A Life Constructed. Delon Hampton
death after an asthma attack while attending a New Year’s Eve party. Everett was very talented but appeared to me to have an unproductive life, I believe, because he was never able to cope with the breakup of his family.
Clarence subsequently married Mary Kearney, RN, a union that produced three very successful children: Susan, Sarah, and Stacy—a physician, a corporate executive, and a lawyer. Clarence was as strong and wise a father as he was a brother. My niece, Sarah Douglas Squiers, once told me of an incident that reflected her father’s counsel. While she was in high school, a male student continually harassed her. She told her father and he advised her how to handle the matter. The next time it happened, she followed his instruction: She hit the bully on his head and then ran like hell. He chased her home but never harassed her again. Ironically, years later, from a prison cell, he wrote to her and asked for a date when he got out. Hope springs eternal.
Regrettably, my brother did not live long enough to read these words, dying of pancreatic cancer well before his time. When I saw Clarence the last time, just before he expired, he was a shell of the strong and strapping young man I had met during that second visit to Jefferson, Texas, and just a shadow of the stately and successful doctor from Iowa who in his later years would sometimes fly to Chicago in his own plane and spend time with me. At the time of his death, Clarence was totally helpless. He could not carry on a conversation for any significant length of time due to the pain medication he was taking. I am deeply saddened that his premature death prevented him from fully enjoying the success of his daughters and their children, but I know he can rest well. His children and grandchildren (Lauren, Miles, and Aiden) will make substantial contributions to society. He left a wonderful legacy.
Clarence was a much better brother to me than I was to him. From introducing me to our father, to his wise counsel, to his helping me secure a bank loan in my later years when my business was struggling to survive, he was always there for me. What saddens me the most about Clarence’s passing is the realization that I did not enjoy his presence more during his life, and that his condition did not allow us the opportunity to say goodbye. The loss is mine.
There is one other thing I remember about visiting Jefferson, Texas, that sticks with me to this day. Like learning about Clarence, my father, and my roots, it forever changed and affected my life, although I wouldn’t know it at the time.
Shortly after we arrived in Jefferson during my first trip there, my family gathered at the home of my Uncle Alvin Lewis. The adults were not there to socialize, however—they were there to work. As I stood with the other kids and watched from a safe distance on that hot summer day, the adults and a few of Uncle Alvin’s friends took giant jacks, and to the awe of me and the other kids, they lifted his home right off of its very foundation. They then moved a long trailer underneath the home, lowered it carefully and slowly on to it, and moved the home to another location not too far away where they seated and anchored it onto its new foundation.
Why Uncle Alvin wanted to move his house, I cannot recall. I am sure he had his reasons, just as my mother, I am sure, had her reasons for deciding on her deathbed to uproot me from Jefferson, Texas, and send me to live with her sister in Chicago.
As a boy, the house moving spectacle left an impression on me in other ways. This was my first close experience with an engineering-related activity. And it very well may have been the initial step toward the engineering career that has defined my life.
MY ROOTS reach back to Texas. But the foundation of my life was built in the streets of Chicago’s South Side.
Known as Bronzeville, the area of Chicago where I was raised got its name from the thousands of African-Americans from throughout the South and other parts of the country who moved there to escape racism and Jim Crow laws that followed the end of the Civil War, and after that, to find new opportunities in the midst of the Great Depression. In the early 1900s, during the peak of black America’s northward migration, the community’s population swelled to new highs, and it became known as both a magnet and a hub for African-Americans. Places like the Regal Theater attracted big-name black entertainers like Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Lou Rawls, Cab Calloway, and later the Supremes, the Temptations, and Gladys Knight & The Pips. The local Chicago Defender, the nation’s foremost African-American newspaper, produced famous writers such as Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Andrew Rube Foster—another Texan who ended up in Bronzeville—created baseball’s Negro National League.
Most of the people who lived there, however, were just like my mother: simple working-class folks looking for a better life, a better world, and a better place to raise their family. Connected by their common experiences and common dreams, these neighbors looked after each other. If an adult saw a child misbehaving, you could be sure that child’s parents would find out about it and dole out an appropriate punishment—typically spanking and/or house confinement. Sometimes the neighbors would take care of the punishment themselves, usually with the full support of the child’s parents. It was common for neighbors to share a meal or some groceries with one another, especially when times were tough. And while some people relied on charity and welfare, back in those days it wasn’t something to be talked about; it was something to be hidden.
My friends were a great group of guys, and we did everything together. We formed neighborhood football, basketball, and baseball teams and challenged other neighborhood teams. Most of the time, we won. Every now and then, when we could scrape up enough money, we would walk down to Comiskey Park to watch the White Sox play baseball or the Chicago Cardinals play football, back before they moved to St. Louis and later on to Arizona. Decades later, my firm would be part of a team to help design and build the new Comiskey Park, right next to the old one where I spent my boyhood days.
When we weren’t playing, or watching, sports. we were building things—dog houses, forts, soapbox cars, and scooters from scrap two-by-fours and old metal roller skates. The leader of our little group, Junior McDaniel, usually took the role of site supervisor. But I did my share of the engineering and construction of these boyhood projects, and I came to love taking whatever materials we could get our hands on and building whatever we could out of them.
Like the rest of my group, I was a latchkey kid. My mother worked outside the home and she couldn’t afford a babysitter, so I had to learn early in life how to take care of myself. Usually the only one at home to meet me after school was our dog, Jack, who had followed my mother and me home one day and was a part of our life for sixteen years. I was responsible for feeding Jack and myself most days. I went to and from school myself, and—with my friends—often hopped on the streetcar for trips to museums, the aquarium, the planetarium, the Brookfield Zoo, and amusement parks. On weekends we might head down to the Savoy Ballroom or to local house parties to dance the night away. We were almost always on our own, with no adult supervision. In today’s society such childhood freedom may seem almost inconceivable. But I can’t help but think that the development of kids today has suffered because they don’t have the freedom and the responsibility to explore and be creative like we did back then.
My boyhood was idyllic in some ways, but around us loomed the real world and all its problems. World War II was in full rage, and it touched everybody, even young boys growing up on the South Side of Chicago. Many days, we roamed the neighborhoods collecting metal—tin cans, scrap building supplies, whatever we could find—to raise money for the war effort. At home we saved money to buy ration stamps that my mother would use to buy sugar, butter, meat, and other staples that were in short supply. Through the newspaper and the radio, we followed the horrific events unfolding in unimaginably faraway places like Normandy, Salerno, and Iwo Jima. We saved our pennies to buy Defense Stamps at school, and our parents saved to buy Defense Bonds.
The real threats to me and my friends, however, were much closer to home. While my immediate neighbors were congenial and caring with each other, we didn’t have to wander far before things got rough.
Across the street from where we lived was the Ida B. Wells Homes project, which would become the stereotype for the problems with public housing before it was demolished in 2011. When I was growing up in the 1940s, the project