The Adventures of Bun Bun and Tisa

Sometime in the early 1960’s, I want to say 1962 but I can’t remember precisely, my sister and I received two stuffed animals on that Christmas day. Bun Bun was a white and pink-stripped rabbit who was delivered by Santa to our meager tree, and Tisa was a gray and black tiger. He was sitting in a blue plastic Model T type toy car. Both were tied with ribbons.

Now in those days we lived in a four story apartment building at 1340 S. Newberry in Chicago. The area was called Maxwell Street back then and in its early history a large number of Russian-Jewish immigrants settled into this neighborhood with its brick apartment buildings at the turn of the century. Many famous people came from Maxwell Street, including William S. Paley, the founder of CBS TV.

By the 1960’s most of the original inhabitants of the neighborhood were long gone, though many still owned the apartment buildings. In their place blacks and Mexicans had replaced the Jewish families, and with them came the attendant problems of poverty, drugs, gangs and violence that were reflective of our society in general, then and now. Little has changed, except how we perceive it.

The apartment building that we lived in on Newberry Street was practically taken over by our extended family. Each floor contained a two bedroom apartment in the front and a one bedroom apartment behind that. We lived on the third floor rear. My mom’s sister, Opal and later their brother Charlie were on the fourth floor rear. On the second floor front apartment front lived my dad’s sister Marie and her long-time companion Pep, who we called Uncle Pep. And on the first floor rear lived my dad’s father and his older brother John. In the first floor front apartment lived yet another brother, Peter, with his wife. So as you can see, the Herrera’s and the Johnson’s practically lived in the entire building, save for three apartments.

We generally had Christmas celebration in Aunt Marie’s 2nd floor apartment; Santa was sure to have left a stockpile of presents there under their huge tree. But he also would leave some toys in our tiny apartment. Naturally Christmas morning my sister and I were in a constant state of agony waiting for our parents to get ready to go downstairs to Aunt Marie's place. It wasn’t extravagant, but it was obvious that people of little means did all they could to make our Christmas memorable. For a long time we were the only kids in the building. My sister is one year younger than I am.

But this Christmas Bun Bun and Tisa enthralled us! It was love and first sight! And indeed we began to give these animals their own persona – and they in turn helped to shape the course of our own lives by enabling us to mimic and act out the attitudes and behaviors of people all around us, though at the time we knew little of that.

Our imagination and fantasies lived abundantly through the persona of these guys, for whom we invented our own language and speech accents. Bun Bun was shortened to “Byne” while Tisa kept his moniker. We invented elaborate societies with our collection of other stuffed animals that Byne and Tisa would teach in made-up school classrooms, perform surgery on as hospital surgeons, arrest as police officers, host in elaborate dinners in intricate homes made of large cardboard boxes cut and altered for the purpose, order around as army and navy officers, play as baseball and basketball players, or entertain as band members (to music of the Supremes, early Beatles, and LP’s our parents made professionally). There were both married from time to time to Barbie Dolls. Some life! There were so many scenarios every day that I have forgotten. I do recall though that they wrote short stories and made bound “books” in their characters and in other characters. I am sure that is where I earned my love of writing.

Oh and they soon lost their fluffy wholesome look. They fell into grime, were burned by too hot space heaters, fell in toilet water, grabbed by our dogs, dropped from 3rd story windows into the alley below, and torn and repaired so often that I actually learned how to make quick repairs to clothing years later in life with needle and thread work that I applied to my Tisa.

It was rich, wild and insular; our play with “Byne” and Tisa kept us safe from the raging currents in the neighborhoods, including the riots if 1968, that tore so much of Chicago apart. And they kept doing that for us all the way up to middle school, when we moved out of the neighborhood after Aunt Opal and Uncle Charlie both passed away at end of the mid-sixties and then our grandfather died in 1969.

We didn’t go very far, just on the other side of the train viaducts, purchasing a two-flat house in Pilsen, a Mexican and black neighborhood to the south of Maxwell Street. It seemed a world away to us. Bun Bun and Tisa of course came too, and enjoyed a sort of Renaissance, with even more new adventures in the new house, for which we had great space (7 rooms, three bedrooms and a huge back yard).

But these were our junior high years and our friends began to see more and more days when they were never touched. Yet we always remembered their lessons, their philosophy of life – fun tempered by and an attitude of eager role play. By high school they were in plastics bags and in drawers, out of sight but not forgotten.

As an adult I would sometimes think about those guys and how they were holding up. I knew that my sister, who still leaves in Chicago, had them with her at her place. Then a few days ago she sent me this picture and a flood of wonderful memories came back all at once and I knew I had to write about them! What we learned on our path to adulthood! Bun Bun and Tisa, we love you!