fire!”
My parents didn’t like these boys one bit. “They’re a bad influence, Jimmie. Stay away from them!” They were actually really great kids—just a bit more mature, and sexually aware.
We collected marbles and played them endlessly at the empty lot at the end of the block that we dubbed “the prairie.” I still remember the feeling of those babies in my hands as I thumbed them toward the valley we dug in the mud: cat’s eyes, cat’s eye boulders (the bigger ones), purees (no colored glass inside), puree boulders, and the heavy steelies and steely boulders. The colors dazzled me: turquoise, coral pink, yellow, orange, and purple.
One day, Binky and Johnny organized a night bike ride. All the boys in the neighborhood made plans to go out in a pack that evening. I could barely contain my excitement until my mother informed me that I couldn’t go because I didn’t have a light on my bike like the others. I was disconsolate. When my dad got home and was told the situation he quietly affixed our family flashlight to my handlebars with electrical tape, and off I went into the starry Berwyn night. At that moment he reaffirmed his status as my hero.
But our main compulsion was cars. We built scale model, plastic cars, which we raced down the sidewalk. I still remember the somehow seductive smell of the Testors glue we used and the slick flame decals we’d lick and apply carefully to the fenders. Some we would purchase at our local hobby shop, already built, that contained a friction mechanism that kept the car in motion when you gave it a good shove. It wasn’t about how fast you could go, but how far we could get them to coast down the sidewalks of Wesley Avenue in front of our houses. If your car made it to the Dandas’ yellow bungalow you were doing pretty darn good.
Me, Binky, and Johnny, with miles of unstructured time each day, would perch on the curb on busy 26th Street and report on every car that passed by: “’53 Packard Caribbean—three-tone paint—coral pink, gray, and white, two-door hardtop, V8, white walls; ’54 Buick Skylark, convertible, wire wheels, whitewalls, V8, no portholes” (the normal Buicks had three or four of these mock portholes on the front fender depending on the prestige of the model). We would talk over one another trying to blurt out the info first.
We didn’t much care about the workings of the engine; it was all about flashy design, and color schemes. I’m still a car nut and recently could afford to relive those days by buying myself a mint-condition 1955 Chevy Bel Air convertible and a 1958 Corvette convertible—both in coral red and cream, both with matching interiors and V8 engines and power windows! Someday I’d like to own a 1956 T-Bird (with Continental kit) and a chartreuse and black Mercury convertible—just like Al Kovarik’s.
Binky and Johnny and Alice Anne and Janice were my life until I turned seven, and then we moved up in status to a brand-new location only about a mile away. Suddenly, there was a whole new group of kids, and though the new crowd made me feel light-years away from Binky and Johnny, I made new friends and quickly adjusted to my new surroundings. But I always maintained a soft spot for my Wesley Avenue digs—the real cradle of civilization for me.
As I said, 2647 Oak Park Ave. was a move up the social ladder for my folks. There was more money in the Peterik family coffers and my parents wanted to move closer to my Auntie Clara, my mother’s twin sister. Auntie Clara was Gracie Allen to my mother’s Barbara Stanwyck. They both came from affluence (Mother’s father, Jim, was the butcher of choice in Hawthorne), but my mother was all sophistication, and Clara all over the deck. Auntie worked behind the long luncheonette counter at Murphy’s five-and-dime in the Berwyn Cermak Plaza. At any given time of day you could hear her shouts resounding though the entire store: “Murphyburger.” “Murphyburger Deluxe.” I would bring friends there just to have them hear my mother’s twin’s ear-splitting voice in full song.
Growing up had its challenges. By the time I was eleven, I had become a target for bullies. Maybe it was the black-rimmed glasses with the tape mending the bridge that made me look kind of nerdy or maybe the bullies just decided to pick on me because I was the musician, “the guy in the band.” I had started playing in the grade school band with those gaudy uniforms and I felt I was scorned upon by the “hard guys.” It seemed they were lurking everywhere in Berwyn and Cicero. One Christmas when I finally got that Schwinn Jaguar bike I had been lobbying for, it wasn’t more than two weeks before it was stolen from our garage. After the police retrieved the bike, it was stolen once again by three thugs who followed me from Cock Robin Ice Cream to G.C. Murphy’s where it was stolen for the final time.
My true nemeses though were two brothers, Gary and Tom Booth, good-looking Irish-Catholics who slathered pomade on their combed-back hair. These boys had lots of swagger and got kicked out of school constantly for truant behavior and failing grades. They tried to make up for their lack of discipline and antisocial tendencies by becoming the kingpins of their own amateur gangster world.
Their henchman, Mike McKenzie, was way nerdier than I was, but since he aligned himself with the “Booth Boys,” his status grew. He became “their guy,” their lackey. Mike McKenzie had wisely bought himself protection.
One day, I was shooting baskets in my driveway when Mike McKenzie yelled, “Hey, want to take a walk to the park with me?”
“Yeah,” I said, excitedly.
Here was this cool henchman who wanted to hang with me. I glanced at the huge beds of colored, dried autumn leaves that were piled up high. Not only was it a gorgeous fall day, but also I was finally being accepted and appreciated for the cool guy I really was. One of the Booth Boys had shown up at my house to meet me!
But when we reached the park, my luck changed. Mike McKenzie shoved me into another pile of leaves, leaving Tom Booth free to shove his frigid switchblade toward my neck.
“I never want to see you again! Never walk past my house again. If you do, I’ll slit your throat,” he said, in a threatening tone that I’ll never forget.
I shook and trembled as Booth lunged over me, thrusting his silver blade closer to my throat. I managed to croak, “Okay” as my young life flashed before my eyes. These hoodlums finally let me go and, though they didn’t actually injure me physically, the mental scar will be with me forever.
After that experience, I made great pains to avoid going past that house. I created a whole new route home just to avoid them. From what I heard, the Booths ended up becoming petty criminals. Tom died recently. God only knows where Mike McKenzie is today.
My days being the brunt of bullies came in handy recently when I got a call from an old record company buddy of mine, Bobby Tarantino, who was looking for an antibullying song for the group he managed, Ariel & Zoey & Eli, Too. This group of twin fourteen-year-old girls and their eleven-year-old brother had already made a name for themselves with their own variety show on The Cool TV network. The song I wrote and produced for them, “Hey Bully,” would eventually go viral on YouTube with their creative video. Maybe I have the Booth brothers to thank for giving me the ammunition I needed to write that song.
I never used the music as a selling point, though, not until about fourth grade when I picked up the sax and played “Wiggle Wobble,” which was a popular tune that year by Les Cooper. When I played it for the class, the girls started giggling. They started looking at me differently. The guys sat silently in awe, looking a tad jealous. My teacher looked surprised. That day my course was set.
MY DAD, like his father before him, was a natural born musician. He mastered violin in his teens and was known all over the Hawthorne district of Cicero, Illinois, as the best around. He looked like actor Robert Young (the adorably incompetent patriarch in one of my favorite shows, Father Knows Best) and became popular with the local girls with his sidewalk serenades.
In the late ’40s he switched to saxophone and formed a group dubbed the Hi-Hatters. Their repertoire consisted of popular