May 28, 2026 • 45 mins
When tragedy befalls Laurie’s crowded family, she and her eight remaining siblings—and their deeply detached and peculiar parents—must navigate the unthinkable. And too, the unsayable—because in this haunted home, nothing is said at all.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. I know that
the more a person goes over a memory, the more
that memory changes. Some things assume new importance. Your mind
erases certain parts, adds new detail. You don't know you're
doing this. You think you remember everything accurately. You swear
by it, but you don't remember accurately. Nobody does. Memories
(00:23):
are fragile, especially when they are of forbidden things. My
family didn't talk much about Bobby after he died, and
I came to understand that it was somehow inappropriate that
we'd all be better off if we just changed the subject.
But I thought about him a lot, and I thought
about the silence. I wondered, isn't it better to talk
than to hide, to open doors rather than to close them.
(00:45):
What happens to stories if we don't tell them?
Speaker 2 (00:50):
That's Lori Hertzel, journalist, book critic, and author, most recently
of the memoir Ghosts of Fourth Street, My Family, a Death,
and the Hills of deLuce.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Laurie's is a story about.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Being born smack in the middle of a big family
that is anything but happy, a family haunted by its
own history. It's also a story of being the one
who quietly witnesses, who absorbs, whose snoops, who has an
irrepressible need to know, to understand, to make sense of
all that she sees.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
I'm Danny Shapiro, and.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
This is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
I was born in Louisville, number seven of ten children,
and we moved from Louisville to Saint Joseph, Missouri, when
I was two and a half. My father had somehow
left his job. I wasn't quite sure if he quit
because it didn't make enough money, or if he somehow
was asked to leave. That's unclear. But we moved into
(02:07):
my grandparents' house in Saint Joe. This was my father's parents.
There were seven of us. My mother was pregnant with twins.
It was very crowded in that house. I don't have
strong memories of that summer, but that summer has always
intrigued me. We lived there for about six months, and
I do have some memories of living in Saint Joe.
(02:29):
And then in the fall of nineteen fifty nine, we
moved to Duluth, where my father was hired to teach
at the University of Minnesota in Duluth, and that's where
I grew up.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
And so by the time you moved to Duluth, the
twins had not been born yet, and your youngest brother
had not been born yet, right, So you went from
seven kids to eight, nine, ten kids in pretty short order.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
My mother was pregnant when we moved to Saint Joe,
so she did have the twins that April, so they
were born. They were new Horrens. So there were suddenly
nine of us. And yeah, the youngest one, my littlest sister,
was born in Duluth a year or two later after
we moved there. We did not call our parents mom
and dad or mother and father. We called our father
Gov Guv like Govnor and we called our mother Trish.
(03:17):
Her name is Patricia, and that was I mean, that
was all of us from the time we were born.
That was what they wanted to be called. So Gov
was a university professor, He was a World War two VET.
He was very controlling and I don't know if he
was bipolar that my mother had a lot of theories
about why he was the way he was, but he
(03:37):
was angry a lot of the time. And I think,
you know, there were stresses, financial stresses, so many kids.
Beginning professor did not make a lot of money. My
mother very beautiful, not well educated, never wanted children, and
now she had ten. So you know, I don't think
she was very happy.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
How did that happen?
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Oh, my father was Catholic and she had to convert
to Catholicism in order to marry him in case any
of their children wanted to be priests or nuns. That's
what she told us when we were kids. None of
us wanted to be priests or nuns. And you know,
she was not a strong willed person, and he was
a strong willed person. And I think he liked babies too.
(04:17):
I mean, he was really good with kids when we
were very small, until we started having opinions and talking back,
and then I don't think he knew how to handle us.
Neither one of my parents had great role models. My
mother's family, she didn't talk about her family much at all.
She didn't tell us family stories much at all. She
had an older brother who died in the war, she
(04:40):
had a baby brother who died in infancy. Essentially, she
was an only child, and our father was a railroad man,
and she said her mother never talked to her very much,
so she was sort of the same way with us.
My father's parents very interesting people. His mother was Irish,
grew up on a far outside of Saint Joseph, Missouri,
(05:02):
wanted to get to the big city, which for her
was Kansas City, Missouri, and she married my grandfather. We
called him John by his first name. He was also
very uneducated. He was a Western Union telegraph operator. He
was the youngest of twelve and his older siblings were
born in Ukraine. They were Germans from Russia and came
to the United States after the Hurtzels had been in
(05:25):
Ukraine for I think it was ninety nine years, and
if you stayed for one hundred years then your family
could be conscripted into the Russian army. So they all
left at that point. His father emigrated to Missouri, and
his father's brother emigrated to Argentina. So I have cousins
in Argentina that I've never met. So they were not
great parents. Grandma and John, they didn't really you know,
(05:48):
they weren't educated. It was volatile. Grandma was a very
she was just a very volatile person. And there were
times when my father would come home and one or
the other of his parents were in the yard shouting
and the other one was in the house with pointing
a gun out the window. And there were never any
actual shootings, but I mean, it was just not He
(06:08):
didn't learn any parenting from his parents, so we grew
up kind of haphazardly, I think.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
So there's a fourteen year age spam between your oldest
sibling whose real name is John Patrick but everybody called Bobby,
continuing the theme of names, and your youngest So there's
ten kids within fourteen years. And one of the things
that I found very striking is that there are essentially
(06:38):
three groups of kids within your sibling group. There are
the older kids, the big kids, who are the first three,
and then there are the little kids who are the
youngest three. And then there's laur in the middle, which
you describe as a clique unto herself. Yeah, and that's
got to be I mean, in all of the research,
(07:01):
and you know which I always find really interesting about
birth order a family of ten kids, like it's a
whole other it's a world unto itself, right, mm hmm.
That must have been so extraordinarily formative for you, growing
up in this volatile and very crowded house where there
wasn't a lot of privacy, and it seems like what
(07:22):
you did was escape into reading, escape into books.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Yeah, I learned to read very early. I was three.
As far as the birth order goes, I saw the
older kids as sort of this group, and the younger
kids were a group. But the older kids tell me
we were not a group. You know, we were all
doing our own thing, and you know, every one of
us felt sort of alone in that house, which is
kind of interesting because it was such a crowded house,
(07:49):
as you say, you know, four girls in the girls room,
three boys in the boys room. You know, there was
no privacy. And maybe that's why some of the people
in my family, including my mother, were so private and
were so secretive about things, because there wasn't any other
kind of privacy. But for me, reading was, I mean,
has always been where I went. You know, I went
(08:11):
in the basement where my father kept his books, and
I read down there, and I locked myself in the bathroom,
which was kind of horrible because there really was only
one bathroom for twelve people, and you know, I refused
to come out because it was like the only room
where you could shut the door and lock the door
and no one could bother you. And I mean I'd
read all the time, and I read books that were
way beyond my understanding. My father kept his books in
(08:33):
the basement on shelves in alphabetical order, and I read
you know you Door, Wealthy short Stories and Catherine and
Porter and Oscar Wilde, and I read Shakespeare out loud
in the basement to myself, and not sure I got
that much out of it, but it was, you know,
it was a place I went where I could just
be by myself and in this different world. I loved
(08:54):
books about orphans, you know. I guess you know, if
only I was an orphan, and I wouldn't have all
these people around me and all this strife.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
It's so interesting what you said about your siblings feeling
like each one of them in some way in that
crowded house and in those bedrooms full of sleeping siblings
felt so alone themselves. What do you attribute that to.
I'm connecting it to what you said about your mother
(09:23):
being secretive because it was the only kind of privacy
that could be had.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Yeah, I have talked about all of this with some
of my older siblings quite a bit, actually, and we
were not raised to band together and trust each other.
There was a lot of self protection. And it might
be because there just wasn't enough stuff to go around.
You know, at dinner, you seldom got seconds because there
were you know, you give everybody they're helping, and then
(09:51):
the food is gone space. Was it a premium food?
Was it a premium everything? You were sort of you know,
we weren't raised by wolves. It's not like every man
for himself exactly, but and in a way it kind
of was. We had to look out for ourselves. And
you know, the younger kids are extremely close, and I
think part of the reason is because twins are going
to be really close anyway. And then there was one
(10:12):
more after the twins, their baby sister, you know, all
of our baby sister, but she was really close in
age to them, so they were and still are very close.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
When Laurie is a little kid, one day she climbs
a tree which is a pretty high branch and realizes
that she can't get down, or at least that if
she tries to jump, she might really hurt herself. One
of her brothers sees her up there and watches Laurie
asks for his help and he just says, no, it's
every sibling for himself in the Hrzel household.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
He and I talked about this maybe a year ago,
and he said he felt bad that he hadn't helped me,
that he should have helped me. And I saw it differently.
I mean, I thought he didn't leave, he stayed there
with me, but he wouldn't help me down. And I
felt like, you know, in retrospect, not at the moment,
obviously I was terrified, but in retrospect, it was like
(11:07):
he knew I could do it, and he wanted me
to be successful. But I don't know for sure that's
what he was thinking. You know, he's my big brother.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Well, and it can be both, right, it can be yeah,
that's true, and you're on your own.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yep, exactly. And we really were. I mean, you know,
the older sisters older than me, they were given the
twins to kind of take care of, and I mean
we were sort of parceled up in that way because
my mother was really she was pretty overwhelmed, and my
father was pretty demanding. And you're either taking care of
someone else, or you were left to take care of yourself.
(11:43):
There was not a lot of great parenting that went
on in a nutthouse.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
So a motif for a theme that comes up again
and again on this podcast with my guests and has
been true in my own life as well, is where
there are family secrets, there are children who become little spies. Yes,
and so you were a little spy. You write that
you were looking for clues, and I'm wondering about the
(12:12):
nature of your spying and also whether you had any
sense what kind of clues you were looking for or
was it was just information, any kind of information.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
That's such a good question. I spied on my siblings.
I sat under the table in the dining room table
and the tablecloths would you know, come down and kind
of hide me and watched what was going on in
the house. There was a coat closet between the front
hallway and the kitchen. You could go back in the coats.
(12:41):
It didn't have doors for a long time, and you
could sit back there and kind of hear what was
going on in the kitchen. I mean, I was always
doing this. I was always hiding and listening. I followed
my father on his evening walks, like trying to figure
out why does he do these walks. I felt like
when I was growing up, I didn't understand and how
(13:01):
the house worked or who these people were that I
was living with. I wasn't really close to any of them,
and I think part of it was just sort of survival.
You know, how do you get through when you're living
in a house with eleven other people and you sort
of need to understand what's going on, and when your
parents are as volatile. My mother wasn't volatile, but she
was more she was more passive. But my father, you know,
(13:24):
he was angry a lot, and if he got angry
at a child, he might just sort of give them
the cold shoulder. But then he'd yell at our mother,
and then we'd feel terrible because he's yelling at her
because of something we had done. I mean, it was
everything was sort of twisted in that way. So I
felt like I was always trying to look to understand
what was going on. But the other part of your
(13:46):
question is was I just looking for information? Information was
power and that remains true today in my family. You
know that people are always trying to find out stuff
about the other ones and power for what I couldn't
even put that into words, but information has always been
something you kind of trafficked in that in that family.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
That's so interesting. And also there's a lot that's kind
of about visibility and invisibility, or the invisibility of being
one of so many siblings in a home where like
the very fact, look, I was raised as an only child.
The idea that you could disappear into a coat closet
nobody would know where you were, Yeah, is just so's
(14:30):
it's hard for me to fathom. And yet I'm sure
that that was nobody was saying, where's Lori. But at
the same time, there's also this sense that you preferred
being invisible. You describe going up to a place in
your house or on the roof I'm not sure exactly,
(14:50):
but where you could see everything and nothing could see you.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
That was in the attic. Yes, I loved that. It
made me feel not powerful exactly, but you know, kind
of invincible, I think. But I grew up and it's
interesting you say all of this because I hadn't really
thought about it, but I grew up feeling kind of invisible.
The girls room was in the front of the house.
It was actually meant to be the master bedroom, but
(15:16):
with so many kids, you know, it was given over
to the four sisters. But there were no shades on
the window. I mean, our house was It's like they
didn't really know how to be parents or put a
house together that worked. And so you know, you're in
this big room in the front of the house, and
if you have the lights on, everyone outside can see you.
And so my sisters at night, they would all take
(15:37):
turns going into the closet to put on their nightgowns.
And I never did that. I just figured nobody ever
saw me, nobody could see me. I would just put
my nightgown on in front of the window because no
one's going to see me. I'm invisible. And that was
really a feeling that I had through most of my childhood.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
At one point, Laurie is given a dollhouse. It once
(16:20):
belonged to her older sister, but before passing it down,
her mother transforms it meticulously, remodeling the interior, papering the
walls to match their real home, filling it with furniture
collected piece by piece the dollhouse becomes a near replica
of their house, but an idealized version, a place where
(16:41):
nothing is out of order, where no one disrupts the calm.
But there's meaning behind this replica. Laurie grows up understanding
in a quiet and unspoken way that her mother never
really wanted children. It's something that's been said often enough
to settle into the background of her childhood. So the dollhouse.
(17:02):
The dollhouse reflects a version of family life that feels controlled, contained,
perhaps even preferred. Laurie can move the dolls from room
to room, but the world inside never truly changes, its days,
fixed intact, a small, silent model of a home where
everything holds together.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
I think she had a lot more fun with the
dollhouse than I did, you know, kind of making this
world that was like our world, but quieter.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
It also seems like, just in terms of the atmosphere
of your childhood and the house and all of the
kids that intuluce you, all were outdoors a lot. It
was cold a lot, and just like sort of everybody
out of the house and come back in when it's
time for dinner, when the church bells ring.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Exactly the house was so crowded. You never knew what
mood my dad was going to be in when he
came home from work. You'd have to retreat until you
figured out if it was hay to be in the
main part of a house or if you needed to
stay away, because his moods did really dominate. And I
think a lot of us. I mean I used to
go exploring by myself a lot. We lived near Old Maine,
(18:12):
which was the original part of the University of Minnesota Duluth,
and there was a ravine there and there was a playground,
and you know, I'd go through the streams and of
the ravine, and you know, I was by myself a lot.
And I think the other my other siblings did that too.
The older kids had bicycles, so they would get on
their bikes and go. In the winter, we all had
(18:33):
to be outside. Now I can't remember if it was
a half an hour or an hour, but it didn't
matter how cold it was, and it didn't matter how
snowy it was. My mother made us all go outside
for an hour a day so that she could have
some peace and quiet. And I remember being so cold
that I'm like pounding on the door wanting to get
back in the house, and couldn't you know, not till
(18:54):
the hour was up. It wasn't abusive. We had you know,
we had mittens, we had boots, but you know, there's
not that much to do out there when it's twenty
bolow zero and a photo snow on the ground.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Did you have any sense of what your mother did
during those hours that she had to herself.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
I have no idea. She was a reader, she read magazines,
she read books, so she might have just sat in
the quiet and read for all I know. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Gov, Laurie's father, is a force at the center of
the household, unpredictable and commanding. His moods swing between anger, hostility,
and relentless teasing. It's constant, unsettling, a kind of emotional
storm the children learn to weather, and yet beneath this
volatility there is a sense of structure. The family sits
(19:46):
down to dinner together every night. Her mother cooks for
all ten children. Gov has his ritual, a martini, sometimes two,
prescribed he insists for his blood pressure. After dinner, he
leaves the house for a walk, following the same loop.
Night after night, Laurie watches him closely, trying to understand
(20:08):
the logic, if any behind it, all the patterns, the contradictions,
the rules that aren't spoken but somehow govern everything. Sometimes
Laurie even enlists her younger brothers to follow him at
a distance on those walks, trailing him through the neighborhood.
Would Laurie ever be able to crack the code of
her father.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
It's funny because of all the kids, I think I'm
the one who liked him the best. And he liked
me because I was a reader and I was a
writer from an early age, and he was a reader
and a writer. He was an English professor, so we
had that in common, and I was curious about him.
Some of the other siblings preferred my mother, and you know,
(20:50):
I tried really hard to get close to my mother,
but she was very stand office, she was very cold.
She didn't she didn't reveal much. My father told stories,
He told families worries a lot, and I loved listening
to those stories, the ghost stories in the book, you know,
the stories about his family. And he told us more
than once that he thought it was very important that
(21:11):
we understood where he had come from. You know that
when he was a child. His parents had no money
and they lived in one rented room the whole family,
you know, in the house of a woman named missus Donnadia.
So I felt like I kind of understood him a little,
or he kind of gave glimpses, and I wanted to
understand him better. I think my father tried to keep
(21:33):
order by rules, you know, and demands, and you have
ten pretty intelligent, willful children. They're not going to follow
your demands, you know, the older they get, and I
think that really frustrated him and added to his anger
and trying even more to control people. So it was
not a successful way of running a household.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Teasing can be such a form of veiled anger, veiled
hostility under the guise of I was just teasing. You
can't take a joke, And I imagine all of you
had different levels of tolerance for that kind of teasing.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Yeah, I mean teasing in that way is it's like
bullying really, you know, but when it's your father, and
you know, if you get mad in response, then he
can pull the father card, right, he's in charge, he's
the adult, and claim that he was just being funny,
and my mother would support him and I understand her,
(22:35):
I think a little less than I understand him. Did
she support him because she thought what he was doing
was okay? Or was it because she knew if she
defied him, he would get angry at her and yell
at her, and she didn't like being yelled at. So
I think that's one reason we were all kind of
looking for information. It's like, why is he behaving this way?
Why is she defending him? What happens if we defy him?
(22:57):
But the teasing was sometimes it was playful, but no
one ever liked it because I don't think anyone ever
really trusted it. And you know, he had all these
nicknames for us, and nobody liked their nickname, and some
of the nicknames were pretty cruel.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Yeah, could you actually go through those? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (23:15):
My oldest sister who did not like her curly hair,
her nickname was curly. There was another sister whose nickname
was pig for absolutely no reason that I could fathom.
She was not fat, she was not you know, I
don't know what he called her pig. Maybe it was affectionate,
like you know, you give little pet names to babies,
and it just stuck. But I don't really know. You know,
(23:36):
he called me hurlbird. I don't know what it means,
but I hated it. I thought it was ugly because
hurle means vomit, you know, And I didn't know what
it meant. And I would ask him not to call
me that, but then he would call me that more often.
And my little brother's the twins, they were Deanie and Fleety.
They did not like those names, and they still don't
like the names. So nicknames seems like they should be affectionate, right,
(24:00):
but they also seemed I don't know, it's a way
of sort of reminding you that he's in charge.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
I think, yeah, they're all belittling.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
Did Bobby have a nickname Punky?
Speaker 1 (24:12):
He was called Punky, And I mean when I you know,
if you look at the old photo albums, when he's
just a baby sitting on my mother's lap, it says
Punky and in my father's handwriting. So again, I think
it was a name that they gave him as a baby,
and then it stuck and he did not like it.
And he did not like Bobby either. I mean, his
name was not Robert. His name was John Patrick. And
I don't know why we called him Bobby. But he
(24:33):
didn't like it either.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
So tell me about the tensions around Bobby the oldest
as he grew up and became more and more of
his own person and less and less tolerant or you know,
sort of able to deal with your father, and your
father to deal with him. And it also strikes me
that he may have been, in certain ways, or at
(25:00):
least in one way, the most like your father, because
he too was a writer, and they got along the
least well, it seems of your father and any of
your siblings.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Yeah, Well, probably because Bobby was the oldest, the oldest boy,
the oldest child, and I think had a lot of
pressure on him because of that, because of birth order. Again,
you know, a lot of expectations are put on the oldest, right,
a lot of hopes. And he was a writer. He
was not interested in school. He cared not at all
(25:37):
for high school, got terrible grades. He had no plans
after high school to go to college or get a job.
He liked to walk the streets at night and write poetry.
And he started missing dinner, which was an incredible sin.
And our you know, dinner time, as my father said
quite often, that's the only time of the day when
the entire family comes together, and it's very important we
(26:00):
do this every day. So it was again one of
his rules right and expectations. And when Bobby got into
high school, he's you know, he had other things she
wanted to do. He was in theater, and he had friends,
and he just wouldn't come home for dinner, and sometimes
they would lock him out of the house. So he
(26:20):
was not like my father in that he was not volatile.
He would just stand there and listen. When my father
would yell at him, he would not yell back. And
my father, I think enjoyed fighting. He argued with my
mother all the time, and I think it was just
something that he enjoyed. He liked to win arguments and
(26:42):
be the victor, I guess, and Bobby just wouldn't argue
with him. I think he knew, I can't win an
argument with this man, so I'm just going to stand here.
And that made my father angrier than anything, just having
him just stand there passively and listen.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Laurie feels a special unspoken can to Bobby. Each of
them retreats to the basement of the house for different reasons.
Laurie is drawn to the bookroom, and as a teenager,
Bobby takes over a small utility room and makes it
his own. He brings down an old mattress, a battered
wooden desk, and his black typewriter. In the bookroom, Lurie
(27:20):
is comforted by the sound of the keys of Bobby's
typewriter as he pounds away.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
I was interested in him. I don't think he was
interested in me. You know, I was nine, and there
were five siblings between us, so I don't think he
was terribly aware of me. But I was very aware
of him because he was a writer, because he had
this power that could really make my father take a
step back, and not many of us had that ability
(27:46):
to do that. And it was also comforting just to
hear him down there when I was down there too,
because the bookroom was this wonderful little room with a
light and with bookcases all the way around, and you know,
a little blanket on the floor, and I would read.
But the rest of the basement was just a basement,
and it was very scary, and I was always a
(28:06):
little bit afraid to be down there alone, and so
having him down there was it was kind of a comfort.
And I used to go in there and snoop. I mean,
I snooped everywhere in that house, you know, I snooped
through everybody's stuff. And I would go in his room
and snoop around and see these poems that he was writing,
you know, And that was mysterious and kind of wonderful
to me.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
As Laurie grows older, the tension between her father and
Bobby intensifies, becoming sharper and more unpredictable. Small things take
on outsized heft. Bobby's glasses, for example, essential for him
to see, become a flashpoint. He leaves them around, and
Gov simply cannot handle it. At some point the story
(28:51):
enters family lore. Gov takes the glasses and breaks them
on purpose. But even this moment exists in fragments. Lorie
wasn't there. The details shift depending on who tells it.
Did Gov stomp on the glasses or snap them in half?
In a family this large, this fragmented itself, information travels
(29:12):
in pieces. It's always like a game of telephone. When
Bobby's seventeen, he leaves, He takes the family car and
drives it to Missouri to their grandparents' house, Gamma and John's,
without anyone quite knowing how he even managed it. Lurie
didn't even know he could drive. He sells his beloved typewriter,
(29:33):
the one he uses to write his poems, to pay
for gas. It's a decisive act. Another flashpoint. Bobby isn't
just leaving the house, He's actively trying to escape it.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Grandma loved Bobby. He was her favorite. She wanted him
to stay and my father said absolutely not. So my
grandparents had to drive him back to Duluth. One of
them drove the family car and then the other one
drove their car and brought back the car and brought
back Bobby. And yeah, it was a terrible time. It
was just so difficult. My father didn't beat us, he
(30:10):
didn't hit us. It was more just the emotions of
the house. And Bobby was kind of the focus of
that because he was the oldest and because he wasn't
doing well in school and he had no plans. And
you know, my father thought that all boys should join
the army. Not that he was a you know, he
(30:31):
wasn't a warmonger or anything like that, but he thought
that the army would you know, straighten out teenage boys.
And I guess because it might have straightened him out.
I don't know. And you know, Bobby had no interest
in joining the army.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
Tell me about the last time you saw Bobby.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
No, I'll never forget that. It was shortly after he
graduated from high school. And I was coming in the
house and going up the stairs to the second floor
where the bedrooms, and he came rushing down from his
room and he had something in his hand. I don't
know if it was a Duffel bag or a paper
(31:07):
sack or you know, something, and he kind of shoved
me out of the way and said move and I
kind of flattened against the wall, and he ran down
the stairs and out the door. And from where I
was standing on the landing, I could see out the window,
you know, outside the house. And he went out the
front door and he jumped in a car and drove off.
And that was the last time I saw him.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
And you were nine.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
I was nine. He turned eighteen on May twenty fifth,
graduated from high school, and died on June eleventh.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
On the day Bobby dies, Lourie and her little brothers
(32:04):
have been out doing errands with her mother. When they
pull up to the house, her father comes over to
the car and says, John Patrick drowned this afternoon, And
then Laurie hears her mother say, oh, Leo, he tried
so hard, you know.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Sitting in the front seat of that car and observing this,
it felt like I shouldn't be there. This is not
something I should be observing. But I was old enough
to understand what was happening and to remember it. My
little brothers were in the back seat, but they were six, maybe, yeah,
five or six, so I don't think that they realized
(32:45):
what was going on, but I did. I just felt
the weight of it, the burden of it. To witness
this felt like, I'm not sure I'm supposed to know this.
I don't know who I can tell. I mean, even
in the family, I don't know who, who already knows,
who doesn't know. I don't know what to do with
this information, and I just, you know, I went upstairs
and kind of crawled in bed.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Did you put the pieces together of what had happened
to Bobby or were you?
Speaker 3 (33:12):
Were you told what had happened?
Speaker 1 (33:14):
I had no idea. I didn't know where he was
going when he was running down the stairs and jumping
in the car. I didn't know where he had been.
When my father said to my mother, John Patrick drown
this afternoon, then I knew that. But I mean I
thought he drowned in Lake Superior because I didn't know
of any other lake. You know, he'd gone to a
friend's cabin. But I didn't know any of this. I
(33:35):
knew nothing. It was not you know, we were not
a family that we weren't talking about important things or
what's going on. So I'm not sure how I came
to know. I think it might have been that night
when I was in bed and my sisters were in
their beds, and my oldest sister, Kristen, talked about how
she had to go and identify the body, and you know,
(33:58):
she was very upset, obviously, and I think she might
have been the one who kind of put it all
together for me.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
So what happens in the aftermath of Bobby's death? The
family changed, And it seems like there's this really haunting
parallel with your mother's family and the way that her
family changed and never recovered after her brother James died.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Yeah, I think the family just sort of fell apart, really,
I mean, both of my parents really pulled away from
their children. My father was drinking a lot. Then my
mother announced more than once that she was starting over
with the three little kids, so the twins and my
(34:45):
little sister, and they would be her new family, and
she I mean lavished attention on them and was devoted
to them, and the rest of us were just sort
of left to figure out what we were doing. And
Kristin went off and got pregnant, and another sister left
and later also you know, got pregnant quite young and
got married brother, you know, sort of hitchhiking around the country.
(35:09):
I mean, it was just we all just kind of
dispersed in whatever way we could.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
And did you ever talk about Bobby.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
No, it was not something that we talked about. I
remember in high school I did the wija board with
some friends and I said at dinner to my parents
and whoever else was at the dinner table that night,
you know that I did the wija board and it
said that I was going to get married and I
would have two sons named Doug and John. And there
(35:39):
was just the silence like I had said something very wrong.
And then my father, I mean his voice actually kind
of broke and he said, well, we we obviously have
no objections to the name John, because that was you know,
Bobby's real name. I mean, it was just like if
you said the word John in passing you, it just
(36:00):
felt like you had done something terrible. So there was
no feeling that this was you know, we were going to
talk about him or our memories of him, or regrets
or anything. There was just we did not talk about it.
We did go to the cemetery. My mother would take
some of us to the cemetery. I'm not sure if
my father ever went there, and you know, we would
(36:22):
maybe brush off the headstone and leave some flowers and
feed the ducks. But no, it just was clear that
it was not something to talk about.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
You know, there's a lot about ghosts in your book.
I'm wondering where this belief in ghosts or this fascination
with them resided for your parents after losing Bobby. If
you have any was there any sense that you know
of that they went on and had some kind of
sense of his continuing to be present.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
For my parents, I don't know. My mother considered herself
to be very psychic, and she didn't like it. She
found it disturbing. So I don't know if she ever
had any experience or thought she had any experience. My
father scoffed at his parents because his parents believed in
(37:18):
ghosts and had all these ghost stories, and the house
that we lived in in Saint Joseph for that summer
before we moved to Duluth was profoundly haunted, and my
father would mock them and say they were ignorant peasants
for believing in ghosts, but it was also clear that
he believed in them too. So I don't know. I
do know my sister Kristen, my oldest sister, the one
(37:41):
they called Curly, she did experience something some years after
Bobby died. She said she was just so haunted by
his death and having to identify his body. And you know,
they had been pretty close because they were the first
and second children to be born, and they were just
a year apart. And she said she woke up one
night in the middle of the night and he was
standing by her bed and he said, don't worry about me.
(38:04):
I'm happy now, and that that made a big difference.
It made her feel a lot better with how things
had turned out. But I don't know about my parents.
If they had, they would never have told us.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
In the years following Bobby's death, Laurie does what she
needs to do to survive mentally, psychologically, emotionally. Books help,
reading helps, work helps. She goes to college on scholarship,
but then quits. She moves out of her parents' house.
Her dad is drinking heavily. The air is thick with
(38:40):
unprocessed grief, and she begins what becomes her lifelong career
in newspapers, working first as a clerk, then a librarian,
then copy editor, then reporter and columnist. She forges her
own path, never graduating from college, but receiving a master's
in arts. In her early forties. She marries, and she
(39:04):
and her husband settle in the Twin Cities. She has
a thriving life, but still Bobby lingers. Of course, he lingers.
She writes about the ghosts of her childhood over and
over again and puts them in a drawer.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
I wrote about the day he died many many, many
times over my life, starting when I was in high school.
I wrote a story called the Dandelion. And the dandelion
was our family, and we were all the little, the
little seeds that go flying off. You know, That's all
I remember about it, but it was something that I
(39:44):
thought about and thought about, and when I turned eighteen,
I remember his death really hit me that year because
I you know, on my birthday, I was thinking, if
I was Bobby, I would be dead in two weeks,
you know, and it was just like, oh my gosh.
It had not really struck me until then. I mean,
I was a child when he died. I was nine,
(40:05):
and you know, you don't have fully complete emotions at nine.
But as I grew older, I wrote about it a lot,
and I didn't think I would publish anything, but I
remember being very interested in, you know, that summer in
Saint Joe that I only have some memories of, and
mostly I remember all the stories about that summer that
(40:26):
we lived in Saint Joe.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
So you wrote this book and you put it away.
You had the sense that your mother would not be pleased,
and she was still living gov had passed away at
this point, right, yes, But you did publish a piece
in a literary magazine that was that story that you
(40:49):
had been writing over and over about the day that
Bobby died, and you didn't think that your mother would
see the story. It was in a journal on the
front page of the Star Tribune. It was something that
she could easily not see, but she did. It was
either shared with her or somehow she saw it. And
you describe how upset she was and that she never
(41:13):
spoke to you again.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
She lived just a few miles away from me at
that time. She had moved from Duluth to the Twin
Cities after my father died in two thousand and four,
and she was ten minutes away from my house, and
so I saw her every Sunday and sometimes at other
times too. And during COVID, I was not allowed to visit.
My little brothers visited her, but I was not allowed
(41:39):
because I was. The ostensible reason was I was out
in the world, you know, reporting and being in an office,
and I could bring her germs. The world was starting
to open up again after COVID, and I did go
back and see her once, and I was making plans
to go back again when this email popped up in
the family email thread and the subject line was this
(42:00):
makes me sick, and it was from my mother, and
I opened it up and it had gone to the
entire family and all it was was a link to
that essay, and there was a bunch of exchanges over
the next couple of days. It was really unpleasant.
Speaker 3 (42:16):
With everybody, or just between you and she.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
It was everybody. It was. It was the family email thread,
you know, so siblings and some nieces and nephews and
a lot of people just lurk. But everybody got these messages,
this exchange. And she never allowed me to come visit
her again. And she was quite deaf, so calling her
wouldn't have you know, I couldn't really call her. And
(42:40):
she lived in a security building and my little brothers
had keys to get in, but I did not, So no,
I never saw her again. Mostly I remember all the
stories about that summer that we lived in Saint Jo
and his life and his death. I have always felt very,
very close to the little girl that I was at
that time, and I remember things that I thought, and
(43:04):
I remember how I felt about things, how I reacted
to things. I remember sitting in that car when my
father came up and said John Patrick, John this afternoon,
and I remember that I almost laughed, which was not
because I thought anything was funny, but because sometimes that's
what emotion does. It comes out wrong. And it was
just this very powerful feeling of not funny laughter, but
(43:27):
just needing to let something out. But I've just always
felt really close to that child. Now that I have
written it as a book, and the book is sitting
here in my hand, I don't think about that little
girl much anymore, and I have for my entire life.
(43:47):
And I've always wondered at people who said, I don't
know how you remember your childhood so clearly it was like,
how could I not? That little girl walks beside me
every day. But now that it's done, she really doesn't.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
Well you kind of you made her visible.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Yes I did, didn't I? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (44:07):
I did.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
She's not a ghost anymore.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and if you'd
(44:40):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(45:01):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. I know that
the more a person goes over a memory, the more
that memory changes. Some things assume new importance. Your mind
erases certain parts, adds new detail. You don't know you're
doing this. You think you remember everything accurately. You swear
by it, but you don't remember accurately. Nobody does. Memories
(00:23):
are fragile, especially when they are of forbidden things. My
family didn't talk much about Bobby after he died, and
I came to understand that it was somehow inappropriate that
we'd all be better off if we just changed the subject.
But I thought about him a lot, and I thought
about the silence. I wondered, isn't it better to talk
than to hide, to open doors rather than to close them.
(00:45):
What happens to stories if we don't tell them?
Speaker 2 (00:50):
That's Lori Hertzel, journalist, book critic, and author, most recently
of the memoir Ghosts of Fourth Street, My Family, a Death,
and the Hills of deLuce.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Laurie's is a story about.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Being born smack in the middle of a big family
that is anything but happy, a family haunted by its
own history. It's also a story of being the one
who quietly witnesses, who absorbs, whose snoops, who has an
irrepressible need to know, to understand, to make sense of
all that she sees.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
I'm Danny Shapiro, and.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
This is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
I was born in Louisville, number seven of ten children,
and we moved from Louisville to Saint Joseph, Missouri, when
I was two and a half. My father had somehow
left his job. I wasn't quite sure if he quit
because it didn't make enough money, or if he somehow
was asked to leave. That's unclear. But we moved into
(02:07):
my grandparents' house in Saint Joe. This was my father's parents.
There were seven of us. My mother was pregnant with twins.
It was very crowded in that house. I don't have
strong memories of that summer, but that summer has always
intrigued me. We lived there for about six months, and
I do have some memories of living in Saint Joe.
(02:29):
And then in the fall of nineteen fifty nine, we
moved to Duluth, where my father was hired to teach
at the University of Minnesota in Duluth, and that's where
I grew up.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
And so by the time you moved to Duluth, the
twins had not been born yet, and your youngest brother
had not been born yet, right, So you went from
seven kids to eight, nine, ten kids in pretty short order.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
My mother was pregnant when we moved to Saint Joe,
so she did have the twins that April, so they
were born. They were new Horrens. So there were suddenly
nine of us. And yeah, the youngest one, my littlest sister,
was born in Duluth a year or two later after
we moved there. We did not call our parents mom
and dad or mother and father. We called our father
Gov Guv like Govnor and we called our mother Trish.
(03:17):
Her name is Patricia, and that was I mean, that
was all of us from the time we were born.
That was what they wanted to be called. So Gov
was a university professor, He was a World War two VET.
He was very controlling and I don't know if he
was bipolar that my mother had a lot of theories
about why he was the way he was, but he
(03:37):
was angry a lot of the time. And I think,
you know, there were stresses, financial stresses, so many kids.
Beginning professor did not make a lot of money. My
mother very beautiful, not well educated, never wanted children, and
now she had ten. So you know, I don't think
she was very happy.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
How did that happen?
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Oh, my father was Catholic and she had to convert
to Catholicism in order to marry him in case any
of their children wanted to be priests or nuns. That's
what she told us when we were kids. None of
us wanted to be priests or nuns. And you know,
she was not a strong willed person, and he was
a strong willed person. And I think he liked babies too.
(04:17):
I mean, he was really good with kids when we
were very small, until we started having opinions and talking back,
and then I don't think he knew how to handle us.
Neither one of my parents had great role models. My
mother's family, she didn't talk about her family much at all.
She didn't tell us family stories much at all. She
had an older brother who died in the war, she
(04:40):
had a baby brother who died in infancy. Essentially, she
was an only child, and our father was a railroad man,
and she said her mother never talked to her very much,
so she was sort of the same way with us.
My father's parents very interesting people. His mother was Irish,
grew up on a far outside of Saint Joseph, Missouri,
(05:02):
wanted to get to the big city, which for her
was Kansas City, Missouri, and she married my grandfather. We
called him John by his first name. He was also
very uneducated. He was a Western Union telegraph operator. He
was the youngest of twelve and his older siblings were
born in Ukraine. They were Germans from Russia and came
to the United States after the Hurtzels had been in
(05:25):
Ukraine for I think it was ninety nine years, and
if you stayed for one hundred years then your family
could be conscripted into the Russian army. So they all
left at that point. His father emigrated to Missouri, and
his father's brother emigrated to Argentina. So I have cousins
in Argentina that I've never met. So they were not
great parents. Grandma and John, they didn't really you know,
(05:48):
they weren't educated. It was volatile. Grandma was a very
she was just a very volatile person. And there were
times when my father would come home and one or
the other of his parents were in the yard shouting
and the other one was in the house with pointing
a gun out the window. And there were never any
actual shootings, but I mean, it was just not He
(06:08):
didn't learn any parenting from his parents, so we grew
up kind of haphazardly, I think.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
So there's a fourteen year age spam between your oldest
sibling whose real name is John Patrick but everybody called Bobby,
continuing the theme of names, and your youngest So there's
ten kids within fourteen years. And one of the things
that I found very striking is that there are essentially
(06:38):
three groups of kids within your sibling group. There are
the older kids, the big kids, who are the first three,
and then there are the little kids who are the
youngest three. And then there's laur in the middle, which
you describe as a clique unto herself. Yeah, and that's
got to be I mean, in all of the research,
(07:01):
and you know which I always find really interesting about
birth order a family of ten kids, like it's a
whole other it's a world unto itself, right, mm hmm.
That must have been so extraordinarily formative for you, growing
up in this volatile and very crowded house where there
wasn't a lot of privacy, and it seems like what
(07:22):
you did was escape into reading, escape into books.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Yeah, I learned to read very early. I was three.
As far as the birth order goes, I saw the
older kids as sort of this group, and the younger
kids were a group. But the older kids tell me
we were not a group. You know, we were all
doing our own thing, and you know, every one of
us felt sort of alone in that house, which is
kind of interesting because it was such a crowded house,
(07:49):
as you say, you know, four girls in the girls room,
three boys in the boys room. You know, there was
no privacy. And maybe that's why some of the people
in my family, including my mother, were so private and
were so secretive about things, because there wasn't any other
kind of privacy. But for me, reading was, I mean,
has always been where I went. You know, I went
(08:11):
in the basement where my father kept his books, and
I read down there, and I locked myself in the bathroom,
which was kind of horrible because there really was only
one bathroom for twelve people, and you know, I refused
to come out because it was like the only room
where you could shut the door and lock the door
and no one could bother you. And I mean I'd
read all the time, and I read books that were
way beyond my understanding. My father kept his books in
(08:33):
the basement on shelves in alphabetical order, and I read
you know you Door, Wealthy short Stories and Catherine and
Porter and Oscar Wilde, and I read Shakespeare out loud
in the basement to myself, and not sure I got
that much out of it, but it was, you know,
it was a place I went where I could just
be by myself and in this different world. I loved
(08:54):
books about orphans, you know. I guess you know, if
only I was an orphan, and I wouldn't have all
these people around me and all this strife.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
It's so interesting what you said about your siblings feeling
like each one of them in some way in that
crowded house and in those bedrooms full of sleeping siblings
felt so alone themselves. What do you attribute that to.
I'm connecting it to what you said about your mother
(09:23):
being secretive because it was the only kind of privacy
that could be had.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Yeah, I have talked about all of this with some
of my older siblings quite a bit, actually, and we
were not raised to band together and trust each other.
There was a lot of self protection. And it might
be because there just wasn't enough stuff to go around.
You know, at dinner, you seldom got seconds because there
were you know, you give everybody they're helping, and then
(09:51):
the food is gone space. Was it a premium food?
Was it a premium everything? You were sort of you know,
we weren't raised by wolves. It's not like every man
for himself exactly, but and in a way it kind
of was. We had to look out for ourselves. And
you know, the younger kids are extremely close, and I
think part of the reason is because twins are going
to be really close anyway. And then there was one
(10:12):
more after the twins, their baby sister, you know, all
of our baby sister, but she was really close in
age to them, so they were and still are very close.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
When Laurie is a little kid, one day she climbs
a tree which is a pretty high branch and realizes
that she can't get down, or at least that if
she tries to jump, she might really hurt herself. One
of her brothers sees her up there and watches Laurie
asks for his help and he just says, no, it's
every sibling for himself in the Hrzel household.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
He and I talked about this maybe a year ago,
and he said he felt bad that he hadn't helped me,
that he should have helped me. And I saw it differently.
I mean, I thought he didn't leave, he stayed there
with me, but he wouldn't help me down. And I
felt like, you know, in retrospect, not at the moment,
obviously I was terrified, but in retrospect, it was like
(11:07):
he knew I could do it, and he wanted me
to be successful. But I don't know for sure that's
what he was thinking. You know, he's my big brother.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Well, and it can be both, right, it can be yeah,
that's true, and you're on your own.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yep, exactly. And we really were. I mean, you know,
the older sisters older than me, they were given the
twins to kind of take care of, and I mean
we were sort of parceled up in that way because
my mother was really she was pretty overwhelmed, and my
father was pretty demanding. And you're either taking care of
someone else, or you were left to take care of yourself.
(11:43):
There was not a lot of great parenting that went
on in a nutthouse.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
So a motif for a theme that comes up again
and again on this podcast with my guests and has
been true in my own life as well, is where
there are family secrets, there are children who become little spies. Yes,
and so you were a little spy. You write that
you were looking for clues, and I'm wondering about the
(12:12):
nature of your spying and also whether you had any
sense what kind of clues you were looking for or
was it was just information, any kind of information.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
That's such a good question. I spied on my siblings.
I sat under the table in the dining room table
and the tablecloths would you know, come down and kind
of hide me and watched what was going on in
the house. There was a coat closet between the front
hallway and the kitchen. You could go back in the coats.
(12:41):
It didn't have doors for a long time, and you
could sit back there and kind of hear what was
going on in the kitchen. I mean, I was always
doing this. I was always hiding and listening. I followed
my father on his evening walks, like trying to figure
out why does he do these walks. I felt like
when I was growing up, I didn't understand and how
(13:01):
the house worked or who these people were that I
was living with. I wasn't really close to any of them,
and I think part of it was just sort of survival.
You know, how do you get through when you're living
in a house with eleven other people and you sort
of need to understand what's going on, and when your
parents are as volatile. My mother wasn't volatile, but she
was more she was more passive. But my father, you know,
(13:24):
he was angry a lot, and if he got angry
at a child, he might just sort of give them
the cold shoulder. But then he'd yell at our mother,
and then we'd feel terrible because he's yelling at her
because of something we had done. I mean, it was
everything was sort of twisted in that way. So I
felt like I was always trying to look to understand
what was going on. But the other part of your
(13:46):
question is was I just looking for information? Information was
power and that remains true today in my family. You
know that people are always trying to find out stuff
about the other ones and power for what I couldn't
even put that into words, but information has always been
something you kind of trafficked in that in that family.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
That's so interesting. And also there's a lot that's kind
of about visibility and invisibility, or the invisibility of being
one of so many siblings in a home where like
the very fact, look, I was raised as an only child.
The idea that you could disappear into a coat closet
nobody would know where you were, Yeah, is just so's
(14:30):
it's hard for me to fathom. And yet I'm sure
that that was nobody was saying, where's Lori. But at
the same time, there's also this sense that you preferred
being invisible. You describe going up to a place in
your house or on the roof I'm not sure exactly,
(14:50):
but where you could see everything and nothing could see you.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
That was in the attic. Yes, I loved that. It
made me feel not powerful exactly, but you know, kind
of invincible, I think. But I grew up and it's
interesting you say all of this because I hadn't really
thought about it, but I grew up feeling kind of invisible.
The girls room was in the front of the house.
It was actually meant to be the master bedroom, but
(15:16):
with so many kids, you know, it was given over
to the four sisters. But there were no shades on
the window. I mean, our house was It's like they
didn't really know how to be parents or put a
house together that worked. And so you know, you're in
this big room in the front of the house, and
if you have the lights on, everyone outside can see you.
And so my sisters at night, they would all take
(15:37):
turns going into the closet to put on their nightgowns.
And I never did that. I just figured nobody ever
saw me, nobody could see me. I would just put
my nightgown on in front of the window because no
one's going to see me. I'm invisible. And that was
really a feeling that I had through most of my childhood.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
At one point, Laurie is given a dollhouse. It once
(16:20):
belonged to her older sister, but before passing it down,
her mother transforms it meticulously, remodeling the interior, papering the
walls to match their real home, filling it with furniture
collected piece by piece the dollhouse becomes a near replica
of their house, but an idealized version, a place where
(16:41):
nothing is out of order, where no one disrupts the calm.
But there's meaning behind this replica. Laurie grows up understanding
in a quiet and unspoken way that her mother never
really wanted children. It's something that's been said often enough
to settle into the background of her childhood. So the dollhouse.
(17:02):
The dollhouse reflects a version of family life that feels controlled, contained,
perhaps even preferred. Laurie can move the dolls from room
to room, but the world inside never truly changes, its days,
fixed intact, a small, silent model of a home where
everything holds together.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
I think she had a lot more fun with the
dollhouse than I did, you know, kind of making this
world that was like our world, but quieter.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
It also seems like, just in terms of the atmosphere
of your childhood and the house and all of the
kids that intuluce you, all were outdoors a lot. It
was cold a lot, and just like sort of everybody
out of the house and come back in when it's
time for dinner, when the church bells ring.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Exactly the house was so crowded. You never knew what
mood my dad was going to be in when he
came home from work. You'd have to retreat until you
figured out if it was hay to be in the
main part of a house or if you needed to
stay away, because his moods did really dominate. And I
think a lot of us. I mean I used to
go exploring by myself a lot. We lived near Old Maine,
(18:12):
which was the original part of the University of Minnesota Duluth,
and there was a ravine there and there was a playground,
and you know, I'd go through the streams and of
the ravine, and you know, I was by myself a lot.
And I think the other my other siblings did that too.
The older kids had bicycles, so they would get on
their bikes and go. In the winter, we all had
(18:33):
to be outside. Now I can't remember if it was
a half an hour or an hour, but it didn't
matter how cold it was, and it didn't matter how
snowy it was. My mother made us all go outside
for an hour a day so that she could have
some peace and quiet. And I remember being so cold
that I'm like pounding on the door wanting to get
back in the house, and couldn't you know, not till
(18:54):
the hour was up. It wasn't abusive. We had you know,
we had mittens, we had boots, but you know, there's
not that much to do out there when it's twenty
bolow zero and a photo snow on the ground.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Did you have any sense of what your mother did
during those hours that she had to herself.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
I have no idea. She was a reader, she read magazines,
she read books, so she might have just sat in
the quiet and read for all I know. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Gov, Laurie's father, is a force at the center of
the household, unpredictable and commanding. His moods swing between anger, hostility,
and relentless teasing. It's constant, unsettling, a kind of emotional
storm the children learn to weather, and yet beneath this
volatility there is a sense of structure. The family sits
(19:46):
down to dinner together every night. Her mother cooks for
all ten children. Gov has his ritual, a martini, sometimes two,
prescribed he insists for his blood pressure. After dinner, he
leaves the house for a walk, following the same loop.
Night after night, Laurie watches him closely, trying to understand
(20:08):
the logic, if any behind it, all the patterns, the contradictions,
the rules that aren't spoken but somehow govern everything. Sometimes
Laurie even enlists her younger brothers to follow him at
a distance on those walks, trailing him through the neighborhood.
Would Laurie ever be able to crack the code of
her father.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
It's funny because of all the kids, I think I'm
the one who liked him the best. And he liked
me because I was a reader and I was a
writer from an early age, and he was a reader
and a writer. He was an English professor, so we
had that in common, and I was curious about him.
Some of the other siblings preferred my mother, and you know,
(20:50):
I tried really hard to get close to my mother,
but she was very stand office, she was very cold.
She didn't she didn't reveal much. My father told stories,
He told families worries a lot, and I loved listening
to those stories, the ghost stories in the book, you know,
the stories about his family. And he told us more
than once that he thought it was very important that
(21:11):
we understood where he had come from. You know that
when he was a child. His parents had no money
and they lived in one rented room the whole family,
you know, in the house of a woman named missus Donnadia.
So I felt like I kind of understood him a little,
or he kind of gave glimpses, and I wanted to
understand him better. I think my father tried to keep
(21:33):
order by rules, you know, and demands, and you have
ten pretty intelligent, willful children. They're not going to follow
your demands, you know, the older they get, and I
think that really frustrated him and added to his anger
and trying even more to control people. So it was
not a successful way of running a household.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Teasing can be such a form of veiled anger, veiled
hostility under the guise of I was just teasing. You
can't take a joke, And I imagine all of you
had different levels of tolerance for that kind of teasing.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Yeah, I mean teasing in that way is it's like
bullying really, you know, but when it's your father, and
you know, if you get mad in response, then he
can pull the father card, right, he's in charge, he's
the adult, and claim that he was just being funny,
and my mother would support him and I understand her,
(22:35):
I think a little less than I understand him. Did
she support him because she thought what he was doing
was okay? Or was it because she knew if she
defied him, he would get angry at her and yell
at her, and she didn't like being yelled at. So
I think that's one reason we were all kind of
looking for information. It's like, why is he behaving this way?
Why is she defending him? What happens if we defy him?
(22:57):
But the teasing was sometimes it was playful, but no
one ever liked it because I don't think anyone ever
really trusted it. And you know, he had all these
nicknames for us, and nobody liked their nickname, and some
of the nicknames were pretty cruel.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Yeah, could you actually go through those? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (23:15):
My oldest sister who did not like her curly hair,
her nickname was curly. There was another sister whose nickname
was pig for absolutely no reason that I could fathom.
She was not fat, she was not you know, I
don't know what he called her pig. Maybe it was affectionate,
like you know, you give little pet names to babies,
and it just stuck. But I don't really know. You know,
(23:36):
he called me hurlbird. I don't know what it means,
but I hated it. I thought it was ugly because
hurle means vomit, you know, And I didn't know what
it meant. And I would ask him not to call
me that, but then he would call me that more often.
And my little brother's the twins, they were Deanie and Fleety.
They did not like those names, and they still don't
like the names. So nicknames seems like they should be affectionate, right,
(24:00):
but they also seemed I don't know, it's a way
of sort of reminding you that he's in charge.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
I think, yeah, they're all belittling.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
Did Bobby have a nickname Punky?
Speaker 1 (24:12):
He was called Punky, And I mean when I you know,
if you look at the old photo albums, when he's
just a baby sitting on my mother's lap, it says
Punky and in my father's handwriting. So again, I think
it was a name that they gave him as a baby,
and then it stuck and he did not like it.
And he did not like Bobby either. I mean, his
name was not Robert. His name was John Patrick. And
I don't know why we called him Bobby. But he
(24:33):
didn't like it either.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
So tell me about the tensions around Bobby the oldest
as he grew up and became more and more of
his own person and less and less tolerant or you know,
sort of able to deal with your father, and your
father to deal with him. And it also strikes me
that he may have been, in certain ways, or at
(25:00):
least in one way, the most like your father, because
he too was a writer, and they got along the
least well, it seems of your father and any of
your siblings.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Yeah, Well, probably because Bobby was the oldest, the oldest boy,
the oldest child, and I think had a lot of
pressure on him because of that, because of birth order. Again,
you know, a lot of expectations are put on the oldest, right,
a lot of hopes. And he was a writer. He
was not interested in school. He cared not at all
(25:37):
for high school, got terrible grades. He had no plans
after high school to go to college or get a job.
He liked to walk the streets at night and write poetry.
And he started missing dinner, which was an incredible sin.
And our you know, dinner time, as my father said
quite often, that's the only time of the day when
the entire family comes together, and it's very important we
(26:00):
do this every day. So it was again one of
his rules right and expectations. And when Bobby got into
high school, he's you know, he had other things she
wanted to do. He was in theater, and he had friends,
and he just wouldn't come home for dinner, and sometimes
they would lock him out of the house. So he
(26:20):
was not like my father in that he was not volatile.
He would just stand there and listen. When my father
would yell at him, he would not yell back. And
my father, I think enjoyed fighting. He argued with my
mother all the time, and I think it was just
something that he enjoyed. He liked to win arguments and
(26:42):
be the victor, I guess, and Bobby just wouldn't argue
with him. I think he knew, I can't win an
argument with this man, so I'm just going to stand here.
And that made my father angrier than anything, just having
him just stand there passively and listen.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Laurie feels a special unspoken can to Bobby. Each of
them retreats to the basement of the house for different reasons.
Laurie is drawn to the bookroom, and as a teenager,
Bobby takes over a small utility room and makes it
his own. He brings down an old mattress, a battered
wooden desk, and his black typewriter. In the bookroom, Lurie
(27:20):
is comforted by the sound of the keys of Bobby's
typewriter as he pounds away.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
I was interested in him. I don't think he was
interested in me. You know, I was nine, and there
were five siblings between us, so I don't think he
was terribly aware of me. But I was very aware
of him because he was a writer, because he had
this power that could really make my father take a
step back, and not many of us had that ability
(27:46):
to do that. And it was also comforting just to
hear him down there when I was down there too,
because the bookroom was this wonderful little room with a
light and with bookcases all the way around, and you know,
a little blanket on the floor, and I would read.
But the rest of the basement was just a basement,
and it was very scary, and I was always a
(28:06):
little bit afraid to be down there alone, and so
having him down there was it was kind of a comfort.
And I used to go in there and snoop. I mean,
I snooped everywhere in that house, you know, I snooped
through everybody's stuff. And I would go in his room
and snoop around and see these poems that he was writing,
you know, And that was mysterious and kind of wonderful
to me.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
As Laurie grows older, the tension between her father and
Bobby intensifies, becoming sharper and more unpredictable. Small things take
on outsized heft. Bobby's glasses, for example, essential for him
to see, become a flashpoint. He leaves them around, and
Gov simply cannot handle it. At some point the story
(28:51):
enters family lore. Gov takes the glasses and breaks them
on purpose. But even this moment exists in fragments. Lorie
wasn't there. The details shift depending on who tells it.
Did Gov stomp on the glasses or snap them in half?
In a family this large, this fragmented itself, information travels
(29:12):
in pieces. It's always like a game of telephone. When
Bobby's seventeen, he leaves, He takes the family car and
drives it to Missouri to their grandparents' house, Gamma and John's,
without anyone quite knowing how he even managed it. Lurie
didn't even know he could drive. He sells his beloved typewriter,
(29:33):
the one he uses to write his poems, to pay
for gas. It's a decisive act. Another flashpoint. Bobby isn't
just leaving the house, He's actively trying to escape it.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Grandma loved Bobby. He was her favorite. She wanted him
to stay and my father said absolutely not. So my
grandparents had to drive him back to Duluth. One of
them drove the family car and then the other one
drove their car and brought back the car and brought
back Bobby. And yeah, it was a terrible time. It
was just so difficult. My father didn't beat us, he
(30:10):
didn't hit us. It was more just the emotions of
the house. And Bobby was kind of the focus of
that because he was the oldest and because he wasn't
doing well in school and he had no plans. And
you know, my father thought that all boys should join
the army. Not that he was a you know, he
(30:31):
wasn't a warmonger or anything like that, but he thought
that the army would you know, straighten out teenage boys.
And I guess because it might have straightened him out.
I don't know. And you know, Bobby had no interest
in joining the army.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
Tell me about the last time you saw Bobby.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
No, I'll never forget that. It was shortly after he
graduated from high school. And I was coming in the
house and going up the stairs to the second floor
where the bedrooms, and he came rushing down from his
room and he had something in his hand. I don't
know if it was a Duffel bag or a paper
(31:07):
sack or you know, something, and he kind of shoved
me out of the way and said move and I
kind of flattened against the wall, and he ran down
the stairs and out the door. And from where I
was standing on the landing, I could see out the window,
you know, outside the house. And he went out the
front door and he jumped in a car and drove off.
And that was the last time I saw him.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
And you were nine.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
I was nine. He turned eighteen on May twenty fifth,
graduated from high school, and died on June eleventh.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
On the day Bobby dies, Lourie and her little brothers
(32:04):
have been out doing errands with her mother. When they
pull up to the house, her father comes over to
the car and says, John Patrick drowned this afternoon, And
then Laurie hears her mother say, oh, Leo, he tried
so hard, you know.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Sitting in the front seat of that car and observing this,
it felt like I shouldn't be there. This is not
something I should be observing. But I was old enough
to understand what was happening and to remember it. My
little brothers were in the back seat, but they were six, maybe, yeah,
five or six, so I don't think that they realized
(32:45):
what was going on, but I did. I just felt
the weight of it, the burden of it. To witness
this felt like, I'm not sure I'm supposed to know this.
I don't know who I can tell. I mean, even
in the family, I don't know who, who already knows,
who doesn't know. I don't know what to do with
this information, and I just, you know, I went upstairs
and kind of crawled in bed.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Did you put the pieces together of what had happened
to Bobby or were you?
Speaker 3 (33:12):
Were you told what had happened?
Speaker 1 (33:14):
I had no idea. I didn't know where he was
going when he was running down the stairs and jumping
in the car. I didn't know where he had been.
When my father said to my mother, John Patrick drown
this afternoon, then I knew that. But I mean I
thought he drowned in Lake Superior because I didn't know
of any other lake. You know, he'd gone to a
friend's cabin. But I didn't know any of this. I
(33:35):
knew nothing. It was not you know, we were not
a family that we weren't talking about important things or
what's going on. So I'm not sure how I came
to know. I think it might have been that night
when I was in bed and my sisters were in
their beds, and my oldest sister, Kristen, talked about how
she had to go and identify the body, and you know,
(33:58):
she was very upset, obviously, and I think she might
have been the one who kind of put it all
together for me.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
So what happens in the aftermath of Bobby's death? The
family changed, And it seems like there's this really haunting
parallel with your mother's family and the way that her
family changed and never recovered after her brother James died.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Yeah, I think the family just sort of fell apart, really,
I mean, both of my parents really pulled away from
their children. My father was drinking a lot. Then my
mother announced more than once that she was starting over
with the three little kids, so the twins and my
(34:45):
little sister, and they would be her new family, and
she I mean lavished attention on them and was devoted
to them, and the rest of us were just sort
of left to figure out what we were doing. And
Kristin went off and got pregnant, and another sister left
and later also you know, got pregnant quite young and
got married brother, you know, sort of hitchhiking around the country.
(35:09):
I mean, it was just we all just kind of
dispersed in whatever way we could.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
And did you ever talk about Bobby.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
No, it was not something that we talked about. I
remember in high school I did the wija board with
some friends and I said at dinner to my parents
and whoever else was at the dinner table that night,
you know that I did the wija board and it
said that I was going to get married and I
would have two sons named Doug and John. And there
(35:39):
was just the silence like I had said something very wrong.
And then my father, I mean his voice actually kind
of broke and he said, well, we we obviously have
no objections to the name John, because that was you know,
Bobby's real name. I mean, it was just like if
you said the word John in passing you, it just
(36:00):
felt like you had done something terrible. So there was
no feeling that this was you know, we were going to
talk about him or our memories of him, or regrets
or anything. There was just we did not talk about it.
We did go to the cemetery. My mother would take
some of us to the cemetery. I'm not sure if
my father ever went there, and you know, we would
(36:22):
maybe brush off the headstone and leave some flowers and
feed the ducks. But no, it just was clear that
it was not something to talk about.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
You know, there's a lot about ghosts in your book.
I'm wondering where this belief in ghosts or this fascination
with them resided for your parents after losing Bobby. If
you have any was there any sense that you know
of that they went on and had some kind of
sense of his continuing to be present.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
For my parents, I don't know. My mother considered herself
to be very psychic, and she didn't like it. She
found it disturbing. So I don't know if she ever
had any experience or thought she had any experience. My
father scoffed at his parents because his parents believed in
(37:18):
ghosts and had all these ghost stories, and the house
that we lived in in Saint Joseph for that summer
before we moved to Duluth was profoundly haunted, and my
father would mock them and say they were ignorant peasants
for believing in ghosts, but it was also clear that
he believed in them too. So I don't know. I
do know my sister Kristen, my oldest sister, the one
(37:41):
they called Curly, she did experience something some years after
Bobby died. She said she was just so haunted by
his death and having to identify his body. And you know,
they had been pretty close because they were the first
and second children to be born, and they were just
a year apart. And she said she woke up one
night in the middle of the night and he was
standing by her bed and he said, don't worry about me.
(38:04):
I'm happy now, and that that made a big difference.
It made her feel a lot better with how things
had turned out. But I don't know about my parents.
If they had, they would never have told us.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
In the years following Bobby's death, Laurie does what she
needs to do to survive mentally, psychologically, emotionally. Books help,
reading helps, work helps. She goes to college on scholarship,
but then quits. She moves out of her parents' house.
Her dad is drinking heavily. The air is thick with
(38:40):
unprocessed grief, and she begins what becomes her lifelong career
in newspapers, working first as a clerk, then a librarian,
then copy editor, then reporter and columnist. She forges her
own path, never graduating from college, but receiving a master's
in arts. In her early forties. She marries, and she
(39:04):
and her husband settle in the Twin Cities. She has
a thriving life, but still Bobby lingers. Of course, he lingers.
She writes about the ghosts of her childhood over and
over again and puts them in a drawer.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
I wrote about the day he died many many, many
times over my life, starting when I was in high school.
I wrote a story called the Dandelion. And the dandelion
was our family, and we were all the little, the
little seeds that go flying off. You know, That's all
I remember about it, but it was something that I
(39:44):
thought about and thought about, and when I turned eighteen,
I remember his death really hit me that year because
I you know, on my birthday, I was thinking, if
I was Bobby, I would be dead in two weeks,
you know, and it was just like, oh my gosh.
It had not really struck me until then. I mean,
I was a child when he died. I was nine,
(40:05):
and you know, you don't have fully complete emotions at nine.
But as I grew older, I wrote about it a lot,
and I didn't think I would publish anything, but I
remember being very interested in, you know, that summer in
Saint Joe that I only have some memories of, and
mostly I remember all the stories about that summer that
(40:26):
we lived in Saint Joe.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
So you wrote this book and you put it away.
You had the sense that your mother would not be pleased,
and she was still living gov had passed away at
this point, right, yes, But you did publish a piece
in a literary magazine that was that story that you
(40:49):
had been writing over and over about the day that
Bobby died, and you didn't think that your mother would
see the story. It was in a journal on the
front page of the Star Tribune. It was something that
she could easily not see, but she did. It was
either shared with her or somehow she saw it. And
you describe how upset she was and that she never
(41:13):
spoke to you again.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
She lived just a few miles away from me at
that time. She had moved from Duluth to the Twin
Cities after my father died in two thousand and four,
and she was ten minutes away from my house, and
so I saw her every Sunday and sometimes at other
times too. And during COVID, I was not allowed to visit.
My little brothers visited her, but I was not allowed
(41:39):
because I was. The ostensible reason was I was out
in the world, you know, reporting and being in an office,
and I could bring her germs. The world was starting
to open up again after COVID, and I did go
back and see her once, and I was making plans
to go back again when this email popped up in
the family email thread and the subject line was this
(42:00):
makes me sick, and it was from my mother, and
I opened it up and it had gone to the
entire family and all it was was a link to
that essay, and there was a bunch of exchanges over
the next couple of days. It was really unpleasant.
Speaker 3 (42:16):
With everybody, or just between you and she.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
It was everybody. It was. It was the family email thread,
you know, so siblings and some nieces and nephews and
a lot of people just lurk. But everybody got these messages,
this exchange. And she never allowed me to come visit
her again. And she was quite deaf, so calling her
wouldn't have you know, I couldn't really call her. And
(42:40):
she lived in a security building and my little brothers
had keys to get in, but I did not, So no,
I never saw her again. Mostly I remember all the
stories about that summer that we lived in Saint Jo
and his life and his death. I have always felt very,
very close to the little girl that I was at
that time, and I remember things that I thought, and
(43:04):
I remember how I felt about things, how I reacted
to things. I remember sitting in that car when my
father came up and said John Patrick, John this afternoon,
and I remember that I almost laughed, which was not
because I thought anything was funny, but because sometimes that's
what emotion does. It comes out wrong. And it was
just this very powerful feeling of not funny laughter, but
(43:27):
just needing to let something out. But I've just always
felt really close to that child. Now that I have
written it as a book, and the book is sitting
here in my hand, I don't think about that little
girl much anymore, and I have for my entire life.
(43:47):
And I've always wondered at people who said, I don't
know how you remember your childhood so clearly it was like,
how could I not? That little girl walks beside me
every day. But now that it's done, she really doesn't.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
Well you kind of you made her visible.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Yes I did, didn't I? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (44:07):
I did.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
She's not a ghost anymore.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and if you'd
(44:40):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(45:01):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The MeatEater Podcast
Building on the belief that a deeper understanding of the natural world enriches all of our lives, host Steven Rinella brings an in-depth and relevant look at all outdoor topics including hunting, fishing, nature, conservation, and wild foods. Filled with humor, irreverence, and things that will surprise the hell out of you, each episode welcomes a diverse group of guests who add their own expertise to the vast world of the outdoors. Part of The MeatEater Podcast Network.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by Audiochuck Media Company.