by Alexis Clark
If there was one positive takeaway from their time in Göttingen, it was that they would never have to wonder, “What if?”. Frederick had gained the clarity he needed on many poignant levels. He now had proof that he could not comfortably and peacefully live in Germany with his African American wife and two mixed-race sons. The community in Göttingen wasn’t ready to accept his nontraditional family. And the move was further confirmation that Frederick could never work for his father and be happy. The two men would never be close. Frederick had tried again and failed—a hurtful reality, but one that gave him closure on the matter. The truth was that Germany wasn’t home to Frederick anymore, which meant the United States had to be. And Frederick was determined to make this move a good one for his family.
He applied for all kinds of odd jobs, mainly blue-collar. Although he was still passionate about art, his work experience was mostly in bakeries and most recently in his father’s factory. He temporarily lived in Philadelphia at the YMCA on Arch Street. It was a humbling experience to be reduced to transient housing, but Frederick had set his ego aside when he left Germany. His luck changed on August 11 when he received a Western Union telegram to report for a training program at Piasecki Helicopter Company in Morton, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia. His experience working in the engineering field with machinery at his father’s company had paid off. He was instructed to bring his birth certificate and army discharge papers on his first day. It was a mechanic position, but Frederick didn’t care. The job would allow him to earn enough money—combined with the small amount of money he had saved in Germany while living in his parents’ house—to bring his family back to the States. Two months later, on October 6, 1953, Elinor and the children boarded a transatlantic vessel in Cuxhaven, Germany, to sail to New York, leaving Europe behind for good.
Frederick had found a modest rental house in the Philadelphia suburbs and he bought a used Saab. Elinor settled into her role as a stay-at-home mom, albeit begrudgingly, while Frederick worked nonstop, often two jobs, as the sole breadwinner. They could have used her additional income, but Frederick insisted that Elinor remain at home. He believed that a wife and mother should oversee the running of the household and take care of the children while the husband provided for the family. He didn’t want her to be a career nurse, and he preferred to work late-night shifts at a bakery rather than have his wife work at all.1
One of the many things that Elinor made Frederick feel, from the moment he met her, was that he was needed, and he relished that feeling. She played a role in creating a dynamic in which she was very much the recipient and Frederick the provider who would see that she had everything she needed both emotionally and materially. If Elinor had to contribute to the family’s household, then Frederick’s role as the one true provider would be compromised, and he couldn’t afford to give that up. The damage done by his relationship with his father created a vulnerability within him that would not have been able to withstand this blow.
Elinor, rather than protesting, focused on getting her children acclimated to American life. She certainly wasn’t going to push Frederick on the idea of working. Göttingen had been her idea, and although her husband had agreed, the move was a painful failure. Elinor felt responsible for the heartache Frederick had endured because of his parents, and she wanted something to be easy and positive for him. She decided that thing would be their relationship. Frederick’s ego had taken a tremendous blow in Germany, and she wanted to reassure him that their love, their union, would always be her number one priority.
She also wanted to get her children into a routine. Christopher was still in diapers, but because they had returned in October, school was already in session and Stephen needed to be enrolled immediately. He was almost seven years old and would have to adjust once again to a new city, a new house, and a new school where he would have to make new friends. Elinor and Frederick decided on the Sidney Smedley School, an elementary school close to where they lived.
Elinor, always impeccably groomed, dressed Stephen in smart school clothes and headed to the Smedley School for what she thought would be a routine enrollment process. She was eager to get her son back into the American school system. But Stephen didn’t get enrolled that day, and the reasons were revealed in a scathing letter Elinor wrote to the Morton School Board. A copy, showing wear and tear, was saved by Elinor and glued into one of her scrapbooks.
Our family has moved recently to Morton, after our arrival in October of this year, we took our son to the nearest elementary school, The Smedley School, for admission. We spoke to the principal, who in seeing that the child was a Negro, advised us that the Phyllis Wheatley School, within the same district was the school for him. Our questions as to why this was necessary resulted only in a maint[ena]nce of her stand and a referral to the School Board if further clarification was desired. In order not to prolong my son’s already overdue enrollment that we placed him in the suggested “Negro” school a couple blocks away and later presented the matter to the School Board at its next meeting. By the time we had looked up the law pertaining to segregation in Pennsylvania and had learned that it specifically forbids “any discrimination whatever on account of or by reason of race or color of any pupil seeking admission “to any public school.” My request to The School Board, therefore, was that the law to be adhered to. It was disillusioning to be advised that a special meeting of the Board members would be required to “decide,” and that I would be informed of the result. In view of the existing law, it is not clear to me what there is to decide but I will wait.
This is the situation my family faced in returning to the United States after a year in Europe. Our home there was in the British zone of Germany, and our son, a foreigner, was enthusiastically and unrestrictedly welcomed in an English school. As an American citizen, in his own country, such was not the case.
The Supreme Court of the United States is at present deciding the constitutionality of segregated schools and wide scale concern is given to the effect of integration in Ala., Miss., and Georgia. Now I ask can we ever consider harmony in these openly opposing states when here in Pennsylvania where democracy and the Constitution was born, is it so passively practiced?2
Elinor E. Albert
For Elinor, her child’s denial of admission was similar to the humiliating slights she had experienced in her own life. The segregation at Camp Florence and the degrading encounters in Göttingen were similar to the discrimination being directed at her son. The message was that Stephen didn’t belong in a white school because he was black, just like Elinor didn’t belong in white establishments because of the color of her skin. It became increasingly clear that racism followed Elinor wherever she went—Boston, Göttingen, and now Philadelphia. It was infuriating, unlawful, and personal.
Elinor sent a copy of her letter to the local chapter of the NAACP in Media, Pennsylvania, which in turn responded:
Dear Mrs. Albert,
The Media Branch NAACP wishes to take this opportunity to commend you for the courage you possessed in taking your stand with the Morton School Board. Needless to say it is very necessary that we have more parents with such courage and faith as you.
Sincerely Yours,
Josephine L. Shumate
secretary3
Elinor kept tabs on the Morton school board even though Stephen never attended the Smedley School. In the same scrapbook as her letter, she included a dateless clip about the school district from a local newspaper with the headline “Morton Expects Integration by Next Autumn.”
Elinor and Frederick did their best to shield their sons from bigoted people, but they couldn’t prevent it entirely. Nor did they fully grasp how being mixed-race impacted their sons’ lives. One afternoon Elinor found Stephen yelling out the window, “Nigger, nigger,” to a black child he saw outside on the street. She grabbed him immediately and pulled him away, but she knew why he was doing that. He was repeating what he had been called by the children in Göttingen. He was simply imitating wh
at he had experienced himself.4
It could only have been shocking for Elinor to see how her son had been affected by some of the decisions she and Frederick had made, including moving to Germany. Yet Elinor and Frederick didn’t complain to family members about the discrimination they encountered. Whenever something happened, Elinor and Frederick moved—that was their survival mechanism. Focusing on prejudice could have destroyed their relationship, since it seemed the world was against them. Instead, Elinor and Frederick put things behind them and left them there.
When Frederick wanted to purchase life insurance he made several calls to schedule an appointment. Well-dressed men in suits would stop by their house, but a disturbing pattern of rejection ensued. Once the agents arrived and discovered Frederick was married to a black woman, they would go through the pretense of showing him different insurance options but would then deny him coverage each time. At one point, a salesman told him to stop calling and finally admitted that most of the sales agents thought Frederick was mentally unstable because he was married to a black woman.5
“They thought he was out of his mind,” said Chris, who heard the story many times when he was older. The grievances weren’t discussed until years later when wounds had healed and the children were grown.
Frederick and Elinor carried on as if they had never been insulted or rejected. There were never any memorable or animated discussions about race in the Albert household. They didn’t focus on it, because their union represented where they stood on the subject. They were committed to facing the world and their children as a solid unit, even when the prejudice was blatant.
They would not let racism impede their ability to provide a good life for their family. If that meant living a life in constant motion in an attempt to keep racism at bay, then that’s what Elinor and Frederick did. When Morton no longer worked for them, they left, just as they had done with Göttingen, and Boston before that.
They were running away from racism, an impossible feat. Jim Crow and other discriminatory barriers were there to greet them every time they moved. During the 1950s, interracial marriages were still quite threatening to many. They represented an undoing of what was considered normal, which was “sticking with your own kind.”6 Society left no ambiguity on the issue. As of 1951, twenty-nine states legally barred interracial marriages between blacks and whites. Most were in the South, but that didn’t mean northern states didn’t subscribe to the same racist views. It just indicated that the black population in those locations was small or interracial marriage was so rare that no legal statutes were put in place. Judges could still deny a marriage license to a mixed-race couple for a host of reasons.7
Elinor and Frederick moved just a few miles away to the suburb of Media, where they rented a small two-story house that Elinor decorated with midcentury modern furnishings. And Frederick decided to make a career change. He wasn’t going to be a mechanic all his life. Artistry of any kind was his passion, and Frederick believed there was an opportunity in the culinary arts. His knack for baking had gotten him through two years of imprisonment during the war, and in 1954 he decided to return to the kitchen. He applied for a scholarship to the American Institute of Baking in Chicago, and he received it. The program required Frederick to move there for one year, leaving Elinor and the children in Pennsylvania.
During this time, Elinor wanted to seek employment as a nurse, particularly while Frederick was away and sending money home from whatever odd job he worked as a baking student. As always, the idea of Elinor being away from the children created stress in the marriage, even though the additional income was helpful. More than the money, Elinor missed adult contact, having friends, and caring for those in need. She loved being a mother, but she was unfulfilled in other ways. She was eerily in the same position as her mother years before when she was told she could no longer be a schoolteacher as a married woman in Milton, and Elinor began to experience the same angst. However, it had been the law that forced Gladys to stay home, not her husband.
When Christopher was old enough to be in school, Elinor began accepting private nursing jobs, but inevitably she would have to quit each one soon after because of Frederick’s reactions. Even though she chose shifts that were the least disruptive to her children’s schedules, Frederick acted as if his whole world were unraveling. Elinor finally gave up the idea of working while the children were young. She feared that if the time came when she had to work to support the family, her pattern of accepting employment and quitting would prevent her from being hired.8
Elinor also knew that her desire to work made Frederick feel like a failure, incapable of supporting his family, and that weighed on her. During the time they lived in Göttingen she had witnessed firsthand Frederick’s lifelong struggle with the rejection he felt from his father. Frederick was the center of her life, and she wanted to keep him happy. She knew she could make him happier by not working, so once again she decided to drop the idea of employment, this time for good.
Frederick excelled at school because he hoped a career in baking was his ticket to financial stability, but he neglected his family in the process by temporarily living out of state. The same intensity that his own father had for his engineering business, which kept him away from his family, influenced Frederick more than he would have liked to believe. And as with Karl Albert, there were other women in Frederick’s life. Chris, too young during this period to know, learned years later that this had been a difficult time in his parents’ marriage, either because of other women, long absences, or both.9
Elinor and Frederick’s marital problems manifested themselves mostly in silence, as evidenced by the fact that no one knew about any strife between them until years after the difficult moments had long passed. They dealt with weaknesses in their relationship similarly to the ways in which they responded to the pain of racism—with stoic calm.
There was no doubt that these two people still desperately loved each other, but figuring out how to establish themselves was difficult, particularly for Elinor. In so many of their living situations, she was isolated and the one who stayed at home by herself with the children.
Although periods of infidelity were woven throughout their marriage, it wasn’t clear if Elinor had proof Frederick was cheating on her. She never discussed it with anyone, not even when Chris and Stephen were adults, and she never disparaged Frederick. And although an adulterer, Frederick wasn’t cruel the way his father had been—he would never have thrown his infidelity in Elinor’s face. Unlike his own father in his relationship with Frederick’s mother, Frederick genuinely desired Elinor. But he undoubtedly led a duplicitous life.
After graduation from baking school in 1955, Frederick returned to Pennsylvania—but the family would move again when Frederick received a job offer as an experimental baker at Pepperidge Farm in Connecticut. They settled into a ranch-style home tucked away in a wooded neighborhood in Fairfield County. It was a secluded location, a place of refuge for Frederick, but a questionable choice for anyone with two young boys longing for friends and normalcy and with a sociable wife who missed having girlfriends around.
“My father rented a house. I think the address was Easton Road, and once you come four or five miles inland it becomes very rural,” said Chris. Their home backed up to a nearby stream. Though picturesque, it was certainly not a good choice for Stephen, who at age ten had already lived in Massachusetts, Germany, and more than one location in Pennsylvania. There were no playgrounds or baseball fields nearby where the boys could meet kids their age, and the seven-year age gap between Stephen and Chris made it difficult for them to play with each other for very long. This made for especially tedious summers.
Surprisingly, Elinor and Frederick did not spend much time or energy worrying about how Stephen and Chris acclimated to all the different homes, schools, and neighborhoods. In their minds, each time they moved they were getting closer to the track to prosperity. Frederick had found a nice house for his family, and he loved his job at Pepperidge
Farm. His career began to soar and he started to make good money. It was only a matter of time before he would have everything he wanted, which he thought would be every thing his family wanted. The process of getting there, however, was plagued with long hours and emotional distance from his growing sons, who needed more of their father in their lives. Frederick, though, was focused on his family’s financial security. He was relentless in his pursuit of success, as if he was still trying to prove his father wrong.
As the children got older, Elinor and Frederick continued to avoid talking about race. People still stared at them when they got out of their car together or took a booth at a restaurant. There were looks of surprise and whispers, but they never lost their patience or their tempers with gawkers. Elinor and Frederick just focused on themselves. Their marriage was back on track, and for the first time they could feel things working out. The family enjoyed Sunday drives together in the countryside of Connecticut. And Frederick and Elinor showed their love for each other openly.
Two countries, four cities, and at least six different residences. That’s how many times Frederick and Elinor packed up and started over after their marriage in 1947. For years they shuffled between rented houses and apartments, trying to find a place that would accept them. Finally in 1959 every thing fell into place.
Village Creek, an idyllic waterfront community in South Norwalk, Connecticut, backs up to Long Island Sound. In 1949, a handful of New Yorkers who wanted a chance to raise their families in an affordable, tranquil, and prejudice-free zone launched a search for the perfect settlement. The group, many of whom were former veterans and avid sailors, also included artists, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and teachers searching for the American dream they had fought for and could afford. They discovered an uninhabited stretch of land for sale, a peninsula, owned by the Nash Engineering Company. With each family contributing, they secured the property, which spanned seventy-three acres, for a reported $75,000. They divided the land into sixty-nine lots, allotting a third of an acre with scenic views to each house. It was an affordable neighborhood that allowed families to own their own private oasis on the water.10