Stephen Kastner

Memoirs
By Stephen Kastner

Chapter 1

I’m a King Bee

My childhood began in the city of Chicago until the 4^th grade when we moved to Wheeling, Illinois. At that time, the first subdivisions northwest of Chicago were under development at Rolling Meadows and Dunhurst Heights. These new housing projects provided young families with the opportunity to own land and a home, despite the fact that they consisted of relatively low-quality prefabs – cracker boxes some people called them.

Evanger’s Dog & Cat Food Company

My parents took me along with them to a party where they picked out the features of our new house and selected a corner lot that it would be built on at 84 George Road, signed a contract and let the developers start building. Soon, we were packing and moving from our Winona Street apartment to what would come to be known as the suburbs. For a while I played with my new found friends in a zone of construction. More than 500 homes were eventually built there as former farm fields were consumed by subdivision creep. Sometimes we played in the adjoining farm fields, eating and throwing heads of cabbage. A little farther across the adjoining field and along the railroad track was Evanger’s Dog & Cat Food Company, a busy operation where old horses were slaughtered and canned to feed people’s pets. The Evangers had a kennel with a pair of beautiful Great Danes whose pictures were on the label of each can.

I was enrolled in St. Mary’s Catholic School in Buffalo Grove, a small rural parish next door to a cow pasture with electric fence wires. The town had one gas station known as Brehm’s garage, a restaurant, the church and school. Lots of new kids lived in Dunhurst, going to school with farm kids who had horses and cows in their back yards. They taught us to hold a friend’s hand and grab the fence wire to pass them a jolting practical joke. Sister Matilde loved baseball and every day at recess she would be outside pitching for both teams of little boys.

Bonnie Hass and Ellen Boden were my best friends. I can’t explain why my best friends were girls. It was a little odd, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I also hung around with Bonnie’s cousin George Beattie, who lived right across the street from me. Dunhurst was a dynamic model of American consumerism directly linked to social rank and status. People with corner lots outranked the ones with neighbors side-by-side. Some of the homes were built with brick, more expensive thus higher status. Then, people started to build garages – our two-car, attached with a screened porch between earned the highest rank. We added a pole lamp out by the sidewalk and everyone followed suit. My mom was an avid gardener, surrounding the house with a plush lawn, a few trees, some bushes and lots of flowers.

Each weekday, kids would stand out at the public or the Catholic school bus stops in the early morning, waiting with lunches packed in paper sacks. The St. Mary’s kids started school days in Buffalo Grove with Mass held in a dark gothic church filled with old statuary, stained glass windows, lots of burning candles, a giant crucifix above the altar with a dead body nailed to it and stations of the cross. I didn’t know what the public school kids did each morning until I was eventually expelled from Catholic school in the 6^th grade.

Then I found out they started off with homeroom and announcements, followed by strange new classes like biology and phys ed. Yes, we all got naked together every day in the boys shower. It was a bit amazing and liberating, but I was a fat little kid, always a bit embarrassed at my incapacities. I can remember hanging like a tuna from the chin up bar, unable to do even one simple pull up.

But I was smart, and that had status at public school – enough status to overrule the husky butt issue. Nonetheless, I had a fat ass and ran as fast as a turtle. I remember trying out for little league, eventually getting to suit up in a team uniform, getting my first hit and starting to run for 1^st base, about a thousand feet away toward right field. Of course I was put out with a quick toss to the 1^st baseman.

When I got back to the dugout the coach said in a puzzlement, “Hey Kastner, turn around. Huh? I don’t see a piano on your back.”

My love of sports sunk to a new low… but I loved girls and rock ‘n roll music. And some of them loved me. Noreen Alsdorf, a young Amazon took a particular liking to me and would on occasion, find places to engage me, literally overpowering and kissing me. She was beautiful, but at least a foot taller than me and much stronger. She had two big brothers who must have taught her plenty of combat arts.

I was in love with Beatrice Neibur and Kay Messenger in that order. Beatrice loved to make out. Kid parties back then always had a dark room for making out. We knew not where we were headed, but the going there was blissful and seemingly endless… until a parent eventually came in to open the doors and windows and let out the steam.

It was in the days of saddle shoes, pony tails and bucket purses that Elvis came into being on the Ed Sullivan Show. I was a soft rocker before the King appeared, listening to Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte, Theresa Brewer and eventually Bill Hailey and the Comets. It seems now like warming up an engine, starting it at idle and then kicking it into gear over time with Presley, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, Fabian, Fats Domino and an ever-increasing wave of musical energy revving me up.

Steve and Ruthie in the Lawrence Ave. Sears & Roebuck photo booth

But, I have to credit my mother for spawning and nurturing my earliest interest and forthcoming love of music. Ruth Kastner was the one that found a little record store in Prospect Heights and shopped it with the same gusto she applied to church bingo parties. She wanted to be a winner. She wanted to display prescience – the ability to pick through the newest releases, selecting the ones that would eventually become smash hits before they climbed to the top. She also loved betting on the horses at Belmont Park, with a special fondness for sulky racing and she wore her hair in a pony tail.

My mom would regularly bring me a stack of new 45s and sure enough, I was cool because I was spinning the hits before they hit. She was cool because she was a hit-picker, but she didn’t have much interest in actually listening to any of my 45s (vinyl 2-song disks recorded at 45 rpm with intended A and B sides, but on rare occasion both sides would become hits on the Top Forty). I played them in my room.

Our house was way more musical when my Dad was at home. Eugene Kastner loved jazz, Dixieland, piano, brass and vocalists. Mom and Dad always mentioned only one song as their favorite, “Stardust” by Glenn Miller. I think they fell in love and danced to it as teenagers… and at their wedding, then World War II split them apart for a while.

I was born in 1946 right after the war ended, probably conceived on or about New Year’s Eve at the end of 1945, a few months after we dropped atomic bombs on Japan and all of the sailors and soldiers came home. The baby boom, a flood of new babies was born following a wave of death and destruction. I remember always being crowded in school, every classroom filled to over-capacity, teachers trying to squeeze in just one more desk, nuns posing as educators, trying to tame and instruct a pack of 35-45 claustrophobic, energetic, pre-pubescent kids. The “Brides of Christ” were mean and sadistic. We created the hive mind early on as a means of fighting back. Note-passing was a fine art, especially long distance delivery. We quickly learned to work together.

Often the nuns would place me strategically in the midst of good girls, trying to isolate me, surrounding me with obedient little A+ worker bees. I seemed to have a knack for corrupting them. And in the 5^th grade we broke two nuns and a lay teacher… literally, sent them to an early retirement with what were then described as “nervous breakdowns.” We were supposed to feel guilty. Instead we felt a strange triumphant sense of power – one that grew as the year advanced. By the time spring arrived the school had exhausted all of their options. Our class developed its reputation as untamable simply because the Catholic school kids sat in the same room all day with the same kids. I would soon learn that Public school kids switched classrooms many times each day and got rearranged regularly.

Luckily, June arrived and school came to a close. My 6^th grade year at St. Mary’s didn’t last very long as I think the management believed they had isolated the real problem. I vividly remember walking home barefoot down Buffalo Creek after being expelled for tormenting Mike Grady who sat in the front row alongside the other teacher’s pets. From my seat in the back row, I managed to somehow invoke such anger in him that he rose out of his seat and ran to the back of the classroom and punched me. I was kicked out of class and sent packing. Thank you Jesus!

On September 9, 1956, Elvis made his first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. I was almost 10 years old. I wanted to become a juvenile delinquent after seeing Jailhouse Rock. I remember walking ahead of my Grandmother, who was kind enough to take me to the film, with my collar turned up, a sure sign of delinquency. But my haircut was always a giveaway, cruel and undermining, it derailed any effort I might expend to be wicked.

1954

My Dad was responsible for taking me to the barber shop where he called all of the shots. After every shearing I wanted to hide from the entire world for weeks. My ears naturally protruded out from my head. Cutting away the hair above them seemed to make them resemble large wing–ears, much like Dumbo’s. I did everything possible to negotiate for sideburns and longer hair but it was always denied – butch cut, crew cut, flat top all through high school. Eventually, came the Beatles but not soon enough.

Before freedom and rebellion in the 60s there were the dark years spent in the south. For a number of reasons my Dad decided to leave his long-term employment with Contracting and Materials Company in Evanston to take up employment with Cohn Brothers Construction in Tampa Florida. In the 7^th grade I found myself in a scary new world where everything I knew was sharply reversed. I was transformed from a witty, popular but “husky” boy at Wheeling Elementary to a fat, brain, Yankee at Sligh Junior High – home of the Red Devils.

Half of the kids there were bussed in from Temple Terrace, an upper-crust suburban development that embraced an 18-hole golf course. Sligh Jr. High tried to be a melting pot, mixing rich brats equally with some of Tampa’s toughest Puerto Rican kids from the poorest sections of the northeast side. Florida schools used “licks,” physical punishment to keep order, paddling with a flat wooden bat if you needed a few licks for correction. Kids dealt out physical abuse as a social sport. There were rules and ongoing games, with penalties imposed upon the losers.

Draw an imaginary x on someone’s upper arm with your finger. If they failed to notice and wipe it off before you counted to ten you earned the undeniable right to “frog” them on the x spot. Frogging was in itself an art form.  You made a fist, but extended the central knuckle of your middle finger out a bit further than the others. With this instrument you struck the muscle of the victim with a sharp punch. If it was done right, the muscle popped out and then retracted, thus earning the name frog. Most of the boys had black-and-blue spots on their arms.

The cool kids had Cushman motor scooters with chrome pipes. It was all about physical strength in Florida. I remember cautiously correcting my math teacher, Mr. Pardo’s mistakes on the blackboard. He also taught Driver’s Ed. We watched film strips like Signal 30, a collection of graphically disturbing still shots of James Dean and Jayne Mansfield’s dead bodies. It was meant to impress you with shots of dismemberment. Florida was a 3-year nightmare, like a hall of mirrors when you were in it, not knowing while you were there if  you would ever get back out.

There were gators in the Hillsborough River and coral snakes and water moccasins on the banks. We had small stinging scorpions and nasty sharp things in the grass called sandspurs that would have to be removed from bare feet with a tweezers. Every summer afternoon was capped off with a sizzling electrical storm as the heat built to the breaking point. The born-and-bred white locals were called “crackers” and they were racist and very Christian.

In 1961 the chapter on Florida closed. We moved back to the same northwest suburbs of Chicago. Despite the fact that I was essentially back home, everything there had changed while I was away. Children had become teenagers. The students from several regional elementary schools were now blended to populate Prospect High School. I was in a mild state of post traumatic shock.

Music remained my refuge. I discovered folk music, broadsides, protest songs and poet songwriters. Phil Ochs, Malvina Reynolds, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and eventually Bob Dylan became my heroes. I started learning to play the banjo first, then the guitar. At 16 years old, Kip Voorhees and I rode the bus to Newport, Rhode Island where we slept on the beach and attended several days of the Newport Folk Festival. I got to meet and talk with those same heroes.

Jim Smith worked in the record store at Randhurst. The employees often got comp tickets to concerts as part of the promotional materials for new artists with records to push. One day Jim asked me if I wanted to see a new rock band from England appearing in Chicago on their first visit to America. Even though I was a folkie, I agreed to go with him to see The Beatles.

Life Magazine photo © Time Inc.

When we got to the Stockyards it seemed like Jim and I were the only two guys in a sea of young girls. We could see the band playing but heard nothing but the sounds of 3,000 screaming, sobbing girls. The entire hall was continuously lit from start to finish with what must have been hundreds of thousands of erupting flash bulbs.

Towards the end of the concert we decided to slip out early to beat the crowds. As we made our way out toward the exits nearest the parking lot, we were suddenly swept back by security guards, just as we were about to go out the doors. I looked back to see John, Paul, George and Ringo running as fast as they could towards us with a breaking wave of young girls pursuing them as they dashed through the doorway just inches away. They jumped in and right through a limo and out the opposite side door, getting in to a second one waiting right beside the first. The decoy was quickly surrounded by the girls who thought the Beatles were inside, while the second vehicle sped off.

The Beatles were entertaining, but it was another British band that would transform me from a folkie back to a lover of rock ‘n roll. I can still remember the day Jim showed me a copy of the first album by the Rolling Stones.

It’s about 4 pm and we are expecting to get more than a foot of snow in the next 24 hours – a perfect time to start a project on my life’s work.