(Listen to the radio version here.)
I grew up in a blue-collar suburb of Chicago developed specifically to provide housing for blue collar workers, especially at Automatic Electric, a ginormous factory that manufactured telephones and switchboards sold throughout the world. Automatic Electric had moved to Northlake from Chicago in 1957 after building one of the largest single-story buildings in the United States on a 35-acre site. Automatic Electric employed somewhere between 12,000 and 16,000 workers in its heyday—more than Northlake’s total population.
Automatic Electric was set way back on the far side of Wolf Road from where my own residential street ended. Addison Creek ran alongside Wolf Road on Automatic Electric’s property.
A dam was constructed right where Addison Creek went under Wolf Road, presumably to prevent flooding of the neighborhood downstream. It wasn’t very effective.
On the part of the creek bordering Automatic Electric were two little islands that my brother and I thought were unexplored wilderness. After Jimmy somehow managed to get a kayak, I’d occasionally help him lug it to the creek and then he’d drop me off on the bigger island where I could play Girl Explorer for an hour or two until he picked me up. I’d walk a narrow path that ran the length of the island without it ever occurring to me that someone had to have been there before me to make that path. I never noticed any birds on the island except a robin or two. There may not have been many birds around, but I was oblivious, so I certainly missed some, especially during migrations. It never occurred to me that birds are supposed to be pretty much everywhere.
Our creek may have been too polluted for ducks and most fish, but mosquitoes, who have breathing tubes to get their oxygen from the air, not the water, proliferated.
Those mosquitoes were why the DDT truck sprayed our neighborhood frequently on summer evenings throughout my childhood.
I found the only Baltimore Oriole I ever saw as a child dead in my yard beneath one of our elm trees one morning after the DDT truck had gone by. I recognized the poor thing because it was featured in my treasured Golden stamp book from my Grandpa.
A couple of large trees on the island were ideal for climbing, giving me vantage points to see Automatic Electric’s expansive, meticulously manicured lawn—acres and acres of it between the creek and their building. That lawn looked beautiful to my eyes, emerald green and dotted with large shade trees. How could a little girl of the 1950s understand how few animals can survive in that kind of biological desert?
Automatic Electric enlisted boys in the neighborhood to trap “gophers” off the grounds at a quarter apiece.
My brother caught a lot of gophers there when he needed money. The easiest way to catch them was to fill a gallon milk jug with water, find a burrow entrance, turn the bottle upside down, and fit the neck into the hole. As the water poured in, one or two poor little ground squirrels would swim up, right into the bottle. You didn’t need to put a cap on it because the glass was too slippery for the little things to escape as soon as you turned it upright.
Most boys didn’t want to deal with the little animals, so someone at the factory would dispose of them, but if a boy did want to keep one, that factory employee marked it with ink or dye so the boy couldn’t bring it back for another quarter. But my clever brother managed to get $1.25 for one very tiny young gopher who’d probably just been weaned—after he got his quarter from Automatic Electric, he sold the little thing to me for a dollar.
Sammy belonged in the wild, and I’m sure from his point of view being held captive for the rest of his life was a horrible fate, but the fate awaiting most of the gophers the neighborhood boys caught was even worse. I took good care of Sammy and loved him. I doubt if he loved me back, but I was the only person he allowed to pet or hold him, and his bite always drew blood. It wasn’t until I took mammalogy in college that I learned the proper name of his species—the thirteen-lined ground squirrel.
As a child, it seemed amazing that such adorable little creatures could be so plentiful just two blocks from my house because, except for Sammy, no thirteen-lined ground squirrel ever appeared at 116 Whitehall. And Automatic Electric’s expansive lawn never seemed to have any dandelions, myrtle, crabgrass, or any of the other weeds that covered our lawn. That solidified in my uneducated mind how wonderful and natural that vast lawn really was.
How was I to know that the runoff from the fertilizers and pesticides that kept it so green and pristine seeped directly into Addison Creek, compounding the pollution and huge phosphate overload? A dam downstream a few blocks from Automatic Electric churned the water so that huge billowing clouds of suds rose up; when the wind was from the southwest, we could see big white blobs floating over my house. My mother said those soapy suds were proof that the creek was really clean. And to me, that green green grass was proof that Automatic Electric was the most exquisitely natural place in my small world.
Beautiful story. Thank you.