Chuck Hybl remembers a Berwyn where the winters were colder and snowier, where there were countless “prairies” for kids to play, and when he should have taken the now-proven-to-be-profitable bet that his marriage to the love of his life wouldn’t last.

Chuck, 86, and Charlotte Hybl, who will be 86 in June, have spent their life together in the house they bought in the 1200 block of Home Avenue in 1949. It was in this house that Chuck tore apart and rebuilt that the couple raised two daughters, had a host of canine companions and lived through good times and lean years.

Chuck, who still works part time at a Crate & Barrel warehouse in Oakbrook, served as a keypunch operator in the Navy from 1944 to 1946. He would later sell insurance, service vending machines, be a warehouse supervisor and work as a milk man for 20 years — “the best job I ever had,”  he said.

The lifelong resident of Berwyn has a long memory that weaves in and out of old storefronts no longer around, a memory where smells of fresh Bohemian bakery goods from Vesecky’s and rich Bohemian cooking cling to street cars racing down the street.

“Our streetcar had leather seats and a wood-burning stove for the winter time,” Hybl said. “Nobody had cars back then. One time, when I was in Boy Scouts, we went on a hike. It was a brutally cold winter day. We had real winters back then. We had taken the streetcar to the end of the line, Stone Avenue, then hiked to Hinsdale. I remember I split my pants — I guess they weren’t very good quality.”

It is strange how childhood memories are often the strongest. Hybl said he remembers when Berwyn had many empty lots the kids would call prairies.

“In those days, my mother would have to pull me out of bed to go to school,” Hybl  said. “I majored in looking out the window and minored in avoiding homework. But I was the first one up on the weekends.”

Hybl and friends would make the rounds, he said, past Johnson’s Funeral Parlor on Cermak Road to the Blue Store grocery, where a clerk would hand pick all items by request and write the price on a paper bag that also served as a receipt. Then it was off to the butcher shop to get a nickel’s worth of liver, a favorite bait for crawfish hunting in the prairies.

Charlotte Hybl has her memories as well. At the age of nine, she was crossing the street when she fell and couldn’t get up. The fall aggravated a birth defect in her hips that would confine her to crutches for the rest of her life.

It made little difference to Chuck, who in 1943, was smitten with the girl at work who had a voice as soft as swishing summer grass. They went on their first date in February and were married in June.

“My boss was going to bet me 50 bucks it wouldn’t last a month,” Chuck said. “I should have taken the bet.”