by Clancy Sigal
My personal GVS, a feudal city-within-a-city with imaginary walls to keep us in and hostile strangers out, was perceived by more prosperous or ethnically unfriendly Chicagoans as a filthy, cockroach-infested, crime-ridden slum full of “kikes,” the lowest form of Jew, crawling up from where they belonged, which was in the slime of Maxwell Street. The upwardly mobile north-side mother of the first girl I ever dated, a Senn High beauty, offered Jennie big money, $100, if she would use her influence to forbid my seeing her daughter. Such was Lawndale’s disrepute. “You shoulda taken the money, Ma,” I brayed. Jennie coldly looked me up and down. “Mrs. Kaiserman probably is right about you. The company you keep, the way you dress. But sell you out to a common snob, never!” The key insult here is common, not snob.
Real Chicago life begins west of Michigan Avenue and the Loop business district, where the vast city is a particular, parochial, and provincial patchwork of watchful neighborhoods. Only in today’s distant suburbs like Highland Park and Winnetka can you get away with saying “I’m from Chicago” without an exact reference to a specific school, parish, tavern, alley. A wealthy real estate developer, who had financed the Sears Tower and was himself a west sider, once refused me an interview until I identified exactly which neighborhood I was from. “Kedzie and sixteenth,” I said. “No,” he demanded, “which corner?”
Fight the Power
On the GVS I never met an accountant, doctor or lawyer, not even an insurance salesman. If such species existed they lived beyond the known limits of my universe. “Middle class” was anyone who had a job no matter how lowly. Studs Terkel once told me he was amazed that so few—almost none—of the Rockets became white-collar professionals. “Neighborhood bums—don’t get me wrong,” he laughed. “But you guys are a statistical improbability.”
One exception. Mr. Freyer, a “people’s lawyer,” lived down the street from us with his wife and a pretty daughter my age named Annette. Jennie moved heaven and earth to make a shidach, a romantic match, between Annette and me because in her mind this would boost me up a social notch. “Such a clean, nice girl,” Ma breathed. Didn’t she know this was the kiss of death? Indeed, the Freyers invited me to dinner, once, and never repeated the experience. When I asked Ma why she just leaned on the Family Hand Laundry counter and looked me up and down appraisingly. “They concede you were polite and well mannered and ate everything they put before you. You didn’t make dirty jokes or raise your voice.”
“So?” I badgered her.
She shrugged. “So … they know.”
“Know what?”
Ma sighed. “It’s written all over you. Kedzie Avenue.”
I protested that Mr. Freyer lived on the same street as us.
She shook her head. “You’ll never be one of them. What’s to become of you?”
“One thing for sure,” I crowed. “Annette Freyer is the big loser on this deal.”
Of course, Annette became one of the few Lawndale girls to go to college, even more rarely became a lawyer like her dad and married a judge. The judge, like so many in Chicago, later went to jail on a graft charge so I came out winners after all, is how I see it.
I was a perfectly ordinary Kedzie Avenue kid with an IQ tested—twice—as “low normal,” an embarrassment to Jennie but a matter of stubborn pride to me. My main ambition was to remain in situ in GVS for the rest of my life and never leave it or my rabble—the Rockets Athletic Club of Greater West Side Chicago, fake red satin jackets and all. The cement sidewalk under my feet was reassuringly solid; the low skyline and long straight streets and prairie perspectives stretching to infinity on the flat Illinois urban plain never changed because in economically sick Chicago time itself stood still, and it was great.
The Great Depression, which for the poor lasted twelve years, from Black Monday 1929 until after Pearl Harbor, was for us boys a sort of stop-time paradise, an anarchic kingdom of our very own.
Life was full of danger but remarkably stable. Divorce was nonexistent because nobody could afford a lawyer. The neighborhood was physically intact as there was no cash incentive for developers to tear down and rebuild. The synagogue, church, school, boys’ club, and street corner that were here in 1933 still stood ten years later. Permanence, of a sort, ruled.
For us preteenage Rockets, the “slum” neighborhood, perceived from the outside as a fetid swamp of crime, vice, and violence, was a vastly amusing playground served by six majestic Greek-columned elementary schools, two high schools and—glory be to the Balaban & Katz theater chain—seven movie houses within easy walking distance. I am a born spy, and just to park my backside on a busy curb and scan the rumbling traffic—pushcart peddlers, street singers, horse-drawn ice wagons, itinerant scissors grinders, roaring streetcars with swaying sparking electric poles, and kids galore running shouting pushing—was better than the best movie ever made.
Without irony, the Rocket-boys I grew up with call Depression-time Lawndale an “endless summer” of time-wasting, with nothing to do but mooch about and dream, bullshit, and fight. Of course, it’s partly nostalgia but also a still-strong sense of what the army calls “unit cohesion.” Most west siders felt so attached to Lawndale that, when they socially scrambled up a notch after World War II, many moved as a group to Rogers Park or Morton Grove and took the old street signs with them; even today, sixty years later, when they are in tonier suburbs like Lincolnwood and Buffalo Grove, west siders continue to see each other, sometimes daily. I know of one poker game consisting of neighborhood guys that has gone on for more than half a century. And three of my best Rocket friends—Ike, Julie, and Hy—have dinner with one another and their families most Monday nights.
Although the crime rackets (whorehouses, bookie joints, fences for stolen merchandise) were Mob-controlled, “civilian” murder was rare in GVS, possibly because the weapons were unobtainable or too expensive. But suicide was a ready option for parents driven to the edge by hard times. Barely anyone we knew shot themselves; gas or rat poison, usually administered by women to themselves, was the preferred method. Even Jennie—for whom self-control under pressure was a kind of religion—when she was off-balance or screaming inside, would suddenly drop to her knees like a penitent in front of the gas stove and flick on the jets without striking a match. Watching in terror, I’d pretend to be bored and yawn, “Ma, be yourself.” Her distraught eyes would slowly refocus. Still kneeling, she’d calmly fix her hair, rise, and walk away in serene composure, and I’d turn off the gas, listening to my beating heart slow down.
Almost all GVS apartments had their “small dark back room” holding a reclusive old country bubbeh or a mother half dead with mental or physical exhaustion, a crazed spinster sister or a depressed father, victims of culture shock compounded by poverty. While we sons enjoyed an astonishing freedom and autonomy, the grown-ups killed themselves, either with one sharp twist of an O’Keefe & Merritt spigot or by degrees with stress and anxiety. The despairing rage that simmered just under the neighborhood skin, sometimes erupting in family brawls, wife beatings, or ax attacks, must have—I’m told—affected us boys for the rest of our lives. But our west side culture survived on denial and iron will. Or, as my best friend and fellow Rocket, Ike Lerman (103d Infantry Division, 112 straight days in the line), says, “The reason we won the war was because our generation went into combat already experienced in doing what we were told to do in dangerous situations. That’s what the Depression was all about. You ate shit and didn’t complain.”
But for Ike, Deaf Augie, Julie, Oscar, Marvin, Mendy, Albie, Hy, Legs, and Barney, the troubled 1930s was a time of unparalleled freedom.
My ten-year-old son Joe protests, “Movies cost only a dime? And your mother let you go alone? No way!”
Rules Is Rules
Today’s gang warfare is random, impulsive, drive-by, Uzis and Glocks spraying innocent bystanders; our GVS violence was contained within a neighborhood crime structure that had natural laws and limits. The organized syndicate out of Capone’s Cicero
ran all the “legit” crime, like bookies and whores, and in that world only guys who skimmed or didn’t pay up on time had their legs broken, or, if the infraction was serious enough, targeted for a hit. Betting on a fixed race was okay, but collecting twice through a dummy bettor was a cause for capital punishment. Everyone, including children, knew the code, the hierarchy, and where the operations were located. Every block had its fixer. “Zimmy,” precinct captain under Arthur Elrod (who served God himself, Jake Arvey, alderman and kingmaker of the twenty-fourth ward) was our fixer. In return for my mother’s vote and some cash, Zimmy got my name erased from the Pulaski Street police station blotter, and in return for Ma’s promise to pet out the people on our side of the street for Democrats we received a Thanksgiving basket and a vague promise of a city job when the Irish quota was full. Cops routinely protected the rackets according to a fixed fee schedule. (In the 1960s, after a series of unusually flagrant scandals, a new police superintendent, Orlando Wilson, cracked down on institutionalized bribery, a reform that shook the moral foundations of Chicago citizenry long acclimatized to cop graft. One police lieutenant complained to me that, as a result of the anticorruption rules, his income was halved overnight. “This new system,” he sighed, “nobody knows where they stand anymore. Yesterday I stop this car for speeding on Outer Drive. Driver holds out the usual twenty with his driver’s license. I step back and say, “No thank you.” I thought the guy would faint.”)
There were hardly any gang murders on the west side because there were no competing mobs. The chance that Jesus could set up a table at Temple Anshe Sholem was as good as rival gangsters surviving Capone retribution. The poolroom/bookie joints where I hung out—Davey Miller’s, Putty Anixter’s, Zucky’s—suffered no competition. Occasionally some half-brained entrepreneur would try to open a lunchroom or horse parlor across from an already established crook joint, but it was always followed by a mysterious explosion and fire.
The only exception to this tightly structured system of controlled crime was Davey Miller’s poolroom near our store where super-tough but un-Mob-organized Jewish guys hung out. They were the muscle armed with baseball bats and tire chains who went after the Italians ganging up on Jews or fought down at the beach when goyim tried to keep Jews off of it. For Davey Miller’s boys, the Jewish role models were not Albert Einstein or Justice Felix Frankfurter but two neighborhood pugs: Barney Ross (Barnet Rosofsky), a Capone apprentice (and son of an Orthodox rabbi murdered in a dairy store robbery) whose three hundredth bout was an epic fifteen-rounder against the three-time titleholder Henry Louis Armstrong; and “Kingfish” Levinsky, who fought all comers even after Joe Louis knocked him out in the first round. (Later, Barney Ross became a Marine hero on Guadalcanal, and the Kingfish ended his own career by hawking men’s ties all over GVS.)
In our child’s kingdom, a high level of physical aggression was accepted as a normal expression of friendship, and we’d flail away at each other on no pretext other than the sheer joy of hitting and getting hit. Some nights I’d return home with a smashed eye or blood-snotted nose and Jennie would cry, “Did a car hit you?” “No, just playing with the guys,” I’d say truthfully.
We Rockets had a strict sense of honor with clear rules: (a) Nobody was to earn a higher classroom grade than anybody else; (b) Status was conferred ambiguously; I became a Rocket hero when left behind in a “subnormal” (retarded, or special-ed) class along with the deafies, pink-eyed albinos, and other local dummies; (c) You never left the group for any reason other than death.
One incident: On the first day of school after summer break there was a Howland Elementary assembly to distribute prizes to deserving pupils. No Rocket had ever won a school prize, and on pain of torture none ever would. We lounged arrogantly in the back row, kicking the seats in front of us, when out of the blue, to my horror, the principal called my name. “To Clarence Sigal—for reading the most library books over the summer vacation.” The branch librarian, whom I’d sworn to secrecy, had ratted me out! Half a dozen pairs of Rocket eyes launched themselves like missiles at me. I was caught. Reading was my secret pleasure, like jacking off in Mrs. Zaretzky’s bathtub.
“Get up, pansy,” Albie Lesher hissed, the guys staring at me as if I was a total stranger. The principal called out cheerily, “Don’t be bashful, Clarence. Please come up and accept your award.” In agonizingly slow motion I squirmed out of my seat and edged toward the aisle, my face burning with shame, as each of the Rockets savagely kicked, punched, and tore at me. By the time I fell headlong into the aisle I had a cut lip and my clean white shirt was out of my knickers and ripped down my back.
Clambering onstage, I numbly accepted the school prize, a rosette of Howland school colors, blue and white with a ribbon hanging down. The assembly politely applauded, and I tried skulking away, but the principal pulled me back and made me face the audience. Way in back I saw Albie, Nate, Ike, Deaf Augie, and the others rollicking with sneering laughter. How to preserve my honor? On brilliant impulse I stuffed the blue ribbon into my mouth and in slow, grinding, clownish movements began chewing it to pieces. The principal and the teachers in the front row simply stared, but my boys burst into thunderous, approving hand claps that continued until the ribbon disappeared into my balloon cheeks and halfway down my gullet, leaving the rosette to scrape my bruised lips and almost choking me with the little pin stuck in the ribbon. Thus, honor restored, I held up my arms like Max Baer after winning a fight and made a little war dance, proving once and for all that I was no snitch, no brain. Rockets now and forever!
Who They Were
One boy equals one brain
Two boys equal two brains
Three or more boys equal no brain
—old saying
The Rockets, all nine or ten of us, moved and thought collectively as a slug-like amoeba, expanding and contracting on whim, sometimes more cellular than distinctly human. There was no leader, no charismatic crack-the-whip boss, no agenda, no purpose or point. That was the point. The club—gang, posse, whatever—existed within its own contradictions; you asserted your individual autonomy through its mass-think. I felt most comfortable and independent inside a conformist mob of undisciplined, mouthy, and impulsive Rockets. They gave me the strength to ultimately leave them.
There was nothing smudgy or indeterminate about each Rocket’s personality. Character was bound up in the all-important look that you were either born with or had improved with hair oil, Mennen’s aftershave lotion, or a particular article of clothing regarded as ultimate cool. Albie (Albert) Lesher, the only one of us reputed to have actually “done it” with a girl, was almost bald at thirteen, with a sexual smirk permanently planted on his Arthur Millerish face. Even in his adolescence, Heshie (Hillel) Wolinsky looked middle-aged and sober. He, too, was losing his hair; thoughtful where we were careless, his surface calm was subverted only by startling outbursts of obscenity directed at girls, remarks nauseating even by our abysmal standards. My best friend, Ike (Isaac) Lerman, was an open-faced, gentle (at most times), hard-punching (at other times) slugger who policed our conduct for club rule infractions; lonely and troubled, he hated to go home at night to his dark apartment (electricity cut off), which was virtually barren of food. (Jennie fed him Jello and Pepsi-Cola, which he’d never tasted before.) Legs (Ben) Glasser was a bookie runner earning a significant income and the only one of us in organized sports—a second-string varsity basketball center for the all-city Marshall High team. Built like a young Mr. Universe, he already knew he was going to marry Marion Lebedeff. He was a scrappy young Maccabee with a grown man’s outlook. Deaf Augie (August Bauer), plumply passive, smiled at everyone all the time and would do anything you hand-signaled him to do; later, in his early twenties, it was discovered he had been misdiagnosed and he regained his hearing after surgery to remove the wax in his ears. The freckled redhead Julie (Julius) Wax had the meanest punch and played the nastiest pranks—you’d turn a corner and he’d smash a lemon crème pie in your face. He was a
math whiz though none of us knew it at the time because we would have whipped his ass for being superior. Oscar Guttierez’s father was serving time in Joliet prison for burglary; Jennie washed my mouth out with Lifebuoy soap for the last time when I called his dad a “jailbird” and made Oscar, ordinarily tough as nails, cry; he was a sweet quiet boy, a go-along get-along kid and dynamite in street fights. Mendy (Mordecai) Rapp was pure corner bum, foulmouthed and affable, a permanent school truant who spent most of his time roaming the streets and looking for trouble. He later teamed with a couple of neighborhood toughs, “Indian” and “Charley,” to work as a strong-arm artist and, maybe because he’d seen too many crime movies, crashed out of a second-story apartment window during a police barricade. High-wired Hy (Hyman) Zimmerman, the most jittery Rocket, had a crush on his own sister, over whose sexual life he appointed himself supervisor with our lynch-mob assistance. And Nate (Nathan) Manoff, the smallest and most cunning Rocket, provoked street-corner brawls from which he somehow always seemed to escape while others took their lumps; Nate tootled clarinet in the school orchestra and ambled along Roosevelt Road humming Mozart and had a habit of jumping on my back and hammering me for no particular reason.