That Poor Jazz Summer

Six-year old introverted prodigy, Richard "Kingfish" Hawkes, one of four children of a struggling Jazz pianist loved books, radio programs, dogs and trains. His solitary world changed as the 1948 Chicago neighborhood transitioned with burgeoning southern migration, hobos, transient World War II veterans, urban decay, emerging machine politics and organized crime. Supporting him through this epiphany were the venal local political organizer, his mystic Native American paternal grandmother and his two new best friends ---- 7 year-old mischievous German private school honor student neighbor Rabbit and 8 year-old affable hypersensitive Italian classmate Joey, the son of a mid-level mob boss.
Patriarch Papa Hawkes would lament, "It's like a losing game of Monopoly, you build up your empire and think you are going to bust the game wide open. Then the dice turn cold and you lose on every turn until all you have left is a mortgaged house on the cheapest street on the board".
The Hawkes family Native American and military historical heritage is chronicled in back story vignettes of Custer's Last Stand, the Spanish-American War and the racially charged Brownsville Texas Incident.

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