Chicago Days: Growing Up Absurd On The South Side

"Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days." -- Flannery O'Connor

West Englewood, on Chicago's infamous South Side, is a notoriously poverty-stricken and crime-ridden district. That's today. This memoir is set in an earlier time. In the 1960s, West Englewood was a rough, working-class, immigrant neighbourhood, rife with street gangs and racial conflict. My local high school yearbook in the mid-60s included a picture of the cop whose entire beat was the school. What could be more absurd than a youngster with intellectual ambitions growing up in such an environment?

But it was also a time when opportunities for a young person were far greater than now. An interest in science could lead from getting a chemistry set for Christmas to experimenting with dangerous chemicals unquestioningly delivered to a private address from far away chemical supply houses. A car that could only be started by spraying ether into its carburetor could be purchased for 75 dollars and be allowed on the road. A shy young man could manage to live two lives: one of the mind and one of the streets.

Ken Stange (1946-2016) worked primarily as a writer but also as a visual artist, with work represented in numerous public and private collections. His literary output includes many books of poetry and fiction, as well as hundreds of publications in literary periodicals. He referred to his books as "hypotheses" as a nod to his interest in the integration of the sciences and the arts. He also published in computer magazines, wrote commercial software for test evaluation, penned an ‘Arts’ column and presented his research at international conferences. For almost a decade he devoted much of his energy to a major work (eventually published as a trilogy) about the similarities and differences of creativity in the arts and the sciences. He taught in the Department of Psychology at Nipissing University (North Bay, Ontario) for forty years, culminating in Professor Emeritus status. More biographical info can be found at: KenStange.com