Part V - Ethnic Groups and Boundaries

 Our little enclave - still known as Riverdale community in the city of Chicago - was bounded by Indiana Avenue on the West, the C&EI Railroad on the East, 138th. Street on the south, and the Calumet River on the north.  We used to call the section north of the Little Calumet River the "North Side".  We were fairly provincial back then.  I recall my dad referring to the real North Side of Chicago as a place you don't want to go to because it's too easy to get lost.  Their street intersections are all names (e.g. Central and Diversey) versus the South Side which had a number with a name (e.g. 111th. and Halsted).  

"MK Packaging" on the map was "the lumber yard where my uncle Don Anderson worked."  He lived right across the street from it. The "Heavenly Angels" funeral home used to be Bachman's and was right across the street from our church.  Most every church member who died was "laid out" there, as the saying went.

The ethnicity of our little enclave was most certainly all white - with basically central European ancestry.  Some of the surnames I recall from memory are:

Busch....Janeschefki....Kainrath.....Wysinski....Reitz....Panozzo.....Bilecki..... Frank.....Drechsel....McCready....Mohr.....Oemick....Dreger....Baron....Mongeau....Stark.... Miller....McCloskey.....Bishton.....Kramer....Kortum....Bauman..... Biggers.... Bilecki.....

On the 1940 census, the overwhelming majority of folks in our little enclave worked at Acme Steel.  And one could walk to work from this neighborhood -- and often did so.

In some sort of manner, we were our own "caste".   I say this based upon a recent reading of a powerful book by Isabel Wilkerson entitled "Caste... The Origins of Our Discontents" (Copyright 2020).  Our neighborhood mimicked so many others across this country as white, blue collar, European ancestry (particularly central European), and very basic or limited formal education.  And in a caste system, there are always groups of people who are "lower in rank" than yours.  

So it was quite natural to look at other groups as lower than ours.  Often, the Irish were considered below our group as my mother often referred to many of them as "shanty Irish".  One can well imagine where "black folks" were considered in this caste system!  And so it was....