Rats killed by Dad and Billy at the West Side six-flat.
After sending out dozens of résumés to Chicago-area school districts, I was interviewed and hired to start in the fall of 1972, teaching sixth grade in Winnetka, a North Shore suburb renowned for its innovative, child-centered approach to teaching. Even Mom was happy, responding with real joy. She wrote in her diary, “Linda got a wonderful teaching job at the wonderful salary of $9,600 per year.”
Winnetka was then, and is now, one of the nation’s richest suburbs, with a well-educated populace, lots of trees, large homes, expansive lawns, and safe streets. When I began teaching in 1972, it was virtually all white, including a smattering of Jewish families. The children were scrubbed, casually well-dressed, and privileged (though not necessarily spoiled). Most of my students were kind and motivated. Their parents held them to high standards of both achievement and behavior, but several kids still needed a good deal of guidance and a teacher’s loving attention.
It was a solar system away from West Garfield Park, the stark difference manifested in my father’s recent close call. The same fall I started teaching in Winnetka, Dad was heading home after checking on his three buildings, all within half a block of one another on Washington Boulevard. Driving a couple minutes east, he saw lights flashing from a scrum of cop cars. The news reported that a twenty-seven-year-old man, his father-in-law, and an employee of a salvage company on Pulaski had been shot to death—just minutes before Dad drove past. The murders occurred shortly after fire had engulfed the nearby historic Guyon Paradise Ballroom, and around the same time the A&P, our family’s go-to grocery store on Madison and Keeler, had burned to the ground. Investigators suspected arson in both blazes.
Not long after the shooting, Mom was collecting rent on the West Side, when she learned more frightening news from one of her tenants, Mr. Brooks. “A reliable source” had told him that fifteen women had been raped in just one week within a two-block radius of our six-flat. “A man sees a woman he wants and, as in days of old, just takes her,” Mr. Brooks told Mom. He added, “There’s a definite deterioration in the kind of people in the area in the past nine months.”
“It looks like the West Side is headed for total destruction,” Mom wrote, as if this were big news. She told Dad, “We’d better sell that six-flat. We’re playing Russian roulette.”
Believing that the West Side was still his neighborhood, Dad refused. But perhaps he also worried about his mother’s disdainful reaction should he sell the six-flat “gift.” I think he also relished how his fearless confrontation of daily dangers impressed his coworkers.
Mom, however, was personally invested in doing her part to make the West Side buildings a success—to prove to herself, and naysayers, that their meticulously cared-for property would be respected by their tenants. Responding to every complaint, spending money on repairs and upkeep in no way commensurate with their income from the buildings, she was determined to do the right thing. Her biggest payback was recognition and appreciation, which she felt was in short supply from Dad. I’ve become convinced that the West Side, with all the fear, crime, and aggravation, somehow fulfilled both my parents’ deepest needs left over from childhood.
As an only child, Mom had been showered with personal attention. Despite Grandma K’s fierce temper, Mom knew she had always been the focus of her parents’ lives. Why wasn’t Dad giving her the same kind of attention now for her intense efforts?
I think Dad still felt the lifelong sting of his mother’s scorn. She had grabbed precious possessions from his hands and thrown them into the furnace; she had belittled his ideas. I believe that Dad, despite his college chemistry degree, unconsciously tried to garner his mother’s approval by maintaining buildings like his janitor parents had. It was a futile endeavor.
In spite of my parents’ commitment to their tenants and property, some West Side problems were intractable. One tenant held back on signing her lease because of roaches in her unit, despite repeated visits from an exterminator. The vermin simply invaded again from neighboring apartments that weren’t kept clean. “Roaches have nothing to do with the lease,” Mom said. “I can’t come over there and hit them with my shoe!”
Near their buildings, rats drank openly at a dripping faucet in the middle of the day. The city ignored West Garfield Park, as it had for years, so Dad fell back on his parents’ philosophy, selbstständigkeit: self-reliance. He had provided lidded and locked rat-proof garbage cans. But at the large apartment building next door to their six-flat, garbage was strewn all about, making easy pickings for rats. Each female procreated at the prolific rate of six to fourteen babies every three weeks.
The rat dens were easy to locate in the yard by simply following the dozen or more paths that crisscrossed the back lawn, the grass worn away by the steady trudge of rats on the move. Dad enlisted Billy to attack the problem head-on.
Dad found the location of a lively rat burrow, including its multiple ingress and egress holes. He plugged up all exits, save two. Into one he inserted a length of garden hose attached to a basement-sink faucet; at the other, he stationed my brother with that useful extermination tool, a two-by-four. Dad turned on the hot water. With a narrow tunnel their only escape route from the raging flood waters, the rats had to scurry one at a time to where Billy stood at the ready, whacking each with the weapon as it charged into the bright sunlight.
Watching the spectacle like an audience at a Colosseum event, neighborhood kids sent up a rousing cheer for every rat killed. It’s no wonder: rats had terrorized them and their families. After nineteen direct hits, rodent carnage lay all about. Boys and girls ran into the yard, poking their dead adversaries with sticks, giving them another thwack for good measure. Always one for documenting major events, Dad carefully set out the curled-up corpses into three rows, like a series of apostrophes and quotation marks, for a photo op—a visual aid for another good story percolating in his brain.
Perhaps Dad could have found a more efficient way to deal with the rats, but he seldom focused on efficiency. Besides, rat poison posed risks to other animals and children; it killed the rats over a period of days from inner hemorrhaging—a far crueler way to die. For the time being, he had rid his corner of rats, and he had another story to amaze his friends and coworkers. Providing entertainment for the neighborhood kids was a bonus, just as Dad had done for me and my friends in our childhoods. He always found a way to spark up the tinder of life’s tedium with a flicker of humor, a whoosh of drama, a crackle of the bizarre.
But the animal problems were less volatile than the explosive situations that could arise like a thunderclap among residents.
One warm summer day, Dad and Mom were trimming the bushes in the front yard at our former two-flat, when an altercation arose. They both told me what happened, each filling in vivid details. Ruby Montgomery, the twenty-something daughter of the man who rented the first-floor apartment, stood on the front porch chatting with my parents in the yard below, when a woman walked by and started talking trash. “Hey, Ruby. I seen you with that man I was sweet on. What you doin’, girl? You the hood ho now?”
“Hey, bitch,” retorted Ruby. “Why’d he even look at you—with that shitty wig you always wearin’?” One hand on her hip, the other pointing at the woman, Ruby’s head moved in rhythm with her insult.
Her voice rising in fury, the woman grabbed a fistful of her own hair, yanking on it repeatedly as she moved up the walk toward Ruby. “What you call this, bitch?” Riveted to the spot, hedge clippers midair, Mom and Dad hardly had time to register how quickly a few sentences were evolving into a physical confrontation.
Before the woman reached the stairs, Mr. Montgomery stepped out the front door, shotgun in hand. He pushed his daughter to the side, simultaneously raising the weapon, nestling it into position against his shoulder, and taking a bead on the woman. “Move over, Ruby. I got her in my sights.”
Dad leaped up the front steps, directly in front of his tenant, and shoved the gun to the side. “Fred! Fred!” Mom screamed. “Don’t get shot!”
“Mr. Montgomery!” Dad shouted, his left hand grasping Montgomery’s shoulder, shaking him. “What are you doing?” Dad pressed down the gun-wielding arm to Mr. Montgomery’s side, looking him in the eye. The woman on the street backed away, screaming epithets back at Ruby as she walked east down Washington.
Montgomery sighed deeply. “You’re right. You’re right.” He then turned and walked back into the flat where I used to live, his shoulders hunched, the shotgun dangling at his side, his daughter following behind. “Thank you, Mr. Gartz,” she said quietly before closing the door behind her. Mom and Dad finished their work, Mom chastising Dad for his rash behavior. Then they drove home.
Dad’s friends and coworkers were once again agape at this latest story. “Freddie, don’t you think you ought to get out of that neighborhood?”
“Nothing to worry about,” Dad said.
Yet one winter night, while shoveling coal into the furnace, Dad had left the basement door open behind him to release the intense heat, the blaze’s flames casting a gleam that rose up into the darkness and shone like a beacon. The basement entranceway, where Dad was working, was down several steps in a dark, cramped space, shielded from view by back stairs that rose overhead—no escape.
A couple of young men moved silently toward the light, catching Dad unawares. “Hey, ol’ man.” They grinned wide at Dad, who had just laid down his shovel, about to close the furnace door. He turned to see their features flickered by flame; the gun, agleam with reflected firelight, pointed at his chest.
“What do you want?” he asked quietly.
“We want your wallet,” said one, extending his palm toward Dad. “Put it right here, and we won’t hurt you. Slow now. Just go slow.” Dad kept one hand in the air, pulling his wallet out from his back pocket with the other.
“Why don’t you two get jobs?” Dad asked, extending the wallet, holding eye contact. “Then you wouldn’t have to bother with people like me who are just doing theirs.”
“Just stay here, and don’t say nothin’ till we’re gone.” They turned and disappeared into the night.
When Dad calmly related this story to me, he said, “I was so mad, my heart was pounding! I was more mad than scared.”
“Dad, that is scary. If it happened once, it’ll happen again.”
“I’ll be ready next time,” he said. “That won’t ever happen to me again. Punks!” His eyes turned fierce and steely.
Dad later told me of how he planned to thwart future robbers and burglars at the six-flat basement. He would set up a crossbow on a trigger so that anyone who forced open the door (tenants didn’t have a key) might be skewered. Bill told him that it was against the law to create a potentially deadly trap, even against someone engaged in a crime.
“A man has a right to defend his property!” Dad retorted.
One day, he arrived at the six-flat to find the trigger tripped, a trail of blood spotting the steps. “I haven’t had a break-in since,” he said triumphantly months later. “Word travels.”
“Dad!” I said, sitting at my parents’ kitchen table, looking at my aging father with alarm. “That’s dangerous! What if that guy comes back with friends and tries to get you when you’re there alone?” He waved away my worries.
Others chided him, too. My father’s best buddy since his teen years, now a surgeon, said to Dad, “Sell those damn buildings! You’re pouring money down a sewer.”
Even the family lawyer said to Mom, “You’d better get rid of that six-flat before you’re wiping Fred’s brains off the sidewalk.”
The dangers were real—rapes, burglaries, muggings, purse snatchings, and Dad’s armed robbery. Mom focused on unloading the six-flat, the building with the most tenants and the most trouble. “Fred, we have to talk about selling that six-flat,” was her greeting when Dad returned home from work.
His evasive response was maddening. “When do we eat supper?”
Taking up Mom’s cause, I said, “Hey, Dad, you really should talk with Mom about selling the six-flat. We’re both worried about your safety.”
“There’s no point in discussing anything with your mother,” he said. “She has to get her own way, so there’s no point in expressing my opinion.”