In Bridgeport, a play lot keeps memories of a fallen soldier alive

The Lt. Joseph T. McKeon Jr. Park consists of a few swings and such for kids and a bench for their parents. It might not catch a passerby’s eye except for a plaque at the corner of Wallace and 36th streets.

It notes that the playground is named for a neighborhood boy killed in Vietnam. Dedicated in 1967, it was even then a throwback to an era when patriotism and neighborhood loyalty intersected.

During World War II, memorials honoring local GIs stood on street corners all across Chicago. Some were hammered together in nearby basements or garages.

Two years ago, the Hyde Park Herald sent a reporter out to check on it and other memorials. All that survived of some was a foundation inscribed with a “V,” for the “V for victory” rallying cry of World War II.

One in Hyde Park had a flower garden and a flagpole on which the janitor raised an American flag every day in memory of his son, “Arthur W. Klein, Lt. USN. 1905-1944.”

In 2010, a Tribune reporter visited a memorial in a South Side park. In front of the marker lay a wreath with a card reading: “In Memory Of Jim Clark Korean War Veteran.”

There is a Vietnam War memorial on the south bank of the Chicago River at State Street. Next to one of the 3,000 names is a laconic descriptor of a place where some of that blood was shed: “Battle of Hill 875.″

But neighborhood markers, reminding passersby of Chicagoans who died in Normandy or the Philippines, have all but vanished.

Joseph McKeon Jr.’s family owned the McKeon Funeral Home. Generations of Bridgeport residents had been waked there. The neighborhood turned out en masse for the dedication of a memorial to Joseph McKeon Sr.’s son.

“Neighbors of the McKeons raised the American flag outside their homes and walked to 36th and Wallace streets to watch the dedication of a park in McKeon’s honor,” a Tribune reporter observed.

“There were nearly 400 there — priests and nuns from Nativity of Our Lord school, where McKeon attended elementary school; uniformed soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen, many of them McKeon’s classmates at De La Salle High School; and families who had watched McKeon grow into manhood.”

“Some women dabbed their eyes with handkerchiefs as the fire department band played the Star Spangled Banner, and a marine corps color guard stood in front of McKeon’s mother Peggy, 45, a widow, and her son and daughter.”

Mayor Richard J. Daley wasn’t there, though he lived close by, due to his wife undergoing surgery. But three of his sons and a daughter were among the host of notables who attended.

The pastor of Nativity of Our Lord Catholic Church noted that McKeon didn’t have to return to Vietnam after his father died. He was entitled to remain in Bridgeport to take care of his mother. But he took President John F. Kennedy’s message to heart. “He knew what his country could do for him, and he knew what he must do for his country,” the priest said.

McKeon went to Harvard University and was posthumously awarded a Silver Star for valor when his unit was attacked by a larger Vietnamese force. The citation read: “Upon deploying his platoon, he began directing effective fire on the enemy positions, then he personally led a rescue party onto the battle field to recover his casualties.”

When Daley died in 1976, New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin came to Chicago to cover the funeral of the man he called the last of the big-city bosses. His companions took Breslin from the church to the McKeon Funeral Home on the other side of 37th Street.

“Upstairs in the family apartment, a woman held out coffee for anybody walking in,” Breslin wrote. “When we realized what McKeon family lived in the house, the day grew disturbing.”

Breslin was told the story of Lt. McKeon, and how “when the body came back to the neighborhood, back to Bridgeport, one of the neighbors, Richard Daley, was badly shaken.”

“‘The mayor put up a playground around the corner,’ a woman was saying, ‘He named it the Lieutenant Joseph McKeon, Jr., Play Lot. Isn’t that nice?’” Breslin wrote.

At Sheehan’s bar, shots were being poured for cops and firemen, and Breslin heard police Lt. Bob Reilly’s lament for the sentimental attachment that enveloped Daley and inspired McKeon’s memorial.

“This affair today was Celtic, last time you’re going to see it,” Reilly told Breslin. “Forget about the Irish. They went to Notre Dame. They came out different. Now they are out in the suburbs wanting to be WASPs.”

Yet even when they left, the neighborhood retained its pull and the former residents regaled their new neighbors with stories set in the bungalows of Lowe Avenue and streets with numbers for names.

Bridgeport was settled by the Irish immigrants who dug the Illinois and Michigan Canal. With picks and shovels they hacked a link between the Chicago River and the Mississippi River that insured the city’s prosperity.

Through the generation of Daley’s father, they worked in the nearby Union Stock Yards. Work in its slaughterhouses enabled manual laborers to send their children to college.

As lunch pails were replaced by briefcases, Bridgeport spawned five mayors: Edward Kelly, Martin Kennelly, Richard J. Daley, Michael Bilandic and Richard M. Daley.

Except for Bilandic, all were descendants of Irish immigrants, and their near monopoly of City Hall provided Bridgeport with a cornucopia of city jobs. Some smart aleck quipped that in more affluent places, parents pray that their children get into the right private school. In Bridgeport, the goal might be the Sanitary District.

Mike Royko expressed a similar idea without shtick. “It is a political neighborhood with political jobs, and people can use them,” he wrote in “Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago.” In 1971, he reported, Bridgeport’s 40,000 residents held 2,000 jobs in City Hall, the County Building, the courts, ward offices where city services are dispensed, and in police and fire stations.

But over the years the neighborhood changed, a shift noted in a comment the proprietor of Schaller’s Pump — a tavern that long sat across Halsted Street from Bridgeport’s 11th Ward Democratic Headquarters — made about Richard M. Daley: “Richie, he doesn’t come around like his father did.”

The younger Daley had forsaken Bridgeport in the early 1990s for a townhouse in the tony Near South Side. Now, Schaller’s Pump is gone. It featured an accordion player who could sing the fight song of any high school, as long as it was south of the Chicago River.

“Where the heck is that?” he asked when a Tribune reporter said he was an alum of Lane Tech. Patrons insisted the stranger sing a few bars.

Gone too is the McKeon Funeral Home. Lt. McKeon’s brother took it over when their father died and operated it for 40 years. Thomas McKeon died in 2013, as did his sister Lollie McKeon, a former deputy counsel of the U.S. Foreign Service.

Seven years later, the family’s funeral home was consigned to a wrecker’s ball. Yet to this day, something their mother told the crowd at the dedication of Lt. Joseph McKeon’s memorial has the ring of truth.

She looked out at what the Tribune called the little people of Bridgeport: the McGuane Steelers in football uniforms, the Little League Braves and Yankees in baseball uniforms. Alongside them were laborers in work clothes, and veterans of earlier wars wearing American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars garrison caps.

“I thank you all,” Peg McKeon said. “My son’s name will remain alive in this neighborhood where we have lived all our lives.

Have an idea for Vintage Chicago Tribune? Share it with Ron Grossman and Marianne Mather at rgrossman@chicagotribune.com and mmather@chicagotribune.com.