Everything was running smooth at the Franklin Park Outlet Store. Dale Hoffman was making plans for his personal around the world cruise in his own sail boat, stopping where ever he wanted to. For him, the price of a boat was just a little more expensive than a nice car. However, he had to store the boat in the winter and then have a slip to anchor it in the summer on Lake Michigan. He was getting excited about his coming trip. I noticed that he was going out to lunch more often and then taking a nap in the afternoon. He always was very casual with his drinking of alcohol. They had moved out the Catalog area so that he had a bigger office than before. He started getting stomach aches. I thought that he might have ulcers. One day, he told me he was going to see his doctor about his stomach problems. He never returned to work again. He called me to tell me that his doctor had hospitalized him for observation, and just make sure that the store was running well. I got a little nervous about this. Being in the hospital is never a good thing. I figured that he would be back in a few days. They would probably give him some tests for his ulcers. After a week, I got a little worried. Ed Thomas, the warehouse manager, wanted me to know that he had been to the hospital and that Dale Hoffman did not look good. I wondered if it was his heart, but Ed Thomas thought it might be an aggressive cancer. His stomach was expanding. Finally, I decided to go see Dale Hoffman in the hospital after work one day. I was amazed when I saw him. His stomach had expanded to twice his normal size. I did not know what to think. I had never seen anything like that. He told me not to worry about him. He would be fine as soon as they got the swelling down. He wanted me to take care of the store. I never saw him again after that. I do not know what happened. He died within a couple of weeks. I did not go to the funeral. I stayed working at the store. Ed Thomas came in to see how it was going. Otherwise, it was normal as usual at the store. However, I had lost a friend and mentor, who I had known for over ten years. It all happened so fast. I had been to his house a couple of times. I knew he had a wife, one daughter, and two sons. Dale Hoffman was gone. Have you ever had a friend die in their early 60s?
The plan at Montgomery Wards
I had returned to work at the Montgomery Ward Outlet in late 1981, with the general idea that Dale Hoffman, the Store Manager, would retire in a couple of years and I would take over. Thus far, everything had gone according to plan. I was an appliance salesman for a couple of months. Then I became the appliance manager. I do not know the exact date, but I know that Dale Hoffman was getting his boat ready to sail around the world. He was going to retire within the next year. I believe it was near the end of 1983 or 1984. He began to show me about budgets and other things from a company computer printout. There was a new manager in the warehouse or the Distribution Center as they called it. Ed Thomas had taken over for Ed Fogler. I knew both of them, but I knew Ed Thomas better since he had been an assistant for a couple of years. This made me comfortable, since they had decided to give the job to someone at this location instead of bringing someone from outside. Everything at the Outlet Store was going smooth. We just kept getting damaged goods and selling them. I just had to make sure that the store had enough appliances to sell. I went two or three times a week to get some from the warehouse. A guy in the warehouse would make out the order. John Short in our Outlet store would receive it off the revolving track in the warehouse. I would get the price tags ready to put on the merchandise. I would decide the prices as a certain percent of the original price, usually about 70%, since there was less markup in appliances compared to furniture. We sold a lot of refrigerators, stoves, washers, dryers, freezers, and TVs. There was a lot of remodeling of two flat houses on the northwest side of Chicago, so some of these remodelers were looking for cheaper appliances that were only slightly damaged. We offered a Montgomery Ward warrantee, plus the five years on the refrigerator compressors. Besides, we offered service contracts that extended the warranty by a couple of years. We wanted to be sure that customers were satisfied and comfortable with their purchase. We had a Montgomery Ward repair service at nearby Rosemont. I got to know the manager there well. The plan of me taking over as store manager made sense, since now I knew about furniture and appliances as well as the warehouse structure. Have you ever worked with the sense that you would get a promotion?
Joy was a middle school student
Joy was nine in fifth grade in 1983. I began to realize that she was growing up before my very eyes, without me noticing it. She and Margaret were all involved with St. Lawrence O’Toole Elementary School in Matteson. Margaret was the junior high teacher and Joy was the middle school student. They were busy with Brownies and Girl Scouts. She was involved with cheerleading, volleyball, and basketball. Joy did not play any baseball or softball in the summer. Swimming at the Aqua Center with her mother Margaret was her thing. Margaret was also a cheerleading coach. Back home, the Dutton kids were not around. Joy had new friends that went to school with her at St. Lawrence O’Toole. Stephanie Rangel, the daughter of John and Ann Rangel, who lived at the other side of Woodgate, was her new friend since they drove in a car pool together when Margaret was not available. Joy and Stephanie played office in my basement office. I had all those trading cards from the CBOE and I had some leftover sign cards from selling signs. They loved playing with them. In fact, at one point they wanted to learn French or German. I tried to teach them on Thursdays, but they were not as interested when they actually had to do some work. They liked learning new words rather than the language and the grammar. I helped Joy with some of her projects. I know that she had one about universities in Europe. I was excited about helping her with that. On my Thursday day off, I would pick up Joy and bring her to visit my mother at Thornwood House. Sometimes, my mother and Joy would go shopping at the Thrift stores in Chicago Heights, since they had a bus that took them there and back. I know that Joy liked to visit her grandmother. I gradually got more involved in car-pooling, as Joy got older and Margaret might have something else to do. Do you remember your children in Middle School grades?
The Woodgate changing neighborhood
Before I knew it, it was 1983. We had spent ten years at our new Matteson house. Some of Joy’s young girl friends had moved away, the Duttons and the Toblecks, but so had a few other people. I guess that I never noticed it at first. I remember the Fricke family was one of the first to move, but they were going back to Michigan. The same was true about the Farmers going back to Kansas. A Mormon couple, whose husband was in the FBI, had moved. Another couple whose son had a Norman Rockwell style of painting moved from Allemong also. There seemed to be a trend of other people moving east to Indiana or west to Will County from Cook County. I also noticed more and more African American families moving in, but not in our cul-de-sac that still only had one black family, the Cato family that had moved in with us in 1973. Sometime in the 1980s, I went to one of the local meetings at Woodgate Elementary School, right beside our house. A lady from the village hall was promoting racial diversity. I was surprised at that. Why not let it just happen naturally, without promoting it? Then Henry Swan, an African American insurance guy, who I knew very well because he was in our Woodgate Bowling league, got up to speak. He was a long-time resident of Woodgate. He posed a series of questions that I had not heard before or since then, “What does diversity mean? When is a place integrated? Does integration mean 5%, 20%, 50%, or 90% black? Was there integration in Woodgate when only 5% were black or African-American? Would it still be integrated if was 90% African-American? Was there a magic number?” The lady from the village hall said that the ideal number would be 50%. Henry objected to that. If we had one black person, would that be an integrated neighborhood? Is there some number that makes it a black neighborhood? Ten years later in the mid-1990s, the Village of Matteson sent an advertisement asking for white people who wanted to live in an integrated neighborhood to come to live in Matteson. Guess what! More African Americans wanted to move to Matteson, because they would be accepted there. The actual statistics show that percentage of Black people in Matteson has gone to 82% in 2020. My estimate is that it was around 30%-40% in the mid-1980s in our Woodgate area. The problem is not the black people living there. The real problem is that white or European descendent families do not want to live in black neighborhoods. They will not buy a house from a black family, so that the value or the market for houses owned by black people decreases, while the value of houses owned by white or Caucasians increases because of the wider market. Everybody wants to own a white owned house versus a black owned house. There still is segregation in housing, whether implicit or explicit. There is a tendency to equate black with poor. In 2023, the median income for an 82% black population in Matteson was $97,149. That is what integration looks like. Have you ever lived in an integrated neighborhood?
The 50-year-old pinochle club
In the mid-1970s, we played a lot of games with our next-door neighbors in our Matteson, Allemong Drive cul-de-sac, Jan and Ken Vlach, who shared the same large driveway with us. One time, Bud and Delores Fricke were there, so that we started to play pinochle, since it was a game that we all knew. Ken Vlach said that he knew a couple at the other end of Woodgate who liked to play cards. Thus, he invited Chris and JB Smith to play pinochle with us. Somehow the Vlachs did not want to play as much as the rest of us. Bud and Delores were our teammates on the Woodgate Bowling League with Margaret and I, that bowled every other Saturday night. Thus, this group decided to play pinochle once a month, on a Saturday that we did not go bowling. The Smiths decided to invite the Webers, but that did not work out. Chris and JB Smith then suggested their good friends, Bob and Barb Strehmann, but they did not live in Woodgate. We would have to drive to their house. Then Bud and Delores moved, since he was opening-up an insurance business in Livonia, Michigan, just outside Detroit, where he had grown up. However, we kept in touch with them. Thus, we stopped to see them on the way to the 1976 Montreal Olympics and went to the double wedding of their daughters with Chris and JB Smith. We got a new member for our bowling team, Dick and Judy Farmer, who lived close by in Woodgate. They also played in our pinochle group, that was now the Finnegans, the Farmers, the Smiths, and the Strehmanns. However, Dick and Judy Farmer with their two boys moved back to Olathe, Kansas, since he was involved with insurance also. Then Jim and Chris Bailey joined our bowling team and the pinochle club. Their children were going to St. Lawrence O’Toole Elementary School. In fact, Brian was in the same class as Joy. Thus, we never had an exact date for the starting of this pinochle club, but sometime around 1974 or 1975 seems right, since it was before 1976. We are still part of that group in 2025, so that means that this group has been together for at least 50 years. However, two members have passed away, JB Smith and Jim Bailey, so that Chris Smith and Chris Bailey take turns being the male in this group, since the pinochle games were always men against women. Chris Smith remarried last year. Sometimes, now we skip a month or two because of sickness or travel, but we try to keep this fifty-year old game going. Have you ever belonged to something for over fifty years?
The Illinois toll road
My daily commute to the O’Hare area included the Tri-State Tollway, a controlled-access toll road in the northeastern part of Illinois. This toll road connects Wisconsin and Indiana, going through Illinois, but avoiding the city traffic of Chicago. The Tri-State goes from I-80 in Indiana via I-94 through I-294 to I-94 in Wisconsin. Along the way, you can stop or exit in the southern, southwestern, western, northwestern, and northern Chicago suburbs, including O’Hare Airport, without going into the city of Chicago. Originally, this was an attempt to alleviate congestion in the city, by going around the city. There were no red lights but toll booths that acted like red lights. In 1958, the tolls were set at 25 cents at the main plazas and 10 cents at the exit ramps. Thus, I always had a lot of quarters and dimes in my car. However, in 1983, the tolls increased to 40 cents at the main plazas and 15 cents at most ramps. Then I had to have nickels for the 40 cent tolls. When the I-Pass system started in 2005, after I had stopped using the toll road daily, the tolls for cash payments were doubled, while rates for cars equipped with the I-Pass transponders remained the same. In 2021, cash tolls were eliminated altogether. The problem with the old cash tollway system was that you had stop every 10 to 15 miles to a pay toll, plus the exit toll. The I-Pass has made it a real tollway without stopping, and is much better. On the New Jersey Turnpike, when I grew up, you got a ticket when you got on and you paid it when you got off. The same was true on the Pennsylvania and Ohio turnpikes. That was simple enough. I still remember the time that I drove from one Illinois toll plaza to the next toll plaza stop, going 5 miles per hour. I was so mad that I was paying to drive on a tollway, only to be stuck in traffic for nearly a half hour. If I wanted congested traffic, I could get it for free on the Kennedy Expressway or the Dan Ryan. That is what made me decide to use the Mannheim Road–LaGrange Road local traffic route. I did not mind congestion, if I was not paying for it. Those red lights did not cost me anything. Do you like toll roads?
The commute to work in 1983
The couple of years of turbulence for me as a CBOE options market maker, a gulf sign outside salesman, and a Prudential Insurance agent were over. I was back working at the Montgomery Ward Outlet Store in Franklin Park, IL, with a nice steady income. My commute was as bad, if not worse, as it had been earlier. The two years that I was working elsewhere made me more sensitive to the time spent in commuting by car. Also, there seemed to be more people driving on the roads. I began to pick my times and routes differently. Monday and Tuesday were the worse commute days since I was a 9-5 guy. Wednesdays and Fridays were better because I started at noon and finished at nine in the evening. The main difficulties were an occasional bad late morning commute. My favorite commute was Saturday and Sunday morning, Saturday at 8:00 AM and Sunday at 10:00 AM. Sometimes the weekend evening coming home would be a little congested. I found various ways to go from Matteson to Franklin Park, and vice versa. The best and original way when there was minimal traffic meant I-57 to the Dan Ryan Expressway to downtown Chicago and then the Kennedy Expressway out to O’Hare with an exit at Mannheim Road. With no traffic and no red lights, this could be about a 45-50-minute commute in the best of conditions. However, reality was not like that. Even with light traffic it could be longer. It might an hour and a half and longer, if there really was a problem. The second option was I-57 to I-80 and then the toll road to O’Hare. However, the toll road started to be congested around O’Hare Airport. My final option was I-80 to LaGrange Road that turned into Manheim Road, but went through every town in between. In the end, this local traffic became my preferred way of going to O’Hare on Monday and Tuesday mornings. The tollway was my preferred way coming home, once I got out of the O’Hare mess. Finally, I would enjoy the Dan Ryan-Kennedy on off-peaks hours and hope for the best. Thus, I usually planned an hour or 75 minutes. I was lucky if my commute was ever under an hour. Did you ever have a long commute to and from work?
TV in 1982
Cable News Network (CNN) initiated an associated channel that featured an around-the-clock “news wheel” format, renamed CNN Headline News, HLN. The Weather Channel began in the USA. USA Network began 24-hour operations. The Playboy Channel began broadcasting. Surround Sound was introduced for home use by Dolby. ABC broadcast the FIFA World Cup Final between Italy and West Germany from Madrid, the first time that the World Cup’s final match was aired live on American television. ESPN televised its first college football game, the Independence Bowel. CBS televised the NFC Championship Game between the San Francisco 49ers and Dallas Cowboys. San Francisco tight end Dwight Clark made “The Catch” to enable the 49ers to defeat the Cowboys, 28–27, as it became one of the most iconic images in NFL history. As part of a two-night event, ABC aired the network television broadcast premiere of Superman: The Movie. The soap opera series Search for Tomorrow broadcast for the final time on CBS, but NBC immediately purchased it and began broadcasting it the following Monday. Bryant Gumbel began his 15-year stint as co-anchor of NBC’s Today Show. John Chancellor anchored the NBC Nightly News for the final time, replaced by the team of Roger Mudd and Tom Brokaw. Mary Hart joined “Entertainment Tonight” as reporter and later co-host until 2011, nearly thirty years. Susan Stafford departed as co-host of the NBC game show, “Wheel of Fortune,” while Vanna White formally replaced her on December 13, 1982, where she is still the co-host, over forty years later. SNL began its 8th season on NBC, with host Chevy Chase and musical guest Queen, as Julia Louis-Dreyfus joined the cast for three years until 1985. The pilot episode for “Cheers” aired on NBC. Cindy Williams made her final appearance as Shirley Finney on “Laverne & Shirley.” The Peanuts special “A Charlie Brown Celebration” premiered on CBS. The series finale of “Mork & Mindy” on ABC was entitled “The Mork Report.” A number of new TV shows started in 1982, “Late Night with David Letterman,” “Chicago Story,” “The Kids of Degrassi Street,” “T.J. Hooker,” “Joanie Loves Chachi,” “Cagney & Lacey,” “America This Morning,” “The Gary Coleman Show,” “Gilligan’s Planet,” “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” “Child’s Play,” “Family Ties,” “Bring ‘Em Back Alive,” “The Little Rascals,” “The Mork & Mindy/Laverne & Shirley/Fonz Hour,” “Pac-Man,” “Silver Spoons,” “Knight Rider,” “Gloria,” “Square Pegs,” “Remington Steele,” “CBS Morning News,” “It Takes Two,” “Newhart,” “St. Elsewhere,” and “The New Odd Couple.” Going off TV were “Late Night with Tom Snyder (1973-1982),” “The Lawrence Welk Show (1955-1982),” nearly 30 years, “WKRP in Cincinnati (1978-1982),” “The Incredible Hulk (1977-1982),” “Barney Miller (1975-1982),” “Mork & Mindy (1978-1982),” “Match Game (1962-1982),” 20 years, “Lou Grant (1977-1982),” “Laverne & Shirley” (1976-1982), “Sunrise Semester (1957-1982),” 25 years, and “The Doctors” (1963-1982), almost 20 years. What was your favorite TV show in 1982?
Music in 1982
The 24th Annual Grammy Awards were presented in Los Angeles, hosted by Quincy Jones, who won five awards. John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy, the final album released by Lennon in his lifetime, won Album of the Year, while Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes” won both Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Sheena Easton won Best New Artist. The top selling song of 1982 was “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John that was played all over the place. Michael Jackson released his sixth studio album Thriller, which would go on to be the greatest selling album of all time, with 70 million units sold worldwide. Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a live bat thrown at him during a performance in Des Moines, Iowa. He was arrested after urinating on The Alamo, in San Antonio, Texas. However, he married his manager Sharon Arden in Maui, Hawaii. B. B. King donated his personal record collection, which included nearly 7,000 rare blues records, to the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. The Mamas & the Papas began a reunion tour with a show in New York. Comedian and Blues Brother John Belushi was found dead of an apparent drug overdose in the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. Iron Maiden released The Number of the Beast, the critically acclaimed yet controversial album often hailed as Iron Maiden’s greatest. David Crosby was arrested for driving under the influence of cocaine and carrying a concealed weapon in LA. Then he was arrested on drug charges a second time three weeks later in Dallas. Johnny Cash hosted SNL with Elton John the musical guest. Germany won the 27th annual Eurovision Song Contest, held in the Harrogate Conference Centre, North Yorkshire, with 17-year-old Nicole singing “A Little Peace.” The first Prince’s Trust charity concert was held at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham with the Prince of Wales (later King Charles III) in attendance. Queen released their tenth studio album, Hot Space, to immense critical outcry. The Wall, a film adaptation of Pink Floyd’s 1979 album The Wall, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Four streets in Liverpool were named after each of The Beatles. Germany began the first mass production of compact discs, as the first compact discs appeared in music stores in Japan. The musical “Cats” began its 18-year run on Broadway. Madonna’s debut single, “Everybody”, was released on Sire Records. The eleventh annual “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” special aired on ABC, with appearances by The Go-Go’s, Hall & Oates, Ronnie Milsap, Barry Manilow, and Jermaine Jackson. What music do you remember from 1982?
Movies in 1982
In 1982, there were a lot of good movies but not any great movies. I loved E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, about a troubled child, Drew Barrymore, who helped a friendly alien ET escape from earth and return to his home planet. I also loved An Officer and a Gentleman with Richard Gere and Debra Winger, about Navy boot camp training. Our whole family really loved Annie, the musical with Albert Finney and Carol Burnett. I loved Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie, who was an unsuccessful actor that disguised himself as a woman to get a role on a trashy TV hospital soap opera. The World According to Garp with Robin Williams was okay. I liked Victor/Victoria, starring Julie Andrews, James Garner, and Robert Preston about a struggling female soprano in 1934 Paris who posed as a female impersonator. I also liked the quirky high school comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High that starred Sean Penn, and the odd comedy of Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid with Carl Reiner and Steve Martin. I really liked The Verdict, starring Paul Newman as an outcast, alcoholic Boston lawyer defending a client in a medical malpractice case. I also liked Sophie’s Choice with Meryl Streep as a Nazi concentration camp survivor of the Holocaust, and Ben Kingsley as Gandhi, with his revolt against the British rule in India through his philosophy of nonviolent protest. I really liked Diner, a group of college-age buddies struggling with their imminent passage into adulthood in 1959 Baltimore. They really were my contemporaries from the East Coast. I was a little disappointed in the Ingmar Berman Fanny and Alexander, about two young Swedish children in the 1900s, since I liked his movies in the 1960s. I thought The King of Comedy was okay even though it had Robert De Niro and Jerry Lewis. My Favorite Year with Peter O’Toole as an aging, dissolute matinee idol was okay. Taps was an interesting movie about a military school with George C. Scott, Timothy Hutton, Ronny Cox, Tom Cruise, and Sean Penn. I did not see Rocky III with Sylvester Stallone, nor Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan with William Shatner, nor Poltergeist, about a haunted house. I also did not see Conan the Barbarian with Arnold Schwarzenegger. However, what I did see, I liked. What is your favorite movie of 1982?
Gene Finnegan Remembers Living Eighty Wonderful Years 