Editor’s Note: This marks the ninth installment in Dispatch’s “Where I’m From” series. Each Saturday, a writer offers a meditation on their hometown—a bustling city, a distant desert outpost, a quiet suburb, or someplace in between—and what makes it distinctive. The purpose? To elevate voices—and fine writing—from every corner of these United States.
During Sunday evenings, as The Ed Sullivan Show aired, my parents often handed me the task of leaping off the couch to tweak our television’s volume whenever a plane roared overhead or touched down at O’Hare International Airport, located about 6.5 miles directly south of our Des Plaines, Illinois, duplex. They didn’t want my sister and me to miss a single syllable of Topo Gigio’s antics, and they cherished Ed’s parade of veteran Borscht Belt comedians and musical acts like Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé.
Beyond the daily drone of jets flying so low that I could nearly count the rivets on their silver bellies, much of my 1960s childhood in this suburb just northwest of Chicago unfolded amid a sea of uniform, brand-new, beige aluminum-sided houses that mirrored the community’s demographic and economic sameness.
Like many suburban boomers, I enjoyed a free-spirited childhood that included 347-inning baseball games on our cul-de-sac, bicycle rides with neighborhood friends to glimpse the latest parakeets in the Kmart pet department, and Slurpees and Milky Way bars bought from the local convenience store. We shopped for school clothes at the nearby Sears. There was even a 1,600-seat theater-in-the-round at a local shopping center, where my parents would occasionally have a date night to see The Ed Sullivan Show favorites like Steve and Eydie, right in our own backyard.
But when I strip away nostalgia’s ill-fitting lenses, what I understand in hindsight is that while Des Plaines left me with some cheerful memories, it was also a place marked by an existential loneliness born from its cookie-cutter sameness. I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but I recall feeling like an outsider even as I tried daily to fit in, to blend, to belong. The uniformity implied that anyone who didn’t color inside the lines was a problem. Although I shared the town’s outward demographics, I was bookish, spiritually curious, and socially awkward. I yearned for a broader world beyond my insular community that might welcome a square peg like me.
Five months ago, my husband and I relocated back to Des Plaines after one too many wild storms and some health concerns chased us from our hurricane-prone home in Florida. It’s been more than five decades since I last lived here. The city’s bones feel both as familiar as long-buried childhood memories and as unrecognizable as if a completely new civilization had risen atop ancient ruins.
This isn’t the first reinvention the area has undergone. This land was once home to the Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi peoples, a forested plain cut by a river the Potawatomi named the Soft Maple Tree River. By the mid-1800s, the indigenous populations had been displaced, the timber depleted, and the river renamed the Des Plaines River. For years it functioned as a quiet farm and mercantile hub. A Methodist campground drew visitors to the river to hear preachers such as Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday, while the Catholic Church established parishes, opened an orphanage, and designated land for a cemetery nearby.
After World War II, parents of the baby boom generation needed affordable housing near good jobs, with access to transportation via commuter rail and the network of highways leading toward Chicago. Des Plaines, once a sleepy place, became a developers’ magnet, with dozens of new subdivisions sprouting across its quiet farmland. In 1960, just before my family and I moved to an unincorporated portion of Des Plaines, the population stood at 34,000. A decade later, buoyed by boomers like me, it nearly doubled to 57,000.
Schools were erected at a brisk pace to educate us, only to find those halls echoing empty years later. One local high school, Maine Township High School North, opened in 1970 and closed just 11 years afterward as the boomer generation aged out of the system. The vacant building later served as the fictional Shermer High School in the 1985 classic, The Breakfast Club.
Today, the city sits at roughly 60,000 residents, so growth has been modest. Modern multifamily housing pockets are tucked into the aging midcentury tract duplexes and townhomes. The Sears building stands as an emptied shell. The shopping center faded away long ago. The former McDonald’s eventually became a McDonald’s museum, which was torn down a few years later after another flood from the nearby river.
My husband Bill spent part of his childhood at the far end of Des Plaines that bordered O’Hare. Returning to this area has felt surreal for both of us. Thomas Wolfe’s line about not being able to go home again rings true, and the reality is that Bill and I aren’t interested in revisiting the Des Plaines of yesteryear. We chose to live here partly for family, but also intentionally, because the city had shed the homogeneous white-character of our own youth.
Recent demographic data show that 53 percent of the population speaks only English at home. The rest communicate in Spanish (17 percent), a mix of Eastern European languages (11 percent), Indo-European tongues (8.3 percent), Asian languages (nearly 5 percent), Tagalog (2.5 percent), and Arabic (0.9 percent). The Sugar Bowl diner I remember from childhood still exists, now flanked by Korean and Vietnamese eateries. Des Plaines today reflects the reality that suburbs surrounding many urban centers have become far more ethnically diverse in the last generation. While some immigrant neighbors may still be navigating their place in American life today, the town’s diversity has thankfully eased the social pressure to conform that once defined the postwar suburbs of my youth. While I’ve grown from the insecure, square-peg girl I once was through decades of experience, I also recognize how profoundly this town has changed. Although I am the new kid here (a Medicare-eligible “new kid”, as I joke), this version of Des Plaines feels far closer to the America I call home than the uniform suburb I experienced as a child.
