Memoirous

I’ve written at this blog before about media saturation. Where even something as significant as the War on Poverty gets churned over and over into a sound byte. Anyway, I listen to NPR in the morning and been hearing about the impact of this far-reaching legislation. At least that was how it was envisioned. I can tell you from my experience living in Uptown these past few years—it feels like a War on the Poor. When I first came to Uptown it felt like a VERY DIFFERENT place. There was trash every where, people lived in their cars, vacant lots were full of trash. Every weekend a building burned. I and a number of other residents worked to improve the lives of the people around us. At times it seemed like a war, being surrounded by rubble and the wounds typical of those living in poverty. I remember one guy, a terrible junkie who would come by for our neighborhood feeding program. I remember thinking, He could be my brother. He was young and somewhat attractive—as if he’d...

Bob Rehak was a young man in the 1970s who took the Purple line in from Evanston into the city to his job downtown in advertising. His passion though was photography, and what he saw from his train window as he passed Argyle, Lawrence, and Wilson L train stops intrigued him. There was a variety of life out on the streets below the tracks. Messy, disturbing life. I’ve noticed that many creative people are somehow energized by chaos, and Bob Rehak was somehow curious enough to bat away his fears, get off the train, and walk the dirty, trash-filled sidewalks with his camera and take photographs. Though I don’t know if he would classify it as “taking” as he describes people in Uptown in the mid-1970s though mostly poor were generous; they gladly gave Bob permission to photograph them. Uptown was a port of entry for immigrants because of the relative low-cost housing in the neighborhoods. There was a large population of migrants from Appalachia, social activists, the down-and-...