Back when I was growing up in the Brainerd neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, I attended Fort Dearborn Grammar School, and just hated it. I couldn't wait for summer vacation to begin, but in the meantime, cherished each holiday or snow day during the school year. In February, a cold and snowy month in Chicago, we got two days off- both Lincoln and Washington's birthdays. However, thanks to heavy lobbying by the travel industry, new legislation required many holidays to be celebrated on Mondays, and Lincoln and Washington's birthdays were combined into President's Day, taking away a school holiday for generations of students. The law did not take effect until 1971, and since I graduated from Rich Central High School the previous June, I was not affected by this outrage. I don't know if there were protests by students and school walkouts, but if not, there should have been. The photograph above, by the way, is of Fort Dearborn Grammar School, which I took when I went back to Chicago to visit in 2010. In it, I am holding a photo of one of the Kloak kids that I took back in the early 1960s on the way home - very happily, I might add - from Fort Dearborn.
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