Chicago Sun-Times: All posts by Harry Mark Petrakis2020-03-13T07:27:53-05:00https://chicago.suntimes.com/authors/harry-mark-petrakis/rss2020-03-13T07:27:53-05:002022-03-31T17:02:29-05:00Years later, regretting an impatient, unfeeling question
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Harry Mark Petrakis’ father</p></figcaption><span class="line"></span><div class="Figure-credit"><p>Provided photo</p></div></div>
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<p>As we grow older we spend more time reflecting upon the life we have lived. We linger on regrets and remorse’s, brood over words we shouldn’t have spoken and actions we shouldn’t have taken, reconsider words we should have spoken and actions we should have taken. Remembering is a poignant exercise that humans indulge in for as long as we live. </p><p>I am an old man in my mid-90s now, and I have a lengthy landscape to revisit. I was born in 1923 into the family of a Greek Orthodox priest living with his wife (called in Greek a ‘<i>presbytera’) </i>and four older children on Chicago’s South Side. A younger sister, the last of the children, would be born a year after me. Through my childhood and into my adolescence, I remember our family occupying a series of dingy, desolate, city apartments which seemed to me built to prevent any light or warmth from entering the cold, shadowed rooms. </p><div class="RichTextSidebarModule Enhancement" data-module data-align-floatRight><a class="AnchorLink" id="module-540000" name="module-540000"></a>
<div class="RichTextSidebarModule-title">Opinion bug</div>
<div class="RichTextModule-items RichTextBody"><h2>Opinion</h2></div>
</div><p>From the back stairs suspended above the alleys, through kitchens with ancient appliances, into a dining room where on a long beaten-up table we ate our meals, did our homework, and, with the cloth removed, played Ping Pong. The remainder of the apartment held a long hallway opening onto several cramped bedrooms and a solitary bathroom which served the entire family, through a parlor with chipped, sagging couch and armchair to another small sun parlor room overlooking the street on which cars passed and where children played. From those apartments we descended into the city to attend school and to work. </p><p>What distinguished our family from most renters was that we owned a small cottage in the Chain O’Lakes region of Northern, Illinois. The building was frame, a single large enclosure braced on sturdy wooden posts and divided by plasterboard partitions into a screened porch, a walk-through kitchen and two small bedrooms. </p><p>The cottage had no electricity but used kerosene lamps. There was no indoor plumbing, our water drawn from an old well pump in the back yard. Our toilet facility was a small malodorous outhouse. This cottage, in the care of a dear lady we called Naka who had lived with my family for years, was where my sister and I and Naka spent our summers. </p><p>My father loved the cottage. Since he was busy with church on the weekends, my father was only able to come out for a day or two in mid-week. He loved to fish and in preparation for his visit I was assigned the onerous task of digging up the worms.</p><p>My father feared entering a colony of bass and sunfish and running out of worms, so his instructions to me were to dig up “a hundred or more.” I always gave up after excavating 10 to 15, reassured knowing he rarely used more than that number. </p><p>My father traveled to Fox Lake by train from Chicago, weary and in need of rest. The prospect of fishing for the weekend buoyed his spirit and as soon as he entered the cottage, his mood lightened. </p><p>My father would rouse me at daybreak. Half asleep, I’d dress sluggishly, eat a bowl of oatmeal and then, I’d carry a pair of bamboo fishing poles and our lunch while my father carried a pair of oars and the can of worms. We’d walk the gravel road for a half mile to the lake. Moored alongside several sleek motor craft was our sturdy wooden rowboat we had named “Pericles<i>.” </i></p><p>We’d settle into our boat and my father would use an oar to push us away from the dock, He would begin rowing to the middle of the lake, his oars clumping through beds of water lilies. His mood was buoyant, while mine was glum. </p><p>We anchored our boat at some place in the lake my father divined was the best spot for catching fish. We’d bait our hooks with the worms and then cast our lines into the water, the little corks bobbing on the water’s surface.</p><p>The hours would pass for me with agonizing slowness. Despite rarely catching any fish, my father seemed content to sit and watch the placid cork barely stirring on the water. </p><p>I’d use the milk bottle to void, eat the sandwich listlessly and drink the soda, squirm restlessly on my seat, the hours dragging.</p><p>My father buoyed by some infinite reserve of patience, sat staring peacefully at the barely moving cork. Although he rarely caught any fish, he seemed content to be sitting in the boat on the lake, a slight breeze brushing our cheeks, water lilies rustling around us, birds whirling in the skies above us. Around the shores of the lake, the beach side cottages glittered like jewels in the sunlight. </p><p>One August day, in my 11th or 12th year, bored and unhappy, reaching the end of my patience, I blurted out. “Papa, what are you thinking of sitting here hour after hour, watching a cork that never moves?” </p><p>He stared at me in surprise. Perhaps by the tone of my voice he understood my distress and impatience, He looked at me sadly and said quietly, “I am thinking how quickly the time is passing and how soon I will have to leave.” Even young as I was I understood then the immensity of my transgression. While I suffered with impatience, my father measured the precious minutes, before he’d have to return to the pressures and responsibilities of his parish.</p><p>After that day my father never woke me for the morning fishing again. Sometimes, the night before, I resolved to get up and join him, but the mornings passed, and I never fished with my father again.</p><p>More than 80 years have passed since those summers we spent in the cottage. My father, mother and all my siblings are long dead. The cottage has long since been torn down to provide space for a grander house.</p><p> I have lived enough years and attained an age where I understand more about the refuge and serenity the cottage and the lake provided my father. And even after all these years, I still regret that impatient, unfeeling question I asked him then. </p><p>If I now had it in my power to relive that time again, I would gladly have given several years of my life for one more hour in the boat with my father.</p><p><i>Find more information on novelist Harry Mark Petrakis at harrymarkpetrakis.com.</i></p><p><i>Send letters to </i><a class="Link" href="mailto:letters@suntimes.com" target="_blank" ><i>letters@suntimes.com</i></a><i>.</i><br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/3/13/21079029/years-later-regretting-an-impatient-unfeeling-questionHarry Mark Petrakis2019-08-21T15:56:00-05:002022-03-31T17:00:36-05:00Immigration: We talk little of the courage and faith it requires
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>The Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island in New York in 2004</p></figcaption><span class="line"></span><div class="Figure-credit"><p>TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images</p></div></div>
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<p>A little over 100 years ago, my father, mother and four of my older siblings left the Greek island of Crete to join families from around the world in journeying to seek a new life in the United States.</p><p>My father was a Greek Orthodox priest. In that period, which covered World War I, coal and copper mines abounded in the western regions of the United States. Labor agents traveled to Southern Europe, visiting Italy, Spain and Greece, to recruit workers. </p><div class="RichTextSidebarModule Enhancement" data-module data-align-floatRight><a class="AnchorLink" id="module-3a0000" name="module-3a0000"></a>
<div class="RichTextSidebarModule-title">Opinion bug</div>
<div class="RichTextModule-items RichTextBody"><h2>Opinion</h2></div>
</div><p>Eager to escape their impoverished villages, many young men in those countries signed often-punitive contracts. In return, they were promised a steamship ticket in steerage and a job in the mines. </p><p>In 1917, a community of Cretan miners residing in the Utah mountain town of Price, Utah, planned for and built a church. They had no priest except for a circuit-riding cleric who came only for funerals and for a Sunday service once every six weeks.</p><p>The miners wrote a letter to the Bishop of Crete pleading to be assigned a full-time priest.</p><p>Years later, my parents told us how they had reassessed their decision and made the decision to go to America.</p><p>“We understood and feared the dangers of the journey. We also felt grieved for the young miners away from their families, and lacking someone to pray for them,” my father said. “But the principal reason we changed our mind was that our blessed island had no educational opportunities beyond elementary grades. America had middle schools and many universities. We felt that in America, you children would have a chance for an education and a better life.” </p><p>The Utah parish sent my family second class tickets which provided them a small cabin with six bunk beds in tiers of three. In later years, I recall my parents speaking of their first sight of the Statue of Liberty when their ship entered the harbor at Ellis Island. Along with the other passengers, our parents and siblings crowded at the railings of the ship.</p><p>“I was grateful she was a woman,” my mother said, “I felt she would understand a woman’s love, fear and hope for her children.”</p><p>“When I first saw the statue,” my father said, “I remembered when I was a boy listening to the old men in our village reading aloud the letters from their family members who had immigrated. They wrote of having food, work and money in their pockets. The great statue looming before us in the harbor that day seemed to promise that fulfillment.”</p><p>But Ellis Island proved an ordeal for my family, the first time my parents and their children had been separated. The miner’s representative who was to escort them to Utah had been delayed. My family was sequestered overnight, my mother and the girls in one compound, my father and the boys in another. </p><p>My father told us of his sleepless night frantic with worry about my mother and sisters, hearing the moans and prayers of the frightened men on the cots around him.</p><p>The following morning, the representative from the parish in Utah arrived, and my family began the long train journey west.</p><p>The young Cretan workers were assailed with fear and loathing. Their language and habits were strange. They were loud and they swaggered and, sometimes, they drank too much. Because of their dark olive complexions, they were thought to be blacks, and suffered the same prejudice and intolerance.</p><p>My parents told us that It was not uncommon to see signs in the windows of restaurants and shops …<i>“100% American. No Greeks, N———s, or Rats Allowed!”</i></p><p>The two years my family spent in Price were a tense and troubled period. Utah was the West and men carried guns. This was true of the townspeople and of the miners, as well. There were confrontations and bitter quarrels, usually ending with the miners being the ones arrested. For public drunkenness and fighting, they would be sentenced to weeks and even months in jail.</p><p>The incessant xenophobia made daily life an ordeal and a constant fomenter of quarrels. My father would visit the taverns on Saturday night and to prevent quarrels turning deadly, take the guns away from drunken Greek miners. He would return the guns when they attended church the following Sunday morning.</p><p>After about two years, my family moved from Price to a parish in Savannah, Georgia, and then to a parish in St Louis, Missouri. Then they moved to a parish in Chicago, which remain my father’s parish until his death in 1951.</p><p>While some parts of the country were less virulent in their resentment of immigrants, life for my parents and siblings was a continuing struggle as they endeavored to learn the language, adapt to the customs and to battle xenophobia in some form or other. Little by little, as they learned to speak English and grew accustomed to their neighbors of other nationalities, their lives were woven into American society.</p><p>As I’ve grown older, I think more often about my father and mother making that courageous decision to expose their children to that perilous journey. I reflect too on their need to learn a strange language and to assimilate themselves into a society that continually resisted them as foreigners. </p><p>Today, there is virulent debate about the surge of immigrants seeking to enter the country. There is meager discussion about the courage and faith required to uproot a family and make such a perilous journey. </p><p>I think it is still the power of the dream personified by the Statue of Liberty that remains an imperishable force today, as it was in the time of my parents’ journey.</p><p>What a shame if that glorious symbol of our country is in years ahead replaced by the stark, desolate image of a wall.</p><p><i>Find more information on novelist Harry Mark Petrakis at </i><a class="Link" href="http://harrymarkpetrakis.com" target="_blank" ><i>harrymarkpetrakis.com</i></a><i>.</i></p><div class="Enhancement" data-align-center>
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Harry Mark Petrakis’ family came to the United States through Ellis Island.</p></figcaption><span class="line"></span><div class="Figure-credit"><p>Provided photo</p></div></div>
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</div><p><i>Send letters to </i><a class="Link" href="mailto:letters@suntimes.com" target="_blank" ><i>letters@suntimes.com</i></a><i>.</i><br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/8/21/20812805/immigration-greeks-utah-courage-faithHarry Mark Petrakis2019-06-01T07:10:22-05:002022-03-31T16:56:44-05:00After 73 years, coping with love, death and remorse
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Harry and Diana Petrakis</p></figcaption><span class="line"></span><div class="Figure-credit"><p>Provided photo</p></div></div>
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<p>This last December, my wife Diana died in her bed on Christmas Day; our son John, granddaughter Adriana and I sitting beside her. </p><p>Diana’s breathing had been harsh and labored for months. We held her hands and spoke to her quietly. She gave no sign that she could hear us.</p><p>My wife had been in good health for most of her life; her only hospital confinements in half a century were those she incurred when oursons were born.</p><p>In August of 2006, Diana suffered a stroke. She spent three weeks in the hospital and, after her discharge, continued to have health problems.</p><p>Over the following decade, while sitting and reading books, she grew frailer, her breathing strained. In October of last year, Diana was allowed hospice at home. They brought in a hospital bed and cylinders of oxygen to aid her breathing. Nurses came daily to check her blood pressure and oxygen level. With her heart faltering, most of her waking hours were spent reclining on the couch or in bed.</p><p>That Christmas afternoon that we sat with her, her burdened breathing suddenly became calmer, the rasping quieter. Her large, endearing dark eyes opened as if she suddenly recognized we were there.A moment later, she stopped breathing, dying with as little fuss as the flutter of a sparrow’s wing.</p><p>Diana was 96 years old, 10 months older than my 95. Her body defied any reason to live on. We had been married 73 years, so lengthy a span of time that the name of one of us could never be spoken without, in the same breath, speaking the name of the other. Selfishly, I wanted her to live, but good sense mandated that it was time for her to find rest.</p><p>In the harsh winter of the new year, I returned to our home in Indiana, a trusted caregiver helping me with meals and tasks.</p><p>I felt Diana everywhere in the house. In one room, I would hear her calling me from another. At night, her whispers carried from the room’s quiet corners.</p><p>She appeared in my dreams at various times in our lives. As a vibrant young girl when we courted, as a lovely bride on our wedding day, her weary but gratified expression following the birth of our sons.</p><p>I thought of the many times she cooked her savory Athenian chicken for family and friends. In one of the seven books I have dedicated to her, I wrote, “<i>For Diana - sweetheart, wife, mother and baker of superb baklava.” </i>That summed it up.</p><p>I remembered her excitement during our visit to the Louvre in France, Westminster Abbey in England, and while traveling in Denmark, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore as well as half a dozen visits to Greece and Crete. She charmed our relatives in my father’s village on the island of Crete with her fluent Greek and her warmth. An aged uncle said to me,”Paidi mou, eisai tixeros”… “My boy, you are lucky.”</p><p>Along with the good memories, the baleful ones returned to me like plagues. Diana never failed me, while I failed her numerous times. There was the anguish my gambling addiction caused her the first few years after we married. My stumbling from job to job, quitting or getting fired, fueling her constant worry about bills. I took her for granted, ignored her wishes, selfishly indulging my own. Recalling the ways I had let her down and made her cry, swept me into a storm of guilt and remorse.</p><p>I tried to assuage those furies by recalling many good experiences. Our jubilation at Christmas of 1956 when, after 10 years of submitting stories that were all rejected, my story <i>Pericles on 31<sup>st</sup> Street </i>was bought by the <i>Atlantic Magazine. </i>Five years later, my first novel, <i>Lion at my Heart </i>was published. When the first copy arrived in Pittsburgh, where we were living at the time, Diana, our sons and I formed a procession and marched triumphantly through our house; with the older boys, Mark and John, banging the bottom of metal pots with wooden spoons, while Diana followed carrying Dean, our son born only a few months earlier. I trailed the marchers holding my book above my head as a priest might raise aloft the chalice of communion.</p><p>As our sons grew older, Diana traveled with me to many of my lectures and joined me for my teaching assignments. Wherever we traveled, she charmed everyone with her warm and endearing personality. I recall a professor at a university in Toronto, telling me,“ Harry, you were the writer we were looking forward to meeting, but now that you are leaving, I must tell you, we will miss Diana more.”</p><p>In the early 1980s, during a three-week hospital confinement for a surgery I had at Rush-St.Luke’s Hospital in Chicago, Diana would ride the South Shore train in from Indiana every morning, then take a bus to spend the day sharing with me the monotonous hours. In late afternoon, when she left the hospital to take the train back home, I’d stand at the large bay window that looked down on the street and watch her walking toward the bus stop. She always looked up,so we could wave to one another. At those moments, my love for her burst the boundaries of my heart.</p><p>In 2006, when Diana suffered her stroke and was confined for a month in St. Mary’s Hospital in Portage, Indiana, I spent every afternoon with her. At the end of her confinement, our son John and I took her home, thankful to have her with me again. </p><p>But that was the beginning of a troubled period. Her heart problems multiplied,her lungs weakened, breathing became an ordeal. </p><p>In her final year of life, her afflictions exhausted her will to live, and Diana spoke often of wanting to die. On Christmas Day, while we were beside her, her wish was granted.</p><p>From the vantage point of the present, I understand that along with gratifying memories of our joy and our love, guilt and remorse will burden me for as long as I live. </p><p>Meanwhile, for the first time in 73 years, I am lonely. I am also grateful that at my advanced age, it won’t be long before Diana and I are together again.</p><p>We’ll have eternity to determine whether the orchards of love we shared for so many years, outweighed my diverse and multiple failures.</p><p></p><p></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/6/1/18647987/after-73-years-coping-with-love-death-and-remorseHarry Mark Petrakis2019-03-20T14:10:16-05:002022-03-31T16:58:57-05:00A battered old warrior and a wonderful storyteller
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Damaged tanks and guns await shipment to repair stations after fighting near El Alamein in World War II. | Sun-Times Library.</p></figcaption></div>
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<p>I’m not sure why at this particular time I should recall Mike Dugger. He belongs to my distant youth, the ROTC drill master when I was a freshman in high school. I don’t remember what rank he held in the Army, but we called him Sgt. Mike.</p><p>He was a tall, spare-fleshed man of indeterminate age. At times his face and voice exhibited a hoarseness and weariness that was noticeable even to immature students.</p><div class="Enhancement" data-align-floatLeft>
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<img class="Image" alt="Some members of the Abraham Lincoln<br>brigade in 1938. |. Sun-Times Library" srcset="https://cst.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/37f107c/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1763x989+0+1005/resize/490x275!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%2Fthumbor%2FiGpW_PXgHsK1RjTpWttm_PDQshw%3D%2F0x0%3A1763x3000%2F1763x3000%2Ffilters%3Afocal%28881x1500%3A882x1501%29%2Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%2Fuploads%2Fchorus_asset%2Ffile%2F16157214%2F10000038aa.5942.jpg 1x,https://cst.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/6af19fa/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1763x989+0+1005/resize/980x550!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%2Fthumbor%2FiGpW_PXgHsK1RjTpWttm_PDQshw%3D%2F0x0%3A1763x3000%2F1763x3000%2Ffilters%3Afocal%28881x1500%3A882x1501%29%2Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%2Fuploads%2Fchorus_asset%2Ffile%2F16157214%2F10000038aa.5942.jpg 2x" width="490" height="275"
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Some members of the Abraham Lincoln<br>brigade in 1938. |. Sun-Times Library</p></figcaption></div>
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</div><p>Sgt. Mike first experienced combat as a youth of 18 when he joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War.</p><p>When the loyalists were defeated, he left Spain, traveled to England and joined the British Army. As part of Gen. Montgomery’s forces, he fought in some of the early battles in North Africa against German Gen. Rommel’s Africa Korps. He was seriously wounded in the fighting at El Alamein, leaving him with a crushed knee and one leg several inches shorter so he lurched instead of walking,</p><p>Finally, battled-scarred and crippled, he was discharged from the Army and ended up teaching callow high school students like myself the art and logistics of war.</p><p>“The training in discipline and knowledge of soldiering and the strategies of war you learn here, will benefit you in whatever occupation you choose in life.” Sgt. Mike said.</p><p>The best part of the class sessions with Sgt Mike were his stories of his fighting experiences in Spain and North Africa. He was a natural storyteller. Utilizing facial expressions and inflections of speech to convey the drama of the experience, we’d quickly become engrossed in his tale.</p><p>“There I go again,” he’d catch himself, “telling stories about war and soldiers instead of teaching discipline and military tactics.”</p><p>His life-battered face released a small laugh.</p><p>“Don’t anyone tattle on me to Mr. Brodkin. He’s aching for a reason to boot my ass.”</p><p>But Sgt. Mike couldn’t help himself and he’d move with ease from tactics to tales.</p><p>Because I liked Sgt. Mike and enjoyed his stories, I applied myself diligently to his class. My test papers came back marked with “A+” and “Good work!” scrawled on the first page.</p><p>One afternoon near the end of that first semester, he asked me to stay after class.</p><p>I sat down as Sgt. Mike retrieved something from the bottom drawer of his desk. When he’d raised it to his desk top, I saw a corporal’s epaulet.</p><p>“In the 10 years I’ve been teaching ROTC here,” his voice was grave, “I’ve never given a promotion to any first year ROTC cadet. But you’ve been a truly outstanding student and I wanted you to know how impressed and pleased I am. You’re a born soldier and I’m hoping you’ll choose the Army as a career. As for your promotion, we’ll announce it to the class at the beginning of the next semester.”</p><p>Pleased by Sgt. Mike’s praise and the promotion, I took the epaulet.</p><p>Then I confided in Sgt. Mike about my desire to write stories, I told him that I didn’t think school was benefiting me and that I was considering dropping out to pursue my dream of writing.</p><p>Sgt. Mike was shocked.</p><p>“Don’t do something so rash!” he counseled me. “You need your education whatever you choose to do! Without schooling you won’t accomplish anything!”</p><p>Despite Sgt. Mike’s warnings, by summer’s end I had mustered the courage to drop out of school. When the academic year began, I went to inform Mike of my decision and to return the epaulet. Hoping the summer interlude would have changed my mind, he was bitterly disappointed.</p><p>“My life has been soldiering. I wouldn’t have been any good doing anything else.” He paused, “Maybe you are meant to write, but even if that’s true. I’m not sure how dropping out of school will help. You’ve got to have the heart and the knowledge to want to soldier and the knowledge and the discipline to write.” He sighed and shook his head.” You’ve made a rash choice now and don’t whine if you come up a loser. You had your chance.”</p><p>I did drop out of school. Like a man who can’t swim jumping into the water, I began my efforts to write. Ten years of writing stories and receiving rejection slips were to pass before I sold my first story. Another five years passed before I wrote and published my first book. And two more years elapsed before I earned enough from my writing to make it my occupation. During this time, I married and a year later we had our first son. That was followed by my wife birthing two more boys. We became a family and I became a writer.</p><p>From time to time through the years, I thought of Sgt. Mike. By that time, he had to have been dead for decades. One of my life’s regrets is that he would never know that things worked out for me and that my life didn’t tumble into disaster as he feared. Despite cutting short my education, I had managed to become a writer, publishing my books and stories.</p><p>I believe that battered old warrior and wonderful storyteller would have been pleased.</p><div class="Enhancement" data-align-center>
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<img class="Image" alt="Author Harry Mark Petrakis, at his home in the town of Dune Acres, Indiana on Friday, October 10, 2014. | Michael Gard/For Sun-Times Media" srcset="https://cst.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/dafd9dc/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2104x1181+0+834/resize/490x275!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%2Fthumbor%2FxZJWxn_AAN-5lIQIqxHFUHYYjn0%3D%2F0x0%3A2104x2848%2F2104x2848%2Ffilters%3Afocal%281052x1424%3A1053x1425%29%2Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%2Fuploads%2Fchorus_asset%2Ffile%2F16157216%2Fpetrakis_cst_101214_3.jpg 1x,https://cst.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/8b85fd3/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2104x1181+0+834/resize/980x550!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%2Fthumbor%2FxZJWxn_AAN-5lIQIqxHFUHYYjn0%3D%2F0x0%3A2104x2848%2F2104x2848%2Ffilters%3Afocal%281052x1424%3A1053x1425%29%2Fcdn.vox-cdn.com%2Fuploads%2Fchorus_asset%2Ffile%2F16157216%2Fpetrakis_cst_101214_3.jpg 2x" width="490" height="275"
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Author Harry Mark Petrakis, at his home in the town of Dune Acres, Indiana on Friday, October 10, 2014. | Michael Gard/For Sun-Times Media</p></figcaption></div>
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</div><p><i>Send letters to </i><a class="Link" href="mailto:letters@suntimes..com" target="_blank" ><i>letters@suntimes..com</i></a><i>.</i></p><p> <br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/3/20/18476943/a-battered-old-warrior-and-a-wonderful-storytellerHarry Mark Petrakis2018-09-28T12:41:00-05:002022-03-31T16:55:30-05:00Cherished memories of libraries as repositories of knowledge
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Author Harry Mark Petrakis, at his home in Indiana. | Michael Gard/For Sun-Times Media</p></figcaption></div>
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<p>My wife and I must have made a rather somber sight as we entered the library in our town of Chesterton, Indiana; she on her walker and I hobbling along on my cane. But we had decided to break the monotony of our days by venturing into the library. Shops were useless since we no longer had reason to buy clothing or pick up items for our home. Diana spent hours a day reading and we decided as a change, she would read in the library as I made notes for a potential story.</p><p>Libraries had been an integral part of my childhood and my teens. They were a haven when I played hooky (as I often did) from school. I’d find a chair in some remote corner and spend hours reading. In my late teens I used libraries as a waiting room after I’d placed my horse racing bets in a nearby handbook. Listening to the announcer over the loudspeaker recounting the races in the frenzied arena of the handbook was nerve-wracking. I began placing my bets early and then spending the afternoon hours reading in the library. In late afternoon I’d return to the handbook to check my losers (mostly) and my winners (rarely).</p><p>There was also a womb-like ambience to libraries, a certain sacrosanct silence befitting a repository of the world’s knowledge. Unlike groceries and department stores, there was little movement or sound. Accepting the silence as a courtesy to others, library patrons sat reading in chairs or at the tables, while others browsed the shelves</p><p>As my wife and I entered our small town’s Westchester Library, I inhaled that fragrance that came with books; the scents of ink, paper and bindings. That aroma I had cherished since childhood. Each time I entered that domain of books, I recall the awe and delight I’d felt the moment I held <i>Lion At My Heart,</i> my first published novel, in my hands. That matchless event came to my family in Pittsburgh where I held a job as a junior level speechwriter for U. S. Steel in their corporate headquarters<i>.</i></p><p>After<i> Lion was</i> accepted, I began the process of preparing the manuscript for publication, correcting the pages and then proofreading the galleys. After several months, I waited impatiently for the finished book. One Saturday morning in the summer of 1959, a few months after our third son had been born in Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, from a bedroom window on the second floor of our house, I saw the mail truck pull up to our rural mailbox. I glimpsed the small brown parcel the mailman slipped into the box.</p><p>I raced down the stairs shouting, “It’s here!”</p><p>When I returned from the mailbox to the house holding the parcel which came from my publisher, our 7- and 11-year-old sons waited beside my wife who was holding our newborn son. All of them watched in suspenseful silence as I tore open the envelope and tugged out the copy of my first book. Our sons, my wife holding the baby and I whooped in a tumultuous moment of celebration. Afterwards our family formed a small procession, led by our sons beating with spoons on the bottom of metal pots. Holding the baby, my wife walked behind them. I trailed the group, holding my book above my head, as a priest might hold aloft the chalice of communion.</p><p>If the joy and celebration became more restrained with later books they always included gratitude and a feeling of relief that the process that began with the first words written on the first page of a manuscript, had been carried to fruition.</p><p>That same lengthy, always arduous process of starting, and then pursuing months and years of writing until a book was completed, followed by the fulfillment of its publication was repeated with each book. In the years that followed, I continued writing stories and additional books.</p><p>Through those succeeding years, I began lecturing before clubs and colleges on writing and storytelling. In the mid-’70s I served two years as writer-in-residence for the Chicago Public Library, setting up week-long writing workshops at two-score city libraries.</p><p>My tenure for the library was followed by serving two more years as writer-in-residence as for the Chicago Board of Education. In those two years, I visited 53 Chicago schools speaking to elementary and high school students on the art and joy of stories and storytelling.</p><p>During these years I also began lecturing as well as and serving periods of teaching. I held yearlong teaching residencies at several universities and during the summers served as writing teacher at numerous writing conferences. Those conferences brought me into contact with numerous novelists and short story writers, a few becoming life-long friends</p><p>Traveling alone or with my wife, I researched my Greek War of Independence novels by traveling a number of times through Greece. After other travels, I wrote essays on spending Easter with relatives on my parent’s island of Crete. I also wrote magazine pieces on my visits to Cyprus, Rhodes, London and Israel.</p><p>In later years, writing a book on the electronics giant, Motorola, my wife and I traveled through the European countries of Norway, Denmark, France and Scotland. A year later we also traveled through Asia, visiting Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore, absorbing the wonder and beauty of these ancient and diverse cultures.</p><p>Meanwhile during these years we enjoyed the comforting insular life of our family. Sharing the growth of our sons through childhood into adolescence, the celebration of their birthdays and their graduations, the milestones accompanying their journeys into manhood.</p><p>There was also the enjoyment of numerous dinners with friends who also savored the dinners my wife cooked for them. These gatherings held the extra bounty of imbibing numerous bottles of red and white wines as well as the stimulus of gratifying conversations.</p><p>A couple of hours later, as my wife and I made our way out of the library, a teen-aged youth at one of the tables raised his head from his book. He stared at the two of us limping along, as if he were witnessing the passage of a pair of aged, brittle ghosts. While I couldn’t be sure, I thought I also glimpsed an expression of pity for our obvious decrepitude.</p><p>I smiled at the youth, offering what reassurance I could, and responding to whatever pity he might have felt for us, wishing for him a fraction of the gratifying, fulfilling life we two old people had lived.</p><p><i>Find more information about novelist Harry Mark Petrakis at </i><a class="Link" href="http://harrymarkpetrakis.com" target="_blank" ><i>harrymarkpetrakis.com</i></a><i>.</i></p><p><i>Send letters to </i><a class="Link" href="mailto:letters@suntimes.com" target="_blank" ><i>letters@suntimes.com</i></a><i>.</i><br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2018/9/28/18484468/cherished-memories-of-libraries-as-repositories-of-knowledgeHarry Mark Petrakis2018-07-09T08:40:25-05:002022-03-31T16:52:50-05:00Slammed Depression-era doors, and a sister's unexpected help
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Harry Mark Petrakis as a young child (left) and his sister, who later would join him in his magazine-selling endeavor. |. {Provided photo)</p></figcaption></div>
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<p>I’d like to believe that if I had not become a writer and instead entered the province of business, I would have displayed a measure of innovation and achieved a measure of success.</p><p>I would submit as evidence a time when the Curtis Publishing Co. designated me “Chicago Saturday Evening Post Salesman of the Year.” This honor came in the mid-1930s, when I was 12 years old and lived with my family in Woodlawn.</p><p>In the spring of that year, a man dressed in shirt, tie and suit interrupted our baseball practice.</p><p>“If you boys want to get into something good that will make you some money, gather around and listen.”</p><p>The country at that time was burdened in the Depression years, and the prospect of making some money intrigued us all. We put down our gloves and bats and listened.</p><p>He told us his name was Charles Poole (“Call me Charley”). He was a regional sales manager for the Curtis Publishing Co.’s magazine, the Saturday Evening Post.</p><p>Charley was soliciting for salesmen. He explained that we’d be paid a percentage of the purchase price for every copy we sold. There would be additional compensation for salesmen who did well, and Honor Certificates for monthly sales winners. At year’s end, the best salesman in the city would earn the title “Chicago Saturday Evening Post Salesman of the Year.” The winner would receive a framed certificate of merit as well as a certified check for the imposing sum of $50.</p><p>Each salesman would receive an initial weekly allocation of a dozen copies and, after they were sold, as many additional magazines as we needed. In addition, we were promised a sturdy red cloth shoulder bag emblazoned with the Post logo.</p><p>A dozen of us volunteered to become Post salesmen (a singular honor, Charley assured us, as significant as volunteering for the military). Bursting with confidence, we spread out across the neighborhood.</p><p>Only a few hours of ascending and descending the back stairs and porches of apartment buildings were required for me to grasp the difficulties of the assignment.</p><p>Charley’s claim “that people around the world were eager to read the Post” didn’t seem to include our neighborhood. I could never have imagined the numerous ways people rejected my appeal.</p><p>Some shook their heads through the window. Some would open the door and say “No!” quite sharply. A few were angry at my interruption. A sleepy-eyed woman in her bathrobe scolded me for waking her up. One beefy, flushed-cheeked man in an undershirt threatened to “kick my ass down the stairs if I bothered him again!” I was outraged, but concluded it best if I took his advice and forever deny the lout the pleasure of reading our fine magazine.</p><p>At the end of the afternoon, after five hours of ascending stairs and knocking on numerous doors, I hadn’t sold a single copy.</p><p>I was apprehensive about reuniting with the other boys, fearing to hear of their successes. I was surprised to find their experiences matched my own. Two had sold a copy apiece, both sales, they admitted, made to relatives. The rest had sold nothing.</p><p>The days that followed repeated the dismal experience of that first day. By the end of that week, I had sold three copies. Almost all of the other boys had a similar experience. One boy, regarded by us with envy, had sold his entire allocation of 12 copies. (We learned later that his mother had bought all his copies.)</p><p>I was sorely discouraged but vowed to keep trying. One Saturday morning, my sister, a year younger than I, despite my pleas and threats, tagged along with me. I made her remain a few steps down from the door I was working.</p><p>In response to my knocking, a woman opened the door. Even as I launched into my pitch, she began shaking her head. Looking past me, she spotted my sister.</p><p>“What a sweet little girl,” the woman said. “Come here, honey. I just made some sugar cookies, and you can have one.”</p><p>Afterward, her heart warmed by my little sister, the woman bought a magazine.</p><p>For the next week, as soon as we got home from school, I took my sales bag and my sister and began my route.</p><p>I was bewildered at why my sister’s presence seemed to warm the hearts and loosen the purse springs of people. Perhaps it was her waif-like look, her big dark eyes glistening plaintively in her small pale face.</p><p>When the boys assembled with Charley for our weekly review, I reported selling 45 copies of the magazine. I easily won the “Post Salesman of the Week” and then “Post Salesman of the Month.”</p><p>Seeking ways to improve my solicitations, I found a tattered, worn oversized sweater for my sister to wear. Standing there with the torn sweater added to her sad and plaintive appearance.</p><p>I kept innovating. I gave the bag of magazines to my sister and, while I waited on the landing below, had her knock on the back doors. The sad-faced little girl in the torn sweater, bending under the weight of the bag of magazines, must have appeared heartbreaking.</p><p>After being designated “Chicago Post Salesman of the Year,” I won the accolade “Illinois Post Salesman of the Year.” Curtis Publishing Co. sent me a colorful framed certificate and a $100 U.S. Savings Bond.</p><p>At that point, the story stops. Selling lost its appeal, plus my sister, suspecting she was being used to only profit her brother, refused to make our rounds. I gave up selling the Post.</p><p>All this drama took place many decades ago, but the memories remain vivid and ageless. Charley urging us on, my sister in her torn sweater, the awards I have packed away.</p><p>Someday when my sons review those possessions I have left behind, they will find the evidence of their father’s time of glory.</p><p><i>Find more information on novelist Harry Mark Petrakis at harrymarkpetrakis.com.</i></p><p><i>Send letters to</i><a class="Link" href="mailto:letters@suntimes.com" target="_blank" ><i> letters@suntimes.com</i></a><i>.</i></p><p> </p><p> <br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2018/7/9/18397471/slammed-depression-era-doors-and-a-sister-s-unexpected-helpHarry Mark Petrakis2018-03-22T16:16:00-05:002022-03-31T17:11:05-05:00Opinion: Election Day 1936 - pride and achievement
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Election night crowds at State and Madison on Nov. 3, 1936. | Sun-Times Library</p></figcaption></div>
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<p>I have not thought of the Myerson family in decades. Perhaps it is this divisive and rancorous election campaign that makes me remember them now.</p><p>In the South Side Chicago neighborhood of my boyhood, they were our neighbors, living in a two-flat adjoining our three-flat building. Both our families had multiple children, my parents six and the Myerson’s five. One of their sons, Marvin, was about my age of 13. Our friendship began with an argument over a tricycle when I was six. By the mid-1930s, he had become my closest friend.</p><p>Our neighborhood was a polyglot of nationalities, mostly Greek, Italian, Danish and Swedish immigrants. There were also Sephardic Jews from Poland and Russia.</p><p>The citizens of each nationality tended to keep to themselves and for the most part lived amicably together. There were some vestiges of prejudice against the Jewish immigrants but the struggle for survival all of the families faced took precedence over the prejudice.</p><p>Just before the First World War began, with help from relatives already in America, the Myerson family fled the Russian city of Odessa to the United States to escape the brutal pogroms against the Jews. As they described to my parents the terrifying experience of the pogrom, families attacked and children torn to pieces by bloodthirsty mobs while the police did nothing.</p><p>The Myerson family came to the United States with three children. Two more, Marvin and his sister Selma, were born in this country. That about matched the history of my family with my parents bringing four offspring and then having two more, myself and a younger sister, born in the United States.</p><p>Abraham Myerson, Marvin’s father, was a burly-bodied man with muscled arms whose occupation was a butcher. Marvin told me once that a slap from his father’s big hand resonated in his head for hours.</p><p>On several occasions, I visited his father’s butcher shop, and when Marvin led me into the freezer, I was both fascinated and revolted by the slabs of dismembered cattle that hung on huge hooks from the ceiling. Marvin enjoyed my discomfort, gleefully calling me a “baby.” Because he was my best friend, I forgave him.</p><p>In contrast to his father’s size, Marvin’s mother, Hilda, was a small, sad-faced woman whose daily ritual was urging others to eat.</p><p>“You are all skin and bones, Harry,” she scolded me more than once. “You have to eat more or you’ll get sick. Now sit down and have one of these blintzes.”</p><p>Abraham and Hilda Myerson applied to become American citizens and in the early 1930s took their tests for that citizenship. Abraham, meeting daily with the public in his butcher shop, had become more fluent in English and could better phrase his answers, so he passed the test. Wife Hilda failed. I remember her crying and everyone trying to reassure her that she could study and be able to try again.</p><p>At that time, we were on the threshold of the 1936 presidential election, which pitted the incumbent, President Franklin Roosevelt, against Alfred Landon. Roosevelt had already served one term and brought in the New Deal that was immensely popular.</p><p>Abraham Myerson was unrestrained in his enthusiasm for Roosevelt.</p><p>“I want my first vote in these United States to be for this great man,” I heard him say more than once. “He is a man who cares for the people.” Abraham Myerson praised Roosevelt so fulsomely that both Marvin and I regretted our youth and inability to vote for that great man.</p><p>“You and Marvin will have your chance in a few years,” Abraham said. “Meanwhile, let us all thank God for what we have here. In Russia we had the brutality of the Cossacks. Here we have the miracle of being able to choose who we wish to lead us.”</p><p>On Election Day in 1936, Marvin told me that his entire family would be going to the polling place to accompany his father. In addition, their Uncle Jonah, Abraham’s brother, had come with his family from Cleveland to celebrate the occasion with them.</p><p>“Papa will be the first in our family to vote,” Marvin said. “He wants us all there.”</p><p>Later that morning when I emerged from our building, the Myerson family and their relatives from Cleveland were assembled on the sidewalk outside their building, about a dozen people in all. The early November weather was unseasonably balmy and no one needed a coat. Abraham and Hilda, their sons and daughters and visiting relatives looked resplendent, the girls and women wearing colorful dresses, the boys and men in shirt, jacket and ties.</p><p>Marvin, crammed into a suit he had outgrown looked pained and uncomfortable. I offered him my sympathy.</p><p>“I am suffering for Papa’s sake,” he said plaintively.</p><p>Soon afterward, the Myerson family began their procession to the polling place several blocks away. I still remember the grand spectacle they made parading proudly down the street.</p><p>Eighty years have passed since the election that President Roosevelt won in a landslide, carrying every single state. For months afterward, Abraham Myerson spoke of the gratitude and pride he felt casting his vote as an American citizen. His family had fled persecution to a country where a man was allowed to choose the leader he wished.</p><p>Now, remembering the Myerson family story, I am once again reminded of the miracle that is our nation’s diversity and the significance for each of us in being able to cast our vote.</p><p><i>Find more information on novelist <b>Harry</b> <b>Mark</b> <b>Petrakis</b> at harrymarkpetrakis.com.</i></p><p><i>Send letters to: letters@suntimes.com</i><br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2018/3/22/18373852/opinion-election-day-1936-pride-and-achievementHarry Mark Petrakis2018-03-22T16:14:00-05:002022-03-31T16:52:47-05:00Magdalena's story of tears, death and happiness
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Harry Mark Petrakis | Provided photo.</p></figcaption></div>
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<p>This memory of Magdalena belongs to my childhood, in a year when I was 12. I was emerging from my illness with tuberculosis that had me bed-bound for almost two years. While still not allowed to leave the apartment, I was able to escape my bed for part of the day. On summer afternoons I sat for hours on our back porch, part of a maze of porches on the rear of those old two and three story brick apartments that littered the South Side of Chicago.</p><p>Another porch belonging to the apartment next door stood beside our porch, the two separated by a solitary wooden railing. That apartment was occupied by an old woman who often sat on her porch as well. In the beginning, aside from a word or a nod of greeting, we sat in silence broken only by the creaking of her rocker and noises rising from the alley. After a while we began speaking to one another. I told her about my illness and that I was recuperating.</p><p>She told me she lived with her son who was a salesman and who was away for weeks, so she spent a good deal of time alone. Her name was Magdalena. I cannot recall ever hearing her last name.</p><p>I wasn’t sure about her age but Magdalena seemed to me to be very old, her cheeks resembling parched brown autumn leaves so brittle that even a slight wind might crack them. She also had a low hoarse voice.</p><p>On those afternoons I watched enviously as the neighborhood boys and girls gathered in the alley below us played hide-and-seek and kick-the-can.</p><p>Magdalena sought to console me.</p><p>“It won’t be long now,” she said,” and you’ll be down there playing with the other boys and girls.”</p><p>Sometimes she’d offer me a cookie or a piece of cake she had baked. Their sweetness lingered with me long after I had eaten them.</p><p>I spoke to Magdalena about how many hours I had read during my time in bed and that pleased her.</p><p>“How wonderful!” she said. “All the books you have read will help sustain you all your life. That knowledge you gained will be the great benefit you’ll reap from your illness.”</p><p>Magdalena asked me what I wished to do when I became older.</p><p>“I want to write my own stories.”</p><p>“Praying, singing and telling stories are the most important and endearing things human beings can do,” Magdalena said. “And the storyteller is among the most important. Everyone has stories from their life to tell. The hardest thing is to find the way to write them down. Storytellers know the way and do that writing for us.”</p><p>Magdalena spoke about her family.</p><p>“My father was a pharmacist, mixing medications that helped people get well. My mother was a housewife who did dishes and washed the laundry but who also had a gift. She designed and hand-stitched lovely quilts that adorned every room in our house.” She paused, a sadness shadowing her face. “And then I had one sister, six years older than I was.”</p><p>“Her name was Melody and she was a gentle and sweet person,” Magdalena said. “But the sadness of her life was that she was truly ugly. It hurts me to even say it, because it wasn’t her fault. As a child she had the smallpox sickness, and it left her face terribly pocked and scarred. I loved her very much and I saw the beauty beneath her woeful face, but sometimes even I had trouble looking at her.”</p><p>Magdalena paused, the only sound her rocker creaking. “That was my sister’s cross to bear. We both believed she would never find a man to love her and to marry her.”</p><p>“The year I was 16, and Melody was 22 she went with a friend on a trip to Santa Fe. A rodeo was playing in that town at the time. Somehow, Melody met one of the rodeo cowboys, a bronco rider named Lancer. She fell in love with him and, miracle of miracles, he must have seen the sensitive, caring person she was under her scarred face, and he fell in love with her.”</p><p>Magdalena paused.</p><p>“She brought home snapshots of Lancer, and he was truly one of the handsomest men I had ever seen, curly haired with big blue eyes, as good-looking as any of the leading men in the movies at that time. And because he loved her, Lancer must have seen Melody as beautiful as Norma Shearer or Joan Crawford.”</p><p>The afternoon sun shifted slightly in the sky, shining across Magdalena’s face. She rose and moved her rocker a few inches into the shade and sat down.</p><p>“Melody came back from Santa Fe glowing with happiness, marveling at her good fortune. I had never seen her so full of joy. Lancer was traveling the rodeo circuit and she wrote to him in different cities so he had letters waiting when he arrived. He wrote her back, wonderful letters she treasured and let me share, telling her how much he loved her and promising they would travel the following year’s rodeo circuit together. When Lancer finished his rodeo tour that year, they planned to get married.”</p><p>In the alley below us, an argument broke out among a small group of boys. After a while they moved on, their angry voices growing fainter.</p><p>“That year a terrible influenza epidemic broke out across the world. Millions of people fell ill, and thousands upon thousands died. My father and mother, Melody and myself, all of us fell severely ill. Melody was the one who died. She was just 24.”</p><p>The alley below us was now deserted, the shadows cast by the fading sun swallowing the row of garages. Small squares of light snapped on in the kitchen windows of apartments around us.</p><p>“I missed Melody so much, and I cried for a long time,” Magdalena said. “What consoled me in the end was the passionate love she had found before her death. Even for the short time they spent together, Melody’s love for Lancer and his love for her brightened their lives like a bursting sun. I truly believe God knew she was going to die so young and he allowed her to find Lancer and had him find her so she’d know the blessing of such a love before her death.”</p><p>Magdalena turned to look at me, her eyes glistening with tears.</p><p>“That is my story,” she said quietly. “Someday when you are grown up and writing stories, you can write my story about Melody and then it will become your story.”</p><p>Eighty years later, near the end of my own lifetime of storytelling, I am finally writing Magdalena’s story and making it my own.</p><p><i>Find more information on novelist Harry Mark Petrakis at harrymarkpetrakis.com.</i><br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2018/3/22/18366324/magdalena-s-story-of-tears-death-and-happinessHarry Mark Petrakis2018-03-22T16:12:00-05:002022-03-31T16:52:40-05:00How beauty of a horse racing 'madhouse' lost its luster
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>Kentucky Derby winner Nyquist is washed at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, Friday, May 20, 2016. The Preakness Stakes horse race is scheduled to take place May 21. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) </p></figcaption></div>
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<p>When I was 16, adrift in my green-boned youth, Zack, my best friend, taught me how to handicap the horses, something you can see people doing today in preparation for the Preakness Stakes on Saturday. He was two years older than I was, a wiry, handsome youth with a winning grin and a swagger when he walked. He had started playing the horses when he was 11.</p><p>“They wouldn’t let me in the handbook,” he told me, ”so I sat outside and paid an older man to carry in my bets.”</p><p>Zack introduced me to the Daily Racing Form, a newspaper he told me, as sacred to a horseplayer as the Bible was to a Christian or the Quran to a Muslim. Zack explained that knowledge of bloodlines didn’t guarantee choosing winners, but allowed one to explain losing with more authority.</p><p>Zack took me into Lenny’s, our neighborhood handbook, for the first time. One entered from an alley into a large and windowless chamber littered with worn and shabby tables and chairs. A row of tellers behind caged windows wrote up the bets and dispensed cash to the infrequent winners. The walls were covered with large sheets listing the horses running that day and, after the races, how the winners had finished.</p><p>A large rusty loudspeaker suspended high in one corner kept up an unceasing cackle of reports and, at intervals, broadcast the running of the races.</p><p>At those times the crowd in the hall would fall silent, surging to gather beneath the speaker, staring up at it with the rapt attention one would show a holy icon.</p><p>When the results of a race were announced, some listeners lamented and others exulted.</p><p>“The place is a dump and smells awful!” I told Zack after my first visit. “People walk around moaning about losing or boasting about winning! One race begins as another race ends so you don’t have time to think! It’s a madhouse!” Zack gave me a broad grin and slapped my shoulder.</p><p>“That’s the beauty of it!” Zack said.</p><p>My initial bleak impression did not stop me frequenting those dismal environs daily. I went over for a few hours every day after school. Then, I simply stopped attending school, a truancy I concealed from my parents.</p><div class="Enhancement" data-align-center>
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</div><p>Zack had dropped out of school two years earlier so he was unencumbered. He’d pick me up in the morning, my parents believing we were going to school.</p><p>At Lenny’s, we huddled over the racing form like generals planning a major campaign. Yet, whether we won or lost, the day unfolded in a series of highs and lows that had us riding an emotional roller coaster.</p><p>“Maybe we’ll have a better day tomorrow, ”I said. “Win or lose,” Zack gave me that embracing grin. “That’s the beauty of it!”</p><p>My wagering tenure lasted another five years, an affliction that burdened me into my marriage and through the birth of our first son.</p><p>Whatever job I held to pay my family’s bills was subservient to those hours I gambled. I borrowed money from friends, stole cash from the liquor store where I worked, pawned my brother’s suit and sold my sister’s books. I won a little but mostly I lost. While winning was better than losing, it was the tension of the racing that ensnared me.</p><p>Those years were an agony for my family. My wife often cried, pleading with me to stop, threatening to take our son and leave. But we loved one another and she stayed and we suffered together.</p><p>Meanwhile, I lived with the fear of being arrested for theft, the shame of not repaying debts from friends, the wasted hours and days frequenting the handbook and the stress imposed upon my family.</p><p>Finally, a catastrophic day, when unable to pay our rent, I borrowed $200 from my father, his month’s salary from the church where he served as priest. On my way home, I stopped in Lenny’s to make a single $10 dollar bet on a horse I’d been following. I felt secure because I had $10 dollars of my own for the bet, my father’s money safe in a trouser pocket I vowed not to touch.</p><p>My horse lost in a photo finish. Frustrated at coming so close and with another race ready to run, I broke into my father’s $200 to bet another $10. When I lost that bet, raging at myself for my weakness, I burrowed into the $190 again and again and kept losing. I kept betting in a demented fever, winning a little but mostly losing. By late afternoon I had lost my father’s $200. Pinned between despair at what I knew I had become and shame at having to confess my transgression to my wife, I mark that day as the time when I began a labored ascent from Hell.</p><p>With my slow move into recovery, Zack and I lost touch. I had a postcard from him once from Arizona and then, on a Christmas, he phoned me from Vermont where he was working for a phone company. He was married, still gambling, but hoping to taper off. Following that phone call I did not hear from Zack for almost 30 years.</p><p>After spending several years with my family in California working on screenplays of my stories, we moved back to the Midwest and bought a home overlooking the lake in northwest Indiana.</p><p>One summer afternoon, I heard a car ascending our driveway. I met the man who emerged at our front door. He appeared to be in his late 50s to early 60s, gray-haired and with a weathered face. I was sure I had never seen him before. He greeted me with a smile.</p><p>“Hi’ya doing, Harry!”</p><p>I kept staring at him, still certain we had never met. Then I saw the Racing Form folded and wedged under his arm that rattled the bones of memory. It was Zack. He had seen one of my essays published in a Chicago paper that mentioned my living in northwest Indiana and he had tracked me down.</p><p>Zack had worked different jobs in half-dozen states. His wife and he had a son and then were divorced, the boy remaining with his mother. Zack had served six years in prison for stealing office equipment from a company where he’d worked. After his release, he had open-heart surgery and prostate cancer they’d treated with chemotherapy. The cancer in remission had returned, and he needed surgery. He was living alone in Chicago, working at a trucking company on the North Side. All those years he had never stopped gambling.</p><p>I tried to coax him to stay for dinner but from the fear of old devils on my wife’s face, I knew she was glad he refused. He smiled, patted the racing form under his arm and told us he was driving to Washington Park to bet on a filly he’d been following running in one of the day’s late races.</p><p>I signed a couple of my books to Zack and then walked him out to his car.</p><p>He got into the driver’s seat and opened his window. We pledged we’d get together again soon but both of us knew that wouldn’t happen.</p><p>“I never made it,” he said with a faint smile. “You did make it. That’s the beauty of it.”</p><p>He turned the key and started the car’s motor. He gave me a final wave and then Zack was gone.</p><p><i>Find more information on novelist Harry Mark Petrakis at harrymarkpetrakis.com.</i></p><p><i>Follow the Editorial Board on Twitter: </i><a class="Link" href="https://twitter.com/csteditorials" target="_blank" ><i>Follow @csteditorials</i></a></p><p><a class="Link" href="https://twitter.com/CSTeditorials" target="_blank" >Tweets by @CSTeditorials</a>//</p><p><i>Send letters to letters@suntimes.com</i><br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2018/3/22/18360419/how-beauty-of-a-horse-racing-madhouse-lost-its-lusterHarry Mark Petrakis2018-03-22T16:10:00-05:002022-03-31T16:51:20-05:00Opinion: An audacious leap in pursuit of a dream
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<div class="Figure-content"><figcaption class="Figure-caption"><p>A family photo taken around 1960 of (clockwise from left) John Petrakis, author Harry Mark Petrakis, Mark Petrakis, Diana Petrakis and Dean Petrakis. | Provided photo</p></figcaption></div>
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<p>The photograph I hold in my hands shows my wife, Diana, our three sons, and myself taken sometime in the years of 1960 to 1961. Diana is seated in a cushioned armchair with our youngest son Dean on her lap. I am perched on the wooden arm of the chair holding John, our middle son, between my knees. Mark is standing behind the chair.</p><p>Mark is about 12. He has close-cropped hair and a smile that hints at defiance. John, who is about 8, is also smiling but with a conspiratorial grin as if he were hiding some sly thought. Our youngest son Dean, about 2, sits on his mother’s knee. The look on his face is one of bewilderment. The three boys, graced with luminous dark eyes and handsome faces, were spared the legacy of their father’s craggy, uneven features and inherited their mother’s good looks.</p><p>My wife Diana and I were married in 1945, both of us then at age 22. We’d agree in later years that we were both too young. My qualifications for marriage and supporting a family were dismal. I had dropped out of high school in my sophomore year, was unskilled and still struggled with a gambling addiction. The first year following our marriage, we lived with my parents and five siblings in a bedroom vacated by a brother who had departed. In the second year we moved into a studio apartment in a 500-unit housing complex. Our studio flat had a Murphy bed that swung out of the living room wall. In summer when our windows overlooking the courtyard were open, the babble of languages resounded and the aromas of assorted ethnic cooking coursed through the hallways.</p><p>In the first few years of our marriage, my employment record only confirmed my futile prospects. I worked for U.S. Steel writing up production sheets for the rolling mills. I was a clerk in a liquor store, delivered prescriptions for a pharmacist and pressed clothes for a cleaner. I was a helper on a beer truck, and for a year I co-owned a small factory district lunchroom.</p><p>During this procession of jobs, I nurtured the dream I’d had since childhood to write. From time to time I managed to write stories and submit them to magazines. After five to six years of printed rejection slips, the next few years brought some personal notes from editors offering suggestions and encouragement. After 10 years of submissions, Christmas of 1956, when I was working as a real estate salesman, I made my first sale to the Atlantic Monthly. The sale of that story<i>, “</i>Pericles on 31<sup>st</sup> Street<i>,”</i> after 10 arid years of submissions was like a cloudburst on a drought-stricken land.</p><p>In the following year I sold several more stories. I also finished and then had rejected a half dozen times a novel I had been working on with the lugubrious title of <i>Cry the Black Tears. </i>I began another novel that I finished in about a year. That book, <i>Lion at My Heart,</i> was accepted in 1958 by Atlantic Monthly Press with plans to publish the following year.</p><p>That was where my literary endeavors stood in mid-1958, when my wife became pregnant with our third child. I had just been fired from a job I’d held for a year with the Simoniz Wax Co. Then my older brother, Dan, came forward with what everyone else but me thought was a rescue. Through his position as a senior manager with U.S. Steel, he obtained for me an interview that led to my being offered a job as a junior-level speechwriter/event-assistant in their Pittsburgh office.</p><p>I drove to Pittsburgh to take up residency while my pregnant wife and sons traveled by train. We rented a small pleasant cottage in the suburb of Whitehall, on a rural lane called Provost Road. Across the road, on a rise of hill, was an old Civil War cemetery dotted with tombstones marking the graves of both Union and Confederate dead buried side by side.</p><p>Our third son Dean was born during our residence in Pittsburgh, and I recall during his first months pushing him in his buggy around the old cemetery.</p><p>My employment with U.S. Steel was doomed from the beginning because my longing, whetted by the sale of one book and several short stories, was only to write stories. My position was also meaningless, including tasks such as making sure a steel executive had Pellegrino water in his hotel room. Finally, after a series of extra long lunch hour breaks while I browsed in a downtown bookstore, I was fired.</p><p>All I wanted to do was write. But the prospects of earning any kind of living to support a family of five, seemed far out of reach. Everyone derided my dream as “reckless” and “foolhardy.” My agent in New York, my publisher, my attorney and several newspaper editor friends warned me about making so rash a leap. Then my longing found an additional source of support back in Chicago.</p><p>My sister Barbara’s husband, John Manta, owned a large old house near the lakefront on the South Side of Chicago. The three-story gabled structure had once known days of gaslight elegance but had long since fallen upon hard times and was scheduled for demolition so that a motel could be built on its site.</p><p>The Manta sons, our nephews Leo, Frank and Steve had always been close and loving to my family. Now hearing intimations of my desire to freelance, they offered the old house by the lake as a residence, pledging to do whatever they could to make it livable and offering it to us rent-free.</p><p>Even with that bountiful generosity, the move was fraught with hazard. There would be no income except for the writing. Falling into debt, I’d have to work twice as hard and twice as long to bail us out.</p><p>What was needed first of all was support and approval from my wife, Diana. I understood all her protective instincts as a mother mandated she strongly oppose an action that would endanger her family.</p><p>Reluctant and frightened, making a great leap of faith, she supported the move I could not have made without her agreement. Buoyed by that faith, we took up residence in the old gabled house that the stalwart Manta nephews, a versatile carpenter named “Ziggy’ and I made livable as best we could. The house became our home for the next two years.</p><p>The first year freelancing, my income from writing was $1,200 and the second year $1,600. We survived by virtue of our rent-free premises and the bounty of our relatives, eating with my sister and Diana’s parents multiple times a week. Relatives donated clothing. By the third year, adding teaching and lecturing to my employability, we broke the barrier into survival.</p><p>There is a lesson in our story for any family faced with major decisions and major change. Good sense mandates caution. But accomplishment is spawned from courage. With my wife’s faith in me adding wings to my soul, I was able to make that giant, audacious leap that has allowed me to live my last half century as a storyteller.</p><p><i>Find more information on novelist Harry Mark Petrakis at harrymarkpetrakis.com.</i><br></p>
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2018/3/22/18353289/opinion-an-audacious-leap-in-pursuit-of-a-dreamHarry Mark Petrakis