Once we reached Chicago's North Side, my father would end up parking his 1959 Pontiac car in some spot near the 1920's-built, rundown, slum apartment building, in which my mother's parents and my grandparents lived, near Humboldt Park and Division Street. By the early 1960's, most of the residents of this slum apartment building and the neighborhood in which my grandparents lived seemed to then be mostly white, Spanish-speaking people from the U.S. colony/"commonwealth" of Puerto Rico.
My grandfather used to leave his slum building apartment each evening and walk through the neighborhood to take a bus downtown to the Chicago Tribune newspaper printing facility; where he then spent the night and early morning hours loading newspapers onto newspaper delivery trucks, in exchange for union wages (until he was in his mid-70's), before returning back to his apartment to sleep during the day in the late morning and until the early afternoon hours. But I can't recall ever walking around this neighborhood, myself, either alone or with my mother, father or sister during any of our one-day, Sunday visits to my grandfather's apartment in this neighborhood.
Usually, we would all just walk from our family's parked car on the street, from a spot that was usually close to the apartment building in which my grandparents lived, enter the unlocked door of the building which had no elevator and then walk up one or two flights of stairs to my grandparents' very small 1-bedroom apartment. Then, after two or three hours in the apartment--in which most of the time was spent sitting around the kitchen table listening to my mother talk to her parents in English about how all their relatives, most of whom I had never met, who still lived in Chicago were doing--my parents, my sister and I would then say goodbye, leave the apartment building and just walk back to my family's car.
Afterwards, my father would then drive us all further north to the 1920's-built two-family house in Skokie that my mother's younger sister and her husband had only purchased a few years before; after selling their 1920's-built house near North Kedzie Avenue, not far from Wrigley Field, that they had previously owned during most of the 1950's. Arriving in Skokie, maybe a half-hour later, we would then usually spend three to 4 hours in the more Americanized, more inwardly modernized house of my aunt, uncle and my two younger boy cousins; and we would all converse with each other and eat dinner together there, before my own nuclear family drove back to Indianapolis from Chicago at around 7:30 or 8 p.m. on Sunday evening.
My grandfather was a good-natured fellow who--despite being brought up in Russia (but speaking mostly Yiddish and only a bit of Russian)-had learned to speak enough English to converse in English with people in a Russian-Yiddish accent and read portions of Chicago's. daily newspapers, during the over 50 years that he had spent living and working in the USA, prior to 1963. He was a member of one of the unions at the Chicago Tribune/Tribune media conglomerate where he had worked since World War II; and, at least verbally, expressed strong support for his union's leadership and shop steward. But he was the type of union member who had no interest in either attending any union membership meeting or following the union's internal politics. And although he was of Russian-Jewish religious background, he had no interest in Zionism, the Zionist movement, the fate of Israel or what was happening in the Middle East during the 1960's.
Having lived and worked in the United States for over 50 years, my grandfather probably would have thought that any Zionist movement supporter who suggested that he consider moving from the USA to Palestine in the 1960's was suggesting a crazy idea. And like most other elderly U.S. working-class people who had immigrated to the USA from Eastern Europe, Russia or Italy in the early 20th-century, in the early 1960's neither my grandfather nor my grandmother in Chicago had much interest in talking about U.S. electoral politics or how the capitalist economic and political system might need to be changed; especially since they felt, despite still living in a slum apartment building, that they were much less economically impoverished personally in the early 1960's than they had been during the Great Depression of the 1930's.
In 1963 both my grandfather and grandmother still seemed fond of my mother. But my grandfather then seemed to be sadder than my grandmother that my mother had moved from Chicago to New York City after she had married my father in the early 1940's. And although, twenty years later, she now lived in a city much closer to Chicago than New York City, my grandfather still seemed to miss my mother in 1963 and regret that she wasn't then living in Chicago again.
My grandmother was, in 1963, less Americanized than was my grandfather and more religiously orthodox; perhaps because her own father had apparently been some sort of a rabbi in Lithuania. But despite being less good-natured than my grandfather, when in their 70's in 1963, both my grandfather and my grandmother in Chicago, with the three daughters they had raised married and living with their husbands by now for over 13 years, still seemed devoted to each other.
My mother's younger sister (who was in her late 30's in 1963 and was probably still considered physically beautiful by most men during the 1960's) and her husband in Skokie, like both my parents, were also not that interested in talking much about U.S. politics or changing the System in 1963; now that they all seemed to have gained more economic security and working-class affluence after World War II than what their immigrant parents had had during the Great Depression of the 1930's.
Between my uncle's blue-collar job as some kind of factory worker at a Bell and Howell plant and the elementary school teaching job that my aunt had obtained (after she decided to go to college in her early 30's, when both her sons had reached school attendance age), my aunt and uncle in Skokie seemed pretty much satisfied in 1963 with the economic opportunities the System in the USA provided them. And when I first became interested in taking 8mm moving pictures on a Kodak brownie moving picture camera in 1963, I was able to take advantage of having an uncle who worked for Bell and Howell; by having him buy for me, at the wholesale price, a Bell and Howell 8mm motion picture, automatic threading projector--which I paid for with part of the money I was earning on my own during my sophomore year in high school, by working between January and June 1963 as an Indianapolis Times newspaper delivery carrier in my neighborhood.
