"Is There No True American?"

That's pretty much the way I remember it too. I remember reading a newspaper feature story about block busting while I was still in school, but most of the other stuff happened after I was gone and I heard about it from my parents. They moved out to Palos Park just before I got out of the army, but it didn't have anything to do with racial issues. They had recently visited some close family friends who had moved there and were favorably impressed. Not long after that, a house just down the street from their friends came up for sale at a price they could afford. While they were still considering the move, and before they even put their house on 51st Street up for sale, they were approached by an agent from Central Steel and Wire who wanted to buy up the whole block and make a parking lot out of it.

My dad was still working at Lawndale Meat Products and, even though the commute increased from five miles to 15 miles, it took him the same time to drive to work, about a half hour. His old route had taken him down Kedzie, while his new route was down Manheim Road and some expressway, I think the Eisenhower. He and his partners agreed that it was only a matter of time till the Blacks would envelop the Lawndale neighborhood and they would have to close the store, but they hoped to keep it going until they were able to retire. It wasn't just that they didn't want to operate in a Black neighborhood, it was because all their customers, who were mostly Poles and Czechs, were either moving away or dying off. As it turned out, the Mexicans got there before the Blacks and kind of saved both the neighborhood and the store. One of the reasons the old Czechs and Poles shopped there was that all the butchers could speak their language, and now my father started to learn Spanish as well. My dad said that the Mexicans were good customers and good neighbors and he never had a problem with them. When they finally sold the store, it was losing money, but not because of the clientele, it was just that they couldn't compete with the big chain stores any longer. The buyers planned to close the retail part and just run the sausage factory.

When I was in the army, a bunch of us was sitting at a table in Steffanie's Bar in the British Sector. You may remember Steffanie's from my story "The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers". Since it wasn't Saturday night, there was no fight on the schedule, otherwise I wouldn't have been in the place myself. Anyway, these two young German girls came over and asked if they could sit with us. They didn't want to pick any of us up or any thing like that, they had been learning English in school and wanted to see if they could use it in the real world. They had conversed with British soldiers before, but we were the first Americans they had met. They were having a little trouble understanding one of the guys who had a bit of an accent, and he told them that he was Mexican. The girls were surprised because they had thought we were all Americans. We explained that we were indeed all Americans, but that particular guy was a Mexican-American. They asked about the rest of us and we went around the table telling them our ancestry. We had the Mexican, a Cuban, a Puerto Rican, a Filipino, an Italian, a Brazilian, and me, the Czech. One of the girls looked puzzled and asked "Is there no true American?" Well, I said, I suppose the only true Americans are the Indians, but there are none of them here at the moment.

We had this sergeant in the mess hall, his name was "Ibarra", or "Iberra", something like that. The only English words I ever heard him say were "Howa you wanna you eggs?" I always thought he spoke Spanish, but apparently not. One day I was on KP and he was trying to tell me to do something and I wasn't getting it. As luck would have it, some the same guys I had been with at Steffannie's the other night were on KP too that day, so I asked if one of them could translate for us. Although they all spoke Spanish in one dialect or another, except for the Brazilian, none of them could understand the sergeant either. The consensus was that, whatever he was speaking, it certainly wasn't Spanish. I said that maybe it was Portuguese, which I imagined sounded something like Spanish, but the Brazilian guy, who spoke Portuguese, said it wasn't that. It didn't sound anything like Italian, French, German, or any of the Slavic languages either. We never did find out what nationality that guy was, and he was a sergeant in the U.S. Army!