My Family’s First Home
Dear Sarah,
Sometime after I was born, my parents took a tiny one bedroom apartment in the basement of a 12 unit (plus ours) three story apartment building at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue, one block east of Halsted Street, in the borderlands between the Englewood and the Auburn Gresham districts.
We lived in that basement apartment for several years during and after the war. The small kitchen had a door opening onto a sunken passageway or ‘gangway’ that led from the buildings concrete back ‘yard’ to Emerald Avenue. The kitchen also had the only eye level windows in the apartment, one looking out on the ‘gangway’, the other double window looking out on the entry area to the rest of the basement, the one used by the residents of the above ground apartments. This sunken entry area was the space beneath wooden back porches and stairways behind the upper apartments.
↔EMERALD AVENUE↔ ↨
73rd
STREET
↨
Bedroom Living Room Basement
Kitchen Bath Closet Basement
The apartment’s one bedroom was adjacent to the kitchen as was the living room. There was also a bathroom and small walk-in closet next to a door leading into the rest of the building’s basement. The kitchen and bedroom could not have been more than 10’ X 12’ and were more likely 8’ or 9’ X 12’. The living room was perhaps 10” X 13’, but more likely a foot or more shorter in each direction. Even by a child’s scale, the apartment was very small, maybe 400 square feet. The main axis of the apartment building was east/west along 73rd Street and the entryways into the upstairs apartments all faced 73rd Street. Our apartment was almost certainly intended as living quarters for a janitor or custodian and was the only unit with an Emerald Avenue address. When I drove by the corner several years ago (and again in 2005), the building had been razed, leaving a vacant lot (which we called a “prairie” when I was young). I was stunned to see how very narrow the lot was and to be reminded how exceedingly small our apartment was. Seeing the lot on Google Map Street Views stunned me yet again, the apartment less than the space taken by three abandoned cars. The one window in the bedroom and the windows in the living room bordered the ceilings and looked out directly on the soil, the lawn grass, in front of the apartment. The bedroom had a bunk bed used by Kitty and me and a single twin size bed used sometimes by my Uncle Jim and sometimes by my Grandpa Denny. My mother and father slept on a sofa bed in the living room. Exposed hot water pipes servicing the radiators in the apartments above ran along the ceilings in our apartment, all wrapped undoubtedly in asbestos.
The frequent residents of our subterranean dwelling, other than my Irish grandfather and my Uncle Jim, were what we called “waterbugs” and the rest of the world called oriental cockroaches. They were big, an inch or more, oblong, black and shiny. They looked like someone had applied Vaseline to their wings. They cracked and were messy, really “ickey”, when stepped on, but they usually were fast enough to avoid a stomping foot. They would scurry under the refrigerator or stove or behind the bathtub. The roaches had flattened bodies that permitted them to come into the apartment from the rest of the basement under the back door, through the openings for the asbestos-insulated, hot water pipes running through our space, or the openings for our plumbing. They liked warm, humid spaces which meant they loved our superheated apartment. Each female could drop up to 18 egg capsules, each of which contained up to 16 eggs so efforts to rid the apartment of roaches were doomed to failure. All the years we lived in that subterranean apartment, we battled the “water bugs,” a.k.a, cockroaches.
There was a wooden railing around the basement entry area to protect against people falling into it from the ground level of the paved back yard but at age three I managed to squeeze through an opening, fall to the pavement below and fracture my skull. It would be comforting to attribute the sins and failings of my subsequent life to brain damage from that fall, but alas, my sins are my own. As we used to acknowledge in the Confiteor, “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”
It is said that our personalities are formed by the time we are 6 years old or so. If that is the case, that little basement apartment was where my sister Kitty and I were formed. It was home from infancy until I was 12 or 13 years old.
Boy with fractured and taped skull admonishing father not to ‘loft’ at him. The wooden stairway to the right leads to a first floor apartment. Our apartment was in the space below. The perfect Parker method penmanship was my mother’s.
I have many good memories associated with the years we lived in the basement at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue. The apartment proper was extremely tiny and plagued by roaches, but our back door opened into the rest of the basement, which for me was an indoor playground. It was exciting to step out that back door into the basement proper where wet clothes were often hanging on clotheslines, smelling clean and moist and bleachy. Roaches and their droppings produce a distinctive and undesirable smell; the bleach smell outside the back door was a welcome alternative. (To this day, I have a peculiar fondness for the smell of a washtub load of hot bleachy water.) Kitty and I could play “hide and seek” and ‘tag’ in the rows of drying clothes, sheets and towels. In the middle and distant sections of the basement there were tenants’ storage lockers, locked wooden cages we could see into. Many of the lockers had World War II souvenirs in them and in those early post-war days, the war was still very much on people’s minds, including children’s. Many war movies were made in the years following the end of the war, including John Wayne’s Sands of Iwo Jima, released in 1949 and Gregory Peck as the returned veteran in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit in 1956. In any event, that basement laundry and storage area was like a huge play space for me, at least when it wasn’t occupied by neighbors doing laundry in their wringer washers or hanging their laundry on the clothes lines outside our back door.
In the apartment, I remember spending what seemed like hours lying on the floor of the living room reading one or another volume of Grolier’s Book of Knowledge. I have often wondered where my parents got the money to buy that encyclopedia which was so important to me during those years. When I was older and served as an altar boy for early morning masses at St. Leo’s Church, I remember coming home from mass and reading at the kitchen table, Black Beautyor Big Red or any number of other books with an equine or canine hero.
Broadcast entertainment came from the radio before anyone had a television. I would lie on the floor and listen to the comedy shows, Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Great Gildersleeve, and Archie’s Tavern. The mystery shows had great dramatic themes and sound effects, Suspense Theater, The Whistler, and my favorite, The Shadow: The weed of crime bears bitter fruit! Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows! The Shadow was really wealthy playboy Lamont Cranston, who had the power to cloud men’s minds and to become invisible, an easy trick on radio, but I fell for it.
I remember the milkman leaving bottled non-homogenized milk at our door. When it was cold, the separated cream pushed the cardboard or paper cap off the bottle. For some time after the war, milk was delivered door to door from horse drawn wagons from the Wanzer or Borden dairies. Every now and then, a milk horse would decide to head back to the dairy stable without assistance of the milkman, who would have to chase the horse down the street. My father worked for awhile as a milkman for Borden and I remember going with him on his route at least once and maybe more often, but by that time the horses had been replaced by gasoline engines. For some time after the end of the war, however, not only milk but also icemen delivering ice for iceboxes, fruit and vegetable vendors, knife sharpening guys, and scrap dealers regularly plied the alleys in their horse-drawn wagons.
I remember Saturday afternoon cartoon specials at the Capitol theater at 79th and Halsted – 25 cartoons for 25¢ and another dime would buy a bag of penny candy at the small candy store across the street next to the Cosmo theater, a smaller, dingy and cheaper movie house than the Capitol. The Cosmo was where I saw John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima.
I remember playing with other kids outside when the weather permitted: playing ‘Catch’ and ‘Tag’ and ‘Hide and Go Seek’ and ‘Cowboys and Indians,’ chasing butterflies and lightening bugs in the summer, having snowball fights and building snowmen and snow ‘forts’ in the winter.
I remember walking to Hamilton Park, three blocks east of us, to play in the playground or to get a book from the small library, or, as I got older, to play handball on the outdoor handball court, baseball on the large ball field, or basketball in the small gymnasium. One Christmas, I received a new green J. C. Higgins bicycle from my Uncle Jim and thereafter I would ride to the park and later to places far distant. There was no Little League in those days or any other organized sports for young kids, and soccer, if it was known at all, was a game for immigrants and “DPs”, displaced persons uprooted by the war and generally looked down upon by us supercilious native-born Americans.
I remember the excitement of walking up 73rd Street to Grandma and Grandpa Clausen’s house on Racine to play with our cousins On the other hand, I have no recollection of Grandma, Grandpa, or Aunt Monica coming to visit us in the basement apartment. For my father’s family, 73rd Street was a one-way street. For that matter, I have no recollection of anyone visiting us in that apartment, other than one visit by a wartime Marine friend of my father, a fellow named “Mac.” On the other hand, my mother’s father and her brother Jim visited us regularly, sometimes too regularly and in unwelcome, i.e., besotted, circumstances.
I remember Dennis in the living room when he had too much to drink. When he was happy, he would dance a little Irish jig, which in that small room placed in peril any lamp or table in his vicinity. When he collided with the sleeper sofa, it was the dancer who took a tumble. When he was unhappy, he would curse England and ‘the goddamn Black and Tans’, though almost 50 years had passed since he left Ireland and 30 years since the despised English ‘auxiliaries’ served as a vicious occupation force in 1920-21. He had a brogue until the day he died; there was no mistaking his ethnicity.
Although I have many good memories from those days leading up to adolescence, it would be untrue to characterize this time of my life as happy. Indeed, it was often a time of great unhappiness, for me, for Kitty, and for my mother, mainly due to the condition of my father following the war and a crime against my mother in 1947. I mention good memories first because I don’t want these letters to sound like a dirge. But the fact of the matter is that my life, my mother’s life, and subsequently Kitty’s life were changed from the day in February, 1944, when my father received his letter from Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
The President of the United States,
To: Charles Edward Clausen
Greeting:
Having submitted yourself to a local board composed of your neighbors for the purpose of determining your availability for training and service in the land or naval forces of the United States, you are hereby notified that you have now been selected for training and service therein.
You will, therefore, report to the local board named above at ____, on the ___ day of February, 1944.
This local board will furnish transportation to an induction station. You will there be examined, and if accepted for training and service, you will then be inducted into the land or naval forces.
Persons reporting to the induction station in some cases may be rejected for physical or other reasons. It is well to keep this in mind in arranging your affairs . . .
Willful failure to report promptly to this local board at the hour and on the day named in this notice is a violation of the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, as amended, and subjects the violator to fine and imprisonment.
Within two weeks of receiving that induction notice, my father, by a selection process that was no more sophisticated than eenie, meenie, mynie, moe, (Army, Army, Navy, Marines, Army, Army, Navy, Marines) was sworn into the Marine Corps, a fortuity that, with another, was to lead to tremendous problems and sorrows for my mother, my sister, and me.
My mother, before “the Good War,” an innocent.
Private Charles E. Clausen USMC boot camp graduation photo
with sharpshooter’s medal. Another innocent, cannon fodder.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought – frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.
Opening paragraphs of
The Great Gatsby
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