by David Nelson
In some way, there was love, too, especially for the kids, though there would be many years where some of them would not speak to each other.
“I remember my mom going to the hospital,” Denise said. “I don’t know, it might have been a different time she was at the hospital. And I remember setting the table and crying when I set her plate with her fork.… And she had her special fork. It had like a flowered tip, and I was looking at it and I was just crying. We had bonded in some way.… There had to be bonding moments because I wanted to cry for my mother.”
Things were no better in the Carroll household nearby on Eastwood Avenue. Few of Billy Carroll’s friends knew what was going on, and only one or two had actually been inside the home.
“I’m not gonna go there and watch Huey drink,” said Gene Anderson, one of Billy’s closest friends, and one who perhaps had an inside view into the more hidden aspects of Billy’s life.
What little money came in was often used for alcohol, both for Huey and for Violet. The drinking soured them against each other and against the children.
Robert, or Bobby, Billy’s older brother, had developmental difficulties after suffering brain damage from huffing glue. But even he knew the situation inside his home was bad, and he spent a lot of time outside the home with friends or getting high on the street.
Billy had started looking for a more permanent solution. There was nothing keeping him in the home. Even love seemed hard to come by. “His mom and dad to me, that was my opinion that they didn’t even want kids,” Billy’s friend Tom Thweatt said.
There was a coldness and a void where warmth and love should have resided. But it wasn’t completely empty, as they’d show later on when things got hard, not just with Billy but with Bobby too.
But for now, at sixteen, the only thing Billy wanted was escape. He could no longer take it. He wanted out. He didn’t want to be around his parents anymore. They weren’t his home, and he’d learned more about life from his time on the street. The only thing he’d truly learned from his parents was to keep himself free of alcohol. He smoked marijuana and sometimes drank, but it never became a clear problem for Billy.
Friends called him “one of the nicest guys,” and an “all around fun guy.” But in his teenage years, the anger that had been growing inside him as a result of his home life, had started to bubble over.
“One of the last times that I was up at his house, Billy had beat the hell out of Huey,” Gene remarked. “And he [Billy] come down and he told me, and there was a little blood on his face.” Gene warned his friend that Huey was going to have him put in jail.
At times, Billy was defending himself, but in other instances he was defending his mother. Mostly, she was sick all the time, watching television and drinking, much like her husband, who was verbally and physically abusive to her.
Gene saw it on the street too. He recalled a time near Christmas when they went downtown to Santa’s Village, a seasonal set-up with holiday food and attractions. Billy had carried two pistols with him. After perusing the stalls, Gene and Billy got on the train to head north. Along the way, some man on the train got into it with them, and Billy knocked one of the guns against the man’s head.
“Man, look, you gotta stop this shit,” Gene said. “You’re getting too out of control.”
While exercising and lifting weights gave Billy an outlet to channel his anger, it was not enough. Like most boys his age living in Uptown, he often misplaced his anger against family, friends, and strangers. It was true that a standard of toughness had to be upheld to survive in that rough-and-tumble neighborhood, but sometimes toughness crossed a line.
His escape began taking form through education, something Billy had never truly excelled at previously.
Gene had started taking classes at Prologue School, an alternative school founded by two Franciscan nuns and situated on the third floor of a building directly across from the Aragon Ballroom on Lawrence Avenue. “Most of the kids had problems with school, dropping out … attendance problems and gang problems,” Gene said.
In its early days, the school comprised four rooms where math, music, history, science, writing, and the school administration took place among a small staff of progressive teachers. One teacher continually spoke about “the exploitation of the worker and the proletariat.” Another teacher brought in his girlfriend to teach art. By 1975 the school had grown enough that they hired another woman to teach Spanish.
During one of his visits to the Carroll apartment, Gene talked about Prologue and his studies there.
“Well, why don’t you take Billy down there and see if he can get in?” Violet recommended.
They left that day, Billy and Gene, and signed Billy up for school. “He started going with me to school there, and we were buddy-buddy,” Gene said.
At Prologue, unlike Senn or Lakeview High Schools, the gang lifestyle ended at the door. Gene and Billy had been loosely affiliated with the Gaylords in their years, but Prologue was a neutral zone. Mostly, they stuck to each other, keeping their heads in their books and never mentioning anything about Harrison Gents or Latin Eagles or Uptown Gaylords.
“We’d go to school acting like that didn’t exist,” Gene reflected.
For a time, Gene and Billy focused on school. They could get done in three years’ time, shorter than the ordinary high school tenure.
But it wasn’t fast enough for Billy. The escape he was planning from his apartment on Eastwood Avenue could not come quickly enough. He wanted money. He wanted a way out. As soon as possible.
That June of 1976, Billy’s older brother, Bobby, turned nineteen. It’s hard imagining much of a birthday celebration inside the Carroll home, but it’s impossible to know for sure: only the Carrolls were in the home that evening, and only the Carrolls would remember. And none of them are here to tell what transpired.
What has been said is that sometime before midnight, Billy told the family he was heading out, but that he’d only be gone an hour. After he left, Violet watched out the window as her youngest son got inside a car with some friends. The car went down Eastwood Avenue, made a turn, and left her sight.
Sam Stapleton was looking to the future as well. In May 1976 he was looking toward the fall, when he’d go to Senn High School, where his friend Randy Reffett was finishing his sophomore year. “[Sam] couldn’t wait to get into Senn High School to go to ROTC,” his older sister, Juanita said.
Outside school, Sam had recently gotten his first job as a delivery boy at the Pizza Factory restaurant on Sheridan Road. Even more promising, there was talk of a contractor giving Sam a job that paid well. He’d been calling the house asking for Sam, saying his name was John.
Sam was also falling in love. Or rather, he was in that kind of dreamy, young love that makes teenagers feel invincible and worthy. He told his sister Juanita that someday he was going to marry one girl in particular. Juanita, always protective of her brother, was skeptical. “I wasn’t exactly crazy about her,” she said.
Like his younger brothers, Sam had been protective of his older sister. She had had a few boyfriends since coming to Uptown. One boyfriend had gotten rough with Juanita, and Sam had gone into a rage, throwing the boyfriend’s clothes out the window of their apartment.
That May, Juanita was living in an apartment on Malden Avenue, not more than a five-minute walk from the family’s apartment. Juanita lived there with her daughter, Crystal, who’d been born the year prior.
After school Sam would come to the apartment and help out. He’d pick Crystal up, play with her, sometimes push her in the stroller through the neighborhood, where other kids joked that she was his baby.
“She doesn’t remember him,” Juanita said of her daughter, “but the first year of her life, he was always there.”
Perhaps because they were older, or because they were from different fathers than their stepfather Bill, Juanita and Sam bonded from an early age. Where the boys fought with one another, Sam and Juanita spent time with each other a
nd confided in one another.
Despite his renowned toughness, there were times when those rough edges smoothed over into something soft and kind that Juanita was able to see for herself. Sam was noted for his care of those who, in his eyes, were less fortunate than he. Aside from the care of animals, Sam also helped people on the streets who had no home or food. His siblings remembered him coming home to gather blankets or sheets during cold months or waking late at night to find him in the kitchen, putting together a baloney sandwich with a chunk of government cheese for a “wino” or an unhoused person waiting outside. If he had money, he’d give them that too. He became so well known as a kindhearted soul that people on the streets would seek him out.
Before she got pregnant, Juanita and Sam had taken a trip together to California. Juanita’s then boyfriend, who had moved out west, paid for her ticket, but her parents hadn’t wanted her to go alone, so they scrounged up enough to buy Sam’s ticket in order for him to tag along as Juanita’s de facto bodyguard.
Juanita remembers passing out from the heat after landing in Las Vegas, the closest airport to their destination of Baker, California, a small town in the Mojave Desert.
The siblings spent a month in Baker, where Juanita got reacquainted with her boyfriend, and Sam caught spiders and scorpions in jars. At the end of his visit, Sam went back to Chicago, while Juanita stayed behind for another month. Sam flew back alone, and for the first time was out in the wide world on his own.
“When we were out of Uptown, he was normal,” his brother, Randy, recalled. “He wasn’t a Gaylord, he wasn’t bad.… If you took Uptown out of Sam, Sam would’ve been OK.”
That May afternoon, Sam was in his sister’s apartment once again, eating milk and cookies and talking about picking up his very first check from the Pizza Factory the next day. He was saving up to buy his own car.
Juanita doesn’t recall much that was said, as Sam ate his cookies, just that he was excited to finally get paid. Before he left to make the short walk home to his parents’ apartment, he told his sister he’d be back the next day, paycheck in hand. He was wearing his silver bracelet, which had been permanently welded around his wrist, and a dark blue jacket. But it was mid-May, so he wouldn’t need it for long.
Somewhere along the route, he ran into his friend, Randy Reffett, who lived only two blocks away on Magnolia. It’s possible they met at the Sunnyside Mall, the footpath where other kids their age met in the early evening hours and sometimes even past curfew. Randy had just come from home where he’d briefly stopped to show his mother and grandmother a new capped tooth he’d gotten at the dentist just that day.
The boys didn’t have any specific plans, that anyone knew of.
Looming in the very near future, the long plateau of summer unfurled in front of them with endless possibilities. Soon the city’s beaches would become a patchwork of towels and swimsuits, with snatches of “Silly Love Songs” by Wings, Peter Frampton’s “Show Me the Way,” or Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” playing over the sound of Lake Michigan falling against the sand. Curfew be damned, the boys would roam the streets in search of fun and friends and females.
The boys went off into the night.
Then the street was quiet, the little buildings of Uptown twinkling and the air gradually warming in anticipation of summer. For a moment, everything was fine on the North Side.
5
SILLY LOVE SONGS
MARYJANE PIPER LOOKED UP to see a forest-green Chevelle coming toward her down Irving Park Road. It was around noon on July 28, 1977, and she and her friend Mary wanted to cool down at the public pool in California Park next to the Chicago River, where the air sometimes smelled like butterscotch from the nearby candy factory.*
They were only seventeen, and they didn’t have a car. But it was summer, and there were places to go.
Up the road, the Chevelle drew near, and the girls put their thumbs down, as they realized it was pulling up to meet them. “We’re getting a ride in a Chevelle,” MaryJane told her friend excitedly, as they approached the car.
Inside were two young guys, not much older, both with long hair and dressed in nice clothes. The guy riding shotgun politely got out and went into the backseat, where Mary joined him. MaryJane took the passenger seat beside the driver.
When they arrived at the park, the boys offered to wait outside the pool fence, keeping an eye on their belongings in the Chevelle while the girls swam. The girls agreed and went off toward the pool.
From afar, the boys watched as the two girls splashed around in their bikinis, laughing and cooling off as the summer sun blazed down upon them. But the girls were looking back at them too.
After MaryJane and her friend had finished their swim, they left the pool and found the boys still waiting for them. By then, they were all hungry, and the boys asked if they wanted to continue the afternoon with them by getting something to eat.
Together, they drove to a Pizza Hut on Elston Avenue, where they sat around a table in a similar arrangement: Mary sitting next to the boy from the backseat, and MaryJane next to the driver of the Chevelle.
During a moment when the boys broke away—one to the jukebox and the other to the bathroom—Mary and MaryJane decided to switch sides of the table. Mary would take the seat at the table beside the driver of the Chevelle, and MaryJane would sit down next to the handsome boy who’d been in the back.
There are few opportunities in life, especially in one’s youthful days, when one can look at a moment in time and realize one’s life took on a different trajectory completely. In the Pizza Hut of all mundane locations, the girls made one of those decisions, and for MaryJane, it shaped the rest of her life.
This was the middle of the ’70s, when you could stick your thumb out and end up someplace you never expected. There was danger, yes, but for a young kid that was part of the thrill. Maybe it was danger—danger of meeting someone you shouldn’t, danger of falling in love, danger of getting your heart broken, danger of never getting to where you intended to go—that made it that much more interesting.
When the boys returned to the table, they put up no protest as they took their new seats beside different girls, their new places in time. The boy next to Mary was Danny Jockell. The boy now sitting beside MaryJane was Billy Kindred. He was nineteen years old.
“He was hot,” MaryJane said simply. “He was well put together, and he was nicely built.” Aside from his physical looks—with his shoulder-length hair and boyish smirk—Billy took care in how he dressed: “Even in jeans and a T-shirt, he could make it look great.”
Almost instantly, MaryJane was drawn to him. Billy was kind, caring, and immediately attentive to her. “Whenever I think about him, I see him smiling,” she said. “And it’s a genuinely soft, caring smile. That’s how I see him.” She noted how his smile sometimes seemed specific to her, as if it contained some secret that only she knew about.
For years, MaryJane kept the napkin she and Billy doodled on at the table, drawing silly shapes or scrawling the lyrics to “Take It to the Limit” by the Eagles, which they kept playing on the jukebox over and over.
At the end of the afternoon, the boys drove the girls back to MaryJane’s home on Springfield Avenue in the Albany Park neighborhood, where she lived with her mother and her grandparents. “I had to be home every day by 4:30 for dinner,” she explained. “I had to set the table.”
MaryJane doesn’t remember exchanging numbers with Billy at the time, and for an instant during that afternoon, it’s possible the connection might have stopped there. But whatever was blooming inside MaryJane was also blooming inside Billy. Not long after, she’d see the same Chevelle roving up Springfield waiting for her to come out. “Then we just took it from there,” she said.
MaryJane didn’t know it, but Billy had his secrets. The very Chevelle they were tooling around in, newly repaired thanks to Danny’s father, was part of one of his secrets.
She’d learn the truth soon, or at least some of it. But for now,
she was a young girl with a heart pointed toward something new.
For Judy Patterson, her heart had passed from one boy to another. He was sitting beside her on the couch in her home in the Norwood Park neighborhood, on the northwest side of the city where the tenement buildings and the high-rises shrank down into squat, two-story apartment buildings and ranch-or bungalow-style houses.
Overhead, planes sank lower on their way to nearby O’Hare Airport, and commuter trains made final stops before passing on into suburban quietude. Norwood Park and its surrounding environments are almost a transitional waystation in between the rough edges of the city and the clean, manicured lines of the suburbs.
It was still part of the city, but it was quieter than most neighborhoods. It was quiet the evening Judy and Gregory Godzik sat together on her couch watching television upstairs in the TV room when someone came to the door.
Her grandmother, an older woman from Germany who hated Greg and lived with Judy and her mother and siblings, went to answer it.
Judy and Greg barely had any time to react as suddenly her previous boyfriend, Glenn, appeared in the doorway in his bell-bottoms and platform shoes. “It was the ’70s, for God’s sake,” Judy said of the “odd” outfit.
Without a word, Glenn swung his leg into Greg’s face, splitting open his forehead with the thick heel of his platform shoe.
Greg was not a fighter, though. He played hockey, generally a rough sport, but he was known for his kindness and his carefree attitude. He often left situations he didn’t like with a terse, “Fuck this noise.”
Greg said nothing to Glenn as he stood up quietly and walked out of Judy’s house with blood running from his head.
Passing Judy’s grandmother on his way out, he said, “Are you happy now?”
“Yes!” she shouted back. “Get out!”