Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

I grew up in a blue-collar suburb of Chicago developed specifically to provide housing for blue collar workers, especially at Automatic Electric, a ginormous factory manufacturing telephones and switchboards sold throughout the world. Automatic Electric had moved to Northlake from Chicago in 1957 after building what was one of the largest single-story buildings in the United States on a 35-acre site. Automatic Electric employed somewhere between 12,000 and 16,000 workers at its heyday—more than Northlake’s total population.

Automatic Electric was set way back on the far side of Wolf Road from where my own residential street ended. Addison Creek ran alongside Wolf Road, and where it bordered Automatic Electric’s property, there were two little islands that my brother and I thought were unexplored wilderness. He bought a kayak from someone and occasionally dropped me off on the bigger island where I could play Girl Explorer for an hour or two until he picked me up. I’d walk a narrow path that ran the length of the island without it ever occurring to me that someone had been there before me to have made that path. I never noticed any birds on the island except a robin or two. There may not have been many birds around, but I was oblivious, so I certainly missed some, especially during spring migration. It never occurred to me that birds are supposed to be pretty much everywhere.

Our creek may have been too polluted for ducks and most fish, but mosquitoes, who have breathing tubes to get their oxygen from the air, not the water, proliferated. So the DDT truck sprayed our neighborhood frequently on summer evenings. I found the only Baltimore Oriole I ever saw as a child dead in my yard beneath one of our elm trees one morning after the DDT truck had gone by.

A couple of large trees on the island were ideal for climbing, giving me vantage points to see Automatic Electric’s expansive, meticulously manicured lawn—acres and acres of it between the creek and their building. That lawn looked beautiful to my eyes, emerald green and dotted with large shade trees. How could a little girl of the 1950s understand how few animals can survive in that kind of habitat?

Automatic Electric enlisted boys in the neighborhood to trap “gophers” off the grounds at a quarter apiece. My brother caught a lot when he needed money. The easiest way to catch them was to fill a gallon milk jug with water, find one of the gopher’s burrow entrances, turn the bottle upside down, and fit the neck right into the hole. As the water poured in, one or two poor little ground squirrels would swim up, right into the bottle. You didn’t need to put a cap on it because the glass was too slippery for the little things to escape as soon as you turned it upright. If a boy didn’t want to deal with the little animals, someone at the factory would dispose of them, but if a boy wanted to keep one, that factory employee marked it with some sort of ink or food coloring so the boy couldn’t bring it back for another quarter. My brother did manage to get $1.25 for one very tiny gopher—after he got his quarter from Automatic Electric, he sold the little thing to me for a dollar.

Sammy belonged in the wild. I’m sure from his point of view being held captive for the rest of his life was a horrible fate, but the fate awaiting most of the gophers the neighborhood boys caught was even worse. I took good care of Sammy and loved him. I doubt if he loved me back, but I was the only one he allowed to pet or hold him. It wasn’t until I took mammalogy in college that I learned the proper name of his species—the thirteen-lined ground-squirrel.

As a child, it seemed amazing that such adorable little creatures could be so plentiful just two blocks from my house because, except for Sammy, no thirteen-lined ground-squirrel ever appeared at 116 Whitehall. And Automatic Electric’s expansive lawn never seemed to have any dandelions, myrtle, crabgrass, or any of the other weeds that covered our lawn—that solidified in my elementary-school mind how wonderful and natural that huge lawn was.

How was I to know that the runoff from the fertilizers and pesticides that kept it so green and pristine seeped directly into Addison Creek, compounding the pollution and huge phosphate overload? A dam not too far from my school, downstream from the factory, churned the water so that huge billowing clouds of suds rose up; when the wind was from the southwest, we could see the big white blobs floating over my house five or so blocks away from the dam. My mother said those soapy suds were proof that the creek was really clean. And to me, that green green grass was proof that Automatic Electric was the most beautiful, natural place in my small world.