My brothers and I were required to do household chores without any expectation of an allowance. “I feed you, don’t I?” Dad would say. I got my first summer job when I was thirteen, working for the Park Ridge Park District three mornings a week supervising a small park a few miles from my house. Since my dad left for work early in our only car, I pulled a wagon filled with balls, bats, jump ropes and other supplies back and forth. From that year on, I always had a summer job and often worked during the year.
My dad was highly opinionated, to put it mildly. We all accommodated his pronouncements, mostly about Communists, shady businessmen or crooked politicians, the three lowest forms of life in his eyes. In our family’s spirited, sometimes heated, discussions around the kitchen table, usually about politics or sports, I learned that more than one opinion could live under the same roof. By the time I was twelve, I had my own positions on many issues. I also learned that a person was not necessarily bad just because you did not agree with him, and that if you believed in something, you had better be prepared to defend it.
Both my parents conditioned us to be tough in order to survive whatever life might throw at us. They expected us to stand up for ourselves, me as much as my brothers.
Shortly after we moved to Park Ridge, my mother noticed that I was reluctant to go outside to play. Sometimes I came in crying, complaining that the girl across the street was always pushing me around. Suzy O’Callaghan had older brothers, and she was used to playing rough. I was only four years old, but my mother was afraid that if I gave in to my fears, it would set a pattern for the rest of my life. One day, I came running into the house. She stopped me.
“Go back out there,” she ordered, “and if Suzy hits you, you have my permission to hit her back. You have to stand up for yourself. There’s no room in this house for cowards.”
She later told me she watched from behind the dining room curtain as I squared my shoulders and marched across the street.
I returned a few minutes later, glowing with victory. “I can play with the boys now,” I said. “And Suzy will be my friend!”
She was and she still is.
As a Brownie and then a Girl Scout, I participated in Fourth of July parades, food drives, cookie sales and every other activity that would earn a merit badge or adult approval.
I began organizing neighborhood kids in games, sporting events and backyard carnivals both for fun and to raise nickels and dimes for charities. There is an old photograph from our local newspaper, the Park Ridge Advocate, that shows me and a bunch of my friends handing over a paper bag of money for the United Way. We raised it from the mock Olympics our neighborhood staged when I was twelve.
Surrounded by a father and brothers who were sports fanatics, I became a serious fan and occasional competitor. I supported our school’s teams and went to as many games as possible. I rooted for the Cubs, as did my family and most folks on our side of town. My favorite was Mr. Cub himself, Ernie Banks. In our neighborhood, it was nearly sacrilegious to cheer for the rival White Sox of the American League, so I adopted the Yankees as my AL team, in part because I loved Mickey Mantle. My explanations of Chicago sports rivalries fell on deaf ears during my Senate campaign years later, when skeptical New Yorkers were incredulous that a Chicago native could claim youthful allegiance to a team from the Bronx.
I played in a girls’ summer softball league through high school, and the last team I played for was sponsored by a local candy distributor. We wore white knee socks, black shorts and pink shirts in honor of our namesake confection, Good & Plenty. The Park Ridge kids traveled in packs to and from Hinckley Park, swimming in summer in the cold pool waters and skating in winter on the big outdoor rink. We walked or rode our bikes everywhere―
sometimes trailing the slow-moving town trucks that sprayed a fog of DDT at dusk in the summer months. Nobody thought about pesticides as toxic then. We just thought it was fun to pedal through the haze, breathing in the sweet and acrid smells of cut grass and hot asphalt as we squeezed a few more minutes of play out of the dwindling light.
We sometimes ice-skated on the Des Plaines River while our fathers warmed themselves over a fire and talked about how the spread of communism was threatening our way of life, and how the Russians had the bomb and, because of Sputnik, we were losing the space race. But the Cold War was an abstraction to me, and my immediate world seemed safe and stable. I didn’t know a child whose parents were divorced, and until I went to high school, I didn’t know anybody who died of anything except old age. I recognize that this benign cocoon was an illusion, but it is one I would wish for every child.
I grew up in a cautious, conformist era in American history. But in the midst of our Father Knows Best upbringing, I was taught to resist peer pressure. My mother never wanted to hear about what my friends were wearing or what they thought about me or anything else. “You’re unique,” she would say. “You can think for yourself. I don’t care if everybody’s doing it. We’re not everybody. You’re not everybody.”
This was fine with me, because I usually felt the same way. Of course, I did make some effort to fit in. I had enough adolescent vanity that I sometimes refused to
