In 1954 when I was two our family moved from my grandmothers house at 79th and Beverly to a newly build house in 125th Place two doors down from the Pennsylvania RR tracks. This aerial shot of the area from 1952 which shows this South Side Chicago neighborhood where I came of age to be mostly undeveloped open land.

So unlike most parts of Chicago it was more like a suburban community where a lot of young parents were in their first house trying to raise kids and grow a decent looking lawn.

It was, in retrospect, an idyllic time to be a kid. In the summer months parents would congregate on the wide concrete porch of whoever wandered out first after dinner to knock back a few long neck beers and commiserate while us kids would play tree tag and other games to amuse ourselves. Most of the fathers worked in the building trades or for the city in some capacity. One of our neighbors (Grossnickle) was a carpenter and the other (Knoll) was a fireman who moonlighted as an electrician at a factory on his off duty days. My dad was an chemical engineer who worked at Corn Products where they made Argo Corn Starch / Syrup, Mazola Oil and other corn based products. He commuted to Argo every day. Most of the mothers were stay-at home and they had their own social network of "coffee clatches".

I was five when my older brother Ray (who died in 2005) joined the Cub Scouts. When told he couldn't enroll due to a lack of leaders my mother asked. "How do become one?" and was soon a "Den Mother" holding weekly meetings in our basement where a pack of ten cubs would do crafts and other projects. She had come from Florida during WWII to find work and had been a "Rosie the Riveter" machinist and thus was no stranger to power tools. She loved doing the craft projects and working with the kids so much she continued being a den mother for 12 years. When Ray graduated to Boy Scouts my Dad became the scout master of troop 745. I was finally old enough to join Cub Scouts myself, but since I'd already done everything I just tagged along to the boy scouts because camping trips were more fun than making clay ashtrays and log cabins out of popsicle sticks in cub scouts. My dad stayed involved in scouts for over 30 years until they moved to Florida in the early 80s. The funniest part of that story is I never joined the scouts officially because by the time I was 12 and old enough to join I'd been there and done that already.

My "15 minutes of fame" also came when I was 12. If you lived in the area in 1964 you might recall there was a kid who got blown-up in an explosion of an abandoned boat in the Little Calumet river. That was me. During the explosion something punctured my ankle nearly taking off my foot. I spent 42 days in the hospital recovering and miraculously I wound-up with full function of all the body parts. I rehabilitated the leg by pushing a skateboard down the sidewalks.

Skateboards were new thing in the early 60's replacing the scooters we had made from 2x4s and a wooden crate with an old pair of metal clamp on skate nailed to the 2x4 for wheels. 20" Stingray Schwinn bikes were also the thing to have and we'd tow each other water-ski style behind them on skateboards. I still have the scars on my elbows and knees from that.

We'd roam all over West Pullman on our bikes, including across the railroad trestle over the river into Whistler's Woods where there were some big hills we'd jump off and get airborne. We also spent a lot of time at West Pullman Park swimming in the pool - with its scary high diving board and seemingly bottomless deep end - and playing handball, tennis and softball at the courts and fields there.

The neighborhood north of 124th was mostly first and second generation Polish immigrants and at most of the local businesses like "Steve's" the nearest grocery, the drug store, bakery and shoe repair you'd hear Polish spoken more than English. The area across the tracks had Lithuanian-run businesses. I have fond childhood memories of the food obtained from those immigrant-run businesses.Many kids in my generation grew-up on spongy "Wonder Bread" that would get pasty and stick to the roof of your mouth, but as a kid my sandwiches were made with fragrant flakey loaves often still warm from the Lithuanian bakery at 123rd and Halsted.

When I was 16 I went to work at was known as "The Milk Store" on 123th and Halsted. It was run by the Krause family and sold milk by the gallon (79 cents), beer by the case, deli meats cut to order, bread and hard liquor. It was the epitome of a "Mom and Pop" store and old Mrs. Krause, then in her 70s, would keep an eye on things on Sundays when her son took his only day off. Because the prices were lower than the supermarket it wasn't uncommon to have customers lined up as we took orders and tallied them up in pencil on the brown paper bags we'd pack the order in.

When I was 17 I took a SCUBA class at the 111st YMCA and joined the Aqua Rays dive club there. It was mostly adults and we took bus trips to quarries and lakes all over Illinois and Wisconsin. I assisted with classes and ran the club's compressor to fill the tanks. I bought a Nikonos II underwater camera do document my diving adventures and that in turn got me hooked on photography.

I attended to Fenger High (see my other stories) and in the summer after graduating worked as laborer at Interlake Steel before after going off to Knox College. I worked there again between my first and second year at Knox, after which I dropped out and moved to Washington, DC in the summer of 1972 to pursue an interest in photography.

I wound up working for a world renowned wedding photographer named Monte Zucker for a couple years, then got a job at National Geographic making maps and doing other photo reproduction and a gig teaching photography at a DC area college in the evenings. I went there to take classes an they offered me a job teaching. In '82 I joined the US Foreign Service as a printing specialist working for USIA and State alternating between managing and automating its overseas printing operation in the Philippines and domestic operations in DC. I retired last year (2010).

I didn't stay in touch with friends in the old neighborhood or from high school and by the time I visited again in 1978 there was no old neighborhood. My parents had moved to Oak Lawn and everyone else I knew had scattered.

In mid 60s, under Lyndon Johnston's "New Society" initiative it became possible for minorities who had previously been unable to get home loans to obtain HUD (Housing and Urban Development) backed no-money down 100% financed mortgages with very little income. Real estate agents began a practice called "Block Busting" selling one or two homes on a block to a minority family then stoking the prejudices and fears of the remaining white residents. While there were undeniable racial prejudices the decline of the South Side was more the result of the inability of new residents, who often moved from subsidized housing, to afford the mortgages and up-keep. A middle-class black family had moved to our block in the early 60's without any problems several years before the panic selling started where one of the first to pull-up stakes and leave, knowing better than most what was to follow. Criminal activity followed the new residents and neighborhood demographics on blocks and the entire far South Side changed from white to black like falling dominos.