She Thought Her Father Was Dead—Until a Shocking Discovery Just Blocks Away from Home

On this episode of Our American Stories, it wasn't until Karen Olson's school held a father-daughter dance that the question entered her mind: "Wait, who is my dad?" After asking her mother, she told her he had died before she could meet him. But years later, after a chance encounter, she found that wasn't true.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:13):
This is Lee Hibib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
And to search for the Our American Stories podcast, go
to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts. Anyone who's lost a parent knows the sense
of loss and engenders, or for people who never knew

(00:33):
their parents or one of their parents, the feeling is
quite different. Karen Olsen grew up never knowing her father,
but her mom was reluctant to share any information about him.
This developed a deep curiosity and she had a drive
to know who was her dad. Karen tried to fill
in the blanks that her mother wouldn't. Despite her effort,

(00:53):
she came up empty until a chance encounter with a stranger.
Here's Karen to tell us the story.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
When I was growing up in Chicago in the fifties,
I lived with my mother, her two sisters, and my grandfather.
We lived in a six flat apartment building. We weren't
very wealthy. In fact, we were pretty darn poor. When
I went to high school, I realized that my life

(01:20):
wasn't like everybody else's. It was an all girls school
run by the same nuns that I had had for
however many years in grade school. It was a familiar situation.
What wasn't familiar were things like the father daughter dance.
What does this mean? I didn't even have an idea.
But when I found out that you had to have

(01:42):
your father bring you to this dance, I was just lost.
I had no idea what that meant. So I asked
my mother. Everybody at my school had a father, and
for this dance, I was expected to bring my father. Well,
that was kind of a four concept to me. I
had cousins with fathers, but they were never around, they

(02:04):
were always at work. There was my grandfather, but he
wasn't my father, so where was mine? So I asked
my mother, mom, where is my father? Who is my father?
Why isn't he living here with us? And she got
on what I used to call her mad face, and

(02:24):
it was pursed her lips and kind of looked very angry.
It took her well to speak, but she said that
my father had been in the war. He was a soldier,
he was French. I was killed in the war. End
of discussion. She wouldn't tell me anything else. So I
had the opportunity at least to tell people where my

(02:45):
father was. He was dead. Time went on and that
just didn't sit well with me, so I needed to
find out more. I had a name for my father.
I knew that my father had and a soldier. I
knew he was dead. End of story. But something just

(03:06):
didn't sit right with that story. There weren't enough details.
So when everybody was gone at work, I made it
my business to become a Nancy Drew detective. She was
my heroine. She was a person who would find the
tiniest little detail and was able to solve mysteries with

(03:26):
it and talking about the mystery. So in my own house,
I looked in every drawer, in every corner, under the rugs,
under the padding of the rugs, and finally I got
to this old cedar chest where my mom kept some
pretty interesting things. One of them was one of these

(03:48):
fox boas where the boxes and mouths were made into
little clips and they clipped together. It went around their necks.
And she knew that I didn't like that, so she
put it on top of everything, knowing that I wouldn't
go near it, so that made it even more alluring.
I just kind of tossed it aside and just rummaged
through this cedar chest full of old clothes and things,

(04:09):
and then I found them. I found a little packet
of a few letters. One of them had a picture
of my father in it, and it was the first
time I saw the face of my father. And of
course I had to read those letters. I know they
weren't meant for me, and I know she was hiding
them for a reason. But in reading them, I found
out that yes he was in the war, Yes he

(04:31):
did suffer some injuries in battle, and yes he never
married my mother. He was my father, but she told
him that unless he did that he needed to stay
away from all of us, and that he need never
see me or have anything to do with me again. Okay,
but what about the dead part. I kept looking and

(04:53):
kept looking, and kept trying to find some evidence he
had actually been killed in the war, as she said,
but it never ever came up. I took my search
to the telephone book in Chicago. We had these giant volumes,
six inches thick, with page after tissue paper page of names, addresses,

(05:16):
and phone numbers of just about everybody who lived in Chicago. Now,
my mother had, somehow through my uncle who was a lawyer,
taken my father's name although they never married, and so
my name was his name tour Mae, And I looked
it up in the phone book and there was my
mother's name. Tourmee wasn't a very common name at the time.

(05:38):
There was a famous singer out there whose name was
mel Tourmay. It was very popular. But he had nothing
to do with me. I was just looking for a soldier.
I looked in these phone books and there in teeny
tiny print was my mother's name, Loretta G. Tourmee, with
our phone number and address. Right above it was Arthur Tourmee, lawyer,

(06:01):
and his address, the address of his business and his
phone number. And I asked my mother about him, and
she said he was your uncle. That's all she would say.
I knew my father's name was l because that's how
he signed his letters to my mother. His name wasn't
in the phone book. So who is this Arthur person?

(06:21):
I found out later that he was my uncle, but
apparently he wanted nothing to do with us. Now, there
was no Internet in those days. I couldn't look up
death records. I couldn't look up any records. The only
thing I could do was look at that phone book,
maybe go to the public library, which still didn't have
any records, or contact art Tourmet, which I wasn't about

(06:42):
to do because I knew that the wrath of my
mother would fall down upon me. So I just forgot
about it and went on with my life. That's forward
to college. I ended up going to Loyola Downtown, an
easy commute. Nonetheless, I came home every night from college.

(07:04):
I joined a sorority when I was at Loyola, but
towards the end of my school years at Loyola, the
sorority decided to go national. When the sorority decided to
go national, the sorority Alpha Sima Alpha, scheduled a great,
big gala to welcome us into the national group. It
was to be a group of about two hundred people,

(07:27):
all women, coming from various chapters of the sorority to
see us get pinned. The night of the big event
came and I was assigned to take care of one
of the illustrious guests who was to be the keynote speaker.
So I had to sit with her, and I had
to not just sit with her, but talk to her

(07:47):
keep her amused it turns out her name was Outline
Giocaris Lambrose. I had never heard of her before, but
she was a pretty big deal in Illinois. She was
at first just someone on the Supreme Court of Illinois
and then later a state senator. So what was I
going to talk about with this woman who knew all

(08:08):
about law and I was just an English major from Loyola.
We all wore name tags and we had some small
talk when we sat down to dinner, and all of
a sudden, she stopped and she stared at me, and
she looked at my name tag, and she said, oh, tourmee.
Is Art your dad? And I, with all my knowledge

(08:31):
about my father and my uncle, said no, Art's not
my dad. He is my uncle. My father's name was
l but he was killed in the war. And the
whole conversation stopped, and she stared, and I stared. Did
I say something wrong? All of a sudden, she said,

(08:53):
Art and L live on the North side of Chicago.
My life was about to change, for good or for bad,
for better or for worse. I had no idea.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
And you've been listening to Karen Olsen. Her maiden name
is Karen Tormat What a story you're hearing, and what
a discovery. It had been haunting her. She'd been wanting
to know what any kid would want to know, who's
my dad? Where is he? Well, she was about to
find out something she'd not been told. She was about
to find out her mom had stone cold lied to her.
When we come back, more of the story of Karen

(09:23):
Olsen's search for her father here on our American Stories,
and we continue with our American Stories and with Karen
Olsen's story. We'd just discovered that Karen had learned her

(09:45):
father was still alive from a chance encounter with a stranger.
Let's pick up where we last left off.

Speaker 2 (09:55):
All of a sudden, she said, Art and l live
on the north side of chicag She didn't have to
say any more than that. I knew what she was
telling me, and she stopped talking because she was trying
to figure out how to tell me and how we
would both process this. Well, we processed it by not
saying anything more about it the entire evening. I'm thinking, Geez,

(10:20):
I was put next to this woman. Not only did
I have to sit there, I had to talk to her.
And she was probably the only person in the room.
Maybe the only person in the city of Chicago besides
my mother and my uncle who could connect me to
my father. How did this happen? I went home and

(10:40):
I wrote a letter, a letter to my uncle saying, look,
this is what happened. I don't want to hurt anybody's family,
I don't want to destroy anything, but I can't be
put in this position again. I need to know the truth.
I need to know what happened between my mother and
father and whom my father is. And I mailed a

(11:02):
letter to my uncle's law office. So I waited and
waited and waited, thinking that he would either call me
or write me back. And I had instructed him to
write me back or call me at school at Loyola
because I knew that if something like that appeared in
my house, my mother would take it and tear it
up and I would never see it. A month went

(11:26):
by and there was nothing, and I figured, well, Okay,
he knew where I was, I knew where he was,
but he didn't want to have anything to do with me.
And then one day, while I was in the Loyola
student union, a voice came over the loud speaker. Karen
durmay come to the Dean's office. You have a phone call,
and I'm like, whoa wait, a phone call. Something's happened,

(11:49):
Something's wrong. So I went down to the office and
by that time the person at the other end had
hung up, and the dean gave me a phone number
to call, and it turned out to be my uncle's life.
It took a while for the secretaries to find him,
and he got on the phone and apologized for not
getting back to me sooner. The next words out of

(12:10):
his mouth were, would you like to meet your father?
Well that didn't take me long to answer. But then
I had to figure out how am I going to
pull this off. If my mother finds out, it's going
to be the mad face for weeks. So I did
make arrangements to meet them at a place called the

(12:30):
Little Corporal downtown Chicago, a time when I could tell
my mother that I was doing something with the sorority.
You know, I did have to lie to her about this,
but I did. When I arrived at the Little Corporal,
there was my father and his brother Art, probably as
a buffer in case something was amiss. They had no

(12:53):
idea what I was going to ask for was I
going to hold them up for money or was I
going to scream and yell at him? Because they both
knew the story. We had to dinner and I asked
all kinds of questions, all kinds of things that I
wanted to know, But it was a pretty low key dinner.
All I really wanted to know was who am I?
Who are you? Why did this happen? And it turns

(13:16):
out my father never married. I didn't have any brothers
and sisters, but I did have a whole family, a
whole family that I didn't know anything about, A whole
family that I later found out had lived about six
blocks away from me for the first eleven years of
my life. My other set of grandparents, my aunt Bee

(13:38):
and her husband and their three children, and even mel
Tarmay had lived in that area as well, and we
apparently were running circles around each other in the same neighborhood,
going to the same soda shop, going to the same
grocery stores for eleven years, none of us knowing that
the other existed. I did find out about them, and

(14:01):
my uncle at that meeting said, would you like to
come to Thanksgiving dinner and meet all those people? I said, yes. Now,
when I went home after that, I realized that my
father had given me his card. I put it in
my wallet so that I could contact him, and the
next morning it was gone. My mother did have this

(14:25):
little habit of going through all my things to see
if I was doing something nefarious, and she had taken
the card. And I knew she had taken the card
because her mad face was on and she was sitting
at the kitchen table and smoking cigarette after cigarette after cigarette.
That was something she did anyway, but not to that degree.
And I said, Okay, I know you've got it. I
know you took it out of my purse. And she

(14:47):
just told me you had no right and I said,
oh yeah, I'm eighteen. Now over eighteen. I had a
write and I'm going to see him, and furthermore, I'm
going to go to Thanksgiving dinner with them and all
the rest of them. Well, I thought she was just
going to stamp herself into the ground like a rumble stillskin.
But eventually she cooled down and the next words out

(15:08):
of her mouth were, what did he look like? How
did he look? So she kind of reconcile of that
that this was going to happen, and then I really
didn't care what happened. Then I only cared what happened now.
I went to Thanksgiving dinner. There were two girl cousins

(15:28):
about my age, one a little older, one a little younger,
Berry and Susie, and all of us had taken ballet lessons,
all of us had majored in English. All of us
were going to be teachers, and we even looked alike.
But my aunt and uncle had never met me, had
no idea that I existed. None of them knew I

(15:50):
existed until that very moment, and eventually we all became friends,
and I am still friends with Susie and Berry to
this day. After that meeting, my father was a frequent
visitor at my house. He came and took me and
my mother to dinner often. He came and took us

(16:11):
to plays, to performances. When mel was in town at
the London Ouse, He and I often went to dinner
downtown because by that time I was working downtown at
least in the summers, and we became friends. I can't
say that he was the dad I'd always wished for,
because there was just too much water under the bridge
for that. But He was in my life for fifteen

(16:33):
years before he died. At first, he would take me
to many different brunches with his cronies who were in
their sixties and seventies. He was showing me off, I think,
but after all, he had no family, just me. A
couple years later, I met someone got married. At that time,

(17:00):
my father was very much in my life. He paid
for the wedding, he walked me down the aisle, and
then when his grandsons were born, he couldn't have been
a prouder grandpa. He took them everywhere. He took them
to restaurants to meet his friends. And then it was
my grandson, this my grandson that so he had a family.

(17:24):
He died fifteen years after that day in Chicago where
I met him at that big dinner. We all have
really fond memories of him and my uncle Art. My
mother had a relationship with him after that. I guess
they were friends. They went out occasionally. I always had
a fantasy of them getting married finally, but that wasn't

(17:45):
to be. It turned out the big reason that kept
him from marrying her was that he came from an
ultra Jewish religious family, and as long as his parents
were alive. He could not marry a gentile without being
thrown out of the family completely. I didn't know that
until much much later. But that was the story, and

(18:07):
that was the truth. So I lived most of my
life without knowing my father, and then all of a sudden,
this string of coincidences happened. They were small things that
I could have responded to or not. I didn't have
to join a sorority, but I did. The sorority didn't
have to go national, but it did. Then came this

(18:31):
big gala. There I was seated next to perhaps the
only woman in the city of Chicago who connected me
with my family. And yet in this room of two
hundred people, we were somehow put together. This is how
I found my father. Was this just coincidence? Was this

(18:52):
a string of random happenings? Or was this a plan,
a plan that God had all along. This could have
been a coincidence, a pretty big string of coincidences, but
I don't think so. I think it was meant to be.

Speaker 1 (19:16):
At A terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by John Elfner. He's a high school history teacher and
frequent contributor here on our American Stories and by the way,
if you have stories to tell, send them to our
American Stories. A lot of you are historians about your family,
historians of your local town. You don't have to have

(19:36):
a PhD in history or storytelling to share your stories
with us. Send them to Ouramerican Stories dot com and
click the your Stories button. Your stories are some of
our favorite And by the way, thanks also to Karen
Olsen for sharing her story and what a story it was.
Imagine that moment when she found out her father wasn't dead, well,

(20:00):
she got to know her father better understood her mind
was probably just trying to protect her Karen Olson's story
about the father she never knew, the father she thought
was dead here on Our American Stories