by Clancy Sigal
True enough, I was movie crazy. It was also true that my father and his friends, without being professional gunmen, carried weapons as an ordinary tool of the trade, just as plumbers heft a locknut wrench and carpenters a bevel-edge chisel. Life in Chicago for activists was beset by everyday dangers that included Mob musclemen, rival union goons, freelance young toughs in hostile neighborhoods, and penny ante extortionists. “It’s nothing,” was one of Jennie’s favorite phrases, “to write home about.”
My Dad was in and out of our lives when the mood was on him according to cosmic laws of motion I never understood. It was like having the Lone Ranger around, here today gone tomorrow. Who was that Masked Man? When, without warning, he’d drop by, Jennie was transformed into a young girl, flushed and excited, flashing legs and full of sparkle. I, too, came alive, heady with male love, eager to impress Dad, aiming to be the perfect son. One night, he and I made history together when he took me down to the Loop to see the Democratic presidential candidate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was on the campaign trail and riding in an open touring car. FDR was waving, grinning, the election already in his seersucker pocket. Dad lifted me astraddle his shoulders to be his human periscope over the hats of the Chicago street crowd. “What do you see?” he kept asking. And I made up stories, fabulations based on my need to keep his interest. “Oooo, there goes Tom Mix—” “Tom Mix is a Democrat?” somebody in the crowd marveled. “Then we can’t lose.”
Even then, I may have been planning a movie career, because I had this habit of turning union meetings into Hollywood extravaganzas, adapting the action—the close-packed, unairconditioned, sweaty-smelling, airless, smoke-choked hall crammed with extras, all of whom had the universal immigrant look, erupting into sustained waves of earsplitting noise—into Robin Hood or The Prisoner of Zenda. I could get seriously lost in my mind writing, directing, photographing, and editing a box-office bonanza from the dissociated figures in the hall around me. My favorite scenario starred Jennie Persily and Leo Sigal (note precedence of credits) and had plenty of car chases, shoot-outs, dynamitings, and gangland massacres, not a whole lot different, I see now, from Mamet’s Hoffa and Stallone’s F.I.S.T., except that one snowy night the fantasy turned all too real.
As streetlamps glowed blurrily in a heavy snowfall outside the Slavic Hall on Ashland Avenue, labor’s Champs-Elysées, the back and side doors burst open and squads of uniformed and plainclothes cops fanned in to block the exits. “Intimidation, intimidation!” people inside the hall booed. Uproar. Angry beefy policemen sauntered up and down the aisles itching to slug somebody, anybody. All this was happening in my movie, except that this time somebody else was directing it.
A rough hand grabbed me by the collar and yanked me out of my folding chair.
“You’re all under arrest for contributing the delinquency of this here minor!” roared the voice belonging to the fist at my neck. I dangled in this fat cop’s grip. Rising pandemonium, shouts, curses, protests. Ma stepped down from the platform and began to reason with the detectives, some of whom she knew by name from the time they planted marked money on her.
In other parts of the hall, the women tried to keep the men out of it. Push, shove, tumult.
“Detective Hogan,” Ma planted herself in front of the cop, “do you have children at home?”
“And that’s where I keep them! In the house with their mother! Not at communist meetings!” Hogan yelled at her.
“Provocation! Cossacks!” cursed some of the union members.
Jennie coolly congratulated Detective Hogan on his good fortune in being able to keep his family at home in these troubled times because some workers were not so lucky. That’s why this meeting had been called. “Don’t you call me a worker!” Hogan roared, still holding me. “Yes, don’t call the bastard a worker! He don’t deserve it!” yelled some of the union guys. Tempers soared. Jennie, looking to avoid confrontation, declared the meeting was over anyway (untrue) so why not let everyone go home? Cries: “Don’t let them get away with it, Jennie!”
That’s when she really turned it on. “Please don’t hurt my boy, Officer Hogan. He’s sick can’t you see?” Hogan, King Kong in a cheap suit, stared at me. Ma put a pink ribbon on it. “TB. Incurable,” she reported falsely. I tumbled to the wooden floor when Hogan dropped me like a poisonous snake. The policemen around King Kong backed off from him. Tuberculosis was universally feared back then.
Things slowly began to calm down—until Dad showed up from a different meeting down the street. Spoiling for a fight, he ripped off his jacket. Ma knew what was coming.
She did the only thing possible, collapsed in agony, doubled over. “Oh God, my gallstones!” Several women hurried to her side as she slumped to her knees. She moaned, “The pain.” The crowd rustled: “It’s her gallbladder.” Dad and King Kong glared at her in equal disbelief. They’d been ready, even eager, to tear each other apart.
In disgust King Kong turned to his colleagues. “Lying kike bitch.” He knew he was being outsmarted by a woman, but the protective female phalanx around my mother was too much. With reluctant bravado, Hogan led the detectives’ retreat out of the hall.
“Jennie, du bist nicht krank? Du bist gesunt? Are you all right?” the women asked. Ma writhed in mute agony. They helped her to a sitting position where one of the women fanned her vigorously while Dad fumed and huddled with some of his Tough Little Jew friends. Denied a role in protecting the meeting, they muttered impotently among themselves until Dad broke from the pack and walked over to Jennie. He grimaced in frustration, and for a second I thought we were in more danger from him than from the detectives.
Then the director in my head yelled Cut! and we went home.
Home was a storefront at 1404 South Kedzie Avenue in a neighborhood called Lawndale on Chicago’s west side, halfway between Al Capone’s bullet-riddled fiefdom in Cicero and high-walled Montefiore Boys’ Reformatory in midcity, which was how I mentally mapped Chicago. In good times, 1404 Kedzie was a pleasant location on a bustling streetcar line and close to customers from nearby apartment houses, except this was the Depression, when people did their own wash or sent it to the Chinese laundry that opened a few doors down from us a week after we moved in. What little business there was, “the Chink” undercut, a penny here, a penny there—he was killing us.
I didn’t care. I loved the store. We were a family. It said so in pink and green cursive script on a sign out front that swung creakily from a rusty pole in the wind: FAMILY HAND LAUNDRY. Jennie insisted that the name was a good omen. Dad chewed hard on his cigar and said nothing.
As usual, he’d come back to us looking like hell. Unshaven, tired, bloodshot eyes spitting dull fire, a ten-cent stogie stuck between his teeth. In ecstasy I’d watched this stranger saunter out of the night and wrap his arms around my surprised mother and swing her off her feet. “Leo, the boy is watching,” she gasped as she returned his hungry kisses. Holding Ma in his grip, he looked over at me. We hadn’t seen each other since I was in first grade and now I was in third. “Come here,” he demanded bending down to rub my face with his hard, bristly jaw.
I grabbed him and held on.
Ma had lured him off the road with an offer she told him he couldn’t refuse. Ah, serpent’s gift! “The comrades”—small-time owners of independent laundries all over Chicago—would buy him the lease of the Family Hand Laundry if Dad would agree to organize them in a rival union to break the grip of the crooked Teamsters Union that, in complicity with the large industrial laundry corporations, ran and corrupted the industry. Several previous organizers had been shot or otherwise disposed of by mobsters or “Chicagorillas.” The comrades implored Dad, whom they saw as fearless, aggressive, and armed, to take on the schtarkers, the hoodlums. Jennie must have done a risk-benefit analysis and concluded the danger was worth having Dad back with us. And, who knows, the Sigals might make a dollar with the store.
This was almost our last shot together.
The Family Hand Laundry ho
me the three of us shared had a single fifteen square-foot room at the back as living quarters, a familiar setup then. The only “fixtures” were my parents’ brass-knobbed four-poster bed, alongside that a swaybacked couch for me, a salt-and-pepper O’Keefe & Merritt gas stove, a wooden icebox with drip tray underneath, a corner toilet whose only privacy was a plywood chest-high partition, and my personal “office”—a folding card table on which sat an Admiral portable radio with the winking green eye and a cigar box full of baseball cards and rubber bands cut from old inner tubes, the indispensable tools of my trade as armorer and rubber-gun maker for boys on the street. (How to make an alley weapon: split the side board of a Sunkist orange crate, stretch two rubber bands length-wise around one broken half of a wooden clothes peg so the knobby part exactly fits the top of your aiming sight, extend another rubber band—ammo—around the snout and pull it taut into the notch between peg and board. You are now ready to sneak up on your best friend and shoot him in the head.)
As much as I loved going Pullman, it was great resting in one place for a while with Dad pinned to the store like a dead butterfly.
That wintry night, after the Slavic Hall near-riot, Jennie went to bed in the four-poster that occupied much of our back-of-the-store home. Pacing up and down, Dad kept his Homburg on, chewed his dead cigar furiously, then stormed out, banging the front door behind him. If his rage had been rocket fuel, the Family Hand Laundry would have exploded clean off the launch pad.
In my pajamas I climbed onto the couch and pulled the covers up to my chin. I wasn’t sure what happened back there on Ashland Avenue between my parents, and didn’t want to know.
“How’s your gallbladder?” I called across in the dark.
“What gallbladder?” Jennie said.
Dad came back about four in the morning by the Ingraham radium clock, banging on the front door which Jennie had firmly locked after him. The door handle jiggled furiously.
I got up to let him in, but Jennie grabbed my hand and pulled me into bed with her. We hadn’t been in the same bed since Dad came back from the road.
Whomp! whomp! on the front door.
“Ma,” I said, “it’s snowing.”
She held me to her.
Eventually Dad gave up punching his fist on the door. Because the soft snow outside muffled sounds, I didn’t know if he was shivering in the doorway or had faded into the night, this time for good.
I lay rigid, unmoving, afraid to upset the delicate balance of domestic terror I was sure I had somehow inspired. So I snuggled closer to Jennie’s warm body and quietly, oh so quietly, played with myself.
Forward to the Past
Chicago is blessed with world-class museums including the Rosenwald Science and Industry, Shedd Aquarium, Adler planetarium, Art Institute etc. For me the best was the Field Museum of Natural History by Soldiers Field on Lake Michigan which became my sanctuary when things got too nerve-wracking at home, school or on the street.
I’d take a streetcar downtown and hide myself among the Field’s exhibits, spending hours of truancy under the magnificent tusks of a North American bull mastodon while staring into a glass-encased replica of a Neanderthal family—bear-skin-covered Dad, prognathous-jawed Mom and Neanderthal Boy in waxy poses of domestic activity around a primitive fire with a stuffed sabre tooth tiger yowling just outside their cave. I came to visit so often that I felt on friendly, intimate terms with these prehistoric and pre-TV Flintstones, endowing each of them with names and moral characteristics. Dad was loving and protective; Mom nurturing and optimistic; and Neanderthal Boy a cutup. They spoke to me in Neanderthalese, and making sure no guard or witness was around I replied in the Native American speech I’d picked up from the radio serial of Tom Mix’s Straight Shooters. (“Oowa oowa sa-wacka.”)
Jennie appeared one day at the Museum looking for me. She might have been standing there some time, watching closely, before I noticed her, but I instantly knew she knew what I was worrying about: would Neanderthal Dad leave Mom and Neanderthal Boy. No real need to say anything.
“You’re missing school again,” she approached.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s go.”
Ma said, “Say goodbye to your friends.”
“Quit your kidding,” I told her. “They’re just dummies.”
But we knew they weren’t.
Mr. Gee Cuts Our Throat
The Chinese laundry next to the alley a few doors down on Kedzie Avenue was a bleak bare place with a dull red store front and simple black lettering—SAM GEE. How did “the Chink” delude himself that he could ever survive against our impressive pink and green sign outside and gold and black cash register inside? Curious, I took to pausing on my way home from school to stare balefully into Mr. Gee’s coolie operation. The clammy darkness and steam mist made it hard to see inside, but I imagined they smoked opium and had tong wars. I knew all about the Chinese from Mask of Fu Manchu, with droopy-mustached Boris Karloff as the evil doctor and Myrna Loy as the lust-crazed “Chinee” girl.
I pushed my nose right up against his sweaty window and got a look at his bare-bones setup; two wooden planks as a counter, a suan-pan, or abacus wood frame with rods and beads as a cash register, a mangle made of iron with wood rollers like we had at the Family Hand Laundry to damp dry customers’ wash, and an ironing board. A woman who was hand sewing at the front window glanced up at me in alarm and signaled to her husband, a youngish guy with jet-black hair who went to his wife as if protecting her from some kind of wild beast. His two kids, a little girl and a boy about my age, came to stand beside them, nervously staring at me staring at them.
I’d seen enough. Before they’d become aware of me they had been smoothly meshing as a team in the hot damp store, each silently bent to a task, with both kids involved, the little girl tying handkerchiefs together on a string and the boy ironing a shirt all by himself. Until that moment it never occurred to me to help out in our store except to mind it alone when my parents were out and I had an empire to protect, like Flash Gordon versus Ming the Terrible.
Suddenly the Chinese proprietor, Sam Gee, came out still wielding his steam iron. He knew who I was. “Go ’way. You spy.” He pointed to the hand-scrawled cardboard signs at the bottom of his front window giving his prices:
One shirt one dime
Two shirts 20 ¢
Three shirts 25 ¢
“Legal!” he shouted. “All legal! Shoo!” He whirled his steam iron around his head to warn me off. At least it wasn’t a dagger and he wasn’t wearing a pigtail, so I backed off, giving him the customary up-you with my crooked arm.
The bastard was cut-rating us to death. We advertised “fine finish” at fifteen cents a shirt, a nickel over him, and we promised customers some items specially hand-washed, which Ma did in an old wooden tub next to our tin bathtub out back. On his desperately low prices how could Sam Gee pay off schmeer to the health inspector as we had to?
But he’d given me an idea. I marched into our Family Hand Laundry to announce that I wanted to learn how to iron a shirt. My father looked up astonished, Ma raised both eyebrows; my volunteering to help at anything was unprecedented. Ma said, “Are you feeling well, Kalman?” adding, “It took your father two years’ apprentice at the Ritz-Carlton before they let him touch a shirt.” My father simply gaped. At last I’d impressed him.
In the end, they gave in and under Dad’s tutelage I learned how to press shirt cuffs, not the whole shirt or collars or fancy monogrammed or specially starched, just cuffs, the steam iron not too hot to burn the fabric and not so cold it was wrinkled. Thanks to Sam Gee, I was ironing my way into Dad’s love, I hoped.
P.S. Since then, I have exchanged experiences with a Chinese laundryman’s son, Pak Lew, and examined a PhD thesis on the subject by Dr. Paul C.P. Siu. In all likelihood, Sam Gee or his parents came from the Taishan district by the South China Sea whose peasant economy had been ruined by Western manufactured goods—and had emigrated to the “Old Gold Mountain” (America)
by way of California and relocated East after the race riots of the 1870s. Isolated except for clan relationships, they were outside Chicago’s complicated police-and-Mob culture in which our laundry operated. To the best of my knowledge, they were the only Chinese family in Lawndale.
I never progressed much beyond cuffs, but I’m super at that.
1936—President Franklin D. Roosevelt elected in a landslide. Bruno Richard Hauptman convicted of kidnapping and murdering the Lindbergh baby. Mussolini and Hitler proclaim an “axis.” King Edward VIII, a Hitler sympathizer, abdicates British throne for “the woman I love,” a randy American divorcee.
5 The Heart Is a Gregarious Hunter
We are the men of the coming generation
We are the lads who will build a mighty nation
Hopeful are we in the planting of the seeds
We are the men our country needs—
—school song
Huckleberry came and went of his own free will.
—Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
MUCH OF THIS STORY occurs in a square mile on Chicago’s west side known as Lawndale, although at the time almost nobody except precinct captains and sociologists called it by that Arcadian name; everyone else knew it as GVS—Greater Vest Side—a reference to its predominantly (95 percent plus) Jewish population.
Technically, the west side stretches from schmatte-haggling now-demolished Maxwell Street on the edge of the Loop way out to the western suburbs of Oak Park and Austin. But my own west side was “inner city”; ten close-packed city blocks that featured a long main drag—Roosevelt Road, or Twelfth Street—a park, sixty-five synagogues, countless storefront schuls, St. Agatha’s church, Sears, Roebuck’s world headquarters with its own railway sidings, the Labor Lyceum—an agora for displaced Old Country radicals—the Marks Nathan Jewish Orphan Home, and the Moorish-turreted “western edition” office of the nation’s most widely read Yiddish newspaper, the Forward. Racial boundaries, the essence of neighborhood Chicago, were strictly observed then as now, though today the ethnicities have changed. The frontiers of each ethnic neighborhood were visibly marked by a streetcar track, viaduct, or tunnel or a street name that defined the exclusive territory of the Irish, Italians, and Poles who lived east, south, and west of us. You knew exactly who you were in Chicago because if you stepped across a certain curb or transgressed the wrong end of a railway bridge some stranger was sure to knock your teeth out.
