Milly's Lore

When I distributed the story of Milly's Christmas gift from the Salvation army, Sandy and Leslie said that they did not remember, or had not heard, that story.  For that reason, I thought I'd better record some other small anecdotes to let people know who their ancestors were. Milly told me this:

     Milly was skinny and the depression was raging.  Men were lined up outside public showers, because they were living on the street. Her parents planted a "Victory garden" in the back yard, and her mother traded a loaf of bread for horse manure to fertilize her garden from one of the vendors who worked their street in his horse and wagon.

     One day when she was walking along the sidewalk in their South Chicago neighborhood, a man in a car pulled over to the curb and picked her up.  He drove her to a dinette and bought her a bowl of chili, then drove her home again.  That's when she got the serious talking-to about accepting rides with strangers, but she did develop a love for chili.

     Her brother Arthur, next in age above her, developed an infection in his mastoid process, the tissue behind his ear.  It cost him some of his hearing.  He had to have it examined periodically, and Milly was more responsible than he, so she had to accompany him to the clinic, when both parents were working.  They had 5 cents for the street car, but they walked so that they could spend the nickel on candy. He got spent three cents on his choice of candy, and she spent two cents for two caramels.  He got to have one of her caramels, because the problem was his ear.

     A neighbor was a Port of Chicago commissioner.  One night a bomb blew the porch off his house.  She slept through it.  Another time, a dirigible flew overhead. She looked and looked and failed ever to see it. The Commissioner handled her brother Ed's traffic ticket when a problem arose, but when Ed went to the wrecking yard to try to reclaim the horn out of his car, that played tunes, the owner of the wrecking yard was sitting at his desk playing with it. 

     She and Art also went to the movies together, and saw Bela Lugosi in "Dracula."  They were so terrified that they held hands and ran down the middle of the street all the way home. (To be exact, I think it was 143rd Ave.  I once lived on 143rd Ave SE in Bellevue, WA, and Dad/Vake commented that that had been Mom's address when he met her.)

     Milly was in the 8th grade when the depression began to alleviate, and girls who had dropped out of school to help support their families began to return to class.  They were a problem for the school, since they wore lipstick and colored their eyebrows, which was not permitted of younger girls.

     As a teenager, Milly was a voracious reader.  She used to go to bed and shine a flashlight on her book, but her mother would see light reflecting off the house next door, and yell at her, "Mildred, turn out that light."  She read Agatha Christie, and Sigmund Freud, but decided he was a dirty old man.

     She had her hair crimped for confirmation or graduation photo, but didn't know she was supposed to comb out her hair when the beautician was done.  She had her photo taken in hard crimps, and her mother "screamed" when she saw it.

     Milly graduated from Englewood High School, a track school that had trained her to be a secretary. (Its most famous alumnus was Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote the play "Raisin in the Sun.") She went to work nights, at Spiegel's catalogs.  She adapted poorly to working nights, and her mother required her to quit the job because she was losing too much weight.  She got a job as secretary to an executive at Westinghouse, and turned part of her paycheck over to her father, to pay for her room and board, every payday.

     One day as she prepared to take dictation, she swept up her skirt with her hand as she sat down, and drove the tip of a sharp pencil into her thigh, where it broke off. She gritted her teeth and finished her assignment.

     During the Chicago World's Fair of 1933, she was admitted to the fair on "Freckle day."  Any child with more than a handful of freckles was admitted for free. Her cousin Muriel had no freckles, but Milly argued, "I have enough for us both."  Both girls were admitted.

Coming Next:  Milly Joins the Army