Each time, the family reacted like it encountered a leper. “No way!” the kids would complain and proceed to choose a different name. The problem was nobody ever fixed the official records.
One may wonder how thirteen children could sleep in a three bedroom home if one of the bedrooms was the parents’ room. Mercifully, there was a sort of revolving door regarding occupancy in each of the children’s bedrooms. As older brothers left for the armed forces, younger ones replaced them. It was not uncommon, in those days, for four or more children to share each bedroom in two sets of bunk beds, with spillover into the parents’ room. Under those conditions, perhaps the biggest miracle was that Babe and Bob ever had time alone to produce thirteen children.
Neighbors and friends gasped when we discussed how Babe coped with thirteen children. To this day I am unsure whether their gasps were attributed to pity, admiration, or both. But Babe gave it all away, seldom purchasing anything new for herself. She did have a particular penchant for shoes, however. Bob would complain she was the Imelda Marcos of Palos as she had some 20 pairs, many stored in their original boxes. Babe used a few of these shoe boxes to hide cash, but quickly forgot in which box the money was stored. This didn’t bother Babe; however, as she thought this was a good savings technique for the hereafter. She claimed she would need the shoes for walking the heavenly streets and would need the cash in case she finds a Marshall Fields store.
Our mother was responsible for the task of feeding 13 children and 2 adults. It wasn’t bad enough that my mother was required to feed her fifteen; she was also called on to feed everyone’s friends. One memorable Easter Sunday our Pakistani friend, Khalid, called and asked if he could come over for dinner. He said he would like to bring along his friends as well, and in Babe’s gracious hospitality, she encouraged him. A few hours later, Khalid and his five friends arrived for Babe’s Easter dinner. When they saw the meat-of-choice was ham, they expressed their Muslim displeasure. “Well then, what would you like?” Babe asked. “We all like steaks” the Pakistani contingent responded. And Babe obliged them with steaks. Babe had a servant’s heart.
Babe would shop at the local Royal Blue food store in Palos Heights. Her modus operandi was to shop with several of her children in tow. When finished, she and the children typically would push 4 or more full carts toward the checkout line. The store manager, witnessing this scene would announce “Attention! Attention! All baggers to the front!” This was intended, of course, to alert store personnel, but for all practical purposes, it told others in the store “Stop what you are doing and notice this family!” Growing up in our family was a constant spectacle. And the military-scale efforts to feed the lot usually relied more on simple repetition than culinary sophistication.
Cooking with Babe was a trip. Babe used recipes and took advice from Grandma and the older girls. But somehow, the kids thought they needed to keep a watchful eye on her. On one particular Thanksgiving morning, Babe put a very large turkey, complete with its bread crumb and celery stuffing into a double broiler at about 8:00 AM. After a few hours, she opened the oven door, lifted the upper broiler pan and through the steam the one of the boys noticed the bird was snow white and sighed, “Look Mom, you boiled it!”
Babe sheltered Bob from most of the bad news of the family, including the money situation. In fact Bob was unaware of his total financial outlays until he woke early one morning and saw Babe handing out money to every child leaving for the school’s weekly hot dog day. It was staggering and Bob was a whole lot better off not knowing. Thank God Bob made enough money to feed us.
The bad news for Babe in living on the hill was the scourge of dust. When farmers plowed and when they harvested, dust would waft over the terrain and settle on our house. A sod company owned the area immediately surrounding our home and needless to say they contributed their fair share. But Babe could not keep up. It was like forever being in a construction site. To complicate matters, we paved our own road with crushed dolomite. This in time became (you guessed it) dust. “Close the doors, the trucks are coming!” was Babe’s desperate cry from the hill. Exacerbating the problem, Babe’s youngest child, Edweird peddled his tricycle down the road dragging a rake. We would ask, “What are you doing, Ed?” “Makin’ moke,” he would respond. As if Babe needed more!
The most embarrassing thing about being in a big family was being late for virtually every engagement. We were late for school, late for church, late for parties, late for graduation, late for everything. My mother did the best she could, God bless her, but the job was too great. We may have been within minutes of leaving en masse when Babe would notice one child with dirt under the fingernails and that would derail the train. “Get in the bathroom and scrub your nails!” she would say. We exhausted the patience of the school district, the church, the Cub Scouts, the Little League, the school bus drivers, and every agency with which we had dealings. To make matters worse, we typically pulled in late with a very noisy diesel car announcing our tardiness, even to the deaf. No sneaking in un-noticed with our family! We children, of course wanted desperately to blend in like everyone else but that was just impossible. One day Babe may force the bus off the road and the next day she may run into a snow bank and we were forced to run to the bus. These mad rushes occasionally resulted in fingers being smashed in car doors, and such an accident typically set the departure back a half-hour or more. So embarrassed were the children by our repeated walks of shame into waiting buses, classrooms-in-progress, and Catholic masses near their end that some of us wished we could just fade into the wallpaper and go unnoticed. And if the diesel car noise didn’t shake passers-by with its decibel level, they would surely notice that the car smelled like a chicken fry as it passed them, as Bob was experimenting with bio-diesel way back in the early 1960’s. Heck, Babe was even late going to the hospital to deliver her babies and was forced, on one occasion, to push the baby back so she didn’t deliver in the car.
A dream one of the children experienced as a teenager summarized our collective frustration. In it, the dreamer dreamed he was the back of a short school bus. The bus was driving by the farmhouse. Normally the bus would be obligated to wait for our family. On this occasion, however, the dreamer sensed an option. Seeing one of his brothers coming down the hill struggling to put his tie on, his mother flagging the bus down, and his sister running and spilling her lunchbox contents, the bus driver looked into his rectangular rear view mirror and asked, “Does anybody know these people?” The dreamer made eye contact with the driver and said “No!” and the bus passed them by. One does not need to be the Biblical Joseph to interpret this dream.
A lesser but still memorable embarrassment for the children involved our Catholic school uniforms. As the word uniform implies, there was little room for individuality. That worked well with most families. But Babe, on occasion, did not have the regulation blue plaid shirts and the skirts cleaned and pressed. So at the last minute, just before the bus arrived, Babe may say, “Here, put this on, nobody will notice.” “Are you joking? There must be some mistake! You want me to wear this pink shirt on class picture day?” The embarrassment was sometimes too much to bear.
Babe had a lot on her plate, however, and between washing the clothes, picking up kids, and preparing meals she occasionally got flustered. Such was the case when she was arrested by store security for inadvertently putting something in a bag. Store authorities recognized she was just confused and advised her to go home and get some rest.
Similarly, a traffic policeman once stopped Babe and asked, “Maam, may I see your driver’s license?” After several minutes of searching through her purse, the policeman then asked, “Maam may I see your vehicle registration?” Babe continued to search through coupons and other materials muttering, “Oh they must be here somewhere!” In utter desperation, the officer resigned and told Babe to be more careful next time. She’s much the same today. Just ask her to find something in her purse!
Babe tried many times to do the wash in Palos but complained the well water was of poor quality and the clothes were being ruined by it. Instead she bundled the wash, packed it into her car and drove to her mother’s home in Beverly, where she had high quality
