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.