1922-1950

1922

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned twenty-two while living in Chicago.

FEBRUARY 8 – The first radio was brought into the White House. _{http://www.fsmitha.com/time/1922.htm}

JUNE 7 – Lambeth Shelton Allen (45) married Alice Julia Smith (22) at the Joyce Methodist Episcopal Church in Chicago, Illinois.

Lambeth Shelton Allen (45)                                                    Alice Julia Smith (22)

The witnesses at their wedding were her brother, Ed, and his fiancée, Evelyn Gifford.

Grandpa Smith refused to come to the wedding. He and Grandma Smith were both only four years older than Lam, and Grandpa felt the marriage was wrong for his daughter, especially that the age difference might mean there would be no children. The wedding party was to return to the Smith apartment for lunch before Alice and Lam left on their honeymoon, but when they got there Grandpa had left; he would not participate in the wedding celebration. Uncle Ed drove them to the station.

They took the train to Denver where Dad had friends who showed them the local sights, then to Colorado Springs and up to the top of Pike’s Peak by open touring car, then to the western slope to visit Dad’s sister, Roberta Briggs, in Cedaredge, Colorado. Next on to Salt Lake City, then back through Wyoming to Yellowstone Park and to attend the Cody Roundup on July 4th. A couple of days at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, ended the tour, and then back to Chicago by train. They were gone for a little over a month. I am including only a few of the pictures they took on their honeymoon. Mother kept all the pictures in a leather-bound album on a table in our living room all the years I was growing up, over which I pored frequently, dreaming that someday I would also take a trip like that. She had beautiful handwriting and identified the pictures with gold ink. The leather cover has deteriorated over the years, and I have recently had to remove it since it was falling apart. I have had to pick and choose what family pictures I would include in this album and Joy [Nancy’s daughter] has said when I have finished this project she will help me remount those I haven’t used so that they can be identified and kept for the future.

The road up Pike’s Peak in an open touring car.          The Honeymooners at the top of Pike’s Peak in Colorado.

Roberta Richardson Allen Briggs (58)

The Honeymooners visited Lam’s oldest sister, Roberta Richardson Allen Briggs at her sheep farm in Cedaredge, Colorado. She and her husband raised Hampshire sheep and one year sold the top yearling ram for $50 when the others were averaging $28, per a clipping I have in a photo album sent to me by Kim Hart-Cooper, the granddaughter of Roberta’s 3^rd daughter who I have connected with through Ancestry.com.  Frank, like Lam and Roberta’s father, was also a Methodist minister. They had four daughters and two sons. Their second oldest daughter Ethel Briggs Cook, fourteen years younger than her Uncle Lam, was the one who transcribed the letters of our Great Great Grandma Kitty Spence Pitts which are presented in the section “A Convoluted Saga from the Pitts Side.”

The Honeymooners in the Rockies

At the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, Utah                          At Yellowstone Park in Wyoming

In 2002, when Lam and Alice’s oldest daughter Nancy was 79 years old, she wrote the following:

In reviewing Mother’s and my lifetimes two things are very evident: first, there is very little to compare the way people lived in 1900 with that of the year 2000, and the two major wars within the century each brought changes which are irreversible, many for the better, but unfortunately many for the worse.

Mother was 18 years old when World War I came to an end in 1918. And just around the corner were the “Roaring Twenties”! Gone were the long skirts and high button shoes, the pompadour hair styles, big picture hats, and chaperoned courting. In were bobbed hair, skirts up to the knees, the Charleston dance, speakeasies and bathtub gin! Girls smoked, drank and no longer tolerated being chaperoned! Can you imagine how my grandparents must have reacted to what their beautiful, only daughter had to adapt to in this turnaround society? However, Mother married at the age of 22 to a man 46 years old, a whole generation her senior, and he was the product of a conservative southern family who naturally expected her to live by the regulated standards by which she had been raised.

Dad had not looked for a place for them to live before they were married, so when they got back to Chicago they stayed at the LaSalle Hotel. Mother said they had called her parents several times while they were away and when they called them from the hotel, Grandpa relented and said “Come Home”.

They then rented a duplex [349 Ashland] in River Forest, Illinois … A duplex is usually thought of as two one-story houses with a common wall and two side-by-side entrances. This, Mother explained, was two apartments, one lower and one upper. They lived in the lower one. It may have been built that way or have been a house converted into two apartments …

After Grandfather Smith welcomed his daughter, Alice, and her husband, Lam, back from their honeymoon, there was a reconciliation and acceptance of the marriage, but Mother told me that when he learned [sometime after November of 1922] that a child was on the way, all was forgiven; Grandpa and Daddy became the best of friends.

Both Lam and his father-in-law Edward Smith were members of the Medinah Country Club where the pictures below were taken.

         Carly Ryde, unknown male, and Lam                                                Alice and Dorothy Ryde

Carl Ryde was a friend of Lam’s from before he had married Alice. Nancy recollected that they “were about the same age and both had married younger women.”

The country club has three golf courses, one for the women and two for men only. #1, the most difficult, is still used on the Professional Golf Association tour circuit. While women were not allowed to play on the #1 and #2 courses, men could play on the #3 women’s course if they played with a woman partner. The two ladies, Mother and Dorothy Ryde seem to be watching their husbands approaching the 18th hole on one of the men’s courses.

Dorothy and Carl Ryde on the left (he’s wearing a straw “boater”). Daddy and Mother are on the right; (he’s wearing a cap and bow tie). I don’t know the lady in the middle; her escort was probably taking the picture.

NOVEMBER 4 – The U.S. Postmaster General ordered all homes to have a mailbox. “Those preferring not to take orders from the government are free not to have a mailbox, but they will have to relinquish delivery of mail.” _{http://www.fsmitha.com/time/1922.htm}

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned forty-six while living in River Forest, Illinois.

1923

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned twenty-three while living in River Forest, Illinois.

FEBRUARY 14 – Alice’s brother Edward David Smith (24) married Evelyn Estelle Gifford (19) in Genoa City, Wisconsin.

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their first wedding anniversary.

AUGUST 2 – President Harding suffered what was apparently a stroke and died while on a tour across the country. He became the 6th sitting President to die in office. _{https://www.history.com/news/the-unexpected-death-of-president-harding}

AUGUST 3 – Harding’s vice president Calvin Coolidge was sworn into office and became the 30^th President of the United States.

AUGUST 12 – At 4:50 in the morning in their home at 349 North Ashland Avenue in River Forest, Illinois, Alice gave birth to their first child, a nine pound 13 ounce girl who they named Nancy Ellen Allen after Lam’s mother Ellen Nancy.

Mother had all her babies at home. Shortly before I was born a newspaper story had alerted her to a mix-up at one of the Chicago hospitals where two women went home with the wrong babies. She wanted to be certain that didn’t happen to her, and lived in an era when doctors willingly made house calls, no matter the cause.

As can be seen in the above Birth Record, the nurse who attended Nancy’s birth was Miss Hough. Nancy would later recall in her memoirs that Miss Hough would attend all three children’s births and stay to care for mother and baby afterwards. They affectionately called her “Huffy” and up until Lam’s sister Genna moved in as the nanny in 1929 Huffy would be asked from time to time to babysit while Lam and Alice attended an event or were out of town.

Later that year a few close family members and friends, including Lam’s mother Ellen (84) and his sister, Mabel (43) from Florida, would gather at the Allen home for Nancy’s christening.

      Nancy Ellen (about 4 months) Alice Allen (23)                                  FOUR GENERATIONS

Julia Ottilia Winckler Smith (52), Alice Julia Smith Allen (24), Johannette Julia Weiss Winckler (77), Nancy Ellen Allen (4 months)

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned forty-seven while living in River Forest, Illinois.

1924

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned twenty-four while living in River Forest, Illinois.

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their second wedding anniversary.

Lambeth (47) with Nancy (about 16 months) at the beach in Florida

while visiting his mother and sisters

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned forty-eight while living in River Forest, Illinois.

NOVEMBER 27 – Macy’s department store in New York hosted its first Thanksgiving Day Parade. _{http://www.fsmitha.com/time/1924.htm}

1925

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned twenty-five while living in River Forest, Illinois.

MARCH 4 – Calvin Coolidge was sworn in for his second term as President of the United States.

“The inauguration of Calvin Coolidge’s for his first full four-year term as president is broadcast live on twenty-one radio stations coast-to-coast. Many homes now have radio receivers. Dance bands broadcast from dance halls, radio stations and hotels.” _{http://www.fsmitha.com/time/1925.htm}

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their third wedding anniversary.

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned forty-nine while living in River Forest, Illinois.

NOVEMBER 16 – Alice gave birth at home in River Forest, Illinois to their second child, a son, Lambeth Shelton Allen, Junior.

1926

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned twenty-six while living in River Forest, Illinois.

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their fourth wedding anniversary.

The home that Lam and Alice had built at 638 Lenox Road “on the best street in Glen Ellyn, Illinois”, according to their daughter Nancy, was complete and the family of four moved in. (For a detailed description of their new home, Glen Ellyn, and the lake across the street see “The Early Life of My Father”.)

Lambeth Shelton Allen, Junior in the front yard of their new home

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned fifty while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

Mother told me that I was Daddy’s little girl from the very beginning. One of the stories I loved to hear was from my babyhood. Children had no restraints when riding in cars at that time. Even the first simple car seats for children had not been heard of! One day I was standing up in the front seat between Mother and Daddy with my arms around his neck while he was trying to drive. Mother said she tried to move me away, saying “Nancy, don’t bother Daddy.” To which I replied, “I want to bother Daddy!” My heart still aches for him.

1927

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned twenty-seven while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

JANUARY 7 – The first telephone call across the Atlantic was made “from New York City to London, via radio waves.” _{http://www.fsmitha.com/time/1927.htm}

MAY 20 – Alice gave birth at home at 638 Lenox Road, Glen Ellyn, Illinois to their third child, another girl, Evelyn Mae Allen.

My sister, Evelyn Mae, was born … on the very night that Charles Lindbergh was making the first solo flight from the East coast to Paris in a single-engine airplane … So while Mother was upstairs with the doctor delivering a baby, Daddy was downstairs listening to the news about Lindbergh on a crystal set radio. I don’t recall whether I ever saw a crystal in any museum I have visited, but Mother said it had no loud speaker and was heard by means of an earpiece.

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary.

OCTOBER 6 – The Jazz Singer, an “American musical drama film directed by Alan Crosland … [was] the first feature-length motion picture with both synchronized recorded music score as well as lip-synchronous singing and speech (in several isolated sequences). Its release heralded the commercial ascendance of sound films and effectively marked the end of the silent film era.” _{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jazz_Singer}

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned fifty-one while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

Lam (51) with his three children in their front yard in Glen Ellyn

Nancy (4), Shelton (2), Evelyn (6 months)

The new home in Glen Ellyn had a formal dining room in the front of the house. In between that and the kitchen at the back of the house was a breakfast room where the children usually ate.

Daddy would not eat in the breakfast room – always the dining room. If he was having his breakfast alone, or when he got home from work at Saturday noon, he would expect that the dining room table would be set with a white tablecloth, folded to cover just half of the table, with china and silverware. His breakfast was consistently Shredded Wheat, orange juice and Coffee, although once in awhile he would, on weekends, eat waffles, bacon and eggs or pancakes with all of us sitting at the dining room table.

[Like his father before him, when Shelton grew up he would often enjoy Shredded Wheat (plain or frosted) for breakfast as well.]

1928

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned twenty-eight while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

JANUARY 13 – TELEVISION – “Dr. Ernst Frederik Werner Alexanderson performs the first successful public television broadcast. The pictures, with 48 lines at 16 frames per second, were received on sets with 1.5 sq. inch screens in the homes of four General Electric executives in Schenectady, New York. The sound was transmitted by the WGY radio station.” _{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1928_in_television}

FEBRUARY 8 – TELEVISION – John Logie Baird made the first transatlantic television broadcast. The New York Times the next day described it. “A man and a woman sat before an electric eye in a London laboratory tonight and a group of persons in a darkened cellar in this village outside New York watched them turn their heads and move from side to side. The images were crude, imperfect, broken, but they were images none the less. Man’s vision had panned the ocean; transatlantic television was a demonstrated reality, and one more great dream of science was on the way to realization.” _{https://www.scotsusa.com/scotland/john-logie-baird-first-transatlantic-television-broadcast/}

Evelyn Mae Allen, about one

Here is little sister, Evelyn, propped up on the swing on our back porch. The only thing I remember about her as a baby is that one time when Mother and Daddy were out of town, “Huffy” was taking care of us. After the baby had been weaned, Mother had a hard time getting her to accept the bottle. I seem to remember Mother saying there was some sort of powdered formula, and I don’t know whether she was giving that to Evelyn or regular pasteurized, bottled milk which at that time was not homogenized which meant the cream rose to the top of the bottle. Whatever it was, Evelyn didn’t like it. To get her to drink it Mother added a tiny bit of sugar to it. Whether this was just her own desperate idea or whether her doctor had suggested it, it seemed to work. When “Huffy” tried to get her to drink the milk straight, Evelyn screamed. I told “Huffy” that Mother put sugar in it, but I was only five years old and she didn’t pay any attention to me. I do remember telling Mother about it when she got home, but I don’t remember the outcome. I guess Evelyn eventually started drinking milk.

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their sixth wedding anniversary.

JULY – A TRIP TO VISIT GRANDMA ALLEN

When Evelyn was over a year old the entire family went by car to Florida.

Lam (51) with his mother Ellen (89) and his three children

Mother [Alice, 29] and the car

SEPTEMBER 3 – THE DISCOVERY OF PENICILLIN – In London, Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin, although the first American patient wouldn’t receive a dose until fourteen years later in 1942. The life-saving drug “was ‘difficult and expensive to extract’ from its original mold source and had not been available in synthetic forms; every time scientists wanted to make penicillin, they had to wait for new mold to grow. A few early test patients in England had died after seeming to recover because there wasn’t enough of the drug to complete the course of medicine. Even in 1943, there had only been enough penicillin made in the USA to treat about 30 people. That soon changed. After it became clear that the drug could help those wounded in World War II, the Army Medical Corps quickly asked for more to be produced. By May of 1944, enough was being made that civilians could finally get access.” One year later, in 1945, Evelyn’s life would be saved by this “miracle” drug. _{https://time.com/4250235/penicillin-1942-history/}

The picture above is of Nancy (5) with her Aunt Mabel Allen [48], Mrs. [Mary] Mills [74] (Mother of the lady standing on the other end), Mother [28, wearing her fox-head stole!!], Grandmother Allen [89], Daddy [51] and Marian Mills. I think it was taken at Medinah Country Club in either the spring or fall, cool weather anyway. It would appear that Aunt Mabel and Grandmother had come up to Chicago, by train, for a visit. The Mills were friends of the Allen family when they lived in Austin [a community in Chicago]. Mother told me that for many years Mrs. Mills had hoped that Daddy would marry Marian Mills. It is always interesting to stop and think, when you are told something like that, what would have happened if your Mother and Father had married someone else. Would Shelton, Evelyn and I have been born to someone else? No, of course not! But I certainly wouldn’t be here telling this life story!

[Of course, the investigator in me could not resist discovering more about the Mills family, particularly because of the marriage wish and because Lam had been living with them at the time of the 1900 U.S. Census. The name of the daughter of Mary Mills was actually Ella Louise Mills. She would have been about 48 when the above picture was taken. Her brother Cecil had a daughter named Marion who was born in 1904. It’s difficult to tell because of the quality of the picture, but I believe that is 48-year-old Ella Mills and not 24-year-old Marion Mills standing next to Lam. Mr. Mills had died in 1920. Ella was a music teacher, never married, lived with her brother and his wife until they died in 1955. After this she seems to have moved to Cooperstown, New York with her niece Marion and family. She died there in 1973.]

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned fifty-two while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

NOVEMBER 18 – Mickey Mouse, created by Walt Disney and animator Ub Iwerks, made his screen debut in “Steamboat Willie.” _{https://www.discovercartooning.com/how-was-mickey-mouse-created/} “It is the first successful sound-synchronized animated cartoon.” _{http://www.fsmitha.com/time/1928.htm}

1929

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned twenty-nine while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

FEBRUARY 14 – CHICAGO – “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre shocked the world … when Chicago’s North Side erupted in gang violence. Gang warfare ruled the streets of Chicago during the late 1920s, as chief gangster Al Capone sought to consolidate control by eliminating his rivals in the illegal trades of bootlegging, gambling and prostitution. This rash of gang violence reached its bloody climax in a garage on the city’s North Side … when seven men associated with the Irish gangster George ‘Bugs’ Moran, one of Capone’s longtime enemies, were shot to death by several men dressed as policemen. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, as it was known, remains an unsolved crime and was never officially linked to Capone, but he was generally considered to have been responsible for the murders.” _{https://www.history.com/topics/crime/saint-valentines-day-massacre}

Nancy would later recall that when driving into Chicago to shop or meet Lam for lunch on a workday they would sometimes park near the Chicago Theater and have “to walk past a nightclub which Mother said was owned by the Mafia and was often mentioned in the newspapers as a hangout for Al Capone and other ‘Mob’ leaders. Anyway, we walked by it in the daytime when it was closed, so as far as I know I never saw a Chicago gangster!”

MARCH 4 – Herbert Hoover was sworn in as the 31st President of the United States.

SOMETIME THIS YEAR – Lam’s sister, Esther Virginia (Genna) Allen Carter (56), moved in with the family as the children’s nanny. Nancy was six, Shelton was four, and Evelyn was two. It was around this time that Genna’s second son Ernest had moved from Florida to the hometown of his wife Mary Dasher in Dasher, Lowndes County, Georgia. Ernest and Mary had one daughter named Mary Esther who was five. Perhaps the Ernest Carters’ relocation with Genna’s only grandchild at the time was instrumental in the decisions she made about leaving her husband and moving to Chicago. Alice would later tell Nancy the events from the Allens’ perspective that led to this happy circumstance for their family.

As recalled by Nancy, a few years prior, Genna’s husband Will, who was a preacher but

didn’t have a church so [Alice] didn’t know whether he held tent meetings, or preached on street corners, or what, but he wasn’t earning much and wanted to turn his house into a boarding house. He wrote Dad asking that he find another place for Grandma Allen and Mabel to live; [Lam] bought them a small house in Miami, Florida.

Ellen and Mabel had lived with the Carters since 1918. [The 1920 U.S. Census recorded them as renting the home next to the one Will and Genna Carter owned free of mortgage. Perhaps it was a duplex, there are no house numbers listed.]

At some time thereafter, Aunt Genna became disgruntled with her role as boarding housekeeper and Will’s inability to earn a living and divorced him, which was practically unheard of in the early 1900s, especially among the non-rich population.

[For the rest of their lives, although they continued to live separately, they both listed themselves as “married” on the U.S. Censuses. Will died in 1939 but not until the 1950 Census did Genna list herself as widowed. Will and Genna had married in 1893 when he was 25 and she was 20. All four of their sons were born in Kansas by 1904. Just to round Will out as a person and give him a fair shake, the following is from his obituary in the Kansas Emporia Gazette (he had been born in Kansas and his two older brothers still lived there.): “Dr. Carter, as a boy, was editor of a paper … He worked as a printer on the Sentinel and later was assistant postmaster and teacher in the schools. He was ordained by the Methodist Episcopal church, went to the Indian school service in the Dakotas and Oregon and later returned to Kansas, serving as Methodist pastor at several towns. About 35 years ago [1904], he moved to Nevada and then to California, where he held Methodist pastorates. In 1917 the family moved to Florida, where Dr. Carter continued his church work and was postmaster at Homestead during the Coolidge administration [1923-1929]. The writings of Dr. Carter, including poems and narrative accounts of his early day experiences, were widely read and quoted by the press. He was a close friend of the late William Jennings Bryan [a three-time presidential nominee and prosecutor in the Scopes “monkey” trial regarding teaching evolution in public schools. Bryan ‘was already well known as an anti-evolution activist who almost single handedly create(ed) the national controversy over the teaching of evolution and ma(de) his name inseparable from the issue.’] [Dr. Carter] also served as supply pastor of Mr. Bryan’s church in Florida, and was a frequent guest in the Bryan home.” Mrs. Esther V. Carter was listed as his widow.] _{https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/scopes-trial#william-jennings-bryan}

After she left Will, Genna

 moved in with Grandma Allen and Mabel. I’m pretty hazy about the financial arrangements. The Miami house had a separate garage which had an apartment built over it which Mabel rented out, and I’m fairly sure that at least some of Aunt Genna’s sons helped her out, but Dad still provided the major support for his Mother and now two sisters.

When Lam, Alice, and the kids had visited Miami the previous year Genna was living with her mother and sister in the house Lam had purchased for them.

Mother and Dad liked to travel, and even when they were home, Mother was very involved with church activities, the Glen Ellyn Women’s Club, a bridge club or two, and various functions at both Medinah Country and Athletic clubs.

For some of these travels they hired Miss Hough (“Huffy”), the nurse who had attended the births of the three children. Nancy recalled one of her earliest memories being a time when Lam and Alice were out of town and Huffy was caring for the children. Alice’s mother and father made a surprise visit to their grandchildren right as they were eating their lunch. Huffy felt the grandparents were checking up on her, when actually they were just coming to visit. She made them all sit, while the children, crying, finished their lunches before they could get up and greet their beloved Poppy and Mommy. After that Huffy never babysat again and it wasn’t long before Genna moved in to be their nanny.

When Nancy was about five or six she “become aware that Mother and Dad often got dressed up in very fancy clothes.” With Genna now living with them  

Mother always had a built-in babysitter. Also, Dad was a member of the Masons, not an active or participating member by this time, but was still allowed to keep his memberships in the Medina Country Club which was about a half hour’s drive from Glen Ellyn, and in the Medinah Athletic Club which was located on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Each of these clubs had formal dances from time to time during the year. After they had their baths and were ready to get into their fancy clothes, I was allowed to watch Mother put on her makeup in front of her dressing table, then slip into her dress and shoes, and put on her jewelry. Sometimes Daddy would let me watch him shave (using a straight razor which he sharpened with a strap hung on the inside of the bathroom door) and then watch him put the studs and cuff links in his shirt, which was pleated down the front, and tie his bow tie.

On one particular night, mother had a new evening gown – remember, this was in the 20s. It was pink taffeta with a self-print pattern in pink, the skirt was just below the knees in the front but long and slightly trailing on the floor in the back, no sleeves, waist down to the hips, and trimmed on the shoulder with pink chiffon. There was an artificial bouquet of flowers on one side of the waistline. I thought it was the most beautiful dress I had ever seen and asked her when she didn’t want to wear it anymore if she would save it for me. I was so proud of the way they looked.

MAY 16 – The first ever Academy Awards Ceremony was held. “It is the only Academy Awards ceremony not to be broadcast either on radio or television.” _{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Academy_Awards}

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their seventh wedding anniversary.

OCTOBER 29 – The New York Stock Market crashed – later known as Black Thursday and the beginning of the Great Depression which would last for ten years.

One of the many tragedies of the depression was that thousands of men were thrown out of work and many were forced to leave their homes and families in a desperate effort to find any kind of work. They had no travel money so “riding the rails” became a way of getting around the country. The steam engine trains which came through Glen Ellyn were not all passenger trains. Most of them were freight trains carrying farm goods and cattle into the big city of Chicago. A main Chicago industry at that time was stockyards where cattle was butchered and processed for consumption. By this time the freight trains had refrigerated cars, so big meat processing plants, like Swift’s, could ship meat all over the midwest. These freight train “hobos”, as they were called, would jump off the moving trains in the suburbs outside the city and beg for odd jobs and food. Mother and Aunt Genna never turned anyone away and frequently there would be some stranger sitting on the steps of our back porch eating a sandwich and a bowl of soup, drinking a glass of milk or cup of coffee, and leaving the house with an apple or an orange or maybe a fresh-baked cookie. We weren’t allowed to go out to talk to them, but sometimes we would stand by the kitchen door and they would tell us about their children they had left back home, often with tears in their eyes. It was a very sad time in our history, and Mother, in many small ways made us aware of how lucky we were. For instance, at the end of each of my grade school years, the teacher and the entire class came to Lake Ellyn Park for a picnic. We took our sack lunches to school and then all walked to the park together. In my lunch sack was always an extra sandwich, “in case someone forgot theirs”, Mother would say, but I soon figured out that even in our affluent town there were some children in my class who weren’t always sure where their next meal was coming from because their fathers had lost their white collar jobs. The teachers used to bring extra sandwiches, too, “in case someone forgot theirs”.

Regarding Glen Ellyn and racism:

Glen Ellyn was what was known as a “closed” community; no blacks, no Jews. There was one black family in the vicinity – the garbage collectors – who lived on the outskirts of the town between Glen Ellyn and Wheaton, along the railroad tracks. Their children did attend the Glen Ellyn public schools but there were none at Hawthorne Elementary when I was there. The first one I was aware of was one black boy who happened to be seated across the aisle from me in typing class when I was a sophomore – we were seated alphabetically – and he played on the high school basketball team. Mason’s Drygoods Store in town was owned and operated by a Jew, but he wasn’t allowed to buy property or live in Glen Ellyn, he lived in Villa Park, a predominately Jewish suburb closer in to Chicago. Of course I didn’t know anything about these restrictions when I was in grade school.

The irony of this is that Dad’s primary business account was The Florsheim Shoe Company. It was Jewish Florsheim money which allowed us to live on the best street in Glen Ellyn and to have no financial worries during those terrible depression years. Other accounts had to hold back on their advertising but Florsheim increased theirs to appeal to those who could afford their top-of-the-line shoes. Of course Daddy never wore anything but Florsheim shoes! Dad and Mother invited Mr. and Mrs. Florsheim to our house at least once every year (Evie remembers being held on his lap when she was a toddler), and Mother and Dad were invited to theirs. If I was ever told, I don’t remember where they lived.

Florsheim Shoes

Neither Mother nor Dad were prejudiced and raised us to be the same. Even though Dad had been raised by southern parents and his grandparents, Catherine (Kitty) Spence and Dr. George Richardson Pitts brought slaves with them when they moved to Missouri in 1828 from Virginia before the Civil War, I frequently heard Daddy and Poppy talking about the Ku Klux Klan, which was at the height of its influence in the 1920s, and the terrible lynchings, murders and injustices imposed upon the blacks, primarily in the South, but throughout the country. Mother once told me that if anyone made a remark about the Jews in his presence Daddy would say, “They put on their pants, one leg at a time, the same way I do!”

[In later conversations between Shelton’s children Keren, Sharon, Ruth, and Nathan, we agreed that our father’s recollection about at least his mother’s feelings towards black Americans was a little different than his sister Nancy recalled above. As Nathan said, “keep in mind we’re talking 1930” and old prejudices and sentiments from generations past are often difficult to break even with the knowledge that they are fundamentally wrong. Nathan recalled our father saying that as a boy “he had had a penny or nickel or something and he had put it in his mouth, and his mom told him not to do that because some Negro may have had that in his hand.” Whether she always carried this bias or it was a deep-seated response from the times in which she was raised, I do not know. Nancy was around her more later in her life while our father was in Japan and Okinawa. Perhaps she was able to overcome her prejudices. But I do recall when I was in high school my escort for homecoming was a fellow student who was black and our father had me cut him out of the homecoming picture before I sent it to our Grandma Allen. This was not because our father was prejudiced. In fact, Nathan recalled him saying that when he was teaching in Kentucky after graduating from Bob Jones University in 1950 it “was Jim Crowe era. And he would just always go to the back of the bus.”  Keren added, “Dad was really careful to teach us not to be racist. So I remember going back to Michigan in high school, I was 14, and encountering racism for the first time that I can remember, and just being utterly baffled by it. Like, ‘What? People think they’re better than other people because of the color of their skin?!’”

There is a memory I have of our father telling us of an experience when we were little and came back to the United States after being in Japan. We were sitting in our car outside an ice cream shop and in the car next to us was a black family. In Japan we were the minority as white people and perhaps had not seen a black person in our young lives so we must have been staring at them. He said something like, “Don’t stare. They are just like us. It’s like they are chocolate ice cream and we are vanilla, it’s all ice cream and we are all people.”

People do change and grow, and biases and prejudices can be overcome. The following was said about Eleanor Roosevelt: “She was not born the compassionate and courageous person she grew to be, the woman who sympathized with and vigorously supported Jews and Jewish causes. Like many other educated people of her time, she shared their ‘low-grade’ anti-Semitic sentiments. But, writes biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook, ‘Stunned by the depths of the problem in America, by 1935 she spoke out against antisemitism and race hatred wherever she found it in the United States.’” _{https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/eleanor-roosevelt-and-the-jews/} Perhaps Nancy knew that Alice had come to a similar realization when it came to her feelings about black Americans.]

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned fifty-three while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

1930

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned thirty while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

Mother told me she had dreamed of being a ballet dancer, and evidently took lessons along that line because she did learn to do the Highland Fling, a dance done, usually by a girl, in a Scottish kilt and the oblong hat with a small feather on one side, and one arm raised gracefully over the head. A pair of swords were laid on the ground crosswise and the dancer, wearing either soft ballet slippers or toe shoes danced within the four sections of the crossed swords. In the back of my mind I seem to remember a picture of Mother doing this dance, but I have carefully gone through every old print and haven’t found it.

Anyway, Mother never became a ballet dancer, but her unfulfilled dream suddenly returned to the fore when she had two daughters. I, being the oldest, was the first to be led to the dance studio. I tolerated the foot position exercises which were done with the soft slippers, and the hand and arm positions which I was somewhat familiar with because I was taking Elocution lessons which included hand and arm gestures … but when we progressed to the hard-toed ballet shoes, I balked. The toes of the shoes were made of wood, covered with pink satin, and there were long ribbons which crossed under the shoe to hold it on and then tied around the ankles. Before putting them on you covered your toes with some soft, puffy material called “lamb’s wool”. You did not dance on your feet, or on raised feet with your toes flat on the floor, but with feet upright and toes pressed hard against the wood, you danced on your toes! And your toes are not evenly long or straight across, so actually most of your weight rested on your two big toes! Since one facet of my personality was practicality, even in my childhood, I deemed this a physical impossibility, and besides it hurt like the dickens! I passed on tap-dancing lessons also and gladly returned to the Elocution lessons where I could perform in my Mary Jane shoes while standing with my feet flat on the floor.

About four years later Evie got the same treatment and quit for basically the same reasons.

MARCH 6 – The first frozen vegetables marketed by Clarence Birdseye for the consumer were sold in a supermarket in Springfield, Massachusetts. _{https://www.supermarketnews.com/archive/introduction-frozen-foods-timeline}

APRIL 13 – Mabel Allen (48) and Ellen Allen (90) are recorded in the U.S. Census living in the home Lam purchased for them at 2318 23^rd Court in Miami, Florida.

APRIL 21 – Lam (53) and Alice (30) are recorded in the U.S. Census living at 638 Lenox Road in Glen Ellyn, Illinois with their daughter Nancy (6), son Shelton (4), daughter Evelyn (2), and Lam’s sister Virginia Carter (55).

MAY 5 – On a Boeing 80A Trimotor airplane, Ellen Church became the first female flight attendant on a flight from San Francisco, California, to Chicago, Illinois. “The flight carried 14 passengers and took 13 stops along the way.” _{https://simpleflying.com/ellen-church-first-female-flight-attendant-history/}

SUNDAY AFTERNOON OUTINGS – About the following, I find it interesting that Nancy, as the older sister, had many memories of going with her parents while the younger two stayed at home. I wonder if Shelton, who was only two years and three months younger than Nancy, didn’t want to go, or if he was left with Evelyn so that she wouldn’t feel alone. Or perhaps this arrangement was more functional, as five could fit in the two rows of seats in the car, but with Poppy and Mommy Smith going along adding Shelton, Evie and Aunt Genna would have made eight and, even without seat belts to restrict the number of passengers, it would have been quite crowded.

With Aunt Genna always on hand to look after the two younger children, I was allowed to go with parents and grandparents on many of their Sunday afternoon outings. One I particularly remember, at least once a year we would take our car, sometimes Poppy’s, and drive up to a town named Algonquin, Illinois, which couldn’t have been more than 25 or 30 miles away. There was an ice cream parlor there which also served sandwiches and soup. Mother, Mommy and I would be dropped off at the ice cream parlor, Grandpa and Daddy would take the car to the gas station, fill up with gas, check the oil, kick and examine the tires to be sure they were properly inflated for the return trip, and then join us for a snack at the ice cream parlor. Believe it or not this little excursion would take about three hours, and we would get back to Glen Ellyn in time for dinner, prepared by Aunt Genna.

Other times we would drive a few miles to a hotel in St. Charles [Illinois] for dinner, and for a really special treat we would go to Medinah Country Club. Grandpa was also a Mason and a member. And what an elegant place it was – and still is – not long ago we watched Tiger Woods, among others, of course, playing in one of the professional golf tournaments held there. The tables in the huge dining room were covered with white linen cloths, crystal glasses, the china was embossed with the Masonic Symbol, the tableware was heavy, the waiters were [wore?] white, and each table was assigned at least two, depending on the size of the seated party. Mother told me of something I said when I was first taken there to dinner. Every time I took a sip of water, an attending waiter would refill the glass. I finally leaned over to her and whispered, “Please tell him not to give me any more water. I can’t drink anymore!” The food was wonderful and impeccably served. Although we were taught proper table manners at home, it was at Medinah I learned about elegant dining – waiting to eat until all the food had been served – where to place my knife and fork when I was finished – the use of warm, wet finger napkins. I always felt like a little princess when I went there to dinner.

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their eighth wedding anniversary.

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned fifty-four while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

1931

This year, as Nancy would record in the history section of her memoirs, “Sears sold its first affordable and popular electric refrigerator, for $137.50.” “With the introduction of small electric motor and nontoxic Freon … refrigerators migrated from industry to home, replacing iceboxes and gas-powered refrigerators.” _{Nancy Ellen Allen Haeger}

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned thirty-one while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

NANCY’S MEMORIES OF HOW LAUNDRY WAS DONE IN THE 1930s

[In the basement was] where the washing was done for the family of six, including Aunt Genna, by a little German lady named Mrs. Funk. She also worked for Mommy and Poppy. She came out to Glen Ellyn on the Aurora & Elgin train on Monday and did the washing, stayed overnight, and the next day pressed the flat things like sheets, pillowcases, handkerchiefs, linen towels, kitchen towels, on a mangle, and all other things by hand. You sat down at the mangle and in front of you was a cloth covered roller on which you smoothed one end of the towel, then lowered the metal curved top with a lever and pressed a button which turned the roller and quickly pressed the flat piece …. All things had to be pressed or ironed because this was before percale sheets or wash and wear fabrics. The electric flatiron was invented in 1882 so development of the mangle for professional laundries probably were available by 1900; the electric washing machine was invented in 1910.

                              A Mangle                                                                A Washing Machine with Wringer

                                                                                                                        Demonstrated by a model

The washing machine stood next to the deep, divided laundry tub. To the right was a double gas burner and a big copper kettle, oblong in shape, which fit over both burners. Mrs. Funk used a hose attached to the tub faucet to fill the kettle with water, turned on the burners to get the water hot, and cut up a bar of Fels-Naptha soap to melt in the boiling water. Then she put in a few sheets and pillowcases, stirred them with a stout, round pole and left them to soak and boil for a while, stirring them some more occasionally. While they were “cooking” there would be a load swishing back and forth in the washing machine. The clothes in the washing machine were washed with soap flakes, those like Ivory were milder than the bar soap used on the sheets. Detergents were not introduced until 1933. Then Mrs. Funk filled both sides of the tub with hot water, moved the hand cranking wringer on the washing machine in front of one side of the kettle, and using the pole, lifted the sheets into the first half of the tub, swished it around then fed it into the wringer and hand-cranked it into the second tub. Then put a laundry basket on the floor and hand-cranked the sheet into the basket to be hung either outdoors or on lines strung in the basement when the weather was cold. Then the wringer was moved over the clothes in the washing machine and hand fed through the wringer into the two rinse tubs and then into a basket to be hung up. The sheets were changed every week so that meant 12 sheets (all big like top sheets, fitted sheets hadn’t come on the scene yet) and at least 6 pillowcases. Also, you will have noticed no mention of an electric dryer and truly automatic washing machines did not come on the scene until the 1930s – first the wringer was electrified – then there was a spin dry unit instead of the wringer! Doesn’t sound like a peck of fun, does it? Actually, it was hard, physical work! And we always had top-of-the-line equipment; most people didn’t. There was still a scrub board in the basement which Mrs. Funk used to rub out stains, and water had to be changed at least twice in the washing machine, the rinse tubs as well as the copper kettle with that many sheets. No wonder it took her all day!

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their nineth wedding anniversary.

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned fifty-five while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

It seemed that Daddy was always dressed up. He wore suits to work and to church, and I certainly never saw him in shorts and I don’t believe ever in a bathing suit. (Remember the picture of us at the beach in Miami with Grandma Allen when he had on not only a suit but a white shirt and tie?)

For a long time Daddy wore detached, starched collars on his shirts, held on by three buttonholes, one attaching to a button at the back of the shirt and two to the top button in the front of the shirt. Only as he got older did he wear shirts with attached collars, collar and cuffs starched, and with little stiffeners in the points to make them lie down flat.

[I remember our father wearing a bathing suit, but he always had a white t-shirt on and I believe swimming would be the only times he would not be wearing long polyester dress pants. He didn’t always wear a tie, but his “uniform” was a white t-shirt under a double pocketed white short-sleeved shirt. He did not like hats and would not wear them, even in the winter, maybe because of the unfortunate hat he was wearing in the picture of him with his sisters in “Poppy’s” backyard (see it under 1933 in The Early Life of My Father). And he did not like winter coats but would wear a sweater or jacket if the weather was terribly cold.]

[Lam’s] cold weather tailored suits were wool with matching vests with which he always wore long sleeved, white shirts with starched French Cuffs and cuff links to hold them together rather than buttons. The shirts had starched collars with stays inserted at the points to make them lie flat. Daddy wore spats on his shoes and rubbers, not galoshes, felt hats with brims called fedoras and a long overcoat with a velvet collar. In warm weather the suits were lighter weight, usually worn without the vest, and sometimes with a bow tie. Shirt sleeves were still long. Hats were either stiff-brimmed straw hats called “boaters” or a cotton cap. Tuxedos were worn with starched, pleated shirts with studs which matched the cuff links down the front instead of buttons, a black bow tie, and the shoes were patent leather. The more formal evening wear with tails called for a white bow tie and a black top hat which was collapsed when not worn.

Daddy would go around the house in only a shirt and pants, but the only really “informal” clothes which he wore away from the house were golfing knickers.

1932

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned thirty-two while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

Let me bring Mother’s best friend, Olga Anderson, into the picture. At the Methodist Church Mother had a friend who lived only a couple of blocks from us named Mildred Barker. Her husband was a business acquaintance of Olga Anderson’s husband, Otto. They lived in a nice house in Wheaton, the suburb next to Glen Ellyn. They had one son, Otto, Jr., who was five years older than me; they had a tennis court on their property for him. He also took piano lessons from an English lady in Wheaton, named Greta Allum. Mildred Barker introduced Mother to Olga Anderson; they hit it off immediately and were the best of friends for the rest of Aunt Olga’s life. We, of course, called the Andersons Aunt Olga and Uncle Otto …

The Andersons had a heartbreaking tragedy earlier in their lives. They had a little girl two or three years younger than 0tto, Jr. One fall afternoon 0tto was raking leaves in his backyard and the two children were playing in the yard. He started to burn a pile of the leaves after warning the children not to get close, but the little girl ran by and her dress caught on fire. Before Otto could get to her to smother the flames, she was so badly burned that she died. Aunt Olga never had another child. She was like a second mother to Evie and me, and Mother told me later, Aunt Olga had held the hope that someday Otto, Jr. and I would marry, so I would then be her daughter- in-law. Otto, Jr. became an accomplished pianist and was very intelligent – graduated with honors from Harvard. He didn’t marry and several years later openly declared himself a homosexual which was another heartbreak for Olga and Otto, which of course meant they never had any grandchildren.

Muriel Barker, Olga Anderson, Mildred Barker,                Muriel, Olga, Otto Jr, Alice Allen (32), Nancy (9)

Otto Anderson, Jr., “Standoffish” Nancy

MAY 21 – Amelia Earhart completed her solo nonstop transatlantic flight. _{https://www.infoplease.com/history/us/us-history-progressive-era-and-world-wars-1900-1949}

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary.

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned fifty-six while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

One of the jokes I remember from the Minstrel shows Daddy produced:

MR. INTERLOCKETER: Sam, give me one sentence which uses all the following words: Defeat, Deduct, Defense, Detail.

                        SAM: De Feet of de Duck goes over de Fence before de Tail!

These performances graduated into plays, sometimes three one-act plays, and sometimes full three act, plays. The only time I was ever upset with my Dad was when he was directing a play that had a nine-year-old girl in the cast. I read the play and knew I could play that part, even though the character was a pretty bratty kid. I was nine years old and had been taking elocution lessons for over a year. Daddy explained to me that it wouldn’t be right for him to give me the part since he was the director and responsible for assigning the roles. He gave the part to a girl who was eleven, who was more bratty than I was, but I didn’t consider that a good enough reason! I knew I could act bratty if given the chance!

1933

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned thirty-three while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

And how to tell about my Mother? When she was in her 70s I overheard her telling a nephew, “l was always a free spirit!” and I suppose that does tell it as well as anything. In her older years we teasingly called her the “last of the family matriarchs” although that species of the 1890s and early 1900s were often depicted in books and movies as being dictatorial, humorless and controlling women. Mother had a wonderful sense of humor, was not dictatorial, and controlled with love and understanding, but nevertheless we were always aware she was in charge. As each of us reached the age when we were away from constant supervision from parents and Aunt Genna, Mother told us, “l have never done anything to make you ashamed of me. I hope you’ll never do anything that will make me ashamed of you.” I don’t know if that was something which had been drummed into her head by her Mother, or something she read in a woman’s magazine, but those words sure made an impression on Evie and me. Neither Evelyn nor I were rebellious daughters; I was the more conventional – she the more high spirited – we both remember incidents in our college and young adult years before we married when we were stopped short by thinking, “Mother would be ashamed of me if I did this!” – or “Mother would kill me if she heard about this!” Of such are life patterns established!

Of course, Mother was spared the really “free spirited” behavior of the “roaring twenties” by marrying Daddy in 1922, thereby becoming a part of his more conservative lifestyle. They went to dances but not to the “speakeasy” nightclubs of the prohibition era. Daddy belonged to a bridge club which included Carl Ryde and a couple named Marshall and Frances Dutton, all of whom were older than Mother except Dorothy Ryde. Even when they moved to Glen Ellyn, most of their friends were around 10 years older than Mother which made their children older than we were by several years. The bridge club (called the “Oak Park Club”) consisted of six couples originally, all Daddy’s friends, but as some of the older couples dropped out for one reason or another, Olga and Otto Anderson were invited to join, then another couple from the Glen Ellyn Methodist Church, Oscar and Nettie Ohmann, but Dorothy Ryde and Mother remained the youngest members.

Mother’s conception of a “free spirit” during her generation is a far cry from the conception beginning in the 1960s with the student protests against the establishment and the Vietnam War, hippie communal living, the drug culture, the sexual revolution; she lived long enough to say, in the 1980s, “l feel like I don’t belong here anymore!” Mother was a “free spirit” because her parents and her husband allowed her to do pretty well as she pleased, within the constraints of her time, and was relieved of many of the responsibilities of married domesticity by household help, hired yard and garden upkeep, and certainly by the presence of Aunt Genna in our home who took over most of the cooking, the care of her three children, and was ever present to look after us so that Mother was free to participate in many away-from-home activities. And she had the money to travel, buy nice clothes, redecorate the house every few years, entertain frequently, generously and graciously, drive nice cars, and, in addition to her Glen Ellyn Women’s Club, church, and bridge club responsibilities, to indulge in any other activity which took her fancy; she took tap dancing lessons, horseback riding lessons, painting lessons, swimming lessons, bridge lessons. And she had many friends, was well liked and admired, full of energy and enthusiasm.

I realize that makes her sound like a spoiled, rich woman who expected to be waited on and catered to which was only partially true. She had the money to hire people to do things for her but always treated them like friends rather than servants. She was extremely generous, compassionate and charitable.

JANUARY 22 – The Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, which moved the presidential inauguration from March 4 to January 20, was ratified.

MARCH 4 – Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in as the 32nd President of the United States.

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their eleventh wedding anniversary.

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned fifty-seven while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

DECEMBER 5 – The 21st amendment to the US Constitution (repealing the 18th amendment, after fourteen years of Prohibition) is ratified with the support of President Roosevelt who had “campaigned for it, stating that legalizing beer alone could raise ‘the federal revenue by several hundred million dollars a year.’” _{https://prohibition.themobmuseum.org/the-history/the-end-of-prohibition/repeal-of-prohibition/}

CHRISTMAS TIME –

For as long as I can remember, Mommy and Poppy’s best friends were Carl and Lillian Duncan. We were taught to call them Uncle Carl and Aunt Lil. In those early days while Poppy was still alive, they were always invited to Thanksgiving dinner at their house, as well as to our house for Christmas Eve. They had no children, and … my Mother, Alice, became her substitute daughter, an attachment and responsibility which she lovingly assumed for the rest of Aunt Lil’s life, for many years after her own Mother, Grandmother Smith, died.

So on Christmas Eve, Mother always had Mommy and Poppy and Uncle Carl and Aunt Lil for dinner. After dinner Daddy, Uncle Carl, Poppy and Mother played a game, each winning hand of which brought forth a cry of “High, Low, Jack and the Game!” I believe the name of the game was [Auction Pitch]. It has recently caused me to wonder, however, who ended up washing the dishes after that big dinner – the other women, I suppose – Aunt Genna, Mommy and maybe Aunt Lil? …

[On Christmas Eve] we children were put to bed rather early. I don’t remember exactly what year, but at some point the poem, “The Night Before Christmas” was printed, and I do remember Aunt Genna reading that to us before we went to sleep. Then the work began for the adults. For us, of course, Santa Claus was the one who put up the tree, leaving it decorated and surrounded with presents. So for several hours the tree was retrieved from wherever it had been hidden, decorated, and magically adorned with candy canes and surrounded with gifts from parents, grandparents, aunts and an uncle, all of whom were family and loved by us. We had to wait for an awfully long time for Mother and Daddy to wake up the next morning, then, after Daddy had gone down first, lit the fire and turned on the Christmas tree lights, we were allowed to come down to the wonderland waiting for us. One year there was a train running around the tree for Shelton, and a dollhouse for me which was hooked up to the same transformer which ran the train so that lights came on in the house. Another time there was a little village set up on the cotton around the base of the tree. Evie said it later was set up in the fireplace and she and Shelton used to lie on the floor in front of it and make up stories about what went on in the village.

After breakfast, weather permitting, we packed up to drive up to East Troy for dinner, or we started getting ready for Uncle Ed’s family to come to our house.

1934

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned thirty-four while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

APRIL 1, Easter Sunday – Alice (34), Shelton (8), Evelyn (almost 7), and Nancy (10 ½)

Before church

After church

The [picture above] was taken by Mother of the three of us, Aunt Genna, Daddy and two other ladies. These are the Rafferty sisters, who were friends of Daddy’s family. They were spinsters (never married ladies) and lived together. We were never sure why, but every year Dad felt an obligation to pick up the sisters and take them to the cemetery where their mother and father were buried. Neither sister drove a car, so one year Daddy and Mother would pick them up, bring them to our house for a Sunday dinner, then would take them to see their parents’ graves before taking them home. The next year they would invite all of us, including Aunt Genna, to come to their house for dinner which meant that we would have to go with them when Daddy drove them to the cemetery. They were Catholic and we children could never understand why they would talk to the graves as if their mother and father could hear them and say things like, “Poor Mama and Papa!” I at least always thought that going to heaven was supposed to be a happy thing, for the people that died anyway! I never did find out from Mother exactly who they were or why Daddy felt this obligation. Evie says all she remembers about it was that the first time she had ever had peas and carrots cooked together was at their house. Evelyn was always suspicious of anything new to eat, if she didn’t like the way it smelled, she wouldn’t eat it. We were all told that we had to be on our best behavior when we were with these two proper ladies, and Evelyn, I’m sure, was warned not to try to smell any food she didn’t recognize! I don’t remember that she ever did, but Mother was never quite sure just what Evelyn might say or do.

[Of course, I could not help investigating into these sisters and, while I don’t know what actually compelled Lam to take them to their parents’ graves once a year, I did find out the following information: Their names were Rose Elizabeth (1865-1955) and Mary Agnes (1870-1949). They were public schoolteachers and in 1920 lived about one mile from where Lam was living before he married Alice. Perhaps they were friends of Lam’s mother Ellen and sister Mabel before they moved to Florida and then Genna when she came up to live with Lam, as the sister standing behind Nancy has her arm on Genna’s shoulder. Genna was just three years younger than Mary Agnes Rafferty and Lam was a few more years younger still. Interestingly they shaved 10 years off their ages in the 1900 and 1910 U.S Censuses. By 1920 they were back to being correct, perhaps they felt they had passed an eligible marrying age or started looking more their age by then, I don’t know. Their parents were both born in Ireland and came over in about 1846, became naturalized U.S. citizens, and married in 1860. Their mother Elizabeth died in 1908 at 76 and their father in 1916 at 86. They and all of their siblings were born in the United States. Their younger sister Elizabeth Veronica was also a schoolteacher before she married, and they had three brothers, one of whom, William Carroll Rafferty, was a brigadier general in the Spanish American War and World War I. Thomas and Elizabeth and all of their children, except William who is buried at Arlington Cemetery, are entered at All Saints Catholic Cemetery in Des Plaines, Illinois which is about 22 miles from Glen Ellyn.]

MAY 19 – Alice’s grandmother Julia Weiss Winckler died in Oak Park, Illinois at the age of eighty-seven years, eleven months, and ten days old. She was the first to be interred in the family plot at Oakridge Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois, (Lot 295, Section 12).

MAY – “A strong, two-day dust storm removed massive amounts of Great Plains topsoil in one of the worst such storms of the Dust Bowl. The dust clouds blew all the way to Chicago, where they deposited 12 million pounds of dust … Two days later, the same storm reached cities to the east, such as Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C. That winter (1934–1935), red snow fell on New England.” _{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl}

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their twelfth wedding anniversary.

JUNE 10-16 – Glen Ellyn’s Centennial celebration took place:

I remember the Pageant presented on the high school football field, the parades into Lake Ellyn Park and other events which were part of the program held in the city over the period of a week. I would have been eleven that August, and the previous summer had gone with my parents and grandparents to the World’s Fair in Chicago, so these two events added to my concept of history and the interplay of far away countries … Only in my adult years have I realized how my childhood was shaped by the close relationships I had with my parents, grandparents and Aunt Genna, each of them from their own unique background and special interests. As I write this in May of 2004, in my 80th year, I can fully appreciate how fortunate I was during my developing years to have had their love, guidance and direction.

JULY 22 – “In Chicago, the FBI kills John Dillinger after he leaves a movie theatre.” _{http://www.fsmitha.com/time/1934.htm}

SUMMER – Again, as the story below shows, Nancy seemed to have been given preferential treatment. In 1934 when they took this trip Shelton would have been nine and Evelyn seven.

Oh, yes, because I was the oldest I did indeed live a fairy tale childhood. When I was eleven I went with Mother and Daddy on a trip to Mammoth Cave … in southern Kentucky [which didn’t become a National Park until 1941] … so the cave had not been fully explored or developed but I remember some long passages which had electric lights and one large lighted cavern filled with stalagmites … and stalactites … It was very impressive and beautiful! …

Besides the cave itself, there are two things I remember about this trip. Daddy hadn’t realized just how popular a tourist attraction Mammoth Cave had already become and failed to make reservations at the newly built lodge in the vicinity. When we arrived there on a Friday afternoon, there were no vacancies. The only other accommodations anywhere near the caves was the old three story hotel at which we were given two adjacent rooms (not connected) which each had a double bed with a brass headboard, a chest of drawers with a washbowl and pitcher on top, and a wooden rocking chair. There was one bathroom on the floor with the only running water for a toilet, a wash basin, and one bathtub with a shower which had a curtain on a circular rod. Mother was not pleased! First of all she was not about to let me sleep alone in a separate bedroom which meant she and I had to share one of the double beds while Daddy slept in the bedroom next door. Next, she wasn’t about to use a single bathroom shared with six or eight strangers on the floor.

No food was served in this old hotel so we had to drive up to the lodge for dinner. Mother took along soap, towels, toothpaste and brushes, and after we had eaten took me into the ladies washroom at the lodge to get ready for bed. Saturday we toured the cave and had all our meals at the lodge, but had to stay one more night at that old hotel before leaving the area after Sunday morning breakfast. And to top it off Mother hadn’t been overly excited about taking this trip in the first place; Daddy was the one interested in caves.

In following this adventure with me you must remember this is the middle of the depression, there were no four lane highways with attractive roadside motels and restaurants, and Kentucky was still very much hillbilly country … Traveling by car was definitely not first class! So … later in the morning we stopped to get gas in what appeared to be a run-down little town, and since it was getting near noon asked if there was any place nearby where we could get lunch. We were told about a place run by a husband and wife – he ran the bar which faced the main street, and she ran the boarding house in the two floors above which had a back staircase leading down into a huge room behind the bar where meals were served to the boarders and anyone else who wanted them. We were told that if we were interested we would be just in time for her Sunday fried chicken dinner.

Having no alternative, we parked in front of the bar and walked through to the back room. (The only bars I had ever seen the inside of were in the cowboy movies at the Saturday afternoon matinees in Glen Ellyn!) The hostess said we were welcome, said we would be fed family style, that we would be sharing a table with some of her boarders who were just then returning from church and would be down immediately to join us. There were eight people at each table, and we were served with heaping platters of real Kentucky fried chicken and ears of corn, overflowing bowls of mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, vegetables, salads, rolls, and butter – all you could eat. What a delicious feast – topped off with homemade apple pie and ice cream!

Our tablemates were just plain folks with southern accents and very interested in why our “Yankee” family was traveling through their State, asking us many questions about where we came from, where we had been, where we were going. After we left even Mother had to admit it was an interesting time and she certainly couldn’t complain about the food! She was awfully glad, however, when we arrived that evening in a larger town with a real hotel and our own bathroom and everything!

Years after this episode I learned that Mother had never been too fond of the Southeast part of the United States. Early after their marriage Daddy took her down to meet his Mother, Mabel and Genna in Florida and then to Valdosta, Georgia, to visit other relatives. One story she told about her visit in that Southern city was about a screen door which was hanging by one hinge and part of the screen was detached. Her hostess apologized for its condition, saying, “Roy is aiming to fix that one of these days.” When Mother asked her how long it had been broken, she laughed and said, “Oh, long about eleven years or so, I reckon!” Mother came away with the impression that Georgia folks were lazy and slothful.

OCTOBER 10 – Alice’s father Edward died of colon cancer in Oak Park, Illinois at the age of sixty-two years, eight months, and 26 days old. He was the second to be interred in the family plot at Oakridge Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois, (Lot 295, Section 12).

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned fifty-eight while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

DECEMBER – Lam and Alice enjoyed the performing arts:

Daddy and Mother had started introducing me to the legitimate theater to which I adapted with joy. The first professional musical production I saw was named “The Great Waltz” which was about the life of Johann Strauss. It was performing in Chicago during the Christmas season and Daddy and Mother had seen it with friends. Daddy thought Aunt Genna and I would like it and bought us tickets in the center of the first row of the balcony. Aunt Genna and I went into the city by train and took a taxi to the theater and we both came home enchanted. The final scene started with one couple dancing to the opening strains of the “Blue Danube Waltz”, then the curtain behind them went up on two more couples dancing under two chandeliers which hung above them, then as the music swelled more couples danced in from the side flats, more chandeliers, ablaze with lights, dropped over the dancers until the entire stage was a swirling, dazzling celebration of the beautiful music. The entire audience stood up and clapped and cheered, and the curtain calls seemed to go on forever along with a reprise of the song gradually softening as the house lights came up. I still get tears in my eyes when I remember that wonderful day I fell in love with the theater!

1935

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned thirty-five while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their thirteenth wedding anniversary.

Once a year there was “Spring house cleaning” when Mother, the cleaning lady, Aunt Genna, and each of us as we reached the age when we could be useful, washed all the windows inside and out, and thoroughly dusted, oiled, scrubbed and waxed the inside. My job was the stairs which were carpeted only up the center so the two sides of each step, plus the area between the three spools on each step down to and around the spiral at the bottom had to be meticulously dusted in every crevice, then Mother would hand paint them, I believe in black. The risers were painted white. Every other year the downstairs was repainted, every third year the upstairs. It seemed the house always smelled of fresh paint. Evie said recently she had hated that smell, and back then paints were not quick-drying; the windows had to be left open, day and night, for two days, and you had to be careful not to touch anything or you would get it on your hands or clothes. One year Mother decided to “antique” the downstairs walls. I was curious what this meant so watched the painter for a while. He first went through a whole room putting 18” streaks of red and green paint next to each other, randomly spaced apart. When these had dried he painted the whole room, including over the red and green streaks, with a dull, gold paint which allowed the red and green streaks to be subdued, but could still be seen through the gold. The windows were decorated with Venetian blinds and framed by red, velveteen drapes and valances. None of us liked it, but, of course, didn’t say so, but Mother tired of what she had told us was the “latest thing” when she had it done and completely redecorated the next year, except for the windows. (The kitchen and breakfast room weren’t painted that way. The floors were covered with big black and white checkerboard linoleum and the walls and cupboards were painted white.)

Once in a while Mother would cover her hair with a scarf, don the oldest clothes she could find, and move everything out of the garage. Then she would sweep it out and finish by mopping it to settle the dust. She never asked the cleaning lady or outside help to do this. At the time I had trouble understanding why, but in retrospect I suspect she would do it when she was upset or angry about something. I know whenever I got into a snit my house would get a more vigorous cleaning than usual!

Mother was also the disciplinarian. Children were spanked back then when they misbehaved or disobeyed. Not beaten – just hand-paddled through their clothes, not on their bare little bottoms. It was meant to teach us the lesson that certain actions or words, like “sassying back” to an adult were unacceptable. Mother would sometimes say, “This hurts me more than it does you”, meaning she was disappointed by our behavior. I only remember a couple of actual spankings, for what I don’t know, but I’m sure I got many swats through my diapers during my developing years. After the spanking she would dry our tears, hug and tell us she loved us but that we had to be taught how to behave properly.

Mother never showed favoritism among us, treating each of us according to our personalities, needs and wants. We always knew she loved us dearly, was always there when we needed her, hugged and kissed us often. She told us from a very young age that we should never be afraid or ashamed to talk to her or tell her about anything. I still remember many times when I was troubled about something that I would sit on the floor in front of her, with my head on her lap or looking up into her face. She would listen, advise, sympathize, explain, instruct or reassure. Until she died when I was 64 I felt she was the dearest and most wonderful woman I had ever known. There hasn’t been a day when I haven’t missed her!

AUGUST 12 – In her memoirs Nancy recalled an incident of

Mother’s tendency (audacity?) to take matters into her own hands, when [Cousin] Alice came down to my 12th birthday party where we were both to wear hoop skirts, she still had her long black little girl finger curls. Mother decided, without consulting Aunt Evelyn, to have then cut off … she looked adorable, and Mother did put the cutoff curls in a box to take to Aunt Evelyn. However, when we took Alice home, when Aunt Evelyn saw her she began to cry and there was a closed door session with Uncle Ed, Aunt Evelyn and Mother in his office to smooth the troubled waters. Aunt Evelyn, understandably, was hurt and incensed that she had not been consulted about this major event in her daughter’s life – as she had every right to be!

Nancy’s 12^th birthday party – Alice Smith, sporting her new haircut, is sitting on the floor on the left, Nancy is sitting on the floor on the right.

AUGUST 14 – President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. _{https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/The-Social-Security-Act-of-1935/}

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned fifty-nine while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER –

The Thanksgiving and Christmas right after Poppy died [1934] were not our happiest ones, of course, but the very worst Christmas was when I was 12 years old. There had been a hurricane which had hit Miami sometime in November and it had blown the roof off the apartment over Aunt Mabel’s garage and done a considerable amount of damage to the rest of the building. Aunt Mabel apparently had no experience in dealing with insurance appraisers and builders and Daddy was in the middle of his busiest business season, so Mother had to go down to handle the paperwork. She went by train and expected to be back before Christmas. Well, she didn’t get home until after the first of the new year, and of course Christmas was not the same without her. At the same time Aunt Genna’s son, Robert [31] (the one in the Navy), [she later added “I had a colossal crush on him probably due to the uniform, the first man I had ever seen in one!”] had come to spend Christmas with us, Mommy had moved to East Troy and wasn’t there.

[According to the marriage records of Robert Carter I found online he was a radio operator in the Navy and had married two years previously, at this point in 1935 he also had a two-year-old daughter and six-week old son, I do not know why he was not with his family that Christmas, but he and this wife were divorced by 1941.]

After Christmas morning we were supposed to go to East Troy for dinner. There had been a terrible snow storm a few days before Christmas and it was very cold.

This was the 1930s before cars had heaters. A winter’s drive meant wearing boots, heavy coats, hats or earmuffs and gloves and then bundling your laps and legs with wool blankets. Evelyn and Shelton were in the front seat with Daddy and I was in the back seat with Aunt Genna and Robert. There were no seat belts – no one had ever heard of such a thing! Roads were not sanded, and if the snow was more than 3” deep you had to put chains on the tires. Today East Troy is just an off-ramp away from a major four lane highway between Chicago and Milwaukee, but back then it was a backroad country town. Just over the border from the Illinois state line was a resort town named Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, then two very small- towns called Spring Prairie and Springfield which were reached by a two-lane road which didn’t go through or between the rolling hills, but up and down then. This final run into East Troy was always a “Whee!” kind of roller coaster ride when the weather was nice, but a real driving nightmare when the road was icy! On that Christmas day the road was impassable. We finally made our way back to Lake Geneva and called Uncle Ed to say we had to turn back. He offered to try to come get us, but Dad decided against it. We made it home, but there wasn’t much of a Christmas dinner that day – no freezers to pick a roast from or microwave to defrost one.

I went with Daddy to the train station when Mother finally came home – we were allowed to go through the gate and walk alongside the train while looking for our passenger coming towards us. When I saw her I ran to her so fast I almost knocked her over, I was so happy to see her! I never spent another Christmas apart from Mother until I married thirteen years later.

(I very rarely went anywhere alone with Daddy. Mother started taking me with her almost right after Aunt Genna came to live with us, relieving her of the daily responsibility of the care of the two younger children. However, as you can tell, while I was the only child, Mother did not hesitate to take me with her, and by the time Aunt Genna arrived she was used to including me in a lot of the things she did. However, the Christmas Mother was in Florida because of the hurricane, when Daddy went to pick her up in Chicago at the train station, he took me with him. I was 12, and it was the first time I remember being afraid. It seemed like the wait for the train was awfully long, and at one point Daddy said that he had to use the men’s room. He sat me on a wooden bench directly opposite the door which said “Men” and told me to watch that door because it was the only door to the room and I would see him as soon as he came out. I never took my eyes off the door, but after what seemed a long, long time, having seen a steady stream of men coming and going through that door, I began to become nervous. What would I do if something had happened to Daddy? What if he was sick in there? What if I had missed seeing him come out and he had forgotten about me? Who could I ask to go in the door and see if he was still there? How could I find Mother in this huge, busy, noisy place? Just about the time I was working myself up to a panic, Daddy came out of the door and walked straight towards me. But, I will never forget that feeling of mounting terror. Of course, I never told him, or Mother. I just took his hand and walked to the gate with him to watch the engine coming down the track bringing our precious Mother home to us … and after the long, frustrating session she had with lawyers, insurance agents and repair people … she came home saying she didn’t care if she ever saw Florida again!

The other times I went somewhere with Daddy were when touring poets were giving readings in Glen Ellyn. Mother was not terribly impressed with this type of entertainment so Daddy took me with him. One such reading was at the Methodist church where a poet named Edgar Guest was speaking. The poem “Habits” … which I recited many times as a young girl, was written by him, and after the performance, Daddy took me up to meet him. When Daddy told him I was taking elocution lessons and recited some of his poems he shook my hand and encouraged me to continue my interest in poetry.

Habits

by Edgar Albert Guest

Habits are things which you do an’ you shouldn’t,
Things which a good little sissy boy wouldn’t.
For instance, to sprawl on a bed in your clo’es,
An’ yank off a shoe an’ don’t look where it goes,
An’ take off a stocking an’ give it a fling,
So that when it comes morning you can’t find a thing
Which you know you took off. It should be on the chair,
But habit has kept you from putting it there.

Habits are funny. You do ’em, that’s all,
And do ’em without ever thinking at all.
You say that you won’t toss your hat on the floor,
Or bite down your nails till your fingers are sore,
Or sniffle your nose or sit humped in your chair
An’ twist up an’ play with a bunch of your hair;
An’ you mean that you won’t when you promise it then,
But the first thing you know you have done it again.

Habits are things that your parents detest,
Like twisting the button that’s sewed on your vest,
Or scuffling your feet as you walk through the hall,
An’ you don’t even know that you do them at all.
You don’t even know what’s the matter when they
Bring you up with a jerk, with that: ” Stop it, I say! “
Then they preach an’ they talk an’ they scold you a lot,
And it’s all on account of that habit you’ve got.

1936

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned thirty-six while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their fourteenth wedding anniversary.

Our living room fireplace had a metal-trimmed screen in front of it, shaped like this:

The long side of it stood on the hearth and allowed for an opening on the top of about six inches from the front of the fireplace opening. One day a full-grown owl fell down the chimney and into the grate which had been cleaned for the summer. Mother and I had been sitting on the porch and heard it flapping around. By the time we came inside it had found its way out through the top of the screen and was flying around the room. I was terrified of anything with feathers and started screaming. Mother grabbed me and pushed me through the living room so I could run up the stairs and into my bedroom. Aunt Genna heard the commotion and came running with a broom; Mother went and got a mop and a towel and after chasing the owl around the room for some time managed to get it out on the porch where it stayed until Daddy got home. He took a screen off one of the porch windows and eventually got it to fly outside. It was after that Mother had the fireplace closed off and put the Christmas village in it while she painted a picture and had the fireplace and irons attached to the front so that it would stand up before the fireplace opening. She always seemed to be able to handle any challenge, even to changing lamp plugs. In Evie’s and my houses our husbands were “Mr. Fixit”. Daddy wouldn’t try to fix anything; Mother was “Mrs. Fixit”, and if she couldn’t or wouldn’t tackle a job, she’d hire someone who would!

CANNED VEGETABLES, CHICKENS AND FREEZER LOCKERS

At the harvest time of year Mother and Aunt Genna would be busy canning string beans, tomatoes, corn and lima beans. After the basement garage was closed off Mother had a carpenter build shelves in that room where the canned goods could be stored … string beans had to be unstrung and the ends cut off, corn had to be shucked and tomatoes had to be cored and peeled …The canning was done with Ball Mason jars, rubber rings under the glass caps and a pressure cooker. And all went well for many years, until one autumn day, Evie and Shelton were playing in the basement, and heard popping noises and sounds of breaking glass coming from the garage, opened the door to see the room filled with spatters of creamed corn, and more jumping off the shelves by the minute! Evidently the caps had not sealed properly and OH! WHAT A MESS! And OH! WHAT A SMELL! The corn had fermented and blew its tops! It wasn’t one of Mother’s better days. I don’t think she ever tried to can creamed corn again!

Another unpleasant job was plucking chickens! Uncle Ed was also affected by the farmer’s depression woes. Very often they simply didn’t have the cash to pay his fees and offered to pay him in things they grew – vegetables, a butchered cow or calf, or live chickens! When he had an overabundance of these products he would call Mother to pick up some of it (for which she insisted on paying him.) This means we had to drive up early in the morning, and if it was chickens, which Aunt Evelyn had partially plucked, we piled them in the trunk of the car, got home as quickly as possible, delivered them to the butcher at the local food locker who would finish removing the feathers, then took out the “innards”, cut them up, wrapped and labeled the contents and put them in the freezer unit(s) which we rented for such purposes. We sometimes kept one or two to be eaten right away and I can still remember the smell of the carcass being held over the flames of the gas stove to get rid of the rest of the feathers and then watching as the insides were removed (they were not pre-wrapped in a bag!). To this day I have little tolerance for anything with feathers, except at a great distance! At butchering time many local farmers would also sell pork or beef which could be cut up, wrapped, marked and frozen, too.

Before the advent of home freezers, these freezer lockers were useful but really had their downside. Not only were the individual units freezing cold, but the entire room in which they stood was below freezing. The only way you could avoid donning earmuffs, gloves, a warm coat, and even boots was to know exactly where everything was or else grab the first package and run. The butcher didn’t put the packages in any particular order so every time a new batch was added you had to go in with a laundry basket, empty the unit, and separate the beef from the pork from the chicken and to put like cuts together. I remember doing this with Mother a couple of years when, even in 90 degree weather outdoors, we bundled up like it was the middle of a mid-western winter in order to spend the half hour or more it took to do this job.

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned sixty while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

One of my teachers gave us an assignment to find how much our fathers made a year. When I asked Mother, her first reaction was, “That’s none of your teacher’s business!” When I pressed her for some answer to give my teacher she said, “Well, just say $25,000.” I got the distinct impression that was just a figure she picked out of the air and didn’t really reflect the correct amount, either because she didn’t know for sure how much Daddy took as salary out of his business or else didn’t want to reveal the correct amount. Looking at it from today’s perspective $25,000 would be the same as $500,000! No wonder she felt it wasn’t anyone’s business!

1937

This year the copier machine (also known as the photocopier) was invented by Chester Carlson. _{https://deanofficesolutions.com/the-brief-history-of-copy-machines}

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned thirty-seven while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

JANUARY 20 – Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in for his second term as President of the United States.

MAY – The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco was officially opened. _{http://www.fsmitha.com/time/1937.htm}

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their fifteenth wedding anniversary.

There were many trips into Chicago with Mother and usually Aunt Olga. When it was only Mother and me, she would sometimes sing as we were driving along.

Although singing wasn’t one of her strong points, I loved to listen to her. Two of her favorites were:

My Alice Blue Gown

In my sweet little Alice blue gown

 When I first wandered down into town

 I was both proud and shy as I met every eye

 In many shop windows I passed walking by.

 Then in manner of fashion I’d frown

 And the world seemed to smile all around.

 In a flurry I wore it; I’ll always adore it!

 My sweet little Alice blue gown.

which was written for the daughter, Alice, of President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, and:

It’s A Sin To Tell A Lie

Be sure it’s true when you say I love you.

It’s a sin to tell a lie.

Millions of hearts have been broken

 Just because these words were spoken.

 I love you. Yes, I do. I love you.

If you break my heart I’ll die.

So be sure it’s true when you say I love you.

 It’s a sin to tell a lie!

 As I recall, in the early years this was before cars had radios although I do remember listening to our favorite Sunday night shows on the car radio while driving home from East Troy, by the time I was eleven or twelve, I think.

The cars did have rear view mirrors though. Because of my tendency to car sickness from the side to side swaying of the car, I would sit in the back seat and rock forward and backward in an effort to counteract the motion. Mother would be looking straight ahead while driving, but would say to me, “Nancy, stop rocking!” When I asked her how she knew that I was, she answered, “I have eyes in the back of my head!” Of course, I couldn’t see any, and when I was little thought maybe they were hidden by her curly hair.

Many times our trips to Chicago would begin with the movie at the Chicago Theater. Grandpa Smith’s company, Manton and Smith, had installed the ornamental brass decorations and fixtures in this theater, and it is still considered the leading movie theater in that city, although it has probably been redecorated and refurbished more than once since the 1940s …

At the theater we always sat in the Loge, or Mezzanine, located beneath the balcony, and which had boxes holding eight or ten individual seats (we always sat 5th row center. These were considered the best main floor seats in the house and could be purchased from “scalpers” who bought them at the ticket offices and then sold them at a premium to those who were willing to pay the price). We would go to the first showing of the day, so before the lights dimmed there would be someone playing the Wurlitzer organ. I don’t think there was more than one feature film, but there would be previews of coming films, a comedy, a cartoon after Mickey Mouse made his debut in 1928, then half of the movie. After a short intermission there would be a stage show, singers, dancers, acrobats, comedians, a variety of acts. Then the second half of the movie and more organ music as you left the theater. This would be followed by lunch at Marshall Fields and some shopping.

Before she was married Aunt Olga had worked as a “shop girl” at Marshall Fields so she knew where everything was located on the ten or twelve stories of this fabulous store. I wasn’t too excited about the shopping, but Mother usually saw to it that we stopped in the book department before leaving for home.

I still get hungry once in a while for a “Field’s Special” sandwich which consisted of a sizable piece of rye or pumpernickel bread, presented open-face with lettuce, sliced chicken, Swiss cheese, bacon, sliced eggs and tomatoes, covered with thousand island dressing, and garnished with olives. Total calories not disclosed!

Another place Mother, Aunt Olga, and I would go would be to the Medina Athletic Club which was located on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago – a many storied building which had a women’s floor with a swimming pool, exercise room, steam and massage room, etc. All of this was pretty boring for me so while Mother and Aunt Olga were swimming, sitting in steam cabinets with their heads sticking out of the top, and getting massages, I would read, or if someone was bowling in the alleys down the hall, would sit in the back of the room and watch.

A few other things we did were a lunch at the famous Palmer House Hotel with a program by the popular pianist/comedian, Victor Borge, and reserved seat, first-run showings of Gone With the Wind and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Once in a while we went to the matinee of a play or musical which were supposed to appeal more to women. I remember one musical called Flower Drum Song which was based on a Chinese fantasy which I loved, but Mother and Aunt Olga snickered through, much to my embarrassment! Marshall Fields also had a suburban store in Oak Park which was nearer to home and we would sometimes go there for shopping and lunch at a unique restaurant called “Robin Hood’s Barn” which served hamburgers, french fries, chicken and fish in baskets, and featured a variety of ice cream desserts. Mother and Aunt Olga were always ready to try new places!

And then there were the evenings Daddy took Mother and me to the theater. We would meet him at a restaurant for dinner and then go to one of the outstanding stage presentations featuring one of the leading legitimate theater stars of the day. I didn’t keep stage bills of all the wonderful plays and musicals Daddy took us to, but … three of my favorites [were]: Maurice Evans in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Ruth Chatterton in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion which was later made into the stage musical and movie, “My Fair Lady”; and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town which several years later I was privileged to act in during my senior year in college.

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned sixty-one while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

For a long time we had a hand-cranked ice cream freezer which Daddy would give us turns cranking until it got too stiff for us, then he took over. That was the only contribution he ever made to anything happening in the kitchen. Mother made the most delicious ice cream, making a custard of whipping cream, eggs, sugar and flavoring – multi-caloried – rich, rich, rich! Later we got an electric mixer which wasn’t as much fun – the ice cream was just as good though!

1938

Sometime this year Lam’s sister Genna (65) moved back to Miami, Florida to help their younger sister Mabel (58) care for their mother Ellen Nancy Pitts Allen. In 1938 Ellen turned 99 years old. That year Nancy would turn 15, Shelton 13, and Evelyn 11 and they were no longer in need of a nanny. On top of this, and I say this as a grandmother myself, Genna’s third son, Frederick and his wife Gladys, who lived in Palm Beach, just 70 miles or so from Miami, had just had their third child. So Genna was moving closer to three of her own grandchild who were six, three and one.

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned thirty-eight while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

Mother always paid the household bills in cash and in person, I don’t think she had a checking account in the local DuPage County Bank. She had charge accounts at the grocery/meat market, the drug store, and other local stores as well as at Marshall Fields in Chicago, all of which had to be paid monthly. There were no credit cards or revolving charge accounts (payable over a period of months) didn’t become the thing at department stores until the early 1960s … Utility, doctor, dentist and garbage bills came to the house, but bills from the country and athletic clubs went to Daddy’s office which he paid from an account he had at the same bank in Chicago where he had his business accounts. I have no idea whether there was a mortgage on the house, but I’m pretty sure Daddy paid cash for the cars.

Daddy gave Mother a set amount of cash each week. Paying the bills in person meant a lot of running around, of course, so by the time I was 10 or 11 she used to take me with her and she would drive from place to place and I would run in to pay the bills. The garbage collector ran his business from his home; his wife did the bookkeeping and wrote out the bills by hand. They lived outside the city limits in what had been a farmhouse. There was a long gravel drive from the road to the house and there was a vegetable garden, some chickens and a couple of cows. Mother would take the money to the front door where the wife would take it from her there, never inviting Mother to come in. It wasn’t until I started doing the running for Mother that I realized she gave the garbage collector’s family an extra $10.00 at Christmas; that would be about $200 today [year 2000]. I remember at that time that Mother said Daddy gave her $100, in cash, a week with which to pay all these bills (which today [year 2000] would be in the neighborhood of $2,000 a week!) … I won’t go into the ramifications of the inflated American dollar, but if you read about someone having an estate of millions of dollars in the 1930s, multiply the amount by 20 for an estimated value in the year 2000 dollars.

Before World War II most women living in the suburbs were married, with children and did not work. Woman’s Exchanges were started all over the country as places where women could take their crafts, needlework, quilts, knit and crocheted afghans, sweaters, caps, mittens, baked goods – everything that was considered of interest to women, and offer them for sale or exchange them for some other item which appealed to them. As the depression deepened many women sold family heirloom items like the cut-glass items which Mother bought at the Glen Ellyn Women’s exchange for about $60.00 which would be worth many times that today if Evie and I didn’t now consider them heirlooms of our family … I recently read an article in Smithsonian Magazine about these shops which said that they continued to be operating in small towns in rural areas until the mid-1980s, but that by the year 2000 there were only 27 still in existence.

Mother went to the Woman’s Exchange mainly to get a home-baked pie or cake to serve at a bridge party or to rent jig-saw puzzles which we had going most of the time and worked on while listening to the radio in the evenings. I liked to go with her because there were all kinds of interesting things to look at and usually different things every time we went.

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their sixteenth wedding anniversary.

MID YEAR – “The last unpaved section of Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica” California was finally paved in Oldham County, Texas. _{https://www.legendsofamerica.com/66-timeline/}

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned sixty-two while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

Daddy was in the direct mail advertising business, at one time the President of the Chicago chapter of the national Direct Mail Advertising Association, and occasionally had to make trips out of town for business meetings.

Daddy commuted on the Chicago Northwestern steam engine trains and either walked or took a taxi to his office which was not too far from the Chicago terminal.

Dad’s office was on the fringes of the City of Chicago. Small, noisy printing shops were not allowed in the Loop (the CHICAGO TRIBUNE was printed in the depths underneath the Tribune Tower on North Michigan Avenue.) The neighborhood was known as “skid row”, meaning the part of town where the down-and-out lived, with many bars, cheap hotels, and bums and drunks sleeping in the doorways and alleys. It wasn’t a particularly violent section of town but unsavory. If we were going to meet Daddy for lunch or dinner, or just go to his office for a visit, he wouldn’t let us drive into that area. We would park near the Loop and take a taxi to his office, or he would meet us at a restaurant. (From one of the places we parked near the Chicago Theater we had to walk past a nightclub which Mother said was owned by the Mafia and was often mentioned in the newspapers as a hangout for Al Capone and other “Mob” leaders. Anyway, we walked by it in the daytime when it was closed, so as far as I know I never saw a Chicago gangster!)

Daddy’s building had a single elevator run by an elderly man ([whose name was]“Nappy” for Napoleon), and his business, The L. S. Allen Company, took up the whole of one of the upper floors. There were linotype and other printing machines, but because of the specialized type of printing he was required to do like brochures with illustrations and printing which did not cover an entire line or column, he retained a person who could set type by hand. I was fascinated watching this man [Frank J. Wirkus] sitting in front of a board hung on the wall which had many small cubbyholes with metal letters in each, capitals and lower case in various styles. He had access to many sizes of metal containers from which he could select the proper size for what was to be printed, and following a typewritten copy would rapidly select the letters, and place them, upside-down, into the metal container. I was only a young girl when I saw this being done so can’t really describe it properly, but I was certainly impressed with how fast he worked! He was Polish and I believe was the Shop Manager.

Dad also had an Office Comptroller named Archie Kelsey and a Secretary whose name was [Aurella A. Brower]. Both Archie and [Aurella] had Underwood typewriters, the finger-pounded ones, not electric, but the most fascinating machine was Dad’s Edison dictating machine, with the wax cylinder and a long speaking tube which he would show me how to talk into and then play back to hear my voice. I suppose the Secretary had a machine to play back the cylinder, but if she did, she never showed me how it worked.

There were no copy machines then; carbon paper copies were the thing (but there was a nonelectric machine called a Mimeograph. You placed a typed legal-sized form over the drum which had been primed with ink, then hand-cranked the drum to print as many copies as you needed.). Talk about primitive!! (and if anyone is reading this in 2O5O and beyond, what I am using to put together this project will, I’m sure, seem pretty primitive to you!) Most schools had this type of contraption for printing notices, letters, etc. Later models were electric.

        An Edison Dictaphone                                    A hand-cranked mimeograph machine

[Lam spent so much time with paper Shelton would later say that he could hold a large stack of paper in his hand and tell down to the page how many pieces were there.]

(I failed to mention who wrote the copy for the brochures; Daddy probably wrote those at the office following suggestions from the clients. I know that the layouts were done at Dad’s office.)

There are several things I remember about Dad’s Polish employee [Frank J. Wirkus], one of them being that he was the first person I met who had a foreign accent. I guess I have always been a person who asked a lot of questions. I still do. But I remember asking Daddy why he talked funny. Learning that there were places where people looked, talked and even dressed differently than we did, began my longing to see those places for myself.

Another was when Mother and Daddy had been invited to his daughter’s wedding. Unfortunately, Daddy had caught whooping cough from either Shelton or Evelyn and was unable to go but felt the family should be represented and I was elected to go with Mother in his place. The ceremony was held in a Catholic church in a Polish neighborhood in Chicago, which, of course, was another first for me, and the reception was in the upper floor of a Polish club, with a polka band for dancing and what seemed like tons of food as well as wine, which I had never been around. Mother and I were treated with great deference as the boss’s wife and daughter and were seated at the table with the bride’s immediate family and their young priest who had performed the ceremony …We stayed until the bride and groom cut the cake, then were escorted to our car by the bride’s father. An extraordinary memory!

And this is a story Evie told to me. Several years ago when Mother was living here in Littleton with Evie’s family, they were talking about Glen Ellyn and Evie revealed to Mother that she and Shelton used to peek through the railing at the head of the stairs and listen to the adult conversations when there was a party going on downstairs. She then told Mother about one incident which they had overheard. One year Mother and Dad had given an open house type of party during the holiday season and had invited not only their personal friends but all the neighbors, and Daddy’s banker as well as his office staff including [Frank Wirkus] his Polish Shop Manager. The banker and his wife were standing at the bottom of the stairs when the Polish man and wife were welcomed at the door by Daddy, who introduced the Shop Manager to the Banker. Daddy stayed near the front hall to welcome any other newcomers and the Banker said to him, “Who invited that man with the accent?” Daddy said, “He’s a member of my staff. I invited him,” to which the Banker said, “l don’t understand why anyone would invite a person like that to their home.” Daddy responded, “He’s been a loyal employee,” and walked away. Evie said Mother then looked at her, paused a moment and then said, “Yes, and the following week your Dad changed banks!”

Daddy was a very kind, patient, perceptive, understanding and reasonable man. At different times in my life it was Daddy who took me aside and quietly listened when I started to ask questions about Santa Claus, what happened to people’s money when the local bank closed during the depression, why didn’t Mother want me to be a nurse, why couldn’t I be an actress and singer like Jeanette MacDonald, why did he want to teach Shelton about his business instead of me…???…then quietly gave me an understandable and reasonable answer. I didn’t always agree with him, but accepted his answers and decisions at the time. I have, however, sometimes wondered what my life would have been like if at some point I had ignored his direction and pursued a course from which he had steered me.

It was Daddy who introduced me to the theater, both dramatic and musical. He took me to Shakespeare’s Hamlet when I was only nine! It was Daddy who taught me to appreciate poetry and took me to hear readings by poets when they included Glen Ellyn on their tour agendas, and helped me with the interpretation of the little-girl poetry I was learning to recite at my elocution lessons. As I grew older it was Daddy who listened with me to symphonies and operas on records or on the radio, sometimes shedding tears with me at the beauty of the music. He had a beautiful, natural singing voice. I remember him singing around the house, while shaving, taking a bath – songs like “When It’s Springtime in the Rockies”:

When It’s Springtime in the Rockies

I’ll be coming back to you.

Little sweetheart of the mountains

With your bonnie eyes so blue.

Once again I’ll say I love you

While the birds sing all the day.

When it’s Springtime in the Rockies

In the Rockies far away.

He was a romantic, an inquisitive scholar of many interests (always had his nose in a book), a man of impeccable taste and values, a marvelous host, a generous and loyal friend, slow to anger, easily led to laughter, and just as easily led to tears of compassion. However, he was completely unimaginative when it came to tending the yard and garden, redecorating the house, repairing household appliances. (He left all of those things to Mother), but was an astute and successful businessman, respected by his business associates and his clients. I was my father’s daughter, and loved him deeply.

1939

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned thirty-nine while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their seventeenth wedding anniversary.

SUMMER – The following is the story of a trip Lam and Alice took Nancy on just before she turned 16. Shelton would have been almost 14 and Evelyn 12. The new car that Lam had purchased was only a four-seater so didn’t have room for all three kids. (It was an interesting decision to purchase a car that would not seat the five members of one’s family, unless he knew he was going to give it to Nancy when she got her driver’s license shortly thereafter.) On the return trip through the southern States, the three would travel on the recently fully-paved Route 66.

The summer I turned 16 … Daddy, Mother and I drove to San Francisco for the World’s Fair. That fair played second fiddle to the one held in 1939 and 1940 in New York City, but it was the first trip that any of the family had traveled all the way to the west coast. We drove on what is nostalgically remembered as Route 66, the first two lane paved highway from the mid-west to California.* No superhighway by any means – only intermittent roadside gasoline stations, some with a few wooden cabins set back from the road, but no fancy motels with restaurants and swimming pools. We stayed in hotels in the cities we passed through.

Daddy had just bought a Buick coupe with a rather different interior. There was no full length back seat but two small jump seats which could be folded up against the sides to make room for luggage or whatever. The car did have a trunk also, so I never did quite understand the reason for the design. I don’t think I ever saw another one like it, so I don’t think it was a big seller. Anyway, that little car became almost like mine once I got my driver’s license. Mother and Daddy rode in the front seat and I made do on one or the other of the jump seats.

Daddy also bought a Leica, the state of the art camera of the day, which made colored slides instead of negatives for prints. For that reason all we have of that trip were slides. This picture of Mother and Dad at Grand Canyon was printed from the slide some time later.

Alice Smith Allen (39) and Lambeth Shelton Allen, Senior (63) at the Grand Canyon in 1939 [twenty years after it became a National Park].

The first stop on this tour was on the west slope of the Rocky Mountains, Cedaredge, Colorado, [about 1,245 miles from Glen Ellyn] to visit Daddy’s older sister, Roberta Briggs [75]. She was by then a widow and lived with her son, Frank [39], and his wife [Katherine Mountjoy Briggs, 35 – Frank and Katherine never had children]. That is, she lived on the same piece of property where she had lived with her husband who had been a minister. Although her son had built a nice house on the property and lived there with his wife, Aunt Roberta preferred continuing to live in the old family home – outhouse, well water, kitchen pump and all! And because that old house was much more fascinating than the new modern, brick one, I asked if I could sleep in Aunt Roberta’s house with her. She was delighted that her niece reflected her own pioneering spirit! There were two bedrooms. Hers had been fixed up more comfortably for her, but the “spare” room, where I slept, still had the old wall paper on the walls, (and in some spots some old gold mine stock certificates), a brass bed, an old fashioned bureau with a wash basin and pitcher on top, and rag, hooked rugs on the floor. Frank’s wife insisted we come to the “big” house for meals, but one morning Aunt Roberta cooked breakfast for me on the old iron, wood-burning stove and told me stories about the primitive life she lived with her family in the earlier frontier days! How I wish I had written those stories down! She would have been born only a few years after the Civil War (around 1872) so was about 67 years old! What fun she was!

[Roberta Richardson Allen Briggs was actually born in 1864, the year before the Civil War ended, per her tombstone and the U.S. Censuses. She was 75 years old at the time of this visit and lived to be 86.]

We were only there two, maybe three, days, and mostly it was talk and reminiscing, but I definitely remember one thing! Back at Uncle Ed’s in Wisconsin, milk was purchased from the local dairy farmers, unpasteurized. Wisconsin was, and still is, one of the biggest dairy states. When cousin Frank Briggs asked me if I ever drank unpasteurized milk I told him that I had. So at the next meal there was a glass sitting at my place at the dinner table. I took a large sip – and it was still warm from the cow! I spluttered and Frank thought that was very, very funny!

Then we went to Salt Lake City [about 337 miles from Cedaredge]. Our hotel was just across the street from the temple, which non-Mormons are not allowed to visit. However, we were permitted to enter the tabernacle and listen to the playing of the enormous organ, to demonstrate the acoustics of the building.

Then across Nevada through Reno [about 518 miles from Salt Lake City], which at that time was a little hick town just beginning to spread its wings by introducing gambling to the state. Las Vegas has taken first place as the gambling mecca in Nevada today, a place I have had little desire to see. Traveling on westward we arrived in San Francisco [about 218 miles from Reno, Nevada] and the world’s fair. The fair was interesting, of course, but more interesting to me were the sights which had been reproduced in the movie “San Francisco”, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Clark Gable which had shown Nob Hill, the site of 1906s mansions of the wealthy, fall to ruin in the great earthquake which destroyed that city in that year. Also across the bay was the fabulous San Francisco Bay Bridge and out in the Pacific Ocean the federal prison, Alcatraz [which was still functioning as a federal prison until 1963].

We stayed at the Saint Francis Hotel in downtown San Francisco where I had my first serving of hash brown potatoes with my eggs and bacon for breakfast and a dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf where I had my first taste of lobster. A beautiful city had risen out of that earthquake and fire which had brought it to its knees 33 years before; but had not smothered its spirit.

Farther south was Salinas, California, where Ernest Briggs [44, an artist who never married], Aunt Roberta’s older son, lived. He showed us the sights and took us to a real western rodeo – another first for me. Then down to Los Angeles where we visited Pasadena, and then an exciting boat ride over to Santa Catalina Island, a resort and vacation paradise.

Heading east towards home we traveled through Arizona and saw the Painted Desert and stayed at the lodge at Grand Canyon [possibly the Bright Angel Lodge which opened in 1935] where I was in awe of the Indian decorations, jewelry, souvenirs, western-style furniture, and of the vastness of the canyon. The Colorado River, which had been responsible for forming this incredible sight over an unimaginable number of years, was still flowing through it far below us. You could get to the bottom on mule by way of a treacherous trail which, of course, we didn’t try!

[Eight-four years later, in 2023, three of the grandchildren of Lam and Alice, Sharon (63), Nathan (58), and Ruth (61), would hike in one day into the Grand Canyon to the Colorado River and back on those “treacherous” trails!]

While traveling through Arizona we stopped in one town so that Daddy could wire flowers to Grandmother Allen in Florida for her 100th birthday. The girl who took the order said that was the first time she would wire flowers to anyone 100 years old!

From Arizona we took the southern route home across the Texas Panhandle and Oklahoma, a part of the country which had been almost completely devastated by the drought and dust storms which had carried away most of the topsoil [five years earlier].

[In the 1890s, when Lam was a schoolboy, his family lived in the panhandle of Oklahoma before it became a State.]

A book by John Steinbeck entitled “The Grapes of Wrath” told the tragic story which was later made into a movie. (My protective Mother tried to hide that book, which she and Daddy had been reading, from me, but I was determined I would see what it was about and would read it when she was away from the house, always putting it back exactly where I had found it.) As we drove along we could see the deserted farms and towns, the barren fields, dead trees and carcasses of starved animals. This natural disaster brought about new laws and new methods of soil preservation and crop rotation which have helped to curtail this type of erosion from happening again. It was a real relief, as we got closer to Illinois, to see green fields and trees.

Later in her memoirs, Nancy added the following corrections to the above story:

(Regarding our trip to California in 1939 and Route 66. I said that was the route we took going west; actually it was the southern route we took going home. [Per an article in] the November 2003 Smithsonian Magazine … the first interstate highway, Route 66, which ran through 8 States, beginning in Illinois (North Avenue as it passed by Glen Ellyn) to St. Louis, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas Panhandle, New Mexico, Arizona (with side trip to Grand Canyon), southern Nevada (where we stopped to see the recently built Hoover Dam and Lake Mead) and California to Los Angeles. Going out west, before visiting Aunt Roberta on the western slope of the Rockies, we drove up to Estes Park, Colorado, and stayed two nights at the Stanley Hotel where Mother and Dad had been on their honeymoon seventeen years before. AND, the name of the bridge over San Francisco Bay is called Golden Gate Bridge! [which had just been completed two years prior.])

JULY 25 – Lam’s mother Ellen died in Miami, Florida at the age of 100 years and seven days.

Evelyn and Shelton had been staying in East Troy while we were on this trip. When we called up to see how everything was, Uncle Ed gave us the sad news that Grandmother Allen had died, just one week after her 100th birthday. Dad called Aunt Mabel who told him they had been holding the body until he could get there for the funeral so he immediately made arrangements to fly to Miami. Commercial flying was still in its fairly primitive stages at that time. I remember going out to the small Chicago airport with Poppy before he died to watch the planes take off and land. The terminal building was not much bigger than a large house with only 3 or 4 ticket windows and you had to walk out to the two propeller (not jet) planes parked on the ground – not straight but on a slant – the front two wheels higher than the single wheel in back. When you took your seat you were leaning back and didn’t sit up straight until the plane was airborne. We took Daddy to the airport and Mother and I waited up until we finally got a telephone call from him that he had arrived safely. I remember the neighbors were having a party on their porch that evening, and their chatter and laughter upset Mother, she was so nervous about Daddy being up in the air such a long time between Chicago and Miami. I can’t tell you exactly how long the flight was, but it was several hours – certainly not the few hours it would take today.

When Daddy came home we were there to meet him, but for some reason he was the last person off the plane. Mother, of course, was getting frantic as one after another person deplaned before him. When he finally came walking towards us he was still trying to get his ears unplugged – the planes were not pressurized, so the ear and sinus pressure could be uncomfortable. Anyway, we had him safely back at last. After a brief rest at home they took Shelton and Evelyn to the New York World’s Fair and I stayed with Alice up in East Troy.

SEPTEMBER 3 – WORLD WAR II – Britain and France declared war on Germany after Hitler’s troops had invaded Poland two days prior thus beginning the conflicts of World War II nearly twenty-one years after the first World War ended. The U.S. would not enter this war until over two years later. _{https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/world-war-ii-history}

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned sixty-three while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

1940

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned forty while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

APRIL 19 – The U.S. Census recorded Lambeth S. Allen (61, head, had completed though four years of high school and owned an advertising firm), Alice Allen (40, wife, had completed through four years of high school), Nancy Allen (14, daughter, had completed two years of high school), Shelton Allen (13, son, had completed eighth grade), and Evelyn Allen (12, daughter, had completed seventh grade) living at 638 Lenox Road in the village of Glen Ellyn, DuPage, Illinois.

SPRING – A crisis arose with Lam’s youngest sister Mabel who had cared for their mother her entire adult life. The fact that their mother had died the past July, and perhaps also because she herself had turned sixty years old on the 22^nd of March, may have been contributing factors to the mental breakdown that occurred. 

Around this time Daddy was notified that Aunt Mabel was ill and in the hospital. Granny [Alice’s mother who was 69] came down from East Troy to stay with us while Mother and Daddy went to Florida to see her. When they came home they brought her with them to live with us. She was in what today would be called a state of deep depression, with some mental delusions about God’s love for her. As the youngest daughter in the family, it had been determined that she was the one to be responsible for the care of her aging father and mother, a “duty” which had prevented her from marrying although she was said to have been the most attractive of all the sisters. I was aware of her condition but as an active high school junior paid little attention to her presence in the house. Evie tells me that she and Shelton were deeply affected by her mood swings, were somewhat afraid of her and tried to stay out of her way as much as possible.

[In the 1935 Florida Census Mabel had been living with her mother Ellen Nancy in the house Lam bought for them at 2318 NW 23^rd Court in Miami, Florida. Ellen died on 25 July, 1939. The 1940 U.S. Census showed Mabel and Genna living together in the house that Lam had purchased in Miami. The above account in Nancy’s memoirs must have taken place sometime after the U.S. Census of April of 1940.]

MAY 15 – NYLON STOCKINGS GO ON SALE – “Nylon stockings made their grand debut in a splashy display at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. By the time the stockings were released for sale to the public on May 15, 1940 demand was so high that women flocked to stores by the thousands. Four million pairs sold out in four days.” _{https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-nylon-stockings-changed-world-180955219/}  Nancy later recounted in her memoirs: “When the first nylon stockings went on sale, women gladly paid $1.15 a pair, twice the price of silk stockings.”

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their eighteenth wedding anniversary.

Mother was afraid of thunderstorms and as soon as one of those mid-western boomers got up steam, she would make the rounds to close all the windows. Summertime thunderstorms usually followed a blistering hot day, and before the days of air-conditioning about the only relief from the heat was rain. This time, when Mother came into my room I said, “Mother, please don’t close the windows. I like the rain; I’m writing a poem about it!” She stopped at the foot of the bed long enough to give me an “l don’t understand this girl!” look, then said she would leave the side window open, but the wind was blowing rain into the room from the front window, and she closed that. I wouldn’t be surprised if I opened it again after she had gone downstairs. But probably not.

[I remember my father telling us that his mother made an effort to not let on that she was afraid of thunderstorms so that her children wouldn’t be afraid as she was.]

After Aunt Genna [had gone] back to Miami to help take care of Grandma Allen, Mother hired a lady named Mrs. Quarterman. Everyone called her “Quartie” and really loved her. She had an English accent, was deeply religious and went around the house singing hymns. She was always cheerful, and while working liked to listen to a radio program which featured a man named “Mr. Anthony” who listened to people’s troubles and gave them advice. When we asked her why she liked to listen to that program she said, “When I hear how terrible other peoples’ troubles are, I don’t think I have it so bad.”

One day while Quartie was at the house, Mother had taken her bath in preparation for her afternoon activity and came down the stairs in her robe to get her girdle which was hanging on the line in the basement. The area around Chicago was high humidity because of Lake Michigan and heavy rainfalls, and sometimes the basement door would swell just enough so that it was hard to open. When Mother tried to open the door oh, woe! it stuck! No matter how hard she pulled, it simply wouldn’t budge! She kicked it, she struggled in vain, trying to shake it loose, she yelled at it!

Meanwhile, Shelton and I, maybe all three of us, were standing around the corner, knowing we didn’t dare get caught laughing, and Quartie was standing in the kitchen saying, “Now, Alice, don’t get so excited! Now, Alice, dear. Oh, Alice, love!!” We had never seen Mother so angry. She did eventually get it open, I think by running a knife along the stuck edge until it separated. The next day she bought a plane, took the door down and shaved enough of the top so that, as far as I remember anyway, that door never stuck again!

[Although only knowing this story from Aunt Nancy’s memoirs, every time I think of it I laugh out loud!]

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned sixty-four while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

Lam by his car.

1941

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned forty-one while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

Alice Julia Smith Allen, forty-one years old

JANUARY 20 – Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in for his third term as President of the United States.

FEBRUARY 12 – PENICILLIN – “The first person to receive penicillin was (Albert Alexander) an Oxford (England) policeman who was exhibiting a serious infection with abscesses throughout his body. The administration of penicillin resulted in a startling improvement in his condition after 24 hours. The meager supply ran out before the policeman could be fully treated, however, and he died a few weeks later.” _{https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5403050/}

SPRING – The mental condition of Lam’s youngest sister Mabel, who had been living with them for about a year, continued to deteriorate.

She told Mother and Daddy that she felt she might do some harm to the younger children [Shelton, 15, and Evelyn, 14] and Daddy admitted her to a private mental hospital in Elgin, Illinois. This removed the pall from the house, but submitted Mother and Daddy to visits to check on her condition; she was given periodic electric shock treatments which a few years later were banned, but are now beginning to reappear on the psychiatric care scene. None of us children were ever taken into see her and after awhile Mother didn’t go in either. We would sit in the car and after Daddy’s visit we would go to Medinah or some other nice place for dinner.

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their nineteenth wedding anniversary.

[The following narrative from Nancy’s memoirs, which makes up the bulk of the chronology through the next several years, revolves around decisions Lam and Alice’s oldest daughter was making regarding love, marriage, religion, career choices and life in general and how they helped influence the direction of their daughter’s life. Alice’s niece, Alice Smith, the daughter of her brother Edward, played a prominent role in this narrative which tells the story of how the people I would know as “Uncle” John and “Auntie” Allie Rogers (although “Auntie” Allie was actually our father’s cousin) came to be married. Also, during this time, the United States became involved in World War II and the narrative shows how everyday life for them, as well as for the first love of their daughter, was affected by it.]

[Cousin] Alice was the “Belle of the Ball” of her small town high school [East Troy, Wisconsin]  – sang in the choir, played in the band, had the lead in the senior class play, was cute, funny and perky and very popular with the boys. [In the Spring] She had accepted an invitation to the prom from a Catholic boy named Cobby Chart who she had never before dated.

A few months later Alice and Cobby were still dating when she graduated from high school in June.

JULY –

Every year Uncle Ed took his entire family to Northern Wisconsin for two weeks of fishing. They always went to the same place, rented a cabin, and just let the kids have a ball fishing, swimming, picnicking. (The only person who didn’t care for it much was Aunt Evelyn who still had to do the cooking, housekeeping and washing under vastly more primitive conditions than those at home.) Alice had turned 17 in January of 1941 and was dating Cobby who had taken her to the prom so she wasn’t too keen on going either, but Uncle Ed insisted since she was going away to college in September and this might be the last time all the family would take this vacation together. The only person who didn’t go on these “vacations” was Granny Smith [69], who during the past year had had a mild stroke and they didn’t want to leave her home alone. So on the 5th of July I drove to East Troy to stay with Granny. During the daytime I read or sat on Uncle Ed’s porch with the window opened to the living room and listened to his opera records. (In East Troy no one locked their doors – day or night.) My favorite was the original “Aida”! … My birthday present that year was that I was to come back for a two week visit with Alice in August. Alice had been accepted for her freshman year at Wheaton College … I was very much enthralled with the idea of becoming a professional singer and decided to spend the year by taking some music courses at Wheaton College while continuing an extended line of voice study with Greta Allum which would include intense training in French, Italian and German language vocal interpretation. I would also continue with piano toward a final recital on that instrument. I would continue to live at home and had daily access to that little Buick [the coup in which Lam, Alice and Nancy had taken the trip to San Francisco in 1939] for running back and forth to the college, to Greta’s and to East Troy with Alice.

AUGUST –

I returned to East Troy for my vacation, which, as it turned out, was extended to three weeks because of the alumni concert. In the summer months the high school band, including any former band members who happened to be in town, put on concerts in the park on Wednesday nights. The first Wednesday, which happened to be my birthday, I went to the park with Alice and sat on a park bench while she played her flute with the band. At the intermission we were walking around the park and as we passed by the bandstand a voice called down, “Hey, Smith, who’s that you’re walking with?” Alice told him who I was and he said, “Wait up. I’m coming down. I want to meet her!” While waiting for him Alice told me his name, Vic Swartz [Schwartz], and that he was home for the summer from his freshman year at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Alice introduced us and explained to him that I was visiting for a couple of weeks. He wanted to know how much longer that would be and then asked Alice, “You’re dating Cobby Chart aren’t you? I’ll give him a call and see if we can all get together this weekend.” Sure enough, on Saturday night we had dates with Vic and Cobby. Cobby was driving so Vic asked me lots of questions – did I have a boyfriend in Glen Ellyn – I was wearing the National Honor Society pin which came with my membership and he wanted to know if that was a fraternity pin – was I going away to college? We went to a movie and he had his arm around me, then held my hand when we got back in the car and asked me for a date after the band concert on the next Wednesday night. I really liked him, he was fun to be with, attentive and flattering. I had never been with a boy who affected me the way he did and was excited about seeing him again.

(I forgot to mention that Aunt Evelyn learned that I liked her homemade applesauce and always made a big batch when I was there for visits. These were depression years and the farm boys we were dating didn’t often have a lot of money for treats, thus if they took us to a movie, which cost about 25 cents, a fountain Coca Cola was usually it. When we got home, Alice and I would look forward to a piece of buttered toast (homemade too) with a dish of Aunt Evelyn’s applesauce.)

For the rest of the summer in East Troy Nancy dated Vic and Alice dated Cobby, but then it was time to go to their respective colleges. Vic and Cobby to Marquette and Nancy and Alice to Wheaton. But before Alice left her father had had a conversation with her about Cobby.

Alice told me that as she seemed to be spending more time with Cobby Uncle Ed had gotten pretty upset. Cobby and Vic were Catholic; Marquette was one of the leading Catholic schools in the middle west, founded by the Jesuit Missionary Brothers. Aunt Evelyn came from a basic fundamentalist Christian family, attending a severe Baptist church in Genoa City but also adhering to the teachings of the current evangelist at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, who had a “fire and brimstone” kind of message, broadcast weekly. That message included the belief that the Catholic Pope was the Devil and that all Catholics were going to hell! Uncle Ed had been converted to this branch of Christian belief. (Unfortunately, all Catholics were taught to believe that all deviants from the Catholic Church – in other words all Protestants – were damned!) Quite a stand-off!

Aunt Evelyn was the more lenient of Alice’s parents, however, because she said that as a young girl they were never allowed to have any fun. Everything was church. They couldn’t have dates, go to dances, hayrack rides, mixed parties. She wanted her girls to enjoy being young before they married and had to settle down to the drudgery that housework was in those days. And Alice had been able to convince her father that she wasn’t getting serious about Cobby, that he would be going away to Marquette in September just as she was going away to Wheaton at the same time, and that they wouldn’t be seeing each other much after that. Both Uncle Ed and Aunt Evelyn thought that marrying a Catholic would be a disastrous sin, however!

I enrolled for three classes at Wheaton College: Keyboard Harmony, Ear Training and Music Appreciation. Part of the enrollment process included the schools request that you sign a pledge that, among other things, you would not smoke or drink, and that you wouldn’t attend any movies. I had no trouble with the no smoking or drinking, but I was an avid movie goer and wasn’t going to say I wouldn’t go when I knew that I would. The person requesting that I sign knew I was only a part time student and that I would be living at home. She saw me hesitate after reading the pledge and said, “Well, is there something about your home life that would keep you from keeping this pledge?” I replied, “l have a perfectly wonderful home life, but I object to making a blanket pledge like this.” Then I asked her if I didn’t sign would I be banned from attending classes there. She told me I would not, but her look indicated that I was definitely in need of saving.

Alice and I were invited to Genoa City one weekend for a going away party for John Rogers who had enlisted in the Air Force. He had been taking private flying lessons for many years and worked on the Gifford [Alice’s maternal grandparents] farm. His folks were best friends of Grandpa and Grandma Gifford, belonged to the same church and were followers of the Moody Bible Institute Ministry.

OCTOBER 6 –

Out of the blue, Alice got a letter from John Rogers, who was in training somewhere in Texas, practically asking her to marry him. She was flabbergasted saying she didn’t know what to say to him! She had known him for some time because he worked as the hand on Grandpa Gifford’s farm, but she had never had a date with him. Anyway, he was 25 years old; she was only 17.

Letters between Vic and Nancy were also exchanged.

I had felt sure that after I had gone home and Vic was back at Marquette that we would both mark it up as a sweet summer romance, but he seemed determined to keep it alive, and I didn’t do anything to discourage him.

OCTOBER 18 – Nancy and Alice met up with Vic and Cobby first in East Troy for the high school homecoming game and then on to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to see the first Marquette home football game of the season.

Alice and I said afterwards it was the greatest date we had ever been on. East Troy lost the game, but we weren’t really paying an awful lot of attention to it anyway. Then we drove to Milwaukee and stopped at one of the college hangouts for hamburgers and cokes. There was a fine mist falling by the time the game started and it was pretty cold, but the guys had each brought a blanket from their dorm rooms which we wrapped around our laps and legs and didn’t all that much mind snuggling close together in the stands. The Marquette team … won 33-7 over Kansas University – and after a stop for a hot cup of coffee – and parking in front of Alice’s house to let those inside know we were safely home, Guess what? More kisses!

Vic and Cobby came over Sunday afternoon, we took some pictures and then [Alice and Nancy} drove back to Wheaton with plans to see each other over the Thanksgiving break.

This was that weekend that Nancy realized she was falling in love with Vic.

NOVEMBER – While Nancy taking classes at Wheaton College Lam and Alice still had all three children at home. Two things Nancy recollected about home life during that Holiday season were:

Shelton was taking driving lessons and I was delegated to take him on his practice drives. And Mother bought me this beautiful black velvet dress with an Irish Lace collar for the Christmas season and it cost $14.98! Can you imagine? I had never had a dress that cost that much!

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned sixty-five while living in Glen Elly, Illinois.

Lambeth Shelton Allen, Senior, sixty-five years old

LATE NOVEMBER/EARLY DECEMBER – Alice remained close to her daughters even during the teenage years and so was a shoulder for Nancy to cry on when Vic’s parents set a roadblock in their romance.

Unfortunately, many nice things have to come to an end, or hit a snag anyway! Our sweet little romance began to unravel about this time. Right after Thanksgiving I got a letter from Vic which I designated [in her diary] as “super”, then one on December 6 saying he was in the “dog house” with his folks but didn’t say why.

DECEMBER 7 – While driving around Wheaton with cousin Alice and some friends

we heard on the car radio about Pearl Harbor being bombed by the Japanese. The next day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared war on Japan and before long everybody in the world seemed to be declaring war on everyone else! That news made us realize that our lives were going to change drastically, especially for the men who would immediately be subject to the draft.

DECEMBER 20 –

I got another letter from Vic … where he indicated he was in big trouble with his folks and probably wouldn’t be able to see me over Christmas break. I wrote Alice I wasn’t coming. The next day I got a heart shaped locket from him for Christmas.

Suddenly things began to drop into place. When we had been in Genoa City for Thanksgiving, Grandpa Gifford, who liked to tease, said something to Alice about getting a letter from John Rogers. John’s parents were also at the Giffords for dinner. Anyway, by Christmas break it was pretty obvious that Uncle Ed, the Giffords and the Rogers, were championing John’s pursuit of Alice. At the same time, Vic explained later, his folks got wind of my trip to Milwaukee for the football game and the steady flow of letters between Wisconsin and Illinois. He said he made the mistake of telling them he was in love with me and when they found out I was Uncle Ed’s niece they had a fit! At the same time Vic was being pressured to break up with me, Alice was being pressured to break up with Cobby, and turn her attentions to John.

By the end of the year cousin Alice had broken up with Cobby.

1942

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned forty-two while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

JANUARY 6 – Nancy Allen’s life choices continued:

When Alice got back on campus she told me that Vic was really in trouble with his folks. and on January 6th I got a letter from him saying his folks wanted him to break it off. They told him this was the wrong time to get serious about any girl, that they wanted him to get as much of his college education as he could before he was drafted, now that there was a war, and that they would never give their consent to him marrying a Protestant!

I read his letter to Mother and she agreed that it was probably a good idea to end it. I wasn’t that definite when I wrote back to him. I told him that after the Marquette and Thanksgiving dates I had fallen in love with him, but suggested that at this time, and under the circumstances, it probably would be better if we didn’t take each other too seriously. A week later he wrote back that he had hoped that somehow we might still be able to keep the prom date, but his Dad kept quizzing him about whether it was all over between us, so he thought he’d better not rock the boat any more.

About this time, Alice, Jean [Alice’s college roommate] and I, believing ourselves to be fairly free of entanglements … discussed the possibility of becoming nurses together. Jean was already accepted for training and the military was letting the public know the urgent need for doctors and nurses … I had told Mother that Alice and I were thinking about joining Jean and becoming nurses. Mother had a fit! … So, while I was in East Troy with Alice, Mother and Dad had a “what are we going to do about Nancy?” conference and when I got home Daddy sent Mother and the two younger kids to the movies and sat me down for a little chat. First of all he made it pretty clear that they hadn’t raised me to empty bedpans, and he felt that my patriotic zeal was misdirected; that I would end up hating what being a nurse entailed. He also said that in spite of my interest, and possible capability in running his business, it was not a proper job for a woman. He had hoped that Shelton would be willing to take over the business from him, but since his interests were elsewhere he did not intend to pressure him. He acknowledged that I had a beautiful singing voice and knew how I loved the theater and opera, but that all singers were not as pure and innocent as the movies depicted Jeanette MacDonald to be and although he, too, enjoyed the theater he would be very much opposed to my pursuing that kind of career. He was also aware that I was “in love” with Vic, or was in love with the idea of being “in love” with Vic, and offered me a proposition. He and Mother would like me to go away from home to college for one year, just for the experience and a change of tempo from living at home under the influence of Alice, Wheaton College, Miss Greta [her voice teacher]. If at the end of the year I still felt I wanted to follow a musical career they would help me to become enrolled in a musical college, like Juilliard, where I could be professionally trained and then make contact to possibly become associated with sacred musical groups who toured the country giving concerts.

Or, if Vic and I felt we were not just “in love” but really loved each other and felt we were meant to be together they would be willing to give their consent, provided that he had been able to reconcile with his parents over a religiously mixed marriage. My other choice, of course, would be to return to college and get my degree.

I thought about it overnight and then agreed that being away for awhile might be a good idea. When all my friends [had been] busy getting catalogues and comparing colleges when we were high school seniors, I had already decided to stay home for a year and study music. I therefore, had very little idea where I would like to go away to school. My friend, Mary Meacham, had always been very smart and capable, with good judgment, so I told Mother and Dad I would like to go to Coe College where Mary was studying.

I wrote to Mary right away and heard back from her that she was excited and delighted that I had decided to come to Cedar Rapids in the Fall. I told [cousin] Alice and she was disappointed that I was talked out of nurses training. She was afraid if I went away to school that I would change. Then she got herself in trouble with her Mother when she wrote home to say that if I wasn’t going into nursing, then maybe she didn’t want to either. Her mother wrote back and said she didn’t have any backbone, that she should make up her own mind.

I was getting regular letters from Vic, one in which he said he was thinking about enlisting in the Marines, then in the next said his Father had vetoed that idea, insisting that he wanted him to get as much education as he could, including summer school, before he was drafted. When I wrote about Daddy’s plan for me to go away to college, and what he had said about us, he wrote back and said my Father sounded like someone he could get along with … We wrote to each other almost on a weekly basis … I wrote him I would do everything I could to get up to see him before I left for college in September. I had no idea how I was going to arrange that without getting him in trouble with his Father.

So we were now in the process of getting me ready to go away to college. I was getting new clothes, a radio with a top which raised up to play one record at a time, a warm winter coat, and I was practicing, practicing, practicing for two recitals, running back and forth to classes, language lessons, voice lessons, piano lessons plus helping around the house and running errands for Mother and writing letters to school friends and to Vic! Also, I asked Mother if we could talk to the dentist about the space between my two front teeth. The braces had straightened the rest of my teeth, but the space was still there! He told us he could grind down the teeth and cover them with porcelain caps. And the total cost for the grinding, molding and making the caps would be only $90.00! Can you imagine what that would cost today? About $2,000! The grinding was pretty bad – I had to be sedated, but I was still conscious of the buzzing. The end result was super, however. I wished I had had it done sooner! Now I went around smiling all over the place!

SPRING – Lam’s sister Mabel had been in a mental institution in Elgin, Illinois for about a year when

she called Daddy one day and said she was better and was leaving the hospital; it was private so her hospitalization was voluntary and she could have left anytime she wanted. She did not keep in touch with us; someone reported to Daddy that they had seen her working as a clerk in the glove department of Marshall Fields but when Mother checked on that she was told that she had quit. We never heard from her after that.

[Three years later, in 1945 when the Florida Census was taken, Mabel was living at 5431 NW 21^st Court in Miami. She was 65 years old and working as an auditor. At the same time Esther “Genna” was 72 and living at 243 NE 4^th Street in Miami with four other ladies in their 70s. By 1950, the year Lam died, Mabel was listed in the Florida State Hospital Mental Institution in Sebring Florida. She died in October 1960 and is buried in the Miami Memorial Park Cemetery where her mother Ellen, sister Genna (who died in 1968), and Genna’s (ex) husband Will Carter are also buried. Ellen’s headstone for some reason says Nancy E. Allen. Genna, Will and Mabel all have headstones of the same design.] 

SPRING continued:

And now more about the life choices of Lam and Alice’s niece Alice Smith and their daughter Nancy:

At Spring break, Alice went to Texas with John’s parents for his graduation from flight training. Mary [Nancy’s friend] came home from Coe, then planned to drive back to Cedar Rapids with Mother, Dad and me so that we could see the school and get enrolled …

When I got back Alice had just returned from Texas. She and her roommate, Jean, had gone to East Troy. One of the other girls from Eastgate [the boarding house Alice and her roommate Jean lived in at Wheaton College] called me – Alice had come back engaged to John Rogers! I was shocked and deeply hurt that I had to be told this news third hand. I felt that her confidant was now a roommate she had known only a few months. It would have been better if she had left no message and waited to tell me the news in person when she got back on campus! Alice was, like me, an innocent and naive girl, still flattered by male attention from different directions, still looking down possible life avenues, full of fun, only on the brink of adulthood, and I felt that she was being forced into a relationship she really wasn’t prepared for. I know I wouldn’t have been! I was hurt and angry that our girlhood relationship had been so abruptly cut off. Here’s a snapshot of her taken at Lake Geneva the summer after she graduated from high school – age 17. She was 18 the following January and was engaged to John three months later – he was almost 26.

Alice Smith (17), the niece of Alice and Lam Allen

MAY 15 – The rationing of gasoline began in the United States due to shortages from the war. _{http://www.fsmitha.com/time/1942.htm}

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary.

JULY – Cousin Alice married John Rogers.

John had been transferred to Washington … as a prelude to going overseas to the European war theater. His parents and Alice went to see him off. And Alice and John decided not to wait and got married on JuIy 27, 1942. They were together two weeks and he got the call to leave. She packed up to come home, and by the time she arrived back in East Troy she still did not know where he was. I called and talked with her and arranged a weekend when I could see her. I wasn’t leaving for Cedar Rapids until September 21st. I told her I was also letting Vic know I would be in East Troy and hoped that would be able to see him before leaving for school.

Vic wrote back immediately saying “wild horses couldn’t keep him away; that he didn’t care who saw us together; that he would pick me up at 7:00 P.M. Saturday night!”

SEPTEMBER – in East Troy

I arrived early Saturday morning and spent the day visiting with Aunt Evelyn and Alice. I asked her if she was happy, did she feel she made the right decision, what her plans were now. She said she was sure she loved John and was glad she married him, but was sad they had such a little time together. Now she was worried, of course. He was a fighter pilot which was a very hazardous duty and she knew that any letters she received from him would be “after the fact” messages which would never let her know where he was and if he was still alive. She wasn’t planning to go back to college. She would divide her time between her family and his in Genoa City, and hoped the war would be over soon. They hadn’t made any plans for after the war.

After dinner Alice sat on the front porch with me until Vic drove up in front of the house, then she went inside and I walked down the front steps to meet him as he got out of the car. Should I stop here and just say we drove down to the lake, kissed goodbye, he drove back to school, I went home and left for Coe College a few days later? No, I wrote almost every minute of that evening in my diary …

When I saw his car come around the corner my heart started beating so fast I felt I couldn’t breathe! I smiled as I walked towards him. He was looking right into my eyes, grabbed my hand and led me to the car. He drove about two blocks away without saying a word. Then he stopped, looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “You are so darn beautiful. I can’t believe you’re finally here. My heart is beating like a bass drum!” I said, “So is mine.” so he put his arm around me and drew me next to him, and drove one-handed through town headed for Booth Lake.

As we were driving past the high school, he suddenly pulled into the driveway leading to the parking lot in back of the school. He parked the car, turned off the lights, and started kissing me as he had never kissed me before. I finally pulled back, laughing, “Vic, let me catch my breath!” He held me so tight and said, “Do you know how long it has been since I’ve kissed you, held you, even held your hand?” Nine months – last Thanksgiving. I’ve got to make up for all the kisses we’ve missed for nine months!”

Then he said, “You know what I wish we could do right now? Take off for someplace where no one could find us and just forget about everything and everybody but us!” I answered, “Just like in the movies, riding off into the sunset to live happily ever after!”

[Nancy said] It reminds me of a little song my sister and I sing together when we’re doing the dishes, “Let the Rest of the World go By’.” He wanted me to sing it for him. “I’ll cry if I sing it. I’ll whisper the words in your ear.” With my head on his shoulder, I whispered:

With Someone like you, a pal good and true,

 I’d like to leave it all behind, and go and find

 A place that’s known to God alone,

 Just a spot we’d call our own.

 We’d find perfect peace, where joys never cease

 Out there beneath a friendly sky.

 We’d build a sweet little nest, somewhere in the west,

 And let the rest of the world go by.

Vic whispered the last line with me. Both of us were in tears. He held me so tight and said, “Oh, God, sweet Nancy, I love you so much it hurts!” I answered, “Me too”, and we kissed some more.

A few minutes later I said I’d be home for Christmas and did he think we could see each other then? He said “I’m not going to hide how we feel about each other any longer. If I’m in town I’ll tell my folks that you’re home from college for the holidays and up for a visit with your cousins and I want to see you.” … Then when we got to the house we sat down on the steps. He looked at me and said, “I just have the most awful feeling that when you walk through that door I’ll never see you again!”

Is it understandable now why I wished I had thrown away this diary many years ago? Reading it again was like living it again! After I first went through it a couple of months ago, I woke up suddenly one night in tears, with the realization that only once in my life had I ever felt the exhilaration of love I felt for Vic that wonderful few months of 1941 and 1942 when I was 18, when nothing was important, when we were together, except the way we felt about each other. When I woke that night I knew what it meant to be old. How much better it had been for me all these years when that year had been just an almost forgotten part of my past. So now I have to complete the story and once again move on and put it behind me. Don’t look for the diary among the books and papers handed down with this legacy – it is now gone!

Looking back through the years you come to realize there is a difference between being “In love” and loving someone. Being “in love” is mostly emotional, exciting, thrilling, exploratory. Loving someone is accepting your differences, being willing to work through problems, building memories – so much more! I’m sure Vic was the only one of the men I knew with whom I was madly “in love”. I loved Cal [her boyfriend later at Coe College]. I loved my husband, Al but without that wonderment of the first feeling of being “in love” …

I received a couple of letters [from Vic] before I left for Coe on September 21st. And when I received the key to my mailbox at the dorm, there was a letter waiting for me telling me how much he missed me already, and giving me the news that he had received his draft notice. He was to finish summer school and report for duty October 1st. There would be no seeing him on my Christmas break. And the following August, 1943, when we had hoped the war would be over, it was just getting into full stride, and we were exchanging V-Mail instead of intimate love letters.

[What was V-mail, you may be asking. Below is an explanation.

V – As In Victory Mail

 By Victoria Dawson

Letters to and from Allied troops were shrunk before shipping.

V-Mail was launched by the War and Navy departments and the Postal Service on June 15, 1942. Correspondents drafted messages on single preprinted sheets of thin paper that, when folded and sealed, also served as envelopes. Gathered at three central postal stations – in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco – the letters were opened, sorted and copied onto microfilm. Flown overseas, the film was then processed into small, sometimes almost illegible, 4×5 photographs of the original … For a postal system overwhelmed by the staggering volume of overseas correspondence, V-Mail delivered more letters to more servicemen in less time and freed up invaluable cargo space for food, ammunition and fuel, Advertising campaigns declared that 1,700 microfilmed letters would fit into a single cigarette pack.]

Besides grappling All mail went to Vic by his APO (Army Post Office) address which never disclosed where he was. Even when he wrote that he was home on leave, I was in Cedar Rapids so we couldn’t see each other. When I started getting V-Mail, I knew he was overseas.

with the separation from her first love, Nancy also had questions about her religious beliefs. The animosity between the Catholic and Protestant faiths at the time had left her conflicted.

When I arrived at Coe I was still a Methodist, but pretty disillusioned about religious faith in general, and personally confused about what I believed. At one point when I was a senior in high school, I felt quite strongly that I had committed my life to walking with Jesus, but after what I had experienced regarding the animosity between my own East Troy relatives’ rock-hard fundamentalism and Vic’s family’s adamant Catholicism, where each emphatically damned the others affiliation, left me heartbreakingly wondering whether either one could possibly be right!

During my year at Wheaton College (and intermittent attendance at the Honey Creek Baptist Church in Wisconsin where a great deal of emphasis was placed on the second coming of Christ and his 1000 years reign on earth) I had very thoroughly been introduced to teachings about salvation through a public declaration of your belief in Jesus as the Christ and as your personal savior. However, such a commitment was also to exclude your own personal decisions about things like movies, the theater, opera, card playing, dancing, yet I knew that Aunt Evelyn, while holding fast to some things when her daughters were young, said she had resented being denied some of those things with the feeling that she and her sisters were never allowed to have any fun …

Having drawn my own conclusions that the Methodist Church, while not a bad thing in itself, had indeed begun to put emphasis on a “social Gospel” of service to the community and the indigent rather than on personal belief and salvation. It was therefore understandable that I was so mixed up I was leaning towards putting religion on the back burner and just starting to have a good time!

The following is Nancy’s account of how the war affected college life and the everyday lives of not just Lam and Alice, but of everyone in general.

The years I attended Coe were considerably influenced by World War II. My first year there – September 1942 to June 1943 was the transition year to let the Juniors and Seniors finish their education, let the ROTC (Reserve 0fficers Training Corp.) finish training for regular army service, and half of the men’s dorm was leased to the military for training air force recruits on three months rounds. We called them the 90 Day Wonders! As I understood it they were college graduates who would be made 2nd Lieutenants after completing this training. Coeds were not allowed to date them. The ROTC did have the last of the traditional military balls and there was one interfraternity/sorority dance. No football games, no men’s basketball or other intramural sports. The last two years – September 1943 to June 1945 the entire men’s dorm, plus Quonset huts near the football field, were filled with the 90 Day Wonders.

So the 1943 Yearbook was dedicated to the Coe College men who were serving in the military services of their country, and our campus echoed with marching feet (when they marched past the women’s dorm they always loudly chanted one of their marching ditties), military parade reviews on the football field, morning and evening flag ceremonies, and the sound of “Taps” at sunset every evening.

The few regular male students had to find lodging somewhere off campus, but could come to the women’s dorm for meals.

During the war years things were different for civilians too. No new cars were being built – the factories were now producing tanks, jeeps, airplanes, all manner of war vehicles. No cars were allowed on the Coe Campus – we walked or took the bus. Gasoline and food were rationed. Everyone had ration books for food, and if you owned cars ration books were issued in amounts depending on the vehicle’s use. Very little gasoline was allowed for cars used for leisure only. Vehicle tires were rationed; worn tires were recapped. Butter was rare – oleomargarine was white and came with a yellow food color capsule which you could mix in to make believe it looked like butter; people were encouraged to cultivate their own vegetable gardens; scrap metal drives were frequent. Meat was highly rationed; the meat points in your ration books were hoarded for special occasions. We had to turn our food and meat ration books over to the college for the months we were living in the dorm.

And of course there were sentimental songs: “When the lights go on again all over the world” (an English song; England was completely blacked out every night because of bombing raids, America on the East and West Coasts); “When Nightingales Sing Again in Barclay Square” (also an English song); “The Very Thought of You”; “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with anyone else but me”); ”I’ll be Home for Christmas (if only in my dreams”), and, of course, “White Christmas”, which we would sing gathered in someone’s double room as Christmas was nearing.

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned sixty-six while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

THANKSGIVING TIME –

The first year I was away to college, I came home for Thanksgiving vacation to find that my little sister, Evelyn, who was 15, had talked Daddy into letting her get a job after school and weekends at the local telephone company. (The type of telephone service in Glen Ellyn was all hand operated at large switchboards which lit up on the bottom row for incoming calls. There were two rows of plugs in front of each operator and a switch which she opened, inserted the first plug into the incoming call and asked “Number Please”, then inserted the matching plug into the number and rang by pushing the switch in the opposite direction. The process was reversed for outgoing calls.

An operator (not Evelyn) at a switchboard which may be similar to the one Evelyn used.

Our number was 846 all the time I was growing up, and the instruments were black, upright with a receiver lifted from a lever on the speaker.

A telephone which may be similar to the one in the Allen home.

I don’t remember when we finally got dialing instruments; I know it was after I had left home either to go to college or to get married. The first dialed telephones were also upright; it was some time before the ones with the receiver on top were developed.) When Mother learned that Evelyn was scheduled to be working during the time we were planning our Thanksgiving dinner, she talked to the supervisor and asked her if it would be possible to divide the operators into shifts, then have Evelyn call us to say three or four were ready to eat. We would prepare trays of the whole turkey dinner for each girl, and deliver them to the telephone exchange. When they were finished eating, Evelyn would call us, we would take dinners to the next shift and bring back the dishes from the prior shift. This would take about three trips, then on the last trip Evelyn would come home with us, we would have our dinner, take her back to work and collect the final dishes. This went on until Evelyn left home for college [in 1944].

CHRISTMAS –

That Christmas season Shelton [17], who was an amateur photographer, talked Mother, Evelyn and me into being his models, some taken in a darkened room gazing into the fireplace, having us change into different outfits. Here are a few he took of me, copies of which I sent to Vic. In the letter he wrote back he told me he was keeping them hidden because after mail call he had been reading my letter and looking at the pictures while lying on his bunk when a guy walking by saw the pictures and wanted to know if I was a model, and said, “Wow! It’d be worth going AWOL to be with a girl like that!” Vic was afraid someone would try to steal them!

The painting in the picture on the left was done by Alice “using the trees in the park across the street as her inspiration.” Later it would hang in the living room of her daughter Evelyn’s home in Littleton, Colorado when Alice lived there with her. It can be seen in one of the pictures from her 80^th birthday party in 1980 below.

1943

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned forty-three while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their twenty-first wedding anniversary.

FALL – Traveling for civilians during WWII:

Getting to and from school became somewhat, of a problem during the war years because the military always had first priority on any land or air transportation. I did go home by train that first year 1942 for Thanksgiving and Christmas. (There were no Spring breaks during the war; the colleges switched to four equal quarters rather than the usual two semesters and a short summer school). I think those trips were on the streamliner, City of Denver, as was my trip back in the fall of 1943. After that the trains were mostly troop carriers, although you could get tickets as far as Cedar Rapids if you were a college student. But having a ticket and actually getting on the train was a different matter! The Chicago terminal was so crowded it was almost impossible to get near the gates. A couple of times we decided to try to board in Oak Park where the crowd would not be so big, but by the time the train got out to Oak Park it was already jammed full of servicemen, and the conductors literally had to shove us and our suitcases aboard. The train stopped in Marion, Iowa, a few miles from Cedar Rapids where we were met by people from the school, and several of the trips were made while sitting on our suitcases in the aisles. On one such ride, a soldier, thinking I was going to be riding all the way to San Francisco, grabbed me when I said I had to get off in Marion, and threatened not to let me go. The conductor heard me shouting above the commotion and finally convinced him that was as far as I could go on my ticket.

While at college, Nancy’s major was Speech Arts and she was in several plays. Two of these were for UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) which were “sponsored by the Student War Council which obtained permission from the school for those two productions in 1944 and 1945 with the proceeds going to the charity to benefit children in war-torn countries.”

My first year at Coe the Dramatics professor and director was a seasoned instructor who had been on campus for several years and provided excellent training. He was somewhere in his 40s and it never occurred to us that he would be called to serve in the miliary because he had one club foot. However, when I returned for my second year we found that his reputation for producing and directing stage presentations bordering on the professional had caught up with him. He had been recruited by the USO (United Services Organization) to produce entertainment for the military.

In most cities the USO organized canteens where servicemen could go for refreshments, music, and entertainment. Local girls were encouraged to attend the weekend dances. The Coe students were not allowed to date the men, even those who were living on the campus as 90 day wonders. The dances were held at one of the downtown hotels and we were permitted to go as a group with several older ladies, or couples, as chaperons.

SEPTEMBER

On the one year anniversary of our saying goodbye on the steps of Uncle Ed’s house … [Vic] had written me a passionate letter telling me that the only things which reminded him that sanity and beauty still existed somewhere in the world were my letters and pictures, that his only daydream was that someday the hideous war would be over and we would arrange to meet at the bandstand and never have to be apart again. It was V-Mail with no indication of where he was, but history says: “Mussolini was deposed July 25, 1943. Allied troops landed on Italian Mainland September 3. Italy surrendered September 8. Nazi’s seized Rome September 10.

There were millions of those little V-Mail letters floating around the world; I didn’t receive that one from Vic for weeks after he had written it! In contrast: we were rehearsing the George Washington play which was presented in November, 1943.

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned sixty-seven while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

CHRISTMAS –

The last time I went to the theater with Daddy was the second Christmas I was home from college. He had managed to get tickets for the first run presentation of the musical Oklahoma! as a Christmas present for the whole family. This is a very dear memory for me; shortly after this time together he began slipping away into senility.

1944

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned forty-four while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

JANUARY 22 – WWII – ANZIO BEACH – “British and US forces, totaling 36,000 soldiers and 3,200 vehicles, land on the beaches around Anzio – about 60 kilometers south of Rome.” _{http://www.fsmitha.com/time/1944.htm}

SPRING – Nancy had formed a friendship with one of the few male students left on campus at Coe College. His name was Calvin Leonard and he had been the male lead in the college’s production of George Washington Slept Here.

After the final performance was the first time Cal walked me back to the dorm. After Christmas Cal and I saw each other more and more and by April 14, 1944, seventeen months after Vic and I had said goodbye, we were declaring our love for each other.

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice celebrated their twenty-second wedding anniversary.

SUMMER – Lam began “losing control of his mental faculties”.

One afternoon … while Evie was getting ready to leave for college, he wasn’t on the train when Mother went to pick him up. She waited for the next commuter train and he wasn’t on that one either. She frantically called his office manager, Archie Kelsey, who told her Dad had left for the station at his usual time. Then, if I correctly remember what I was told, she received a telephone call from the local station master who said he had been informed that Dad had been found on an empty train out in the yards. He was very confused and disoriented and they had to look in his wallet for identification and had him taken to the next train leaving for Glen Ellyn. Mother met the next train and with the help of the station master found him and took him home. Then she called Archie again and asked that from now on someone follow him to be sure he got on the right train.

FALL – With their son Shelton in California training with the Navy, Lam and Alice became “empty nesters” when their youngest daughter Evelyn began attending Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where Nancy was a senior. As a gift for college Alice bought Evelyn something that was near and dear to her own heart, a fur coat.

Alice had a fox fur neck piece. This was a big fashion statement of the 20s, started by Hollywood actresses of the time. It was made up of the fur of the entire body. Under the head was a cloth-covered clasp which, when pushed, opened to attach to one of the hind legs and worn draped around the shoulders. (As Evie recently said, “Can you imagine they really wore those things?”)

[I remember Grandma’s fur coats, very stylish in her time. In particular l remember the one with the stuffed fox head when I saw it hanging in her closet in Aunt Evie and Uncle Bill’s house when she was living with them in Littleton, Colorado. In Aunt Nancy’s memoirs she said in her life she only had two fur coats. “Mother bought me the first one which I … wore in high school. (The second) one was black with a longer pelt. Evelyn was also given one which she wore when she started school in the Fall of 1944. I’m not sure what fur it was, but we both got teased about our ‘skunk coats’.” Below is a picture of the three Allen children, Shelton in his Navy uniform and the girls in their fur coats.

Nancy (21), Shelton (19), and Evelyn (17)

When Evelyn and I were both going [to Coe] in the fall of 1944 Dad managed to get us two tickets in the Parlor Car of the train, but when we got to the terminal they wouldn’t let us go through the gate. Dad spotted another gate where they were letting commissioned officers through and he took us down there and asked two young officers if they would escort us through the gate and to the parlor car so we could board the train. They tried to talk us into joining them in an officer’s car further forward, but we decided we’d be better off staying where we were.

The effects of the war on male college students: 

Cal was a pre-theology student, majoring in Philosophy and Psychology. Technically, only 4-Fs, those with physical disabilities, were exempt from military service, but there were two professions which were also excused, pre-medical and pre-theology, both of which were deemed essential to the military in themselves. Thus, even those who were just starting their training in those fields, since no one had any idea how long the war would last, they were allowed to pursue the necessary training. Cal’s father and older brother were both Presbyterian ministers, so his leaning toward that profession was legitimate, but he was still self-conscious, in fact somewhat embarrassed, to be obviously healthy but out of uniform and enjoying campus life.

“Local restaurants were able to buy beef and pork from the nearby farmers so didn’t ask for any of our meat ration points.”

“Many mothers sent ‘care’ packages of goodies every week or so which were shared with friends, usually for a Saturday night ‘spread’ in the dorm because by our junior and senior years there wasn’t much dating going on – a conspicuous lack of men on the campus! There were only 54 of us in my graduating class – 6 of them were men. The entire school enrollment in my senior year – September 1944 to June 1945 – was 286 students – only 47 men, many of whom, from their yearbook pictures, looked older than college-age.”

During college Alice sent Nancy $5 “a week which had to meet all miscellaneous expenses including having my laundry done every other week”.

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned sixty-eight while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

NOVEMBER 15 – Alice’s mother Julia Ottilia Winckler Smith died in Glen Ellyn, Illinois at the age of 72 years, eleven months, and seven days. She was the third to be interred in the family plot at Oakridge Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois, (Lot 295, Section 12).

Just before Thanksgiving I received a telephone call from Mother that Granny Smith had died. She was staying with Mother at the time. She complained during the day that she didn’t feel well and Mother took her to the doctor’s evening office hours. While waiting to see him, my dear, dear Mommy died in Mother’s arms. Through my tears I said to Mother, “She never got to go to Hawaii! “

After the death of Alice’s mother, she and her brother Edward inherited the shares of Manton and Smith, the company their father had helped start. Alice’s portion was 1400 shares.

DECEMBER – Nancy continued to date Cal at Coe College while still writing to Vic overseas.

As I had promised Vic, I answered every letter he wrote to me, and although he couldn’t tell me where he was fighting, I knew he was at some dangerous place in Europe. He wasn’t able to tell me he had been fighting in that Anzio to Rome battle for months after it happened. Could I tell him not to hang on to his dreams? That I was in love with someone else? That we were acting in plays and putting on musicals, studying philosophy in the shade of a beautiful tree, and kissing behind a pillar of a picturesque dormitory? I just couldn’t bring myself to write him a “Dear John” letter (the sarcastic term given to letters military men got from their “girls” back home saying they were in love with, or already married to, somebody else.” I knew Vic thought I was his “girl back home”  … The radio and movie blurbs were constantly reminding the “home front” how important our letters were to the men at “the front”, that their high morale was essential to victory. So it wasn’t until I got a letter (on regular stationary) that he was stationed back in the States late in 1944, when I knew he wasn’t in danger anymore, a letter full of how he would come to Cedar Rapids to see me as soon as he was granted a leave, that I finally told him about Cal, and at this 2003 point in time I honestly don’t remember if I ever got another letter from him after that.

Three years was a long time to keep our few times together alive on far away letters written on partially blacked out micro-filmed paper. Those moments on the front steps of Uncle Ed’s house were indeed the last time we ever saw each other.

Yes, I had told Cal about him and he knew that I was still writing to him and why I waited to break it off until he was back in this country. He said if he had been in Vic’s shoes, to have gotten such a letter from me would have torn him apart …

In 1990 Evie and I were taking a tour of Europe together. On the bus ride from Southern Italy towards Rome the guide played a tape of the battle from Anzio Beachhead to Rome during World War II. As I got off the bus I said to him, “I used to get V-Mail from a soldier who fought in that battle. I haven’t thought about him in years.”

A few weeks ago I was talking with [cousin] Alice when Evie’s Bill was so sick and thought to ask her if she knew what had happened to Vic. She told me she didn’t remember when most of the East Troy boys returned from the war. Because John had been older than most of the boys who were admitted to the Air Force, he was discharged several months earlier, after completing so many flying missions. They had returned to East Troy and Uncle Ed had offered to send John to veterinarian school at Ames, Iowa, and then suggested that they go into partnership together, as he was near the age when it was difficult to handle the larger farm animals. She said there was a big celebration saluting all the servicemen, but she and John were in Ames at the time. She told me Vic had finished college at Marquette and never took up farming. He lived in a suburb of Milwaukee, but she wasn’t sure what he had done for a living. When they had their high school reunions, since he had been a class ahead of her, he met with his class, and she met with hers, usually in someone’s home or at a restaurant, so she hardly ever saw him. I asked if he had married a Catholic girl like his folks wanted him to. No, she said. I think he married a Methodist. She was so surprised to hear that Vic and I had written to each other for so many years after I had seen him for what turned out to be the last time.

And so my story of Vic ends. I hope his life has been a happy one!

[Again, the investigator in me: with the help of sites like Find A Grave and the U.S. Censuses, I have answers to some of Nancy’s questions about what Vic did for a living, who he married, the children he had. Of course, I can’t answer whether he was happy, or if he ever thought of her, or if she was the only one he was ever “in love” with as well.

Victor Aloysious Schwartz was born on January 1, 1923. He was the youngest of six children with two older brothers and three older sisters. He married and he and his wife had five daughters. His wife died November 18, 2012. Nancy died two and a half months later on February 2, 2013. At the time of his death in 2018 all of his daughters were married and he had three grandsons and seven granddaughters. The following is from his obituary.

He graduated from East Troy High School in 1940 and attended Marquette University until he was called into the U.S. Army in 1943. He took his basic training at Fort Jackson, SC. In November of 1943 he was sent overseas as a replacement, first to Africa and then to Italy where he was assigned to the 1st Armored Division, 6th Armored Infantry Regiment. Beginning with the landing at Anzio, he served in all four of the Italian campaigns: Naples-Fogia, Rome-Arno, North Apennines and Po Valley. In addition to the four campaign battle stars, he was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge and the Bronze Star. He returned home in December of 1945 just in time for Christmas.

After his return from the service he joined the family farming business, Schwartz Brothers. In 1948 [on the 10^th of April] he married a wonderful girl, Joyce “Joey” Kehoe of East Troy where they made their home [Nancy married Al Haeger on the 14^th of August that same year]. In 1953 Schwartz Brothers disbanded and the farm was sold. Vic took employment with Allis-Chalmers, Mfg. Co. … as a Test Engineer … After 17 years at Allis-Chalmers, Vic took a job as a sales engineer with Nelson … In 1973 the company transferred him to the Nelson Plant in Neillsville, as the Plant Manager. He retired in 1988. A few years after retirement, Vic and Joyce moved to Monroe to be closer to their children.

Vic enjoyed several hobbies. He was an avid woodworker and loved photography. For many years he wrote the newsletter for his 6th Armored Infantry Battalion, 1st Armored Division, helping the many old veterans, buddies, spouses and children to keep in contact. The 1st Armored Division Association has held a reunion every year since the end of WW II. Vic and Joyce attended whenever possible and since it was in a different city each year, it allowed them to travel to much of the United States. They also traveled to Europe several times; Spain, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and England. Vic was a member of St. Clare of Assisi Catholic Parish in Monroe, a life member of the 1st Armored Division Association, a life member of the Anzio Beachhead Veterans Association, life member of the DAV, the American Legion, the VFW and the Knights of Columbus.

Vic is survived by five daughters: Mary (Steve) Madsen, Katie (Bob) VanStedum, Jeannie (Jim) Brehmer, Lori (Dave) Sievers and Beth (Eric) Penfold; his grandchildren: David and Erik (Lia) Madsen; Adam (fiancé Taylor) Erin and Lauren Brehmer; Emma, Holly, and Kylie Sievers; Sophie and Clare Penfold; as well as his sister, Catherine; brother, Ron; nieces and nephews. He was preceded in death by his beloved wife, Joey; brother, Charlie; sisters, Dorothy and Nellie.

Although his wife may have originally been a Methodist, as cousin Alice said, according to her obituary she was “a member of St. Victor Catholic Church in Monroe and former member of St. Peter’s Catholic Church in East Troy and St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Neillsville.”]

CHRISTMAS –

We spent Christmas in East Troy with Uncle Ed’s family. There was a poignant feeling of sadness. The little house next door was closed and silent, waiting for Mother to come up and decide with Uncle Ed what to do with Mommy’s belongings. Alice’s John was back in the country as a trainer for the younger fighter pilots but couldn’t get leave to come home for Christmas. I had heard from Vic that he was back in the States and … felt that maybe he was home for Christmas and just a few miles away.

Around the year 2006 Nancy would write in her memoirs:

I don’t suppose my memories of East Troy would be quite as wrenching if the cousins weren’t all still living there – Alice, Charles, Dolores especially. Muriel (Murt) still lives in Southern Michigan but near enough to still be grouped with her East Troy siblings. Alice and John still live in Granny’s two bedroom house. Carol wasn’t born until 1940 so I never got to know her except when she was a baby. Vic is still living near there, as of about this time last year, anyway, when I asked [Alice] about him. If they had all dispersed around the country and around the world as mine did, the pull on the heart strings wouldn’t be as strong. I’m still seeing and remembering East Troy the way it was 62 years ago!

[Nancy died in 2013, Alice in 2016, Charles in 2018, Dolores in 2011, Vic in 2018. As of 2024 Muriel and Carol are still living.]

I had turned 21 the summer before while I was at Coe for the summer session. When I got home for Christmas Mother drove Daddy and me to the Medinah Athletic Club in Chicago for lunch to celebrate. Daddy was coherent enough that he knew what we were celebrating. I had my first cocktail – a whiskey sour – and asked for a huge shrimp cocktail for which they had to find a special serving dish, and Mother had ordered a small lemon filled coconut cake surrounded with 21 tiny candles. Of course I cried, as I am doing this minute in memory of that sweet time with my precious Daddy and Mother.

1945

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned forty-five while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

JANUARY 20 – Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in for his fourth term as President of the United States.

JANUARY – Lam’s cognition began to decrease “at an alarming rate”.

Mother was going through a very difficult time of her life – her Mother had died only two months ago. Shelton had just left for action in the war with Japan, and Daddy had recently demonstrated that he was losing control of his mental faculties and could no longer go to work.

One day [Mother] got a call from one of her friends who told her she had seen Dad get off the train in Lombard, the stop before Glen Ellyn. It was a cold, snowy night. Mother drove to Lombard. He wasn’t at the station so, thinking he was probably trying to walk home, she drove up and down the nearby streets until she found him. After that she couldn’t allow him to go anywhere alone. They didn’t call it Alzheimer’s disease then – hardening of the arteries, I think. Whatever, it meant our dear Daddy was mentally slipping away from us at an alarming rate, and although Mother had been advised to place him in a nursing home, she couldn’t bring herself to do so. She had indicated she thought that since I was so close to him that I might be able to be a soothing influence since, like a child, he was rebelling when he wasn’t allowed to have his own way.

APRIL 1 – On Easter Sunday, the Battle of Okinawa began. It “was the last major battle of World War II, and one of the bloodiest.” Three months and 21 days later it would end. “Though it resulted in an Allied victory, kamikaze fighters, rainy weather and fierce fighting on land, sea and air led to a large death toll on both sides.” _{https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/battle-of-okinawa}

APRIL – Alice took Lam to see Nancy at Coe College in Cedar Rapids in a UNICEF production the college drama class was putting on.

The musical appeared in April and was another big success. There had been pictures in the 1944 yearbook of the first UNICEF presentation, so they didn’t feature the 1945 show, much to our disappointment. Lack of space and shortage of paper in the wartime annuals made it necessary that the editors pick and choose among the many campus activities.

Next, the W.A.A. (Women’s Athletic Association) was starting to rehearse the May Pole dance to be performed on May 1st for school and public. In addition, the military hospital in Clinton, Iowa, had been informed that Coe had this entertainment available to them if the administration deemed it appropriate. They accepted the offer, set a date and said they would arrange for refreshments and a get together with some of the ambulatory patients after we had presented the program.

The dance is performed around a pole from which long ribbons about five inches wide hang in a circle from the top of the pole to several feet out from the base. Girls, dressed in spring colored long dresses, each take the ground end of a matching colored ribbon and pulls it waist high, then start a pattern of over and under as they dance around the pole. As they move the ribbons make a braid-like design on the pole and the dancers move closer to the pole as the ribbon length shortens, then they reverse the dance as ribbons unwind back to their original length. This is repeated several times, with a different dance pattern, thus creating a new pattern on the pole. An old-fashioned schoolgirl entertainment and very pretty, but not exactly terribly exciting for men who had recently been wounded in battle. However, they enjoyed having attractive girls to look at and were attentive and appreciative.

For them our being there was a pleasant afternoon’s break from a boring, lonely and painful daily hospital routine. For us it was our first real glimpse of what these men, most of them no older than ourselves, had experienced. The bus ride to Clinton was full of chatter and laughter; driving back to campus was pretty quiet. Loss of arms, legs, facial and body disfigurements, paraplegics, wheelchairs, canes, crutches, bandaged heads – sacrifices which would affect the rest of their lives along with memories of lost companions and horrors which they will never forget.

We had been so protected and unaware. Daily radio reports were nonexistent. Edward R. Murrow was the ground breaker – relaying intermittent reports about the bombings which were happening in London, but we were too involved in our own lives to listen. Most of the news came by telegraphed reports from newspapermen, but not many of us read a newspaper regularly. There was always a newsreel at the movie theaters, but the newsreels couldn’t begin to show what a battle was really like, and just recently they had begun to show pictures of the first findings of the concentration camps in Europe with gaunt, skeletal faces of the prisoners gazing through fenced-in yards which brought gasps and sobs from the movie audiences but still no real understanding of what those hellish places meant in terms of human suffering and death!

The hospital staff had cleared out a room with a small space for dancing. Men in wheelchairs were sitting along the sides and I was sitting, talking with one when I was asked to dance. When I hesitated, he looked at me and said, “No, I want to watch you pretty girls dancing. That’s why we fought this damn war so our girls back home would never have to experience what we saw in Europe.” That one afternoon was the real beginning of my adult life.

APRIL 12 – President Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage while in office and his Vice President Harry S. Truman was sworn in as the 33^rd President of the United States.

MAY – Alice was in need of gall bladder surgery.

It was only a month before graduation with finals looming when I got a letter from Mother saying she had to have a gall bladder operation but had put it off until I got home to look after Daddy. I hadn’t been home since Christmas but understood that he had become increasingly more difficult to handle. She was looking forward to having Evie and me home. I finally had to look at the possibility that family obligations were going to cloud my plans to marry [Cal] while Daddy’s condition continued to become more burdensome.

Also, the original glow of my feelings for Cal had begun to dim as I realized more and more how much he leaned on me for support and encouragement. Since the fall when he enrolled for his second year of German he called me almost every day to declare he was afraid he would never make it through the course … I sympathized with him, but told him my knowledge of the German language was limited to a few words my Grandmother Smith used to say and my experience with German language vocal pronunciation. After a while I suggested that he see if his parents would approve him hiring a tutor, but that having failed I found myself caught up in hearing the same complaints over and over about which I had no control.

Suddenly I was having alien feelings of frustration. It seemed many people were expecting a lot from me while leaving me with a troubling sense that I had no one to whom I could turn for support. Mother had sent Evie to Coe so that I could “look after her”. I was so occupied that senior year I really didn’t pay too much attention to her, and, as I learned later, it was difficult for her to follow in my honor student footsteps. She was a fun-loving high-spirited girl and only an average student …

Cal seemed to be taking it for granted that I would work to support us while he concentrated on his Masters and PH.D., and I was beginning to realize that, although I had no idea how long I would feel the necessity to be there with Mother to help with Daddy, I did know that Evie had three more years of school before she would be there to help. And also, that if I was going to be working full time I instinctively knew I would want to be working toward possibly continuing my education, in a field not yet determined – only a vague dream – an illusive hope. I pondered on this to my own distraction, and finally woke one morning realizing that I had to tell Cal I couldn’t marry him. Then, proceeded to cry my eyes out because I knew that I did love him. I knew he would be shocked and hurt and vacillated between knowing what I had to do and wondering if I was making a mistake I would regret for the rest of my life!

I caught up with him after lunch the next day. We walked around the campus while I told him all this, and more, including how much I loved him, and how I didn’t want to hold him back or stand in the way of his achieving his goals – that it was better that we part now than to realize later I was not the partner he deserved. We had found a distant corner where we talked, eventually dried our tears, and walked away separately.

MAY 8 – V-E Day: Germany surrendered, ending the War in Europe, but not yet in the Pacific.

MAY 28 – Evelyn’s near death experience and the end of college for Nancy:

Then came the end of May and Memorial Day, and another all-school picnic in place of Flunk Day. I had planned to spend the day finishing up my geology notebook and writing my graduation speech and then joining Chi Omega sisters for the evening bonfire celebration. Early in the afternoon there was a rap on my door and it was the school nurse. My sister, Evelyn, had been taken to the dorm infirmary with a painful stomachache. The nurse had at first felt it was just from overeating, but had become concerned because Evie had a fever. She had called the school doctor who suggested Evie be taken to the hospital, which was across the street from the campus, to check her blood count. The nurse and I immediately went to the hospital where Evie had been taken by a taxi. The blood count showed a high rate of white blood cells and suddenly the pain stopped! The doctor immediately suspected a ruptured appendix and called for a surgeon, who happened to be out playing golf on this holiday.

In the meantime the nurse told me they had to have a parent’s permission to operate and I had to call Mother to tell her what was going on. The permission was given and I promised Mother I would call her as soon as I knew anything else. There was some delay in locating the surgeon before they could start the operation, and as I sat alone waiting for word, the nurse came out of the operating room, crying! The appendix had ruptured, Evie was already gangrenous; they had filled her with Sulfa which was the strongest medication they had and put her on a stomach pump and intravenous injections. Then they confiscated a private nurse from a male patient who had been injured in a small airplane accident, telling him there was a college student who was in a life or death situation.

I called Mother back and she said she would get to Cedar Rapids as quickly as she could. The school nurse was distraught and had to be calmed by hospital personnel. After the special nurse took charge I went back to the campus and found Mary Anne and some of my other friends. We notified Mrs. York and she gave us permission to prepare Evie’s room for Mother.

My … friends stayed up with me until we finally saw Mother walking up to the dorm about midnight. Otto Anderson had driven her in her car; he gave Mother all of his gasoline ration stamps so she would be able to drive to Cedar Rapids and back, saying he would straighten it out with the ration board to replace them. Aunt Olga had come over to the house to stay with Daddy. Otto stayed in a hotel overnight and took the train back to Chicago the next day. Mother, in putting off her operation, had lost so much weight I hardly recognized her. We all finally got to bed, but Mother was up early and spent five days sitting in Evelyn’s hospital room, knitting, reading and praying, because the doctors were not sure whether she would make it. They had been able to obtain some penicillin from the Clinton, Iowa, military hospital. This antibiotic had been available only to the military during the war and the dosages which eventually saved Evie’s life had to be released by special request from a group of doctors who were of the combined opinion that she was not responding to treatment and probably would not make it.

I tried to spend as much time with Mother as I could …

Evie was unconscious for five days. Dr. Berger was there to see her every day and was standing at the foot of her bed in prayer when she first opened her eyes. Even in such a physical state, her quick wit, when she saw Dr. Berger, burst forth with, “What is happening? Are you giving me the last rites?” Mother said she laughed and cried all at the same time as she realized she had her baby daughter back!

The Resident Nurse … Evelyn told me recently, was so traumatized by this experience that she gave up nursing and several years later, when attending a meeting in Chicago, came to Glen Ellyn “just to see her in a healthy state”, she said.

After we knew she was going to recover, I finished up my assignments, then Mother and I packed up Evie’s things she was going to take home, marked and stored her possessions she would need for the next year, and I started packing all my stuff to take home …

Evie had to stay in the hospital until one day after graduation so did not attend the ceremony. Mother sat in the audience alone. I didn’t see Cal at the ceremony, but as I walked up the aisle heading outside where we would be joined by our parents, I saw his father sitting in an end seat. He nodded and saluted me as I passed by.

Mother and I went to Cozy #1 for dinner, which I could hardly eat; the tears kept falling. After a final night in the dorm we made a bed for Evie in the back seat of Mother’s Buick, picked her up at the hospital and drove home to Glen Ellyn.

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice had their twenty-third wedding anniversary.

JUNE 21 – The battle of Okinawa ended. _{http://www.fsmitha.com/time/1945.htm}

SUMMER –

Going home was not a happy occasion. There was no celebration of my graduation; but Aunt Olga, who had been staying with Daddy while Mother was in Cedar Rapids, had wrapped a pretty package with a card; I found it when I carried my suitcases up to my room. It contained several recordings of my favorite operas. I called her upstairs to thank her, with tears of course, for her thoughtfulness.

I was overcome with sadness over Daddy’s condition – the surrounding of so many people confused him. He didn’t know who any of us were. Uncle Otto was there to greet us, helped carry in the overloaded contents of the Buick. They had made up a folding bed for Evie in the living room near the back porch because she was still too weak to climb the stairs. After dinner and dishes, Otto and Olga left for home.

Mother was exhausted so I settled her and Evie in their beds, leaving me with the task of getting Daddy to undress and go to bed. There were now twin beds in the master bedroom and Mother had installed a folding gate across the top of the stairs because she had told me that Daddy often wandered around in the dark and she was concerned that he might fall. He resisted my efforts, of course, so I finally took him into Evie’s upstairs room and sat him on the bed, then quickly went and changed into my night clothes and went back to him and quietly talked to him until he started to doze off and I was able to get him to lie down, with his clothes on. There were twin beds in that room too so I slept in the other one so I could oversee him during the night. It took only a couple of nights before he accepted, and even sought me, rather than Mother, when, like a child, he needed help dressing, eating, bathing, whatever.

Meanwhile, I had talked with our doctor to arrange a time for Mother’s Gall-Bladder operation, and to bring him up to date on Evie’s operation and recuperation. He came to the house to examine her and told her get lots of rest and, since she was daily hankering to get back to work at the telephone company, that she needed to get her full strength before getting too active. Evie was always an independent thinker and failed to follow his instructions, went back to work too soon and had a relapse so had to spend another week or so at home before the doctor declared her well enough to have her way about working.

Mother’s operation was to keep her in the hospital for a week or more, and the war with Japan was still on so there was a continuing shortage of nurses at Elmhurst Hospital which was about a 30-45 minute drive away. Mother wanted day-round nursing care, but since it was not available, I arranged for the hospital to put a folding cot in her room and stayed with her for the first three nights until the floor staff assured me that she was recovering well and could be put on their schedules. Aunt Olga again stayed with Daddy for the nights I was away.

AUGUST 6 – The U.S. detonated the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima in Japan. It is estimated that between 70,000 and 135,000, mostly civilians, would die “both from acute exposure to the blasts and from long-term side effects of radiation.” _{https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/bombing-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki}

AUGUST 9 – The U.S. detonated the second atomic bomb over Nagasaki in Japan. An estimated 60,000 – 80,000, again mostly civilians, would die. _{https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/bombing-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki}

All through the summer Nancy helped with Lam’s care as Alice recovered from her surgery. Towards the end of summer some friends from college invited Nancy to take a short trip with them to St. Louis.

Mother was well by this time and agreed that I needed a change of scenery and duties before seeking a job in Chicago …

We were there on V-J – Victory over Japan Day [August 15] …The radio reported that all over the country, in fact all over the world, swarms of people were filling the streets day and night for two days celebrating the final victory. Church bells rang, sirens blared, horns honked. It was a long-dreamed-for day!

AUGUST 15 – V-J Day: Emperor Hirohito of Japan surrendered, thus ending World War II nearly six years and an estimated 70 – 85 million deaths after it was started with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Shelton was serving as a Radio Technician 2^nd class aboard the U.S.S. Alcyone (AKA-7) in the Pacific.

OCTOBER 19 – THE END OF WORLD WAR II BROUGHT THE BEGINNING OF THE COLD WAR WITH THE SOVIET UNION. George Orwell published an article in which he coined the phrase “Cold War” “to refer to what he predicted would be a nuclear stalemate between ‘two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds.’ It was first used in the United States by the American financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch in a speech at the State House in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1947.” This Cold War period between the United States and the Soviet Union would last for more than forty years until the breakup of the Soviet Union. _{https://www.britannica.com/event/Cold-War}

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned sixty-nine while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

1946

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned forty-six while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

JUNE 7 – Lam and Alice had their twenty-fourth wedding anniversary.

JULY 4 – Alice finally realized Lam needed to be in a care home.

Daddy liked to take our dog, Teddy, for walks in the park across the street from our house. Knowing that he easily became confused, either Mother or I would follow him from a distance or walk with him. As the 4th of July celebration started drawing a crowd across the street, he wanted to go for his walk. Mother tried to dissuade him, but called upon me to keep him at home. I tried talking to him calmly, but he didn’t understand why I wouldn’t let him go, and for the first time in his life turned on me, slapping my face. Mother was in the kitchen but heard me cry out. When she realized what happened she said, “If he will turn on you I’ll have to put him in a home.” She found a quiet place near a lake about 10 miles from Glen Ellyn with a wide porch where he could see the trees and water. She and I went every weekend to see him. He didn’t know who we were. It was heart-breaking when one day he looked at us with his sweet smile and said, “It’s so nice of you ladies to come and see me.”

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned seventy while living in the Bellevue Place Sanitarium in Round Lake, Illinois.

1947

This year “Earl Tupper designed his first line of polyethylene kitchenware, which he dubbed Tupperware.” _{https://people.howstuffworks.com/tupperware2.htm}

JANUARY 3 – For the full account of the following story see The Early Life of Our Father.

My brother, Shelton, was the center of the next family crisis. After his discharge from the Navy he returned to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, continuing his scholarship from General Electric which had been interrupted during the war. He was home for the Christmas holiday break. One evening Mother was at a friend’s house when Shelton came to my room, saying he wanted to talk to me … He shut the door and then told me that he would like me to help him tell Mother that he wasn’t going to return to Northwestern but wanted to enroll in a school which would prepare him for the ministry as a missionary … I asked him whenever he had decided he wanted to be a missionary. He then told me an amazing story

about clinging to a large rock during a severe typhoon on Okinawa while he was stationed there in 1945. Most buildings were demolished, many were killed, including his tent mate. He had promised God he would come back to Japan as a missionary if he were spared.

Shelton then told me, “l thought I could go back to Northwestern and take up where I had left off, but God won’t let me forget that promise! I’ve got to go back to that part of the world as a missionary!”

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned forty-seven while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

It happened to be the morning of her birthday that Shelton and Nancy chose to talk to her about Shelton’s dramatic life decision.

The next morning I went with him to talk with Mother. She was adamant against it at first, not able to face what she felt was losing her son for a second time, but with God’s help, Shelton and I prevailed. Mother called Uncle Ed and told him what happened. They left immediately for East Troy and when they returned they had made the decision that Shelton would drop out of Northwestern and enroll at Bob Jones University, a fundamental Christian school, where one of Uncle Ed’s daughters, Dolores, was a student. So, after New Year’s day, 1947, Shelton was on his way to [Greenville, South Carolina].

Once again I was left to console Mother as she watched our house really become an “empty nest” – Evie in her Junior year at Coe, Daddy in a nursing home, and now Shelton gone far away from Illinois with aspirations of returning to the Far East after he had been trained for spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a foreign land.

JANUARY – The following story from Nancy memoirs again shows the influence and spirit of Alice who now had to manage parenting her three young adult children on her own.

Nancy and one of her friends took Spanish lessons at the beginning of 1947 in downtown Chicago from “an interesting man in his early forties who introduced himself as Gregorio Martinez [and] explained that he had been an inhabitant of Castille, Spain.” About three weeks after the class started Senor Martinez called to ask Nancy to dinner for “an interesting conversation” about her “interests in Spanish history and culture”. He met her after she got off work that Friday.

And it was a very interesting date, in several ways. Gregorio, as he preferred to be called, took me to the formal dining room at one of the downtown hotels, up a wide flight of stairs which led to a velvet-curtained entrance of an elegantly decorated room, an orchestra playing dance tunes at the farthest corner of the room, several couples dancing, tuxedo clothed waiters moving swiftly with trays and wine bottles. I was nicely dressed, but not elaborately as most of the older patrons I saw being seated around us were. I certainly hadn’t expected this kind of background for instructions on Spanish culture!

Gregorio did talk about many of the things which I had wondered about since I was quite young, not just Spanish culture and history but European environment, history and traditions. I was fascinated with this personal introduction to parts of the world I longed to see; my anticipation was heightened by everything he said.

While we talked I barely noticed what was going on around me. Gregorio ordered the dinner and almost silently, at prolonged intervals, several courses were placed in front of us (seven, I found out later). First, there was a champagne cocktail at which Gregorio raised his glass to mine, saying “To the return of glory to Spain!” He then looked at me and said, “How much I would like to show you my country the way it used to be!” At the time I knew very little about the war in Spain or what Franco’s dictatorship was going to mean to the country. I merely returned his look with a smile and said, “War is a terrible thing. I am sorry you have had to leave your country; I know it must be very difficult for you.” He put down his glass, took my hand and kissed it. Real European gallantry!

We were both silent for a brief time, listening to the music, then the salad was served. As the waiter removed those dishes, Gregorio said, “Come, we must dance – that is a fox trot.” I told him that high school and college men did not know much about dancing; that I was not familiar with the fox trot! He laughed and said, “Then I will show you. Come!” And that was the routine on into the evening – dancing or talking during the lengthy intervals between the courses. He told me that eating was almost a ritual in Spain, taking place between conversation, dancing, heated discussions, laughing, reminiscing, continuing over several hours. I told him that eating in America often took place only because it was necessary, that at school and even at home it was consumed as quickly as possible because everyone usually had something else they wanted or had to do. It was from Gregory that I learned to eat slowly and enjoy the companions at the table so that even now I am usually the last one to finish my meal – frequently because I love to contribute to the conversation!

Shortly after 10:00 o’clock I suggested that it was time for me to catch a train for home. Gregorio walked me to the El platform. I thanked him for a lovely evening and the interesting conversation. I told him I was really looking forward to seeing his part of the world some day. As the train approached he kissed my hand again saying, “The evening was a pleasure for me also, Senorita Nancy.”

On the way home I was thinking that I now better understood why Mother had married a man so much older than she was. An older man is more sophisticated, more sure of himself, more sure of his place in society. Mother was just 17 and 18 years old during the two years the United States was involved in World War I. The only men I ever heard her mention prior to meeting my Father were Gilbert Austin and her half-cousin. Both of them lived back east. Daddy had his own business, liked music and the theater, took her to the historical Colonial Club, whose membership was open only to those who could prove they were from a line of ancestors who had lived ln America in the Colonial days before the Revolutionary War. She was only 21 when they met and when he proposed to her. She was 22 when they married in June of 1922. He was 46, had been past the age of eligibility for enlistment for World War I, was able to build her a lovely home in an upper class suburb, and to give her a lifestyle to which she quickly became accustomed – theater, musicals, Country Club and Athletic Club memberships, sophisticated friends, travel, as well as financial security.

I certainly knew that Gregorio had nothing material to offer, having come to America as a refugee from Spain. The elegant evening we had just shared was surely beyond the means of a language teacher, but for some reason was meant to impress me. I was impressed – by his love for his country, his courage in leaving everything and everyone he had known to start life over for the sake of freedom and independence. To have spent the time with him was a learning experience for me and I was glad I had not given up the opportunity to accept his invitation.

Over the next few months Gregorio and Nancy continued to go places together, sometimes to the “’near north side’ of Chicago which was called the ‘Bohemian’ part of the city … Here gathered the artists, foreign restaurants, various ethnic residents, hopeful musicians and actors, a culture so alien to my own that it fascinated my young mind.” But often to the “Spanish Club” where Gregorio’s fellow Spanish immigrants would meet, men mostly, but women could join them if they were accompanied by a man. The cultural differences between Spain and America, and Gregorio’s attitude in particular towards women, ultimately led to the end of the relationship that Nancy had seen as a friendship, but Gregorio saw as much more. This is where Alice became involved, as the following excerpt shows.

After several trips to that part of Chicago, Gregorio was aware of how affected I was by the atmosphere which reflected the world from which he came. He caressed my hand saying, “Europe will recover from the war my precious Nancy. I will be able to show it to you the way you are thinking of it!” He had never before called me by an endearing name. I looked at him with surprise and he then said, “Come with me to my apartment tonight.” I pulled my hand away from him, and as the train came to a stop at the Oak Park Station, I said, “No, Gregorio.” He leaned towards me and whispered, “Please, Nancy.” I shook my head, and he had to quickly move forward to get off the train.

Riding on to Glen Ellyn all romantic thoughts of Europe drifted away as I finally began to realize that Gregorio had been leading up to that invitation for some time. I was still accepting his attention as I would from a teacher or a good friend; obviously he thought differently! I reprimanded myself for naively opening the way for him by being so obviously fascinated with my romantic dreams of Europe and the Old World environment! “Grow up, Nancy!” I told myself. “Quit dreaming and face reality! You’ve been leading him on. Time to set things straight!”

The following week when he called to confirm our Friday night meeting I told him I could only be able to have a drink with him this time because a relative would be visiting at home. We met in the lobby as usual and walked to the cocktail lounge nearby. During that short walk he addressed me endearingly three times: Precious, my Sweet Nancy, Dearest. The lounge was quiet at this early hour and we had our choice of booths near the back, away from the entrance. At first Gregorio started to sit with me on one side of the booth. I asked him please to sit opposite me, I wished to talk to him.

After our drinks were served, he looked at me and said, “What is troubling you, my Precious?” I hesitated, trying to remember all the arguments I had considered using when explaining to him my reasons for bringing our meetings to an end. Finally I said, “Gregorio, I feel that I owe you an apology.” “An apology for what, my Precious?” he asked. I looked him straight in the eyes and answered, “Well, first of all for leading you to believe that you have a right to call me ‘Precious’ or to ask me to spend the night with you.”

“I have offended you by letting you know my feelings for you?” He sounded confused. “Not offended, Gregorio, as much as surprised. I have come to realize that I have been terribly naive to have supposed that we were just good friends with a mutual interest in your homeland and European culture. I have been so interested and fascinated by the things you have taught me I feel I have selfishly taken advantage of your knowledge and generosity. I am truly sorry that you have misunderstood my reason for accepting your attention.”

“It has been my greatest of pleasure to be with you, Nancy. I have truly hoped that you also felt affection for me.” He reached for my hand which I then withdrew from the table and placed in my lap.

“Among the things we talked about, Gregorio, was European attitudes towards religious beliefs. You may not have been in America long enough to understand our differences on this subject. I have been raised in a family where religion is taken very seriously. One of the most demanding teachings is that men and women do not sleep with each other until after they are married.”

“But, Nancy,” he interrupted me, “You would be released from this restriction by ‘Noblesse Oblige.’” “By what?” I questioned. “You are so beautiful. It would not be fair to men who are attracted to you by limiting your favors to only one! ‘Noblesse Oblige’ means that beauty is obligated to give pleasure to those who admire her!”

“Oh, Gregorio,” I said, trying not to laugh. “You don’t really mean what you just said!” He tried to protest but I continued, “Please, I may have appeared to be a complete innocent in such matters, but I have graduated from college, you remember, and I do know what ‘Noblesse Oblige’ really refers to.” He stared at me but said nothing. “Many centuries ago, one of the rulers of a European country declared that he, the king, had the ‘Noble Right’ (Noblesse Oblige) to sleep with any woman in his kingdom – even to the extent of declaring that on the wedding day of any virgin in his realm, he had the ‘Noblesse Oblige’ of sleeping with her before she slept with her husband! I, Gregorio, do not claim any nobility or any such obligation. If you are interested in attracting a woman as a bed partner, Gregorio, you have picked the wrong woman. I think it would be well for us to stop meeting apart from the classroom.”

He looked at me with frustration, finally saying, “No, no, Nancy, I am sorry if I have offended you. Your beauty is not the only thing which has drawn me to you. You are intelligent and have shown such an interest in my heritage and background. I have so much enjoyed the times we have been together. I have come to feel great affection for you; my suggestion that we spend a night together was meant as a complement to your beauty and charm.”

 “Thus, Gregorio, you should now be able to see how our interpretations of your suggestion have differed. It is still light out; I will catch my train home now. Please do not call me again.”

As I gathered my purse and coat he grabbed my arm and said, “Nancy, you cannot simply disappear. My friends are used to seeing us together. They will not understand if I come to the Club without you! Come with me tonight! We need to talk more about this. I will feel humiliated if my friends recognize that you have refused me!”

“Are you suggesting that I should continue to see you so that you can ‘save face’ with your friends?” I said.

“It is not acceptable for a woman to end a relationship! It is a man who must make this kind of decision. You must give me time to tell them that I have decided that we are not compatible!” he whispered angrily. “I must attend an important board meeting for a short time this evening, and I have asked two of my best friends to converse with you while I do this. Please, Nancy, come with me tonight so that I can – yes, as you say – save face!”

This situation suddenly struck me as being totally ridiculous. I hesitated, but rather than make a big issue of it I told him I would have to call home to let Mother know I would be taking a later train, and would go to the Spanish Club with him.

After we had eaten dinner, Gregorio went to his meeting. His friends remarked that Gregorio and I had not been coming so often to the Club. So I told them about our visits to the near north side for a few Italian dinners. Then one of them (I can’t remember their names) asked me, “You have been with Gregorio for several months now. When are you going to invite us to your place for dinner?”

I looked at him with surprise, and without thinking, quickly said, “I do not live with Gregory.”

They stared at me in an embarrassing silence, then one of them said, “But Gregorio has told us…..” “Yes,” I said, “I can just imagine what Gregorio has told you. He was lying!” I got up from the table and went to get my coat, just as Gregory came out of the boardroom. He followed me, asking where I was going. “I’m going home. I’ll catch a taxi downstairs.” He grabbed his coat off the rack and followed me down the stairs. When I tried to signal for a taxi he said, “Tell me what is wrong!” “You told your friends I was living with you! They wanted to know why we have waited so long to invite them to dinner at our place!” I signaled again at an approaching taxi which stopped. I quickly closed the door and it drove away, leaving Gregory standing on the sidewalk.

Mother and Aunt Lil were just finishing dinner when I walked in the door. They were surprised to see me as I had told Mother when I called that I would be on the later train, and since Aunt Lil was staying overnight, I would see her the next morning.

Mother asked how come I was home so early. I just got a cup of coffee and sat down with them, saying, “I won’t be seeing Gregory anymore. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.” Then I changed the subject, asking Aunt Lil how things were with her and after awhile excused myself and went to my room.

After Aunt Lil left the next afternoon, Mother asked me, “What’s the story about Gregory?” After I had told her she asked me, “Did you give him one of your graduation pictures?” When I told her I had she said, “We have to get that back! I don’t want a man like that to have your picture to be showing it around!” I told her it was only a picture, but she insisted that we would go to his apartment to get it. I told her I didn’t know where he lived, so then she said that we would go to the school where he taught and take him to his apartment to get lt. I tried to talk her out of it, but there was no changing her mind.

At work the following Monday afternoon I plugged into an incoming call on the switchboard. Gregorio said, “Nancy, Please!” I disconnected the call by pulling the plug.

Monday evening we drove to the Berlitz school in Oak Park. We stood together outside the locked classroom door until he arrived. Mother approached him saying, “l’m Nancy Allen’s Mother. We have come to take back Nancy’s picture!” He looked aghast as he said, “It is not here. It is at my apartment.”  To which Mother replied, “My car is parked downstairs. I will drive you to your apartment.” “Now?” he asked. “I have a class now.” The students were already arriving. He opened the door for them. Undaunted, Mother said, “Tell your students you will be right back.”

We went down to the car – Gregory in the front seat with Mother; me in the back. We drove ln silence to his apartment, which was in reality just a small vacated single storied store, into which Gregory quickly entered the front door, returning immediately with the picture which he handed to Mother as he sat back into the front seat. We drove silently back to the school. Gregory left the car without acknowledging my presence; I could tell he was totally humiliated!

I have told this story several times over the years, usually to astonished laughter, my audience usually asking the question, “How old were you when this happened?” When I said I was twenty-three they couldn’t believe it! Even that I had told my Mother what had (or in this case had not) happened between Gregorio and me was completely beyond the understanding of younger generations!

This story, while eliciting from me more disgust for Gregorio’s attitude towards women than “astonished laughter”, does emphasize the closeness and openness Alice had with her children.  

JUNE 7 – The twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of Lam and Alice.

NOVEMBER 13 – Lam turned seventy-one while living in the Bellevue Place Sanitarium in Round Lake, Illinois.

DECEMBER 31 – Manton and Smith, Alice’s father’s former company, wrote a promissory note to Alice and Lam for the amount of $25,044.99 towards which the company began paying $100 a month plus 4% interest.

1948

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned forty-eight while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

FEBRUARY 14 – In 1948 Nancy met Al Haeger for a blind date on Valentine’s day. The parents of Nancy’s friend from college, Ann, were gone for a few days so she was home alone and asked Nancy to spend the night at her house to keep her company and, “oh, by the way, we’ll be going on a double date.” Ann’s date said he didn’t have a car, but he really wanted to take her to dinner and a movie and this friend of his did have a car so did she know someone who they could double date with. That’s the set up and here’s the rest in Nancy’s words:

Valentine’s day came and I reluctantly had Mother drive me into Oak Park to keep Ann company. HER date arrived on time; mine was nowhere to be seen! I found myself sitting alone in the kitchen so as not to disturb Ann and her date. I was about ready to call Mother to ask her to pick me up when Al Haeger arrived – with postwar clothing which were really leftovers from the past four years [both dates were ex-service men] – belt in the back of his coat – pork-pie hat on the back of his head – and a big grin on his face. He had called about an hour before his arrival to say he had taken his Mother to church and would show up as soon as he could run a few other errands for her … Ann and I kept waiting for the invitation to take us to dinner to blossom. But when it appeared not to be in the offering, we decided to cook a chicken with some mashed potatoes and put a salad together.

They finally went home – around midnight or so – and I wasn’t sure that I would ever hear from Al again. In fact I really didn’t care one way or another! Ann, also, felt less enthusiastic about her date, and during breakfast the next morning shrugged them off as another wasted evening.

From this point on in Nancy’s memoirs a change takes place, at first barely noticeable, but more and more the memories are less and less descriptive. She had macular degeneration and, I believe, it was at this point she began dictating to either her daughter Joy or her “adopted daughter” Patricia Nelson. Also, it is possible, some dementia was setting in. She was in her mid 80s after all.

MARCH – JUNE – Nancy, who was 24, was living at home with Alice. Lam was at Bellevue Sanitarium, Shelton was in his sophomore year at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, and Evelyn was in her senior year at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Surprise, Surprise! About three weeks after I had met Mr. Al Haeger the telephone rang and there he was on the line. He asked me how I was doing. I said, “I’m doing fine. How are you doing.” And he said he was doing a lot better than he used to because he went out and finally was able to buy a convertible and he wondered whether I would like to go for a ride in the convertible. I said, “Why, sure. I really like to ride in convertibles.” So we made an appointment for him to come by the next night to take me out for the ride. He lived in Palos Heights, which is several miles south of Chicago, while I lived in Glen Ellyn on the west side of Chicago. So it was quite a ride for him to come that distance, but he said he liked to drive and he wanted to see me and so he said that it was no problem.

We were beginning to get pretty well at having a good time together, but after about two months Al told me that he had decided that he was going to quit his job and take a job in Louisiana. I said, “Why in the world would you want to do that?” He said it was just a chance to get back down in the south and see if he could meet some of his friends that he knew before he went into the service. And he said, “What I will do so that you do not have to sit and wait and wonder if I am ever going to call you, I promise I will call you every Thursday night. So if you have other plans, you know you don’t have to sit and wait for a call.” And Al was very good with that. He did call me every Thursday night. That went on for about three months.

And then one Thursday night after we had talked for about twenty minutes I started to hang up and I heard him say something else and so I asked him, “What did you say?” He said, “Nancy, I love you. Will you marry me?” Well, I almost dropped the receiver I was so surprised at that. But I said yes. He said, “Well, I will let you know as soon as I can get back, but just tell your mother that I may not be back until October, but maybe she would like to get started, I know she likes to sew, maybe she would get started sewing a wedding dress for you and then we can get married as soon as I get back. I will continue to call you on Thursday night every week. I know this is a big surprise, but I finally made up my mind that you were the gal I wanted.” Well, I hung up the phone and I said to mother, “He asked me to marry him.” She said, “Well, he should. He was spending a lot of time with you.” But that was something I hadn’t expected.

JULY

And so mother and I picked out a pattern for a wedding dress and she started putting the pattern together. I was still working at Young and Rubicon and I expected that I wouldn’t be getting married until October. But then during a Thursday night telephone call in July Al said that he was planning to come back for the holiday weekend to see me. A problem arose with his boss for that who asked him why he was going back to Chicago and Al said that he was going to go see his girl, the girl he was going to marry. Al’s boss said, “Well, in that case, don’t bother to come back.” I told Al that was terrible, but Al said, “No, its not terrible. I will just get up to Chicago.” I said, “But I will never be ready for the wedding so early.” He said, “Well, just tell your mom to fix up the wedding dress as fast as she can and we will get married as soon as she is ready. You can start sending invitations to people and everything else that women do when they are going to get married. And so, of course, mother got all upset because I was not giving her the long time that she thought she had to make my dress and to get ready for a wedding. But she managed to do it anyway …

Al told me that he had been looking into different companies to work for and he had found a place he wanted to go to but they were waiting until the [presidential] election was over before they made a decision on who they would hire. And so Al said that if I was to quit my job we could take a nice long vacation out to the west coast and see some of his old friends and buddies out there and it would give us a real nice way to get to know each other real well. And he said we can then come back and by that time the election will be over and we could then decide which job he should take.

AUGUST 14 – Nancy Ellen Allen (25) married Elmer Albert (Al) Haeger (29) in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. The following account, which was published in the Glen Ellyn newspaper, describes the wedding and the dresses Nancy, Alice, and Evelyn wore. While Alice made at least Nancy’s wedding gown, I would not be surprised if she had made all three of their dresses.

The ceremony … was performed in the chapel of the Methodist church … Miss Delores Smith of East Troy, Wis., was the soloist … Palms, candles, and baskets of white gladioli on each side of the altar decorated the chapel. An ice-blue satin gown with an ice-blue crown and veil were worn by the bride, who was given in marriage by her brother, L. Shelton Allen, Jr. Her bouquet was of white roses with a white orchid center and a fuchsia ribbon. Maid of honor was the bride’s sister, Miss Evelyn M. Allen, who wore a sky-blue gown with an off-the-shoulder neckline. Her flowers were red roses with a white ribbon. She also wore a tiara of red roses … A reception for 110 guests was held at the home of the bride’s parents following the ceremony. The bride’s mother wore a cinnamon brown dress and accessories and an orchid corsage … the young couple will be at home in Palos Heights following a month’s honeymoon trip to the west coast. Prenuptial parties included a shower given by Mrs. Otto E. Anderson [Aunt Olga] and one given by Mrs. Oscar [Nettie] Ohmann, both of Glen Ellyn.

L. Shelton Allen, Jr. (22) and Nancy Ellen Allen (25)

Shelton walked Nancy down the aisle because, as she wrote:

My father was in a nursing home and so he was not able to attend the wedding or to walk me down the aisle. [The] sad fact is that Daddy didn’t know either one of us when mother and I went to visit him at the nursing home. We used to cry all the way home saying that our Daddy wasn’t there anymore and asking Jesus to take him home soon so that we could know he was safe. We loved him so …

From left to right are Shelton (22), Evelyn (21), Alice (48), Nancy (25), Al Haeger (29), Al’s mother Anna (58), possibly Al’s sister Esther (35), his sister Ruth (34) and her husband Richard Douglas (38), and the tall man on the far right might be Al’s brother Clarence (32). The five children in the front are Al’s nieces and nephews, probably as follows: Esther’s daughter Polly (5), Ruth’s son Don (4), Esther’s son James (7 yrs. 1 mo.), Ruth’s daughter Julie (7 yrs. 8 mos.), and Ruth’s son Richard (9).

Well, the wedding was at 4:00 in the afternoon and the reception was at mother’s house. After the reception, it was still quite light out and so we just took off. We continued driving west on our way to the state of Iowa. We crossed the Mississippi River and arrived there just as the sun was setting. We found a nice hotel where we had dinner and stayed the night …

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER – On Nancy’s month-long honeymoon, Alice continued to show her support.

The post office at that time used to order something for travelers so that if you told people where you were going to be stopping in different cities that you would get a letter there each time from the family back home. So that worked out very well. We had already sent letters back to our families telling them in a brief way where we were going to be … One of the funny things about our trip was that in all the letters I received from my mother at the different places we had told her to leave letters for us there was inside of every envelope a $20 bill [valued over $250 in 2024!!] and so we had enough money to stop and do unusual things, while always making sure we had enough money to get back home with.

After the month-long honeymoon driving and visiting family and friends through Iowa, Colorado, Utah, California, Oregon, Wyoming and then back through Colorado and Iowa to Illinois, Nancy recollected the following:

We called my mother and told her when we thought we would be there and she said she had some surprises there for us when we got home. She said, “I am not going to tell you what it is. You just get here.” … When we got to my mother’s house, we walked into the living room and Mother pointed to the fireplace. Up on the mantle were two envelopes addressed to me. The first one I opened up was money in the amount of $500 [valued over $6,000 in 2024] from my grandmother, Mommy. I could remember as a little girl I used to be happy when the insurance man would come once a month to collect about 25 or 50 cents each time he came. And she kept saying to me, “You will be happy about this. I am buying it for you so that one day when you are a young lady you will get a check from me that you can spend for something that you would like to do or buy something you would like to have.” She did this for me and for my cousin Alice. Well, when I opened that envelope and saw that $500 check, I started to cry. I couldn’t believe that she really had gone all those years and put up every single month 25 or 50 cents so that my cousin Alice and I would receive this money when we were 25 years old.

I continued talking to Al by saying, “I want to take this check and put it into a savings account where it will [earn] a little interest and I wanted to use it down through the years as I get older.” I knew I wanted to keep it as long as I could because it was from my Grandma. What turned out to be was that my mother decided that every Christmas she would go and take a little bit of the money out and buy something sweet and pretty for me and she would wrap it and put the package under the tree with a tag that said, “To my first granddaughter Nancy. Love, your Mommy.” … that money made me very happy to know that my Grandmother was always looking after me. Even now I get tears in my eyes when I think of the fact of how sweet that memory was.

When I looked at the other envelope, it was for Al. He opened it up and he had a check from the government. Three years after the end of the war, the United States government had decided to send all of those who had been participants in the war to receive payment of several hundred dollars as a thank you for all that they had done in the fighting of the battles of the war for four years.

Well, we spent several hours talking like crazy to mother about all of the things we did. She thanked us so much for all the letters, but she said she couldn’t wait just to see us. She was happy because here she was, she had a son-in-law and she had her daughter now happily married.

The next morning we used my mother’s fancy washing machine down in the basement and got everything cleaned. Al called his mother and talked to her. He told her everything was fine and we would be arriving at her house in the afternoon. And so after all the clothes were cleaned and dried and everything was packed up again, we left Mother and told her we would be back to see her the next weekend. Mother told us, “Well, just plan on coming every weekend on Sunday and we will have dinner together. It is something I have looked forward to for a long time.” So we agreed to that and went down to Palos Heights.

FALL – Evelyn, after graduating from Coe College, may have been living at home and beginning her courtship with Bill Kudebeh. Shelton was in his junior year at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. The newlyweds Nancy and Al, living in Palos Heights, visited Alice almost every Sunday. Occasionally Alice took them to Medina Country Club for lunch, other times she would cook for them at home. Nancy recalled the following:

Several times she cooked a leg of lamb with mince pudding. It was one of her favorite Sunday dishes. This went on until after a few weeks while driving home, Al said, “I wish your mother didn’t always want to give us leg of lamb.” I said, “You don’t like it?” He said that while he was overseas and they were living in tents at camps they could smell the sheep cooking and the smell wasn’t very appetizing. I said, “Well, a leg of lamb is a far cry from sheep meat!” He said, “They said the mint jelly helped the taste alright, but the smell while it is cooking was very much the same.” So I told Mother and she found other delicious meals so that Al wasn’t reminded of the smell of sheep meat.

Fall – “Regularly scheduled programming on the four networks— … ABC … CBS … NBC and the DuMont Television Network, which folded in 1955—was scarce. On some evenings, a network might not offer any programs at all, and it was rare for any network to broadcast a full complement of shows during the entire period that became known as prime time (8–11 PM, Eastern Standard Time). Sales of television sets were low, so, even if programs had been available, their potential audience was limited. To encourage sales, daytime sports broadcasts were scheduled on weekends in an effort to lure heads of households to purchase sets they saw demonstrated in local appliance stores and taverns—the venues where most TV viewing in America took place before 1948. Although a television set cost about $400—a substantial sum at the time … by autumn of that year, most of the evening schedules on all four networks had been filled, and sets began appearing in more and more living rooms, a phenomenon many credited to comedian Milton Berle (who) was the star of TV’s first hit show, The Texaco Star Theatre (NBC, 1948–53), a comedy-variety show that quickly became the most popular program at that point in television’s very short history. When the series debuted, fewer than 2 percent of American households had a television set; when Berle left the air in 1956 … TV was in 70 percent of the country’s homes, and Berle had acquired the nickname ‘Mr. Television.’” _{https://www.britannica.com/art/television-in-the-United-States}

1949

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned forty-nine while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

JANUARY 20 – Harry Truman was sworn in for his second term as President of the United States.

AUGUST 6 – Alice’s baby girl Evelyn Mae Allen (22) married William Dean (Bill) Kudebeh (24) in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. I would be surprised if Alice had not again at least made the wedding gown. Evelyn’s brother Shelton walked her down the aisle.

The Newlyweds: Evelyn and Bill Kudebeh

FALL – With Evelyn married Alice was now alone in the big house on Lenox Road and, on top of this, the weekly visits from Nancy and Al would stop as the Haegers left for Kingsville, Texas where Al would attend college. Nancy remembered the following:

The trunk of our Pontiac convertible was packed as well as the backseat. One of the things in there was a cooler in which there was ice cubes and sandwiches and cans of drinks so we wouldn’t have to stop at restaurants.

Mother Haeger was in the front seat with me in the middle and Al driving. As we drove away from Glen Ellyn I couldn’t stop the tears that were falling quietly down my cheeks. I was leaving Mother all alone and I knew that she was probably crying her heart out as we drove away. Her husband was in a nursing home. Evelyn (my sister, Evie) was married and living in Iowa where her husband, Bill, was working on his college degree. Her son, Shelton, was on the east coast at Bob Jones University where he was studying to become a minister. Mother had lived in Glen Ellyn for a long time and so she had a lot of good friends, but it is always a little bit different when all of the family has left you alone.

After arriving in Kingsville, Texas, Nancy made a further discovery about the generosity of Alice for her daughter.

When we spent weekends with my mother we had spent time opening up all our wedding gifts. And then later when we got our little book from the college listing what we needed to bring for our lodgings we realized that many of the gifts were too fancy for trailer living, such as sterling silver, chinaware and beautiful glasses … Mother had told us that as a wedding gift she would supply us with everything that we needed, even everything for four people in case we wanted to ask friends to come over and eat with us once in a while. Well, as we were leaving her, she handed me a small package which she told us to take good care of so that it didn’t get lost. I kissed her and thanked her and had been carrying it in my purse this whole time. Well now, after we had finished getting everything put into place in our trailer, we sat down to open up this small package. When we saw what was inside, we both said, “Oh, my gosh!” There was a fistful of $100 bills. It was $1000 to keep us until I had gotten a job and Al had received his first government check. [valued at over $12,000 in 2024]

1950

JANUARY 4 – Alice turned fifty while living in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

FEBRUARY 23 – Alice borrowed $12,000 from Maton and Smith, her father’s former company in which she still owned shares, to help pay off a $27,500 loan to Lake Shore National Bank. L.S. Allen Company paid the remaining $15,500. I do not know for what purpose this loan had been, perhaps for the house on Lenox Road, or for her children’s college degrees, or for her husband’s care at Bellevue Place Sanitarium, or for a combination of the above.

MARCH 11 – Lam died at the Bellevue Place Sanitarium in Round Lake, Illinois from cerebral arteriosclerosis at the age of seventy-three years, three months, and 28 days. He had lived there for about three and a half years. His ashes were the fourth to be interred in the family plot at Oakridge Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois, (Lot 295, Section 12).

Mother had called us and said it was freezing cold in northern Illinois. I had a fur coat and I had put it in storage when it got hot in Kingsville. We got the coat and Al grabbed his good Sunday suit and we were on our way in the convertible in our summer clothes. We got as far as Little Rock, Arkansas, when we were told that only a few miles ahead of us a big snow storm was having its day. So we put the convertible in storage in Little Rock and took the train to Chicago. We took the local trains around the loop and stood in the cold blowing snow until the little train came out and took us to Glen Ellyn. On the way home, Mother stopped at the funeral [home] so that we [could] see Daddy’s coffin. When I saw Daddy I gasped. He was so thin and so wrinkled — the tears started rolling down uncontrollably. Mother whispered in my ear and said, “No, Nancy, no. You are the strong one. I cannot face tears of grief.” She said, “Shelton is coming from Bob Jones University in the East. Evelyn and Bill are coming from Iowa. Uncle Ed and Aunt Evelyn and all of the folks from Wisconsin are coming. Please, Nancy, I need your strength. You are the strong one.” So I tried hard to hold back the tears when I was around her — Crying myself to sleep that night and crying silently on our way back to Arkansas the day after the funeral. Daddy and I were so close. He saw that I was a person, even as a little girl, who liked all the things that he liked, and cared about all the things that he cared about. He saw to it that I had singing lessons, that I had piano lessons, that I had elocution lessons where I was taught to recite poetry … Daddy took me to Shakespearean plays that were held in Chicago when I was only nine years old and he bought me beautiful opera music records. He would come up to my room to listen with me because Mother didn’t like the sound of opera music. Daddy also took me to all of the good plays that come into Chicago. We were always there sitting in the fifth row center of the auditorium. Daddy was a patient and kind father. I still miss him.

Many older couples can spend their final years together, but Mother lost her husband when she was [50] and so she was always going to have to be alone. Since she was only in her fifties, we thought that she might find a man there in Glen Ellyn who had lost a wife and would like to have Mother as a companion to go to the country club, theater, and movies and who would be a good companion for her. But when we asked Mother why she had turned several offers away she said, “I’ll never find a man who would be as good to me as your Father was.”

Lambeth Shelton Allen, Senior (1876-1950)

THE FAMILY BURIAL PLOT

Before my Grandfather Edward Smith (Poppy), passed away, he had purchased a large burial plot for our family. So when my Great-Grandmother Winkler passed away, she was the first one to be buried at that plot. Grandfather Edward Smith was next, then Grandmother Julia Otellia Smith (Mommy), and now it was my Daddy, my beloved Daddy … And there is one plot left there for me.

[At the time Lam died, per the assessment of his estate, Alice was making $150 a week (nearly $2000 in 2024 prices) with the L.S. Allen Company, although she did not actually do any work there. In comparison, the Office Manager of 22 years Ridell “Archie” Kelsey was making $125 a week, the secretary of 22 years Aurella Brower was making $90 a week, and another employee of 43 years Frank J. Wirkus (the Polish shop manager who Nancy said “could set type by hand”)was making $110 a week. (The office also had about eight other full-time employees and four full-time typists.) It seems that Archie Kelsey and Frank Wirkus had continued to run the business since 1945 when Lam was no longer able to go in. But how long the L.S. Allen Company stayed in business after Lam’s death or how long Alice continued to get her weekly paycheck, I do not know. Throughout most of the remainder of her life it seemed Alice continued to spend money as she always had and freely bought gifts for her children and grandchildren, even after she moved into the home of Evelyn and Bill in the 1970s. For instance, she bought shoes, about three pairs each from my recollection, for the five children of Shelton one year before we returned to Okinawa. And I still cherish the silver charm bracelet I received from her which she would add to from time to time. But I also recall either Nancy or Evelyn saying something to the effect of, “Mother still spends money like she has it!” And so I think at some point, much later in her life, the money did run out. Social Security wasn’t enacted until ten years before Lam was no longer able to work so I’m not sure how much of that was available to him or to Alice after he died. For the last few years of her life she was in a semi-private room in a nursing home.]

APRIL 20 – Lam’s sister Roberta Allen Briggs died at the Meyers Rest Home in Stockton, California where she had moved after the death of her husband in Cedaredge, Colorado to be closer to her daughter Lola Briggs Hart when she was no longer able to care for herself.

MAY 8 – The widowed Alice is recorded in the U.S. Census living alone at 638 Lenox Road, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

JUNE 27 – THE KOREAN “CONFLICT” – Less than five years after the end of World War II “President Truman announced to the nation and the world that America would intervene in the Korean conflict in order to prevent the conquest of an independent nation by communism … Despite the fear that U.S. intervention in Korea might lead to open warfare between the United States and Russia after years of ‘cold war,’ Truman’s decision was met with overwhelming approval from Congress and the U.S. public. Truman did not ask for a declaration of war, but Congress voted to extend the draft and authorized Truman to call up reservists.” _{https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/truman-orders-u-s-forces-to-korea-2}

JULY – Alice got a visit from Nancy and Al.

In July there was a six-day break at the college. Al and I decided that we would drive up to Glen Ellyn for the holiday … We had picked up a stray cat and she was riding with us up north. She had a pillow to sleep on in the back seat of the car and a “necessary box” for the necessaries. After we had been on the road for several hours, I began to feel nauseous from the smell of the kitty box. We stopped to empty and clean the box, but Al started asking me questions leading up to asking me if I thought it was morning sickness, that maybe I was pregnant already. I couldn’t believe that and so I kept insisting that it was just car sickness or just the kitty box. But all contemplations were settled when we arrived at Mother’s. We hugged and kissed her and then she looked at me and said, “Are you pregnant, Nancy?” Al said, “We kind of think so.” So she took us to our old medicine doctor who talked to me and asked a lot of questions and then finally said that he was pretty sure that I was going to have a baby.

We had a wonderful time with Mother. One day she took us to the Medina Country Club for dinner and then, of course, we had a Fourth of July celebration in our front yard across from all the goings-on in the park across from us. Mother had invited all of the people from the Oak Park Club and Aunt Lil and also Aunt Olga and her husband. She invited all the neighbors too. Everybody was busy cooking barbecue and watching the fireworks in the park across the street.

Oh, how I loved all those people up there. As I write this, I think they are almost all gone.

The next day we went up to East Troy to see all the relatives there, Alice and John, Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Ed, and children and grandchildren galore. Yes, they too are all gone, except Alice. She is my dear friend who was only five months younger than I was. She was born to Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Ed and she is still living although she has been very sick.

CHRISTMAS – Alice sent a Christmas box to her daughter Nancy who was in Texas, away from home for Christmas for only the second time in her life, and nearly five months pregnant with Alice’s first grandchild. Although Nancy’s recollections put this event after their visit to Illinois, it may have been the year before or the year after, considering her pregnant state in 1950 and the champagne mentioned.

Everything was closed for Christmas Day, every store, every movie show, everything was closed and most of the houses were empty.

So Al and I decided that we would try to make the best of it by saying that we were going to do something to decorate up our little apartment even though it was looking like it was going to be a bummer Christmas. There was a man selling Christmas trees down a little hill near us and we waited until it was the day before Christmas and then we got a Christmas tree for only two dollars as he was closing up his shop. Then we went to a dime store and we bought some paper ornaments and one string of lights for the tree. We remembered a gift that someone had given us for a wedding present, a bottle of champagne which I had tucked away and forgotten about, but we decided that we would drink it anyway. We bought a small turkey. I baked some cookies and then for Christmas day we had an apple pie and some ice cream. We called mother and she asked if we had gotten her package that she had sent to us and was disappointed when she heard that it had not gotten to us yet. We listened to Christmas music and a broadcast church service from Dallas and we ate cookies and drank the champagne. Mother’s box arrived the next day and it was filled with wonderful gifts and goodies and a $500 check to each of us. So it turned out to be a great holiday, a real blessing.