Make America “safe” as it used to be? Careful what you wish for

Who doesn’t long for those lazy, hazy days of their childhood?

I was raised in quiet Elmwood Park, just a stone’s throw from Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, and I have always thought of my 1950s childhood as idyllic, calm, and peaceful.

And yet…

I grew up in a house with a bullet hole in the outside wall just under the kitchen window. My grandmother Nani lived with us, a woman surprisingly nimble with a left hand paralyzed when that bullet ripped through her chest years earlier in the back yard, shot by a drunken neighbor plinking at tin cans with an old army rifle. In apology, he brought her a box of chocolates as she lay in a hospital bed, and the matter was forgiven.

When I entered fourth grade, I was eager to show my favorite teacher that I had been practicing on the little wooden recorder flute she had taught us to play the year before, but she was nowhere to be found. When I got home, Mom said she had been murdered by her boyfriend over the summer. There were no grief counseling sessions, of course, because it didn’t happen during the school year.

The next summer, Dad restricted my bike rides to the immediate neighborhood, because the cops still hadn’t caught the guy who murdered the Scheussler and Peterson boys and dumped them naked in a ditch near the Des Plaines River not far from our home. Dad said he didn’t want to go through what those fathers had gone through, because on his way to work he had seen the fathers searching the woods for their boys.

When I was eleven or twelve, my buddy Larry and I dashed a couple blocks over to 73rd and Diversey, where the cops were just hauling away the bank robber they had shot after a short chase. Larry and I stared at the bloody patch on the lawn just in front of the apartment building, and at the brick wall that had been chipped by a stray bullet from the shootout. We thought it was cool how the inside of the chip had been silvered by the lead of the bullet.

That December, just a few blocks farther south, neighborhood gangster Roger Touhy would be shotgunned to death outside his sister’s house, the end of a long-standing feud with Al Capone’s outfit that dated back to Prohibition.

When high school rolled around, I hoped my neighborhood pal Richard Macek would join the football team with me. Although short, he was insanely strong and built like a fireplug — he’d be an immovable center or guard. But even before we entered high school, disturbing rumors about him started circulating. By sophomore year, he no longer stood right next to me in our high school yearbook photo as he had freshman year, because he had moved out of town. A few years later we would learn about his conviction for raping, murdering, and disfiguring at least six women and girls in Illinois and Wisconsin, and his violent death in prison.

As a young teacher at Maine South High School in the 1970s, I remember a student coming to class saying she hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before because of all the flashing police lights on her block. Her neighbor was John Wayne Gacy, and the cops found 26 bodies buried in his crawl space.

And so, as my wife’s sister sat with the morning paper recently and read an article about the still-unsolved murder of Valerie Percy (daughter of ex-Illinois senator Chuck Percy) and asked me, “Do you remember what year it was that the Percy girl was killed?” I had to admit that I didn’t. The article said it was September, 1966. I was 18, and by then I had little reaction to violence that only came to my door in the newspaper. Besides, that murder paled in comparison to the eight student nurses murdered two months earlier by Richard Speck, who lived a couple miles from where I grew up.

And yet, as I say, my overriding memory of childhood is that it was idyllic, calm, and peaceful. For as much as violence surrounded me, I can’t say that I shudder with horror when I think of my Chicago-area childhood.

There’s a lot of shuddering going on these days whenever the topic of violent crime arises, as Americans yearn to go back to the “idyllic, calm, and peaceful” past.

But it only takes a quick glance at the numbers to see that homicide rates have actually plummeted since their all-time highs some 25 years ago. Violence today across America has dropped to 1960s levels and continues to fall year by year, despite occasional spikes that fill the news with gloom and doom.

Homicides in New York City last year were the lowest since record-keeping began in 1963.

Even Chicago, widely touted as America’s murder capital, has seen homicide rates plummet by at least 25 percent since the 1990s, when the city averaged more than 800 homicides per year, with several years topping 900.

By contrast, fewer than 500 were killed annually in Chicago over 11 of the past 12 years. Last year saw a spike to just over 700, with similar numbers this year, but as horrifying as those numbers are, they still don’t come close to the mayhem of the ‘90s.

The ‘70s yearly average was even worse. In 1974 alone, there were 970 homicides in Chicago.

And yet, ask almost anybody about today’s murder rate, and they’ll cluck their tongue and shake their head about how bad things are getting these days—because perception is not always reality.

So, shall we “Make America safe again” by winding the clock back a few decades?

Now, that would give me a shudder of horror.

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.

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