Some times of a morning

Some times of a morning

the life and homes of Jane Love

Beverly, in Chicago, Illinois

Earl decided to open his own Beauty Shop with a partner [he had met at the Fair Store. It was called Lagniappe, and was on Western Avenue just south of 103rd St, in what was called Beauty Shop Row, between the Purple Cow Ice Cream Parlor and a Southern restaurant whose workers were always on strike.]

We borrowed $500 from my mother to finance it. The money was paid back in 3 months. I thought it would be good to move closer to Earl’s shop and easier to drive Doug to the Planetarium.
After dropping Earl off at the shop [one day], I decided to drive around the neighborhood. I turned left off of 103rd street onto Charles St. The second [third] house on the left [10238] had a for sale sign in the yard. I was so excited at what I saw I parked and went into the yard and up to the house. It was empty, so I decided to explore.

There was a walk on the side of the yard from the street to the house [, with a hedge between it and the driveway]. There were TREES, in a small lawn surrounded with a hedge. Off [the] center [of the yard] was an old apple tree, and a very large chestnut tree. The front porch wrapped around to the side of the house, and that part was screened in.
I walked around the side. There was a cherry tree on that side, and a pear tree. [I loved to pick those cherries! But the pears were like rocks.]

The back yard was bordered with snowball and Spireo bushes on the south side, and Lilac bushes on the north side. There was a walk leading out to– of all things, a small barn! –and garden space lined with grapevines and current bushes on the south.


The back of the house from the neighbor's
The barn had windows on the south side, a door facing the house, and a big barn door on the north side by the driveway. [The loft became my new Fort, where I tried to invite friends. But the teenagers I went to school with were less interested in that sort of thing.]

I didn’t know it then, but the driveway was half on the neighbor’s side and half on our side. I had already fallen in love with it. The back door led up to another small screened-in porch.

I went up the steps and looked in the window to a large kitchen with a large breakfast bar. I walked back around to the front and looked into the glass door and saw a lovely stairway, and through the large window into the living room, which opened into the dining room.

I called the phone number on the For Sale sign and made an appointment for after work to see the rest of the house after Earl got off work.

We met the lady who owned the house. She opened the door for us to see it. It had four rooms and a bath downstairs, and a stair- way from the kitchen to the second floor with lots of windows, [above which was another stairway] which...led up to the large attic. There were 3 large rooms and a bathroom upstairs, and large closets in the bedrooms. The basement ran under the complete area of the house. There was a large workshop and a work table covering most of the floor, as well as washtubs and a gas stove, used as a studio by the artist who owned it. [I later took piano lessons from her. She tried to introduce me to Jazz, at which time I lost interest in piano lessons.]
Earl painted this picture of the house from the back. His favorite restaurant, the Beverly House, appears throught the trees at the right where another house actually stands.
Click on it to see it enlarged.
The house was 70 years old at the time. [The neighborhood had been built for the 1892 Columbian Exposition, and was at the extreme south end of the city in those days.] The price was right, so we decided to buy it. Our house in Oak Lawn sold to the first couple who saw it.

our second powerboat
 [Around this time, we took up boating. We had 2 power boats at first, which we kept on a back- water on the Chicago Sanitary Canal. Once we went as far as Lake Calumet, where we ran into an island of cornflakes dumped from a ship.]

[Later we built an 18' Sailfish in the dining room. We had to take out the window to the back porch to get it out of the house. We were scared of the waves on Lake Michigan, so we took it to Lake Mattoon where my grandparents lived, and to Lake Carbondale, near Aunt Jean's.]
Earl Love pilots the Sailfish sailboard
on Lake Carbondale. Click on it to see
Jane's watercolor of this photo.
[I didn't enjoy flipping it over as much as my parents did, as I didn't and still don't swim. Dad finally broke a rib doing that, and sold the sailboat. It was fun while it lasted. Then we built a swimming pool in the back yard.]

 [We bred Ceasar, and picked Missy from the litter. We kept her after Caesar escaped and was killed by a car, but eventually we gave her to Uncle Loy.

Mom's mother spent part of her last year in the downstairs part of the house. It was big enough to be a separate apartment. Later Dad's mother did the same. She really bitched a lot!

After Grandma Carmen moved back to Albuquerque, Dad sold his share of the beauty shop to his partner, and opened a shop in the downstairs part of the house.]


Grandma Hemphill spent her last birthday with my Uncle Donald and his youngest son Danny

[One time we were thinking of selling the house, long before we actually did. The Knox family visited us one night, and we decided to not sell the house, so we took down the For Sale sign as they left. The next night, the next door neighbors came over and asked us if we had sold to Blacks! We told them we hadn’t, and the neighbors preparing to burn down our house dispersed. I don’t know what the sole Black family across the street thought of that, because they kept such a low profile that I didn’t know we had Black neighbors. I would have befriended them.


Jane's trailer
 In the early 1960s] Earl decided to move out on me while I was in the hospital. [He was having an affair with on of his employees.] Later he was sorry and cried to come back to me. I let him back into my life. [After leaving for college, I worried about them. They weren’t fighting any more, but Dad had a hernia operation that kept him from working for several months. I worried about staying in school, which had to be full-time to avoid going to VietNam.
While Dad was living elsewhere, mom bought a trailer that we stayed in when we visited relatives in Southern Illinois.]

The beauty shop had been a success, but business started falling off. Our customers were moving away, and the neighborhood was changing. We saw this happen in Hyde Park where we worked before. So we decided it was time for us to make a change. We thought we should go South to a warmer place.

[By then I had spent 3 years at 2 colleges, and had moved to Bloomington, Indiana to continue my education and go cave exploring. My parents found that Southern Indiana was a nicer climate, more like where they grew up in Illinois.]

← Oak Lawn, Illinois ↓ The Cottage on
Lake Michigan		 Doug's house in
Bloomington, Indiana ↓		 Nashville, Indiana →