When the family and friends of Olga McAnarney
gathered during Christmas week last year to mourn her death, the
traditional repast after the burial was an occasion that reunited
many current and former residents of the old North 22nd Street
neighborhood near St. Aloysius Church on Springfield’s North
End.
The mourners, many of them now aging baby
boomers, sought to soften their grief by breaking bread and sharing
memories of Mrs. McAnarney, whose passing, to many of them,
represented the end of a long chapter in the neighborhood’s
history and gave them pause to consider their own mortality. As the
tears and laughter flowed, the nostalgic sentiment had such a
cathartic effect on so many that a few — Mary McKibben, Julie
Shields, Vicki Selinger, and Judy McAnarney — decided to
gather again under happier circumstances. And so they are inviting
anyone with an attachment to the old neighborhood to the Fieldhouse
Pizza and Pub on Saturday evening.
The neighborhood burgeoned in the aftermath of
World War II, when the veterans returned from service, got
government-backed housing loans, and settled down to the peacetime
business of raising families — for most, a prolific
undertaking. It was a decidedly blue-collar neighborhood with
nearly similar houses that featured a downstairs bathroom and an
upstairs dormer. Fathers, in the days before women entered the
workforce en masse, were largely union workers — police
officers, firefighters, postal workers, or employees of such
long-gone concerns as Sangamo Electric and Pillsbury Mills.
According to retired educator Jim Berberet,
whose family moved there in 1954, large families were the norm in
those days: “Everybody, it seems, had a large family. Six,
seven, eight kids — it was just not unusual. The Redpaths,
for instance, had 10 kids. Getting two full sides for baseball was
never a problem.”
His assertion is echoed by Mike Aiello, now of
Troxell Financial Advisors, who says, “I’m not exaggerating when I say that in that three- or
four-block stretch of 22nd Street, there had to be at least a hundred
kids, or more. We played sports and rode bikes all the time, at
Fairview School or Fairview Park. Nobody wanted to stay inside —
there was no air conditioning.”
Berberet recalls when the Selingers became the
first family on the block to get a television. The picture quality,
he says, was a lot like his memory is now: “real, real
fuzzy.”
According to McKibben, during her childhood,
“There was no Northgate, Indian Hills, Twin Lakes or
Devereaux Heights. Twenty-second Street was a tar-oil road lined by
ditches, and there was nothing between us and 31st Street [now
Dirksen Parkway]. I mean nothing — even 23rd Street was a later addition.
“It was a different time,” she
says. “All the kids were welcome at every house, and every
house was a community house, ours especially. It was just a good
neighborhood.”
Barry McAnarney, now the executive director of
the Central Laborers Pension Fund, has similarly fond memories of
22nd Street. He shared the dormer room with his three brothers and
remembers an incident in the early 1960s that speaks volumes about
the strong ties of so many people to 22nd Street:
“The neighborhood was expanding, and my
father bought a lot on 23rd Street with the intention of building a
house and moving all of one block over. He came to us with his
proposal and put it to a democratic vote. He said he’d made
the decision to move us and just wanted to see if we’d ratify
his decision. We voted it down, unanimously and emphatically. Mom,
in true fashion, voted it down as well,” he says, laughing.
“She wanted whatever her boys wanted. Dad ended up selling
the lot, and, I think, making a little money on the deal.
“It was a real Ozzie
and Harriet-type neighborhood. Everybody
walked to school, walked home for lunch, and then raced back to the
schoolyard to play. All the moms were stay-at-home moms, and we
respected their authority. Whoever’s yard you were in, well, that
mom was your mom, too. No matter who it was, she looked out for us, and
we played by her rules. You did as she said. It was a real close-knit,
family neighborhood — very stable. People didn’t seem to
move around so much.
“Of course, it wasn’t always
idyllic. We had our rivalries, even with the kids from 21st Street
or 23rd Street. We did some things for which we got our butts
whipped, and, believe me, we deserved it. But I think that we were
so fortunate to grow up there during that time: A lot of
us have had good success in the business and professional world, and
much of the credit for that goes to the neighborhood and the upbringing
we had there. Nobody felt better than anybody else, there was a real
sense of community property, and there was a real generous community
spirit.”
The North End reunion will be held at the
Fieldhouse Pizza and Pub, 3211 Sangamon Ave., starting at 7 p.m.
Saturday, June 25. Regular menu and cash bar.
This article appears in Jun 23-29, 2005.
