Celestine Harvey’s up early, applying makeup and selecting her clothes. “If I’m going to be seen,” she says, “I want to be seen looking right.”
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“Folks are more than what they did for a job,” says John Wesby, or Frog, who used to work in a spring factory. “I’m a dancer. I learned to dance at a pool hall at 31st and State. We used to hang out there. You’d just be moving your feet. The next thing you know, we’re doing the bop.”
Another regular, Bill Hyde, made his living as a post office clerk. “Then I retired and really started living,” he says. “I do it all–I travel, I dance, I learned to fly a plane. I dived off cliffs in Jamaica–I learned to dive in Hawaii when I was in the service. I run track. I compete in the seniors games–I’m one of the best runners they got.”
“Back then it seemed everyone in our community knew everyone else. McKinley Morganfield used to come into my bank. I’d help him with his accounts. He’s Muddy Waters, you know, and he was recording for Chess Records. They were right down the street back then. I knew Leonard Chess very well. He used to come in. He used to tell me I should come on his radio show. I’d always tell him, ‘Next week, Mr. Chess. Maybe next week.’ But I never did go on.”
Charles Horn circulates, passing out copies of a 58-page ad booklet honoring the Neptune Social & Benevolent Club, a group he and his wife run on the south side. The booklet features testimonials to the club from, among others, Mayor Daley, Jesse Jackson, and a Woodlawn grocery-store owner named Fawzi Zayyad.
