You Live There!?
Someone once said to me “You don’t look like you’re from there” after I told her where I lived. That is when it hit me that others thought my neighborhood was, well, different. I was fine with my neighborhood – it is all I knew. We had the “Catholic Gym” where I could play basketball, baseball and join boy scouts. We had a Chicago Housing Authority-funded swimming pool and a place called “The Children’s Building” where we could also play hoops plus join multiple clubs including dance and gymnastics teams for boys and girls. They even had chess clubs. I grew up with SOOO many smart kids – many of whom I saw at my 35th High School reunion. And the teachers! All I need to say is – my Kindergarten teacher attended that class reunion which included four kids she taught as a new teacher in 1970. Our teachers went beyond regularly — to sum it up I had the raw materials including a mom who expected excellence.
The rest of the story
The famed Paul Harvey would say – “NOW, the rest of the Story.” If you watched the movie, “Southside with You” which chronicles Barack and Michelle’s steamy (1989) First Date then you have “seen” my neighborhood – a scene near the old Children’s Building where future President Obama attended a (Chicago Southside) community neighborhood meeting. My wife, Victoria, and I watched the movie in Toronto last year and I was bursting with emotion – …I am from there!… Altgeld Gardens
Making a way forward or Out
During summer, the Catholic gym and the Children’s Building had summer jobs where older neighborhood kids were Counselors for the younger kids. These facilities (programs) ceased long ago and arguably there are dramatic (traumatic) impacts from the lack of productive outlets for too many kids…
“Making it out” – leading a productive life takes many forms. That said, my purpose for writing this is, in part, to generate interest in discovering what factors mattered most & figure out how to pay it forward.
Growing Up
Growing up in Altgeld Gardens – the southernmost part of Chicago – I was the youngest of 7 kids, but the first College graduate. As an accomplished H.S. basketball player, Dartmouth, as an example of my naiveté’ recruited me but, not having any idea about them or the Ivy League, I kept tearing up their letters. I had my eyes on the Big Ten – Northwestern! I did not know much about NU either, but it represented an aspiration – the “North Side of Chicago” – akin to the Jeffersons Theme Song – …moving on up to the East Side…
