For those who are fanatics about geographical details, some minor ones have been deliberately altered to facilitate the story. However, South Chicago does contain some of Illinois’s last wetlands for migratory birds, and a part of that marsh is really known as Dead Stick Pond.

CONTENTS

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Ttile Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

1. Highway 41 Revisited

2. Bringing Up Baby

3. My Sister’s Keeper

4. The Old Folks at Home

5. The Simple Joys of Childhood

6. The Mill on the Calumet

7. The Boys in the Back Room

8. The Good Doctor

9. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

10. Fire When Ready

11. The Brat’s Tale

12. Common Sense

13. Dead Stick Pond

14. Muddy Waters

15. Chemistry Lesson

16. House Call

17. Tombstone Blues

18. In His Father’s Shadow

19. You Can’t Go Home Again

20. White Elephant

21. Mama’s Boy

22. The Doctor’s Dilemma

23. End Run

24. In Grimpen Mire

25. Visiting Hours

26. Back to Home Base

27. The Game’s Afoot

28. The Golden Notebooks

29. Night Crawlers

30. Fence Mending

31. Old Fireball

32. Flushed Out of the Pocket

33. A Family Affair

34. Bank Shot

35. Changing Words at Buckingham Fountain

36. Bad Blood

37. The Shark Puts Out Bait

38. Toxic Shock

39. Plant Clean-Up

40. Night Shakes

41. A Wise Child

42. Humboldt’s Gift

43. Bringing It All Back Home

1

Highway 41 Revisited

I had forgotten the smell. Even with the South Works on strike and Wisconsin Steel padlocked and rusting away, a pungent mix of chemicals streamed in through the engine vents. I turned off the car heater, but the stench—you couldn’t call it air—slid through minute cracks in the Chevy’s windows, burning my eyes and sinuses.

I followed Route 41 south. A couple of miles back it had been Lake Shore Drive, with Lake Michigan spewing foam against the rocks on my left, expensive high rises haughtily looking on from the right. At Seventy-ninth Street the lake disappeared abruptly. The weed-choked yards surrounding the giant USX South Works stretched away to the east, filling the mile or so of land between road and water. In the distance, pylons, gantries, and towers loomed through the smoke-hung February air. Not the land of high rises and beaches anymore, but landfill and worn-out factories.

Decaying bungalows looked on the South Works from the right side of the street. Some were missing pieces of siding, or shamefacedly showing stretches of peeling paint. In others the concrete in the front steps cracked and sagged. But the windows were all whole, tightly sealed, and not a scrap of debris lay in the yards. Poverty might have overtaken the area, but my old neighbors gallantly refused to give in to it.

I could remember when eighteen thousand men poured from those tidy little homes every day into the South Works, Wisconsin Steel, the Ford assembly plant, or the Xerxes solvent factory. I remembered when each piece of trim was painted fresh every second spring and new Buicks or Olds-mobiles were an autumn commonplace. But that was in a different life, for me as well as South Chicago.