When the tour bus turned onto streets of their youth, members of the class of 1969 at Luella Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side were surprised by homes smaller than they remembered yet as neat and tidy as the day they left. The Jeffery Manor neighborhood wasn’t run-down like their parents had feared it would become.
“Everybody’s got little kids, like we were,” said Eileen Rubinson, looking out a window at black families sitting on front steps or preparing a 4th of July barbecue. “Nothing’s changed.”
Rubinson and her bus mates were the children of white flight, a panic that swept across urban America in the 1960s and ’70s. Compounded of fear and racial stereotypes and played upon by unscrupulous real-estate dealers, it impelled older residents to flee when a black family moved into the neighborhood.
“The only good thing that came out of it was that it gave me a group of friends for life,” said Jeff Magid, who came to the reunion from Los Angeles.
Their childhoods psychologically cut short by being moved at the time of their grade-school graduation, Luella’s 1960s alums are remarkably cohesive. Scattered across the country, they’ve held periodic get-togethers.
About 120 people attended this year’s reunion, a three-day event over the Independence Day holiday at a hotel near O’Hare International Airport. The centerpiece event was a nostalgic trip back to the Manor.
When the bus discharged its passengers at a long, squat building at Oglesby Avenue and 99th Street, several excitedly remarked that the faint outline of a Jewish star could be discerned. When a six-pointed star hung on that wall, the structure housed Congregation Kehilath Israel. It is now Mt. Olive Methodist Baptist Church.
“I was bar mitzvahed there,” Kerry Levin, the reunion’s organizer, said to Denise Barnes, who lives nearby. Her curiosity was sparked by the bus and the Chicago Police Department squad car accompanying it.
“I go to that church,” Barnes told Levin. “We still worship in the basement.”
In 1953, the synagogue’s founders built a stately entrance and roofed over a half-basement intended as temporary quarters. But funds were never raised for a proper sanctuary, perhaps because the congregation’s time in the neighborhood was limited.
The ‘flight’ begins
Jeffery Manor, south of 95th Street and east of Jeffery Boulevard, wasn’t built up until a post-World War II housing boom lined its streets with duplexes and boxy little residences called “ranch homes.” The vocabulary of Chicago’s neighborhoods was an expansive one. Several bus riders recalled roasting hot dogs on “the prairies.” Elsewhere, those unbuilt spaces between buildings would be called empty lots.
Many, but not all, of the Manor’s original home buyers were Jewish. The Luella school was flanked by four churches — one each Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist and United Church of Christ. Their congregants came from crowded neighborhoods closer to the city’s center, bearing hopes for their children’s futures. On the bus was Jackie Sachs, a former teacher at Luella.
“When I was hired, the principal explained parents would stop me on the street to ask how their children were doing,” Sachs recalled.
Jew and gentile alike, those parents quickly left once African-Americans started moving in.
The historian W.E.B. Du Bois observed: “The problem of the 20th Century is the problem of the color line.” In Chicago, the boundary between black and white neighborhoods moved rapidly across the South and West Sides in the immediate decades after Jeffery Manor was developed. Black families hoping to escape the ghetto would move to a white neighborhood only to see themselves shortly living in another segregated community.
Two days before the bus tour, Magid brought his three children to Jeffery Manor to show them where he’d played pinners — an imitation of baseball played by banging a tennis ball against house steps. Barbara Allen came out to say she and her late husband bought the house from Magid’s parents. She wrapped him in a bearhug.
Why such a warm welcome from someone who had lived through the neighborhood’s re-segregation?
“My parents were the first black family to buy on a block in Gresham,” Allen recalled, referring to another South Side neighborhood. “Soon, all the white families were gone.”
Some Jeffery Manor residents expressed a certain understanding of the panic that had gripped the parents of the visiting Luella alums.
“This is wonderful!” said Diane House, when the bus stopped on Oglesby, where she and her sister Linda Townson live. They and members of the tour group exchanged urban horror stories, past and present.
“This place is changing,” House said. “Section 8s are moving in. They’re not like us.”
She was using a shorthand for “undesirables” derived from a government program providing rent subsidies to low-income families.
An idyllic place
Before an earlier fear of newcomers took Luella’s alums from the Manor, it was an idyllic place to grow up, by their account. The streets of a subsection called Merrionette Manor trace graceful curves. There is the feeling of a small town, with a big city bonus: Heavy industry marks its eastern border.
Dan Wecker recalled riding his bike to see the smoke-belching steel mills. More recently, he was in Beijing, where Chinese factories still burn soft coal.
“It smelled just like home,” Wecker said.
The age of innocence for Wecker and his schoolmates came to an end on July 14, 1966. Standing in their old schoolyard (Luella was later renamed in honor of Robert H. Lawrence, the first black astronaut), the ’60s alums looked out across 100th Street at a townhouse. There, mass-murderer Richard Speck raped and killed eight student nurses.
Two years later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and deadly riots erupted on the West and South Sides. Many Jeffery Manor residents decided against waiting to see how America’s racial conflicts might play out.
Some at the reunion put their parents’ flight in economic terms. They were blue-collar workers whose life savings were tied up in those little ranch houses. They thought they had no choice when real-estate brokers urged them to sell before it was too late.
Lauren Marcson recalled her parents pleading with neighbors not to heed that argument. Her father and mother were 1940s radicals who found each other at a Young People’s Socialist League meeting.
“They felt they could change the world,” said Marcson.
Yet for her, too, the neighborhood’s evolution was saddening. Walking home from school, she’d pass homes where friends had lived.
“They were gone,” said Marcson, whose family finally moved from the Manor in 1975.
Yet however they left, Luella’s alums took with them emotional ties to streets like Yates and Chappel, Van Vissingen and Merrion.
That includes Jeff Skolnik. He never forgave his parents for moving from the Manor to Niles. He became a high-school loner, isolated from classmates by their insults of black people.
“‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I’d say to them,” Skolnik recalled. “‘Have you ever been to Chicago?'”
But while Chicago’s neighborhoods were segregated, its airwaves weren’t. So Skolnik took with him from the Manor a bit of its newer residents’ culture. Listening to Muddy Waters and other blues performers on the radio, he taught himself to play harmonica.
He became a professional musician making records and playing Chicago blues around the world, taking “Jeff Stone” as a stage name.
Once, he was appearing in Paris, a favorite venue because of the French love of African-American music. An audience member asked if he was from the South Side.
“Yep, I replied,” Skolnik said. “I’ve never been so proud in my life.”
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rgrossman@tribune.com
