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Authors: Georgie Anne Geyer
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to the old "Negro" men and try to learn about them.
Much later, when I worked on the Chicago Daily News, I tried to repay the black community just a little for all it had suffered at our hands: I initiated and got printed the first series on the black community that any Chicago paper ever printed. We had thirty- eight parts to it -- in fact, once we did it, we overdid it!
But in many ways life was also so snug and cozy that to this day my closest and most loyal friends are those from the "old neighbor hood." We had "old countries" and "old neighborhoods" and "new neighborhoods" then, you see, and those who "made it" might move away but were never really hated for it -- envied a little, maybe -- because they always came back and never forgot their friends in the "old" neighborhood. Indeed, one success was everyone's in this basically tribal milieu.
In this environment my big, stubborn, honest father stood out like a beacon of honesty, if not always of understanding. Both an admirable man and a difficult man, he was a typical "mountain man" of southern Germany. He had hands like great hams, and he stood well over six feet tall and weighed sometimes more than 250 pounds. He terrified my boyfriends. He was absolutely incorruptible, with that dire, unforgiving honesty of self-made men whose honesty is both a heartfelt thing and a dare against the world they have bested.
In the midst of the Depression, before I was born, the dairy business on the South Side of Chicago was fraught with corrupt building inspectors looking for payoffs, with Mafia "enforcers," and with big dairies driving out small dairies like ours with bribes of five thousand or ten thousand dollars--substantial amounts of money at that time. If you were not Irish or one of the "machine" ethnic groups, you weren't in -- especially Germans, with their individualistic tendencies toward their own businesses. My father had the dubious "honor," when he was a boy at Twenty-first and Lowe, of having to avoid the Reagan's Colts, an Irish gang that included such boys as Richard J. Daley and his cronies. This left him with a deep hatred for "the machine" and its bullies. He overcame by being so big he simply threw Mafia bullies and others out physically.
I inherited this white, burning hatred. I was capable of being moved to tears when I was only seven or eight by the pictures in the paper of mobsters bombing union leaders' homes. I was never one of those suburban relativists, bred in suburbia where liberalism was easy; life for me was real because there was always a very real bully on every block.
In the early days of the Depression, before I was born, the White Castle route, a large and money-making route of hamburger stands all over the city, opened up for bids. They were little white-brick "castles" and the hamburgers were flat, good, and cheap--five cents in those days.
A story that became one of the little myths by which we lived was born when my father, Robert, went to Mr. Lewis, then president of the White Castle chain, and told him flatly, "I'm not going to offer you one cent in bribes. I couldn't, and I wouldn't if I could. But I'll give you the best milk and the best service you'll find anywhere."
Mr. Lewis, another rare, honest man, accepted the offer on the spot. The Geyer's Dairy chocolate milk was so rich that the White Castles just whipped it up and there you had creamy milk shakes. Thanks to all of those little white "castles," we became moderately well-to-do.
But my father worked so hard -- and he had been forced to do so since he had to quit school at thirteen when my grandfather abandoned the family -- that he had little time or few emotional resources for bouncing a blond little girl on his knee. Robert Geyer was an endlessly good man, but he was often, like many self-made men, remote, given to fitful rages, to lengthy soliloquies, or to endless silences.
I loved my father, and I never blamed him for anything, for how can you honestly blame
Much later, when I worked on the Chicago Daily News, I tried to repay the black community just a little for all it had suffered at our hands: I initiated and got printed the first series on the black community that any Chicago paper ever printed. We had thirty- eight parts to it -- in fact, once we did it, we overdid it!
But in many ways life was also so snug and cozy that to this day my closest and most loyal friends are those from the "old neighbor hood." We had "old countries" and "old neighborhoods" and "new neighborhoods" then, you see, and those who "made it" might move away but were never really hated for it -- envied a little, maybe -- because they always came back and never forgot their friends in the "old" neighborhood. Indeed, one success was everyone's in this basically tribal milieu.
In this environment my big, stubborn, honest father stood out like a beacon of honesty, if not always of understanding. Both an admirable man and a difficult man, he was a typical "mountain man" of southern Germany. He had hands like great hams, and he stood well over six feet tall and weighed sometimes more than 250 pounds. He terrified my boyfriends. He was absolutely incorruptible, with that dire, unforgiving honesty of self-made men whose honesty is both a heartfelt thing and a dare against the world they have bested.
In the midst of the Depression, before I was born, the dairy business on the South Side of Chicago was fraught with corrupt building inspectors looking for payoffs, with Mafia "enforcers," and with big dairies driving out small dairies like ours with bribes of five thousand or ten thousand dollars--substantial amounts of money at that time. If you were not Irish or one of the "machine" ethnic groups, you weren't in -- especially Germans, with their individualistic tendencies toward their own businesses. My father had the dubious "honor," when he was a boy at Twenty-first and Lowe, of having to avoid the Reagan's Colts, an Irish gang that included such boys as Richard J. Daley and his cronies. This left him with a deep hatred for "the machine" and its bullies. He overcame by being so big he simply threw Mafia bullies and others out physically.
I inherited this white, burning hatred. I was capable of being moved to tears when I was only seven or eight by the pictures in the paper of mobsters bombing union leaders' homes. I was never one of those suburban relativists, bred in suburbia where liberalism was easy; life for me was real because there was always a very real bully on every block.
In the early days of the Depression, before I was born, the White Castle route, a large and money-making route of hamburger stands all over the city, opened up for bids. They were little white-brick "castles" and the hamburgers were flat, good, and cheap--five cents in those days.
A story that became one of the little myths by which we lived was born when my father, Robert, went to Mr. Lewis, then president of the White Castle chain, and told him flatly, "I'm not going to offer you one cent in bribes. I couldn't, and I wouldn't if I could. But I'll give you the best milk and the best service you'll find anywhere."
Mr. Lewis, another rare, honest man, accepted the offer on the spot. The Geyer's Dairy chocolate milk was so rich that the White Castles just whipped it up and there you had creamy milk shakes. Thanks to all of those little white "castles," we became moderately well-to-do.
But my father worked so hard -- and he had been forced to do so since he had to quit school at thirteen when my grandfather abandoned the family -- that he had little time or few emotional resources for bouncing a blond little girl on his knee. Robert Geyer was an endlessly good man, but he was often, like many self-made men, remote, given to fitful rages, to lengthy soliloquies, or to endless silences.
I loved my father, and I never blamed him for anything, for how can you honestly blame
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