Chicago Stories - Growing Up In the Windy City. Thomas Walsh

no one was home or there was no answer, Tim left a calendar by the door with a Christmas card in the hope the customer would send him a tip in the mail.

      Tim came around to the back of an apartment building with a high third floor he knew he could not reach from the walk. There were papers to be delivered on the all three floors. He trudged up the stairs. As he passed the second floor on the way up to the next landing he glanced down to his right into a lighted kitchen. A woman was rummaging through her purse at the kitchen table. Tim reached the landing and tossed the last paper up to the third floor. He turned around and began back down the stairs.

      When he reached the second floor, the woman in the lighted kitchen cracked her back door and said, “Oh paperboy, please wait a minute I have something I want to give you. Please come in out of the cold.”

      Tim knew this was a customer who was not home when he had made his rounds with Christmas calendars. She seemed friendly enough so he stepped into her kitchen. She closed the door behind him. He felt a little nervous and self-conscious standing in the woman’s kitchen all bundled up in his winter clothing.

      The kitchen was similar to the one in the apartment he lived in. A small room with an old off-white gas stove with four burners, a small off-white Frigidaire refrigerator, and an off-white sink with a built in drain board. The floor was dull, worn linoleum. In the middle of the kitchen floor was a small dinette set like the ones advertised by Polk Brothers, a popular discount furniture and appliance store. It was a shiny metal trimmed table with four metal frame chairs with plastic covered seat cushions and backs.

      The woman had turned to her purse on the table. She was dressed in a robe over a nightgown with fluffy slippers on her feet. Being a preteen, Tim was very interested in what women and girls were really all about, but in a shy, awkward way. He cast a furtive glance at the woman noticing that she was very shapely under her night clothes. She had deep black hair, rich cream colored skin and a pretty face with a slightly turned up nose which gave her a youthful look.

      He thought she must be quite a bit younger than his mother, but quite a bit older than his sister who was 20 years old. His glance turned into a stare as he wondered what she looked like under her clothes.

      As she closed her purse she said, “I am sorry I missed you when you left the calendar. I want to give you this present for Christmas.” She turned quickly and caught Tim staring at her body. A soft smile formed on her lips as she held out a five dollar bill to Tim. Startled at being caught staring, Tim dropped the bill on the floor. He knelt on one knee to pick it up. When he stood up, the woman had let her robe fall open to expose a sheer nightgown. Tim stared uncontrollably at two full breasts with erect nipples pushing up the sheer material of the nightgown.

      She reached out and gently stroked his cheek and said, “Have a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year.” She dropped her hand to his shoulder and turned Tim to the door which she reached around and opened. Tim walked through the doorway in a daze without even thanking the woman or wishing her a Merry Christmas.

      Tim knew he should have said something to the woman, but he was struck dumb by seeing her body. He wanted to brag to his pals about what he had seen. But, he was afraid they would tease him about being too young to know what to do with her. He decided to keep the memory of the round, full breasts and hard nipples to himself. The memory came to mind frequently at first, raising a hard-on in his pants, which he enjoyed and cherished as a sign of his coming manhood. Tim thought less about the woman as he grew older, but every Christmas her memory brought pleasant thoughts to mind.

      The men who ran Murphy’s, the paper distribution business, were named Mickey and Peter. They were two very different individuals. Mickey was friendly and talkative with a pot belly, close cropped curly hair and a ruddy complexion. He always looked disheveled and in a constant state of motion. Peter was reserved and spoke sparingly. He dressed neatly and maintained a trim physique with neatly combed hair. Peter measured his actions and always seemed to be in control of a situation. The boys all loved Mickey because he was easy going and likeable. He looked out for the boys and they knew they could trust him. Peter, who seemed distant and unfriendly to the boys, was respected by the boys but they did not love him.

      Mickey ran the distribution side of the business. He supervised the paperboys, delivery and the paper barns. There was a second barn in the Uptown neighborhood east of Broadway. Once the paperboys were out on their routes Mickey cruised around in a small beat-up red truck that said Murphy’s Newspaper Delivery on the side, checking on the paperboys to make sure there were no problems Peter looked after administrative matters and handled calls from customers about no paper delivery, broken windows and such. He usually stayed around the small office in the main barn.

      Tim’s family moved to an apartment east of Clark Street in Uptown. It was the only area still in Our Lady of Lourdes Parish where his parents could find a larger apartment for rent they could afford. Tim asked Mickey if he could change to a morning paper route that started in the paper barn in Uptown, which was closer to his new home. He didn’t have long to wait. Murphy’s had trouble keeping paperboys in the Uptown neighborhood.

      The Uptown area once known for large, gracious homes and roomy apartments had become a mecca for poor white people from Appalachian states like Tennessee and Kentucky. These people from rural areas and small towns in Appalachia were poor, uneducated and unskilled. They were looking for factory and construction jobs in the big cities of the north like Chicago. They were derogatorily referred to as “Hillbillies”.

      Real estate speculators had bought up many homes and apartments in Uptown, and subdivided them into as many units as the law would allow. Investors bought the chopped-up properties to take advantage of the flood of poor people from Appalachia who needed a place to live. These buildings were easy to pick out. In good weather the front porches or stoops were full of young women with sallow skin and drawn, unhappy faces, surrounded by packs of babies and young children. Junk cars were usually parked in front. Cars were status symbols to the men. Automobiles were the first thing they would buy when they scraped together some money for a down payment. In their spare time the men worked on the cars in front of the apartment buildings in their overalls and wife beater T-shirts.

      Many of the people who migrated from Appalachia became homesick, and unhappy with low paying jobs, high rents, squalid living conditions and bitterly cold winters. Drunkenness, wife beatings, robberies, violence and murders were rampant in Uptown. Bars, pool halls and other unsavory establishments blossomed in the area. Sordid characters were drawn to it by the opportunities to commit crimes.

      Tim was soon assigned a new morning route in Uptown: one of the largest routes in Murphy’s distribution territory. It extended from Broadway east through some of the worst tenement areas in Uptown to expensive homes and apartments along Sheridan Road. In the tough areas Tim kept a wary eye on men he did not recognize. After a while he recognized the men who were usually hanging around between 5:00 am and 7:00 am. If there was a man he did not recognize he stopped his push cart and busied himself rolling papers until the person passed and went a comfortable distance. Occasionally, a bum or wino would hide and wait for Tim to head into a building to try to steal papers from the cart. If this happened too often in a particular area, Mickey would track the down the thief and administer a lesson that assured there would be no further trouble.

      One summer morning Tim was pushing his cart down a street just west of Sheridan Road. He crossed an intersection and tilted the front of the cart up on the run to make it easier to lift the back wheels of the cart over the curb and onto the sidewalk. The metal strips on the bottom of the wheels made a grinding sound against the dry concrete sidewalk. The sun was nearly up. The sky was clear. It was already warm. He could tell it would be a hot day.

      Tim stopped to gather papers to deliver to a large apartment building. As he bent over the push cart he noticed out of the side of his eye that there was a man about 50 feet behind him at the corner of the intersection he had just crossed. The man had stopped. He seemed to be watching him. Tim turned his head to look at the man. Even in the half light of dawn he could tell the man was not a bum or wino. If it was a bum or a wino, they would usually duck away and wait for a better opportunity to steal some papers unnoticed. The man did not turn away. He looked nervous and shuffled his feet. He was not dressed