NEIGHBORHOODS: Wilmette, IL

We even lived on a weird block in Wilmette, in our whitebread, Ozzie-and-Harriet style northern suburb, where I grew up in a German Catholic area (full of unrelated Hoffmanns), and had as idyllic a childhood as anyone could hope to have. Still, there was plenty to keep me and my “alley pals” interested. For example, the Godemanns lived on the corner with their four young daughters and grandma, plus an apparently unending supply of bottled beer. The latter was enjoyed by the entire family every clear summer night, along with their alfresco dinners at their gray picnic table, flaking paint into their TV dinners.

Our lot was sliced off the back of their property, plus that of the Salvanos and the Sullivans, as our house had been a wedding gift from the developer of the neighborhood to his daughter, the grandmotherly Mrs. Hoth who babysat me when I was little. My bedroom overlooked these yards plus the alley (which also ran under our kitchen window), so I was well aware of what the Godemanns had for dinner, especially as my mom was idiotically firm about sending me to bed at 8:00, even in summer when the sun was still out.

Mr. Godemann was the head baker for Bennison’s Bakery, and created fabulous cakes with spun sugar roses built upon marischino cherries to give them volume and realism. No one could make a cake like he could, even though our doormat had, I believe, a higher IQ. He was six-foot-two and skinny as rail, in spite of his habit of putting away two or three six-packs of beer every night. His wife was short, dumpy, dumb and good-natured, and the daughters were alternately tall and reedy or short and dumpy like their parents.

Next to them were the Salvanos, a fascinating menagerie I never tired of watching from my little bedroom, which was an enclosed (by my father) sleeping porch, screened on three sides by elm branches, and facing north (Wilmette Avenue and the Godemann/Salvano Show); east (down the alley); and south (overlooking the alley and the yards of the Dormodys and the Smiths). So I had all the entertainment a television-less house could possibly ask for, and then some.

Mr. Salvano was barely five feet high, a wiry little Italian who had married a dumpling named Eleanor Doetsch, whose wealth was derived from a very large quarry on Grosse Pointe Road colorfully named Doetsch’s Pit, now a thriving municipal park. The dumpling tolerated Jake just long enough for him to completely remodel everything on the property, then tossed him out to live the life of a single mom with serial live-in boyfriends and four children: truly a woman ahead of her time.

There was a hedge between the Salvanos and the Godemanns and the two men occasionally would have a go at it with giant clippers on weekends. This was always an event. Jake would begin down by the garages, clipping as high as his five-foot frame would allow, while Herman would begin by the houses, whacking away a foot above Jake’s head. When they met in the middle there would be a loud altercation regarding who was to blame for the lopsided trim, and Linda Dormody would magically materialize at my side to take in the fireworks.

They remained on good terms for most of their neighborly lives, however, in spite of the occasional fight that would put both sets of parents leaning precariously out of upstairs windows hollering for the whole of Wilmette’s 17,000 souls to hear; while the children (four on a side) would lean out the downstairs porch windows and loyally continue the bellowing match. All wonderful fun for the rest of us, and not even R-rated stuff, although our parents tried unsuccessfully to keep us from eavesdropping.

The Salvano kids bore a startling resemblance to one another (dark and curly). The only two who stand out in my mind were the two younger ones, who were almost a generation apart, like my half-brother and I. Holly was dark, several years older than I, and beautiful, obsessively tanning herself to a degree of black that was worrying, even in the days before we gave a thought to melanoma. Marshall was several years younger than I and spent his first years in a harness, tethered to clothesline that gave him the run of the yard. This was because, at some point, one of his older siblings (or he himself) had precipitated a headfirst fall down the concrete basement stairs, and he wasn’t quite right in the head after that. However, he made up for it in brute strength.

For example, at five, he got loose and chased Karen Godemann (who was tall and many years older) down Wilmette Avenue with an eggbeater. Later that summer he actually caught up with her and actually knocked her out with a crowbar. He then proceeded to KO the Dormody’s 12-year-old cousin, Dane, with a crowbar, as well. These events began one of the most interested shouting matches between the Godemanns and the Salvanos and, as we cowered on the back porch riveted by the spectacle, led us to believe homicide was imminent. The noise was deafening, and if noise could kill, homicide would have occurred almost immediately. It was several months (or was it years?) before the chill wore off between the two families: the Salvanos maintained that Marshall couldn’t have accomplished all that at a mere five years of age; the rest of the neighborhood sided (silently, of course) with the Godemanns.

Both families had extremely loud power mowers and Jake enjoyed listening to the baseball game mostly when the mower was running. He would crank up the volume so even the Dormodys across the alley behind us could get the score with their windows closed (a thing one didn’t like to have to do in those pre-air conditioning days). My father, who had no use for either noise or sports, nevertheless had no desire to alienate our neighbors, especially ones as volatile as the Salvanos. So he made a little radio transmitter in the basement, tuned it to the frequency of Jake’s station, and beamed it at the Salvano’s porch window whenever their radio began to blare. Jake must have replaced dozens of perfectly good radios over the years, undoubtedly earning a reputation as a nut with a host of bemused radio repairmen, without us ever having to get into fight over it. We always felt a teensy bit guilty about it, though, but not enough to stop the practice or give up the resulting peace and quiet.

Of course, we caused enough havoc to become legendary ourselves, especially one spring vacation in the early ‘60s when we took it into our heads to go to New Orleans for a week. (Whatever were we thinking?). My dad had entered his midlife crisis in style with the purchase of brand-new 1960 Corvette, just as I was going into high school. He had lovingly constructed a hideous carport for it out of corrugated aluminum and fiberglass (badly disguised by windowboxes full of geraniums), so he could pull into it after work without struggling with a garage door, as mom had to (all the heavy work, apparently, was hers, unless it involved carpentry).

Unfortunately, in spite of a small window, the front end of the carport faced the back of our house and blocked our view of the actual car. So every night, somebody managed to sneak in and try to steal it. We knew this because dad placed a small metal bar opposite the front bumper of the ‘vette, with a plate that could activate a switch when the bumper pushed up against it. To ensure that the pressure was right, a small wedge was slipped in each night between the bumper and the plate. Inside the house, in a small jacket cupboard, was a switch that set up a Rube Goldberg-like alarm system. There was a bell and a light above the back door, the spotlight aimed directly at the window of the carport so as to blind anyone within. Another spotlight was attached to the outside wall at the top of the downstairs porch windows, aimed at the bedroom of the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan (I assume they knew about it). All this noise and flashing of lights was to scare off would-be burglars, but dad always marched outside in his pj’s, bathrobe and slippers, carrying his trusty .38 (which was otherwise carefully hidden where kids couldn’t find it). Maybe it was actually the sight of my father’s attire, his wild hair and the gun which had the sobering effect on our would-be criminals. In any event, the car remained untouched.
This alarm system also applied to our house. A small wedge inserted into the top of the back door set off the same bedlam if someone opened the door when the system was on. Assuming that burglars weren’t stupid, dad allowed them a chance to find the wedge and reinsert it before venturing further into the house (in case the neighbors failed to respond to our primitive 911 arrangement). The first curiosity point, dad reckoned, would be the darkroom door, which had a brass handle with a black kidney-shaped area painted behind it to mask the fingerprints we tended to generate. So a second wedge was placed there to set off the alarm a second time, at which point any sensible burglar would presumably split the joint.

Unfortunately, as soon as we left town, a violent thunderstorm occurred, shaking the wedge out of the back door and tripping off the first part of this crazy burglar trap. We had new neighbors occupying the Dormody’s old house who were both unaware of our eccentricities and given to barbecuing in their garage directly across the alley from our back door where they couldn’t fail to hear the uproar. They called the Wilmette police who promptly sent over a squad car to their house. Their big collie dog, Banner, unnerved by the commotion, more or less had the first cop for dinner. So a second call was made and most of the police force arrived to deal with the commotion. By this time all of our neighbors except the Sullivans were up and involved in the hullaballoo, and madder than hell at that crazy Hoffmann guy.

With everyone watching, the police made a thorough search of the house, tripping off the second alarm in the process and somehow managing to bring in the mail, as well. When they got back to the station (with nothing to show for their pains), they discovered that Encyclopedia Britannica’s headquarters—in the center of town—had been completely cleaned out while we had been entertaining them elsewhere. EB promptly pulled up stakes and left town, taking their money and their jobs to some remote location where the police were undoubtedly more responsive to their burglars.

We innocently returned home after a rather uneventful vacation to find that most of the town wasn’t speaking to us. It was some time before we determined exactly what we had done to deserve this churlish treatment, at which point my mother wisely persuaded my father to abandon his burglar alarm schemes.