“Three-fifteen and here you are,” Aunt Mary said. “Just like you said.”
Will, Clyde, and I were already out of the car, rubbing the miles out of our kidneys. “Three thirty-seven, actually,” Will said. “But here we are. All the way from Bennett’s Corners, Ohio.”
She saw the cotton sticking out of Clyde’s sideways head. “You got an earache, honey?”
Clyde poured it on. “My ear’s badly afflicted with wax, Aunt Mary.”
She pulled Clyde’s pained face into her swollen, sympathetic bosom. “You just give me a hug.” What I wouldn’t have given for a little ear wax at that moment.
Will was next in line for a hug. “We passed Uncle Fritz up the street.”
“He wouldn’t take a ride,” I said.
Aunt Mary finished hugging Will and extended her hand for a shake. “You must be the famous Ace Gilbert.”
“That would be me.”
“Will’s told me all about you in his letters. Your daddy was a hero in the war.”
“He flew with Eddie Rickenbacker in the famous 94th. Between them they sent twenty-seven of those butchering Huns into the vineyards.”
I saw her eyes giggle at the Gilbert SXIII. “Looks like you plan to follow in your daddy’s footsteps.”
“Absolutely. Soon as there’s another war.”
Then she did it. Buried my face in her bosom just like I was a third nephew. “Well, I’ll tell you what, Ace Gilbert,” my muffled ears heard her say. “If you want to stay alive until the next war, I wouldn’t mention butchering Huns around my Fritzie.”
“Absolutely not,” I echoed into her cleavage.
“We better get the tent set up,” Will said. I’m sure he saw I was enjoying my hug a little too much.
We started unloading our gear. Aunt Mary offered us each a bed in the house, but Will insisted we needed practice setting up the tent. “It hasn’t been up since Dad took our scout troop camping to Niagara Falls.”
She frowned and nodded. She knew that camping trip was just two weeks before his father’s embarrassing death. “How is your mother doing?”
“Well enough to drive me crazy,” Will said.
“That’s my sister.”
“She’s doing fine,” Will said.
“You know I worry.”
“I know. We’re all doing fine.”
“Except for my damn ear,” Clyde added.
“I hope your mother had enough sense to get you some medicine.”
“Got a whole bottle of drops in the car,” Clyde said proudly. “Take a squirt every four hours.”
Aunt Mary waved at her Fritzie, who was still several houses away. “Good. I never saw anybody hold onto a dollar like your mother.”
“Money and mother are a legend,” Will agreed.
“That’s for sure. I hope she’s getting good use of that apron I made her for Christmas.”
Clyde informed his aunt she’d torn it up for kitchen rags.
Will’s eyes went to blinking. “Jeez, Clyde! Red just isn’t her color, Aunt Mary.”
She laughed so hard she had to grab her knees. “Kitchen rags? At least she’s getting good use of it.”
The Gilbert SXIII was unloaded. Uncle Fritz was working his way up the lawn, playing with his beagles. “Say, Aunt Mary,” Will said. “Let me get a picture of you and Uncle Fritz by the car with Ace and Clyde. I’m keeping a photographic record of our historic pilgrimage.”
She was all for it. Uncle Fritz waved us off in disgust and went inside. But the beagles joined in the photograph. It’s one of my favorite pictures from our trip to Chicago. I’ve still got it. Along with the others. Mrs. Randall gave them to me along with some of Will’s other things after I returned from England in 1946. Too bad Will wasn’t in the picture along with me and Clyde and Aunt Mary and those three sniffing dogs. But I know he snapped it. So I guess he’s in the picture as much as the rest of us.
Will wanted to build a campfire in the backyard and cook some beans and brew a pot of coffee. But his aunt insisted we have a proper supper inside. Roast chicken and baked potatoes. Canned corn and rolls. Bowls and platters passing clockwise and counterclockwise around the table in a minuet of near misses. It wasn’t long before talk turned to our encounter with that hillbilly gangster on U.S. 20 between Rolling Prairie and Bootjack.
“You must have been scared to death,” Aunt Mary said. “More corn, anybody?”
Will waved off the bowl. “It all happened pretty fast. Ka-boom. ka-boom.”
She made him take more corn anyway. “I’m sure I would have wet myself.”
“I think that farmer did,” I said, adding some drama to our encounter. From my chair I could see the beagles on the porch, pawing and licking the window.
“At least you’re all safe. Have another potato, Ace. They’re small.”
“Small potatoes,” Will laughed.
“Doze robbers sound like a couple no-good communists to me,” Fritz said.
“They were nice enough to give us those melons,” I pointed out.
“Nice enough to give you da farmer’s melons,” he said. “Dey was communists OK.”
Aunt Mary sent the chicken platter on another tour of the table. “Some people are just bad on their own, Fritzie. Not everybody’s a communist.”
“More people den you tink, Mary. Da whole country’s lousy with communists since Mr. Roosevelt.”
For some reason I felt the need to defend the hillbilly and his girl. “I wouldn’t say they were actually bad. They were pretty square with us, anyway.”
“Only because we weren’t rich,” Will reminded me.
“Well, how about Robin Hood?” I said. “He was like that. Stealing from the rich, giving to the poor.”
“Who’s Robin Hood?” Clyde asked.
“Da first communist,” Uncle Fritz said.
Will had the chicken platter in one hand and the plate of rolls in the other. His tongue chased a corn niblet trying to escape over his lower lip. “The way that robber and his girl were dressed, and that fancy car, I don’t think they share too much of their loot with the poor.”
I continued my defense. “All I’m saying is that they were nice to us, regardless of how bad they are to everybody else.”
Aunt Mary wanted me to shut up. “Eat some more of this delicious chicken, Ace.”
Now Will put his foot in it. “When’d you grow that mustache, Uncle Fritz? You didn’t have it at Christmas.”
“Ace says it makes you look just like Adolf Hitler,” Clyde said. I quickly took the chicken platter.
“Now see, Mary? I told you I’d look just like Mr. Hitler if I grew dis mustache. Now dere’s a man who wouldn’t put up with all dese communists shooting up everybody’s melons.”
That time I went to see Mary in Michigan City she told me Fritz felt so betrayed when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, that he not only shaved his mustache, but changed his named to Bob and sent three hundred dollars to the Sons of Warsaw in Chicago. He gathered more scrap metal for the war effort than anyone in Valparaiso. But in August 1934, Uncle Fritz was still very high on the no-nonsense Mr. Hitler.
We finished dinner and rushed into the living room for pie and radio.
It was cherry pie. Tart. Top crust sprinkled liberally with sugar. While Will and Clyde watched Uncle Fritz play with the radio dial, I watched Aunt Mary clear the dining room table. Better than a striptease. Stretching for the empty potato bowl. Bending for the corn bowl. Back and forth from the kitchen. Hips meandering like the wide Maumee.
Uncle Fritz loved his radio. It was a big six-tube Distatone. Beautiful walnut cabinet with mahogany inlays. Ornate pillars running up the sides. It sat on a table by his rocker, as imposing as the Ark of the Covenant, imparting the voices of faraway gods. We huddled around that Distatone for the next four and a half hours listening to what Uncle Fritz wanted to listen to. No talking allowed. No fork clinking allowed. No laughing. Even a squirm got a scowl.
There were three national r
adio networks then: one operated by the Columbia Broadcasting System and two by the National Broadcasting Company, NBC Red and NBC Blue. Chicago I believe had two CBS stations, two NBC Red stations, and four NBC Blue stations. Add to those all the independent stations and all the signals floating in from other cities and, well, you had a real beehive. There was more variety on radio than cable TV today. Drama. Comedy. Sports. Music for every taste. News. Political harangues from left and right. Gossip. More advice than you could use in a hundred lifetimes. Religion so fierce you wanted to jump off a barn roof. Anything you desired could be had by rolling that magic dial up and down the kilocycles. None of the slime you get today, of course, but occasionally things did get a little cheeky.
Uncle Fritz had us on the sofa with our pie right at 5:30. He thumbed the dial to WBBM, one of Chicago’s two CBS network stations. The announcer’s voice exploded: “Wheaties, breakfast of champions, brings you the thrilling adventures of Jack Armstrong, All-American boy!” We all loved Jack Armstrong back in Bennett’s Corners. Jack was just like us, and his fictitious Hudson High just like our real Brunswick High, except Brunswick High never produced too many heinous crimes that needed solving by a boy. Like most of the serial dramas of the day, Jack Armstrong lasted just fifteen minutes.
Next came a program called Little Italy, right there on WBBM, fifteen minutes of phony Italian accents. Uncle Fritz loved it. Next came Colonel Stoopnagle and Budd, on WMAQ, one of the NBC Red network stations. I quietly gathered up the pie plates and took them to the kitchen.
Will’s aunt was taking a sheet of cookies from the oven. I piled the plates in the sink and sat down at the kitchen table. “I’m baking you boys some cookies for your drive up to Chicago,” she said. She took one of the cookies off with a spatula and deposited it right in my mouth.
“I like hot cookies right from the oven,” I said.
“You’re not a fan of Colonel Stoopnagle?”
“He’s about as funny as wet shoes. I thought you might need some help out here.”
“Now I like Little Orphan Annie,” she said, opening the icebox door, bending her housedress tight. “How about a glass of milk, Ace?”
“Nothing better than hot cookies and ice-cold milk.”
She sat across from me and poured me a glass. She started singing the Little Orphan Annie theme song: “Who’s the little chatterbox? The one with the pretty auburn locks? Who can it be? It’s Little Orphan Annie!”
I laughed and sang the next line: “She and Sandy make a pair. They never seem to have a care!”
In the living room Colonel Stoopnagle was putting one over on Budd. Aunt Mary watched me dunk my cookie and suck the milk out of it. The three beagles were watching us through the screen door. “You know, I envy you boys,” she said. “A whole week in Chicago to raise hell.”
I can still feel my shiver. I couldn’t believe a worldly woman like that was saying “raise hell” to a dopey kid like me. “I don’t know about raising much hell,” I said. “Will’s got our entire trip planned minute by minute, looking at one scientific wonder after the other.”
“Well, I hope you find a little time to raise some hell.”
I licked the crumbs off my lip. “Me too.”
“Nothing wrong with a young man your age raising a little hell. It’s natural.”
The way she said natural. Goddamn. Sonofabitch. “How about raising a lot of hell?” I asked.
She pretended to frown. “I’m not so sure about a lot of hell, but raising a little hell is an absolute requirement of growing up.”
You can imagine what that word absolute did to me. “An absolute requirement,” I repeated. Colonel Stoopnagle signed off. Uncle Fritz thumbed the dial back to WBBM for Just Plain Bill, fifteen minutes about the kindly barber of Hartville, brought to us by Whitehall Pharmaceutical Company, the makers of Anacin.
She broke off a corner of my cookie and nibbled on it. “Boys are born with more than one extra organ, you know.”
Organ. I was ready to faint. “They are?”
“Uh-huh. And that extra little organ works away quietly year after year, deep inside them, storing up drop after drop of hell-raising juice.”
“Hell-raising juice?”
“Uh-huh. And when a boy gets a certain age that extra little organ gets so full, some of that juice just has to spill. He might explode into a million pieces otherwise. Want another cookie, Ace? While they’re still hot?”
Spill. Explode. You bet I wanted another cookie. I watched her move inside her dress all the way to the counter and back. “What about girls?” I asked. “Do they ever fill up with that hell-raising juice?”
“Sometimes they do.”
Like a fool I called her Mary. “You ever, Mary?”
She shot me a wicked wink. “I guess I was pretty full of it my senior year. When I went to the state spelling bee. Two days and two nights free as a bird in Cincinnati.”
Sin-sin-atti. “So, did you get a chance to spill any of it?”
“The last night there I did.”
“What’d you do?”
Her eyes froze on the icebox door. “I’m not so sure what I did. Except the next morning I came in eighty-seventh out of eighty-eight at the bee.”
“What word tripped you up?”
Her eyes left the icebox and landed square on mine. “I think it was yes.”
Well, that did it. I threw my face across the table and sucked her on the mouth like a nursing calf. I cooled my fire with a long drink of milk. I could feel the mustache it left.
She didn’t get mad and she didn’t laugh. She moved her face close to mine and wiped the milk off my upper lip with her little finger. “Naughty naughty, Ace Gilbert,” she said. For the rest of my life, whenever I made love to a woman, “Naughty naughty, Ace Gilbert” rang in my ears, enhancing the experience greatly.
She slid out of her chair and headed for the doorway. “Buck Rogers is coming on next, I think. You like Buck Rogers, don’t you, Ace?”
“Absolutely.”
Buck Rogers was in fact next, right there on WBBM. It was only 6:30 Chicago time, but following Aunt Mary out of that kitchen, I was years older than I’d been going in. I’d been toyed with by an older woman, two rooms away from her German husband. I felt wonderful.
The Goldbergs came on at 6:45 on WENR, an NBC Blue station. I laughed out loud when Molly Goldberg gave us her very Yiddish “Yoo-hoo! Is anybody?” Uncle Fritz shushed me. “Laugh to yourself inside,” he growled, “so da rest of us can hear what’s funny, too.”
At 7:00 he thumbed in WMAQ on NBC Red for the Eno Crime Clues program, a half-hour detective show we all listened to in Bennett’s Corners. Halfway through the clues he thumbed to WBBM to hear Singin’ Sam the Barbasol Man. At 7:15 he thumbed the dial back to WMAQ for Lady Esther Serenade, a half-hour music program featuring the Wayne King Orchestra. Halfway through he thumbed to WLS, another NBC Blue station, to hear Trade and Mark, a team of song-and-patter men who made up with long shaggy beards like the Smith Brothers on the cough drop boxes. At 8:00 he stayed on WLS for Ben Bernie’s Blue Ribbon Orchestra. The Old Maestro was a legend. Everybody knew his closing by heart: “Until the next time when … possibly you may tune in again … keep the Old Maestro always in your schemes … Yowsah. Yowsah. Yowsah … Au Revoir!” We didn’t dare sing along. But back home in Bennett’s Corners I’m sure everybody was.
At 8:30 Uncle Fritz thumbed back to WMAQ for the Texaco Star Theater featuring Ed Wynn, The Fire Chief. It was hard to keep your laughs inside with a guy funny as Ed Wynn. But we managed. At 9:00 Fritz stayed with WMAQ for Lives at Stake, real-life death defying stories accompanied by the Harold Stokes Orchestra. Aunt Mary helped Clyde with his drops. At 9:30 we stayed tuned to WMAQ for Madame Sylvia’s Hollywood Interviews. She gabbed for fifteen minutes—minus the advertisements for cold cream and lipstick—with Maureen O’ Sullivan, who was currently starring with Johnny Weismuller in Tarzan and his Mate.
One by one we made trips to the bathr
oom, except for Uncle Fritz, who dutifully stayed in his rocker, thumb ready. At 9:45 it was over to WBBM for Myrt and Marge. This was a fluffy serial about two career girls struggling to make it big in New York City. At 10:00 the dial was back on WMAQ for Amos ‘n’ Andy. White guys talking like Negroes. We all wanted to laugh out loud. Even Uncle Fritz. It was the thirties and laughing at Negroes was just as proper as laughing at Italians, Jews, country barbers, ambitious women, and Arkansas hillbillies like Lum and Abner, who came on at 10:15 on WENR, on NBC Blue.
At 10:30 we went out to the tent. The three beagles had peed all over the flap, making that old bag of canvas smell even worse than it already did.
“You see machines that tabulate, sort and file. They can automatically sort out any group of cards from a file of hundreds of thousands in a few minutes. Books and records are kept by machinery. Intricate tasks that would require thousands of eyes and fingers are rattled off at a dizzy speed.”
OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR
Seven/Whizzing By
Will, Clyde, and I lined up like sardines on the tent floor, our noses itching from the stink of fresh dog urine and moldy canvas. Will clicked off his flashlight. “This is something, isn’t it?” he said.
“If you mean how the tent smells, it’s something all right,” I said.
“I mean just being here. Almost to Chicago. On the greatest adventure of our lives.”
“I just wish you two would shut up and go to sleep,” Clyde said. “I don’t want be awake when my ear starts aching.”
Going to Chicago Page 5