Linda and Peggy, October 1962. Caricature of Linda’s Dad behind them.
In the fall of 1962, Dad’s job at the National Board of Fire Underwriters was terminated, and he received ninety days of full salary as severance. After a couple months of searching, he was hired as a loss-control engineer at Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company. Dad drove throughout his Chicago territory, inspecting bars, bathhouses, hunting-goods stores, motels—any business insured by Fireman’s Fund. He chatted up the owners before inspection, not just because they would be more receptive to his recommended changes, but because he loved conversation and interaction. “Every man has his story,” he often told us.
He might suggest thick metal fire doors to keep blazes contained or accordion-pulled grates over windows to prevent theft. The secretaries competed to type up Dad’s cassette tape–recorded reports, eager for a good yarn. He opened one report on a South Side motel with: “This is a place where the beds never have a chance to get cold.”
“You gotta hear this one,” said the transcriber passing around the tape.
At the same time Dad was enjoying his newfound freedom at Fireman’s Fund, I was discovering a new life at Luther High School North, seven miles from our home and a world away from the West Side. Learning to navigate the shoals of adolescence, I was in a school with a homogeneous population, made up of kids from German and Swedish backgrounds. They had names like Strauss, Radtke, Diener, Faust, Schroeder, and Nelson.
I met my best high-school friend, Peggy, sitting next to me in homeroom, on the first day of school at Luther North. Peggy was very blonde with pure blue eyes, perfect skin, and beautiful, long fingernails. I bit mine. I began the conversation with this pretty girl sitting next to me by openly complimenting her nails, a feature I’d never have. She jumped right in with a funny rejoinder, “My mother sometimes strokes my nails.”
“Wow, that’s nutty!” I exclaimed. Instantly we were talking and laughing nonstop, and we continued chatting until the bell rang—and between every class for the whole day. Magically, our schedules were identical!
Our personalities melded seamlessly, even though our childhoods had been markedly different. Peggy’s mom read Seventeen magazine to know what was “in” for the new school year. I had never heard of Seventeen magazine, and Mom had no time to read the women’s magazines that piled up month after month. Peggy and her mom shopped for new school clothes in August, just when they’d be the most expensive. Mom and I shopped for some of my fall wardrobe when the winter clothes went on sale in February, purchasing each item one size larger. Grandma Gartz also passed on to me hand-me-downs from tenants. Some of the items were at least acceptable to my untrained eye, so I wore them.
Frugal and practical, Mom had bought Paul a winter coat with two sets of buttonholes. After he outgrew it, she switched the buttons to the left (girls’) side when I was ready for it in about third grade, then back to the boys’ side for my younger brother. We were middle class but spent money sparingly. My parents’ mantra, “Save for a rainy day,” meant they could afford LHN tuition.
Peggy, like most Luther North students, came from a middle-class family, too. Her dad was an accountant, and her mother worked part-time at a movie theater, spending most of her income on Peggy’s clothes. Sometimes when I went to Peggy’s apartment after school, her mother had surprised her with two or three new outfits laid out on her bed! Always dressed stylishly and more adept at negotiating the high-school social scene, Peggy became my adolescent guide and consultant.
She was aware of a high-school hierarchy. I had been unaware of any such hierarchy at Tilton, where I’d had the modest goal of being a good student, and like-minded strivers were my friends. We Tiltonites worked together on the school newspaper and volunteered during recess or in the front office. That seemed cool to me. Kids hung out with like-minded other students, tough kids with tough kids, science geeks with science geeks. I was friendly with all, but I didn’t discern that one group was more desirable than another.
Peggy had gone to a school where she felt left out of the popular crowd, and she wanted to find a way in at Luther North. I was definitely not the ticket into the cool crowd, but we had become best friends anyway. I’ve come to realize a great truth of Peggy’s soul. She’d put aside her dearest adolescent desire (at least what she thought it was) for real friendship. But she would have to shepherd me along—and I was in great need of shepherding. I just hadn’t realized it until I met Peggy. She must have seen a glimmer of potential.
She insisted we go to football games, where I quickly learned the sartorial expectations. I met her at the field for the first game on a Saturday dressed in a sweatshirt and velveteen pants, onto which Mom had sewn satin fall leaves. She exclaimed, “Gartz! You can’t wear an outfit like that to a football game!”
“Oh.” Pause. “I thought the fall leaves looked nice. I mean . . . it is fall, right?” Chagrined, I found more casual pants for the next game. Raised by parents with zero interest in sports (a complete waste of time, in their minds), attending a football game never would have even occurred to me, if not for Peggy.
Above all, she and I never ran out of things to talk about— which boys we liked, whether we could ever make cheerleader (we never did), or who was in the popular crowd—and how the heck did one achieve that pinnacle of high-school success? She regaled me with advice on improving my appearance. “Gartz! You have to do something with your hair.”
I had no idea how to create a stylish coif. Peggy told me I needed rollers to set my hair, and she demonstrated. I bought a plastic bag of large rollers and a card of bobby pins. Each night, I struggled with manual gymnastics, holding a roller in place with some fingers while using others to wrap hair around the prickly cylinder, wisps flying out, finally securing it in place with a bobby pin, my arms growing numb in the process.
I seldom had seen Mom set her hair. She had a natural curl she just brushed into place. About every two months, she went to the beauty parlor for a permanent and a haircut and came home looking like a stranger.
She wore slacks and a simple top every day, clothes easy to work in. But the few times we went out as a family, like for Mother’s Day or birthdays, she always looked classy. As a young woman, Mom dressed with great élan. Photos show her wearing fabulous clothes with impeccably matched costume jewelry, hair perfect for the times. Yet she never passed on a sense of style to me. Shopping had to be accomplished as speedily as possible, a chore she squeezed in between her other duties.
Despite my attention to Peggy’s expert clothing and social advice, I also had a rebellious streak, picked up from Dad, to not kowtow to fashion. “Fashion,” he used to spit out. “Changing styles every year. That’s just a ruse to get people to dump perfectly good clothes and spend money they don’t have!”
Just around the time I started high school, Dad had bought me a raccoon coat (one of those 1920s fads) at a Salvation Army store for five dollars. I cut the tail off an old Davy Crockett hat and had a matching outfit, which I wore to school. Peggy advised against the coat (“It looks ridiculous!”). But a lot of kids thought it was hilarious, in a fun sort of way. At lunchtime, I’d find some students traipsing around the halls in my coat, like the Pevensie kids in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
The laughter was mostly good-natured. They had never seen such a coat, bristling with thick brown-and-black fur and wide, capacious sleeves and shoulders.
More than once a kid mocked me, asking “Where’d you get that big animal on your back?” or baring teeth, growling, hands pawing at me like claws. My face flushed hot, but my innards went steely. My dad bought me this coat! I don’t care whatyou think. For many mornings, after I’d eaten the soft-boiled egg and grapefruit Dad had prepared for me, I was pleased at his happy smile when he watched me draw my arms through the thick, heavy sleeves and let the full heft of the coat settle on my shoulders. I kissed him goodbye and walked half a block to the bus stop.
I defiantly wore the fur coat every day for at least a week, until any negative comments died down. Only then did I return to my more typical teen coat, which I’d left hanging in my closet until I was certain I had been unbowed by the comments. I wanted to fit in, to absorb Peggy’s adolescent wisdom, but I wouldn’t succumb to intimidation and abandon a sense of self just to please others.
Peggy and I walked and gossiped together between classes, worked stage crew for the thespians, and wondered if all that guys really wanted from a girl was to make out. We had in common the same sort of thirteen-year-old naiveté when it came to any aspect of sexual matters. We went to parties and had crushes on various boys, but neither of us had a clue as to how to attract them. We admitted to each other that we used our pillows to practice kissing. We were filled with sexual longings we couldn’t identify. I felt a sucking deep in my belly drawing down into a place I couldn’t name, sometimes catching my breath short. But Peg and I felt certain (based on our mothers’ admonitions) that going all the way was for trampy girls who thought sex was the only way to get a guy.
Peggy’s parents rented the second floor of a two-flat brick building in a modest and pleasant neighborhood on Keeler near Montrose, five miles directly north of our home at Keeler and Washington. We walked up carpeted stairs to her door, which opened into her living room, taking off our shoes before stepping on the pale-gold carpet to enter into the thoughtfully decorated two-bedroom apartment. No dogs or cats were allowed. Unlike our house, which overflowed with a menagerie of animals that came and went, Peggy was permitted only a small blue-green parakeet in a cage.
Mom and Dad had spent years of personal labor to beautify our home, but we lived with a different mindset. Our house was our business. I just accepted that I grew up with tenants living in bedrooms down the hall, who came and went in our apartment at will and who shared our washroom. Second-floor roomers and basement tenants rang the bell and walked through our flat to pay rent or use our phone, dropping ten cents per call in a coffee cup Mom had set nearby. Mom’s office was the dining room, where the table was covered in the sorted piles of her bookkeeping, insurance policies to read, bills to pay, and magazines she might speedily flip through once every two months in search of articles to clip (like “How to Make Old Furniture New Again” or miscellaneous homemaker advice).
Some project was always underway. A tiny sampling: Dad plastered, painted, built shelving, stripped woodwork, and hung wallpaper. Mom taught me to pull out a root-bound fern from its pot, lay a clay shard over the hole of a slightly bigger pot, insert the plant, pour fresh soil around the perimeter, and tamp it down. As we got older, we kids were taught (and expected) to prep and paint the back porch, fences, screens, and storm windows; cut grass; rake leaves—to lend a hand to all maintenance. I recall nothing labeled “boys’” or “girls’” work.
Mom refinished lamps, picture frames, and, most memorably, a Victorian oak desk, its varnish blackened by the passing of time. Dad had purchased it for a song at some secondhand shop. “I’ve always wanted my own desk,” Mom said, inspecting it longingly, opening the drop front, revealing upright file-folder slots and drawers for office paraphernalia. She frowned and looked at Dad. “But when would I ever find the time to work on it?” We could all see the beauty beneath the blackened surface, but the elaborate filigrees, spindles, and raised relief carvings presaged hours of tedious labor. Mom took it on.
That desk squatted on newspapers in our dining room for months, as Mom devoted a little time each day to its renewal. She painstakingly stripped off the sticky black finish, sanded and wiped the wood with a tack cloth to remove vestiges of wood dust—until it stood naked and pale like a freshly scrubbed country gal, ready to be dolled up for a dance. When mom brushed on fruitwood stain, the colorless oak leaped to life; its grain emerged, zigzagging in broad swaths or swirling around the delicate details. After two coats of varnish, it was the belle of the ball. Dad snapped photos. We kids oohed and aahed at its glorious transformation.
I often thought of Mom’s months of commitment whenever I saw her working at the desk, a daily reminder of the power of perseverance.
Peggy’s apartment was a mere fifteen-minute bus ride east of LHN, so I often spent the night at her house if we stayed after school to practice baton routines, memorize songs for a musical, or write German conversations. She and I were the same size, so I could wear one of her oh-so-cute outfits to classes the next day, thrilled with how fashionable I looked.
During my years at Luther North, the racial change in West Garfield Park continued until it was nearly complete. Returning home to the West Side from Peggy’s, I walked two blocks from her house to Pulaski, where I boarded a southbound bus, watching the neighborhoods grow progressively poorer as we bumped along: more currency exchanges with giant yellow signs, more trash in the streets, more bars on the corner, more paint-starved houses, more wan and worried faces. The ethnicity of the people changed, too, first to Hispanic, then Hispanic and black, and finally all black several blocks north of my street, Washington, where Dad always waited at the bus stop to walk me home after dark.