opener) as Dad warmed up in the basement workshop of our Wesley Avenue house, which was part of his routine before he left for a “job,” as such gigs were called in those days. His tone and vibrato put chills right through me even from down in the basement. He had that effect on his audience, too, the ladies flocking around the stage to see and hear this handsome sax man. He blew into his sax from the side of his mouth—a very incorrect embouchure to be sure but his sound was spectacular just the same. He was in the best mood as he tinkered in the workshop, oiling the pads and adjusting the action on his Martin tenor and Conn alto saxes.
Sometimes my mother would threaten the sanctity of his warm-up ritual with sharp criticism or chastisement. “Alice, this is my job; I have to be in a great mood,” he’d say. “I can’t play sweet tonight if you’re nagging me about something and putting me in a bad frame of mind!”
In the basement, he stored the bandstands with the words “Hi-Hatters” carved out in vibrant blue and gold. I posed proudly with the whole band in front of one stand the first day I got my very own saxophone. There was my dad, on tenor and alto sax, Joe Delfino on trumpet, Irv on drums, and a really talented accordion player named Al Tobias. Later on, Al was kind enough to let me use his amazing Magnatone amplifier with a cool vibrato feature.
For a while, my uncle George Peterik played drums with my dad’s band, before he moved to California, and then the band had to change drummers. Though I was too young to remember, they say that that band with the two Peterik boys was a ferocious entity. Irv took his place, but he was no George Peterik, and the musical bond my father and my uncle had developed was gone forever.
By day, Jim Peterik, Sr., was a relay adjustor at Automatic Electric Telephone. I have a picture of him at the desk painstakingly fine-tuning these delicate pieces of gear in his black-rimmed bifocals. Without these relays tuned just right, the telephone of the day would not have functioned properly.
Automatic Electric had a factory parallel to the Eisenhower Expressway, near downtown Chicago. My father soldiered to the bus that took him to the train early each morning, despite the elements. I’d wake up to the familiar farm report blasting from our clock radio, which had become his makeshift alarm.
“The grain is up fifteen points and soybeans are down five,” bellowed a voice from the airwaves in a monotonous tone. The voice was loud enough to wake the dead—and my dad and the entire household.
I’m still an early-morning guy, and that is probably because of my dad’s impenetrable work ethic and that droning call-to-arms. But these rituals bonded us. Each day when he came home, I would greet him as he ambled down Wesley Avenue from the bus drop-off.
As we’d walk he’d tell me stories about his work buddy “Skinny” who was always doing hilariously stupid things. Sometimes he’d talk about an upcoming job with the Hi-Hatters at the VFW or the Moose Lodge in Blue Island.
When I finally got good enough on sax (around sixth grade), I would tag along with my dad to his various gigs—bar mitzvahs, men’s fraternities like the Elks, Lions, or Moose clubs, weddings, anniversary celebrations, and the lot.
For a while they were the featured band at Melody Mill on First Avenue in suburban Riverside. With my alto sax I would hide behind one of the wooden Hi-Hatters bandstands and play harmonies to my dad’s sweet tenor sax.
I had no union card and was underage so I kept pretty scarce. By the way, my dad played “by ear.” He never learned to read music, but it never held him back. He was equally adept at concertina (like his father) and fiddle, and his ear was deadly accurate, his tone was sweet, his vibrato wide, and his soloing was as good as his hero’s, Wayne King, the popular sax player from Wisconsin to whom he was often compared. In some circles he was known as “Young Wayne King.”
Another one of my favorite memories was doing a job at the VFW or the Moose Lodge with my dad and his buddies and then going out for White Castle hamburgers. It was the only place still open at midnight when the gig was through. I felt so grown-up, being in sixth grade and hanging with the guys at these gleaming white burger palaces.
I must have meant a lot to my dad. The day after my birth, my dad boasted to Skinny and Zichek, another friend of his from work, on the bench at Automatic Electric that he now had “a son!” It was somehow the validation my dad needed to make his manhood complete. That phrase, “a son,” echoed through Berwyn for days to come!
My birth did little, however, to still the constant and accelerated bickering between Alice and Jim, my mom and dad.
“Alice, quit belittling me! You’re baiting me again!”
“Jimmie, all you do is lay around the house doing nothing. Can’t you be useful? And why do you spend so much time in the bathroom? You’ve got some magazines in there with some pretty dandy pictures. I can imagine what you are doing!” My mother’s intimation of my dad’s masturbating in there was not lost on me as I grew older.
“Go jump in the lake!” he would respond, among other unprintable phrases. I got used to the slamming of doors and the feeling that all was not right in the world after all. It shook me to my core. Music became my asylum, my safe house.
As I grew up, I learned how to create a protective shield from the often negative spirit of their marriage. I think it was actually this kind of behavior that made me more determined that I would never be like that. When my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hull, asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered, without hesitation, “a good husband.”
For the same reason, I never smoked cigarettes. I had spent one too many Sundays at home tolerating what I called my “Sunday Headache,” which I discovered much later came from inhaling secondhand smoke from my father. He chain-smoked unfiltered Camels all day, lighting the next one with the glowing butt of the last one ’til he died of heart failure at the age of seventy.
My mother and dad always seemed distant from each other. It felt as if some dark secret existed between them—as if there was an elephant in the closet that no one saw or at least acknowledged.
When Daphne, my mother’s pen pal, visited from Australia we all went to the Brookfield Zoo. Although I was only about eight, I noticed something unusual happening—my mom and dad were holding hands. I had never seen that happen before. They were clearly putting on a show for Daphne.
That simple display of affection was so unlike them. I know there must have been a lot of love there, but there was never any demonstration of it. My parents were not huggers. They didn’t hug me, and they didn’t hug each other. In fact, it seemed like nobody hugged back then. Still, I never had any doubt that they loved me—unconditionally.
Every time tempers got really hot and my mother needed ammunition, through her sobs, she would lay out her trump card: “It was seventeen years ago (or eighteen, or however many years it had been at the time), Jimmie, but I remember it like it was yesterday.”
Many years later, my mother finally cornered me and told me what “it” was. “You think your father is so great—well, let me tell you about the affair he had when we had only been married a few years!”
That encounter didn’t change my respect for my father, but it did explain the fights and icy silence between them once and for all. It affected me greatly for years and made me vow not to repeat this pattern of holding onto hurt and using it as a weapon. Inversely, it taught me the vital importance of forgiveness.
My own sexual education was sketchy at best. In sixth grade my buddy Jerry Kmen told me all he knew about the opposite sex. He said something about a girl having “three holes.” And the main one was called a “pussy nose.” This was before I had my first orgasm so the thought of taking off my clothes in front of a girl sounded just plain embarrassing. He described masturbation but I couldn’t quite put all the pieces together.
One day I was at the park with my friends and for some reason I started climbing the poles that supported the swings. When I got near the top I felt a very odd and unfamiliar sensation between my legs. I wasn’t sure if it was pleasurable or not at first—just different. The next day, trying to recreate that feeling at the poles, I clearly