Michelle Cox's Blog, page 43

“She Could Move Mountains”

Rozalia Malec was born on March 13, 1900 – one of twelve children – in what is now Radziechow, Poland. Not much is known of her parents, her childhood, or her early life with her husband, Stanley Malec and their four children: Margaret, Gigi, Danuta and Lester. Rozalia’s story, it seems, begins in 1941 when the Russians invaded the Malec’s village in what was then a part of Germany.

Like most of the people in the village, Rozalia and Stanley and their children were displaced and sent on a cattle train to Siberia. It is unclear why, but somehow on the journey, Stanley died, leaving Rozalia alone now with the children. Once in Siberia, she was forced to cut trees for which she was given a daily ticket for bread and water. She took her children with her into the forest to help her and to forage for any extra food they could find. The Malecs spent the rest of the war this way, and when it finally ended, they were again put on a train, this time bound for refugee camps in what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. From there they went to a camp in India under English control and remained there until after India was liberated from the British in 1947. From India, Rozalia took the family to London, where they stayed for a number of years.

At some point in this tragedy, Rozalia’s oldest daughter, Margaret, escaped one of their internments, making her way back to Poland to join the underground. She drove ammunition trucks for the army in Poland and then found her way to Italy and finally the United States after the war ended. She and her husband were able to get a sponsor in America through a distant relative of her husband’s. Finally, in 1952, Margaret convinced Rozalia and the rest of the family to come to Chicago so that they could all be together.

Rozalia finally agreed and made the journey with her three children, all of whom had spouses and children of their own by now. They landed in New York first, where they stayed for several months, though they hated every minute of it. They eventually made the journey to Chicago where they were finally reunited with Margaret, meeting her husband and children for the first time. From that point, they all worked and saved money until they could buy a house big enough for them all to live.

A pattern quickly developed in which the adults all went out to work each day while Rozalia stayed home and watched all of the grandchildren, teaching them Polish and stories from the past as well as how to respect the country and culture they now found themselves in. She was always dispensing little bits of wisdom, her family reports. Besides tending to the children, Rozalia also did the cooking, the cleaning, the sewing, the baking, the gardening and volunteered at church. At the holidays, their house was always packed with people and food, music and laughter. One of Rozalia’s daughters, Danuta, recounts that her mother was the most positive person she ever knew – so active and truly “full of life.” Rozalia was always ready for anything, Danuta says. “She was one of those people who could truly move mountains.” All of her children report that despite what she had been through, Rozalia remained a very positive, loving, warm, caring person. “She was wonderful,” they all agreed.

Rozalia was nearly comatose when she arrived at a nursing home in 1995, at age 96. All of the above information was given to the staff by her children, as Rozalia’s only intelligible whispered words were “pray for me” and “pray for us.”

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“A Rotten Trick!”

Clara Hansen was born in 1902 in Adrian, Michigan to Henry and Katherine Engelskirchen, the fifth of what would be nine children. Henry began his working life at age ten in a brickyard, later working his way up to being a superintendent in a piano factory in Mendota, Illinois. When that factory closed down, he moved the family to Steger, chasing another piano factory job and then yet another in Chicago.

Clara was nine when they moved to Chicago, and though they were poor, they managed to get by. Unlike her father, who had been forced to quit school at ten by his stepmother, Clara was excited at the prospect of going to high school. After only two weeks, however, her dreams were crushed when her mother died unexpectedly of typhoid. Oddly, the family had been walking in a funeral procession when they happened to pass a house with a well where they had once briefly lived. Katherine, overcome with thirst, went over to the well to get a drink despite Henry’s frantic warnings about drinking from a well that had sat for so long untouched. Katherine would not listen, however, and died soon after.   Clara, then, was forced to abandon her happy days at school to stay home and care for the family, which she did for two years before Henry could afford to hire someone to come in and help.

Finally released from caring for children, Clara got a job at Carson’s Wholesale, which she enjoyed much more. She met a friend there, Florence, who was always begging her to come with her on a Saturday or a Sunday night to the nearby Mable Theatre on Elston and Irving Park Road (later becoming the Revue Theatre in 1934), which, in Florence’s opinion, anyway, had the best vaudeville acts around. After much refusing, Clara finally agreed to go with her one night and found herself laughing as much as Florence. They spent the walk home talking about which had been their favorite acts and laughing all over again. Eventually, however, they noticed that two young men were following behind them. When the girls finally reached Clara’s home, one of the boys, Arthur Phillip Hansen, asked if he could have Clara’s telephone number. Clara lied and said they didn’t have a telephone, but Florence spoke up and said that they did to have a telephone! and promptly gave Clara’s number to the hopeful Arthur.

It turns out that Clara rather liked Arthur, and they dated for two years before Arthur worked up the courage to propose. Clara was hesitant to accept him. Although she liked Arthur well enough, her real love in life was dancing. Arthur, for his part, didn’t dance, but he swore to her that if she married him he would drive her and her girlfriends to the dance halls every week. Clara agreed, then, and was married at eighteen, which she later said, “was too young!” and that it was “a rotten trick!” as no sooner was she married but she got pregnant, and that was the natural end of her dancing days.

Arthur and Clara seemed happy enough, however, and had three sons and lived in the same apartment on Kasson Avenue for 29 years. Her father, Henry, died at age 71 the night Pearl Harbor was bombed. Clara does not remember of what. When they met, Arthur was working as a roofer, but after three close calls, he took up carpentry and was able to earn a decent living at it. He died at age 91, and Clara eventually went into a nursing home in 1993, believing that it was only temporary.

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“I Thought You’d Never Ask!”

John Varchulik was the son of Yugoslavian immigrants that had moved to Chicago after farming for a time in Ohio. John was born in 1906, and as a young boy got a job at a furniture store loading and unloading trucks. He diligently saved his money and eventually had enough to buy a small fruit and vegetable market in Cicero. Determined to be a success, he worked at the market constantly, practically living there and so came to know many of his customers very well.

One such customer that frequented the market was a young woman by the name of Emily Broz, who came often to shop for her mother and twelve siblings. John took a fancy to Emily, though she was shy to return his affections. She was grateful, however, when he would set aside a bag of “bad” vegetables that were supposedly bruised or damaged, giving it to her for free, though when she got home she always found that the bag contained perfectly good vegetables and even sometimes fruit! John finally got up the courage one day to ask Emily out, saying “Do you think you could ever go out with a guy like me?” Emily apparently laughed and said that of course she could. “I thought you’d never ask!” was her happy reply.

Eventually John and Emily began courting and eventually married in 1934 and moved in with Emily’s mother, who was blind and partially paralyzed, and Emily’s sister, Pearl, who was very weak and sickly, too. John continued working furiously to support them as well as the two daughters he and Emily eventually had. Sadly, Pearl died when she was just thirty-six. John had tried to take her to different doctors, but there was apparently nothing that could be done for her.

It wasn’t until the early ‘50’s, after Emily’s mother and sister had passed away, that John decided to sell the market and go into the restaurant business. He got a job at the very bottom of the industry at a drive-in burger stand and went to school at night to learn bartending. After that, he bought the Lisle Lounge is Lisle, Illinois with his sister, Mary, and her husband Ed. He and Ed tended bar and Mary and Emily ran the kitchen. It was a huge success and became quite the place to go, with bands playing every weekend for dancing. John dreamed of expanding it, but Ed didn’t want to, saying that “This is good enough. Let’s not get greedy.”

Eventually it led to more and more arguments, however, and the partners finally split, John taking various bartending jobs for the rest of his working life, splitting his time between his two hobbies, music and gardening. He loved dancing, and he and Emily made time to go out each week, sometimes even going into the city to go to the famous Aragon Ballroom.

Eventually John retired, and he and Emily, after working so hard for so many years, finally began the life of travel they had always dreamed of, even making it all the way to New Zealand and Hawaii before Emily was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in May of 1986. She died just one month later.

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Humboldt Park – Swampy Marsh to Victorian Elegance

Humboldt Park was a sparsely populated prairie settlement that was annexed into the city of Chicago in 1869. At about that time, visionary Chicago residents began demanding an ambitious park system to serve as the lungs of the city and to help the city to become a great metropolis. The state legislature eventually gave into their demands and created three separate park commissions for the city, the West Park Commission being one of them. This was the first plan for a comprehensive park and boulevard system in America, and the vision was that a unified ribbon of parks and boulevards would encircle the young city. The West Park Commission divided its land up into 3 massive parks: Douglas, Garfield and Humboldt.

Humboldt Park, a 207-acre area on Chicago’s Northwest side was originally called North Park but was later changed to honor a German naturalist and explorer, Baron Freidrich Heinrich Alexander Von Humboldt. It was designed by “the father of the skyscraper,” William Le Baron Jenney, who was hired by the West Park Commission to lay out its entire park system. Jenney had served in the Civil War and had studied engineering in Paris before coming to Chicago to work with Frederick Law Olmsted (New York’s Central Park designer) on the Chicago parks project. Jenney was very influenced by the park and boulevard system he had studied in Paris and sought to recreate it here.

The area set aside for the park began as a flat, desolate marsh, which Jenney dredged and turned into a lagoon. Trees, shrubs, plants and even the grassy lawns had to be added. The park officially opened in 1877 with 20,000 people coming to celebrate. The Chicago Tribune reported that it was the scene of an “outpouring of humanity never before witnessed in Chicago.”

Later, Jens Jensen, the famous Danish landscape designer took over the project, adding his own touches, beginning by turning Jenney’s lagoon into a more natural-looking, prairie-style river. He was also responsible for constructing the Boat House, still Chicago’s most elegant public building designed in a prairie style, complete with a coffee room and a resting room on either side. He also had a music court and band shell built for outdoor concerts and in 1906 tore down a Victorian conservatory and constructed a formal garden on the site.

Another Victorian framed building was taken down in 1928, and the magnificent field house was built on the site. The Stables, built in 1896 in the style of a German country house was originally used for horses and wagons and later contained park offices, including that of Jens Jensen, who later became the park superintendent.

Humboldt Park features several times in the novel, A Girl Like You. In one chapter, the “Viking monument” where Henrietta agrees to meet Inspector Howard is actually a statue of Leif Erikson, donated to Humboldt Park in 1901 by Norwegian citizens. On the day it was dedicated, 50,000 Scandinavians from all over Chicago came to see it’s unveiling.

 

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The Maid, the Asylum, and the Old Cubs Field

Agnes Faraldo began life as a maid in wealthy homes around Chicago after quitting school in the seventh grade. She was born on April 12, 1917 to Feodor and Vera Zientek and was the oldest of their four children.   Feodor had worked as an usher in a movie theater and had presumably met Vera there. It was years and years later that Agnes discovered that when her parents married, Vera was already seven months pregnant with Agnes! Theirs was not a happy marriage, however, as Feodor was an alcoholic, and the two of them separated when Agnes was sixteen. Vera soon took up with a man named Oscar Schaffer, whom she lived with for twelve years before getting married to him. Feodor, meanwhile, died in the TB ward of Cook County Hospital in 1942, a broken-down alcoholic.

Agnes hated her stepfather, Oscar, and wanted to get away, but her mother refused to let her move out until she turned eighteen. When she finally did, she stayed away from the family for almost a year before being persuaded by her sister, Ruth, to come home to help celebrate their brother’s graduation. Agnes agreed and at the party was introduced to Ruth’s boyfriend, Vince Faraldo, whom she was instantly attracted to. When Vince asked her out the very next day, Agnes agreed but she felt horribly guilty. The two of them really hit it off, but Agnes worried what kind of man would switch his affections so easily, especially between sisters. Vince managed to convince her, though, that he had only recently met Ruth and that she was more of a friend, really. When Agnes finally worked up the courage to tell Ruth, her sister didn’t seem to mind at all. “He’s not that great. You can have him!” Ruth supposedly told her.

With Ruth’s blessing, then, the young couple began dating and married in 1939. Agnes quit her job as a maid and became a housewife. When they met, Vince had a job delivering coal and ice, but after they got married, he began working for the B & O Railroad and finally ended up as a cement mason. Their first baby, Anthony, was born in 1940, and two years later, Rosamund, was born. When the World War II broke out shortly thereafter, Agnes and Vince made a conscious decision not to have any more children. Fortunately, Vince did not have to serve in the army because he had stomach ulcers.

Agnes and Vince lived for several years in an apartment on Hermitage and Taylor, but they eventually had to vacate it because the University of Illinois Hospital was buying up more land to expand. In 1917, the hospital had bought up the nearby, vacated Chicago Cubs ballpark, also known as West Side Park, which was located at Polk and Wolcott and where the Cubs won two World Series championships. It is interesting to note that at the time, an insane asylum was located just past the left field fence. During the games, the inmates used to scream crazy things out of the windows, which is supposedly where the phrase “that came out of left field” originated.

Agnes and Vince were thus forced to leave the area and moved north to Division Street, just across from Humboldt Park and were together for 45 happy years before Vince died of cancer in 1984.

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Schwinn – The World’s Best Motorcycle?

The Schwinn Bicycle Factory, located on Chicago’s northwest side, was one of the many bicycle factories across the city but the one which eventually became a Chicago icon. Schwinn was founded by a young German entrepreneur, Ignaz Schwinn, who came to the United States in 1890 to make his fortune in the booming bicycle industry. Within five years he partnered with meatpacker, Adolph Arnold, to form Arnold, Schwinn & Company and released the Roadster, which was a 19-pound, single-speed recreational bike. Very quickly, however, they became known for their high-speed racing bikes.

By 1907, with profits nearly non-existent, Arnold decided to leave the company, convinced that the bicycle boom was over. Now on his own with his son, Frank, Ignaz Schwinn also began to experiment with designs for motorcycles, and in 1911, though they had themselves come up with a superior blueprint for a new type of motorcycle, they purchased the bankrupt Excelsior Motorcycle Supply Company for $500,000, which included the factory on Courtland and Lawndale, all inventory and $200,000 worth of back orders. By 1913, Schwinn was the third largest motorcycle producer in the country, behind Harley-Davidson and Indian. In 1917, they increased their dominance when they bought the Henderson Motorcycle Company of Detroit, which produced one of the best bikes of the era. The owners, however, despite their quality product, couldn’t keep up with the supply shortages and the increased prices brought on by World War I and eventually sold to Schwinn. Thus was born the famous Excelsior-Henderson Motorcycle.

Schwinn soon became very wealthy and owned a mansion at the corner of W. Palmer and Humboldt Boulevard on Palmer Square, an elite residential address of some of the city’s more wealthy. Ironically, Palmer Square proper, a long, oval-shaped park lined with mansions, became the epicenter of the city’s bicycle culture with races held regularly on its long, linear path. Schwinn also owned an apartment building at the east end of the square to house the employees of his bicycle and motorcycle factories, which is where Henrietta and her family lived while her father was still an employee at Excelsior-Henderson in the novel, A Girl Like You.

With the stock market crash in 1929, however, motorcycle sales began to plummet, and in the summer of 1931, Schwinn called together his department heads at Excelsior and informed them that they would cease production immediately, saying, “Gentleman, today we stop.” Schwinn was convinced that the Depression would continue for years, so he dismantled operations despite a full order book, creating a shock to owners and dealers alike. Excelsior-Henderson ceased production at a time when the company was a leader in the industry, making what were regarded as the finest machines available.

From there, Schwinn focused all of his attention on bicycles and continued as a Chicago icon until the company relocated to Colorado in 1993.

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“Nothing Would Stay”

Marta Sirko’s parents were Ukranians that fled Eurpope in the 1930’s to avoid another war. The ended up in Brazil where they bought a small farm and proceeded to have nine children. Life was very hard on the farm as they attempted to eek out a meager existence. Marta attended elementary school, but according to her, “nothing would stay.” Though she was obviously never officially diagnosed with a learning disorder, she found school very difficult. Marta says that she would try to focus on the teacher, but everything being said “went right through me.” She eventually gave up and stayed on the farm to help her mother with the eight other children.

As a young woman, Marta decided that she wanted to go live on her own in town, which happened to be 75 miles from the farm. Her parents agreed and she tried it for about three months before she got too homesick and dejectedly returned to the family. Marta went back, then, to the daily routine of the farm until she was about 27 years old and decided to try again to leave. Her brother Josef had immigrated to the United States, and Marta proposed to go and live with him in Chicago. Her parents agreed, sending her sister, Zoya, with her, hoping it would be a better life for them. Marta was able to get a job at the Olson Rug Factory while living with Joe and his wife and Zoya. She was relatively happy with this arrangement, she says, and worked for Olson for over 15 years.

By now Marta was in her early forties, and one night at a party, an unfortunate thing happened. Marta was introduced to a friend of a friend, a man by the name of Nicolau, and Marta developed a terrible crush on him. Marta became almost like a young adolescent girl again, Zoya says, dreaming of him and “longing with all her heart” to be married to him. Nicolau, however, not really realizing the extent of Marta’s fantasy, was not interested in her and did not return her affections.

Devastated by this turn of events and always suffering from a “weak mind,” Marta had a nervous breakdown.

According to her sister, Zoya, Marta was always a very nervous, anxious person who worried constantly and could not navigate the normal ups and downs, especially the disappointments, of life. She longed to get married, and when that dream wasn’t realized, she couldn’t handle it and began to wonder “what is wrong with me?” that she couldn’t find anyone. She spiraled into a depression, frequently chastising herself and calling herself stupid – unable to learn at school, unable to learn to drive, unable to learn much English.

Zoya eventually took her to a hospital where she was treated and several other siblings came up from Brazil to try to help. After she was released, she continued to live with Josef and Zoya, mechanically working at her job at Olson, but she was never really the same. She perpetually mourned the fact that her only romance had been her interlude with Nicolau, which, everyone confusingly told her, had existed only in her mind.

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Tawdry Tales of Chicago’s Burlesque

The first burlesque dancer in Chicago could arguably be considered to be Fareeda Mahzar, later known as “Little Egypt,” who danced at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and was acknowledged as “the first of the sensational girlie dancers.” Similarly, at the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair, also held in Chicago, Sally Rand caused a stir with her ostrich feather fan dance and her infamous balloon bubble dance. She was arrested four times in a single day during the fair due to perceived indecent exposure.

American burlesque began as a form of variety show, melding together elements of Victorian burlesque, music hall and minstrel shows in which pretty women showed off their figures while singing and dancing, sometimes involving elaborate, revealing costumes. Exotic “cooch” dances, resembling belly dancing, were also brought in. Eventually, the ensemble ribald variety performances gave way to the striptease, which became the dominant feature of burlesque by the 1930’s, the period in which the main character, Henrietta Von Harmon, from the novel, A Girl Like You, finds herself inadvertently employed at the fictitious Marlowe Theater.

Two of the more famous, actual Chicago Burlesque theaters, both located on State Street, however, were the Rialto Theatre and the Follies Burlesque, which was originally known as the London Dime Museum in 1890, and which featured a vaudeville house on the main floor and an “oddities” museum on the upper floor. In 1908 it was renamed the Gem Theater and began running burlesque shows as early as 1916. At the time, a Mrs. Guy Blanchard, the leader of the Political Equity League complained that the dancing girls at the Gem were “drug fiends” and claimed that there were small rooms under the stage where the girls would go to get high.

In response to this attack, one of the dancers actually published a letter in the Feb. 1, 1916 edition of the Chicago Tribune saying that the “girls who dance at the Gem theater work there and do the dances they do because by doing so they can make a living.” By the early ‘50’s, the name of the theater was again changed to The Follies Theater, or the Follies Burlesque.

By the late ’30’s, however, a social crackdown on burlesque shows across the country began their gradual downfall, putting most of them out of business by the ‘40’s.

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Married in His Mind

Arthur Kowalski was born in 1911 – one of four children born to Polish immigrants.  Arthur and his father, a “rough and tough” realtor who drank too much, did not get along at all.  In fact, Arthur reflects, if it wasn’t for his mother, he would have run off altogether.

His father tried to bully him into going to college to become a lawyer so that he could help him with his real estate business, but Arthur refused, saying that “law is a profession for liars.” At heart, however, he felt too guilty taking money away from the family when times were so hard.  Instead he took jobs as a peddler, a caddy and then as a printer, but none of them seemed to suit him.

Finally, in desperation, his mother slipped him ten dollars and sent him to an employment agency downtown Chicago.  They in turn sent him to an office supply company on Madison for what was supposed to be a temporary position in shipping, but he was so productive and so fast that they kept him on permanently.  Eventually he was even promoted to bookkeeping.

At about this time, Arthur was introduced to Margaret Paszek at a dance hall.  He was about twenty-three, and she was twenty.  Arthur describes her as “a knock-out!”  They dated for five years because Arthur really wanted to be sure and because Margaret’s mother was very strict as well.  They married in 1939, but Arthur refused to have a reception because he didn’t want to dip into his savings with no guarantee of getting it back in gifts from Margaret’s “mooching relatives.”

After their marriage, Arthur continued to work hard, taking night classes to become an accountant, but just as he was about to become a CPA, World War II broke out, and he went into the service.  His childhood hobby had been to build radios, so he naturally ended up in radar.  While he was still stationed in the U.S., he came home to Margaret every singe weekend no matter what it took, and when he was eventually shipped overseas, he wrote her an eight- to ten-page letter every day.  He was eventually shipped to New Guinea, but was discharged in 1944 with malaria and jungle rot.

When he finally got home to Margaret and their six-month old daughter, Frances, or Franny, things were different.  He was very sick and weak for a long, long time and had little interest, he says, in “sex, drinking, or going out.”  All he wanted to do was stay home and be with Franny.  Margaret, on the other hand, was “raring to go” and resented having to stay home, so she instead began going out with her girlfriends once a week, though it became more and more as time went on.  Arthur says she started drinking excessively and had several affairs, all the while Arthur lavished all of his love and attention on Franny.

Finally, when Franny was nine, Margaret sued for divorce.  Arthur refused to grant it, saying that it was a sin.  Finally, however, after much arguing and the blessing of the Church, Arthur divorced her but insisted on sole custody of Franny.

Now that he was rid of Margaret, Walter devoted his life to Franny.  He did all the housecleaning, cooking, laundry and ironing.  He curled her hair in the mornings, took her to school, picked her up, attended all school functions, and had dinner on the table every night at 5:30.  He was determined to give her a “normal” life, despite her lack of a mother figure.

He never married again, insisting that he was still “married” in his mind.

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Palmer Square – Home of Chicago’s Elite and Bicycle Mecca

Palmer Square, located in Chicago’s northwest neighborhood of Logan Square, was named for the Chicago luminary, Potter Palmer, an extremely successful business magnate and real estate investor of the time, famous, among other things, for his Palmer House Hotel, which he built as a wedding gift for his new wife, Bertha Honore.  The Hotel opened on September 26, 1871 but unfortunately burned to the ground 13 days later in the great Chicago fire.  Palmer began rebuilding immediately and was likewise concerned with the development and beautification of the city as a whole, reclaiming, for example, the marshy swampland north of the commercial district and developing it into Lake Shore Drive.

Besides the Palmer House Hotel and his downtown private mansion (aptly named The Castle), Palmer also owned another mansion in Logan Square on Palmer Square proper, the site of many elegant residences of Chicago’s reigning elite of the day.  The park itself was a seven-acre rectangular swath of green space plotted out in the 1870’s by William Le Baron Jenney, the “father of the skyscraper,” as part of a new system of boulevards that would connect three magnificent parks that had been commissioned to be built on the west side: Humboldt, Garfield and Douglas Parks and which were refined by landscape architect, Jens Jensen.  These wide boulevards lent themselves not only to the display of regal homes but to strolling, carriage rides and cycling and were taken advantage of not just by the Square’s wealthy residents but by the poor immigrants who lived on the surrounding streets and worked in the many factories springing up across the city.

In fact, a bicycle craze was sweeping through Chicago at the time, spurred on by the recent invention of the “safety” bike, which closely resembled a modern-day bike with two same-sized wheels, as opposed to the “high wheelers” popular at the turn of the century, which consisted of one giant wheel in front and one small wheel behind.  Palmer Square became a popular spot for “wheelmen” – local, and even national, bicycle clubs.  The paved oval-shaped road around Palmer Square made it perfect for bicyclists, though pedestrians often complained about these “scorchers” taking over the path.  Because it was connected by boulevard to the larger Humboldt Park, Palmer Square was often the scene of various bicycle races and parades, and in one Chicago Tribune article, dated May 25, 1896, the writer calls the Associated Cycling Clubs Annual Run – where clubs chose specific colors and patterns as riding emblems – a “kaleidoscope of color,” so beautiful and memorable was the display.

Palmer Square’s predilection for bicycles was ironic considering that one of the mansions lining the square was that of Ignaz Schwinn, the founder of the Schwinn Bicycle Company located nearby on Kostner Avenue.

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