Due to the coronavirus pandemic, we have been hearing a lot about 2020 graduating classes not being able to have traditional ceremonies this year. And I mean hearing about it REALLY a lot - maybe way too much, but that is just my opinion. Regardless, it reminds me of Fort Dearborn Grammar School, back in the South Side Brainerd neighborhood of Chicago, which both my sister Susan and I attended and from where we graduated. Susan liked grammar school, while I myself hated it. Classes went until mid-June, and I remember sitting in the classroom, with the windows open and the sound of lawnmowers in the background, counting the days until school was over. And finally back in 1966 I graduated, and on that day we took photographs in the backyard of our house, although curiously we did not have the film developed for another 3 years. In the photo on the left I am posing with my Grandmother Spillard (my mother's mother) and my mother Mary.
My sister Susan graduated 11 years earlier, and can be seen in the photograph on the right posing in front on my father Nelson's Nash, back in June of 1955 (I think). When I visited Chicago 10 years ago, I visited Brainerd, and Fort Dearborn looked just the same as ever. I put together a book titled The Journey Home: Returning to Chicago, about my trip back there after almost 30 years, and included photographs of Fort Dearborn, as well as the rest of the old neighborhood. You can check it out at https://www.blurb.com/b/1361398-the-journey-home-returning-to-chicago. And even buy a copy if you have 50 bucks lying around.
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