Boy Named Shel The Life and Times of Shel Silverstein

Chapter 1 When he was five years old, Shel Silverstein taught himself to draw by tracing over the comic strips in the newspaper. His favorite was Li'l Abner by Al Capp. He placed a sheet of paper over the strip and traced over the faces, the hands, the buildings, the scenery, everything. "The first thing I did was copy Al Capp," he said. "He really influenced me. It was the most wondrous thing for me. Al Capp knew how to draw people, shapes, bodies, hands. He knew how to draw well, so I learned how to draw well." He also began to think up stories to go with the cartoons. "I didn't have a lot of friends," said Shel. "I just walked around a lot and made up stories in my head. Then I'd go home and write them down. That's how I got started." Shel also loved books. Because he was lonely, he turned to books for companionship. "One of the things that made me happy was to go to old bookstores and look through the books," he said. "I would hold them, smell them, and even hug them. They were my friends." But he didn't have the money to buy the books he wanted. So he vowed that when he got older and had money, he'd spend it on books. He dreamed of a day when he would have so many books on his shelves that he couldn't read all of them in a year if that was the only thing he did. Drawing cartoons and reading books gave him something nothing else could: They gave him comfort. "He was a lonely kid," said songwriter Drew Reid, an old friend. "He was always aware that he was different from the other kids around him. Let's face it, musicians, artistsanybody who's creativewe're all kind of wacky because we don't look at stuff the way other people do. And Shel always knew that." On March 3, 1891, twenty-nine-year-old Sigmund Balkany, a laborer from Bohemia, arrived at the port of New York aboard the Aller passenger ship along with thousands of other European immigrants who wanted a better life in America. He spent a few years in New York before moving to Chicago. Rae Goldberg was born in Hungary in March of 1876 and immigrated to the United States at the age of twelve. She met Sigmund Balkany in Chicago, and they married in 1897 or 1898. Helen, their first child, was born on January 5,1899. In 1900, Sigmund found work at a tannery, and the family of three rented a house at 911 Milwaukee Avenue near Wicker Park, in a section of Chicago known as West Town. Eastern European Jewish immigrants flocked to the neighborhood, known as a community rich with political radicalism. However, the Milwaukee Avenue corridor also had its share of gangs and violence, which author Nelson Algren described in his 1949 book, The Man with the Golden Arm, the story of a heroin addict released from jail who returns to his old neighborhood and fights to keep from succumbing to the drug again. "Louie was the one junkie in ten thousand who'd kicked it and kicked it for keeps," wrote Algren. "He'd taken the sweat cure in a little Milwaukee Avenue hotel room, cutting himself down, as he put it, 'from monkey to zero.'" By 1910, the growing Balkany family had moved less than a mile west to 2235 West Potomac Avenue, still in West Town but closer to Humboldt Park and in a more residential area. It was a definite step up for the family, since the neighborhood had newer and more spacious housing stock and apartments. Sigmund had left the tannery and opened a small grocery store, where Rae worked alongRogak, Lisa is the author of 'Boy Named Shel The Life and Times of Shel Silverstein', published 2007 under ISBN 9780312353599 and ISBN 0312353596.