Blog

Amy, Barry, and Kelsey Grau live on the third floor in a south-facing apartment. In the winter, when the typically gray Chicago sky yields to sunshine, their living room is awash in warm light. On just such a day, about six weeks after Kelsey was born, Amy was sitting with her on the couch. She was surprised that the sunlight, which fell directly into Kelsey’s eyes did not make her squint. She and Barry had begun to notice that Kelsey was not tracking them as they moved about the room. Soon it was confirmed that Kelsey had been born blind.

The expectations that Amy and Barry each held about having a child were very different from the reality that they faced with their new baby. Many of Amy’s expectations centered around expeditions to museums and the zoo and making things, all visual stuff. Barry was like Bill in the play Carousel, who dreamt about “teaching his son to shoot a gun and hit a baseball,” things that Barry laughingly admits he himself does not know how to do. As in Carousel, the he was a she, a child who challenged all their notions of family life.

Having a handicapped child presents opportunities as well as problems. There is, in fact, a large support network for such children, especially in big cities. But you have to know how to use it and you have to put the time in with your child, learning to become a capable teacher/guardian as well as a loving parent. Amy and Barry are blessed in that they are intelligent, middle-class, and have comprehensive health insurance. They are informed and aggressive about seeing to their child’s needs. 

The Graus were quick to realize that their daughter’s blindness could, if allowed, undermine their relationship. This knowledge has redoubled their resolve to work together and to support each other. The only models they had for such heroic efforts were negative ones provided by their own parents. Amy and Barry each came from broken homes. 

Amy’s mother was abusive. Barry’s mother, a cold person, was embittered by her husband’s philandering. Their fathers were not emotionally or physically present much of the time. Amy was raised by her stepmother. After his mother’s death when he was sixteen, Barry lived with his rabbi and then moved to Chicago to live with his father. Where Amy got love from her stepmother, Barry found that his dad was not so terrible a person as his mother had painted him to be. Barry says, “I think we’ve both learned from our parents, and we’re not going to make those mistakes. We may make other mistakes, but we’re not going to make the same mistakes that made our childhoods unhappy.”

Return to Family Stories

Return to New Mexico Family Photos / Regresar a Nuevo Mexico Fotos de Familias

First thing in the morning, Edie Weiss calls out to her son Brandon. He comes in to her room and they snuggle for a few minutes before they begin their day. It is the warmest vision she has of her life. She has been a single mom for over three years, and it has often been difficult.

When Edie and her husband Mark split up, she went to live with her parents. The support they gave her was grudging and laden with expectations to do things their way. Finally, after ten months, Edie’s cousin lent her the money to get her own apartment. About the same time Edie got a decent job and began pulling her life together again. 

She tries to be a father as well a mother to her son. The boy needs a father figure. She will not let him meet her boy-friends because she fears that he will get attached to them and will end up feeling abandoned as he did by his father. 

In fact, after the divorce, Mark did not see his son very much. Edie had to take him to court to get him to pay child support. For a while prior to their breakup, there had been plenty of money from the business they started together. But Mark spent most of the profits they earned on drugs. In the last year of their marriage, Edie says she went from a “six figure income” to $5000. Just as she seemed to have some stability in her life, she lost it because of her husband’s addiction. 

Edie Weiss’ childhood had been a difficult one. She was picked on at school and she was abused at home. If she came home with bad grades, her father would beat her with a belt; if she misbehaved, her mother would lock her out on the back porch and tell her that she was going to be an orphan. It was cruel irony that it was her parents she had to turn to for help after her divorce.

As a young woman, Edie’s decision not to go to college was a spiteful reaction to her father and his desire for her to get a degree. She traveled and “just fooled around for years and years,” mostly in California. When she did discover college in the mid-1970s, she took courses in crafts and dance and music, “the fun things.” 

At present, Edie feels quite alone. She is estranged from her sister, whom she protected as a child from their raging mother. She is not as close to her best friend as she once was. And she simply does not have the time to cultivate the friendships of some of the other moms at the school which Brandon attends. She is determined to do a good job of raising her son, and it is this important task which fills her life and gives it meaning. 

Return to Family Stories

Return to New Mexico Family Photos / Regresar a Nuevo Mexico Fotos de Familias

Fred Romano and Jim Stefanski became friends at an architectural firm where they worked in Chicago. A col-league invited them to go folk dancing one evening. This is where they met Ellen. The three became friends. Eventually, Ellen and Fred became a couple 

Family folklore says that it was Jim’s idea that they pool their resources and purchase a house together. The neighborhood where they bought a three-flat had been quiet when they moved into it, but in the ten years they remained there, it became oppressively popular. Also, Ellen and Fred had decided to have a child and needed more room. 

The three debated going separate ways, but decided to find another place together. In their new home, Jim occupies the flat downstairs and the Romanos live above. These old friends seem contented to be tied financially as well as emotionally.

After five years of trying in vain to have a baby, Ellen and Fred decided to adopt. Fred was 40 and Ellen 37 when they got five-day-old Annie. She has changed their lives in many ways, including that of limiting their former favorite pastimes of travel and theater. They also feel out of sync with their contemporaries who decided to forego having children or whose children are grown. 

For Ellen, having a child brings up her own childhood issues. Ten days after Ellen was born, her mother died of an aneurysm. She was raised by her paternal grandmother until her father remarried. Her relationship with her volatile, alcoholic stepmother was an unhappy one. She found comfort only with her grandmother.

Fred and Jim, on the other hand, had relatively happy childhoods. Fred was the younger of two children and grew up in a “traditional” household in which his mother stayed at home. His extended family consisted of his father’s friends, pals who remained close for their entire lives.

Jim grew up as an only child in a small Indiana town. Similarly to Fred, he enjoyed the support and friendship of his parents’ friends. He knew everybody in the town and remains close to many of his old friends and schoolmates to this day. It was not until the Romano’s adopted Annie that Jim told them that he too was adopted. He is her somewhat bemused, doting uncle.

Ellen, Fred, and Jim consider themselves a family. They have been friends for many years now. They are about the same age, share similar values and interests, and are financially linked because of the home they co-own. 

Return to Family Stories

Return to New Mexico Family Photos / Regresar a Nuevo Mexico Fotos de Familias

Elyn and Kurt Koentopp live in a rambling frame house with their two sons, Sam, twelve, and Danny, nine. They also have two cats, one of which is an ancient Siamese. Rounding out the family is a friendly and excitable golden retriever, Barkley. One cannot help but notice that Barkley, Elyn, and the boys all have the same color hair. It is a reddish hue that used to be called strawberry blond. 

Elyn and Kurt met at college. They remain sweet-hearts, bound in what Elyn calls an “Ozzie & Harriet type marriage.” They graduated from college, got married, and began new jobs, all within two months. They were married for ten years before having children. “We saw every movie ever made,” Elyn says.

Both Elyn and Kurt enjoyed happy childhoods. She is the eldest of four, two girls and two boys; Kurt is the middle of three sons. Ellen says of her child-hood, “It was carefree. There were no restrictions on us. You’d get up in the morning and you’d get on your bike and ride wherever you wanted to ride.” Kurt says much the same: “You’d walk out the door in the morning and come back at 5 o’clock in the afternoon and there’d be no worry.” 

Kurt grew up in Minneapolis. His family moved to Chicago when he was twelve; his parents still live in the area.  Elyn’s parents and all of her siblings also live in the Chicago area. Kurt’s brothers live in the west; he is not close to them and sees them infrequently. The Koentopps have a warm relation-ship with Elyn’s parents. On the other hand, Kurt’s mother and father have become remote and retiring, much the same as his maternal grandparents were. 

In Elyn and Kurt’s home there is an overwhelming sense of well being. The boys love their parents and show affection for them in an undisguised, matter-of-fact way.  Elyn and Kurt dedicate most of their free time to the boys, particularly taking them to their soccer, football, and baseball games.Elyn and Kurt’s own dreams and goals have changed somewhat. Elyn, who began taking art classes some years ago, stopped working at a job outside the home. She thus let go of her youthful desire to have a career in business. Painting has become her passion. Kurt is an architect whose career goals have been detoured by a prolonged slump in the building trades in Chicago in the early 1990s.

Return to Family Stories

Return to New Mexico Family Photos / Regresar a Nuevo Mexico Fotos de Familias

Jack, Jim, and Tom own a Graystone two-flat together. Jack lives downstairs, and Jim and Tom occupy the apartment upstairs. Jack and Tom have known each for twenty years. Tom and Jim became lovers nine years ago. Jack is the eldest at forty-five, Tom is thirty-nine, and Jim, the youngest, is thirty-two. Sometimes the clerks at the convenience store at the end of the block think that Jack is Jim’s father.

Each is from the Chicago area, Tom from the south side, the other two from the suburbs. Tom and Jim are predominantly Irish; Jack describes himself as “white bread.” He says, “I was baptized Methodist, but we were raised Lutheran. The closest thing I could identify with was Norwegian because we went to a Norwegian church.”

Each is a businessman by day: Jack works as a bookkeeper for an insurance firm; Tom is a freelance business consultant; and Jim is the office manager and music director for a church.  He says, “I used to sing in the choir, but now I only sing for Jesus—for cash.” Each evening and weekend, theater occupies much of their time and passion. Each man declares that being gay was something he discovered rather than chose. They did, however, choose their current family. “We didn’t follow what our parents did because our parents had limited choices,” Jim says. “People had a lot more choices (after the 1960s) and took advantage of things. We created our own lives.”

Return to Family Stories

Return to New Mexico Family Photos / Regresar a Nuevo Mexico Fotos de Familias

Robin Harris and her husband Gary Hasegawa were going to move out west. They had a wooded lot picked out in the mountains outside of Denver. The landscape and climate thrilled them, called them. But they did not go. Instead they remodeled their home in Chicago

They could not bring themselves to leave their families. Nor could they take their nine-year-old daughter away from a rich network of aunts, uncles, cousins, and adoring grandparents.  Rachel is the only grandchild on the Hasegawa side of the family, so, as Robin says, “She gets treated like the Queen of Sheba.”

Robin was born into what she thinks was the largest Jewish family on the north shore of Chicago, ten sisters and brothers all told. Robin’s parents retired to Tucson, missed Chicago, came back and un-retired and are prosperous and happy.

Gary Hasegawa was born March 5, 1941. Six months later, his family, along with 110,000 other Japanese-Americans was interned. They lost their fruit farm and property in Puyallup, Washington and were sent to Minidoka, Idaho. There they, American citizens, remained imprisoned for three bleak years.

Robin Harris supported herself from the time she was eighteen, putting herself through college and law school. She was working as an attorney for a Fortune 500 company when she and Gary met.

Gary was trained as an industrial designer. He worked for a container company, where he amassed more than fifty patents, including one for the pop top found universally on soft drink and beer cans. When his company decided to transfer him, he took that as an opportunity to go into business for himself, a venture that Robin joined.

Robin and Gary, with active input from Rachel, are toy inventors. While Gary does much of the inventing and all of the prototyping, Robin handles the contractual side of the business and is studying design in order to become more active in that area.

Betty Fumi Hasegawa, Gary’s mother, is a powerhouse. Her strength during and after World War II helped her family survive a terrible ordeal. Betty was a leader in the Redress Movement for Japanese-Americans interned during the war and testified before congress. Today she is a skilled and dedicated maker of kites.

Return to Family Stories

Return to New Mexico Family Photos / Regresar a Nuevo Mexico Fotos de Familias

Penny & Philippe Michel live with their two sons and a “adopted” daughter in a white, stucco house. The house, and the ones on either side of it, are unusual for Chicago. They were built to demonstrate this then-unfamiliar style of home building around the time of the 1933 World’s Fair.

Penny is a ceramic artist. She works in a studio away from home three days a week. She makes large, colorful bowls and platters, pieces that have a brightness which evoke Matisse. In fact, she was an art major in college, but upon graduating, decided to get a regular job, so she could travel. She worked for the Federal Reserve Bank.

Philippe is from Brussels, descended from generations of Belgians. His father was an engineer, his mother a school teacher.  He is in the exposition and trade show business. He came to the States twelve years ago with a friend on a business trip. The people he met liked Philippe so well that they convinced him to move to Chicago and go into business with them.

Penny was born in Carthage, Tunisia. She lived the privileged life of a French colonial until she was five, when the government was overthrown. Her parents moved their family to New York. Her American-born mother did ads for stores like Lord & Taylor. Her French-Italian father, like Phillipe’s father, was an engineer.

Penny and Philippe’s feelings about family life were quite different. Penny, whose parents, and later her sister, were divorced, saw marriage as “a crummy trap.” Phillipe, on the other hand, grew up in a stable, happy home where he felt loved and protected. He keenly wanted children, so much so that he and his first wife divorced over this issue.

Penny and Philippe, now thirty-four and forty-six respectively, have produced two handsome, but wildly energetic sons, Martin—called Binky— and Max. Their “third child,” Hamdia, is the orphaned daughter of Penny’s grandfather’s housekeeper. Penny’s grandfather bought Hamdia’s parents a home in Carthage and, while driving to see it, they were hit and killed by a speeding car. Hamdia, the eldest of four siblings, was adopted by Penny’s grandfather. When he died, she came to live with Penny and Philippe.

Return to Family Stories

Return to New Mexico Family Photos / Regresar a Nuevo Mexico Fotos de Familias

“My family now is my doggies and some friends. I think of them, honestly, more as family than my family.” These are the words of Pamela Erbe who, in her forties, is learning to live with a different family reality than she had foreseen as a younger woman. She has lived alone, dogs excepted, for the past ten years. Her partner of the previous ten years, Phil, left her rather than deal with the issues that plagued their relationship.

When she was in her twenties, Pamela married Paul, a darkly handsome young man from New York. They legalized their relationship in order to get money as wedding presents to go to Europe. They loved each other without really understanding the implications of what they were doing.

When they returned from Europe, they each got part-time jobs and wrote fiction in their free time. Pamela, being the more disciplined of the two, began to sell her stories, something which did not fit into the script: “He was supposed to be the successful writer, and I was the one who was supposed to be tagging along.” Their breakup was amicable, and they remain friends.

She and Phil, on the other hand, did everything right: they bought a big wonderful house, and set about being a family. The only trouble was, Phil wanted to be a business success more than he wanted to have a happy family life. Pamela got the first of her two dachshunds shortly before they broke up. The breakup of their relationship devastated her. It caught her at the height of her literary powers and rising professional reputation and effectively aborted both for a long time.

As her family life of ten years suddenly vaporized, Pamela asked herself, “What ever made you think that you could have that?” The nearly ruinous effect on her writing was something she is very conscious of now. She declares, “Either I write fiction and take it seriously or I give it up. I’m not 20; I don’t have all the time in the world. I always felt that I had to make a choice between me and the family, whoever the family was, Paul, Phil, my mother, any of them. The choice I always made was, the family. I’m not willing to do that ever again, ever.”

Through her family experiences, perhaps in spite of them, Pamela Erbe has begun to learn to take care of, parent, her-self. Through investments, she earned the money to buy her own apartment. She divides her week into time spent doing technical writing and writing fiction for herself. Her stories are being published with regularity.

Return to Family Stories

Return to New Mexico Family Photos / Regresar a Nuevo Mexico Fotos de Familias

Larry Leithardt has lived in the same house since 1912. The youngest of three children, he was one year old when his family moved there. His brother was seventeen years his elder, his sister nine. Their father was a welder and their mother a housewife.

Larry’s brother was like an uncle to him. He sent Larry postcards from wherever he happened to be, including Germany after WWI. He addressed these cards to Master Lawrence.

Larry Leithardt’s is the story of a life lived on the scale of a small town, even though he has been a lifelong resident of Chicago. The range of his friends, activities, and travels is, by today’s standards, almost inconceivably circumscribed. “I went to Ravenswood School. I graduated from there and from Lakeview High School. Those are the two big things in my life. I never went to college.”

Larry’s family history is one of diminution, that of a small family which got smaller and smaller. Larry is  the last surviving member. Neither Larry nor his sister married, but remained in the family place. After World War I, their elder brother went into the mail order business, married, and moved out of the house. In 1939, their mother passed away. Ten years later, their father died in his sleep, at age eighty-one. Larry and his sister, as he says, “kept house” until her death, in 1957.

”It was hard. I had to do everything myself and I was all alone. I got by, I accepted my sister’s death, not that I didn’t care. But you get strength from somewhere. When I look back, it makes me feel worse now than it did then, almost.”

In 1961, Larry began to acquire a series of dogs. His first dog, Blackie, died of distemper. The next, Pal, was stolen, Larry thinks, by a man who sold him for fodder to people who had fighting dogs. After Pal, Sweetie and Honey came wrapped in towels and were dropped over his fence by a neighbor who didn’t want them. Sweetie died, but Honey is alive and is Larry’s constant companion, his family.

Return to Family Stories

Return to New Mexico Family Photos / Regresar a Nuevo Mexico Fotos de Familias