About 4:00 a.m this morning, I awoke and as I passed by the front window, I noticed two people walking towards my street, down the side street. I thought: "Wow, early walkers even for this neighborhood"! - we have a lot of walkers, dog and otherwise as well as early morning joggers. One of the pair ran across the street and into the driveway of a neighbor and tried to open the door on the car parked close to the garage. It was locked, so he ran back across and met his companion and they crossed the street in front of my house. Down to the corner and right into the Knolls.
We have had some suspicious happenings in the neighborhood and from the Homeowners Association came the message, if you see something that doesn't look right, call 911. What didn't look right to me, was the young man trying to open the neighbors car door, so I called, gave them the information I had and that was that. The 911 operator said they would send a car into the area. End of story - for me - this morning.
But it reminded me of an incident when we lived on Martin Street on a corner, one block from Western Avenue and one block from Proctor Center in the mid 1960s.
Our bedroom was on the back of the house. It was right around midnight on a summer night and the window was open. We had a box fan in a window in the hall, that pulled outside air into all three of the upstairs bedrooms. I slept nearest the window and was a light sleeper and I heard voices outside and sat up and looked out. A car was parked in the alley across the street and they shined a flood light on the back of Vern's Volkswagen parked in front of the garage and I heard them reading the numbers on the license plate. The car waited a few minutes - they must have been verifying the car did indeed belong where it was - and then traveled into the alley behind our house.
I woke up Vern and so he and I sat on the side of the bed, looking out the window wondering what they were looking for, when all of a sudden, we saw a figure, walking through our next door neighbors back yard and out the gate into the alley. I said: "Vern, the police are obviously looking for someone and that person might be it." "Don't get involved", he said, "It's probably nothing." We watched as the figure walked through the yard of the neighbor behind us - toward Kettelle Street and I said: "I'm calling the police!" and I did. I told them what we had seen and all of a sudden, cars and armed men came out of nowhere. Down our alley, on the side street, walking cautiously, carrying rifles in front of them. It looked like all the scenes we had seen on the news of what was happening in Viet Nam and Israel. Pretty scary, like a war zone. The men checked all around the area and most of them then went away, but a car stayed at the end of the alley across the side street.
The next day, the morning newspaper headline read: Policeman shot at Bellevue Drive In. A policeman working security at the Drive In had been killed. I believe his last name was Espinoza. The afternoon edition said: Killer Caught in South side. The shooter was found on a porch roof at a house on Butler Street, two blocks from us. Do I think it was the same person, absolutely! That was the direction he was heading when he passed through the neighbors yard.
It wasn't long after that incident that we began to look at property away from the city. Although I had grown up in the area, and we loved that our children were attending the same school I had, things were changing and it just didn't seem safe anymore. A couple of other incidents happened that made us decide to move to Washington.......but that's another story.
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