Back to Highland Park

IThas been at least fifteen years since I was last in Highland Park, Illinois, to show my two youngest sons the home my parents built and moved into in 1956 and in which I grew up with my four younger brothers. We even visited Uncle Dan’s, which did not exist in my day, and from whose roof Robert Crimo III, armed with a rifle, murdered seven and wounded forty others, some critically, at a Fourth of July parade.

There is something terribly disorienting about being suddenly thrown back into a time and place from which one is long gone, as I was when one of my children called up and asked, “What’s going on in Highland Park?” In a video clip of those fleeing from the gunshots, I instantly recognized the street where I had stood with my family watching other July 4 parades, no more than a seven-minute bike ride from my home. (In truth, I preferred the previous night’s fireworks viewed from the beach along Lake Michigan.)

As the national press swarmed to Highland Park, at least one journalist referred to it as Chicago’s “Mayberry,” the fictional rural Southern town where Andy Griffith served as the slow-talking, wise sheriff, and Barney Fife as his bumbling deputy. Highland Park bore no relation to Mayberry — too affluent, too Jewish, too fast moving. But safe it was. My parents had no worries letting me walk or ride my bike alone to school from the age of six, something my nieces in suburban Philadelphia never did.

And there was Fell Company, a clothes store, on Central Avenue, founded by Sam Fell, a Russian immigrant, in 1913, where my friends’ mothers worked at the cash registers, and brothers Red and Jake and Jake’s son Happy knew almost everyone who came in by name.