Street Peddlers

I remember those street peddlers back in the 50s. We had a fruit peddler with a truck, and a knife grinder who we called the Umbrella Man. There was even a song about him, although it probably was written about some other umbrella man, not ours. I've got a copy of the sheet music somewhere.

"When there's a lull, and things get dull, he sharpens knives for all the wives in the neighborhood, and he's rather good. He'll darn a sock, he'll set a clock, an apple cart, a broken heart, he'll mend anything, but he'd rather sing, Toodelumaluma, toodelumaluma, toodeleyay. Any umberellas, any umberellas to fix today?" ......or something like that.

Our umbrella man didn't sing, though, or even talk. He didn't have just a single grinding wheel, he had a miniature machine shop mounted on a tricycle similar to the ones the ice cream peddlers had. He would peddle up to the corner, then change gears so that the tricycle stood still and all the wheels and grinders turned at the same time when he peddled. I only saw him a few times, but some of the older kids had known him for years, and he let them peddle for him while he sharpened stuff.

My favorite, though, was the Ragsaline Man. He had a horse and wagon that went clattering down the alley once a week to pick up junk. We called him the Ragsaline Man because that's what we thought we heard him chanting as he clattered down the alley driving our dogs nuts. Come to find out, years later, that he was really saying "rags and old iron", but he ran it all together so that it sounded like "ragsaline". He was one of the last street peddlers in Chicago. When I was in the army, my mother sent me a newspaper clipping about when he retired or died or something. It explained that the city fathers had decided to phase the street peddlers out a long time ago. They stopped issuing new licenses,  but they allowed the guys who were already operating to keep doing it until they retired or died, which they all eventually did.

There was another self contained community right downtown called the Merchandise Mart. It was all in one building, and you could theoretically live there your whole life without leaving that building, but I don't know if anybody ever actually did that. Is it still there?

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