The words “record store” have become almost like a secret code, a reference to a now ancient forum that was once part of the mainstream but is now an endangered species. The record store was the equivalent of the Egyptian pyramids; each one filled with its own special treasure. Today, those vaults of sound and rhythm have become scarce. An MP3 may have replaced the immediacy of finding music, but it will never, no matter what technological advances may come, replace the intimacy of standing in a record store and asking a store employee, “So, what’s good?”
It was ten years ago this month when I spent my final day as an employee of Hegewisch Records in Calumet City. There are just some things you’ll never forget about your first job, good or bad. For me, working at my favorite record store after graduating from Mount Carmel High School remains one of the best times of my professional life. I’m now into my fourth job, managing a small law firm in River North. Having gone through my share of stereotypical office politics à la Office Space, I sometimes shake my head when I think about what I would consider to be a “bad day” at the record store. Having to remind customers of the alphabetical order of the CDs seems to pale in comparison to the bullshit headaches of having a supervisor inform you at 4:50 P.M. on a Friday that you should plan on coming into work for “a few hours” on the weekend.
For anyone on the south side of Chicago, Hegewisch Records was the place to get your music. Before it was a record store chain, it began as a basic general store in the Hegewisch neighborhood back in 1967 by Joe Sotiros. Sotiros became partners with Rich Milan and made the move to Calumet City in 1974 to open Hegewisch Discount Records & Tapes. By 1979, a second location was added in Merrillville, IN, followed by a third location sometime in 1987 in Richton Park, IL. The store’s history took a tragic turn when on September 13, 1991, Sotiros was found dead in his home in far south suburban University Park. He was shot multiple times, and his murder has gone unsolved for 18 years. Sotiros’ death was an open wound in the history of the store that would never heal, and the Hegewisch chain’s declining future was practically sealed by the time Best Buy and Circuit City entered the picture. The passing of Milan and Greg Hoogheem (General Manager/Record Buyer) in 2000—both to cancer—truly signaled the end for Hegewisch Records.
“It seemed like they were a fish out of water trying to breathe,” said Nick Skipitaris (29) about walking into the Calumet City store during a spring break from Eastern Illinois University in 2001.
By the summer of 2001, the last two remaining stores closed—the Calumet City store was demolished and replaced by a Walgreens, because we can never have too many of them.
As early as 7 years old, I’d go with my dad to the Calumet City store and walk the aisles while he hunted down his latest musical gem. I’d have the pleasure of carrying the records or CDs back to the car. It wasn’t until I turned 13 and received R.E.M.’s 1986 album Life’s Rich Pageant—my very first CD—that music really became a huge part of my identity. Suddenly, working at Hegewisch Records became the dream job I had to achieve.
“We did our own thing and kept the place standing,” recalls William Mason (29) about his time working at the Calumet City store. “It was like a commune in many ways. I never felt I had a boss but shared responsibility to not burn the place down.”
Bill was one of four fellow Mount Carmel students from my graduating class that worked at the store during my time. Today, he and his lovely wife, Jackie, live in Clarendon Hills, IL, where he is a manager within the McDonald’s Corporation. One of my best memories of Bill was during the Christmas shopping season in ‘99 and a customer almost starting a fight with him over a supposed new Rush album. Unbeknownst to the customer, there was no new Rush album out that year, and Bill was a black belt in karate.
Today, Jill Ciciora (30) is married and is the Associate Director of Sales Planning for the ABC Network. When I worked with her, Jill was the expert on all things Queen. Her love for the band has always stayed with me anytime I’ve purchased another Queen album to add to my collection. “I loved music and wanted to be involved in the business,” said Ciciora. “I figured Hegewisch would be a good introduction. I remember coming in and talking to Richie [Milan]. He asked me my favorite bands and I mentioned I liked the Moody Blues. Richie loved them and told me stories, then hired me.” Jill started working at the Calumet City store in 1995 when she was 16 years old.
I’d known Mike Kristovic since First (1st) grade at the now defunct St. Victor’s Grammar School in Calumet City, and we’d gone through Mount Carmel together. Mike started working at the store sometime during our sophomore year of high school. Nick Skipitaris went to a different grammar than me and was a year ahead of me. We met when I went to Castaways bowling alley in Calumet City to ask about joining their league. He just happened to be at the counter and mentioned his team was short one player. He was just beginning as a freshman at T.F. North High School while I was entering my Eighth (8th) grade year. Nick talked, a lot, but he was funny. He was half salesman, half comic, and I knew no one else like him. Nick was hired at Hegewisch about a month prior to me. Both Mike and Nick were vital to submitting my name to the owner as a potential hire.
The day I received the call to come meet Richie about a job at the store, I jumped into the car, sped down Torrence Avenue, hoping the bridge near the Ford plant on 130th St. wouldn’t suddenly go up or a train 5 miles long blocks my path to destiny. I probably made a casual 15-20 minute drive to the store into 5 minutes. I walked in and got the sign from Nick to head to the back office. I stepped into the office, my nerves shaking with excitement and said, “Hi! Here I am.”
Richie pulled his head up from the papers on his desk and snarled, “And who are you?”
The thought of properly identifying myself quickly caught up to the rest of my brain. He slipped a piece of paper over to me as I stood next to his desk. “Here’s a schedule. Got any problems with it?” he asked.
I glanced over the writing in pencil and said, “No.”
Richie folded the paper in half and gave it to me. “You start Monday,” he declared.
I was both terrified of the man and grateful all at the same time. My eyes quickly converged on a photo on the office wall taken of Richie and a bare-chested Roger Daltrey holding up a framed picture of Daltrey’s first solo album cover. My Who-geekness told me the photo was likely taken in 1975. I instantly felt like I was about to work at a place with some serious musical history.
Greg Hoogheem could either astonish you with his encyclopedic knowledge of music or scare the shit out of you. He was a towering fellow, mostly wore flannel, rarely would leave the back storage room, kept little mouse traps to protect his loaf of white bread, and he generally had a scowl on his face no matter what the time of the work day. I was told when I started that Greg was once given an award for having the largest record collection in Indiana. The whole time I worked there, he never called me by my name. He knew me as the kid that like R.E.M. and The Who. Greg was a huge Who fan. Depending on how his day was going in the backroom—tracking orders and such—he could stop and talk for 10 minutes with me about why The Who should never have had brought Kenny Jones in to replace Keith Moon.
“He didn’t have the best social skills and probably didn’t have much of a social life,” said Brandy Murzyn (34) when remembering Greg. “He may not have been the most financially successful person, but I think he was as happy as he wanted to be because he was surrounded by music his whole life.”
As Greg’s cancer began to wear him down, his frequency coming to work grew less and less, just as Richie’s did. The last time I saw Greg was probably during my final week at the store. I told him I was leaving to take a student job at DePaul, shook hands and said it was fun working with him. He had a hint of surprise in his voice when I said that to him, to which he replied, “Oh, thanks. Good luck.” That was the only time I ever saw him crack a smile to my face.
For all the thumps the store endured, especially in the waning years of the store’s life, there were still plenty of good moments. Sure, Richie had his faults as a person and owner, but we all loved the store. We never wanted the character of the store to diminish, and we always wanted to keep our musical ears sharp to maintain the store’s strong reputation as a place that knew its music.
“As strange as this sounds, I miss the smell of that store,” said Grace Mazon (33). “It reminded me of an old library.” Grace was 19 when she started working at Hegewisch Records. “Hegewisch was special. From the customer service, to the musical knowledge of the workers, to the extensive catalogue of music it carried, you knew when you went in there you were bound to walk out with what you went in for,” said Mazon.
Of the two movies that came out while I was a teenager that focused on the record store culture, Empire Records (1995) and High Fidelity (2000), High Fidelity was the closest resemblance of what it was like working at Hegewisch Records. The lights were never too bright, and the floors had spots of dirt that had developed since 1974 into living entities (Mike always felt bad about mopping the floors because he felt it hurt the store’s vintage atmosphere). The turnstile at the entrance might take out your knees if you weren’t too careful. The ceiling was adorn with music t-shirts and promotional posters. The Polka section always remained stocked, and the bootlegs were always labeled “Import.” The backroom was a cave filled with its share of dust and forgotten CD stock that didn’t sell.
My first customer has never left my memory. She approached me and said that she was having some difficulty locating Elton John in our “L” section. Let that sit with you for a second. One time an elderly woman held up a cassette copy of The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers and asked if I thought her grandson might enjoy dancing to it. “Oh yeah,” I said while trying not to laugh at the sight of this woman waving that crotch shot cover in my face.
There was a time when the store’s CD player broke, and I got a call before heading to work to bring as many of my mix tapes to play on the back-up tape deck. It was like going to DEFCON One.
For my 19th birthday, I choose a vinyl copy of R.E.M.’s New Adventures In Hi-Fi as my discounted birthday gift. My coworkers also set aside two R.E.M. album promo posters (Murmur and Out of Time), a 1979 Cheap Trick tour program, a tour program from The Who’s “final” tour in ’82, a 25th anniversary Who poster and a Gillian Anderson calendar for 2000. Those remain some of the best “office” gifts I’ve ever received from coworkers.
When the foot traffic was slow and the work day dragged, we would find ways of entertaining ourselves. If it was a night shift and my coworker, Rob (another Carmel alum), was present it meant Pink Floyd night. What that entailed was Rob taking a hit of acid and then sitting at the register listening to his selection of Floyd. What I learned from him was that you don’t wave your hands in the face of someone on acid—an action that warranted a “Not cool” remark.
A group of us gathered at the register one evening because our coworker, Luis “Lou” Rodriguez, found a CD by a band called Mindless Self Indulgence. The album was Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy, and the song that caught his eye was “I Hate Jimmy Page.” Lou played guitar in a band called Lost Generation (now called Lucid Ground) and worshipped Jimmy Page. He cued up the song, and we all stood intently listening. We started laughing at the lyrics and all seemed fine…then came the chorus. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!/I hate Jimmy Page!/Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!/Kick those faggots off the stage!” Lou immediately hit STOP, pulled the CD out of its tray, threw it to the ground and proceeded to smash it. Again, Lou was a big Jimmy Page fan. I’m sure his newborn daughter, Zoey Paige, will receive a good lesson about the Hammer of the Gods. Lou is married and works for Illinois Department of Revenue while still actively performing with Lucid Ground.
Since Hegewisch Records closed, I’ve managed to come across some other great stores in other cities—Indianapolis, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin, New York City, Nashville, Ann Arbor. Had I landed another record store job, I suspect part of me would have tried to find some element of the new job that made me feel like I was still at Hegewisch, but it would have felt like musical adultery. I would have been surrounded by music, but I wouldn’t have had the people that formed the core unit I had working alongside me at Hegewisch. All of us that worked together have gone our separate ways. Nick is my personal banker and branch manager of a U.S. Bank. Mike is a social worker. Brandy works as a legal assistant, and Grace is an office assistant. We were all from different backgrounds, but it was a dingy store that created a bond between us that hasn’t gone away.
“It was a community experience—to go there was to know people who knew your tastes,” said Kristovic (29). “The memory is 8 hours of music; days measured not in coffee spoons but rather in really good records with really cool people, looking at the CD lineup behind the register because that was your work day. It’s Pink Floyd and then we’re going to do R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People. That was the day. You were listening. It wasn’t just background music.”
To Grace, Brandy, Jill, Lou, Mike, Bill, Nick, Rob, Zuccarelli, Bren, the Hegewisch Records family, all those little record stores and the loyal customers that helped keep the lights on for as long as they could, thanks for sharing the music.
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Written by Guest on 2010-04-21 10:14:38
cool! |
nice work millhouse
Written by Guest on 2010-04-21 13:24:16
this is a great story- love the pictures. i can't believe those are from our senior year. i think it is time for you to open a record shop down on the southside somewhere. we need stuff like that.
craig |
"imports"
Written by Guest on 2010-04-21 13:35:15
ohhh i remember that "import" case in the far back corner of the store....Pearl Jam's "No F*cking Messiah" was the pick of the litter - havent seen that CD since |
John O
Written by Guest on 2010-04-23 20:41:12
Great article Chris: I'm sure your dad remembers Fat Joe with the open cash register, no receipts, return with no receipts. A fun bygone era. And yea, vinyl, no CD's  |
I miss that place too!
Written by Guest on 2010-05-06 11:34:51
Good article Chris. That pic of you and Mike is hilarious! |
Michael
Written by Guest on 2010-05-29 21:27:53
Due to my oldness, I remember Hegewisch Records when it was in Hegewisch on Brandon Avenue. I grew up a few blocks from there. I bought my first album there at age 12, Led Zeppelin IV. I was completely validated when a hippie behind me in line looked over my selection and said' "Good album".  |
Written by Guest on 2011-11-02 13:31:29
Wonderful article Chris! -From Hegewisch Joe's niece, Lisa |
bobby skafish, former Gavit Glad
Written by Guest on 2011-11-08 08:50:21
Excellent, evocative writing about a great store. Thanks! |
Only Rolling Stone Records is left...
Written by Guest on 2011-11-21 22:17:00
I grew up in Homewood during the '70's and made many a Saturday trip east to Torrence Ave, for the drive past River Oaks to Hegewisch. That store and Discount Records in Homewood were my early music education. Rolling Stone in Norridge is the only area store left of it's kind. |
Jim
Written by Guest on 2012-04-28 18:31:05
My first apartment was in Cal. City in
1976 and I went to Hegewisch frequently. Probably still have some
cassettes from purchases there as I did not have a turntable but just a tape player. |
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