From time to time when I was a youngster, I asked my family members what their aspirations had been when they were young. I had aspirations, too, but only one came to pass.
My grandfather always wanted to be a civil engineer, so when he completed high school, he enrolled at the Armour Institute (now IIT) and completed the course of study for civil engineering. This is the career he pursued for 53 years.
My grandmother dreamed of being married, having four children and living a middle-class lifestyle. She accomplished these dreams except for the fact that she had three and not four children.
My father was born into an economically poor family. His mother died when he was 10, and he and his three brothers and father lived with his father’s widowed sister on the North Side of Chicago. My dad sold newspapers at Cicero and Addison after school to help support the family, and that’s how he became interested in the newspaper business. When he came home after service in WWI, he went to work for the Chicago Tribune driving a delivery truck, but as the years went by, he furthered his education and eventually became circulation manager.
My mother majored in home economics in college and planned to own a restaurant, but in order to fund this dream, she got a job at WGN Radio working for Tommy Bartlett. Her job was to cook recipes that listeners wrote in and that were tasted and rated by a panel on the show. Tommy introduced her to my dad and all thoughts of owning a restaurant disappeared.
My uncle Hubert had the dream of becoming a novelist. He studied English at Northwestern, and after he graduated, he tried his hand at writing, but he had no success. He then went into the banking business until WWII. When he returned from service in 1945, he got a job in the purchasing department of the Chicago Board of Education where he remained until he retired in 1975.
My uncle Gene was mechanically adept, so his earliest dream was to be an automobile mechanic. When he turned 18, he felt he could do better, so he studied industrial engineering at Armour/IIT and went to work for Victor Gasket in the 1930s, and except for army service during WWII, he remained there until his death in 1961.
When I was in the middle grades, my dream was to become an architect because I enjoyed building structures with my steel erector set and my Lincoln Logs. Well, that idea passed, and I decided to be a civil engineer like my grandfather. I carried this dream through high school, taking four years of math, plus chemistry and physics. When I enrolled in college, I planned to go three years to Illinois College and then two years to IIT in order to earn a degree in civil engineering.
Something happened, though, when I was in my sophomore year of college, and I fell under the spell of literature. My desire to teach English became very strong, so I decided that this would be my career. I taught literature and rhetoric for 47 years and never looked back on what might have been.
John Stanger is a lifelong resident of Oak Park, a 1957 graduate of OPRF High School, married with three grown children and five grandchildren, and an English professor at Elmhurst College. Living two miles from where he grew up, he hasn’t gotten far in 73 years.