About 200 people who used to live on Chicago’s South Side gathered Aug. 2 in a north suburban delicatessen, and many of them talked about how their idyllic lives in a special place came to an end on the same day, about 50 years ago.
All around Max and Benny’s, a big old-fashioned deli in unincorporated Cook County at 461 Waukegan Road, between Northbrook and Deerfield, people were gathered for the restaurant’s annual South Siders Night. Almost all of them were Jewish, and most seemed to be from South Shore or Hyde Park or South Deering, and Bowen or South Shore or Hyde Park high schools. And a dozen people said the same thing: everything changed July 13, 1966.
That was the day that Richard Speck killed eight student nurses in a town house at 2319 E. 100th St. It was a subject that seemed to come up at every table. It was the defining moment of lives that had been one way one day, and another the next. People said that families started moving away as soon as two weeks after it happened.
It was especially shocking in Jeffrey Manor, the South Deering enclave where it happened. “White flight” would later turn over the neighborhood, but first, these people said, their faith in the place they’d lived was destroyed.
“We never had crime like that, all in one place, all at one time,” said Ellen Abrahams Swartz, now of Buffalo Grove.
She said the kids in Jeffrey Manor, and a sub-neighborhood, Merrionette Manor, might go to one of three different public grammar schools, “but in seventh grade, we all went to Luella” Elementary School.
“And it happened right across the street from there.” Swartz said. “You could stand in the playground and look across the street at the town house.”
She was at a table with Bowen graduates of 1964, give or take a year, including Sheldon Helfgot, now of Arlington Heights.
“That year, everything changed,” said Helfgot. “Before it happened, nobody even locked their doors.”
Jeffrey Manor was one of those places that sprung up after World War II to satisfy the demand for housing for returning veterans and their families, its former residents said. They remembered nearly-identical duplexes that were extremely modest.
“No one was different, because everybody’s house looked exactly the same,” Helfgot said.
“Everybody was in the same boat,” said Swartz. “There wasn’t the competition you see today. Most of us didn’t go to camp — we would go outside and play in the summer. Everybody rode the bus.”
No one had much, and no one stood out, and that was the key to easy friendships between families, Paula Cooper Berk said.
“None of us were rich kids,” she said. “We thought (Ralph Abraham’s) family was rich, because they had two bathrooms.”
Her own kids were confused when taken to the old neighborhood to look at the duplexes.
“They asked, ‘Did you live in the whole house, or the half?'”
Berk, now of Long Grove, said that her own children don’t understand how their friendships mean so much to each other after all these years.
“How many times do you need to see each other?” she said she’s been asked.
Jeffrey Manor, she said, was a prescription for a great way to raise families: a community designed, purposefully or not, to be modest and non-competitive.
Swartz said it would be wonderful if more families could live in a neighborhood like she grew up in.
“My kids looked for one,” she said. “They couldn’t find it.”
They’re not the only ones.
“My mother says she still wants to go back there,” Helfgot said.
Twitter: @IrvLeavitt
