil Company at 2727 South Troy Street on the near southwest side of Chicago. Sometimes he would be called to go down to the “plant” to take care of some problem there. On a few occasions he would take me with him. To me it seemed like a very spooky place at night. He would only turn on what lights were needed at the time. The

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noises and smells and shadows were not something that I was used to. On our way home, late at night, we would stop off at an all-night hot dog stand on 22nd Street near Ogden Avenue. That was a real treat, and hot dogs have never tasted so good as they did then.

We ourselves did not get an automobile, as a family, until 1929, but before that my Uncle Leonard Edwards would come over on a Sunday or Holiday to take us out for a “joy ride”. (That was the term used in those days.) I remember on one such trip I had with me a small toy yellow bird on a stick and a short string. It had a tail made of two wood chips that would twirl when swung around on its tether. We went on this occasion out Route 66 to an air show near Joliet, Illinois, about 30 miles southwest of Chicago. I believe it was on the Fourth of July. I can remember seeing the old style biplanes that were taking off and circling about to land. It was all very novel and exciting, and the flyers were thought to be real daredevils. On the way home, I sat in the back seat near the open windows and had fun letting my little bird fly in the breeze outside. It made a cheeping sound when the tail spun. After the novelty of died down and I became sleepy after a long and exciting day, the little bird’s stick left my hand and just flew away, never to be seen again but long to be remembered. (In like manner have gone many of my dreams over the years!)

On another such outing, Uncle Leonard took us over to Maywood, Illinois, which was about four miles northwest of our home, to what was called the McCook Airfield. It was a government owned airport adjacent to a large U. S. Veterans Hospital. We parked the car and walked to where some of the planes were parked. I remember seeing a pilot or two who were dressed in leather clothes and wearing leather helmets. When the planes were to be started, the propellers were given a spinning turn by a brave person who quickly got out of the way when the engine started. Planes did not have starters in those days. The runways were not paved like they are now, but were only spread with cinders. This was in about 1926, before Lindbergh made his historic flight. Before he did that, he had been a government airmail pilot flying between Chicago and St. Louis; so he may well have been one of the pilots that I saw there when I was a young boy.

On these car trips then we would see balloon men who would stand in places such as parks where people gathered. They would have a dozen or so inflated balloons on strings floating in the air above them and were selling them to parents to give to their children. Another sight might be the “Good Humor Man”. He would be parked in a prominent place and dressed in a white jacket and hat ready to sell to any passing motorist or pedestrian a delicious chocolate ice cream bar. On these trips, if we were going downtown to the Loop of Chicago, we would go by way of either Jackson Boulevard or Washington Boulevard. In either case our route usually took us around a city park that had a lagoon or small lake where people could rent small boats. My sister Wilma and I always liked to see how many boats we could count. If it was a night on our way home, we learned that if we squinted our eyes to almost completely shut, we could see what looked like a star when we looked at one of the street lamps. Things such as these are what children do when they are eight years old.

Aunt Ethel and Uncle Leonard at that time lived on Harrison Street, west of Western Avenue, in an apartment building. I can remember that to visit them we had to go up a long flight of stairs from the street entrance. It was dark and dimly lit by a gas flame in a

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small fixture near their door. Also, there on the landing was a fancy ceramic umbrella stand that people could put their wet umbrellas into. The back bedrooms of their apartment faced out onto the tracks of the elevated trains. These trains whizzed by with their dust and noise within a few feet of their windows. They later moved to Cicero, Illinois and lived in an apartment that abutted up against the famous Annetta Hotel, which was the headquarters of the Al Capone gang. They would relate to us the goings on that they could hear form next door.

At the time that I was eight years old, and after my Uncle Leonard Edwards had persuaded my parents to leave the “Modernistic” Methodist Church in Riverside and begin attending regularly the newly formed Cicero Bible Church, I was enrolled in a Sunday School class that I attended every Sunday morning. My teacher was the previously mentioned Mrs. Jenny Winters. She was also my teacher at that time when I attended the classes of the Summer Bible School. For regular attendance and for learning a prescribed number of Bible verses, we had gold stars placed after our names on a prominently displayed chart. My parents praised me for these attainments, and church became a very important part of our family life. When we attended other services during the week such as the Wednesday prayer meeting, or the Friday night Bible study, I could be found seated up in the front row with a few of the other young children taking it all in and learning every word and verse of every song and scripture reading. A few years later, a new church building was built about three blocks north. When it was completed and ready to be occupied, I can remember that we, as Sunday School children, were part of a gala parade that trailed around through the surrounding Cicero neighborhoods to the new building. It was here that the nucleus of what later became “Independent Fundamental Churches of America” and the associated “Bible Churches” that are now seen everywhere was begun.

When I was eight years old and in the third grade in school, I walked the mile to the Central Grammar School that was located adjacent to the downtown business area at the south end of Des Plaines Avenue. It was quite a large two story red brick building with a large ornate entranceway and a bell tower at the south end of the building. The bell would ring the “first bell” five minutes before the “final bell”, so we often had to run to get there so as not to be late. At the large entryway there was a wide row of steps, and between there and the sidewalk there was a wide and long slopping walkway that made an ideal place to slide down during icy winter weather. We all had great fun doing this before our classes took up.

The school building had already served one or two generations of Riverside children before my time, and I can remember how the wooden floors creaked. My third grade class was in the basement near the bell tower, and when we went to attend “Assembly” on Friday afternoons, we walked in two by two file to the other end of the building. Assemblies were held in the gymnasium. There we went up a wide flight of steps and through three double swinging doors into a large room with a stage at the far end to the left. We sat on portable chairs with the lower grade children toward the front and were under the watchful eyes of our teachers who sat with us. We were taught to salute the flag and to pledge allegiance to it; after which we sang patriotic songs and heard a talk usually given by our principal, Mr. Ames. After that we sang other popular songs of the day and

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were sometimes asked what we would like to sing. The children would shout loudly, “Reuban! Reuban!”. In this song the boys sang part and the girls had their part, and it was great fun.

I became aware, about this time, that some of my classmates were wearing a peculiar pin on their clothes. When asked about it, they were very secretive, which further aroused my curiosity. It had the letters “TTT” emblazoned on it, which was a mystery for a while. At length, the meaning became known. A children’s program that some of the families that had radios had been listening to at home had organized what was called the “TTT Club”. They had to send in a stated number of cereal box tops in application for membership in this exclusive secret club; they then would get a pin and learn the secret password. I never did join, but the secret finally did get out and was passed to everyone – it was “Tell The Truth”. Innocent enough, but it caused quite a stir among us when we were only eight years old.

My parents were not active in civic affairs, and I don’t remember that they ever attended the PTA meetings. Most of their attention was given to the church’s affairs. However, I do remember that they came to school in the evening one time with my sister Wilma and me to attend a “Magic Show” that featured the famous magician by the name of Thurston. He did all of the astounding tricks with rabbits and doves and hypnosis that magicians do. It was an evening to be remembered.

Back in the ‘20’s in Cook County, Illinois, whenever there was a case of a communicable disease reported to the Health Department, a Public Health Nurse would come to the home to verify the truth of the report. If she found the report to be true, she would post a placard on the entrance of the house or apartment to warn that the home had been quarantined and that it was forbidden for anyone, not an immediate family member, to enter. These were posted for such diseases as diphtheria, mumps, scarlet fever, whooping cough, and pneumonia, as well as tuberculosis. These were posted on our house when my sister and I had the common childhood sick spells. Only the proper authorities could legally remove these signs after they had once been posted.

I had recently, at the age of eight, learned the pleasures of reading. My parents subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, which was a weekly magazine, and the Chicago Daily News. The News was an afternoon paper and did not publish a Sunday edition. The newspaper that did was a morning paper, the Chicago Tribune. When we went to visit our aunts and uncles on Sunday afternoons, I was always eager to read the comics that appeared in the Tribune. Mutt & Jeff, Crazzy Catt, The Katz and Jammer Kids, Toonerville Folks, etc. were avidly read. In the Post, one of the favorites was “Tugboat Annie”, and my father seemed to enjoy that feature especially.

I think that I was very fortunate in growing up to have so many aunts and uncles and cousins. My father’s parents had immigrated from Scotland in the 1890’s and settled in the Lawndale section of the southwest side of Chicago. They had twelve children – six girls and six boys. They all, but one, lived into adulthood, so I had those and a few others on my mother’s side, also. As a boy growing up, I was much influenced by my uncles, especially.

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Uncle Bill, my father’s oldest brother, had come over from Scotland with his mother and two sisters when he was about eight, and he used to tell me about how it was to come across the ocean. He told me that he had made friends with the cook aboard ship and helped him by taking the job of peeling potatoes. For that, he and my grandmother were sure of having enough to eat. Uncle Bill and his younger brother Jim never married, nor did they ever become U. S. citizens. They lived on the shady side of the law and resided in a dark dingy basement flat on Harrison Street near Western. I remember that when we would visit them they usually offered us a glass of homemade root beer. Uncle Jim did their cooking and kept the house, while Uncle Bill went out to make a living. Uncle Jim, I was told, spent a lot of his time tending fires for people who lived in the neighborhood. Most people then heated their homes with wood and coal. Stashed away in one corner of their house, I remember, was a large stack of copies of the “Racing Form”, a daily paper that was used by people who played the ponies at horse racing tracks throughout the country. Uncle Bill worked for many years as a bookkeeper for the Al Capone gang, and not only kept Al’s books, but was the one who was delegated to set the odds at all of the bookies that were run by the Capone gang. The main headquarters were in the Annetta Hotel on 52nd Street in Cicero, and at a bookie establishment on 31st Street just east of Laramie Avenue. I would sometimes overhear him tell my father, in great confidence, about some of the shady things that went on that Uncle Bill was privy to. I remember that whenever the Cicero or Chicago police were to make a raid, the gang was given ample notice so that only the “patsies” were arrested and the police could put on a good show. After my mother had passed away and my father was living alone, Uncle Bill came to live at our house and was one of the few members of that gang who died “with his boots on”, as they say. In spite of all of that darkness, I always thought of Uncle Bill as a good man. He never swore, or smoked, or drank liquor, or attended any church. He was the one who came regularly to take care of my mother while my father was in France during the War. He saw to it that she had food and fuel for the stove. Though he had plenty of money, you would never know it by looking at him. He was a neat and clean person, but wore second hand clothes and would walk ten miles to save on carfare. With little in the way of schooling, he was a whiz in common mathematics, and once tried to teach me how to figure using the “power of nine” that he was an adept at. That, and the fact that he knew how to keep his mouth shut, made him a valued asset to the Capone’s. He liked to visit us in Riverside, and would walk the entire way if the weather permitted. I always liked to hear the stories he could tell. He was very knowledgeable, and knew all of Chicago’s dirt. My father kept a vault box rented at the Lawndale National Bank for him, and he would occasionally give my father some bills to be put away for him. When he died, May 27, 1964 at the age of 80, he left a considerable amount of money, which was divided up among the many children of his nieces and nephews.

The way that Al Capone paid his employees such as my Uncle Bill was this: When a certain horse race at a given race track was to be fixed for certain, the few chosen ones would be told about it, and they could then go to any bookie and place a bet on the long shot of 100 to 1 to win and take their winnings as their salary. He paid his help well, and there were no records kept for the IRS.

After the demise of the Capone gang, Uncle Bill worked for a time for the Moran gang of Chicago’s North Side. Once a week the gang would deliver a shopping bag of Racing

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Forms for Uncle Bill to set the odds on races all over the country. They would take the work that he had done the week before, and use his work for their purposes.

Soon after our move to Riverside, which was in 1924, my parents decided that we needed a new kitchen stove. The old one was very old and had been used for many years before we moved in. It was a happy day for Mother when the new “Estate” stove was delivered and installed in our kitchen. It featured pilot lights and an oven thermometer. We no longer had to use the old wooden matches to light a burner to do the cooking.

We still retained the old icebox that was in a nook off of the back door entryway for a few more years. The iceman came to serve us when we had put up a sign in our front bedroom window. I remember that the placard was square and had three large numbers printed on each of the four sides so that the iceman would know whether to bring in 25, 50, 75, or 100 pounds of ice. He made his rounds with a horse and wagon and would only stop if he saw our sign displayed. Children in the neighborhood could usually find a way to get a small piece of ice to suck on from the bed of the wagon.

In those days, back in the ‘20’s, we had deliverymen and peddlers of all kinds. When we heard a certain tune in the neighborhood we knew that the knife sharpening man was near. The peddlers had horse and wagons and would holler out what their trade was. They might be selling various vegetables or just potatoes, or apples, or onions. Some were anxious to buy your old clothes, or scrap metal, or old newspapers. People then all saved their papers and bundled them up for the peddler who would come with a scale and offer a few pennies per pound. We also had a milkman and a butter and cream man who came by regularly. That was the time before milk was homogenized or came in cartons. The old-fashioned, glass milk bottles were taken back by the deliveryman each time. If the milk were allowed to stand outside during cold weather, it would freeze and expand an inch or so above the top of the bottle. We children thought that it was a close second to real ice cream.

My father had two brothers who were younger than he was. They were my Uncles Ben and Jack. They had both been in the U. S. Navy during World War I. They both were skilled steel construction workers. My Aunt Jessie’s husband, Uncle George Shaeffer had been in this trade for a long time and had become an officer in the Steelworker’s Union, so he was influential in getting Ben and Jack into this dangerous work. When this work was slack, they both worked part time as cab and bus drivers in Chicago. They were both flashy dressers in their uniforms and polished leather putties between their shoes and knees, and their official looking caps and badges. These impressed me at the age of eight, and I thought that they were really “hot stuff”. Jack never came to visit us. He was a boozer and a womanizer, and I think he may have felt uncomfortable around my religious mother. On the other hand, Uncle Ben would come over and often take on an odd job of work that needed doing about the house. After we moved into our new house in Riverside, I remember that one of the first things that he did was to attach two “U” shaped pieces of iron on each side of the basement door. He then nailed several laths together for a bar to place across the door to keep any intruder out. This served it’s purpose for us for many years, but did not prevent my having a new “Elgin” bicycle that I bought with my paper route money when I was about 14 years old from being stolen.

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Thieves broke in one of our basement windows and took it while we were away on vacation.

A story that I heard about back then was that one night Uncle Jack got drunk and was driving wildly late at night and hit the abutment of a viaduct. He lay there nearly dead with a broken neck until someone came by and called an ambulance and the police. He was taken to the Illinois University Hospital and finally made a recovery, though he had to wear a leather collar for quite a while. As his older brother, Uncle Ben attended to him quite a bit at the hospital and fell in love with on of Jack’s nurses. Betty and Ben were married. Jack had many girl friends, some of ill repute, but he remained a bachelor.

Another story that I overheard told about Uncle Jack was that after WWI was ended, and while he was still on active duty, he was placed in charge of a group of Naval prisoners who were coming into Chicago on the train to be put into the brig at Great Lakes. As the train made a scheduled stop at Western Avenue as it was coming into the city, Uncle Jack got off and went home to see his folks who lived nearby, thus leaving the prisoners to proceed as they might wish. For this he received a dishonorable discharge, but it was quite in keeping with his personality. He was always a wayward one and considered a “Black Sheep” in the family. In outward appearance, I was always told that I looked just like him. As I grew older, I learned that he had been employed by the “Mob” as a hit man and had a reputation for his cruelty. He went by the underworld name of “Scratchy”. When he and I were both quite a bit older, I saw him for the last time on his deathbed suffering from cancer, and he died October 16, 1962 at the age of 63.

After Uncle Ben retired from his work on the “High Iron”, he signed up with the U. S. Navy during World War II and was a Lieutenant J.G. in the “Sea Bees”, stationed on the island of Attu, most western of the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. He was always proud of being a Navy man, and he looked the part. He was very hansom and in appearance looked a lot like the philosopher/lecturer, Joseph Campbell.

As an adult and a salesman in later life, I had occasion to make a sales call on the man that he had worked for when in his later years he had worked for the Chicago Parks Department at the Conservatory in Garfield Park. His boss there told me that he, Uncle Ben, had been one of his most highly respected employees. He said, “Let me put it this way. There are two kinds of workmen. There are the Plebeians and there are the Patricians. The former do their work as they must, but the Patricians take pride in their work and seek to do it to perfection. Your Uncle Ben was a Patrician.” I thought that this was high praise and was glad to hear it. He died January 28, 1963 at the age of 61, and he was a good influence on me as I grew up.

One day back in the ‘20’s, my mother got a telephone call that Father was in the hospital; something had happened down at the plant – some kind of accident. It was a Saturday when there was no school, so she got us ready and we took public transportation to go down to the St. Anthony Catholic Hospital in Chicago. It was located near Garfield Park. We had never been in anything Catholic before, and I can recall seeing a picture of Pope Pius and lighted candles in the foyer. We found Father in fair condition after having a

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life-threatening sad experience at work. He made a full recovery except for the scarring memories that he carried for the rest of his life.

My father was the Superintendent in charge of plant production activities for the D. A. Stuart Oil Company, 2727 South Troy Street in Chicago. As such, he had on this Saturday morning directed two men to go out and clean one of the storage tanks so it could be filled with a new shipment that was coming in the next week. Sometime during the previous week there had been a fire at another location where the grease kettle was. The residue of that affair had been pumped into the tank that the men were sent to clean. This tank was one of about six there that were about ten feet in diameter and about twenty feet high. They each had a rather small manhole at the top with a ladder to the bottom. It was to be a routine operation. One of the two men arrived at the tank first and went down. Soon after, the second man arrived. When he looked down at the first man, he saw that he was lying face down in the oil. He gave a yell of alarm first, and then went down himself to do a rescue, and he likewise became a victim of carbon monoxide gas and the oil at the bottom. My father led a group of several people now assembled, and had a rope tied to his body before he, too, went into the tank. When he had determined that the men were indeed dead and surmised the cause, he was lifted out and taken to the hospital.

This was an especially hard time for him as he, as boss, was the one who had hired these men. Dad made a practice of hiring men that lived near the plant, and he knew them and their families well. He hired strong men, as full 55-gallon drums of oil are not easy to move around or pile, one above the other, as they needed to be when they were shipped in boxcars.

When I was eight years old, I had already lived under the administrations of Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, and Calvin Coolidge. I can remember the grownups talking of the politics of the day which very often lead to heated arguments in which the volume and tone of their voices rose to high levels. My Republican father and my Democratic uncles often got into these discussions when we visited our relatives, which was usually on Sunday afternoons.

At that time, telephones were just coming into common usage, and one of the stories I remember the adults telling was of the time that Queen Maria of Rumania, before she made her diplomatic trip to Washington, called to talk to the President, and Mr. Coolidge was told that she was on the line ready to talk to him. Before taking the telephone, President Coolidge asked his aide, “Who’s paying for this call?” A few years later, when I became a paper delivery boy for the Chicago Daily News, one of my customers was President Coolidge’s Vice President, Charles G. Dawes. He also lived, as we did, on Shenstone Road, but at the other end, closer to downtown.

Mr. Dawes’ home, as many other homes of the wealthy people in Riverside did, faced away from the road and toward their own private grounds. The doorway that faced the street was sometimes only the service entrance. People of importance would enter a private driveway around to the more elegant entrance to the home. Some of these older homes had a nearby coach-house that also housed the servants in an upper story. When I

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was eight, the days of the horse were over, but I can recall that a few of the upper class had electric cars that traveled noiselessly about Riverside’s winding roadways.

People coming out to Riverside from the City would often get lost in the maze of our Village’s winding roadways and have to stop to get directions. The streets and roads were named for famous poets, statesmen, writers, and others of history. As an example, we lived on Shenstone, as I have said, and the next street over was Addison, named for Joseph Addison (1672-1719), the English essayist, poet, and statesman. The entire town was patterned after a village that one might find in New England a century or two ago. It was planned and platted out along the Burlington Railroad and along the banks of the Des Plaines River about ten miles out from Chicago. It was conceived by Mr. Frederick Law Olmstead (1822-1903) and two wealthy men who helped finance the project. Mr. Olmstead was a famous American landscape architect and writer who had designed the parks of many eastern cities, including New York’s Central Park, and Chicago’s World Fair, known as the Columbian Exhibition of 1893. One of the distinctive features of our village is the water system’s water tank that is located in the heart of downtown near the railroad depot. Unlike most every other town, it is formed of stone and masonry in the form of the keep of a castle. You might never guess that is was built to contain a water tank. It became, in time, a symbol of Riverside’s uniqueness and appears on the village’s logo even yet.

Many of the town’s early settlers were well-to-do English or Scottish families who had an appreciation of culture and education. One of the reasons that my parents chose to move to Riverside was the reputation it had for the quality of its school system. It was an ideal place to raise my sister and me. We both benefited greatly by being raised in such an ideal environment.

At the time that we moved into our new home in Riverside, during the mid 1920;s, there were many vacant lots and even what were called “prairies”. We had neighbors on either side of us, but it was all vacant across the street, and behind, to the north, there was a large expanse of vacant prairie land. At the far northwest part of this was located a gravel pit with buildings that pertained to that business. There were two ponds of water there that were an attraction to a small boy such as I was. It was a good place to look for pretty stones, frogs, and pollywogs. One day when I was there, playing with one of my boyfriends, a workman across the pond hollered to us to leave at once. In my haste, I fell and received a gash on the palm of my right hand. I carried a scar from it for years and learned a good lesson about trespassing.

One of the other lessons that I learned early was that it was always safer to say little and to listen well. My mother had a half-brother named Samuel King who had also come up to Chicago from Southern Illinois and had the trade of a barber. He had a shop that was off of Ogden Avenue east of Crawford. I was told that as a young man he had fallen out of an apple tree and had injured his hip. It had been a bother to him for the rest of his life and was partly the cause of his death. His widow, Carrie King, was a close friend of my mother, and they often visited one another in their homes. On one occasion, Mother and Aunt Carrie went downtown to the Loop of Chicago and took me along. After making the mortgage payment at the Great Northern Bank and doing some shipping on State Street,

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it was time for lunch. They decided on this occasion to go to an unusually nice place. Each alone would not have been so bold, but together I think they felt more adventuresome. We walked over to Michigan Avenue and went into the Strouse Building, which is a prominent feature of Chicago’s lakefront skyline. At the top it is in sort of the shape of a pyramid and a ball at the point. We went to near the very top by elevator and took a table in a very fine dining room. I cannot remember anything of the food, but after the meal, as they remained over their cup of tea, I, as an adventuresome boy of about eight, wandered out onto the balcony that overlooked Grant Park and the wide expanse of the Lake Michigan shoreline. It was a grand panoramic sight. Standing nearby to me were two adult men who were talking and in conversation were discussing the identity of the various larger yachts that were there below in the harbor or tied up in the yacht basin. I drew near and listened in rapt attention and was amazed at their knowledge of not only who the owners were, but even to the dimensions and horsepower of their engines. From this vantage point and this experience, I gained a new appreciation for the grandeur of Chicago and the larger world that was out there. I think it awakened in me a desire to gain knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

In those days, a trip downtown was not complete without going into the Woolworth’s and Kresge’s ten-cent stores. Ten cents was a significant sum back then when people counted their pennies. I can recall that near the entrance there was an automatic doughnut-making machine where you could see the entire process operating there before your eyes, and then go in and get a super-fresh tasty doughnut. There also was a saltwater taffy candy-making machine and you could buy a bag of taffy kisses freshly made. There were also ice cream sandwiches. They were made of a prepared square of ice cream, sandwiched between two thin waffle squares. Each store had a “bargain basement”, and that is where the lunch counters were, also. It was exciting to ride the old rickety escalators that were only one person wide. I remember that on the third floor was where the toy section was. I liked especially when I could have a “Tootsie Toy” which was a miniature model of an automobile. Also on the third floor was the music department, selling phonograph records of the latest hits and sheet music that people bought to take home to play on their pianos. They always had a piano there and a lady who was an expert player. She would plan any record you might want to buy or just hear played. These were the days of the “Roaring Twenties” when some of the “looser women” were having their hair bobbed or marcelled, and a few were even bold enough to smoke cigarettes when in private; but never, as yet, out on the street. It was seldom that one heard music then, as it was before the days when electric amplifiers made it heard wherever you were, so it was a treat then to hear the lady banging away so effortlessly on one of the pianos. They also sometimes would put a roller on the “player piano” which played automatically. Going shopping in those days took all day and was a real adventure as well as a learning experience. As a child, it opened my eyes to the larger world that was out there.

During the time I was eight and during the 1926-27 period, and before there were any busses running in the western suburbs of Chicago, we could get to downtown in the Loop by also walking a mile or so to get to the end of the Douglas Park elevated. To take the Burlington train in from the Harlem Avenue station would have been an alternative, but for some reason we never did. It may have been that the fare was more than my parents thought was reasonable; in any case we usually went by way of the “El”. This was before

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the days of air conditioning, so during the hot summer weather many of the windows in the cars could be opened. It was refreshing to sit by an open window and have your face washed by the cooling breeze as the train sped along. One of the attractions of the trip for my sister Wilma and me was to smell the smell of the pickle factory that was located just before we went over Western Avenue. Here the tracks climbed higher and higher to go over the crossing of the Belt Railroad, which itself was over the street traffic. That meant that we were very high, and we could imagine that we were on an airplane taking off, though we had never been in a plane before. If we watched for it, we could spot the vats of pickles that were soaking in brine along side of the pickle factory, and we would be happy if the wind was so that we could get a whiff of their odor. From such mundane things come the giggles and glee of little children.

When we moved to Riverside in 1924, two of the toys that I brought with me were my “Sandy Andy” and my “Muggzie”. The first was a toy used in the sandbox. A little car traveled up and down an incline track delivering sand from an upper hopper to the bottom level. I had been about five when my parents gave it to me. It, of course, needed sand to operate, so my father took me one evening to the streetcar barns that were at 22nd Street east of Crawford Avenue. That was where all of the City’s streetcars came for overnight and to be repaired. They used sand on a regular basis during the winter when ice was a problem for them. Father knew that sand could be had there in exchange for a cigar. We took my coaster wagon to carry it in. That was another of my favorite toys, also. I can remember clearly that while walking beside my father, I looked up and for the first time in my life I saw the wonderful sight of the round full moon in the sky above. I then learned about it being made of cheese and having the face of a man, but the wonder of the grand sight stayed with me for a long time. The other toy, “Muggzie”, was a little stuffed brown dog made in the shape of a little bulldog pup. It was mounted on a frame of four wheels, and was meant to be pulled along on a leash. The wheels and leash soon were lost, but that little dog was my very best friend for several years.

My parents had for many years, and before I was born, been regular attendants of the Fowler Methodist Episcopal Church that was located on Homan Avenue south of 22nd Street. We went there on several occasions because of my parents’ strong attachment to the people and the pastor there. To get there from the streetcar, we had to walk under the Burlington Railroad viaduct, which to me was a little scary, especially if a train was going over at the time making its roaring and rumbling sound.

The church was on a corner, and I remember that from the front entryway stairs led down to the Sunday School rooms, and a winding stairway led to the right up to the auditorium. After church, we would walk a mile or so to the home of my Hardie grandparents to have our Sunday dinner and spend the rest of the day visiting. It was a typical Chicago flat, with a bay window in the front and a wooden back porch off of the kitchen. I recall that there was an opening in the wall between the kitchen and the dining room so that dishes and food could be passed between to the dining room table. Grandma had a collection of china plates arranged on a shelf along one dining room wall that were for decoration only. She also had a very large fern in a large china bowl sitting on a stand at the front room window.

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One of the people that my parents were acquainted with from Fowler Church was a bachelor man named Mr. Andrew Perry. He came to live with us as a roomer and was with us for many years. He was given the back bedroom, and I was transferred to a bed made up in the attic. I didn’t mind this, as it gave me freedom to go to sleep or not, as I chose. I had books and magazines of my choice and a little homemade crystal set radio with which to amuse myself. WLS, WMAQ, WCFL, and WHFC were the only stations on the air then, and I could get one of them to hear with my earphones if I was lucky. At that time there was very little advertising to be heard, but I could hear political campaign speeches that went on to the wee hours of the night. “Big Bill Thompson”, I recall, was running for re-election to be mayor of Chicago in a hot campaign.

Mr. Perry bought a new Buick four-door sedan in 1927. My parents had our coach house remodeled to accommodate it. Once, when I was small, he took our family out to Sycamore, Illinois to visit his family folks there. They owned a commercial dairy and were most proud of their cottage cheese, I remember. Mr. Perry was a very congenial old man who stayed with us until he died and was almost like one of the family. It was nice when he would sometimes be invited to take an evening meal with us and we could enjoy his conversation. He would compliment my mother by saying that her cooking “Just hit the spot.” He had a windup Victor Victrola in his room on which he would occasionally play such records as “The Prisoner’s Song”, and “I Picked a Lemon in the Garden of Love, Where They Said Only Peaches Grow”. Mother said that he had once been unhappily married. He did, however, have a lady friend who was also from Fowler Church. She was not a pretty-looking lady, but I suppose she provided companionship, which he sometimes felt in need of. Her name was Carrie Gordon, and she, too, had been a friend of my folks for a long time. In fact, her father, Mr. Gordon, had been influential in arranging for my grandfather William Hardie obtaining employment at the McCormick Deering Company when he came over here from Scotland. I can remember overhearing a conversation between Mr. Perry and my mother on whether or not there was an after-life. He did not believe in heaven or hell, except what we found in the here and now, whereas Mother was a true believer. Since they’re both gone now, I suppose it either did or did not matter, but at the time it gave me, as an eight year old boy, something to contemplate.

The daughter of my mother’s half brother, Sam King, was my Aunt Ethel. As an only daughter, she was given the special attention that an only child usually gets, and as a young adult, she became a singer to some of the dance orchestras that performed at ballrooms in the Chicago area. In the course of time, during this time of high living, she developed a case of tuberculosis and had to give up her singing career. She became very religious and looked on her previous life as having been sinful, and I think helped to prevent her from throwing off that malady. She spent most of the remaining years of her life in bed as a convalescent. She had married before coming down sick, and her husband was my Uncle Leonard C. Edwards. He was an insurance man who held a high position in the Phoenix Fidelity Insurance Company and did a lot of traveling by train to various cities in the Mid-West. My mother felt obligated to help care for her, so we often went over there to see how she was doing and to help cheer her up. She took a special liking to me, and I always felt that she was one who truly did love me. We developed a special spiritual bond, and when she died at the early age of 27, I felt a great loss. One thing she taught me, as a small child, was to be kind to animals. During this time, although she of

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course could not have any pets herself, there was a wild squirrel that would come up to her windowsill, where she could give it peanuts. Often on Sunday evenings, after attending church, we would go over to her house in the late evening to visit. Before leaving, we would stay just a little longer in order to listen to “Amos ‘n Andy” on the radio. That was the most popular program on the air at that time.

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It is common in the Orient, among people under the influence of Confucianism, to consider a newborn child to be already one year old. This seems to me to be a very logical and reasonable way of looking at it. It leads us to consider more carefully the beginnings of our earthly existence when the genes and passions of our parents were generating the molecules and juices that would unite to incarnate us in a body of human form.

This process took place for me soon after the declaration of war by the United States at the beginning of World War One. As a patriotic young man twenty-two years of age, my father decided to give up his secure and promising employment in the oil business, marry the young woman that he loved dearly, and enlist in the U. S. Army. This he did, and after making sure that my mother would have a place to stay and be cared for, he went off to war. He was at once sent as a recruit to the training base at Camp Grant, Illinois, and then was sent to France where he participated in some of the worst of the fighting.

Mary Cornelia Duff Hardie (for that is my mother’s name), a twenty-seven year old young woman, living alone in a basement flat on the west side of Chicago, finally came to term and was delivered of a healthy male child at the Wesley Memorial Hospital on October Fifth, 1918. Returning home to her basement apartment where she lived alone, I am sure that she found me good company and partly made up for the absence of my father. As was the custom then, a flag with a red star was shown in the front window in honor of our soldier protector doing his duty in a far country. Mother told me that a few weeks after my birth, she was awakened late one night to the sound of shouting and horns and bells. She knew that the Armistice had been declared. She drew me close, covered me with kisses, and cried for joy. My father had attained the rank of Sergeant and did not come home until nine months had passed – only then did he see me for the first time.

Each year as I was growing up, on the evening of the 11th of November my father would tell us a war story after the evening meal was over. He enjoyed recalling the more pleasant and sometimes humorous experiences of his wartime duty. At the age of eight, I was old enough to realize that war was not fun and games. One of the mementos of the war was a large-sized picture book about the war, which I spent many hours looking at and reading. While we were still very young, my parents bought a thirteen-volume set of “The Book of Knowledge” for my sister Wilma and me. We poured over these for years, and at about the time that she was six and I was eight, we took it upon ourselves to act out some of the Aesop’s Fables and other stories that we had read about. We would practice these in the living room, and then in the evening we would call our parents and Mr. Andrew Perry, who was a man who roomed with us then, to come and be our audience. We would charge them a penny each, and then portray in a charade the story that we had read about. Back then, children found ways such as this to entertain themselves and others before the days of radio and TV.

Sometimes back then, Mr. Perry would feel generous toward us and let us spread a bag of change that he had, out on the living room floor to see how many Indian-head pennies we could find. He was a bachelor man who lived with us for several years. He was a conductor on the Chicago streetcars. He had the back bedroom to himself, and on rare

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occasions would take his evening meal with us. He had his own line of stories to tell, that we children listened to avidly.

My parents bought our first automobile in 1929. It was a beige-colored, four-door, Chevrolet sedan, so we still did not have a car of our own when I was eight years old. If we happened to have Aunt Agnes’ car, we would take Grandpa Hardie to visit another relative on Sunday afternoon, or take him home to where he lived with Aunt Agnes in Forest Park, about three miles to the north. She had remarried Walter Joakens, a truck driver and semi-professional baseball player. They lived in a basement flat where the grownups would be gathered around the dining room table talking about the events of the day while we cousins would go about playing or showing our newest toys. These were the days of very early radio and movies. We did not go to movies, but our other relatives did. We had a crystal, and then a one-tube radio on which we were able to get the latest news of the day using earphones. Rudolph Valentine (1895-1927) died in 1926. Al Jolson, and Amos ‘n Andy were beginning their careers and were topics of conversation. My father was always a staunch Republican, and I overheard many heated political arguments that he had with his many Democratic brothers-in-law.

People in those days, during the ‘20’s, had very little in the way of outside entertainment. One of the favorite things to do was to play the Victrola. They had the 78-RPM records and the large overhanging morning-glory horn to amplify the sound. Sometimes we children were allowed to put records on ourselves, be we always had to get permission first. Favorites of the time were: Carusso singing “O Solo Mio”, “The Prisoner’s Song”, Al Jolson’s “Mammy”, “The Garden of Love”, “Bye, Bye Blackbird”, and many others.

I was in the third grade in school when I was eight. We were learning our multiplication table and learning to write properly by the “Palmer Method”. We used steel-nibbed pens and had an inkwell at the upper right hand corner of our desks. Over and over we practiced the circles and proper curves to please the teacher. Our Principal, Mr. Ames, was a tall, distinguished old man who walked through the halls observing everything. He always wore a hat, and before coming into a class, he would cast it down upon the floor outside the classroom door. He was much liked and respected by all. When he later died, the children’s classes lined the streets leading to the Presbyterian Church while his funeral was in progress.

One day that I remember, as we students were marching back to our classroom from the assembly hall, the teacher monitoring us as we passed, two by two, put her hand on my head and said, “There’s a fine laddie.” I’ve carried that moment with me all my life. What a nice thing for a teacher to say!

When I was eight and in the third grade at school, I got a pair of leather high-top boots for either Christmas or my birthday. They were my pride and joy, and they had a pocket of leather on the top outside of my right boot that held a small pocket-knife. It was the one thing that all boys then of my age wanted to have.

One day, during our noon 1 ½ hour recess, I went with my pal, Robert Freestate, across the downtown area of Riverside to the footbridge that took us over the swollen Des

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Plaines River. On the other side we went downstream along a pathway that bordered the river until we came to a place that we had to wade through. With my high-top boots, I thought that I could do it safely, but in the middle I floundered and lost my footing. I scrambled up all right, but was thoroughly soaked through and through. It was winter and snow and ice were on the ground at the time, but we hurried back to our classroom at school where I huddled alongside of the steam radiator to dry out until class started. I tried not to shiver too much so as not to draw attention to myself. We told no one of our escapade, and neither the teacher nor my parents ever found out what had happened. As a consequence, I came down, a day or so later, with rheumatic fever and was out of school for about a month. My parents, and the doctor that they summoned, thought that I had caught a bad case of the flu! I kept it all to myself because I did not want another “licking”, which I often got when I had been bad.

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Chicago At Eight

Chicago, one of the great cities of the world, and for many decades the second largest city in the United States, came into my consciousness about the time that I became eight years old. Before this tender age, a person normally is not aware of the larger world in which they live, but only the persons and things that are in one’s close surroundings. The age of eight is one of innocence, before the peers of neighborhood and school exert their influence. At this age, a child’s mind is awakening to the wonders of nature and the larger world beyond home and family.

Chicago was a wonderful place to be born. I came into being there October 5, 1918, just days before the Armistice of November Eleventh brought the First World War to an end. At the time, my father, Sgt. Richard Russell Hardie, was fighting as a member of the United States’ Expeditionary Force and was engaged in some of the heaviest battles on the Western Front. He was not to know of my birth for some time and did not return home to see me until I was nine months old. I am told that on first meeting him I cried at the tone of his loud, strong voice. While still in his Army uniform, he took my mother and me to a photographer to have our family portrait taken and to visit the other family members that he had been away from for so long. He was inordinately proud of his son because, of the twelve children that my Hardie grandparents had, I was the first, and in time the only, male child to carry the family name into the next generation.

During the time that my father had been away in the Army, my mother and I lived alone in a small basement apartment at 4024 West 22nd Street on Chicago’s west side. Our living space was at the front of the basement with a bay window looking out on the street at sidewalk level. The rear half of the basement was devoted to the laundry and locked cubicles as storage space for each building occupant.

After my father’s return, we soon moved up to the flat on the first floor where we had much more room – enough room that my parents rented out rooms to the workers at the nearby Western Electric Company. With this added income, and because of their Scottish habits of thrift, they were able, in a few years, to buy property in the western suburb of Riverside. This was a lot located in the northern part of the village on which they hoped to build our future home. They employed an architect to draw up plans and had high hopes for a bright future there. On several occasions, Mother took my younger sister Wilma and me on a picnic day-trip by way of the La Grange trolley out to our own piece of land where we sat on the ground, and picked a few wild flowers to take home. Mother was very much an idealist; born and bred in Central Illinois, raised in Methodist parsonages, she always wanted to make things nicer than they were.

In time, it became apparent to my parents that the building project that they had in mind would cost more than they could afford, so they put aside those plans to build and put the land there up for sale. One weekend, Uncle Leonard Edwards came by with his car and took us to the Bragg Real Estate office that was in downtown Riverside to see what houses were then on the market for sale. After looking at several, they decided to buy the brown-shingled, three-bedroom bungalow located at 468 Shenstone Road on the eastern

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edge of the village. It was for sale by a widow lady named Mrs. Black, and the selling price was six-thousand dollars. A hefty mortgage made it affordable, so we moved out from Chicago to Riverside in the early summer of 1924.

Sister Wilma was given the front bedroom, which also doubled as a sewing room. My parents had the middle bedroom, and I was assigned to the back bedroom, with the bathroom being between. With a screened-in front porch, living room, dining room, and kitchen, it was very well suited in every way as a place to raise a small family.

As a child of six and having just finished my first grade in school, it was like starting a new life to begin living out of the city and in a place where there was tall grass, birds, bees, butterflies, and on warm summer evenings even fire-flies. Life took on a new dimension with many things to be explored. I can remember Mother taking my sister and me out for a walk to gather flowers for the table and greens for the kitchen. Being a “country girl”, she knew the food value of dandelion and narrow-leaf dock greens in the diet, and she was a good teacher.

Soon after moving, and when my sister and I were yet small, our family doctor recommended that my sister and I have our tonsils and adenoids removed. On his advice and encouragement, Mother took us down to the Illinois University Hospital down in Chicago early one morning. She registered us in and then was required to leave; she could pick us up the next morning, she was told. We were taken to a room where we were stripped naked and dressed in a white loose-fitting gown. We then joined a group of eight or ten other children and were all herded to an upper floor of the hospital and told to sit on chairs that were lined up in a long hallway that led to the operating room. We sat there for quite a while, it seemed, before anything happened, and we all became very apprehensive. At last, when the doctors, nurses, and student doctors had finished their preparations for this teaching exercise, the first child was led in. After a few minutes, he came out, lying as though dead and bleeding, past us on a gurney. You can imagine how our anxiety rose to terror as each of us was called in turn, after seeing those ahead pass by us in such a condition. I was led in with soothing words, as a lamb to the slaughter. As I neared the operating table, I was roughly grabbed up off the floor and plopped down on the table and strapped down. I was told to take a deep breath of the mask put over my nose, and I was soon dead to this violating world. It was then that I had my first OBE, or Out-of-Body Experience. As in the “Superman” movie, I was as a spaceship speeding out past the moon and the stars into the blackness of outer space, when I lost all sense of consciousness. I later found myself one of many in a large room of wailing and sleeping children. Many of us had never been away from our mothers before then. The feeling of terror continued throughout the long night. A gruff female voice admonished some to “Be quiet or you won’t get any ice cream.” After a long night and a long wait, Mother came for us the next morning and took us home. I can imagine that it was a long night of anxiety for her, too. My impression of the medical establishment was indelibly set by that terrible childhood experience.

Howard  Robert  Hardie

Winter 1998-1999

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