How I Became a Juvenile Delinquent

On a Saturday afternoon in June of 1962 when I was 7 years old I left my hometown without a parent. That day I road with my three older brothers from our house in Libertyville, Illinois, to Lake Forest.

My brothers were unimaginably old: Phil was 17, Pete, 16, and Jud, 14. Since I had just finished second grade, they were minor deities. My parents had nine kids; I was the sixth one.

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

Next came Pete. Ah Pete. He suffered from a tragic birth defect because he wasn’t Phil. Phil was a refined teenager who weighted 135 or 140 pounds. Pete was a galoot who clocked in at over 230. He wasn’t fat; he was just big. All his life Pete wanted our parent’s attention and respect but they always seem to be thinking, “My God, he’s not Phil.” Pete had a lot of pain his whole life. Despite all that, I considered him the fun one.

Jud was an entity unto himself. While Phil and Pete wanted our parents’ approval, Jud took a different path. By the time he was ten, he had memorized Two Little Savages, a book with hundreds of pages of Indian lore and illustrations. It was Jud’s how-to guide for living in the wild. When he was 11, Jud shot a squirrel with a .22 rifle from his bedroom window. Jud was often ditching school and out in the woods like Tom Sawyer. To me, Jud was a fascinating enigma.

In ‘62 I was a lump of unformed clay. At the beginning of the summer, Mom shaved my head with a dull electric razor. It felt like that thing pulled out as much hair as it cut. 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 grey tee shirt was white when Mom bought it ten months ago before I started second grade. Now it was riddled with holes and too small. You could see my bellybutton in the gap between my tee shirt and drooping shorts. My mud caked gym shoes didn’t have laces. I wasn’t wearing socks. Many days that summer I didn’t wear shoes. I had scabs on my elbows and bruises covered my legs. Poison ivy surrounded my eyes; the left one was almost swollen shut. My nose ran constantly.

That was the cast of characters going to Lake Forest. It’s only about seven miles, but in 1962, it was a trip from one culture to another. We went from middle class Libertyville to waspy Lake Forest. Where people lived in mansions they kept behind stone walls on streets lined by stately elms. They sent their kids east boarding schools. Lake Forest businessmen owned a private train car that they rode into the city and back every day. Because God forbid they sit with the likes of you and me. They were all whiter than white.

Back then, 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. But many kids, like their parents, left high school and entered the trades or factories where they carried their lunch buckets through the gates when the whistle blew l cerebrates in a Bruce Springsteen song.

Later in life, I learned that folks in Lake Forester thought that Libertyville was full of hillbillies because families Appalachia moved into town for jobs in the factory. 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-extremely-very pregnant 16-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. One wanted to listen to the White Sox on WCFL and the other wanted to hear the rock music on WLS. They argued about almost everything their whole lives.

My brothers smoked during the drive. Back then everyone smoked everywhere. People smoked in restaurants, on planes, on trains, at ball games, in hospital rooms. Our doctor gave us stitches while smoking a cigarette.

We were going to the record store on market square. It was a snooty shopping center with elegant dress stores, swanky jewelry boutiques, and the people that came with it all.

As we got out of the car, Pete stopped and said, “Hey Tony, come here. I tell you what, If you smoke a cigarette in the store, I’ll buy you an ice cream cone.” That was the wonderfulness of Pete. He great ideas like that almost every day of his life.

I 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 30 seconds I wanted to quit. Pete said, “No, Tony. No. You got go knock the ashes off in the ashtray by the register. Then come back and smoke some more. When I say so you can go it out.”

Now, there was a challenge, but he’d promised ice cream.

As I walked to the front I saw the owner a woman in her fifties with blue hair, reading glasses on a string around her neck and a couple pounds of makeup. I saw twist face into a mask of horror and disgust. Apparently you don’t see Charles Schultz’s Pigpen character smoking a camel in Lake Forest. 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 records in the bins like nothing unusual was happening. They were using me to yank this lady’s chain. They already knew about the different social classes. They knew what Libertyville was. They know what Lake Forest was. They chose to bring this chunk of the Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath into Gatsby’s world because they knew it was hilarious.

Eventually with Pete’s OK I returned to the counter to snuff it out. That woman couldn’t stop looking, like some people can’t look away from a car wreck. I don’t know. 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 on the sidewalk in front of the store, Phil and Jud hoisted me onto their shoulders. For a moment, I was their hero instead of the other way around. They really liked it when I asked the lady how she was doing.

On the drive home in a smoke-filled Chevrolet station wagon, during the ongoing bout over control of the radio, Phil, Pete, and Jud talked the people in Lake Forest. One mentioned the Ferrari dealership in town. Jud said, “The best car you could buy in Libertyville was a Buick.” I listened and thought about what they said. I sensed that Libertyville was better because Lake Forest had some rich SOBs who looked down their noses us. But I felt bad for their kids, who never got to see what goes on behind Ma-cull Bake-A’s glass eye. They probably would have paid a quarter.

In summary, that was the only fun I ever had with Phil, Pete, and Jud all together. They were so much older, and adulthood got in the way.

Years later, after he came back from Vietnam Phil wrote speeches for Lake Forest CEOs. They paid him good buck because he made them sound much smarter than they were. Pete, after he came back from Vietnam, and Jud, who did not go, had award-winning advertising careers. They were creative guys who could put a high sheen on any turd the marketing people wanted to sell.

They all became successful because they grew up together at that time in Libertyville.

I never smoked again; my stint as a juvenile delinquent lasted less than half the time it took to read this story.