I lived on the other side of the Damen Avenue Overpass in the McKinley Park neighborhood. We went to the “Free Fair” every summer after we moved into the neighborhood. Sometime in the late sixties the name was changed to “Fun Fair”, allegedly because of a lawsuit, and it did fit better since, as mentioned in an earlier post, the only thing free was admission. It was easy to blow weeks of allowance in one night if you weren’t with your folks to pick up the tab. As a teenager we walk the overpass (over a mile itself) to and from the fair, even after closing and didn’t worry about the time as long as we made it home by curfew (It’s 10:30 do you know where your children are?).

In the summer of 69, a year after the Democratic Convention, I remember getting off the bumper car ride at the back of the ride and exiting by the carney’s trailers. I saw two portly Chicago cops who had a teenager not much older than me and with hair not much longer, pinned against a trailer and they were taking turns punching him out, I boogied out of there as quick as I could before they saw me and made me their next target. After that I still wasn’t afraid of walking across the overpass all the way home at night, but I was sure terrified of the cops.