“With little more than our hopes and a flimsy strategy, we (Karl, daughter Carroll Lee, age 3, and I) loaded up what little we had into a bus—all our household items were wrapped up in an old grey blanket and tied with a piece of rope) and headed east in the depths of the Great Depression (1933) to begin Karl’s medical school training. There, we learned what it meant to be poor—like all the people around us.

We got off the bus carrying our little girl and the rope-tied blanket bundle—the totality of our earthly possessions–and started to walk around to find a place to live. We found an apartment we could more or less afford in one of the poor immigrant parts of the city on Maxwell Street (see photo). Some old houses that had once been fine homes had deteriorated badly and had been cut up into separate small apartments with a little stove or a hotplate. I think we got one with a hotplate. During our first night there, we waked up to hear scurrying noises. We turned on the lights to see bunches of bugs running around. That was the first time I ever saw cockroaches.

“Maxwell was (and presumably still is) an east-west street in Chicago that intersects with Halsted Street south of Roosevelt Road. The neighborhood is part of the Near West Side and is one of the city’s oldest residential districts. During our stay there, and for something like 100 years before that, was a most unconventional business and residential district. It was a mile long and was located in the shadows of the downtown skyscrapers. You could hardly walk on the street because of the incredible numbers of people, all trying to sell something it seemed. You could buy anything from the latest Paris and New York fashions to shoestrings or thimbles.          “Every imaginable ethnic group was represented there—negro people, Jews, Armenians, Italians, Polacks, Greeks, Latins, Scandihoovians, you name it. Across the hall from us lived the Poileittis–Joe, Helen, and Joey–who were wonderful to us, especially Ma Poiletti. Their apartment was better than ours because they could have their place constantly fumigated. To say life was hard was a gross understatement. There were times when we shared a carrot for supper and were glad to have it. I got a job in Marshall’s Department store where they let me work by the hour to get around the NRA rules. Karl sold his blood for $25 a pint. The two years in Chicago were years of gradual starvation and deprivation.

“After a while we were able to move into a little larger apartment which had a kitchenette. There was a little park across the street. Before I got the job at Marshall Fields, I used to take our little one there to play on the swings. She was very unhappy, cried all the time. She wanted to go back to Spanish Fork. It wasn’t great fun for me either. We had to work all the time to get enough food; so, we didn’t have any time for movies, radio, card playing, or singing like back home, even if we had had the money for such frivolous things. That summer I got a ride with a friend of my dad’s and took Carroll Lee back to Spanish Fork for a month. I felt much better, but I worried about Karl. Carroll Lee loved it there and wanted to stay even when I had to go back. I don’t think she really cared if she never saw me again. It was just too nice to sit on the porch in the sun on an old rocker.

“The teaching hospital where Karl obtained his coveted medical degree was established on Wood and Harrison Streets by the Rush faculty established a teaching hospital they originally named the Presbyterian Hospital, with the support of a local Presbyterian congregation in 1883, and the Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing was founded in 1903. A reconstituted Rush Medical College came from the Old Presbyterian Hospital. The medical school received its charter on March 2, 1837, two days before the city of Chicago was incorporated. Rush Medical College was the first medical school in Chicago, and one of the earliest in the Midwest.

“The founder of Rush Medical College, Daniel Brainard, MD, named the school in honor of Benjamin Rush, MD, the only physician with medical school training to sign the Declaration of Independence and was affiliated with the University of Chicago from 1898 to the period when Karl attended. Following the end of this affiliation, Rush Medical College closed its doors in 1942—seven years after we left Chicago. It remained dormant for the next twenty-seven years. The first months in Chicago were spent trying to stay alive. Then things got really tough. I’ll rest up and tell you about that next time, God willing.”