Days of yore -- Being a boy in Oak Park decades past . . .
. . . as at Gene's drug store at South Blvd., Gus's at Madison St.
. . . On the way home from Stevenson playground in the 40s was Gene's, "home of the black cow." At Madison was Gus's, or Oak Park pharmacy -- "we live by the service we give." Gus, placid and smiling, would cash my father's checks.
Gene Bogot held forth at Gene's, which was more a kid's place, partly because it was on the way to Stevenson but also because of the black cow, which was a root beer cooler served in frosted steins. First came the root beer syrup, then fizz from a spigot, but not all the way, then ice cream, then fizz the rest of the way. Or frosted stein, root beer only. Tasty and refreshing on a hot day. Nickel for the latter, dime for the black cow.
Gene's had a rental library from which books could be taken by the day or longer, for a charge. These had bright dust jackets in plastic transparent covers. Far more interesting was the comic book rack, where one could read up on Draza Mihailovich, the intrepid anti-Nazi partisan, in True Comics and then a year or so later about Tito, the intrepid anti-Nazi partisan. Years later you could read, not in True Comics, about how Tito (the communist) did Mihailovich (the Chetnik) in. Thus early in one's life could one learn something about propaganda.
REVOLUTION . . . War over, brothers home from service, you read about the "L" station, street-level at Lombard across the street from Gene’s, being phased out. That meant the demise of Lombard and South Blvd. as a (small) commercial center. Gene's would go, so would Ed & Gus's meat market next door on South Blvd. Citizens rose up. There was a meeting. My veteran brothers went, and my father. He addressed the meeting about the importance of saving our neighborhood drug store -- no man said pharmacy then, or pharmacist; it was drug store and druggist.
It was the only neighborhood meeting I ever heard of. It was certainly the first that my father addressed. He was no shrinking violet, but the neighborhood was for talking over the back fence or in the alley, rather than a focus for concerted action. The action was at parish or school, and then it was hardly about policy. Fund-raising was the point of those meetings.
DISCOVERY CHANNEL . . . Have found I can yawn and walk at the same time, but chew gum and yawn and walk at same time, no.
HIGH-PROFILE PEOPLE . . . Read the gospels, and it's "the Jews" this, "the Jews" that, always as opponents of Jesus. For that matter, read the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), and Jews are a "stiff-necked," largely faithless people. So if you get explicit about either, you lay a burden on Jewish people, unless you think they stand for us all.
THEY ALSO WAIT . . . Fenwick girl sits at Bread Kitchen window awaiting school bus, plugged into CD player, working with pencil at thick spiral note book. She is stopping by the train station on a winter morning, with minutes to go before her ride arrives, indulging her knack for concentrating while listening.
WHAT I MEAN . . . Question for fans: How many superfluous you-knows from a sports or other commentator does it take to make you turn radio or TV sound off? In other words, what's your you-know threshold?
From pages of Blithely, Blithely, about:
Books and essays, ideas from lots of places, some of them wild and woolly.
offering:
conservative commentary, with special attention to literature, Oak Park Illinois, and cultural drift in general.
Proudly signatured:
My threshold is one. The same with "like", which has overtaken "you know" as the most irritating interjection in the vocabulary of twenty-to-forty somethings. I even know a few fifty-and-sixty somethings who indulge. No matter what they say, I can't take them seriously. "You know" and "like" are tell-tale signs of mental vacuity.