Reminiscences

presented by Jim Reising at the 20th reunion

“Your attention please – Your attention please” 

Those words over the public address system of the Iroquois County Fair a couple weeks ago (where I was manning a booth for my current employer) jolted me into the realization that I had yet to begin to prepare for the upcoming 20^th class of 1959 reunion.

The unrelenting heat and humidity  - that only the month of July and the swiftly growing corn and soybeans in north central Illinois can produce - set me into a trance-like state, my eyes glazed over slightly, and I began to remember…..

Spring of 1955.  Eighth grade at St. Teresa.  There I was, a svelte 220 in a print shirt and EP system slacks – as unsure and insecure a product of the early fifties as you’re ever likely to see.  God, that was incredible!  Our eighth grade class trip that year was to Springfield.  We thought we were finally making it to grown up!  The class was small, 25 or 30 as I recall, as was the school itself.  I remember vividly a warm spring Saturday morning going into St. Patrick High School on Hickory Street to take placement tests.  Wow! Three stories high!  And that building kitty corner across Indiana Avenue was the grade school.  You could have lost St. Teresa in there!

I went into a classroom at the direction of a priest, in itself an oddity since my previous contact with catholic education had been mainly with the good sisters.  There were about sixty other bewildered looking guys in there, too.  We all took a battery of tests that would, so said Father, place us in the correct ranking scholastically.  What it really meant was where you were going to spend September through mid-January of the next school year – not really in high school, but either in the basement of St. Patrick grade school or over the tracks at St. Rose grade school on the second floor.  I managed to escape the dungeon on that one, and eventually, in September, I and about sixty others could see the sun from the windows of the St. Rose gym.

The Kankakee area was different then.  Simpler.  A lot of the streets were still paved with brick, and you could see where the streetcars used to run.  There was a really good local bus company – although we didn’t think so at the time – you could go anywhere in town for fifteen cents and a transfer.  And a lot of folks rode those busses.  Most families had one car, and it was used only for special occasions, not for anything so mundane as going to work.  There was a bridge over the mighty Kankakee at Station Street, and another at Washington Avenue, and that was it.  St. Mary’s was the only hospital.  There was something called a “shopping center” out near where the new high school was being finished up in Meadowview subdivision.  I suppose back then “Meadowview meant what it was.  Now the only thing that resembles a meadow is Mac’s practice field.

The local YMCA was in a grubby building by the courthouse.  Good Catholics didn’t join.  If you wanted to go to Chicago, you took the train.  There were ten daily between the Illinois Central and the Big Four, and another six on the Chicago and Eastern Illinois at Momence.  The trains made the trip in an hour and a quarter, and depending on which train you took you could exit at one of three stations near the loop.  The trains were almost always on time.

The more adventuresome could make the journey by car via route 54, but the trip usually took a lot longer because you had to go through every small town along the way.  And then fight the heavy traffic downtown.  There were no speed limits on the highways back then, but you really had to watch those small town cops who’d have you up before the local Justice of the Peace in a second.  Cars were relatively inexpensive back then, as was gas to run them on. – as low as fifteen cents a gallon during one of the frequent gas wars.  And when there wasn’t a gas war on, you could collect hundreds of glasses and other premiums that enticed you to burn more fuel.

Kankakee was still primarily a farm town with an old and unsophisticated downtown area, several large industries, and residential sections for the people who worked there.  Bradley and Bourbonnais were sleepy bedroom communities on the north of the “Big City”.  Bourbonnais, which now prefers to be known as Bour-bon-nay, was particularly known for the speed trap set up to snare the unwary motorist with a poorly marked and unreasonable 35-to-20 mph speed change.  Come to think of it, they still work that scam in the village, this time on a two-mile stretch of road marked 35 that anywhere else in the state would be posted at 45 or 50.  But…I digress.

Life was simpler in the fifties.  Network meant radio.  Chicago had four daily newspapers.  There was television, but most of us didn’t have it yet.  For entertainment you either listened to the radio, maybe WLS’ news top 40 format, went to a movie, or talked with friends.  Speaking of the movies, they were different too.  If you went to see a war movie, you knew we were the good guys and had God on our side.  A western always had the cowboys vanquishing the Indians, and romance ended with clinch… instead of a bed.  Sex was never spoken of in mixed company.  Divorce was unheard of.  A pill was what you took when you had a headache.  Contraception was the man’s responsibility.  (If you were Catholic you weren’t supposed to know about that anyway, much less practice it.)  Love making outside of marriage was even worse than self-abuse…but we didn’t know anything about that stuff anyway.  If fact, kids in eighth grade in 1955 didn’t generally know much about life, period.

The summer passed, and in September I found myself riding my bike over to St. Rose.  We spent the first weeks feeling a new kind of freedom.  We were almost being treated like human beings for the first time in our academic careers, and we couldn’t handle it.  We were to be taught by MEN!  A novelty right there, most of us having come from schools taught by nuns.  We met Big Louie and little Fr. Grigaitis, and SMEE.  We found out early on that Sr. Mary Edgar was deaf as a stone…a definite advantage.  We also found out that taking Latin from a Lithuanian could be a bit rough.  Discipline pretty well vanished, especially in the gym where you were far enough from the teacher to get away with murder.  Bill Gohring and I would go to the hobby shop downtown and get railroad models, and then build them under cover of books in study hall there.  I later found out that Big Louie was a closet model railroader, so Skip and I would have probably made a friend if we had ever been caught.  There’s no question in my mind that the lack of upperclassmen at St. Rose and the ensuing lack of control by the faculty was responsible for the atmosphere of our four years at St. Pat’s.

A lovely fall filled with more Box Elder bugs than I’ve seen before or since led into winter.  I remember the first day at the new school only hazily at this point, but I vividly recall the mud that was everywhere.  My senses were so assaulted by the newness of everything that I must have gone into mental shock.  And I hadn’t seen so much black in one place since the last funeral.  Everywhere you looked there was a priest or nun making sure you stayed confused. 

And the discipline tightened to, for us, the strangulation point.  Hell, they even told you which way to walk!  The loose freedom of the St. Rose gym was gone forever.

We were able to get to know the faculty from their faces instead of just names:  Hoffman, Beatty, Durkee, Gallagher, Shaw, LaMarre, Clancy, Lyle, Benoche, Meissen, Grzelak:  Leorita, Ursaula, Teresa, Allice Carline, mary Magdalen, Marylin, Antonella Marie, St. Eugene, Celene, St. Tarcisius,Frances Therese, and of course St. Thomas.  And Sherwood. 

We had the novelty of a hot lunch but soon found out that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.  Someone said they thought they were getting slanted eyes from all the rice.  And instead of having cushy, soft kneelers for Mass, there were rock hard bleacher seats.  There were some oddities at the new school:  In the center of the gym was to be had a truly memorable experience due to the sound waves coming off the dome.  And we had a trendsetter in Fr. Grigaitis.  Only recently have I realized that he was the first “jogger” as he made his way round and round the circle.  Sure, I know he was slow, but you had to consider his age!

We made a lot of new friends among class members.  Instead of hanging around with the neighborhood kinds, we had people with a lot more in common that lived all over the county, and we didn’t hesitate to badger our folks to run us here and there or take the bus.  Or even ride our bikes, although bicycling was getting to be rapidly passé.  And I’ll bet that a lot of us who looked with scorn on the bicycle then are now riding regularly again.  Funny how times change, isn’t it?

Probably the highlight of our Sophomore year was that most of us learned to drive and got the teenager’s most cherished possession, the driver’s license.  The big advantage of this was that if we could get a car for school (our favorite ruse was that something special was going on that day and we would have to stay late, so rather than mom having to come and get us, we’d get the car.  By the time we were sophomores, riding the city bus line was akin to having the plague.   Anyway, if we could get a car to drive to school or beg, borrow, or stow away with a Junior or Senior, we could escape the cafeteria!  This really widened our horizons! In season we could go to the A & W, which had been a haunt of so many classes before us, or to the Bradley Steak & Shake which was referred to in racier circles as the Gag & Vomit, or even to a new place with yellow arches over on 54.  I remember when McDonald’s had not yet sold their first million! 

The after-school "places to be" were the same as they’d always been for St. Pat’s students…Ryan’s Drug Store, and of course the CYO.  And after a game it had to be the Sahara.  And we went to a lot of those games, too, because we had new talent in the coaching line…Chiodo and Bonczyk, who could fire up the guys to unheard of heights.

We began to get jobs, not only for summer, but part time during the school year as well.  And our friendships solidified.  It was nothing those days for me to pick up Beaky and Rock, and drive on out to Goodrich to get Frank Dumas, then on to Essex to swim at South Wilmington for the afternoon, or to Lake Manteno.  In the evenings we cruised around all the drive-in eateries to see what was going on.  The film “American Graffiti” was right on.  That’s the way it was in ‘57!

Things continued to solidify through our junior year.  Our circles widened with our gas money.  We began to know whom we could count on.  We were friends. 

We went to nearly every game now that we were more secure with our wheels.  There was most always someone willing to drive the distance if the rest would chip in the necessary gas money.  And again, there were the movies, but now at the drive-in… Movies at the drive-in were different.  You went to one of the two local drive-ins for one of two reasons: to make out or to drink.  The drive-in was a safe place to do either as long as you didn’t make too much commotion.  I remember once when the 54 ran THE TEN COMMANDMENTS… we broke eight of them while watching.  There were such things as drugs then as now, but the only time I remember a drug problem was one night at the drive-in when Don Gallois had beer on top of his sinus medicine and got higher than a kite.  He didn’t come down for about six hours.  He never did know how close he came to getting creamed by one of the patrons of the theater who thought he was smarting off. 

The more familiar we got with the school and our friends, the more outlandish things we thought up.  We got away with murder, and we got closer than ever with the faculty.  Father Beatty, instead of being the incarnation of the Inquisition we had once thought, turned out to be a regular guy.  In fact, when we stopped to realize it. Most of the teaching staff were probably a lot more tolerant of us than we deserved (with one or two exceptions).

The summer between our junior and senior years was probably the best.  We all knew where we’d be in the fall and the nine months after that, and we kind of opened up.  There were lots of late nights, and lots of swimming and skiing and partying and hell-raising in general.  We all knew where the action was and who was involved.  For those who wanted booze, it could be had.  In fact, almost anything could be had by the time we were seniors.  It was truly a glorious time.

The senior year was capped with the picnic, which probably did more to bring us together as a class than anything else in four years had.  When the grilling by faculty began the day after, not one person in attendance incriminated anyone but themselves.  We had, it appeared, grown up.

Summer after graduation was a lot like the previous one, except we knew that, come September we would for the most part split up.  Many would go to college.  Some would begin the world of full-time employment.  Some would enter the service.  Some would get married.  For some, little had changed since graduation.  For many, a lot changed.  As we entered the first year of our separation, many came back to the high school for games around Thanksgiving and Christmas, and occasionally to the CYO.  But as time passed, the returns became less and less frequent.  Some groups from high school maintained close contact, if only during holidays and vacations.  Other groups were closer, seeing one another once or several times per week.  And the times continued to change.  More of us got married, and more of us moved away. Some lost contact all together. 

Five years passed.  There wasn’t even a hint of a reunion.  Did we really dislike one another that much?  Time passed and things changed still further.  We increased and multiplied and grew further apart.  Nine years after graduation some of us thought it was time to try a get together.  The resulting ten year reunion was a resounding success.  We found, much to our delight, that, for the first time, everyone was talking to everyone else.  Which is what should have happened many years prior, except maybe we weren’t quite as mature as we thought we were.  A vote was taken at the tenth, and we decided to get together at fifteen as well!  And the fifteenth was another resounding success. 

And as the nineteenth year came, we found ourselves so involved in our respective careers that it looked nigh impossible to mount the necessary preparations for a twentieth reunion.  And out of that despair came the voice of Susie, and she said: “Okay, so we DON’T have time to do it in the usual manner.  Why not have a simple get together, nothing fancy, no really involved preparations, none of that shit!”  And Susie spake the truth, and we saw that it was good, and the preparations, such as they were, were begun.  There would be no band.  There would be no formality.  There would be good food, and drink aplenty.  But mainly there would be the people, who had so much in common twenty years past.  And I now have looked upon it and find that it is good.  Very good indeed.

 Night fell upon the fair at Iroquois, and I continued my reveries, thinking of things past, and people, and life in general.  The drudgery of a factory job – the freedom of the road – the responsibility of having others to support besides oneself – the sheer joy of loving your work – and the sheer hell of hating it.

The exhilaration of having done a job well – the glorious fatigue at the end of a perfect day – the depression that follows a well-deserved chewing out – the torture of being terminated, not because you weren’t good at your work, but due to factors beyond your control – the desperation of trying to find a job as good as the last one – the resignation of taking a job “until things get better” – the hopefulness of sending a resume to a promising newspaper ad – the hopelessness when the “dream Job” turns out to pay $8,000 less than your family can live on – the anticipation of owning your own business – the triumph of having it work out as you thought it would – the desolation of not getting the all-important loan that would enable you to “turn the corner”.

The upwelling of pride at having raised good children – the despair of having a child go wrong – the happiness of a good marriage – the trauma and perhaps relief of divorce – living with someone you like as well as love – holding a newborn – burying a close friend or relative – conversation with good friends – helping someone in need – reading or learning of tragic news about someone you once were close to – rejoicing over good news – commiserating over bad news – hearing from a friend who’s been away a long time –

And the very, very special good feeling of spending time with old friends who have shared many of the same experiences.

I thank you – indeed we ALL thank you – for coming and for making us all a bit richer this year.