I am a Chicagoan by birth and love. Even those born to wealth and privilege, as I was, are among those who never have left the city in their minds and hearts, despite the years of change. I was born a very long time ago. Many things have happened to me. I have lived among the celebrated. But despite the richness of the intervening years, everything I remember of my childhood is as clear as if it had happened yesterday, and those memories are very dear to me.
I was born in Chicago in 1913, and our family lived at 4518 S. Woodlawn Ave. This neighborhood was and is Kenwood, just north of the University of Chicago in Hyde Park. The houses were big and the lawns were wide. Only over time did I realize that I was a different child because of the wealth of my family. My brother, my cousins and I all played together or played with the family servants. Did other children have family servants? Or did I never think of that question at all?
Children never give up their first remembrances. It is only as we grow up and grow old that we forget the stuff of grown-up lives that seems so important.
For the last 10 years, memories of my Chicago have been crowding more and more into my thoughts. So I decided to go back to see it again, or at least a little bit of it, and to remember it the way it had been.
I flew from Los Angeles into O’Hare International Airport one morning in the fall and took a taxi to the Hotel Inter-Continental on Michigan Avenue. O’Hare. It is an exciting airport, but nothing would ever match the excitement of the train stations downtown in the era of transcontinental rail travel, with the comings and goings of rich and poor, the crowds, the calls of the conductors on the platforms, everything in motion, full of smells and sights.
I went out to the University of Chicago to see stately Rosenwald Hall, now part of the U. of C. business school. Then I went to my old dorm and knocked on the door of “my” room. A young woman opened the door, which never would have happened in my day. When I told her that I once had lived there, she invited me in. She was very nice, but she seemed amazed at this bit of ancient history.
I, too, was amazed, but by the flood of memories I retrieved on the campus, which seemed unchanged to me, and later, going into Kenwood, the neighborhood of grand old houses where my grandfather had lived and where I had been a young boy. It was changed but essentially the same, still stately and calm and full of splendid houses and wide lawns.
Our old home on Woodlawn Avenue was gone, but my grandfather’s house at 49th Street and Ellis Avenue was still there, and the lady who lived there was willing to show it to me. The house was full of life, of young people with children, of toys and a sense of laughter. It was so casual and so different from the formal home of my grandfather. I liked it very much.
My grandfather was Julius Rosenwald, the chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Co. He was one of the most prominent men in Chicago, and he endowed many charities, as well as founding two of the city’s great museums. But to me, as a child, he was just my grandfather. I did not understand how important he was.
I should tell you that one of my schoolmates at the very private Harvard School for Boys in Kenwood was a boy named Bobby Franks. He was kidnapped and murdered on May 21, 1924. I remember the black, awful headlines and the sense of tragedy that filled our home and the homes of my friendsof everyone in that small, privileged section of Kenwood. More than that was the loss of a friend, the thought that he was my friend and now he was dead. I can’t be more profound than that: I just knew that he was dead.
Only later did I learn that it might have been me. Instead of walking home from Harvard School that fateful afternoon, I was picked up at school and driven to a dental appointment. For that reason, I could not have been picked. So I am still alive at my great age, and Bobby Franks has been dead for nearly 73 years.
Every summer, our family would go far, far north (as I remember thinking of it), far out of the city, to the coolness of woods and trails along the North Shore, to my grandfather Julius’ estate in Ravinia, a part of Highland Park. The suburbs of the North Shore then were just little towns along the lakefront with plenty of woods and fields between them and within them. There were great houses in all the towns, and my grandfather Julius had one of them. I remember there was a steep ravine through the property and a wide, great lawn that reached to the lakefront. There also was a coach house with a large garden and a greenhouse.
It was not unlike the literary mansion of Jay Gatsby, which appeared so prominently in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” but to me it was just my grandfather’s home.
Children have so little understanding of what makes a real world real, and I was certainly more removed from reality than most children. But when I was 8 and we were in Ravinia for the summer, I remember that I decided I would become a businessman and open my own lemonade stand.
Nothing is ever that simple, of course. Kiku, who was my grandfather’s Japanese butler, was put in charge of “Armand’s lemonade stand project.” The stand was not an orange crate, or anything homemade. It was a wooden table covered by a beautiful damask cloth with a dozen large crystal glasses, buckets of ice and pails filled with pure lemonade. We opened it on a grand day on the estate’s long gravel roadway where it met Sheridan Road. Each glass of lemonade cost 5 cents. Business boomed.
I served people going north, and Kiku crossed the road to serve people traveling south–I was not allowed to cross the busy road. There were some problems with the stand from the beginning–some of the customers drove off with the crystal glasses, for instance, and we had to replace them all the time.
The larger problem was a woman who lived down the road. She had operated a soft-drink stand for years. It was her business and with our low price, we were ruining it. After a week, she complained to my grandparents, and they shut me down right away. As I said, children have so little understanding of what makes a real world real.
I went up to Ravinia, to see the place where I had spent my summers. My grandfather’s house was gone and the side of the ravine where it had stood was now a public park for Highland Park. It is called Rosewood Park. On the side of the ravine where my mother and father and I lived in summers there were now three or four homes. There was not a shred of evidence that any of us had ever lived there.
So much was changed when I revisited, and yet there was a familiar sense to everything.
I went to Sheridan Road off the property and got out of the car and looked. And I saw.
There.
The exact spot.
The place where Kiku and I had our lemonade stand so long ago, where we had poured out the lemonade into crystal glasses with plenty of ice, where I was not permitted to cross the road. There it was, and it was the same.
I realized, by coming back to see them again, how lucky I am. I lived here. And I am lucky to remember it all.
It was Thomas Wolfe who said you can’t go home again. But Fitzgerald knew better, which is why we are “borne back ceaselessly, into the past.”
