Mathilda
Mathilda shared apartments in Los Angeles
with her cousin Margaret Temmer from 1963 to 1981. For many
years she was the family’s champion correspondent, whose letters
and phone calls kept her children and grandchildren informed of
what the others were up to. She never allowed English to daunt
her as it had Joseph, sometimes consulting dictionaries but more
often spelling as seemed best at the moment. Her family tried
to keep up with her communicative pace but seldom matched it,
and Mathilda was seldom shy about pointing this out. If she
sent a letter to someone mentioning she hadn’t heard from him or
her for awhile, and got a prompt reply, she might say “Love and
telepathy goes out together” and close with thanks—plus hopes
that “it won’t be a whole month till the next one.”
Mathilda belonged to several senior citizens’s clubs and
frequently went to meetings or luncheons or away on tourist
jaunts, occasionally sniffing at Margaret and Rose Ruhig for
preferring to stay home and play cards. (“Nothing else
interests these two?”)
She paid many visits to California City and made it out to
Kansas City every year or so, well into her eighties. In May
1978 she commented on photos George had taken during
her most recent trip to KCMO:
I look OK too I guess, except it’s hard for me
to get used to see[ing] me as a really old person now. I am
sure you both are laughing at my saying this, but I haven’t had
a picture taken for so long, and I don’t feel my
age, so it’s hard to accept it as is.
That August Mathilda got mugged and her injuries, including a
fractured pelvis, were misdiagnosed; so Martha the onetime
wallflower took action (telling George “I haven’t been in a good
fight for a long time”) and won a legal settlement after
threatening to contact ombudsmen, state medical associations,
and David Horowitz. By the following summer Mathilda resumed
her “merry-go-round of activities with friends” and clubs, but
never fully recovered. “Seems that my age’s trying to catch up
with me or something,” she admitted in 1980. “So I[’m] just
being lazy, and wait for a miracle.”
After suffering a stroke in 1981 she was brought to stay with
the Mlinariches, but her condition continued to decline and in
January 1983 her children placed her in the Lancaster
Convalescent Hospital, an above-average nursing home. Mathilda
went there resigned to ending her life, occasionally muttering
in Hungarian about hurrying up and getting it over with. After
a difficult year she grew stronger and “graduated” from therapy,
able to read again and perambulate with a walker; in 1985
Mathilda even wrote a few letters, her first in several years.
But she was devastated by Martha’s predeceasing her (“a mother
ought to go first”) and went into passive limbo till her own
death on June 4, 1992, aged 96.
On his final visit to Lancaster, George had to rack his brain
for things to tell his unresponsive mother. When he mentioned
that he and Mila Jean had recently prepared chicken paprikash
but couldn’t produce its dumpling-like egg noodles, Mathilda
stirred long
enough to say, “Try rice.”
I had one more visit with her early Sunday
afternoon. She and I mostly sat and held hands… There was
something in how she kissed me goodbye the Sunday I left which
(even then I knew) was different from all the other times. So,
she finally was able to slip away as she clearly wished to do…
[and] take the trip for which she had
waited so long.
Martha and Nick
The Mlinariches remained at 8125 Nipa in California City for the
rest of their lives. Nick had to give up teaching shop after a
series of minor strokes but never let his health slow him down,
continuing to smoke unfiltered Camels and tool around the desert
on a motor scooter. Martha finally learned to drive in 1964 and
visited Paris in the later 1960s, meeting her Aunt Ily and
cousin Márta Kun (“the other Martha”) but not her childhood
playmate Violet “Bébi” Ladner.
During another trip in 1971 Martha first became aware of having
a sacral chordoma —a malignant tumor at the bottom of her
spine—and had to be brought home in great pain. The tumor was
surgically removed but another slowly grew to the size of a
tennis ball. She soldiered on teaching high school Biology and
Psychology, remarking in 1985 that “a teacher should imbue a kid
with the desire to learn, and do the best he can.”
Martha was ceaseless in her fight against the student anthem of
it’s boring, as well as the California Philosophy of
Education and the double wall of can’t-afford-it and
can’t-be-done. Always vocal at faculty meetings, she
carried the courage of her convictions and the strength of
increasing seniority into battle with a series of Mojave
superintendents. At an assembly where students voiced
grievances against the incumbent superintendent in 1979, Martha
marched up and took her formidable turn at the microphone, arms
resolutely folded, brows knitted, jaw set.
At the end of each school year, students would send her messages
or inscribe yearbook pictures with sentiments that shone through
their spelling and grammar: “Your a great teacher who relley
understands alot of the kids problems.” “Your the first teacher
who had ever had an interest in the students… You might get mad
at us, but you have a good reason too.” “Mrs. Mlinarich, your
my favorite teacher. I’ve had you for three years now and have
loved every hair of it.”
It was widely known that anyone who felt lonely or depressed or
troubled by some problem could talk to Martha about it, and she
would always try to help.
Some of her pupils regarded her with the same adulation she’d
once felt for Mrs. Eckaros and Dr. Brown, writing essays in
grateful tribute: “Mrs. Mlinarich is truly a hard-working,
dedicated teacher, for whom a wasted minute is a bit of
knowledge that could have been learned, or a bit of help or
service that could have been performed.” In 1975 she was named
one of the Outstanding Secondary Educators in America, Top 25 in
California.
But by 1983 her tumor was giving Martha terrible pain, with the
threat of paralysis and death if left untreated. She hemmed and
hawed about retirement until George asked if she were afraid of
disappointing their father by again choosing to leave the
classroom. “It was like a light bulb went off”: until then she
hadn’t been able to figure out why she was hesitating. In June
1984 Martha retired after a quarter-century of teaching in
Mojave.
That October at the University (of Washington) Hospital in
Seattle, she was the first patient in the United States to
undergo treatment by a fully-operational medical cyclotron.
This was the latest tool in radiation therapy, using an atomic
particle accelerator to fire streams of neutrons to kill tumor
cells; and besides hoping to ease her pain and gain some
retirement time (“There are thousands of books I haven’t read”),
Martha took professional interest in this new procedure. It
added more years to her life than anticipated, but did not
relieve her discomfort for very long nor spare her from
unpleasant side effects.
It was announced at the Mojave High Class of 1965’s twentieth
reunion that a Martha Mlinarich Mojave Alumni Scholarship
Foundation had been established,
and the 1986 Mojave Mustang yearbook was dedicated to
Mrs. Martha Mlinarich: “We thank you for caring enough about us
to make us learn what we wouldn’t have learned. Thank you for
unfailing devotion as a teacher and as a friend.”
Martha died on Earth Day, April 22, 1991, aged 71. A week later
George wrote:
Part of me has been numb for years, since it was
in the summer of 1985 that she had been given no more than six
months to live. So when the news did come, there was in one
sense a genuine feeling of relief, since her pain was now
forever stilled. Yet there is also a void which can never
really go away. Indeed, it will become ever more real to me. I
know this because as the years slip by I find myself thinking
more often of my father, and often wish I could sit with him to
visit and tell him news which would make him happy, or simply to
let him know that I better understand him, and
that I appreciate how well he managed things
when the circumstances were difficult.
Nick Mlinarich followed Martha on February 2, 1993, aged 74; and
their ashes were scattered over the Mojave Desert.
George and Mila Jean
George and Mila Jean remained at 5505 Holmes in KCMO for the
rest of their lives. In 1964, a year after KCU became the
University of Missouri-Kansas City, George became chairman of
its Art Department; he spent the next decade putting “teaching
and scholarship on a lower priority than managerial concerns”
while building up his department facultywise, facilitieswise,
and curriculumwise to realize its potential. He stepped down in
1975 partly for reasons for health, and partly in order to
“rediscover the professor in the administrator.”
In 1968 Kansas City’s eighty-year-old Board of Trade Building,
“an exceptional work of architecture,” had been torn down “to
make room for nothing more than a surface parking lot.” This
sparked a local preservation movement, with the Landmarks
Commission created in 1970 and the Historic Kansas City
Foundation organized in 1974. George was prominently associated
with both from their inception, stating that “Central to the
preservation movement is the objective of halting unwarranted
demolition or radical remodeling of historically or
architecturally significant buildings.” KCMO’s monumental Union
Station was threatened with destruction, and a crusade was
mounted to save it; in 1972
George organized and moderated a symposium on Union Station’s
future, asserting that
We do not advocate preservation of every old
building. The key element is finding new uses for many of our
old buildings… I resent deeply that things can be done without
explanation. If they do tear it down and put up a Holiday Inn
or something, I
want to be convinced that there was no other
alternative. So far I am not convinced.
Nor were many others; but their campaign would go on for decades
as Union Station withstood neglect and decay. Numerous other
vintage buildings of eminent importance were in need of
safeguarding, so the preservationists were kept vigilantly busy.
1979 saw George’s book Kansas City, Missouri: An
Architectural History 1826-1976 published by the Historic
Kansas City Foundation. This was not intended as a scholarly
work, but one bringing together the various social, cultural,
economic, and artistic forces that had shaped Kansas City’s
architectural heritage. It was illustrated with nearly two
hundred photographs taken by George over the years. A revised
and enlarged edition came out in 1992 (its subtitle extended to
1990); this was followed in 1996 by a Guide to Kansas
Architecture in collaboration with David H. Sachs, published
by the University Press of Kansas. That same year Union
Station’s long-sought restoration was finally approved, with
renovation completed in 1999 and train service resumed in 2002.
After George retired from UMKC as Professor Emeritus in 1992,
the University offered a George Ehrlich Scholarship for Art
History majors, and the Historic Kansas City Foundation
established an Achievement in Preservation Award in his name.
George was an honorary member of the American Institute of
Architects, and in 2003 the Kansas City Architectural Foundation
presented him with a Legends Award. A year after that, the
Kansas City Public Library Board of Trustees selected Kansas
City, Missouri: An Architectural History as one of the
titles to appear on 25’ x 9’ book spines decorating the façade
of the Central Library’s parking garage.
Mila Jean taught part-time in the UMKC English, Theater, and
World Literature departments from 1964 to 2000. Upon retirement
she hoped she and George could devote themselves to traveling,
one of her favorite activities;
but George took a bad fall in November 2000 that required
surgery.
Coincidentally or not, from that point he began a gradual yet
unremitting descent into dementia. In 2003 he gave up working
on a biography about pioneer architect Asa Beebe Cross, as well
as keeping a day-at-a-glance reminder book and trying to
correspond by letter or email. Mila Jean’s attempt to jog his
fading memory by showing him photos of Joseph and Mathilda only
reduced him to tears.
George died on November 28, 2009, aged 84. He’d arranged that
he and Mila Jean would be laid to rest in Leavenworth National
Cemetery, where the Department of Veterans Affairs would provide
interment space and suitable markers free of charge. Mila Jean
was disinclined to follow through with this plan, thinking the
destination too martial; but went along with it rather than seek
an alternative (such as scattering his ashes over Union
Station). “Well, they took George to Leavenworth yesterday,”
she dolefully announced—followed by a Mila Jeanesque laugh at
how that could be interpreted. She joined him there after her
own death on February 21, 2016, aged 83.
Sherry Renée
In many ways Sherry Renée’s life reflected the 1960s in which
she grew up, not least in the often fractious relationship she
had with her mother and stepfather. This was due in part to
widely differing viewpoints on financial matters: Martha having
learned frugality from her parents and, like George, making it a
lifelong style of living (often out of necessity), while S.R.
went by “Why save for tomorrow if it means starving yourself
today?” Yet Martha was the first to admit she was unable to
deal with her own child as she could with anybody else’s; and
S.R. was the first to praise her mother as a teacher, having in
fact been her student for five years in Mojave Junior/Senior
High science classes.
After graduating in 1966, Sherry wanted to go to San Francisco
(with or without flowers in her hair) but settled for college at
Fresno State, where she distanced herself from Lamb Chop jokes
by going by her middle name Renée. Leaving school after a major
confrontation with her parents in 1968, she headed for Los
Angeles and worked there as a waitress, model, and movie usher,
then at banks and an answering service and in the garment
district. She moved around considerably, at one point every
week, and at times was out of touch with her family. Finally in
1974 she “got burned-out, yelled at the boss’s son, cried in the
restroom, went out for lunch and couldn’t bring myself to go
back.”
Packing her suitcase and sewing machine, S.R. moved with friends
to Olympia, Washington, where Mathilda sent her a letter that
September mentioning the Ehrlich Family History. “If and when
Paul writes the book he started” (already sounding dubious about
this happening) “hope he’ll really do it up some time.” S.R. in
turn sent Paul Stephen a letter in
October:
For some reason it has come into my mind to
write you. I’m feeling rather contemplative tonite (you can
tell by my language—I’m usually much more casual), and since
Gramma mentioned that you’re writing a family history I thought
I’d ask about it. I know she has Mama’s diary and will either
send you the whole book or excerpts from it. I’ve never read
it, though I’d like to. For a long time she (Mama) didn’t want
me to—perhaps I was too young or we were still too caught in the
parent-child relationship instead of being friends—and later I
was home so seldom that it never came up. Anyway, I’m sure
there must be many interesting things in it. But what (who,
rather) I really wanted to write about is our mutual
grandfather. I doubt if you remember him too well. He died
when I was 13 or so and I think I’m about 8 years older than you
are. But he has to have been one of the really good
people of the world. There is so much I remember—I wish we
could talk instead of writing. I
don’t know what you’re interested in. Oh
well—here goes…
After seven pages of reminiscences she added:
I wish I could tell you more. Pictures keep
coming but words don’t—at least, not to write. Talking would be
easier. Maybe sometime… If you’re making a carbon of your
writing and wouldn’t mind loaning it out, I’d love to read it.
There’s a lot I don’t know that I’d like to find out. OK! My
hand is breaking, my stomach is empty and I’m exhausted, so this
is it for now. Write, if you have the time and inclination.
I’d like to hear how you and the rest of the family are doing.
Please give them all my
love. Sherry. P.S. It’s beautiful up
here. You should see it sometime.
In Olympia S.R. found all the verdancy she’d missed in Mojave.
For several years she worked for the state Department of Labor
and Industries, then the Department of Licensing’s Driver
Improvement Office. She also got involved with a dramatic group
that put on The Agony: A Passion Play every Easter,
appearing in 1976 as Mary Magdalene as well as assisting with
sets, lighting, and makeup. Also in The Agony was Tim
Morta,
and soon after Easter he and S.R. learned she was pregnant with
their child. But not till Thanksgiving would Martha and Nick
hear that S.R. was expecting a baby—and that it was due in two
months. Their reactions were characteristic.
Amber Joanna (Jo for great-grandfather Joseph) Lewis was
born on January 15, 1977 and made her stage debut three months
later in that Easter’s production of The Agony.
From 1979 to 1982 S.R. attended Evergreen State College, founded
in 1971 in the middle of a rainforest. It offered grade-free
multidisciplinary programs of coordinated studies, and there
S.R. earned her Bachelor of Arts degree.
During the brutally hot summer of 1980, she and Amber traveled
across country by bus to Boston and back, stopping in KCMO to
visit the Ehrlichs and urge Paul Stephen to visit Olympia. This
invitation would be extended repeatedly till he headed west in
1984, partly in order to complete An Honest Tale Plainly
Told.
In July S.R. and P.S. discussed this project, deciding to work
on “a composite volume of some comprehensiveness.” They “shaped
up the Definitive Edition as 1894-1963, emphasizing Grandpa’s
influence on family—S.R. anxious that it not be done ‘dry,’ but
with popular bent, with view to publishing.”
Over the next year Sherry Renée was preoccupied with Martha’s
health and her own love life, the latter culminating in a June
28, 1985 wedding to Nick Layden,
a softspoken easygoing postman. Despite marked differences in
temperament, Nick Layden shared a number of traits with Nick
Mlinarich: both were mechanically-handy “lapsed” Catholics who
smoked Camels and had gone through a marriage and divorce. In
fact it was S.R.’s friendship with Nick’s ex-wife Myriam, and
Amber’s with Nick’s daughter Nichole and stepdaughters Marcella
and Monique, that led to S.R. and Nick becoming acquainted.
As her engagement ring Sherry Renée wore the one Grandpa Joseph
had gotten from his mother Sarolta in 1916 to be Grandma
Mathilda’s. The newlywed Laydens’s honeymoon was an arduous
trek by truck (with Amber and Paul Stephen in the back seat) to
California to visit the Mlinariches and Mathilda. Grandma could
not have asked for a better ninetieth birthday present; at long
last she was able to proclaim “I have a third grandson!”
In 1986 S.R. reported having found “OUR HOUSE. Caps definitely
necessary”—the suburban Seattle domicile
she would occupy with husband, daughter, and several cats for
the next decade, and which Paul Stephen would dub “Laydenland”
when he joined Sherry Renée & Co.’s household in 1988.
S.R. was employed by the University of Washington from 1988 to
2009 as an office assistant, secretary and program coordinator
with the Extension, Developmentally Disabled Rehab, Admissions,
Minority Affairs & Diversity, and Lab Medicine departments.
When they turned sixty Sherry Renée and Nick decided to retire
to an acre of land in Republic, Washington, a onetime goldmining
town (originally called Eureka Gulch) surrounded by the Colville
National Forest. Except during the depths of winter, S.R. has
never had to say “There’s nothing
green out here!” in
Republic.
Paul Stephen
“Paul is adapting well to the college work,” George wrote
Mathilda in October 1974. “He doesn’t mingle much (as usual)
but he is working quite hard and long on coursework.”
Actually Paul spent more time working harder and longer on
fictional enterprises than scholarship or “dayjob” employment;
and to a great extent that priority has gone unchanged for
nearly half a century. For awhile he considered becoming an
accountant, but instead took a general Bachelor of Business
Administration degree at the University of Missouri-Kansas
City. From 1975 to 1988 he was employed by the UMKC Bookstore
as a student assistant, then a fulltime clerk, and finally
Supplies Buyer. In 1984 Paul Stephen began vacationing in
Washington state—first to escape from KCMO summers, then KCMO
winters, then KCMO altogether. From 1988 to 1994 he
roomed-and-boarded in the Laydenland rec room before shifting to
his own place; thirty years later he is at the same apartment
complex in Des Moines, Washington. Since November 1989 he has
worked in what evolved from Patient Data Services (i.e. Medical
Records) at the University of Washington Medical Center, to
Enterprise Records & Health Information (still Medical Records)
at a conglomeration of hospitals called UW Medicine. As he
writes this, he is beginning his third-person-singular descent
pattern toward unmingled retirement.
And through the last half-century Paul Stephen has devoted the
bulk of his free time to creative writing. George and Mila Jean
always tried to encourage this, but were frequently baffled by
his methodology and often by his output, or lack of the same.
All through the 1970s he constructed enormous novels in thorough
detail, but achieved next to nothing in the way of actual text.
That threshold was crossed in the early 1980s, but seldom
reached final-draft form. Not till To Be Honest did he
bring a large-scale writing project to completion—and that one
was non-fictional. Output improved after his relocation
to the Puget Sound area. From 1989 to 1993, and again from 2002
to 2006, numerous poems and stories and novel excerpts were
published by “little” magazines in print and online. Since then
Paul Stephen has been content to hang his literary and
genealogical oeuvres out to dry on
www.SkeeterKitefly.com,
the website he launched in 2002, for anyone to read or ignore as
they see fit.
As P.S. has told his brother Matthew on several occasions: “I’m
glad one of us took the academic career route, and that it
wasn’t me.”
Matthew Carleton
“Matt” became involved with journalism while attending the
Pembroke-Country Day School, where he also took part in
theatrical productions.
Combining these endeavors, he engaged in radio broadcasting
through the 1980s as reporter, producer, and anchor at several
NPR or nonprofit stations.
In the meantime he earned a Bachelor of Journalism degree at the
University of Missouri-Columbia (1983), a Master of Science from
the University of Kansas School of Journalism and Mass
Communications (1987), and a Ph.D. from that old Ehrlich alma
mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1991).
Following a year of teaching at the University of Oklahoma, it
was at the U of I that Matthew settled down in 1992. He was
promoted to full professor with tenure in 2006, and took early
retirement (due in part to Illinois’s underfunded pension
system) as Professor Emeritus of Journalism and the Institute of
Communications Research in 2016, but continues to teach.
Matthew has also written a series of books published by the
University of Illinois Press or its imprint: Journalism in
the Movies (2004); Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio
Documentary in the Public Interest
(2011); Heroes and Scoundrels:
The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (with Joe
Saltzman: 2015); Kansas City vs. Oakland: The Bitter Sports
Rivalry That Defined an Era (2019); Dangerous Ideas on
Campus: Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK
(2021); and The Krebiozen Hoax: How a Mysterious Cancer Drug
Shook Organized Medicine (2024).
Matthew also inherited Mila Jean’s partiality for widespread
travel. In 2020 he nearly got trapped in Ireland when the
coronavirus pandemic lockdown began, but made it safely home and
staged a successful return (this time nonviral) to the Emerald
Isle in 2023.
Amber Joanna
Sherry Renée’s becoming a single mother was not among her
grandmother’s hopes and dreams; but Mathilda wrote Paul in
August 1977 about getting “a nice long letter from Sherry the
other day, she seems to keep busy, and sounds happy with her
baby. So I guess I should feel the same and stop worrying ha?”
Mathilda would be smitten by her great-granddaughter’s
vivid charm, and
comment about her in much the same way Mártuka and Sherry had
once been described:
1978 July 15.
…Amber’s a sweet little girl, for 15 months she knows and does
so many things I was surprised. I haven’t seen a young
child for so many years, I forgot how they [are] developing.
Amber was crazy for her grandpa. She used to climb up to
his immense easy chair and sit in Nicky’s lap hugging him and
pushing her tiny face up to kiss him on his cheek.
Naturally Nicky was tickled about that. She imitated every
word she heard and was
very happy to hear us laugh, and she laughed with us too…
1980 January 14. …We [Mathilda and Martha] were
very surprised that Amber was so good, all day walking around
with us at a “Kay Mart.” When it came lunch time she a three
year old packed away a full meal [of] spaghetti and meatballs.
I only had a cheese sandwich
and a cup of coffee…
1980 December 30.
…We had a good visit with Sherry and Amber. She is such a
smart four years old, she already can write her name and tries
to read also… When she saw us at the Airport she greeted
us with, “I haven’t seen you guys for such a long time, I’m glad
you
came.” She constantly amused us both while we were there…
Including Amber Joanna in To Be Honest does not change it
to “four
generations of unexpectedly dramatic family saga,” since
being dramatic has always been an integral part of her parcel.
Like Great-Grandma Mathilda in her youth, Amber could play
csipi csóka pinch-and-slap games while having “three other
boyfriends at the same time.” After many adventures she became
a massage therapist at various spas and a vocal musician with
various groups, as well as a wife,
stepmother and eventual stepgrandmother (or “Gramber”).
In 1990 the thirteen-year-old Amber read Paul Stephen’s second
Skeeter Kitefly story (“The Demon Bag Lady of Skeet Street”)
with qualified approval, saying “You should’ve left her a
teenager” (as in the first Skeeter story, “Initially Illustrated”).
Putting thought to more Skeeter-as-a-teen stories led P.S. to
the full-length The Ups and Downs of Skeeter Kitefly, its
sequel Skeeter Kitefly’s Sugardaddy Confessor, and
www.SkeeterKitefly.com
plus its weblishing adjunct Split Infinitive
Productions—which now includes the Revised Anniversary Edition
of To Be Honest.
Notes
