I am a packrat when it comes to scanning in and saving photos. I have literally thousands of photos on my computer and I particularly cherish photos that bring to mind memorable events in my life. I love how I feel when looking at an old photo -- especially one I remember posing for, because it's like time traveling to that time and place. In the photo below, I remember the sense of triumph that we had finally reached our destination and I was so happy to see my cousins. It was a very hot day, and yet the wind made it seem not that hot. I instantly understood why Chicago is called The Windy City.
The trip to Chicago commemorated in the photos here was quite memorable.
Left, me and my grandmother Memaw Hasty and two of my Hasty cousins in Chicago, 1974. We drove from Knoxville to Chicago in a 1968 Impala with Memaw sitting between me and my brother on the back seat. Memaw wanted to visit her son Don and his family and stay for a while. She flew home a few weeks after we carried her up there.
I was 12 years old and I had never been to a city as enormous as Chicago. My uncle was an administrator at McCormick Theological Seminary. As part of his compensation, his family was able to live in a row house near the school.
For me it was a huge adventure. There were a lot of firsts.
I had never been in a car that long, for one. In those days it was about 9 or 10 hours. We played a lot of car games, sang songs, and told stories. My grandmother pulled out her crossword puzzle books and gave us all Chiclets.
Our family played a car game where we tried to guess the identity of a famous person based on asking yes or no questions. Memaw stumped us all. She said her Famous Person was a military man, last name started with S. We asked a lot of questions, for miles and miles, and finally gave up.
The answer? Colonel Sanders. Mom and Dad laughed about that for years.
From the houses to the train to the stores, Chicago was a fascinating place.
I had never been inside a brownstone -- I'd only seen them in TV shows and movies. The idea of building such a vertical home just fascinated me, and of course scampering up and down the stairs was fun. [Now, almost 50 years later, my knees hurt just contemplating all those stairs!]
My cousins and brother and I were able to get out and run around by ourselves, in a big city! That was major league fun, in my book. I had never been on a train. I had never been in anything like the Field Museum. I was used to museums that were enclosed in old houses, easily viewed in an hour or so. I could have spent a week in the Field Museum and not seen it all.
My cousins had the enviable life of freedom, and although to me the city was scary it was also fascinating.
We wandered into a little junky "antiques" store, the kind of dusty little shop one finds everywhere, and I found a blue bottle that I loved, the blue a rich dark purple-blue that reminded me of my mother's eyes. When we got back to the house and I showed my mother she burst out laughing. My Dad laughed. My aunt and uncle laughed. I was upset because I felt like I had messed up and I didn't know why. Finally, Mom explained that the writing on the bottle, "Strychnine," was a type of poison. I had never seen that word. None of us kids knew the word. From feeling proud at finding a cool present for Mom, I felt like an idiot.
We left Chicago and drove to Springfield Illinois, to see where Abraham Lincoln had lived for years, and visit his law office and his in-law's house, all of those places having been well preserved. I think we also spent a night in St. Louis, and my brother and I wanted to go up inside the famous arch, and my parents said NO. My mother was deathly afraid of heights.
I came home happy to see the mountains of East Tennessee, happy to not take any more long car trips for a while, but missing my cousins. It would be years before we would see them again.
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