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Older Brothers

Oak Park, 1966

He was crouching in the bushes. We couldn’t see him, but we knew he was there. As Lori and I stood next to the crossing guard, it became clear that there was no escaping our fate. Kurt Nolan needed to push someone around, and he chose us. He was in third grade, a head taller than Lori. Lori was a head taller than me.

We walked with the crossing guard as far as we could, then we started to run. As we hurried past the bushes, his long arms reached through, grabbing handfuls of my jacket. He yanked me into his hiding place, tightening his grip on my collar, pushing me against the side of the house.

“Don’t you ever pass my house again,” he barked as he squeezed the air from my throat.

“We have to...” I gasped.

“Never,” he growled. He knew we had to walk past his house.

“But...”

He squeezed my throat until I couldn’t breathe. Tears rolled down my cheeks. That was the currency he wanted. Words meant nothing to him.

He let me go, and the moment he released his grip, Lori and I ran home. Mom was expecting us, but we couldn’t go in until I stopped crying. We stood in the gangway, and Lori held me against her shoulder to muffle my voice until I cried away the terror that burned in the pit of my stomach. Lori and I agreed that Mom shouldn’t know anything about the Kurt Nolan problem. If she knew, she’d call Kurt’s mother. Kurt would get in trouble, and then, at the first opportunity, he’d kill me.

Lori argued that eventually Kurt would lose interest in us. This strategy didn’t help our situation now, but she was always right. We agreed to wait. After choking out the last sob, we pulled ourselves together and stepped out into the front yard.

“Hey, we’re playing football,” Jimmy Fitzgerald shouted. He skipped toward us, tossing a football to himself. “You guys wanna play?”

“Okay, be right there,” I shouted, but the cracking in my voice betrayed me. I should have kept my mouth shut.

“Hey, what’s up?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I have to change.” I ran up the front steps and into the house.

“Lori, what’s up?” I could hear Jimmy’s voice through the screen door.

“He’ll be right out,” she assured him as she followed me into the house.

I ran upstairs to put on my play clothes. We played tackle football every day after school, grinding up the front lawns on Home Avenue. A gully of mud formed at the Peterson’s house on the corner, oozed across our lawn, tore through the Hurley’s lot, and ended at the far end of the Fitzgerald’s house.

Of the twelve Fitzgerald kids, nine were boys. The three girls, Nancy, Kathy, and Mary were better football players than most of the boys in the neighborhood. I was just old enough to play, but the honor didn’t come easy. I earned it by attempting a leg tackle on Donny Hurley, my next door neighbor. He was three years older than me and twice my size. Donny dragged me the entire length of our makeshift field through the mud and across three sidewalks. I held firmly to his enormous foot until Patrick Fitzgerald tackled Donny just before he reached the end zone. It was a test. The Fitzgerald boys wanted to see how long I could hang on, but they weren’t going to let Donny score an easy touchdown for the sake of science.

After school, we could round up at least fifteen kids to play. On our block alone, the Hurleys had six kids, we had four kids, the Turners had five kids, and the Petersons had four kids. A few years later, Mrs. Fitzgerald, a widow, married a man with six kids, bringing the total number of footballers in the Fitzgerald-Bailey household to eighteen.

That afternoon’s game was one of my best. I didn’t score, but I helped our team win. I made tackles, and blocked for Brendan and Patrick Fitzgerald as they cut and dodged their way to the end zone. When the streetlights came on, we broke up the game, with each family of kids ambling home for dinner and homework.

After dinner, I couldn’t get my mind off football. Lori and I sat at the kitchen table. She was busy with her school work, and I was drawing. I drew pictures of myself in a Chicago Bears uniform, diving over the line of scrimmage toward the goal post. Touchdown!

When the doorbell rang, I could see the hat and shining badge of an Oak Park police officer, standing rigid under the porch light. Mom opened the door, and the officer started asking questions. I couldn’t hear all of the conversation, but I did hear the officer mention my name. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Why were they coming after me?

“Sammy, come here,” my Mom shouted. I could tell by her voice that she was concerned.

I walked down the hallway to the front door. The officer looked big and mean. On his belt, he had a radio that belched static along with the sound of a metallic voice repeating words and numbers that made no sense. He carried a clipboard that contained several blue sheets of paper. He was writing as I approached.

“Young man,” he said, pointing his pen at me, “do you know a boy named Kurt Nolan?”

I didn’t answer. Actually, I had to fight off a smile. I imagined Kurt Nolan being arrested and whisked off to prison until I finished grammar school. If he served eight years, I’d be in high school before he was free. The high school was on the other side of town. I wouldn’t have to walk past his house at all.

“Sammy, answer the question,” my mother prodded.

“Yes.”

“When did you see him last?” the officer asked.

“After school.”

“Did you say anything to him?” The officer wrote something on the blue paper.

“No,” I said, but I knew that wasn’t quite true. What I meant to say was that Kurt didn’t allow me to speak, but it didn’t come out that way.

“Did he say anything to you?” The officer stared at me in a way that insisted that I tell the truth.

“He told us not to walk past his house,” I whimpered. “He hates us.” I could feel the tears starting to well up.

Mom finally cut into the interrogation.

“Did you tell Jimmy Fitzgerald that Kurt was bothering you?”

“No. I didn’t.”

“Are you sure?” she questioned.

I nodded my head to communicate my “Yes.” I couldn’t speak. Thank God I didn’t have to lie.

The officer said nothing. He stared at me for a minute to see if I was going to change my story. I didn’t move.

“Okay, I think we’re done here,” he said, writing one last note in his report.

The officer left abruptly. Mom shut the door behind him and turned toward me. She gave me a long, penetrating stare, trying to see the truth in my face.

“Mom, what happened?”

I didn’t know what she was expecting from me, or why she thought I wasn’t telling her the truth.

“There was a fight. Jimmy and Patrick Fitzgerald pushed Kurt Nolan through a window. It’s going to cost a lot of money to fix,” she said seriously. “The police are trying to figure out what happened.”

“Are Jimmy and Patrick okay?” I asked. “Are they taking them away?”

“No. But Kurt Nolan is in the hospital. He has a broken arm.” She watched my reaction. I tried not to jump for joy.

“Did they break his arm?”

“It was an accident, but that’s what happens when boys fight. Someone gets hurt.” She paused to let this lesson sink in. “I don’t want to hear about you fighting. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, you can go now,” she said.

I hustled back to the kitchen and took up my place next to Lori. I didn’t feel like drawing any more, so I put away the crayons. Lori kept her head down, reading an article from her Weekly Reader. She didn’t ask me about Kurt Nolan, Jimmy or Patrick Fitzgerald, or the police officer. I waited for her to say something, but she kept reading. After a while, it dawned on me that Kurt Nolan and the many others like him would never bother us again.

The Big Snow

Oak Park, 1967

On January 24, 1967, it was sunny with a late afternoon temperature of sixty-five degrees. With the arrival of an early spring, I was thinking about baseball. At the bottom of my toy box, I found my Wiffle ball and bat. In shirt sleeves, I took the field.

I’d throw the ball up in the air, whack it over the fence, and begin my home run trot, crossing home plate and shaking hands with imaginary teammates. I’d retrieve the ball from the alley and take my place in the batter’s box. I’d throw the ball up in the air, swing, home run, trot. Swing, home run, trot. Swing, home run, trot. This was going to be a great year for baseball.

That evening, the wind shifted, sending an Arctic blast across the entire length of Lake Michigan, turning the unseasonably warm water into a snow-producing machine. First came sleet, then pellets of ice. An hour into the blizzard, the heavy stuff was hitting the rooftops. It came down so fast that the air inside our house smelled like cold water.

The first flakes that hit the ground melted. But soon, the soggy lawns froze and the snow began to accumulate. Two hours into the storm, four inches of snow covered the grass, the sidewalks, and the streets. The blizzard hit so quickly that there were several inches of snow on the Eisenhower Expressway before the city trucks spewed the first salt crystals onto the pavement. Hours later, thirteen inches of snow blanketed the Chicago metropolitan area with no let-up in sight. Stranded motorists abandoned their cars in the middle of the streets, hoping that the trains were still running. The city bus service shut down completely.

Before dawn, neighborhoods awoke to the sound of shovels scraping the pavement, as the early commuters tried desperately to clear a path from their front doors to their garages. But the snow kept drifting and falling, quickly erasing any attempts to move it aside. The blizzard finally ended one full day after it began, leaving twenty-three inches of new snow across northern Illinois.

At Midway Airport, the national weather service measured drifts up to six feet high. On the Lakefront, great waves of blown snow covered park benches and sealed the doorways to the offices on Michigan Avenue. In Oak Park, schools and businesses were closed. Somewhere in the yard, my Wiffle ball and bat were buried where I left them only yesterday. My short-lived spring training was postponed indefinitely.

In the days following the blizzard, every snow shovel in the neighborhood pulled double shifts in an effort to reclaim life as we knew it before the storm. We shoveled the sidewalks. We shoveled the driveways. We dug out the garage and cut through the plowed snow drifts to open a path to the street.

Just as we cleared the snow, piling the excess high along the perimeter of the lawns, the weather changed again, bringing another glimpse of spring. Temperatures soared, melting the snow almost as quickly as it came. The drifts of snow shrank as water ran from the lawns into the street. In our backyard, the snow melted down to about four inches of slush with an inch of standing water on top. I could see my bat and ball, rising from its watery grave. Given just a few more warm days, I could continue my inevitable march to Cooperstown.

That night, the Earth made an imperceptible shift on its axis, which permanently stalled my journey to the Hall of Fame. Overnight, the temperature dropped fifty degrees. By morning, the entire city was a sheet of ice. The sun seemed to make the air colder, pushing the mercury below zero. When I looked at the backyard, instead of seeing an emerging baseball diamond, I saw my bat and ball, trapped below several inches of solid ice.

At the bottom of the toy box, there were two pairs of unused hockey skates, a holdover from last year’s Christmas. My brother Will and I were not that interested in hockey, but coincidentally, the Blackhawks were in first place and fate seemed to be steering us in that direction. For the next few days, after school, we made the long walk down Madison Street to Gunzo’s hockey supply store. Gunzo’s was famous for its warehouse-like commitment to hockey. It was rumored that the Blackhawks players shopped there, and one time we thought we saw Blackhawks defenseman Pierre Pilote walking to his car with seven new sticks slung over his shoulder.

We bought sticks, pucks, and regulation-sized hockey gloves. The padding for the gloves reached our shoulders. At night, we listened to the Hawks games on WGN radio. We could imagine the fierce action on the ice, sticks flying, brutal checks into the boards, shards of ice shooting off steel blades as Bobby Hull, Dennis Hull, and Stan Mikita attacked the goal.

And then, some lowlife on the opposing team would take a cheap shot, and the gloves would hit the ice. Fists raging, the Hawks pounded cold blows against their opponents’ heads until the ice was streaked with blood. In time the game resumed, but the message was clear.

Will and I knew nothing about hockey. We laced up our skates, walked from the basement to the ice like tight-rope acrobats, and tried to teach ourselves the game. We’d launch our slap shots in the general direction of the garage, occasionally hitting the two-car target. We’d try to skate backward, which neither one of us could master. We’d pass the puck back and forth, working on our stick control. This intensive training on the fundamentals of hockey occupied at least ten minutes of our practice session.

We also knew nothing about fighting, but it seemed to us that we should master the fighting part of the game first. We took turns slamming each other into the garage, then we’d drop our gloves and start swinging. We’d practice our uppercuts for hours, rolling across the ice, landing body blows wherever we found an opening. After a few hours of fisticuffs, we’d knock off for the day.

A few weeks passed, and our rise to NHL stardom seemed inevitable. On Saturday, we took our game to the public rink at Fox Park. This rink was twenty times the size of our backyard, the perfect arena to host two full hockey teams. When we arrived, there was a pickup game in progress. We laced up our skates and took to the ice. Soon, we were invited to join in.

At the next face off, Will and I squared up, jabbing at each other with our sticks. The puck was dropped, and the action started. My team won the face off. The sharp sound of steel blades on ice cut the cold morning air as we raced toward the goal. The puck was passed back and forth, as our center and right wing moved deftly past the defense. I was racing toward the goal on the left wing, trailing the action by ten feet. Suddenly, the defense converged on our center. The passing lane to our right wing was cut off by the opposing team’s center. Just as we were about to lose control of the puck, our center back-handed the puck behind the converging defenders, leaving me with an open slap shot. I wound up, poised to fire the puck into the net, but in spite of our intensive training, Will and I never practiced the skills needed to take a shot while moving. By the time I got my stick up in the air and squared myself to the goal, the puck had already skidded between my legs and was on the stick of the opposing team’s left wing.

I dug my blades into the ice to make a quick stop. My only hope of saving face was to catch the left wing from behind and steal the puck. I was about to turn and pursue the action when I was hit from behind. The impact carried me and the defender off the ice and over the snow embankment. We hit the ground clutching each other’s necks, and at that moment I knew that Will had executed a perfect full-body check. As our bodies slid across the snow-covered field, we dropped our gloves and began landing blows at a rapid clip. I peppered Will’s head with lightning-quick jabs as he landed body shots into my overstuffed parka.

On the ice, the hockey game continued as if we were never there. Off the ice, Will and I rolled toward the Community Center, neither one of us ready to concede defeat. We’d trained for this moment, and we were just beginning to experience the true joy of competition.

Free Money

Oak Park, 1968

I never noticed the sorrow in Abe Lincoln’s face until the day Bobby Collister slapped a five-dollar bill on the counter at Chicks. In our limited economy, currency was exchanged in pennies and nickels. If you saved your allowance diligently for weeks, you could trade up for quarters, but that was rare.

A shiny new dime could buy a week’s worth of candy at Chicks. Hot dogs were ten for a penny; fizzies were five for a penny; a box of lemon heads set you back a penny; and the greatest prize of them all, the bub’s daddy, cost only a nickel. A bub’s daddy was a cable-shaped stick of bubble gum, a full two feet long and a half-inch thick, that exuded enough grape flavoring to turn your mouth purple for weeks.

After school, Chicks was as active as the bond pit at the Chicago Board of Trade. Candy was bought, sold, and traded with an eye on maximizing your take at the other guy’s expense. Buying an interest in a bub’s daddy was as risky and contentious as trading gold futures during times of geopolitical crisis. The day that my best friend Steve Randall cornered the hot-dog gum market ended in a brawl that resulted in a forced redistribution of wealth.

The moment Bobby Collister laid down that five, an uneasy quiet settled over Chicks. We stood two or three faces deep along the twelve-foot counter, staring at that bill, wondering how so much wealth could accumulate in the hands of one eight-year-old. Bobby scooped handfuls of gum, candy, and wacky packies onto the counter. We never saw such largess, and one had the peculiar feeling that we’d never see anything like this again. The score was too big. The buying power too great. The entire candy supply at Emerson School could very well be controlled by Bobby Collister until we entered junior high.

His pyramid of treats stood eight inches tall, sloping up to the heavens from its broad base. To the untrained eye, a conservative guess put the total cost of this purchase in the millions of dollars. However, after the counting was complete and the cash register rang for the last time, Bobby’s total bill came to $1.78, plus tax. The change that Mrs. Watson handed Bobby included three dollar bills and some miscellaneous coinage.

Bobby fumbled with the currency, showing the first signs of stress. He clutched the bag of candy in his left hand, and in his right, he held the cash far from his pockets, as if he accidentally picked up poison ivy. Without saying a word, he ran from Chicks.

Wanting to be close to the great man in his moment of glory, I followed Bobby out, catching up to him a block from the store. The change in his right hand seemed to be burning through his grip, and when I finally tapped him on the shoulder, he turned and whimpered, “Take it. I don’t want it.”

Before I could say anything, he dropped the money into my hands and ran.

For a second, I thought this was a setup, some sort of test. But these feelings were pushed aside by the boundless joy I felt at having over three dollars to spend on anything I wanted. Before Bobby could change his mind, I did an immediate about-face and strolled back to Chicks. Whatever was left on the shelves after Bobby’s spree, I was going to buy.

I was on top of the world until I reached the store. As I was about to enter paradise, Butch Parcheski flung the door open and started running in the direction of Bobby’s house. He pushed past me, and then stopped abruptly. Although Butch was trying for the second time to pass third grade, he knew things. He grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled me away from the relative safety inside Chicks.

“Where did he go, Sam?” Butch interrogated. Within seconds, he had me pinned against the wall. It seemed that when you spoke to Butch, this was the typical posture.

“He went home,” I coughed, choking through the grip he had on my collar.

Butch stared into my eyes and tightened his hold on my vocal chords. He wasn’t completely satisfied with my answer. I could see his brain parsing this information, determining which of his reactionary responses I deserved: (1) belch out another question, or (2) hit me.

Before he made his decision, I made my play.

“But he wanted me to give you this.” I pulled a single dollar from my pocket and held it between our faces. As the bill waved in the breeze between us, time stopped. I waited breathlessly for Butch to think through this offer.

Eventually, he loosened his grip on my collar. He snatched the bill from my hand and looked it over carefully. I don’t think any of us could recognize counterfeit money if we saw it, but Butch was always wary of the double-cross. After painstaking examination, he was convinced that it was real.

“Thanks Sam, you’re okay.”

He tucked the bill into his pocket and started walking toward Barr’s Five and Dime.

With over two dollars left, I burst into Chicks, ready to spend like Sinatra in Vegas. My purchases were sweeping and comprehensive. I bought bubble gum, candy bars, m&ms, wacky packies, pez, and a full dollar’s worth of bub’s daddies. When the goods were packed and ready to move, the stash filled two shopping bags.

I strolled home, thinking about my good fortune. This morning, I had a net worth of zero. Now, I owned this town. I filled my pockets with necessities, and stashed the rest of the loot in my bedroom closet. In a few minutes, Jeff Smetzer would stop by with his army of plastic soldiers. We would divide the troops, find a suitable patch of ground in the backyard and reenact World War II. Jeff’s fascination with German military strategy was a bit annoying, so we all took turns kicking the snot out of him in pitched battle. Today was my day.

“Sam, get down here right now,” Mom yelled from the kitchen. Jeff was early. That cheat was probably staking out the high ground.

“Sam, get down here now.” Mom’s voice had a ‘double-time soldier’ tone to it that didn’t sound good.

“Is Jeff here?” I asked, strolling into the kitchen.

“I sent Jeff home,” she said. She was holding the telephone receiver in her right hand, cupping the mouthpiece with her left.

“Did Bobby Collister give you any money today?”

I stood dumb. How could she know?

“Did he?”

“He said I could have it. I didn’t ask him for it, he just...”

“Stop,” she said, holding up her hand like a traffic cop. She didn’t want to hear my side of the story. She lifted the telephone receiver.

“Alice, I’ll call you back in ten minutes,” she said reassuringly into the receiver. “Yes, he’ll bring it to you within the hour. Yes, goodbye.”

She hung up the phone. She stared at me for a few seconds before speaking.

“When you leave this house, do you think about your behavior? Do you realize that your actions reflect on us as a family? Do you ever think about right and wrong?”

She paused, waiting for an answer. She had me cornered. There was no way to respond without incriminating myself.

“Mom, he gave me the money.”

She looked disappointed.

“Go get it.”

“I bought candy with it. I don’t have it any more.”

“Go get the candy. You’re going to return it, then you’re going to give all the money that Bobby gave you back to Mrs. Collister.”

“But why? He gave it to me.”

“Because he took the money from Mrs. Collister’s purse. You had no right to take it. Go get the candy. You’re taking it back.”

I started upstairs, but suddenly I remembered Butch Parcheski.

“Mom, I don’t have all the money.”

“What?”

“I can’t return all of Mrs. Collister’s money because I gave a dollar to Butch Parcheski.”

“Why in God’s name did you do that?” she asked. I could hear the frustration in her voice.

I thought about trying to explain the intricate relationship I had with Butch Parcheski, but I knew that this would be another bad reflection on me, and certainly the family. I couldn’t get out of this by telling the truth.

“I don’t know,” I said weakly. “I just did it.”

“Fine. Since you’re such good friends with Butch, after you return the candy, you can go over to Butch’s house and get the dollar back.”

“Mom, I don’t think I can.”

“Really? Well you’re going to think of a way because I told Mrs. Collister you would return the money within the hour.”

“Mom.”

“Go.” She pointed to the door.

My first stop was at Chicks. I returned all the candy and collected two dollars and change. Mrs. Watson was expecting me. I didn’t have to say anything. She took the shopping bags plus the loose candy from my pockets and gave me the money without counting the returned merchandise.

The easy part was over. I walked toward Butch’s house, wondering how I was going to pull this off without getting hit. Butch understood the taking part of life but not the giving. I couldn’t think of any argument that would convince him to give back the dollar.