Phil,

I grew up in a high-rise building in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s. We had no pets--ever.

When I was in highschool, we had a "Social Athletic Club"-----probably equivalent to a soccer club in the U.K. and elsewhere where we were involved in sports---baseball and American football. (Street gangs maybe sprang from this to an extent--but we were pretty benign---even made cash for charities.)

Our S.A.C. was not good at baseball and we were pretty down about it. I thought we needed a mascot to BOOST MORALE. I went to a Polish shop on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago where you could pick out a live chicken, they woould kill it for you, pull the feathers, drain it of blood and wrap the frsh bird for you to take out and make dinner with.

I bought a chicken--a beautiful bird---and took it home ALIVE. We put it into a small suitcase I had drilled many holes in so our pet could breathe. At home, I painted the words "ALFRED---THE BARON'S COCK" artistically on the sides of the suitace. THE BARONS was the name of our club and Alfred Crepin was our least favorite chemestry teacher at Lake View High.
Every day we had a ball game, I took that chicken (Alfred) to our games, tied a nylon cord to her (I can't remember how we did that) and when our guys hit the ball and ran to first base, ALFRED would chase him down the first base line. When the rope ran out, Alfred would tumble head over heels with feathers flying in all directions.

We won the next six games.

Now, a year or so before this, I had found my way to the top floor of the building I lived in. The top floor was the 14th floor but really the 13th floor 'cause no building had a 13th floor then as it would've been bad luck). If you climbed a ladder and made your way through the electrical elevator machinery, you could get up on the roof of the place overlooking Chicago and Belmont Harbor on Lake Michigan. I would go up there to sun bathe and listen to Cub games on a 6 transistor radio (remember those). I could see Wrigley Field if I looked West. For some reason there was a wooden radiator cover up there on the roof. Little did I know that a year later this would make a home for our pet chicken--"The Baron's Cock". I left water and food for her and she did really well for quite a while-----until Frank Caldwell, a maintenance guy from the building, found his way up there one day, saw ALFRED, plucked him, rung his neck and took him home for dinner.

All I found there when I went up that night with water was a ton of feathers and some blood.

The next day I asked Frank if he'd had a good dinner. Somewhere, I've got a photo of a 16 year old me up on the roof with that chicken. You can see the lake and the harbor in the background. My mother and my aunt(mom's twin) used to say on seeing the picture, "Oh, how handsome you were before you grew that beard."------It's funny what sticks with you-----all those parental voices---long gone...

The only other PET I ever had was after I'd moved out of the family home one Thanksgiving when all were out of town but me and when they came home I was out o' there (with my GUITAR, BANJO, bed & desk) and into my own cold-water pad in Old Town where I would bet with myself which cockroach crawling across the ceiling would win the race to the plaster hole. The one that won I would kill first.

No, those weren't pets---the pet I had when I lived there was an iguana named HOMER who would sit on my shoulder as I walked up and down Wells Street and through Lincoln Park Zoo.

And THEN came the bullfights...

ART THIEME