By John Kass | June 8, 2025

There are good boys and there are bad boys.

To be clear, I was not one of the good boys.

Was I some  budding homicidal maniac who would take his story as the killer next door to “Evil Lives Here”? No, not really.

I didn’t hurt anyone except for Danny Halloran in 4th Grade because he picked on my brothers. And I never tortured animals.  I would become a veterinarian at Lincoln Park Zoo, if I didn’t follow in Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s footsteps first to help heal the poor lepers of darkest Africa.

But was I good? No.

At 10-years-old, I was an altar boy at church and a Cub Scout.

But I was a hunter, a thief and a vandal just itching to get myself a real rap sheet.

Just before Halloween, I was finally caught stealing cool vampire fangs from the dime store next to my father’s grocery store. The pinch-faced Mr. Wolley thought he was showing me mercy by not telling my father (who would have made good on his vow to skin me like a goat if I brought the shame of thievery to our door), but I hated Mr. Wooley for his “mercy” because he had me in his power. I hated that. And the smirk he’d give me.

I couldn’t stand that.

And yes, I was a vandal and often a stupid fool. I took a pen and drew an x through a photograph of beautiful and bossy brown-eyed girl. My true love even if she didn’t know it.

Diane Tatman was a rich girl from Texas. She was the best student in our class and an expert climber on the monkey bars at the playground. Once I held her hand in gym during a square-dancing class. There were blisters on that delicate hand. My heart flipped and flopped like a fish in my chest. The photo of the girl was in a book we’d made for our teacher. I X’d it out and was eventually apprehended and shamed.

Why did I do it?

I dunno.

Love I guess.

I tolja I wasn’t good.

But then my life changed forever with the storm of tornadoes that tore through Oak Lawn on April 21, 1967. When I started on the dangerous path of becoming a writer. How did I begin? By reading.

 

 

About the terrible, killer tornado. I wasn’t hurt. I joined my mom and brothers hiding under a table in the basement  as the funnel clouds passed overhead. At least we had a basement. I can’t live in a house without a basement now.

At least 58 people were killed that afternoon, hundreds of home were destroyed in minutes and several schools and businesses were obliterated. Looters began attacking and the National Guard was called out to stop them. A year later, after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and the black street gangs burned the West Side, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley would issue his famous “shoot to kill” order against arsonists and looters.

After the’67 tornadoes, As Oak Lawn tried to climb from the rubble, our parish church, St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, opened its classrooms to other ruined schools.

I think it was the storm savaged St. Gerald School that found a home with us. Perhaps it was another. I really didn’t care about the ecumenical aspects. What irked me is that tornado or no tornado, after our American school came Greek School. Always. And you’d think we might catch a break and they’d cancel school so we could go outside and play baseball our like our Americani neighbors?

No way.

No excuses. You have to go to Greek School, they said.

No we said.

You’ll shame us in the village! Then my dad made a show of reaching for his belt.

I didn’t care.  Willie Mays and Pete Rose weren’t in our village. Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox weren’t from our village.

Each afternoon, after we’d leave Kolmar School in Oak Lawn there was a block walk north across the playground to St. Nicholas. We didn’t have a church built just yet. We held liturgy in the gym. They’d built the big gymnasium with the sculpture of the discus thrower on the outer wall–the Discobolus by Myron–and then built classrooms. Where they would build the church was  the site of an old decrepit orchard. For white flight Chicago refugee kids from Back of the Yards, it was like some wild country.

Crows sometimes nested there.

“You can’t kill a crow,” my father said. “You? With a slingshot? Impossible.”

 

I smiled darkly at the man who just signed a crow’s death warrant. I would kill one. Oh, I’d show him.

So the next day after school I walked to the orchard and planned my crow hunt. First I tore up what was left of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and scattered the pieces near the twisted crabapple trees of that old orchard. I left the bait to work its magic and entered Mrs. Photopoulos’ classroom, the scene of many of our psychic tortures.

The room looked out on a green parkway where kids from Miss Zabinski’s room would sometimes play football after school

And we’d have to watch, as Dave Norgard and Barney Brannigan had fun throwing the football, as we were forced to conjugate verbs and hammered out grammar and read aloud from our reader all about some stupid car trip to “Ooowas-sheen-ton” (Washington) taken by a boring family.

It was excruciating. Three times a week. It was like pulling our own spines out of our bodies.

The stupid family in the Greek School reader were the good boys and girls. The boring plaster saints. They made me ill. I hated them.

There were a few rebels in our class. Dimitri Kottaras who would later be elected a Cook County judge, was almost a rebel, and the Panayiotou boys and my cousins Jimmy, Johnny and Billy Ekonomou were revolutionaries. We wanted to play ball and be free. We weren’t scared of our parents. What were they going to do to us? Send us to Greek School?

So I went back outside. I had a crow to kill.

The bait worked. I had my slingshot pre-loaded, a good rock heavy round and smooth, nestled perfectly in the sling. As I saw them I pulled the slingshot with a straight elbow in one motion and fired. Two thumps! First, the thump of the rock on the big bird and the flop of the feathery blackness on the grass. It fluttered once, then lay still, the blackness of it against the thin green grass.

I shouted: Who can’t kill a crow? WHO CAN’T KILL A CROW!!!!

I wrapped the dead bird in my jacket and returned to the classroom. I slipped my feathered treasure into my desk. But there was a book in there, too, left by one of the Catholic school kids. His name was Patrick McSomething. Hmmm. Let’s see.

“Odysseus the Wanderer. The greatest of all adventure stories told by Aubrey De Selinourt.

 

 

Even the cover was exciting, like the old vase paintings. What a find!

And who deserved this bounty more than a Greek American boy being bored to death, stuck in a boring classroom with the boring verb conjugations and the plaster saints of Oowasington?

I opened it to an old man talking to a young man.

“So traveler, you want a story. They say here in Greece there’s a story under every stone—and that’s a lot, if you take a look at these hills I scratch and sow my handful of grain on for a living. I’m a poor hand at story-telling. If it had been my father now…he was a great one for stories...”

I hid Odysseus the Wanderer inside the large boring Greek School reader. I was hooked by the sack of Troy, and the building of the Trojan Horse. The King of Ithaca wasn’t trying to be a “good boy.” He was Odysseus, sacker of cities, and didn’t care what you thought of him. The giant Polyphemus the Cyclops grabbed members of Odysseus’ crew and bashed their brains like puppies on the ground before he ate them raw. Then he slept.  Odysseus was forced to use his wits on that one.

This wasn’t a story of good boys or bad boys. This was a story for all boys. In years to come, education would focus on the needs of girls, and stories about the King of Ithaca and his faithful wife Penelope would fall out of favor with the educrats, who pushed other stories for boys, pro-gay agenda stories like “Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope” and “My Rainbow.”

The hard political left, which had already taken the universities, killed off classical studies and the teaching of Greek and Roman as their way of killing off the West.  You ruin the foundation, you break the building. It crumbles. You’ve seen this play out in the open in recent years. The great Western tradition–which gave us democracy and meritocracy and the primacy of the individual–chopped down by communists.

In “Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom”–the 1998 book by classics scholars Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath–it was argued if we lose our knowledge of the Greeks, then we lose our understanding of who we are.

But I knew who I was. I knew who my father and ancestors were. They fought the Nazis and the Italians in the mountains of Albania in the snow. They sacked the great walled city of Troy. They fought the Persians at Thermopylae. They were the Greeks.

 

 

I can still remember the touch of the black silkiness of the dead crow in my desk, as Mrs. Photopoulos, ruler in hand, directed us to read. Feeling the feathers as we opened the book of the plaster saints. The girls who liked sitting in front led off. We went row by row.

Something bite my right finger, then my left.

It was alive and bouncing around in the darkness of that desk.

“Mr. Kass what do you have there?!”

Me in a small voice nothing Mrs. Photopoulos. nothing.

She had the yardstick and raised it. The black bird was pounding and moving.

“I said WHAT DO YOU HAVE THERE!!!!”

I reached down into the desk with both hands and took out the crow.

HERE!!!

It flew around the room. The kids screamed and Mrs. Pho made the sign of the cross so quickly her arm was like an airplane propeller. Pho glared and took a swing at me with her yardstick.

With all the kids screaming, my cousin Johnny opened the window. And the bird perched on the ledge. It cawed once, angry. Then it flew off.  The Greek School called my parents and ratted me out. My Theo George had been principal of the school and I was a bad boy, a disgrace. I think I was cracked a few times by my mom with the wooden spoon and sent up to my room to wait for my dad.

What did I care?

She said no TV.

What did I care?

I had my book. I’d shot the crow. Pho hated me. She’d forgive me when I became a columnist at “the paper,” but back then I was still the evil child. But  I had Homer and the greatest of all adventure stories. And Homer wasn’t dead. Not yet.

And like a kid lost in a wizard’s cave, I began to learn about the mysteries and power hidden in stories.

I would be a writer.

Yes, I stole the book. It’s my precious now. And I never had any intention of giving it back to Patrick McSomebody. Finders keepers Patrick.  And I still have it today.

 

 

 

(Copyright John Kass 2025)

-30-

About the author: John Kass spent decades as a political writer and news columnist in Chicago working at a major metropolitan newspaper. He is co-host of The Chicago Way podcast. And he just loves his “No Chumbolone” hat, because johnkassnews.com is a “No Chumbolone” Zone where you can always get a cup of common sense.

Merchandise Now Available: If you’re looking for a gift for that hard-to-buy for special someone who has everything, just click on the link to the johnkassnews.com store.

Where else would you find a No Chumbolone™ cap or a Chicago Way™ coffee cup?

Because I know this about you: You’re not a Chumbolone.