Memories from my childhood

  

Last night I watched parts of a documentary titled, “I Am Not Your Negro.” It dealt primarily with Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The parts about Malcolm X brought memories flooding back to me.

In the 1950s, at the tender age of fourteen, I went to work as a go-fer for my father’s executive secretary. Dad was the administrator of an osteopathic hospital and the president of the associated osteopathic college. Before you shout nepotism, let me say it was the best training I ever had. Over the next six years, I became a darn good executive secretary and could still do that today, whatever moniker you put on that job. And I loved it. Had to be dragged kicking and screaming to college. (Besides there were all those cute medical students that I dated.)

Joan Schmidt was an eccentric, and why my dad, a dignified, straight-laced Anglophile, put up with her, is a mystery, except she was so good at what she did. Probably then in her fifties, she was tall, thin, with red hair piled on top of her head. I suspect, in retrospect, she was a lesbian, but we didn’t talk about such in those days. She smoked, and she drank martinis at lunch. She would occasionally let me order a brandy Alexander and then make me chew parsley before we went back to the office. Once she took me to lunch with someone she really wanted me to impress and asked sweetly, “Judy dear, why don’t you have the Calavo pear with tuna salad?" I replied that I would if it were an avocado, but I didn’t like pears. She kicked me under the table—hard!

Joan lived three blocks from the hospital, on the western edge of Chicago’s historic Hyde Park neighborhood. On hot summer days, pre-air conditioning, she would send me to her apartment to take a shower and freshen up at noon. The apartment was right across the street from a temple of the Nation of Islam and the headquarters for Malcolm X. This was a time of high racial tension, fostered in part by Malcom X’s insistence on black supremacy. One of my girlfriends had to take the El (elevated railroad) to work at Dog World Magazine (talk about a dream job), and she used to describe the black man who went through the train crying, “Arise. The white man is your enemy.”

No wonder that I, a shy and timid teenager, was scared to death as I walked to Joan’s apartment. I was scared of the oversize black men who milled around outside and the women in flowing white robes that even wrapped around their heads. I never actually saw Malcolm X, but I knew all about him, and I was scared by his reputation. Racism was rampant on the South Side of Chicago, and probably elsewhere, in those days.

On the South Side of Chicago, I learned both fear and respect—fear because that was a dominant emotion in those days, on both sides I expect. The bogeyman (oh, was I scolded for using that term!) comes in several colors. And respect from my dad, who knew every person, black or white, who worked in his hospital and always had a personal word for each.

Mostly good memories of a time that shaped my course in life.