Fathers and Sons

We spent the first part of yesterday kicking around Bridgeport, one of Chicago’s oldest neighborhoods and birthplace to Richard J. Daley as well as my father, Edwin J. Bukowski.  The initial was about the only thing those two Bridgeporters had in common.

My father was one of three boys raised by a single parent.  The good son that he was, my father left school in the seventh grade to help with the mortgage when his mother bought a bungalow on the Southwest Side.  He ended up buying it from her when he got married.  She moved back to Bridgeport, where we regularly visited her and a favorite cousin of my dad’s.

Bridgeport used to be the kind of place where people didn’t take to strangers, unless you could prove you were related to someone they knew and liked.  Many of the yards front and back are sunk five-six feet below street level.  Back in the mid-1800s, the streets were raised for better drainage, but not the surrounding lots.  Hence, the sinking.  As a kid, I found the Bridgeport landscape endlessly fascinating.

First, we went to Palmisano Park, reclaimed from an old quarry.  For all his unbalanced budgets, Richard M. Daley got it right with this gem of a park, with a gently sloping, prairie-flower covered hill rising up from the remnants of the water-filled quarry pit.  The trails look out onto the Chicago skyline from a distinct South Side vantage.

From there we went to a coffee house; maybe I should mention the neighborhood has a strong hipster presence these days.  As luck would have it, we were just a block away from where my father was born in August of 1913, in a second-story apartment over what was probably a small grocery; so, we walked over and took pictures.  Back home, Clare and I watched the White Sox fall to the Cubs.  My father never said whether or not he cared for interleague play.

And that night we again ate at Frank Thomas’s Brew House.  On the way out, I shook hands with the Big Hurt and complimented him on the food.  Really, you don’t expect ex-athletes to care that much about what goes on the menu, but the food here is quite good.  And talk about a gentleman.  Pressing the flesh with the clientele comes with the territory, and Thomas certainly does it better than Michael Jordan ever did.  The Big Hurt also refused to speak ill of the Cubs.  He said they were good and hot, sort of like the burger melt I’d just finished.  You might also like the creamed corn.  The recipe comes from Thomas’s mom.