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It Happened on Hill StreetBy Billy Ingram
Tales of a true Hill Billy “I have a real genius for staying at home.” — Henry David Thoreau I rang up my sister to wish her a happy birthday the other day and found her excitedly basking in a sentimental glow, it so happened she was visiting a friend who lives in the house that we grew up in on Hill Street. When she told me this was a possibility at lunch earlier in the week, I suggested she ask if I could join them, reasoning I could cobble together a column for O.Henry out of what is a highly unusual experience. When she brought up to her friend the possibility of my tagging along, I was pointedly not invited. ”We’ve read what your brother has written about our house,” was the dour response the homeowner gave my sister. Well… I never! Or maybe I did, you decide. I find it funny because I have nothing but fond memories of being a carefree youngster roaming the two blocks of Hill Street north of Wendover in Latham Park (Irving Park adjacent, in modern parlance) with my brother, sister, and neighborhood youths who all seemed to move away after a short 2 or 3 years. In a Mayberry-like cliche, it wasn’t until I was a teenager and we moved into Irving Park proper that my father had a key made for the front door on Hill, we’d never had one, the place remaining unlocked even when we were away on 2 week vacations. Our Mema resided on the corner of Hill and Northwood in a charming Tudor inspired cottage, almost daily strolling from her place to ours cradling a wicker basket filled with cakes, pies, or silver dollar country ham biscuits, a gingham cloth covering those baked goods. The stuff of Norman Rockwell paintings. I wondered, how could I have offended my sister’s friend with my quaint remembrances shared in an article written maybe 5 or 6 years ago? Surely not when I told readers about what was referred to as ‘The Snake Pit’ located at the end of our driveway. Folks loved my gregarious parents who, until I was born and torpedoed the party, actually drove around in a school bus they had retrofitted into a rolling nightclub. On Hill Street, around sundown on warm nights around a dozen young adults, many of whom I suspect should have been home with their babies, would congregate guzzling Old Grandad or downing beers, laughing hysterically at heaven knows what while upstairs we were attempting to sleep. Witnessing this spectacle one Irving Park socialite remarked, “I don’t know who wrote Tobacco Road but I know where he was standing when he thought it up!” Pull tabs yanked and discarded from Miller High Life cans littered the driveway each morning, so many I once made a chain mail vest out of them. Was my faux pas revealing that our 70-year old next door neighbor was fond of sunbathing in the nude? Daphne Lewis left this realm long ago, that shouldn’t be a prickly issue today. Then again… maybe it is. Mrs. Lewis harangued her husband so loudly at night we heard every word clearly inside our home, one imagines his death was a welcome release when it mercifully came. Passing away a few years after he did, I helped Mrs. Lewis’ sister clear out the house while, the entire time, random objects fell off of shelves in rooms we weren’t in. For all I know Daphne’s restless spirit may still be tossing tchotchkes to the floor in that residence. Was it distasteful, the story of brazen Mrs. Bunn living directly across the street? Forty-something and attractive, I spent hours sitting on her front steps while Mrs. Bunn chain smoked, bitching about married life. Like Bette Davis in The Letter, one steamy September evening around dusk from her front porch perched high above the street Mrs. Bunn emptied a .22 snub nose into her husband who fell dead in the middle of the road between our homes. My first instinct was to rush across the street to see if she was okay, which my dad and I did after waiting a respectable few minutes, as Emily Post likely would have approved. Wish I could find the Polaroids I took with my siblings posing in the chalk outline of the body that police left sketched on the pavement; relatively tasteful I’m certain. After exercising her Second Amendment right to a speedy divorce, Mrs. Bunn moved to the Sunshine State with her son and a boyfriend who had appeared on the scene before the proverbial gun smoke cleared. Further up the block, a businessman shot and killed a perceived peeping tom perched outside the couple’s bedroom window, we were told he was an unfortunate teenager who managed to stagger back toward his nearby home before expiring. As kids we wandered in and out of everyone’s backyards without any consideration as to boundaries or property lines, almost every property had 2 story garages which served as our clubhouses, whether homeowners were aware of it or not. The side yard removed from 1102 Hill Street when Wendover was widened in the mid-1960s was a jungle-like wooded area we dubbed ‘Tarzanland’ for the interwoven vines descending from ivy covered trees that we swung from. You can still see the weathered remnant of ‘Tarzanland’ alongside Wendover at Hill. Across the street was a backyard display with an ornate bird bath crowned with a statue of Christ that we called ‘Jesusland’ where we’d linger a bit and pray. For Pixie Stix and Wacky Packages, no doubt. Northwood, traversing downward from Grayland Street, past Hill, then Briarcliff Road leading into Latham Park, was one the city’s greatest sledding spots whenever the city experienced its numerous major snow and ice events just about every winter. Those were corners where teenagers, all but obscured under unrelenting swirling nighttime whiteouts, stood swigging potables possibly purloined from Pop’s liquor cabinet, gathered around the metal trash cans everyone was required to have that were now serving as bonfire bins. There was so much frozen precipitation when I was younger my father would equip one of the cars with snow tires from November until March. The city didn’t bother plowing neighborhood streets then, a children’s paradise whenever a few inches of snowfall shut down the town. Heartstring tugging tales, astonishing that anyone presently living on Hill Street would be offended. Even with the occasional corpse to sidestep, this was a wonderful neighborhood to grow up in, inhabited with kind and loving neighbors, family, and folks who became lifelong friends. An idyllic place to live to this day one imagines. Heck, I’m not the sentimental type, being denied a peek inside my childhood home isn’t any loss. I was mostly curious if that deep hole I dug tunneling to China was still behind the garage and whether any misshapen mole creatures ever crawled out of it. As I’m writing this, I related some of these childhood stories to a good friend who quipped dismissively, “No wonder you go around in life acting like the rules don’t apply to you.”
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