by Linda Gartz
With each unable to empathize with the other’s position, Mom and Dad couldn’t find wholeness in one another. By the late sixties and into the seventies, what loving intimacy could possibly have existed between them? Mom often screeched at Dad, “You son of a bitch!” She nagged incessantly and called his parents and brother the “most disgusting family that ever lived!” Dad was dismissive of Mom and her legitimate complaints, retorting, ”Aw, quit your complaining. It’s all in your head.”
Sometimes he tried to reach out. “What’s the matter, kid?” he once asked, when she sat brooding and sobbing in the dining room.
She turned away, fed up and furious that it wasn’t obvious to him. “This man is unbelievable,” she wrote.
At a German event, Dad asked her to dance. Mom wrote later, “I fixed him with a cold stare, waving him away, and told him, ‘Go ask someone else.’” Mom’s face took on the look of a Diane Arbus photo subject in moments like these: her eyes glazed from drink, her features drooping with bitterness and cynical sadness.
Yet Mom and Dad still cared for one another. One Christmas, as we exchanged gifts, Dad handed Mom a string. “Follow it,” he said mischievously, his eyes glinting. She rolled the line in her hand as it twisted around furniture and under throw rugs, ending in a hidden corner of the music room, where it was attached to a cello! She had played the instrument in high school, and for several years had been talking about starting up again. Now she had no more excuses. She clapped her hands in excitement, gave Dad a quick smack on the lips, and said, “Why, thank you, Fred! That’s just wonderful.” A few months later, she joined Wright Junior College’s orchestra.
Mom looked after Dad’s health. He had started becoming a little paunchy during the thirteen years of travel, when, for weeks at a time, he had eaten most meals in restaurants. By the 1970s, his active social life, including drinks and heavy eating, drove his weight up to thirty, forty, fifty pounds past ideal. Dad’s mother had suffered several heart attacks, then died of a stroke, and he had inherited her cardiac disease. His doctor prescribed blood-pressure medication, but Dad forgot to take it. Mom clipped reminder notes into a large clothespin she set on the kitchen table, next to the bottle of medication. She later began taping reminders to the front door, too. He couldn’t be bothered when there was so much fun awaiting him.
CHAPTER 45: A Convergence of Change
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church, West End and Keeler, Chicago’s West Side.
In the spring of 1978, Bill’s father spotted an ad in the Chicago Tribune. An immigration attorney in downtown Chicago was selling his law practice and retiring to Virginia. “It’s worth investigating,” his dad told Bill. The two of them met the lawyer in his office, discussed price, and by the end of the session, with money borrowed from his father, Bill owned an immigration law practice. He was thirty-two.
At the same time, Winnetka District 36 informed teachers that my middle school would close in June of 1978, due to lack of enrollment. Sixth grade would be incorporated into the existing seventh-and eighth-grade junior high, so my job was secure. But it was a transitional moment, spurring me to rethink my future.
Was it possible I could work in a field other than those the 1950s had assured me were the only viable options for women? Could I move beyond the “nurse, teacher, secretary” model, eight years after the women’s movement had cracked open society’s restrictive notions of acceptable women’s roles? Bill’s new law practice gave me a starting point. We decided it would be an investment in our future together if I worked as his office manager while simultaneously searching for a new career for myself. I took a year’s leave of absence from teaching.
Bill dove into research to learn the nuances of immigration law. He set up accounting systems, and created efficient practices to deal with the complex bureaucratic details of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. I scheduled his appointments, ordered supplies and equipment, and spent every spare moment plotting a new career course by following the advice in the job-search book What Color is Your Parachute?
After several months of learning about careers as far afield as banking, computer-systems analysis, advertising, journalism, and public relations, and after setting up dozens of informational interviews, I still had no clear direction. I despaired of ever finding my way.
I thought of teaching in a business environment, where video was emerging as a new technology for training, so I signed up for a video-production class. It was a perfect fit! Producing a video incorporated everything I had loved about teaching: researching, relating to an audience, working with people, and being the creative person in charge. But at the end of a production, I would have a tangible product, not just the hope that I had made a difference. I began networking to find a start in the field of television.
At the same time as I was moving my career in a new direction, our former family church embarked on changing the history of West Garfield Park. By 1978, the neighborhood was the national poster child for urban decay. People arrived with wheelbarrows at the scores of homes that had been burned out or shuttered. They chipped away at the hulking remains, stealing vacant buildings brick by brick, carting away the pieces to sell. The area drew comparisons to Berlin after World War II, but there was no Marshall Plan.
Reverend Nelson and his sister, Mary, who had come to work at Bethel on the day of the August 1965 riots, were desperate to save the community they had embraced. Going door-to-door, encouraging folks to come to Sunday services and become part of the solution to poverty and crime, they had built up a vibrant church congregation. Mary told me several years later, “By 1979, we knew we had to do something about housing, or there wouldn’t be a community to be church of.”
She and David asked Bethel’s members to each contribute $10 per week to raise $5,000 to purchase and rehab an abandoned three-flat at 367 North Karlov Avenue, just a few blocks from my parents’ buildings. With that bold move, Bethel New Life was born. Mary Nelson was its first president, gaining national renown over the years for her creative approach to providing low-income housing, childcare, jobs, transitions from prison, and assisted living for the elderly. It became into one of the nation’s most successful community-development organizations.
While Mary was getting Bethel New Life off the ground, I interviewed at Catholic Television Network (CTN) in Chicago. I’d learned through networking that it was a great place to get started because it wasn’t a union shop, so I could try my hand at everything. I interviewed with the station director, Judy, a tiny, wiry fortysomething with an outsize personality. I told her my goal was to become a producer, but the only position open was as an intern on the minicam crew. “Get started with that,” she said, “and something may open up in production. I want to see more women in this field, and I’ll help you get started.”
I worked with the camera and audio men and the different producers of CTN’s varied religious programs that were broadcast on its own TV station. We called ourselves “The God Squad,” rolling out of the garage in an equipment-laden van, heading to our shoot location, where I hauled gear, dragged cables, and set up lights.
After a couple months, Judy asked me to sit down across from her behind a desk stacked with crisscrossed papers and VHS videotapes. Removing her rings and rubbing in hand lotion, its sweet lavender scent filling the room, she asked, “How’d you like to be in charge of your own show?”
I answered instantly, “That would be excellent!”
“We need a producer for a thirty-minute video targeted at the parents and sponsors of adolescents preparing for Catholic confirmation. Are you willing to take that on?”
“Absolutely,” I answered with complete confidence, but I had no idea how I was going to pull it off. Early the next morning, I awoke at three in a panic. How the hell do you produce a show, start to finish? Working the rest of the dark early-morning hours until dawn, I made a three-page list on a yellow legal pad of everything I didn’t know how to do.
After production started, I
sat down each day with one of the station’s producers, trying to appear calm, to get answers to my questions, sometimes learning only the day before what the next day’s step was. I conducted research and interviews, organized and scheduled the shoots, logged all the tapes, wrote the script, and supervised the rough edit.
Judy was pleased. “Very nice work,” she said. “You should be proud.” I was—not to mention relieved. I almost didn’t know how I’d done it, the pressure, and fear of failure, had been so great. After the rough edit was approved, we recorded a professional narrator. I had all the pieces ready for the final edit.
During that last step, the director, usually brusque and cynical over the poorly conceived productions he supervised day after day, blurted out with astonishment, “This is really good!” His spontaneous compliment washed over me in a warm rush. When the video won a Silver Award at the Chicago International Film Festival, I knew I’d found my career sweet spot.
My first break came when my résumé arrived on the desk of WLS’s production manager, the woman who had purchased our three-flat and coach house six years earlier! She interviewed and then hired me to produce a youth-sports documentary, which won an AP award for Best Sports that year. I moved on to more work at ABC, producing six-minute television-magazine segments and later researching and setting up daily live consumer reports for the Chicago 4:30 newscast. In April of 1983, I landed the associate-producer position with an award-winning documentarian at Chicago’s CBS affiliate, producing documentaries from subjects as varied as Chicago’s homeless women and children, to the Chicago Children’s Choir and America’s failing schools.
Dad was closing in on sixty-nine and Mom on nearly sixty-five when they finally agreed to unload two of their West Side properties. Mom felt our original home was easy to manage, but the troublesome six-flat and two-flat next door to it were to go.
I don’t know if my parents consulted a real-estate agent or just went straight to Bethel New Life because they knew Pastor Nelson and his sister, but in June of 1983, Mom gathered the necessary figures to show to Mary. The six-flat was appraised at $30,000, which was $10,000 less than when my grandparents had given it to them in 1965. Bethel’s model for acquiring property would pay my parents $15,000 cash for the building, and the remaining $15,000 would be taken as a tax deduction. A similar split was presented for the building next door. My parents’ income was not great enough for the tax deduction to mean much of anything, but they agreed.
After eighteen years of an upslope battle, traveling ten miles round-trip to maintain the buildings against an onslaught of breakins, rat and roach infestations, feral dogs, purse snatchings, and armed holdups, Mom and Dad finally were giving themselves a break. My parents signed the papers, and Bethel New Life brought in Habitat for Humanity to finish up whatever requirements were needed to meet federal housing standards.
Bethel Lutheran Church had been the social vortex of Dad’s young life, its vibrancy in the 1920s emblematic of a community on the rise. Now, six decades later, the church was still a hub in West Garfield Park, but of a dramatically different community, one which Bethel New Life was striving to raise out of the ashes. Property had sustained the Gartz family on the West Side after my grandfather started in the janitorial business, providing financial security for his family. Now my parents’ buildings, half the value of which they had donated, would create a future home for the newer residents. In a way, my father had been right; by believing for twenty years that WGP was still his community, he and Mom had nurtured a small part of it, passing on the product of their commitment to a new generation.
Meanwhile, Fireman’s Fund insisted it was time for Dad to retire, and on February 2, 1984, the company threw a retirement party for him. Friends from Dad’s youth, neighbors, and all his buddies at FF gathered in a downtown Chicago hotel to roast and honor Dad. Smiling and grasping people’s hands in both of his, greeting everyone with hearty hugs of happiness, Dad was in his glory. At an open mike, stories flowed, enveloping Dad in fond memories.
Dad at his retirement party; Mom and Linda looking on.
“This man came out at two in the morning to rescue me when my car died,” said Esther, the woman who’d been at the dance where my parents met. “You could always call on him, night or day.”
“Fred played Santa Claus every year at the Christmas party,” said a thirty-something gal. “The girls sat on his lap, and he’d ask them mischievously if they’d been good. Then he always ended with, ‘Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere!’” The audience roared while Dad crunched up his shoulders, grinning in faux embarrassment.
A fortyish man, whom Dad had trained right out of college, recalled, “Fred could fit anything into his company car. He always had strands of rope, bungee cords, blankets stored in the trunk. Once he managed to fit five empty forty-gallon drums into that sedan: two in the trunk, one lashed to the roof, and two in the back seat, sticking out the windows.”
Mom put aside her resentments and talked about Dad’s warmth and friendliness to all, then added this romantic remembrance: “I remember one of our early dates,” she reminisced, “when an older couple came up to us and said if they were young again, they would wish to be us for that night.” She leaned over and kissed Dad on the cheek before sitting down.
That Christmas, my parents, Uncle Will, Bill, and I traveled to Seattle to spend the holiday with my brothers. In a family photo of the visit, the rest of us are beaming, while Mom manages a wan smile. Looking at the snapshot later at my parents’ house, I was shocked by Dad’s enormous girth. In person, his happy ebullience overshadowed his physical appearance. I said to him, “You know, Dad, you really need to lose some weight. I’m worried you’re going to have a heart attack.”
“I know, I know,” he said, then grabbed his round belly, shook it, and laughed, “All bought and paid for!”
His doctor ordered him to shed thirty pounds. “Your cholesterol and blood pressure are sky-high,” he told Dad, “and you have fat in your blood. You’ve already had an attack of angina. You’ve got to bring that weight down, or you’re a ticking time bomb.” Dad agreed, but changed nothing. Sure, he’d had to lie down when he’d felt some chest pain a few years earlier, but he wasn’t a complainer. He carried on. There was work to be done (he still worked around the house) and fun to be had. Even after retirement, he kept to his previous routine, driving downtown to have coffee and sweet rolls or eggs and sausages with the same Fireman’s Fund crowd he had joked and talked politics with for the previous fifteen years.
After two years of doing the work of a documentary producer at WBBM, but allowed only associate-producer credit, I quit my position there and pitched a production idea to Chicago’s PBS station, WTTW, in anticipation of Vatican II’s twentieth anniversary. The nuns with whom I’d worked at Catholic Television were among the smartest, most educated women I’d ever met, yet they were treated as second-class citizens by the all-male Roman Catholic hierarchy. My proposal stated that Changing Habits would be a documentary about the conflict between American nuns and the Vatican.
“This is fascinating,” said the executive producer at WTTW, flipping through my treatment, which laid out the story line and issues. It was the same woman who had hired me to produce my first documentary at WLS-ABC.
She called me a couple days later. “We want you to do this show for us,” she said. “The timing is perfect.”
Thrilled at the opportunity, I dove into the research that September of 1985.
CHAPTER 46: Not of Our Choosing
I was planning my shooting schedule in my WTTW office, when the phone rang at five thirty on September 23, 1985. It was Mom. “Linda, something terrible has happened.”
“What, Mom? What’s happened?” My mind leaped from one family member to another.
“Dad collapsed outside of Fireman’s Fund.” Breathless, she ran her sentences together. “Lena found him on the sidewalk when she left work. She said he was incoherent but alert. An ambulance took hi
m to Ravenswood Hospital. The nurse there said we should wait in the main lobby. Can you meet me there?”
“I’m coming right now.” I left the research notes, calendars, and to-do lists strewn about my desk, grabbed my purse, and dashed through the station’s now-empty hallways, bounding down the stairways into the still-light evening.
In the lobby of the hospital, I scanned the hunched forms and drawn faces of the sick and injured awaiting care, looking for my mother. Standing alone at converging hallways, her head bobbed left, then right, a go-to tic when stressed. I called out, “Mom!” and strode quickly to her side. I grabbed her hand, then hugged her. A babushka covered her flattened hair, and a grimace of concern darkened her face.
“Have you seen Dad yet? Is he okay?”
“I just checked at the desk. He’s arriving soon.”
“What happened?” I put my hand on her shoulder.
“Not sure.” She shook her head. “Lena said she found him slumped against a light pole outside the Fund. She said his words were garbled.” Mom shook her head again. “Oh, brother! Now what?” she exclaimed.
We scanned the hallways, too agitated to sit, watching, searching for Dad’s arrival. The scene was familiar from movies: green-garbed figures carrying charts, pushing patients in wheelchairs and gurneys; doctors and nurses chatting urgently, power-walking and disappearing around the corners of shiny-floored hallways.
A gurney wheeled toward us, flanked by two doctors, an orderly, and a nurse. It took a moment for recognition to click in. It was Dad, an IV dripping into his arm. “Dad!” The gurney stopped, and I leaned over to kiss his forehead.
He was alert, looking from me to Mom, but when he opened his mouth to speak, only a strange series of moans and unintelligible sounds emerged. “Ah-oh, ah-oh, oh-oh-oh.” He shook his head as if trying to dislodge an impediment, but the uncommon fear in his face distressed me most of all.