August 27, 2025 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, for Karen Olson, the ache of missing her father began at a school dance where other girls stood beside their dads while she stood alone. Her mother had told her he was dead, and Karen believed it for decades. But the truth was far more complicated. A long-lost family connection surfaced years later and changed everything she thought she knew about her childhood.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
This is Lee Habib 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, but 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.
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
(01:21):
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 or in concept to me.
I had cousins with fathers, but they were never around,
(02:04):
they 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?
Speaker 3 (02:20):
And she got on.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
What I used to call her mad face, and it
was pursed her lips and kind of looked very angry.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
It took her well to speak.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
But she said that my father had been in the war.
He was a soldier, he was French, he 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 father was.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
He was dead.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
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
been a soldier. I knew he was dead end the story,
but something just didn't sit right with that story. There
weren't enough details. So when everybody was gone at work,
(03:12):
I made it my business to become a Nancy Drew detective.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
She was my heroine.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
She was a person who would find the tiniest little
detail and was able to solve mysteries with it and
talking about the mystery.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
So in my own house, I looked.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
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 fox
boas where the boxes and mouths were made into little
(03:51):
clips and they clipped together.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
It went around their necks. And she knew that I
didn't like that, so she put it on top.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
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, and.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Then I found them.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
And of course I had to read those letters.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
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 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
(04:43):
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 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
(05:05):
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, 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
(05:26):
father's name although they never married, and so my name
was his name tour May 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. There
was a famous singer out there whose name was mel Tormae.
It was very popular. But he had nothing to do
with me. I was just looking for a soldier. I
(05:48):
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,
and his address, the address of his business and his
phone number. And I asked my mother about him, and
(06:08):
she said he was your uncle.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
That's all she would say.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
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?
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
(06:33):
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 tourmee, which I wasn't about
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
(06:53):
to college. I ended up going to Loyola downtown and
easy commute. Nonetheless, I came home every night from college.
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
(07:14):
go national, the sorority Alpha Sima Alpha, scheduled a great,
big gala to welcome us into the national group.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
It was to be a group of.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
About two hundred people, 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,
(07:46):
but talk to her, keep her amused.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
It turns out her.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
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 about law.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
And I was just an English major from Loyola.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
Is Art your dad?
Speaker 2 (08:29):
And I, with all my knowledge 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?
(08:51):
All of a sudden, she said, Art and L live
on the North side of Chicago.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
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?
Speaker 3 (09:13):
Where is he?
Speaker 1 (09:13):
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 Olsen's search for her
father here on our American Stories, and we continue with
(09:40):
our American Stories and with Karen Olsen's story. We'd just
discovered that Karen had learned her 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.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
I knew what she was telling.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
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,
I was put next to this woman. Not only did
I have to sit there, I had to talk to
(10:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
How did this happen?
Speaker 2 (10:38):
I went home and 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 who my
(11:00):
father is. And I mailed a 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
(11:21):
never see it. A month went 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 Jourmey, come to the
(11:42):
Dean's office. You have a phone call, And I'm like,
whoa wait, a phone call. Something's happened, 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.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
Life law office.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
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
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
(12:23):
to be the mad face for weeks. So I did
make arrangements to meet them at Outflace called the Little
Corporal downtown Chicago on a time when I could tell
my mother that I was doing something with the sorority.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
You know, I did have to lie to her about this,
but I did.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
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 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 Label knew the story. We
had to dinner and I asked all kinds of questions,
(13:03):
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?
Speaker 3 (13:11):
Who are you?
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Why did this happen? And it turns 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
(13:35):
other set of grandparents, my aunt Bee 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
(13:55):
for eleven years, none of us knowing that the other existed.
I did find out about them, and my uncle at
that meeting said would you like to come to Thanksgiving dinner?
Speaker 3 (14:06):
And meet all those people. I said, yes.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
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 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
(14:33):
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 just told me you had no right, and
I said, oh yeah, I'm eighteen, now over eighteen. I
(14:53):
had a rite and I'm going to see him, and furthermore,
I'm going to go to Thanksgiving dinner with them, and
I meet 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 of her mouth were what did
he look like?
Speaker 3 (15:11):
How did he look?
Speaker 2 (15:13):
So she kind of reconcile the fact 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 about my age,
one a little older, one a little younger, Berry and Susie,
and all of us had taken ballet lessons, all of
(15:37):
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 existed until
that very moment, and eventually we all became friends, and
I am still friends with Susie and Berry to this day.
(16:00):
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 to plays,
to performances. When mel was in town at the London House,
He and I often went to dinner downtown because by
that time I was working downtown at least in the summers,
(16:23):
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 years before he died.
At first, he would take me to many different brunches
with his cronies who were in their sixties and seventies.
(16:45):
He was showing me off. I think, after all, he
had no family, just me. A couple years later, I
met someone got married. At that time time my father
was very much in my life. He paid for the wedding,
(17:05):
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. He died
fifteen years after that day in Chicago where I met
(17:29):
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 to be. It
turned out the big reason that kept him from marrying
(17:50):
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 up out of
the family completely. I didn't know that until much much later,
but that was the story, and that was the truth.
(18:11):
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 big gala. There I was
(18:33):
seated next to perhaps the only woman in the city
of Chicago who connect 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 a string of random happenings?
(18:55):
Or was this a plan, a plan that God.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
Had all along.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
This could have been a coincidence, a pretty big string
of coincidences, but I don't think so.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
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 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):
if she got to know her father better understood her
mom was probably just trying to protect her. Karen Nelson's
story about the father she never knew, the father she
thought was dead here on Our American Stories
This is Lee Habib 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, but 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.
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
(01:21):
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 or in concept to me.
I had cousins with fathers, but they were never around,
(02:04):
they 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?
Speaker 3 (02:20):
And she got on.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
What I used to call her mad face, and it
was pursed her lips and kind of looked very angry.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
It took her well to speak.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
But she said that my father had been in the war.
He was a soldier, he was French, he 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 father was.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
He was dead.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
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
been a soldier. I knew he was dead end the story,
but something just didn't sit right with that story. There
weren't enough details. So when everybody was gone at work,
(03:12):
I made it my business to become a Nancy Drew detective.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
She was my heroine.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
She was a person who would find the tiniest little
detail and was able to solve mysteries with it and
talking about the mystery.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
So in my own house, I looked.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
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 fox
boas where the boxes and mouths were made into little
(03:51):
clips and they clipped together.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
It went around their necks. And she knew that I
didn't like that, so she put it on top.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
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, and.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Then I found them.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
And of course I had to read those letters.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
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 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
(04:43):
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 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
(05:05):
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, 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
(05:26):
father's name although they never married, and so my name
was his name tour May 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. There
was a famous singer out there whose name was mel Tormae.
It was very popular. But he had nothing to do
with me. I was just looking for a soldier. I
(05:48):
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,
and his address, the address of his business and his
phone number. And I asked my mother about him, and
(06:08):
she said he was your uncle.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
That's all she would say.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
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?
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
(06:33):
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 tourmee, which I wasn't about
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
(06:53):
to college. I ended up going to Loyola downtown and
easy commute. Nonetheless, I came home every night from college.
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
(07:14):
go national, the sorority Alpha Sima Alpha, scheduled a great,
big gala to welcome us into the national group.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
It was to be a group of.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
About two hundred people, 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,
(07:46):
but talk to her, keep her amused.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
It turns out her.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
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 about law.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
And I was just an English major from Loyola.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
Is Art your dad?
Speaker 2 (08:29):
And I, with all my knowledge 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?
(08:51):
All of a sudden, she said, Art and L live
on the North side of Chicago.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
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?
Speaker 3 (09:13):
Where is he?
Speaker 1 (09:13):
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 Olsen's search for her
father here on our American Stories, and we continue with
(09:40):
our American Stories and with Karen Olsen's story. We'd just
discovered that Karen had learned her 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.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
I knew what she was telling.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
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,
I was put next to this woman. Not only did
I have to sit there, I had to talk to
(10:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
How did this happen?
Speaker 2 (10:38):
I went home and 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 who my
(11:00):
father is. And I mailed a 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
(11:21):
never see it. A month went 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 Jourmey, come to the
(11:42):
Dean's office. You have a phone call, And I'm like,
whoa wait, a phone call. Something's happened, 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.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
Life law office.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
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
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
(12:23):
to be the mad face for weeks. So I did
make arrangements to meet them at Outflace called the Little
Corporal downtown Chicago on a time when I could tell
my mother that I was doing something with the sorority.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
You know, I did have to lie to her about this,
but I did.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
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 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 Label knew the story. We
had to dinner and I asked all kinds of questions,
(13:03):
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?
Speaker 3 (13:11):
Who are you?
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Why did this happen? And it turns 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
(13:35):
other set of grandparents, my aunt Bee 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
(13:55):
for eleven years, none of us knowing that the other existed.
I did find out about them, and my uncle at
that meeting said would you like to come to Thanksgiving dinner?
Speaker 3 (14:06):
And meet all those people. I said, yes.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
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 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
(14:33):
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 just told me you had no right, and
I said, oh yeah, I'm eighteen, now over eighteen. I
(14:53):
had a rite and I'm going to see him, and furthermore,
I'm going to go to Thanksgiving dinner with them, and
I meet 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 of her mouth were what did
he look like?
Speaker 3 (15:11):
How did he look?
Speaker 2 (15:13):
So she kind of reconcile the fact 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 about my age,
one a little older, one a little younger, Berry and Susie,
and all of us had taken ballet lessons, all of
(15:37):
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 existed until
that very moment, and eventually we all became friends, and
I am still friends with Susie and Berry to this day.
(16:00):
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 to plays,
to performances. When mel was in town at the London House,
He and I often went to dinner downtown because by
that time I was working downtown at least in the summers,
(16:23):
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 years before he died.
At first, he would take me to many different brunches
with his cronies who were in their sixties and seventies.
(16:45):
He was showing me off. I think, after all, he
had no family, just me. A couple years later, I
met someone got married. At that time time my father
was very much in my life. He paid for the wedding,
(17:05):
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. He died
fifteen years after that day in Chicago where I met
(17:29):
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 to be. It
turned out the big reason that kept him from marrying
(17:50):
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 up out of
the family completely. I didn't know that until much much later,
but that was the story, and that was the truth.
(18:11):
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 big gala. There I was
(18:33):
seated next to perhaps the only woman in the city
of Chicago who connect 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 a string of random happenings?
(18:55):
Or was this a plan, a plan that God.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
Had all along.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
This could have been a coincidence, a pretty big string
of coincidences, but I don't think so.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
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 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):
if she got to know her father better understood her
mom was probably just trying to protect her. Karen Nelson's
story about the father she never knew, the father she
thought was dead here on Our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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