In 1932 Joseph suffered what Dr. Biesenthal, the family
physician, thought at first was a heart attack. Dr. Biesenthal
called in a specialist; they consulted in private by going into
the Ehrlich bathroom, where Joseph’s condition was rediagnosed
as a severe case of pleurisy. To recuperate, he would have to
get away from the cold and damp of Chicago and into a warmer
climate.
One of Joseph’s customers
mentioned that her mother, Mrs. Dever, ran a home for
convalescents in St. Petersburg, Florida, assisted by another
daughter, nurse Lila Renbarger. For something like a dollar a
day, patients could rest on cots outdoors in the Florida sun;
meals were part of the package. Joseph went off by bus to St.
Petersburg, convinced he was going there to die; but Mrs. Dever
and Lila took such good care of him that after a month he
returned home “all well.” A year or two later Mathilda was
suffering from gall bladder problems; she too was sent to St.
Petersburg and got not only well “but fatter,” as she put it.
For several subsequent winters Mathilda and Joseph would
alternate going to St. Petersburg; they were unable to go
together since they could not afford to bring the children with
them.
Joseph had to give up smoking, cold turkey, as part of his
recuperation; so he took up chewing P.K.s, a peppermint
Chicletlike gum made by Wrigley’s and sold in machines on
pillars at the elevated station. You put in your penny, a
little mechanical man would rotate, and the P.K. would come out
of a slot. (On one occasion the mechanical man kept turning and
a whole series of P.K.s were produced—greatly upsetting Joseph,
since he’d only spent a cent and people were hurrying up to help
themselves to the gum windfall.)
He was allowed to continue drinking, in moderation as usual.
During Prohibition there was New Life near-beer which he
purchased by the case, always dark, restricting himself to a
single bottle a night, and offering Martha its last few drops.
After Prohibition, if the Ehrlichs had company at 1553 Devon,
George might be sent with a pitcher to the local tavern to fetch
ten or fifteen cents’s worth of beer—about a quart. Joseph was
also known to have an occasional glass of wine, always drunk
“Old World style” in one swallow, and followed by a little
hiccup.
Up till now Joseph had picked up and delivered customers’s fur
coats by hand, traveling by streetcar, but around 1933 he bought
his first automobile: a Chevrolet two-door sedan with maroon
body and black fenders. This was not so much to spare Joseph’s
health as to enable his having a more widespread clientele; now
many customers, including those who moved away from the
neighborhood, would not have to come to the store at any time.
Joseph never liked to drive, and for trips to St. Petersburg he
would advertise in the newspaper for a driver; a young man who
wanted to go to Florida would be hired and get paid
transportation there. So as not to worry about maintenance
Joseph would trade in the car every year or two, going back each
time to the same Chevrolet dealer, who looked forward to these
trade-ins since the Ehrlich Chevy tended to be in fine condition
with less than 5,000 miles on it.
At this time Joseph also began listening to radio broadcasts of
baseball games and boxing bouts, always rooting for the least
objectionable boxer. The Ehrlichs bought their first radio, a
Majestic, about the time they moved to 1553 Devon, but the very
first radio George remembered seeing belonged to Leo Kohn. It
had enormous dials three inches wide, all calibrated, with Leo
wearing earphones busy tuning it, periodically going “Shh! Shh!”—he
had to have absolute silence—and on one occasion saying, “I
think I have Pittsburgh.”
On February 8, 1933 Martha performed at a piano recital for Miss
Claussen’s
students at the Indian Boundary Park Field House. Afterwards
Mathilda wrote:
You, dear, weren’t nervous at all, and played very well … but
best of all was that you enjoyed it, and knowing it was worth
all the effort to make you admit that you liked what you did
this evening. We are so glad to hear you say that at last. We
are
very proud of you and we are sure you are proud of yourself too.
If not a turning point, this recital was at least a milestone in
Martha’s gradual emergence from her shell of insecurity and lack
of self-esteem. “As I grew older,” she was to say, “I was
distressed more than a few times to find that I could go through
life in my early years as if behind gauze draperies. Instead of
clear, sharp images, all my past is blurred and muted. No doubt
a self-defense mechanism. If I didn’t see anyone or anything
clearly, I couldn’t be seen clearly either, and invisibility was
what I sought always, except when playing the piano.”
In April 1934 Joseph wrote in Martha’s Diary:
Your piano playing improved very much, and now you really enjoy
sitting at the piano and playing just for pleasure. There are
times when you go to practice without anyone prompting you to do
it, which is very good. It’s true you can play well but just
because I insisted on your practicing every day so you learned
your lessons. But music isn’t in your blood. But I am going to
keep you at it because I know there will be times in your life
when your music will be a help to forget all your troubles and
to
help you make adjustments when you need to, and keep you from
despair.
The love of animals was in Martha’s blood, and she tended
to volunteer at holiday times to bring home any small creatures
being nurtured in school classrooms. Once this included a
snake, which escaped from its container and got into the fur
shop.
There was always at least one representative of Nature resident
at 1553 Devon, thanks to the presence of Peggy the drooling
watchdog and her successors. After Peggy’s death the Ehrlichs
looked for a suitable replacement and seemed to find it in a big
shepherd called Rin, who “was so ominous-looking that people
would cross the street rather than walk past the dog. Except
the dog was an absolute milquetoast.” Since Rin looked horrific
he would have been ideal, had he not been so huge that he could
(and did) eat out of pans cooking on the stove. By 1934 he was
replaced by Patsy, a much smaller Belgian shepherd who “really
had a nasty temperament, except with the family; would tolerate
absolutely no one else… and barked up a storm, snarled, teeth
flashing—consequently was exactly what we wanted.” Patsy would
remain with the family for nearly a decade.
Among other wonders of Nature intermittently in the Ehrlich
household were a little green turtle or two, and a couple of
experiments keeping canaries. Whether it was “Would it be nice
to have a bird sing?” or “Would it be nice to have it for the
kids?”, the Ehrlichs’s canaries were not be nature singers; nor
did they live very long.
In February 1935 Joseph returned from another visit to St.
Petersburg, bringing home a ten-inch baby alligator—under his
coat, to keep it warm in the wintry Chicago climate, and
possibly also to keep the neighbors from gossiping. The
Ehrlichs tried to keep their alligator alive on flies and bits
of raw hamburger, and “I just love it,” Martha wrote. “I am
worried about it though because it will not eat.” Its general
lack of response caused Joseph to call it Dumbkopf, which Martha
abbreviated to Dunky for the remainder of its brief life.
Earlier that year Martha had encountered a dog “laying in the
street as if he was dead,” stretched across the streetcar lines
so that a conductor had been obliged to drag it over
to the curb. Martha indignantly observed:
One woman went to call the dog hospital and they sent out an
ambulance. It must have been broken ribs. The dog was a
beautiful police. Big, strong, it didn’t cry or whimper, just
lay there. A man called it across the street and it got hit by
a car. The
man that hit it disappeared, nobody knew who it was.
Martha wrote this on January 3, 1935, in the Diary her parents
had kept for her since birth, and presented to her the previous
September when she turned fifteen. Beforehand,
both Joseph and Mathilda made final entries of their own:
1934 September 27.
I just looked over your diary once more before giving it to
you. Fifteen years is a long time, dear, but to me it seems
like it was yesterday when we made a party for your sixth
birthday. It was a big party, lots of children and presents
too, but you don’t remember anything about that. I wish you
could, Mártuka, because childhood is the most precious time in
life. Before I close this book to give it to you to keep, I’d
like to give you only one piece of advice, and hope it will help
you out. If you ever come to a hard problem in your life that
you don’t know what to do about, just stop for a second and
think: What would Dad advise me to do? If you think I would say
go ahead and do it, then you could be sure it will come out OK.
But if you have any doubt about it, then don’t do it at all.
One more thing, my dearest: always love your brother George, he
is a good boy and loves you very much. We can never know what
the future brings for us in life. But we are better
off by knowing we are a family thinking [of] and loving each
other forever. [Joseph]
[Same day] My darling, it is ages since I wrote
anything in your diary, but since you are grown up to be a young
lady, there isn’t much happenings I could write down for you.
There’s so much more I’d like to say in here, but as you are
growing up we don’t see all the little things that were so
important before. Except what I think is interesting to jot
down is you have a stubborn streak just like Daddy. When you
decide you want to do something, it has to be done no matter
what. I argue with you about this and try to show it is wrong,
but in the end you always win because I can’t argue, never did
for long, so I give in. My dear, I hope this won’t get you in
trouble. Sometimes you need to be stubborn, but then you have
to learn when you do too have to give in to someone else also.
Tomorrow you will be fifteen years old, my darling, and I wish
you all the joy and happiness for the rest of your long life.
Never to know disappointment, and to be contented with life.
Best of all my dear, remember you have a younger brother to love
and to be good to. Be a good girl, which won’t be hard I am
sure, and try to remember with a kind heart your old parents, we
love you dearly always.
[Mathilda]
When Martha was given her Diary, Joseph had to read it to her
since she could not
read Hungarian well enough to translate. The next day Martha
herself began writing in it:
1934 September 28.
Daddy read me pages of the book and I cried like a baby. I want
to thank everyone who wrote in my book, and I think it is the
best present I ever got. [In Hungarian:] If I ever go
back to Europe, my first visit will be to my Uncle Janika and
Aunt Fáni, to let them know I still love them even if I don’t
remember how they look. I’ll be always grateful for their love
and goodness to me in my earliest life with them. [In
English:]
I shall try faithfully to keep the first and best diary of my
life…
The next day she added: “Today I just remembered that when I
felt very dramatic, I always acted as if my life story were
being written. I read a lot and often imagine myself doing
things people do in books.”
That same month Martha began tenth grade at Nicholas Senn High
School,
which had “truly some very good teachers in what today we would
call college prep courses.” Among her tenth grade classes were
Zoology, taught by Gertrude Eckaros,
and Geometry, taught by Clyde Brown.
These teachers made a great and lasting impression upon Martha;
in January 1935 she wrote, “Mrs. Eckaros and Mr. Brown are the
two teachers that make going to school worthwhile. I love both
of them and hope I shall never do anything to make them ashamed
of me.”
She had given both teachers Christmas cards: Mrs. Eckaros had
liked hers and reciprocated, but Martha had “laid Mr. Brown’s on
his desk and scrammed
before he came in.” Earlier she had wistfully written:
I wonder if when I graduate will I have any boyfriends? I am
fifteen years and one day old, and boys are still holy terrors.
I hope I change because it does not make a
girl very popular with boys if she is afraid of them.
“Woe is me,” Martha went on in March. “I think I shall become
an old maid and teach dumb kids their ABC’s. Here’s hoping not.”
But little by little she was gaining shreds and patches of
self-confidence. When she turned fifteen she was finally
allowed to stay home alone, and buoyed by this freedom she would
sit at the piano and play “mood-release” music—Rachmaninoff,
Sibelius, Liszt.
It must also have been around now that Mathilda defied Joseph (a
thing unheard-of) not just once but twice, the only occasions
Martha was to remember, and both on her account. One was when
Martha wanted to shave her legs for the first time, and Joseph
told her to just keep wearing stockings—they would “rub” the
hairs off. The other time Joseph pounded (or at least slapped)
the table and declared that no daughter of his was going to
appear on the beaches of Lake Michigan dressed like that.
Both times Mathilda intervened and got him, albeit
unenthusiastically, to let Martha go ahead with that.
By the age of sixteen, Martha the pianist (according to her own
grudging admission) “played really well. It was not really
concert caliber, but close to it.” Hers were the closing
performances at Miss Claussen’s recitals, and she won a tryout
to become one of three accompanists in the Senn High School
orchestra. “So I felt an ego-boost there. I was good,
and that—that—I was able to admit.”
However, music was not to be George’s road toward finding
himself. Around 1933, when he was eight, his violin lessons
came to an end. Joseph had been teaching him and Joseph was a
perfectionist, so “if you didn’t get it right the first time, or
the fortieth time,” Martha would remark, “you played it the
forty-first time, to get it right.” George found playing the
violin a chore; he was developing facial tics and not sleeping
well—“the kid was a nervous wreck,” Martha was to say, “he burst
into tears at a sly look”—and finally dug his heels in and
refused to go on. Which Joseph allowed, expecting him to come
to his senses in time. Martha was intended to become a teacher
(particularly as talkies dried up the silent-cinema-pianist
market) but Joseph had ambitions for George to make music his
life’s profession. He told his son that being able to play the
violin might be of help in case another war broke out, since
George could then “join the military band and stay out of
combat.”
This was not enough to sway George; and when the PTA asked
Mathilda how her talented children were getting along, “I had to
tell them that Georgie didn’t want violin lessons very much, so
we stopped it.” Nevertheless she too remained hopeful: “I still
had for years afterwards all the violins in one bunch in the
closet”—the quarter-size, half-size, three-quarter and full-size
violins, awaiting George’s coming to his senses. Eventually the
violins had to be sold, and as Joseph was getting them down from
the closet shelf and putting them together he said, “They look
just like coffins.”
Far from coming to his senses, George (along with two other
kids) gave Joseph
material for a new Three Boys story, this one written in
English:
Once upon a time there was a good little boy who got into bad
company. That made three bad little boys. They filled their
pockets with stones, and went out to conquer windows. One
little boy got twelve, another got five, you got only one. When
you came home that afternoon, you murmured incoherently about
stones, but who would dream that you……! You were such a good
boy. Nevertheless a plainclothes man came with a warrant, and
next morning I awakened you early to appear in court. I
was more scared than you. You were soundly lectured and I was
fined $2.75.
“That was my total juvenile delinquency record during the Capone
era,” George would say. In spite of this, at the age of nine he
demanded that he be allowed to go downtown alone,
and this was granted—at a time when big sister Martha was still
being escorted everywhere by Joseph, even to the Ridge Theatre
across the street.
Downtown Chicago was an exciting place for a youngster to
explore. It was the year of the 1933-34 World’s Fair, “A
Century of Progress Exposition,” which the Ehrlichs could not
afford to visit as often as they would have liked.
But there was no admission charge at Chicago’s many museums and
George began to systematically check these out, partly because
there was such a “wealth of museums—probably there was no
equivalent in terms of the variety, except New York, at that
time.” Grant Park boasted not only the Field Museum of Natural
History but also the recently-opened Shedd Aquarium and Adler
Planetarium; there was the Botanical Greenhouse, the Chicago Art
Institute, the Historical Society of Chicago, and what was then
called “the Rosenwald Museum”—the Chicago Museum of Science and
Industry, which began to develop after the World’s Fair. George
would go to all of these, “not all in one day, but it would be a
typical weekend kind of thing… half entertainment, half ‘What do
we do on Saturday?’” He was to be a museum buff from this point
on, and in later years would attribute a great deal to having
had such extraordinary educational opportunities while growing
up.
George had been just as glad as Martha when she was given her
Diary, and he enjoyed looking at it, though the only thing in
the book he could understand was its photos. At least until
Martha began writing in it herself; soon she was grumbling that
“George is so nosy I think I will have to lock my book up
somewhere.” At Christmastime in 1934 she noted that “George got
a diary from Daddy and is he proud of it. He also for the first
time in his life, I think, saved up 75¢. He counts his money
every little while and acts as if he were a millionaire miser.”
Granted a chance to write in the little memorandum book that
served as
George’s diary, Martha contributed:
Don’t forget that after you read this you still have to dust.
You make a better “Scrooge” than “Scrooge” himself. I hope that
when you grow up you won’t be as tight as you are now. Happy
New Year and the king of hearts. Martha (I am your
sister).
Having gotten a diary of his own, George judiciously observed:
“This is not so good as Mar’s but I like it. I don’t know when
I will write again but I will have something interesting when I
do.” His next entry mentioned that he was starting a stamp
collection and getting an album for his tenth birthday; Patsy
had cut her foot and was limping (Joseph made her a little shoe
out of fur to protect the cut paw, but Patsy was not
enthusiastic about the shoe and kept working it off with her
teeth); and “Martha is a big pest. I bought 25 stamps for a
nickel today and I still know Martha’s a pest.”
Joseph himself contributed to George’s diary on January 18,
1935, commenting in Hungarian (now in part indecipherable) that
when he had been a soldier he could not have
imagined having a little son someday to tell war stories to:
When you grow up and read these lines you will be curious about
what you actually were like before. You very much liked stories
to listen to; in all the world you liked best of all that I told
stories to you… On another occasion, you said, “Papa, it is
good
that you came to America. In this way you became my father.”
(George was at a disadvantage when boys boasted of their
fathers’s exploits in the Great War, since Joseph had spent most
of his time on the hardly-heard-of eastern front—and on the
losing side.)
By the fall of 1935 both Martha and George had become very
sporadic diarykeepers.
On September 10th George wrote:
Dear Dinery, I haven’t written since my birthday because I just
went crazy and I quite forgotten you, but today I happen to wish
I had a diary and I took you out and wanted to take out the old
pages but I couldn’t find a scissors and a customer was in the
store and I got an idea I wanted to continue you since Jan.
28th. Dad GOOD OLD DAD went to Florida and when he came back I
got a lot of stamps… I get two bits or 25¢ a week for taking
Bob
to school. You know Bob is the brother of Martha’s best friend
or she was Mar’s best friend and I[’m] supposed to like Bob very
much he’s all right but he isn’t my kind… Mom was sick Dad
still takes medicine and Mar’s OK and her birthday is the 28th
of this month and I only got 63¢… Oh and Huey P.
Lond [sic] is dead he is a senator of Lousyeana and he
was shot. GOOD NIGHT.
Even though George had not come to his senses about playing the
violin, his parents remained determined that he be given a
“well-rounded-out” education. Joseph informed his son that
dancing was a useful capability,
one appropriate for George to acquire. So once a week for six
weeks George attended Mr. Huntinghouse’s Dancing Academy. This
was a large and rather dimly-lit upstairs room on the North
Side, where girls and boys were instructed by Rudolph G.
Huntinghouse. There they learned the foxtrot, the tango, the
“fairly entertaining” waltz, and also the polka, which struck
George as “mostly kind of a jumping thing.” He learned
everything except how to dance.
In February 1936 it was the ailing Mathilda’s turn to visit St.
Petersburg, and in her absence Joseph did some cooking for the
children. From his youth in Budapest he recalled how to whip up
things like kolbász (sausage), but having seen Mathilda
pan-fry prézli hús (breaded chops) he decided this was
the proper method of preparing cube steak. He put cooking oil
in a frying pan and set it on the stove, assuming that as a
liquid the oil would eventually boil. When it started smoking
instead, “this was a Discovery—I won’t say of momentous
proportions for my father,” George would remark, “but the fact
you couldn’t make this automatic transference based upon casual
observation of cooking.”
If Joseph was tentative as a cook, he was rather indifferent as
an eater and not that interested in his meals, except for his
favorite Continental breakfast: a big mug of milky coffee into
which he would break up a roll, eating it with a spoon. Once in
awhile Mathilda would prepare Kolozsvár dishes in Chicago;
Martha still enjoyed Transylvanian fruit soups, but George
continued being fussy—he tasted one once “and that was it.” The
children were always given the better cuts of whatever was on
the table, and sometimes there was not much there. Mathilda
became very proficient during the Depression with whatever was
at hand, creating another kind of soup out of chicken necks and
feet.
Summers were always the hardest times, both weatherwise and
moneywise. During the dreadful killer-heat-wave summer of 1936,
both Martha and George held down jobs, and Martha in fact had
two: she worked for neighbor Dr. Ascher,
a dentist, and also as a waitress at a Walgreen’s drugstore.
Mathilda would send George to Walgreen’s to pick up Martha’s
tips, and these would buy the family’s evening meal. One night
they could afford nothing but rye bread and watermelon, yet
Martha and George considered this a treat.
Mathilda would remark that she and Joseph “were very sad
because, you know, we never had to do that before, send the
children to work. But that summer we needed the money very
badly.” George was made apprentice in the fur shop, partly
because Joseph said it would not hurt to learn the mechanics of
sewing and how to operate the machines, and partly for
discipline. The latter was a matter that cropped up more than
once when George
was eleven. In November he was ordered to write:
Dad—I will always do my work without you having to prompt me. I
will take the dog down when I come in from play and won’t make a
fuss. I will finish my
homework before 8. I will always keep my word. George
Ehrlich.
“Old fashioned maybe,” Joseph would comment in English in
George’s Scrapbook, “but most effective means of ‘Bringing up
Baby.’” As for keeping one’s word, Joseph was never shy about
reminding George that in German the family name meant “honest.”
(He also assured his son that “you don’t have to be the best—I
just want you to be in the top ten percent.”)
As George moved into adolescence, he and Joseph—“both being
totally stubborn males”—began to have differences more often;
but as George was to put it, “You could not argue with my
father.” After a no-win non-argument, George’s recourse would
be to grit his teeth, go downstairs, and head outdoors for a
several-mile, several-hour cooling-off walk.
Joseph was a devout FDR Democrat, and the economic maxim “From
each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”
was one he fully agreed with; but he also invariably read the
Chicago Tribune, and few newspapers in the United States
were further out of sync with Roosevelt (not to mention Marx)
than Colonel “Bertie” McCormick’s. George might bring home the
more liberal Daily News, but Joseph would never read it.
The Tribune had been his newspaper while he was teaching
himself English; moreover it was a morning paper, and it took
him all day to wade through it. For many years he saved the
front page of each Tribune, storing them in a large flat
fur-coat box kept atop his safe, with the idea that they might
someday prove useful. During the 1930s Joseph also subscribed
to a Hungarian tabloid paper, the Pesti Napló [Diary
or Journal].
When George was asked to bring a non-Chicago newspaper to school
for a fifth-grade project, he produced a Pesti Napló, but
his classmates would not believe it had come from Hungary.
Mathilda underwent a serious operation in February 1937 and
afterwards went to St. Petersburg for the customary recuperative
trip, this time with Joseph. The only way they could go
together was to take George too; Martha, now in her final
semester at Senn High, stayed in Chicago with the Ruhigs. This
was George’s first great journey, which Joseph would later call
“Marco Polo Jr. or Around the States in Thirty Days.” George
was to remember it as one of the more boring episodes of his
life, with nothing to do in Florida than eat citrus fruit and do
his homework out in the sun.
The following summer he again ventured into the world beyond
Chicago, going to a “rural resort”—a forty-acre farm near Glenn,
Michigan, which boarded kids for about ten dollars a week. This
place was discovered by the Ehrlichs’s good friend and former
neighbor Florence Kan,
“a really extraordinarily fine person” whose husband Michael had
sold women’s wear at 1537 Devon when Ehrlich Furs had been at
1539. The Kans’s son Joe went to this farm, and Joseph and
Mathilda thought it would be a good experience for George too.
He was “absolutely terrified” at the prospect, but parental
persuasion got him on the bus and four hours later he was down
on the farm. After the first day he adapted well and came to
enjoy it tremendously: “I literally learned how to harnass a
mule, mow the oat field, rake it, bring it in, and put it in the
hayloft so the stock could be fed… I learned how to shovel
manure.” George wrote the folks back home that “it’s swell out
here,” mentioning that he had gotten a compliment “from some
lady on table manners.”
Martha graduated from Senn High School in June 1937. As a
graduation present Joseph gave her a treasured book, Sándor
Petőfi’s Összes Költeményei [Complete Poems],
which he had bought in Budapest twenty-five years before.
His daughter had stayed in Chicago during the family’s Florida
trip so as to take the Normal School Tests. She wanted to
attend one of the state teachers’s schools, either the Illinois
State Normal University near Bloomington or the Northern
Illinois State Teachers’s College in DeKalb. Both elliptically
informed her that their Jewish quotas were filled; so she set
her sights instead on the University of Illinois at
Champaign-Urbana.
In bringing up Martha, Joseph had (in Martha’s words) “more or
less brainwashed” her into thinking as he did: that being a
teacher was not only “the most tremendous thing anyone could
ever be,” but in her case the only thing to be. Martha
never seriously thought of becoming anything else; and in
September 1937 she left home to try achieving her father’s
dream.
Notes
