In September 1942 Martha began teaching science at Thornburn
Junior High, where she was taken under the wing(s) of veteran
teachers like her good friend and “hitchhiking buddy” Esther
Ewald,
and Mr. Lauchner the Principal, “a marvelous man—he taught me
the little tricks of the trade.” After school and on Saturdays
she worked on her master’s degree, taking classes at the
University of Illinois.
Martha contributed her share to the American war effort during
the summer of 1944 by working as a hostess at an Urbana USO
show. There she met a sailor from Florida named Murel Calvin
Lewis,
who was stationed at the Navy base in Champaign and attending a
specialist training program at the University. As Martha later
put it: “We danced together, chatted together, and then got
married.”
“He really had her walking in the clouds, too,” Esther Ewald
would add.
To each other they must have appeared totally exotic—Murel the
southern Baptist with a Byronic profile and head of dark waves;
Martha the urbane college graduate with That Certain Chicago
Sophistication. Murel was far from home, Martha “ready for
marriage,” and in the heady wartime atmosphere their mutual
exotic-appearing attraction rapidly turned into matrimony.
Joseph had always been consciously and deliberately
overprotective of Martha; now she wanted to marry a sailor she
barely knew. Did Joseph pound (or at least slap) the table and
demand to know how Mr. Murel Lewis intended to support his
beloved only daughter?
He did not. Joseph’s reaction was: “Even if it doesn’t last
long, it’ll be a good experience for her.”
“He was probably so relieved I finally had a boyfriend that he
didn’t want to say anything,” Martha would quip.
So on or about August 20, 1944, Martha Ehrlich and Murel Lewis
were married in Chicago by a grumpy justice of the peace. The
J.P.’s attitude during the hastily-performed ceremony gave the
bride the giggles, which scandalized her mother, who elbowed the
bride to make her stop. Joseph and Mathilda gave the newlyweds
a set of silver and a pressure cooker, and Joseph got the
Lewises a ten-dollar suite at the Ambassador East Hotel.
Martha and Murel then traveled to Wauchula, Florida
to visit Murel’s parents. His father Andrew Lee, a farmer
turned foreman at a state convict camp, accepted the marriage
and made Martha feel welcome—or at least more so than did
Murel’s mother Ella Belle, who was aghast that her son had
married (of all people!) a Jew from Chicago. The elder
Lewises lived in a one-room country shack without electricity or
plumbing; Murel made Martha her own outhouse seat, and the
junior Lewises honeymooned in the back of a pickup truck.
Returning to her own element in Champaign-Urbana, Martha
received her Master of Science degree that October. Murel was
able to attend this ceremony before being transferred to San
Francisco, with the strong likelihood he would then go on to the
Pacific Theater. But things did not work out for Murel; he was
not sent overseas, nor did he become an officer and aviator as
he had hoped. Around February 1945 Martha gave up her job
teaching eighth grade science
and went to join him in California, leaving her master’s diploma
in Joseph’s safekeeping.
Her having chosen to leave the classroom was a decision
which Joseph seemed wholly unable to fathom. But he tried
coming to grips with it in a letter to his daughter, one
of the very few he wrote in English:
1945 Feb. 13. Hello Martha! I know you was a Master, but
still it was nice to see on paper. Valentine is an occasion to
send something like this. I will save you this diploma with the
others and someday you will take out from the [fur shop] safe to
see it, or (I hope) someday maybe you want to use it. It will
be always something for you, to depend on it. I know your ideas
are all different now and I hope you get what you want, but we
live in a strange, funny world. If it would happen, that the
teacher overpower the woman in you, you can depend on your
diplomas. Something else, if I won’t be here no more, and you
would like to talk to me, ask your Master degree, she will give
you always an answer, what to do, because I feel a little part
of me is in your diploma. One thing more I want to see in my
life, George’s diploma from the Eng. school. This must be all
of our duty in the future. So long Martha, Love Popy [sic].
At first the Lewises occupied a motel cabin in King City,
southeast of Monterey. In August 1945 Murel’s father was
reputedly killed in a prison uprising,
and Murel went to Florida to find out what had happened,
insisting that Martha keep a shotgun to defend herself with
while he was gone. She was uneasy having it, and gained no
confidence after managing to shoot out a screen door and pepper
the cars in the motel parking lot.
After Murel was discharged from the Navy he and Martha moved to
Ferndale, Michigan in suburban Detroit.
Murel remained in the Reserves and worked as a mechanic in the
auto plants; Martha tried to get a new teaching job but was
viewed as a “Navy wife” and therefore too much of a transient.
She fell back on her Walgreen’s experience and found work as a
waitress and cashier in what she’d later term “ill-fated
places.”
Martha’s entire life had been directed toward education: first
in becoming a teacher, then in being one. Now she was in a
position where she could not teach—not even as a
substitute, since she’d never learned to drive and therefore
could not get about town—and this led to great frustration, as
it had with Joseph.
Moreover, in Ferndale there were few people she could relate to
in any way she understood. This emphatically included Murel’s
widowed mother, who lived with them for a very brief period.
Martha was thrown for a loop by Ella’s “strange little
hillbilly Mammy Yokum habits,” such as ignoring the hamper and
stuffing dirty laundry under the bed instead.
Like many couples who’d met and married during the war, Martha
and Murel found themselves joined together without a whole lot
in common or much to talk about. Martha patterned her married
life after her mother’s, remembering that Mathilda never made
waves or argued with Joseph, or at least never in front of the
children. And the Lewises attempted to make marital progress
the traditional way by having children of their own; but in 1947
Martha miscarried.
Afterwards they decided to buy a trailer with friends from
Ferndale, carpenter Howard Johnston and his wife Bobbi,
and move together to Florida. They set up in Miami where a big
construction boom was going on; Murel got a job servicing planes
for Eastern Air Lines at the Miami airport, keeping up hopes of
someday becoming a pilot by taking flying lessons. Joseph and
Mathilda had resumed their annual winter vacation trips to St.
Petersburg, which had lapsed during the war; now the Lewises
were able to join them and share some leisure time fishing.
Joseph, though not a serious fisherman, enjoyed this sport
(perhaps for its peace and quiet and chance to commune with
Tampa Bay) and would spend hours catching little fish, then
throwing them back.
In Miami Martha remained a “transient Navy wife,” unable to find
work as a teacher. She continued waitressing and
cashiering—“and I was good at it, too”—but remained less than
happy.
As part of his freshman orientation at the University of
Illinois in the fall of 1942, George took a battery of tests
which resulted in his being placed in an accelerated chemistry
course. “I started out like a house afire, and slowly began to
disintegrate… I did so poorly that I got a D.” Like Martha
five years earlier, George’s first semester of college was not a
happy one; he discovered he had neither vocation nor real
interest in chemical engineering. And at the semester’s end he
had to tell Joseph (“which was not easy”) that, because
of a too-low grade-point average, he had been dropped from the
chemical engineering curriculum.
Promptly drafted after turning eighteen in January 1943, George
was allowed to complete his second semester at Illinois. “Your
past and present have been closely tied up with school,” Joseph
had written when presenting George with his Scrapbook the
previous Christmas, “and for the future . . . we wait to see.”
They were not to wait long: in June 1943 Private George
no-middle-name Ehrlich was out of school and in the Army.
There was another battery of tests to take at Camp Grant in
Rockford, Illinois, to determine selection for officer
training. Some of the draftees were told they could take
further tests for aviation cadet training; George took these in
order to get out of guard duty and KP. While he waited for his
test results, most of the rest of Camp Grant was shipped out to
Australia. George qualified for the aviation cadet appointment
and was sent to Miami Beach
for three months of basic training. Most of the pre-cadets got
shipped out after basic; George and a few others went through
more advanced training, then everyone shipped out—except
George, whose records had been misfiled.
Once these were found, the Army seemed uncertain just what to do
with Private Ehrlich. He was finally sent to Henderson State
Teachers College in Arkadelphia, Arkansas to undergo four months
of special college training for officer candidates, plus ten
hours of flight training in an ancient Piper Cub. In February
1944 he moved on to the San Antonio classification center and
took yet another battery of tests, this time to determine
specialty training. 95% of the aviation students wanted to
become pilots, but George had no such yen; with a “Hooray” he
wrote his parents that he’d been classified to study navigation.
For the next four months
George went through pre-flight training at Randolph Field in San
Antonio. Though now a full-fledged aviation cadet he spent no
time in the air, but did get visited by an encyclopedia salesman
who was wholly unable to step out of his memorized spiel. When
George asked him questions about the Britannica, the salesman
had to go back and recite until he came to the relevant answer.
George bought the encyclopedia one volume at a time over the
next eighteen months, having the books delivered to Chicago
where Joseph found them vastly interesting and starting reading
through the Britannica from “A” on.
When the San Marcos Army Air Field Navigation School announced
the graduation of Class 44-47 N-6 in November 1944, George sent
his parents a class photo with capsule descriptions of his
fellow students. Himself he captioned: “His mother is famous
for cookies.” News always spread quickly at San Marcos when
packages for Ehrlich arrived; Mathilda’s “fancy cookies” left
the competition crumbling.
George was now an officer—A hadnagy úr (“Mr. Second
Lieutenant”) to his father.
He had taken a strange test in radar training, still “pretty
hush-hush” at this time, and was one of three officers who
received Restricted Special Orders to undergo it. In February
1945 he completed this radar course in Boca Raton,
having wrestled with temperamental equipment, and then got
thirteen days of furlough in Chicago.
Photos were taken of him in his officer’s uniform; when Martha
saw them, she burst into tears.
He joined the 315th Wing of the 20th Air Force in McCook,
Nebraska. This wing was intended to fly B-29s at night and
destroy Japan’s oil refinery capabilities using radar-directed
bombing. After a month’s training in Jamaica,
George’s crew picked up their plane; they were supposed to be
the first in the 356th Squadron to go overseas but ended up
among the last, since the authorities kept insisting George’s
records were not complete.
Finally his crew made it to Guam. It was the summer of 1945,
and they assumed they would take part in the imminent invasion
of Japan. George had just completed his first combat mission (a
flight to Truk Atoll) as a radar operator when news came of the
atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The A-Bomb was said to have the
power of 2,000 B-29 bombloads, which George’s crew had a hard
time believing. Seven days later they flew a more conventional
bombing mission to Tsuchizaki in the northern part of Honshu; a
day after that, Japan surrendered.
There was still plenty going on to keep George busy. In
September he flew a mercy mission to the Philippines,
carting in Red Cross material for released prisoners. On the
way back his crew encountered a typhoon; and when George,
filling in for the ailing navigator, was able to get a fix on
their position he found the plane had been thrown 350 miles
offcourse. (The B-29 flying behind them was lost.) A month
later George spent nine days at Iwo Jima with no gear; and he
who’d once refused to touch vegetables would say that World War
II taught him to eat.
Returning to Guam at the end of October, he was promoted to
first lieutenant. After a long tedious wait for his turn to
return home, George finally left Guam in April 1946 on an
old-fashioned steamer to Saipan. From there he could have flown
home but opted instead for the S.S. Cape Mendocino, a
converted cargo freighter captained by an ex-internee. It
turned out to be a wretched ship and a grim voyage, including a
stop in Honolulu to pick up a group of reform school students.
After eighteen days, the “Mendocino Maru”
arrived at last in San Francisco—and “if there was a welcoming
band, it was gone.”
Discharged
in June, George returned to the University of Illinois as an
architectural design major.
Previously he had taken a drafting class and found it far more
enjoyable than chemical engineering. Architecture was “kind of
like engineering… professional, respectable, and it includes
drafting.” With the G.I. Bill and three years of saved military
pay, George was now economically independent and able to attend
the University year-round—fall, winter, and summer. “I actually
had a hell of a good time going to school,” he would say, while
expanding his curriculum to sculpture and art history.
He met the local Unitarian minister, Phil Schug, whose church
ran a co-op food service of sorts on Sunday evenings; and though
George did not become a church member at this time, he took part
in their Sunday socials. At them he became close friends with
Don and Marion Holshouser
and others of their circle at the University.
It was not long before George decided he was more interested in
the history of architecture than in design. He asked Frank Roos,
Head of the Illinois Art Department, about job prospects in the
art history field; Roos was bluntly realistic about the lack of
such, but at the same time encouraging. By 1948 George’s job
prospects were becoming better defined: he was hired as a studio
assistant in sculpture classes, and discovered that he enjoyed
helping students with technical questions.
To aid his study of architecture he got his first camera, a
Kodak Brownie. He would often take pictures in Chicago but it
never occurred to him, then or later, to photograph his
parents’s fur shop, their apartment at 1553 Devon, or the
surrounding neighborhood; and in later years George would kick
himself for not doing so. In September 1948 he visited his
sister and brother-in-law in Florida, taking many photos of
booming Miami Beach and—still being an incorrigible kid
brother—one of Martha’s clothed backside. (She captioned it “My
Sister Fanny.”)
The Lewises now had their own tiny trailer at the Northwest
Trailer Park, and commuted to and fro on a motorcycle called
“Jezebel.” Murel was still working as a mechanic and hoping to
become a pilot, but George got the impression he had no
practical plan for achieving this dream other than to take
flying lessons and work at the airport. There remained the idea
that a child would make a difference, and here was a dream with
a chance for achievement: in the fall of 1948, Martha again
became pregnant.
When George returned to Illinois he realized he had accumulated
nearly two hundred hours of coursework, but was still semesters
away from earning any established degree. He set his sights
instead on becoming a Bachelor of Science in the Division of
Special Services for War Veterans, and achieved this the
following June. Joseph’s graduation present was $200 to finance
a trip to New York.
On the same day that George graduated—June 11, 1949—Sherry Renée
Lewis was born at Edgewater Hospital in Miami.
1949 June 15. My Darling little granddaughter!
You made us the happiest and proudest grandparents in the world,
by arriving to be part of our family four days ago. We
love you with all our hearts even without seeing you yet.
But your dear parents promised to bring you to Chicago, as soon
as you are old enough to travel without doing any harm to your
health. We are looking forward for that time which we all
hope it won’t be too long. I hope when you see this, you
won’t think it silly to write to you when you are so young, and
couldn’t know much about anything. But if you grow up to
be something like your Mother, you will like it, just like she
did her diary Grandpa and I started for her just about the time
she was as old as you are now, and presented it when she was
fifteen years old on her birthday. She loved it, although
she could not read it herself as it was written in “Hungarian.”
But now that you are “born” I am going to translate it to
English so some time you might be able to read it, and see how
much we loved her too. Here together is all the letters
your dear Mother wrote since your birth, I saved them all to
form a nice diary for you from your early childhood. Hope
you will like what we had to say about you and your progress of
life. Your loving
Grandma Mathilda Ehrlich.
“Oh how good it feels to no longer resemble the rear view of a
baby hippopotamus,” Martha wrote in one of eleven letters she
sent her parents over the next six weeks. Sherry Renée’s
progress was spelled out minutely, sometimes clinically, and
once in awhile
liltingly:
She smiled today for the first time that it
wasn’t a grimace but a real smile. Murel was tweaking her nose
and poking at her chin this morning, and she enjoyed it so she
broke into a wide toothless grin each time. I had to stop my
work and go hug Murel, he was so tickled at her and proud, and
was so cute. He’s going to be like you Dad—strict and firm in
his ideas about raising her, but he’ll be a very proud and
loving father. We’re so happy—with each other and with Sherry,
that I can hardly wait till
you come down and can share it with us. I’m a
very fortunate person indeed…
News galore today. Stinky grins like a
“chessy-cat” now when we play with her, and I know for sure she
can see. Her eyes and head follow a moving rattle, or the drape
swaying in a breeze, and I can no longer sneak up on her to see
if she’s asleep or uncovered. She sees me and wants immediately
to be picked up. Which incidentally led to her first scolding
and “potchy-potchy.” She simply would not be quiet and go to
sleep, and yet could hardly keep her eyes open. Pick her up and
she’d snuggle down in my arms and go right to sleep. Put her
down and she’d scream herself purple—with rage—not one tear.
So, says mama, if the young lady is old enough to get mad,
she’s old enough to get mad at. So she got a couple of sharp
pops in the spot nature intended and I scolded in a stern
voice. She was so surprised she stopped howling, and while
getting over the surprise, she fell asleep. Peace and quiet
reigned
supreme. Five weeks old…
Sherry’s first checkup left no doubt that she was the daughter
of the little girl who’d once bargained with a doctor in
Kolozsvár to not look into her throat with a spoon. The Florida
pediatrician checked Sherry’s “heart, lungs, ears, etc., and
finally throat. When Dr. finally removed the tongue-depressor
from her mouth she was so mad she would have sworn if she
weren’t a lady. But she got even with him a few minutes
later—she baptized him, but
good.” In August Martha took Sherry to visit Chicago, and on
the 19th Mathilda wrote:
Dearest Sherry Renée! You and your Mommy are
with us for ten days now, it’s your first visit and you are only
two months old. But what a joy you are to us already. I don’t
know how we will live after you go back to your Daddy, and
Grandpa and me have to stay here in Chicago alone. We will miss
you terribly. Your Grandpa loves you very much and as little as
you are, you like him too. Whenever you see him you smile at
him and he’s as happy to see that as can be. He told me
yesterday your smiles are worth a million dollars to him… We
have so much fun watching you when you are awake, your
Grandfather can sit by you for hours and enjoy every second of
it… You were out on the porch, Grandfather was watching your
antics, you were lying on your tummy and didn’t see him, but
when he laughed out loud you started to smile too although you
did not see but recognized his voice and he was tickled silly
for that. We both have lots of fun with you, you are a darling
and so good too, sleeping all night almost, just whimpering a
little when feeding time comes. I gave you a bath alone today
the first time and how you love to be in the bathtub. It was a
lovely experience for me. But Grandfather helps your Mommy
every day while she bathes you. Your Uncle George came home too
to see you and he helped once also, he received you after the
bath, he loves you too although he doesn’t say it
with words, but we can tell.
1949 August 30.
We are alone again as your Mommy took you home on the 27th. We
all five of us drove out to the airport and the three of us
watched till you boarded the plane and it took off. Grandfather
and I felt very lonesome, but George was with us and he drove
our car home. We are glad at least he’ll be home for another
week so at least he is here yet. He had to admit it before you
went home that you are a very unusually bright baby for your
age… Now we are like to push the time so Christmas would come
sooner because Grandfather and I will count the days till we can
see you again right after New Years. Till then, all our love
and blessing goes with you
wherever you are. Grandma Ehrlich.
Around this time Joseph and Mathilda finally bought a new car.
They had gotten their one and only Plymouth in 1941, and when
the war dried up the auto market this had to last the Ehrlichs
for the duration. Now they returned to Chevrolets, and the
one-and-only Plymouth went to George. He was back in
Champaign-Urbana, beginning work on his master’s degree in art
history, but with wheels of his own it was easier for him to go
up to Chicago for an occasional visit. He was at 1553 Devon
about a month after Martha and Sherry returned to Miami. The
phone rang, George answered, and Martha was glad of that because
she had news to announce: “Murel and I are breaking up.”
At first there was dead silence from George, and when he went to
tell his parents it was with an absolutely white face—“probably
because I was trying to figure out how to break it to them.
‘Divorce’ was not a word in their vocabulary.” But Joseph and
Mathilda took the news calmly enough; they told Martha to come
home, and they would take care of her.
The Lewises had never communicated well, and Martha’s attempts
to emulate her mother’s make-no-waves style did not help. When
displeased, Martha had a tendency to let resentments grow and
build, never giving them any ventilation—“and you can’t make a
marriage on non-talk where you bottle things up,” she would
later observe. Evidently accusations of infidelity sparked a
blowup, and with it the breakup. Martha cut her losses and
returned to Chicago with the only things from her five-year
marriage that she considered rightfully hers: the pressure
cooker, the set of silver—and Sherry Renée.
Notes
