Why Osiris Organization?

3/16/2010,

Chicago, 1963

Grandfather left Arkansas and found work in a paper factory. He rented a small apartment on Chicago’s west side. He sent for us in 1963: Grandmother, my aunts Betty and Ida, and me. Houses and apartment buildings; jammed together. Constant street noise from traffic and the conversations of thousands of people. No chirping birds and insects to awaken us in the mornings we knew as life’s rhythm down on our farm. Like Dorothy and Toto it was clear: we aren’t in Kansas anymore!!!

“Daddy, can we go back home to Arkansas? We don’t like Chicago!”

We adjusted. We had no choice. Grandfather was the law and the law said this was now home. But we all cried.

Aunts Betty and Ida enrolled and went about finishing up high school. That fall Grandmother took me to enroll in kindergarten. Leaving parents to spend all day with strangers. Traumatic for a young child even under best circumstances. Imagine going to school for the first time in life, right after a move to a huge, scary city. Chicago in the 50s and the 60s was filled with African American families migrating from the South to the steel mills and auto assembly lines. I reflect now at all the children crying with me that day. Some seemed nearly hysterical. How many of them had also recently uprooted rural life for big city chaos? How many were like me, terrified that secure childhood had ended, doubting our parents assurances that big city=better life?

I met Ernest Leaks in that kindergarten class. We share a bond to this day.

Comiskey Park with Ernest and “Daddy”. Chicago slowly became a bit more inviting.

3/23/2010, Middle School Years, Daddy and The Chicago White Sox