Gartz Family: Lisi, Josef, Frank “Ebner,” Will, and Fred (Dad), 1926.
Dad’s family fared far better than Mom’s during the Depression, despite the loss of all their savings in the 1929 crash. Dispirited, but possessed with entrenched optimism, resilience, and hope, Dad’s parents committed to starting over with more determination than ever. The janitor for up to sixty- five apartment units in West Garfield Park, Grandpa Gartz worked around the clock. Grandma helped manage the tenants, kept track of their finances, and did all the “women’s” work. With a free apartment thrown in, my grandparents saved an astounding three-quarters of Grandpa’s $200-per-month salary.
West Garfield Park was just coming into its own when Dad was born in 1914, a year after his older brother, Will. Forced to share attention at the tender age of twelve months, Will preserved his status through obsessive obedience. Dad, sensitive and whimsical, quickly learned he could never be as rule-bound as his older brother, so he carved out his own niche in the family by doing whatever came into his head. It was an approach that didn’t sit well with a young immigrant mother determined to raise “good boys.” Grandma Gartz, reared with nineteenth-century, small-town, Germanic values, punished both her boys physically for “bad behavior.” More prone to boyish shenanigans, Dad endured the pain and humiliation more often. When they misbehaved, Grandma G whacked their bare bottoms with a heavy, wet clothesline or made them kneel on hard peas. Will got into line pretty quickly, but Dad resisted however he could.
Early in my childhood, Dad shared with me the rancor he felt toward his mother: how she took the side of the tenant children over his; how she slapped his face—back and forth, back and forth—when he tried to explain his side of an altercation; how, when he was five years old, she threatened to kill him with a two-by-four—after she found out he and a neighbor girl had played the age-old game “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” Teeth clacking in fear, he admitted his moral turpitude and took his whipping.
The stories of his mother’s harsh punishments tormented my young heart. I sobbed myself to sleep, thinking of the injustices he suffered, wishing I could be his mother. I’d be fair—and treat him with kindness! But Dad figured out the means to get around his mom’s demand for control.
When she made him wear a dress to keep him grounded, he defiantly wore it outside to play baseball with the guys, figuring fun was worth a few jeers. I was captivated by his gleeful recollection at outwitting his mother. He would forever figure out how to maneuver around whoever tried to deny him happiness. He’d make his own fun.
Dad mightily resisted his mother’s attempts to control him, but he could never, not in his lifetime, escape her scorn. He couldn’t free himself from her disdain at his ideas and interests, the way she would grab a cherished possession from his hands. A magic “glue” that made smoke rise from pinched fingers? “Foolishness!” she declared, and threw it into the blazing furnace. He protected his treasures by climbing to the top of the church belfry and hiding them in a dark corner.
She succeeded only in driving his behavior underground, in fostering a fear of rejection and the thrill of “getting away” with something.
In my parents’ attic, when I dug through the box labeled “Fred and Lil’s Journals,” I came upon two of Dad’s diaries from his youth. One started in 1933, when Dad was eighteen; the second continued through most of 1935. He made almost daily entries.
Standing in the dim light, I fingered the embossed green cover of the first, gingerly turned yellowing but still-sturdy pages, and touched the words. Dad’s voice and personality emerged—like a ghost rising from its crypt, as if his spirit hovered beside me, whispering secrets no one else had ever heard.
His youthful life unspooled off the pages like an old film, whisking me back to his everyday world, where I saw familiar traits manifested in his younger self: a poetic soul, a love of science and nature, a fascination with guns, a simultaneous pursuit of fun and devotion to work that tapped his boundless energy—and always, an abiding secrecy.
Fearful that his parents might find his diaries, Dad devised a simple code.5 With a little analysis, I deciphered it, though it would have been incomprehensible to his time-pressed, foreign-born parents. Entries like kissing girls, making off with some high-school chemistry equipment, or quarrels with Grandma and Grandpa Gartz were encoded.
Despite his mother’s harsh treatment, the family was close. My grandparents set aside Sundays to spend time together with their boys, whether by enjoying the simple pleasure of chatting on a bumpy streetcar ride, lounging at the beach, or savoring a picnic in nearby Garfield Park. Dad admired his parents’ grit, ambition, unrelenting work ethic, and determination to send their sons to college. Dad and Will pitched in with work, helping the family survive the Depression.
After school and all day on Saturdays, Dad threw himself into chores until suppertime, squeezing in homework afterward. At various times, he cleaned the house, washed down the pantry, or scrubbed floors. He showed vacant apartments to potential renters, dusted hallways, cooked dinner, painted, sorted and repaired screens. He ran errands; washed dishes, laundry, and windows; chopped wood; and paid his father’s janitor union dues.
In the winter, he rolled wheelbarrows of coal, shoveled it into voracious furnaces, removed the unburned “clinkers,” and disposed of ashes. He and Will helped his dad shovel snow from the front and back porches of multiunit apartment buildings and their surrounding sidewalks, sometimes until two in the morning, then started up again four hours later. On Saturdays, Dad worked all day on chores, from nine to five.
But no matter how exhausting his schedule of school and household duties was, Dad never missed a chance for fun. The center of his social life was Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church, where his best friends in the active youth group rode horseback in the summer, jostled and found romance on hayrides in the fall and sleigh rides in the winter. He practiced weekly with the choir, sang at Sunday morning services, and performed in operettas held across the street in Tilton Elementary School’s auditorium. Movies, sledding, Ping-Pong, basketball, fencing, swimming, biking, baseball, reading, parties—he did it all.
He had a romantic love interest at Bethel, but he hadn’t met anyone he wanted to marry—until he fell in love with Mom.
After the Lake Como trip with her parents, Mom wrote little about her mother. She was juggling her demanding job as executive secretary to the president of the Bayer Company and pulling together every detail of her wedding. She commissioned a creamy satin wedding dress for herself and three bridesmaid outfits made from fuchsia and plum velveteen, the skirts overlaid with net. Typical of Mom’s life philosophy, they combined beauty and practicality. The festive net was removable so that the skirt could also be suitable for daytime wear.
She decided on a bride’s bouquet of fat white mums, chose the reception hall, ordered dinner for thirty and a jukebox for music, and typed up a ten-page, minute-by-minute script to direct every participant in the ceremony. But Mom had no mother with whom to share her joy. The morose and erratic behavior she had recorded during the Lake Como trip continued into the fall. Whenever Mom tried to share her excitement about the wedding plans, Grandma K waved her away. “Why do I want to hear about that?”
Dad and Mom wed, November 8, 1942.
Grandma hadn’t expressed any dislike for my dad, but was it mere coincidence that her irascible and combative personality transformed into insanity just as Mom was about to be married? Or did the loss of her treasured child to marriage trigger such a transformation in her fragile mind?
On November 8, 1942, Grandpa K walked his daughter, glowing in her shimmery bridal gown, down the aisle of Bethel Church and gave her hand to my dad. Standing at the altar, bathed in the golden November light streaming through Bethel’s soaring stained-glass windows, they made their vows, then exited down the church steps, ducking under a hail of flying rice. In the photos, they radiate hope and happiness, posing arm in arm on the church steps. Even Grandma K is smiling, perhaps caught up in the spirit of the many well-wishers.
After what both agreed was a perfect reception at the Central Plaza Hotel at Central and Lake Streets, my parents drove to the small basement apartment they had rented two blocks east of the church for their first night together. Lifting Mom into his arms, Dad looked down into her smiling, eager face and carried her across the threshold to begin what they were certain would be an ideal life together.