On one of the last days of October, one of those glorious, blue-sky, warm days, I was creeping along in heavy construction traffic. I had a CD playing. The beautiful weather and the song transformed me back in time to the 1970s.
I was reminded of why fall and the month of October especially are my favorite time of the year. I got married in October, three days before Halloween. The weather couldn’t have been better that day. It was as beautiful as my bride. This year will be our 36th anniversary.
I remember my Uncle Charlie’s house “out in the country.” When I was younger, my hardest-working friends and I would spend every weekend at Uncle Charlie’s house raking his leaves. He had hundreds of trees and liked to keep it manicured. We would blow and rake the leaves into mountains and then burn them. This is how I made the money to buy the engagement ring for my future wife.
My thoughts drifted me back to my childhood home. I remember a Sunday morning, sitting at the kitchen table along with my dad and my brother Steve. We were each reading our favorite part of the Chicago Tribune. Dad was reading the Business section, Steve had the Sports section and I was looking at the Magazine insert. I know it was fall once again because the Magazine had the cartoon “Injun Summer” in the issue, just like it had printed for as long as I could remember. I loved the cartoon and reading the short stories that accompanied them.
I then wondered why I hadn’t seen this cartoon in the Tribune lately, so I looked on the Internet and found out that the Chicago Tribune stopped running it in 1992 because people complained that it was insensitive to Native Americans. The article also said that every fall, the paper gets complaints from readers who miss it. Add me to that list.
It’s a shame that things have to change. You can’t burn leaves anymore. Cartoons can’t be insensitive even if they are not intended to be. People don’t sit around reading the newspapers like they used to. That’s too bad, because I doubt years from now I’ll remember fond memories of looking at the Internet.
— Jim Sertich, Oak Lawn
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