Milly Sampson was born on a wheat ranch in Saskatchewan, Canada, but was always adamant that her parents were Americans. A few years later, her sister Evelyn was born with a cleft palate. A doctor was treating that condition, and the often-associate “hare lip,” at Cook County Hospital, so the family relocated to Chicago, Illinois so Evelyn could have surgery. Her father, Emil Arthur John Goers, found work as a piano finisher, and her mother, Edith Wirth Goers, worked in a dry-cleaning plant. However, the Great Depression hit hard in 1929 when Milly was 7 years old, and Emil’s job disappeared. The family of seven was so impoverished that at times, they had nothing to eat but oatmeal, morning noon and night. “We had cinnamon with it at night to make it special,” Milly recalled. They planted a “Victory Garden,” and when she could bake bread, Edith would trade a loaf to one of the vendors who came through the neighborhood in a horse-drawn wagon, asking for horse manure to fertilize her garden in exchange.
The family lived on the south side of Chicago, the only German Lutherans in a neighborhood of Irish Catholics. Usually they were the best of friends—the Irish kids taught her to tap dance—but sometimes they fought viciously, with the Lutherans calling the Catholics “Idol worshipers.” She lost her front tooth in one of those fights. She was hit in the mouth by a brick, that she called an “Alley Apple.” At first, she had a cap, but after she lost it for the second time, her parents refused to replace it again. “I cried great big horse-turd tears,” she said, but it was no use. But her teeth were so crowded that the gap in her smile disappeared.
Her religion was so strict that she said once that she was afraid to dig a deep hole in the yard, for fear the devil would come out. Her father would put whatever he could afford in the collection plate on Sunday, but he did not feel he could afford to pledge a tithe. He would be furious when the list of donors to the church was published annually, and he was never named.
Milly had her hair waved for communion. Her mother was gone to work at the time of the communion photo, and Milly didn’t know any better, so she didn’t comb out the hard-set waves before posing for the photograph. Her mother screamed when she saw it!
Milly was so skinny that the school system issued her a sweatshirt and set her to work in “the fresh air room,” a classroom with all the windows open to the stiff wind blowing off of Lake Michigan. It was supposed to be bracing. The Italian kids came to class with bags of garlic hanging around their necks. At home, she lived next to the stockyards. The odors were overwhelming, and she speculated once that’s that what made her love perfume so much. She was so skinny that once a car pulled over to the curb and a stranger ordered her to get in. She did. He drove her to a café, bought her a bowl of chili, and drove her home again. After that, of course, she got the lesson about not talking to strangers, but she learned, also, to love chili.
At Christmas time, the Salvation Army came through the poor neighborhoods, knocking on doors and offering each child in the household one toy and a fresh orange. Once, she chose a little figurine of a horse. Another time, she chose paper dolls, and her older brother Arthur chose a harmonica. He tore the heads off her paper dolls, so she filled his harmonica with salt, corroding its reeds and ruining it. (I have always hated that story as much as I have hated O.Henry’s “Gift of the Magi,” where the woman cuts off her long hair and sells it to buy her husband a watch fob, and he sells his watch to buy her combs for her hair. It’s so unfair: her hair would grow back, but he would never have his pocket watch again!)
Arthur needed surgery for a mastoid infection that cost him a part of his hearing. He needed to go to the clinic for check-ups from time to time, but he wasn’t responsible, so their parents gave Milly a nickel for the street car and sent her along to chaperon, even though Art was the older of the two. Instead of taking the street car, they walked to the appointment and back, and spent the nickel on candy. He got three cents, and she got two, and she always bought two caramels. Then he took one of the caramels, “Because it ‘s my ear.”
They fought like cats and dogs, but when they saw Bela Lugosi starring in the movie “Dracula,” they were so scared afterward that they held hands and ran all the way home, right down the middle of 143rd Street.
In 1933, the “Century of Progress” World’s Fair came to Chicago. One day was “freckle day,” when any child sporting five or more freckles was admitted for free. She was covered with freckles, so she took her plain-complexioned cousin Muriel with her, and got them both in. “I have enough freckles for us both,” she contended.
The FDR administration brought some relief to the victims of the Depressions. Emil got a job as a security guard at the central Chicago Post Office, and her oldest brother Edison got a job with the CCC. Older girls who had dropped out of school starting returning to class They were disturbing to the 8th grade teachers, because those girls were so old that they wore lipstick!
“Mildred! Turn off that light!” Milly was an avid reader, but the light from her lamp would reflect from the house next door, and alert her mother downstairs that she wasn’t getting a good night’s rest. She read through Agatha Christie and Zane Gray, and picked up the works of Sigmund Freud. However, she decided that Freud was just a dirty old man. She worked through plenty of more romantic matter: “Green Dolphin County,” “How Green Was My Valley,” and wept her way through “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” pitying the heroine, a poor girl growing up in New York, while she was a poor girl growing up in Chicago.
Milly stayed in school over the objection of her grandmother, who thought that a young woman of her age should be staying home and stocking a hope chest. She kept the hope chest also, a Lane brand, of the “waterfall” design popular in the 1940. It had a curved front edge veneered with a wood grain running down like a waterfall.
She graduated from Engelwood High School, whose most famous graduate was a handful of years younger. Lorraine Hansberry was the author of “Raisin in the Son,” treating the discrimination against blacks in the neighborhood at the time. Their school, Engelwood, was closed in the 2000s because of poor performance.
Milly was educated on a track system that trained her brothers in engineering and which graduated her as a well-qualified secretary who could type and take shorthand. She went to work for Spiegel Catalogs, then took a job as private secretary to an executive at Westinghouse. Her father collected room and board out of her paycheck, and she spent some of the remainder on riding lessons, and on the latest fashion: She had a green suit with broad shoulders and a peplum waist that she wore with spectator pumps and silk stockings with black seams up the back. She loved to dress up and to go out to night clubs to dance.
At home, she pounded away on a player piano that her Aunt Minnie had given her, and her brothers played guitar with the neighbors. She recalled that one was Richard J. Daly, the boss mayor of Chicago, and others were Homer and Jethro, who became professional banjo players who were popular in the 1940s to ‘60s. But maybe I disremember, because their biographies indicate that Mayor Daly was born in 1902, so was twenty years older than Milly and nearly that much older than her brothers; and Homer and Jethro weren’t working in Chicago until 1950.
She and the family learned about Chicago politics from an early age. Her brother wrecked his car. When he went to the junkyard to try to retrieve his horn that played tunes, the junkyard operator was busy playing with it. He didn’t get the horn back, but he did get the associated traffic ticket fixed, simply by calling the neighbor who was a Port Commissioner. The Commissioner wasn’t equally beloved by all: One night a bomb took the porch off the front of his house, but Milly slept through the blast. She also missed it when a dirigible flew over the city. “It’s right there! It’s right there!” others told her, but she looked in the wrong place, and never saw a thing.
Milly had to wait until 1943, until she turned 21, to join the Women’s Army Corps; and parental consent was required. She waited a few more months until her cousin Muriel turned 21, then they both enlisted.
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