Despite his college diploma, embittered and disappointed perhaps because of the effects of the Great Depression on his own prospects, Hugh had remained in the same industry in which he’d worked since childhood—the same as his immigrant father — lace-making and embroidering.  But he also had a great skill: like the man Hillary would marry, he could talk a great game. “Dad was the world’s greatest salesman,” said Tony Rodham. “You never saw him lose a sale. Our father was the best closer I’ve ever met in my life.”

His business acumen was also considerable, and he became quite successful as an entrepreneur. He manufactured drapes, window shades, and lace curtains that he sold to hotels, offices, movie theaters, and airlines — printing and cutting and sewing the fabric himself. His only employee was a black man he’d found drunk on the doorstep in 1958 and offered a part-time job. His wife served as his bookkeeper at the start. The shop, near the Merchandise Mart in downtown Chicago, was stifling hot in summer, and the workroom gave off a whiff of tobacco. There was also a showroom. He invested wisely and saved prodigiously. He was fascinated with the how-to’s of making money — how money makes money, and how he could keep it.

When Hillary was three years old, he bought the mock-Georgian house in Park Ridge, moving from the one-bedroom apartment in downtown Chicago where he and Dorothy had lived since their wedding. The house at 235 Wisner was purchased for $35,000, all cash. Hugh did not believe in borrowing.

Most days, he was back home by 3 or 4 p.m. When the children were growing up, he could usually be found after work sitting in his easy chair with his bad leg stretched out on an ottoman or low table, complaining about something or silently drinking a beer as he watched television, preferably a sports event. He rarely rose from the chair to greet guests or even uttered a welcome, but his presence dominated the room.  When the boys returned from school, he issued their orders for the rest of the day — chores, studying, then lights out early, the same that had been expected of him as a boy in Scranton. Rather than hire tradesmen for regular upkeep of the house, Tony and Hughie were conscripted to patch and paint as required. As a result, the house gradually sank into structural disrepair and headed toward deterioration, so much so that it was described as “a wreck” by the real estate saleswoman who eventually handled its sale — for about $200,000 — when Dorothy and Hugh moved to Little Rock. At the time, it still had antiquated sixty-amp electrical wiring.

Hugh Rodham did not pay his children on those weekends when they came downtown to “help work on a big order.” Often he’d drive them through Chicago’s aggregation of skid row neighborhoods to remind them of how fortunate they were. He freely expressed prejudices against blacks in the most denigrating terms. He never had a credit card, taught Hillary and her brothers to read the stock tables in the Chicago Tribune, and counseled the wisdom of thrift. The bitterness never left, despite the accoutrements of prosperity and his children’s devotion.  Rodham had chosen to settle his family in a tranquil neighborhood of two-story, brick-and-frame houses painted in subtle hues, with copses of maples and elms shading the macadam, and small gardens and grassy curbsides lovingly tended. The house was on a corner, its front and side yards seeded green, its sizable front porch directly under the secondfloor bedroom-and-sundeck that was Hillary’s.

The house was not large. Downstairs there was a living room; a dining room with space sufficient for a table and eight chairs; a cramped kitchen with a breakfast nook; a TV den perhaps fifteen feet square; and a tiny powder room. Upstairs were three bedrooms — none large.  The basement was unfinished and used for storage. Across the backyard was a garage, only slightly wider than Hugh’s Cadillac but with room for a few bicycles.

In “town,” a single stoplight hung like a pendant from wires over the intersection of Main Street and South Prospect Avenue, Park Ridge’s commercial center — candy store, art deco theater, public library, wedding photography studio, pharmacy, coffee shop. Nearby, planes bound for new O’Hare Airport descended like buzzing drones in the twilight.  Park Ridge, then as now, was an altogether different type of suburb from the communities along Chicago’s exclusive North Shore, the houses newer, built mostly in the 1930s and 1940s, without pretension of the grand manner. The breadwinners of Park Ridge in the 1950s and 1960s were mainly first-generation professionals or successful merchanttradesmen like Hillary’s father. They were disposed to exhibiting the ripe fruits of their good fortune and hard work, which had lifted their generational climb from working-class wages: Cadillacs, golf handicaps, gadgets, leisure wear, and leisure time. Many had moved their families from Chicago to escape the incursion of Negroes from the South whose numbers were tipping the city school system. The high school Hillary would attend through eleventh grade, Maine East, was the largest all-white high school in the nation.

To reach Park Ridge, you drove or took the Northwest Rail train past the synagogues of Skokie or the tract houses and little apartments in Niles and then, before you got to O’Hare, you turned and skirted some vegetable farms just outside town. Park Ridge had no Jews (at least none that Hillary knew of ), blacks, or Asians, or legal liquor sales, or, so far as Hillary was aware, divorce. Dorothy Rodham was one of the few women in the community who didn’t stay home all day, who could be found in the library’s reading room, or downtown at a museum.

Almost all the Rodhams’ neighbors were Methodist, Catholic, or Lutheran, and voted Republican.

After each of Hugh’s children was born, he drove the family back to Scranton for a baptism at Court Street Methodist Church, where he had been baptized in 1911, and his brothers before and after him. Every summer the Rodhams drove across the Alleghenys for a two-week vacation at a cabin he and his father, with their own hands, had built on Lake Winola, near Scranton, in the rolling Pennsylvania hills. The cabin had no heat, bath, or shower. It was a far different environment than the luxurious vacation cottages of many Park Ridge children on the shores of Lake Michigan or the Wisconsin dells.

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