Remembering Country Club Hills

Back in 1966 my parents Nelson and Mary, sister Susan, and I moved from the South Side Brainerd neighborhood of Chicago to the southern suburb of Country Club Hills, Illinois. I myself never warmed to the place, and neither did Susan. She soon rented a 40th floor studio apartment at 1130 South Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago, which made me very envious indeed. Ironically, I now have much of the furnishings of that studio in my condo here in Denver, not to mention furniture from that house in Brainerd. Susan tells me it is like visiting a museum of our past whenever she visits. The photograph on the left is of my mother and our dog Irma in front of our house at 18840 Loretto Lane.

Country Club Hills did not have a country club, nor hills, or for that matter any trees, either. It was a suburb with identical homes, built for young families with children, and I think that is where my intense dislike of suburbs began. Years later, my mother told me she didn't like it there much, either. My father, seen in the photograph on the right, never said anything about the place one way or the other. After 10 years, when I completed high school and college, my parents moved to Stuart, Florida, where my Uncle Bill (my mother's brother) and Aunt Elsie moved several years earlier. My parents both loved it there. My father and Uncle Bill played golf every day (the complex had a par 3 nine hole golf course), and my mother took up golf, too, making more friends there than anywhere else she had lived. I myself at the time was working for Walden Books in North Riverside, Illinois, and moved to my first apartment, a studio in Forest Park, right across the street from the Daisy Hill Meatpacking Plant and the "L" train barn. It actually was my favorite apartment, just a short "L" ride from downtown Chicago.

The one advantage Country Club Hills had was that all my mother's relatives lived close by, just like they had done for all their lives. My Grandmother and Grandfather Spillard and my grandmother's sister Babe and husband Byron all lived in nearby Park Forest. My Uncle Jack (my mother's other brother) and Aunt Helen, my grandmother's sister Irene and her husband Al, and their daughter Marie and son-in-law Ed all lived in Evergreen Park. My mother's three cousins, their spouses, and children all lived in either Country Club Hills or nearby Midlothian. They were a bit of an eccentric bunch, but lots of fun, and I am sad to say that I did not appreciate at the time how wonderful it was to have all your family nearby. The ignorance of youth, I guess. And by the way, the photograph on the left shows Jack London, the husband of our cousin Shirley, and one of our other cousins, Betty, who loved entertaining and had large and fun parties quite often. A shame I didn't drink beer back then.