Racing across the border into Illinois, we come to Gurnee, home of the Six Flags amusement park, and a giant shopping mall, Gurnee Mills. The ladies may want to send dad to the park with the kids, and then go shop till they drop at Gurnee Mills.
We pass by the upscale communities of Lake Bluff and Lake Forest, and come to Highland Park, home of the Ravinia Festival, a summertime tradition of fine music played at Ravinia Park. It's a Symphony on the Green, pack a picnic basket, bring a blanket, and as the Rubiyat says, "A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou...." We merge again with Interstate 94, an on-again, off-again love affair, and zip past Glencoe on the left, Northbrook on the right. The Chicago Botanical Gardens is a worthwhile side-trip. Next, it's Winnetka on our left, and tiny Northfield on the right. We separate from I-94 once again, as we slip into Wilmette, and the road becomes Skokie Boulevard. Jump off for a trip to the Kohl's Children's Museum and the world-famous Bahai Temple. Crossing into Skokie, catch up on your shopping at the upscale Old Orchard shopping center. Kitty-corner to Old Orchard, at Golf, is the Performing Arts Center. Further south, at Emerson, hang a left and follow it east to Evanston, home of Northwestern University and the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

Back on Route 41, now known as Cicero Avenue, we head south again. On our right, the bells clang, the gates go down, and the Skokie Swift, a stepchild of the Chicago elevated line, goes whizzing past on it's way to the big city. Leaving Skokie, Route 41 heads southeast, changing it's name to Lincoln Avenue as it crosses into the village of Lincolnwood. Lincoln Avenue in the village of Lincolnwood in the state of Illinois, known as the "Land of Lincoln".
We head for the local library, where our goal is to find the "voice of Lincolnwood", someone who is an expert on the town, perhaps the town historian, or maybe a librarian. We query the librarians, and are flabbergasted as they quickly turn and look at each other, and almost with one voice, say "Harice Levitt". No fumbling, no wondering, without battling an eyelash, these three ladies unanimously have voted for the same person. My mind says, "Bingo, this has got to be my expert". Within minutes, the librarian has Mrs. Levitt on the phone, I'm talking to her, and the next thing you know, we have an appointment to meet in the library that Saturday.

Saturday comes, and so does Mrs. Levitt. She is a delightful woman, the editor of a column in the local paper. The column is called "Around Lincolnwood", and the paper is called "The Lincolnwood Review". We hit it off immediately.
Harice moved to Lincolnwood back in 1952, when her neighbors were vacant lots and prairies. Over the years, she raised 6 kids, planted asparagus (you know someone is putting down roots when they plant asparagus), and hosted visitors from all over the world through an organization called the International Visitors Center of Chicago. Besides her own children, she would occasionally take in a neighborhood kid who was "running away" from home. Rather than let them run too far, she would take them in and raise them as her own.
She mentioned that recently she ran into a man who told her she had saved his life. She did not recognize him, could not remember ever saving anyone's life, until he recounted to her how she had taken him in some 30 years before.
Lincolnwood is not a tourist town. There are no museums here, no attractions, no outlet malls nor amusement parks, and the cultural center of the village is the library.
Harice says that when she came to Lincolnwood from the South Shore area of Chicago, it was the draw of a local ice cream parlor. During one such visit, she and her husband (now deceased) saw a home they liked, and made the move. She noted that when they moved in, the makeup of the residents was decidedly WASP. Nowadays, Lincolnwood is multi-cultural, and you can as easily see someone dressed in a sari as you can a Hasidic Jew.
Assimilation is slow to non-existent, and while the public schools are always a melting pot element, many of the ethnic groups run their own after-school schools, stressing heritage, culture, and language. So there is separation, not assimilation, a de facto cultural segregation tempered with tolerance.
The biggest bone of contention facing the village now is the conflict between the "Progress Crowd", represented mainly by business forces and the politicians on the village council, versus the residents who wish to maintain the "Quality of Life". This is not a problem unique to Lincolnwood. All up and down Route 41, we will visit communities fighting this same battle, how do we balance growth vs. stability? And you never know who is going to be on what side of the "battle", for even businessmen, who like to see growth, often chaff at progress and growth when it means increased traffic and congestion, higher taxes, and often a rise in crime.

We leave Harice to sort out, with her fellow citizens, the problems of Lincolnwood, and head back to route 41. We wonder about the signs above the stores, in some new foreign language, decidedly Asian, which we find out later is Korean. Out for an afternoon stroll is a gentleman wearing a beard and a traditional men's hat, a fedora, the kind of hat that was fairly common in the 30's and the 40's. Perhaps an orthodox Jew.
We cross Devon Avenue, which according to the map, now puts us into Chicago, and we wonder why there are no signs welcoming us to the big city. While we are in town, we will mark our passing by neighborhoods. In the country, you go from town to town. In the city, you pass from neighborhood to neighborhood. Each neighborhood has it's own identity, it's own flavor, it's own piece de resistance.
So Chicago fails to announce itself to us, and we make our way unobtrusively. We cut a slice off the North Park neighborhood, then into Lincoln Square, and wonder why there are so many motels? The big airport, O'Hare, is not that near.

We continue on an angle, southeast, then south, turning left at Foster Avenue. Some of the signs are Japanese, a lot Korean. Eastbound on Foster, we are heading toward Lake Michigan, past the Al Khayam (Arabic?) restaurant and the supermercado.
Near Amundsen High School, we get our first glimpse of the downtown skyscrapers. The Taste of Heaven Bakery is kitty-corner to the Ebenezer Lutheran Church (heaven for the body and heaven for the soul, both within 50 feet of each other). A few blocks later, we pass the Islamic Bookstore. We are indeed in the melting pot of America, as we watch a Moslem man in full regalia cross Foster Avenue, heading north across the street, while a Hasidic Jew makes his way past him toward the south side of the street, ala Abbey Road.



The light turns green, and we head east on Foster, which runs into and ends at Lake Shore Drive. Route 41 is the border between the Edgewater community to the north, and the Uptown neighborhood, on the south.
We turn right, south, and merge into LSD's high speed traffic. Years ago, the group Aliota, Haynes, and Jeremiah wrote a song called Lake Shore Drive (get the words). Lake Shore Drive goes south along Lake Michigan, past the communities of Lake View and Lincoln Park. This day, picnickers of every race, creed, and color enjoy the lakefront. Diversey Harbor offers a safe haven from which to launch out into the lake.



High rise buildings rise up on the west side of the drive, and look out over Diversey Harbor and Lincoln Park. We drive south past the old Lincoln Park Gun Club, a victim of the anti-gun movement, and now known as the Theater on the Lake. Past Montrose Harbor and Montrose beach. Past Temple Shalom and Belmont Avenue.
A block west of the Drive, kids are making faces at the monkeys at the Lincoln Park zoo. Beaches line the lake off and on. Tiny Oak Street beach hangs on to a sliver of land, fighting for it's life as the rising lake nibbles away at it, year after year.
The drive takes a turn to the east and follows the shoreline, passing the world famous Drake hotel and, behind the Drake, the John Hancock Building. We come around the corner, and are favored with a dramatic view of the Ferris Wheel at Navy pier on the one side, and the downtown campus of Northwestern University and its hospitals on the other side. Look to the right as you pass Navy Pier, and there, below the drive, is block-long Peshtigo Street, a small tribute to that "other big fire" back in 1871.

We cross the Chicago river, famous in engineering circles as the river whose flow was reversed so that Chicago's waste would stop flowing into the lake.
Find your way over to Michigan Avenue, to what is called "The Magnificent Mile", do some shopping, do one side of the street and then back down the other, then go down the stairs at Michigan Avenue and the river, and go for a boat ride.
Chicago has one of the most beautiful skylines in the world, and the view from the side of a boat making it's way along the lakefront is incomparable.
Making our way back to the Drive, we pass Grant Park (in the summer, take in "Taste of Chicago", where all the major restaurants in the city set up booths in the park; pig out on Chicago-style pizza, Chicago red hots, Polish sausage, Mexican, Italian, Oriental, you name it, it's here and it's delicious!).

To the west of the park is "the Loop", Chicago's main business and shopping area, so named for the elevated train (the EL) that circumnavigates the downtown area. Toward the south end of Grant Park, find a place to park, and visit Buckingham Fountain.
A few blocks south of Buckingham Fountain, the drive veers to the right, around the Field Museum of Natural History. Pull in around the back of the building, and go in to see Sue, the Dinosaur, an expensive tyrannosaurus, who has become the belle of the ball since her arrival here last year. After Sue, the mummies are an all-time favorite.



Outside again, we go across the street to the Shedd Aquarium, for a look at the fish, and then down the street, to the Planetarium, for a look at the stars. Back in the car, we head south along the lakefront, past the well-known, giant convention complex, McCormick Place, and further south, past the little-known statue of Stephan A. Douglas, the Little Giant (Douglas was the half of the Lincoln-Douglas debates that made Lincoln famous, and Douglas an unknown).
Neighborhoods to our right, the lake to our left. Old neighborhoods that decades ago were upscale, the home of characters like Studs Lonigan. Neighborhoods like Douglas, Oakland, Kenwood, Hyde Park, and Woodlawn. Hyde Park's claim to fame is the University of Chicago, with it's acclaimed hospitals and the world-renown Rockefeller Chapel. It was here in the early 40's that research was conducted to find out how to split atoms. Then they went on to learn how to make atom bombs that would split everything in their wake. Decades later, Hyde Park and Woodlawn would witness another atom bomb of sorts, the Blackstone Rangers, named after Blackstone Avenue, which runs north and south from 49th street, out to the far south side. 63rd and Blackstone was ground zero, this was the target drop sight, and the reverberations would be felt all the way to Washington, DC.
The Blackstone gang became the Black "P" Stone Nation, the "P" standing for Power. Black Power. Power means guns, for as the Chairman (Mao, for those of you not in the know) said, Power grows out of the barrel of a gun. So the Stones had guns, and they dealt drugs and became rich, and bought real estate, and some grew up to go into politics, and people say one of them may even be a congressman.
People also said that the Stones were recipients of Federal money back in those days, that Federal money was involved, that a minister named...(oops, can't say that) was involved, that the University was involved, that there was some sort of unholy alliance between the University (left wing liberal pinkos, some would say) and this uniquely American mix of Marxism and Mafia, the Black "P" Stone Nation. For the University liberals, it was like a social science experiment, the lab was down the street, the lab was IN the street, and "let's do some social experiments with these black guinea pigs, and see what happens".
The result is a neighborhood that looks like a war zone, vacant lots littered with rubble and debris, building destroyed from the inside-out by neglect, destroyed from the outside-in by vandalism. The Nation is firmly entrenched in power (we have our own Congressman), and you don't want to travel through the "hood" alone at night.

We stick with Route 41 in the daylight, moving south past the Museum of Science and Industry at 57th Street, home of the World War II German sub, the U-202. I have childhood memories of going to the museum, of visiting their mammoth model train set-up and the working replica of a coal mine. The coal mine was Indiana Jones stuff long before there was an Indiana Jones. An elevator took you down into the mine, and by combining semi-darkness with a lot of movement of the elevator, you felt like you were going way down into the earth, when in reality, you were only going from the first floor to the basement. Once off the elevator, you got into a train of coal cars (ala Indie), and rode to an area where you got out and walked around a guided tour and demonstration of what an actual working mine would be like.

When we were kids, I and my friends would get on the streetcar in Roseland, a far-south-side neighborhood of the city, take the streetcar to 55th street, and take the 55th St. Bus over to the museum. We were sexually-addled 12 and 13 year olds, and heavy into research into this mysterious subject, sex. So an exhibit that was of great interest to us was the museum's excellent display regarding the human body, including the human reproductive system. We were especially enamored of the female human form, and so here were naked mannequins, full breasted, upon which we could indulge our prurient interests, and all in the name of scientific research. Never mind that the female mannequin was transparent, that you could see her internals.
At Christmas time each year, the museum hosts an annual event, "Christmas Around the World". For youngsters of any age, it is a delightful array of Christmas trees, ornaments, and ethnic celebrations of the birth of Christ. Featured are daily programs showing a cultural potpourri of holiday activities from countries and cultures around the world.

Outside the museum, we continue south. From this vantage we can see the shoreline curve south and east along the lake toward Indiana. The Indiana skyline here is one of industry. But unseen, scattered amongst the towers of productivity, are little cancers of speculation. For hidden amongst the towers of the steel mills are the casino boats. This is a skyline of contradiction, a juxtaposition of philosophies. On the one hand, labor, investment, capital, long term plans, jobs, productivity, and product. The steel mills produce a tangible product, hard-cold metal, useful, meaningful, and young men toil their lives away in the soil, sweat, and soot, and the metal gives meaning to their lives.
The casinos, on the other hand, offer no meaningful, tangible product. Their product, if anything, is ephemeral, intangible, a mirage, a vision. Men and women take the essence of their work, their money, and toil away pulling the arms of one-armed bandits, hoping for a killing that for most, never comes.
There is a verse in the Bible that says fast gains are fleeting. Huge corporations own these boats, and none of these corporations are non-profit. They are all out to make money. They are not in the business of giving away money. So we can only say that each of these casino boats is a ship of fools. Foolish people speculating on a sure thing, that the corporation that owns the boat is going to make money.
The steel business is real men and women, producing real products with real uses. The gambling business is a sham, a con, a fraud, a deception that leads to addiction, broken homes, broken dreams, wasted assets, wasted lives, and ultimately, poverty. Our government in the past prohibited gambling, because they knew back then, it's evils. Now they condone and license it, and run lotteries. We have Truth-In-Lending laws, where disclosures must be made to protect the consumer. How about a Truth-In-Gambling law, where the citizen is given fair warning and proper disclosure? Or better yet, ban the gambling once again, and save our people from the theft. The Indiana shoreline from Route 41 is a picture of the Steel industry, and the Steal industry.

Heading south into the South Shore neighborhood, we move inland away from the lake, pass the South Shore Country Club, sitting aside the lake at 71st street. Running up and down the center of 71st street are the tracks of the Illinois Central Electric suburban line (now part of the regional Metra transportation system). The IC, as it was called, went from 91st street north through the South Shore neighborhood, along Lake Shore Drive all the way to the downtown area, to the Loop. The train gave the neighborhoods it passed through a suburban feeling. South Shore had, years ago, been a little haughty, a little high-class. But with the passing of time, this once-fashionable neighborhood has been humbled, just-folks have moved in, and the new settlers have brought with them their own vibrant culture and life.

Moving through South Shore, we pass a block away from Rainbow Beach. Again, as kids, we would get on the streetcar in Roseland, take it to 75th St., and transfer to the eastbound 75th street bus, which would take us to the end of the line, Rainbow Beach. This four-block-long slice of sand is one of the more substantial beaches in the Chicago Park System, since many of the others are being eroded away by the rising of Lake Michigan. Set back from the beach are towering apartment building which, in the 50's and 60's, were populated by those considered well-to-do.

Leaving the beach, we head south again, and route 41 changes it's name from South Shore Drive, to Bond St., then wends it's way southeast through the East Side of the city, changing street names every few blocks, down to Ewing Avenue. The names of the stores tell us we have passed into another culture. El Rodeo restaurant, LaNacional Food store (a supermercado), etc. As we pass under the Chicago Skyway at 95th and Ewing, a few blocks to the east is another favorite beach of my childhood, Calumet Beach. Here in summer, the flavor is decidedly Latino, as families bring their children to the lake, new mothers push their strollers along the walkways that skirt the beach, and the air is filled with the pungent fumes of charcoal-grilled chorrizo.
Memories come back of that summer of 61, when Jim's dad had gone to work in Wyoming, putting a roof on a new steel mill. Jim's house became an open house, the first party started the weekend after his parents left, and it went on for about a week.
We drank and played cards that Friday night, and then about two in the morning, tumbled drunk out of the house into the warm summer air. The suggestion was made to go to the beach for a swim. Jim was somewhat sober, and we drove to the beach in his Pontiac convertible, the one with the Tri-Power carburetor.
There were about 6 or 7 of us in the car, more or less spilling out and over the sides of the car. Our beach destination of choice, Calumet Beach.
We drove around the park, and when someone passed in another car, we made derogatory remarks about them, perfect strangers who we made fun of, laughing drunkenly.
The other car braked hard, circled around, and headed our way. We had Jim stop, tumbled out of the car, and headed for the water. The strangers came out of their car with murder in their eyes and tire irons in their hands.
Our only choice was to flee for our lives, flee to the water. Clothes and all, we plunged into the water, safe for a moment, but could we stay here all night long? One of ours had fallen short of the water, and was kicked by the strangers. Our drunken fallen compatriot lay still on the sand, playing possum, whether by plan or simply because he was totally intoxicated, we knew not. But it worked.
The strangers grew bored with us, even as we jeered at them from the water, and they turned and left. We returned to land, and fell onto the sand. The water had revived us somewhat, and we decided to call it a night.

Coming out of my reverie, we turn left at 95th and Ewing, and head southeast down Indianapolis Boulevard, with the Skyway on our left, and the East Side on our right, southeast into Indiana.