The Musical Memoirs Continues With the Blues Brothers in Chicago
My grandfather was a pretty good pool player – especially considering the fact that he was missing four fingers.
Okay, well – maybe not technically four fingers. On one hand he was missing two entire fingers. On the other hand, two of his fingers were half gone. So if you do the math, then, I guess he was missing a grand total of three. Or two and a half-half.
But still.
A couple of people in the family had a theory about those missing fingers. They said that times were lean, my grandfather had a big family to feed, and the insurance company doled out $10,000 per finger. So he took one for the team.
Four, actually. Two separate incidents.
But that’s just a theory.
I tend to think that the factory was a dangerous place to work, and my grandfather found out the hard way. Buy, hey, at least he got a pension, which is more than anyone in my generation will be able to say.
Amazing, though, how you adapt to things. There were many times when I didn’t even notice that he was missing fingers (curiously, the middle two of each hand). He’d hold a pool stick, pound a nail or light his pipe like anyone else. Heck, I think missing digits actually helped his pool playing.
I wish I’d asked him more about things. I mean, yeah, we talked. We talked a lot. But today I wished I’d probed him for details. Like what was his father like? Did he really give up boxing for my grandmother?And what really happened to those fingers? 
When I lived in the suburbs, my grandfather’s place in the city was both a place of great excitement and danger. My aunts and uncles once bought my grandfather a bullet-proof vest for his birthday — and the gesture was only half-joking. Whenever I’d talk about wanting to move to the city myself one day, my grandfather would send me newspaper clippings detailing people recently killed in his neighborhood.
In one letter, he described hearing a gun shot outside his house. When he looked out his window, he wrote, he saw a kid limping across the road, his leg bleeding.
He didn’t think my moving to the city was a good idea.
But, of course, Chicago wasn’t all about violence, and he couldn’t hide that from me. It was also about the Cubs, the lake on a hot day, and the elephants at the Lincoln Park Zoo.
I remember watching a local news segment about the filming of “The Blues Brothers” there. We only lived 30 minutes away, but I wanted to be there. Right there. Except my dad, who worked in the city – who grew up in the city – hated the city. So it might as well have been another state. Because he wasn’t going to go there if he didn’t have to.
Years later, I was driving myself to Wrigley Field – not far from my grandfather’s neighborhood — and “Sweet Home Chicago” by the Blues Brothers came on the radio. At that moment, the neighborhood alive on a warm summer afternoon, everything felt oh so right. Despite my grandfather’s efforts to dissuade me from it, Chicago was a great place. Maybe not the place I wanted to live –definitely not the place I wanted to live in the winter. But a place that really did feel like home, even if the big buildings always gave me butterflies as I approached.
When my grandfather died, my aunt sent me one of his trademark pipes, and I couldn’t think of a better gift.
Sometimes I smell the bits of tobacco in there and think: Sweet, sweet home.
Posted on June 10th, 2008 by Pat
Filed under: Music, Songs in the Key of Life: My Musical Memoirs, The World According to Pat
I remember my first trip to Chicago. I was 11 or 12 and my brother and I visited my Uncle Bobby — the dark sheep of the family. We took the train down from Milwaukee. It seemed odd that we traveled through people’s backyards. You could see their sheets flapping from backyard clothes lines as the train headed south into the Windy City. Bobby picked us up and took us home to what I think was a row house. I remember walking around the neighborhood and seeing a car sitting on 5-gallon paint cars, all its wheels gone — or stolen. And I remember a trip to the Natural History Museum at the lakefront that weekend. There was a group of kids throwing pennies in the pond. No not in the pond. At the turtles in the pond. Trying their best to knock them into the water — with pennies. Chicago was a rough town.
My dad grew up on the north side. Lived there ’til he joined the Air Force in the early 60’s. By the time I was born, he had moved way, way out into the suburbs. (In fact, McHenry County wasn’t really even considered part of the world back then.) I never really understood why he decided to go so far away from the city, and I never really had the foresight to ask him. I hated the tiny town I grew up in, and was always enamored with the city. Chicago was actually first on my list of places to move to, with SLO being second. The lousy midwestern weather is what eventually tipped the scale towards SLO’s favor. Regardless, Chicago is a great place, and given the way the city is gentrifying, it’s probably not nearly as dangerous as it used to be. For better or worse.
Shawno:
You have a point. Much like the area around Wrigley, my grandfather’s neighborhood today is much different. While I wouldn’t really walk around at night carelessly, it’s clearly safer (and cleaner) than it once was.
Thanks for the comment.
First of all, I just want to say, “Go Cubs!” Secondly, this series gets better and better. Thirdly, its really weird that you bring up the lost fingers thing, because I’ve been thinking a lot recently about writing about my great-grandmother, who had only one arm. Another whole story. Anyway, thanks for another inspiring post.