By Jack Clark
Chandler would later become one of my favorite writers. But I wouldn’t read any of his books until after I’d moved away from the west side.
The afternoon after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, in April 1968, an announcement came over the loudspeaker at Austin asking all black students to immediately leave the building through the south exits. Moments later the white students were asked to leave through the north exits.
After the two gunshots a squad car was overturned at the corner of West End Avenue. I’d already fled west with the last of the white students.
Well, that game gets you nowhere. In retrospect Austin seems doomed from the start. Chandler had been right back in 1940–trying to stop resegregation in a place like Chicago was like trying to stop rain from falling. By the autumn of 1971 we were one of two white families left on our block. We moved north that November.
I read plenty of mysteries, sometimes two a day. I once found a hardcover first edition of Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, but I put it back on the shelf after another quick look at that opening page. I’m sure that even then it was worth more than the 25-cent asking price.
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We’d walk back through the park with our books. Sometimes we’d sit on a bench and have a cigarette and talk or just read.
