Bridgeport

We spent part of last night attending a wake in Bridgeport, a neighborhood most people know about as well as Jon Stewart does pizza.  Irish Bridgeport, home of the Daley clan?  No, Polish Bridgeport, where the Bukowski and Skonieczny clans once roamed.  It all depended what block you were born on.

Bridgeport was, and in many ways still is, a hardscrabble place my father left at the age of thirteen, but we often went there to visit his mother and one cousin.  I never ceased to be amazed by how all the homes in Bridgeport looked to have sunken yards; back in the 1850s, the street levels were raised several feet, which is what caused the “sinking.”  The sidewalks also had a tendency to buckle because they did double duty as roofs; in other words, basements extended underneath.  I grew up in what is known as Chicago’s Bungalow Belt, where everything was neat and orderly.  Bridgeport was one step the other side of chaos.

My father particularly enjoyed seeing his cousin, Doc Krops, Bridgeport royalty of a non-political sort.  The man drove a Cadillac, had a bar in his basement straight out of Las Vegas and vacationed in pre-Castro Cuba.  How a dentist and a fireman with a seventh grade education could be so close is beyond me, but they were.  The best part of these visits was sitting in Doc Krops’ kitchen on a summer night, the windows open, a bottomless glass of Pepsi in my hand, when all of a sudden, Boom!  “Somebody musta hit a homer for the Sox,” said Doc Krops, his way of letting me know we were no more than a mile west of Comiskey Park.  “They coulda used that last week against the Yankees.  But what are ya gonna do?”  And he went back to telling some incredible story about Castro or serving in the Pacific during the war or parallel parking his Cadillac.

             Doc and now his son were waked just down the street from where the fireworks echoed.