The Prairie

The house I grew up in also was the house in which my mother was raised: 7311 S. Marshfield in Chicago.  When my grandparents (Patrick and Hannah Kelly) brought it in 1923 it was at the far south boundaries of Chicago.  The streetcar lines ended at 74th street and beyond that was miles of the good old midwest prairie.  I don’t have any photos of the house at that time, but I imagine that was still a lot of the open space — prairies – – around their home too.

Even when I was growing up there, almost a half century later, we still played in the “prairies” that dotted our neighborhood.  Our favorite prairie was between our alley and Ashland Avenue just a little south of our house.  The neighborhood kids played baseball there so often that the high prairie grass finally gave way to an imperfect diamond on which to run the bases.  It wasn’t anything like the baseball diamonds my grandchildren play on today  – – –  with fences and an actual pitchers mound and a warm-up cage  – – – but we thought it was wonderful.  We organized our own games, no adults monitored us or, if I’m to be truthful, even cared that we played.

Our parents were too busy working.   Our dads usually put in long hours at backbreaking jobs and our mothers were busy with household chores.   Heck, just keeping our clothes clean was hard work:  they washed clothes in roller-wash machines and hung them to dry on clothesline strung crisscross around the yard (no electric dryers in those days).  There were no wrinkle-free fabrics yet either so our mom’s spent a lot of time over a hot ironing board.  One of my favorite memories (until I became old enough to help hang the clothes) was seeing the clean clothes blowing in the wind on a beautiful summer’s day.  Don’t get me wrong, hanging clothes was hard work and not always a beautiful sight.  Like when it started to rain and they had to be taken down quickly . . or during the winter when they were hung in the damp dark basement.

But let’s get back to the prairie.  Another memory of the Ashland Avenue prairie is the time some of us kids decided we wanted a  “secret” clubhouse. So my little brother Jackie,  Bernadette Clark, Pat Carlon,  Judy  and her sister Barbara Mair,   Judy Cobb, Stevie Madden, Donna Jolliet,  Johnny  Gallagher and a few others confiscated some shovels and dug a long tunnel under the high grass and then dug out a small space  – – probably about a foot or so underground – – that we called “our clubroom.”  We furnished it with a small old rug someone found and held many secret meetings there.  We had to crawl into it and couldn’t stand.. heck we even had to hunch over just to sit.  But it was our’s and the adults didn’t know about it.

Until they did. Then a lot of us got into a heap of trouble; moms yelling we could have been buried alive and dads running out to the prairie to fill it in.  That was the end of our secret clubhouse . . .  until we found another one ….

© Eileen Murphy Donnersberger