by David Nelson
The children stayed behind with their grandmother as police wrapped up the scene. Not until sometime the next day, hours after the event, did they get to the hospital to check on their father. At the other hospital, their mother hung on by a thread. Both were in serious condition.
Not long after the violent episode, the family began to change under the strain of their trauma. Although their mother had been shot once compared to the four shots that had hit Charlie, her recovery was far more drastic. Charlie was out not long after, but doctors were unable to extract the single bullet from Myrtle’s body, where it remained for the rest of her life, resting against a nerve. Any surgery to remove the bullet might have resulted in paralysis, or even death.
At home, Charlie was cared for by his wife’s sister, Mabel. In the evenings, after the children went to sleep, she would help bathe him. As the weeks went on, Charlie and Mabel started having an affair. While Myrtle remained in the hospital, her sister became pregnant with her children’s half-brother.
The situation was inevitably tense when Myrtle returned from the hospital. Fights between her and Charlie often became physical. While Charlie had always been a heavy drinker, it was even worse now. And although she hardly ever drank at all, Myrtle was now drinking both to dull her physical pain and to get closer to her husband.
She would eventually forgive him, but she never fully trusted him. Before the shooting, he’d frequently stayed out in the evenings, meeting up with rough types operating in shadowy corners of Lexington, pulling up to the house wearing expensive suits when they dropped him off. Clyde remembered pulling on his mother’s apron as she stood at the window at night, looking out into the street, keeping watch until their father came home.
These friends had a bad influence on Charlie, who’d started writing fraudulent checks in the names of strangers and collecting large sums of money. Somehow, he had obtained the driver’s license of a prominent doctor in the area and opened an account in his name. Not long after, Charlie left his firefighter position with the city of Lexington.
When a cousin told him about Chicago, about Uptown over a game of horseshoes during a family visit, Charlie’s interest was piqued. He’d spent time north before; he and Myrtle had been married in Champagne, Illinois.
Shortly thereafter, the family packed their things, and went north.
But it was never for good. Even after the Reffett family had found somewhat firm footing in Uptown, they would take vacations back to Kentucky. Charlie, too, enjoyed going back, in particular for one trip that coincided with the death of his mother’s former husband, Ray Adams.
Immediately after the shooting, police had charged Ray with two counts of malicious shooting and wounding with intent to kill. In the event of his trial, investigators had recommended two responding officers, Myrtle, her brother Larry, and her nine-year-old son, Randy Reffett, as potential witnesses. But as part of a plea deal, Ray pled guilty for amended charges of two counts of assault and battery.
Ray Adams was given six months in jail, followed by six months’ probation. It wasn’t the last they heard of him, though.
According to both Chris and Clyde, their father and a family friend took a trip back to Kentucky around the time Ray was released from prison. They didn’t stay long, but when Charlie returned to the apartment in Uptown, he informed the family matter-of-factly that he had learned Ray had died while he was back in Kentucky.
Although no one pressed him for more information, both Clyde and Chris have always had suspicions about their father’s trip back to Kentucky. At one point, Chris had heard Ray had even been shot. In actuality, Ray died at the age of sixty-seven of natural causes. But the fact that the brothers had ever suspected their father at all underscores the prevalence of secrets and tragedy in the lives of the Reffett family.
Samuel Stapleton and Randy Reffett, like Billy Kindred, made the most of life in Uptown. Each day brought a new set of adventures so very different from those they’d had amid the trees and brooks and little houses of Appalachia.
This was a new world, noisy and populated by a diverse cast of characters, living on top of one another in tight apartments or newly constructed high-rises built by HUD (the Department of Housing and Urban Development).
While Appalachian whites made up most of the neighborhood, pockets of other groups took root as well. American Indians, displaced by relocation laws encouraging them to leave reservations and “assimilate,” found homes in Chicago, expanding from a population of 775 to 6,575 between 1950 and 1970. The majority lived in Uptown, where, for more than fifty years, the American Indian Center operated. American Indians even had their own bars in the neighborhood: the Wooden Nickel, Sammy’s Reservation, and the Teepee Inn and the War Bonnet, both on Broadway Avenue and known for their late-night rumbles.
War in Southeast Asia displaced Cambodians and Vietnamese, who, over the years, would turn Argyle Street into a successful stretch of restaurants, grocery stores, jewelry stores, and other businesses. Former prisoners of America’s Japanese internment camps also found homes on the North Side. Eastern Europeans parting the Iron Curtain came to Uptown and lived alongside Latinos displaced by war and revolution. Although predominantly located in South Side neighborhoods, Black Americans lived among them as well. For many decades, Uptown has been considered the most diverse of Chicago’s neighborhoods.
While minority groups bore the absolute brunt of discrimination, Appalachians weren’t immune. They and their families were often derided as low-class and labeled “hillbillies.” Their ways—food, speech, clothes, and education—were a source of mockery and discrimination. “Convinced that Appalachians were ignorant, lazy, unclean, and sometimes immoral, community leaders bemoaned their arrival,” Ronald Eller wrote.
Most of Uptown’s peoples found themselves somewhere along the spectrum of poverty. Physically, you could see it everywhere you looked. Nothing could conceal the distinctive sights and sounds of the shambolic neighborhood. Sirens looped through the air all day long but especially at night, as firetrucks, squad cars, or ambulances raced to respond to crimes or fires. Breezes off the nearby lake stirred up dust and garbage piled in empty lots or alleyways. Broken bottles gathered in overgrown lots or rattled in the gutters. In summer, humidity strangled the stuffy, airless apartments, scented with the sting of Raid insecticide. Winter brought subzero temperatures, with icy winds whistling through broken windows as radiators clanging menacingly.
When buildings were no longer livable, they stood as vacant, brooding, gap-toothed hulks in the corners of Uptown. A 1977 article in the Chicago Tribune estimated the number of abandoned buildings at around 3,100 and demolitions on a steady rise since 1960, peaking at 2,675 in 1975.
Without minor upkeep or tenants, the buildings became havens for drug deals, sexual encounters, and murders. James Stapleton remembered how, as a child, he came upon the body of a homeless man in the basement of an abandoned building where the man had hanged himself.
For some landlords the easiest way out was to strike a match, and throughout the 1960s and ’70s, black smoke curled through the elm trees and blue skies above Uptown. Residents ran out of their homes to watch firefighters battle the flames. In 1975 the Tribune labeled Uptown the first of three hotspots for arson. A 1979 fire on Malden Street took the lives of five people and injured nine others during a party held on the fourth floor. Thirteen hours later, a fire up in Edgewater* near the Uptown border took the lives of six and injured thirty-eight on Winthrop Avenue.
By 1980 the fires had gotten so bad, so frequent, and so deadly that Illinois senator Charles Percy proposed new legislation to make arson a federal crime. Local aldermen formed arson task forces, and Mayor Jane Byrne called for the death penalty for arsonists.
With so many souls to save, religious groups naturally found a home in Uptown. A branch of the Moonies—or the Unification Church led by Reverend Myung Sun Kim, famous for his mass weddings at Madison Square Garden in New York City—operated nearby. Hare Krishnas fr
equently roamed Uptown, headquartered in Rogers Park. Documentary footage from the era shows a Black preacher in a suit and cowboy hat shouting about the sins of alcoholism through a megaphone on an Uptown street corner. Meanwhile, one of his followers attempts to persuade an alcoholic man to attend church the next day to save himself.
The most notable of these groups operated on Malden Street, just a few blocks north of the Stapleton and Reffett families. Jesus People USA began in Milwaukee but moved to Uptown in the early 1970s, quickly finding a place with its good works among a community frequently in need. Hungry Uptown folks lined up for food from the group’s kitchens or to listen to its famous Christian rock group, the Resurrection Band.
While religious activists and even state and city officials paid attention to the neighborhood plight when they could (or it was politically convenient), Uptown was largely a place for forgotten people. Deinstitutionalization—the nationwide movement to close state-operated psychiatric facilities in favor of integrating patients back into the community—brought in a flurry of nursing homes, methadone clinics, and mental health facilities to Uptown.
James Stapleton once saw the effects of both mental illness and arson play out in his neighborhood. One Saturday afternoon playing with friends outside, they smelled smoke in the air. They followed the scent—and soon the sight—toward Clark Street, where they found firetrucks and spectators gathering in an alley at the back of a building. As they took their places with the other onlookers, they saw a man, naked, running around the back balcony of the building holding a broom like a torch, its straw bristles alight. The man climbed up and down the balconies, extending his flaming broom into open windows, where curtains spread the fire upward. He even broke open closed windows, climbing all the way up until the entire building had been swallowed in flame.
The next day, James and his friends found charred rubble where the building once stood. Firefighters were still sifting through it to find any victims.
“Our playgrounds were other people’s disasters,” said Chris Reffett, the youngest of the Reffett kids. He recalled traipsing through the rubble of buildings that had been demolished or burned down, always tagging along as the little brother to his older brothers’ schemes.
Alongside various forms of mental illness prevalent in the neighborhood, Uptown also saw its fair share of addiction.
Even as a young kid, Chris Reffett saw and recognized “winos”—a colloquialism of the time for alcoholics—stumbling through the neighborhood with their pockets cut out by anyone looking for change. Most frequently, he remembered seeing them in one park locals had christened Wino Park.
Bob Rehak was a young photographer for the Chicago Tribune, but in the days of the 1970s, he was often shy and reluctant to interact with people. While traveling on the El one day, he challenged himself to get off and take pictures of strangers he met in the neighborhood renowned for its ramshackle ways and downtrodden people.
Some might imagine he faced hostility in his private social experiment, especially in a place like Uptown. But more often than not, his subjects were delighted to have their portraits taken, and over four years, Rehak managed to take thousands of photographs of Uptown’s streets and people. By coincidence, Rehak once photographed a young Chris Reffett on the streets of Uptown with a friend. In the photograph, Chris and his friend, no more than six or seven, are smiling, arms around each other as they stand outside an electronics store.
In December 1975 outside the Aragon Ballroom, Rehak photographed a line of long-haired teenagers waiting in the cold to buy tickets to a Blue Öyster Cult concert. “All of these kids were high on drugs or alcohol,” Rehak said.
Youthful crews like the Latin Kings, Latin Eagles, Simon City Royals, Harrison Gents, and Thorndale Jag Offs (TJOs) battled it out with fists, bats, pipes, knives, and sometimes even guns. But for a young white boy from Appalachia, the main attraction was the Uptown Gaylords.
Many former Gaylords today are quick to clarify that the gang had nothing to do with homosexuality, as in the days of the 1960s and ’70s gay still mostly meant “happy” or “fun.” Gangs like the Gaylords had grown out of postwar social clubs, evolving into greaser gangs that soon dabbled in theft and drugs.
Pitted against the Latin Kings, Gaylords sought to protect the neighborhood from rival gangs and even other ethnicities. While many former members say it was about protection and scare tactics that had nothing to do with racism, one of the Gaylords’ foundational purposes was to “keep the neighborhood white.” Clyde Reffett recalled Molotov cocktails going through windows, sometimes as part of gang wars, sometimes as warnings to minority residents.
Even though the mantras and principles of the crew were thinly veiled attempts to cover up long-instilled prejudices, the gangs still often allowed boys of other races in. “There were white kids, black kids, Latino kids, Asian kids, it didn’t make any difference what you were, they just wanted you in a gang,” said Rehak, who frequently photographed the gangs happily posing with their weapons of choice. “Once you got in, I think the reason all these kids joined was for the sense of belonging.”
For many kids in the neighborhood, gangs commanded respect and admiration (especially from girls, who also had gangs like the Latin Queens), and they were sources of enforcement, protection and even leadership if they lived long enough. They were given recognizable sweater cardigans with specific colors (black and blue for Gaylords) and their names stitched onto the backs. “They were sharp-looking things,” Rehak said of the sweaters he saw in Uptown. “As professionally done as any of the athletic teams at Northwestern [University].”
Lisa Heath, a resident of Uptown living in a HUD high-rise by the lake, remembered an officer at a Chicago police station pulling open a closet full of confiscated sweaters, each of different colors: “I’m sure they were heartbroken. [The sweaters] cost them, I think, at least $50.”
Oftentimes, gangs faced genuine heartbreak on the streets of Uptown. “A lot of people disappeared in that neighborhood,” Clyde Reffett said. “A lot of people got shot with shotguns, guns, and knives. I was pallbearer at a lot of funerals.”
Death in some ways seemed embedded in the culture, with young men accepting and even embracing the idea of dying young. As the Latin Kings’ slogan went:
When I die, have no pity
Bury me deep in Latin King City.
Of course, the police were no friends to the gangs—or teenagers in general—in Uptown. All Randy Reffett’s and Samuel Stapleton’s siblings relate similar stories of police aggression. They mention officers picking up kids from the streets, taking them to the lakefront to beat them up or shave their heads, and then dropping them off in rival gang territories. A friend of Sam Stapleton’s had once been picked up and dropped in Latin King turf, where three Kings beat him mercilessly with a bat. Somehow he survived, but he would walk with a cane for the rest of his life.
The accidental shooting of a bystander during a Latin Kings scuffle resulted in the abduction of a member of the Gaylords by police. For hours, they hosed him down with water, electrocuting him with extension cords to force him to give up the murder weapon and details of the shooting.
Committed to the gang’s code of silence, the boy refused to say anything, though eventually the real shooter stepped forward to serve time.
Samuel Stapleton, too, had once been picked up by a pair of officers named Martin and Ross (which drew laughs from the neighborhood, owing to the similarity with Italian alcohol company Martini & Rossi.)
With Sam handcuffed, they drove him to the lakefront, where they dragged him out and laid into him with fists and billy clubs.
Randy Stapleton remembered his older brother telling the story: “Sam told them to take off the cuffs …”
“Let’s go at it!” Sam suggested.
One of the cops, who knew Sam from previous interactions, replied, “You think I’m stupid?” From there, bleeding and bruised, the cops forced Sam to walk home through rival gangland.
In some ways, Sam had learned from Bessie how to defend himself. James Stapleton remembered his mother getting into a fender bender on Montrose Avenue, where the other driver got out to yell at her. Bessie grabbed a length of pipe or some type of long, hefty object that her kids barely caught a glimpse of as she flew out to confront the other driver, who quickly backed off. “She would fight anybody if she felt like it was worth it,” James observed. “If she was being wronged.”
Bessie was a vocal member of the community too. She protested Uptown slumlords who took forever to repair apartments and treated residents as after-thoughts. One slumlord was the father of her sons’ friend. Bessie would rail about the boy’s father, even in front of the friend when he came over to hang out.
For Sam, he’d never had difficulty until coming to Uptown. “I think it was the atmosphere and surroundings of Uptown that kinda changed him,” James said. “He was young and impressionable.… [Other kids] beat up everybody and caused mayhem on the streets already, and he was like, ‘This is perfect ’cause it’s fun.’” James added, “There was a lot of times he would just start a fight just to have something to do.”
Safety never concerned Sam. He knew how to navigate the streets and the many characters populating daily life. He knew the gangs especially well, and they knew him, often steering clear when they saw him coming down the path.
The Harrison Gents heard about Sam’s reputation and came from their territory to challenge him. Sam’s brother Randy estimates around fifty guys showed up to wait outside Stockton Upper Grade School for Sam to come out one afternoon. Sam found them waiting at every exit. He didn’t have far to go; his apartment was well within view of the school on the same block.