Josef and Lisi Gartz, Dad’s parents, wed in Chicago, October 13, 1911.
West Garfield Park lies five miles due west of downtown Chicago. In 1912, Dad’s immigrant father, Josef, had landed his first decent-paying job in this community, at the lunch counter of Joe Nelson’s Saloon, serving up free sandwiches with every five-cent schooner of beer. Dad spoke with naked admiration for his parents and their bold decision to strike out from their tiny towns in Transylvania for a country more than five thousand miles distant. Whenever my brothers or I asked Grandpa Gartz why he’d come to America, he answered with the same cryptic remark: “Nothing from nothing is nothing.”
Grandpa had seen his widowed mother barely eke out a living, standing in a snow-fed river, beating clothes clean on rocks. He had to leave school after the fourth grade and was eventually apprenticed to become a master carpenter. By age fifteen, he’d seen enough of struggle and poverty. He started saving money for his exodus to the “promised land.” Six years later, on Christmas Eve 1910, he boarded a train heading to the Port of Bremen, where he’d catch a ship to America. But he’d been too impatient to wait for the required visa.
At a border stop thirty-five miles outside Vienna, a guard shook Grandpa awake and asked for his papers. A daring scheme entered my grandfather’s brain. “One moment, please,” he said. “I’ll fetch them from my luggage.” Instead, he exited the train and climbed the outside ladder to the top of the car, where he lay flat, buffeted for two hours by bitter December winds before the train chugged into Vienna. “I thought I would fly away like a piece of paper,” he later wrote to his sweetheart, Lisi Ebner, my future grandmother.
After more close calls with border guards, he arrived in the Port of Bremen, where, on December 31, 1910, he climbed aboard the steamship Friedrich der Grosse. I imagine his churning gut and thumping heart, his high elation and jangly hopes, as he made his way to the ship’s deck. At age twenty-one, he was embarking on the boldest adventure of his life. From the deck, he gazed down at throngs crowding the dock far below, waving handkerchiefs, bidding farewell to those departing. “They know this is a journey of life and death,” he wrote in his diary. “They may never see us again.”
On January 11, 1911, his ship docked at New York’s Ellis Island. From there he traveled first to Cleveland, Ohio, eventually making his way to Chicago, where he channeled his formidable determination to persuade Lisi Ebner to join him. They had fallen in love before he’d left. She was a like-minded striver with intelligent, dark eyes and a powerful aspect, her black hair parted down the middle and drawn straight back. In photos from this era, she stands erect and proud, her confident gaze looking to the distance, like a military commander, fully in charge. He had written to her throughout his journey, but he pulled out all the stops in a May 1911 letter:
Dearest Love, Precious Sweetheart, Darling Lisi, If you love me, I hope that you also will come here. . . . I would greet you with greatest joy and thankfulness, and take you in my arms. . . . If you don’t want to come, then I also know that you don’t love me. Because if you loved me, you wouldn’t do anything other than come here.
How could she resist? Lisi left behind her beloved employer of five years and a large, devoted family, arrived in Chicago on October 11, 1911, and married my grandfather two days later. They eventually had three sons: Will, born in 1913; my dad, Fred, in 1914; and Frank, in 1924.
At the time of Dad’s birth, in 1914, West Garfield Park was a neighborhood of wooden sidewalks, dirt streets, and butterflies fluttering above open prairies. Just down the street from Joe Nelson’s Saloon, near Crawford (now Pulaski) and Madison, Dad admired the Herculean biceps of the local blacksmith as he wielded red-hot horseshoes, beating them with rhythmic clangs. During the 1920s and ’30s, hotels, ballrooms, theaters, and the impressive Midwest Athletic Club rose up, increasing the neighborhood’s stature and prestige.2 An L train at Lake Street and Crawford whisked workers to downtown offices. My grandparents’ work added to the community’s increasing appeal. Shortly after Dad was born, Grandpa began his lifelong career in the janitorial business, at one of the many buildings he and Grandma would care for—pristine, thanks to their flawless upkeep.
Like most new immigrants, Dad’s parents put in long hours and saved money, but even in that world, their frugality was obsessive, their work ethic preternatural. Grandpa liked to brag, “When I was young, nobody could work me tired!” Often putting in sixteen- to twenty-hour days, he and Grandma Gartz spent virtually nothing. Their sons wore hand-me-downs from tenants or clothes Grandma made. With his carpentry skills, Grandpa could repair anything, including cast-off furniture he found for their home. They grew vegetables in the summer, canned in the fall, and raised pigeons and rabbits on the back porch for meat. They figured out how to invest in the stock market, then lost $20,000 of savings in the 1929 crash.3 During the Depression, they started over, saving three-quarters of Grandpa’s janitorial salary, eventually buying West Side properties and becoming landlords.
My grandparents’ make-do, disciplined lifestyle left an indelible impression on Dad, shaping the future he would one day envision with my mother.