Thornburn’s days as a junior high school came to an end in 1953;
Martha would say that it had been “built on quicksand.”
A brand-new Urbana Junior High opened its doors, and among those
hired to teach English there was Annie Mlinarich
of Fairmont City, Illinois, near East St. Louis. She bunked in
with Martha and Sherry at their new apartment on Stoughton
Street, and they hit it off so well that Annie remained for an
extended time.
That same year the Urbana Federation of Teachers was organized,
electing Martha as its first executive secretary. “Who would
have believed I’d ever come to this—Unions! Politics!!!” she
wrote her parents. “It seems I’m up for vice-president of the
Teachers Union for next year. I said I’d accept on the one
condition that I would not automatically go up for president the
year after. Can you imagine me president of a labor
organization? I wouldn’t know beans from buttons.”
When the next year rolled around, Martha duly took office as
union president.
(It might be mentioned that she loved Eve Arden’s
radio/television show Our Miss Brooks, but Joseph
disliked it because it “made fun of teachers.” He much more
approved of The Halls of Ivy, which starred Ronald Colman
and Benita Hume and was set at Ivy College in Ivy, U.S.A.)
In the spring of 1954, Annie Mlinarich invited Martha to come
see an old-fashioned Croatian wedding in Fairmont City. After
the ceremony Annie appealed to her brother Nick to take Martha
to the train station. Brother Nick retorted that this would
interfere with a softball game he was to play in, but even so
“he graciously dropped me off,” as Martha put it. The following
autumn Nick visited Urbana on weekends, at first to see Annie
and attend Illini football games, then to call on Martha. “He
liked me because I wasn’t an expensive date,” she would say.
In appearance and approach Nick Mlinarich was cut from much the
same cloth as the new senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater:
dark-eyed, with prematurely white hair—“We thought he was an old
man the first time we saw his picture,” Mathilda would
remark—loud, blunt, never shy about letting you know what was on
his mind, and (unlike Martha) gifted with the knack of going
into a room full of strangers, being perfectly at ease, and
striking up acquaintances left and right. At the age of
thirty-six he’d been laid off as a machinist in a Milwaukee zinc
plant; applying for a Civil Service exam, Nick was deemed
ineligible since he was over thirty-five, and his indignant
letter about this to The Machinist magazine eventually
made the Congressional Record
. Nick had gone through a
marriage and divorce and had two daughters living with their
mother in Milwaukee.
At a Halloween party in October 1954 Martha, Annie, and friend
Pearl Gold parodied Zsa Zsa, Eva and Magda Gabor, appearing as
the “Less” sisters—Aim, Hope, and Use. Martha came as Aim, and
from then on Nick called her “Amy.”
Though an inexpensive date, Martha was a high-flying one: during
the summer of 1954 she and nine other Illinois schoolteachers
had received hands-on training on how to pilot a plane,
so they could better discuss the “air age” in their classrooms.
On July 24th
Martha wrote her parents concerning her adventures in the skies:
Now I know how a caged bird must feel, looking out through the
bars at wispy clouds floating by, and wondering “what am I doing
way down here? …” When we got back from the flight to Chicago I
was so keyed up I couldn’t sleep for hours… We watched the sun
set from an altitude of about 3000 feet, and as we finally
turned our nose toward home, we saw Venus to our right in the
West, and Mars shining out from the North East, almost close
enough to reach out and pull from the sky. As the sun sank out
of sight, the constellations began to appear, and the city below
us burst into bloom as lights were turned on. Route 45 was a
luminous ribbon, and small towns looked like sparkling jewels…
Jesse [Stonecipher, Martha’s instructor] had even called in to
our tower for clearance to land when I finally realized we were
back, and I was so overwhelmed, I simply wailed “But I don’t
want to go down!” And bless his heart, even though he did
laugh at me, Jesse said O.K. we’d cruise around awhile longer.
But if I was going to keep him up there, I’d have to do the
work, not he. So he adjusted my pedals, swung the wheel over to
my side of the cockpit, and I followed [Route] 101 almost to
Bloomington, turning and banking to get a better look at this
and that below… Is it any wonder I couldn’t sleep when I got
home?
Until yesterday I thought that was about the most thrilling day
I had ever had. Until yesterday… [when instructor Ralph Green]
said very casually “I’ll wait for you right here,” and I
suddenly realized this was it. I don’t think I’ll ever in my
life experience the same sensation I had when, 1100 feet over a
golf course, I glanced back over my shoulder and realized
finally that it was me and my plane all alone in the clouds. I
shot two landings by myself, and then it was 10:30 and time to
go in. I got my log book signed, signed the final flight sheet,
and felt like crying, I wanted so
badly to go up again…
At this time Martha had still not learned how to drive a car.
Even after having gotten her crossed eyes corrected by surgery,
she’d never had truly binocular vision; yet this was a minor
handicap when it came to flying a plane. (Martha knew it was
time to lower the landing gear when she could see the grass
below from the cockpit.)
1955 June 11.
Hello my Sweet! It is a long time since I chatted with you… But
today is a very important day, you are six years old. And you
are such a sweet and serious little girl for your age. Everyone
tells us how mature you are for a six year old. But no wonder,
your Mother, your Uncle George, and all their friends are
treating you like a grown up person, and talk to you that way,
so you really are like a ten year old at least. You are
visiting with your Grandfather and me for two weeks now and we
are so glad to have you here with us. You are no trouble at all
and a very nice company for Grandpa especially. Tomorrow,
Sunday,
we are planning a big birthday party for you…
1955 June 25.
You had a lovely party for your birthday… On the 17th, your
Mama, Uncle George, and Nicky came in to pick you up and take
you back home. I went along too for the weekend to be at the
wedding, because your Mama and Nick got married on the 18th of
June, 1955. She looked so lovely and very happy on that day,
but so did you Sherry. You had on a very pretty nylon dress,
pale pink with roses on it, and you stood up next to Nicky and
Mommy holding the ring on a small silk cushion and looked on so
solemnly, listening to every word. I didn’t know whom should I
look at, you or your Mother, you both looked just lovely, and I
loved you both so much.
Well I am home in Chicago again with just Grandpa, and our house
seems so quiet without you my darling. But we are hoping you
could come again for a visit very soon, and stay for a couple of
weeks before the summer is over. I am saving your sixth
birthday cards for a souvenir. I guess we won’t make another
[party] till you graduate from the eighth grade. I hope we all
will be well, and living, to celebrate it with you. So long
Sherry, my sweet and darling granddaughter. You don’t know how
much your grandparents love you, and always looking forward for
the day you could visit with us here in Chicago.
Lovingly—Grandma.
Martha and Nick were married at the Holshousers’s house by
Arnold Westwood, Phil Schug’s successor as Unitarian minister in
Urbana. Nick joined Martha and Sherry at the Stoughton Street
apartment and began attending college to get an industrial
education degree, so as to find a job teaching high school shop.
Friends who knew both Martha and Nick predicted their marriage
would not last four weeks, and the Mlinariches’s first year
together was indeed a rough one. Nick was a stickler when it
came to punctuality; when Martha was ten minutes late after a
teachers’s meeting, she and Nick went tightlippedly home without
exchanging a word between them. Quarrels were not settled by
being talked out, only with the passage of time. Finally Nick
forced Martha to break her bottled-up silences and clear the
air. Living with him taught her the “when and how” of dealing
with people; living with her taught him to give a little and
take things easier. And their marriage lasted longer than four
weeks.
To a great extent Sherry was afraid of Nick, what with his being
loud and strict and wanting everything right-this-minute,
shouting at the scared-to-death Sherry if she were late. But
certainly Nick was more open than Martha, who still tended to
clam up rather than raise her voice; and “If there was anything
I wanted to do that was fun,” Sherry would say, “I’d ask
him rather than Mother.” In time her stepfather would evolve
from Nicky to Poppa.
Whatever else happened, there were always Grandpa and Grandma to
turn to.
1955 August.
It seems my darling that each time I chat with you lately, is
farther apart. I don’t know why, except probably old age creeps
up on me, and I get more forgetful each day. You were with us
here in Chicago almost all of August which we both or rather all
three of us enjoyed it a lot. You are so grown up my dearest
and don’t act like a baby anymore. Grandfather was teaching you
“arithmetic” and marveled at how fast you are learning, and love
it too. Soon you will start first grade in Urbana close to
where you live, at Lincoln school.
You are looking forward to it, and we all are very sure you will
be a first class student just like your Mother and Uncle George
were… So here is lots of good wishes for you too, my dearest
little granddaughter, to be a happy student. We all love you,
more
than I can express it, but you feel it don’t you my dear?
The previous spring Joseph and Mathilda had left 1553 Devon
after twenty-three years of living and working there. With
$10,000 saved over the last decade they bought a house at 4505
N. Western Avenue, south of their old neighborhood, just
northwest of Welles Park. The upstairs apartment was rented to
a tenant and the new fur shop was downstairs, “on the main floor
with more and better facilities for storing, repairing, and
remodeling your furs,” as Joseph informed his customers. “We
will pick up and deliver, and will do
everything possible to keep your furs in the best condition.”
1956 August.
My
Darling Baby! You were here with us for one month during
vacation… You weren’t very enthusiastic about going home,
but we both tried our best to show why you have to, and in the
end it was all OK. I am writing on this paper which isn’t
too clean and easy to do. But I wanted to save it for you
my dear. This is your very first [multiplication] studies
Grandpa did with you. You will start second grade next
September. You have a wonderful mind Sherry, you learned
this multiplication table very quick and easy. But the
best part was that you enjoyed it very much and Grandpa was real
happy to do it with you…
“He taught me so much,” Sherry Renée would say. “I learned time
and letters and the continents… and math. I wonder if he was
ever disappointed because I didn’t enjoy it the way he did.” Of
the house on Western Avenue, Sherry remembered “there were bars
on the windows, but it was nice. Again, the store and shop were
in front and they lived in back. And the big bear
stood in the corner of the store, with a piece of wood where one
thumb should have been. And a basement full of fur coats and
moth balls. Grandma had a garden in back. There were
four-o’clocks and mint. Grandpa taught me how to play chess out
there before I’d even started school. I used to help him in the
shop too. I’d nail the skins down so he could spray and stretch
them. And look at all the kinds of furs and patterns of
lining. I used to very carefully print his name on the tags to
hang on the coats. He’d let me use his lifetime-guaranteed
fountain pen with the white dot on it and I’d feel so proud and
important to be really helping him.”
Every evening Joseph would have a Pilsner glass of beer,
offering Sherry the last few drops as he had with Martha when
she was a child. One time at a big family dinner he gave Sherry
a little glass of “golden something,” telling her it was wine.
Not thinking she would like the taste, she drank it and did—and
later found out it was apple juice. (One of the very few
instances on record of Joseph consciously uttering a
falsehood.) Despite such teasing, “he never laughed at me the
way adults often do at children. Most people don’t realize that
a child can really feel that, but he did. I used to sit on the
back of his green chair and brush his hair for hours. But I
always knew not to disturb him when he read the paper or watched
the news with John Cameron Swayze. He always got the Chicago
Tribune and when I was old enough he’d give me a nickel and
stand at the doorway to watch while I ran as fast as I could to
the news stand at the corner and back with the paper…”
Back in 1950 when George visited Chicago and encountered older
relatives or his parents’s friends, they were curious why he was
“always going to school.” Why did he not get a Real Job and “do
art” on weekends? His graduate degree program was for a Master
of Fine Arts with an art history option, and since his studies
were mostly tutorials he had time to work as both a teaching
assistant in Sculpture and a “reader-grader” in Art
Appreciation, where he occasionally delivered lectures for Frank
Roos.
By early 1951 his wartime savings and GI Bill money had begun to
run low. “Poor George,” he captioned a photo of himself: “No
money/NO job in sight/Et al.” Rather as a surprise to everyone
(himself not least) George was “backing into the teaching
profession,” or at any rate trying to; but job prospects in his
field, the history of art and architecture, were less than
abundant. Not much was available in museum work, and though
George applied at a wide range of schools, there were very few
teaching positions to be had. This was the effect of the Korean
War upon higher education: the draft had resumed with no college
deferments, and universities were cutting back staffwise.
He received his master’s degree in June 1951, and the University
of Oklahoma expressed interest in someone able to teach both
sculpture and art history; but they lacked the budget to hire
George. He’d begun to wonder whether he’d better find work (and
fast) in a craft such as carpentry, when news came of a possible
opening at the University of Kansas City.
Borrowing train fare from Joseph, George arrived in Kansas City,
Missouri, on
July 5th. By mid-afternoon he was hired as an instructor, and
before the day was over he visited the grand and impressive
William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art.
It was actually closed that day but a compassionate guard took
pity on George’s woebegone expression, and soon he was shown
some of the collections by Registrar Ross Taggart. “There began
one of
those magical experiences which are truly unforgettable,” George
was to recall:
We went through an almost totally dark building, and
periodically Ross would switch on a light and wondrous things
literally burst upon my vision. That is how I first saw
Caravaggio’s St. John the Baptist, the Head of
Hammurabi, little Methethy, and Pilon’s St.
Barbara. And dozens upon dozens of others. Cezanne, Van
Gogh, Hals and Rembrandt, period rooms, and treasuries of
Oriental art, which I could only guess at, paraded before me, or
rather I paraded before them in the darkened museum, illuminated
room by room, like some sort of controlled theatrical event.
The Nelson had begun collecting only twenty years earlier, and
the results to date were to my
fresh eye on that warm day the furnishings of a treasure house…
George returned to Chicago, marveling at having “been catapulted
from the edge of despair to a situation far better than I
dreamed I could attain… I thought I had hit the jackpot of good
fortune.” Joseph and Mathilda agreed; to have both children
earning their living as teachers! And George doing so at a
university! Certainly this was hitting the good-fortune
jackpot.
But when George went back to Urbana to prepare his move to
Kansas City he found a letter informing him that, in light of
the Korean War, the United States Air Force was recalling him to
active service. An attempt to arrange deferment was rejected by
a colonel who’d been a professor at the University of Florida
before himself being recalled; so George had to give up the
Kansas City job. At which point the University of Oklahoma
wrote to say they would be able to budget a position after all,
and was George still available?
At Randolph Air Force Base in Texas
it quickly became apparent that the World War II radar operators
whose surnames began with A, B, and C were not adjusting well to
flying in jet interceptors. Most of the other retreads, further
down the alphabet, were consequently sent into a “pipeline” that
shipped them to reactivated B-29s in Korea; but there was a
shortage of qualified radar instructors outside the
pipeline, at its beginning at Randolph Air Force Base. “A small
clutch of us” happened to be available, those whose surnames
began with D, E, and F—and among these was George.
So for over a year
he taught radar operation to airmen in Texas. Occasionally the
instructors had to fly as a crew, to demonstrate their
proficiency; tobacco smoke in the plane’s close quarters gave
George a constant throat inflammation that got treated with
various new medications, some causing dreadful side effects.
His military career in fact culminated in the hospital, where he
had a double hernia attended to.
George was discharged in January 1953 and decided to return home
via Kansas City, so as to at least see the place a second
time. He unwittingly wandered onto the KCU campus smack in the
middle of what came to be known as “The Revolution,” when four
deans quit over differences with the university president, five
hundred students engaged in a mass boycott of classes, and
finally the president himself resigned. Not till considerably
later would George find out about any of this; at the time he
simply went from office to office, being told that each person
he wanted to see “wasn’t in,” with no indication why they were
out or when they might return. Thoroughly annoyed, George left
KCMO in a to-hell-with-them mood and went back to Urbana.
Having put aside a year’s military pay, he was no longer
desperate to find work; but neither did he want to live off his
savings. So in March George took a job as draftsman at the
University of Illinois’s Digital Computer Lab, and discovered
that as a civil service employee he could return to school
tuition-free. “From many aspects, going back to school for a
Ph.D. seems to be a very wise choice,” he wrote his parents,
“since it will complete my formal schooling while I am still
young… If I do stay at Illinois for the Ph.D. then I can make
arrangements to work and go to school. This is ideal… And of
course I am looking for a teaching job. I might not be making
two chairs to sit in, Dad, but it is a long bench.”
(One of Joseph’s maxims was “You mustn’t fall between two
chairs.”)
When George mentioned he was thinking of getting himself a
pocket watch since wristwatches interfered with his work as a
draftsman, Joseph insisted he take the Omega that
George had bought him in Jamaica.
After all, he said, if he had the original [Hungarian] watch he
would have given me that. So why not this one, now? I carried
that watch for years,
but it began to need repairs regularly. And it was expensive to
maintain. Finally I put it away as a keepsake. It is perhaps
the most telling relic of the curiously distant but close
relationship I had with my troubled and disappointed father that
I could ever have.
At least he lived long enough to see me a university professor,
married and with two
sons. In those ways I had earned my Omega if not before.
The University of Illinois had no doctoral program in art
history, but an unusual interdisciplinary program was set up for
George in the Social Implications of Art in American History.
“While technically I was pursuing a Ph.D. in history,” he would
remark, “I was in fact doing something very strange in the
context of that discipline.” Beginning in the fall of 1953,
George had seven years to complete all the requirements for his
doctorate. He took two seminar courses that semester and
another two the following spring, working forty hours a week at
the same time. All in all it was an exhaustive pace, though
George found his job at the Digital Computer Lab more
interesting than he had expected. In fact, as the months passed
he was very tempted to switch fields and concentrate on
computers.
But he continued trying to become an art historian, and in this
he was aided by Allen Weller, who’d replaced Frank Roos as Head
of the Art Department and was very good about recommending
George for jobs. In the spring of 1954 he informed George of an
opening for an art history teacher at the University of Nebraska
and George applied, only to be told that the position had just
been filled by a Mr. Fehl. This happened to be the same Mr.
Fehl who’d taken the job at Kansas City that George had been
obliged to give up in 1951.
“It was so tempting to bring the circle full around” that George
immediately applied for the KCU vacancy. His not knowing about
The Revolution delayed matters until he was put in touch with
the new dean, John Barnett; and it wasn’t till the end of August
that George returned to Kansas City “so I could play out the
game to its conclusion.” Once there, he had to wait an hour for
the detained Dean Barnett, who that very morning had injured his
eye on a shrub while putting out the trash. A hideous summer
heat wave was going on, and the lightweight summer suit George
wore to his interview felt like heavy tweed. The whole KCU
situation seemed not only less than comfortable but definitely
unpromising; and George came away from the interview wondering
why he should leave his home, his friends and family, the
computer world, and free tuition for his doctoral program—all to
come to Kansas City, Missouri.
However, he was nearly thirty now and did indeed want a chance
to try his hand at teaching art history. Unlike 1951, George
had certain conditions he wanted met before taking a job at KCU;
among them, he resolved that he should be offered no less than
$3600 a year. When the University’s offer came, it was for
$3700, and George’s other conditions were all satisfied. In
September 1954 he at last began teaching as an instructor at the
University of Kansas City.
There he became friends with dapper Al Varnado,
another ex-Air Force navigator who was the new Assistant
Director of the KCU Playhouse. As Al’s pal, George not only
watched tryouts at the Playhouse but created a “dreadful
expressionistic green nude” for the landlord’s painting in My
Sister Eileen and a “strange wooden nonrepresentational”
sculpture for a play directed by Mort Walker,
who in the spring of 1955 asked George to design the set for
Don Giovanni.
That summer he stayed in Urbana with the newlywedded Mlinariches,
building a small balsawood model of this set while continuing
work on his doctorate. Returning to Kansas City in September,
he was introduced by Mort Walker to a tall young woman with
greenish eyes and auburnish hair: “This is Mila Jean Smith, who
has been abroad.”
(She had just returned from a year in Europe on a Fulbright
scholarship.)
Mila Jean—whom most people called Jean or Jeanie, but whom
George would mostly call Mila—was twenty-three, a native Kansas
Citian and KCU alumnus who’d worked backstage on many Playhouse
productions, appeared onstage in several (most notably as Mary
in Juno and the Paycock), and incidentally participated
in The Revolution’s mass-class-boycott. Now helping with Don
Giovanni’s costuming, she and George were together quite a
lot that autumn—first with the rest of the Playhouse crowd, then
on their own. George found himself getting “clearly emotionally
entangled” with this ebullient young woman, taller than himself
and seven years his junior; she, as it happened, was getting
entangled with him.
George returned to Urbana for the Christmas holidays and invited
Mila Jean to join him there to see in the New Year. “Martha (my
sister) and Nick (her husband) are standing by, full of
eagerness. Sherry (my niece) will be with Grandpa and Grandma
in Chicago all next week. This means there are two roll-away
beds available. I’m on one—Sherry’s is open. But in the event
this cozy, European-type informality is too much—Don and Marion
Holshouser are standing by, also full of eagerness… Everyone is
eager.”
Mila Jean stayed with the Holshousers, met George’s family, and
saw in 1956 with George. “I certainly didn’t get down on one
knee,” he would later remark, but by January he and Mila Jean
decided to get married.
“Dearest Jean!” wrote Mathilda, “I wanted to tell you my dear,
how happy we all are, to have you as a member of our family.
But specially, Dad and I welcome you as a daughter with open
arms. It sure took our boy a long time to find his girl. Thank
Heaven he finally did find her, and that she is you.”
George and Mila Jean were married on May 26, 1956, at the All
Souls Unitarian Church
in Kansas City. George’s family was unable to come (“We are
standing up with you in Spirit,” Mathilda wrote) but on June
16th the newlyweds were again married, this time by Arnold
Westwood at the Holshousers’s in Urbana. Mathilda and the
Mlinariches were present on this occasion, and “there was a
reading, ‘Marriage’ from The Prophet,” Sherry would
recall, “after which they promptly shared a single glass of
champagne.”
During the summer of 1956 they sublet Arnold Westwood’s house in
Urbana, where they had a “thesis corner” with two separate
tables; George continued work on his doctorate and Mila Jean on
her master’s thesis. In August they returned to Kansas City,
moving into an apartment at 4112 Walnut north of the KCU
campus. George was now an assistant professor and Mila Jean
discovered she too had been promoted: the frog test’s results
were positive, with the ultimate result due to arrive the
following March.
It made its presence increasingly felt in various ways, earning
the working name of “Thumper.” George and Mila Jean got a
Baby’s Diary and prepared to begin chronicling; Thumper had
other ideas and stayed put where it was. The diary’s first
entry was made on March 20, 1957, when Mila Jean disgruntledly
wrote: “Due, but that’s all.” Not till April Fool’s Day would
labor pains commence, and on April 2nd the thoroughly-overdue
Thumper arrived with a full head of hair and a disgruntled
expression of his own.
Three days later the KCU News announced that “the latest
Production announced at the Playhouse last Wednesday was Paul
Stephen Ehrlich”—the Little Postscript.
Sherry Renée now had her “first first cousin,” and mightily
resented his existence. All the treasures her longtime bachelor
Uncle George owned that Grandpa’d said she would someday
inherit, such as the twenty-four volume set of Mark Twain’s
Complete Works, were now going to go to This Boy.
Grandpa and Grandma had This Boy for a grandson, and it seemed
inevitable to Sherry that she would be relegated to second
place. On Memorial Day Grandpa and Grandma even went to Kansas
City to see and be photographed with This Boy, and Grandpa
almost never left Chicago nowadays except for the annual
vacation to St. Petersburg!
But Sherry need not have worried; she hadn’t been the Little
Princess for nearly eight years for nothing. In July the
Mlinariches came out to Kansas City and a picture was taken of
Paul Stephen in Sherry Renée’s lap. She had on her prettiest
smile and he a “what the hell’s going on now?” goggle.
So by mid-1957 Joseph and Mathilda could look about and see both
their children teaching for a living, both married, and both
with children of their own. The Ehrlichs’s splendid dream of
achieving an all-around Good Life had apparently come true; and
the future seemed very bright.
Notes
