Michigan Avenue - Niche Media - Michigan Avenue magazine is a luxury lifestyle magazine centered around Chicago’s finest people, events, fashion, health & beauty, fine dining & more!
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/78288
M y grandparents, Israel and Goldie Balaban, landed in Chicago shortly after the turn of the last century to escape the pogroms of Bessarabia, Russia. After a brief stint as a lineman for the newly invented tele- phone company, Israel and his enterprising young bride set up shop with a less-than-thriving grocery. At the center of the bustling "lower east side" ghetto of Chicago, Maxwell Street was a collection of ramshackle wooden tenements teeming with open-air stalls and pushcarts. The neighborhood would come to produce some pretty famous (and infamous) characters, including Benny Goodman, Admiral Hyman Rickover (the father of the Nuclear Navy), CBS founder William Paley, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg; and Jack Ruby, who killed JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. They existed cheek by jowl on the noisy, crowded street, hawking their wares and dreaming of a way out. Israel and Goldie lived in the back of their store with their children, Barney, John, Dave, Max, Abe, Ida, Harry, and my father, Elmer, who was born in 1908. Right about that time, Goldie wandered into a nickelodeon, became ecstatic over the possibilities of this amazing new medium, and made the decision that the family was going into show business. While gro- cery customers "sometimes paid their bills and sometimes didn't," there was no buying on credit with the movies. You paid your money when you entered, no questions asked. And best of all, there was no waste. In the grocery store, when the lettuce wilted, you threw it out. In the movie busi- ness, when the picture got stale, you sent it back and got a new one. It was an unbeatable business model as far as my grandmother was concerned. The family quickly scraped together enough money to rent their first theater, the Kedzie, which had a hundred folding chairs and an old sheet for a screen. Though the theater wasn't much to look at, they strived for quality and to create the impression that going to the movies was a special event. Barney, who worked at Western Cold Storage, supplied the earliest