Betsy and I separated and went off with total strangers. I ended up with a couple who drove me to the South Side, dropped me off in a poor neighborhood and told me to knock on doors and ask people their names so I could compare them with registration lists to find evidence to overturn the election. Off I went, fearless and stupid. I did find a vacant lot that was listed as the address for about a dozen alleged voters. I woke up a lot of people who stumbled to the door or yelled at me to go away. And I walked into a bar where men were drinking to ask if certain people on my list actually lived there. The men were so shocked to see me they stood silent while I asked my few questions, until the bartender told me I would have to come back later because the owner wasn’t there.
When I finished, I stood on the corner waiting to be picked up, happy that I’d ferreted out proof of my father’s contention that “Daley stole the election for Kennedy.”
Of course, when I returned home and told my father where I had been, he went nuts. It was bad enough to go downtown without an adult, but to go to the South Side alone sent him into a yelling fit. And besides, he said, Kennedy was going to be President whether we liked it or not.
My freshman year at Maine East was a culture shock. The baby boomers pushed enrollment near five thousand white kids from different ethnic and economic groups. I remember walking out of my home room the first day of class and hugging the walls to avoid the crush of students, all of whom looked bigger and more mature than me. It didn’t help that I had decided the week before to get a more “grown-up” hairdo to begin my high school years. Thus began my lifelong hair struggles.
I wore my long straight hair in a ponytail or held back by a headband, and whenever my mother or I needed a permanent or trim we visited her dear friend Amalia Toland, who had once been a beautician. Amalia would take care of us in her kitchen while she and my mother talked. But I wanted to show up at high school with a shoulder-length pageboy or flip like those of the older girls I admired, and I begged my mother to take me to a real beauty parlor. A neighbor recommended a man who had his shop in a small windowless room in the back of a nearby grocery store. When I got there, I handed him a photo of what I wanted and waited to be transformed. Wielding scissors, he began to cut, all the time talking to my mother, often turning around to make a point. I watched in horror as he cut a huge hunk of hair out of the right side of my head. I shrieked. When he finally looked at where I was pointing, he said, “Oh, my scissors must have slipped, I’ll have to even up the other side.” Shocked, I watched the rest of my hair disappear, leaving me―in my eyes, at least―looking like an artichoke. My poor mother tried to reassure me, but I knew better: My life was ruined.
I refused to leave the house for days, until I decided that if I bought a ponytail of fake hair at Ben Franklin’s Five and Dime Store, I could pin it to the top of my head, put a ribbon around it and pretend the slipped scissors disaster never happened. So that’s what I did, which saved me from feeling selfconscious and embarrassed that first day―until I was walking down the grand central staircase in between classes. Coming up the stairs was Ernest Ricketts, known as “Ricky,” who had been my friend since the day we first walked to kindergarten together. He said hello, waited until he passed me, and then, as he had done dozens of times before, reached back to pull my ponytail―but this time it came off in his hand. The reason we are still friends today is that he did not add to my mortification; instead, he handed my “hair” back to me, said he was sorry he scalped me and went on without drawing any more attention to the worst moment―until then, at least―of my life.
It’s a cliché now, but my high school in the early 1960s resembled the movie Grease or the television show Happy Days. I became President of the local fan club for Fabian, a teen idol, which consisted of me and two other girls. We watched The Ed Sullivan Show every Sunday night with our families, except the night he showcased the Beatles on February 9, 1964, which had to be a group experience. Paul McCartney was my favorite Beatle, which led to debates about each one’s respective merits, especially with Betsy, who always championed George Harrison. I got tickets to the Rolling Stones concert in Chicago’s McCormick Place in 1965. “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” became a catchall anthem for adolescent angst of all varieties. Years later, when I met icons from my youth, like Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Mick Jagger, I didn’t know whether to shake hands or jump up and down squealing.
Despite the developing “youth culture,” defined mostly by television and music, there were distinct groups in our school that determined one’s social position: athletes and cheerleaders; student council types and brains; greasers and hoods. There
