Anyway, I worked in that place. . . I was maybe fifteen. . . believe me, it was the first naked girls I ever saw. And they weren’t completely naked either. They wore G-strings.

And then it depended on the cops whether they took their bras off or not. Because the cops would come in every week and tell Johnny and Vera they can take their brassieres off . . . or they can’t take their brassieres off. I don’t know what it depended on, you know, like whatever the cops got told. I mean, they were paying off the police. That was just a fact of life. This week they’re doing it, next week they’re not.

It was during World War II and all the guys who were eighteen and over were in the army, practically, except the 4F’s.

And here are all these strip joints on Clark Street and State Street. And they had a lot of business because there were a lot of sailors in town, and there were merchant marine, you know, sailors from off the Great Lakes boats . . . and soldiers from Fort Sheridan, and guys passing through town. They were making a killing, hustling all these guys.

But there was a shortage of players, mostly all the musicians were in the army, so everybody winked at the fact that there were these kids like me working in there.