A Life Story

In our house on Esmond Street, my mother could be heard calling up the stairs, “Your father’s not going; he’s working on his book today.”

His book. My mother proudly told us that it was going to be a great work of literature, that it would make him rightfully famous. But knowing its ostensible title, the book drew little interest or awe from the group of us, preparing to go to church or the beach or the S&H greenstamps store.

We would leave my father standing in the doorway, his pipe clenched in his teeth and a box of papers under his arm.  A sacrifice for the book.

In the 1960’s, my father could have used the Olivetti from his office for the project, but he wasn’t a typist - he was an artist.  He used fountain pens and bics, legal pads and plain white paper.  

There on Esmond, work on the book had just begun, so we often saw him carrying his box of papers, busy and intent and energetic. Young, tall, and thin.  Unburdened and eagerly anticipating his future as an author and historian.

The box with the loose pages could be found in his studio, among other flotsam and jetsam carried along on his creative river of talent; oil pallettes and canvases, brilliant pools of watercolors drying in plastic pans, and delicately drawn outlines of Chicago homes waiting for the watery touch of his brush. 

His studio resonated with music and smell of Bond Street pipe tobacco.  Visiting his studio, we watched from playpens and highchairs, stools and swing-o-matics. 

We moved from Esmond Street to a tiny brick house on Longwood Drive in Blue Island, where work progressed.  Pipe smoke and inappropriately loud operatic music drifted up from the basement; certain clues that Chicago’s sepia history of barons and brothels and business tycoons was being transcribed.

As he penned those pages in the cramped basement, he was sifting through the rubble of a house on Prairie Avenue, or walking up a grand mahogany staircase with his friend and mentor, whom he told us was part of Lord Carnarvon’s excavation of King Tut’s tomb. John McCormack and Arthur Rubenstein deafened the sound of the babies crying upstairs. It must have seemed like heaven.

We lived in the Blue Island house during the Viet Nam war.  My mother would occasionally have “Viet Nam Dinner” nights for the children.  They featured only rice, odd vegetables, and water. 

We hated it then, but see if differently today.  Now with admiration.  Because now we know of the days my father would come home after selling just a few art supplies or hand-sketched note cards in his gallery.   We’d eat the budget-saving Viet Nam dinners and then my father would head downstairs to work on his book.

The book that would make him famous.

Then, during those tumultuous Blue Island years, history happened.  Men landed on the moon. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were shot.  Riots erupted across the city, and Daley’s canary blue police served up justice as the fires burned.  And the basement flooded.

Amid the floating boxes and submerged furniture, the pages of the book were saved. I remember seeing a box of rippled and streaked paper and wondering if the book project would survive.  Evidently it did.

Shortly after the flood, we moved into a new house and a new period in our lives. The house was not unlike those featured in the unfinished book. It was a peeling and dilapidated old Victorian, with broken pipes and windows. The high-ceiling rooms had piles of leaves from the oak trees that towered over its three stories. And it seemed like a perfect place to work on the book.  In this new space, our lives felt changed.  Our minds seemed to expand.

And we grew.  Teenagers started appearing.  Braces and new cars were needed.  Our friends gathered in the large kitchen in the house on Prospect Avenue, filling the place with noise and laughter and chaos. We were all swept into our own lives and personal dramas.

We had temporarily forgotten the image of my father standing by the door in our Esmond house, youthful and hopeful, clutching his box of paper.  For the moment, we'd forgotten those hand-written pages, water stained from the flood.

I lost track of the book.

But my father must have kept writing it.

He must have, because today his book, “Chicago's Old Homes - Legends and Lore,” is in its third edition from McGraw Hill.  It’s been sold on Amazon.com and E-Bay.  And I once saw it in a Barnes and Noble bookstore in Florida.

Maybe it didn’t make him a famous author. 

But in my eyes, he acheived fame from another work, yet unpublished but even longer in the making.

Upon endless pages, he has drawn the indelible characters of our family.  He penned each of us imperfectly and yet grandly.  Our minds as big and open and irrational as moving into a house filled with leaves and racoons.  Our souls bathed in the artistic and creative process. 

Thus we became philosophers and scientists, thinkers and writers, musicians and artists.

For this, my father shares the byline.

And now, we are busy writing our own books.

Thanks dad.


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