About running home to my mother when I was upset. That was my refuge, when the events of the world and World War II would become ubearable.
I was an only child and greatly treasured by my parents.. My mother was 40 years old when I was born. This was pretty unusual at that time for a woman to have her first baby at that age. but, she did not get married until she was 39 years old. When she was pregnant, my father was in the World War I service; and mother barely made it through that 1918 flu,while carrying me.
I was born on April 6, 1919 at home - as was the custom in those days. People did not run to hospitals as they do now. The doctor filled out my birth certificate: My mother had named me Lorraine Lillian. He goofed it up as Lillian Lorraine. My mother refused to call me Lillian: She said:"No doctor is going to name my kid!" This has caused me a lot of confusion to this day with my official records.
One of my Dad's favorite jokes:: People did not have appendicitis in the old days in Belgium. They just had a belly ache in the middle of the night and died. Born in 1887, Dad could remember the black plaque of the pox which swept through Europe for years. He said there were big X's drawn on the doors of those who were afflicted; and he could remember the rumble of wooden carts going down the cobble stone roads carrying the dead.
My mother was born on January 18, 1879. in Roubaix, France. A linen mill town in the northern part of the country - near the Belgian border. So,she spoke beth French and Flemish.
She often recounted how she started working at 7 years old. That must have been in 1886. The Black Plaque then swept through France, too. The only job my mother could get was to wash clothes for the stricken. She said she had to stand on a box to reach the big black cauldron that stood over a wooden fire in the city square. (Her greatest heighth was 4 ft. 10", as an adult.)
The cauldron had a fire under it and she could remember scrubbing the clothes of the afflicted in the big pot on a scrub board. She was the second youngest of 13 children. Her father had died very early. He was an artisan, who made tapestries, etc.
My father was born April 15,1887 in Denterghem, Belgium (the name of the city was changed to Dentergem, after World War II). He was the second youngest of 19 children; many of whom did not survive through childhood. His father was a farmer - and he also died at a young age.
My father started to work when he was nine years old. That would have been 1896. He and his older brother, 11 years old, went to the southern part of France to work in the brick ovens. They could not understand the French language. He said they worked from dawn to dark, carrying bricks o their shoulders in big wooden hods - often up and down ladders.
(I grew up speaking those two languages and English, of course. When I started school,, I spoke English with the thick accent that my folks did, was put into a special English class, and endured the laughter of my little school mates during my formative years.
When I was at the University of Michigan, I was still embarrassed to speak in public. I would often mix up my words, when nervous. Two of the times that I can recall because I was so humiliated: I was seated in a large auditorium (Hill Auditorium) where all the social science classes would meet once a week for a lecture.
The professors lectured and we took notes; however, I had never heard any student being called to answer a question.One day, while my professor was lecturing on Russia, to my horror I heard him say: "Miss Lievrouw, would you please tell the class what influence Stalin's family had upon his young life.?"
Being singled out and asked to stand up and speak in this huge auditorium, was very upsetting to me. I arose and tried to say: "on this part of his father". However, it came out as: "On the fart of his potter".The audience roared. That was a time of relative innocence, and such a remark was unheard of. I turned red, sunk down into my seat in humiliation, and did not leave the auditorium until every one else had departed.
Another time, as a freshman, I had been invited to a fraternity formal dinner by a young man I was infatuated with at the time.I was very nervous - my first fraternity dinner, and when the watter came around and asked whether I wanted chocolate or butterscotch on my dessert: I said: "Bustercrotch, please."
Ah, those days of innocence, when a remark like that was highly out of order.
This embarrassment in speaking in public is amusing to me now. Later on, in adulthood, I lectured at Columbia University in NYC, at the Universities of Michigan, Michigan State, University of Detroit - and just about every university in the state of Michigan on Journalism.And you can throw in Ball State University in Ohio, to boot.
I'll never forget the day I stood on the stage at Hill Auditorium as alecturer. I can still remember walking across the Ann Arbor University of Michigan campus diagonal on that crisp, fallday. I was surprised at the depth of emotion I was feeling.as my memory took me back to my teens. I felt like a young coed, and my heartwas singing with joy.
