Compiled by Kathleen (Armstrong) Hauke

Memoir of Alice Loretta Hauke Schrag

Memoir ofAlice Loretta Hauke Schrag,

A Detroit Catholic Girl

© Copyright 1999, Alice Loretta Hauke Schrag 816 Wotan Road Columbia, SC 29229-6500(803) 736-6020albill@bellsouth.net

To my parents, my brothers and sisters; to Sweet William, and especially to my beloved children and grandchildren, that they may know from whence they came.

Table of Contents

Memoir of Alice Loretta Hauke Shrag: A Detroit Catholic Girl

I. Small Memories of a Young Girl on Hartwell Avenue 6

II. Littlefield: The Beginning of a New Era 15

Richard’s memoir, or A Boy Grows Up 37

What Did Dad Do? By Rose Marie Hauke Powers 57

Photos 59

Small Memories of a Young Child on Hartwell Avenue

By Alice Loretta Hauke Shrag

On November 10, 1932, Henry and Eleanor Hauke welcomed their fifth child and named her Alice Loretta. I was preceded in birth by George, Rosemarie (Rea), Francis (Frank), and Richard. Succeeding me were Margaret (Boots), and Kathryn (Babe, Kath).

Our parents were exceptional people, dedicated to raising their children with the very best in them. Consequently, we were raised gently, with kindness, honesty, intelligence, dignity, humor and love.

Dad was born to a strict German farming family in Ripley, Ohio, the third of eight children. I think his childhood was harsh, as he made a remark once that his father would prefer that he and his brothers would carry the work horses up the hill instead of the other way around. Dad figured that if he was to punished for something, he might as well have the pleasure of doing the (evil) deed (which was eliciting the punishment). I know farming boys of that era worked physically very hard. Dad did talk of humorous pranks, such as a wagon appearing on top of the barn at Halloween, and the fun of sliding sown the hills, helter-skelter. He left the farm to enlist in the Army of World War I and was sent to France which had a lasting impact on his gentle soul. He returned, moved to Detroit, Michigan, and became a skilled carpenter. He met my mother at this time.

My mother was born in the very cold, snowy, Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She adored her father who died when she was14 years old. He suffered from tuberculosis and spent his last year building a home for his young family of six children. Her mother survived by sewing for families, and by running the post office in the small town of Pelkie. These were the times before welfare or aid to families. Mother managed to earn a high school diploma, which was quite an accomplishment in hose days. I come from sturdy stock, which serves me well.

My first memory is of Dad and Uncle Eddie, Mother’s brother, giving me a bath in the bathroom sink on Hartwell. Since I was small enough to fit in the wash basin, Mother must have been in the hospital giving birth to Boots. From this time I remember bits and pieces, such as Boots and me playing in the dining room. The popular décor of that time must have been stucco walls. Boots smeared the contents of her diaper on this rough stucco. Mom found us; she was aghast. She removed Boots to clean her, then with the ever-present galvanized scrub pail and brush, attacked the cleaning of the wall. I think she was crying.

Our house was built by Dad as a two-family flat. We occupied the lower floor which consisted of a living room, decorated with an itchy maroon mohair couch, a large stuffed

chair and a large breakfront [a high, wide cabinet or bookcase having a central section projecting beyond the end sections, according to the American College Dictionary. Richard disagrees and says it’s a cabinet with top and bottom sections, the bottom projecting farther out than the top section. Webster’s Second New International Dictionary says, “a type of front as of a bookcase in which there is a break in continuity of the principle surface”]. There were lace curtains in the three adjoining windows with dark red drapes on little swinging rods hanging down the side. There was a fireplace with two high leaded-glass windows on each side. I begged ‘til Mom held me up to see out of them. The mantle was painted white, and had many holes in it for hanging Christmas stockings. Behind the living room was the dining room and connecting to the side was the kitchen. The kitchen had a door which led to the outside door and to the basement. The basement was dark and spooky to be avoided at all costs. Dad had put a coal feeder in the basement for easier loading of coal to fuel the furnace. There was also a coal room, housing coal, which was delivered through the window. None of us children ever went in there. Behind the dining room was a circular hall connecting Mom and Dad’s room, the long hallway leading to the boy’s room, the girl’s room, the bathroom and a built-in closet with several drawers under it. One day Dad took out one of the drawers, found a mouse, and removed it.

We lived on the outskirts of the city of Detroit which was so unpopulated at that time, we thought we lived in the country. Our nearest neighbors were the nun’s convent and the buildings of Precious Blood Church and School. We were surrounded by huge fields of tall grasses. Since we were so isolated, our playmates were each other.

As a small child, I remember a package delivered to our house. It was a brown snow suit, sent to me by my grandmother Duquette. Dad wanted me to try it on. I protested as I was dressed in my underwear, but Dad put it on me anyway and, to my horror, took me outside to see how it felt. All I felt was that I had no clothes on. Dad assured me it did not matter, I was completely covered. I think that was the same day the andirons, fireplace screen and fire basket arrived to fill our empty fireplace.

I remember an Easter when someone had given me a hand-me-down yellow coat with matching straw hat. The hat had a large rim with ribbons hanging down the back. I was playing in the tall grass field next to our house, holding the hat to my head, because Mom had admonished me not to lose it. A large gust of wind tugged the hat from my head and sailed it far away, I do not know where. Rea and Frank and Richard helped me look for hours, but we could not find it. I had to face Mom. She did not scold me, much to my relief. I guess she knew how much I really liked this hat and that was punishment enough.

Mom and Dad took Boots to buy her a new pair of shoes. Of course I went along. They found a pretty pair of black patent leather shoes for her. I wanted pretty shoes like those, but since my sturdy, brown oxfords were not worn out, I was stuck with them. I am sure that was the time I cut off one side of Boots’ pretty, curly hair. We were playing barber shop.

Dad would take Boots and me on his Saturday grocery shopping rounds. The back window of the car had a roll-up shade on it. Dad parked the car on the street and left us in the back seat. Another car pulled in behind us with children in it also. We proceeded to stick out our tongues and make nasty faces at them, then pull down the shade, fast. We repeated this harassment until Dad returned to stop his little rascals.

Thinking of grocery shopping and bags, I am reminded of the story Dad tells me of my birth. He says that he was emptying a grocery bag and there at the bottom of the bag he found me, his “little brown Indian”. He always called me his “little brown Indian” because of my dark brown hair and eyes and for the fact that as soon as the sun shone, I was out in it and my skin tans darkly. I was a tomboy. I think this is why Mom and Dad were so sorry later when I got arthritis and became housebound. They remembered my free soul and grieved that I was struck with a debilitating condition.

Again, Boots and I went with Dad to the General Motors building where we parked inside. There were offices connected to the parking area. Boots and I discovered we could should loudly and create an echo. We did this shouting many times, falling down on the floor of the car so no one could see us. Many people came from the offices to see what was happening. An embarrassed Dad returned to the car and shushed us but did not scold us.

One night there was a terrible commotion. Richard had fallen out of the top bunk bed, hitting his head on a sharp corner of a desk, splitting it open. Dad left a hysterical family in search of a store open late which would have tape, bandages and mercurochrome. He finally found a bar open that had these supplies and returned home to patch Richard up as well as any doctor. He then put a hollow tubular bar along the length of the bed to keep Richard in.

On a Sunday afternoon, the family went to a church-school function, leaving me home asleep. When I awoke and found no one home, I showed my displeasure by turning over the dining room chairs and then hiding on the side of the house. Dad found me and consoled me. Mom laughed.

As I said earlier, we all played together. The back boys’ room was our favorite place to play in the winter. We were somewhat left alone. Mother did not bother us much. Frank could walk that long hall with his feet spread-eagle. George was the only one else who could do that.

We used Richard’s tubular bed for chin-ups, somersaults, and hand-over-hand games.

Frank and Richard had pets of lizards. They raced the lizards by putting them in one open end of the tubular bar then, waiting to see which one would come out the other end first. These races went on for many weeks. One day, only one lizard came out to the finish line. So ended the lizard races.

One evening George decided to have a restaurant in that room. He went about setting up three tables, putting toy dishes and little candles on the tables. After seating us, he would stoop over the toy tea set I had received for Christmas, wheeling it to the kitchen and back to the bedroom through the long hall with cookies and water to serve his patrons. Mother let him light the candles; we were told to be very careful of them. I can still see tall George in the old Indian bathrobe, stooped over, pushing the tiny tea cart.

One of our favorite games was called Furfee. We would line up on our knees and on our knees would scoot to the other side of the room. Furfee’s name came from the sound the boy’s courduroy knickers made rubbing together.

In the summer we were outside most of the time. We tried to dig a hole for a swimming pool in the backyard sand. We wondered why it never filled up. We caught mice and dug out nice apartments for them in the sand and wondered why they were gone the next morning.

Dad had made a cage inside the garage with a sliding door on the outside. The boys kept gophers in this cage and fed them through the sliding door. I was terrified of the gophers and also of the Banty hens which George kept as pets. I really did not like any animals, cats and dogs included.

Mom and Dad were amused when they saw me leaning on a shovel stuck in the ground. I was imitating the WPA (Works Progress Administration) workers who were doing something by our house. WPA was a program instituted to put men back to work while the country was recovering from the Great Depression. By their detractors, they were depicted as lazy, leaning on shovels and being paid for it; others remember their positive aspects—national parks, sidewalks, bridges, murals in public buildings.

There was a huge fire in the field beside our house which separated us from the nun’s convent. Frank was very efficient in notifying Mother to call the fire department. He was so brave helping the firemen that they praised him to Mother. She was so proud of him. He was so smug. We later found out that he had set the fire.

I looked down the long hallway and saw Frank at the end in his underwear. He shot me under the eye with his BB gun. I went crying to Mom, but she blamed me for looking at half-naked Frank.

The upper flat of our house was rented to the Malloy family. Their only child was Jackie. He was an over-privileged, spoiled brat. Mother did not care much for him either. One day, while playing with Boots and me, he tipped over the ever-present scrub pail, spilling the water all over the floor and making an additional chore for Mom to clean up. I don’t think she let him in our house after that. Being older than him, I could dominate him. Once I told him to pee in the yard. As luck would have it, his mother was on the upper porch. She threatened to tell Mom. Fearing great reprisal for such evil, I hid in the attic of the garage. Dad and Mom called and called and looked for me. I was as quiet as a

mouse and finally fell asleep. I think Dad saw me in the attic as he went to work as usual. When I awoke in the early evening, I came into the house but not a work was said.I despised Jackie after that even though he was blameless.

Dad took Boots and me to the train station to see Mom off n the train to meet with Grandmother Hauke for a three-month trip to California. Dad told us to wave as the train crossed the trestle. We did not know why Mom was going away. She left us in the care of her mother, Grandmother Duquette. We felt Grandma Duquette did not like us and we considered her crabby. She was especially unhappy when I rode my tricycle off the front porch and cut my knee, but Dad was there and always able to smooth the waters. When Mom came home, she brought me a red-painted wood apple which opened up and had a set of little wooden dishes inside it. Boots got an orange just like it.

About ten months later, Mom brought home a beautiful, sweet baby sister. Aunt Alice carried Kathryn in and displayed her on the picky maroon couch. We were in awe of her. We called her our Bebe. Kathryn’s crib was set in Mom and Dad’s room. Sometimes in the evening, while Kath was sleeping, I would sneak in, sit on the rocking chair, softly rocking, and watch her sleep. I picked up one of her little crocheted bonnets that was strung with pink ribbon. I pulled the ribbon out and proceeded to weave it through the crocheted spaces, pretending I was doing crochet. I mad e no sound so that Mom would not find me and shush me out.

Kath continued to grow; we all continued our play. Then all of a sudden it was time for me to go to school. I started kindergarten at King School. I had to walk forever, it seemed, sown the cement alley to Littlefield, then continue through a long wide field full of weeds. The weeds and grasses were as tall as me. The field ended at Cheyenne, the site of King School. I traveled this route many days as did the other children. Out fo the blue, a boy in my class named James Rafferty started to beat me up every day. I came home crying and was so frightened of going through this field that I was not going to school anymore. Mother designated Richard to meet me every day at the school door to walk me home. Safe at last, Richard was tall and well-built even at that age. Later, in the third grade, I beat the tar out of James Rafferty, in front of all the class.

On “Show and Tell” day, I brought my prized, blue tea cart to school. My classmates played with it and at the end of the day, the teacher did not give it back to me but put it with the other toys instead. I was too shy to ask for the cart and never did get it back. I did not tell Mom since she had not wanted me to take it to school in the first place.

Kindergarten was a fun time. We painted pictures on an easel with water colors; we played in the sandbox; we learned simple songs. We dressed in our Halloween costumes for Halloween and were paraded through the whole school. At Christmas we all got a candy cane while Christmas stories were read to us. At Easter, we made paper baskets which the Easter Bunny put candy in overnight.

On the corner of Six Mile Road and Schaefer, still an unpaved street, was a stall run by a man selling things from it. On one of our Sunday afternoon walks with Dad, I had spied

a red silk parasol. I wanted that parasol so badly. I begged Mom and Dad for it. They had to refuse due to the long recovery time of the Depression. They had no spare money fro frivolity. One day, to m y surprise, Dad brought home the red parasol for me. I loved it. I used it for all occasions, indoor and out. It matched my red-dotted Swiss dress. How much did they give up for my prize?

Our neighborhood started to develop and the first store to be built was Goetz Drugs on the corner of Littlefield and Six Mile Road, a few blocks from our house. Occasionally, Boots and I would venture this great distance to spend our two cents a week allowance and two cents for Sunday. At that time, we were deathly afraid of dogs and feared meeting any of them. I had a tricycle and rode Boots on the back. Sure enough, a dog attacked, I sped off, Boots fell off the back, I kept going out of fear; Boots had to fend for herself. Fortunately, the dog went away. Mr. Cummings, the church janitor, provided us with a solution to our problem. He gave us an old black umbrella. Boots and I decided we could use this umbrella for protection, opening it up as a barrier between us and the offending animal, or we could point it at the dogs, opening and closing it very fast to scare the dogs away; there is an additional protection because of the sharp point at the end of the umbrella. With this new method of security, we could now go farther, to Hartwell Drugs or the penny candy shop located at Hartwell and Puritan. The penny candy store was operated by a lady who hated children but she wanted their small business. I might guess the reason she disliked us was that t might take us an hour to decide how to spend our two cents.

I started in the first grade in September of 1938. I quickly learned the alphabet. The first word I learned to spell was banana. While on a shopping trip with Dad, I had seen the word spelled on the southside brick wall of a grocery store. I repeated the letters over and over until we arrived home and could ask Mom, “What does b-a-n-a-n-a spell?” Mom told me. “Banana.” I learned to read quickly also. At the time of my birthday, November 10, I started having much pain in my left knee. I told Mom. She asked if I bumped anything. I could not remember doing so; therefore I forgot about it. Before long I was limping so badly and the knee had swollen considerably. I could not walk. Ii had to miss all the Christmas activities at school. By this time, Mom and Dad became very concerned. Dad, being from a farm, used home treatments such as rubbing the knee with horse liniment and putting flannel or knitted materials in the oven to warm, then wrapping my knee with the warm cloth, trying to reduce the pain and swelling. Mom then heard of Sister Elizabeth Kenny using hot wet packs on polio patients. She and Dad soaked rags in almost boiling water, wrung the hot water out and applied the wet rags to my knee. I hated those rags because they burned. I later realized how much more burned Mom and Dad’s hands must have been wringing the hot water out of the rags. They called my uncle Eddie for advice as he was a first-aid man employed by the Ford Motor Company. He could think of nothing more to do.

My parents then heard of Father Solanus Casey, a Capuchin monk known to have performed cures for people such as me. We made three trips to see Father Solanus. I remember the man opening the door, but all I saw was a long, brown robe ending with

bare feet clad in sandals. He put me on a chair while Mom and Dad and Boots knelt. He then put his hands on my head and prayed.

Although financial conditions ere still rough, because of the slow recovery from the Depression, my parents decided they had exhausted all the things they could do for me without assistance, and took me at great expense, I am sure, to the doctor. After examination, the doctor decided I was crippled from arthritis. To straighten my leg, which was by now bent backward at a 90-degree angle, it would be necessary to put the whole leg in a plaster cast. Reluctantly, my dad agreed. My leg was in a cast for approximately one year. During this time, I was confined at home, sometimes in bed, sometimes carried out tot the picky couch. I did not have crutches so, after a while, I learned to hop about on one leg. Fortunately, I had learned to read before having to drop out of school. Because we lived so close to the school and the nun’s convent, my school work was given daily to my dad, and Mom supervised my work. I had no problems finishing first grade and most of second grade.

During this time at home, Dad would carry me out to the car so I could accompany him on his morning rounds to the stores, bank or garden-buying errands. I was frightened of cats, I think because Dad did not like them either. He thought cats stole the breath from a baby if they could get into a baby’s crib. He was positive a cat had tried to do this to one of his siblings but had been caught before it could do harm. On one particular morning as I was being carried out to the car anticipating a nice outing, there, sitting on the top of the car seat, was a huge cat. Dad was such a tease, he had put the cat there. Of course I would have nothing to do with getting in that car. I was leery forever after of entering a car.

Boots would pull me in the wagon as an outing. When we had saved enough pennies in our jello-box banks, we liked to go to Goetz’s to get a treat. On Sunday, we were on our way when some evil older boys caught us and stole our money in the jello-box banks. We returned home as quickly as possible and Richard was sent to find the boys and retrieve our money. He accomplished the task to our great relief.

Rea was such a lovely sister and must have felt sorry for me as one day she bought me a coloring book and crayons, a very much prized gift of the time. I wonder where she got the money; she was not that much older than me.

My grandmother Duquette and Aunt Alice, who really did not have much to do with me, hardly ever recognizing me as a person, did bring over some brown beads which I could string into necklaces or bracelets.

Dad’s friend and coworker, Jack Walsh, brought me a box of chocolates shaped like a valentine heart. I had never had so much chocolate. I hope I shared with the others.

The doctor came to our house to see me and check the cast. He took it off and wanted to put another one on as he thought my knee needed more straightening. Dad refused to let him do it. He could see that the left leg was not growing and was indeed shriveling. He

took matters into his own hands again and whenever the sun would shine, he would take me out to the porch to bake the sun in. The children from school would see me on the porch and would come to visit me. They said my knee looked like a baseball. I was embarrassed by their remarks. Mom and Dad decided to get a vitamin supplement to build my body up. It was brown and tasted terrible. They put it in orange juice, but I still would not drink it. Boots had to drink some of it and pretended it was good until I would drink it.

It was spring now and I was to return to school, the second grade. Since I could not walk the distance to school, Mother would put me in the wagon, wrap my legs with a blanket and Frank would pull me off to school. At the door of the classroom, the nuns would help me to me seat. At lunch time and at the finish of the day, Frank would pick me up and with the help of the nuns, put me in the wagon and return home again. At the end of the school year, a pageant was held. My grade was doing some kind of gypsy dance. I wanted to be in it. The nuns were afraid to let me. Mom talked to them and they agreed to put me in the back row for the dance where no one could see me I could not do the dance. Mom made me a special gypsy costume of bright colors with many ribbons and I stood in the back row, not able to dance. But just to be able to stand there and be there all dressed up in my pretty costume was enough for me. On reflection, I realize that Dad carried me on his strong shoulders for about a year and a half.

Now I will stand on my own. I will feel the closeness of Dad for all my life. Mom is my nurse and she cares for me all of my life. As I get stronger and more able to walk, Mom and Dad and I are convinced of Father Solanus’ healing gift.

It had been a custom of the family to take a trip every summer to Ripley, Ohio to see Dad’s family. We usually left in the middle of the night after Dad got off work (from the afternoon shift) and we drove all night. We slept in the car and arrived in the morning. Dad must have been very tired after working all day and driving all night but his family was so happy to see him that he stayed up to visit.

Mom helped Grandma Hauke in the kitchen. It could not be much fun for her but she enjoyed Grandma’s company. A problem arose. Richard and Boots became extremely car sick and had to spend the first day on the farm in bed. There came a time when they were no longer able to go to Ripley. I stayed home with Boots, Richard and Mother while the others continued taking the trip.

That summer of 1939, Dad started to build our new house on Littlefield since we had far outgrown our Hartwell house. That marked the end of one era and the beginning of another.

As I think back to the family’s life on Hartwell, I wonder at Mom’s capacity to endure. She spent here days mostly alone without neighbors or a telephone. She did not drive a car, but she would not have access to one anyway. Dad worked the afternoon shift a t Ford Motor Company and didn’t come home from work until around midnight. Incidents, such as the drunkard who kicked in our front door one night, must have

frightened her terribly. She had to cope – alone – with the responsibility of keeping her young children safe until Dad got home from work. She must have dealt with countless emergencies, unknown to me – alone.

As the neighborhood developed, surely her life would be easier.

Chapter II – LittlefieldThe Beginning of a New Era

Dad, with his friend, Jack Walsh, spent most of his free time framing in the new house. Dad, with Mom’s input, designed the new house, drew the plans, and made the blueprints himself. He put in many innovative ideas, rare for the time. There was a half-bath on the first floor, right off the back door, cutting sown the traffic through the whole house.

We had the convenience of a built-in milk box. The milkman opened the door outside to deliver the milk and we opened the door on the inside to retrieve the milk. The milk was bottled in glass quart bottles. The milk bottle was wider at the bottom, graduating to a smaller neck. It was sealed with thick paper that covered the top of the bottle, with a paper cap inside. There were about three inches of pure cream on top of the milk. We were supposed to shake the bottle to mix the two, but sometimes we sneaked a fingerful of the sweet, thick cream by itself.

A built-in clothes chute ran from the upstairs bathroom through the kitchen wall, ending up in a cage built in the basement to catch the clothes. Dad had done this by bringing a part of the kitchen wall outward, thereby allowing a larger space for the clothes to fall between the outside and inside walls. The cage became another place for us to play. It was big enough to hold two small children or one big one. Many shenanigans took place here in years to come, such as wet clothes or wash rags being thrown down on unsuspecting children, or one child trying to slide down the chute or another child trying to stuff someone else down the chute. There was also an exhaust fan in the kitchen leading outside through the brick wall, common now, unusual then.

Dad built a walnut wood china cabinet into one corner of the dining room. It had three shelves behind double glass doors. Mom kept her good china and glassware here. There was a cabinet below with two shelves, opened by wood doors. Mom’s best linen tablecloths were kept here.

The front entry door opened into the vestibule which had a closet for hanging our winter coats and to put our winter boots. Dad made a mail chute into this closet. There was a little brass door in the outside brick wall which connected to a metal chute that ended at a little wood door, which opened inside the closet, from which we retrieved our mail. The floor of the vestibule was of Italian tile which was durable and easy to keep clean. There was another door, from the vestibule, which opened into the living room. The door was kept closed, especially in the winter, to keep drafts out of the rest of the house. If Mom could keep the door closed in the summer, it would be to “dress up” the living room, keeping the entry door out of sight.

The living room was extra large with a fireplace in ceramic tile, sort of a mottled amber color. The same tile was used on the hearth. The fireplace was surrounded by a

magnificent walnut wool mantel with sides. Dad hand-made and finished this beautiful mantel, showing his skill as a cabinet maker. Mom and Dad had a small bedroom off the living room, a room which was intended to become a den after some of the children moved out.

Upstairs were three bedrooms for us children. We were allowed to pick the colors for them. Boots and I were given the large back bedroom and we chose yellow. Rea, sharing her room in the front of the house with almost two-year-old Kath, picked blue. The largest bedroom, also in the front of the house, was for the boys and was painted green. There were two closets built in the front of the boy’s room on both walls where the roof slanted down and we called these “the cubbyholes”. Who knows what the boys did in there. These were meant for storage but I think things were hidden there and sometimes we played in there. All of the bedrooms had huge closets and the two front bedrooms had built-in book shelves.

There was a large bathroom upstairs with a deep cabinet built over the commode to keep towels and toiletries in. The whole bathroom was tiled in ceramic tile in a pinkish coral color which was very attractive. A shower had been installed in the tub area which only George used in the beginning. The rest of us were used to tub baths and did not change this habit until much later.

There was a storage closet next to the bathroom which kept all our toys and books and miscellaneous stuff. Next to this closet was the linen closet. It had three very large shelves on top opened by double doors, with three drawers underneath, used by Boots and Kath and me for our folded clothing.

Dad used only the finest materials in this house. All the wood had been seasoned. Such walnut wood as was used for the baseboards, window frames, door frames and doors is no longer even available. The ceramic tile in the bathroom never had a crack or chip; the Italian tile in the vestibule stood up to much wear, always looking new. Dad was a master a laying the hardwood floors throughout the house. He would not use a piece of floor board that was flawed. He fitted all the boards carefully, thereby eliminating any squeaking. Dad used the best mason to brick the outside of the house, except for the part of the front of the house which he had set with stones which he had gathered from his trips to Ripley and our Sunday afternoon drives. This piece in the front was of a triangular shape, next to the front dining room window, abutting the front porch. He hired plumbers, electricians and tile-setters. All the fine finish work he did himself. We were almost ready to make the final move into the new house. We spent the transition time pulling our wagon back and forth on the cement alley from Hartwell with things for the new house on Littlefield.

Finally, we made the permanent move in February of 1940. I was in the kitchen with Mom, feeling “not at home” and asked if I could use the bathroom. She said, “Of course, this is your home now.”

Boots and I were getting used to our new room. Kath was not. She was afraid of the dark and of being alone. Since Rea did not go to bed at the same time that we did, Kath was alone in the blue room. She begged us to let her sleep in our room. Boots and I fixed a makeshift bed for her on Mom’s cedar chest which was kept in our room. We padded the top of the chest with blankets and whatever else we could find. She brought her pillow with her and we found a blanket to cover her. She was so small and uncomfortable on the cedar chest and we felt sorry for her so we let her sleep at the foot of our double, brass-framed bed. She used a doll dresser that Dad had made for Rea’s dolls, to put her things in. Now she was content. Later, when Mom and Dad realized that she could not stand to be alone, they bought her a single bed and put her in with Boots and me in our back bedroom.

Mother had made a quilt-like covering for my bed. She took some worn-out blankets, put them together, then made a cotton covering for it. She had picked out some material of a yellow background with a small print of three little pigs all over it. She put the materials together and finished by tying pink yarn in knots through all the components. When this coverlet was put on my bed, I had a nightmare of huge, fierce dogs barking and trying to break into my closed bedroom door in order to bite me or worse. I blamed this nightmare on the quilt, which Mom said was silly, but I never did like that quilt afterwards and was glad when it was worn our and removed from my bed.

The lot on which our house was built was higher in the back than the cement alley. In the summer and fall of 1940, Dad built a stone wall on that side. As I have said, he always gathered stones wherever he went, selecting them for color, shape and size. For the wall, he started about one foot high in the front and ended about three feet high in the back, by the garage site. He wheeled the stones to and fro in his wheelbarrow with Kath often as a passenger. He fitted the stones to perfection, cementing them in place. He used flat stones to make a pathway from the back porch to the garage area.

After he built the garage at eh back of the lot, he made an arbor for roses at the side of it. He also made an arbor, with a seat, which he fitted against the garage wall. He strung thick wires from the side arbor to the hooks which were cemented into the back brick wall. The wires were Mom’s clothes lines. In the winter, these wires would “sing”. It was a kind of humming. We were frightened by the sound, but Mom explained the noise away. I liked to hear the music in the wires. The weather flashing in the upstairs door to the dust porch wailed in the wind. Since I knew what made it, I liked the sound of the wailing wind. It made being inside more cozy.

There was a large basement but the stairs going sown to it from the kitchen were open at the back. Kath and Boots and I did not like the open back as we imagined something grabbing at our ankles as we descended the stairs. Dad closed them in. We then played in the open basement. It was large enough to roller skate around in, and Dad hung a swing from the rafters, so we could swing as though we were outside. He had partitioned off a work room for himself in which to do his woodworking. The furnace and heating oil tank were in this partitioned-off room also. The space under the front porch cement slab was made into a cold cellar which had a door leading to it from the main basement.

The walls of this cellar were made by Dad with a handmade tool with which he pounded the natural clay into the same shape as the porch above. The cellar was approximately fifteen feet long by six feet wide and seven feet high, ample room for shelves he built to store Mom’s home-canned foods and to store the many bushels of apples and potatoes he would buy in season. We kept the apples fresh by sprinkling the burlap-covered crates with water. Dad would also buy apples of different varieties, some of which kept fresh longer than others. Some were for Mom’s delicious pies and other desserts, and some for plain eating.

Dad planted two cherry trees in the back yard, one called Queen Anne, and the other a sweet black cherry. We picked and pitted the Queen Anne’s for canning. Mother made the best pies with them. We ate the sweet cherries straight from the tree.

Dad planted many other flowers. He had a cutting from his mother’s farm in Ripley, Ohio, of a white rose. It grew healthy but bloomed only once a year. He had many other roses as they were his favorite flower. He had planted other bushes and trees also.

I now felt secure on Littlefield. When fierce storms raged outside, I knew that nothing could harm me. I was safe because Dad had built this house so strong, that it would protect all that lived in it. It was my sanctuary, my comfort. I loved coming in the kitchen when it was cold outside. It was warm and steamy from Mom’s baking and cooking. The smells of her kitchen were wonderful with the promise of good food to come. Mom was such a good cook. Her meals were nutritious and well-balanced. We always had dessert at the end of the meal. If she had not baked anything that day, we would have a dish of her home-preserved fruit.

In May of 1940, I made my first Holy Communion. There was much preparation for this in my religious life. The Baltimore Catechism was memorized from first page to last. Our Class was taken to the church to practice our form. We also practiced how to make our First Confession. We were told the importance of fasting before taking the Host. We were not to drink or eat anything after midnight of the day of Communion. We were told horror stories of children who had taken a drink of water and therefore could not make their First Communion with the rest of the class. When the nuns were assured we were prepared, we were led to the church and one by one went into the confession box to tell the priest our sins and be forgiven. When the Sunday on which we made our First Communion arrived, we met, as a group, in our classroom. As we came into the school, we saw that the drinking fountains were all covered with paper so that no one could make a mistake and take a drink of water. My cousin, Mary Anne Boudreau, made her First Communion on the same day, even though she was one year behind me in school. I was late in making mine because of my crippling arthritis. My grandmother Duquette attended our First Communion Day. She brought me a small, white communion book and a rosary.

Following the First Communion Day was my favorite ceremony of the school year, the May Crowning of the Blessed Mother Mary. This crowning was held in the courtyard between the school and the church. This year, since I had just made my Communion, I

was able to wear my First Communion dress and veil. The eighth grade girls wore long gowns for the first time. All the girls wore flowers in their hair. The Hauke girls wore spirea which was taken from a bush growing on the side of our house. The white blossoms grew on a long stem. Dad cut the stem of flowers and Mom pinned the blossoms in a band around our heads. An eight grade girl was chosen to place a crown of flowers on the head of the statue of Mary. The school children sang songs to honor Mary. It was such a holy service.

In later years, after my husband Bill and I bought the Littlefield house from Mother, I would hear the children, including my own, practicing the songs fro this ceremony which was still a part of the school year at Precious Blood School. I would leave my work and walk to the courtyard to watch and listen to the beautiful voices of the children. Nothing was more inspiring. Nothing more pious.

That summer, our neighborhood was still not fully-developed, although more and more houses were being built. We were still out far enough that we qualified for the bookmobile to stop near us. Our designated time for using it was in the evening as it was getting dark. Richard would take Boots and me down the cement alley, past the foreboding back alleys, dark streets and empty fields, to reach the bookmobile. It was parked at Schaefer and the cement alley. We were afraid to make this walk without Richard, we would not have made it at all, but our desire to read outweighed the fear. Later, when the area became developed, we no longer had that privilege of the bookmobile and had to walk to the library located at Schaefer road and Grand River Avenue, a long walk for little girls.

As fall came and school started, I was now in the third grade at Precious Blood. I thought, how fast I am growing. My health was mostly recovered by this time. Halloween came with its dress-up and candy, Thanksgiving came with the superb dinner, and a pre-Thanksgiving event. Precious Blood Church would hold its annual Feather Party at this time. It was a fund-raising event, favored by Dad. The parishioners played Bingo and players could win prizes. Younger children did not attend, but Frank went along with Dad. Dad loved to play Bingo, always thinking that one day he would win something. I do not know if he did, but one year Frank did. It was a glass rolling pin, filled with mincemeat for pies. The glass rolling pin could not compare with Dad’s homemade wooden one, but it was the thrill of winning that made it special. Still our favorite time was Christmas.

We always decorated our Christmas tree on the morning of Christmas Eve. We usually had a balsam tree and if it was bare in spots, Dad would drill a hole in the bare spot and plug in a spare branch. We always had a most pretty tree. The traditional Christmas Eve dinner was oyster stew. Boots and I hated this stew, and Dad would tease us by slurping down the squishy oysters.

We would hang our stockings on the fireplace screen now, as Mom did not want to put holes in the beautiful mantel. We wrote our letters to Santa, then up to bed to try to sleep. Kath was always too excited to sleep very long and would hide under the tree waiting for

the others to wake. On Christmas morning, we would all get up and rapidly open our presents. I always got a doll, a game, a book and some clothes. I looked forward to getting new pj’s and sleeping in them for the first time when they were warm and fuzzy.

We would look through our stockings, counting the pieces of candy to make sure we all got the same amount. The stocking would also contain a candy cane, an apple, an orange, a banana, some walnuts and a small additional present. Frank would spend the whole day lying under the tree. It was his job to look for the burnt-out bulbs, which would cause the whole string to go dark. I tried to lie under the tree on my back but pine needles fell into my eyes. I don’t know how Frank escaped this hazard.

We would have the added bonus of getting a present from our godparents. My Aunt Florence, Mom’s younger sister, was my godmother. She made sure I always had a nice present. Boots and I would try to make Christmas last longer. We would re-wrap our presents, except for the pj’s and reopen them the next morning. It was not the same. Each year, Christmas morning is a one-time event.

After Christmas, the weather would become cold enough so that someone connected with the church, maybe a young priest, maybe the custodian, could start the process of freezing a field next to the rectory. This was a fairly small field directly in line with our house. When the ice was ready, all the children of the parish area were allowed to use the ice pond. We were only to use it during the daylight hours as there were no lights and children did not stay out very late anyway. One evening, I think it was Frank, came back with a report of seeing black, floating objects on the ice pond long after dark. I don’t know why he was out that late, but his story sort of scared us. Upon further spying, he reported that these objects were our teachers, the nuns. They were human after all and liked to do the things we all did; they were just restricted in their daily life.

The following Easter, Mom made me a lightweight wool coat of a rich brown color with a dark brown velvet collar. I loved the feel of the coat, it was so soft. I begged Mom to let me wear it before Easter, and she agreed to let me wear it for the first time on Palm Sunday. I still can picture myself in that coat standing on the church steps feeling the warm sun. At a later Easter, I was given a red Chesterfield-style coat. It had a black velvet collar. There was a matching hat to go with the coat. Dad cut a tulip from his garden and pinned it to the lapel of the coat. The pink tulip was my Easter corsage.

Our street was rapidly filling up with houses now. Some had been started before the weather got too cold, but the finish work inside could continue through the winter. A colonial-style house was being built next door. Dad scoffed at the inferior materials being used. I wonder what he would think of today’s construction.

In the spring of 1941, our new neighbors moved in, the Carl Walker family. Boots and I spied from the boy’s window and were pleased to see a girl about our age. Joan Walker became a lifelong friend. As more houses were built, two more girls moved in, Dean Bishop and Joan Reid. We became “the gang”. Our girlhood friendships lasted through adulthood. Our gathering, as young mothers, was called “the hen party”.

The Mercury Theater was being built about this time, along with the development of the shopping complex which started at the cement alley and Schaefer Road up to Six-Mile Road and around the corner to the east. There were many stores to satisfy the needs of the growing neighborhood.

We would play around the construction, but we were shooed away when the workers were on site. We would sneak back when they had gone home. Mom did not want us anywhere near this construction, but we did so without her knowledge. I realize now how dangerous that play was. My guardian angel was working overtime. When the Mercury movie theater finally opened, we avidly attended the Saturday afternoon matinees. Boots and Kath and I would do our Saturday chores as quickly as possible so as not to miss the 12 noon matinee. Our chores consisted of changing the sheets of all the upstairs beds, then dusting the furniture and dust-mopping the bare wood floors. Kath dusted the stairs and Mom scrubbed the upstairs bathroom. Mom did all the downstairs cleaning herself.

We played outdoor games such as “Kick the Can”, “Red Rover”, “<other may I”, and “Pom Pom Pull Away”. We played hopscotch and we jumped rope. We played board games and card games. And we played with our dolls. Combining all of our dolls, Boots’, Kath’s and mine, we amassed a large collection. We never threw any doll away. Mom often made new clothes for them. One time we left a doll outside. It rained and the poor doll was blistered. We kept it anyway; we even felt sorry for it. During the later war years, Boots got an Army nurse doll with accessories. My last doll was a Betsy Wetsy.

We made a “fort” in the attic of our garage. It had a window looking out to the alley. We set up chairs, had our toys up there. I had a harmonica which I thought I could play. We would bring food to eat and something to drink. One time and one time only, I climbed out the window onto the roof of the garage. I was so scared, but I would not let anyone know of my fright. I never tried that climb again, although I did climb the cherry trees fearlessly.

On very hot summer days, George would drag his mattress onto the dust porch in order to get a cool night’s sleep. The dust porch was located upstairs on top of the small back porch downstairs which led out from the kitchen. I would push my bed to the window and put my pillow on the sill, seeking a breeze. Since Boots and I shared the bed, I would sometimes give her the chance to get the breeze, mostly not.

On Sundays, after faithfully attending Mass, Mom would start baking pies for our afternoon dinner. She and Dad would stay dressed in their Sunday best and insist that we did too. After a delicious dinner, we would coax Dad to take us for an automobile ride. He would have preferred staying home listening to the baseball game on the radio or just to rest, but he took us out anyway. Boots, Kath and I would sit in the back seat fussing, Boots and I mostly teasing Kath. We would make words up, giving them a French accent. Kath thought we were speaking in a foreign language and was angry that she

could not understand us. Mom became irritated with our noise and would say, “Henry, stop this car and let those girls out. They can just walk home!” We would be quiet for a little while, then resume our obnoxious behavior. I don’t know why Mom continued to go on these drives. Dad would chase down an ice cream truck at Kath’s urging and buy us an ice cream on a stick. He spoiled us, but then, he liked ice cream, too. Occasionally, we went to the Hartwell Drug store and bought ice cream sundaes. Such a big treat. My favorite was chocolate ice cream with marshmallow topping

Boots and Kath and I would buy candy with our allowances. We liked to get Necco wafers, a round, firm, chalk-like candy. We played Communion, placing these wafers on each other’s tongues. I wonder if this was sacrilegious on our part. I hope not. We were really very religious children. We felt great devotion to Mary, Mother of God, and would make a May altar, since May was the month dedicated to Mary by the Catholic Church. We would stack two books, one smaller on top of one larger, making tiers. Then we would drape a blue or white cloth over the books and set a small statue of Mary on top. We would surround the statue with vases or small glassed filled with flowers from Dad’s garden. We would sing songs and say prayers to honor May. We kept our altar for the whole month of May, always with fresh-picked flowers.

We were scrupulous about going to confession and Communion. Once, Boots and I were in Joan Walker’s basement. Their basement was finished and had furniture. We played there often. There was a dish of candy on the coffee table. We each took a piece without asking while Joan had gone upstairs for something. We were sure we had committed a mortal sin. We could hardly wait for Saturday to come so we could go to confession and worried that we might be hit by a car crossing the parking lot before we could confess our sin and be forgiven. We were positive we would have been condemned to hell had we not gotten to confession in time. Sometimes, when we did not have clear-cut sins such as stealing, we would go through the page in our prayer book which described sins and make up a list to confess. Once, seven-year-old Boots confessed to adultery. I wonder how the priest handled that one. We figured that since we were taught that everyone sinned seventy times seventy every day, we surely were guilty of any amount of sin that we could think of. Boots and I tried to be so holy but sometimes when we were in church, we would have uncontrollable giggling fits. Anything could set us off, and we tried so hard not to laugh as we knew the staid matrons around us were shooting disapproving looks toward us. We would fold our hands and put our faces in them in false reverence, but all it took was a sideways glance at each other to induce new rounds of giggling. I would pray to the Blessed Mother to make me stop laughing; it did not work.

An elegant woman, presumably rich, since she wore a stole around her neck which was made of little fox furs strung together, would sit in front of us at Sunday mass. Boots and I hated that fox fur stole. It had little feet on each pelt, a tail hanging down, and little glass eyes. It was made with real fox furs to look like the real live animals. Boots would reach out to poke the glass eyes, hoping the woman would not feel her fingers. She would repeat this gesture until the woman would squirm. Of course, this would send us into stifled laughter. Our eyes would tear, and our noses would run but we

just could not resist. We made it a point to never go to church without a handkerchief for this kind of emergency.

While attending our regular mass at 8 a.m., an incident occurred which changed my attendance at that mass. A woman in the congregation suffered from epileptic seizures. Kath, attending mass with Boots and me, was very frightened as the woman groaned and emitted strange noises while suffering a seizure. WE had no idea what was happening and if the condition had been explained to us, perhaps, we would have understood. This was not the case and the only remedy for Kath was to attend the 6 a.m. mass. I agreed to go with her so we would arise early and since we planned to return to our bed after mass, we would not get dressed. Instead, we rolled the legs of our pj’s up above the knee and threw a coat on. But at sometime during mass, it was inevitable that the pj legs would begin to unroll. It was a constant struggle to keep the legs rolled up out of sight. It really would have been easier to dress and return to bed in street clothes. We did not think of this. Later, Dad would take Kath to 6 a.m. mass, Boots and I would go to later mass, still attending in our pj’s, same result, “the unroll”.

When the weather got cooler, Dad would make us popcorn and shine red apples on Sunday afternoon. This was our after-dinner snack. He grew popcorn on his Ripley farm, brought home the cobs and stored them in the cellar. We would then shell the kernels off the cob, ready to be popped. To this day, the Hauke children consider popcorn their soul food.

School would start and again the holiday season followed quickly. Mom made sure our holidays were very special. On Thanksgiving, she would decorate the dining room table with an amber bowl and candle set. She filled the bowl with fresh fruit and arranged the fruit just so. She would make waldorf salad on individual plates and we children were served the same as the adults.

At Christmas, she would bake special fruit cakes and cookies which were not baked at any other time of the year. She would decorate the house at Christmas with the colors of red and green, using ornaments, candles and Christmas wreaths. If some decoration became “shopworn,” as she termed it, she would give it to Boots and me to decorate our bedroom.

The stores on Shaefer and Six-Mile were not open for business. On the day after Thanksgiving, the Christmas season began. The stores would decorate and put out their Christmas merchandise. We children shopped mostly at the Woolworth Five and Dime store of the Cunningham Drug store. We saved our allowances and budgeted five cents to be spent on each of our brothers and sisters. We set aside ten cents for Mom and tend cents for Dad. Boots and I would often combine our money in order to get something higher-priced for our family. We usually got Kath a paper book of The Night Before Christmas. The book always had such lovely pictures. We read the book every day before we gave it to Kath on Christmas. One year we decided to wrap the book as soon as we bought it, so that it would not be wrinkled, dog-eared, or worn when we gave it to Kath. WE learned how to slip the book out of its wrapping and slip it back in again so

that it looked untouched. We had defeated our own plan, but we did enjoy the book’s drawings so much.

We bought the boys Big Little Books every year. Big Little Books were in size about four inches by five inches with a cardboard cover over comic-book quality paper. They were also fat. The stories were of adventure or other boy-related themes. Rea got perfume bottled in a pretty dark cobalt blue bottle. It was called Midnight in Paris and smelled just horrible, but we did not know that at the time. We thought, since the bottle was so lovely, it had to be good. Dad received shoelaces or a black comb, and Mom got a kitchen utensil or maybe a pretty handkerchief. Sometimes a packet of straight pins for sewing. One year we found what we thought was the most beautiful light green bowl. This was Mom’s present for that year.

Kathryn, even though still quite young, did Christmas shopping too. One year she got such a bargain, two powder puffs in one package, one for Rea and one for Mom. She could not resist playing with her purchase either. She spent many hours using the puffs to polish the woodwork. They became a bit dirty. She wrapped them anyway, unaware of their condition, and presented them to Mom and Rea.

There was another store called the Federal Department Store. That store carried everything from clothing to shoes and housewares to linens. At Christmas, the store hired a man to play Santa Claus. Boots and I were insulted because he looked so fake. His boots were nothing but tall spats over his own black shoes. His beard showed the elastic that held it to his face. He walked around the store talking to the children. One of our friends was so upset that she spit on him from the upper floor when he as at the foot of the stairs on the lower floor. The clerks immediately started to chase us. Boots and I were innocent of the spitting. Knowing we would not be believed, so with hearts racing in fear, we dove under a display rack of ladies’ long, chenille bathrobes which reached the floor. The clerks did not see us. We peeked out from under the robes and when we saw the feet of the clerks’ retreat, we quickly jumped out and headed for the back door. We exited safely. We did not go into Federal’s for a long time afterward, just in case we might be recognized.

Many years later, when Richard was sixteen years old, he worked in the shoe department of Federal’s. Because he was an employee, Mom was able to buy white figure ice skates for Boots and me for Christmas, at a discount. It was great having figure skates rather than hand-me-down hockey skates.

I received many memorable presents in my days, a book of movie passes to the Mercury theater, from Rea and Jim Myron. A radio for Boots and me given by Rea, Frank and George. Richard gave me a Banking game on year, even though it was much too expensive for his budget. Rea and Mom each gave me a beautiful Story Book Doll. These dolls were from the Madame Alexander Doll Company collection. They had porcelain faces, hands and feet, with soft bodies. Thee dolls were elegantly dressed in nursery rhyme themes or months-of-the-year themes. Mine, from Rea, was dressed as November. It was in a burgundy plaid taffeta dress with a matching felt hat. The hat had

a feather in it and was burgundy-colored. I do not remember how the one Mom gave me was dressed but I think it may have been Mother Goose. Boots and Kath also had two each of these dolls. The dolls were all of a different theme and were dressed accordingly. Together, there were six of the dolls and none of us can remember what happened to them. Mom probably gave them to “the poor.” She always gave things to the poor. I think she thought of herself as having enough to share.

On a sunny Sunday, December 7, 1941, the Japanese Air Force bombed Pearl Harbor, an American Territory. President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war with Japan. He made this announcement on the radio. Mom and Dad were glued to the radio to hear every word. They were deeply concerned but hid this from us younger children. We had no idea what war was, although war had been conducted in Europe for some years by Adolph Hitler and the German military. As children, we did not know of the impact of the politics of the time. Hitler had overrun most of Europe and was bombing England. After Japan bombed our territory, and war was declared, America joined the war in Europe, along with England and Canada and Russia. I do not remember what other countries were in alliance with America, England, Canada and Russia, but we called ourselves Allies. Italy was on the side of Germany and Japan and were called the Axis. Our lives continued as normally as possible.

Our first impact was that of Jim Myron joining the Coast Guard. Jim was Mom’s young cousin from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He was about George’s age and after graduating from high school had come to Detroit to find work as there was little work in the Upper Peninsula. He lived with us for a while and worked at Willow Run, a manufacturing plant that made the bomber airplanes used in the war. We all liked him because he was so kind to us. He would give Boots, Kath, and me money to buy ice cream every Friday. He had such a nice nature. Jim was stationed on an ammunition ship. It was either bombed or torpedoed and all aboard were killed. Jim was missed greatly by all of us, especially Rea.

We were all urged to do all we could for the war effort. We collected newspapers, saved metal cans and toothpaste tubes, and we returned grease to the grocery store. Our food was rationed, but since Mom and Dad planned carefully, we noticed little change in our meals and wanted for nothing. We could no longer get butter. Margarine was the substitute. It was white and came in a soft bag. There was a yellow capsule packaged in the bag. The capsule was broken and kneaded into the white margarine, coloring it to make it look more like butter. [KAH: It was against the law for the margarine maker to color the product yellow because the law considered that they might palm the product off as butter; so the capsule coloring method was devised of necessity, to keep the manufacturers honest.] We children did not notice any difference in flavor. Mom did. She could not abide the stuff. Dad knew a butcher who saved the precious commodity, butter, for him to give to Mom. She used the butter sparingly. Candy bars during the war were made mostly of cereal, covered with an imitation chocolate.

Bubble gum, when it was available, was rationed to one piece per child. It was sold only at Rice’s, the penny candy store run by Mrs. Rice, the lady who did not like us.

Dean Bishop would use disguises to go repeatedly into the store and obtain more than her one piece. The rest of us did not have the nerve to try this ruse.

Mom volunteered her time working at the USO (United Services Organization) held in a large building downtown where young soldiers away from home, could go for companionship. They were given homemade food and beverages. Sometimes they just talked to some motherly figure, like Mom. I’m sure Mom liked to do this as she would like someone to do the same for her own son. I think the soldiers would dance with volunteers, girls of their own age. Mom also gave blood at the Red Cross Blood Bank as often as she was allowed.

She attended the Friday Night novena to pray for peace. Also, she attended morning Mass every day of the year. She prayed with hope and trust in God’s Will. She encouraged us to pray for God’s blessings, too. Wartime was a good time to instill this practice.

A German family, the Walter Steukens, lived in the house behind us. They were a devoted Catholic family. They were very good neighbors. At one time, Mrs. Steuken told me how worried she was for her brother who was a captain in the German army. She had not heard from him in a long time. Even though we were at war with the Germans, I felt sorry for her concern. She and her family were NOT my enemies.

It was probably during this time when I joined the children’s choir at school. We would practice in the choir loft of the church. The choir would sing at the children’s Mass maybe once a month. WE sang at Easter and Christmas. Mom would come to the Mass at which we were singing. She was showing her support for me. Mom would like to sing while at the kitchen sink. She said that it made the task lighter. Dad would then sneak in the back door, putting his finger to his lips and shush us, with that little grin and sparkling eyes, pull loose the ribbon of her neatly tied apron. She would feign exasperation, but we know she was amused. When I would go to church with her, she would sing all the responses and hymns. Our school life in the war years was filled with references to those less fortunate than us.

We had Holy Childhood drives in which we were to sell the stamps which supported a mission society. A prize was given to the child who had sold the most stamps. This was such an unfair practice as we lived in a neighborhood where many wealthy people, with fewer children, lived. There was a classroom competition conducted throughout the whole school for us to bring in our pennies, used to rescue the Chinese pagan babies. This was a worthy effort. I question Pagan. It seemed too exclusive. We were encouraged to buy stamps for savings bonds. After buying enough stamps to full a book, the book was then turned into a war savings bond. All citizens were urged to BUY BONDS.

During this time, there were posters admonishing us to think of the war effort. These posters had slogans such as REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR, UNCLE SAM

WANTS YOU, and LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS. There were probably ore but I remember these the most.

Home heating fuel was rationed also. Mom did not think we were allowed enough for the size of our house. She shopped for warm clothing for all of us. One day, she came home with knitted underwear for Boots and me call Snuggies. Boots and I spent an afternoon laughing hilariously over the looks and shape of these Snuggies. Mom could not find them in Kath’s size and Kath was very disappointed.

I read the newspaper carefully to be informed as to what was happening. We went to the Saturday movies which were preceded by newsreels, showing the action of the war. We saw the clips of Hitler and the German army in Europe and of the war in the South Pacific. The horror of Guadalcanal, the American flag-raising at Iwo Jima, the glory of the bomb fighters flying over enemy targets, dropping devastating bombs, would forever be impressed on my mind. We watched with fervor the propaganda movies. I imagined myself as growing up to become a bomber pilot. At this age, I thought the war would never end and my life would revolve around it forever.

In the war years, and for many years afterwards, Mom would preserve many types of fruits and vegetables. Dad knew the farmers in the area and would come home with bushels of produce. I’m sure Mom cringed at the sight of all this canning to be done. We all would help as much as we could, mainly peeling tomatoes and peaches and pitting cherries. The most arduous work was Mom’s. She also made jams and grape jelly. To make the jelly, she would boil the grapes, put them in a cloth bag and hang the bag on a cabinet door, letting the juice drip into a waiting pan. While the filled bag was hanging, we were told not to touch it, but we simply could not resist poking the bag each time we passed.

I joined the Girl Scouts around this time. The initiation ceremony was held in the church. Mom attended the ceremony to show her approval. I loved being a scout. I wore the Girl Scout uniform with pride. I worked on earning badges. Badges were earned by fulfilling certain requirements for each one. A badge could be earned for cooking or sewing. There were some for civic duty and some for community service. My badges were sewn on a special sash.

Even though Dad worked two jobs to support his family, I was given the privilege of attending the Girl Scout camp named Camp Metamora. The camp was expensive and required extra equipment to participate. I enjoyed the experience so much and was allowed to attend the camp for a second year. I appreciate Mom and Dad letting me have so many opportunities for development. I was a Scout until the end of eighth grade. I would have continued, but there were no senior troops in my neighborhood.

The war hit home with great reality when George, after graduating from high school in June, enlisted in the Army the following October. He had just turned 18 years old. Dad had to take him to the train depot from where he was shipped to boot camp for training to become a soldier. Dad said that it was the hardest thing he ever had to do. I

suppose he thought of his own Army life. George was eventually sent to France. I think he was connected to a medic unit. We put a flag in the dining room window showing that own of our own was in the military. The flag was made of satin material with a white background, edged in red, with a blue star in the center. If the star was gold, it meant that someone had been killed in military service. We hoped that all who passed by and saw the flag would pray for our George.

The war in Europe ended in June of 1945. The Japanese held on until the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They then surrendered in August of 1945. Sometime later, George came home. I do not remember exactly when. He never talked about his experiences overseas except to say that he had met a nice French family. We got a hint once when Boots was crying over a bleeding cut. George just said, “You don’t know what blood is.” He had always been shy but now he was more of a recluse. He did not eat supper in the dining room with the rest of the family but preferred to eat alone in the kitchen.

The rest of us enjoyed the banter of the evening supper. Mom would prepare a meal for Dad in the afternoon before he went to work. Then she cooked our dinner, which she shared with us. We chatted about our day, laughed a great deal and maybe disagreed on something.

Frank had decided to have a party one day while Mom and Dad were away from the house. As a ruse, to make Boots, Kath and me go to bed earlier than our normal time, he set all the clocks in the house forward one hour. When he told us to go to bed, we felt the time was not right, so he took us to all the clocks, pointing to the time they read. We had to agree that it was the right time. After his party, he set the clocks back to the correct time. Mom and Dad never did find out what he had done.

We were suspicious of anything we thought we might have been “cheated” out of. Boots and I would listen through the heating vents when Mom and Dad had company. We knew Mom served refreshments. We strained to hear and identify sounds of what was served. We once heard the freezer door of the refrigerator door being opened and a rustling sound. We were positive that Dad had bought ice cream and was serving it to the company. The next day we marched downstairs, opened the freezer door to look for any remaining ice cream. No sign of anything. We learned, after we had grown up, that Dad had taken the empty carton and disposed of it in the garbage can, thereby hiding the evidence. I used this trick on my own children.

On many Sunday evenings, Mom and Dad would visit Aunt Helen and Uncle Buddy to play cards. Aunt Helen was Mom’s younger sister and they lived in the house which Dad had built for them located about three blocks from our house. Frank and Richard were left to babysit Boots, Kath and me. We were skittish children with vivid imaginations. There was a radio program called the Hermit’s Cave. It was very scary. The boys had been told not to make us listen to that program. They circumvented this order by putting the radio in their bedroom. When we went to bed for the night, they would turn the volume up very loudly so we could hear the offending story against our

will. We would try to hide our ears in the pillows so as not to hear, but we heard anyway. I still remember some of the spooky stories. “The Chicken Heart” was one and “the Jungle” was another.

In 1945, I was in the eighth grade. Mom and Dad bought a piano. I was the privileged one who got to take piano lessons. A woman who lived on Hartwell north of Grove gave the lessons. My lesson hour was after dinner in the early evening. Like to cross the large empty fields alone so guess who came with me? Boots. The teacher would give her something to play with while I was taking my lesson. Mom thought I played well.

Toward the end of the school year, the eighth graders were given their first ribbons, one red and one white. They were an acknowledgement of having maintained good grades and good behavior. The ribbons were signed by our classmates and became quite dirty. We received new ribbons for the graduation ceremony. We participated in our last May crowning. I wore my first long gown and pinned flowers in my hair. I was not the chosen one to crown the statue of Mary but felt special anyway. I graduated in June, 1946.

The next step was to enter Immaculata High School. I had been chosen to take the scholarship test but did not win. Richard had won a scholarship to De LaSalle High School two years before. He was much more studious than I was and deserved to win.

That summer passed with “our gang” having added Margaret Mulavey. We played cards intently. We were all competitive and strove to win. We went to the Mercury theater on Wednesday evening and Saturday noon. The movie being shown was changed on those days. It was at this time that we started to think of some activities which would be for teens. We thought the church should sponsor such activities. We knew that Mr. Carl Walker, Joan’s dad, was active in the church, so we urged him to start a teen group. He and other men of the parish listened and started what was called the Dad’s Club. The Dad’s Club initiated the teen dances held in the social hall of the church. The Dad’s chaperoned the dances. They urged the church to purchase the empty property on the corner of Littlefield and Grove. They developed this property into play fields for all the children in the area. In the summer, there were baseball diamonds and swing and slides. The baseball diamonds became football fields in the fall. In winter, the field was flooded to become two ice rinks, one for hockey players and one for regular skaters. A club house was built for the skaters to come in out of the cold. The dads would take turns in flooding the fields for ice rinks and umpiring the ball games in the summer and fall. We children of Precious Blood parish owe those dads a debt of gratitude. They gave us a safe neighborhood place to play.

There are other images in my mind. They were all of the things that were part of my daily life. One that comes to mind is of Dad coming home from his grocery shopping trips with bags filled to the top. He would gather the bags into his arms and hands. He would even put a bag or two in his mouth. He seemed to be trying to beat his record of

how many bags he could carry in one trip. I think his main purpose was to amuse us. It worked.

I can still smell the “cold” of his navy blue winter jacket when he came in on a winter day. I hear him calling other drivers on the road, especially “an old man in a hat”, “that doggone boll weevil”. I can remember his slight smile, hear his soft laughter, laugh myself at the memory of his quiet humor, and enjoy seeing him tease Mom. I know he followed the “golden rule”. He was deeply religious but private about his beliefs. He set only the highest standards of decorum for himself and for us. He never gave any bad example.

He allowed us to keep our childhood.

I remember Mom listening to the radio on Sunday afternoons. She liked classical music. As she listened to an operatic aria being sung by Lily Pons, she told me that Lily “sings like a violin.” Whenever I hear Brahm’s Symphony Number One, the introduction piece to the Sunday Concert, I see her sitting beside the radio. She has taught me, with my knowing it, how to appreciate the gift of music. How I love the beauty of the human voice; it touches my inner soul. What a dreary world it would be without the sounds of a symphony orchestra, without songs.

I saw her avidly reading her books. She taught me the technique of losing myself in a good book. What better way to relieve the tedium of everyday tasks. What better way to dream.

I watched as she went about the mundane tasks of raising a family. I have learned so much from her, sometimes I think I have become her. She did not raise her voice in anger to me, even if I tried her patience. She supported my decisions; I was never ridiculed. She, too, allowed me my childhood. I matured at my own pace, no stress, no pressure.

My grade school life was predictable. We went to Mass every day before school started. We were taught our lessons. We were taught our Catholic religion. We participated in the school’s activities. We learned to take responsibility for ourselves. We did not blame anyone else for our mistakes; we took our own punishment. We believed in God and His Justice. Everything we learned in school was reinforced at home. I am grateful for that. It was a good way to live.

I was now ready to being my high school years. I enrolled at Immaculata High School. This school was taught by the order of nuns called the Immaculate Heart of Mary. They were known as a teaching order and were very good teachers. Immaculata High had a reputation of scholastic excellence. The school was on the campus of Marygrove College for Women, also taught by the IHM’s. It was an all-girl, private Catholic school. A dress uniform was required. It consisted of a navy blue pleated skirt, a collared white blouse and saddle shoes. Saddle shoes are white oxfords with the navy blue inset on the side. Nylon stockings were also to be worn but “bobby sox” could be

worn over the nylons. Mom made my skirt of navy blue wool and bought a few white blouses which I was responsible for to keep ironed. The uniform was not worn until the second week of school, allowing the students to wear their street clothes until then. I had very few street clothes and was relieved when the two weeks had passed and I could dress like the other girls.

This problem of few clothes did not ease until I learned to make my own clothes. I had watched Mom sewing, so I bought a pattern for a skirt and blouse and a dress. I followed the directions in the pattern, teaching myself how to do it. If I ran into a problem, I called upon Mom. I thought I was large and picked out a size 18 pattern. I ended up folding the material over and pinning it together. It was not until much later that I realized I was not a size 18.

In the freshman year, I met girls not of my own neighborhood. I had led a sheltered life and I thought all girls of Catholic education thought like me. I had met a girl from Gesu parish, a well-known wealthy parish in Detroit. I thought this girl was so sophisticated and I tried to follow her lead. She seemed so much more worldly than I was and she was. She had invited me to join her sorority and gave me some raffle tickets to sell. An older girl, a senior, saw the tickets and told me they were not legitimate, but I could not believe my “friend” would do anything wrong. I asked the friend about this. To quiet me, she told me to meet her on a Sunday afternoon for initiation into her sorority. I was so excited.

Mom made me a pretty skirt of a light-colored, plaid taffeta material. She bought me a pretty silk blouse to go with the skirt. When the appointed Sunday arrived, I carefully dressed, curled my hair, put on light lipstick, then took the bus to the corner of Six Mile Road and Livernois street, the chosen meeting place. After waiting there about two hours, I realized that my “friend” was not going to show, and so took the bus home again. I was so very disappointed. I then found out that all people did not have the high moral standards that I had been brought up with. I cried anyway. Mom told me that I was a better person than my “friend” was. Laer in the school year, this girl was suspended from Immaculata under suspicious circumstances. I never did find out why she was expelled. I was deeply hurt by this experience and became more introverted. I did not seek out any close friendships except those that were safe, my family and the neighborhood girls. I did learn from this and no longer tried to be one of the “in” crowd. I now felt empathy for the ignored. I was not friendless, just wary. I found the best qualities were in those girls who did not seek to impress.

I attended the Friday night dances at the Precious Blood teen club held in the church social hall. They were so typical. The boys, leaning against the walls, the girls chattering and dancing with each other, trying to catch the eye of any boy, hoping to be asked to dance. It did not work. Girls of that age always went out in groups for support. They went to the teen meetings together, they went ice skating at the Dad’s Club rink together. They went roller skating together, all the time thinking they would meet a boy. The boys did the same thing.

The freshman year for me was ordinary. I did my school work, but not to the best of my ability. Mom had encouraged me to continue with my piano lessons, and was willing to pay extra for this. I took the lessons at Immaculata, taught by a nun, who was an accomplished musician. I lost interest in the piano and stopped taking lessons. In hindsight, I regret this decision. I know I could have done well. I still played, but without the discipline.

I do not remember anything remarkable about this year. I would guess life went on as usual. Summers would have been spent with the neighborhood girls and with Boots as my closet ally. Playing cards and seeing movies would have been the recreation, perhaps just hanging out. We girls did get into a singing kick. Joan Walker had a book of folk songs. In the evening, we would gather as a group and sing the songs, sometimes in harmony. We thought we gave the neighbors a treat with our concerts. I had always enjoyed singing in a group.

The summer passed and the fall was upon us again. I was starting in the sophomore year. New studies, a little more interesting. I now joined the choir at Immaculata. We were well taught and competed with other schools in the Detroit area. Autumn turned into winter and Christmas. I remember that year I received a red plaid scarf as a present. I still have this scarf. It must qualify as an antique by now.

That spring of 1947 I started to hand around with a girl from my grade school days; her name was Mary Shaughnessy. It was spring by now. We were at her house when her cousin and his friend came to visit her and her family in May of 1948. The cousin was Bill Schrag. I was not too impressed with him. He was sort of skinny, but very good looking. He seemed very young because he was so thin. I was very self-conscious as I was not very thin.

Bill was with his friend Walter who had driven him from their near-downtown neighborhood to our Northwest area. We paired off, Maryanne going with Walter and me with Bill. I think he was not very impressed with me either as I was dressed in Levi jeans and Richard’s large flannel plaid shirt. I wore this kind of attire to hide my shape. The girls at school would tell me that I would be pretty if I was not so “fat”. Their idea of fat was anyone who weighed more than 105 pounds.

Maryanne’s young brother was to make his First Holy Communion and I was invited to the get-together afterward. Bill and his friend Walter also came to this party. This time, I wore my Sunday best, a black taffeta blouse trimmed with colored sequins, and a black ballerina skirt. I had a shape. Bill then became interested.

After trying to find my name in the phone book—he did not know how to spell my last name—he called Maryanne’s mother, his Aunt Helen. She gave him the number and he proceeded, without delay, to call me and ask me for a real date. The most glamorous of dates for teens at that time was to go to the Michigan theater, and that is where we went. We dated from that time on. Neither Bill nor I had much money, so many of our dates were just walking around the neighborhood and attending the movies

at the cheaper Mercury theater. I dated other boys at that time but mostly group dates. I was not the “Belle of the Ball.” Bill and I started to see each other more often during that first summer of our meeting.

He worked as a stock boy for Sears and lived three bus rides away from my house. He did not have access to a car, so coming to see me was a long, involved trip. This getting-to-know-each-other time was rather exciting but we were not committed at this time to an exclusive relationship. We did go to his best friend’s senior prom. I did not have a very suitable dress. I think it was a hand-me-down gown of Rea’s. On the ride from my house to Bill’s house, my hair was windblown and there was nothing I could do about it. Bill’s family must have thought I was a slob. We did things together with my family. Bill would help with the canning operation and did eat some Saturday evening meals with us. He enjoyed the rapport of my brothers and sisters since he had only one brother, Bernie. He was incorporated into playing card games with my family, usually on Saturday evenings.

The favorite card game was Contract Rummy. Dad would frustrate Mom horribly. He would have a whole mitt-full of cards, keeping quiet, not making any plays, while all the others did. Then he stood up, cards stuck every which way in his hand. Mom would say, very disgustedly, “Henry, are you going to go out?” He would grin, his eyes always sparkling, and say nothing while placing all his cards in play and very dramatically throw down the very last card. He would then sit down and look at Mom. She would vehemently throw her remaining cards down on the table and retreat to the kitchen in a huff. We would snicker as we know how he did tease her. Bill was a little intimidated by this behavior. He later learned to become accustomed to it and was amused by it also.

Kath loved to play cards with anyone who would indulge her. Most of the time it was Mom. Now that a new face was on the scene, she immediately commandeered Bill to play cards with her. Bill, trying to fit in, would succumb and be stuck for hours playing cards. He really did not like to pay, but I suppose he thought he was impressing the family.

We continued to date, mostly attending the movies. We began to speak slyly of marriage. In January of 1949, Bill graduated from Western High School. He looked diligently for a job but could find no work. Out of desperation, he joined the Navy. The Navy was offering to high school graduates a one-year active duty stint with ten years of inactive duty. Bill went to train at Great Lakes naval Training Station in Chicago, Illinois. On a weekend during the middle of boot camp, his mother asked me if I would like to go with her and Bill’s cousin, Mary Lee, with her husband Joe Leffler, to visit him. I wanted to go but did not know how I would pay for this. Bill’s mother assured me she would pay all costs and Mary Lee and Joe would take care of transportation. Mary Lee was petite and very glamorous and I felt drab and homely next to her. I borrowed a black crepe two-piece dress from Rea, so I was presentable. As usual, I was self-conscious about being “fat”. I think I was not as fat as I thought I was and at least I was young and had good skin and hair. Some guy whistled at me. I was so happy to see Bill

and I do not remember what we died except visit the Naval Station. I do remember having to share a bed in the hotel with Bill’s Mom. I clung to the edge of the bed, nearly falling off the side, so as not to touch her. In those days, the beds in hotels were double size, not much room for a scared girl trying to avoid contact. I did not sleep, if at all. I did not know how to act since my only intimate contacts were my safe family. I was happy to see Bill but happier to go home.

In July Bill came home on a to-week leave time between training and schooling. He had been picked to attend Seabees Training School. This was a construction school of the Navy which was located in California. We wrote letters, Bill doing most of the writing. He had to send me stamps so I could write to him. The longer we were apart, the lonelier I became. We wrote seriously of marriage. I did have a few dates but felt guilty as I knew Bill was saving his money to buy me a diamond engagement ring. He was planning on giving me this engagement ring on Christmas leave. He had written Mom, asking for her permission to ask me to marry him. I know she was impressed with his letter. He was not sure he was going to get enough leave time to come to Michigan or afford the train fare if he had the time as he had spent all his money on the diamond. He sent the ring in a small package to my house. I knew what it was and placed it, unwrapped, on the mantel waiting to see how things would turn out. As it happened, Bill was given Christmas leave but had only fifty-seven dollars. He tried to call his mother to wire him some money to take the train but could not make contact. The bus fare was fifty dollars, so he took the bus, a trip of two days and three nights. He had only seven dollars for meals. A very large man took up one and one-half of the seat. Bill did not mind as the man took pity on him when he noticed that Bill would not get off at most of the meal stops. He would urge Bill to get off with him and then pay for Bill’s meal. He told Bill that he had been in the same situation in his lifetime and was only too happy to help Bill.

Bill arrived home during the night and the next afternoon was waiting outside Immaculata for me. He was dressed in his Dress Blues and looked so handsome. The girls at school could see him waiting and many rushed to the windows facing the street to see that “really cute guy.” I think they were surprised that he was my boyfriend. Maybe a bit jealous? There was something about a guy in uniform. On Christmas Eve, after midnight mass, he did formally propose and put the ring on my finger. It was official now. I had committed my future life to marriage and a family. Bill returned to California on New Year’s Eve. Time passed slowly. Bill was Honorably Discharged from the navy in April of 1950. When he came home, we started the plan for our wedding.

It was now the time of Lent, preparation for Easter. Dad and Frank would make a big joke of who might be eating too much food during the strict fast days. They would eye each other’s plates to see if they fell within the guidelines of quantity. Holy Saturday arrived. The official fast ended at noon of that day. Dad and Frank started to prepare a big lunch at about 11:30 a.m. in anticipation of the release from fasting. They proceeded to scuffle around the kitchen, keeping close watch on the clock, counting the minutes until noon. When 12 o’clock struck, they quickly sat down at the white enamel kitchen

table and dug into their huge meal, enjoying each fat bite. Easter Sunday same and the ritual of hiding Easter baskets, filled with candy and colored eggs. I awoke and dressed for the Easter mass knowing that I would look for my basket after I came home from mass. Before leaving the house, I had opened the cupboard where the trash can was kept and saw just the tiniest bit of the colored handle of my basket. I thought I would sure fool Dad and Frank and pretend to look around for a while, then go to the trash can and triumphantly pull the basket out. I came home from church and proceeded with my plan. When I figured I had spent enough time, falsely looking, I went to the trash can and pulled up the handle. That was all there was, just the handle. Dad and Frank had those teasing grins on their faces. I was the fooled one. I started to look for the bottom part of the basket with the two of them coaching in the background, getting hot, no, getting cold. Oh, so hot, oh, so cold. I looked in every imaginable place, and I knew of all the places in that big house. It was getting to be dinner time and I still had not found the basket. I had to concede defeat. Frank crawled under the dining room table. I followed him. There, taped to the underside of the table was the basket. I do not think that hiding place will ever be surpassed.

I still had to graduate from high school. My high school prom was held in the gym of Immaculata with the nuns discreetly observing us from the balcony above the gym. I made my prom dress. It was a long, black crepe skirt with a sheer white blouse that had a black flower pattern on it. I took a white camisole and sewed rhinestones on the straps so they would sparkle through the white blouse. Bill had to borrow a suit since he did not own one of his own. I graduated on June 10, 1950. Rea was married the day after. I was the Maid of Honor for her wedding. Boots and Kath were also in her wedding party. Her mother-in-law-to-be was a professional seamstress and had made her a beautiful ivory satin wedding gown. She made Boots and Kath’s gowns of light blue chiffon over blue satin. She made jackets to match so the gowns could be more versatile.

During the summer months following my graduation, Bill and I would often go to Sterling State Park for swimming and picnics. Kath would invite herself to go with us. She went to Mom to ask if she could go with us saying that we asked her, then come to us and say, “Mom said I could go.” She was almost a permanent fixture in the back seat of Bill’s car. That was fine. We did not mind her. She secretly had a little-girl crush on Bill. In the evenings, Bill and I would sit on the stone wall and sometimes he would sing to me. Kath thought that was the most romantic thing she could think of. She would peek out of the corner of the bathroom window, hoping to catch more romance.

This was the summer when Dad first showed signs of becoming sick. At first a doctor diagnosed him as having heart trouble and advised taking a shot of whiskey a day. Dad was not a drinker so this really was medicine. The whiskey did not work and Dad suffered more symptoms. It was then discovered that he was diabetic. He went on a strict diet. It was at this time that cancer was discovered. Dad went into the Veteran’s Hospital for treatment, which was surgery. The surgery was severe and it took him a very long time to recuperate. During this time, Bill and I would drive his car down Southfield Road to visit him almost every evening. Mom would go with us as often as she could. Dad looked forward to our visits. One Saturday, we could not go to visit as

normal, as Bill had to take his mother to look for a new place to live. As fate would have it, that was the one day that Dad felt good enough to come outside on the hospital lawn. He waited in a wheelchair for us, by the sidewalk, in order to surprise us. We did not come and to this day both Bill and I feel sorry to have disappointed him. It could not be helped. Dad was released from the hospital in time for Christmas. He suffered great pain. He was very depressed. We all tried to cheer him up but our efforts were feeble.

Bill and I had planned to be married by the end of January, 1951, but changed the date as Richard, who was to be Bill’s best man, had to take final exams at the University of Michigan during that time. We set the date for February 3, 1951.

Richard’s MemoirOr, A Boy Grows Up

By Richard Louis Hauke

Copyright 1999

Dedication: To all those who helped me along the way

My earliest memories are spotty. I remember being about four years old and sick in bed when my Uncle Duke, Emil Duquette, and his family came from Boston to visit. He was supervisor of the Ford Assembly Plant at Somerville, Massachusetts, and we thought him rich. He had three daughters, Marie, Therese, and Helen (who was my age), and they came into my bedroom to visit with me.

A later memory is of my riding in a car with Aunt Alice, my godmother, who was taking me someplace special for my birthday.

During the depression, we were the beneficiaries of charity at Christmas time. I remember the Goodwill giving us a Christmas box which included clothes for the children, or at least long winter underwear, and some candy. I don’t think my parents thought the Goodwill gift was necessary, but I do know that the children were very happy to get the candy.

When we lived on Hartwell, Precious Blood church and school were right across the alley but they had no kindergarten, so I had to go to kindergarten at the public elementary school, King School, which was about four blocks away, on Cheyenne. My main memory of kindergarten was my standing behind the piano as punishment for some infraction.

Later, when I entered Precious Blood, I remember having to eat chalk as punishment and on at least one occasion having a nun use a belt on my leg. It seemed that whenever I whispered in class to another kid, I always got caught and punished for it. I never could understand why other kids could whisper in class and never get caught and punished.

Other memories of primary school are having classes in portable classrooms, feeling great impatience as other students tried to read and stumbled over every other word, and being bored with the use of workbooks. I never felt that I had any close friends in primary school. In fact, I view myself in my childhood as being pretty much a loner.

I did always enjoy investigating nature, watching bugs, etc. and when we would go to a park in summer, I would wander off and get lost. I have a memory of riding in a carriage behind a horse as some man brought me back to my parents in some park.

In 1941, Jim Miron came to live with us. The Mirons lived in Iron Mountain of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Their mother was Mom’s aunt Angeline; the cousins included George, Jim, Hubert and Opal, and possibly others whom I never met. Jim Miron came to Detroit after high school to get a job. He went to work at Willow Run when it first started up (the Ford Motor Company built it to manufacture B-24 bombers). He was pleasant and friendly to us children. I remember at Christmas time he went out on Christmas Eve and bought presents for all of us. Rose Marie, 16 years old at the time, was, as I remember, in love with him. He joined the Coast Guard and was killed when his ship, the USS Seraphis, blew up. I heard later that the miscellaneous remains of men from that explosion were mingled in a few coffins and buried in Arlington Cemetery.

Years later, when I was a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, I visited Opal and her husband in the Los Angeles area at Christmas time when I was on my way to Ensenada, Baja California. I also remember on some occasion Hubert mixing a Christmas drink for us called Glug, which included some kind of fruit and was heated up. Apparently this was a Scandinavian custom. All I remember of George Miron was ski-jumping. There was a ski jump at Iron Mountain and he was quite good at ski-jumping.

During World War II, Mom put me in charge of shopping because I understood the use of rationing stamps and coins, so I would take the family supply of rations stamps for meat, sugar, butter, etc., and go off to the store with the money to purchase these things. one time, on my way home, I lost some money, maybe a ten dollar bill, -- I can't remember for sure—and when I got home, I really thought my mother would be angry, but she was understanding (if Dad brought home $3000 a year, then $10 would be nearly a whole day’s pay and it supported nine people).

In grade school I did not always get along too well with the other students or in some cases with the teachers. I remember on one occasion, kids were talking about what they wanted to become and I said I wanted to become an archaeologist. None of them knew that word and thought I was showing off. On another occasion, there was some talk in class about the location of the heart and I indicated that it was on about the lower level of the rib cage. The other students thought this was too low and began kidding me about having my heart in my stomach.

In the eighth grade, students would get graduation ribbons, two ribbons with the school colors. The better students would get the ribbons earlier on so they could wear them longer. The average student would get them only a couple weeks before graduation, and the mediocre students would not get them until graduation. When the first ribbons were given out, I didn’t get mine because the eighth grade teacher didn’t like me. On one occasion, she had said something to the class that was wrong and I had corrected her. I thought I was being helpful, but she didn’t think so. As a consequence, I got my ribbons last.

Also, when I was coming up to the eighth grade, I was elected patrol captain. We had patrol boys to help students cross the streets at various places and the captain’s job was to see that they were on duty and that everything was going OK. I had wanted this job because the patrol captain was sent to summer camp for two weeks as a sort of training session before he assumed his duties. When I was elected, I was very happy anticipating going to summer camp for two weeks, since, of course, my family was too poor to ever send me to summer camp. As the summer went on, I never was told about where or when to go. Finally I asked the pastor, Msgr. Hermes, about it. He said they weren’t going to send anyone that summer. I felt cheated.

Monsignor Hermes did not really fit the parish because Precious Blood was a working-class parish and Msgr. Hermes was an aristocratic-type person. People would do the best

they could in contributing and he would every year publish a list of all the people and how much money they gave , which of course was embarrassing for those who could not afford much. He did manage to build up a large school and church on the backs of these poor working people. He also managed to have a fancy rectory, to drive a Cadillac, and to spend a couple weeks every year vacationing in Florida when the average parishioner could not even dream of such a way of life.

I feel that Msgr. Hermes mistreated my parents in one affair. Our house on Hartwell, which my father had built, was close to the church, but also, it turned out, was in the potential parking lot of a proposed theater. The developers planning the shopping center at the southeast corner of Six Mile and Schaefer need to buy the lots occupied by our house and the convent. We didn’t know this, but, Msgr. Hermes told my dad that some old woman parishioner wanted to buy the house to be close to the church. Since it was a two-family house—the upstairs was a rental apartment—my father took this as an opportunity to build us a single-family house on Littlefield, so he was willing to sell. Thinking he was selling to an old female parishioner, he was willing to sell for less than the house was truly worth. If he had known it was to be bought by developers, he could have sold it for a much higher price. Our suspicion was that Msgr. Herms was in cahoots with the developers to get my father to sell for the lower price.

For me, the patrol captain job turned out to be hazardous. On one occasion, I had ridden my bike out to a distant station to check on the two patrol boys there. They started harassing me, so I got on my bicycle to leave. One of them grabbed one of the handlebars, the front wheel turned sharply, and I pitched off the bicycle onto my face, breaking my glasses and tearing up the side of my face. I rode on home, got patched up, and was out of school for a couple of weeks.

While in the eighth grade, 1944, I also missed a month of school when Boots and I got scarlet fever. I used to babysit for the Herb Walker family up the street and one night while babysitting, I began to feel very hot. The next morning I was running a high fever. The doctor was called in and I was diagnosed with scarlet fever. Boots got it, too. Mom set up a sickroom in what had been the girls’ bedroom, for Boots and me. She had to be careful to sterilize everything that came out of that room, and was the only one besides the doctor who could enter. There was a sign on the front door of the house quarantining the house for forty days. Some of our siblings went to live with other people temporarily, but I don’t remember who went where.

I started working at a shoe store during World War II when I was about 14. I went out with a friend, Jim Asimakis, to look for a job. We decided to go to the local stores and each of us would inquire at every other store. We walked into a shoe store, which was supposed to be Jim’s place to ask for a job, but he was afraid to, so I spoke for him, and the manager hired me.

I was the stock boy and would also fill in on the selling flor when it got busy. Because of my naiveté, I didn’t realize what was happening, but the manager would have me sign chits for window washing and stock work separately, and for other jobs. I later

realized that he was collecting money for all these things, which money of course, I never saw.

He was going to start another store and needed some carpentry work done –building shelves—so I talked to my father about doing the job for him. My father agreed to it, I think for my sake, not because he wanted to. Unfortunately, the man, being a crook, never paid my father for the work.

I soon left that store and went next door to Federal’s shoe department to work. There I was primarily a stock boy, although again, I would sell shoes when necessary. I was a good organizer, worked well independently, so on one occasion the district manager borrowed me to work at the warehouse for a while. Because I was tall and strong, I could pile the boxes of incoming shoes up high and also, being able to work independently there was essential.

At the regular store, I would work late on weekends and then afterwards go to a late movie, a double-feature, at the Mercury – the theater that replaced our Hartwell house – not getting home until about 2 am. My poor mother, I later realized, could not get to sleep at night until all her children were in.

When it came time to go to college, the store manager tried to persuade me to stay full-time in shoes, with promises that I could become manger but I wasn’t interested. Working there did enable me, though, to provide more lavish Christmas gifts for my family because I got a good discount. I would buy slippers for them.

There was a period of time when we tried to go high-tech with an x-ray machine to see where the foot was in the shoe. After we had been using this apparatus for some time, some men came in to put lead shielding in the machines. Eventually, the machines were removed. We were never informed of the possibility of serious side effects from this constant exposure to irradiation. For the customers, the exposure was probably minimal. For the workers, however, it could become cumulative.

The machine was a fluoroscope at which the customer would stand with his or her feet, in shoes, inserted in a cubbyhole and the salesperson or customer would look down through a couple of eye pieces to see a glass screen on which the image of the shoe and his or her feet, including bones, and an outline of the flesh could be seen. (Kathleen says she used to love those machines and being able to look down through the eyepiece and see here toes wiggling in the new shoes.)

One time when I was in the back room stocking shelves and singing to myself, one of the sales clerks came in and said that a customer had asked him if there was a sick cow in the back. That put a damper on my singing. Now I confine my singing to church where every voice is appreciated.

When I went to college, there was a branch of my shoe company on the main street in Ann Arbor and I was able to work there part-time during my freshman year. The

summer after my freshman year, I went back to the Detroit store and worked, but the second year at college, I gave up the school year job because it was too hard to work and go to school both.

Another job I tried for I think when I was 14 was mopping floors at an exclusive downtown Detroit club. I went there in response to an advertisement and the supervisor showed me what the job consisted of, but when I applied for working papers, I could not get the because the job was definitely not suitable for a 14-year-old. Since this was still during World War II, many places were hared up for appropriate employees.

During one summer at the shoe store, I took two weeks’ vacation and intendedto just stay home and rest, but every day the manager would call me up to come in and help out, so I figured I had to get out of town. I hitchhiked up north through Alpena and St. Ignace to Sault Ste. Marie. After watching the boats traversing the straits, I took the train back. It was definitely not a luxury train. I expect it was a mail train because we went slowly and stopped frequently. But it was my first experience riding a train.

Sitting next to me on the train was a girl of 18 or so and she had smuggled a cat on board in a basket which I contrived to help her conceal.

My next train experience was in the other direction. My parents and some of the other children had gone to Ripley, Ohio to visit my father’s family. I was a t home with George and Rea, working. When some of my schoolmates heard that my parents were away, they thought they should have a party at my house. I started to go along with the idea, but when they hid a bottle of whiskey in the front bushes, I was afraid that the party would end with a trashing of our house. I had heard about previous “parties” trashing other peoples’ houses. I was never part of the “in” crowd so I wasn’t invited to these other parties and, of course, I also started to resent them “using” me for this ulterior motive.

Since I had originally agreed to the party, I figured the only way out of it now was to leave town, so I told my “friends” that I had to join my parents in Ripley, and I went down to the Fort Street railroad station and got the Wabash Cannonball to Fort Wayne, Indiana, from where I hitchhiked to Ripley. My parents were shocked to see me come striding across the field at the farm since they thought I was still in Detroit. I never told them the real reason I was there.

When it came time to go to high school, I tried for scholarships at Catholic Central and De La Salle. I was awarded a scholarship at De La Salle which was way over on the east side of Detroit. When I went there, I did not have any acquaintances because most of the students were from east side parishes and had known each other in primary school.

Because we lived on the west side of town, I had to take three buses to get to De La Salle Collegiate on the east side. That took a lot of time, so I would often hitchhike, particularly coming home in the afternoon. This occasionally caused interesting

encounters. One was with a man who, as we drove along, reached down with one hand, unzipped his trousers, pulled out his penis, and asked me if I wanted to play with it. I, of course, got out as soon as he stopped for the next red light.

On another occasion, I was riding with a man who wanted to show me a nice Negro section of the city. I had always visualized Negroes living in run-down areas and being laborers and poor, so he drove me around the Palmer Woods area near Woodward and Seven Mile Road as I remember, and here were beautiful brick homes with well-kept lawns, well-landscaped, and, as he pointed out, they were all owned and occupied by black people. This was my first exposure to blacks as professional people.

At the De La Salle Collegiate, I, not being an athletic type, did associate myself with athletics by becoming a team manager for the football team, which meant that I had to take care of towels, footballs, water buckets and such things. I also became involved with the oratory groups. De La Salle was the only school I knew where one could get a letter for something other than athletics, namely oratory, so I joined the Debate Club and also went with the oratory team to regional contests. I would memorize a speech and then try presenting it in a somewhat dramatic fashion. I don’t remember if I ever won anything, but I did enjoy this kind of contest.

On a few occasions in high school, I would be out partying with some of the students and drink to excess, but because I was working after school most days, there wasn’t much of that.

During my junior year, I was going to attend the junior prom which required a tuxedo. I rented one but hated the expense, so at the senior year, since I knew I would need a tuxedo again for the senior prom and for graduation, I decided to buy a tuxedo. Graduation was an intimate affair because there were only 91 graduating seniors in my class and we wore tuxes rather than caps and gowns. Probably when I entered the University of Michigan, I was one of the very few people who owned his own tux. I wore it to a couple of formal dances there, so I figure that I wore it enough times to get my money’s worth out of it.

During Work War II, cigarettes were rationed and so it was a challenge to obtain them. To meet this challenge, several of us started smoking at about age 14. My parents would not approve, so I did not smoke openly until a couple of years later. I never became as hooked as my brother, Frank, never having smoked more than a pack a day, and on several occasions quitting for a while. Sometimes the rasping throat and adverse effects would take away from the pleasure.

I always did enjoy a cigarette with a cup of coffee or a bottle of beer, but never first thing in the morning as a true addict does. I continued smoking until finally in February of 1958 I decided to give it up forever and this time I managed to succeed. It is interesting to realize that I smoked for fourteen years, that I have been married for over forty years and that Kathleen has never known me to smoke. (I smoked “cheap”, although I never liked Kools. I had no brand loyalty.)

Alice mentioned in her memoir Dad leaving the farm, in his youth, to join the Army, but my memory is that he said he left the farm about 1913 and apprenticed as a carpenter or sheet metal worker and was not living at home (in Ripley) when the United States entered World War I. I also believe he said that after he got out of the Army, he went first to Dayton and worked there for a while before coming to Detroit.

Dad left the farm because he did not want to be a farmer. He said that a person could work hard all year and then lose the crop. I saw an example of that one summer when we were in Ripley visiting at tobacco harvest time. Tobacco was grown to a seedling stage in a specially-prepared seed bed, then transplanted by hand to keep the weeds down, topped by hand to keep side shoots from developing and tobacco worms are picked off by hand to keep them from eating holes in the leaves. In short, to produce a nice large clean tobacco leaf, which can then be sold, requires hard, hot, intensive labor. The government controls the amount of acreage each farm can put in tobacco, perhaps two or three acres, as their money crop. Other crops are grown only to sustain themselves and the farm.

One summer when we were visiting in Ripley, the tobacco was just about ready to harvest and was looking really good. A sudden thunderstorm came up, with hail, and in five minutes the beautiful tobacco leaves were full of holes, making them essentially unsaleable. All of the labor for that year had been put in a crop that then was lost.

My father did buy a farm and rented it out to someone else.

At a later time, he bought a bar in Detroit on Schaefer near us. He named it the Mercury Rendezvous ad installed Uncle Buddy to run it. The reason he bought it, I think, was to give Uncle Buddy a steady job since he had a large family (eventually twelve children) and was not able to keep well-paying jobs. In order to buy the bar, Dad had to mortgage the farm and the house. I don’t think Mom was too pleased with that, even though it was to help her sister, Aunt Helen’s family.

Actually, the bar did provide a diversion for Dad after he had to quit work at Ford’s because of his ill health, so that he was able to get some benefit from it.

The summer of 1950 or 1951, Dad got me a job at the Ford Motor Company. Actually, I’m not sure how much influence my father had, because Ford was always hiring people. I do remember that my Uncle Ed Duquette worked at the infirmary at Ford and would help give physicals to the new hires.

My job at Ford was in the body shop where they would spot-weld bodies together and then fill in the joints with solder (liquid metal) and smooth them off with the rasp and sandpaper. As the cars came down the line, the inspectors would notice defects in certain ones and they were pulled off on to a side line where they could be worked on more, whereas those that passes inspection would continue down the main line.

One time when I was working on the line, pulling defective bodies onto the turn table to go on the side line, the foreman was on one side of a car, the supervisor was on the other side and they could not see each other. Each one was indication to me to put the body in a different place. I had to act, because the conveyor belt kept moving. So I finally just pulled the body off onto the floor. Then the two supervisors could see each other and realized each was giving me different directions.

Working in the factory was a numbing experience. I found that most of the workers would turn off their minds the moment they entered the factory until the moment they left and only really lived the rest of the time. This renewed my determination to get a college degree and stay out of the factory.

When I was in graduate school and told my father that I wanted to become a biologist, he never really understood what I would be doing, but he was not that concerned so much as that I would be able to earn ten thousand dollars a year and not have to spend my life in a factory. At that time, ten thousand dollars a year was considered an above-average salary. My father never earned more than five thousand dollars a year.

In about 1950, Dad began to cough for long periods and lose weight and appeared in declining health. On one occasion, he suffered some kind of attack. We never had much occasion to consult a doctor because my father tended to take care of minor problems and for fractures, my Uncle Ed would be called upon, but in case of serious illness, such as Alice’s with arthritis and when Boots and I had scarlet fever, a doctor was called upon.

When Dad had the attack, our family doctor diagnosed it as a heart problem, probably because he himself had had heart trouble. It turned out that Dad had had a diabetic shock attack which was controllable by diet. But he also developed prostate cancer. When this was discovered, he went to the Veteran’s Hospital where he was operated on and I think that the doctors messed up and nicked some nerves in his legs because he could not walk as well afterwards, remained upstairs in Rea’s former bedroom convalescing for a long time. I can remember waking up at night to hear him shuffling his slow way to the bathroom. It broke our hearts to hear him moaning with pain.

He had to take early retirement from Ford’s. Fortunately, television had been invented by this time so he could watch television, and then, when he felt up to it, he could go to the Mercury Rendezvous and sit there visiting people.

I heard that he bragged about me at the bar. When I was a student in California, I sent him a telegram wishing him a happy birthday. I think it was. His birthday was December 23. The following summer or so, when I went with him to the bar one time, somebody told me how he had carried that telegram around and showed it to the people at the bar. I, of course, felt touched that it had meant that much to him.

When it came time to go to college, I expected to go to the University of Detroit, a Jesuit college near my home, but I did try out for a Regent’s Alumni scholarship at the University of Michigan. It paid only tuition (ninety dollars per semester, Kathleen remembers, when she started in 1954). I ended up going there and years later my mother told me that she had been concerned about me “losing my faith” at a secular school and had talked with Brother Arator at De La Salle Collegiate about it. He assured her that I would be much better off intellectually and academically going to the University of Michigan rather than the University of Detroit.

I essentially paid my own way through the University of Michigan from summer earnings and part-time work added to the tuition scholarship. My parents did help me out as much as they were able.

I went up to Ann Arbor in September, 1948, a time when a lot of soldiers, discharged veterans from World War II, were entering on the G.I. Bill. The place was crowded and we started out with about twenty men living in the recreation room of one of the houses in the West Quad. By Thanksgiving time, enough people had dropped out that we were all placed in dormitory rooms. Rooms designed for two people all housed three, however.

I would send my laundry home each week; my mother would wash and iron it and send it back. Mail costs were lower then and laundromats did not exist.

College was a real eye-opener for me. It was probably the first time that I felt like I belonged because my fellow students were all academically-oriented and talked about other things than girls and sports.

One of my roommates was Dale Zimmerman, a junior. He was a botany major although his real interest was ornithology. We remained acquaintances for a couple of years and the summer after he got his bachelor’s degree, I went up to Imlay City, Michigan, one time to see him and happened to get there on the Saturday he was being married , so I ended up attending his wedding.

During my freshman year, I drank and gambles on weekends, often losing the five dollars or so that I had for pocket money that week. My grades suffered because I got a C that year, although it was from an English composition teacher who was commonly known as “C Minus Hawkins”. In my junior year, I got another C, in speech. The teacher had asked for feedback on her teaching so I made an appointment and told her what was wrong with her teaching. After I learned my grade, I went to see her, but she had married and left the university, and I had no recourse.

I think it was during that year when for some reason I had been out on a school night late, drinking. The next morning was a physics test. The other students were all complaining about how late they had stayed up studying for it. They were quite surprised when I scored highest on that physics test without having studied the night before.

When I went to the University of Michigan, I had intended to become a chemist, but after taking introductory chemistry, then introductory physics, I decided these sciences lacked some vital spirit, so in my sophomore year, I took introductory botany and introductory zoology and changed my major to biological sciences.

I did soon give up drinking and gambling because I couldn’t afford it and concentrated on my school work and occasional part-time work.

The many veterans who were my school mates were probably a positive influence in that they were serious about their studies rather than being satisfied with the “gentleman’s C” that pre-war rich students settled for.

When graduation time approached, I wondered what to do next. In late spring, Dr. Warren “Herb” Wagner, a new member of the faculty, asked me whether I would be his graduate assistant at the University of Michigan Biological Station at Douglas Lake. It was called Bug Camp. That stroke of fate probably had much to do with my eventually becoming a botanist.

At the time for commencement, I did not feel that I could afford the fees to rent a cap and gown and had not expected to attend commencement, but I discovered that my mother was really looking forward to seeing me graduate.

She had been an intellectual-type person when young, was one of the few people of her cohorts to finish high school, and would have loved to go to college but never had the opportunity. I think she saw in my education a chance for a vicarious experience. By the time I realized this, it was too late to go through the formal ceremony, so I got tickets and she and I sat in the stands and watched my classmates march up in their cap and gowns.

My summer at the Bug Camp was memorable. I assisted Herb Wagner in teaching courses in algae and pteridophytes (ferns and fern-allies) and I took a course on mosses and liverworts. I also did a research project under Dr. Wagner on the genus Equisetum. For eight weeks, I got up early every morning, spent the day in the field, worked in the lab until late in the evening, and never got much rest. But I loved the experience. Ultimately, of course, I would end up working under Herb Wagner for my Ph.D., on the taxonomy of the genus Equisetum.

During that summer at Bug Camp, Pierre Dansereau, who had taught the ecology course that I had taken the previous school year, came up to the biological station to ask me if I was interested in taking a graduate research position at Florida State University working with Herman Kurz on a study of tidal marshes. Since I had never planned much of my future, I grabbed at the opportunity and when the Bug Camp was over, set out for Tallahassee, Florida. This included an eye-opening train trip.

I was on the train from Jacksonville to Tallahassee and in the vestibule between cars, I encountered a “Negro” of about my age, smoking. I stopped to talk to him and

eventually asked him why he was sitting there smoking rather than doing it in the car where I was sitting. That was my first exposure to segregation. On southern trains at that time, blacks could not ride in the same car as whites.

I had actually, earlier, had an exposure without realizing it in that when I was working at Federal’s in high school, I was once asked by another stock person, a colored man of about age 45, to stop in at some public office and obtain copies of income tax forms for him. I did so but asked him why he didn’t do it for himself. He said because he was afraid they wouldn’t give them to him.

Two other examples, though, of the segregated south come back to mind. On one occasion, I had some boxes of heavy material that I was carrying into the lab and was told I should not do that because there were “niggers” to do the heavy, manual labor.

Another occasion, Marian Anderson came to Tallahassee to give a concert at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College, the local black college. I wanted to hear her so I sneaked in, then felt conspicuous as a white face in a sea of black. Later, I heard of how Marian Anderson had been denied the opportunity of singing in some hall in Washington, D.C. because of the Daughters of the American Revolution and so had been invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to sing on the steps of the Capitol.

At Florida State University, which had previously been Florida State College for Women, I entered the botany department and began working for Dr. Kurz. He was about 55 at the time and had one of the first research grants for scientific studies. Government support of scientific research through grants to university faculty were just beginning then. His was from the Office of Naval Research to study tidal marshes with the idea of them as predictors of rising sea level. My year at Tallahassee also involved a lot of field work and laboratory analysis of soil samples. I took both botany and zoology courses there. My course work was sufficient to maintain my standing as a graduate student but not enough to earn a master’s degree.

During the spring of that year, 1953, I applied for a National Sciences Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, again a new government program. I was awarded one and went to the University of California at Berkeley to work on a master’s degree in botany, but apparently there were some miscommunications because I expected I would be working in ecology under the ecologist Herbert Mason. Part way through the year, I discovered that technically I had no major professor ad nor research program. I ended up being taken under the wing of Dr. Adriance Foster and getting my master’s degree in plant anatomy. The master’s degree did not require a thesis there, but it did require an extended research paper to be approved by the major professor only.

Looking back on it, I realize that my eventually becoming a Ph.D. in botany and a college professor was never planned ahead, but at many stages was a matter of fate: going to Bug Camp, going to Tallahassee, and ending up in anatomy and taxonomy.

I don’t know exactly at what point I realized that I wanted to be a college professor. When I was a high school student, I was often called “The Professor”, because I used big words, I guess. But even after having gotten my master’s degree at Berkeley, I certainly did not view myself as a college professor.

In Berkeley, I was living in a rooming house. One of the other roomers was a Frenchman who was studying mathematics. He owned a jeep and so one time when we had time off, we decided to see California. We drove down to Death Valley and driving that area, discovered that there was a lot of road with no gasoline stations or restaurants. Traveling in an open jeep with an external temperature of over 100 degrees, became very dehydrating. We all began to suffer greatly from thirst and when we finally reached a restaurant, stopped in and spent probably an hour drinking ice water, before we continued our journey.

One of the roommates was a very gentle soul who worked rather than being a student. I became aware that he was a homosexual and I think was the first time that I ever really knew somebody who was homosexual. But because he was such a nice person, I felt no animosity and in fact he died in an auto accident and I felt real sorrow.

While I was in Berkeley, I used to go to the Catholic Center there which was run by the Paulists. Another friend of mine there who was not Catholic was getting married and invited me to the wedding which was in a Protestant church. I had never been in a Protestant church and in fact, thought it would be a mortal sin to go to one. But, since my friend was getting married, I really felt I should attend. So I went in quietly and sat in the very back row, thinking that perhaps that would ameliorate the punishment I would receive for entering a Protestant church. The Catholic Church at that time was less ecumenical than after Vatican II.

During Christmas break, I thought I would visit Baja California, which is part of Mexico, so I traveled south of the Los Angeles area, stopped to visit my cousin Opal Miron, whom I don’t think I had ever met before and then continued down by bus. I had not thought ahead of the fact that I knew no Spanish, the language of Mexico, so I got off the bus in a town in Baja California and asked where I could rent a room. No one knew what I was talking about until finally I used the word hotel which sounds similar in Spanish, and I was pointed to the place. Ensenada was a nice seashore town and I enjoyed spending the days walking the beach or climbing the hill beyond town to look out across the ocean. I managed even without Spanish to order meals and to get the bus back.

I finished my pre-doctoral fellowship year, July, 1954, completing the requirement for the master’s degree. It was not actually awarded until the following spring, by which time I was in the Army. So I did not attend my master’s commencement.

After Berkeley I came back home. I was due to be drafted that October. I was home for a couple of months, like August and September, and I painted the upstairs because it needed doing and my father’s health was bad enough that he couldn’t handle it.

There was one summer I couldn’t get a job, so I spent it driving Dad around a lot on errands. That’s when I got a chance to talk with him about a lot of things. That’s probably when he told me about being in the Army and how the only person he only ever hated was his sergeant in the Army and about being in charge of building warehouses in the port of Le Havre and they had to use wood packing cases and build up beams by nailing lot of small pieces together to construct the warehouse from and he couldn’t talk French, but he was in charge of all these French workers, so he had to show them by motions what to do. He was in the Corps of Engineers because he didn’t want to have to shoot people. That’s why he was building warehouses in the port.

It must have been that summer of 1954, that Frank, Jack Duquette and I drove around the Gaspé Peninsula. Frank had finished his term in the Air Force and we drove to Maine to see where he had been stationed. We were camping out on a bluff overlooking some bay the night Hurricane Carol struck, but it did not blow our tent over. We were somewhat sheltered where we put up our tent.

When we got to Gaspé Peninsula, we stayed in a little cabin and went into the nearest settlement to buy fish then we went back and cooked up a delicious bouillabaisse which Frank and I both recall now as the highlight of the trip. I do remember the outstanding scenery. There was on place where just offshore was standing a tall, barren rock with numerous birds flying around it and apparently nesting on it.

This experience may have been a precursor to the Gourmet Club which George, Frank and I founded shortly later. For that, we would take turns preparing a special meal for the other two. I don’t think we met very often, but I do remember this unique arrangement. That’s one reason I am encouraged to see my sons-in-law, Delano DuGarm and Bruce Ohr, both good gourmet cooks. It seems to me that when I was younger, one never heard of a man cooking anything other than frying a hamburger or grilling some chicken. A special feature of the times George cooked was his homegrown tomatoes and corn, the latter of which we watched develop on the stalk. It went straight off the stalk into boiling water, and then onto our plates.

Rather than starting a Ph.D. program with the draft hanging over my head, since I had had draft deferments to go to college but wasn’t sure they would continue being honored, I decided to submit to the draft before entering a Ph.D. program. That’s why I spent that summer at home painting the house. I feel blessed that I had that time with my father, for he would die without me having another opportunity to spend time with him one-on-one. I was drafted in October, 1954.

My basic training was at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. That was a miserable eight weeks. Because of being on K.P. (Kitchen Police), marching in cold rain, etc., I

developed a persistent cough, lost a lot of weight, and probably was either living with or on the verge of having pneumonia.

We finished basic training just before New Year’s and were to go home for leave before beginning the Advanced Basic Training. One member of our company arranged for charter buses to take us into the nearest place where we could get some public transportation home. Everybody was so desperate to leave the base that we all crowded on these buses as soon as they arrived and the last thing I remember as the bus pulled out was that the fellow who had organized it all was left standing in the cold because there was no more room on the bus. We probably would have killed each other to get on the bus at that point.

When I got home, my poor mother was very concerned. She thought I looked like I was at death’s door. But two weeks of rest and recreation did restore me to health so that when I reported for Advanced Basic Training at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, I was in reasonable shape.

Because I had a master’s degree in biology, I had been sent to Fort Sam Houston to be trained as a Medical Lab Technician. However, when I got there, the Medical Lab Tech program was full so I was reassigned to the Hospital Corpsman program. We were commonly known as bedpan jockeys. The eight weeks at Fort Sam Houston were much more positive than had been the time at Fort Leonard Wood. San Antonio was a nice part of Texas. I remember going into San Antonio to attend an opera, Lucia di Lammermoor, and as I entered the opera house wearing my uniform, I was given a ticket by some person who was not going to use his. I felt good that somebody could be that kind to a soldier.

During my Advance Basic Training at Fort Sam Houston, my father died, in February of 1955. I was called out of class to go to Company Headquarters where I was informed that my father had died and that I was being given emergency leave to go home. And attend his funeral. I was sent to the Red Cross office to borrow the money in order to fly to Detroit. IN Detroit, of course, were all of my siblings and my mother deep in mourning. We went to the funeral home for the viewing of my father’s body. The whole experience did not really come to a peak until the next morning when we were sitting in a car outside the funeral home and my father’s coffin was brought out to be put into the hearse. At that moment, I suddenly fully comprehended that he was dead and I broke down. After the funeral was over, my mother remarked to me something about my having been a tower of strength. I never felt like it at that moment.

Upon graduation from Advanced Basic Training, I was assigned to Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco. This was a choice assignment because San Francisco is such a lovely city in which to spend time. From our barracks we looked out at the Golden Gate Bridge and across to Marin County. Here I ended up being the doorman on the night shift in the psychiatric closed ward, which meant I had to unlock and lock the door to let people enter and leave the building. And of course I had to prevent violent patients from exiting. Since I worked the night shift, much of the time things were quiet.

Also, since I was in the Army and not worried about earning a living, I partied a lot when I had time off. One buddy and I would walk off base sight-seeing, eating and drinking. Usually we managed to spend all of our pay within two weeks and then have to hang around base for two weeks until the next pay day. One memorable occasion was the night when we had been drinking too much, took a taxi back to the base and started to climb the stairs in our barracks. My friend who was somewhat hefty was going up ahead of me. I was right behind him when, in his drunkenness, he fell backwards. We both ended up at the foot of the stairs with him atop me, but in my drunkenness, I was so relaxed that I did not suffer any injury.

I became somewhat dissatisfied with my work, partly because of the stress of dealing with completely irrational people, so I applied for transfer to the professional corps under the chemical corps. U was accepted and transferred to Dugway, Utah, to participate in the Chemical and Biological Warfare Experimentation going on there.

At Dugway, my job was to be part of a team trapping rodents in the desert, extracting their blood, and then taking it to a Public Health Service Lab in Idaho to be tested for disease levels. This was a way of monitoring for the escape of disease agents such as anthrax being released into the test areas. The chemical warfare people had a much rougher time than we did because they would have to go out all night wearing gas masks and running around, whereas we worked only in the daytime.

Because I had botanical experience, the public health officer in charge of the Biological Warfare section, had me compile an herbarium of the local poisonous plants. This was necessary to identify potential poisoning of animals from eating poisonous plants rather than from the biological agents released. We would also, every so often, go out and take blood samples from local herds of sheep without, of course, telling the shepherd why we wanted the blood samples. There was some reasonable excuse for doing it.

Several years after I had left Dugway, there was a report of death in herds of sheep in the nearby Nevada area and I immediately realized that some test at Dugway had gone wrong.

At Dugway, there was no real recreational facility so that when we had time off we would go into Salt Lake City which was about 100 miles away, rent a hotel room, and then enjoy the city. Again, I have a memory of a drunken episode. This time a group of us were in a hotel room and for some reason I wanted to show off being able to do one-handed pushups but ended up falling on my chin several times and not realizing what was happening until the next day when my jaw was exceedingly sore.

Because of going to Berkeley to school and then going into the Army, I had several trips across the country. I don’t know exactly which ones, but there are two outstanding memories from these trips. One was when I was hitchhiking and picked up by an Army lieutenant on leave. We drove to Grand Canyon to look at it and decided to

walk down from the South Rim. We walked down about four miles, about half way, and thought we should turn back. It was stifling hot. There had been a water fountain at each mile, but I don’t think there was any past he four mile point, so going up the trail we became aware of how much more difficult it is going up than going down. We made it to the next water fountain, rested and drank, and then the heat and aridity became so serious that my companion sat down in the middle of the trail and would not move. I had visions of him dying there but I could not convince him to get up and continue. I was shocked to realize that he had given up and was prepared to remain there forever. Fortunately for us, a donkey train was coming up the trail (people would ride donkeys down to the bottom and up, and would be led in a string of a dozen or so). The people on the donkeys gave us water, so we were able to climb on out of what almost become Death Canyon.

Another memorable incident was when I was hitchhiking I was picked up by a man who drove continuously about thirty hours, then stopped. I was going to get a room in a hotel overnight. I took my baggage and he said, “Don’t bother, just leave it here” I think he thought I didn’t trust him, so to show my trust, I did leave a sweater and few other things in the car. The next morning I got up and went down to the car, but it was gone. He had left me.

Altogether during my years out west, I got to visit not only Death Valley and the Grand Canyon but also Yosemite, Sequoia, Glacier, Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Zion, and Bryce Canyon National Parks.

I applied for early release from the Army then, in order to enter the University of Michigan and the Ph. D. program in September of 1956.

I arrived in Ann Arbor with a graduate teaching fellowship and the G. I. Bill so that I was relatively rich for a graduate student. I did taxonomic botany, working with Herb Wagner and studying the genus Equisetum. I was teaching sections of the introductory botany course. Because of wanting to do well and to finish in three years, I ended up putting in long hours.

Frank and Boots were both attending the University of Michigan that fall, so we rented a house together. Frank was in an engineering program, Boots was doing library science. I did not spend much time at home because I would try to get into the Natural Science building before 8 a.m. and would often be there until 11 p.m. Boots ended up staying only the fall semester then leaving to marry Louis Burns. Frank and I gave up the house after that year and each got rooms closer to campus.

During the summer of 1957, Frank and I joined the Youth Hostel movement, got a cheap charter flight on Flying Tigers airline to Europe to spend seventy days hitchhiking and riding trains and buses around that continent. We visited the Netherlands, northern Germany (where we were taken for British because that was the area occupied by the English army). We got a ferry up to Denmark, hitchhiked back, going to Hamburg to meet a friend who never showed up, went sown through France to Switzerland and Vienna, Austria, then to Venice, Italy, and on down through Florence to Rome and back

up through France to England and finally back to Amsterdam to catch our return flight. Seeing all those places made that a memorable summer.

At the university, my course work went well and my research on Equisetum progressed satisfactorily so that when I was coming up to the third year of my Ph. D. program, I was awarded a fellowship so that I no longer had to teach and could devote full-time to my research work. It was during the spring of my junior year that I used to attend Mass regularly and then go to a nearby café to eat breakfast because I had a room on William Street near St. Mary’s Catholic Chapel, the Newman Center.

One day in February I was at a meal at the Catholic Center and encountered an attractive woman, whose acquaintance I made. She was active in doing the newsletter for the Newman Club. I began courting her and before the spring was over had gone to Kalamazoo to ask her father for her hand in marriage.

The summer of 1958 George and I took a trip to Isle Royal, Michigan. We drove up there, as I remember, non-stop and got the boat from Houghton, Michigan to Rock Harbor at the east end of Isle Royal National Park, and then set out to hike the length of it to Windigo at the west end. That was before the real passenger ferries were put into service and this was a rather rough working boat which did carry passengers. We hiked the length of the island and did not see another living person for about three days. Because of having to go up and down so much to get to the central ridge, by the time we reached our fist inland camp, we had to stop and rest for a full day. It was exciting seeing all the wild life and signs of wild life. The third day we encountered a man named David Mech who was studying wolves on Isle Royal which at that time was one of the very few places in the United States where wild wolves lived. We heard wolves at night but did not actually see any. When we reached the western end of the island, we did see moose.

We took the mail boat back from there to the eastern end and discovered that since we had not shown up when expected at Windigo, the rangers were concerned about us and were on the lookout for us. This trip with my brother George was to be my final foray as a bachelor before becoming tied up in marriage.

Kathleen and I were married on September 20, 1958 by Father John F. Bradley at St. Mary’s in Ann Arbor. I remember that since he knew us and had baptized Kathleen, that he was able to give a little homily which was personally directed to us. We had our wedding reception at the University of Michigan Union on the cheap. Since we had little money for this wedding, and since Kathleen’s father would not come and provided only a small amount of subsidy for it, we were trying to do things as frugally as we could. We did spring for a photographer and we had a lunch at the Union with Chicken a la King. For flowers on the altar at St. Mary’s, I borrowed some asparagus fern pots from the University of Michigan botanical garden greenhouse and we found some flowers there which we stuck in among the asparagus fern. I did not realize that the custom at weddings was to leave the flowers at church, so after Mass, we carried our pots to the Union to decorate the tables there, and of course, they were eventually returned to the botanical garden.

Since I was married and had the fellowship, I was able to work very hard in finishing my research and in hiring my wife at no pay to type and retype the dissertation (including many long pages of citation of specimens which I am sure would have cost a fortune for any other typist to do for me).

In that spring, we began considering job possibilities and ended up applying for a position as an anatomist-morphologist at the University of Rhode Island. I had never really heard of that University or even that state (many people in Michigan thought it was somewhere near Chicago), but since this job was in my field, I could be teaching courses other than the introductory course, I applied for it and was accepted. I later learned that it was most unusual that I was hired without having gone for an interview.

Kathleen and I finished the dissertation. I defended it successfully, we made all the necessary corrections, which were not many, and, arranging for a moving van to move our goods from Ann Arbor to Kingston, Rhode Island, we drove to our new life there.

This was the end of preparing for full-fledged adulthood and it was time for me to take on a man’s responsibilities. When I was laboring away over my dissertation, my sister Boots used to ask me, “When are you going to get a job and go to work?”

This was the time.

THE END

What Did Dad Do?

By Rose Marie Powers

Dad, Henry George Hauke, enlisted as a carpenter in the Army on 12 June 1917, served with the A.E.F., American Expeditionary Force, in France from 18 August 1917 until he arrived back in the United States and was discharged 14 April 1919. While in the Army Engineers, he helped build warehouses in the south of France which were still in use during World War II, 1941 to 1945.

After a short time “back home” in Ripley, Ohio, he wended his way to Dayton, Ohio, where he worked for a short time, then on to Detroit to seek his fortune.

At some time in his younger years, he worked on the family farm in Ripley and among other things constructed tomato casks and picked many, many bushels of tomatoes, selling them at twenty-five cents a bushel to big grocery concerns like Kroger’s.

He reached Detroit probably the middle of 1920 and until the Depression worked in the New Center-area –Grosse Pointe, Grosse Ile, Bloomfield, Palmer Woods, and on the Broadway, Capital and Madison theaters in Detroit. He served on construction crews and as foreman.

That work folded with the Depression and he had no full-time job until he went to work at the Ford Rouge plant, in the foundry I think. He later transferred to the Carpentry Shop.

During the interim, he served a jury duty stint and built the 16840 Hartwell house. Mom said that at the Carpentry Shop, he built showcases for Greenfield Village and the Edison Institute, among other things. Ill health in 1949 and early 1950 caused him to retire.

While at the Carpentry Shop, he built the Snowden house in which our Boudreau cousins lived, our Littlefield house and the Dr. Montagne house, doing all facets of the work himself from drawing up the blueprints to arranging financing, to contracting the operations he could not do by hand and all the rest of the work until each entire house was completed and landscaped. In addition, during all this time, he did private carpentry jobs for various people before reporting in the afternoon to his P.M. job at River Rouge.

What was Mom doing during this time? She was busy, too.

Mom graduated from Baraga High School in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in about 1917 and came to Detroit to seek work and to pave the way for the rest of her family to move down from Pelkie.

Mom was first employed by the Parke-Davis drug company and later by the Peninsular State Bank, until her marriage, December, 1923. Then her main job began. She ran a family, a house, the finances, and a canning factory and food-processing operation.

Note: The print edition of this revised Duquette Cookbook included updated addresses which are not included here in the interest of individual’s privacy