First Call For The Burley Express

"First Call For The Burley Express" follows the adolescent adventures of eight guys from Western Springs, Illinois, an affluent suburb of Chicago, who spent their teenage years taxing the patience of local authorities and exploring all there was to do in downtown Chicago and beyond. Their adventures, and their often-hilarious shared times, helped form enduring friendships that lasted over fifty years. The wisdom they acquired, and the life lessons they learned along the way, became their foundation of experience as they somehow made their way to become responsible adults. As the friends coped with insecurities of high school social life, they found a shared outlet in the big city next store, taking chances and somehow surviving, in an era of semi-lawlessness and mischief that has since largely disappeared---cherry-bombing the town police station on Halloween, sneaking into the box seats in the friendly confines of Wrigley Field, hopping a southbound freight train in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois heading to the Big Easy, careening raucously in a 1953 Ford station wagon "transportation cooperative" to the Follies Burlesque Theatre on South State Street, hitchhiking on the old US 66 highway, walking boldly into the otherwise-segregated Regal Theatre on Chicago's south side to hear The Crystals sing "He's Sure The Boy I Love". These were the late 50s and early 60s, idyllic times to be growing up close to and inside of one of the world's great cities. This memoir chronicles the laughter and highlights, the failures and frustrations, of young men in a time and place that can never and will never be duplicated.