Change
I start every day the same way. After getting myself a cup of coffee, I open my iPad and check out my Facebook page. I start with my memories and then move onto notifications from my Facebook friends and then end up scrolling through the posts that Facebook thinks are right for me.
If you do Facebook, you know exactly what a lot of these posts are, mainly ads for things Facebook imagines I’ll be interested in. In my case, it’s generally ads for hearing aids, cruises, or shaving kits. I tend to scroll through all of this stuff quickly to get to the posts from the pages I’m really interested in.
Today, that’s where I ran into something that stopped me. On Facebook’s “Growing Up in Chicago” page, I saw a photo of an old CTA bus with two metal trolley poles that stretched up to a pair of parallel, overhead wires. These trolley buses relied on electricity to transport people. At their peak in the late 1950s, there were about 700 of these electric-powered coaches in Chicago. That represented about one-quarter of the CTA’s transit vehicles, the others being regular motor buses and old streetcars.
Seeing that trolley bus photo started me thinking about how Chicago has changed since the 1950s when I was a kid. I haven’t been to Chicago since 2016 when I did a book tour to promote Echoes of Tattered Tongues, my book of essays and poems about my parents and their experiences in the slave labor camps in Germany and their lives in Chicago after the war. I spent a week going to bookstores all over the city and reading from my book and autographing copies. I even did some radio interviews on WBEZ and a Polish radio station.
But probably the most memorable thing that happened was returning to my old neighborhood east of Humboldt Park. My family lived in that area for almost 23 years, from about 1952 to 1975.
For most of that time, the neighborhood was so Polish that my parents felt almost like they were back in Poland. St. Fidelis, our local parish, had five priests. All of them spoke Polish. In fact, one of the priests, like us, came over as a Displaced Person after World War II. He could barely speak English. The nuns at my school were all Polish Americans who spoke perfect Polish. My parents felt right at home going to masses that were all in Polish and talking to the sisters in Polish about what a good boy I was.
But that’s not all my parents loved about the neighborhood. They loved the fact that about half the people on our block were either recent Polish immigrants or Polish immigrants from before the war. Having lost so many family members and friends because of the war, my parents loved talking in Polish to these neighbors about the world they had left behind and the world they now lived in.
My parents also loved shopping on Division Street. The butcher shops, bakeries, clothing stores, restaurants, hardware stores, and taverns there were either run by Poles or had workers who spoke perfect Polish. My parents loved going into places with signs on their windows that said, “Mówimy po Polsku.”
But then all of that changed just the way the CTA trolley buses changed. By 1973 those 700 CTA trolley buses were gone, replaced by gas-powered buses. And by 1975 when we moved out of that neighborhood, its Polishness hadn't disappeared, but there was less and less of it.
Probably the biggest cause for the change was that St. Fidelis Church was demolished in 1968 because of structural problems. The parish school eventually also closed its doors. Another factor that contributed to the decline in Polishness was the fact that many of the Poles and Polish Americans in the neighborhood were starting to make more money and were moving into better neighborhoods. A third cause was probably the increase of violence in the neighborhood stemming from Hispanic gangs. On my block of Evergreen Street, five houses, including our home, were burned down by the gangs.
By 1975 when my parents finally moved out of the Humboldt Park area, it didn’t feel like the Poland they had been dragged out of by the Germans during the war, and it didn’t feel like the Polonia they had discovered when they first moved to Chicago in 1952. My mother missed talking to her neighbors about how walking through Humboldt Park in the evening reminded her of what it was like growing up in a forest in eastern Poland before the war, and my father missed sitting with the other dipisi in a bar and sharing his memories of the war.
The world had changed for them, just as it had changed for the other Poles and Polish Americans in our neighborhood, and just as it will continue to change for all of us.
We can’t stop that change.
All we can hope to do is remember.
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My most recent column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.
If you’re interested in seeing more of my columns about Chicago, check out my book Who I Am: Lives Told in Kitchen Polish, available at Amazon or from me.
