Christmas in Chicago by Fanny Butcher

ovithanos

Dec 24

On any Christmas Eve in those days–and some are still alive who remember it–the smooth motor-filled boulevard which magnificently borders the city was a country road, frozen in deep ruts, or, if the weather had been mild, a sandy morass, thick and impassable. And the streets just west of it, the streets which are filled with Christmas shoppers, with ballyhooers for jumping bunnies and sparklers and little rubber men who stick out their tongues and great tin lobsters which waddle around on the sidewalk, the streets which are thick with human beings and every known mechanical device to lure them and give them comfort and excitement–these same streets were frozen bogs of pathways barely worth the name of road, often with an abandoned cart mutely crying their impassability. Signs proclaiming 'No bottom here' told the tale which the rivers of mud only hinted at.

Fanny Butcher born on September 13, 1888, in Fredonia, Kansas and died on May 11, 1987. She was a long time writer and literary critic for the Chicago Tribune newspaper. Her family moved to Chicago when she was 3-years-old and she later attended Lewis Institute (now Illinois Institute of Technology) from 1906 to 1908. She graduated from the University of Chicago in 1910. In 1935 Butcher married Richard Drummond Bokum, Jr. (1885–1963), an advertising executive. They had no children.

First published 1926
Ovi eBook Publsihing December 2023