Different Slants

Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story:  http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355

© May 1, 2013

I came to Hyde Park in April, ’64 from an odd ethnic bubble of only Irish and Jews, mixed together with periodic success on the South Side of Chicago, near 87th Street. Never had any relationships or encountered any Black people anywhere.

There were two Black girls in my last year at Caldwell School whom no one would talk to. It was stunning. I was both appalled by this situation and I was unpopular as well, so I got it immediately and befriended them. They were suspicious of me at first (and who wouldn’t be?), but then visibly relieved that the ice was broken for them. Except it wasn’t broken.

We would talk in the halls or in the playground, but there was no contact between us out of school. I had no classes with them. I simply didn’t know what to do with a Black female friend, at fourteen. Or a White one, either. It’s a long time ago now, but one of them was named Ardelia Baker, and the other one was named Hazel Dennis.  They probably went to Bowen High School with the other thousands of South Siders.

Even going to the university of Chicago Laboratory School didn’t acclimate me to interacting with Black people because there, the minorities were rich and I wasn’t in their crowd. Always something.

Opening Bob’s Newsstand in August ’65 changed everything for me, and maybe a tiny bit for Hyde Park, too. If I was to succeed in my primitive wooden shack, I was forced to overcome my hesitancy and learn to initiate conversation with strangers, constantly, and all day, every day.

People in Hyde Park may have eventually taken it for granted that I was comfortable with anyone and a natural at this.  That was never true. Overcoming my shyness was extremely difficult considering what I was doing, selling newspapers, but in school I spoke to virtually no one.  Two worlds, neither one the right one. In a way, for me for a long time, that newsstand was more like a theater where I was performing a part.

Over time, I met thousands of people of every race, discovered interracial marriage existed, made friends, met families, watched their babies grow up over twenty years, hired uncountable White, Black, African, Mexican, European and Asian kids, discovered prejudice in Black people against Jews–but not me, never me–and we could talk about it.

Bob’s Newsstand was some kind of miniature isolated zone of civilization where race, religion, age and gender were of no consequence and only “Could you do your job?” mattered.

I met African cab drivers, Jamaican nurses, Black cops, thieves, doctors, prostitutes, ministers, professors, Nigerian university students and Black Jews.  That shack was my own decades-long constant education in becoming human, becoming compassionate and learning to see people for what they were and who they were inside of their skin.

Lab School was always a difficult experience socially, but that wooden shack on 51st and Lake Park made me into a decent person of the larger world and taught me the absolute essentialness of tolerance.   I received an education which is no longer available because all the instructors died.

I believe I partially write out of a sense of obligation. If I don’t, then whatever they taught me dies with me. I’ve published six books and finished several more, like its a race to record everything. I am unsure what else will be able to be published.

Old men, old women, old cops all pouring tales into me, warning me, teaching me, and then everything I could understand became woven together into a perspective of my own, but a blended perspective.

Finally, there was a girl, Gloria Rogers, simply incredibly beautiful, so alluring, and Black.  I never had the nerve to ask her out. I always regretted it. Hard to break free of an immigrant family’s prejudiced restrictions.  Years later, I learned from a mutual friend that, incredibly, she liked me and (maybe) would have gone out with me. That only added to my misery and regret. Gloria left our school our junior year and remains eternally 16 in my memory.  I never saw her again. I can never fix that timidity. And stupidity.