to thy happy children
of the future
those of the past
send greetings
reads the inscription on the Alma Mater statue at the University
of Illinois. Eighth-largest in enrollment among American
campuses in 1937, Illinois was perhaps the archetypical
Midwestern university; not even the eruption of a volcano, it
was said, would be able to hide its identity from future
archaeologists.
As an Illinois resident, Martha had to pay a tuition of no more
than forty dollars a semester. Her real expenses were
textbooks, supplies, and especially housing. This was a far
more formidable cost, around $350,
to be paid each semester as one lump sum; and each time the
Ehrlichs would struggle to come up with the money for Martha’s
room and board. She lived at Busey Hall, one of the women’s
dormitories, rooming at first with Ruthie Schnitzler who “sang
like a bird.” Joseph and Mathilda and George would go down to
see Martha once or twice a year, usually on a Sunday, leaving
Chicago fairly early since it was a four-and-a-half-hour trip to
Champaign-Urbana. Busey residents could arrange for their
families to lunch in the dorm dining room, where the girls would
sing “college-type songs” waiting for meals to be served. After
lunch the families were allowed to go upstairs and see their
coed’s room, while shouts of “Man on second!” “Man on third!”
were given to warn shower-exiters. The Ehrlichs never stayed
for long, nor did much at the University other than visit
Martha. She in turn would come back to Chicago via the Illinois
Central Railroad, which had student specials at holiday times.
During her visits she seldom had much to say about school.
Martha was in fact dreadfully homesick her first year away at
college, and doing poorly there as well. She started out
uncertain whether to major in mathematics or biology, but her
first math class was Spherical Trigonometry & Navigation where
“there were forty-nine engineering students and Martha,” she
would recall. “I got through with a D- out of the kindness of
the teacher’s heart, and that ended that… Ohhhhhhh, was I
miserable!!” It was not the sort of thing to hurry home and
tell Joseph.
She did better her sophomore year, figuring out the best ways to
study: some subjects were strictly memorization, while in lab
work you could see things happen instead of merely
reading about them. And Martha became involved in Orchesis, an
extracurricular dance group sponsored by the Women’s Athletic
Association, which presented a Mother’s Day pageant in May
1939. Martha’s numbers included two parts of Cecil Burleigh’s
Leaders of Men: The Fanatic (“Unbalanced and fiery, the
fanatic leads the masses to that same state”) and Savagery (“I
heard the boom of a blood-lust song / And a thigh-bone beating
on a tin-pan gong”).
The following summer, Martha’s cross-eyed strabismus was at last
corrected by surgery. Both eyes had tended to cross,
particularly when strained or fatigued, but following the
operation she was better able to face the world head-on. At
times this seemed of little comfort: although she was working at
a Walgreen’s again that summer to help pay her college expenses,
when the time came for Martha to begin her junior year, the
necessary $350 was simply not available. Three days before
school started, a customer came to Ehrlich Furs needing her coat
repaired. Normally the job would have cost at least six hundred
dollars, but Joseph agreed to do it for $350 if paid in cash
that day. He was; Martha was able to continue college; and
Joseph doubtless attributed it all to Fate.
Back in Urbana, Martha continued economizing. At Busey Hall she
breakfasted on a slice of toast with coffee, and for dinner had
another cup of coffee or glass of milk with a bowl of chili.
(Crackers were free.) And that was it, mealwise, for the day.
By her senior year Martha had improved to the point of getting a
letter of commendation for superior work from the Dean of
Education. Among her accomplishments in the fall of 1940 was
student-teaching at an Urbana high school. She enjoyed this,
her first chance to teach, and in the Spring 1941 semester
student-taught at Thornburn
Junior High in Urbana. Her supervisor or critic teacher there
was Joyce Faber,
who every once in awhile called in Principal A.H. Lauchner
to observe and be impressed by Martha’s
performance.
1941 April 6.
College, Busey Hall, coking and smoking, men, Orchesis, Phi
Alpha Chi, God! what a five years. I’ve just discovered diaries
aren’t for the present—they’re for the future. In reading back
over the past dozen years or so, I’ve realized what a mess of a
kid I must have been (hm!). But them days are gone forever.
Seven more weeks and graduation. Then what? I don’t know…
Practice teaching, home for vacations, and soon home for good.
How can one summarize five such years as have gone by?
Graduating from H.S.; starting college, maladjustments,
homesickness, unhappiness… Stacks of letters written home in
four years—more than any diary could say, yet less too. But
now, home for Easter in four days, registration with the appts.
committee, the kids home for the weekend—me here grading
sky-high stacks of papers. Oh, what’s the use. I’ll never
catch up with myself anyway. Continue later as though I had
never left off. About the only way to do it.
[Martha]
But Martha’s Diary came to a final end eight days later, after
“a wonderfully perfect Easter” with the family in Chicago and
Racine. She practiced the piano “till I thought my back would
break in two,” hemmed hems “till I couldn’t see straight,”
danced in Racine “till I could barely stagger out to the car,
but it was worth it,” and “ate like a refugee from a famine all
vacation. Now back to Busey, and back to famine…”
In June Martha graduated from the University of Illinois with a
Bachelor of Science degree, and struck a Statue of Liberty pose
in her cap and gown to note academic liberation. Three months
later she had a teaching job—not at the Sorbonne but in Sanborn,
North Dakota, an agricultural town with a population of 350.
“I had been applying all over everyplace,” she would recall,
“and of course everybody asked ‘What religion? What church?’
And I would get letters back saying, ‘Sorry, the teacherage was
for this particular religion, or that particular religion.’ And
ostensibly what they were saying was, ‘We don’t want Jews.’” So
when Martha wrote to Sanborn she said she was a Unitarian.
“Well, it was such an innocuous church, it wasn’t way-out in any
sense, no gung-ho religion about it.”
She was hired to teach high school English, biology, and general
science for a monthly salary of $100. The high school had a
faculty of three: besides Martha there was Ernest A. Hornbacher,
who also served as Principal and Superintendent; and a young
woman named Dugalda Langdon
who taught history and music, directed the band and played
trumpet. For $30 a month Martha got room-breakfast-and-laundry
at Tom and Olga McCormick’s house,
the only place in Sanborn other than the school that had indoor
plumbing. To an extent: “They had a cistern up on top of the
roof, and when it rained the cistern was full, and when it
didn’t rain—boy, you saved water no matter what. We’d get about
half a cup of water, and we brushed our teeth, and that was all
the water there was, so you kept dipping your toothbrush in the
cup, and then you’d rinse with that. And that to me was
horrible. My
water runs when I brush my teeth! and I get it from under the
faucet!”
There was not a great deal of entertainment to be found in
Sanborn, North Dakota. Once (and only once) Martha went out as
a beater in a pheasant hunt. Occasionally she and Dugalda
Langdon went to the Royal Neighbors of America lodge, where
Dugalda—daughter of a Methodist minister—would not play cards,
so she and Martha indulged themselves in Chinese checkers.
There never seemed to be enough for Martha to eat: “I didn’t
feel I had enough money to go to a restaurant—I was being fed by
pillars of the town, and you couldn’t admit to being hungry.”
And during the winter of 1941-42 it was not warm in Sanborn,
North Dakota: “My lord, it got forty below—but real dry, so you
could freeze to death and not even feel cold.”
Yet as Miss Ehrlich the Teacher, Martha found a role to play and
compensate for her self-styled lack of identity. “As a teacher,
I could meet people—I could meet the parents of my students, and
I could be among strange people at meetings, because I was a
teacher. But leave me as a stranger at a gathering, a social
gathering for just people, and [it was] back to the wallflower
days of dancing school. I didn’t dare talk to anybody, I was
afraid—well, I couldn’t talk to anybody, I had nothing to
talk about, I was afraid that anything I would say would be not
worth hearing… I didn’t feel there that I was a good
teacher. So in addition to the normal shyness that I had as a
basic part of my personality, there was the shyness that I felt
too that I wasn’t as good. My father taught me to be
perfect. You know: you had to be perfect to be anything. And
since perfection was lacking in that first year of teaching, I
felt so inept, and so negative about myself there, that really I
had almost no identity there at all… See, here I am, twenty-two
years old, my first teaching job, I was teaching everything from
ninth grade through twelfth, and some of my students were
nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one-year-old farmboys who hadn’t
been in school long enough each year to be graduated, ‘cause
they’d have to leave to do crops, and all the rest of it. And I
had troubles. I had discipline problems. I remember one day…
after the kids had finally gone and I had had a day to end all
days, I was standing in the cloakroom crying and debating to
myself: do I want to jump out of this window and end it all? or
can I make it to the end of the year? or how am I going to
handle it? All these thoughts going through my mind—and then as
usual I got stubborn and said, ‘The hell with it, I am
going to finish.’”
The year at Sanborn, that is, and not herself.
When George was about twelve, he hauled out his parents’s box of
European memorabilia and started going through it, organizing
the old postcard photos brought from Kolozsvár. Many of these
were of wartime couples with the man in uniform, or of soldiers
out on the Eastern front, and George laboriously dated the
photos and identified the people pictured in them by asking
Joseph and Mathilda. His parents might say, “That’s my brother
Dezső,” or “That’s your cousin and her husband,” but they would
provide few stories or anecdotes. When George pressed Joseph
for tales of the war or about his father’s boyhood, Joseph gave
him only bits and fragments—the beautiful books behind glass
doors in Győr; having to study by moonlight; a shell that came
into the dugout but did not explode. There would be no
elaboration.
Eventually George put his notes in order and tried to lay out
family trees for the Ehrlichs and Kohns/Kuns; he ended up
thoroughly confused, and had to give it up. Occasionally the
past made itself present in unexpected ways: George slept on one
of the goosefeather pillows brought from Kolozsvár, and one
night he found a Hungarian coin in it. Or when Martha read Jack
London’s novels and George began collecting the works of Mark
Twain, Joseph might let them know he had read these too (in
translation) when he was their age. The books he talked about
were always ones he had read in his youth.
In January 1938 George turned thirteen.
Perhaps this stirred some memory for Joseph, because soon
afterwards and completely out of the blue, he took his son to a
synagogue or temple. George would recall their donning
yarmulkes, and for many years would wonder what had suddenly
motivated his father to take this most uncharacteristic step.
Was it to see what George’s reaction might be? Or for Joseph to
find out how he himself would react? There was no discussion of
this adventure, and it would not be repeated.
The following September George began high school (Joseph calling
this “The Coming of New Horizons”) and among his first classes
at Senn was Algebra—an easy subject, since Joseph had already
given him lessons during the summer, having patiently waited to
do this till George got out of grammar school.
Around now Joseph also began assembling George’s Scrapbook.
This was not a running account as Martha’s Diary had been, but
consisted of recollections and carefully-saved keepsakes.
Another notable feature of the Scrapbook was Joseph’s writing
its captions and commentaries in English rather than Hungarian.
George took his first Art class during his sophomore year at
Senn in 1939. “That’s probably when I began drawing,” he was to
say. “Chances are if I did any interesting drawings before
then, my father would have saved them, because that would
have appealed to him.” Joseph himself had skill and imagination
when it came to art, though by the 1930s it surfaced only in
such projects as making the occasional SPECIAL canvas banner.
When George wanted better-quality (and more expensive) paint and
materials, his father told him, “First show me what you can
do.” George sketched his customary live subject, Patsy the
shepherd (“Probably I was sitting there, and the dog was on the
floor, and I thought: ‘Well, you know—draw it’”) and Joseph was
impressed. He pasted several of George’s sketches and paintings
in the Scrapbook, captioning them “Favorite Indoor Sport.”
George got his first “real job” in the summer of 1940, working
on the assembly line at a fluorescent lamp company where
Florence Kan was bookkeeper. He worked for thirty cents an
hour, making $13.80 a week; ten dollars of this went to his
parents. A couple of summers later he would get his second real
job, as a Walgreen’s soda jerk, and in the Scrapbook Joseph
would write “I’ll have a
chocolate-banana-double-flip-super-colossal ‘Ehrlich Special.’”
On December 5, 1941, George attended a seminar at the University
of Chicago where he “heard a very lucid and clever fellow tell
us why there would be no war between Japan and the United States
for at least three months.” Two days later Pearl Harbor was
bombed. George was already in the Senn ROTC (“It wasn’t
mandatory,” Mathilda was to say, “but he liked the uniform… it
was prestigious, you know”) and the following February he and
other cadets worked fourteen straight hours helping teachers
with draft registration.
In the spring of 1942 George and Don Friedlen
(a fellow member of the Glenn Miller Club) presented a research
project to their History class: “From Bar to Bar—Musical and
Otherwise,” which covered ragtime, jazz, blues, boogie-woogie,
swing and precisionism. Many years later George would comment
that this was “my first exposure to historical research… I
assembled a body of notes which I still have in a box somewhere,
and we organized this. Don Friedlen was the musical expert, he
had the phonograph records and he could play the piano, and I
did the sort of historical narrative; and this wowed everyone…
There weren’t any of these History of Jazz kinds of things [at
that time], and it smacked of New Orleans, red-light district,
and things of that sort. Yeah: that was when I discovered it
was fun to do research.”
George graduated from Senn High School
in June 1942, not yet eighteen and therefore not yet eligible
for the draft. He had been admitted to both the University of
Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology, but neither
gave him a scholarship and without one he wound up going to
Champaign-Urbana and the University of Illinois. Since George
had never “regained his senses” regarding the violin, Joseph had
begun thinking of him as a future engineer.
“You went off to college to become something or somebody in the
professional sense,” George would remark. “An engineer was
clearly the sort of thing that young men did become and I’m sure
my father had suggested this, either directly or indirectly.”
But what what kind of engineer—civil, electrical, mechanical, or
chemical?
“I had a vague idea that mechanical engineers were not as high
up the status scale, because my father always muttered about the
fact that when Bill Hoyer had become a mechanical engineer, he
had to wear coveralls at his work… I had had what I would
consider a very bad physics course in high school, and that
would have been the lead-in to electrical engineering. And
civil engineering was really roads, bridges, and things like
that—that didn’t seem anything I could relate to. So that’s
probably why I picked chemical engineering when I looked down
the list: it seemed closest to something I understood, what they
did. Which was not true at all.”
In April 1942 Martha received a letter from Joyce Faber, her
teaching supervisor the year before at Thornburn Junior High.
“It seems that I must retire to raise a family,” Joyce wrote, so
Mr. Lauchner the Principal had asked her to get in touch with
Martha and see if she would like a try at Thornburn, for $1100
per school year. “You know the advantages of Urbana,
Illinois—and there’s promise (almost definite) of a
demonstration table complete with H2O and CH4!!!”
Joyce’s pregnancy was Martha’s ticket out of Sanborn, North
Dakota. Having lived a frugal life there, she’d saved a fair
amount of her $900 earnings, and when she stopped by 1553 Devon
for a post-Sanborn visit “I had two hundred dollars in cash
bills. I stood in the middle of the living room and just
whoops like that,
tossed them up into the air, and it just trickled down like
leaves falling. And that’s my master’s [degree]—that started my
master’s money.”
So the fall of 1942 saw both the Ehrlich children living in
Champaign-Urbana, Martha preparing to teach and begin work on
her graduate degree, George moving into the Granada Club
dormitory
and starting college life. He would go to her apartment at 1111
W. Stoughton for Sunday dinners, and Joseph and Mathilda would
come down from Chicago at times to visit them. When Martha
showed Joseph her Thornburn classroom on Saturday afternoons
when no one else was in the school building, he always took off
his hat and walked softly and spoke in a whisper. Joseph’s home
might have been his church, but to him the classroom was a truly
sacred place; and in Martha’s he looked at everything—the
textbooks, the pictures on the walls, and the inevitable small
animals which he would be allowed to feed.
As for Mathilda, she exercised her maternal prerogative and
wrote her son a farewell
letter:
1942 September 9.
Dear George: I’m writing these few lines so Dad could put it
in your scrapbook. Yesterday was the big day for you, as well
as for us too. The day of your college entrance. It was
wonderful to watch you George dear, you seemed so happy, really
it was your biggest day as far as I could tell. But no matter
how glad I felt for you myself, I had such a funny feeling right
there while we were waiting for you… I wanted to cry, and I
believe if I was alone in the car, I would of cried just
thinking that I haven’t any little boy to spoil anymore. You
are so grown up dear with your seventeen years, and it takes
time to get used to the idea that you are old enough to be at
college and that Dad and I have been left all by ourselves at
home. The only consolation is that you and Martha live close
together in Champaign. This thought only, that keeps me going
here at home, and that I am sure you are satisfied and contented
to be at the University. We two old people
are terribly lonesome for you and Martha. Good luck my dear,
and may your dream come true for ever.
Notes
