Memories & Memoirs
Summer days around 1948
Summer days around 1948. I’m seven and my sister, Ruth is three and a half. We live at 1414 Monroe Street in River Forest. The house was built in 1941, just before the war. It was a handsome red brick two storey building with a long cool back yard. Mature elms made cathedral arches over the street. Dad loved to garden and I remember gladiolas and hydrangea bushes, three crab apple trees and a lacy honey locust shading (too strong a word for what a honey locust does) the swing set. The long pods in the fall. We had a sandbox in the back corner of the garden.
The 1400 block of Monroe Street, River Forest, in 1945-1953
Our father bought a double lot at the north end of the town at 1414 Monroe Street, and had a house built. When I was born in 1941, the house was not quite finished and we lived in an apartment in neighboring Berwyn. We moved into the house sometime in 1942. There is a photograph of me hanging up my Christmas stocking at the age of 1 ½. Because of the war, house construction had stopped and didn’t resume until 1945. When I was little there were only five families on our side of the block. The other side of the street was a foreign country. On our side there were seven empty lots, which we called prairies. We lived in the house at 1414 until 1953 when we moved about 5 blocks to a larger house.
Uncle Nis Refslund
“Uncle” Nis Refslund, had he been related to me, would have been my great, great uncle. Nis was the much younger brother of the second wife of my grandmother’s father. Although not a direct blood relation, he looms large in the stories from my dad’s side of the family. He was born in Denmark near the German border, around 1890 and, at the urging of his sister living in Chicago, emigrated to America around 1910. After a visit with family in Chicago, he went west and established his homestead in the wheat country of eastern Montana. The nearest town was Wolf Point. It’s still there.
My First Week at St. Vincent’s
My two younger sisters and I are the products of a mixed marriage. At the time (mid 1940’s) and place (old suburb nestled up close to the western edge of Chicago), a mixed marriage meant a Catholic married to a Protestant. Our mother was the Catholic and our father was the Protestant.