GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #288: IT STARTED WITH A BAR

Last night's entry reminded me of the old way of doing things. I've said it before and I'll say it again now: I believe that the 'Eighties was the death toll of the 'Fifties. Think about all the nostalgia projects that came out in the 'Eighties about the time of DA haircuts, cars with fins and that old time rock 'n' roll. Not much of that leaked into the 'Nineties. That was when the world really, really began to change.


I grew up in the 'Eighties. I remember what it used to look like. At the risk of sounding like an old fart, I remember a time when stores closed at five and were always closed on Sundays. Cigarettes were everywhere, and the only reruns you could catch were from the 'Fifties and 'Sixties. Oh yeah, and you could hit your kid in public and no one would say anything about it. Women still belonged either pregnant or in the kitchen (preferably both). You had to be white to live in my hometown of Elmhurst. So don't get the idea I'm getting nostalgic in my old age. But I think about things a lot.


How much do you know about your own town? I love history, so I know a lot about mine. I recently tried to remember, though, what mom and pop store used to be where the Jewel/Osco is today. I remember going there a lot with my mom or grandma. Mom's gone. Grandma doesn't remember. One day I stumbled upon the answer because I discovered that the Elmhurst History Museum actually has a lot of old pictures up on their website. I looked through them all until I found a picture of the place. Here is a link in case you want to peruse some of the sights. If you're from Elmhurst yourself, I think you'll find a lot to interest you there.


It started with a bar. Without that bar, Elmhurst would not exist. But there it was, and the town grew up around it. There is a rock where the bar used to be on Cottage Hill and St. Charles, but it's all residential. The guy who ran the bar got the US to put a post office in the bar, and so the town began to really fire on all cylinders. It was called Hill Cottage back then, but soon changed to Elmhurst due to the amount of elm trees. This was before Dutch Elm disease took most of them out.


The clincher came when Union Pacific wanted to put a railroad through town. That's when Elmhurst truly began and slowly morphed into the small city I live in today. Some of the pictures showed images of places I know to be residential now, but were nothing but prairie back then. My junior high was Sandburg. It used to be Elmhurst Junior High. Carl Sandburg lived here for a while, but I had no idea he was there when they changed the name of the junior high. I see people fishing and cutting ice out of Salt Creek near what is now Spring Road (guess why they called it that). And it's hard for me to imagine horses walking down Park and York, much less actually see it in a picture. It's interesting to see what was there before they put the underpass in (which they surprisingly did when I was a mere year old). And then there were the gas stations that looked a lot like Gomer Pyle's on Andy Griffith.


What do you know about your own hometown's history? In the end, maybe it means nothing. At the same time, aren't you interested to see what came before? How did your town begin?


Some people laugh at my horrible attempts at trying to nickname Elmhurst the Suburban Prairie, much like Warren Ellis has the Thames Delta. It is very much tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time, after looking at those pictures, well. It makes some measure of sense.


Look at your own historical museums. Tell me what your nickname for your living space is.