“I was born in Kankakee, Illinois, which is just south of the city and we moved to the south side of Chicago. It was much colder there and I remember there is a larger lake right off of the city that makes it really chilly. It was mostly fun growing up there, we had a neighborhood with quite a few apartments in the area with quite a few kids. We had a basketball hoop for a while and it was a big deal that we had our own and we didn’t have to go to the park, but the older kids broke it because they could dunk and my parents didn’t replace it. So, we switched to playing street hockey which was a unique choice for our neighborhood as we grew up in an African-American neighborhood, in fact me and my brother were the only white kids around. So we introduced hockey to that area which was pretty fun. You couldn’t break a hockey stick so my parents liked that. It snowed a lot there so we would build snow forts in front of the apartment complex. I had a really good first grade teacher whose name was Mrs. Watson, she made me teach the other kids how to read. I had a famous neighbor whose name is Chief Keef. He lived about a block away from us and he was more tight with my brother. The thing I remember most  about him is that he lived with his grandma and he had an ankle monitor by like 14, he couldn’t leave the house and his grandma used to beat him with a slipper, which is funny because he is this big tuff guy now. In the 90’s when I grew up, Michael Jordan and the Bulls won like six championships in a row so you couldn’t wear Jordan’s or they would be stolen. Another big thing was to steal someone’s bike. You couldn’t leave your bike or someone would take it. We moved out of the city when they changed the rules for my dad’s job. He was a union water line repairman, operator and you had to live in the district that you worked. We moved south of the city to a much safer and respectable town.”