“I’m Losing My Mind…”
Oldrich “Al” Pakosta was born on January 3, 1913 to Stanley Pakosta and Marie Pajer, both Czechoslovakian immigrants who came to Chicago in 1908. Unfortunately, however, Marie died at age 31 when Al was just three years old. Stanley, a cabinet maker, remarried, and actually had a total of five wives, out-living them all! In fact, Al’s father died coming home from a girlfriend’s house on Christmas Eve, 1967, aged eighty-seven!
Al and his two older siblings grew up in Chicago and completed high school. Al worked as a cabinetmaker with his father and also as a machinist. His free time was usually spent with a cousin, John, who one fateful day let Al in on a secret as to where they could find a lot of good food. Not knowing what to expect, but always hungry, Al agreed to go with John in pursuit of this mysterious food source. He was shocked, then, when John drove him to – of all things – a farm in Riverdale, Illinois, which is now a south suburb of Chicago. John had a job delivering produce from the farm and gotten to know the people, who often let him keep bruised items, and had decided to let Al in on the spoils. For Al, however, the spoils were not to be the food. As he slowly climbed out of John’s truck, he noticed a young woman standing on the second step of the farmhouse. He looked up at her and just knew, then and there, that she was going to be his girl. Her name was Gertrude Popper, and she and Al were married on November 21, 1936.
Al and “Gert” got a little place in Chicago and over the course of their lives moved about between Cicero, Lisle, Berwyn, and finally Algonquin. They had one child, Charles, who was born on October 30, 1937.
Al had a variety of jobs over the years besides being a cabinetmaker and a machinist. He also worked for Diamond J trucks as an inspector and then for Harvester. He also owned two taverns – first the Tree Gables in Lisle and then the Court Inn in Cicero.
His favorite “occupation,” though, was playing saxophone, clarinet and piano in a local band called, Guy Pakee’s Orchestra. They even made a few records, of which Al is extremely proud. Al feels they had a great life together, he and Gert, and when they retired (Gert had sometimes worked in the Time Life building downtown), they decided to travel. They went to Europe, Alaska and even to Hawaii, and traveling became a great love of Al’s.
Their traveling days ended, however when Gert died unexpectedly of emphysema, which was also when Al’s “forgetfulness” began. Months after Gert’s death, he was often found by the neighbors, wandering, apparently lost, in the neighborhood. Charles, his son, who was living in Ohio and flying in every weekend to check on Al, finally took him to a doctor, who diagnosed him with early Alzheimer’s. Not knowing what else to do, Charles arranged for his father to go into a nursing home. Charles reports that Al agreed to this move, but now at the nursing home, Al is frustrated and upset and wants to go home.
As a way to deal with his anxiety, he at times makes jokes with the staff, but at other times, he can be found wandering the halls, desperately asking the staff if they have seen Gert. When they gently tell him that she is deceased, he bursts into tears as if hearing the sad news for the first time all over again.
The most heartbreaking part of Al’s condition is that he has moments of lucidity in which he seems to realize his condition, reporting to staff that “I can’t think straight” or that he fears he is “losing my mind,” though he does not know the cause. In these moments, he blames his forgetful state on a pinched nerve in his neck, which he says despondently, the doctors can do nothing about.
Now when Al anxiously asks the staff where Gert is, they simply tell him that she has gone out to the store, which seems to pacify him for a little while. He passes the time, waiting for her, in his room, listening to his Guy Pakee records on a little phonograph he has brought with him or looking at the scrapbooks of history and geography he has made over the years from newspaper clippings, as if in surrounding himself with the familiar, he can hang to… if even for a few moments…whatever part of his shattered mind still remains.
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