Born in 1943, Neal Samors enjoyed an idyllic Rogers Park youth, playing ball in the alley behind his apartment building and seeing movies at the Granada Theatre. When he married in 1969, he and his wife settled on Farwell Avenue, just blocks from his childhood home. But after their daughter was born in 1975, they moved to Niles in search of a house with a yard, and eventually landed in Buffalo Grove.
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Despite their different backgrounds, both men yearn for a simpler, more communal urban existence–a nostalgia that’s evident in their new self-published book The Old Chicago Neighborhood: Remembering Life in the 1940s. Samors and Williams see that decade as the twilight of the era when neighborhoods still functioned like small towns. In that Chicago, people spent most of their lives in the same neighborhood, buying groceries at small independent shops, playing games in local parks, and sleeping on their porches or nearby beaches in hot weather.
Many of the interviewees, says Samors, described the 40s as the best years of their lives: “Even the interviews I did on the phone, I could tell their eyes were lighting up.” Hugh Hefner reminisces about the Grand Avenue streetcar that ran to Navy Pier. Dan Rostenkowski remembers his father, an alderman, routinely bailing constituents out of jail. Pitcher Dolores “Champ” Mueller Bajda of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League recalls earning $50 a game: “That was a lot of money back then.” Despite open discrimination in housing and employment, African-American subjects also view the 40s as a special decade, a time of thriving black shopping districts and jazz clubs.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Yvette Marie Dostatni, Library of Congress, Chicago Public Library Special Collections.
