Monthly Archives: February 2024

A 2912 Tale of Photographs, Memories, and Momories, Part I: Gaston, Evelyn, and Irene

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In October 2023, on my way out West for a research trip, I spent a couple of days with my siblings in the Chicago suburbs, which is always a treat. And it gave me the time to help my sister Kathi go through the last few boxes of photos from our childhood home at 2912.

Kathi set all the boxes on her big dining room table, which once belonged to our mom’s mother and served as the grownup table for holiday dinners. Many of the photos in those boxes depicted our parents, Mike and Irene, at various stages of their younger lives, with their extended family members.

Most snapshots lacked identifying information that would have provided the who, where, and when. With some regret, we threw them away. Kathi kept saying, as we pitched photo after photo, these were our parents’ memories, not ours.

But I couldn’t help holding on to some of their memories, because they have seeped into mine. That’s because our mom, the great storyteller of the family, loved to relate tales about her relatives. I think of these handed-down memories as momories.

Uncle Gaston is one of them. These days, when we four siblings are together and reminiscing, just a mention of Uncle Gaston will trigger a lot of laughs. That’s because we remember our mom talking about this relative of hers who died before any of us were born. We were impatient with those stories when she told them because they had nothing to do with us. Sometimes we teased her that she made him up—we couldn’t imagine anyone with the name Gaston. So the momories I have of Uncle Gaston are limited to his World War I service in the navy that never took him further away from home than Lake Michigan.*

That day with my sister I was delighted to find a black and white picture of three people, their names written in full on the back: Uncle Gaston along with his wife Evelyn, and Evelyn’s sister, Irene. That Irene—later called Nana by us—was the paternal grandmother of our mom, which means Gaston was our mom’s grand uncle by marriage. There’s no location or date noted on the snapshot, though Evelyn’s peep-toed, ankle-strap shoes suggest the picture was taken in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

Irene senior, already widowed by the time she posed for that photo, stands next to Gaston. She wears a fashionably tilted hat and a slight smile. She looks jaunty. Another photo from that box shows Irene on a street on the Isle of Capri in 1953, the year she turned seventy, sitting on a donkey. She appears remarkably capable, though not totally at ease, as she holds the reins. The man standing to her left looks at her, impressed.

I have my own memories of Irene senior because I knew her for the first several years of my life. As a child, I wouldn’t have recognized her as the woman in those two photos. I knew her as the Nana who wore housedresses and, at Thanksgiving and Christmas, baked pumpkin pies (with lard crusts) in the kitchen of her Berwyn bungalow. If we great-grandchildren behaved while visiting, she let us go into the pantry and coax a cookie—iced oatmeal or an almond-studded Windmill—from its crackling plastic package. (Holiday pies were homemade; cookies were not.) But only if we behaved. Nana wasn’t indulgent.

I learned from census records that Irene was born in 1883 and grew up in Chicago, the eldest of five siblings (including Evelyn) whose father was a cabinet maker from Germany. She worked for a time as a clerk in a pickling factory before, at age nineteen, she married Edward, a salesman for a plumbing supply business.** During the 1910s, the company transferred Edward to Kansas

City, Missouri. He, Irene, and their two sons remained there through part of the 1920s but returned to Illinois before the end of the decade, settling in a new two-bedroom brick bungalow in Berwyn.

What follows is a momory, a story our mom, Irene junior, told often. Sometime after 1930, when the economic reversals of the Great Depression had sunk in, Edward and Irene’s son George, his wife Martha, and their two children, George, Jr. and Irene junior, came to live with them in their Berwyn home. George and Martha had recently bought their own brick bungalow in nearby Elmwood Park, but because of the Depression, there was only enough money across two households to save one home. So our mom ended up growing up in the Berwyn bungalow, surrounded by extended family members.***

(Irene senior is at the top right, Irene junior is on the floor with her dog Jerry, in the living room of the Berwyn bungalow, December 1950.)

Our mom would not like me referring to her as Irene junior. She always said she hated her name, but I don’t think that’s because she hated her grandmother. Resented, maybe, on some level because Irene junior also did not like having extended family members around. The Berwyn bungalow belonged to Irene senior, yet even after the Depression ended, George and Martha remained there with their two children. Irene junior never had her parents all to herself. She spent the rest of her life determined never to live with any of her children, and she never did.

But I think a lot about the relationship between the two Irenes. I’ll get into that next time in A 2912 Tale of Photographs, Memories, and Momories, Part II: Irene senior and Irene junior

Additional asides about the family:

* Gaston served in the Navy Auxiliary Reserve in 1918, then married Evelyn the following year. In civilian life he mostly worked in the milk industry, first as a driver, then as a salesman for Bowman Dairy. Evelyn stayed at home, which was a rented apartment in Chicago, and raised their daughter, Aline, who was likely named for Gaston’s younger sister, Aline, who died in 1914 at age twenty.

Through the decades, after the deaths of her aunt and uncle, our mom kept in touch with her cousin Aline, even when Aline settled with her husband way out in California. (Irene junior didn’t approve of people moving away from where they grew up. To her, no place was better than the Chicago suburbs.) As teenagers, Kathi and I accompanied our dad on a business trip to California. We stayed at Aline’s house, which had a swimming pool in the backyard and was located within an easy driving distance of Disney Land. We even took a day trip to Tijuana where I bought a very hip brown suede jacket with fringe. I still have the jacket.

** Edward had a younger sister named Albina who became a statistician, and our mom sometimes told stories about her, none of which I remember in detail. But we had two such great names in the extended family.

***Our mom never shared the details of that decision. Did Edward, as patriarch, pull rank? Did the size of the house factor in? (The Berwyn place had more square footage.) Was the mortgage payment on that house lower, making it more affordable? Edward and George, both salesmen, would have realized that their jobs were always in jeopardy. Did they both manage to hold on to full-time positions or did they find their hours and salaries cut? Did they have to move on to different sales jobs? Was there ever a discussion of Irene senior and/or Martha looking for work? How did Martha and her mother-in-law get along, especially with young children in the house to raise? I think of all these things now, but of course they never occurred to me to ask such questions when I was a child listening to our mom.

My 2023 Reading, Part Two: Nonfiction (Plus a Bonus)

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The best narrative nonfiction books I read in 2023 comprise an unusually short list. I think there was something about my reading mood last year that affected my reactions to books. “Best” and “favorite” are subjective, anyway, so I’m sticking to that as an explanation.

All of these books deal with the past, and all but one are biographies. The outlier of the group, though, could be described as a collection of mini-biographies. Here they are, roughly in the order of my admiration.

In Master Slave Husband Wife, Ilyon Woo traces the perilous journey from enslavement to freedom of Ellen and William Craft. The Crafts fled Georgia with Ellen disguised as an invalided white man and William posing as her “servant.” Their life in the “free” North was dangerous because of the Fugitive Slave Law, yet the couple became part of the great abolitionist movement in the years prior to the Civil War. It’s an unforgettable story of moral and physical courage.

Catherine McNeur introduces readers to Margaretta and Elizabeth Morris in the dual biography Mischievous Creatures. The historian makes a convincing case that the largely self-taught sisters, one an entomologist, the other a botanist, made significant contributions to scientific knowledge in the decades before the Civil War. Margaretta and Elizabeth are fascinating women, and McNeur expertly weaves in the science without slowing down the story of the women’s accomplishments and the barriers they faced because of their gender.

Leaning heavily on literary analysis and historical context, David Waldstreicher recreates the life of an eighteenth-century Black poet in The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley. Kidnapped and enslaved as a child, Wheatley learned how to read and write while living in Boston and began turning out poetry as a teenager. This is a finely detailed story that took me some time to read, but I thought it was wonderful.

I learned a lot about South Africa from Jonny Steinberg’s dual biography, Winnie and Nelson. Steinberg traces apartheid through the lens of the Mandela marriage, focusing on Nelson’s long imprisonment and Winnie’s increasing political influence. It’s a riveting and important book.

Emma Southon’s lively voice adds an extra layer of enjoyment to A Rome of One’s Own, which reveals the history of the Roman empire through the lives of twenty-one mostly-forgotten women. This serves as a nice reminder that there was more to Rome than gladiators and pontificating politicians.

There were also a couple of other books I liked, both biographies. I appreciated learning more about the Queen of Crime in Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley, and it was interesting to find out about the intrepid twentieth-century journalist Elsie Robinson through Julia Sheeres and Allison Gilbert’s Listen, World!

Now for the bonus: memoirs. Last year, I included them in with the other nonfiction I read, but this time I decided it was more appropriate to give them their own category. While it’s true they are nonfiction, memoirs are very different from the historical, fact-based nonfiction that I usually read.

There are three memoirs I read in 2023 that I keep thinking about.

I’m certainly not the first person to rave about poet Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, but I may be among the last to have never run across her poem “Good Bones.” Its last line was turned into the title of her lyrical story of the unraveling of her marriage and her enduring love for her children.

Love for her children is a strong undercurrent in Life B, author and book critic (known in online circles as The Book Maven) Bethanne Patrick’s clear-eyed account of her decades-long struggle with double depression. She hits and maintains a sweet spot of narrative voice that is neither too bleak nor too Pollyanna-ish. I rooted for her all the way through.

Marsha Jacobson rounds out this trio of devoted mothers. In The Wrong Calamity she describes how she survived an abusive marriage, established herself as a successful businesswoman (even earning a Harvard MBA) and as a role model to her daughters, then suffered a shattering disappointment with her second marriage. Like both Smith and Patrick, Jacobson shows restraint in parceling out the gritty, personal details of these relationships, giving readers just what they need but never tipping into a salacious tell-all.

That’s it for my 2023 reading recap. I’m delighted (and slightly relieved) to report that 2024 is off to a blazing start. I could hardly bear to put down Vanessa Chan’s The Storm We Made and Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren, plus I’m swiftly moving through Mott Street by Ava Chin.

Up next: some pieces that are more or less connected to my new book project.