Mae (Nee Hodous) Schlick was born on 21 March 1911 in Chicago Cook County Illinois. Her father was a teamster milkwagon driver for the Cicero Dairy Co. (2610-14-56 Avenue) in Cicero, Cook County Illinois. By 1930 per the U.S. Census the family was living at 3215 22nd Street in Chicago, Illinois. Mae had two brothers Robert (age 16) and Leonard (age 9). They were living in a multi family apartment building. The building housed five families and a total of twenty people. My grandmother can recall that another they lived prior to the nineteen thirties was a one room apartment above a chili parlor. They had to share the bathroom that was down the hallway from her family’s living quarters. It was not an ideal nor easy life for a young girl. She dreams of moving away from the city one day and live in the country.

At one point in her young live Mae recalls during a challenging economic time prior to 1930 the family moved to Interlocken Michigan. Her father was hoping to begin farming for a period of time. The move unfortunately did not work out and the family returned to Chicago and the town of Cicero, Illinois.

Her father’s parents were Bohemian and born in Bohemia which later began part of Czechoslovakia. The family settled in Chicago’s southwest side near 22nd Street. It is interesting to note per the Encyclopedia of Chicago that “by the turn of the century, Chicago was the third largest Czech city in the world, after Praque and Vienna”. The Czechs and Bohemian popluation reached its peak in 1870. The Hodouses were part of a larger immigrant influx of Eastern European people settling in the City of Chicago.

Chicago’s Czech community followed a common pattern of migration from inner-city working-class neighborhoods to middle-class areas further out and on to the suburbs. This gradual movement followed the economic progress of many Czech immigrants and the influx of other ethnic groups. In the 1850s and 1860s many Czech immigrants settled on the Near West Side. The neighborhood, known as “Prague,” centered on the Roman Catholic parish of St. Wenceslaus at DeKoven and Desplaines Streets and was largely spared by the Chicago Fire of 1871. Movement south and west in the 1870s and 1880s generated a second working-class Czech community, dubbed “ Pilsen, ” which included the Czech congregation of St. Procopius, founded in 1875. By the 1890s, Czechs were colonizing middle-class neighborhoods like South Lawndale (popularly known as “Czech California”), where they established several churches, schools, and Sokol halls. As the Czechs continued to move south and west, other immigrant groups moved into the neighborhoods they left, with immigrants from Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, Lithuania, and other Slavic areas settling in Pilsen around the turn of the century. By the 1930s many Czechs were moving into such suburbs as Cicero, Berwyn, and Riverside (Source: Encyclopedia of Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2005).