All Gone to Look for America

by Peter Millar

  The trouble is that the nice kitchen – which I had had described to me in intricate detail as an absolute design classic – wasn’t quite nice enough. It’s gone. What had astonished her cousin so much was that Helen had been the not-so-proud possessor of an American kitchen circa 1950. Whereas any British housewife would of course be rightly horrified to have a British kitchen circa 1950, an American one was something else altogether. Not only had it had a refrigerator large enough to stand in – at a time when most people in Britain kept things cool by leaving them on the outside windowsill – but it had a built-in oven, something that has only made a serious impact on the British domestic scene in the past decade or so. Certainly not more than half a century ago. And it was pink! Bright puce pink. To die for.

  Unfortunately the British, and wider European, craze for retro kitchenware that echoes classic American designs of the 1950s – we have just taken proud possession of a maroon 1950s-style American fridge freezer, made in 2007, in Slovenia – hasn’t quite caught on in America itself. As far as Helen was concerned, her classic kitchen was an antique eyesore, and just months before we arrived, blissfully unaware of our enthusiasm for her dated household fittings, she had had the whole lot ripped out and replaced. With the smartest modern technology. But we all have that nowadays: chalk up another victim of globalisation. America used to represent a vision of our future; now it’s just another flavour of today.

  Next morning I have occasion to investigate another of those American icons that used to seem so futuristic and exotic until varieties of them opened next door to us: the drugstore. I first got acquainted with the concept in France, where they took to ‘le drugstore’ with some enthusiasm early on. I remember sitting in one on the Champs Elysées circa 1977 thinking what a very strange establishment it was that mixed chemist’s, tobacconist’s, corner shop and ice-cream parlour all in one.

  Back then, of course, the French were still blissfully ignorant of what even they now call ‘l’allowine’. Here in Chicago, the month-long run-up to Hallowe’en is already in full swing which is why going into a place that supposedly sells cures for ailments I find myself greeted by a death’s head and a dangling life-size skeleton the precise putrid pale green colour of the stuff I’m trying to stop dribbling from my nose. It is one of the drawbacks about long train journeys that the carriages take on some of the characteristics of aircraft: they become a great social rendezvous point for germs, and over the previous 24 hours I reckon I’ve picked up at least one or two joyriders. In other words I had come to a drugstore to pick up some drugs, in the purely pharmaceutical sense.

  Even more annoying than my runny nose, however, is an incipient sore throat that in my personal experience can presage something worse. What I want is Strepsils, or Tyrozets. But those brands appear to be unknown over here and I have no idea what the equivalent might be. As a result I’m standing there scanning the vast array of things vaguely intended to do the necessary job, but all of which seemed excessively medical, not to mention unnecessarily explicit in their discussion of symptoms.

  ‘Do you think you want a “demulcent”?’ the wife asks, with a note of humour in her voice which I’m not sure is inspired by the gruesomely technical name or just Schadenfreude at my predicament. I have absolutely no idea what a ‘demulcent’ might be or do, although I reluctantly admit the products advertised as combating ‘mucus build-up’ might be on my list, though I would rather not have been reminded of it in quite those words. What I really want is something vaguely medicinal-flavoured to suck that would have the same effect as in those old adverts where some bloke with a runny nose sucks a little square sweet and all of a sudden goes around demonstrating his wonderfully clear nasal passages by singing the brand name.

  What I really did not want – just at this precise moment – is some of that good old, wholly genuine, completely spontaneous, endlessly irritating American enthusiasm for meeting strangers.

  ‘You from England?’ says the jovially smiling gent in blue blazer, red tie and slacks, the raised intonation implying a rhetorical question rather than a statement of the blindingly obvious after hearing me ask for cold remedies from an assistant.

  ‘Yes, indeed. London,’ I add, using the line of least resistance. It’s not actually true, but most Americans have heard of it. Quite a few have even been there, although this is not always an advantage.

  ‘I’ve been to London,’ says the jolly moon-shaped face beaming beneficence upon me, while preventing me from seeing if there were any nasal decongestant lozenges behind him.

  ‘Really,’ I don’t say. I have learnt that there is no point in encouraging them. But this bloke needs no encouragement.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, in response to the ‘really’ I hadn’t uttered. ‘Back in the late fifties,’ which confirms my estimate of his age. ‘I stayed just in front of Buckingham Palace.’

  Now, it’s not impossible, but even in the days of post-war belt-tightening I doubt very much if they erected tent hostels in either Green Park or St James’s and if they did whether visiting Americans stayed in them.

  ‘That’s when I saw the queen,’ he says, with the air of a magician producing Kylie Minogue from a beret, as if he somehow expects me to prostrate myself on the floor of a Chicago drugstore facing in the direction of Big Ben at the merest mention of Her Majesty.

  ‘Oh, really,’ I venture, in a way intended to suggest that if he wants to indulge his enthusiasm for the British monarchy in public I might not be the best audience.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ he continues, undismayed (unlike me). ‘She was making an impromptu appearance. We were standing outside the gates, just as her car pulled out,’ my genial, well-meaning Anglophile is drifting into happy memory mode, ‘and she waved,’ he says, displaying the pack of verucca pads clutched in his left hand, reinforcing my belief that other people’s personal complaints should be kept on a “need to know” only basis.

  ‘Not at me, well not directly,’ he adds modestly. ‘She was going,’ he informs me sombrely, ‘to lay flowers at the tomb of Winston Churchill in Westminster Abbey.’

  Were I sadistic enough to scar an old man’s crystallised memory – and at this stage I was tempted – I might have pointed out that HM would have been getting it seriously wrong in that case, as old Winnie was in fact buried not in the abbey but in the village churchyard at Bladon in Oxfordshire. But even more particularly because in the late 1950s he was still alive and very much kicking and would have loudly objected to being buried anywhere at all for another half dozen years.

  Happily however, fate intervenes at this precise moment as my eyes light on a packet of Halls honey-menthol-eucalyptus lozenges – a familiar brand riding to the rescue like the 7th Cavalry in an ‘Injun’ ambush. Kemo Sabe, white man, I’m outta here. I head for the till, flashing him a broad smile of my typical rock garden British teeth, that I hope he might just possibly interpret as meaning my life had been enriched by our meeting. He waved back, looking genuinely as if his had. I felt like a shit, but sometimes you just can’t take too much niceness.

  And in any case, today’s the day we’ve chosen to look up Chicago’s legendary bad boys. Oddly Chicago city tourism officials make absolutely nothing of them, and yet they form much of the backdrop of what most tourists know of their city: the crime scenes. Yes, I know twenty-first-century Chicago may have one of the world’s premier orchestras and some amazing ballerinas and operas and whatever. But if you’re a tourist the image of a man in Chicago carrying a violin case doesn’t suggest he’s on his way to a Vivaldi recital. At least not in that Jimmy Cagney suit. Let’s face it, the musical that’s put Chicago back on every culture vulture’s lips, isn’t about the city’s flourishing gay scene, or the annual Grant Park music festival, it’s yet another hackneyed exploitation of the phoney glamour of the gangster age which it milks for every red – bloodsoaked – nickel. And why the heck not?

  Can it really be that the twenty-first-century city fathers are so afraid of a resurgence o
f their vibrant modern metropolis’s violent past that there is absolutely nothing to commemorate one of its most famous events: the St Valentine’s Day massacre? Mobster Al Capone’s 1929 ruse to lure seven men from rival ‘Bugsy’ Moran’s gang to a garage where his own hoods, dressed as police officers, tied them up and then riddled them with bullets, has not only been immortalised in the movies but become a minor part of modern mythology. People may try to make myths, but they make themselves, and it’s a mug’s game trying to ignore them. But that’s what Chicago does. It took us hours wandering around North Side to locate two of the sights I absolutely wasn’t going to leave Chicago without seeing. The first was – marginally – easier to locate than the second, but only with a map reference.

  Between July 1933 and June 1934, John ‘Jackrabbit’ Dillinger robbed no fewer than 10 banks in Indiana and Illinois, escaped from an ‘escape-proof’ jail with a fake gun carved from soap, and earned himself a reputation – almost certainly unjustified – as a latter-day Robin Hood. On 22 July 1934, he decided to take in a gangster movie, Manhattan Melodramas, with his girlfriend Polly Hamilton and Anna Sage, a Romanian brothel keeper, in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago. But Sage had tipped off the FBI, an organisation whose growth was hugely abetted by the largely Chicago-based crime wave of the Prohibition years, and Dillinger was ambushed and shot dead outside the cinema. The Biograph, at 2433 Lincoln Avenue, with its curved light bulb-lined canopy, still exists, but having been shuttered up for years has only recently been restored, although as a theatre rather than a cinema.

  At least the conservationists got there before it might have been pulled down, which was the fate of the site of another of Chicago’s most celebrated gangland incidents, the S-M-C Cartage warehouse at 2122 North Clark Street, where on 14 February 1929 Al Capone orchestrated the gang killing that entered history as the St Valentine’s Day massacre. Capone represented the South Side Outfit who for five years had been engaged in bloody warfare with Bugsy Moran’s North Side Mob for control of the illegal trade in alcohol.

  The day before, Capone arranged for a false tip to Moran that there was to be a consignment of whisky delivered to the warehouse the next morning. Moran himself was late but seven of his men were already there when what appeared to be two police officers appeared. The mobsters thought it was a phoney bust by police on their payroll, but when the ‘police’ opened the garage doors and let in two others in plain clothes they realised differently. Especially when the two newcomers produced Thompson sub-machine guns and cut down the seven in a hail of bullets against the warehouse wall. They then disappeared, leaving a local landlady to call the real police because of the noise of one of the dead men’s dog howling. The officers who eventually did arrive found a scene of carnage that left them traumatised. Moran who had stopped for a coffee and dallied when he saw the phoney police arrive, immediately put the blame on Capone but the ‘Napoleon of Crime’ had the perfect alibi: he was in Florida at the time.

  The building became a place of ghoulish pilgrimage – a bit like mine – for years afterwards, even when it was turned into a furniture warehouse in 1949. But in the 1960s, that decade of ‘cultural revolution’ even in the west, it was needlessly pulled down. Today it is merely a patch of grass which belongs to the next-door nursing home. There are trees planted, allegedly for each of those killed, but not so as you would notice. There are rumours that the site is haunted and that people have heard screams and the staccato rattle of machine-gun fire. But try as hard as I can all I hear on this warm afternoon is the traffic passing by and muzak from the Chicago Pizza bar opposite.

  Today North Side Chicago is quiet, leafy, residential, with three-and four-storey houses in brick dating back to those violent times and before. In fact it is more like a sedate inner suburb of any British city than anything else I have encountered or am to encounter in America. It is also, I am glad to say, especially after a wearisome few hours street-tramping in search of what turned out inevitably to be less than riveting sights, perhaps the busiest area for bars in the whole of Chicago. Without knowing it, we have wandered into the heart of Wrigleyville.

  That’s the nickname for the whole heaving pub and restaurant district around North Clark Street in the immediate vicinity of Wrigley Field, the baseball park that is home to the Chicago Cubs, named in turn after William Wrigley Junior, the chewing gum magnate who owned the team in the 1920s. The baseball season, as I know, having just ended, however, everybody here is watching the football (American, that is), which is mostly college teams; the girl at the bar in the John Barleycorn explains, ‘because the play isn’t so perfect and that makes it more exciting’.

  The beer is pretty perfect though, as even the wife agrees, as we tuck into a couple of frothy wheat beers and discuss when we might bump into one another again, which probably won’t be for several weeks. She has meetings to go to, and I have a continent and more to cross. The John Barleycorn is a fine pub – and I use that word in the fullest, British sense of the word – an old Victorian palace of a place with high columns and a long dark mahogany bar, and a collection of odd artefacts brought back from around the globe by its former Dutch owner.

  It was, fittingly enough, the favourite local of John Dillinger, who was famed for ‘buying the house a round’, which may well have gone some way towards building up his ‘Robin Hood’ reputation. During Prohibition or the previous decade the old saloon, like so many others, had been forced to close down. But like so many others, it only appeared to do so, becoming a Chinese laundry in appearance, while actually the basement was used to store barrels of booze which were served to customers in the apparently closed old saloon rooms upstairs. Nipping out to get the laundry done soon became a frequent habit for the people of Wrigleyville.

  Even with endless college football on big screens in every direction, it’s a fine place to while away a few hours as the afternoon slips into a gentle autumnal dusk. An early night is on the cards.

  The wife has a dawn flight. And I have a date with Hiawatha.

  CHICAGO TO MILWAUKEE

  TRAIN: Hiawatha

  FREQUENCY: 7 a day

  DEPART CHICAGO, ILLINOIS: 10:20 a.m.

  via

  Glenview, IL

  Sturtevant, Wisconsin

  Milwaukee Airport, WI

  ARRIVE MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN: 11:49 a.m.

  DURATION: 1 hour, 29 minutes

  DISTANCE: 86 miles

  7

  Willkommen

  THE TRADITIONAL SOUTH GERMAN dirndl dresses worn by the waitresses would have given it away but the big sign over the door, cut into the stone in elaborate Gothic lettering that says ‘Willkommen’ was clear enough. As was the one over the mock half-timbered exit from the car park that said ‘Auf Wiedersehen’. If the majority of Milwaukee’s original inhabitants had had their way, then Wisconsin’s first city – founded two years before the state itself was incorporated into the union – would have been called something like Mitschiganerhafen or maybe Neustettin.

  In fact Milwaukee was founded by a French Canadian called Solomon Juneau who set up a trading post on the edge of Lake Michigan at a place the local Indians called ‘milioki’ – ‘where the waters join’. By the 1830s the little settlement had become a mecca for immigrants from central and eastern Europe, fleeing the repression and unsettled aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. A substantial number came from Prussian Pomerania, today Poland’s Baltic coast, but also from the rest of the then still fragmented German-speaking princedoms of central and eastern Europe along with Polish and Ukrainian neighbours.

  I had pulled into Milwaukee a few hours earlier on board the long-distance commuter train from Chicago romantically named The Hiawatha, after the most famous of those local ‘Indians’, the second shortest trip – after the shunt from Niagara to Buffalo – that I would undertake on my 10,000 mile rail odyssey. But then I could hardly not stop off in a city renowned as one of America’s prime brewing capitals. What made Milwaukee famous isn’t going to get by with
out a chance of making a boozer out of me.

  The first opportunity of the day is a late lunch at Mader’s restaurant – which despite its obviously German heritage is pronounced English-style as ‘madeerr’ rather than ‘madder’. Mader’s sits in the middle of the schizophrenically named 3rd Street Old World which is what Milwaukee folks call one of the few streets of pre-twentieth-century architecture they haven’t pulled down yet. Already on my walk up here from the station I’ve noticed a disturbingly Buffalo-like tendency to knock things down and not replace them. I can’t help wondering what it is you need to escape the bulldozers round here.

  Whatever it takes, Mader’s obviously has it. The place is almost a historic monument, a testimony to the one-time pulling power of the local German vote, as witnessed by visits from Presidents Truman, Kennedy and Reagan. The politicians competed with the stars of stage and screen to visit Mader’s and pour a few ‘steins’ of lager down their necks to accompany a Sauerbraten or a Schweineshaxe. ‘I have never enjoyed food as much as I have yours. Thanks for the fourth pork shank,’ wrote Oliver Hardy, who had certainly dealt with a few in his time, on a menu card on display. Other memorabilia testify that Cary Grant was a fan, as was Boris Karloff.