How I Became a Juvenile Delinquent

On a Saturday afternoon in June of 1962, when I was seven years old, I left my hometown without a parent for the first time. That day, my three older brothers and I drove from our house in Libertyville, Illinois to Lake Forest, Illinois.

My brothers were unimaginably old; Phil was seventeen, Pete—sixteen, and Jud—fourteen. I had just finished second grade, so they were like minor deities. My parents had nine kids. I was the sixth one.

Phil was a classic first-born, reliable and diligent and an overachiever. He built model airplanes, read Latin, and played the guitar. Our parents were very proud of Phil.

Pete suffered from a tragic birth defect because—he wasn’t Phil. Phil was a refined teenager who weighed 135, maybe 140 pounds. In contrast, Pete was a galoot who clocked in at over 230. He wasn’t fat, just big. Perfect offensive line material. Whenever Pete came to our parents’ attention, they thought: “My God, he’s not Phil.” I considered him the fun one.

Jud was an entity unto himself, an artist. Phil and Pete longed to please our parents, while Jud took a different path. When Jud was ten, he memorized the book, Two Little Savages, with hundreds of pages of Indian lore and illustrations—it was a how-to guide for living in the wild. That’s where Jud wanted to be. One day when he was eleven, Jud shot a squirrel with a .22 rifle from his bedroom window. Jud was often out in the woods ditching school like Tom Sawyer. To me, Jud was a fascinating enigma.

Now in 1962, I was a lump of unformed clay. That morning, Mom shaved my head with a dull electric razor. That thing pulled out as much hair as it cut, but she wouldn’t pay $1.25 for a barber to mow my noggin.

I was so filthy that my dirt had its own dirt. You could grow potatoes in the loam under my fingernails.

I wore ratty plaid hand-me-down shorts that were too big and hard to keep up. My gray T-shirt was white when Mom had bought it ten months ago at the start of second grade. Now it was riddled with holes and too small. You could see my belly button between my T-shirt and drooping shorts. My gym shoes were caked with mud and had no laces. I didn’t wear socks. Many days that summer, I didn’t wear shoes.  Scabs covered my elbows and bruises painted my legs. Poison ivy surrounded my eyes; the left one was almost swollen shut. I carried plenty of snot under my nose.

So that was the cast of characters headed to Lake Forest. It’s only seven miles, but in 1962, it was a trip from one culture to another. We went from blue-collar Libertyville to waspy Lake Forest, where people lived in mansions behind stone walls on streets lined by stately elms. They sent their kids to boarding schools and colleges back east. Lake Forest executives owned a private train car they rode into Chicago and back every day. Because God forbid, they ride with the rest of us. They were all whiter than white.

Libertyville was a different kind of white. The population included factory workers, tradespeople, truckers, farmers, small business owners, and middle management. If a Libertyville kid went to college, they probably attended a state school in the Midwest. Many, like their parents, went straight from high school into the trades or the factories where they carried their lunch buckets through the gate when the whistle blew like characters in a Bruce Springsteen song.

Later in life, I learned that folks from Lake Forest thought Libertyville was full of hillbillies because families from Appalachia moved into town for jobs in the factories. One kid from the mountains named Michael Baker (pronounced “Ma-cull Bake-A”) would go behind the grade school and take out his glass eye for a nickel. My eighth-grade graduation ceremony included a very pregnant sixteen-year-old girl from Eastern Kentucky. That’s about as un-Lake Forest as you can get.

In the car, Phil and Pete argued over the AM radio. Phil wanted to listen to the White Sox on WCFL and Pete wanted the rock music on WLS. They argued about everything their whole lives.

All my brothers smoked cigarettes during the drive. Back then people smoked everywhere. People smoked in restaurants, on planes, on trains, at baseball games, and in hospital rooms. Our doctor gave us stitches while smoking a cigarette.

We were going to the record store on the market square in the middle of Lake Forest. It was a snooty shopping center with elegant dress stores, swanky jewelry boutiques, and the people who shopped there.

As we got out of the car, Pete called me over to him and made an offer, “Hey, come here. If you smoke a cigarette in the store, I’ll buy you an ice cream cone.”

That was a classic Pete move. He was the fun one.

I nodded and thought, What a spectacular deal!

We entered the shop and hustled to the back. Phil handed me an unfiltered Camel cigarette. Jud struck a match, and I became a seven-year-old juvenile delinquent.

I puffed and puffed and never inhaled.

After thirty seconds, I wanted to quit, but Pete said, “Nope, Tony. You must knock off the ashes in the ashtray by the register. Then come back and smoke some more, and when I say so, go back to the ashtray, and put it out.”

Now, here was a challenge, but he’d promised ice cream. I would have done much worse for ice cream.

As I walked to the front, I spotted the store owner, a blue-haired woman in her fifties with reading glasses on a string around her neck and two pounds of makeup. I saw her twist her face into a mask of horror and disgust. Here was Charles Schultz’s Pigpen character smoking a Camel right in front of her. I realized that this apparently never happened in Lake Forest, and I was the worst specimen of a human being she had ever seen.

I gazed up at her, smiled, tapped the ash off the cigarette, and said, “How ya doing?”

She didn’t answer. I imagine she thought, My God, it speaks.

All the while, Phil, Pete, and Jud flipped through the record bins like nothing unusual was going on.  They were using me to yank this lady’s chain. They knew about the different social classes. They knew what Libertyville was. They knew what Lake Forest was. They chose to bring a member of the Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath into Gatsby’s world because they knew it was hilarious.

Eventually with Pete’s okay I returned to the counter to snuff it out. That poor woman couldn’t stop staring at me, like some people can’t look away from a car wreck. I couldn’t tell. Was she beguiled by the dirt or the clothes, the scabs or the bruises, the poison ivy or the snot, the cigarette or the whole package?

Phil bought his record and my brothers put me onto their shoulders in front of the store. For a moment, I was their hero instead of the other way around. They loved how I asked the woman how she was doing.

On the drive home in a smoke-filled Chevrolet station wagon, my brothers talked about the people in Lake Forest. One mentioned the Ferrari dealership in Lake Forest. Jud said, “The best car you can buy in Libertyville is a Buick.” I heard them and sensed they thought that Libertyville was better because Lake Forest had some rich SOBs who looked down their noses at us.

I felt bad for the Lake Forest kids, who never got to peek behind Ma-cull Bake-A’s glass eye.  They probably would have paid a quarter for the pleasure.

That was the only fun I ever had with my three older brothers when we were all together. They were so much older, and adulthood got in the way.

Years later, after coming back from Vietnam, Phil wrote speeches for Lake Forest CEOs.  They paid him a good buck because he made them sound much smarter than they were. Pete, after he came back from Vietnam, and Jud, who avoided the war, had amazing award-winning advertising careers.  They were creative guys who put a high sheen on any turd the marketing people wanted to sell. But I never smoked again. I was a juvenile delinquent for less than half the time it takes to read this story.