The boys of the blizzard of January 1967.

The snow kept coming down on Churchill Avenue, over all the new three flats that all looked the same. The kids of the 8000 block looked out of the windows at the gathering piles of it, and it seemed to us that it had come along with the new place that we lived in, clean and white and new and not of Chicago.

January 1967.

I remember thinking, Does this happen a lot in Niles and other suburbs?  Maybe the weather is more spectacular just outside the city limits.

The street sometimes flooded a few feet deep at the end of the block, where it curved around to meet Church Street, didn’t it? That was a special suburban weather phenomenon, for sure. There was never enough water on a Chicago street to swim in.

The snow settled on the old cars that the dads had driven in Chicago, and the newer old cars they had bought as they moved to the suburbs. Just the dads’ cars. Mrs. Denson bought a Dodge Dart, but I don’t think many of the other women had their own cars then.

Before long, there was no way to drive out of the street to go to work. It would be a while before United Motor Coach got the Number 11 buses going down Milwaukee Avenue, and the Number 50 going east and west.

And now, the parents were wondering if this was some kind of suburban bull. Yes, the people they had left behind in Chicago were snowed in, too, but weren’t things supposed to be better out here? What’s the big problem? Who has the number of the Ward Office? Township? Village Hall? Whatever.

How hard could it be?

Very hard, the one guy who got through was told. We can’t plow your street with all the cars parked on it. We won’t.

Tell you what. We’ll come to plow it the day after tomorrow, if all the cars are gone. All of them. One car still there, we’ll send the truck somewhere else.

Most of the cars were buried under the snow. It was hard to tell where some of them were.

There was no way to drive them out of there. There wasn’t any way to get half of them out of there at all without a thaw.

But the guy who’d gotten through to the village and a couple other guys walked up and down the street, along the apartment buildings on the south side, and the houses on the north, knocking on doors.

Come out early tomorrow. Be on time. Bring shovels.

The next day dawned, and most of the men and boys came out. All the boys old enough to spit and swear were there. None of us were going to miss this, even if it was doomed to failure.

There were dozens out there, armed with hardware store snow shovels, GI trench shovels, big street shovels they’d stolen off garbage trucks. And there were straw bosses, or probably more aptly, platoon sergeants or drill instructors. Guys ready to order you around.

They didn’t have to do much of that. The excavating and pushing gave us all something to do, something positive that we all agreed on, unlike the war or the music or the hair or the clothes. The old men who chased the kids they saw on their lawns, alongside the kids they chased. Or at least on the same street.

Seven guys can push a car a lot easier than one or two can. And a dozen guys, easier than that. We had all the cars off the street by sometime in the afternoon.

Somebody suggested that if the plow didn’t show up, fine. We could just shovel the blankety-blank street ourselves.

My sister tried to help, but somebody told her to stay home and cook or sew or something. I don’t think any of the other girls or women were out that day.

I have no photographs. People didn’t take as many pictures then as they do now. None of the women were interested in snapping pictures of all their brave men. Not that I remember, anyway.

But after the plow came, we were all congratulated by the ladies. We acted cool, like it was something we did every day.

I lived there for another five years, and nothing like that ever happened again.

Life went on. The older kid next door, the best of us all, the guy who gave me a book to read so I would be sure to understand that Negroes were people, too, was drafted.

He went to Vietnam, and that was that.

A boy the same age who lived in the building on the other side asked my sister out. She thought he was a little weird, so she dumped him after a couple of dates. He got arrested the next week when the phone company told the cops he was the fellow calling women and telling them that their husbands were dead.

One of the guys across the street walked into the police station one day and told the deskman, “I killed the lady on Carmen Street.” She was dead, all right. He was never charged.

His nephew and I got into it one day, and we wrestled on the parkway in front of his house.  I pinned him, despite him being a bigger individual. I forgot about it until we went to high school. But every time he saw me there he’d take a swing at me.

The father of one of my pals, according to lore, didn’t get the biggest steak for dinner one night. He moved out. Mom and the kids, broke, moved to Wisconsin.

My best friend’s dad’s landscaping business went belly-up, and his marriage did, too. He and my friend took off, and I never saw either of them again. My pal never called his mother to tell her how he was.

Another kid’s dad owned a hardware store on the West Side. One day, when he got robbed for the umpteenth time, a teenage employee decided he would try to hit the robber over the head with a bottle. The old man’s days above ground ended right then.

The man downstairs was married to the nicest woman I knew, but he treated her like dirt, and got arrested for rape a few blocks away. Ten years later, Diane had a new boyfriend, who murdered her and then killed himself.

I walked over to Steve Cunneen’s bar on Devon Avenue when I heard about that on the radio. It was a new experience.

Diane was my first crush, when I was too young to know what a crush was, but not too young to watch her kids, one toddler and one in diapers. She couldn’t afford a real babysitter.

Her husband was a paid-per-call firefighter, and he spent most of his time hanging around the firehouse, so they were always broke. Diane was the only person I ever knew who washed paper plates.

I walked out onto Devon to get some air. One of the more regular  guys at the bar, a house painter, saw me being strange, and wanted to know what was going on.

He and the other guys had their own trouble right then, though they didn’t discuss it much. One of the tavern’s best softball players had gotten into a fight over a woman, and he got knocked through a porch railing. It was a pretty high porch.

“He shot her and then himself?” the painter asked. “The only thing he did wrong was shooting people in the wrong order.”

We never talked about it again. I don’t remember us ever talking about anything, except once at the Thybony paint store, when he told me I was buying the wrong roller to use on a tongue-and-groove wood ceiling.

A few years later, I moved to a quiet neighborhood about a mile away. After the first heavy snow, I went out to shovel around our family car.

A short, wiry woman was shoveling the street along the entire length of her nearby building, freeing up all the cars.

“Are these all your cars?” I asked her.

“Hell, no,” she said. “But this way everybody can park, even the ones who can’t shovel.”

I looked around, and saw much larger people shoveling just enough for their own cars, then putting chairs out to reserve their cleaned spaces.

“I think I like your way,” I told the lady.

I helped her finish up. When we were done, she came by my building, and helped me do the same there.

We kept it up, together or alone, for years.

But as time went by, we had to put our own dibs out, or we couldn’t be sure to have a place for our own cars. But, oddly, it didn’t work well for me.

One day, when I was about to pull up to pick up the very pregnant lady who lived in my apartment, I watched as a man picked up my chairs, threw them on the parkway, and parked his car.

He knew, he said, that some guy regularly shoveled out that whole stretch, so he resented anyone reserving any of it.

“I don’t let anybody get away with nothing on my block,” he said.

Years before, my friend had stopped doing her extra shoveling.

I asked her why. She didn’t answer, but she looked at me funny.

I’d seen that look before. A small sigh, a slight eye roll, then look away.

It says, You wouldn’t understand.

You’re one of them.