The Indiana Dunes (now Indiana Dunes National Park) has been a popular getaway for people from the South Side of Chicago for many years now. When my parents Nelson and Mary were dating back in the late 1930s, they and their friends would often go there on weekends during the summer. It was really not that far away, just a bit east of Gary, and featured not only those famous sand dunes, but also very fine beaches along the southern end of Lake Michigan. The photograph above is of my mother and father on one such weekend back in 1937. When I was going to college, I would sometimes drive out there myself to take photographs, and often I would bring my bike, park in Michigan City, and then bicycle along the water to Grand Beach, Michigan, where the Daley family had a house along the shore. Richard J. Daley, who was mayor of Chicago from 1955 to 1976 (my formative years), and his wife Sis lived in a humble bungalow in the South Side Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago, staying true to their Irish roots. Until Friday afternoon, that is, when a helicopter would whisk them away to Grand Beach, where they would stay until Monday morning. I often biked to the gate of that beach house before turning around, seeing as how the Chicago cops guarding the place would probably shoot me if I tried to pay the Daley family an impromptu visit. Daley's son, Richard M. Daley, who served as mayor of Chicago from 1989 to 2011, and his family still own the place, by the way, but I haven't visited them, either. Yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment