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Gary, IN (see Indiana/Steel Mill...)

No one wrote about Gary, Indiana where Michael and the Jackson 5 (Jacksons) are from:

Gary is an rough industrail area (mills, refineries, factories...oil fumes, mill soot in the air...) to live and work in near Chicago (Lake Michigan/Indiana Dune.  Their dad, Joe, worked in the steel mill (2). Most mothers didn't work back then. Thiers was the home job. Not everyone had a car and or phone back then around when Michael Joe was born. Milk and soda and all that was in glass bottles, not plastic, and it was better qualitn drinking, tasting much fresher and better.  Back then there were still some fruit trees around.  Farmers came selling from their trucks maybe weekly, the mothers ran out of their homes maybe weekly, to get the good stuff. Our neighborhood area supermarket came in 1964. Otherwise you went to private little stores.  Gary was the biggest city around there. The street I lived on didn't get paved untill about 1960 and others after that, it was like that all over.

It got really cold in the winter and windy.  You had a coal or AN oil furnace which required a coal truck or oil truck (hose) to come to the house.  Summers got real hot and humid, there was no air-conditioning back then.  Nor color TV, you had a black and white TV (with tubes) and a simple house radio, both with few channels until FM. And the car radio.

There were small transistor radios you could carry if you were fortunate to have one or use your parent's. WLS disc jockey (Dick Biondi) in Chicago played Doo Wop, Rock and Roll, and Oldies music.  There was American Bandstand and Soul Train on TV, so that's how I think the Jackson 5/Michael got started more or less, listening and watching these.  They were on these shows eventually. I saw the JACKSON FIVE (5) in a veterans post in my hometown around there in 1969 (or 1968). We kids all around there grew up on the music like they did.

Record players, .45's...4 Track tape players came in the 60's, then the 8 track players and then the casette players which all got into cars.  Young kids that drived, loved these. Life was more appreciated maybe back then. You hardly saw a police patrol car. You played, had fun on the streets too.  There was no automatic weapons etc. You didn't have back packs for school which amazes me now. The discipline was harder too.  The churches were full.  There was censorship of things and curfews.  Sport pros wore no gloves, nor us kids.  We had wooden bats only. I was 26 when I got my first car (used), working in an oil refinery, able to make payments.  I remember climbing up the ladder on one of the towers with the fire torch way on top burning off bad gas, then going into a manhole on the side of it. $4.24 hr.

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