English translation follows
English translation follows
English translation follows
A safe link to the children’s book Freedom Soup read aloud – History of Haiti
Hello, I am Muhannad from Gaza. I am 19 years old, Palestinian I was studying Computer Science and English at university in my first year. I loved playing volleyball with my cousins and friends. I used to go to the most beautiful places in Gaza. I used to go to restaurants with my friends to eat delicious food. My life was very beautiful and full of happiness, dreams and ambitions, but unfortunately it all stopped and ended on October 7 when we were subjected to a major ongoing genocide, as I lost my beautiful school, whose every corner was engraved in my memory. They also destroyed my university, which I was only a few days away from entering. They also killed many of my friends whom I had loved and been attached to since childhood. They killed my relatives and many of my teachers. I lost everything The only thing I have left is my family of 7 people. I try in every way to protect them because I won’t be able to lose any of them because I lost a lot of people I love. I cant bear any more. Please help me keep the last thing I have left, which is my family. Help me get my family to safety. Please try to help me before it’s too late. They are very close to me and my family. Help me |
Well, I was born in 1941 so a lot of my growing up was in the 50’s. For the most part it was a good time to grow up. But the good things all had a bad side as well.
Nearly every friend I had lived in a two parent home. I can only think of a few who were raised by a single parent. Most all of the moms were stay at home moms which is also good in many ways. I do think that gave a better sense of family and that side was good. However opportunities for women were very limited so if a woman was in a bad marriage she was pretty stuck. Women could be teachers, waitresses, clerks or secretaries and the pay wasn’t usually all that good. At the time, in my state, divorces were much more difficult. No fault divorces didn’t come along until the 60’s here.
People were much friendlier then. We knew all our neighbors and would visit them and our relatives quite frequently. That was probably because life was more boring and in the early days of TV we only had one channel. Later that went to three channels. The nice thing about one channel was that you didn’t have to decide what to watch. The decision was to watch TV or not.
The world was much safer. There were no mass shootings. We often slept out on the front porch on hot summer nights and in a pup tent in the back yard as well. We typically didn’t lock our front door or our car. My little town of 12,500 had one murder in it’s 70 year history.
Doctors were cheap. You only went when you were sick. Now you only go to the doctor if you are not sick. If you are sick you go to insty care. Of course if you are really sick the doctors made house calls. I can always remember our doctor pulling in front of our house with his white 59 caddy with the tall tail fins and bringing his little black doctor bag in.
Cars were not all that reliable but easy and cheap to fix. When they would not start they all had bumpers and bumper guards and someone would pull their car behind you and push you. Then you would pop the clutch and the car would start. Oil changes were at 2000 miles, spark plugs and points every 10–12,000 miles, brakes needed to be adjusted with a break spoon. It was common to lose your brakes. Flat tires were common.
Sundays were pretty boring. The blue laws were in effect so stores and bars could not open on a Sunday. Sunday was a time for going to church and spending time with family.
I don’t think it was a good time to be a minority but we had few in my little town. We had 13 black families and they all lived on one street, if you could call it a street, it was more like an ally. The only Asians ran the Chinese laundry and we never saw them on the street. We had no open segregation since we had so few blacks it wasn’t practical. I recall being rather shocked when as a teen we took a vacation to Virginia and a restaurant we stopped at had separate water fountains and rest rooms for blacks and whites. I had never seen that and it seemed odd.
To me, it was a good time to grow up. In school you either learned or were held back. We didn’t sit with a play station we went out and played baseball, street games or board games. I knew tons of people. We worked for what we had. We all had families and did things as a family. Drugs were unknown. Few people had guns and few felt any need for them. Guns were for hunting. I would rather have grown up then as primitive as it was than to grow up today.
My grandfather on my father’s side of the family was an Irish emigrant to this country in 1820 when he was only seventeen years of age and was living among the Cherokees in Tennessee where he was married to my grandmother, Eliza Heldebrand in 1829. To that union were born ten children, William, Nancy, Rachel, Marguret, Elias, John J. (my father), Washington, Polly, Lucy, and Mikel.
As grandmother was Cherokee, she and grandfather and the children that were born up to that time were driven out of that country with the removal of the Cherokees to this country in 1837 with the general exodus of the Indians over what has been referred to in history as the “trail of tears”, the darkest blot on American history. According to the stories told to me by my grandmother when I was a small girl it would be impossible for anyone to graphically portray the horrors and suffering endured by the Cherokees on that journey. The hardships were many all along the trail, rough country, bad roads and all kinds of weather. A seeming endless march of weary, struggling mass of humanity, driven from a country they knew and loved as their home, deprived of most of their individual possessions, to the wilderness of a new country. A procession miles in length of wagons, two-wheel carts, vehicles of every description drawn by horses, mules and ox teams, long troops of pedestrians of all ages and conditions, mothers walking and carrying their babes on their back. Many walking and driving their small herds of cattle and other stock. After a few days out on the trail you could see them scattered along the roadside falling out of line of march from exhaustion and illness, and so the long journey from east of the Mississippi to the Indian Territory was made after several months of hardships and sorrow and the cost of many lives of the Cherokees. I have read of the “Trail of Tears ” by different writers but none portray the horrors of it all in detail as grandmother related to us when we could persuade her to talk of it, as she would often tell us it was too horrible to talk about and it only brought back sad memories.
Soon after the arrival in the territory my grandfather taken up a claim in what was afterwards known as the Whiteoak Hills in the Illinois district of the Cherokee nation about seventeen miles east of where the town of Bragg now stands. He built a large two room log house with a railway between the rooms and a stone fireplace at each end of the house. At this place they reared their family of ten children and resided the remainder of their active lives. Their last few years were spent among the children who were all married and living at different places in the Territory. Grandfather died at the home of his son Washington Patrick near Braggs in 1887. Grandmother died at the home of another son at Vann, Oklahoma in 1903
Bridgeport, south of the Loop, is home to the White Sox. Church steeples sprout from this working class neighborhood of the Irish, Italians, Polish, Lithuanians, Chinese and Croatians of St. Jerome’s Parish.
Many of them were born during the ’20s to immigrant parents.
Giggi Besic Cortese, 81, has lived in the neighborhood all her life. She lives on a block full of two-story brick and frame houses with narrow sidewalks between them. She said boarders stayed upstairs, including a man named John Vuk who took her to the show every Sunday.
“Do you known how I survived those days?” Cortese asks. “[It] was going to the show every Sunday to see Shirley Temple, but [I] tell you, she was my inspiration to go on living. Honest to goodness, I couldn’t wait till Sunday, and we would sit and wait for John Vuk to say, ‘Come, ve go to the show, ve go to the show today.’ You can certainly say that people had heart for one another — and if they were able to help, more often than not they did.”
Dusko Condic, 77, who is also from the Bridgeport neighborhood, says his father died “a relatively young man,” in his early 40s.
“He left eight of us,” Condic says. “Unfortunately, we lost the house. I can remember to this day — and I become emotional when I think of it — literally being placed on the sidewalk [with] every last possession that my poor mother had because she wasn’t able to supposedly pay the mortgage. And an incredible number of people came to my mothers’ aid, literally wheeling wheelbarrows of coal to help warm the house.”
Condic and his friends have a lot of good memories, too. They were children glued to the radio every Sunday.
“There’s nothing they like better than gathering around the table and telling stories from the old days,” Condic says. “Today, on Thanksgiving, their children and grandchildren might ask about the Great Depression they say, but they’re pretty sure the kids don’t really understand.”
“My brother Mark has 10 kids, and somewhere along the line they tend to disregard the value of money,” Condic says. ” ‘Oh, Dad, it’s only money. So what, I can make more.’ And on more than one occasion, he tells them, ‘Hey kids, God heaven forbid if the Depression comes around again. I won’t be opening up the window and jumping out, but I can see you guys doing it.’ I think that’s probably true.”
There’s grit in this generation of Chicagoans — and something of a swagger, too. The man who cries about his mother’s struggles can boast in the face of today’s catastrophe.
Says Condic: “Tomorrow I could lose everything, but somehow I’m not afraid. I really am not.”
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