I’m not sure anybody will read or want to read this memoir (Rozprawa in Polish), but it is a vehicle to get me to write regularly so it will be worthwhile in that sense. Of course, it will be unique in that no one else has the knowledge or perspective to convey not only the events, but what they meant to me at the time and with distance of years. So be it, and let’s go.

Chapter One

I was born in Michigan City, Indiana on April 23, 1947, at St. Anthony’s Hospital. My father had been discharged from the US Army in 1946. He had been drafted in early 1942 and spent most of the war in the South Pacific fighting the Japanese. So, I was born nine months or so after he came home. I suppose the experience of war emphasized his own mortality and gave him some urgency to pass along his genes. I didn’t know that Michigan City, Indiana was a bit of an oxymoron, but I was vaguely aware that it was a strange name for a town. I later found out that it was named for the Northwest Territory’s Michigan Road between Detroit and Chicago and the town was at the point the road touched Lake Michigan and began following the lake shore to Chicago.

We lived in a two-bedroom apartment at 604 ½ Willard Avenue where it intersected 10th Street. It was a big old house that Mr. and Mrs. Shellenberg owned and lived in the lower level. Everybody called them Mr. and Mrs. Shelly and I remember them as being really nice to me. They had a dog named Brownie that was nice to me too. I remember the stairway up to our place was very steep and when I learned to walk, I took a few bumpy unplanned trips down. The South Shore electric commuter railroad ran down 10th Street and shook the house several times a day, but no one seemed to notice. West down Willard Avenue about ¼ mile was the Indiana State Prison that looked a lot like a white castle with high walls all around it. About a block East down Willard were the stores and flats over them that my great grandfather Fredrick Krueger had built. The largest retail space was on the corner where 9th Street intersected and was the spot where my great grandfather’s grocery had stood before he died, and it was sold to Eddie Linde. The flats were now occupied by Frederick’s five sons. The last flat in the row was occupied by my grandparents, Otto and Louise Krueger. Across the street was a Tavern and the next house down 9th was occupied by my aunt and uncle, May and LeRoy Krueger, and my first cousins JoAnn and Alan.

My early childhood was spent swirling around these places and people since we didn’t move out to the southern suburbs until I had finished first grade and turned seven. Aside from all the relatives, everyone knew each other in the neighborhood and consequently knew me. The only problem with the place was there weren’t many places to play because Willard was a busy street, and the train ran down 10th. I remember playing in the Shelly’s side yard and watching the South Shore rumbling by. My two vivid memories of my pre-school years were burning my hands at three and the death of my other grandfather Vincent Ostrowski at five.

We were over at my aunt and uncles place and Aunt May, who was a great cook, had the oven in the porcelain covered stove going. Alan and I were running, and I slipped throw rug and put my hands out to keep from crashing into the stove. They stuck and I think the sizzled. My Uncle pulled me off, scooped me up, and ran to the Fire Station where Otto was on duty. Otto immersed my hands in a sink full of cold water and then in a vat of some kind of salve. Ever since then I’ve had minimal feeling in my palms and consequently cut and scrape myself without knowing it. I also gained a fear of fire which I’ve never gotten over.

I called my Polish grandfather “djadja” which was a nickname for the word “djadek.” When I was five djadja, who had recently retired, had a heart attack while fishing on the long pier that led to the lighthouse. He was the first dead person I’d ever seen, and I touched his hand in the funeral parlor. I’d never touched anything that cold. The first responders gave my dad the fishing rod they recovered from the scene and the braided line was in hundreds of knots. Dad set in the kitchen corner. One day it disappeared and returned several days later with all the knots worked out. Otto had taken it home and patiently worked on it until it was back to normal. I fished for perch with that old steel rod for several years.

The Catholic schools in the city didn’t have kindergarten, so I started school about a mile away at Park Elementary School. Since my mother didn’t drive and the one car we had was needed for transport to work, I walked to kindergarten. My teacher, Miss Freeland, was very young and pretty and I liked everything about school except the naps, which I faked.

In first grade I walked to St. Mary’s with my cousins and had a little squat nun for a teacher. She was overdue for retirement and was at the end of her rope. She spent most of the day screaming at us, and I was alternately terrified and pissed off. I remember that I had to learn to write my name, and though I was already reading quite well, the prospect of a nine-letter last name was daunting. I finally realized it was three sets of three letters “Ost row ski” and learned to write it that way. The one thing I learned from first grade was that people weren’t always nice to you, and they had their own problems. That fact was proven to me several times in my academic career, and in later life. Sometimes when you’re made to feel a failure, the failure is in someone who doesn’t know themself.

We bought our first house in 1954 when I was seven. It turned out to be our last house since both my parents died there: Dad in 1986 and Mom in 1996. It was a new house and I loved it. It was only two bedrooms but had a full basement where I could play in in bad weather. In September I started second grade at Queen of All Saints School.