As the sole male progeny of Evelyne Elizabeth, I pray that the Muse of Pioneering Women guides my hand in narrating her stanzas and story, that the native intelligence shown me, her delivery of sophistication and female independence from the Heights of Chicago to the boom town of Denver, her modeled instruction in naïveté, that is not ignorant but genuine, clue my readers to her abiding cultural identity, her insistence that work could substantiate and liberate a body, and periodic personal recreation leads to redemption in the eyes of the social network. Evelyne, who found a way to support a family without familial roots; Evelyne, who steered clear of the clutches of relatives hungry for the service of young daughters; Evelyne, who lost a husband as Penelope once feared, but who moved west with a trinity of girls, independent of man or suitor. Evelyne sought help but from one aunt, Helen of Drux, to aid her and her girls triumvirate in their Exodus West. Muse of the Covered Wagon Women who wrote diaries of their days crossing the wide plains, women who put family first but who rose to battle when called on, Muse help me tell this tale of an independent woman who started a new family now five generations strong. Hear the story of Evelyne, of Chicago Heights, and Her Three Girls, related by her favored son her bon fils the amanuensis who seeks historic eminence for her and her brood, and his own emotional clarity in this rendering of their lives.
The two large picture windows of the Queen Anne manse looked out on a street clustered with old and new families, Italian, Irish, German, Mexican and Denver native (Pioneers accredited later by their car license plates) the windows the eyes of the house of Evelyne, acknowledged as a strong single mother in the 1950s’ time of American normalcy amidst nuclear families. The veranda that wrapped the front and side of the house welcomed neighbors, but they knew that unless Evelyne sat ensconced in her rattan saucer chair, they were not welcome. It was instead the place where her daughters, her princesses, dwelled with their friends. The veranda became their stage, their rehearsal space for fun and love, relationships and showmanship. Marylyn, the senior debutante, only eleven but charged with adjutant duties, saw the porch as a place to practice her starring role, to act, make movies, become someone. She had been to plays in Chicago with her father, seen Oklahoma just two years prior, when Papa George was still alive. He saw her as an actor, a trouper. Now it was the movies that made Marylyn happy and hopeful. Once she and her sister Eileen occupied the front bedroom, once a parlor that still had a fireplace, she imagined a new life of romance and singing and dancing, warmed by the White Christmas production of Crosby, Kaye, and Clooney. They should put on plays in the neighborhood; she would direct and star. Their odyssey across the Midwest would be over, and they would capture the heart of North Denver as impresarios and stars of community theater.
Tante Helen divinely escorted Evelyne and Her Three Girls to the Queen City of the Plains. Evelyne had sought her assistance in Las Vegas, New Mexico, when it became clear that their journey west had stalled, that Polyphemus had called on his father to halt her progress. No jobs, no home, no luck for the independent Evelyne, who was intent on becoming a new person in a new place. She had lost her husband George, as he had died on the Exposition Flyer as it ushered him back to her side in Chicago. Suffering from respiratory problems, he ventured west on doctor’s orders to investigate the dry climate. George had telephoned to say that he was excited about the move, but he expired aboard the train. Evelyne buried him in early 1946 before heading west. She could have been taken in by her sister-in-law Norine, but she carried out George’s wish, to move west, and Evelyne left with Her Three Girls, of ages 10, 7, and 5, in a green 1943 Chrysler, their mobile hostelry, seeking a new life, venturing into the future across the Great Plains. She chose New Mexico because cold Chicago had chilled her determination, delayed her destiny. The Southwest beckoned with its claims of climate and opportunity, just as the West represented the salve that the disunited states required post Civil War. The western horizon of big skies and mountainous backdrops cradled her epic hopes for a new home, a new start, without an identity constricted by emotional ties, already stretched thin with George’s move of his family to the Heights. The survival of her trio of daughters cast her fate to the Zephyr West Wind. They were Evelyne Elizabeth’s little women.
Children are born of two families. In this case both were German, although one was more Americanized than the other. One followed the path of discovery; the other the tainted trail of entitlement. Evelyne’s mother and aunts were born in Germany. Grandma Drux held sway over the panoply of kids, especially her trio of daughters, Tina, Helen, and Elizabeth. A posed photo of Charlotte Drux enshrined in each of their homes captured the no-nonsense emotion of her legacy. Evelyne’s mother Elizabeth ran a grocery that catered to many Jewish customers, so the rabbi came weekly to supervise the killing of fowl and beef. Her father Joseph mixed paint colors to match the furnishings of wealthy clients in Lake Forest. He worked for the McCormicks and the Fields and the Armours, Chicago entrepreneurs and industrialists who resided on the rich north shore of Lake Michigan. Her parents showed Evelyne the way, grocers and painters who achieved the heights of success that could only embolden newcomers to the country.
Her husband George lived with his siblings and cousins in a brick home on South Sangamon Street in Chicago. Their affluence derived from a middle class background that rewarded them with jobs in city departments and corporations. His sister Norine married wealth, but returned to command her post after only a few months of wedlock. She became the executive assistant to the president of a chemical company. His sister May played the socialite who was spurned in love, and lived out her days as a recluse in the house, eating to forget, and finally succumbing to the desperate sorrow displayed in her never changing outfit of a shmata and slippers. Sangamon means, “There is plenty to eat here,” indicative of an affluent attitude espoused by a faltering protectorate.
As an ambitious detective, George tailed and investigated the criminal cohorts of Al Capone. He had recently moved his family of wife and daughters to Chicago Heights, which had grown in notoriety as part of the Chicago Outfit since one of the crews had infiltrated the Heights. Evelyne and Her Three Girls, her princesses in waiting, finally had a home of their own thanks to their crime-fighting father. Although Evelyne and George had attended the nominating convention for Franklin Roosevelt in their courtship, their move into a house, beyond the reach of Norine and May and his younger brothers Ray and Joe, meant more to them. How could Evelyne return to the South Side after her husband’s sudden death? What family she had, older relatives on both sides, was split between Hammond and Calumet City, neither locale attractive to a mother and her little women, unprotected, her husband suspected by those who controlled the streets. Her parents were old, a younger brother Gene had drowned as a boy when she was in her twenties, and now George had passed. Did her young brother’s death, the apple of her mother’s eye, and now her husband’s heavenly departure, move her to make more of a life that she knew could forever be uncertain? Pragmatism made short shrift of sorrows, the emotional ties that bind a person to the expected course in life.
Her Three Girls were named Marylyn, Eileen, and Norine. Evelyne grew up in the 1920s a knowing knockout of a flapper, with blonde bangs, slinky dresses, a sharp nose, a sultry look. Evelyne married George and became a mother; the girls’ nomenclature indicated her insistence on branding them with distinct names. The suffix “lin” derives from her own name. Norine was named after her aunt, born after the family settled into a house of their own. Perhaps it was a sign of respect towards the spurned sister-in-law? When their father died, the girls didn’t realize the impact his death would have on their lives. Marylyn and Eileen had already become accustomed to their comfortable middle class upbringing. They were hesitant, intermittently hysterical about moving, preferring the insulation of the Bingen family. But the German Druxes knew what it was like to uproot a family and establish a new identity in a new land. Evelyne’s Tante Helen would help anyway that she could, for she was childless and saw Evelyne as her charge since Evelyne’s mother Elizabeth had descended into despair over the drowning death of her blonde boy, so broken was her heart by the loss of her son. As Evelyne failed to find a house or work in New Mexico, Helen surveyed the West, and suggested Denver called the Queen City of the Plains as a better place to settle. She had said that there were good houses at good prices, so the family skipped on the next month’s rent and slipped out of Las Vegas in the middle of the night, as Odysseus had slipped through the hands of the blind Cyclops hanging onto a sheep. Evelyne, known for her decisive ways, asked Marylyn to lead the other girls on this adventure to find a home with heart, a home that would afford them independence and control of their destinies. Manifest Destiny calls them to a land of promise. Hysteria turns on adventure. Emotion is on hold. They would be Heroines of the Frontier.
Evelyne Elizabeth and Tante Helen looked the place over, and decided that it would make a comfortable home for their august family of females, along with providing a handsome rental income from an upstairs that had a private entrance on the side of the house. The stairs to the apartment adjoined the dining room, but that door could be locked and diaphanous curtains hung for privacy. They would have to turn the front parlor with the tile fireplace into a bedroom for the older girls. The picture window wasn’t ideal, but heavy curtains and drapes could insulate the room from the pavement of searching stares. Evelyne already knew how people managed in tight quarters. The family they had escaped in Chicago lived on the South Side, in a brick house that had four bedrooms, with siblings sharing the space. The fact that she was way out west liberated her thinking — she could gain control of a life unstable.
Like her Bingen sisters-in-law, Evelyne could have become overly controlling, to the point of sacrificing love, or secluded as another woman scorned. But Charlotte and Anton Drux had moved their family of seven from Germany, and learned to tolerate and do business with all kinds of people. That’s the immigrants’ fortune and mandate, to survive and thrive. The Bingens had lived the more comfortable life, but now saw Negroes moving to Chicago from down south, taking up residence nearby, where planners and realtors confined them. The Bingens found the situation untenable. The elder Norine became so hateful of this Great Migration, she forever discriminated against black people. Flying to Denver years later on a pioneering Continental jet, she was seated next to a Negro, and invoked Jim Crow, but was not accommodated, forever refusing to fly that airline again. Evelyne saw the hate, and wanted a life for her daughters that did not prejudice people, a life that welcomed differences, cultural connections. In New Mexico, although the weather was warm and dry, a blessed relief from Chicago, she noted the discrimination against Mexican Americans. The move to Denver meant openness. The Angel of American Progress, pictured in a famous painting leading pioneers West, ushered Evelyne and Her Three Girls to their farmhouse dwelling, on a large plot of land. Soldiers were returning to the mild climate, seeking out the mountain fishing and hunting that they first encountered when they were in training at local bases like Lowry and Buckley. To the second and third generation Italians and Irish and Scots of North Denver, these heroic soldiers were welcomed as Denver entered its boom years. Evelyne, of independent means and practical economy, welcomed them as renters. She would succeed without a man, succeed without the crippling emotional ties of her late husband’s dissolute family in Chicago.
The new man lived upstairs, and started sales after the war, like many soldiers who wanted the middle class life beyond the labor of manufacturing jobs. It was a new society that was bursting with suburbs and people who needed appliances and cars and televisions and clothes. John Tyler found himself selling vacuums, what every housewife needed who had wall-to-wall carpeting in the wide spaces and open plans of tract homes built in the burgeoning suburbs of the West. He grew up in Alabama, a small town west of Atlanta, but the war had changed his perspective. He was a mechanic with the Air Force and had fought in Europe, in the march from North Africa up through Italy to Berlin. He returned to Colorado where he had trained at Lowry Air Force Base. He didn’t return to Alabama where he had grown up, married, fathered three children, where they lived with his mother-in-law before the war. Now it was time to start anew, take up with a good woman, labor in love again, no pining over the past. To start, she could be his landlord. He saw the daughters as fine young women. Evelyne, the ever independent woman, lovingly let her guard down for this man. A photograph shows her vacationing with him near Gold Hill, sporting a brown plaid Pendleton sport coat, smiling, smoking. He became her Manifest Destiny, a contract of love, albeit she naïvely ignored his divorce before the war — did she even know when they married? (Surely she did. Evelyne Elizabeth was ever one to ignore rules intended for subservient handmaidens.)
A girl growing up in the 1940s knew Judy Garland and Andy Rooney — they were young stars making movies about the predicaments of youngsters living through the Depression. The movies were musicals that often posited help for orphans. Marylyn could identify with the plight of these youngsters, and once she moved into the front bedroom with Eileen, she could imagine the possibility of turning that big picture window into a movie frame, her own silver screen. It was her magnificent glass on the life of the street, and her backdrop. It is the same room and window that provided the writer of this epic with privacy and a view through his teenage years. In this room of his own, he inhaled the dreams of his sisters who had lost a father — a son who never knew his own.
The girls started school at St. Catherine’s — their street was the dividing line between parishes, and St. Catherine’s as it was located further north by northwest tended to be richer than Mt. Carmel, as money tended to move towards the cathedral forests and mountains west of Denver. Marylyn and Eileen outdistanced some of the other students; their experiences and education had been substantial. Marylyn needed an outlet for her ambition. The next summer she organized the first of the neighborhood plays that the children from the block would stage. At first these were knockoffs of the movies of Garland and Rooney. It was kids reciting lines about jobs and money, singing about love and hope, with some dance routines thrown in for the sake of a show. Marylyn the star and Eileen the trusted aide-de-camp wrote it and cast it; they rehearsed with the neighborhood minions on the big porch in front of that window scrimmed with curtains; they would arrange extra furniture in their big back yard to stage it; they made programs and charged admission, handled by the young Norine so savvy was she with numbers. Later, they branched into plays based on Westerns that featured strong female leads like Joan Crawford’s Vienna in Johnny Guitar. The expressive Westerns offered them moments both epic and intimate to embody like the Plainswomen of the West. This became a summer endeavor for four years, while Evelyne and her new husband shared control of the family. The princess trinity retrieved their youth.
Evelyne married John the traveling salesman who lived upstairs after a short courtship. He agreed to adopt the girls; Evelyne thought him upstanding. She loved his solitary side, his emotional wall, thinking him thoughtful and intelligent. They lived in that big house on the North Side for four years while he was on the road, setting up distribution of his vacuums in the cities of the West, while the girls put on their plays. They were doing well when a baby boy was born — the very writer who distills these memories, trying to understand how Evelyne whom he always knew as his only parent took on this man for the sake of family. She had already journeyed alone across the Midwest to ground her girls. The urge towards the normalcy of a two-parent household swept her away; she let her emotions get in the way. John had become the man of the house, but was often gone on sales trips. When home, he began to demand the girls recognize his authority, but their mother had always offered them independence, minds of their own, and so this rankled them. Was the baby boy a fluke at her age of forty: would he be a genius or a fool, as genetics was want to suggest?
When the baby was born, John’s relatives showed their love by traveling to Denver for the baptism. His grandparents were Chiltons, the name of the county where they resided in Alabama. John Tyler had come from the landed gentry of Reconstruction, a native now removed to the West. They beamed at his fortune to have married Evelyne the strong woman, who counted Eleanor Roosevelt and Wallis Simpson as her models: Eleanor, who matched her husband for lovers, and Wallis who broke the succession of Windsor monarchs, for a king who loved her. This should have indicated to John the kind of woman he had married, a stand-by-your-man kind of woman who retained a strong will of her own. The Pendleton-wearing widow was more like Calamity Jane than Annie Oakley.
Evelyne of the Heights, known for her independence, had married John Tyler on one condition. Her Catholic catechism insured her adherence to church rules, and so they were married before they made love. Four years of marriage preceded the boy’s birth. Did Evelyne allow this to happen; were they cognizant of the chances of a baby born to a forty-year old woman; did her naïveté prevent her from seeing how their relationship might change? Now he had a native progeny, a new son of the West to call his own, but JT had already abandoned a wife, two daughters, and a son. John Tyler could not abide the new situation — three daughters and a baby boy, plus a wife to support, on a salesman’s commission. The young Prince became the favored subject of Evelyne and Her Three Girls’ affection. John became the feared suitor to this baby Telemachus. He became harsher in his criticism of the girls, and Marylyn reacted by calling him “mean” and “horrible” not her father. She saw him watching her more, as she was 15, in high school, and there were reasons why boys turned their heads. She was a brunette who had the lips and eyes but softer cheekbones of a young Rita Hayworth. She turned John Tyler’s head as well, and she would suspect if she could have imagined that he was less than faithful to Evelyne. Her mother might have been taken with John as a life savior after her spell as driver and breadwinner in the family. However, after every trip he took, he spent more time talking to Marylyn about her place in the family as the oldest girl, for she now bore responsibility as much as he did. He drank with his air force buddy Tom, who acted like a spurned suitor who observed how John treated Evelyne, who had lovingly relinquished her independence. Tom lived a few blocks away and helped out when John was gone. He was the boy’s godfather, his Don. Shortly after the Prince’s first birthday, John Tyler left on a trip and didn’t return. He was native to no parts, family to no one but himself. He relocated to Colorado Springs, where he could be the big fish in a pond still small, abandoning a second family, leaving the baby’s godfather to act as his replacement. John Tyler’s own father was a Baptist deacon, and so he knew the language of the congregations in the Springs. He would divorce and marry again; perhaps it was the origin case of serial monogamy that was becoming acceptable. Evelyne would have to recreate herself once more, regain her pioneering spirit. She never gave up on John, telling this scribe her son the young Prince that she always loved his father, although her devotion to the Church may have warranted this response. Marylyn was relieved, as she feared her stepfather’s growing interest and intimidation. She had entered high school, and was searching for a man to call her own. Evelyne would carry on and build a life for her brood the way of O Pioneers! Cather’s story in which Alexandra Bergson provided for her siblings.
Evelyne needn’t fear a life without men. Hank from the hills up Evergreen way helped her out with a get rich quick scheme of raising chinchillas — he was enamored with Evelyne. There was a painter in the neighborhood who wooed her, but she would never marry again because of the church’s dicta, and her reliance on its community. She had joined Mother of God church, where her celibacy and altar society devotion led to her eventual assumption. Young men, new suitors, hung around the big house on the North Side seeking the companionship of the young princesses. They paid Evelyne the respect of royalty for a chance to woo a daughter. Guys in leather jackets, guys in hot cars, guys on motorcycles. They took advantage of the missing man of the house, the deserter, the suitor conniving and shirking who never returned. Evelyne prided herself on her gaggle of girls, and her little boy who allowed her to weave her own Penelopiad. The girls spoiled Baby Blue, and so the boyfriends paid him special attention. He scarcely talked for his first three years, finding it easier to point as the one anointed. Years later, his godfather gave him a rack of ties that symbolized a salesman’s life — silk omens of a fashion sense that his mother instilled in him, and a reminder of his father’s wanderlust. The godfather Tom moved on, as Evelyne had spurned his every entreaty, finding him to be an unremarkable substitute for her lost husband. Evelyne acted as both parents to the young Prince, and he never questioned her about the missing man, his father only in name. Nor did he take up the interests of his sisters’ beaus, their obsessions with cars and hunting and fishing. He would instead follow his sisters in exploring the exotic landscapes of the world, from his native outpost in Denver.
Marylyn the Star wanted to attend St. Francis de Sales high school, newly built in south Denver. She was certain it would be high class, since it was located in an older neighborhood near Washington Park, a premier landscape of lakes and gardens, one dedicated to the first wife of the country, Martha Washington. She fell for one of a clan of boys, a popular bunch from a large Irish family. He had the look, his blonde hair slicked back, blue eyes, dressed in the standard uniform of 1950s’ guys — khaki pants, oxford shirt, penny loafers. Marylyn who thought she was destined to be a star managed one year of college accounting before she married this prince. They had five children in close succession, and moved through a series of bigger and bigger apartments. Her charmed companion worked for the upstart Continental Airlines. His job demanded that he be gone at odd hours. Marylyn found him keeping the odd company of stewardesses. She would not have it, having seen her mother Evelyne the Independent faulted once she succumbed to John Tyler. Finding that her lover man was seeing other women, she divorced him, and although she took care of the children for some years, in a house east of Washington Park where that native Irish clan lived, they ultimately lived with their dad and his second wife, one of three women he was to wed after Marylyn. She married a man she had worked with before getting married. He was divorced, as was she, so their marriage was civil, not in the Catholic Church, which long plagued her, a fact which Evelyne understood. Marylyn the Star worked as an accountant with her new husband, and they traveled far and wide, went on cruises, and she documented every adventure with photographs glued in scrapbooks, her autographic memories. These journals of her life suggest that she too was the independent sort, considering she turned her children over to her first husband, an extraordinary act for a mother in the 1960s. Her élan was sparked by a desire to control her destiny, after the stress of moving at such a young age and being forced to assist her mother in making a new life in Denver. She fought alongside her mother Evelyne, as Telemachus fought alongside his father Odysseus against the obsequious suitors.
Norine’s straight black hair and bangs marked her as the beatnik type. She married the twin brother of Marylyn’s charmed beau. She had three daughters in close succession, and spent a miserable year in Chicago cleaning motel rooms for rent while the sultry twin drank his pay away crisscrossing his own river Styx. He had already spent a decade in the navy, which might have led to his alchoholic disability. She divorced him after their return to Denver, and raised the girls on her own. She went up against the Church, wanting her marriage annulled, but the laws were still too strict regarding divorce. Norine collapsed into despair and tried to take her life, but found a steady savior in a man from the neighborhood, who sported a rockabilly look and the cool charisma popular on South Broadway. Norine the Money Manager had bought a house, worked for an insurance company until her retirement, drove long black Cadillacs like her namesake aunt, and rode her freedom out on road trips through the West: she and her second husband rode a motorcycle, or toured in one of his sports cars. She made a life of her own despite the hardship of her first marriage. She painted her house nearly every year, and always maintained her own yard, tasks she mastered as the youngest Princess awarded many chores on that old farm house in North Denver.
Although Eileen dated another brother from that Irish family prominent on the South Side, she eventually married a Pittsburgh native who had been in the Air Force and trained at Lowry. He was the most ambitious of these first husbands, but remained an outsider because he frequently relocated his family as he pursued a career in the booming business of computer repair. They stayed together until her death. Eileen the Earnest followed her husband as she reined him in. She stood by her man because she understood his frailty and forgave his faults. She complained about him forever — she was known for calling him out regarding his words and behavior — but salvaged their marriage along the way. She had two boys and a girl after several miscarriages. Eileen was the steady one. Her face was round and open, and she had Evelyne’s winning smile. She counseled her sister Norine when she was despondent over her first marriage. Eileen made sure that her husband remained by her side. She was the most controlling of the three girls, although she impressed people as the least demanding. She had attended high school just a few blocks from that house on the North Side. The Italians who controlled the neighborhood populated Mount Carmel — it reminded her of Chicago Heights, and she intuitively knew her way around her classmates. She was a native of North Denver before she arrived.
Evelyne the Independent who went her own way was always there to house and nurture Her Three Girls when they were in need: Marylyn, Eileen, and Norine, her princess daughters who fought through relocation and money worries as youngsters, only to carve their own careers as independent women, who hung out to dry the men who failed them. This trinity of daughters all died of cancers in their sixties, scarcely outliving their mother Evelyne who died at 85 in a nursing home where she was confined, conscripted for the first time in her life. Her eldest daughter found the facility, and drove the decision. Was it an unconscious reprisal for her youthful uprooting by Evelyne? Did the Three Girls pass so early due to their father’s genes, or the stress of early struggles in their lives? Evelyne Elizabeth her middle name for the sister of the immaculate virgin had no time to write a diary like the Montana pioneering voice of Kate Dunlap. Why has it taken this scribe the Son and Prince so long to tell the tale? Why has he never pursued the father who abandoned him, or even his memory?
The naïve son and brother survives, who never fished or hunted or liked cars, not like the men who married the sisters, who wants only to tell the story of this family who means more to him in their passing than he ever realized during their lives, because they encouraged his scholarship and education, knowing it was Evelyne’s wish; and never questioned his independence, knowing they all deserved it. Her Three Girls saw the world in their ways, traveling and cultured like Evelyne the strong woman who always looked to the future. Let their families and beloved friends proclaim that Evelyne, and Marylyn, and Eileen, and Norine demand the tribute of honor, and deserve continued acclaim for their independent natures — remiss of excessive emotion that might have drained their drives — that procured for them their dream homes — a husband, children, and a car, a chance to see the world — despite the heartaches. If only this lofty western epic can attest to that….
