My mother Mary grew up living around 57th and Prairie (5731 South Prairie Avenue to be exact), on the south side of Chicago, and attended elementary school at nearby St. Anslem's (her grandmother paid the tuition, since the family did not have much money). Mother often talked about here life there, and I have a photograph of her - which I have put several times on this blog - as a child standing if front of the "L" tracks, which ran behind their building. And so I was thrilled to find the photograph on the left of my Grandmother Spillard and my mother's brother (my Uncle Bill) underneath the "L" tracks with the back of their building in the background. It gives a good idea of what the place was like back in the 1920s when they lived there. I went back to Chicago in April of 2010, by the way, and visited all the old sites, including Prairie Avenue. The building they lived in is now a vacant lot, but it's neighbors are still there, and an expensive condo project was being built across the street. Gentrification had finally reached 57th and Prairie.
My Uncle Bill, by the way, was quite a character in his own right. He was an insurance adjuster, and was transferred to Cleveland early in his career, where he met and married my Aunt Elsie. He often came back to Chicago on business, and would stay with us when he did. His visits were always a happy occasion. I remember one visit he and my father Nelson and I drove to the Lincoln Park Zoo one afternoon, a visit that I remember to this day. Another time he and my father met me at Brainerd Park, located in the center of the South Side Brainerd neighborhood, where I was playing baseball, and he convinced my father to buy me a baseball glove. I also remember one time him reading out loud a Chicago Daily News story, in a dramatic voice, about the horrible conditions in the Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project that lined the Dan Ryan Expressway, and now thankfully gone. He is seen in the photograph on the right in the backyard of my grandparents flat on East 85th place during one of those visits. When he and Aunt Elsie, and shortly after them, my parents, moved to Stuart, Florida, we took a sightseeing boat cruise, and it ran aground on a sandbar. We were stuck there for hours, but they lowered the price of beer to a nickel, and there was a piano player, and my Uncle Bill spent the entire time singing old time favorites. We were finally rescued that night when the company's fishing boat came back from a day on the ocean, dropped off it's passengers, and came back for us. Happy memories.
