Mom with baby Paul, summer 1946.
My parents’ three-room flat was now tighter than ever, with Grandma K often sleeping overnight and the baby’s crib squeezed in. Mom didn’t write much the following few years, but photos show me that Grandma K was a constant presence in their lives—even on vacations. In one 1947 picture, she’s lying on a cot, reading the newspaper, outside two tents, camping with the young family in Wisconsin. Although Grandma K was capable of fending for herself, even working as a seam-stress at a downtown women’s clothing store, my parents had virtually no family time without her.
An exception was a June 1948 driving trip to America’s West, which Mom, Dad, and two-year-old Paul took with Dad’s parents and brother, Will. Grandma K rented her own place, but Mom invited her to stay in her and Dad’s more pleasant apartment while they were away. Upon their return, the neighbors reported that Grandma K had repeatedly lam-basted my parents for trying to starve her to death—despite the fact they had given her money to buy food at the A&P grocery store across the street.
But soon a happy surprise offset their anxiety. While traveling, Mom had become pregnant with a second child, me. Their one-bedroom apartment was too small for the growing family and Grandma K. It was time for a major change. In December of 1948, Mom and Dad closed on their first home—a two-flat at 4222 West Washington Boulevard in Dad’s lifelong neighborhood of West Garfield Park, a block away from where Will and Grandma and Grandpa Gartz lived.
Just in time to undermine my parents’ excitement over their new home and the anticipation of a second baby, Grandma K again careened into insanity, hurling outlandish accusations at Mom and Dad or staying in bed all day, arising only for meals. After reading Mom’s case studies, I detect in the timing of my grandmother’s downward spirals a pattern, which my mother apparently never grasped—or at least, certainly never acknowledged.
Each of Grandma K’s mental breakdowns coincided with my parents’ most joyous occasions. Grandma K was belligerent and delusional just before their wedding, before Paul’s birth, and now, again, the month before I was born. It’s impossible to know whether Grandma K had some control over her mentally ill brain, although in many diary entries I see how deftly she played the guilt card against both my parents when it suited her.
The timing of my grandmother’s serious meltdowns shows me that whenever Mom’s attention might be distracted from her mother, Grandma K turned sullen and confrontational, delusional and paranoid, forcing Mom to divert her focus away from her own family happiness and cater to her mother. Did Grandma give in to her psychosis at these times, drawing Mom tightly into an orbit with Grandma at the center?
Dad hated argument, so I’m sure he hid his frustration at the volatile disruption his mother-in-law injected into their lives. His childhood had taught him not to fight openly with his powerful mother, knowing he could never win. In Mom, he had found and married another strong-willed woman, and he would have had little luck convincing her Grandma K’s psychotic presence was undermining their marriage and family life.
Mom called an ambulance on February 20, 1949, to transport her mother to Cook County Psychopathic Hospital, where two doctors evaluated Grandma K. They testified in Cook County Court on February 28, three weeks before I was born.
We find that the said Louise Koroschetz is mentally ill and is a fit person to be sent to a state hospital for the mentally ill . . . that her disease is . . . psychosis. . . . We would respectfully recommend that she be sent to some public or private hospital or asylum for the mentally ill.
Grandma’s symptoms certainly fit the diagnosis of psychosis: depression, anxiety, suspiciousness, delusions, hallucinations, ongoing unusual thoughts and beliefs. Medication would be the first line of treatment today, but effective psychotropic drugs were nonexistent at the time. Mom was caught in a quandary, both psychological and fixed in the real world.
Mom had always feared her mother’s wrath, yet she also had absorbed Grandma K’s devotion to her as the only child. This potent combination of fear and love bound Mom to Grandma K even more tightly than the bonds of her ardor or concern for Dad. Swept up in the desperation her mother’s illness wrought, and within weeks of giving birth, I’m sure Mom had little capacity or energy for self-examination.
In the outside world, perhaps she had seen the stark, gruesome photos of neglected patients in psychiatric hospitals featured in a 1946 Life magazine photo essay.6 She often talked about the movie The Snake Pit (nominated for Best Picture at the 1949 Academy Awards), which depicted staff at mental institutions as cruel and incompetent.
Maybe those portrayals, combined with the fear and love she felt toward Grandma K, prompted her to ignore the doctors’ advice. Just two weeks after my birth on March 23, 1949, Mom had her mother discharged so she could move with us into our new home on Chicago’s West Side.
Our two-flat at 4222 West Washington Boulevard.
The two-flat at 4222 West Washington Boulevard was a fixer-upper for sure, but the bones were beautiful—leaded-glass windows facing the front, classic chunks of greystone lending weight and grandeur, a relief of vines and a carved birdbath decorating the concrete pinnacle. My parents envisioned a bright flower garden and space for the kids to romp in the compact backyard.
A single family occupied the first floor. On the second floor, a seventy-year-old woman held the lease and rented out two of the four bedrooms. Subletting was against building code, but for many it was an easy way to make ends meet. If Chicago building department inspectors snooped around, a show of cash usually made them go away.
My parents decided the second-floor apartment was best for us, but they didn’t ask any of the existing three tenants to leave. Our family just moved right in with them. “How could you share your living space with a bunch of strangers?” I asked my mom years later, incredulous at this setup.
“It never occurred to me that it was odd,” Mom said. “Seemed like the most natural thing in the world.” The arrangement bemused me: my parents, newborn me, three-year-old Paul, and off-balance Grandma K would share the intimacies of their already-complicated family life with three people they had never met before. Mom’s childhood diaries held the answer for me: renting out half their apartment in the 1930s was how Mom’s parents had survived the Depression.
The flats in the building were known as shotgun apartments because of their long and narrow design. If you thought to do such a thing, you could pull the trigger of a gun in the kitchen at the back end, and the bullet would fly straight through the dining room, hallway, living room, and out the front window.
Each of the three live-in tenants on the second floor occupied one of three bedrooms: two on either side of the long hallway connecting the dining and living rooms, and one that overlooked the front porch. My parents took the back bedroom, just off the kitchen and across from the only bathroom, which would be used by six adults and Paul. Snugly tucked into a corner of my parents’ room, my crib stretched along one wall to the doorway.
Grandma K and Paul, then almost three, slept in the “dining room,” Paul on a cot and Grandma K on a low bed that nestled perfectly into the twelve-by-six-foot alcove on the room’s west side. Dad rigged up a clothesline spanning her space so she could pull across a sheet, providing her with a modicum of privacy. A built-in, oak-trimmed china cabinet held her clothes and sundries.
Overflowing with ideas for their new home, Dad pictured spending weekends and evenings together with Mom in domestic unity—painting, stripping woodwork, building shelves—to create the lovely home they both envisioned. But it didn’t work out that way.
Instead, Dad lost his job.
Mom, baby Linda, Paul, Dad: April 1949.
It’s unclear why Hotpoint Refrigeration Company let Dad go that summer of 1949, but it threw my parents into a tailspin. Painful memories of her family’s possessions strewn across the sidewalk outside the Koroschetz home came flooding back to Mom. Would her family again be put out on the street? They would lose their down payment, as well as the $1500 they had already spent on a new furnace. They had set aside Mom’s entire secretarial salary for four years; all their savings were tied up in this house. Dad searched the entire summer in vain for a decent-paying job, each day tightening the knot of fear strangling their hearts.
Relief came in August 1949, when Dad was offered a position with the National Board of Fire Underwriters, the NBFU. The starting salary was good, around $3600 a year, but there was one huge drawback: travel—and lots of it.
The National Board’s Chicago office sent engineers throughout its territory, comprising Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri, Minnesota, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Kansas, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Their job was to document a city’s preparedness for fighting fires and natural disasters. Winter was set aside for the lengthiest trips, to faraway, warm-weather states where, in January, fire hydrants could spout water (to test that the pressure was adequate to fight multiple fires at once), and the men could trudge across miles of city streets on outdoor inspections without freezing. Dad would be gone for up to seven weeks at a time during Chicago’s harshest months.
Of course, he and Mom would have discussed the pros and cons of working for the NBFU, but really, they had no choice. He needed a job—pronto. Surely their great love, optimism, and steady confidence in the future could weather anything.
Dad didn’t know it, but Mom had formed an opinion about such a job eight years prior, when she dated a peripatetic salesman. She made what looms to me as an ironic and prescient entry into her diary. “I have always vowed never to wed a traveling man,” she had written. “Life would be just too lonesome.” Now she found herself facing just what she had dreaded.
Mom wrote Dad a letter dated October 5, 1949, when he was on an early NBFU trip to Ashtabula, Ohio. She reminded him of their dire finances: they were down to their last dollar, $159 in debt to his parents as well as to their children’s accounts, and had to meet monthly mortgage payments. She went on:
I do hope you are taking advantage of your spare time and studying all you can about your job because this is such a wonderful opportunity. Please do all you can to excel at this job. Don’t take it for granted.
My parents were on the cusp of a new life. The excitement of owning their first home, a bulwark against financial insecurity, was now offset by anxiety of the unknown: their impending long separations.
But at the same time, another momentous and historic event was occurring on a national scale, one that wasn’t even a flicker in their imaginations. As Dad began his travels in 1949, a mass migration of African Americans, escaping from the oppression and systematic cruelties of the Jim Crow South, was well underway to northern cities.