by David Nelson
Even his best friend, Danny, was not good enough for his sister. “I actually had a crush on Syble for a while,” Danny said. “But I didn’t want Billy to get mad at me.”
But it was their mother, Lola, who was in charge of their overall well-being. With six mouths to feed, plus their stepfather, Lola threw herself into all sorts of jobs. She managed buildings, babysat neighbor children, peeled potatoes at restaurants, and cleaned up during overnight shifts. “Whatever it took to pay the bills,” Syble remembered of her mother.
Lola ensured that her kids knew the value of hard work too, assigning chores so that they learned how to clean and take care of themselves. “My mom always taught hygiene,” Syble said, remembering how white her brother Billy’s teeth were. “He was probably the neatest one in the neighborhood.”
The kids always had nice clothes to wear. Billy insisted on ironing his own clothes, especially his pants, which were always creased and fitted. Handsome and sharply dressed, as almost all those who knew him recalled, he grew into his preteen and teenage years with many eyes upon him. “Anywhere he went, the girls went nuts,” his sister said.
But for Billy, the main girl in his early years was and would always remain his mother, Lola. At some point, he had her initials tattooed on his arm—“L.W.,” for Lola Woods as she was called after her third marriage to Billy’s stepfather. “He loved the ground my mom walked on,” according to Syble.
Billy’s own father, Ira Kindred, had not been present for much his life. Although Lola had met and married Ira in Chicago and had Billy and Syble with him, Ira left not long after and moved down to Florida. While Syble believes Billy was at times looking for a father figure, perhaps even missing their own father, she also thinks they didn’t need one. Their mother was both parents in one, even when they had a stepfather.
“She’d come down to the police station and she’d bond us out sometimes,” Danny said of Billy’s mom.
Lola had carved out a place for her family in Uptown. She’d scraped and toiled each day to keep them healthy and safe, even when the neighborhood pressed in on them. Uptown was no easy place, no matter how hard Lola worked, no matter how hard Billy tried to fulfill his role as the protector brother. They were surrounded by difficulty, by poverty, at times flirting with it themselves.
But at home, they left it at the door, a safe haven for them all. At times, their apartment, full of kids, was full of music too. Billy especially loved the song “The Poor Side of Town” by Johnny Rivers. “I used to say, ‘my God, don’t you have more records than just that one?’” Syble recalled.
But Billy didn’t care. It was his favorite song. He’d play that record over and over, singing alongside Johnny Rivers, the two of them crooning at all hours in the apartment in Uptown.
It’s unclear what details the boys knew of their neighborhood’s storied past. During their day, when Chicago’s other residents read about Uptown in the newspaper, they shuddered without ever understanding what truly went down on the North Side.
Just before the turn of the twentieth century, as roads and train lines gradually reached north, those living downtown sought to stretch out and escape the smells and sounds of the busy Loop. Until then, the area known as Uptown had consisted mainly of farmsteads and cemeteries on the outskirts of a city still rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1871.
As more of Chicago’s citizens—including governors, Civil War generals, and even its mayors—found their permanent rest in North Side cemeteries like Rosehill, Graceland, or Montrose, shopkeepers and entrepreneurs looked to capitalize by erecting various taverns and restaurants for mourners wanting to wet their whistle before heading back south to the congested Loop. Pop Morse’s Roadhouse, opened in 1907, later evolved into the present-day Green Mill Cocktail Lounge jazz club.
Along the shady avenues or the breezy lakefront, millionaires erected mansions of stone and marble for a splendid life away from the city. But the quiet would quickly vanish. By the 1910s and ’20s, the spark of entrepreneurialism had ignited in Uptown through hotels, theaters, ballrooms, and comedy clubs, all thrumming to the new type of music called jazz.
Many celebrities had humble beginnings in Uptown. According to a local landlord, Bob Hope once lived on Carmen Avenue. After a performance at the Rainbo Gardens in Uptown, Larry Fine was asked by Ted Healy to join his act and become the third of the iconic Three Stooges.
Before the demand for cowboy pictures drove film productions westward, movie moguls George K. Spoor and Gilbert Anderson scouted Uptown as a perfect location for their new movie studio, Essanay, on Argyle Street. For a time, Uptown residents walked among such silent film stars as Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone, Colleen Moore, Gloria Swanson, and even Charlie Chaplin, who made his first appearance as his famous character the Tramp with Essanay.
Even long after the silent era, film stars found their way to Uptown. In 1969 Haskell Wexler filmed a cinema verité–style movie called Medium Cool about the turbulent summer of 1968, when the Democratic National Convention was met with violent protests in Grant Park. During his time filming in Chicago, Wexler caught sight of a young Uptown boy named Harold Blankenship, who’d come from West Virginia with his family some years prior. Wexler decided to put him in the movie.
Later, the infamous chase scene in Steve McQueen’s The Hunter took audiences to a fight scene in an Uptown apartment where it spilled out onto the El tracks and ended downtown in a car crashing off the Marina City parking deck and into the Chicago River several stories below. An Uptown resident remembered McQueen handing out sandwiches to neighborhood folks in between takes.
But the 1920s, with its excess and vice, brought a range of gangsters to Uptown’s confines. Speakeasies ran hot with jazz, hooch, and girls, networked together through a series of secret tunnels and intricate payments to local police. The Green Mill gave safe harbor to the most infamous of all gangsters, Al Capone, who, legend says, seated himself in the same booth each visit in case he needed to make a quick exit.
Much later, in 2003, construction workers tearing down the former Rainbo Gardens—where some of the boys and their friends could often be found ice skating or playing hockey—discovered human bones buried on the grounds.
Despite the seedier aspects of Uptown, an urban bazaar of pleasure and thrift took root, packaged neatly within the debatable borders of Foster Avenue to the north, Ravenswood and Clark to the west, Montrose and Irving Park to the south, and the wide blue patch of Lake Michigan to the east.
In those prosperous days, commerce formed around the intersection of Lawrence and Broadway with some of Uptown’s most iconic landmarks: the Sheridan Trust and Savings Bank Building and Goldblatt’s Department Store. Near that same intersection, Balaban and Katz, the famous theater corporation responsible for palatial theaters downtown, built the Riviera Theatre until demand allowed them to build an even bigger one—the Uptown Theatre—on the site of the Green Mill’s former beer garden nearby. Their two jewels were rivaled by the nearby Aragon Ballroom, built in a Moorish architectural style with interiors designed after a Spanish village. For decades, the heartbeat of Uptown drummed at Lawrence and Broadway, pumping blood down into nearby Clark Street or Wilson Avenue.
Yet underneath that splendor lurked a darkness, an urban immorality, the kind warned against by rural folk who saw cities as havens for sin, and perhaps best summed up in Carl Sandburg’s famous poem “Chicago”:
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
Before the Reffetts, the Stapletons, and the Kindreds, Uptown had brought in a host of military families. The luxury hotels and upper-crust homes of yesteryear were split up du
ring World War II to increase capacity for the nearby Naval Station Great Lakes.
But when the war ended, these military families moved out, creating an occupancy vacuum in Uptown. As demand for housing decreased, the rents fell. Enter the Appalachian families.
Timber mills, coal mines, and steel mills had begun closing down in states like Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, the Virginias, and parts of the Carolinas. Those that still ran were now operated by machines or new methods like longwall mining, strip mining, and mountaintop removal, decreasing the need for manpower. Ongoing union disputes put folks out of work for extended periods. Competition from other regions and even abroad held sway over the nation’s increasingly temperamental energy markets.
In addition to mechanization and automation, there was also a burgeoning awareness of the health hazards from these kinds of jobs. In the 1950s doctors and unions alike finally recognized “black lung,” or coal worker’s pneumoconiosis (CWP), as a disease.
Bessie Stapleton’s father, a coal miner from Kentucky, had moved to Chicago not long after a mining accident had taken a leg and several fingers. In her early years, she shuttled back and forth to the city on the lake whenever work could be found. Both her oldest children, Juanita and Sam, were fathered by men she’d met in Chicago. Although she eventually passed along a photograph and the name of Juanita’s father, she took Sam’s father’s identity with her to the grave. For the rest of his life, Sam went by either Samuel Dodd (Bessie’s maiden name) or Samuel Dodd Stapleton.
Albert Stapleton, or Bill as he was called, had come from West Virginia, where he’d enlisted during World War II at seventeen. By the time he met Bessie, he was divorced with three children living with his first wife. Bessie and Bill were both survivors, moving around Appalachia looking for what little work they could find. Two more children, half-siblings to Juanita and Sam—James and Randy—were born in quick succession.
The family drifted around Ohio for a few years before finally finding themselves in Stockton, a small, forgotten hamlet north of Cincinnati just east of the border with Kentucky. Today, it no longer exists, absorbed instead by bigger, nearby towns over the years. “We lived up in a holler up in the woods,” explained the youngest, Randy, referring to a mountain hollow, or valley, termed a “hollow” in Appalachian slang. Unpaved roads crisscrossed pastures and fields girded by hills and forests surrounding the family’s house, a small, single-story home with dirt floors and an unusually low ceiling designed to retain the rising heat during colder months.
The house had no electricity or indoor plumbing, just a well sitting in the yard among wandering pigs and chickens. Sam and his family used an outhouse across the road, sometimes crossing in the dead of night and using pages of magazines for toilet paper.
Only flashes of their time from Ohio come back to Sam’s siblings—feeding the pigs eggshells, coffee grounds, anything they had to spare. Juanita remembered cows lingering near where they stood out waiting for the school bus each day. James remembered a lady, perhaps their father’s sister, grabbing a pistol and shooting a black snake in the yard.
But of Sam, they remember a wild child running free through the woods and fields, climbing trees and plunging into creeks, catching crawfish, minnows, and frogs. At the end of every day, he’d return to the house covered in scratches and dirt. Sam’s siblings tell different stories of their time in Ohio, though they agree their mother, Bessie, was the best cook they’d ever known, making wondrous meals seemingly out of thin air. Despite this, things like cakes and ice cream were rare delicacies for the family.
Randy Stapleton remembered his older brother Sam coming home one day telling a tale of a woman with a shop down the road, promising that if he worked for her for one day, she’d give him a blueberry pie when he’d finished. In mouth-watering suspense, Randy waited all day for his big brother to return with the pie. But at the end of the day, when Randy looked up to see the shape of his brother traipsing up the road through the dust, Sam’s hands were empty. “It still bothers me,” Randy said, laughing.
Bessie and Bill both found it harder and harder to shield the children from the reality of poverty. They were more frequently hungry than not, and money was scarce in the hills. The difficulty created tensions between their parents, and although sometimes they separated, they always returned to each other.
It was during those years that Bill began looking north for work, specifically to Chicago, where Bessie herself had briefly lived and where Sam had been born. At the start of each week, Bill would make the journey, a five-hour car ride to get to the city on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Bill was not the only one undertaking these weekly trips back and forth. Ronald Eller, a professor and scholar of Appalachian history, wrote, “It was not uncommon on Friday nights in the 1950s to find the highways flowing south from Akron, Dayton, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Chicago filled with Appalachian migrants heading to West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.”
These “Midnight Riders,” so named for their habit of traveling at night when temperatures had cooled, traveled along a network of roads collectively and derisively known as the “Hillbilly Highway.”
Many others stayed north to make a home for themselves, and soon Bill and Bessie chose to go for good.
At first, the Stapletons found themselves living next to Riverview Park, a now defunct amusement park in the Roscoe Park neighborhood. But eventually they too moved to Uptown, where the decreasing rents of hotels and houses, now split up into multiple units, had given the neighborhood the likewise derogatory nickname “Hillbilly Heaven.”
The Reffett family had their own reasons for leaving Appalachia. To an extent, they were seeking an escape as well, from bad circumstances and bad memories. But for many years, things in Lexington, Kentucky, were good for the Reffetts.
“We didn’t hurt for nothing,” Clyde said.
Myrtle, their mother, made sure the children went to school, had food, new clothes, and words of wisdom to last their entire lives. Their father, Charlie, helped make it possible through his work as a firefighter in town. Sometimes he would take them to the tracks to see horse races, once even taking them to the Kentucky Derby.
Their life was distinct from their own family history. Whenever they visited Hazard, Kentucky, where their mother had been born into a coal miner’s family of thirteen children, relatives would often ask Randy and his three siblings why they always talked “so proud.” The Reffett kids—Randy, Clyde, Brenda, and Chris—did chores and received allowances. They played in the neighborhood and came home each night.
But the Reffett children never missed an opportunity for mischief. Once, they added chocolate milk to the daily delivery from the milkman, hiding it from their parents until the bill came at the end of the month. They often set fires in the backyard garbage cans, forcing their firefighter father to run outside in his boxers in full view of the neighbors to put them out.
With an age gap of only five years between the youngest and the oldest, there was bound to be fighting. “I don’t know how they tolerated us,” Clyde said. “We’d have chipped teeth, bloody noses, red necks, black eyes, we’d be fussing and fighting.” Even their sister, Brenda, joined in. “I fought her more than I did any brother.”
Some nights, when he was in good spirits and the kids behaved, Charlie would drive them to the nearby reservoirs where they grilled steaks and played guitar or sang hymns.
During one of those evenings in August 1969, Charlie asked his family if they wanted to drive out and see “Nanny,” his mother, Odessa. Charlie had had a tenuous relationship with his alcoholic mother, who’d left him to be raised by his own grandmother. Nevertheless, Charlie wanted his mother to be part of her grandchildren’s lives, and he was working to rebuild a better relationship with her. They agreed to go.
When they arrived at their grandmother’s house in Lexington, Odessa greeted them at the door with a black eye. Charlie flew into a rage at his mother’s husband, Raymond. According to Clyde, who rememb
ered the event most clearly, the situation calmed down after the initial argument. Eventually, the family settled in and took to playing guitar and drinking together. As the alcohol continued to flow, a second argument erupted sometime after midnight, when Ray told their father to stop playing his music. “My dad told that guy, ‘You ever black my mother’s eye again, I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch,” Clyde recalled.
Ray went to a nearby lard can and took out a .38-caliber pistol and quickly turned it upon Charlie, firing twice. Their mother, Myrtle, saw the gun and moved between Ray and her husband. She was shot once, taking a bullet to the left side, where it snarled through her intestines and stopped somewhere in her leg.
As Myrtle fell to the ground, Ray lifted the gun again and shot Charlie two more times. But even with four wounds, Charlie somehow still had the strength to charge Ray, grabbing hold of him and wrestling him to the ground, where he pinned him down. The gun spun off under a couch.
Randy Reffett, almost nine years old, and his three younger siblings had just witnessed the shooting of both of their parents. One of the official reports states that Larry Neace, Myrtle’s younger brother, who happened to be living with Odessa, hurried over to grab the gun from under the couch. Clyde recalls stashing the gun and heading outside to find help.
Eventually, police arrived to find four terrified children and a bloodbath inside. They found Ray pacing the floor splattered in blood. Paramedics came for their parents, taking Charlie away to the hospital. As for Myrtle, there seemed to be nothing they could do, as they took her to a separate hospital. Those left behind at the scene assumed she was close to death, if not dead already.