Growing Up in Chicago

Our house was a lot bigger than the apartment we used to rent, and we loved the space. There was a living room, a sitting room, three bedrooms, a dining room, and a kitchen. We had an enclosed sun porch. There was a basement, but it was not furnished. We did have a washing machine. It was one of the first ones manufactured. You had to put the clothes through the rollers by turning the knob on the side. This was the way you wrung the water out of your clothes. After a couple of years, my mother was able to purchase a clothes dryer. We also bought a ping pong table to put in the basement. There were a lot of stores in the neighborhood. There was an Allendale Furniture store on Seventy-Ninth Street. It was a beautiful store, almost a block long, and they only sold French provincial furniture. One day I went to the store with my mother to pick out a sectional sofa for our living room. The sofa was an off-white color. It was very elegant-looking. Unfortunately, the sofa I picked out was too big for our living room. My mother had to take the center piece out and put it on one side of the living room and the two end pieces of the sofa on the other side. The sofa still looked nice there. There were a couple of department stores, a hat shop, restaurants, dry cleaners, grocery stores, jewelry stores, and a couple of taverns in the neighborhood. There was also a funeral home, a theater, and a Walgreens drug store. I thought this store was really nice because you could buy a number of things for the home, as well as fill prescription drugs. In the 1970's, some Walgreens had a lunch counter. You could sit and eat a hamburger and french fries, and a number of different meals.