1139 Elmwood Avenue...

...in Wilmette is up for sale again and I stopped by today for a look. A friend of mine who lives on Forest, the next street over, called me this afternoon and told me that one of the houses I grew up in would be open from 2 to 4. So I hopped into my gold '65 Chevy Corvair (which is unsafe at any speed) and tooled on over. Past Meier's Tavern on Lake Avenue I drove, past the DQ, past Loyola Academy, over the Edens and past Chalet until I finally drove over the railroad tracks and took a left onto 12th Street. I slowed down immediately as I drove onto the red brick-paved streets of the CAGE (Chestnut, Ashland, Greenwood, Elmwood).

My buddy Scott was waiting for me and we went inside and met the listing agent. She was an Irish Catholic gal who grew up in the western suburbs but now lives on Lake Avenue and sends her kids to St. Francis. (Sound familiar?) After telling her why I was there, I asked her what the house was selling for. "One million, forty-seven thousand," was her reply. I told her my dad paid about forty-seven thousand for it in 1962. (I guess it's appreciated a little since then.) The taxes are over $15,000, and my mother said that that's gone up, too.

The house looks good on the inside; the hardwood floors gleamed. It was much better than the outside, which has gray siding now and odd-looking oversized windows. When we lived there it had red brick on the first floor and white siding on the second -- typical for that era. I explained to the broker that my father built on to the dining room even as we were planning to move. She got a puzzled look on her face. "You had to know my dad," I said. He also had the builder convert the garage into a family room and build another garage on the alley. Above the family room, he put on two more bedrooms -- that's how the house had six in all. "Six?" she said, incredulously. "There are only five in this house."

"That's impossible. My parents had one, my sister had one, my oldest brother had one, my next two brothers shared one, I had one, and we had a den (that's where we watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan). That's six." Again she gave me her puzzled look. "Come on, I'll show you."

So up the stairs we went. To the left was the den; it still had the original wood paneling, painted over many times, I'm sure. It seemed much smaller than I remembered it, though. In fact, the whole house seemed smaller than I remembered it. (Maybe I'm just bigger.) I told Scott that after dinner when my father was traveling on business (which was often) my mother would send my brothers and me up to this room to work off some energy. My oldest brother Jim would then lock the door, turn out the lights and we'd all swing wildly at each other. It usually ended up with someone crying, but by then we were ready to sit down and do our homework. (Times were a little different back then.) My sister Joanne would usually do her homework in front of the TV in the den and I would often sneak in there after my bedtime to watch "Patty Duke" with her. (She also enjoyed dressing me up as a girl from time to time, but I won't go into that now. Gotta save something for the therapist.)

Farther down the hall and to the left was the master bedroom. Turning around, there were three more bedrooms: the one that Tom and Peter shared, Joanne's room, and mine. Let's see; that's one, two, three, four, five bedrooms. Five? What happened to Jimmy's room? It disappeared; it's been expunged from the record! But how could that be? Well, if you knew my brother, you'd understand. Stuff like that always seems to happen to him.

The backyard looks the same, as does the garage and the alley, although I didn't see anyone driving a go-cart or lighting off any cherry bombs or M-80s. No skitching, either -- it's summer, remember?

I shook hands with Scott and thanked him again for the heads up. I was now in a nostalgic mood, though, so I drove through downtown Wilmette, past the corner where Lyman Sargent was, past the theatre and over to the lakefront and Gilson Park. The Bahai Temple still looks magnificent, but the Teatro movie theatre is long gone. Also, No Man's Land and Suicide Hill are now home to expensive high-rise condo buildings overlooking the lake.

I headed west, eventually, and drove past our other house in Wilmette. (Again, you had to know my father.) It looked good and I hope to visit that one some day, too.