Interview draws Arlington Heights memories

Often when I am downtown in Arlington Heights I have what I think of as "double vision." It happened recently when I was parked across from the sleek new condo building on the southwest corner of Dunton and Campbell.

Instead of seeing neighbors walking past the sturdy burgundy-colored bricks and solid stone base of one of our newest residential options, my mind conjured up a spirited little girl terrified of the dark and dank basement that used to be in that very location I was staring at. Almost a hundred years ago, that corner housed the Arlington Heights State Bank and the little girl's father's shoe store. And the basement harbored rats. Lots of them.

"It was my job," Gertrude Pfingston once told me, "to take the butter and milk to the basement. We had no refrigeration."

There were 23 steps to the basement, and Gertrude was afraid on every one of them. She was afraid of the long hallway. She was afraid of the junk corner that could have hidden something frightening. But, mostly, she was afraid of the rats.

She couldn't put the butter and milk on the floor and run. First, she had to find the metal wash tub to put over the perishables.

She sang to allay her fears.

Gertrude Pfingston was a remarkable interviewee because she could draw on her emotions in early life as clearly as she drew on the facts. She went to the Lutheran School in the days when teachers were overworked -- "where did I read that there were sometimes 100 children in a class" -- and took extreme measures to keep children in line.

Gertrude arrived late one day and found the classroom door locked.

"I ran home and told my father. He wrote a note. When I went back in the afternoon, the teacher made chalk crosses all over my face."

He made Gertrude stand in the front of the room and told the children to laugh at her because, he said, she was a "tattletale."

What hurt Gertrude the most was that "my cousin Leonard laughed the loudest."

Her memories of her beloved church were exact and detailed. The women and children sat downstairs, the men in the balcony. One grand day Gertrude's father brought her with him to the balcony. "The men would sing so loud. I could see the little man pumping the organ. When a little button got to the top, he stopped pumping. I could look into the bell tower and see the ropes. They rang the bells for the words, "Our Father," "Give us this day," and "Amen."

The world of rats in the basement and chalked faces seems remote from the Arlington we know. But Gertrude Pfingston's zest and keen powers of observation are not. They are vital to the spirit that has moved Arlington since its beginning, not too long before she was born.