The 20's (Chapter 13)

The years following Campbell's rehabilitation - the TWENTIES - were the happiest and most productive of his life. He moved his family of six into a lovely, brand new Colonial house in the newly developing suburb of Sauganash on the northwest side of Chicago. Our new house was a spacious home with an elegant open stairway that Martha and I quickly discovered was also a marvelous slide. It also had a huge kitchen with a large but cozy breakfast nook in one corner, a spacious front entry way that opened with French doors into the living room with a fireplace, a lovely dining room with a sparkling chandelier, and a glazed-in spacious three season porch which we used all year-round and where Campbell kept his latest radio with the huge speaker with attached earphones. We also had a console radio for the family in the living room. There were four large bedrooms upstairs, plus a small nursery room upstairs that also served as a sewing room.

I was five years old when we moved to our first Sauganash home, and I loved the evening walks that Martha and I would take with our dad watching the Lamplighter light the street lights, occasionally stopping to chat with a neighbor.

The year was 1925.

My baby sister Helen was just learning to walk. My brother, Irv, was a mischievous little three year old who kept wandering away from home so that Mart and I often had to retrieve him from a neighbor's yard. It was about this time that Campbell hired a full time "maid/housekeeper" for mother. She arrived in the person of Florence Green, a handsome, articulate African American woman the same age as my mother. She became my friend on sight, and I loved her truly. She stayed with us for eight years until a month before my fourteenth birthday. She adored Campbell, and from the very beginning, looked after him in her own special way - cutting up his food so that he could handle it easily - cooking his breakfast every day and serving it to him at the dining room table where he would have his typewriter set up to begin his writing of his correspondence for the day. She kept the house immaculate, the beds freshly made and the laundry done. Mother was freed of all these duties...free to shop, visit relatives, and pursue anything else she wished to do. She continued to visit her old landlady who owned the two-flat where she and Campbell had spent the early years of their marriage - the lady being Gertrude Hopf.

Gertrude's son, Eric, had grown from a teenager to a young man, marrying a lovely young woman named Christine who, very sadly, was killed outright when on the way to a wedding where she and a girlfriend (driving the car) were trying to outrace a train on the way to a crossing.

The twenties were also years when Campbell reached his full potential as a business man, and will write about that in the next chapter...