The True Story of the Three Jacksons - Part 1.

Like all south side story tellers and fabulists, I begin not in medias res, but way the hell long after the subjects are dead and gone and have no recourse or access to lawyers - I begin.

This is no bullshit. Long before the peroxide black kid from Gary had a massive grabber after making millions of dollars and paying out millions in hush money, there was the Jackson Three*. They were accordion kings. Andrew, Joseph, and Solomon Jackson came from under the Dan Ryan expressway. Actually they were from 47th & Wentworth. They lived in back of the Yards - Canaryville.

They were raised by their Mom, Delia Murphy Jackson after their father Morris Solomon Jacobson(Jackson) a tanner for J. Ogden Armour was killed by a strikebreaker in 1898. Mo Jackson was a devout Jew, but got sick of explaining to his Mick, Hunky and Dago relatives how he had fought in the Irish Brigade in 1864 and changed his name to Jackson. Mo Jackson went to services on Saturday and the wife and kids went on Sunday to St. Gabe'.

Andy was born in 1895; Joe in 1896; and Sol in 1897 - they were Irish Triplets and Miracle Babies - Mo thought it a miracle to be three for three in three. Andy was the joy of his mother and as useless around the house as a blind cat with no claws. Joe was a mope who always groused about everything and Sol was gabby little bastard from out of the chute. The three boys played in a pile at their parent's feet when Mo and Delia had finished their dinners and Mo could stretch his long legs to absolute limits of tarsals. The rugs were clean and beaten regularly by Delia and boys rolled and undulated like cuts of prime on the Armour conveyors only a few blocks west of the frame house of the Jackson's on Wentworth.

A few days after Sol's first birthday, Mo went to a strike meeting at John Joyce's Knight's of Labor Hall at 47th and Ashland. It was pretty good stretch of the legs from Wentworth to Ashland and there were sinkholes in the street that could swallow a horse.

( next time Mo gets trimmed by a strikebreaker and dies a few months later)

*The Three Jacksons were Dutch accordion kings so my story is essentially, fundamentally, thoroughly and originally pure and unadulterated bullshit - fiction.

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