waterboy
Yesterday I left work with an elderly member of my departmental staff to do a house call on his ailing computer. Lucky for me, it was a quick email server switcharoo, and I made $20 for about 10 minute's work. (An hour, all told, travel and tinkering time.)

On the way to his car, he told me about growing up in 1930s Chicago. He had been a water boy, delivering pure water to homes with no filtration for the city's undrinkable sludge. Those were the days of Al Capone and the Chicago mafia. His neighborhood, he said, was home to several major mob members including Golf Bag Sam Hunt, who carried around a tommy gun in a golf bag. Sam Hunt's daughter was one of his friends. Lucky for him, though, he was too young to take interest in her and moved away before Sam was caught and hauled off to prison.

Another neighbor suspected of being a mafia man would sit all day in front of his home inside his black cadillac with dark window curtains. Sometimes his wife could be seen bringing out his lunch, before he drove off to whatever dark deeds awaited him.

Some of this may have just been childhood fantasy. But even so, it painted clearly a picture of the pre-war era, a sort of innocent nostalgia from the time before everyone wanted to be a hero and many, like he, went off to war at the age of seventeen.