Gary's usual exaggeration seems to apply to his personal history...
Dobry, who quit fighting this past year, grew up in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, an area notorious for raising
kids who needed to be tough. "Me and my buddies would take the Lawrence Avenue bus over to Broadway and go see movies at the Uptown or the Riviera."
Ah yes, I know the area well. Tough kids? No doubt.
What you must realize is that the Uptown and Riviera theaters are smack in the middle of Uptown, on Broadway. And that Chicago neighborhoods are generally not very large. It doesn't seem likely that he would consider living on the lake, five blocks to the east, to be a tough Uptown upbringing.
To the west of Broadway, Uptown only extends about four more blocks along Lawrence. If the "young toughs" lived three blocks away, would they really bother taking the bus? Doubtful.
Of course, Gary could have lived a neighborhood or two away from there. Having a Polish surname, and given the fact the next neighborhood over was primarily German at the time (and that Chicago was a city far more segregated by ethnicity years ago) my guess is he lived in a predominantly Polish neighborhood about five miles west on Lawrence, which would require taking a bus. Hardly Uptown.
But it sounds infinitely better on the toughness scale to say you "grew up there", not just went to a boxing club on occasion.
P.S. "Dobry" means "good" in Polish, in case anyone wondered. |
