CATHERINE
Chicago: 1919-1939
1
Every large city has a distinctive image, a personality that gives it its own special cachet.
Chicago in the 1920’s was a restless, dynamic giant, crude and without manners, one
booted foot still in the ruthless era of the tycoons who helped give birth to it: William B.
Ogden and John Wentworth, Cyrus McCormick and George M. Pullman. It was a
kingdom that belonged to the Philip Armours and Gustavus Swifts and Marshall Fields. It
was the domain of cool professional gangsters like Hymie Weiss and Scarf ace Al Capone.
One of Catherine Alexander’s earliest memories was of her father taking her into a
bar with a sawdust-covered floor and swinging her up to the dizzyingly high stool. He
ordered an enormous glass of beer for himself and a Green River for her. She was five
years old, and she remembered how proud her father was as strangers crowded around to
admire her. All the men ordered drinks and her father paid for them. She recalled how she
had kept pressing her body against his arm to make sure he was still there. He had only
returned to town the night before, and Catherine knew that he would soon leave again. He
was a traveling salesman, and he had explained to her that his work took him to distant
cities and he had to be away from her and her mother for months at a time so that he could
bring back nice presents. Catherine had desperately tried to make a deal with him. If he
would stay with her, she would give up the presents. Her father had laughed and said what
a precocious child she was and then had left town, and it was six months before she saw
him again. During those early years her mother whom she saw every day seemed a vague,
shapeless personality, while her father, whom she saw only on brief occasions, was vivid
and wonderfully clear. Catherine thought of him as a handsome, laughing man, full of
sparkling humor and warm, generous gestures. The occasions when he came home were
like holidays, full of treats and presents and surprises.
When Catherine was seven, her father was fired from his job, and their life took on a
new pattern. They left Chicago and moved to Gary, Indiana, where he went to work as a
salesman in a jewelry store. Catherine was enrolled in her first school. She had a wary,
arms-length relationship with the other children and was terrified of her teachers, who
misinterpreted her lonely standoffishness as conceit. Her father came home to dinner
every night, and for the first time in her life Catherine felt that they were a real family, like
other families. On Sunday the three of them would go to Miller Beach and rent horses and
ride for an hour or two along the sand dunes. Catherine enjoyed living in Gary, but six
months after they moved there, her father lost his job again and they moved to Harvey, a
suburb of Chicago. School was already in session, and Catherine was the new girl, shut
out from the friendships that had already been formed. She became known as a loner. The
children, secure in the safety of their own groups, would come up to the gangly newcomer