“I want to ride all the roller coasters this year, Dad,” he announced after we were inside. “There’s six of ’em, aren’t there?”
“That sounds about right. You even want to go on the Bobs?” I asked, referring to the fastest, scariest, most famous of them all.
“Sure, even the Bobs.”
“Well, you’re going to have to do that one by yourself,” I told him. “My stomach isn’t what it used to be. What about the Parachute Jump?” I pointed to the twenty-story girdered tower that loomed over the park like a gaunt, skeletal dinosaur rearing up on its hind legs. Riders got strapped onto open, backless seats and were hoisted slowly to the top, then they plummeted earthward on cables in a free fall until their parachutes opened, about halfway down.
“Uh, maybe not that,” he said, eyeing the tower with respect. “Did you ever go on it?”
“It’s only been open since last year. And for me, it’s in the same category as the Bobs; watching it is excitement enough. It really does look a lot like that tower you built at home with the Erector set, doesn’t it?”
Peter agreed, but he clearly had no interest in riding the thing; his heart belonged to the roller coasters. And I did manage to survive three of them with him, along with the Chutes, a relatively tame water slide. As we walked under newly leafed trees on the park grounds with frankfurters and Cokes, we passed a row of metal cages called the “African Dip,” where Negroes were perched precariously on boards above tanks of water. For a nickel, or maybe a dime, you got to throw three baseballs at a target, and if you hit it, the board would drop, dunking its occupant into the water tank.
“Want to try?” I asked Peter, gesturing toward the cages, where the colored men good-naturedly and loudly heckled potential pitchers.
He wrinkled his nose and shook his head vigorously. “That’s really dumb. Why would they want to do that?”
“They get paid,” I said. “And jobs are hard to come by these days, especially if you’re a Negro.”
“Really dumb,” he repeated, looking over his shoulder at them as we headed off in the direction of the fabled Bobs.
Before work on Monday, I stopped in at Tribune Tower and paid a visit to the morgue — or reference room, as some of its staff insist on referring to it.
“Well, by God, if it isn’t old Snap. What brings you inside the holiest of the holies? Haven’t seen you around here for a couple of years. Been called on the carpet for insubordination?”
It was “Popeye” Petrucci, so named because he sported a black patch over his left eye. Stories varied as to its origin — among them that he was beaned in a minor-league baseball game in Louisiana about 1905, partially blinding him; that he lost his eye in a barroom brawl on the Marseilles waterfront just after the Armistice; or that he was stabbed in the face by a holdup man while guarding a shipment of gold on a train going through the Canadian Rockies, date unknown. Popeye wouldn’t confirm any of the versions, although I always suspected he generated all of them himself.
“Believe it or not, I’m here in search of information, although given the quality of this so-called archive, that may be a fool’s errand.”
“Them thar’s real fightin’ words, padnuh,” Popeye cracked, doing a middling Walter Brennan imitation. “This here dollar says that we got what you’re looking for. Even money.”
“Put your cash away, you old fraud of a trail hand. Actually, my request is simplicity itself; I’m after a Chicago phone directory, circa 1910.”
“Duck soup! Goddamit, Snap, I thought you was really gonna give me a challenge. I could use a real challenge.” Popeye limped back into the rows of shoulder-high filing cabinets and returned two minutes later with a mildewed, dog-eared directory. “You ask for 1910, you get 1910,” he proclaimed as he slapped the big book down on the table, raising so much dust we both coughed.
Normally, the overly nosy Popeye would have asked why I wanted something as abstruse as a twenty-eight-year-old Chicago directory, but today I was spared an inquisition. The phone jangled at that moment, and he was the only one on duty in the morgue.
As he shuffled off to answer the rings, I flipped the directory open, gently turning its brittle pages to the Mrs. Edgar Martindale was listed on Longwood Drive, all right, which I vaguely knew to be in the expensive Beverly Hills district on the Far South Side of the city.
Next, I went to the reference shelf and pulled down the current city directory, or “criss-cross,” as reporters refer to it. As thick as the phone directory, this volume lists residences and businesses by street address, rather than alphabetically by name. I paged to Longwood Drive and found a listing for “Mrs. E. Martindale” at the same address as the one in the 1910 directory. I recalled that in Lloyd Martindale’s obituary, his mother was mentioned as one of the survivors, and she had been described as something like “long active in both social and charitable circles.”
I wrote down the addresses of a half-dozen names on the Martindale block of Longwood and returned to the ancient phone directory to see how many had lived in the neighborhood almost three decades earlier. The answer was two, surnamed Warburton and Cook, both on the opposite side of the street from the Martindale address. The Warburton name in the earlier book was Harold, with the current listing being Mrs. Harold, presumably his widow. The Cook entry had remained unchanged: Lewis J.
Popeye was off the phone. “Find what you want, Snap?”
“Pretty much. Thanks.”
“Don’t get a lot of requests for old directories,” he observed pointedly, eyebrow raised in anticipation of an explanation.
“I’m sure that’s true, Popeye. Good to see you again; sorry, I’ve got to run or I’ll be late getting down to 11th and State.”
The next weekend, Peter was staying overnight with a friend from school, and although I enjoyed and valued my time with him, I was glad for the freedom and I planned to make effective use of it. On Saturday morning, I climbed onto a sooty Rock Island Line commuter local at the LaSalle Street Station and rode south to Beverly Hills, a trip of a half-hour. It was hard to conceive that I was still well inside Chicago’s city limits as I stepped off the train at 103rd Street. The cozy little business district that clustered around the depot had the feel of a small village or a distant suburb with its block of groceries, meat markets, barber shop, and the like, and at the far end, a church spire poking above the trees.
Once again referring to my ratty pocket map, I walked west one block to Longwood Drive, which parallels the railroad tracks, and here I got another surprise: hills! I haven’t traveled extensively, but from what I’ve seen of other places across the U.S., Chicago is about the flattest city around. Yet here, only a dozen miles or so south of the Loop, the streets actually climbed uphill west from Longwood. Okay, I grant that these slopes would not be impressive to somebody from San Francisco, but for me, at least, they were a local novelty.
I guessed it was the Martindale house even before I got close enough to read the address. Stone-and-brick Victorian, it was three stories and had even higher round turrets topped by dunce-cap roofs on two of the corners. I counted six brick chimneys, although there could have been even more on the back side, hidden by the steep slate roof. With its front entrance framed by a bulky stone archway, the house loomed on a grassy, elm-shaded hill well above the street. A flight of brick steps that rose from the sidewalk had been cut into the embankment. At the top of the rise, the steps leveled off to a brick walk leading to the front door. A brick driveway also scaled the grade and curved around behind the big house, presumably to the garage or coach house.