John David Norman - Evanston - The Connections and beyond pt1

 It was always in the late night when I would find myself searching to see if anyone else suffered child sexual assault in my old neighborhood in Evanston. Nothing would surface. I tried tracking my old neighbor down - I didn't have a last name. I wondered about other children, how many came after me. I'd fall asleep frustrated, feeling that anger and fear I did as a little girl. Decades of this - And, I know others do the same. 

I'd skip over reports that didn't match mine, knowing that predators usually have a certain victim type they go after - it wasn't until I started digging into some unsolved murders of women in Wisconsin that certain stories kept reappearing, and then I saw him, John David Norman, a side view of his , his profile, and immediately my stomach churned. "He was the man on the bike", my mind said, "the one who was a "teacher" and he lived with John, the Nam Vet, who molested me. " I clicked the article, and nothing matched. Just him and that face. 

It nagged at me. It was him, I was sure- but how? 

And the rest of that story, up to this moment, plays out on the pages of this blog in many, many, posts and in many ways. My need to know and face those horrific memories was that intense. 

They are years that formed Asha's Beginnings. I was a child with an enlarged spleen. I was sick all the time. I had tried killing myself and because I was carrying the burden of child sexual assault, and I did tell my mom only to be met with disdain, told it was disgusting, not to say anything to my father as it would kill him, and then sent to California where underage I did work for a short time on a factory floor and placed there by relatives. 

Why?

Even as this story has spilled out of me, I keep asking why. Why isn't there anything about it in Evanston? It was him, my mind kept screaming.  That neighbor boy did always want to play pretend photographer without clothes on - they grew pot on the roof of the apartment building, walls in the apartment the men shared were painted black.  Why? 

After all this time, and only a day or so ago, I finally found it. Something that helped to tie it all together for me personally and how it played out in Evanston - the connections. I've been absorbing this knowing no matter how this turns out, all hands created it but I am also that survivor who has carried this in me for half a century knowing there had to be more to it, why my life kept parking me as a child next to predators - knowing it sounds insane as I utter any of it. 

Then I saw it in an article about a beloved attraction in Evanston, the newsstand on Chicago Ave and Main. Everyone knew it- Everyone has stepped through it's doors. Kids loved the place. My first home in Evanston was across the street. My mom worked at the bank on the other corner. It was part of my daily existence my entire time living in Evanston during the 70s. 

The Chicago Tribune article; Evanston haunt back in business, was published in 2001. They evidently helped to nap a pronography and a rogue undercover FBI agent and then there was also a murder there. Now I need to explain something here, my dad, he grew up in Evanston. He knew a lot of people and was in the UAW at Mark Controls/Clayton Mark which sat over on Dempster and Dodge. He would become the local's president. He, and his brother,  attended St. George High School. 

While not concrete, it started making sense. Things I've written about and things that remained unsaid. I started remember Dad taking me with he had excursions - we'd go to his barber and a few bars along Howard, the dividing line between Evanston and Rogers Park/Chicago. I'd get handfuls of quarters for the pinball machines and jukeboxes and I would be well supplied with Shirley Temples. 

Remember all of that I looked into it and found something that tied it up, that newsstand and at least one of those bars and Dad- they all knew one another from the neighborhood they grew up in, specifically St. Mary's parish and St. George High School. An obit led me there. 

Seeing all of that, knowing they would have been teens when John David Norman first came to Illinois to attend Northwestern in Evanston, and then knowing how abuses with clergy spiked in those decades, including with the Christian Brothers who ran St. George and Brother Rice, the connections felt stronger. 

A lot stronger -just not concrete. 

This post was to introduce you to how I am going to present this story the best way I can - in segments. 

I think to get us there we need to look at main threads first, and one of them that stands strong in this, beyond John David Norman, is St. George and the Christian Brothers. 

The next post will concentrate on that.......