Larry Leithardt has lived in the same house since 1912. The youngest of three children, he was one year old when his family moved there. His brother was seventeen years his elder, his sister nine. Their father was a welder and their mother a housewife.
Larry’s brother was like an uncle to him. He sent Larry postcards from wherever he happened to be, including Germany after WWI. He addressed these cards to Master Lawrence.
Larry Leithardt’s is the story of a life lived on the scale of a small town, even though he has been a lifelong resident of Chicago. The range of his friends, activities, and travels is, by today’s standards, almost inconceivably circumscribed. “I went to Ravenswood School. I graduated from there and from Lakeview High School. Those are the two big things in my life. I never went to college.”
Larry’s family history is one of diminution, that of a small family which got smaller and smaller. Larry is the last surviving member. Neither Larry nor his sister married, but remained in the family place. After World War I, their elder brother went into the mail order business, married, and moved out of the house. In 1939, their mother passed away. Ten years later, their father died in his sleep, at age eighty-one. Larry and his sister, as he says, “kept house” until her death, in 1957.
”It was hard. I had to do everything myself and I was all alone. I got by, I accepted my sister’s death, not that I didn’t care. But you get strength from somewhere. When I look back, it makes me feel worse now than it did then, almost.”
In 1961, Larry began to acquire a series of dogs. His first dog, Blackie, died of distemper. The next, Pal, was stolen, Larry thinks, by a man who sold him for fodder to people who had fighting dogs. After Pal, Sweetie and Honey came wrapped in towels and were dropped over his fence by a neighbor who didn’t want them. Sweetie died, but Honey is alive and is Larry’s constant companion, his family.
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