Introduction: The Author, Bob Baker
Hi. My name is Bob Baker and some of you from the Hyde Park High School class of 1956 might remember me. After I left Hyde Park High I went to college and then became a history teacher. Now in retirement I continue to be fascinated by the past and in this web-book our common past as the class of 1956. What you are about to read is my personal take on that history but as benefits a web-book also your opportunity to express your views of our past.
Chicago—our Chicago–was the city that existed between 1952 and 1956, during our high school years. This Chicago was both (as Nelson Algren described it in his 1951 essay, Chicago, City on the Make) the mecca of hustlers, greed, low deceit, smiling hypocrisy, organized crime, institutionalized racism, dehumanizing class conflict, brutalizing violence, and also a city of broad boulevards, beautiful parks, high-minded reformers, arts, music, museums, well-intentioned tolerance. We lived our formative teen-age years in the matrix of these complexities and I, for one, had an inchoate suspicion of Chicago’s contradictions as I was growing up on the South Side.
Historians have defined us as the “Silent Generation“ sandwiched between the Depression/WWII “Greatest” and the Baby Boomers. But that label comes from the youth in the newly emerging suburbs of America who were for the most part silent and conformist. I did not realize how different I was from suburban kids until I met them at college. Of course I had absorbed much of the culture of the 1950’s and of course I was blissfully ignorant of much that was happening around me, but the diversity of Hyde Park High School, the dense urban life of the South Side, and the uniqueness of our neighborhoods guaranteed that after high school I would be neither silent nor conformist.
This web-book contains five chapters that you may access by clicking on the chapter heading above. Each chapter contains my commentary and photographs and except for Chapter One and Chapter Five, an accompanying map. The map will at first seem complicated but you will find it easy to comprehend. The master map is constructed in five layers and is confusing if you look at all five layers at once. You must eliminate some layers to understand the layer described in each chapter. At the end of each chapter are commentaries from our classmates, and you are encouraged to contribute your own commentary, as well as to correct any mistakes that I have made. If you want to change or delete your commentary, or write something anonymously, I will honor those requests. If you wish to contact me, use the form below, or the comment button that is at the top of each chapter page, and I will email you back.
I would like to thank the following folks for their advice and help: classmates Roberta “Rowie” Rosenstein Siegel and Lesley Dahlin Shapiro, and Bob Howard; University of Chicago Professor Ken Warren; and especially Jonathan Coles of Mountain Mapping in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.