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Hilda Satt Polacheck, who had immigrated to America in 1893, could hardly wait to return to her former Halsted Street neighborhood to attend the fortieth-anniversary festivities for Hull-House in 1929. What drew Polacheck and so many others back to the settlement, even if, as in her case, they no longer lived in Chicago? Certainly, the personal magnet was Jane Addams. As Polacheck reported in her memoir, I Came a Stranger, Jane Addams moved among the great and the humble just as any mother would when her far-flung children returned to the old home for a reunion. She knew everybody's name. She asked after children of the former children who had come to Hull-House years ago as bewildered, uprooted little immigrants. . . . I felt that all the people who had come to that reunion were her family. 1 For Polacheck, writing about this occasion years later, the anniversary dinner presented the central image affirming this feeling of domestic community: "I will never forget how [Addams] seated me at her table in the dining room. I know that many celebrities sat around that table that night, but I only remember Jane Addams at the head of the table, carving a roast, as if she were serving a family." 2 Polacheck's recollections were unabashedly romanticized, but this

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