I came up with a nickname for my Dad during my high school years. I began by calling him, “FRB,” his initials. And then the nickname stuck, as others in my family began to call him FRB.
FRB loved his family, loved his work, and FRB loved “I Love Lucy.” Every week, we all watched the episodes – repeats, after the late 1950’s – on our little tv screen in the living room, FRB’s comfy chair directly across from the screen. FRB would laugh and laugh at the ridiculous and wonderful scenes of Lucy and her cohorts – all over-the-top silly folks. And vivid in my mind in those moments, FRB would turn to one of us – Suzie, Mom, or me – from time to time as he exploded again with laughter at scenes he’d seen before, and, his eyes sparkling, say: “Fun, isn’t it, honey?”
Over the years, I saw FRB angry, I saw him enjoying life, I saw him have fun, I saw him being nervous and serious, and I saw his eyes – one blue, one brown – sparkle as he looked at one of us. And I saw him cry, as he realized that the cancer he’d been diagnosed with at 65 had returned in his early 70’s, and as he realized that the cancer would take his simple, kind, and quiet life.
I’m grateful. When I think about my own life, and as my world has expanded to be able to get intimate views into the lives of many, many other folks, I know that I was raised in love. For as many things I did not receive, I received love – not always unconditional, but a good dose of love.
“Feels like home to me Feels like home to me Feels like I’m all the way back where I belong…” words & music, Randy Newman
Were someone to ask me the question: “where’s home?” I would say, Milwaukee, the city where I was born, went to school, and where I lived until I was in my early thirties. I suppose in a way, Milwaukee is home to me. But another place holds my heart: Door County, Wisconsin, 200 miles north of Milwaukee, the peninsula between Lake Michigan to the East and Green Bay to the West.
My father, born in Upper Michigan, grew up in Sister Bay, a village on the Green Bay Shore of Door County, the place where his mother had been born – though several of her older siblings had been born in German speaking Prussia, now Poland. And because Dad had his roots in Door County, when he had vacation weeks from the steel factory in Milwaukee, where he had gone to find work after the Depression, and during the War Years, we traveled to Door County. And I expect my love for that place settled in me during those early years.
In my early twenties, I was assigned to Green Bay, Wisconsin, in my first career as a Claims Representative for the Social Security Administration. Brown County was a short drive north to Door County, and I grew to travel that highway north many times. Sometimes I would stay with one of my beloved aunts and uncles. Sometimes, over the years, I’d rent a small cabin – one right on the shore of Lake Michigan, north of Baileys Harbor – to spend a few quiet days alone. Every time, I promised myself I would return.
And I’ve kept that promise, even as Door County has changed over the years to become a popular, populated place of exodus for folks from all over the Midwest, in particular Chicago. I’ve kept that promise – as I moved from the Midwest to live most of my life in the Bay Area on the West Coast.
I know the “old” places and I know the roads that lead through the center of the Peninsula, with its rolling hills and orchards – luscious green in the summer – where not many tourists drive during their few days in Door County. I remember the places where members of my extended family lived, and as I drive past those places now, I can see us gathered on the lawn, talking, laughing, playing.
Because so many of the people I have loved my whole life are gone now, I use some of my time in “the Door” to drive the cemeteries, to walk again among the graves to find the names of those I loved – and love.
There is a love of place. I know that love of place. As I write this now, a gentle kind of homesickness comes to me. In my mind – and in my heart – it’s been too long since I’ve driven the roads of my beloved place. My own longing brings to mind my ancestors, those who traveled so far from their beloved homelands to come to a new country, a place where they were strangers with a strange language, a place where they could only remember, but never see again, their true home. In my life of privilege and these days of fast transport, my longing can be satisfied again. Some day – soon, I hope! – I’ll drive those roads again.
Johnson Homestead marker – Gills Rock, Wisconsin, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2021
Uncle Johnny wasn’t very tall, but he was a god to us. He could stand at attention in a doorway for hours, talking about the workers, about union wages and strikes, about strikes and collective bargaining. He was an Atheist. He greatly respected my father, who had gone through 8th grade in rural schools, because my father was a good, strong, honest worker, a union man, a steelworker.
Johnny was a Communist, giving his own life, his smarts, to make life better for the workers.
Uncle Johnny was almost ten years older than my mother, who adored her brother. He had “been born on the boat,” we were told, coming with his father and mother – my grandparents – from Ukraine, about 1914. Years later, I discovered that his date of birth was in the year 1910; given that date, he had been born in Ukraine. To this day, I hold firmly to the understanding that people who leave their homeland for life in a distant land do what they must to keep their families together. I know mine did. My people were poor and uneducated, the grandchildren of freed serfs. My grandfather died when I was almost 2, falling to the curb on a Milwaukee street, drunk again. Still, he’d made it, made it to America to give his kids a life different from his own. My mother taught him to read English when she was in grade school.
When my mother, her two brothers and younger sister, Anne, were small, Johnny was already a worker. With great homage to Johnny, my mother told me that he had made Christmas happen for his siblings one year when my grandparents could not. There was no Christmas tree in that Milwaukee flat, now a boarding house for other men who’d arrived from Ukraine, most without their families. And there was lots of drinking in that house, a fact that has shaded the family ever since. Johnny knew there’d be no Christmas for his brothers and sisters, so he bought a tree and brought it home. Together, the kids decorated it, together, they made Christmas happen, thanks to Johnny. And under the decorated tree lay the gifts big brother had also brought. That made him a hero, forever.
My sister tells me that she was home sick from school the day two men in suits came to the door. That would have been about 1960. Two men in suits – an anomaly in that working-class neighborhood! What Suzie remembers is that Mom lied when the men asked her if she knew where her brother Johnny was. Mom said no. Didn’t Mom always tell us not to lie? A rumor in the family is that Pete, the youngest brother, who fought in three wars in the Army, never rose above the rank of SFC because of Uncle Johnny’s politics.
The family was proud of its politics, proud of its atheism. We were smart people, smart and uneducated, smart people who worked hard, union workers.
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Sometime around the time I turned 20, I started thinking that the life of a minister might be a good call for me. I don’t know where the idea came from, because, like the rest of my family, I was not a “church person.” Now, I think a lot of people answer the call they receive by choosing a vocation that suits their temperament. The Call is not particular to the Church, although the Church likes to think it is. The year I was confirmed in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, I stopped going to church, because what I heard in that fundamentalist denomination did not jive with what I was already learning from my European-educated school teachers. Besides, I had never heard of a woman minister. And I wouldn’t, for almost a decade. But there it was, the seed of a different life.
I was over 30 when I enrolled in seminary, almost 35 when I was ordained and sent to serve as Associate Pastor at a Church in San Jose, CA. My uncle Johnny and aunt Dani lived in Campbell, West of San Jose, where they had raised their family, my cousins. The autumn after I started work, my parents wanted to visit me, to see Uncle Johnny, and they wanted to see my church, to hear me preach.
You’ve heard it: “he would never darken the door of a church.” That was certainly true for Johnny. But there he was, along with Aunt Dani, my Uncle Pete and Aunt Athalie from South San Francisco, and my proud parents. It would take me several years after that time to get the hang of being a pastor, of whatever that all meant.
When the service was over, the congregation – full of many well-educated and highly regarded members of the community – filed out through the ornate doors, each person stopping to have a moment to tell the pastors a health concern, or about a death in the family. When my parents came through, followed by the uncles and aunts, I expect pride shone on their faces. I don’t remember.
What I remember is what Uncle Johnny said to me that day. “I can see you want to help people.”
With a touch of kindness and a few words, Uncle Johnny delivered the blessing. From people who had nothing came a love for their children, a pride in the young people who followed them. As a pastor, I’ve given blessings, and I’ve received blessings. I’m grateful. Mostly, I’m grateful for the quiet blessing I received from Uncle Johnny that day.
“There are places I’ll remember. All my life, though some have changed. Some forever, not for better; Some have gone and some remain…” Lennon and McCartney
Our yearly trips to Door County seemed to have a pattern, and the pattern included visits to various aunts and uncles – my father’s siblings – who lived close to where they had been born. At some point during the week, we would drive for a visit to Auntie Edna’s house, close to the tip of the Door Peninsula, at Gill’s Rock. The road that ran to the north of Auntie Edna and Uncle Werner’s (we said, “Verner”) place led to the dock to the ferry to Washington Island.
Edna and Werner had lived in that house for many years longer than I had been alive. My cousins Donna and Dean had been born in that place. On my trips to Door County now, I always drive past the brown-shingled house with the cherry orchard to the East. On the edge of the property on which their home stands is a plaque: “Johnson Homestead 1904, Leonard and Selma” the names of their children with years of birth, below. My Uncle Werner, who spoke as if he’d come straight from Sweden, had been born there! Years later, the thought would come to mind that his first language had been Swedish.
For a living, Uncle Werner had fished the tumultuous waters of that part of Wisconsin, Green Bay, Death’s Door to the North ( the native people had named that passage between Green Bay and Lake Michigan). He also raised the sour cherries that grew abundantly in the rocky soil of Door County.
The visit to with Auntie Edna and Uncle Werner began in their living room, with both Edna and Werner seated in their large, comfortable chairs. I sat in the same place each time, also, and I would look to that part of the long, narrow room toward the places we did not sit. Did they ever go into that part of the house, I wondered? Did the Christmas Tree go there?
Dad and Mom, Suzie and I sat formally in that living room, Dad with his cap in his hand, doing most of the talking. Of the lot of us, he was the most extraverted. Uncle Werner seemed to have a twinkle in his eye; I always thought that in his way, he was laughing at us. Auntie Edna was one of the quiet Bahlerts, and so she sat quietly in her chair, asking questions. Gentleness radiated from her presence. After awhile, we’d all get up, and Auntie Edna, Mom, Suzie and I would move to the small, dark dining room, where she served us juice and cookies. I remember her kindness, her ability to listen. When I went to the bathroom before we left the house, I’d glance into their bedroom, and always wondered why they slept in two single beds. At home, Mom and Dad slept together.
Years later, I would come to know my cousin Donna, who worked in Milwaukee and made the trip to the Door Peninsula every week to get her clothes washed, to be home again. Her life was much like my father’s had been, a generation before. While I was in college, I made the trip to Door County with Donna for a weekend, and she took me to her lifelong haunts. After she retired, Donna would marry Jim Thorp, who had lived his entire life on the Door Peninsula. They would live in their double-wide trailer, a short walk away from Donna’s folks.
On the Sunday of our week in Door County, we’d go to church at the Moravian Church just down the road from Werner and Edna’s place, and there she would be, my beloved aunt. In her quiet way, she was a presence.
Once a week, Edna wrote a column for the Door County Advocate about happenings in that place, so beautiful in the summer, with long bleak winters. When we had had our yearly visit, our names were mentioned in her column.
When we are a child, it’s hard to imagine these elders as being young, but sometimes I try to piece together the bits and pieces I heard, often repeatedly, into a pattern. I knew that Edna had graduated from high school, something not all of her siblings had done. She spoke as I spoke, not in the dialect of that place that my father had. Her father, Ginter Bahlert, my grandfather, had wanted her to go to college to be a schoolteacher, but that was not to be. She worked for a time at Bunda’s Store in Sister Bay, an establishment that lasted there until at least the 1970’s, on the West Side of Highway 42, on the South end of town, before she married Werner. I think of her every time I pass the building that once housed Bunda’s Store, the Sister Bay Bowl across the street, still standing.
It is odd, in a way, hard to understand that these places are still there, and the people I loved gone now, so long.
I was searching, it felt as if I was always searching, had been searching for a long time. Searching implies an object – what was I searching for? I had the idea that I could go into the ministry – but I had no church experience of a community of faith. I had only a history that included a family distrust of “Church,” and three years of study in a fundamentalist denomination. After confirmation, I had abruptly left what I knew as “Church.” I thought the social movements of the 70’s were more about Jesus and what he taught than what I had known of Church. In particular, I had noticed and admired the work of Father James Groppi in Milwaukee, a Civil Rights leader in my hometown and adjoining ‘hood.
After college, I embarked on a career with the Social Security Administration, and after three months of intense training as a Claims Representative in Minneapolis, I was assigned to the District Office in Green Bay, Wisconsin. At the time, I was happy to have been assigned to Green Bay, which was a couple of hours north of Milwaukee. I didn’t know at the time how lonely I would be, how lost as I began my professional life as an adult.
And part of me was still searching. I was always searching. For what? For love? For meaning? For connection? For depth? For community? All of these were to be answered, although I didn’t know it when I was searching. And part of me is searching, even now, which has given my life and faith a depth and richness I would not have had otherwise. I’ve always been open to new understandings, to new learnings. I’m grateful for that.
After a couple of years, as the Social Security Administration took on the administration of SSI – Supplemental Security Income – the staff in the SSA office at Green Bay grew. From my first days, when I was the first woman CR, staff numbers grew. My first colleagues – who ruled the roost as only white men in power can do – were challenged to accept women who were at least as good at what they did than the men had been.
I was still searching. One of my colleagues was a woman named Joan, who was a bit overwhelmed by the work as a Claims Representative, but whose life I noticed. She was a white woman from Wisconsin, married to a disabled African American man from the South. Joan always wanted to go deeper, and I sensed a depth in how she wanted to relate to others. She didn’t engage in the politics of the office, often spending her breaks reading a Holy Book – the Holy Book of those people who are called Ba’hai, the teachings of their prophet. In a way, Joan was difficult to relate to, but I liked her depth, the way she looked at others as she spoke to them. Joan and Nat invited me to dinner at their house, and there, after the meal, we talked.
Joan and Nat were the first people I knew who took the faith they professed seriously. They allowed my questions. They didn’t expect rigid answers, the answers of a “right faith.” They wanted to talk, to learn where I was going with my questions. They took me seriously, as well as the faith they professed. When I asked about becoming a Bahai’, they didn’t surround me with evangelical fervor – they encouraged me to explore my journey, to see how my journey unfolded.
And my journey unfolded in another direction – in a way. I’ve written about returning to Milwaukee, still working for the Social Security Administration, and following my heart and questions to the people called Methodists, to my friend and guide Harvey Stower, and into the ministry.
I’m grateful for the journey, and for the questions, which still arise, will continue to arise. I’m grateful for all those whose path has lit my way. I’m grateful for the ongoing quest of faith, of trust in life as life offers itself. And I’m always grateful for the beacons of light who have lit my way – for Jesus, for Joan, for Nat, for Harvey – for all the others.
The Blue Mosque, Istanbul - View by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 5/2023
