293 Days Until the Big Five-0

This is based on Prompt number 9 from the book Branches by Nancy Beckett.

“Describe a person or a group you saw everyday on the street or in a neighborhood. Place yourself in the scene and describe the setting, clothes, weather and where you were going.”

The newspaper stand on the corner of Rockwell and Devon was a blue wooden structure that looked a lot like the little house I see in backyards all over the suburbs. These backyard sheds can be bought at Menard’s or Home Depot and are used to house lawn mowers in the winter and snow blowers in the summer so garages can be free of clutter. The newspaper stand looked like a small barn to me when I was a child and had no idea about suburbs, backyards, or snow blowers. My father and brothers equipped with shovels were my idea of snow removal. Lawn care followed the same principle but with a manual piece of metal. My mother with a rake and a broom managed to pick up all the loose grass after each lawn, front and back, got the weekly hair cut in the summer. In the city we had basements to store all these shovels, rakes, lawnmowers, sprinklers and anything else needed to make the outside as beautiful and clean as the inside of where we lived. In the suburbs Basements are usually furnished and use for R&R, not laundry and bicycle storage.

I often wondered where the old scrubby newspaper man lived. His little blue hut was barely big enough for him and his stool and his stacks of papers. He decorated the outside with a sample of all the products he had: The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Daily News, The Jewish Sentinel, The Wall Street Journal, The North Town News (I cannot recall if North Town was one word or worked into a single word). There must have been others but I don’t really remember. I don’t remember much really about the old man and his newspaper stand. I just remember it was there. I cannot recall when it finally was removed. I think it was still there when I took the Devon Bus everyday to go to Circle (now known as the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle). Back then we just called it Circle. It was appropriate my first college experience would be at someplace representing the shape of my life, I always seemed to be going in circles, never getting anywhere. Is that what was happening to that old man sitting in the blue hut? He started handing out newspapers for a dime, or on Sundays for a quarter and they were filled with words about wars, Viet Nam, or the Six Day War in Israel, or one of the other many wars raging in the Middle East, or about hippies and the Civil Rights Movement. Eventually the price of the paper went up and the wars changed names and locations, the fervor of the Civil Rights movement faded, the 60’s became the 70’s and the news was a lot less exciting. No man landing on the moon, no more marching on Washington, no more being afraid of Russia, really afraid I mean.

I never knew the old man’s name and I can’t recall ever hearing him talk. But I saw him. I just wish I could remember when I stopped seeing him, stopped reading the newspapers, stopped thinking about the all the different wars that have come and gone over time. Some of the newspapers died, and I am sure the old man eventually died as well. His little wooden blue hut was taken down by some city of Chicago employee perhaps or maybe the local Chamber of Business for Devon Avenue. The entire street was changing, the dream street. It had been a shopping destination for over a decade with Jewish people from all over Chicago coming there to stroll along the stores offering fine clothing, bakeries, jewelry, records, perfumes, cameras, grocery stores, shoes store, and so much more. It was a rich man’s Maxwell Street, the famous place for shopping for immigrants and discounters, where so many of our ancestors landed to begin a business and perhaps for a lucky few to build an empire to pass along to their children selling socks, ladies’ underwear, or watches. Devon was a street where kids ran to get the paper for their parents at the corner or cars would pull up on Sundays and honk signaling the old man. He would come out of the hut wearing his blue apron with the big pockets take the quarters from the outstretched hands of drivers with his left hand while passing them the newspapers heavy with advertisements with his right hand.

Devon was simply re-modeled for the newest influx of immigrants from India and Pakistan. Soon there were Sari’s for Sale and stores filled with Electronics and Spices (I never did see the connection between those two), and jewelry stores where the jewelry had this incredibly unusual tone to it that I had never seen before. It looked fake but I was told it was not. Parking became unbearable as more and more people moved into tiny apartments and more and more families owned 2 cars. The street would become some other child’s youthful dream of days gone by when their parents first got to America and made a place for themselves that reminded them of home.