Stories from Charleston Street: A Memoir of Growing Up in Post-War Chicago (Bucktown)

By Bob Skaleski

Bob Skaleski takes you along his Chicago childhood through the days of baseball, human rights, religion, and
relationships with friends and family. Bob's experiences as a youth helped shape his adult views on life and its complexities. Bring a hankie to wipe away tears of laughter and sadness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bob Skaleski
• Release date: Mar 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224824847

Book preview

ONE

LOOK BOTH WAYS

There is probably little chance that you have wondered how the ill-fated November Uprising of the Polish against the Russian Empire from 1830 to 1831 affected the life of a Polish American boy born in 1942 in the Bucktown section of a bustling Chicago in the early days of World War II. Also unlikely, unless you grew up in or near Chicago, is the possibility that you have wondered how Bucktown got its name. In the time-honored—and sometimes time-suffered—tradition of elders, who understand all-too-well the comfort and inspiration that a visit to the past can bring to the turbulence of the present, I invite you to join me on a journey.

While Polish craftsmen were part of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke Colony in North Carolina in 1585 followed by the Pilgrims’ vaunted 1620 arrival on the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock and the subsequent movement to the Jamestown Colony in Virginia, it wasn’t until the early 1830s when the failure of the Polish rebellion against the Russian Empire brought the first wave of Polish settlers from their war-torn homeland to the New World. Fleeing cultural and political oppression and economic devastation, the settlers sought freedom, farmland, and economic opportunity. These stalwart pioneers came as far west as the young state of Illinois, where they created a community along what eventually became known as the Chicago River. Using the land, these hard workers not only became successful farmers, tradesmen, craftsmen, and shopkeepers, they also became widely known for the many goats they raised on their spacious pastures. Since goats were called, bucks, the nickname, Bucktown, was born, a socially, culturally, and historically comfortable environment where all needs were met without leaving Little Poland.

During the mid-1930s, Anton Skaleski, along with his brothers, went to the Milan farm to fetch a clarinet that had allegedly been stolen. There, Anton met Helen and my future parents married in 1938 in Thorp, Wisconsin, a town of just over twelve hundred people about three hundred miles from Chicago. Their first child, a girl named Betty, was born soon after their marriage, and Anton and Helen Skaleski later moved to Chicago, looking for work. On March 21, 1942, just a bit over 110 years after its founding—and possibly less momentous than previous arrivals—I, Robert Anthony Skaleski, was born screaming in the heart of Bucktown and brought home to my sister, who was four years old and excited to have a baby brother to take care of.

Our flat was on the first floor of a two-family wooden house at 2332 W. Charleston Street, near Holstein Park, Saint Hedwig’s Catholic Church, and the Casimir Pulaski School. The Oak movie theater was not far away as well as the Milwaukee Ave shopping area. Early on Betty and I shared a bedroom and many mornings staring up at the old, decrepit ceiling discerning shapes within its countless cracks and fissures like finding animals in clouds over our neighborhood of taverns, small grocery stores, and candy stores all within walking distance of our front door. Bucktown was situated on the near northwest side of Chicago bordered by Western Avenue to the west, Damen Avenue to the east, Fullerton Avenue to the north and Armitage Avenue to the south.

By the ages of nine and five, Betty and I were often left alone at home because both our parents worked. We were fiercely independent and thought of ourselves as responsible little adults pushing through life's circumstances to forge our paths and create our identities within the neighborhood. My sister and I were fortunate to live across the street from Aggies Candy Store.

Aggies was a haven for the kids of our neighborhood. The store had a glass case that displayed penny candies: licorice sticks, bullseyes, buttons on paper, chewy hats, and cherry-flavored wax lips (my favorite). I, a plucky five-year-old with a few pennies, could spend all day selecting, each choice required care and planning. For every piece of candy purchased, several others were left behind. Aggie was kind and would sometimes sell me a half of a nickel popsicle for two cents. Her husband, Joe, always sat in the back of the store and never said a word. I believe he was suffering from some kind of shell shock acquired from the war in Europe.

I had candy on my mind Halloween 1947. Betty and I, having grown used to caring for ourselves, buzzed with anticipation of our once-a-year evening activity: trick-or-treating. Mom and Dad had left us a can of Franco-American spaghetti and a jar of Mott’s applesauce that needed to be eaten before venturing out. But try as we might, we couldn’t find the can opener. The longer we spent looking for the can opener, the less time we had left for Halloween trick-or-treating in the neighborhood. Betty and I watched as our friends and neighbors left their homes to go door-to-door while we searched the kitchen.

The minutes ticked by.

In a moment of wild desperation, I grabbed two available tools: a hammer and a flat-head screwdriver.

Betty, wary but willing, pulled on a couple of oven mitts and held down the stubborn can of spaghetti. At her nod, I slammed down the screwdriver over and over until I finally managed to get it stuck in the soft side of the tin can. Then, I picked up the hammer and whacked away until the top lid popped off spilling sweet red sauce onto the countertop. In our determination to open the can, eat, and get outside, Betty and I were ill-prepared for a spaghetti mess, but Betty was a fast thinker. She managed to grab a saucepan and used her hand to swipe sauce and pasta off the countertop and into the pot, salvaging most of our dinner. She went to work heating our modest meal on the stove, while I sopped up the sauce mess with a dish rag.

We had barely finished eating dinner and pulling on our costumes for the evening when I pulled open the front door and started across the street to Aggie’s dressed as Charlie McCarthy, Edgar Bergen’s famous ventriloquist doll. Betty decided to be a nurse this Halloween. I was distinguished and wise in the suit, top hat, and homemade monocle as I walked beneath the darkening blue of the autumn sky while the setting sun gently warmed my shoulders to ward off the crisp breeze winding down the city street. The pennies in my pocket jangled with each eager step I took. My eyes were locked onto Aggie’s. She was to be my first stop. Her storefront windows featured chewy, sugarcoated treats, and I made a beeline to the door already salivating.

I never saw the car coming.

The wallop hit fast and hard. I was suddenly breathless and being dragged down the street, about forty feet away from Aggie’s, away from home and Betty, away from the Halloween sugar rush and those luscious wax lips. My body was crumpled and broken when the shapes and sounds whipping by finally slowed to a stop. The car’s driver was as horrified and loud as my own anguish when I realized I would not make it to Aggie’s Candy Store.

When I awoke in the hospital to the worried expressions of my parents and the relief of my sister, Dr. Robert Wurman, our young, Polish family doctor, calmly explained that I had a compound fracture of my left leg; part of my broken bone had pierced through my skin during the accident. My leg was propped up in a traction device, and Dr. Wurman was careful to explain that he’d had to pin together my ankle to allow the bones to heal properly. Halloween was over, trick-or-treating was over, but my healing was just beginning.

While Betty went back to school the following Monday, I had to stay in the hospital for several weeks, listening to Amos ’n’ Andy, Duffy’s Tavern, and The Studs Terkle Program on the radio until I was released home on bedrest. I remember dad giving me a Mickey Mouse watch to lift my spirits. I cherished that wonderful gift for years until it somehow, somewhere disappeared. My leg was fractured so severely that I had to skip school for a year while on the mend and had to learn how to walk again. The healing was tough, but I finally made it back to school in time for first grade and baseball season at Pulaski Elementary.

TWO

A BALL IN THE HAND IS WORTH TWO IN THE URINAL

A Ball in the Hand is Worth Two in the Urinal

Ilove baseball; the sound, smell, feel, and look of the leather ball, the excitement of the game. Baseball entered my life quietly and without pomp somewhere in the schoolyard. Our home was without a television, so I learned to love the game through play-by-play radio coverage, magazines, and collectible bubblegum cards. I asked questions, watched how the game was played, and dutifully read the sports pages of the morning newspaper, keeping up with my favorite team, the New York Yankees. Within a short time, I magically understood the intricate game with illogical rules and had daydreams of strikeouts and heroic, World-Series-winning pitches.

I had a gazillion baseball cards and knew every player on each of the sixteen teams. I even knew the batting and pitching statistics, which changed almost daily. I was unconcerned with the players’ private lives and didn’t know or care about their earnings. There was no free agency, so many ballplayers stayed on teams for a long time and became family. I loved each player as if they were cousins or brothers. I was disappointed by bad games and seasons, but I looked forward to improvements the following season. My favorite players were beloved, hope was always in play, and team allegiance was never in doubt.

Consequently, my own ball and glove were at the top of my toys-to-have list. One day, Dad brought home a box from Mages sporting goods store. Inside, nestled in sheets of tissue paper, was my first glove—A Dubow, three-finger infielder’s mitt. My heart leaped into my throat as I breathed in the smell of new leather as intoxicating to me as Chanel to a movie star. I had to break in the glove, so Dad and I walked to Skippy’s General Store on Leavitt, between Charleston and Shakespeare, and got a new Spalding authentic National League ball. A fresh, new baseball had a unique shine, scent, and beauty, the white leather sphere held together with 216 raised red stitches that held the jacket over the string windings.

During the day, I threw the ball into my glove to create a pocket and worked the leather with petroleum jelly until it was supple and fit perfectly over my left hand. At school, I practiced arithmetic by computing daily batting averages and drawing baseball fields at my desk. I knew the distances from home plate to the outfield fences in every major league ballpark and I always carried a baseball or Spalding pink high-bounce ball wherever I walked. The feeling of a ball in my hand was comforting. I almost always fell asleep with my glove and ball by my side. When he got home from work, or when we had time on weekends, Dad and I spent hours playing catch in the alley.

One afternoon when no one was home, I was playing baseball inside our apartment by hitting the ball with my bat, dropping the bat and picking up my glove and catching the ball on its way back from rebounding against the back section of the couch. I enjoyed this pepper game with myself until one unfortunate swing. One time I got under the ball and lifted it high fly into the living room and it landed smack in the middle of a very large picture of two guys fishing in a lake between two mountains. The print survived but the glass protecting the image shattered into a thousand pieces. Luckily, I had time to clean up the mess. There were slivers of glass everywhere. The print looked undisturbed and the missing glass was hardly detectable, so I decided not to confess this baseball mishap until a more opportune moment. The next time aunt Nettie came over for coffee, I gently broke the news to mom, and she gave me with a forgiving smile. Admitting guilt for some kind of wrongdoing always brought a lighter reaction when company was over.

I played baseball every day and prayed to God often that the Yankees would win their games. My new ball became scuffed on the Bucktown city streets and the concrete, asphalt, and stone of the schoolyard. Once the beautiful outer leather fell off, my friends and I made a quick fix and wrapped white tape from a tin can around the entire ball. The resulting shape was less a perfect sphere and more an oblong lemon but it didn’t stop us from playing.

Dad took me to my first real Major League Baseball game in the late ’40s. We rode the Green Hornet streetcar south on Western Avenue down to 35th Street before we transferred to a bus and rode east to Comiskey Park. The Chicago White Sox were playing the mighty New York Yankees for a night game. Uncle Roman came along. I was already excited as we walked into the largest structure I had ever seen and purchased tickets from a fellow in a booth with bars on the window. People were outside shouting and selling scorecards and souvenirs like pennants and buttons. Comiskey Park was much larger than the biggest buildings in my neighborhood, bigger than Saint Hedwig’s Catholic Church and the Oak Theater combined.

We walked up the stairs to the playing area and an amazing sight. The field was large and bright green under the stadium lights. I had never experienced so much beautiful green grass in my young life as I did in the outfield. Being a city kid, it was one of the largest expanses of open field I had ever seen except for Uncle Albert’s farm in Thorp, Wisconsin. The infield was trim and smooth—unlike the dirt and stones we had in the schoolyard—and the bases gleamed white. The right-angle foul lines directed outward from home plate like the arms of a victorious sprinter at the end of a hundred-yard dash, a spectacular sight surrounded by stands of individual folding chairs. Farther up were grandstands, and high above were upper-deck seats that circled the field leaving only an open area behind the center field wall for the bleachers and a giant scoreboard. I looked around the stands full of fans and hopeful open gloves and realized I was in good company. My own gloved hand was poised and ready for a foul ball.

The players were out and about practicing pepper or shagging fly balls. Infield practice was fun to watch, but batting practice was a show. The crack of a bat smacking a ball was mesmerizing, a sound unlike any other, as the players tried to launch homers out of the park. They seemed like giants of strength to me. One player threw a ball into the crowd, and nearby fans clapped in appreciation. In those stands, fans also uttered unfair judgments and engaged in name-calling, which I tried to block out. It was unjust and demeaning to the players I loved.

Through the stands walked deep voice vendors with trays of products hawking beer, peanuts, and hotdogs, ice cream, Cracker Jack, and soda. Vendors threw bags of nuts to customers with incredible accuracy while the fans in a row shuffled money to, and change from, the sellers. Dad and Uncle Roman ordered beers, and Dad got me a hotdog and a soda.

The fans poured in to see the mighty Yankees. Comiskey Park held over fifty thousand spectators and filled up. The upper-deck seats were almost all occupied. When the four umpires came out onto the field and gathered around home plate waiting for team captains to bring out the batting orders, the announcer called out the starting lineup, and the players’ names echoed off the stands.

Joe DiMaggio, Center Field; Yogi Berra, Catcher. It was the first time I heard two names that stuck with me my entire life.

I was enraptured, enthralled by the game, by savory hotdogs, by the endless cups of sweet soda. By the sixth inning, total darkness enveloped the stadium, and the night game lights brightly glowed.

And I had to pee. Badly.

At the seventh inning stretch, Dad gave me directions to the bathroom, so I proceeded first up the stairs and then down the stairs to the men’s room. Walking by myself, I was confident and chipper until I found the crowded toilets and the corresponding line of tall, belching men with beards and beer bellies waiting to relieve themselves of two, three, or more beers so long it continued into the hall. I jiggled, hopped back and forth from one foot to the other, and tried not to look too conspicuous about the impending accident if I didn’t relieve myself soon.

When I finally reached the urinal, I had to stand on my tiptoes to get a good aim at my target, which created unexpected discomfort as I tried to maneuver myself into position flanked by