Dekalb? Lets see!

1949 or so--my aunt and uncle's house was on Route 38--Lincoln Highway--about 2 blocks from the big old cement post office where, as a kid, I disturbed a hornet's nest and got stung maybe 100 times before I could run home. A package liquor store is where that house stood. NIU was called the Northern Illinois State Teachers College then. The big pond by the Linc. Hwy. entrance was where we would go ice skating. It froze solid almost every winter back then; winters always seemed much colder back in the 1940s. I discovered the Hardy Boys books about that time and bought every one I could get with my meager allowance. --- Jolly's Toggery was a men's store there then, and the newspaper was on the corner of First Street I think it was---near the PRINCE CASTLE ice cream place--and Ben Gordon's Hardware Store was further down past the railroad tracks that split downtown in two. I remember Ben Gordon, a friend of my uncle's, being a great guy who was always smiling. Joe Katz auto dealer was downtown too. And the theater with the mummies downtown--just amazing. The guy's house who invented barbed wire! One day, right downtown, I saw the hobo called Side Door Pullman drop off a boxcar, walk into the greasy spoon I was drinking a Coke in, and sit down next to me at the counter! Side Door later became King Of The Hobos in Britt, Iowa --- and he just passed away a year or two ago.

Many a memory still travels with me from those few summers and Christmas vacations I spent in Dekalb--before my uncle moved his factory operation to Evansville, Indiana.-----But that's another story...

Art