by Richard Hill
The residential neighborhood near Plymouth Road and Stark Street, where Jackie once lived with her mother, was gone. Various commercial businesses filled the space once occupied by small homes.
Cavalcade Inn had burned down many years earlier, but by asking around, I found the site. Although the roads had changed, I also located the approximate site of the Jeep accident that killed Jackie and Joyce.
The day was a “Sentimental Journey” in every way. Seeing these places made Jackie’s life far more real to me.
Before leaving the area, I stopped at the local newspapers to search for additional clippings about the accident. Amazingly, the Northville Record still had the actual newspapers from 1947. No microfilm.
The accident that killed Jackie and Joyce was front-page news in this small-town paper. But the article did not include any photos.
The newspaper’s editor was in the office at the time. As she photocopied the article for me, she asked about my interest in that news item.
Without mentioning adoption, I told her that one of the women killed in the accident was my mother, adding that I had no pictures of her and was hoping there might have been one with the article.
The editor noted that many people in Northville and nearby Plymouth had lived in the area a long time. Perhaps one of their readers had a photo. She took my name and phone number and promised to mention my query in the next weekly issue, dated February 10, 1982.
On February 11, my phone rang. Once the woman caller confirmed she was speaking to me, she surprised me with these words: “This is your Aunt Marilyn.”
15
LYNN
The voice on the other end of the line belonged to my biological aunt. Marilyn was the older sister of my birth mother, Jackie.
Of course, I was thrilled to receive her call. Marilyn, who I learned went by the nickname, Lynn, did not live near Northville. But an incredible series of events caused her to learn about me through a newspaper she did not read.
• A serious traffic accident had recently occurred in almost exactly the same spot as Jackie and Joyce’s accident thirty-five years earlier.
• This reminded Lynn of her sisters’ accident and she mentioned the coincidence to her daughter, Judi.
• Shortly after that conversation, Judi happened to speak with a friend who lived in Northville.
• For some reason, Judi shared the old story of her aunts’ deaths with that friend.
• The next day the Northville Record came out with its brief note about the old accident and a son looking for a photo of his mother.
• Judi’s friend happened to see the item and realized that the two sisters it mentioned had to be Judi’s aunts.
• The friend called Judi and read her the article. Judi called the editor of the paper, who said I’d made a good impression on her.
• Judi then called her mother, Lynn, who immediately called me.
Fortunately, Lynn knew and remembered that Jackie had given up a child for adoption. So Lynn correctly surmised that I was that child. She was happy to introduce herself and fill me in on family history.
Lynn was the family’s oldest child, born in 1923. Jackie and Joyce came along in 1926 and 1927.
Their parents were Horace and Marion Hartzell. Horace was a bright man with a good job at the telephone company. But he drank a lot and often squandered the family’s money.
Tensions rose between the girls’ parents until Horace left his wife and family in 1938. When he didn’t return, Marion had to find a job.
Lynn was in high school and remained at home. But Marion had to board the two younger girls in the Edwin Denby Home run by the Salvation Army. Jackie and Joyce lived in that home from 1938 to 1941.
After Marion married her second husband, Johnny Ratkewicz, she was able to bring Jackie and Joyce home. Jackie, then fifteen, hated her stepfather. Lynn thought the home situation had been a factor in Jackie’s decision to quit school early and marry Leonard at such a young age.
Lynn, who was three years older, also got married. She remembered spending a lot of time with Jackie in the summer of 1943. Both girls were pregnant for the first time and Jackie’s husband, Leonard, was away in the service.
When Jackie and Leonard later split up, Lynn was preoccupied with her own family. She had two babies at home and did not want to get in the middle of a divorce case. Once Mike moved to his paternal grandmother’s home, Lynn never saw him again.
“I did see Mike on a Detroit television station a few years ago,” Lynn said. “He was a contestant on Bowling for Dollars. But I figured he would not know who I was, so I never contacted him.”
Naturally, I wondered if Lynn would be able to name my biological father. But she could not answer that question for me.
When her husband’s employer transferred him to Kentucky, Lynn followed him. She did not return until the fall of 1945 and was then dealing with her own marital problems. As a result, she had little contact with Jackie and did not know much about her sister’s last two years.
She knew about Jackie’s second pregnancy, but Jackie never shared anything with her about the father.
When I described myself as tall, Lynn wondered if my father might have been Lester Barney, a tall Plymouth man whose family owned a restaurant called Barneys. Jackie and Lester had dated at some time, but Lynn could not remember when.
A veteran, Lester had shrapnel in his head that gave him seizures. He never married and died in a motorcycle accident in the early 1950s.
Since Barney was not a Polish name, I did not think he could be the one. But taking detailed notes was my nature. So I wrote down the information.
After divorcing her first husband, Lynn remarried in 1948. Her second husband was the love of her life and they had four more children for a total of six—all girls. He had died some years before this conversation and she was now a widow.
I asked Lynn if she knew what happened to her sister Joyce’s daughter. She knew the daughter’s maiden name was Linda Clark. The last thing Lynn had heard was that Linda was divorced. But they had not been in touch for at least fifteen years, so Lynn did not know Linda’s current name or where she lived.
As for my quest for a photo, Lynn had good news. She did have a photo of my mother. It was a formal studio portrait taken when Jackie was about fifteen years old. Lynn offered to have a copy made and send it to me. We ended the call with a promise to speak again soon.
A week later, I received a large envelope from Aunt Lynn. I tore into it like a five-year-old on Christmas morning.
In addition to the photo of Jackie, she also included two old studio portraits of Horace’s mother, my great-grandmother. There was also a studio photo of Jackie and Lynn taken when Jackie was about a year old, and a snapshot of Marion, my grandmother.
To complete the package, Lynn had even tracked down a copy of the Northville Record article that resulted in her calling me. I was touched by her thoughtfulness.
As an adoptee who had never seen any biological ancestors, I pored over every photo and proudly showed them to my family and friends.
The picture that meant the most to me, of course, was the eight-by-ten black-and-white photo of Jackie, my birth mother. She was beautiful. And that wasn’t just my biased opinion. Every person I showed the photo to had the same reaction. More than that, she looked happy. And I saw myself in her eyes.
Jackie at age 15
The weekend after the photos arrived, I went on a two-night men’s retreat at St. Lazare Retreat House on Spring Lake. A silent retreat in a beautiful setting, it allowed many hours for personal reflection. In my case, I used the time to dwell on my search in general and my birth mother in particular.
I took along a couple books on adoption search that others had recommended.
It surprised me to learn that many adoptees felt angry with their birth mothers for rejecting them. I had never felt that and I wondered why. I decided it was because I learned about my adoption so late. By the age of eighteen, the fact
that a young, unmarried girl could not raise a baby alone seemed obvious to me.
Other adoptees spoke of having fantasies about their birth mothers coming back into their lives. Once again, I missed that phase due to the lateness of my discovery. About to leave for college, I had been looking forward to a life with less parental supervision. I had no desire for a second mother in my life.
There were, of course, other comments in the books that matched my feelings exactly. For example, adoptees spoke of feeling more complete once they knew the facts about their background. My story was far from finished. Yet I could feel a growing contentment as the pieces fell into place.
I had taken Jackie’s photo with me to the retreat house and I propped it up on the desk in my tiny room. Like most guys, I was always aware of my thoughts. But my feelings were difficult to find. That weekend, as I tried hard to get them to surface, I was more successful than I ever imagined.
After staring at Jackie for a long time, tears began to form in the corners of my eyes. Then I really started to cry. It took me much of the weekend to identify the feelings behind this sudden burst of emotion.
Why would I cry about a woman I could not possibly remember who had died when I was a year old?
When I started my search, I was merely curious about Jackie. She was more of a concept than a real person. But as I got to know more about her, the rough life she led and her tragic early death, I developed feelings for her. She wasn’t just a name on a birth certificate anymore. She was my mother. And I knew I loved her.
Eventually, most children grieve over the death of their parents. I had already lost the man who had been Dad to me. Now I was experiencing delayed grief over my birth mother’s death and our lost relationship.
Obviously, there were many things I never got to ask Jackie. But on that weekend, I discovered some things I wanted to tell her.
I wanted her to know that I understood why she couldn’t keep me and I was not angry. That giving me up was the right thing to do in her situation. Finally, I wanted her to know that I had turned out OK.
As I continued to gaze at Jackie’s photo, I thought of the movie Somewhere in Time, which had been filmed on Michigan’s Mackinac Island. My wife, Pat, and I had seen it a little more than a year earlier.
In the movie, Christopher Reeve’s character, a playwright in the late 1970s, becomes entranced with the photo of a lovely young girl (Jane Seymour) from 1912. He then uses self-hypnosis to travel back in time to meet her.
That was exactly what I wanted to do! Only I wanted to travel back to the 1940s to meet the beautiful young woman in this photo. I lay quietly on my bed, closed my eyes, and gave it my best shot.
It didn’t work, of course. But I really wished it had.
On the last Saturday in February 1982, Pat and I loaded up the kids for another first-time meeting with lost family in the Detroit suburbs. This time our destination was the home of Lynn’s daughter, Judi.
We got to meet Aunt Lynn, Judi, three more of my biological cousins and many of their children. Like my meeting with Mike and Eleanor, it went quite well. I was beginning to see that there was a lot of curiosity about lost relatives from both sides of the adoption wall.
Judi presented me with an old greeting card for a baby’s first birthday. It had been hers and she saved it all these years. The handwritten signature read “Aunt Jackie” and Judi wanted me to have this sample of my birth mother’s handwriting.
I thought it was extremely nice of Judi to give it up for me.
When Judi learned that I had attended Michigan State in the late sixties, she remembered a strange conversation she had back then with our grandmother.
Judi was visiting Marion in a Lansing hospital, when the old woman kept insisting that she had a grandson at nearby MSU. She demanded to see him before she died.
Marion’s abuse of alcohol had been legendary in the family. By that time, there were doubts about her mental health. So Judi just assumed her grandmother was hallucinating.
Now that she had met me, Judi realized that Marion was not at all crazy when she talked about a grandson at MSU.
I explained that Marion must have kept track of me through her husband Bill French’s niece, Mickey Woods, who knew my adoptive parents.
Marion died in 1969—the year after I graduated. We never met.
16
TONY’S STORY
I told Mike about meeting Aunt Lynn and gave him her phone number. I also gave her Mike’s number. Living less than thirty minutes from each other, I hoped they would meet. But neither one called the other. I soon realized it would be up to me to get us all together someday.
Life got busy again and I had to let my search slide for about six months. In August 1982, I got Mike to make his first visit to our home on the west side of the state. We had a great time and were starting to connect with each other.
I also stayed in touch with Aunt Lynn. We talked occasionally by phone and I stopped to see her whenever I had business in the Detroit area. She kept filling me in on her family, including her father, Horace Hartzell, who was Marion’s first husband and my maternal grandfather.
Growing up, Horace had acquired the nickname “Tony,” so everyone knew him by that name instead of Horace.
While Tony was still a baby, his mother had divorced his biological father, Oscar Friskie. She remarried James Hartzell, who had adopted Tony. The parents never told their son about the adoption or his mother’s earlier marriage.
Once again, I was amazed at how secretive people used to be about subjects like divorce and adoption. People before my generation seemed to think that anything short of a perfect family with biological children was shameful. I just didn’t get it.
When Lynn was a young girl, Oscar Friskie suddenly showed up at her family’s doorstep. Tony was at work, so Oscar introduced himself to Marion. Unfortunately, he was only in Detroit for a short business trip and could not stay.
When Marion filled Tony in on Oscar’s visit, my grandfather finally learned about his adoption and birth father. But Tony and Oscar never met. I wondered if I would ever meet or even identify my birth father.
That conversation with Aunt Lynn led me to ask about the nationalities on my birth mother’s side. I learned that Marion’s ancestors were English and Irish. Tony’s mother was Pennsylvania Dutch. Tony’s birth father, Oscar Friskie, had changed the family name from Janushefska. He was Polish.
I couldn’t help but smile when I heard that. A great grandfather would account for one eighth of my ethnic background. If the non-identifying information on my birth father was correct, my Polack meter was now reading five-eighths Polish. Mom would be so proud.
One day I asked Aunt Lynn if she knew what happened to her father, Tony, after he disappeared in 1938. Long after the deaths of her sisters, Lynn learned that Tony had remarried in Oregon. He died in 1966, but his widow was still alive.
After getting the widow’s name and phone number from Lynn, I called her in Oregon and introduced myself. Her name was Harriet Hartzell and she turned out to be one of the most fascinating characters I had met yet. She was seventy-five then and she graciously filled me in on my grandfather’s later life.
Tony was thirty-seven years old at the time he left Marion and his three daughters in Detroit. According to Harriet, Tony made his way to Kansas City and later to Salt Lake City by jumping on freight trains. The Depression was in full swing and he worked whatever jobs he could find.
Eventually, Tony made it to San Jose, California, where his parents were living in the Victorian home of his maternal grandmother. From there he moved to Oregon where he worked at a cousin’s dairy. In 1940, he met Harriet, a widow, and they soon married.
According to Harriet, Tony wanted to send money for his kids in Detroit. But he wasn’t earning much and he was also afraid Marion would make trouble for him if she knew where he was.
When Tony received a letter from someone telling him about the 1947 accident that killed two of his daughters, h
e was quite shaken up.
“He loved them all,” Harriet said. “Yet Jackie was his favorite.” Tony had known about Jackie’s son, Mike, but not about me.
Tony was intelligent and eventually got his career going with a major manufacturing company in Portland, Oregon. Later in life, he even stopped drinking. Just days before his retirement, he died in a traffic accident.
Harriet described Tony as a good-looking man with lots of personality and a wonderful sense of humor. He attracted a lot of attention from the ladies, and Harriet had to fight off more than one woman to keep her man.
Wistfully, Harriet quoted me a line from the old song, “Thanks for the Memory.” She insisted it was a perfect description of life with Tony.
“You might have been a headache but you never were a bore.”
Harriet sent me two eight-by-ten photos of Tony. In one he was a young man, possibly still in his twenties, and in the other he was in his sixties. This was the first time I had ever seen pictures of a male ancestor. Everyone I showed them to thought we had features in common.
I continued to correspond with Harriet at least once a year. She wrote long, elegant letters about anything and everything. She was bright, charming, and more than a little eccentric.
Much like Mike’s Aunt Eleanor, she was not a relative of mine. Yet she was still excited that I had contacted her and was eager to share whatever she could to help me.
My next clue did not come from Harriet, however. It was a small, black-and-white photograph that got me excited.
17
RAY
In late summer 1982, I passed through Lansing on a business trip and stopped to see Carol Woods. That wasn’t her married name, of course, but she would always be Carol Woods to me.
Members of her mother’s family had given me the information on my birth mother. I wanted to fill Carol in on my progress and it was a timely stop, as she was anxious to show me something.