Boys Enter the House

by David Nelson

  As a result, Greg received stitches to his head, and Judy received a lecture from Greg’s father.

  The episode did not deter Judy and Greg. Judy had known it was over with her boyfriend Glenn before she even dumped him. Despite her grandmother’s love for Glenn (she had purposefully allowed him inside to confront Greg), he was a lot older than Judy—he was almost eighteen years and she fourteen when they first started dating. Judy’s mother didn’t like the situation. “He would keep me out past my curfew,” Judy recalled. “It was causing problems.”

  Aside from that, Glenn also called the shots in the relationship, telling her what they’d do or where’d they go during their time together. She grew tired of it. So she had called her good friend Gregory Godzik—a friend her mother liked and approved of—and asked if he wanted to get together and do something.

  Judy Patterson had met Greg only a few years prior, in maybe sixth or seventh grade, hanging out at nearby Norwood Park where kids sat around talking and laughing on picnic benches at all hours. Sometimes there were bonfires, and sometimes there was ice skating when the parks department froze over the baseball diamond. Judy would skate on one side of the rink while Greg played hockey on the other side.

  At some point, Judy’s group of friends melded with Greg’s. She doesn’t remember any specific moment when she met the blond-haired boy. Just one day, he appeared.

  “He was your typical kid,” as she told it. “Very low maintenance, very ‘go with the flow.’” She liked him, and for a time, they interacted in the tentative way kids do as they’re navigating puberty and figuring themselves out.

  Greg lived nearby with his older sister and his parents, both of whom had been born to Polish immigrants, one of the largest ethnic groups of Chicago in the twentieth century. Greg was only two years older than Judy. Shortly, he would go to Taft High School, where Judy would eventually join him.

  “We’re just kids,” Judy said of that time. “And we liked each other. But of course, what do you do when you’re in sixth or seventh grade?”

  It was simple things like swimming at Foster Beach near the neighborhood of Uptown. “We’d always go to that one pier and go way on the edge where you’re not supposed to and sit there with the waves crashing on you,” Judy recalled.

  Nothing much happened between Greg and Judy back then. They hung out, but not all that frequently, mostly drifting in and out of scenes taking place in each other’s lives. “Maybe we held hands or kissed,” she said.

  Without regularly seeing each other, Greg and Judy stopped short of starting anything real. For Judy, there were other boys like Glenn in the next few years, and for Greg maybe there were other girls, though no one as important as Judy would eventually become for him.

  Straight down the newly paved Kennedy Expressway, another family with ties to Poland lived near the intersection of North and Ashland Avenues.

  Richard and Rosemarie Szyc had not ventured far from the neighborhood where they grew up. Among their neighbors and friends, they even had nicknames—“Bugs” for Richard, who worked as a truck driver, and “Tootie” for Rosemarie, who worked an overnight shift at a bank and taught Sunday school. Over the years, they filled their home with five children—one girl and four boys.

  In the very middle of all the Szyc children was John, or Johnny as the family called him.

  There would be many things that set Johnny apart from others over the years. Although he shared this particular characteristic with his brother, for now it was his hair—a flash of red hurrying through the neighborhood, doing all the ordinary things a young boy in the 1960s might do.

  For Christmas one year, he and his brothers got an 8mm camera they quickly put to good use. Their sister, Patti, remembered the boys lining up G.I. Joes frame by frame and then repositioning them in between takes to give it the appearance of movement, or stop motion. “[Johnny] wrote a whole script … and we were all in this movie,” Patti said. “I don’t even remember what it was about.”

  Since the camera couldn’t record sound, she recounted how they held up signs with words for dialogue and exposition scrawled out on them. “It’s gotta be the stupidest thing, and it’s gotta be about ten seconds long, but you know as a kid, that was a big thing. The whole neighborhood was in this movie.”

  On weekends, Johnny followed his paper route through the neighborhood, ensuring that each newspaper was delivered by 6 AM. “So that meant by four o’clock, we’re out the door,” said Patti, who frequently tagged along on his route. “I remember pulling the wagon through the snow.” Patti estimated she would have been eight at the time, making Johnny about ten. Together, they’d traipse through the cold, making sure a paper had made its way to every house.

  On his own, Johnny developed interests as well. Early on, he fostered a love for animals of all kinds. “We were probably the only family in the neighborhood who had a pet bullfrog,” Patti said. “Where he found that, God only knows.”

  Johnny frequently brought stray cats and dogs back to the house to take care of along with other pets the family was raising. At one point, he brought home albino hamsters in hopes that he could breed them and sell them, owing to their rarity. “So we had a male and female albino hamster,” Patti said. “That doesn’t mean they’re going to produce albino hamsters. At one point, I think I had twenty-three hamsters, and I think two of them turned out to be albinos.”

  And like any young boy living in those years, whether in Uptown or elsewhere, he had his own streak of danger. One of the neighborhood boys came running into the Szyc household one afternoon and announced, “Johnny’s bleeding!”

  Rosemarie, who did not know how to drive at the time, flew out into the neighborhood, trailed by Johnny’s friends, directing her where to go.

  Johnny and his friends had been “rolling” down a hill on sheets of cardboard when he had injured himself somehow. Now, arriving at the hill, Rosemarie found no trace of her middle child except for a trail of blood running back through the alley.

  Rosemarie followed the blood all the way back to her own home, where she found Johnny, bleeding from the leg. “They didn’t want to walk down the sidewalk and have people see them, so they walked down the alley,” Patti said.

  The scars of young boys are like maps of their childhood. Up his leg, Johnny received forty stitches for a gash that now carved its way through the many freckles Patti used to link up like “connect the dots.”

  There would be more scars, some visible and some that Johnny Szyc would keep to himself, carrying with him through the short years of his life. He would learn to adapt and live his life in new ways.

  But in those carefree years, Johnny and his siblings did the typical routine of Cub Scouts and summer camps. On Sundays, Johnny and his brothers stood as altar boys at nearby St. Stanislaus Kostka Church—the first Polish parish in Chicago—where the Szyc kids also attended school.

  Although their mother had been raised Lutheran and went to church every Sunday, she agreed to put her children through Catholic schools (or at the very least, public schools) when she married their father, as part of an agreement with the diocese.

  “If the nun knew Polish and she knew how to pronounce [Szyc], your life was miserable for the year,” said Patti, explaining that Szyc was pronounced “Shits” in proper Polish. “You don’t need every kid in the world knowing how to say it.”

  On Christmas Eve the family went together to St. Stanislaus for midnight mass. After communion, Rosemarie would disappear, hustling back to the home to put out all of Santa’s presents for the kids. On Easter they brought food in baskets to be blessed by the priest.

  The church was just one source of community engagement the Szyc family took advantage of. Outspoken and energetic, Rosemarie also found time to join the PTA at schools where none of her children even attended.

  Given all their social events, plus the fact Bugs and Tootie had lived their entire lives in the area, the Szyc family became a fixture of the neighborhood. “I can remember w
hen I started smoking, it was like, ‘OK, what alley can I go in?’” Patti said. “You couldn’t go anywhere and not pass somebody that at least knew who we were. That’s how it was.”

  But as the early 1970s progressed, the Szyc family found the neighborhood changing around them. Old friends had gone off to other neighborhoods or out into the suburbs of Chicago. The boys were getting older, and soon Patti would head to high school, though Rosemarie was not too keen on her daughter attending St. Stanislaus Kostka’s school for girls.

  Part of her feared Patti might rebel against the confines of a Catholic girls’ school. Rosemarie’s mother had been a single parent. She saw how much her own mother had struggled and did not want that for her own daughter.

  That summer of 1973, as Patti returned home from summer camp down in Indiana, Rosemarie informed her that the family was moving to Des Plaines, a suburb north of the city where they’d found a new house just a few blocks away from O’Hare Airport. Patti hadn’t wanted to go to the Catholic school, but the idea of life in the suburbs didn’t appeal to her all that much either.

  Almost the instant they turned onto the street, Patti found fault in their new home. “I hated it,” Patti recalled. “These two girls were sitting on the sidewalk. It was like, people didn’t do that in the city. You sat on the stairs, not on the sidewalk at the intersection. It was weird.”

  As soon as she had sat down in her new homeroom at Maine West High School, a girl turned to her and asked, “Do you smoke?”

  “I can remember thinking to myself, how do I answer?” said Patti, who by that time was lighting up whenever she could find a private moment. “If I say yes, then I could be in trouble. If I say no, then I’m not very cool. I just said, ‘It’s none of your damn business.’”

  Patti’s city ways quickly put her against her neighbors as well. She remembered riding her bike through the neighborhood, cussing at two little girls she passed along the way. Their mother called the police, and when Patti swung around the corner for her own home, a squad car waited in the driveway. She returned later, after the officer had left.

  In suburban Des Plaines, police had a slower pace of criminal activity to keep up with. They had their minor share of drugs and murders to deal with, but not like cops in the city.

  Johnny Szyc adjusted with few problems, as he started his junior year at Maine West. She remembered him having friends back in the city, at Gordon Tech where their older brother commuted to finish his senior year, but he seemed to blossom in Des Plaines.

  Johnny made friends quickly, hanging out with members of the drama department and joining them out in the forest preserves after school. He had grown into a young teenager, still with the same freckles and the same red hair pluming out a bit more as the ’70s went on.

  “John was just a little ginger smiler,” one friend from the time named Mark Johnson remembered.

  “Strawberry blond hair down to about his shoulders,” another friend named Lynn Meadows said. They met in Des Plaines, though after Lynn had gotten through Maine West, graduating a year early. “Pleasant lovely smile, sparkling eyes, innocent. He had a beautiful innocence in him.… He was a lovely young soul.”

  But unlike his family, she knew him as John, not Johnny. In time, she would come to learn a lot more about him that they also did not know.

  Somedays, on her way home from school, MaryJane would come upon her house on Springfield Avenue in the Albany Park neighborhood, where she lived with her mother and her grandparents, and find her new boyfriend, Billy Kindred, sitting there with her grandfather. They’d be chatting each other up, crossing the generation gap with talk of baseball or whatever else came to mind on a given afternoon.

  “My grandpa wasn’t unfriendly, but he didn’t care about talking to teenagers,” MaryJane said. “There were only a few he’d really sit and have a conversation with.”

  Although he had little money, Billy wanted very much to take MaryJane’s grandfather to a Cubs game, where a distant cousin, Pat Pieper, had been the announcer for the team from 1916 to 1974.

  MaryJane’s grandmother and mother also liked Billy, who was always courteous and personable with them. “He respected his elders,” MaryJane said. “He respected me as a teenager.”

  Billy was unlike other boys MaryJane had known from her own neighborhood. A teenager himself, he wasn’t just looking to have sex with MaryJane. “A piece of ass is a dime a dozen,” Billy would say to her.

  Of course, it could have all been for show, it could have been a long, patient facade to manipulate MaryJane. But for as long as she knew him, it was never like that. Every day that they were together, he would show up and he would treat her family and her with respect. When he and MaryJane walked down the street, he’d stick out an arm for her to take, “You like chickens? Grab a wing!”

  With his own family, too, Billy was still the tender older brother, the protector. He would often schedule plans with MaryJane so that he could go see his sister or his nieces. A few times, he even brought MaryJane to meet them, and MaryJane remembered how excited they were to see him, and he to see them. In MaryJane’s words, “He was just a nice guy. He was fun, and he could be scandalous, too.”

  Together, MaryJane and Billy roamed the North Side, particularly Old Town, where they’d shop or go out to eat or go to Piper’s Alley, which Mary-Jane jokingly considered “her” alley, since it bore her last name.

  MaryJane often liked to drift into punk rock bars where she could dance to new music like the Ramones or Patti Smith. While Billy didn’t enjoy dancing, except for an occasional slow dance with MaryJane, he also didn’t approve of places like that. “I was going to some places that I shouldn’t,” MaryJane recalled.

  Billy and MaryJane buoyed each other. While MaryJane stayed out of bars and places she shouldn’t go, Billy, for the most part, stayed out of trouble during the time they were together. Or, at least, he stayed away from friends he’d previously gotten in trouble with.

  For the most part, after Billy and his best friend, Danny Jockell, had picked up MaryJane and her friend the night they’d all met, Billy and Danny stopped hanging out. It’s possible they ran into each other or saw one another around town or the old neighborhood a few times, but for the most part, they had gone their separate ways.

  Billy had started hanging out with a guy named Gerald Burress, who Mary-Jane remembered meeting as well, but was never able to get a bead on. “I was cordial and nice,” she explained, “but I didn’t really associate with him.”

  Gerald and Billy had been bouncing around places in the Lake View neighborhood, possibly living together, sometimes separately. At one point, Billy had a bedroom in an apartment with several other people on Melrose Avenue.

  MaryJane visited him there a couple of times, but never enough to get a clear sense of who his roommates were or how Billy was living there. Mostly, when she came over, Billy would take her out for a walk or they’d make their regular tour of the neighborhood, finding things to do. Sometimes, MaryJane’s mother would let her take the car, a Pontiac Grand Ville, to go visit or pick Billy up at his apartment. “Well, la-tee-dah,” Billy would say as he got inside the car.

  Sometimes, MaryJane would leap off the rocks into Lake Michigan while Billy stayed ashore watching her swim, just like he’d done the first time they’d met. But he never jumped in himself.

  She began to think something was holding him back in general. Something in his life was preventing him from moving forward. “It was like a struggle of his trying to get a job, always having to hustle and work side jobs,” MaryJane said. “It was like, this guy needs a break. Cut him a break.”

  While Billy tried to look to the future with some semblance of hope, some glint of positivity, he continued to compare himself to MaryJane. With few prospects and a troubled past, he felt himself unworthy of her love. “I’m a high school dropout who likes to do acid,” MaryJane would reply. “Are you kidding me?”

  MaryJane had dropped out of Roosevelt High School ahead
of her junior year, but a friend had mentioned a job sorting mail at the American Legion Life Insurance office downtown. Not long after starting there, MaryJane started doing bookkeeping for the company as well. She was part of Chicago, dressing up each morning to catch the train with all the other professionals in their suits and skirts, heading to the Loop and the rush of the working world.

  All while Billy continued trying to find a way forward on his own path.

  “He did have goals, he did want to reach something,” MaryJane said. “He did want to make something of himself.” She wasn’t sure what that might have been; their time together, although significant, was still short.

  Despite the feelings of doubt continuing to frustrate him, they continued happily as boyfriend and girlfriend through the fall of 1977.

  Close to the holidays, MaryJane remembers walking home on a wet, slushy day from the Welles Park indoor swimming pool and meeting up with Billy at her house for a quick moment together. He had someplace to be and so did she, but before he left he said to her, for the first time, “I love you.”

  MaryJane laughed. She didn’t mean it disparagingly; she was nervous as she registered the words he’d just uttered.

  Billy stepped forward and hugged her.

  “No,” he told her. “I mean it, I love you.”

  MaryJane paused. “I love you too.”

  Not long after, they began having more serious conversations about the direction of their relationship. Billy had gone so far as to ask MaryJane’s mom for her blessing to marry her daughter. While she loved Billy just like the rest of the family, she felt that they were too young. She gave her blessing for them to move forward but asked that they at least wait until MaryJane was eighteen, to make certain they were certain.

  MaryJane was certain, though. She loved Billy. She saw how tender and caring he was with children, and she knew he loved her. “So we kinda considered ourselves engaged,” MaryJane said. “Unofficially engaged.” And while Billy didn’t have money for a ring, he brought over a box of jewelry he had obtained, mostly made of turquoise. She had no idea where it came from, but now, she wonders if maybe he’d stolen it, during a flash of Billy’s past self that he’d never truly let go of.