The prostitute that lived kitty-corner across the vacant lot from my house was an accepted part of the neighborhood. I don’t know her history or how long she had been there but she had a nice house with a fenced in yard and a couple of small dogs to make sure that the neighborhood kids stayed on the outside of the fence. Her business was her business and if anyone opposed it they kept it to themselves. It wasn’t like she had men coming and going at all hours of the day and night. The occasional John usually parked a block or so away and then walked over. They would be there for a half an hour or so and then they would leave. The policeman on the beat that included my neighborhood dropped in periodically to see how she was. I don’t know who paid whom but she never seemed busy enough to warrant her paying a bribe unless they just traded services.
She was just another part of my neighborhood that had enough other characters living in it to provide her some cover. There were several families on welfare and two families with deaf parents. The husband and wife of one of these families would have arguments that turned into shouting matches. Their hands would fly as they signed to each other. When the husband turned his back on his wife he couldn’t “hear” what she was saying and it would make her even madder. There were two black families and a “Mexican” family along with the German, Russian and Slovak families, most of whom worked at the CF&I.
Then there was the World War I vet who had been in the invasion of Vladivostok during the Russian Revolution. When I was growing up, he raised red worms to sell to fishermen. He had large bins full of dirt and household garbage and worms. The worms would eat the garbage and reproduce rapidly, creating excellent compost and thousands of worms The used soil was taken to his front yard and used to grow vegetables and flowers. He had a yellow tomcat that we all called Geronimo. He was covered with scars and the ends of his ears were frayed from all the fights he had been in.
The neighbor across the alley built and raced “stock cars.” The stock car track , west of the corner of Bay State and Northern, was within walking distance. Many weekend nights my dad would take us to see the stock car races including the “powder puff derby” where the drivers were women and the “demolition derby” where the last car moving won the prize. As if to balance this strange mixture, there was a young girl who was preparing to become a nun.
Across the street from my house there were three vacant lots that had been converted into a baseball diamond. There was a pitcher’s mound, home plate with a tall backstop and three bases. The outfield included the dirt streets at the corner of Euclid and Mesa. A good hit into right field could go into the yard of the prostitute and that always led to a certain amount of pleading as we tried to convince her to give the ball back. Sooner or later she always returned it but quite often it was the next day and then only after giving us a good lecture about respecting her privacy and not trying to retrieve it ourselves by going over the fence. If we acted contrite enough she would give it back. If we had an old ball we would dig it out and play with it. Otherwise we just had to wait until she felt sorry for us and gave us the ball back.
When I was in college the woman decided to share her house with another woman and it wasn’t long before the police arrived and arrested them both for running a house of prostitution. That was against the law, while living alone and entertaining guests was legal. The other woman moved out and the neighborhood went back to normal. By the time I graduated from high school, houses had been built on the baseball field and I had no reason to know what she was doing. I lost track of her completely when I went away to college and my parents sold the house on Euclid.
Looking back I appreciate the “live and let live” attitude that prevailed in Pueblo while I was growing up. It brings to mind Henry David Thoreau who wrote in 1854: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music that he hears however measured or far away.”
Robert Pardun
March 25, 2009 at 1:59 am |
I lived fairly close to your neighborhood and yet it was really different from what you discribe. That will be a story for another time–Palmer and Mesa.
The man who was into racing also was also a square dance caller and he called for a small group of kids that met in my parents’ basement. His son, later was also into racing and owned a shop that did radiators or something like that at the junction. He had a daughter that was a part of the racing circuit. She raced at the I-76 track (Fort Morgan) several times about 10 years ago. I did not know about it until long after the fact, but I am not into racing anyway, so I am relaying this information. Bill O’Neill lived in the 1100 block of Belmont. He vividly remembers Don, the racer, and Russell.
Thanks for some interesting thoughts.
March 27, 2009 at 4:30 pm |
We didn’t have any prostitutes on our block. We had lots of kids, fathers who worked and mothers who stayed home, except for one who was divorced. I can’t think of one man on our block who worked in an office. Several worked on the railroad, or at the state hospital, or POD. Strangely, none worked at CF & I that I can remember. We played basketball in the alley behind my house. My dad had put up a hoop on a homemade backboard, nailed to a telephone pole. The ball bounced into a yard of a couple with no kids sometimes, which they didn’t like. One day we went out to play and the hoop and backboard had been moved to a different telephone pole… but put up upside down. I can still remember almost every family that lived on our block.
March 28, 2009 at 3:15 am |
I lived about ten blocks from Lakeview School and only went there once, to watch a basketball game between Lakeview and Minnequa where I did go. As I walked to Lakeview, I had the distinct sensation of leaving my neighborhood.
I lived on the corner of Cypress and Division from the time I was not yet seven till I graduated fom Central. Both those streets were unpaved when we moved there. There were so many kids living on the north half of the 1500 block and the first house on the 1400 block of Cypress that we rarely needed kids from the south half to make up two teams, football or baseball, to play in the street.
We played touch football, of course. Some Saturdays we’d go to Bessemer Park to play tackle. To the end there was an empty lot on the corner of Stone and Division that would have been fine for tackle, but there was a small, younger girl, named Rosie I think, that nobody wanted to play with because she hit so hard. We played in that lot just once that I can remember.