Vince and I graduated from Austin in June 1940, and then we went to register at Loyola University. I had this idea of this great university I was going to attend, and then we walked into this dumpy building. The downtown campus was on Franklin Street around the corner from Washington. It was a walk-up with real narrow stairways, one of those real old buildings. The floor by the bursar’s office was slanted straight down–it was like being on a slide.
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It was real dark.
Vince called me that night, and he said, “I don’t know what to make of you.” I said, “Well, I’m not going to go to school in a place that looks like that.”
I would get on the Garfield Park el and get off at Independence Boulevard, and he would get on the el for the north side. This was before they built the subway. He would be on one side of the platform, and I would be on the other. We’d wave to each other. He went north, and I went west.
