Oh Really, Riley?: The Story of Riley’S Trick Shop and the Family Behind It

By Jim Riley

For more than seventy years, Rileys Trick Shop has been a source of fun for generations of families who live on the south side of Chicago. Founded in 1937 by Jim and Eleanor Riley, the shop stocks joy buzzers, whoopee cushions, and fake vomit; they greet their customers like old friends. In Oh Really, Riley?, the owners son, Jim Riley, details the true story of his familys long-time business.

In 1937, the Rileys dream was simpleto eke out a living during the Great Depression. From before World War II to the dawning of the new millennium, Riley shares how the business managed to survive through dedication, perseverance, pranks, and laughs amid the cornucopia of gags, party items, and costumes. Riley narrates the fascinating story of how one kernel of popcorn somehow expanded into a trick shop that would become the center of a community, serving as a gathering place for amateur magicians and jokesters alike.

In the spirit of the continued success of every small family businesses, Oh Really, Riley? spans seven decades as it shares the compelling story of one mans dream and how he made it come true.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 29, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450265485

Jim Riley

Jim Riley has been associated with Riley’s Trick Shop his entire life. He lives with his wife, Judy, in Homer Glen, Illinois. They have four grown children and nine grandchildren. He is the author of several magazine articles. This is his first book.

Book preview

Contents

Preface

Prologue

In The Beginning

Rhodes Avenue

79th & Aberdeen

The Times They Were A-Changin’

Western Avenue

Star Tracks

He Had A Dream

The Real World

Time to Move Again

111th Street

The Evolution of T-shirt Printing: The Early Years

On the Road Again

The Wheels Start Coming Off

On The Road Again

STOP THE PRESSES!!

The Changing of the Guard

A New Beginning

What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

About the Author

Preface

You are about to embark on a journey of one man’s dream and where it took him. He did not see its end and it continues without him. Indeed, your humble scribe might not see the journey’s end either. That could be up to the next generation. The time just seemed right to tell the story so far.

The title comes from the standard response whenever I relate any of the happenings I’m about to tell you. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard it, I’d have no need to work, or write this book.

Everything you’re about to read is true. Some of the dialogue may not be exact, there was no one taking down every word, but it’s true to the people who said it. The story of the later years comes from my daily journal and personal experiences. The early years are based on the countless times I’d heard these stories from my parents. I’d roll my eyes on hearing them yet again, but somehow they stuck with me.

I decided to write this story for several reasons, chiefly to set the record straight on where our stores have been through the years. If we’d been on every corner and block people thought we were on, we’d have had more locations than Starbucks.

Typical was the woman who said, I remember your store on 69th and Langley to my Dad. When he answered that we were never at that intersection, she got in his face and told the him, "What do you know? I was in your store at 69th and Langley and don’t you tell me any different." You’ll see his response repeated throughout the story. It was one of his favorite sayings.

I wrote this also to hark back to a time when a man could take a dream of being his own boss and turn it into reality without having it crushed by giant, soulless conglomerates.

I wanted everyone to know definitively that we are not now and never were associated with Ryan’s Trick Shop, Wayne’s Trick Shop, Bill’s Trick Shop, or Izzy Rizzy’s House of Tricks. There has been much confusion over the years. They are all gone. We are still here.

It’s about a family business where we got to know our customers and they came to know us. Not many businesses today can claim that a customer from the 1970’s can come into the same store in the same location in the new millennium and see the same face he or she saw back then. Granted, that face is more wrinkled than they remember and there’s a lot less hair on the head above it, but it’s the same face nonetheless.

Finally, I wrote it so future generations of Rileys will know the legacy left them by two children of immigrants.

Thanks to Cheryl Bouselli of Paper Magic Group for information regarding the early years of one of our suppliers.

Special thanks to Don and Joyce Wiberg for inviting me into their home and spending a delightful afternoon reminiscing about the days at Riley’s before I was born.

Jim Riley

Prologue

It’s always been there. Since the day I was born I’ve been a part of it. It’s been the source of everything I’ve ever had. It’s kept a roof over my head and food on my table. Even my parents who started it and were involved for more than sixty years, lived the first third of their lives without it. To us it’s always been the store. To everyone else in the Chicago area and around the world, thanks to the internet, it’s known as Riley’s Trick Shop.

Founded in 1937 by my parents, Jim and Eleanor Riley, Riley’s Trick Shop has been the source of fun for generations on the South Side of Chicago. Parents bring their kids and then their grandkids to stock up on joy buzzers, whoopie cushions, fake puke, and other treats. Countless former Chicagoans make it a point to stop by when they’re back in town. They bring their grandchildren, too.

Riley’s wasn’t always a trick shop and this is the story.

In The Beginning

James Joseph Robert Riley was born on Chicago’s East Side on September 16, 1908, and grew up in the area near 92nd and Commercial, a gritty neighborhood of steel mills, docks, and taverns. His parents, James Riley and Anna Malloy, arrived from County Mayo, Ireland, sometime in the 1890’s. He was the youngest of three children. His brother, Martin, would go on to work at the water filtration plant near Rainbow Beach on Lake Michigan. His sister, Mary, taught in the Chicago Public Schools for 42 years. Jim started working at an early age, selling The Industrialist, the organ of the International Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies. It seems strange that this future entrepreneur would hawk a paper that espoused the overthrow of capitalism but, hey, a buck’s a buck.

He didn’t talk much about his early years except that he was an altar boy at St. Patrick’s Church on Ewing Avenue and graduated from St. Pat’s school in 1925. That’s what it said on the roadmap-sized diploma we found among his things. Not everyone graduates grammar school at the age of seventeen but he never liked school anyway. After a semester at Mt. Carmel High School he was expelled for shooting dice in the hallway. From then on it was work, work, work. His mother once told him he’d never die in bed.

It was around this time that his father died in an accident involving a Chicago Transportation Authority street car. Depending on which relative you ask, he either walked in front of the car where the motorman didn’t see him and ran him over or he slipped going out the door and had a fatal head injury. For that, the CTA paid Anna the princely sum of $600. Anna passed away in 1944.

Jim made friends wherever he went but his life-long pals were from the South Chicago neighborhood. In most cities they’re called gangs but in Chicago they’re referred to as social clubs. His was called The Chevaliers. As adults, they dispersed around the country but always kept in touch. On our summer road trips, we made stops in places like Albuquerque, San Francisco, Seattle, and Ft. Lauderdale to stop by and say hello. Sometimes that hello would result in being put up for three days or more.

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Jim Riley, seated at left with The Chevaliers, late 20’s.

Jim knocked around a series of jobs in the 20’s and early 30’s eventually winding up in the grocery business at the Piggly-Wiggly. Their stores had a unique setup: once the customer entered, she had to traverse a serpentine path to the checkout which required her to pass every item on the shelves. This clever piece of marketing probably led to more things in her grocery basket than were on the original list. These were not the warehouse-sized super megamarkets we frequent today. Grocery stores occupied one or two storefronts on a busy street. There were no parking lots. If you were lucky enough to own a car, you parked on the street. Most people walked, carrying their purchases in a grocery bag or dragging folding two-wheeled carts behind them for larger orders. A shopping cart never left the store. Jim worked himself up to manager of a National Tea store and that’s where he met his future wife.

Eleanor Virginia Borgeson, the only child of Nathaniel (Nate) Borgeson and Ellen Ahlin, was born in Chicago on March 3, 1915. Nate emigrated here from Goteborg, Sweden, in 1905. Total cost for the ship to New York and train to Chicago was $48. You can bet it wasn’t first class. Eleanor was an avid historian and the original documents were in the papers she left. Nate and Ellen married in 1913.

The family moved to Lockport, Illinois, where Eleanor grew up. Like Jim she was a hard worker who got up at 4 a.m. to walk from her house at Jefferson and Division down the hill to a bakery on State Street to help start the baking for the day. From there she went to school.

The same year that Jim’s father died, Eleanor’s mother succumbed to food poisoning after eating an apple from a tree that had been sprayed with insecticide. Nate died in 1948 while my mother was carrying me. I never got to meet any of my grandparents.

Eleanor graduated from Lockport High School in 1932 and moved back to Chicago with her father. She eventually went to work in the grocery business. It was at the National Tea where she met Jim.

Being Irish, Jim was always quick with a story but it was hard to tell if he was telling the truth or just making it up for effect. The story of how he and Eleanor got engaged is typical. One evening, so the story goes, he was having dinner with Eleanor and Nate at their place. Nate asked Jim if he wanted another pork chop. At the same time Eleanor asked him if he wanted to marry her. When he said yes he got a pork chop and a fiancee.

Jim’s sister had purchased a piece of property west of Twin Lakes near Dowagiac, Michigan, in 1929. She originally wanted to build a cottage near the lake but her mother suggested she build on a hill to get the breeze. The summer humidity could be stifling. The cottage had two bedrooms with two beds each in back and a combination living room, dining room and kitchen in front. It had indoor plumbing but water had to be pumped from a well by hand. The dining/living room had sofas and chairs but the centerpiece was a huge, round wooden table, the kind supported in the center by a heavy pedestal with ornate carved feet. It was the gathering place where many a poker hand was played, story swapped, meal enjoyed, and beer consumed. Mary covered the outside of the cottage with a unique shape of shingle in shamrock green. They named the place WeLikeIt.

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Jim, leaning in doorway at the WeLikeIt cottage.

Like it they did. Jim and Eleanor would close the National at 8 p.m. Saturday night and pile whoever could fit in his Oldsmobile to head up there to enjoy a summer Sunday. Some even made the four-hour trip standing on the running boards when the seats were full. It’s a good bet that not much sleeping went on but everyone was back at work Monday morning.

Rhodes Avenue

A Store Is Born

Chicago is based, thanks to Daniel Burnham’s master plan, on a grid of major streets a mile apart. East and west there are 16 streets to a mile, north and south, eight. Store fronts and offices are at ground level on the major streets with apartments or more offices above. On side streets there were sometimes stores between the main street and a parallel alley. It was next to the alley on the east side of one of those side streets in the Chatham neighborhood (or St. Dorothy’s parish if you were Catholic) between Cottage Grove and South Park, south of 79th Street, that Jim Riley and Eleanor Borgeson opened their store on Sunday, March 21, 1937. The address was 7909 Rhodes. Their first customer was Irene Keller, the wife of Joe Keller who owned Keller’s Tap around the corner on 79th Street.

By today’s standards it wasn’t much of a store. It seemed big to me when I was a kid but I was only eight when we left. By looking at some old pictures and making some very uneducated guesses I estimate it couldn’t have been more than 20 feet wide and 30 to 40 feet deep. The front was two display windows flush with the sidewalk. Two more windows angled toward a door in the middle. Inside the door to the right were glass and wood showcases. That was the counter where business was transacted. Behind them against the wall were shelves. The lower half was filled with drawers originally used as storage for 5x8 index cards. The upper half was where larger items were kept. To the left of the door were taller glass showcases that angled back from the floor. They may have come from a bakery or candy store. None of it was new. All the cases were originally filled with stationery, greeting cards, board games, and notions. Notions are defined as small, useful items or sundries. Since Eleanor was a seamstress, there were lots of sewing items like packages of needles, thread and thimbles. Basically, it was a general store. They even took in laundry and shipped packages.

In a throwback to his gambling days that got him kicked out of high school, Jim somehow got the phone number Stewart 7411, as in seven for eleven. He kept that number until 1965. The phone company inserted a 3 before the 7 when phone numbers went from six to seven digits.

The small back room became their home after they were married. There was no living together ahead of time in those days. Their view, through iron security bars, was the single-car garages allotted to each tenant and the underside of the wooden staircase leading to the back porch of the second floor apartments. In later years Jim would proudly say that he never parked a car in a garage. His garage was for storing merchandise or stock as he called it. There was no bathtub or shower. They had to bathe in a metal tub filled with water dragged by the bucketful from the bathroom sink. For their bedroom Jim brought home a bed, dresser, and vanity he found in the alley. We still have them. Their first purchase was a small Frigidaire refrigerator for $99.00. In later years it became Jim’s beer refrigerator. It was still in use when they had their 50th anniversary party.

Three weeks after the store opened, they were married on Sunday, April 11, 1937, at Our Lady of Peace Church at 79th and Jeffrey. It wasn’t much of a wedding. Since Eleanor wasn’t Catholic they couldn’t be married in the sanctuary. Instead they had a small ceremony in the rectory with Jim’s cousin Dan Malloy and his sister Mary as best man and maid of honor. A small reception netted them a whopping $15.00 in gifts. And so they embarked on a journey that lasted almost 65 years.

How’s Tricks?

Riley’s didn’t start off as a trick shop but it wasn’t long before its destiny was set. Jim had a popcorn machine like the ones in the theater, with a glass front where you could watch the popcorn pop. Where he kept it in that tiny store is a mystery. People would stop by to pick up a bag or box before heading to the Rhodes Theater across 79th Street between Rhodes and St. Lawrence. When the theater manager found out why his popcorn sales were so low he came into Riley’s and offered Jim $75 for the wagon. Jim took that windfall and invested it in a line of tricks, jokes, and magic from the S.S. Adams Company of Neptune, New Jersey. And so a kernel of popcorn expanded into Riley’s Trick Shop.

The Rhodes Theater is long gone. Riley’s still carries the Adams line but the one hundred year old company was recently purchased by Magic Makers who moved it to their headquarters in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

When that first box of tricks from Adams arrived, Jim was like a kid on Christmas morning. He opened every item and played with it until he knew what it did and how it worked. He was especially intrigued by the magic tricks. The stationery and other items of the original stock were pushed into smaller spaces and replaced by items from Adams and other novelty companies. It wasn’t long before everyone on the South Side knew that Riley’s Trick Shop was the place for jokes and magic.

The Early Years

Even though the Depression had eased somewhat, the country didn’t fully recover until the wartime economy brought about by World War II. The late thirties were not the best time to start a business but the store did well. The ledger from 1937 showed that they took in a whopping $1800 for the month of October, their first Halloween. In later Halloweens we’d do that much in an hour. The ledger also showed their monthly bills: telephone $2.62, electricity $3.28, rent $45.00.

In front of the store there was a parkway between the sidewalk and Rhodes Avenue. Nate built a couple of benches and set them facing each other in the parkway. Nate worked at the store, too. Many a slow hour was spent on those benches in warmer weather. It wouldn’t surprise anyone if more than one beer was consumed during those hours,