Here's one of my favorite pictures of her, taken circa mid-1980s with my sister Joan and me.
Angeline Josephine Bogdanski was the middle child of an emigrant Polish family who came to America in 1909, settling in Chicago. Barbara and Leon, having lost their first child during the sea journey, went on to have 7 more: Marie, Stephanie, Joseph, Angeline, Edward, Wanda and Virginia. Angeline--or Angie as she was known to everyone--was the middle child in this struggling family. She almost didn't make it past childhood. A priest was called in when at age 7, she seemed to be dying from--was it scarlet fever? It was a pre-antibiotic era when childhood deaths were not uncommon. She pulled through--and my future existence remained a possibility.
Angie had a bilingual education when that was considered a very normal, non-controversial thing in her Catholic elementary school: Polish in the morning and English in the afternoon. While Polish remained the language at home, she along with her siblings soon became English-dominant. Unlike most of her siblings, she finished high school, graduating from Carl Schurz High School in 1934. She used to laugh about saving her streetcar money for sweets, necessitating a long multi-mile walk from home each day. Perhaps that's where she gained her prowess as a walker, honed all through life by the fact that she never learned to drive.
Four years later, her beloved mother, the mainstay of the family, died from complications of a freak accident---no doubt the worst event of Angie's young life. She was 21. The Depression had not yet ended. Like her older sisters, she worked to help support everyone. Her youngest sister was only 13. As World War II began, her elder brother entered the Army. Earlier dreams of becoming a nurse were on permanent hold.
She was working as as a cashier at the Chopin movie theater on Division Street when a brash subway construction worker, John Riley, started to flirt with her. She rebuffed him, but one day he followed her sister Wanda home, pretending to have a date with Angie but having lost the address. Arriving home later, Angie was "blown away" as we'd say today, at seeing John and her father laughing and talking. John did not speak Polish and Leon spoke no English. "Your father has the gift of the gab," she often said to me and Joanie. I think she admired his skill while she remained the introvert, the one who would just as soon spend a quiet evening reading or talking to someone she knew well.
Angie and John married in 1944 in a civil ceremony. A church wedding was out of the question, as they had been excommunicated by the Catholic Church. John had been married before, and divorce was not recognized by the church. Did Angie really mind that? I don't remember her telling us, but she did talk about being in love, and awash in that grand emotion, perhaps religion and its rules receded in importance. That severing set her on the spiritual course I remember as Joanie and I grew up. She attended church every Sunday--and we with her for much of childhood. She felt that religion was a personal matter between God and herself, and that was a constant in her life. She did not take the sacraments and did not miss joining church groups. She was not a "joiner"; her extended family comprised her social circle, and they had frequent get-togethers even after we moved from Chicago to Hammond, Indiana. Years later, when Angie had a hysterectomy in a Catholic hospital, the priest arranged to have her marriage formally blessed in the hospital chapel, as John's first wife had passed away by then. She was very pleased, but I don't believe that event really changed anything in her spiritual practices.
During our years in Hammond, Angie was a stay-at-home mom, sometimes working part-time jobs, like serving food samples at the Jewel supermarket. John was proud that he was making good money during the construction boom of the 1950s, and that his wife "didn't have to work." She told me later, when I was discovering the fledgling women's movement via Betty Friedan and the feminist critique of housework, that those years were the best of her life. "And you hated it when I went off to work when you were little and your father was in the hospital," she would say, puzzled that I would reject what she held most dear.
Today I would have the language to tell her how much I understand and appreciate the work she did; understand that homemaking was indeed a liberation for working class women who, unlike Friedan, never expected jobs outside the home to be "fulfilling". Angie worked well inside: getting a husband off to work early in the morning, the kids up and dressed and off to school, the house tidied, food prepared and served. There were moments of quiet amid all that, moments she--not a boss--awarded herself--for a nap, time for reading, and in the summer, tending flowers under the sun in the backyard. Her reading tastes ran to Reader's Digest condensed novels, as well as Proust and Cervantes.
A Chicago resident all of her life, Angie loved and enjoyed nature. She told us of summers (or was it just one?) when she spent time in the country. (A friend of her family's farm?). In Hammond she enjoyed our small garden yard--no doubt a real treat for a woman who spent her first 35 years in various Chicago apartments). She loved going to the beach, and Lake Michigan afforded several, all accessible by bus.
John died in 1977, when she was 60 years old. I had moved to Colorado a year earlier, and Joanie had left home and married. Recently I found some letters Angie wrote to me during those early years of widowhood, when she had to make a new life for herself. She acknowledged difficulties, but never really complained. She tried to learn to drive, but later sold the car, saying she just couldn't. For the most part, however, she showed a resilient spirit. She continued working in a secure secretarial job with the Illinois Department of Mental Health. Then came retirement and a move to a new apartment shared with her sister Stephanie (who died in 2001). That relationship brought companionship as well as some stress. Here she is in front of the typewriter, circa late 70s. She was a master typist, schooled in the days before correcting buttons or word processors, when speed and accuracy counted.
One terrible day Angie was hit by a car. Nothing broken, but within a couple of years, she developed significant mobility problems. Undiagnosed neurological damage? Treatment ensued, no relief, then a heart attack, which killed her almost instantly. I was living in Japan then, and on our last visit, a couple of months before she died, she wept that she might soon be crippled, unable to walk--an ability essential to her sense of personhood and freedom.
No doubt she had no intention of dying young--at age 77--but she would not have wanted to live beyond a time when she lost the abilities that made life worth living: mobility, eyes to read, a sharp mind. She would have been relieved that she did not suffer for a long time before dying and that she did not become a "burden on you kids". I don't think she would have envied the stuff of 21st century life: electronic devices that must constantly be charged or replaced, the scam-ridden Internet, the 24-hour news cycle. She was never political, but always leaned Democratic. She would be appalled at the results of the last election, no doubt suggesting that she knows someone in the Dept. of Mental Health that the current president should see.
Conversely, Angie would be pleased to see any efforts that made Chicago cleaner and brighter (pollution controls on the lake and river), and the growth of senior affordable living communities. In her day, when you got old and living independently became problematic, you were shoved aside into a "home". Today she would joyfully visit Joanie and her husband Jim in their Chicago condo overlooking the magnificent Millennial Park, and then me in my senior community in Denver, happy that both of her kids were settled, secure and happy.
Happy Birthday, Angie. Love you and miss you, today and always.
