I am working on an “Education and Society” blog posting about the birth of progressive education in Chicago in the 1890s. It reminded me of a story my grandfather used to tell on himself.
Grandpa was born in 1883. His father, who had been born in Prussia, died in 1899. Grandpa had hoped to attend a seminary in Erie, but, with his father’s death, that goal had been abandoned. Charlie, the older of the two sons, stayed home with his mother, Lizzie.
They lived on Strawbridge Avenue in Hickory Township (now Hermitage, Pa.), where his parents had owned about 8 acres of land. One day, Lizzie sent Charlie to the grocery story to buy some pork chops. On his way to the store, he encountered a friend who was driving a wagon filled with his personal belongings.
“Where are you headed?” Charlie asked his friend.
“Chicago,” the friend, forever nameless in Grandpa’s story, answered. “Want to come along?”
“Sure,” said Grandpa, and hopped on board and went to Chicago.
He stayed there for two years, working among the immigrants who dominated the workforce in those days. When he returned, Grandpa recounted, he stopped at the grocery store and picked up those pork chops before heading home.
I think about that story when I read or write about John Dewey and Jane Addams in Chicago, about Hull House or the Pullman Strike. I wonder if Grandpa ever found himself in Halstead Street—home to many German immigrants—or at Hull House itself.
Grandpa never talked about Chicago itself, only about going and returning. I suspect Chicago was a brief period of excitement in a life that was otherwise tormented by alcoholism and disappointment. It is part of my memory of him (he died in 1960) and one that has been renewed as I study the great things that were happening in Chicago around the same time as his visit. It is nice to have another connection with him.
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