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Some times of a morningthe life and homes of Jane LoveWorking in ChicagoAfter working in the steel mills and taking classes at a beauty school, I began working as a manicurist at Gunn’s Beauty Salon in Hyde Park in the 1940s. It was an elegant place, with statuary everywhere. Doug learned to read there, looking at the Breck ads in the magazines. |
 in Gunn's Salon |
I lived a Bohemian life on the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s. My cousins Jean, Lillian and Erika shared an apartment with me for awhile, and we took art photos. Lillian had just returned from winning World War II in Africa, and lived an exciting life. We met some interesting folks there. Jean later married Judge Schwartz, Erika became a radio and TV star, and a realtor in California. Lillian remained an adventurer. She lived in a log cabin in Southern Illinois, and rode an elephant on her 80th birthday. |
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 Lillian Hemphill  Jean Hemphill |
 Jane as an old person  Jean posing |
| Doug made a brief video about my best friend Irene Knox when she visited us in Greenbelt in the 1980s. We went to the opera together in the 1940s, and one night the Opera was Verdi’s "Othello, the Moor of Venice". It inspired her to marry Mr. Fred Knox, a cultured Black professional, rather than one of the White Bohemians in the neighborhood. They remained close friends, and Doug grew up with their kids, finally giving their grandkids all of his childhood toys. We continued to have fun times in a racially tolerant city. |  | |
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Some other relatives lived nearby that we did not introduce to the Knoxes, but visited often. My mother’s sister Clara moved with her husband Loy Collins to Crown Point, Indiana, where he drove a switch engine for the Chicago Harbor Belt Railroad, and collected dogs and railroad memorabilia. Clara Collins was the original couch potato, watching TV day and night. She let Doug watch anything with her, and even took him to horror movies, against my wishes. Doug stayed with them and played in the creek behind their house, and caught fierce hayfever every summer. | |
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Loy Collins was a master at training animals. He trained horses in Marion Illinois,
but only kept dogs in Indiana. In Marion, his daughters felt that they were above us when
we were children, but his son Bill has kept in touch with us, sharing an interest in geneaology.
Loy had one unfortunate trait for someone living close to Gary Indiana: he actually believed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He showed it to Doug when he was 9, and Doug saw through it immediately. Loy constantly fought with Clara over politics and religion, but Doug remembers one Thanksgiving where she gave Loy a third of a pie for dessert, and they smiled warmly at each other.
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But then there was Earl Love. He had grown up in Alton IL, and also disliked his own immediate family. (He once warned Doug that if he ever looked them up, they would be after him for money, so Doug has remained true to his father’s wishes, and only knew Earl's mother Carmen, grandmother Puetz, and aunt Charlotte. Doug’s favorite relative on his dad’s side was Charlotte’s husband Uncle Carl, who called him “Doogie”. Charlotte was the president of the African Violet Society when they lived in a big house in Webster Groves, MO, west of St. Louis. Then they bought a farm, and Carl became an egg farmer in Missouri where Doug explored his first wild cave in 1960, and discovered his love of Classical Music while helping him deliver eggs. Carl and Charlotte later ran the Big-O-Burger restaurant near Potosi Mo. They always fought, which seems to be a family trait, but they were reputed to be Earl’s nicest relatives. Grandma Puetz’s husband had owned and sold the Budweiser company during the depression, and died poor.) |  
Puetz |
Earl was a signalman on Guam in WW II. After the war, he worked in a bolt factory, then as a street photographer, while taking classes to be a hair stylist on the G.I. Bill. He had first learned to cut hair by cutting his mother’s hair, against his own wishes. When he graduated, he started working at Gunn’s. Later he went to Toronto every few years, and brought blow-dry to Chicago in the 1970s. We met soon after I had left Frankie, and when his son Doug was born, he adopted Doug and married me. [Mom later disputed this statement, claiming that they were married before I was born. I dunno.] Although I hadn’t been with Frankie for 18 months, he still thought he was Doug’s father! |
| Earl was a good husband and a good provider, at first. I really loved him, and he said he loved me. Until recently I have had nightmares about him. For several years, we shared a basement apartment on Stoney Island Avenue (now Martin Luther King Avenue) just north of the terminus of the 63rd street Elevated Train station. It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Doug’s first memories are from this apartment. This is where I first told Douglas about Jesus while he was in his crib, and it took. He’s now a deacon in our church. |  |
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Earl smoked his pipe at night, and Douglas was allergic to it. Mr. Gunn gave baby
Douglas a pet bird, and his allergies got worse, so Mr. Gunn had to take it back.
Later, we both gave up smoking before everyone else realized how bad it was.
Doug’s health improved drastically at that point. We let him try smoking when he was 4,
and he couldn’t finish his first cigarette. It was his last, I’m proud to say!
We raised Douglas on Dr. Spock, Classical music and English poetry records. He developed what he calls an Evanstonian accent, because of the English accents of the announcers at the Classical radio station in Evanston, north of Chicago. The people that work at the steel mills east of us lived in what they called “Sout’Chacoggy”, a totally different accent. | ||||
| When I still worked at Gunn’s, I would sometimes leave Doug with Earl’s mother, who lived 2 blocks away on Blackstone Ave, overlooking the train tracks. One day Doug made a friend while hanging out the window, and his grandmother thought he would fall out, so she shut the window. End of friendship. |  |
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Her alcoholic second husband Fred Swoboda would play with the toys he had bought for Doug, and was disappointed when Doug asked him to stop one day. Fred kept the refrigerator filled with beer. He worked at Spiegel’s, but during WW II had designed a footbridge over the Outer Drive near the Lake. He later died of a sore toe, and Carmen moved back to Albuquerque. Her first husband, Earl’s father, is said to have built the Tucson airport, but hasn’t been seen since 1947. When it was inconvenient for Doug to stay with his grandparents, he stayed with the Sterlings, a family nearby on Blackstone, where Jim would sometimes play “I gave my love a cherry” on the trombone. | ||
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One day their daughter was playing hide-and-seek with Doug, and Doug somehow didn’t see her in the closet. He ended up looking for her on the Elevated train station at 63rd Street, but came back safely. It was a safe neighborhood in those days, but still I once told Doug, “See those men sleeping on the grass in the park across the street? They’re bums. Never go over there.” |  |
| ← Marathon Dancing | Hometown, Illinois → | |
