The suburbs of Chicago are a 10-minute drive from the city, or one stop on the yellow-line train that runs to “The World’s Largest Village.” From the lines that separate Chicago’s northernmost neighborhood of Rogers Park, where my mother’s family moved when they made enough money, you’re only five miles away from Skokie, where I was born. They didn’t get too far into the suburbs, but the city felt like it was a world away.
Follow the trees as they multiply with each passing block north, and you’re in Evanston, a town once so influenced by its Methodist founders that it came to be known as “Heavenston,” as well as one of the four American towns claiming to be the the birthplace of the ice cream sundae.
The part of the Chicagoland area known as the North Shore is what John Hughes turned into the fictional Shermer, Ill., 25 years ago with the release of the first of what is called his “teen trilogy” of films: Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off(1986). These represent the peak of a decade filled with directorial and screenwriting credits for Hughes that, put together, represent one of the strongest bodies of work in such a short time by anybody in movies, but more importantly, present a fully realized portrait of an idyllic America seen through the eyes of its youth.