It is definitely a small world

Recently, a couple of Lake Viking Association members discovered an amazing connection. It’s a coincidence that defies the odds!

Dan August had given Dennis Schlaiss (everyone calls him “Shoe”) a call because he was having computer problems. He didn’t really know Dennis but had heard about his computer savvy.

Dennis told him to bring his laptop over and he would look at it. When Dan arrived at the Schlaiss home, the two began to converse. Dennis mentioned that he was originally from Chicago, and the conversation went something like this:

“Oh yeah, I’m originally from Chicago too,” Dan said, and then he asked Dennis what part of Chicago he was from. “North side,” was the answer.

“Me too,” Dan August replied. “What part of the north side?”

“My family owned a house on West Ainslie Street,” Dennis stated. Dan was amazed. His family had also lived on West Ainslie Street!

Out came the Google maps. More information was exchanged, and as the two compared locations, they came to the realization that they had lived two houses apart!

This was too much coincidence, so Dennis called his father, and then gave the phone to Dan so the two men could converse.

Like Dennis, his father, Ben Schlaiss, grew up in the house on West Ainslie Street, and there was only a few years difference in Ben’s and Dan’s ages. Chicago is heavily Catholic and has a huge parochial school system — with the schools and churches established along ethnic lines. Ben Schlaiss went to the German Catholic School, and Dan August went to the Polish Catholic School.

They existed in different circles, but they definitely remembered each other. Dennis remembered riding his bicycle around the neighborhood as a boy and recalled that the driveway of the August house was one of his boundaries.

By the time Ben Schlaiss and Dan exchanged names of different people they had known and memories of the old neighborhood, they had been on the phone for almost an hour.

Both families had strong roots in Chicago. Dennis’s grandmother worked for years at the hallowed grounds of Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Ben now resides in Arizona. Members of Dan’s immediate family have left Chicago but he still has second and third cousins there. West Ainslie Street, in the meantime, because of its proximity to Chicago’s near north end, has become a trendy neighborhood with memories of the quiet middle-class neighborhood faded forever — with the lingering reminder to Dennis Schlaiss and Dan August that it’s truly a small world.

~ Reprinted from the October 2017 issue of Lake Viking News.