After the Soviet Union crushed Hungary’s rebellion in November
1956, thousands fled the country; one family, the Luksanders,
eventually came to Urbana, Illinois. They had escaped in a
novel fashion: Mr. Luksander brought his pregnant wife across
the border on a motorcycle, then went back and rescued his nine-
and three-year-old daughters, piling them both on the motorcycle
with him. The Luksanders were almost penniless when they made
it to Urbana, and soon were joined by a newborn third daughter.
The Catholic Church sponsored a certain number of refugees,
promising them work and housing till they could adjust to
America and get to their feet. The sponsoring committee
discovered that Martha was a native of Kolozsvár/Cluj and could
still understand spoken Hungarian quite fluently. (George
sometimes needed to have a phrase repeated before he could
figure it out.) Martha befriended the Luksanders and became
their interpreter, accompanying them to supermarkets and
Woolworths where they would look at every object on the
counters, amazed and intrigued by the plenty everywhere in the
United States.
However, there was not plenty of room at the Mlinariches’s
apartment, crowded as it was with three people and two dogs.
In November 1957 they moved to a house in “the suburbs”: Fithian,
a rural community some fifteen miles east of Urbana. “Oh, what
bliss!” Martha wrote her parents. “This place is beyond
description, and we resent having to leave it
tomorrow to go to school.”
1957 November 28. “Thanksgiving day.” My Darling
Sherry! You and your parents were here for the day, we hadn’t
seen you for three months now… Somehow you are getting to be
so grown up, and smart too. You helped Grandpa do a lot of
work, writing out a storage list… You also brought your school
papers to show how well you are doing in your new school in
Fithian. Every page shows the mark a 100. We are so proud of
you darling, and so’s your Mother and Nicky. You were wearing a
T-shirt with Illinois and an Indian head on front. Nicky bought
that for you as a surprise with a date 19-??? Grandpa figured
it out, it will be 1966 when you will be old enough to enter the
University of Illinois. Hope we all will be here to enjoy that
date with you my sweet… So long my dearest, till next time, we
are planning a Christmas reunion with you all and George, Jean,
and Paul at your house. Till
then all our love to you from us both.
Just after Christmas, George and Mila Jean brought Paul to
Urbanato visit the Holshousers (“Paul charming, but schedule shot to
hell,” was entered in the Baby’s Diary). Then Joseph and
Mathilda came down from Chicago and they all went out to Fithian
to stay with the Mlinariches. This was the first and, as it
turned out, the only so complete an Ehrlich family gathering to
ever take place.
In May 1958 Martha sent Joseph the results of Sherry’s Stanford-Binet
intelligence test, showing her reading at a ninth-grade level.
“The enclosed little chart should make you very happy,” Martha
wrote, “and proud enough to pop a few vest buttons. If you’re
not wearing a vest, I’ll wait till you put one on… By the
way—are you planning to teach her
algebra this summer? I hope not…”
1958 June 21. My Dearest Sherry! Your parents picked you up
today and took you home again after a three weeks vacation with
us here in Chicago. Darling I have to tell you what a wonderful
time we all had together. We took you to see the Adler
Planetarium, Grandpa took you to see the Science & Industry
Museum and the Field Museum too… Grandpa gave you $2 for your
birthday, and told you to buy what you wanted with it. So we
had lots of fun, you and I went to shop in a toy shop. After a
long time, you chose a set of chess game, and of all things, a
cap pistol. But I let you buy it, because we want always for
you to be a happy child. I never let your Mommie or Uncle
George buy any, when they were small, but I let you, even though
I don’t approve of children playing with guns… Grandpa took you
fishing and you caught one little perch, but it made you just as
happy as if it would have been a real big fish, and Grandpa was
just as happy you could catch anything, it’s hard to fish in
Lake Michigan, the fish stay very deep down in the water.
Nick earned his industrial education degree in 1958, but he and
Martha were not allowed to both teach in the Urbana school
system. Moreover, Nick lacked certain credits and his teaching
credentials were therefore limited. The first place to make him
a firm job offer was Mojave, California; Nick accepted it and
the Mlinariches prepared to move west.
Coincidentally, the extended family was doing likewise. After
Markus Temmer’s death in January 1956, his son Ernie had sold
the laundry business in Wisconsin, got himself and wife Ruth and
their children settled in southern California, then persuaded
his mother Margaret to move there too. By 1958 the others
followed: Rose and Béla Ruhig, their daughter Evelyn with
husband Albert Sessler and their kids, Ted and Nan Ruhig and
theirs.
Joseph and Mathilda would be the last to leave Chicago, but they
had a different direction in mind. St. Petersburg, Florida, had
been their haven and vacation spot for over
twenty-five years, and long ago they’d decided to retire there
in due time.
1958 July 27. My Dearest Sherry and her Parents! We just
got home from Fithian seeing you all and for the day before you
are leaving Illinois to go to live in California. It was a
lovely day together, but oh, when the time came to say goodbye,
it was a sorry affair. We too left feeling very sad, thinking
how far away you’d be from us. Even though we didn’t see you
too often while here, we still could get together four or five
times in a year. Now who knows how long we will have to wait
till we see our little Princess?… It took all my willpower to
keep my tears from spilling out, and I sure cried on the way
home. My darling children I do hope you will all be happy in
your new home, and you Sherry will find a lot of
new good friends there. We both love till it hurts.
Your
Grandparents.
Nick took to Mojave and the desert atmosphere very quickly, but
his womenfolk decidedly did not. Sherry never would: “There’s
nothing green out
here!” was her initial reaction, and it was not to change. As
for Martha, when her first days in Mojave featured 85 m.p.h.
winds blowing semis off the roads, she responded with: “Let me
out of this place!! I want to GO HOME!!!”
The local high school’s junior high wing was not yet finished in
1958, so there was no teaching position available for Martha.
Principal Tom Kelly,
who’d hired Nick to teach shop, gave Martha a job working
half-days in the high school office; the other half-days she
worked in the elementary school office. By October she’d
adjusted somewhat to the desert: “So far, the L.A. weather
reports have nothing to do with Mojave,” she wrote her parents.
“We definitely have no trace of smog, and though it is summer
weather, it’s not a bit unpleasant and evenings are wonderful.
The only hitch to our staying here permanently is the California
philosophy of Education. Things may get better in our school,
but it’s still too early to tell. Maybe by mid-semester we’ll
know whether we stay here, try another town in California, or
try another state.”
Martha would witheringly define the California Philosophy of
Education as “Pass the kids on—no challenge.” And Nick (who’d
come home from University of Illinois classes “bitching about
the tripe they came out with concerning teaching”) went to war
with it after he found boys making brass knuckles and
switchblade knives in the Mojave High shop. Hoodlumism was a
major problem, and not just among boys; certain girls “with
razor blades in their hair” were conducting a reign of terror
over other students.
How was juvenile delinquency dealt with at Mojave? “The
administration never did beans, ever—the teachers did it
all!” Martha was to snort. She made an exception of her friend
Tom Kelly, who tried his best; but in the Mojave shop it was
Nick who ended the Reign of Terror with his own form of brass
knucks: flunking everybody one semester, an action almost
without precedent and completely contrary to the California
Philosophy of Education. And despite a storm of protests, Nick
stuck to his guns.
“He could outshout anybody in that school, anyway,” Sherry would
observe.
In the summer of 1959 the Mlinariches revisited the Midwest,
where Martha re-encountered humidity. After that she wanted
nothing more than to return to Mojave, and from then on it would
be her desert. That September the Mlinariches moved to a
ranch house at 8125 Nipa Avenue in California City, a
grandiosely-named new community about fifteen miles northeast of
Mojave.
The high school’s east wing was completed by this time and Tom
Kelly hired Martha to teach junior high science. Joseph
captioned a photo of his daughter, back in the classroom, as “My
favorite teacher.”
“Erratic behavior during the day,” went the entry in Paul
Stephen’s diary for November 28, 1958. “Very active—alternates
charm with brattiness.”
What with teething, temper tantrums, and toilet training, life
with Paul had all the intensity of Wagnerian opera. This did
not ease things
for Mila Jean or especially George, who was unhappy at KCU but
had decided not to seek another job until completing his Ph.D.
And he was struggling to do this, wading through the necessary
preliminaries while keeping up continual enrollment at the
University of Illinois. George had just sent off the current
term’s $80 check
in May 1959 when a financial crisis overtook his family.
They had perhaps ten dollars left in the bank. Bills and debts
were straining George’s limited income but had to be promptly
attended to; that was a lesson drummed into him by his parents.
He did not have tenure at KCU, so his job there—however
unsatisfactory incomewise and opportunitywise—was by no means
guaranteed. Mila Jean did not have an outside job, there being
“more than enough to cope with” at home with Paul.
George had little more than a year left to complete his
doctorate; the Ehrlichs’s old refrigerator chose Memorial Day
weekend to give up its ghost; and the family was left “really in
a don’t-know-which-way-to-turn” situation. (Paul would later
claim that at this time, when his parents read him “Hansel and
Gretel” and came to the part about abandoning the children in
the woods, they got a dreamy look in their eyes.)
Then the telephone rang. It was Homer Wadsworth of the Kansas
City Association of Trusts and Foundations, getting back to
George a year after he’d applied for a small grant. Wadsworth
offered him a “discretionary gift” of $500.
“Even now I get a strange feeling when I think about it,” George
would say long afterward. “How did he know that I was at the
edge of financial chaos, filled with despair, wondering what
next to do? Or was it pure coincidence? I never had the nerve
to ask; some things are best left as minor miracles
unexplained…”
So, despite everything, Martha and George were each set and
established by 1959, though both would have many more moments of
doubt along their individual paths. These had become widely
divergent in various ways, but both were teaching—with the
likelihood they would be able to continue teaching—and
this was a great and deep satisfaction to their parents,
particularly Joseph.
He celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday on March 17, 1959, and
promptly retired from the fur business he had diligently (if not
wholeheartedly) pursued for over thirty years. Among his final
productions was a miniature raccoon coat for Paul,
whimsically echoing George’s “collegiate” one in the 1920s.
Joseph and Mathilda sold their house and shop on Western Avenue
and also their furniture, partly to save the expense of moving
it, but more because they wanted “nice new things” for their new
home in Florida. The front pages of the Chicago Tribune
that Joseph had collected over the decades were sold too, and he
realized a small but tidy profit—as indeed he and Mathilda did
from their fur business.
They had lived frugally all their lives, and now were going to
enjoy themselves. By April they began a happy retirement in St.
Petersburg, living comfortably and (thanks to the Nice New
Things) a bit plushly in their little pink one-story house at
2451 36th Avenue North. Joseph had always anticipated the
future by carefully providing for their Social Security; and
though the elder Ehrlichs didn’t have money to burn, neither did
they have financial worries.
Mathilda, outgoing as ever, quickly began joining clubs and
making friends; Joseph fished and read the St. Petersburg
Times and worked out algebraic equations to his heart’s
content. “He loved to do math problems very much just for his
enjoyment,” Mathilda would say. “It was his Hobby.” For awhile
he tried getting her interested in it, but “I got tired of
dealing in thousands when we had sixty dollars a month.”
And when people asked Joseph what he had done for a living, he
told them he was a retired teacher.
The only cloud on the Ehrlichs’s horizon was having their family
spread across the continent, but there was always the promise of
vacation visits; the Mlinariches came for a stay every summer.
Sherry enjoyed a wide range of recreations in St. Petersburg,
from swimming in Tampa Bay to watching Joseph make fresh orange
juice with a gadget on the garage wall, to fighting a fullscale
paper-boat war with him on the dining room table. Joseph
devised the various boats, including battleships complete with
smokestacks. And sometimes he would share snippets of the past
with his granddaughter, such as telling her about his little
sister Eszter with the long blonde hair, and that Sherry
reminded him of her.
In February 1960 Martha underwent a hysterectomy, and Mathilda
journeyed to California to be with her. Mila Jean’s mother
wrote Joseph a letter of cheery commiseration and on February
24th he wrote back, having labored over this reply to George’s
in-laws,
trying to weed out errors in grammar and spelling:
Dear Folks: It is a big relief to know that
Martha’s operation was a success. To tell you the truth I was
very nervous but helpless, glad Matyu was with her. The next
few days will be painful for Martha, but time is a good doctor.
If you feel blue and lonesome you really can
appreciate your neighbors, who like to help you in every way.
We have wonderful neighbors and we are like brothers and
sisters. Our 36th Avenue blocks are occupied with old couples,
no children. [On the] fourth of the month in every mailbox is a
check from Uncle Sam. We all live in the present and talk about
the past, our children, grandchildren, our sickness. Maybe you
would not like this kind of life, but wait till you will be in
our ages.
Right now everybody is talking, Matyu Ehrlich
went to California and lonesome Joe maybe need some help. Yes I
am very lonesome. I don’t think our house is not so nice no
more, the rooms are so big and cold. I wonder why??
It would be a good idea, to go to K.C. and wait
for Mother there. If I could drive I would do it, but my
driving days are over for a long trip. I would love to be with
my grandson Paul, play with him, teach him [a] few tricks but
this has to wait. When Matyu will see him, she can tell me all
about him.
Excuse my shaky handwriting. Hope you can read
this letter. Thank you for
your letter it is a pleasure for me to read it.
My love to you all. Joe.
In October 1960 George at last received his Doctor of Philosophy
degree.
After all the years of pressure and frustration he sorely needed
a sabbatical leave from KCU, and when the University awarded him
tenure that fall he was able to arrange for one.
The Ehrlichs acquired a Volkswagen Beetle and took off on a trip
to St. Petersburg in February 1961. Paul had begun to read (to
a certain extent) by this time,
providing his parents with considerable relief in the ensuing
quiet.
George brought his dissertation along to show Joseph. His
father was not especially interested in its topic (the influence
of technological development on 19th Century American pictorial
art) but he turned Technology and the Artist’s pages
lovingly and wanted to keep it. Over the years Joseph had built
up the status of “teacher” in his mind until it ranked with
“movie star,” and this token of his son’s Ph.D. was a precious
thing indeed. However, it was a considerable disappointment for
Joseph to learn that George’s students did not stand up when he
entered the classroom.
While George and Mila Jean explored Florida in the Beetle, Paul
stayed with his grandparents in their little pink house. He
took note that they used foreign words such as “cushion” when
everybody knew the thing was called a “pillow.” He would recall
watching Joseph fish, and making fresh orange juice with the
garage-wall gadget (juice that Paul did not care for, since it
had Things in it), and Joseph trying to teach him to whistle,
and long fascinated periods of observing ant colonies in their
back-garden hills, and being taken to the Tampa Bay beach and
refusing to wade—certain that creatures with pincer-claws were
going to assault his feet.
One night Joseph and Paul were sitting on the front porch and
Paul decided to start barking like a dog, which caused lights to
go on in the house next door. “They think you are a little
dog,” Joseph told him, and Paul stopped, and the lights went
off, and Paul began barking again, and the lights went back
on—and the two boys had a fine time until Mathilda
came out, her hair in pins, to take them by their ears and put
them to bed.
1961 March 12. [Martha to her parents]
Dearest
folks: This is a nostalgic day somehow. I was thinking of Dad’s
birthday, and reread bits here and there of my baby diary—of our
troubles about my practicing, reading in bed too late at night,
teasing George, and the stories you told us at night about L[aci,],
P[ali] and S[anyi]. I’m sure you remember too. In a way it’s
almost impossible for me to realize you’re 67, Dad, and I’m in
my 40s. When I really think about you—not just “daily
thinking”—I’m still in my early teens and you’re the one in the
40s. I wonder if you realize what wonderful parents you were,
and how very much I have to thank you for…
Spring is coming rapidly to the desert. Our trees are budding,
flowers beginning to bloom, and though the nights and early
mornings are still cool, the days are warm and sunny. Two weeks
more until Easter vacation. I need it, and so does Nicky. Then
only ten more
weeks, and another year is over… Happy birthday, Dad. We love
you. Martha.
The troubles about Martha’s piano-practicing had not been in
vain. At Mojave High School’s 1961 baccalaureate service she
was able to provide selections from Sibelius, Beethoven, Chopin,
the “Triumphal March” from Aida, and “Pomp and Circumstance.”
In the spring of 1962 Mathilda gathered together all the letters
and memorabilia
saved from Sherry’s first thirteen years, and put them together
in a book.
1962 May 1. My Dearest Sherry: Sorry, this book isn’t as
pretty looking as I would have liked to make it. But I’m hoping
you’d like it, after you browse around in it just the same.
Your dear Mother and I tried to record the most important
happenings in your life ever since you were born. She sent me
letters from Miami, and wherever you two lived, to tell us how
you were developing, and I saved them all so when you got old
enough to understand, you could see how much happiness you gave
us all, and how much we loved you at all times.
Now you will be thirteen years old this coming June, and old
enough to enjoy reading about when you were a little baby. To
your Grandpa you still are a baby, but I know better than that.
I know you are a young lady, and soon you will be completely
grown up. We just hope you will always be our darling
Princess. We both love you more than ever, and miss you
even more.
1962 May 10. Well,
my Darling, your book’s put together, I read nearly every page
over, and enjoyed it so much to reminisce, and live over those
lovely years with you. I can still see you as you were.
Such a tiny and so sweet a baby, and what a joy to us all.
When you and your parents moved out to California, and we here
to Florida, it seemed we just couldn’t stand the distance
between us. We both missed your smiling face, and still
do. Grandpa and I feel terribly lonesome for you, and Paul
too. More so for you, because we know you longer, and saw
you grow up. So now we just have to live on the memories
of those days, and hope we could spend a few weeks each year
with you. As the years speed by, you are growing up to be
a fine girl. And your grandparents are growing old
(gracefully I hope?). All I have to say my dearest, is
that you be happy, and love your Mother as she deserves to be
loved by you. She was a very understanding and a loving
Mother to you. Hope you will
think of us kindly too. We always will love you with all our
heart. Grandma and Grandpa.
By the spring of 1962 rumors were circulating that the
University of Kansas City, which seemed on the verge of going
under fiscally, might become affiliated with the University of
Missouri in Columbia. This would necessitate KCU’s losing its
autonomy and changing from a private to a public institution,
but George decided such a merger could only bring improvement.
He hadn’t been enthusiastic about returning to KCU after his
sabbatical; the Art Department “had not grown or improved one
whit” in seven years, “and the university was seemingly going
down into a whirlpool of a deteriorating fiscal crisis.” George
had felt there was no future for him there; now he resolved to
stick around awhile longer.
There was also the fact that Mila Jean was again pregnant (this
time hosting “the Little Stranger”) with a resulting need to
find a larger place to live. The Ehrlichs bought a two-story
house at 5505 Holmes, a few blocks south of the University and
Nelson Elementary School,
where Paul began kindergarten that September.
Matthew Carleton Ehrlich was born on October 30, 1962, and
George went to see his new son expecting another dark-visaged
infant such as Paul had been. He was bemused to find a
red-faced reddish-haired blueish-eyed boy, whose resemblance to
Winston Churchill was stronger than the average baby’s.
Meanwhile the tremors affecting Joseph’s hands were growing
worse. They had been diagnosed as a symptom of Parkinson’s
disease, a mysterious and baffling disorder; no one could say
for certain what caused it, and there was no known cure. Many
cases were traced back to 1918 and the Spanish influenza
epidemic that had caused encephalitis, damaging nerve cells deep
at the base of the brain. Its effects sometimes took forty
years or more to show themselves, and such was the case with
Joseph: the past had caught up with him.
Parkinson’s disease was being intensely researched, and
neurosurgeries of various experimental sorts—using radioactive
beads, electric cautery, or proton rays—were showing some
promise. One of the field’s surgical pioneers was Dr. Irving S.
Cooper, who had successfully treated Life photographer
Margaret Bourke-White by injecting drops of alcohol that
permanently deadened the brain’s damaged cells. But Dr. Cooper
now considered that method outmoded, and in July 1962 Time,
Newsweek, and Look magazines featured his new
technique: cryogenic surgery, the rapid deep-freezing of a
pea-sized portion of the brain. Dr. Cooper emphasized this
could not cure Parkinson’s or guarantee improvement; but his
prospective patients were eager for any chance to relieve the
uncontrollable shaking of their rigid, half-clenched hands.
Prospects were carefully screened before being sent to Dr.
Cooper, but he would operate on only seven out of every ten; he
felt that sufferers should be treated early while they were
still strong, and doubted that surgery would be beneficial for
those deemed too old or too severely handicapped.
Joseph went to New York and was examined by Dr. Cooper, who told
him there was no way that further deterioration could be
prevented. Worse than this news was Joseph’s seeing patients
with advanced cases of Parkinson’s: the disease, though not
itself fatal, was progressively degenerative and made helpless
invalids of its victims. They grew stiffer and more bent each
year until they could not get up and walk alone, or dress or
bathe or feed themselves unaided. Minds and memories were not
notably affected, but faces would take on a wide-eyed unblinking
stare with mouths half-open and drooling saliva.
“It was terrible,” Joseph said. “What I saw was terrible.”
He decided to sell the house in St. Petersburg and move Mathilda
to Los Angeles, saying he would not be able to rest until he saw
her standing between her cousins Margaret and Rose. Mathilda
was reluctant to leave Florida, and it was not really necessary
for her to be looked after and taken care of; but to Joseph the
idea of turning to the family for support was by now the
unquestionable key to survival.
Since their lifestyle hadn’t changed much in retirement,
Mathilda had been able to continue saving from her housekeeping
allowance, and she contributed these rainy-day reserves to help
finance their departure. However, it was at this time that she
discovered Joseph had deliberately destroyed many relics of the
past. Gone now were most of the carefully-captioned photos
brought from Kolozsvár, the pictures of comrades on the Eastern
front, of relatives lost over time and in the Holocaust; gone
too were old glass negatives Joseph had kept from his childhood
in Győr, and the little silver wine cup he’d had in
memory of his father.
A
mult idő nagy mezein,
On great fields of the past,
Hervadt lombok emlékeim;
dried leaves of my memories;
Ősszeszedem őket,
I gather them
Kötöm egy csomóba,
into bundles
Ugy vetem bele az
and cast them in
Égő kandallóba.
the burning fireplace.
George was acquainted with an osteopath, Joe Markine, who
attended the Unitarian church and taught physiology part-time at
KCU. Markine was working with a team at the University of
Kansas Medical Center, experimenting with Parkinson’s treatment
using ultrasonic waves. One day over lunch George mentioned his
father’s case, and Joe Markine said he could arrange for Joseph
to be examined by the ultrasonic team’s principal physician and
so get a second opinion.
In April 1963 Joseph and Mathilda stopped in Kansas City on
their way to Los Angeles; it was their first opportunity to see
their newest grandchild Matthew. George took his father to the
KU Med Center for examination, and the doctor pronounced him a
candidate for ultrasonic surgery. Since there would be a fairly
lengthy convalescent period, it was decided the surgery should
be performed in California, and the doctor made arrangements
with a friend doing similar surgery at UCLA.
So there still was hope, and cause for somewhat renewed
optimism. Joseph still lived in the rational and enlightened
world of reality, where modern technology could find cures for
all diseases; the world where science held all the promise to
solve all the problems. Jedes Warum hat seinen Darum:
every Why did have a Wherefore.
He hoped to at least ease the palsy in his hands, which by now
was so bad (and so embarrassing to him) that he spent much of
the time with arms folded and hands tucked tightly under his
armpits. Having turned sixty-nine in March, he told George, “I
have lived longer than any man in my family has lived, and I
would like to reach seventy.”
The elder Ehrlichs went on to Los Angeles and got an apartment
at 577 N. Grevillea in Hawthorne, choosing this community
because the Ruhigs lived there. In due course Joseph underwent
the first half of the ultrasonic surgery; two operations were
necessary when both sides were afflicted. After it was over he
took a look at his hand, found it still palsied, and shrugged a
little.
On Sherry’s fourteenth birthday in June, she and Martha and Nick
went to visit Joseph in the hospital. Sherry would recall that
he did not look like himself; he had a vacant expression,
unfocused on what was going on around him, and did not have much
to say. Nor was he eating, so Martha “in her best schoolmarm
voice” told him that he had to eat, and fed him. He was taken
back to the Hawthorne apartment, still in an invalid condition,
and died there on July 6, 1963. The funeral took place at
Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City on a bright sunny summer
day. Mathilda and Martha were devastated by it all, but to
Sherry it did not sink in—it didn’t seem real.
He would not have viewed his fortitude in adapting to life as an
accomplishment, because he had not been able to achieve the
goals he had set for himself. First and foremost he had wanted
to be a teacher, and to a lesser extent a musician and an
artist; Fate (as he saw it) had frustrated him in all these
pursuits when he was a young man.
To the end of his life Joseph wanted to go back to Budapest, if
only to see the school he’d taught at, to see if it was still
there. Otherwise he stopped dreaming of what he could have
done. Instead he dreamed for his children, hoping they would
want to achieve what he had not, and be able to achieve it with
his and Mathilda’s encouragement and support. And the dreams
had come true—if not in the most straightforward manner—and this
gave Joseph that great and deep satisfaction which is born of
fulfillment.
At the end of the Spring 1963 semester, Martha and George
between them had been teaching for twenty-five years. Martha
had just received a Life Diploma from the California State Board
of Education, allowing her to teach for as long as she lived;
George’s hopes for his own academic future were refreshed as KCU
merged with the University of Missouri and became the new
University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC). Twenty years
after Joseph’s death, both his children would still be teaching.
“The fatalist in Joseph would mean he would shrug his shoulders,
not give in but reconcile himself to the fact that he had once
again to cope with adversity, this time without any hope of
winning,” George was to write. “But he had seen more than
Canaan from the hill; he had actually enjoyed, if briefly, the
milk and honey of the promised land. He saw his children
successful in his eyes. Therefore, I think he died relatively
content.”
In June 1962 Martha received a certificate noting her fifteen
years as a schoolteacher,
and sent it to Joseph for Father’s Day with a note:
Dearest Dad: During observation of Public
Schools Week this year, I was awarded a certificate which
rightfully belongs to you. Since my name is on it and can’t be
removed, we’ll have to share it, just as we’ve shared so many
things during the past forty-plus years. This then is my own
“Certificate of Appreciation” to you for all the love,
sacrifices, and wonderful philosophy of life given so generously
and unfailingly
when I deserved it, and also when I didn’t.
On Joseph’s birthday in 1976, George wrote Mathilda a letter in
which he remarked:
How different my life has been than Dad’s had
been. I think he would have liked to be able to skip the bad
parts, but still our lives and experiences were very special and
it made us the type of people and family we were (and are).
Despite all the problems we face these days, I know it has been
a good life and things for us are really pretty good. And my
Dad had a lot to contribute to the fact that this generation has
a good life together. When I think of the things we
can do and have done I really marvel.
Writing to Paul Stephen in 1974, Sherry Renée said of “our
mutual grandfather”:
I have one of his fountain pens. I never use
it, just keep it put away in a drawer. It’s all I have that was
his… He had to have been one of the really good people of the
world. He was always so gentle though and always had time to
care… He was quiet too, but fun, and he had so much love in
him. I guess he had his faults too—people
do—but I never saw them.
And when Mathilda wrote her own minihistory of the Ehrlich
family in 1976, she concluded:
Our firstborn daughter’s a graduate with a
Master of Biology from the University of Illinois. Our son is
also a graduate of Illinois, an Art Historian and Professor with
a Ph.D. They’re both teaching school and love it just as their
father hoped for. He learned to be a furrier in trade here, but
he never stopped being a teacher at heart. He died in 1963, but
never forgotten by his family. Thank God he at least had a
chance to see his children succeed also, and to enjoy
the three wonderful grandchildren…
The marker at Hillside Memorial Park reads BELOVED HUSBAND AND
FATHER / JOSEPH EHRLICH / 1894-1963. To that, alongside the
tributes from his family, might be
added a line from Shakespeare:
To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of
ten thousand.
Notes
