Blame it on the Christmas season — and then the long, dark winter nights in the weeks that follow — but I always get a bit nostalgic about those great days of my childhood.
Walk north from the tavern on the corner at 75th and Diversey in Elmwood Park, a stone’s throw outside of Chicago city limits, and you’re on the block where I grew up.
The first house standing next to the tavern was the home of Kenny Nabors, one of my school chums, and next to his house was “the Prairie,” the only vacant lot on the block. It was there that we caught the garter snakes we would keep as pets each summer before releasing them again in the fall.
“The Prairie” was lost when a new house was built on the lot, and the Accorsi family moved into it. Both Mr. and Mrs. Accorsi wore leg braces because of polio, but my generation was saved from that horror when we gathered in the playground of John Mills Grammar School a block away to get our Salk vaccinations. Kathy Accorsi became my brother’s first girlfriend years later when they were in high school.
Next to the Accorsi house stood the brick home of the Garvanians. Chuckie Garvanian was a few years younger than I was, and because of spina bifida he could barely walk, but he kept up with the rest of us kids on his Irish Mail scooter. In his basement, his Nana baked Armenian breads every day and sang with the windows thrown wide open, the savory aromas and her lilting voice tempting us to sit by the windows and watch her work with her hands dusted with flour. She always had warm cookies or cakes for us to snack on.
Next to the Garvanians lived Mr. and Mrs. Winchetonas. Their son Robert was the first person we knew who went to college. When my brother and I were little, our parents hired him now and then to babysit for us just to help him pay tuition bills, and he would read to us from his college texts if we asked him to. I wondered how anybody could ever be smart enough to go to college.
Next door, Mr. Skampa left the house each day with his lunch in a hinged-lid metal pail. When he returned every evening, he stopped at the corner tavern to fill the pail with draft beer for his dinner. Whenever relatives sent a newspaper from Czechoslovakia every few weeks, Mrs. Skampa would invite me up onto their porch, where she would read the words to me and tell me what they meant in English.
Our house was next, and then it was the Zumsteins, whose collie, cat, and duck all got along with each other as if they were from the same litter. Beverly and I were born only days apart, and we grew up climbing the big apple tree in their back yard to sit on the garage roof, munching apples. Mr. Zumstein brewed beer in the basement, and sometimes on hot summer nights we could hear the bottles bursting — each one punctuated by a curse.
The Fiorentinos were next, and Larry was my best friend on the block. I loved the exotic taste of their meals — and especially their dark, oily olives — whenever I ate dinner at their home. But Larry’s grandmother Nona watched me hawk-eyed whenever I had dinner with them, and she never failed to comment on any gaffe I might make, in words I could never understand.
Walk a bit farther and you come to the Peterson house, where Ricky was just a year older than I was. When he played “Lady of Spain” on his accordion on the radio, he became the first famous person I ever met. He was also the fastest kid I knew, always wanting to race down the street. When we were on the high school track team we ran on a record-setting relay team together, and he finished 5th in the state in the 100-yard-dash his senior year.
Keep walking down the block past house after house—Colangelo, Branda, Zimmerle, Kaminski — and smell the wonderful scent of their dinners wafting out to the street, each so different from the other.
Come back down the other side of the street and read the names on each mailbox — Simons, Ryan, Fritz. And then there were the Kufliks and the Gutmans, who lit menorahs in the window while we had Christmas trees. In the fall, Mr. Gutman would pay me a few bucks to pick all the cherries from his tree so they wouldn’t lay rotting on the ground, and I could take as many as I wanted for Mom to make pies. Mrs. Kuflik let me snag all the blue grapes I could eat when I cut through her gangway on the way to grammar school on autumn mornings.
That was my block — my America — where a child got to know the world up close and personal without having to ride his bike any farther than the nearest stop sign.
And whenever I find myself nudged into nostalgia over the greatness of America past, I remember my childhood block and realize that the best path to making America great again is clear:
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan: “Mr. President, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!”
Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
