Post 5-Chicago
Our 6 years in Chicago was a very mixed bag. For Eric it was a dark period and almost swamped him. He arrived with a BA from Columbia and an MA from Harvard but all his Ivy League experience did not prepare him for the University of Chicago. I don’t think he ever felt at home in his department and was thoroughly intimidated by most of the professors. It took him 4 years to get thru the courses, prelims, and orals and then he really bogged down when faced with the dissertation. For several years he taught at the university’s downtown adult extension along with several other humanists, and some of his colleagues became famous in their fields like the poet Galway Kinnell. But others were being mired, as he was. There was a professor named Richard McKeon who was, at least for Eric, a formidable and destructive presence, who enjoyed reducing his tutees to dust. Later a film about such a professor was made with John Houseman playing the role of Professor Kingsfield (The Paper Chase). He won an Academy Award, his performance was mind-curling. If I could stand it I would rent the film, it is still available on Netflix. Eric never finished his PhD and this cost him grief later in California.
We lived in 3 apartments on the south side near the university. First a 2-room basement on Hyde Park Blvd that had been cut down from a much larger unit. It was on the a back alley, sunless but clean and quite new, but felt temporary from the very beginning. We stayed a year. 
The best thing was a nursery school right across the street where Heath was very happy. When Mom and Dad came to visit they were very disconcerted about our living quarters, as were we. Here are Mom and I collecting Heath from her school.
The teacher, Miss Cooney, was an upbeat redheaded Irish girl who loved her charges. She married towards the end of our first year and chose Heath as her flower girl. It was a Catholic ceremony and Heath floated down the aisle scattering rose petals and looking enchanting.
One incident that occurred in our first apartment I still remember vividly, as it introduced a dark side we had never before experienced. We heard a late evening altercation in the alley and Eric went out to investigate. He brought in a woman who had been punched around and was probably on drugs; she was pretty battered and in poor shape. We called the cops and two of Chicago’s finest arrived, took one look and pulled Eric aside and told him never to do that again, as there could be unnerving consequences, like he might be subjected to charges himself if she accused him of causing the damage. In retrospect that was nonsense as we were clearly respectable, and even more clearly naïve, so I guess they thought we needed a wake-up call about Chicago’s underbelly. We certainly got a dose. Both the prostitute and the cops were about as unsavory as characters from Raymond Chandler. The Chicago police had a bad reputation for corruption – if stopped for a traffic offense you could negate it by tucking a few dollars in with your driver’s license. Cat burglars regularly entered thru kitchens at the back of railroad flats while the tenants were in the living room, and often they didn’t know they were being burgled. Much later when Heath was 7 she and two friends were walking our dog on the UC campus in early afternoon they encountered an exhibitionist, and a scary one. When we called the cops later we were asked if she was raped, and when the answer was ‘no’ they lost all interest. There were so many major crimes around it was now worth their time to bother with incipient ones. Odd how these memories flood back. But the south side of Chicago took getting used to, and when we landed in southern California and didn’t even lock our doors, the adjustment was most welcome, being all in the opposite direction.
The second apartment was on Hyde Park Square, on the 5th floor with windows overlooking a green patch in the cityscape. I didn’t care that it was roach- and bedbug-ridden, it was open and airy and sunny. We scrubbed and painted and hauled out the bedbug-infested Murphy bed and made it quite presentable. And spent two years there. We acquired a mutt, Pip, and maybe that was when I realized I didn’t really like dogs. But she was the major player in another incident I will never forget. When noone was home she somehow fell out our living room window, landed flat and lay there stunned as a crowd gathered. When a cop arrived he grabbed the dog by the scruff of the neck and shot her thru the neck, then left. About which time I arrived home from work and the dog was lying there with bullet holes on both sides of her neck but no bullet in sight. He must have shot her thru the scruff, as there was a hole on either side of her neck. We took her to a vet who looked her over and said she was fine! So much for the skill and judgment of the cop. This photo of Jenny with Pip was taken a few years later in our 3rd apartment.
This apartment was actually great, and we lived there for 3 years. It was a 3rd floor railroad flat with good windows in front and back and bedrooms on air shafts. An ubiquitous style in Chicago and other cities, and lots of them are still around. We were finally in a very nice, university-owned apartment with a good landlord. Every year one or two rooms were repainted and the building was well maintained. It was here that we bought real furniture. There was a huge building downtown called the Blue Whale that had been built to be a furniture mart. It had all the young 1950’s designers and agents would show you around. The price was cost-plus-10%. We had a magical day choosing and came home with a Paul McCobb dining table, coffee table and cabinet; 6 Eames chairs; and an armchair by, I think,Eero Saaranin. They are now worth an amazing amount of money, but better than that, they were great design and look wonderful today. Our grandchildren, when they came of age in knowledge about such things, were astonished to realize how cutting edge their grandparents were!
The best happening in Chicago was Jenny’s arrival. She was born on June 24 1962, the day after Eric’s birthday. She was another happy baby and we were in better financial shape to enjoy her, with both of us working. I, by now, had maneuvered a half-day job, a much better arrangement for all of us. We had a caregiver for her in the mornings. And assumed our family was complete.
I fared much better than Eric in Chicago, with two wonderful jobs. The first at Argonne National Lab as assistant to Dr. Freidrich Wassermann. I just googled him and there is a Wickipedia article in German that gives the outlines of his life. He was an MD and a university professor of Anatomy in Germany and a Jew. He fled Germany and came to the U of Chicago in 1937 and got his family out later. I loved and 
admired him, he was a wise man and a mentor to me. His wife was also an MD and they became role models – their wisdom and urbanity plus their agonizing past were all new in our experience. Despite the huge difference in our ages and backgrounds we were good friends. I don’t remember this picnic but Dr. Wassermann is in the center, his wife on his right. And once, when my parents were visiting, Dad took us all to dinner and Dr. Wassermann cornered him and told him I should go on to graduate school and become a qualified scientist. When Dad related that to me the idea was planted in my mind for the first time. I was already a member of the pioneering generation of women who supported the family while the returned husband was in school, an unheard-of situation before WW2. Now I began to think of my own professional future, although it was in reality 20 years off.
In 1952 Argonne Lab moved 40 miles out of Chicago and I couldn’t stay on. I was quite pregnant and looking forward to a summer off (with pay) and not thinking any farther. But with wonderful timing I was recruited by Cyrus Rubin to found a gastric cytology lab at the U of C hospital – he had found me through Ruth Graham. I liked Cy immediately but was lukewarm about returning to work, so I laid down some conditions. 1) to be a research associate , not a lab tech 2) to have an apartment within easy walking distance of the hospital, and 3) to work half-time. To my astonishment he met all conditions even though housing was a huge challenge and half-time work was hardly an option anywhere. That is when we moved into the university-owned apartment and Jenny was born soon thereafter. When my maternity leave from Argonne was over she was 6 weeks old. I went back to work for one day and then resigned – federal policy. I began mornings at my new job and it was great. Cy and I became very good friends as well as colleagues, published several papers together, and when he left two years later for Seattle we continued to 
maintain contact for many years. The last time I saw him was an unexpected encounter in Chiapas in the 1980s where I was birding with friends and he and his wife were on vacation trip. We had dinner together and tried to catch up. Our lives had diverged, but his wife had become a birder, to my surprise. But then, they was surprised at my change of career, for by then I was no longer laboratory-bound but a field ornithologist. Cy became a much admired professor at the U of Washington Medical School and died in 2011, a month after Eric’s death. This photo was taken when he was in his 60s; the few I have in my photo albums that were taken 65 years ago are too poor to reproduce. Cy was one of the very few men I met who could have rivaled Eric, if we had met before we were both married, and both parents. But there was no way either of us would have jeopardized our relationships with our spouses. I suspect there are such persons in everyone’s life, and different outcomes too.
Every summer we drove east to Lake Buel where my parents had a 2nd home. I had been doing this since I was
very small and was really tired of it, besides having developed a real wanderlust. But it was great for children and Heath has memories of it throughout her childhood. Her is a photo of her rowing with her Grandpa.
Heath had a happy time in Chicago. Early on, when I starting working full time, we began Sunday outings together, to the museums, parks, and zoos in and around the city. And sometimes Eric joined us, although he was heavily occupied with work and study. But on one such outing at the Museum of Science and Industry we did a photo of him with Heath in an old Ford and when he saw it he was appalled. He had gained about 50 lbs and saw himself as squeezing her out of her seat and promptly went on a diet. Lost it all in 6 months and never regained it. Here is the photo. The one on the right is of my all-time favorites of him, taken around 1951. He was 32. I hardly remember him without a crew cut, and what a head of hair he had!
In the spring of 1955 Eric was offered an Assistant Professorship in the brand new Philosophy Department at Long Beach State College in California (later California State University, Long Beach), with the understanding that he finish his dissertation in 3 years. We jumped at the chance. California was the dream of many young Americans and we were among them. Our trip across country was a fabulous experience for us, the first one west of Chicago, first camping trip, and first family adventure – and it truly was an adventure. I found the journal he kept on the trip and transcribed it. It has already been posted in the Adventure/Travel section on this website. It was more a translation than a transcription as his script was tiny and he never dotted an ‘i’ nor crossed a ‘t’, often making words unreadable. Made me realize the significance of the phrase. It was a huge chore but my efforts were much appreciated by the family.