The FBI Was Interested in the Beauty Salon
A problem with following my family through public records is that the records rarely stay inside the family.
A name leads to an address.
The address leads to a business.
The business leads to somebody else.
That is how I ended up deep in a federal file, staring at the name of a beauty salon.
Park Lane Beauty Salon.
Then it appeared again.
1135 West 127th Street
Park Lane was at 1135 West 127th Street in Calumet Park, just south of Chicago.
The first time I saw it in the file, I barely registered it.
There were hundreds of pages. Names, addresses, cars, telephone calls, businesses, trips.
A beauty salon did not seem particularly important.
Then the FBI mentioned it again.
And again.
By October 1964, an investigator for the Illinois Crime Commission had gone into Park Lane looking for a woman connected to the file.
He interviewed one of the employees.
She gave him almost nothing.
The woman he wanted, she said, was vacationing in Italy.
Then she refused to tell him her name.
That was the entire exchange.
And it made it into the federal record.
I keep coming back to it.
An investigator walks into a neighborhood beauty salon asking questions.
An employee tells him that the person he wants is on another continent.
Then she stops talking.
An FBI report records daily travel to Park Lane Beauty Salon and notes that the business opened Dec. 6, 1963. FBI File 92-5793, Chicago Field Office File 92-920. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Scan via Internet Archive. Emphasis my own.
The file preserves the refusal.
The salon kept coming back
Once I noticed Park Lane, I started seeing it everywhere.
A report noted who managed it.
Another recorded where that person was living.
Another described who was believed to own the business.
Another put the license in somebody else's name.
Investigators went to the salon looking for people.
Informants talked about its customers.
Travel appeared.
An FBI report records Illinois Crime Commission investigator questioning an employee of Park Lane Beauty Salon in October 1964. FBI File 92-5793, Chicago Field Office File 92-920, report dated Dec. 18, 1964, p. 8. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Scan via Internet Archive.
Telephone calls appeared.
So did local gossip.
None of these fragments explains the salon by itself.
Together, they made me realize I had been reading the file incorrectly.
I had been looking for events.
The file was recording relationships.
A perfectly ordinary business
A beauty salon is an unusually intimate kind of neighborhood business.
People sit there for an hour.
They talk.
They know who has gone away, who is back, who is seeing whom, who has moved, who owns what.
They notice cars.
They notice absences.
They know who has gone to Italy.
The FBI file does not call any of that an archive.
But it becomes one.
The Bureau collected information from employees, investigators, informants and business records.
It noted addresses.
It noted movements.
It noted who could be found where.
And then, in the middle of all that, a woman working in a beauty salon says the manager is in Italy.
No, she will not tell you her name.
That sentence survives more than sixty years.
Looking past the obvious records
When I started Family of Mine, I thought the useful records would be the obvious ones.
Birth certificates.
Marriage records.
Census pages.
Immigration files.
Property records.
The documents designed to tell you who someone was.
But the further I go, the more interested I become in records that were never meant to preserve a family story at all.
A photograph keeps a street.
A death record keeps a workplace.
And a federal file keeps a beauty salon.
Not because anyone thought I would come looking for it.
Because somebody once asked a question there.
And somebody else decided not to answer.
308 Nightclubs for 14,000 People
I knew nothing about Calumet City until my family story led me to nearby Chicago Heights.
Calumet City sits right on the Illinois-Indiana state line, in the middle of a region I had mostly understood through industry: steel mills, factories, rail lines, refineries, workers moving back and forth across municipal boundaries that meant less economically than they did on a map.
Then I found a January 1941 spread in Life about Calumet City nightlife.
Population: 14,000.
Bars and taverns: 308.
That works out to almost one drinking establishment for every forty-five residents.
I grew up in a university town with more coffee shops than bars, so perhaps my scale is distorted. But 308 still seemed like a lot.
Way too many for the local population alone.
Which made me stop looking at the clubs themselves and ask a different question.
Who was keeping them in business?
The answer started to come into focus when I looked at what surrounded Calumet City and Chicago Heights.
Steel mills. Factories. Rail yards. Industrial plants. Thousands of men working shifts that started and ended at all hours.
This was not a nine-to-five landscape.
A worker finishing late at night did not necessarily want to go home to bed. Someone getting off before dawn did not need entertainment to wait until evening.
And apparently it didn’t.
One of the musicians working the Calumet City circuit was Sun Ra.
I once got to see him at the Village Vanguard in New York. Sun Ra!
Years later, he remembered playing the Calumet City clubs from evening until nearly dawn. The schedule sounds punishing from the musician’s side. The shows were staggered, so when one club paused for an intermission, a performer could move to another and play there.
The entertainment kept circulating.
One room slowed down. Another picked up.
The night did not end just because one set did.
That detail made the whole place look different to me.
On one stretch of State Street, twenty-six taverns and nightclubs occupied just two blocks.
Some stayed open for most of the day and night.
Many employed B-girls whose job included getting male customers to buy more drinks.
That is the kind of detail that makes the economics visible.
A customer was not simply buying liquor.
He was buying time.
Liquor. Music. Gambling. Food. Cigarettes. Women. Company. Spectacle.
I had been encountering all of these things separately in the records.
A tavern here. A nightclub there. A gambling room. Jukeboxes. A restaurant. A hotel. A floor show.
Taken one at a time, they looked like nightlife. Together, they began to look like an economy.
And not just any economy, an entertainment economy built right next to the industrial one.
The factories and mills produced wages. They also produced exhaustion, odd hours, transient populations, single men, married men away from home, salesmen, drivers, travelers and workers whose lives were organized around shifts instead of evenings.
The clubs were positioned to absorb some of that money.
Not necessarily in one dramatic night.
A drink here. A meal there. A few songs. A bet. Cigarettes. Another drink. Another room.
The point is not that every steelworker spent his paycheck on State Street.
I cannot know that, and I do not want to invent him.
The point is that an entertainment district this dense had to be feeding on something larger than Calumet City itself.
The industrial belt supplied the customers.
And geography mattered.
If you worked in Chicago Heights or somewhere nearby, you did not have to drive thirty miles into Chicago to find a night out.
Nightlife came to you.
That may be the part I had been missing.
I had been looking at the men who ran things.
The owners. The operators. The gamblers. The people moving liquor, money, machines and influence.
But none of that explains itself.
Supply requires demand.
And around Chicago Heights and Calumet City, industry seems to have created both the money and the schedule for an after-dark economy to thrive.
My 5th Great-Uncle Died In The Duke’s Licorice Factory
A death record from Calabria connects my relative, a duke, and a black candy that somehow made it to the Smithsonian…
Nobody in my family ever told me a story about Francesco. I had heard the name Salerno from my grandfather. They were legendary, those Salernos. What did he tell me? I cannot recall a thing.
Francesco Salerno’s death record in the National Archives of Cosenza
But I know where Francesco died.
He spent his last day in a licorice workshop belonging to the Duke of Corigliano.
On January 5, 1817, Francesco was sixty years old and working as a laborer when he died in the concio della liquirizia, the Duke’s licorice-processing workshop in Calabria.
Naturally, I stopped researching Francesco and started researching licorice.
My sisters and I were licorice fiends so I’m not a newcomer to licorice. No one ever connected our fixation on this candy to a family story. The duke was news.
It turns out this was not some eccentric duke making candy in his kitchen. A century earlier, the Duke of Corigliano had established one of Calabria’s earliest conci, helping turn the wild licorice root there into a regional industry.
Duca di Corigliano Licorice Sticks, at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. These date to about 1885, nearly seventy years after Francesco died in the Duke of Corigliano’s licorice workshop.