Headed to Chicago

About a week after Helen and I married, I took the train to Chicago, arriving at Dearborn Station August 2, 1941, leaving my bride home in Flintville. Dad had rented an 8 x 8 cubby hole in a flop house on South State Street, north of the main bus station. For two days, I wandered around the loop seeing the sights and familiarizing myself with this huge city with all the skyscrapers and noisy street cars and elevated trains.  Then I went to work as a mail order clerk for Scott-Freeman, a wholesale school book depot, located at 620 Wabash Avenue, one block east of my cubicle at "Derelict Manor" on State Street. Dad carried out all kinds of fruit and ice cream and cakes from the kitchen and brought them up to me for my supper meals. Workers in the kitchen at the hospital were allowed to take home food for themselves as a side benefit. I ate no breakfast and paid thirty cents for a full noon meal including drinks and dessert at a stool and bar eatery on State Street, just up from the flop house. The food tasted good. I did not question its contents.

Helen and mother arrived in two weeks. Helen and I, dad and mother, rented two, one-room furnished apartments at $6.00 a week on Prairie Avenue from Mrs. Waterstraus. The rooms overlooked Soldier Field and the switching railroad yards. It was within walking distance of the hospital. Not a bad neighborhood. Mother took a job at St. Luke's, Helen a little later. I left the book depot, taking a job at a downtown men's club s an express elevator operator, for more money. Took two or three hit or miss jobs, all requiring long street car rides - was marking time while awaiting a job at St. Luke's. In a couple of months, a job opened up as operator of the elevator in the Physio Wing. I took it and we were then all working for St. Luke's Hospital. It was quite a trick to operate this elevator as it was an old hydrolic type, kind of like a car rack in a garage, you controlled it with a long handle sticking up out of the floor. It had a habit of leaking pressure and when you would level off at a floor by the time you got the door open, the dumb thing had sank a foot. Then you had to close the doors and start all over. I soon learned that you had to overshoot the floor and let her sink down. I finally mastered it about the time I was transferred. The only thing I liked about it was when I worked late shifts. I would take the - thing - as we called it, down to the basement and study my radio books, when traffic was light.

Tim Marsh, Helen Marsh, Blanche Marsh and Richard Marsh in 1941
Chicago, Illinois - Prairie Avenue - First Apartment.

I was glad when I was transferred to the front desk, as a bell-hop, where I carried up flowers, delivered messages, picked up food for the more affluent patients. I remember one was the Governor of Illinois. At the time, he had been in for some time, they were drying him out, had to go down Michigan Boulevard, about two blocks to a catering restaurant, who always prepared roast duck for him and I had to carry it back to his room. On one occasion the gravy spilled all over my uniform on the way back. Oh yes, I remember him well, he never tipped me once. Most days I had to take the street car down to Mercy Hospital, about twenty blocks south, to pick up mother's milk for babies and bring it back to the hospital. Often while not busy, we sat in a lounge behind the desk and listed to the war news. We could never get away from it. It consumed the country.

Tim and Helen Marsh - 1941
Chicago, Illinois - Prairie Avenue

On occasion, I would meet Helen going down a hall as I would be making a delivery and she would be dropping off something as a nurse's aid. She also worked as a dining room attendant while at St. Luke's. She was working in the dining room the day the flash came over the radio about Pearl Harbor. I continued to work here until January 1942.

Dad wrote in his journal: "Dec. 7, 1941, War - War - War. Worry - Worry -Worry." Guess that pretty well summed it up.