These Days!

Planning this trip, I thought I would journal and blog at the end of every day, I thought I would read the day’s research and write a bit before I went to bed. I have not done that. I have mostly gone back to my hotel room, had a drink, and gone to bed early.

Today was not atypical. I went to bed last night at 9:30 and woke up at 6. I met my cousin Cathy for breakfast at 8:30 and we talked about the last 50 years of our lives, our families, our loves and losses. The last time I saw Cathy (she remembered, I had forgotten) was on a trip to Six Flags Great America with her, her cousin Meg—I guess that would make Meg my cousin, too—and my brother and me when I was 15. Mom was much closer to her Aunt Alice (Cathy’s mother) than to her own mother and when we visited we always stayed with them and not at the DeMeyer farm. After breakfast, I drove out on Washington Street, which used to be Grange Hall Road, to Gurnee to see where the DeMeyer farm was. I knew the farm was no longer there, or any farms, it’s all just dusty random businesses along a wide highway. I couldn’t tell where the farm had been. I haven’t been there since I was ten. I think Great America came first and then lots of development followed. It’s all unrecognizable.

Next was the Waukegan Historical Society. I was very frustrated yesterday not having found Grandma Lenore’s address here and wandering around, nothing ringing a bell. I thought someone there might be able to help me. Their library is closed for a renovation, but the woman running the museum remembered the popcorn store that I remember in the storefront of Grandma’s building. I went to the public library to see if they had old city directories. They did, and there it was: “Cheslik, Lenore 207 N Genesee Apt 305”!

So I walked over to Genesee Street and, plot twist, Grandma Lenore lived over a theater! The Waukegan Theater, now called the Genesee Theater, was a vaudeville house, then a movie theater, and I think about 25 years ago they completely renovated it and now use it for live music. That strip of Genesee was a small theater district in the early 20th century, with three theaters in a handful of blocks. I have no memory from childhood visits of a theater next to the entrance to Grandma’s. She lived there from the early 1960s until the late 1970s, so it’s possible it was closed. Those were rough years for a lot of those old downtown theaters.

Then I drove the few blocks to the house where my family lived when I was born. The house is still there and looks better than it does in photos from the early 1960s. When I got out of the car, I remembered that down the block and across the street my mother had a friend, Henrietta, who told a story about her daughter getting ringworm on her scalp and having to have her head shaved. (That story transmuted into Y’all lore as the story of Cousin Mandy.) At the end of the block, there’s a deep ravine with a creek at the bottom. My brother and I remember the ravine and how Grandma told scary stories about a troll who lived down there (and I also somehow connect the ravine with Helen Keller but I have no idea why now). But I didn’t remember that it was half a block from our house. No wonder Grandma was trying to scare us away from it.

Henrietta lived in one of these houses, I’m not sure which.

Don’t go down there!

It was only about 2 so I decided to drive down to Des Plaines about a half hour south to visit the grave of Danny Bridges, Larry Eyler’s last victim. I’d been feeling a little uncomfortable about the murder tourism aspect of a visit and almost talked myself out of going, but I was compelled. Of Eyler’s victims, Danny Bridges is the one I, and I think a lot of people, are most drawn to. He was the last one, the murder Eyler was convicted for, and he’s unusually young. Young among Eyler’s victims, and young to have been on his own. Everything you read about him makes you think there’s no way he would’ve let that happen to him, he was too smart, so it’s especially puzzling and sad. I cried when I found the grave. I felt silly, I don’t know him. The inscription from his sister was moving. He didn’t have much love in his life.

I was going to have dinner at Louie’s tonight, but I hadn’t had lunch and I was hungry so I stopped on the way back to the hotel, at 4. Louie’s Pizza is mythical, it is the pizza that my parents compared every pizza they ever ate their whole lives to. The best pizza review you would ever hear from my dad was, “It’s pretty good, but it’s not Louie’s.” The reason my mother taught herself to make pizza was to see if she could duplicate it, because they couldn’t get pizza as good as Louie’s in Indiana. I would bet that my dad took Mom to Louie’s on their first date. It was their place. I had never had it, so I can’t comment on whether it’s the same now as it was 65 years ago, but it’s pretty damn good. Tavern-style pizza—very thin cracker crust, cut in squares—is the other Chicago pizza. If you want to try it, there’s a new place in the West Village called Emmett’s on Grove that doesn’t have the regional atmosphere, but they’ve got the pizza down. It’s pretty good, but it’s not Louie’s.

Mecca.