“Chicago
…Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:…
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive…”
Carl Sandburg
…One of my favourite poets, on one of my favourite cities. ‘Hog butcher to the world’, wasn’t it?
Finding Chicago I wanted to write poetry like Carl Sandburg. I wanted to write about big cities and small towns, about open prairies and rivers in the sky. I wanted to write about the people: plumbers, politicians, poets, but I’d never been east of Tucson. So I quit my dead end job, closed out my savings account, all 600 dollars, and went to Chicago in search of a poem. Chicago—City of the Big Shoulders, wrote Sandburg. But I couldn’t find it. I found Chicago falling down around an old black man leaning on his battered bass case, the way you lean on a friend when you’re in need. And Thomas Jefferson Brown was a man in need, shoulders sagging under the weight of six decades of back alley blues bars and his thirst for blended whiskey. Chicago—Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler, wrote Sandburg. But I couldn’t find it. I found Chicago in a rusted heap of railroad cars, twisted tracks and 55 gallon drums where bums built their fires. Factories and warehouses empty, workers sitting in nearby bars drinking beer, expecting checks at the end of the week. Chicago—Stormy, husky, brawling, wrote Sandburg. But I couldn’t find it. I found Chicago shimmering in the shadows of towering concrete, steel and glass along 32nd Street, poets reading in bookstores and coffee houses, children marching to museums, women with slim hips in black silk gowns, men in tuxedos and Italian shoes, dressed for the theater. I wanted to write poetry like Sandburg. But I couldn’t find his Chicago. Clifton King
(http://www.jeffpittmanart.com/images/Galleryphotos/chicago_skyline_hancock.jpg)
I love Chicago also, but this sums up the experience of my Chicago, Sandburgs, much like the New York of Brando and Bernstien, no longer exists in that form.
It’s like finding your hometown after being away for many years,
The name is the same,
what was once best is now like the rest.
HJ, I go thru that every time I go visit my mom, she still lives where I did most of my growing up, back then there were still active dairy farms all over the place and very few things for us kids to do, so we explored, rode our bikes thru the abandoned dairies, made the houses under construction our personal jungle gyms and even commandeered an abandoned cement mixing plant as our fortress for a short time, most all of it is gone now, today it is ENTIRELY built over with housing tracts, strip malls and shopping centers.
It is sad, isn’t it. The apple, cherry and pear orchards that surrounded the home that I grew up in are now all gone. My daughter and her family now live in that house.
Steve I’ll wager those apple, cherry and pear orchards that surrounded your home smelled one hellova lot better than the dairy farm we had over our back wall, especially after it rained…
:lol:
Oh, yes, indeed they were. I lived for 4 years in Chino, CA, so I know the difference.
@Steve In the late 50’s to the mid 60’s my Dad worked for a Dairy in Chino. Ahhh the aromatic beauty of a cow pen w 100 cows after a fresh morning shower… Smell that money
Dave Taylor said:Never smelled anything like money to us, not to mention the thumbsize blackflys we'd get plagued with every summer ;)
@Steve In the late 50's to the mid 60's my Dad worked for a Dairy in Chino. Ahhh the aromatic beauty of a cow pen w 100 cows after a fresh morning shower... Smell that money
Yeah, but one thing is certain: it was all organic. 
:lol: