In 1931 I was 15 years old, and I had a new pair of fancy coveralls that I was eager to wear out on the streets of Hanover, Ill., in Jo Daviess County.
That year was a grim time in that area for teenagers, especially the ones who lived in “town.” At that time farm youth were always busy in home canning and field work. Our town of Hanover was especially hard hit by the closing of the woolen mill; my dad was home only on weekends, having found work elsewhere.
I don’t know when the mill owners abandoned upkeep on their two tennis courts, but wandering around in my flashy “pajamas,” I looked at these courts of weeds and grass and felt something–A sadness? An anger? A revulsion?
Anyway, I persuaded my girlfriend to go with me to pull weeds. It took a while. Soon we began to see observers down there at the tennis courts near the silent and abandoned mill near the dam on the Apple River. Eventually one of the two courts was free of weeds. Miraculously a net appeared, and I received a racket from the owner of the mill, who still lived in Hanover.
After that, several old tennis rackets came out of attics and barns, and play began. I remember two high school teachers helped us learn the game, and I was especially grateful to one of these men who observed me at play and said that I needed eyeglasses.
Not long after that summer, the adjoining court somehow got cleared, and many people got through those dreary days of the terrible Depression. In 1933 I graduated and became a freshman at the University of Illinois in Urbana. There I entered a tennis tournament, but I was defeated. My eyesight, you know.
