This is not yet a dot-com world, though it must often seem that way as we are flooded with stories of dot-com millionaires, of the wonders of using e-this and e-that for our daily needs, as we become increasingly tied to computers for work and play.
Driving around the city as Osgood and I have been doing this year in pursuit of stories from the city’s 50 wards, and for many years before that while looking for stories, fun and (especially for Osgood) food, it has been easy to observe that Web pages and e-shopping have not yet touched in any profound way the lives of most people who work in the city.
The two men smiling in the picture above are named Earl Norris and Robert “T-Bird” Mitchell, and they work at a place called Thomas Auto Parts on South Halsted Street, one of the hundreds of small businesses that exist in the area without the benefit of Bill Gates; they are among many thousands who spend each day working with their hands.
I am sure it is possible to order tires and other auto parts via the Internet, but many residents of the Englewood neighborhood avail themselves of the palpable goods at Thomas Auto Parts, and of the human expertise of Norris and Mitchell.
A few weeks ago I met a man picking through a garbage can in an alley near State and Division Streets. He did not want to talk, did not want to tell me his name, did not want to even tell me what he was doing, though it was obvious from the items he had in a large bag that he was looking for things that he might later sell: pieces of metal and cans. However hard his life may be, there was a certain pride in the way he brushed me off, saying, “Leave me alone, now. I am not bothering you or anybody that I know of. I am just out here trying to get by. Now get away and let me do my work.”
I left him alone but within a couple of blocks realized, not for the first time but for the first time in a long time, how simple and low-tech so many lives remain.
Of course the city is no longer the place described in Carl Sandburg’s famous poetic vision “Chicago”–“Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities”–but in certain corners that spirit lives on.
I do not begrudge all of those people enamored of, getting wealthy from or beholden to personal computers (this column is being written on such a machine). But meeting people like Norris and Mitchell, or the waitress at the corner diner, the guy bagging groceries, the cop on a horse, the construction worker hauling bricks or the man or woman cutting your hair, should remind us that there is an honesty and dignity in what too many of us might now deem “old-fashioned” work as we make our way through the increasingly icy world of American commerce.
