Margaret, always known as Marge, was 2 years younger than my father. My father was the second child in the family and Marge was the third child. Perhaps that was why they were so close. There were 10 children in their family, spanning 19 years.
Aunt Marge and Uncle Joe (Molitor) lived in Fox River Grove, Illinois, on the Fox River, and you have to know how to find that house,... it's way out near Burton's Bridge, on Tuxedo Lane. To get there we had to travel a little farther west than the actual location of their home, due to the meandering path of the Fox River. We traveled through the town of Fox River Grove, past the castle, across the river and up around the bend to the Main Street cutoff on the right. There used to be a little island in that cutoff corner for the right turn to head eastward. Main Street on down to Hickory Nut Grove Road, and then northward. This sometimes comes to me in dreams all these years later. Hickory Nut Grove Road runs north, and in my memory it runs on into a wooded area, where it ends. That is where you make a left turn onto Hickory Nut Grove Lane,...from there it is 1/8 mile (an easy walk) to Tuxedo Lane, a little gravel road that curves gently past the slough. I always knew it as "the slough" because that was how they spoke of it.... a slough is a swampy area, and this one was overgrown with reeds, swamp grasses, and other natural vegetation- most of it more than 6 feet high -- for the first 11 years of my life. So "the slough" was a mysterious, scary place, to be avoided at all cost --never cross the road, was the rule I abided by.
Sometimes we approached from a different direction entirely, sometimes coming through the town of Algonquin, and traversing Cary-Algonquin Road to Three Oaks Road.... other times we came from the north, straight down State Highway 31 to U.S. Highway 14, and then to Three Oaks Road and on to Hickory Nut Grove Road. My father liked to take different routes, and it depended on our point of origin, and dad's wanderlust.
Aunt Marge and her husband Uncle Joe lived in a one bedroom bungalow with a detached garage. It was on the Fox River, with what I called a "long" front yard, meaning that the house was set back a good 70 feet from the river. To people who live on a body of water that side of their home is often considered the front yard, and the back yard faced onto the road. There were huge, old oak trees throughout the yards. I remember the sound of acorns dropping onto the yard and the roof of the house. They had a back porch with a fiberglass sheet roof....
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| what the porch roof looked like, except that it was green and not very opaque |
The back yard, from the house to the road was perhaps 60 feet, with a sidewalk along one side of the yard. Between the sidewalk and the chain link fence were rabbit hutches between the garage and the house. Uncle Joe raised rabbits for eating (he made the best hasenpfeffer in the world - a mean feat for a man with no sense of smell). There were maybe 10 individual hutches in that structure, with a roof, open to the sidewalk with fencing to contain the quite large rabbits. I had no knowledge of the killing of the rabbits for eating, it was not even something I thought about as a child. (When I was older, age 10, I witnessed such "preparation" as performed by a different uncle.)
Aunt Marge smoked cigarettes endlessly and drank wine.... my parents were always amused by the fact that Marge ALWAYS had a glass of wine in the dining room, where we all gathered, and another glass of wine in the kitchen, 6 steps from her chair in the dining room. She did love her wine.... I always hated cigarettes, and would routinely blow out the match before Marge could get a light, so she would go into the kitchen and light her cigarettes off the gas stove instead. She would laugh gently at me, because one cannot simply blow out a lit burner on a gas stove.
Their little home was always comfortable and warm. Sometimes other cousins near my age would be visiting as well, and we would gather in the little front room of the house to play. There were a few toys in a box, and some books. Occasionally we would be granted permission to turn on the television, but more often it was tuned to a Cubs baseball game, and we ignored it. My Uncle Frank, (younger brother of my dad and Marge) who never married, lived with Marge and Joe. Frank slept in the attic bedroom, a small room with one window and a twin bed... I was never up there myself...
I can remember times when the conversation in the dining room became hushed... that was when us kids would silently crawl into the room and under the table to see if we could catch the conversation that was hushed. What was is that the adults did not want us to hear. Never much of interest to us actually. Although it was at Aunt Marge's house that I heard my dad's stories of tying tin cans to the tails of stray dogs and laughing as the dog ran from the noise, and ran and ran. That was mean!
And another story, about my grandfather and the Model T Ford automobile,... It seems that grandpa made his eldest son (my father), age 15, drive him to the local drinking establishment.... Granddad went into the bar to drink with acquaintances, and his young son was made to wait in the car. After a few hours my dad got tired of waiting for his dad to come out of the bar, so he drove the Model T home without his dad! And, in my father's words: got his "hide tanned" for making "the old man" walk home. (Probably the naughtiest thing my father ever did as a teenager.)
Aunt Marge always made us dinner. Usually chicken, but once spagetti -which I then wanted every time we visited,...but it was always chicken. And at Aunt Marge's house I was given 7UP to drink. That was all there was for a child to drink in their house.
Whenever my Dad expressed a desire to go "bumming" and was inclined to ask me where I wanted to go, I would announce "Aunt Marge and Uncle Joe!" .... Thinking back I suppose he only asked me the question when that was where he wanted to go as well.
When I was a young adult I would buy a carton of cigarettes and a gallon of wine and drive out to spend the day with my Aunt Marge. She would fry me a grilled cheese sandwich, just right, with margarine, on white bread, using those terrible individually wrapped slices of cheese --and I LOVED it and I really, really miss that. Anyway, my Aunt Marge is one of my most unforgettable people.
(this is part 1 of what will be a series of Unforgettable people blogs. ...based on the old Reader's Digest series "my most unforgettable character")
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