Nowhere in Particular and Everywhere Americana
In a universe far way, in the year of 1958, there is a proverbial postwar oasis made of greener pastures far removed from the incessant noise and clamor of Chicago.
In the midst of the the windswept prairies, there are mile upon mile of cornfields connected by remote gravel roads, where creeks run wild, full of ferocious snapping turtles and exotic crayfish, this was the destination of my clan in search of suburbia. For me it meant no more playing in the backyard which was the fire escape, or missing the walks to sample the delights of Cicero along Roosevelt Road. What I found was a world of postwar America, tract homes, and what was to become suburban sprawl, so much so than when an old friend of mine returned after thirty years, he immediately lost his bearings. A great deal of what we both knew as landmarks had vanished or were so altered they were unrecognizable. We talked about "suburban archeology" as being an unrecognized field. My childhood home home inadvertently became a museum for postwar suburbia in a development named "Fairhaven" ..The word ubiquitous comes to mind as if Kurt Vonnegut was put in charge of naming tract developments despite the fact that there are no Oaks or Mission in a cookie cutter development such as an atypically named Mission Oaks that defies it's own description. Yet, as we age we become hapless historians of our past as baby boomers glued to the dawn of a mass migration based on seemingly endless oil reserves and a promised future of flying cars. So it was back then, and we were carried on it's back only to look back with wonderment at the now seeming miracle of optimism mixed with the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Out on the front lawn, one summer night night long ago, we watched the arc of Spunik as a pinpoint of light in the blackness of space pass over our enclave of Fairhaven....as a portent we could not decipher as a mixture of awe and foreboding....only to return inside to out tv trays and Uncle Walter pronounce..."Thats the way it was"at the end of every broadcast and so it is as we glance back over ours shoulders en route to elsewhere.
It was, like all such rapidly spreading automobile enclaves, a new world of emerging technologies, that now are lost, forgotten and yet, were an important facet of every day life. Consider this state of the art self service machine. Then consider now when an electronic device fails, it is, for all purposes, a disposable artifact.
The long extinct television serviceman's fee could be prone to an end run by our fathers.
This short essay began with a friend Bob and myself spending six months on a quixotic quest to find the mythological vault where Coronet Films were archived in search of one particular jewel of an educational film..Remember the Projector Boys? Roll the film until it flaps around the spool....darkened classrooms and a soggy bag lunch placed atop the coat rack awaits us. "Galoshes" line the hallway awaiting recess as well.
We were in search of a film starring no less an important figure in my childhood, Mrs Frost, my third grade teacher who took her students on a tour of 1950's Mundelein, my hometown, replete with vanished vistas and ghost images that portrayed a small town community much like Mrs Frost's hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana. We never did find that film....but the past lives on nonetheless...as a series of detours and whirlpools frozen between drills where we hid under our desks to await annihilation in a blinding flash or chasing butterfly's. I am still in recovery from those educational films..Arent we all?
She regaled us with stories of her childhood in Indiana and as a suppressed and talented artist she had an indelible influence on yours truly. She sketched each of her students in a portrait and my own was a personal treasure for decades....a place and time created by sitting next to her desk, one by one, myself among them created a keepsake of childhood...a remembrance. She saw into a future that often adults need to be reminded of through her own tales she regaled us with..of root cellars and Ice Men.
Yes, but in the beginning, this place whose name is legion was so unique, so indescribable that in the beginning, they couldn't settle on a name. Or more accurately, determine one. One can imagine Rufus and Elmore deeply ruminating on the front porch overlooking the infinite horizon of the flat prairies green with corn stalks and the soft breezes that made them wave...as if it were a kingdom of dreams that had no identifiable location on a map.
Rufus had a far away stare stuck on his grizzled face and to no one in particular, he muttered "You know what, we don't live anywhere particular." Elmore winced,"What on heaven's name are you talk'in about now?"
"Well... I was over in Half Day, you know where that is located... right?"
"Of course I do, so whats your point?"
"Well.... they sort of asked me where I was from... and you know what all I had in my mind was tryin like hell to get some mental image I could give them of this place."
"And,so?,"
"There ain't none"
So universal was it's delights sought, they, at first settled on Mechanic's Grove, which seemed to infer a place of flat tires, broken buggy springs or exploding radiators. Worse perhaps, this may be a place where nails were placed on the roads in order to gain new citizens. Actually the name came from a wave of immigration to the area as a result of a severe depression in industrial England, hence they honored their previous professions.
Then, in a moment of misbegotten genius, someone had a revelation, that this place need a name to separate it from all other such little towns scattered like so many forgettable tiny burgs. Area was chosen as the name,as the ultimate generic,sort of like Place, or Spot, which I suppose is better than the suggestiveness of Intercourse, Pennsylvania or the hyped promise of Santa Claus,Indiana. The name Area stood for the motto of a small, short lived private school that taught "Ability, Reliability, Endurance, and Action."
Suddenly this lovely oasis due to it's brand X name became the butt of jokes. A private developer by the name of Holcomb came along with his cash, and the name suddenly dropped the more idealistic name that designated a defunct school of ideology and became Holcomb as a means for this fellow to honor himself. This did not last long when Holcomb presumably "went south" and a connection to a name of overwhelming prestige and power was thought of as a antidote, a sort of 360 degree "Hail Mary" pass then ensued, and so it was that Area became Rockefeller which I suppose, implied more dynamism. Then, in a flash of star crossed fate, a new seminary akin to a Disneyland was announced to be built by the Cardinal Mundelein, ordained by he to be on the West edge of town.
Hmmmm.... the gleeful aroma of a likely tourist trap ensued as the magic spell of the Rockefeller name had certainly failed to jell as intended.. Not wanting to seem opportunistic or trading in on their new attraction, the city fathers then met with due haste and as a result of fierce debate, the fourth consecutive name was chosen and Rockefeller went the way of Area and Mechanics Grove as they were simply a crazy quilt prelude to a photo finish.... in a stroke of genius, it was thus named. No surprise here.
So why Mundelein was chosen as a postwar escape route from the West side of Chicago for my parents became obvious, as at the time, being a lifelong city dweller my father had no immediate need for a car, and so a way of commuting became paramount in their decision. The station of what was called the North Shore line became my primary object of curiosity for me and many an afternoon was spent either waiting for my father's train or simply milling around asking questions of the motormen. Even more importantly it had a candy counter where I would bring my younger sister along for "Milk Duds" or some other "sugar buzz"
Of course, my father eventually bought a car, a manually shifted used 1951 Ford, which came out of Detroit the year I arrived at Oak Park Hopital. My father, "peddle to the metal" drove this car until the floorboards had holes big enough where our feet would get wet, and my mother forced the issue of a new car, after perhaps saying once too often to me, "Keep your feet away from that hole!"
The Conquering Of Space and Time
So, in Mundelein or Mundlelean, or Mundlebin, what have you, a young man that was once me wistfully eyed the roaring Mountaineer or The Laker thundering through the town, horn blaring...me sadly confined to a series of pathetic orange crate scooters that had such innovations as candle lit headlamps that unfortunately had a bad habit of blowing out at a critical moment, or failing to have brakes, inevitably led to violent spin outs, or even lacking such conveniences such as a seat, we careened toward an ill fated mobility. The harsh reality was that I was still confined to my P.F Fliers as a general mode of transportation. In desperate moments such as these... we would place our contorted bodies inside the rims of old tires and roll ourselves down a hill, or worse make futile attempts to slide on cardboard boxes, then hitting a rock, only to be hurled like a softball of laundry in a somersault of doom.
It was a era of failed attempts to conquer space and time. The brief glances of the urban sophistication of Libertyville, outside of the outskirts of our tract homeland, were like glimpses of the Emerald City. Strange temples and exotic attractions lined the wide boulevard of dreams.
Then, like all miracles of technology, the Schwinn Bicycle Company of Chicago suddenly solved this age old riddle and my new 1958 Red Hornet stood there gleaming there in 1958, awaiting me like a passport to Oz, or deepest Africa, even the deeply forested canyons in my mind's eye, of the verdant Skokie Valley which I imagined to be the proverbial Black Forest cut through by a winding river.
An Expedition to the Luxurious Wiener-mobile, to Greet World Famous Uncle Johnny Coons
In those dark pre-Bozo days of summer, Uncle Johnny Coons was the raconteur of cartoons, that taught us how the world really operated versus the boring facts that led us to capture flys on our desks or made us turn on ourselves... in a intermittent flurry of improvised weapons, like the highly accurate rubber band, carelessly left for us to use in place of the notoriously difficult to aim "spitballs" made ingeniously fashioned in haste from notebook paper. Some became sure shot legends in those days of armed resistance to our captivity. Cartoons were our textbooks, or at least mine anyway.
But summer in Mundelein was a cornucopia of delights resulting in "whatdayawont to do?"
" I don't know I asked you first."
Ah, but the day, our hero, the mastermind of the cartoon school of knowledge came to town with no less than the high tech vision of our future, the streamlined Weiner-mobile that cast a spell on our cartoon imaginations. I imagined all the important local townsfolk turning out lining the streets as the triumphant wiener wagon in all it's glory separating the pushing and shouting crowds.."Look, omigod, there he is... It's Uncle Johnny Coons!" I also expected the world famous Oscar Meyer to be a Germanic Count, like the Grand Duke Ferdinand.
Uncle Johnny was having an off day on a hot summer morning and was gruff, little beads of perspiration ran behind his glasses as his frozen smile was more like an involuntary gritting of teeth during a visit to the dentist. Oscar Meyer was having a smoke in the alley behind the Jewel, a short and swarthy Italian "little person" from the Fifth Dimension, like Snow White's driver. I suppose it was another day on the Wiener Road for them, but that day is indelibly etched in my mind for entirely unforeseen reason on my part. The Star Trek of the future arrived early with the stove top miracle of instant Jiffy Pop, but my future would be forever changed when I saw a colorful unfamiliar banner, flying wildly over at a large cooler. Wow. The tastes of exotic lands, foreign cultures, had arrived in the Jewel parking lot. It was a miracle!
At first glance I thought it was an elf peering out of a snowball, but then it struck me, these are pies made by Eskimos! There were other exotic fare in that little town that even hot dogs were extraordinary, amazing and yes, fabulous.
My brother Brian like a determined explorer of yore set his gaze upon the endless plain of cow pastures surrounding Mundelein and then set his sight on finding the enigmatic origin of the creek. My mother , dressed in her business casual "moo-moo" frying up a storm to meet a last minute dinner deadline, blithely asked, Where's you brother?"
"I dunno.."
A postcard at the Lake County Museum shows a work crew atop a ditch-digging machine. Dated June 30, 1911, it includes a message from one of the workers saying he won’t be home for the Fourth of July holiday because the machine has to be disassembled to cross a railroad bridge.The creek has a connection to one of the individuals satirized by the film, Citizen Kane, for his lavish spending on what resembled a throne chair,facing the planned Westward expansion of his empire, the Civic Opera House in Chicago. He died penniless in a Paris subway station, the victim of the Morgan investment banks, cashing in on the depression as well as a little known event that would forever change America. Just prior to the depression, the United States Supreme Court in their wisdom, forbade utilities from owning transportation networks, which broke up the synergy and growth of cheap electric transportation via the interurban, one of which was the one that brought us to Mundelein. Non polluting mass transit was passe with cheap gas, as I recall gas in 1958 was 27 cents a gallon.
Insull himself is a forgotten man.
Seavey Creek as it is called begins to bend south near Lake Charles in the Gregg’s Landing subdivision east of Butterfield. The ditch was rerouted and a dam built to create the lake, according to Brown, the Vernon Hills engineer, which originally served as a gravel pit for the building of the North Shore Line that sits on the former property of the aformentioned Insull "the man who electrified America", beginning in nearby Libertyville, which then spread throughout the U.S. While he is forgotten, his mansion remains.
That same aforementioned bridge that disrupted a worker's 4th of July holiday, later caused more issues, or should I say excitement. My sister Lynn as well as others in her classroom were stunned by the anomalous UPS truck stuck like a piece of dry gum under the Soo Line trestle. This was life in the slow lane. She rushed as all the others did in a frantic push to the window, to gaze in wonder upon this miracle floundering there like a permanently wedged, square soda can..
" You're not going to believe what happened!"
Somehow this seems to be symbolic of a changing world being delivered and of it's choices which would later come back to haunt us as wedged between destinations
There is one final twist in our story of lost Americana, in that in the year of 1963, a group of Japanese engineers flew over to the Midwest to examine what was then high speed transportation and their target was the financially failing North Shore Line. The vanquished of WW2 had a dense population that was growing. Rather than rely on expressways which took up a great deal of scant real estate, they were the pioneers of the Bullet Train which originated here, not there. In that same year due to competition from the Edens Expressway, the line folded and became ironically enough a harbinger of my own past, a walking path.Irony, thy name is history, forgotten and lost, the arcane and archaic seems to reinvent itself before our eyes.
Ah, progress ...that bitch Goddess...in the memory in more ways than one as a retrogression of what was as a genome of childhood.
More to follow...My teenage escape from an ill fated future toward the Oz of California in the Gold Rush of 1969....
