The Chicago Years

(Last week, in honor of my dad's birthday this month, I started sharing some of his life story. Click here to see what you missed in the first installment.)

When my dad’s family emigrated from Germany to the United States in the 1920s, they settled in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois.

My dad started selling newspapers on street corners, for three cents apiece, keeping one cent from each paper he sold. It would have seemed like a small fortune. He dropped out of school, after graduating from eighth grade; it was more important at that time to work. It didn’t mean however that it was the end of his education. My dad read everything he could get his hands on and never quit learning.

When the Great Depression descended on America, my dad’s family managed just fine. They had lived through bad times in Germany.

My dad and both of his brothers got jobs at a golf course. With some families having no members employed at all, the brothers didn’t want everyone to know they were all from one family. Frank, being the youngest, started going by his stepfather’s last name. I don’t know how that officially happened at the time, but that became his permanent name, the legal name of his kids and grandkids.

In June of 1934, my dad’s older brother married and moved to the area known as Lincoln Park, Illinois. On the hot evening of July 24, John Dillenger, public enemy number one at the time, was coming out of the Biograph Theatre on Lincoln Avenue in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. He had been set up by a prostitute, and agents of the Division of Investigation, the precursor to the FBI, were waiting for him. Five shots were fired, three of them hitting Dillenger.

People from all around the neighborhood hurried to the scene, and even after the body had been removed, taken to the Alexian Brothers Hospital, gawkers continued to arrive. It was reported that some even dipped their clothing in the puddle of blood on the sidewalk as a souvenir of the famous criminal. My father, nineteen years old at the time, was one of the visitors to the scene, running to the Biograph Theatre as soon as word got out of what had happened. There was no report, though, that he took any souvenir.

Quite the claim to fame, huh? 

(This is the oldest picture I have of my dad. It is July 1945 and he is 30 years old, on his wedding day. I cut my mom out of the picture because she would kill me if I put it on the internet, even though she was a beautiful bride.)

The Early Years

Ninety-eight years ago on the 20^th of this month, my dad was born near Cologne, Germany. Thinking back on what his life must have been like, I deeply regret not gleaning more information from him. As it is, over the years, I have pieced together a few stories from that past.

He was the second youngest of six children born to Paul and Emma Loehmer. Hannah was the oldest and I have found absolutely no information on her. When the rest of the family moved to America in 1923 and 1924, she stayed behind. I know, I need to set up that Ancestry.com account and find her, huh?

The next oldest was Frederick, known as Fritz, born in 1908. The remaining siblings were Emmy, born in 1912; Klara, born in 1914; my dad and finally Franz, born in 1918.  

The only memory my dad shared with me about life in Germany was that he learned to swim when his father threw him into the river.  It was either sink or swim, so he picked up a noble dogpaddle and was able to get himself to the shore. 

I think he spoke very little about life in Germany because it had been so very hard. It’s one of those things they don’t talk about much in the history books. When Germany lost World War I, the victors imposed such stiff retributions on the country, that it seemed the country would never bounce back. Do you remember how well that worked? The poor and destitute population of Germany turned to an up and coming individual who promised to return the country to its former glory. It was so easy to be drawn into his promises, easy to be mesmerized by his oratory style. And just as this man - it doesn’t even seem right to call him a “man” he was so evil – began his rise to power, my dad and his family were packing up to come to America. How different my life would have been had they not left Germany when they did, or more likely I wouldn’t have been born.

(I just couldn't come up with a picture for tonight. There are very few pictures of my dad from back in these days, but this blog post willl shed more light on his early life.)