our man, John Huss

I'm a little confused about C O.  I assume that means commanding officer, but I don't know what rank that would be,  I always thought that there would be a sergeant, one of those big-time sergeants with the upside down chevrons under his regular chevrons, master sergeants I think they called them.  And a sergeant was not an officer.

There is some kind of line between officers and sergeants and corporals and privates, and isn't there something below privates, for like the new guys.  I think you can work your way up from a new guy to one of those sergeants with all the chevrons, but you can never become an officer unless you do something more (officers training school?). 

So why didn't you go to OTC (I think I am getting the hang of this)?  You had that perfectly good Gage Park education.  Did you just want to be one of the guys, and maybe you would go into it later?

The busing is not for racial reasons.  There is a system where if you don't like your neighborhood school you can apply to have your kid go to a different school and maybe they will let him and maybe not.  These kids are bussed in.  In my experience these kids were often black because the schools in black areas were generally worse than the schools in hispanic areas where I taught,  They were a bit of a disciplinary problem because the normal behavior in their neighborhoods was rougher then the one where they were going to.  And I think the other kids goaded them into being bad, they wanted them to be like the black guys they saw on tv.

I said Western but what I really meant was the area east of a viaduct that was a block or two east of western.  The maps in the book show the color line to be further east than that and maybe they were right, we didn't really go into those areas, we just knew what we heard.

You know it wasn't until I was maybe thirty when I first heard of John Huss.  I would go on about being a Bohunk because I thought it was cool (never got me any babes though, I don't know why not), and then one day one of my more academically inclined buddies asked me how about that John Huss, and I was like Who?

Since then of course I have done a lot of reading on the subject.  The English had that empire the sun never set on and the French had Napoleon, and we Bohunks have John Huss.  I think you are wrong about all the Czechs becoming Catholic after that, there was the Moravian Brethren who are still around and had some influence on our own John Wesley.  And then there were the Bohemian Freethinkers, not really atheists, more like agnostics, maybe even like unitarians, but certainly not Catholics.

Do you remember hearing about the Eastland?  The boat was chartered for the employees of Western Electric which was located in Cicero by Berwyn and when it tipped over a lot of Czechs lost their lives.  There is a whole section for them in the Bohemian National, all these tombstones with different birthdates but they all have the same death date, right down to the day.