NEWSFLASH - Janice has informed us that she will be attending the 50th reunion!

 

Janice Westlund Bryan and Jon Bryan

 

I'm sorry I won't be able to make it to my 50th reunion. Being so far away I try to limit my trips to see family.

I'm retired now and am taking a class at the U. of Hawaii (seniors audit free) in autobiography writing. My first piece was on Naperville. (See below.)

Our daughter Elizabeth is married to Tony Martinez and lives in Lafayette, CO. She is stepmother to David, 19, and Anthony, 17, who are in community college and high school.Our daughter Rebecca is married to Marc Friend and lives in Palo Alto, CA. She is mother to jasper who will be one on October 24, 2008.

English 273

Janice W. Bryan

Short Piece #1

Field Trip

We belted out the song "Ninety nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety nine bottles of beer, if one of those bottles should happen to fall ... ninety eight bottles of beer on the wall..." and so forth ad nauseam all twenty eight miles it took us to get into Chicago on our school bus. I have no idea where that song came from. Perhaps it was an old German drinking song since our town, which was actually incorporated as a city, was founded in 1831 by a German, John Naper, hence the name Naperville. He and family members sailed two months in their schooner through three Great Lakes and then came across land to settle on the banks of the DuPage River. We bragged that our town was two years older than Chicago. Our sign announced a population of 7007.

Boys in crimson jackets, emblazoned with white letters FFA (Future Farmers of America) on their backs, roamed our school halls. Along with the farm children were people like us who lived in a three bedroom, one-and-a-half bath ranch house. Because the farmers' children lived so far away most of my friends had fathers who ran small businesses in town selling coal and oil, cars, or insurance.

I did join 4-H, however, and learned how to sew well enough to win trips to the State Fair and collect some blue ribbons. We also had lessons on practical things like how to fix a light switch. Although I can't remembers things that happened yesterday, I can still recall the pledge we recited before each meeting: "I pledge my HEAD to clearer thinking, my HEART to greater loyalty, my HANDS to greater service, and my HEALTH to better living for my club, my community, and my country." We wore green pins in the shape of a four leaf clover with a white "H" on each leaf. Years later when I lived near Boston I asked a citified friend if she knew what the 4-H's were and the only thing she could think of was "horse" which was as good a guess as any I suppose.

I didn't know any other fathers like mine, although there must have been some, who commuted into Chicago on the Burlington Rail Road which deposited them in the city each day and then after work re-deposited them back home. My father had put himself through the electrical engineering program at the University of Minnesota (go Gophers) during the Depression by working at a knitting mill and a bread factory and was rewarded with a life-long job at Western Electric, which produced telephone systems, and a retirement which included money and health benefits until he died. My mother worked first as a secretary to an elementary school principal and later as the secretary for the superintendent of schools. The great tragedy in her life, she told us over and over, was she couldn't afford to go to college, being sixth of nine children who grew up during the Depression on a farm in South Dakota with a father who was "a terrible farmer." Her dream had been to be a teacher and this was the closest she could get. She would also tell us over and over, "Get an education. No one can take that away from you." The way she said it made me wonder if there actually were people lurking in the bushes ready to pounce on us and try to grab our education. She was the one who rescued us from having to commute to the local college run by the First Evangelical United Bretheren Church where our father wanted to send my twin sister and me, because that was our church and they offered a "two for the price of one" scholarship.

I'm not sure what made my parents pick Naperville over other towns. The railroad was certainly a factor but it also had a large "beach" made out of an old quarry with sand in the shallow end. It was roped off from the deep end, which had diving boards, rafts, and piers where we spent our summers playing endless games of tag. We would ride our bikes there and back and when we were older some of us taught swimming and worked as lifeguards where we got to row around in the deep end in a rowboat to look for and rescue drowning victims, and play card games on the grass during our breaks. We glistened under the baby oil we rubbed on our pale skins and spun over periodically, as if on a spit, to attain an even toasty brown. That was the closest we got to "people of color" in our town. In those days minorities were actually the Catholics who got to join our high school after their stint was up in Saint Peter and Paul's Elementary School. Even though we lived in the North I remember once, when kids were bussed out to the "beach" from an orphanage in the city, the Black children weren't allowed to swim and had to settle on dangling their feet in the water at the edge of wall.

Before my cushy life guarding days we earned money, I think it was 75 cents an hour, by detasseling corn in the hot sun. One person drove and steered a machine through rows of corn with the rest of the crew on connecting platforms and we pulled the tassels out of the eight female rows, but not from the two taller male rows boardering them, so they could cross pollinate and produce hybrid corn. It was hot, dirty, and exhausting but we persevered with visions of new school clothes arriving in lumpy packages from the Sears Roebuck catalogue.

But back to our bus ride into Chicago. We were so busy keeping track of the bottles of beer on the wall we hardly noticed anything until we arrived at the stockyards on the south side of the city, the poor area where Barack Obama chose to work and settle in after Harvard Law School. I can't remember if we were at the Swift or Armour plant. It was in the 1950's and we were told that Chicago was the center of the meatpacking business. They shut down butchering by the 1960's, because they needed factories with more modern technology, and went to places where the unions weren't yet established. They then rented out space for parties and my first date with my husband was at a sorority party there in 1961. I was thrilled that he came from such an exotic place as Hawaii, married him a week after I graduated, and moved to Hawaii the very next day, where he was stationed in the Navy. I tell people I found him shivering in a snow bank north of Chicago.

The powerful stench of death greeted us when we filed in the door of the slaughterhouse. I held my breath as a steer arrived at the head of the line where a man with an enormous sledge hammer, which he raised high behind his back, swung it with all his might, and deposited it with a thud on the top of the steer's head, whacking and cracking the skull. I remember those brown eyes widening, looking both shocked and confused, before they closed as he sank on the floor, first the front legs crumbling and then the back ones. I can't remember how they did it but somehow they slit his throat and got his body upside down on a hook attached to a conveyor belt as he began his slow journey down the line. It reminded me of the pictures Mr. Plazek, my fifth grade teacher, showed us that he took in the war of Mussolini, and some other men, and even his girlfriend, hanging upside down in Italy.

The next man in the row used a gleaming knife to slit open the steer's underside from top to bottom. The intestines poked out and more blood collected in a trough that gushed the length of the room to some unknown destination. Hopefully not out to the Chicago River and then out to Lake Michigan. Each man, wearing a substantial butcher's apron, stood at attention at his appointed station, and hacked off a different part of the animal as it lurched by. I felt lightheaded, nauseas, and hugged myself for comfort. I'm sure others must have felt the same. We were told that nothing was wasted and in addition to meat and leather they produced glue, oil, fertilizer, hairbrushes, buttons, oleomargarine, and drugs from the byproducts. Another product that was a big hit was Dial deodorant soap, which offered 24 hour protection against body odor. They advertised it first in a full page ad in the Chicago Tribune using scented ink and the slogan, "Aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish that everybody did?"

Being rooted to a small patch of earth, with friends since childhood, made some of us life-long friends. For over thirty years, after the exhausting early years of raising young children, a fanned-out group of us "girls" have met periodically for slumber parties and sight-seeing at each others houses—in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, Massachusetts, Virginia Beach, Knoxville, and most recently nine of us met at my home in Honolulu. I've tried going to official high school reunions, but I can't find my Naperville anymore which is now looked back at as a "quaint farm town." Although I know I couldn't stop Progress, the obliteration of my past breaks my heart and reassures me I can't ever go home again. The farms have turned into housing subdivisions and office complexes for high tech companies such as Tellabs, Lucent Technologies, and the BP North American Chemical Headquarter. We had one high school with 150 in our graduating class ('59 Will Shine) only half of whom went on to college. There are now four high schools ranked in the top 3 percent of high schools in the country. The population is now over 150,000 people who live in multimillion dollar homes, with the average salary $150,000 a year. Money Magazine voted it the second and third best place to live in the United States in 2006 and 2008.

I don't remember much else about the slaughter house except one of the last men in line gathered hot dogs, stacked them up neatly in rows, and put cellophane around them in a tidy package. After that we were herded into the lunchroom and served a roast beef dinner.