My Life As It Was at Age Eight

My Life As It Was At Age Eight

by Howard Robert Hardie
October 5, 1918 -- October 19, 2004
Written during the winter of 1998 - 1999.

The day would begin for me by hearing noises in the bedroom of my parents as my father got up and went to the basement. There he would light the gas-fired water heater and stir up the coals in the furnace, shake down the ashes, and add more coal or coke with which our house was heated. I then could hear him in the kitchen preparing a roast or fowl for the oven in preparation for our Sunday dinner.

I was expected to be up then, washed and dressed, and ready to go with him to get the usual Sunday breakfast of fresh bakery. He and I would usually, at this time of the year, shovel out a pathway to the stable/garage to get our car. It was then an old roadster that belonged to my Aunt Agnes but which we were using because her husband, who had died, had had a peanut machine route, which my father had taken over for her.

We then would drive a mile over into Berwyn to get a baker's dozen of danish and sweet roll buns that were warm and fresh from the oven and which cost 23 cents. These, with a glass of milk and a half of a grapefruit or juice, would be my breakfast. My mother and sister would join us at the kitchen table, and at this time our conversation might be about our plans for the day or about what Lindberg was doing after his historic flight. We had heard about what he had accomplished from our neighbor, Mr. Vieth. Lindy from then on was my hero and model and fostered my lifelong interest in aviation.

I was expected to straighten up my room and put my dirty clothes down the clothes chute in the bathroom. They went down into a basket under the chute in the basement. My mother washed them in the basement at the laundry tubs once a week using the wringer and a Maytag washing machine. Lines were strung there for drying them near the heat of the furnace. In fair weather, of course, they were dried out doors.

We only had Aunt Agnes' car for a short time as it went with the business when she sold it, so we were without any car for a long time. We went to church every Sunday without fail, and to get there the four of us (I had a sister, Wilma, who was two years younger than I) would walk half a mile to catch a Berwyn/Lyons streetcar to go into Cicero to the newly organized CiceroBibleChurch. The cars of the trolley were then heated by a coal stove which the motorman or conductor tended. At age eight, I was always expected to be a "good" boy and, except for my Sunday School class, stay close to my parents. I was thoroughly indoctrinated in the tenets of the Christian religion.

On returning home, we would prepare for our grand Sunday dinner that my father had prepared with some help from my mother and sister, Wilma who were responsible for setting the table in the dining room. About once a month we would have Grandpa Hardie over to eat dinner with us. He usually came from Forest Park, where he lived with Aunt Agnes, by way of the La Grange streetcar. There were few houses then in that part of Riverside, Illinois where we lived, so we would look out of our kitchen pantry window to see him walking the mile or so from where he had gotten off of the trolley. It was always a pleasure to me to have him with us. The aroma of his corncob pipe, his mustache, his Scottish brogue, his mannerisms and his loving interest in my sister and me are fond memories. He never ever went to church with us but kept his eye on the roast in the oven and made himself at home while we were gone to church. He had been soured on church, we learned, long before he left Scotland. The parson there had accused him of attending only to partake of the wine tasting. He spoke glowingly of his work as an iron molder over there and of the beauty of the countryside in Scotland.

Reminiscinings

It is common in the Orient, among people under the influence of Confucianism, to consider a newborn child to be already one year old. This seems to me to be a very logical and reasonable way of looking at it. It leads us, I think, to consider more carefully the beginnings of our earthly existence when the genes and passions of our parents were generating the molecules and juices that would unite to incarnate us in a body of human form.

During the time of my mother's pregnancy, she went by train back to the southern Illinois town of Oakford, not far from Springfield and on the SangamonRiver, to visit her mother's family. My mother was named Mary Cornelia Duff Hardie, and her sister was named Susan. At their tender age of four and six, the mother of these two little girls, Emma Jane Lounsberry, died and left my grandfather James Monroe Duff with two little girls to care for. He was an ordained minister of the MethodistChurch, and as is their custom, he was relocated to a new place to minister every few years. To return to Oakford for the funeral of his wife, he took them by train. As they were riding along, a woman fellow passenger noticed this man alone with these two little girls and asked, "Where is their mother?" To which Grandpa answered, "She has passed away and is in the baggage car ahead." This incident, and these words, were used in a very popular ballad song that was often heard on phonographs during the 1920 era. While visiting there in Oakford, Mother and Aunt Susie went on a picnic to a farm where Uncle Carl, Susie's husband, was working, and while there had a watermelon feast. Uncle Carl warned my mother not to eat too much watermelon, as it might be harmful to the baby that she was carrying.

As a child, and all through life, I knew without any doubt that my mother's love for me was unconditional. My father's love, however, I always felt, was conditioned on my behavior and on my attainments. He came from an immigrant Scottish family of twelve children and had had only an eighth grade education. I was an only son, while he had been one of six boys in the family and had become quite a success in the business world. My parents were very frugal and had saved for several years to make possible the purchase of a modest house out of Chicago in the western suburb of Riverside. We moved there when I was six years old, so at eight I was learning about the surrounding area, as a boy would.

One day my sister and I went for a walk up along Harlem Avenue to the north. We strayed away for about half a mile to where a group of laborers were preparing the roadway for the paving of Riverside Drive. The men were not working at the time, as it may have been the noon hour, but they had gathered in a shack in which there was a stove for warmth and where they were having a roisterous time of playing a game of craps. We wandered in and stood a while, wide-eyed at this rowdy bunch of smoking, drinking, swearing men. I had never seen such before, and finally decided that I should take my sister and get ourselves back home. This, too, was something I never mentioned to my parents.

Once a month it was my mother's duty to go downtown to the Loop of Chicago to make a payment on our house mortgage. The house had cost six thousand dollars. Mother most often took Wilma and me along with her on these trips, and we were always eager to go. We walked to the Berwyn and Lyons streetcar at Harlem and Stanley and took it to the end of the line where we transferred to a Chicago22nd Street car. On this we went down into the city and mingled in traffic with autos, crowds of people, and also horse drawn wagons and carriages. On the way, before getting into the Loop, we went through the West Water Street Market area. This was an interesting place because it was where the farmers came with their wagonloads of produce to sell, and where many peddlers got their store of goods to sell. Beyond this, the streetcar went down into a tunnel, which carried us under the South Branch of the Chicago River – very exciting for an eight-year-old boy.

We made our way, after leaving the trolley, to the basement of the Great Northern Trust Bank where Mother made the mortgage payment. It was a grand place of polished brass and marble. Sometimes she would take us with her when she had occasion to go into the vault to use the safety deposit box there. The vault doors were huge, and we were told that they were operated by a time clock and were thus able to keep our things perfectly safe.

From there we would go to State Street where the ten-cent stores and department stores were. We shopped at both Woolworth's and Kresge's for things, and then went to the basement of Kresge's where the lunch counters were. They were often very crowded during the middle of the day, and we had to stand behind a seated person until they were through until we could get their seat. My favorite was a small baked dish of spaghetti that had melted cheese on top. A special treat also was a soda or a malted milk.

If it was a nice day, or especially if we had someone like my Aunt Susie or my Uncle Elmer from northern Wisconsin with us, Mother would take us into the Boston Store. Here we would ride the elevator up to the top floor where we could walk up a ramp and out of a doorway onto the roof of the twelve-story building. We would then walk across the roof to a steel fire-tower-like structure that we climbed to take us up another forty feet or so where there was an observation deck from which to view the city from this vantage point. Back then, the only building higher in Chicago was the MasonicTempleBuilding a few blocks away.

The department stores that were on the east side of State Street down in the Loop in those days were: Marshall Field, Carson Piere Scott, The Boston Store, and the Lion store, which later became Sears. On the ninth floor of The Boston Store they had the toy and farm supply departments. I was especially intrigued by the electric trains, and the baby chicks that were sold there in the spring of the year. Later, when I was about fourteen, I bought six baby chicks there and raised them.

One Saturday afternoon when I was about eight years old, I had my attention drawn to some rather loud talking by my parents who were down in the basement. From the top of the stairs I could see that they were having a heated discussion about whether or not we should leave the MethodistChurch which we had been attending in downtown Riverside, and start attending the new Cicero Bible church in Cicero. We had been there once or twice at the persuasion of my Uncle Leonard Edwards. As I remember, my mother was for the change and my father was not. In any case, we did make the move, which was to affect our lives greatly in the future.

As a small child attending summer school at Cicero, I had, for a time, a teacher by the name of Jenny Winters. She and her husband Warren were missionaries to China who were home on furlough. For a while they lived with us in our home, as did a large number of other missionaries and visiting pastors and evangelists, from time to time. Mother kept a book in our home for friends and visitors to sign. Wilma, my sister, and I were thus exposed to a variety of deeply religious evangelical Christians. Warren and Jenny Winters later were in China when the Communists took over the country. They were offered the choice of leaving or conforming to the new rules. Jenny came home and was provided with an apartment near the church, but Warren chose to stay and was never heard of again.

One day when I was in the third grade at school, I was in the room in the basement of CentralGrade School where we went to eat our lunch. I carried my lunch in a brown paper bag that my mother had prepared for me each day. We could buy a half pint of milk to go with it for three cents. The table at which I sat faced a window that I think was open during fair weather at the time. All at once we heard several gunshots in downtown Riverside, about a block away. We then heard some shouting and knew that something had happened. After school, I went over there and learned that the Riverside National Bank had been held up. People were looking at a spot in the masonry where a bullet had hit, and soon paperboys who had gotten a special edition of the Chicago Daily News from off of the suburban train that stopped at the station there, were shouting, "Extra; read all about it." It was all very exciting for a small boy, and I had something important to tell at the dinner table that night.

These are just a few of the many experiences that come to mind now, that a pre-pubescent boy had back in the Year of our Lord, 1926.

Howard R. Hardie
Medford, Oregon
December 24, 1998

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My mother had a half brother who lived at Cederville, Wisconsin, which was ninety miles north of Green Bay. About the middle of December every year we could expect the mailman to deliver to us a burlap-wrapped fir tree to have for the holidays. We put it up and decorated it in the customary way. father would build a fire in the fireplace that we seldom otherwise used, and the home seemed a more cheery place. Winters in the Chicago area can be long and dreary as well as severely cold and harsh. After a snowfall, we could sometimes hear sleigh bells which told us that the men who worked for the village were passing with the snowplow to clear snow from the public sidewalks using an "A" shaped plow and a team of horses. We lived a mile from the schools in downtown Riverside, so we were glad to have the walkways cleared so we could walk to school. Busses for children were unheard of when I was eight.

One year at Christmas time when I was about this age, my mother took me with her to visit her father my Grandpa Duff, and her brother Uncle Elmer. We traveled by way of the Milwaukee Railroad and got off at the flag stop of Cederville, which is no longer in use. Grandpa met us there with a horse and sleigh for transporting us to their house about two miles away. I remember that, though the weather was very cold, we were comfortable under a large robe and with a lantern down at our legs. Sleigh rides are always something to be remembered.

Another event when I was eight was when Mother took Wilma and me down to visit her relatives in Oakford, Illinois. This was a small town on the SangamonRiver southeast of Springfield, not far from New Salem where Abraham Lincoln had lived. We traveled by way of the Wabash Railroad and the thing of it that I remember was that the railroad cars for that line, and perhaps some others, were all painted yellow. Many cars then were still being used that were made of wood. Like all boys, I really enjoyed train rides, and Chicago was a great railroad center where many lines all came together.

The church we attended then was very strong on sending out missionaries to foreign lands. A big affair was made of sending them off at the downtown Union Station, which is a huge building with great large halls of marble in which the sounds are amplified and in which they echo and re-echo. When the arrivals and departures are announced the sound reverberates and adds to the excitement. I found the noise, the rushing of the crowds, the Redcaps dashing about, the smell of the steam and stale tobacco smoke all made an impression on this young lad. After a street-meeting type of gospel service, we would walk our departing friends out into the train shed and along the engines and cars to where they would board and final goodbyes would be said amid smiles and tears. Air travel has done away with all such as that now.

My father, with the encouragement of my mother, became quite a devout evangelical Christian, so when I was about eight years old, he took me to a special, for men only, meeting that was held in the movie theater in downtown Berwyn, Illinois where the then-famous Billy Sunday was to give a talk. I had never been in a movie house before, so the décor and plush seats were new to me. I of course sat next to my father and listened intently to the firey oration of the most famous public speaker of the time. Of all that he said, I have long remembered what he had to say about the rich man who, if he could, would take his riches with him when he died, only to have them melt in hell. Our pastor at the Cicero Bible church that we regularly attended in those days, Rev. William McCarrell, delivered his sermons, especially at the Sunday evening service, much in the style of Billy Sunday. He punctuated his points of emphasis with gyrations and shouts designed to shake one loose from their lethargy. As a young lad, I received the whole indoctrinating treatment.