29 Dover St. 5 The Neighborhood 1-15-2020

My parents were proud of their Zook designed Irish Hut. It sits on a triangular lot that was once a park. When we were growing up there  was a  large concrete fountain (a remnant of the park) in the corner of our next door neighbors , the Grogan's, house (to the east). Dover Street was distinct from Dover Place, a one block long street on the south side of the Auge's House across the street. Dover Place had no houses on it. Dover Street started at the gas station two blocks to the southeast, curved around our house and then went north across Ogden Avenue and ending 3-4 blocks north  at the Salt Creek Woods where the street turned east and with another name.

The Grogan's lived to the east of us. Barney Grogan owned the Florsheim Shoe store on La Grange Road south of the tracks on the east side. Barney had a machine that allowed you to see your feet in the new shoes for fit. I loved seeing my toes wiggle. After awhile we learned that such machines could be dangerous because of the radiation but it was a cool machine. Barney was a friendly neighbor but the pressures of life in his later years were too great  and he did himself in. We kids,of course, wondered what the room where it happened looked like.

The Hoags lived to the north of us with their elderly parents, the Bancrofts. They had several children and my brother was close to their son Chuckie. The Hoags moved and were replaced by the Fries, a large family from Tennessee, with many teen age daughters. They were very 'country'  with southern accents which added a lot of drama to the neighborhood.

The Leverings lived next to the Hoags. Dorothy Levering was my age and when she was five had polio requiring an iron lung. It was a time of concern. Polio was felt to be contagious and this fear was one of the reasons we were sent out of town for July and August for several years. Dorothy had been our playmate and I can still remember visiting her when she was in the iron lung. She passed away after about a year and a half (right at the start of the war). This was scary for us kids.

We all had the usual childhood infections such as measles and mumps and chicken pox. The village required contagious disease specific red signs to be put on the front door for several weeks when we had these diseases. Once while riding my bike near a friends house on Park I was bitten by a dog. Because the bite broke the skin  I had to take the two week series(14 days) of the dread anti-rabies shots in my hip. They were not really as painful as advertised

Our home was very well positioned. We could walk one block to the IGA grocery store and Schneider's Drug store a little further. Down from the drug store on Hilgrove was Nick's  Barber Shop.(One day I went to Nicks and asked for a Heiny haircut. My hair had been somewhat longer so Nick who was very smart  told me to go get my mother before he would do that, which I did). Further east on Hilgrove was the Park Movie Theater where almost every kid in town went on Saturday afternoons. It was during the war and each week we would see a news update and then either a war or a western movie. My favorite war movie was "The Commandos Strike at Dawn", a 1942 film with Paul Muni and Lillian Gish. My favorite western was any Hoppalong Cassidy film starring William Boyd. The kid noise in the theater was deafening. 

My dad worked at the Thorsen Real Estate office which was right across the street from the railroad tracks,an easy walk from home.