After the war, during which Helen and Brenda stayed in North Carolina with her parents, Marvin was transferred to a base in Alabama. There, another child, Kenneth Everett, was born. But the infant died six months later from complications that were attributed to an Rh blood factor of Helen’s. The following year, she had a miscarriage, and several more would follow in succeeding years.
When Marvin was transferred to Korea in 1947, peacetime conditions allowed him to bring his wife and small daughter along, although that did not prevent Marvin from carousing in bars at night while Helen stayed home with Brenda. At the time, venereal diseases were rampant among the bar girls of Seoul. Eighteen months after their arrival, Helen became seriously ill, jaundiced from a condition that was diagnosed as hepatitis. Accompanied by Brenda, she was rushed back to the States by emergency airlift.
Helen was at home recovering from the initial assault of this illness when the war in Korea began in 1950, just before Marvin had been scheduled to be transferred back to the States. She and Brenda would never see him alive again.
In the spring of 1951, she got a terse army telegram that told her Marvin had been killed in action. In a later message from the army, she was informed that Marvin had died heroically and had been posthumously awarded the Silver Star, the nation’s highest award for valor after the Medal of Honor.
The citation the grieving young widow received with her notice of Marvin’s award said that while serving with the 24th Infantry Division in Kun Jong Dong, Korea, on April 16, 1951, Second Lieutenant Marvin E. Taylor, seeing that forward elements of the troops were pinned down as his company attacked Hill 404, “left his platoon and joined the lead elements, which were without a leader. Exposing himself to enemy fire, he completely took over the situation.… His continuing exposure to enemy fire was an inspiration to all his men.”
Even after she remarried, Helen kept a photo of Marvin in a bureau drawer and always kept that letter close to her. Over the years, she would take it out on occasion and read it aloud. Sometimes, in the later years, and with malicious intent, she would read it aloud to John.
As they had expected, John’s presence on the West Coast wasn’t required for long; the army discharged him in April. He and Helen made the long trip back, picking Brenda up first at her grandmother’s in North Carolina, and then, with Alma still in tow, heading up to Michigan, where John’s old job at Ernst & Ernst was waiting.
Brenda was not happy about her mother remarrying so soon after her father’s funeral. Brenda would always cherish her fleeting memories of the three of them, of Marvin in his uniform and she and her mother nestling beside him. So she naturally resented and mistrusted the intruder who came into her mother’s life, a life that Brenda had begun to notice was now filled with sorrow and an anger that occasionally flared toward her child for no apparent good reason.
But John quickly won her over. A smart child, she quickly developed certain survival instincts that allowed her to discern in John a potential ally. John’s overanxiousness to be liked, a trait that many adults found repellent, appealed greatly to the preadolescent Brenda. Unlike others, who went pointedly unnamed, “he would never cut you down,” she said in 1971.
After a brief stay in Bay City, John and Helen found an apartment near Detroit. John returned happily to Ernst & Ernst, to a good job with a future, at a prestigious firm where he had proudly written on his personnel form, under the heading “Hobbies”: “Going to plays and listening to classical music.”
To John and Helen List, as to millions of other newlyweds holding hands at the edge of a new decade ripe with promise in 1952, with the Depression and two wars finally behind them, with bouncy songs on the Hit Parade expounding the joys of a happy little house and a family with a child, or two, or three or more, the long-delayed American dream lay at last within their grasp.
Chapter Four
In 1954, John and Helen moved into a small rented house in Inkster, a suburb of Detroit.
Their first child, Patricia Marie, was born on January 8, 1955, in a Detroit hospital. She was a pretty, delightful baby who came into the world with a smile on her face.
Patty’s birth heralded the happiest times the Lists would ever know. They were a merry little group. Helen, proud and happy to be a new mother once again, was doted on by her own mother, who came to visit, and even Alma’s chilly nature melted into effusive German warmth once she held the baby in her arms. She even kissed Helen, for the first time.
Brenda, just turned thirteen, bubbled with delight over the baby. And John, who read Dr. Spock and other authors of the child-rearing books that had sprung up for the parents of the Baby Boom, made a concerted effort to gather Brenda firmly into the fold. Among Brenda’s happiest childhood memories are of trips to the city zoo and the circus, and of her stepfather making pizza for the family on Saturday nights. John also spent hours a week coaching Brenda in the Lutheran religious instructions he insisted on. These were the years of the winter visits to Alma and the ice fishing, the time when Brenda first recalled being comfortable calling her new father Daddy.
The networking techniques John had learned at Michigan, meanwhile, paid an unexpected dividend. An Ernst & Ernst executive John had known and liked, Bernard White, had recently left to become comptroller of Sutherland Paper Company, a producer of paper packaging based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Throwaway packaging was starting on a period of phenomenal growth as the fifties gathered momentum. White suggested that an ambitious young man with a growing family like John List might want to break away from the hidebound atmosphere of an accounting firm, where promotions were limited.
Initially wary, for he was proud of working for one of the most prestigious accounting firms in the country, John did not decide to come to Kalamazoo to have a look until late in 1955, just before Patty’s first birthday. He was impressed. The people at Sutherland seemed to be on the ball. What’s more, they seemed to genuinely like him as a person, not just an M.B.A. on a résumé. Kalamazoo was a fine town to raise a family, 165 miles removed from the gritty outskirts of Detroit. Elated, John drove back to Inkster to think over the offer from Sutherland.
Strategically—and John always thought strategically—a move to the packaging business made sense. In the years after being freed from the constraints imposed by the demands of World War II, American consumers were buying with a vengeance. Industry was going on an unprecedented spree of production driven by the twin engines of advertising and marketing. Literally millions of young families, with millions and millions of new babies, were breaking free from shackles put in place by the Depression of the 1930s and kept there by the war. Materially acquisitive, a generation of new Americans was practically giddy with the awareness that it was now quite possible to have a piece of the good life. All over the nation, they were fleeing the cities for newly developed suburbs, where an explosion of home building, highway construction, and automobile production, all of it illuminated by the new domination of television, was effecting the biggest change in American society since the Industrial Revolution. In the America of the fifties, optimism blazed into the sky like a searchlight outside a new car dealership.
John realized what these new settlers demanded to go with their split-level homes with the big V-8 cars in the driveway next to well-tended lawns. More convenience to enjoy it all! Throwaway packaging was clearly a wave of the future.
He had brought back from Kalamazoo a handsome twelve-page recruitment booklet that Sutherland’s personnel office handed out to prospective employees. To a man of thirty at a crossroads in his career, the brochure made a persuasive case.
The brochure proudly listed the company’s products, among them “butter and margarine cartons, cigarette cartons, soap boxes, packages for baked goods, soft drink and beer carry-outs, sanitary napkin cartons, shirt boxes and shirt protectors, lard and shortening packages, frozen food containers and egg and cereal cartons” as well as “paper plates and cups, both plastic-coated and plain, meat boards for prepackaging, butter
chips, produce and fruit trays.” Not to mention “Plasta-Plate, the best plastic-coated paper plate on the market.”
Sutherland boasted of its tradition. One of the two men who had founded it in 1917 was still chairman of the board. It was one of the largest employers in Kalamazoo, with thirty-five hundred people on the payroll. The brochure practically begged for “young, well-trained men ready to step into sales, production and administrative positions.” Sutherland stressed that it was more than a company, it was a corporate family, happily located in a municipality, Kalamazoo, that called itself the “Debt-Free City.”
“If the Company is to grow successfully, the management team must grow too,” Sutherland’s president, William Race, noted in the brochure that John avidly read. “I believe that there is a good future in the Company for the right men, and the future of Sutherland Paper Company will be in the hands of those right men. Perhaps you can be one of them.”
Perhaps? John List was sold. He jumped at the opportunity to join the Sutherland corporate family.
Early in 1956, John started in Sutherland’s costs division at $7,200 a year, a handsome salary for a thirty-year-old at a time when a new home cost little more than that.
The Lists didn’t have enough for the down payment on a house when they arrived. They rented an apartment, and John began putting aside money for a house.
Initially, Sutherland was everything it had promised. And John got good marks there from the start, when a personnel officer who interviewed him made this note about the new employee: “A very good appearance, seems to be well-adjusted, a very capable person with a good personality.”
Erwin Slesdet, an accountant whose desk was adjacent to John’s, remembered a “neatly dressed man, a polite man. He always wore a hat, walked erect, and kept his clothes pressed and his shoes shined.”
At first Helen seemed happy in Kalamazoo. Always an avid reader, she now seemed to find in books a refuge from the stultifying demands of being a mother to children, both of whom were at particularly demanding ages: one and fourteen.
“Helen was very proud of the fact that in Kalamazoo she belonged to three book clubs,” said her sister Jean, who was living with her husband and their young son then in Illinois. The families visited each other regularly. “I’ve seen her in a day’s time go through two books,” Jean said with a laugh. “She would rather read than do housework and things like that. She read anything she could get her hands on.”
Helen became pregnant again shortly after the move to Kalamazoo, and because of her history of miscarriages, she was advised by her doctor to stay in bed as much as possible. Not especially happy at the prospect of another baby anyway, she welcomed the excuse to do little but read. When she wasn’t in school, Brenda was saddled with the hands-on supervision of little Patty, who had only been walking for a few months.
The baby, named John Frederick after John’s own father, was born on October 21, 1956. The infant was an amiable, extraordinarily engaging, and active child, but one who, even as an infant, could show a temper.
Helen’s mother came up from North Carolina for a few weeks to help after the baby was born; when Eva left, Alma, who was becoming a frequent visitor, was on the next bus down from Bay City. Helen was glad to see the last of both of them. While the Lists had moved to a bigger apartment, it was still too small during the day for two babies, an increasingly rambunctious teenager, and an unhappy new mother who only wanted to be left in peace.
One of the first things John had done upon arriving in Kalamazoo, of course, was to enroll the family in a Lutheran church affiliated with the Missouri Synod. There he was proud to be seen at Sunday services with his attractive wife—and Helen could look stunning when she was in the mood—and two pretty daughters.
And a year later, in recognition both of his accounting skills and of his respect as a new pillar of his church, John was elected treasurer of the parish. Proudly, he phoned his mother with the news that he was keeping the family tradition alive.
But the afterglow faded sooner than John would have liked. Though Helen was proud of her husband’s new status at church, she never quite shared the joy John found in a church. She had converted to John’s religion to make him happy, but she wasn’t prepared to devote much of her week to it, and there was a definite appeal in having a Sunday morning off. After spending hours dressing the babies and tugging the increasingly resistant Brenda along to church, it seemed that they were only there to sit on display beside John as the model family, always in the same pew and always in place early as the congregation filed in around them. A busy mother exhausted by three children who kept her going all the time, Helen began begging off attending church every Sunday. She would rather sleep late and, a terrific cook who enjoyed being in the kitchen, make a great breakfast for her family.
Since she was certain the God she knew didn’t mind, Helen had difficulty understanding why her husband so evidently did. John had his own way of letting her know. As usual, he didn’t say anything overtly. Balefully, he would get up and go about dressing the babies. He would hustle Brenda along and then wordlessly slump off to church, where everyone could see—she knew he wanted her to realize that everyone saw—that his wife once again had not cared to come to church with that handsome family. After a while, Brenda took the cue from her mother. She began sleeping late on Sundays, too. Then it was just John, juggling two toddlers on his knee, feeling exposed and abandoned.
John couldn’t understand what was going wrong. He catered to Helen’s whims. Money that would otherwise have been going into the bank for the down payment on a house went toward presents that he showered on her, including expensive jewelry. He was a model father, a good provider. But Helen wanted something more than what she had taken to calling John on those increasing occasions when she drank too much at night and gave voice to her resentment: a “goody two-shoes.” John didn’t engage with her on these occasions. Instead, he sulked.
Around Christmas, Helen got pregnant again. Deeply depressed, she began spending long periods of time in bed, as advised by her doctor.
By now the family had moved to larger quarters, a rented duplex on Coy Avenue in Kalamazoo. Brenda, now sixteen, was miserable leaving her old neighborhood friends behind. What’s more, she was beginning to feel like a permanent babysitter and nursemaid. She began looking forward to leaving home. More and more, she and her mother seemed to be shouting at each other.
Money was an irritant. As the child of a serviceman who had been killed in action, Brenda was to receive until age eighteen a monthly pension, which she was beginning to regard as her potential ticket out of that household.
John and Helen were required to file regular reports with the government showing how the pension money—Jean Syfert said she believed it was a total of about five hundred dollars a month—was being spent. Brenda complained that the money should be hers to do with as she pleased. The dispute caused a rift that never really healed. “I know without a doubt that that’s why they had their falling out,” Jean said of Brenda’s growing estrangement from her mother and her stepfather.
John and Helen’s last child, Frederick Michael, was born on August 26, 1958. After the initial phase of cooing and fawning over a new infant, Helen became despondent again. With a screaming infant—for little Fred was not as mild-mannered as his siblings—and two whining toddlers, with a teenage daughter threatening to run away from home, Helen began drinking regularly. Helen had always liked a drink, but in Kalamazoo, cooped up with four children, she began liking her Scotch rather more.
Worse, she added chemical depressants. This was the era of the Wonder Drug, the prescription tranquilizer. Helen, recovering from postpartum depression, under extra scrutiny because of her history of miscarriages and the illness that had sent her back from Korea, was now seeing a psychiatrist regularly. She began a dependency on various medications, primarily Doriden, that, off and on, would continue for the rest of her life. Combined with even moderate nighttime drinking, the medicati
on left her lethargic on many days.
John, meanwhile, was too caught up in the demands of his job, where he was obviously on the right career track, to pay much attention. He did bristle a bit on those nights, which occurred more frequently now than before, when he would come home from work and find Helen curled up on the couch with a book and a glass of Scotch. All the same, he kept his anger inside. He simply changed the badly soiled diapers of the two boys, looked after Patty, and ascertained Brenda’s whereabouts. Then he made dinner himself.
Though a growing family was a significant drain on even a comfortable income like John’s, and though both John and Helen were the sort of people who bought on impulse, they had enough money by 1959 for the down payment on a house, which they purchased on April 14 with a mortgage of $17,300.
This money hadn’t accrued through any sort of prudent financial planning, however. As usual, John had come to his mother with his problems. Shortly before John and Helen made settlement on their new home in Kalamazoo, Alma went to Bay County Probate Court to petition for an amendment to her late husband’s 1943 will, the terms of which had left the entire estate to her; upon her death, half of the estate would go to the deceased’s first son, William G., who was the same age as Alma, then seventy-one, and the other half to John. What Alma’s petition asked the court to do was to accelerate certain terms and allow the sale of the old general store on Salzburg Avenue.
On December 2, the store was sold to cousins for a price listed as $1 plus “other consideration”—a common accounting practice in Michigan at the time to avoid a tax assessment. The property was estimated to be worth about $20,000 at the time it was sold. John and Helen had their one-third share of the proceeds in plenty of time to use it for the down payment on their first home.
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