We had a politician or two who lived nearby as well, including Benjamin Adamowski, former Cook County State's Attorney who challenged Mayor Richard J. Daley in the 1963 election, and Edward V. Hanrahan, another State's Attorney, who led the terror squad that whacked Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
There were no blacks in Galewood. But the place was lousy with Outfit characters, from upper-echelon bosses to low-level juice loan collectors.
My old man, a shipping/receiving dock foreman, and my mother, a vacuumer, lucked their way into Galewood. Looking to buy their first home in the 1950s, they happened upon a comfortable bungalow on Natchez Avenue owned by an ancient dowager named Mrs. Alstead. Not sophisticated enough to squeeze every last penny out of her home, she offered it for a good deal less than $20,000. Ma and Dad snapped it up.
Even at that bargain-basement price, the house was too rich for my father's meager salary so Ma had to go to work, first at a sandpaper company, gluing abrasives onto heavy-gauge cards while I floated blissfully in her womb, later for Frank's Dime Store, and then for Sears. To this day, she brags about her magical way with money. She relies on a tried-and-true series of old financial saws guaranteed to make the eyes of her children roll like pinballs:
- I robbed Peter to pay Paul
- I made a penny do the work of a dime.
- I struggled to make ends meet.
When I was very young, I heard that last adage as "make ennsmeat," which I assumed was some old country dish that she didn't feel like preparing anymore.
Sadly, in part because Ma was a pecuniary tyrant, I rebelled and became a profligate spender. Oh, I won't blame all my debtor woes on her; I possess, after all, a wide streak of compulsive narcissism. But one of my primary goals in life has been to show Ma that actually buying stuff isn't fatal.
My Galewood neighbors attempted to impart many other lessons to me. Here's a compendium of Galewood's philosophies on black people:
- They wreck everything we give them.
- They're comin' after our daughters.
- Martin Luther King speaks with a forked tongue.
- JFK (or LBJ or any national Democrat) is a nigger-lover.
- The White Sox lose because they have too many niggers.
- They don't want to work.
- Better watch out or they'll take over.
Even as a dopey kid, I couldn't figure out how a group that didn't like to work would have the ambition or capability to "take over."
Galewood's actions were as alarming as its words. When, for instance, Ma refused to participate in an anti-busing school boycott, our house was showered with raw eggs. And after King's assassination, I took a schoolyard ass-beating after objecting to the prevailing opinion that he'd gotten what he'd deserved.
As mentioned here in previous posts, I had a hard time washing myself clean of Galewood's racial muck. Even though I mourned King's death and was outraged by those of Hampton and Clark, I still found myself uttering slurs now and again. It took me years to free myself of even unintentional racial loathing.
I compare my own growth in this matter to that of the nation's. Sure, we've elected a partially black man as president. Yet, as the inane "tea parties" of the past week demonstrated, we're not totally free of racial fear.
Too many people bandied placards and words decrying our new "tyranny" and comparing Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler. They aren't just suggesting that taxation or government spending programs are the moral equivalent of the Holocaust or Saddam's gassing of the Kurds.
It's more cryptic than that. I suspect the "tea party" right-wingers are not as devoted to Ma's brand of thrift as they are enslaved to Galewood's old fears that "They'll take over."
The tea party-ites still have a lot of racial muck to wash off.
