by Roger Ebert
At Martha’s funeral Mass in Wapella, Father Richard Brunskill, their next-door neighbor, noticed that as a lapsed Catholic I remained in my pew, and walked over to me. He held up the Host and said, “Take this for Martha.” The village held a crowded potluck dinner in the church basement, and Martha was buried in the plot she and Jean had purchased in Wapella. Then Bill and Jean moved into separate retirement homes.
My uncle Bill and aunt Mary attended my wedding. Mary, learning I would marry a black woman, asked me, “Honey, that’s never been done in our family, so why do you want to start now?” I said I loved Chaz and wanted to make her my wife. “Well the good lord knows you’ve waited long enough,” she said, “and it’s better to marry than to burn.” At the wedding, Mary and Bill sat with Chaz’s mother, known universally as Big Mama, and enjoyed their celebrity.
Aunt Mary had a childless marriage with John J. O’Neill, a former state trooper who became the Champaign postmaster. Tall, jocular, a glad-handing Democrat with a patronage job in a Republican city, he ganged up with my father against Uncle Everett the Republican at family gatherings. He and Mary moved house at least every two years. “Johnny has Mary work like a slave to fix up those places, and then he sells them,” my father said. “She loves it,” said my mother, who may have been right. Some people enjoy being in eternal interior decorating mode.
Uncle Bill, a lifelong bachelor, was a retired high school agriculture teacher who taught in Elkhart, Indiana, and Elkhart, Illinois. Bill and Mary visited us in Chicago frequently, and we often drove down to Urbana. Bill and Mary by then lived in the Clark-Lindsey retirement home, where both remained alert until the end, although Bill in his eighties began counting on a visit from Ed McMahon with a $1 million check from Publishers Clearing House, and after his death we had to cancel his subscriptions to Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy.
Bill came to visit in Michigan many times, Mary only once. As I proudly turned into our wooded dirt lane, she shrank in her seat and said, “Oh, honey! Cut down these trees! They’ll never be able to get in here to get you out!” Mary slowed in her later years because of emphysema. All those cigarettes. Bill was still planting tomatoes and cooking family dinners into his nineties. Every summer in the 1980s, he and Martha and Jean Sabo would take long road trips with their close friends Dave and Dot Sparrow of Kenney, Illinois, near Wapella. It was Bill’s bitter disappointment that they wouldn’t allow him, at eighty-six, to ride a mule to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. He dismissed their fears. “The mule isn’t about to fall. Just strap me to the saddle and I’ll get there one way or another.” He was very serious, and there was lingering resentment over the issue. At the very end, on his last birthday visit to Michigan, he said he thought his brother Everett had died and yet there he was sitting at the table big as life. He was looking directly at me. Dot Sparrow said, “Well then you’d all better have some cake and ice cream!”
3 MY OLD MAN
UNTIL THE DAY he died, I always called him “Daddy.” He was Walter Harry Ebert, born in Urbana in 1902 of parents who had emigrated from Germany. His father, Joseph, was a machinist working for the Peoria and Eastern Railway, known as the Big Four. Daddy would take me out to the roundhouse on the north side of town to watch the big turntables turning steam engines around. In our kitchen, he always used a knife my grandfather made from a single piece of steel. “That is the only thing you have from your grandfather.” There was a railroad man’s diner next to the roundhouse where we would go for meat loaf and mashed potatoes, but my first restaurant meal was at the Steak ’n Shake on Green Street. “A hamburger for the boy,” my father said.
What have I inherited from those Germans who came to the new land? A group of sayings, often repeated by my father: If the job is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. A good workman respects his tools. Don’t go to sleep at the switch. They spoke German at home until the United States entered World War I. Then they never spoke it again. He was taken out of the Lutheran school and sent to public school, “to learn to speak American.” He spoke no German, apart from a few words.
There is a story he told many times, always with great laughter. It was from Joseph. Before a man left Germany for America, the school-master taught him to say “apple pie” and “coffee.” When he got off the boat, this man was hungry and went into a restaurant. “Apple pie,” he said. The waiter asked, “Do you want anything on top?” The man replied, “Coffee!”
My father was raised in a two-story frame house with a big porch, on West Clark Street. His parents believed they couldn’t conceive, and adopted a daughter, Mame. Then they had three children: Hulda, Wanda, and Walter. Aunt Mame and Uncle Ben lived north of Champaign in a small house made of tar paper, heated by a stove. This was not considered to be living in poverty, but simply was their home. It was always comfortable and warm, and I loved to visit. Uncle Ben drove a heating oil truck and would sometimes drive past our house and wave. Always with a cigar stuck in his mug.
Hulda and Wanda remained at home. I spent hours with coloring books on their floor or at their kitchen table, and tiptoeing up and running down the scary staircase. They had an actual icebox, and they had me hang the sign on the porch so the iceman could see from his horse-drawn wagon how much ice they needed. We sat around a kitchen table covered with oilcloth and ate beef and cabbage soup. Hulda contracted tuberculosis, and I heard, “She has to go live in the sanitarium up on Cunningham.” This was spoken like a death sentence. She died, and the body was laid out in the living room. I was allowed to approach her and regarded her body solemnly. The occasion itself made more of an impression than the dead body: A coffin was in the living room. How strange.
I never knew Wanda as well as I knew my uncles and aunts on my mother’s side. There was tension between my parents about their families, and I was always at the Stumm house, rarely at the Ebert house, although they were only six blocks apart on the same street. This was never really discussed, and my mother and Wanda always seemed friendly. I vaguely gather it involved how their financial assistance was divided. Perhaps their difference in religion. Because my father wasn’t a Catholic, their marriage couldn’t take place in St. Patrick Church, and my mother often observed, “We had to be married in the rectory.” This wasn’t my father’s fault. Religion was never mentioned by Hulda and Wanda. I never went to their Lutheran church with them, because that would have been a mortal sin.
Wanda worked most of her life as a saleswoman for the big G. C. Willis store in downtown Champaign, and we’d visit her there, my father buying something. Everybody seemed to know her. The last time I saw her was in the 1970s, after she moved to a nursing home. My mother and I took her out to dinner. I was a little surprised by her warmth and humor. I felt her love. When I was a child she seemed tall, spare, and distant. “Your father’s initials are still carved in the concrete on the curb in front of the old house,” she told me. I went to look, and they were.
My father as a young man moved to West Palm Beach, Florida, and opened a florist shop with a man named Fairweather. “We delivered a lot of flowers to the Kennedys in their mansion,” he said when Jack was elected president. There was a photo of him, trim and natty, standing beneath palm trees with a cigarette in his fingers. He and Fairweather lost the shop during the Depression and he had to move back home. He apprenticed as an electrician at McClellan Electric on Main Street in Urbana and then “got on” at the University of Illinois, where he worked for the rest of his life.
After the war, Bill and Betty Fairweather moved to Urbana, where Bill, the son of my father’s partner, would study for his Ph.D. in psychology. He’d been a bomber pilot. Night after night, the voices of Bill and Walter drifted in from the front porch, as they talked late and smoked cigarettes. In the 1980s, the Fairweathers came to visit us in our Michigan house. “Rog,” he asked me, “did you ever wonder why a Ph.D. candidate and an electrician would spend so much time talking? It was because your dad was the smartest man I ever met.”
One day years later
I was out to dinner with Glen and Reba Pickens. Reba was the daughter of Ben and Mame. In the years after the war they founded the University of Illinois Employees Credit Union, which began in idealism in dingy basement quarters and later grew into a big new building and millions in deposits. Glen and Reba were two of the sunniest people in my family, popular all over town. Their children were Jim and Karol Ann, who are the only cousins near my age I have from my father’s side. At dinner I asked Glen and Reba what they knew about my dad’s life in Florida. Not much, it turned out, although they thought the florist business had been doing well until the Depression.
“Your dad wrote a lot of letters home,” Glen said. “He wrote about good times and then times turned bad and he started to think he would have to come back home. There were some sad things in there. We found all those old letters after Wanda died.” I asked what had happened to them. “We threw them out,” he said. “That house was filled with things. She never left home, you know.” It hadn’t occurred to him I would have given anything to read letters written by my father in the 1920s. My father was thirty-seven when he married, fifty-eight when he died. He lived twice as much of his life before I was born as after. How did he write? What did he dream? What were the sad things? I loved Glen and Reba, but what were they thinking? One Sunday in the 1950s, during the Rose Bowl game, the phone rang, and it was an old girlfriend of “Wally” from Florida, who told my mother she’d found his number from information. My mother handed him the phone. There was ice in her eyes. After the call was finished, I was told to go back downstairs and watch the game.
Growing up, there were always books in the house. Daddy’s living room chair had a couple of bookcases behind it, which held best sellers like USA Confidential, and matching volumes of Hugo, Maupassant, Chekhov, Twain, and Poe. We took both local papers, and the Chicago Daily News. He told me that if I read Life magazine every week and the Reader’s Digest every month, I’d grow up to be a well-informed man. Every night at dinner we listened to Edward P. Morgan and the News, “brought to you by the thirteen and a half million men and women of the AFL-CIO.” He told me I should never cross a picket line, and I never have. He was a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and my mother told me, “Your father may have to go on strike.” I pictured him consumed in flames and wept until it was all explained.
He told me, “The Democratic Party is the friend of the working man.” On election night in 1952 I was allowed to stay up as late as I could, listening with my parents to the radio. I must have been carried to bed. They came in together to wake me the next morning with the news that Eisenhower had defeated Stevenson. I had no idea what this meant, but I saw they were depressed. I knew Stevenson was the Democrat and had been governor of Illinois. “He gave a speech,” my father said, “saying that he felt like the little boy who stubbed his toe. He said it hurt, but he was too big to cry.” I burst into tears. He bought me The Major Campaign Speeches of Adlai Stevenson, and in 1956 when Stevenson came to the University of Illinois for a speech, I took it to him for a signature. He was surrounded by Secret Service agents, but when he saw the book he reached out to sign it. “Haven’t signed one of these in a while,” he said.
The TV set in the early days was banished to the basement, because my mother didn’t want it “cluttering up the living room.” Half of the basement held my father’s workbench, the washer-wringer, and clotheslines. The other half had been supplied with reclining aluminum deck chairs. Later there was room for my science fiction collection and the desk that represented the offices of the Ebert Stamp Company. Daddy and I faithfully watched Jack Benny, Herb Shriner on Two for the Money, Omnibus, and particularly The Lawrence Welk Show. Welk reminded him of his father. When something good came on, my father would shout, “Bub, you’d better see this.” She was often right upstairs at the kitchen table, reading the papers, listening to music on the radio. When she came down, she usually remained standing, as if she didn’t want the TV set to get any ideas. Otherwise she could have my chair, and I’d sit cross-legged on the floor.
My father woke up about five thirty every morning, and listened to Paul Gibson on WBBM from Chicago. Gibson had no particular politics; he just talked for two or three hours. Daddy would make coffee and liked his toast almost burnt, and the aromas would fill the small house. I’d stumble in and he’d hand me a slice, slathered with clover honey from the university farms. Gibson didn’t play much music, but one day he played “The Wayward Wind” by Gogi Grant. I walked into the kitchen. “You like that?” my father asked, nodding. The song has haunted me ever after.
My parents took me to see my first movie, the Marx Brothers in A Day at the Races. I had to stand to see the screen. I’d never heard Daddy laugh more loudly. He had seen the real Marx Brothers in vaudeville at the Virginia Theatre in Champaign. We went to see Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and I was prepared to clap my hands over my eyes because Our Sunday Visitor, the newspaper distributed in church on Sundays, said the movie was racy. Together we saw Bwana Devil, the first movie made in 3-D. Those were the three movies I remember us seeing together. My aunt Martha took me to most of my movies.
At Walter’s lunch hour, he’d come home and fix himself something. His favorite meal was a peanut-butter-and-jam sandwich and pickled herring in wine sauce. “The sweet and sour go against each other and make every bite fresh.” When he cooked at dinner—rarely—it was usually hamburgers, pressed on a device of his own manufacture, or round steak, pounded with the side of a saucer, sprinkled with Accent and flour, and fried. He made chili with some bacon in it and let it improve in the refrigerator overnight. He always drew onion-chopping duty, with his father’s knife.
He’d take me to Illinois home games at Memorial Stadium. “See those electrical pipes? I installed them.” When the All-American J. C. Caroline broke away for a touchdown, he and everyone around us yelled so loudly it could be frightening. When it was very cold, he’d send me under the stands for cans of hot chocolate, to hold in our pockets. In the cold air the smoke of his Luckies was sharp. Everybody smoked. Ray Eliot, the legendary Illini coach, smoked on the sidelines. After my father was told he had lung cancer, he switched to filter-tip Winstons.
Walter was a tall man for his generation, six feet two inches. I never saw him angry with anyone except my mother, and that was mostly shouting at her to calm down: “Cut out that noise!” Their fights were mostly about money: how much they were helping her family, and how much they were helping his. Sometimes my mother would lie on my bed at night, sobbing after a fight, but I pretended I was asleep. My stomach would hurt. I have never been able to process anger.
They pushed me. I would go to the university and get an education. I wouldn’t be an electrician like my father. Daddy refused to teach me a single thing about his work. When I was in grade school and used a new word, they would laugh with delight and he’d say, “Boy, howdy!” When I won the radio speaking division of the Illinois High School Speech Contest in 1957, the state finals were in a room in Gregory Hall. My aunt Martha told me years later that he had hidden in a closet to listen to me.
When I was around twelve he spotted an ad for a fishing resort in Wisconsin and mailed off for the brochure. We studied it. He was especially impressed by their seven-course meals. “Boy, howdy!” We drove north for a fishing trip, the two men in the family, who had never been fishing together in our lives. I guessed I was about to be told the facts of life, which I already knew from a leaflet hidden in the night table of my friend Jerry Seilor’s father, who was never able to bring himself to give it to him. No facts were mentioned in Wisconsin. The resort was small and inexpensive, knotty pine with stuffed deer heads and painted sunsets on the walls. I remember little about the food except that my father carefully counted the courses. Combination salad. Split pea soup. Cottage cheese with chives. We rented a boat and fishing tackle and sat upon the glassy lake in the sun. The weather was one degree above cool. I don’t remember if we caught anything. I remember our co
ntented silence together, the smoke from his Luckies, the hiss when a spent cigarette would hit the water, the songs from our portable radio: “The Wayward Wind.” “Oh, Mein Papa,” by Eddie Fisher. “That makes me think about my father,” he said.
In 1956, I entered Urbana High School and joined the staff of the student paper. That autumn, Senator Estes Kefauver was Stevenson’s running mate, and my father learned that after his speech Kefauver would be spending the night in a guest room of the Illini Union building on campus. He hatched a plan for me to interview the senator. He found someone on campus to letter an official-looking badge reading:
ROGER EBERT
URBANA HIGH SCHOOL ECHO
At six in the morning, we took up our post with other reporters and photographers outside the senator’s room, and when his aide looked out and saw me, he saw a photo op. I was brought in to “interview” Kefauver and had my photo taken. “Are you deeply concerned that we are all in danger from strontium ninety?” I asked him, because we had been at his speech the night before as he lectured about the dangers of nuclear testing. “That’s an excellent question,” he said, smiling for the photographer.
I always worked on newspapers. Harold Holmes, the father of my friend Hal, was the managing editor at the News-Gazette and took us down to the paper. A Linotype operator set my byline in lead, and I used a stamp pad to imprint everything with “By Roger Ebert.” I was electrified. I wrote for the St. Mary’s grade school paper. I used a primitive hectograph kit to duplicate copies of the Washington Street News, which I distributed to neighbors, and Ebert’s Stamp News, which I mailed to the six or so customers of my mail-order stamp company. Both were hand lettered in the purple ink that was absorbed by the hectograph gel and produced copies until the ink faded.
Harold Holmes asked me before my junior year in high school if I wanted to cover the Urbana Tigers for the News-Gazette. This caused a debate at the kitchen table. I was not yet sixteen. I would have to work until one or two a.m. two nights a week and drive myself home on a learner’s permit. My mother said, “Those newspapermen all drink, and they don’t get paid anything.” There was some truth in this. My father said: “If Harold thinks the boy can do the job, we’ll always regret not giving him the chance.”