THE TOLLING BELL

     A bell was tolling mournfully as I came out of my daughter's Pullman town house in South Chicago in the mid-1980s.

    When George Mortimer Pullman, inventor of the Pullman Palace Car, built the village to house his railroad car employees he included one church, intended to serve all the Protestant denominations. He calculated without the Catholic Church. No sooner was the Greenstone Church ready to receive congregants when the Catholics, feeling snubbed, immediately constructed a church just beyond the village limits. The slow, measured peals came from a few blocks distant.

    I left the Pullman neighborhood, ran my errand and returned. And the bell was still tolling, a low, somber, reverberating tone. I stopped with my hand on the stair railing to the porch. A non-Catholic, I dug from my memory the phrase, "one for every year  of life".

    Another item dredged from my recent memory: a newspaper feature article about a 106-year-old Pullman resident who could still remember, through the eyes of a child, the federal troops moving about on the lawn of the Florence Hotel during the Pullman Strike. Looking across Arcade Park, I could see the Florence Hotel south lawn from my third-floor bedroom window.

    Also called the Great Chicago Strike of 1894, the first labor conflict that eventually spread across the entire country, the Pullman Strike had forced the painful birth of a national Labor Day, as proclaimed by President Grover Cleveland.

    I had never met the older woman, but I knew which house she lived in and had seen her from afar. I marveled that my life had almost crossed paths with someone who had witnessed such historically significant events. From 1894 back to 1776 was not much more than 100 years.

    We really are, I thought, a still young experiment in the concept of a self-governing people.