October 7, 2016
Our school had a fair every year, sort of a mini-Renaissance Fair called the Rites of May. It took place in, well, May, in the courtyard of the school. This being Hyde Park, there was falafel instead of fried dough, but you get the idea. Chris, my best friend, was visiting. He’d moved away the year before, to Springfield, two hundred miles south. Springfield was exotic – there were things a Hyde Parker had never seen – subdivisions, cornfields, bigots, and non-Unitarian Christians as far as the eye could see. To a Hyde Parker, it might as well have been Europe. But Chris had been at the Lab Schools with me (his father was a neurosurgeon at the U of C Hospital) and so he cruised the fair, seeing old friends (“hey, didn’t you used to live here?”) and eating falafel and playing speed chess with the Chess Club. And following girls around. (We were 13.)
That year there was a contest – guess the number of beans in the great big jar, and win a prize – so I put down a quarter, and made my guess. I used the same number I always use when I want to sound precise – eleven thousand, eight hundred and thirty seven. The ticket went in my pocket, and we went about our business.
Later in the evening, just before the play, the various raffles were called. (The play was on a big stage rigged in front of the doors to the cafeteria, and invariably had a young woman holding the back of her hand to her forehead and crying “what am I to do?” at some point. You know the type.) Chris and I checked at the bean booth, and got the news – I had been exactly right! The person running the booth didn’t seem all that excited, but we were. We’d won!
We were handed our prize – a brand new, still-in-the-box Mirro-Matic Coffee Maker. Aluminum, about a foot tall, that said it would make 10 cups of coffee. Automatically. We were thrilled. We sat through the play, the box on my lap, waiting for the show to end.
We were thirteen years old. We weren’t coffee drinkers (though I’m drinking coffee as I write this, made on a rescued coffee machine that’s a story in its own right.) But we’d won the prize, and the prize was a coffee maker.
The A&P on 57th street, on the way home, was still open when the play ended, so we walked the narrow aisles until we found the Eight O’Clock Coffee, the A&P house brand. Someone showed us how to use the grinder, another exotic experience. I’ve always been impressed at this display of open trust – the store lets you grind the beans when you haven’t paid for them yet. We were happy we still had a few bucks left after all that falafel, chess and raffle stuff, and we left, walking through the Ray School lot and the couple of blocks to my house.
The prize was magnificent. The Mirro-Matic was made of Aluminum, with a nifty glass cap, and an aluminum filter basket (no annoying paper filters to replace.) It was a percolator, so it basically boiled your coffee until it was ready. “What are you waiting for – let’s fill it up!” said Chris.
Chris and I were a little like enriched uranium. Left alone, we were well-behaved and predictable. But put us close together and stuff would happen. This was only enhanced by the fact that he’d moved away. We were still in good touch – someone had told me a magic sequence of about 60 digits that you could dial into the phone and make long distance calls for free. We could barely hear each other, but it was free. We’d met a few years before because I’d gotten a gift – enough money to buy a movie camera. But not a projector. At school, I’d asked all of my friends if they had a projector. “I think Chris Pearson has a projector,” I was told. I arranged an introduction. He lived a few blocks away, was kind of a goofball, but he had a projector, and my camera was fancier than his, so there we were.
By this point it was about 11 o’clock at night. Max, our 105-pound black Labrador, watched in curiosity (it looked like food might be involved) as we poured eight o’clock coffee in the aluminum basket, up to the line with the 8 on it, and Chris put the pot under the faucet, filling it to the corresponding 8. Then we plugged it in, in the basement of my house so that we wouldn’t wake the rest of us. The glass cap revealed its purpose – we could see water bubbling under it, getting steadily browner.
“Sleepover” is the word usually used when a friend comes to visit. Not that day. Max was confused, but pleased, when we walked him at midnight, and again at 3 AM. Around five o’clock my newspapers arrived – on Sundays the Tribune was a behemoth, weighing four or five pounds, so my paper route involved a cart. The district manager had asked “you need a cart?” I thought I’d get some kind of Chicago Tribune-issued bit of equipment, but the next morning Carl showed up with a shopping cart, fresh from the Jewel. I’d never had a job before, much less one that involved stolen property. Carl would also sometimes run out of newspapers, and then you’d be greeted not by a stack of 60 newspapers, but by one or two, with a quarter on the top of the pile. This meant you had to find a newspaper machine, put the quarter in, and steal the rest of what you needed.
One pot of coffee in us, with lots of sugar (we weren’t seasoned coffee drinkers) and we were good to go. But go where? Late night TV wasn’t much in those days, and the rest of my house was asleep. We couldn’t play the pinball machine (an old Gottlieb Mibs, possibly the dullest machine ever made) and anything above the basement was too noisy.
Kids today are the lesser for being denied a childhood they might not survive. But our most dangerous activities (fireworks, flaming spray cans, horizontal model rocket launches) were too noisy for late at night. So we told stories and kept busy until the newspapers arrived, and set out to deliver them. Sunday, so we needed the shopping cart, and had to stuff the ad section (which arrived in one pile) into the news section (printed later, in another pile.) Sunday papers were due by 830, luxurious compared to 7 AM for the rest of the week, but this week they were likely to be delivered by 5.
The paper route was from 55th to 59th, Woodlawn and University Avenues. As such, it included Milton Friedman, Saul Bellow, and Norman MacLean. Friedman (in his bathrobe) told me “if you put it inside the screen door, it’ll be worth your while.” A fundamental lesson in economics from the master. Saul Bellow was not talkative (for once) and Norman MacLean had me in for coffee a few times – he had taught Freshman Shakespeare to my father, and was likely working on Young Men and Fire at the time. I wish I’d been more troubled at the time – we might have had amazing conversations, but mostly I remember a nice old man, who didn’t know that kids don’t drink coffee.
At least until that night.
We finished the route, avoiding police attention. We tended to explore while we delivered, and the shopping cart was a great way to bring things home – milk crates, some of which are still in my basement, and random things we found. We stopped and pined in front of the houses of girls we liked, and squeaked the cart down the street as the sky got lighter, telling dirty jokes and repeating old Firesign Theater routines.
About an hour after we returned, my mother expressed displeasure at all the noise, and her eyes fell upon the new percolator (fresh from its second batch) and realized what was going on. Chris remembers her reaction as a trifle sarcastic. There’s a special relationship between a boy and his best friend’s mother – a level of entitlement that doesn’t apply to others. That day she was entitled to be a little snarky.
Sometime around mid-day we drove Chris to the Amtrak back to Springfield, and I went to a fitful sleep of perhaps 18 hours. He reported something similar when we called the 800 number that night.