ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL

That was me. Seventeen years old, trying so hard to hide my naivete. The fourth born of five children, I spent the first seventeen years of my life in Little Italy. My parents spoke broken English, spiced with a little Italian. My grandmother spoke only Italian. A conversation between her and I was like a day at the Tower of Babble; she spoke Italian, which I minimally understood. Speaking mostly in English, with occasional fractured Italian, I communicated. The only member of my family who ventured beyond high school, I had a lot to learn and I was learning fast—in some areas. When I left for Champaign in September, five months before, it was the first time I had been away from home longer than two days; before then the furthest from home I had been was about thirty miles. Education was hardly a family legacy. My brothers boasted of going to college. "Yeah, we went to college. The College of Hard Knox. Knox U. We majored in MAL, Makin a Livin." My mother finished second grade; she dropped out of school to help support her family. She worked in the shoestring factory a block away at 16th Street and Lowe Avenue. At sixteen she married my father who was living in a boarding house across the street while working in the lime pits at Victor Chemical. After losing a grocery store on Grand Avenue in north Chicago, and losing what was left of their possessions in a fire when their apartment burned on Christmas Eve, they moved to 1535 Lowe Avenue three doors away from my grandparents and in the shadow of the shoestring factory. The house was rented from my father's employer who adjusted the rent proportionate to my father's salary. With each raise in pay, the rent went up. When they moved in he was making fourteen dollars a week and paying fifteen dollars a month in rent. The house was a pit. We should have been paid to live in it. One bathroom with a tank toilet, no hot water, no tub, a dirt basement complete with rats, heated by a wood stove in the kitchen and a coal-burner in the dining room. We came onto better times in the early forties, with the war. My father improved his lot in life We moved out of the house when I was thirteen. I thought I was in heaven, to actually have a house with a furnace and central heating, hot water and a bathtub, and not have to bathe in a Number 2 Tub or go to the Community Center and shower for ten cents. I even had a bed now. No more sleeping on the couch. The fantasy of a college education became a reality.

My father had about six years of schooling in Sicily, the very bottom of Italy, geographicly as well as socially. It was never clear to me how much education he had. He never spelled it out; he must have been ashamed of it. He spend a few years in a seminary. He was considered blest, the seventh son of a seventh son. He boasted of that often, but I was unimpressed. A seventeen-year-old is seldom impressed with his parent's accomplishments and rarely considers important what his parents hold dear. When seventeen my father fled Sicily to avoid mandatory military service. He spoke little of that also. At seventeen my father tried to avoid a war and stay alive and I too, at seventeen, was hoping to do the same. The curse of our society on seventeen-year-olds.