Here are a few photos that mean a lot to me but may be yawners for everybody else - some snaps of my childhood neighborhood, where I visited the afternoon after my plane landed at O'Hare airport. First I took the shuttle from the airport (a lugubrious ordeal, next time I plan to take the train), checked into my hotel, called my childhood friend to tell her I'd gotten that far, palavered with the guy at the desk and the guy at the hotel door re whether I could just get the purple line at Jackson and State or had to take the red and transfer at Howard. Caught the redline, transferred at Howard, called friend when I got off at Main Street and Chicago Ave. in Evanston, and she showed up a few minutes later. Weird, of course. She was immediately recognizable some 50 years later...
She drove me up Main (oh, yeah, that's where the IGA was...) and we parked on our street - amazingly almost the same as in 1955, when my family left the area. A few elm trees down, and the school yard is now paved instead of covered with gravel, and missing the lawsuit prone type playground equipment.
Our street -
The school yard - school at the right, former basketball court on lower right, convent in the middle/left (piano lessons), gravel baseball field in front of convent...
Our rental house - happiest years of my young life, complex though they were
The house we finally bought, lived in for a year; I got scarlet fever there...
Neighbor's house (we played canasta on an earlier version of that porch, tag up and down the street; it was with those kids I learned to ice skate, roller skate, play softball, all sorts of normal childhood stuff.
Corner grocery store, similar to one a few blocks west that sold penny candy..
Ridge Avenue, a main street for us through the town -
