Rockin' History

Some time ago we chatted about how Cuba Township was named and I gave you a theory suggesting that this nonsense about farmers feeling sympathetic for the island of Cuba in 1845 was just that; nonsensical. Probably the real answer lies within the State Archives with correspondence back and forth between the then officials of Cuba Township and the State of Illinois officials who were organizing the Townships. It would make an interesting find if someone had the time to spend a year or two in Springfield rummaging around. In the meantime after talking about Cuba in the 1930's I thought you might like to hear about Cuba Township in the 1950's. We have gone in three short articles all the way from 1845 to 1930 to the fifties but will go back into the 19th Century in months to come. I like to jump around kind of like "Back to the Future".

My family first came here in the middle of the 1950's when we settled on Castleview Court in Biltmore Estates in what is now the Village of North Barrington. Gee, that just sounds like the way an historian writes. The Gooch family settled here in the 1950's. I like that. Actually we didn't settle here really. We came in a moving van to the place we bought, actually we didn't buy the place my parents bought the place. It had a pond and right after we moved in the ducks the former owners never told us about came out from underneath the bushes around the pond. All the little ducklings came out that were hatching. Pretty soon we had 50 or 60 of them. One day they all disappeared and my parents explained to me that the farmer down on Kelsey Road (Walter McGraw) really liked ducks and they gave them to him as pets. Years later I found lots of duck bones in the McGraw backyard and realized mom and dad hadn't been totally forthright with me.

Anyway, Barrington was a much different place back in the 1950's. You either lived "in town" and were part of a totally different social structure or you lived out in "the countryside" and an entirely different social structure existed there for kids. The two seldom socialized or met. Most of the kids from the North Barrington/Tower Lakes area and what is now Lake Barrington attended what was then called P.S. 89 now known as North Barrington School. All the schools were under control of the County Superintendant of Schools. There was no local school board and certainly were no teacher unions.

Most of us walked to school through the golf course and the side streets of Biltmore or in bad weather took a bus that was leaky, drafty and generally uncomfortable. But it beat the way my father claimed he went to school with hot potatoes in his pockets to keep his hands warm, barefoot often struggling through blizzards.

In those days the real treat was on Fridays when with parent permission you could ride the school bus into Barrington after school, have something to eat and go to a movie at the Catlow theater after which one parent or another would pick everyone up. McGonigal's tavern back then was called Bert's Bank Tavern, and served great cheeseburgers and for those of us who were convinced that eating meat on Friday would result in our immediate death, tuna fish sandwiches. I remember the first day I decided to test what my mother had told me and took a bite of a cheeseburger on Friday and dove under the table to avoid the lightening bolt. A great disappointment to me that my mother had not been forthright again. A greater disappointment to her as I spent a lot of hours at St. Anne's talking to Father Thain after that episode.

A real treat was fishing in the spring and fall after school. We frequently hid fishing rods outside P.S. 89 and then climbed over the fence into what is now Lake Barrington Shores and ran for the lake in the trees surrounding it before the steers that were raised there sensed our presence and decided to frolic, by chasing us. You haven't lived until you've felt the ground shaking from a thousand pound steer galloping behind you.

The fishing was great and when we got caught the conversations we had with the local sheriff were even greater. Naturally a price was paid in conversation when the sheriff returned us home, but the fishing was great.

The P.S. 89 that I remember still had the old steel tube playground equipment from before WWII installed had as I recall about ten classrooms and a small gymnasium. Hot lunches were not something ever heard of and the parent-teacher organization consisted of parents being told by teachers of the various deficiencies in their children. Those conferences were a time of great sadness for me.

High School was a lot smaller too. Kids did get to drive to school but generally in surplus army jeeps and beat up old jalopies, not what you see today in the High School parking lot. School itself was probably a quarter of the size of what it is and Prom took place in the High School gymnasium followed by a box car trip to Lake Geneva on what was then the Chicago Northwestern Railroad. The railroad would push a box car to onto a siding and that's what Prom-goers rode to Lake Geneva in and ultimately a passenger car in years later. It was pretty basic but it was pretty much fun.

A lot of the roads around Barrington were still gravel and in the spring the road grader would come through with the same Road District guys operating it year after year and frequently they'd stop along the way for a glass of cold water or lemonade or I'm sure a beer or two given by happy residents. The Road District back in those days didn't have the outstanding type of Highway Commissioner it has now (me) nor the equipment nor the manpower and sometimes after a heavy snow it was a couple of days before everyone was moving and most of us learned at an early age how to help our fathers put chains on the rear wheels of automobiles in order to get to town. Putting chains on wasn't fun.

Farming was still a big deal in Cuba Township in the 1950's and the big farms were very much in evidence and provided a lot of summer employment opportunities for energetic teenagers. I decided early on that I was not going to make a career of being a farmer. Nobody should have to work as hard as those people did then. I was pretty surprised to find out the supermarket did not manufacture milk.

Early 1950's and 60's around Barrington were a pretty laid back period. The big developing hadn't started and the zoning wars which could fill up a book with their tales had not commenced. We weren't farm born boys (girls) by any means but we were certainly more attuned to the rural lifestyle here than what a short fifty years later has brought. I think it was still a lot of the pre WWII way of life here in Cuba Township just as it probably was in America. None of us really realized the changes that were going to come as the middle 1960's as the Viet Nam era came to affect us all.

When we first moved here we had an honest to goodness party line. We shared it with three other families and were told never to listen to someone else's conversation if we heard voices when we picked up the telephone. Our number was Dunkirk 526. Today it is ten digits long and digital. I'm not sure how the telephone company decided on Dunkirk for the Barrington area for exchanges but the common prefix today of 381 if you look on your keypad adds up to the first three letters of Dunkirk.

No one had ever thought of area codes and communication if it worked right could be had by a rotary dial on one big heavy telephone. Sometimes you just had to hit the little buttons where the handset went until the operator came on the phone and ask her for the connection, particularly if you were calling within your party line. At that time the phone company had moved out of the Kaper building on Main Street and had built a building closer to Main and Route 14. It had real banks of switchboards and telephone operators. Sometimes the phone system worked and sometimes it didn't but most kids were not allowed unrestricted access to the phones because of the party line situation and the need to share with others.

Contrast all this with just fifty years later and every teenager and even younger than high school age kid has their own personal cell phone, tablet, laptop and or home computer able to communicate world wide at one flat rate. Who would have ever thought in just fifty short years Cuba Township and America would change that much.

Have some fun; ask your kids how they would like living with a "party line".

Regards,