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  Race riots were the focus of the entire front page of Saturday’s Chicago Daily News. The upper three-fourths was devoted to Watts, introduced by this enormous headline:

  TERROR IN L.A.

  16 Dead; 2,000 Troops Fail to Stop the Rioting Mob

  The article at the bottom, “In Chicago, Scores Hurt in Riot,” reported that seventy-nine people had been injured during the Chicago riot, including eighteen police officers. The headlines conveyed the shock of both black and white reporters who had been on the Chicago scene: “Hysterical Hate on the West Side” and “A Night of Shame on Pulaski Road.” TheChicago Defender, Chicago’s venerable newspaper for African American readers, headlined less volatile sentiments in its August 14 issue, “Civic Leaders Condemn Violence.”

  It seemed as if the entire country were disintegrating into racial hatred and violence, while we lived side by side and got along fine with our African American neighbors. The day after the riots, Mr. Lewis, whom Mom had always referred to as “the nicest man,” was helping Paul work on our car. This is what Mom recorded:

  Police from all over the city were stationed on every corner of our neighborhood, ready for trouble. The strangest thing of all was that, on this day of racial tension, Paul and Mr. Lewis next door were working on [our] station wagon, doing a new valve job. So here they were, both black and white, working together, sweating together, while this racial situation was just waiting to explode. Later in the day, I brought up the subject, just casually, and [Mr. Lewis] said, “I just hate this worse than anybody.”

  A new era had begun in our neighborhood—and our lives.

  CHAPTER 29: An Island in a Sea of Destruction

  The riots erupted just a couple of weeks after Mom and Dad had toiled through the July heat to bring my grandparents’ former six-flat apartment into pristine condition for rental. In June, the building had been appraised at $40,000, but what would it be worth after the angry destruction wreaked on our community’s once-bustling commercial district?

  Searing images of the deadly and devastating Watts riots in California melded with the fires, looting, and virulent anti-white hatred on Chicago’s West Side into one amorphous threat. Gripped by visceral fear, remaining whites and middle-class blacks fled, creating a vacuum that sucked in an ever-poorer population. Amid rising crime, a glut of homes for sale, and continued blockbusting, property values plummeted. My parents soldiered on, but not without consequences.

  Over the next several years, the demands of overseeing four houses (our home on North Keeler, the six-flat, our former home, and a second two-flat they had bought in 1958 on Washington Boulevard) multiplied their workload. Grandma and Grandpa Gartz had routinely worked sixteen-hour days, so the extra labor my parents took on seemed normal to Dad. But he had scant experience managing all the moving parts, which Mom did. The increasingly complicated paperwork and income-tax preparation, the coordination of repairmen and the management of tenants, as well as her own household and children, boosted her stress—and her ire against Dad, whom she blamed for her predicament. In the early days of his travel, Dad had repeatedly tried to mollify Mom with compliments and appreciation, but by the time he had secured a non-traveling job with Fireman’s Fund in 1962, the pattern of their relationship had reset into one comprising Mom’s complaints and Dad’s increasingly cavalier attitude, figuring he couldn’t do anything to please her, so he might as well please himself.

  My parents had arrived at a crossroads, both personal and historical. The riots were not isolated neighborhood tremors that would subside, but rather part of a societal earthquake, cracking open and challenging long-held beliefs on a national scale. We teetered on a fault line of radical change, and America rocked from one upheaval after another—every value and institution under scrutiny and dissent. As a young teen, raised by a traditional family and attending a conservative Lutheran school, both of which reinforced values of good behavior and obedience to authority, I couldn’t understand the turmoil, the decades of simmering black grievances that boiled over into riots, the slow-burning fury that exploded and embroiled cities across the nation. As I came of age, I felt like I was gasping for understanding, as if gasping for air, in the flood of change overwhelming us.

  Returning to the West Side the day after the riots, I exited the bus at Pulaski and Madison, where Dad was waiting for me. Smelling the lingering odor of stale smoke in the air, I scanned still-smoldering buildings, broken windows, and glass-strewn streets. “Wow, Dad!” I said, gaping at the destruction. “What happened here?”

  “People run amok. Just run amok. Hating white people, throwing Molotov cocktails, burning down buildings.” He swept his arm in a wide arc. “We used to chase butterflies through open prairies in this community when I was a boy. Everyone wanted to build the place up, not tear it down.”

  “But why? Was it like Watts?”

  “Not that bad. Today’s paper has an overview. Something about a fire truck hitting a colored woman. I’ll show you when we get home.” We walked west to a chorus of hammers clanging on nails and grunting men lifting plywood boards to cover smashed windows. Broken bottles, some with charred rags hanging out the necks, littered the street. The world was coming undone just as I was getting old enough to enter it.

  “I just don’t get it, Dad.”

  Putting his arm around my shoulder, he said, “Let’s talk about something more pleasant. What were you up to last night? Mom tried to call you, but no one answered.”

  I told Dad how my friends and I had skulked around a cemetery, dressed from head to toe in black to emulate the characters in the TV showThe Man from U.N.C.L.E.

  “That seems so stupid now. You guys really could have been hurt—and I was acting like a little kid!”

  “It’s never stupid to enjoy yourself at sixteen,” he said. When we reached home, he kissed my cheek before pushing his key into the lock.

  We walked through the house and into the kitchen, where Mom was making lunch. “Well, it’s my long-lost daughter,” she said, smiling ruefully and looking over her shoulder from the stove.

  Dad showed me the Chicago Daily News, its front page plastered with photos of riots and mayhem in Watts and Chicago. A shadow of dismay crossed his face. “What were they thinking?” he said, looking up from the paper, gazing at nothing. “They’ve burned down their own neighborhood.”

  Mom sliced celery, adding it to the bowl of tuna salad. “If they owned property, they’d understand the effort required to care for buildings—they wouldn’t be so quick to just destroy everything!” she said as she smeared the salad onto pieces of bread, added cheese, placed them side by side on a cookie sheet, and slid them under the broiler.

  After lunch, I walked to my summer job at Baer Brothers & Prodie, a fine-clothing store on Madison Street. Just a block from the worst rioting, its display windows were boarded up.

  I rode the elevator to the women’s department and started my day as usual, moving the overdue layaways from the stockroom to the sales floor. I hated returning those clothes to the rack, wondering what happened to the women who had dreamed of owning a pretty dress or skirt, put money down, but never finished paying. Now their money and the clothes were gone.

  Just in case of further trouble, Mom and Dad picked me up from work. Taking a cue from my parents, I wasn’t fearful, but I was flabbergasted at the wanton destruction of property. We certainly didn’t see ourselves as capitalists who exploited poor people. But that was how the ACT activists had portrayed landlords on the night of the riots. Their pronouncement that owning and caring for buildings had something to do with subjugating others was incomprehensible to us.

  In my naïveté, I was clueless about the centuries of intimidation and humiliation blacks had endured at the hands of whites. Years later, sociologists and historians concluded that decades of thwarted dreams had exploded into violence in cities across the country. It wasn’t until I gained some distance from then-unfathomable events and better understood the racist housing policies an
d the bigotry African Americans had endured from a white-controlled society, in which my family had been complicit, that I could gain perspective and put the riots into context.

  Whites continued to abandon West Garfield Park by the thousands. We stayed, and my parents came to know our new neighbors and their histories. The insights were often heartbreaking, especially since many had every reason to be consumed by fury, yet hadn’t rioted.

  Eddie Bass was one of these. He labored seven days a week at the local butcher shop. Eddie was a squat African American with close-cropped hair and an anguished look, as if sadness from somewhere deep inside seeped out to his face. He spoke kindly to all his customers. Mom admired his direct, honest manner and liked to chat with him when the butcher shop wasn’t busy.

  One day, she asked Eddie what he thought about the civil rights movement. Folding the white butcher paper over her ground beef, he shook his head and said, “I just wants folks to call me ‘Eddie’ or ‘Bass’ and shake my hand, but not call me nigger.” He handed her the package and wiped his brow. “When I was growin’ up in Mississippi, I did all sorts of low work for the boss man.” He sighed. “That weren’t the worst of it. Every Saturday night, that man was drunk. He made me run around in the dark so he could do some target practice—on me, shootin’ at me with his pistol.”

  Mom’s eyes welled up. Little had been written in mainstream newspapers about the oppression of blacks in the Jim Crow South—until the civil rights movement placed the injustices squarely on the front pages and led the evening news. When she came home, she told us Eddie’s story.

  “Man’s inhumanity to man,” said Dad.

  “He made me want to cry,” said Mom, her voice choking in the retelling.

  Mom showed an apartment to Mr. and Mrs. Darden, a middle-aged black couple. Mrs. Darden carried herself with an air of dignity and privilege. As she and her husband walked from room to room, she just nodded and said, “Mmm-hmm.” Mom was crestfallen at Mrs. Darden’s lack of enthusiasm for the beautiful apartment.

  That evening, the smell of pork chop suey filled our kitchen. As we each passed our bowls to Mom from seats tucked around the table, she talked about her day. “That Mrs. Darden I showed the apartment to today?” She scooped rice into each bowl, then ladled her steaming chop suey on top. “She kept asking about the heat.” Mom finally pulled out her own chair, squeezed against the stove, to sit down.

  “The heat?” asked Dad, after blowing on a hot spoonful. “What did she want to know?”

  “Well, get this. It turned out her last apartment was so cold, she had to put on a coat every morning when she got up and even when she came home from church!”

  Dad, his parents, and his brothers had awakened in the middle of the night to keep their coal-burning furnaces functioning perfectly. He stared at Mom, his spoon poised above his plate, his eyes wide with surprise. Looking down in disgust, he said, “I guess that’s how these other landlords make a killing—just don’t heat the place!” Mom assured the Dardens that the heat worked fine, and they signed a lease as of October 1.

  Mom rented another six-flat apartment to Samuel and Dorothy Headd, an African American pair in their thirties. “They’re such a darling couple,” she said. “They didn’t ask, but I repainted the kitchen and dining room for them. A lovely pale pink. She kept thanking me for the beautiful apartment.” It was the first time Mom was renting to African Americans. She felt on shaky ground and wanted to be sure everything went smoothly with no ruffled feelings.

  That fall, Mom advertised, fielded phone calls, showed apartments at the six-flat, typed up leases, and worked late into the night to keep up with increasingly complicated bookkeeping. Dad drove around the city during the day, making inspections as a loss-control engineer for his job at Fireman’s Fund. Nights and weekends, Dad went to the West Side, comfortable with the kind of work integral to his family pride. He dusted hallway banisters, mopped tiled vestibules, glazed new glass panes into rock-smashed windows, and cleared the sidewalk of broken beer or whiskey bottles—and then, something new—used needles.

  Acquaintances and friends assured him and Mom, “The colored will wreck those apartments,” but my parents ignored them. “We’re going to take care of those buildings like we always have, and I believe we’ll get tenants who do the right thing, too,” Mom said. After the hectic summer of beautifying the six-flat and interviewing potential tenants in autumn, my parents hadn’t had a spare moment to think about the shabby condition of our newly purchased North Side home and all the work it needed.

  CHAPTER 30: Be Still, I Am Thy God

  Every room in our new home needed fresh paint or wallpaper. Even without the West Side properties, it could have overwhelmed the time and energy of most fifty-something couples. But Mom and Dad had nurtured more than buildings over the years. They had taught my brothers and me the skills of home maintenance, the value and satisfaction of a job well done, the patience to stick with long-term projects from start to finish, the optimism and confidence to keep our eyes on the prize. Paul, Billy, and I were so thrilled to have a home of our own, we willingly dove into whatever effort was needed to uncover the hidden beauty in our Cinderella house.

  In our family’s version of “quality time,” we teamed up to refurbish the house during the December 1965 holiday break. Paul volunteered to paint every surface of the enormous sixteen-hundred-square-foot unfinished basement, beams and all. The week before Christmas, he rented a paint sprayer and worked around the clock for two full days, stopping only to eat the sandwiches Mom brought him when he refused to come home until he was finished.

  When Paul finally walked into the back door on the West Side, he was like the mimes who stand motionless in European city squares, stiff and white as a statue. His lashes, heavy with paint, blinked oh-so-slowly. Every hair on his body was a bristly, sticky white: head, arms, hands—even up his nose. Only his eyeballs weren’t white. They were red, bloodshot from the insult of spray paint.

  My bedroom was next. Wrestling rented wallpaper steamers, we pressed the awkward, heavy rectangles of metal against the walls for thirty seconds at a time. Vapor hissed out, clouding my room with the cloying smell of melting wallpaper paste. Despite frigid outside temperatures, we threw open the windows, releasing intense steam and heat.

  Pressing rigid putty blades against softened old paper, we scraped off layer after layer. Press. Hold. Scrape. Repeat— until we were down to the bare wall, each of us shouting a loud “Hooray!” upon reaching the base level. Sometimes the massive steamer plate fell against an arm, causing a blistering second-degree burn. An expletive, a quick trip to the bathroom for Mercurochrome and a Band-Aid—then back to steaming, a vision of the end product firmly in mind.

  Mom found beautiful wallpaper, a closeout at a dollar per roll—enough for the parlor, entry, and hallway up to the second floor. One of her tenants recommended a contractor, Mr. Henderson Ford, a large, heavyset African American man, who dropped by to give an estimate. Ford arrived in a paint-spattered coat, which, when unbuttoned, exposed overalls stretched by his rotund belly. Garrulous, funny, and with years of experience, he explained to Mom how he’d approach the work. She liked his forthright style, his attentive ear, and his good suggestions. They hit it off instantly, and she hired him on the spot to paper the first floor and all the bedrooms.

  Amidst all these complicated projects, Mom still had to figure out what to do with our present two-flat on Washington Boulevard. We had to pack up sixteen years of family living and the accumulations remaining from Dad’s Depression-era mentality. “Never throw out anything you might need someday,” was his parents’ mantra and a guiding principle still embedded in Dad’s psyche. It was how his family had survived, then thrived, during lean times. He saved everything— scraps of wood (for repairs), old buckets (still serviceable), a two-foot stack of 78 records (“These will be priceless someday”), multiple sets of dishes and cheap Revere pots and pans he collected at Salvation Army stores (“The kids will need cookw
are when they move”), and hundreds of other items, from rolls of plastic to bottles of nails and screws, each type labeled and sorted into its own baby-food jar, and multiples of every tool imaginable: ten varieties of saws, fifteen screwdrivers, wrenches of all sizes and uses.

  How were they going to get everything packed and then manage their rooming house, with a total of twelve individual tenants, from five miles away? That winter of 1965, Mom panicked at her predicament. Heart racing, mind ajumble, she saw lying on the dining-room table a small pamphlet by Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking, probably ordered from a magazine ad. Inside was a Bible passage, Psalm 46:10, offered as a solace in times of crisis: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Mom remembered it as: “Be still. I am thy God.” She lay down on the dining-room couch, repeating this passage over and over until her thoughts and pounding heart calmed. “That’s when I began to think,” she later told me, “and figure out priorities. Before that, it was always work, work, work.”

  “We can’t possibly run a rooming house from five miles away,” she told Dad.

  “Well, we’ll see,” he said, unwilling to make a decision.

  Mom wasn’t religious and seldom went to church, but the Peale epiphany would inspire her invocations of the Almighty in the years ahead.

  The following March, Mom was moving boxes to our new home, when she found a contractor’s soggy brochure on the front porch. “Divine intervention,” she declared, and called the man and hired him to remodel our rooming house. Within ten days, his crew tore down the sleeping-room walls and restored the second floor to a single-family, eight-room flat with two bathrooms. They turned the three basement studios into one multiroom flat, all completed as our family packed its possessions. Now she would have to cope with only three tenants in our two-flat, instead of twelve.