Jan. 18, 2010

The Nazi Spy in Our House

Pre-Home Kid

In 1938 my mother took in boarders to help with expenses. I know it was ’38 because that’s when my Grandma Bruder died and Grandpa Bruder decided to go back to his homeland, Germany, in spite of all the rumblings of imminent war in Europe.

Grandpa was heartbroken that his Emma died. Grandma had been ill a long time and my mother said she had “dropsy”. I later learned that was the term used at that time for congestive heart failure.

Cash was short and we were on relief, which meant we could go to the relief station at the park to get food to eat. I can remember our family moving a lot in my early years. I changed elementary schools eight times before I went to high school. The truth was we couldn’t pay the rent. Mom and Dad fought all the time and my brother, Howard, went to work at a local A&P store to help with expenses. He had a kind boss who often sent home a wagonload of groceries for our family.

When Dad did work he was a painter of houses and in addition to a drinking problem he often played the horses on payday before coming home, hoping to make some money. He seldom did. We had to move often because, as I said, we couldn’t pay the rent.

When we moved to Keeler Avenue my mother decided to take in boarders to help with the rent. My brother was five years older than me, which meant he couldn’t be a legal employee. His boss paid him “under the table”. My sister, Marlene was five years younger than me, and Larry was the baby.

I remember the boarders like it was yesterday. I thought they were all strange. They reminded me of people who worked at the carnivals. There was Mr. Railing (I never knew if he had a first name), an older man with grey-thinning hair, thin, always dressed in a nice suit—usually grey or brown—shirt and tie and when he went out the front door he wore a fedora, a man’s hat worn by almost all the men I saw in Chicago. Even guys who worked at common labor jobs wore fedoras. No ball caps in those days. I wondered if he ate in restaurants because he never joined us at breakfast or supper. He was quiet and polite and never said much to anyone in the house.

Boarder No. 2 was Tiny. That was what he told us to call him, but I thought that was just so funny because Tiny wasn’t exactly Tiny. He kind of looked like the actor, Oliver Hardy in the Laurel and Hardy movies. He was a funny man, too and what my mother called “crazy as a loon”. Tiny played the trumpet in a jazz band at saloons and dance halls on the north side of Chicago. Sometimes he would get drunk before coming home after midnight and this one time he was really loaded and began to jump on his bed. We heard a loud crash. That was the wooden slats holding up the box spring and mattress on Tiny’s bed, breaking into toothpicks. Tiny sprained his ankle. And told Mom the next day after going to the doctor that he couldn't go to work for several weeks. He apologized and had a friend come over to fix the bed. Unlike Mr. Railing, Tiny (I don’t remember his last name) ate everything Mom cooked for him and all the leftovers he could get his hands on after breakfast. And now that he had to stay at home he’d be there to eat lunch and supper, too, plus all the leftovers if there were any.

Another boarder came in one day to rent the remaining room Mom had set aside for her project and my brother’s eyes almost popped out of his head when he saw him. “That’s the new Golden Gloves champ,” Howie said excitedly. “His picture was in the Sunday paper!”

The young, muscular man did indeed look like he might be a boxer, but Mom was suspicious. “I never heard of him” she told my brother. Find a copy of the sports section and bring it to me”.

Howie found the paper and took it to Mom and there was Mr. Lee Christianson, No. 3 Boarder at Keeler Boarding House, punching some guy out in the ring at the local arena.

Mom was still suspicious. For one thing, Mr. Christianson spoke very broken English and told my mother he’d only been in the country a couple of months. “So how did he get to be a champion boxer in so short a time?” Howie, who always had an answer, said, “Maybe he was a boxer in Germany before he came here.”

Mr. C, champ boxer, became the mystery flavor of the month and Mom wouldn’t let it go. “I’ll bet he’s a German spy,” she said out loud one day, and all eyebrows shot up like a murder of crows taking flight.

Our newest guest began receiving letters postmarked Germany. Mom learned to speak and read German from my Dad’s parents before she was married so before Mr. Christianson came home from work each day, Mom would steam open the letters and read them.

They must have been a different kind of German than Mom knew because, she said, she couldn’t make heads or tails out of them. She finally gave up on the letters. “They’re probably all in code,” she said, which reinforced her theory that he was a German spy.

War finally did break out and Mom cried buckets thinking about Grandpa Bruder over there. He surely would be killed when they found out he was a U.S. citizen.

One day several years later a picture and story about Christianson was in the Chicago Tribune. It was a tiny mug shot somewhere in the bowels of that huge paper and very small headlines, but Mom recognized our old boarder who, the story went on, had once lived in a rooming house on the North side of Chicago. Even with a beard, which he didn’t have when he stayed at our house, my mother recognized him. Our mystery man had been arrested as a spy in the Panama Canal Zone.

My mother stood in the hallway of the old house full of strangers and said to my father, “I told you so! Christianson was a spy and all those letters from Germany were written in code!”

That was the end of the discussion. It also was the end of my mother’s dream of running a boarding house. Mr. Railing moved out, as quietly as he’d moved in; Tiny the Terrible went on to bigger and better nightclubs and stronger beds, and the letters we sent to Grandpa in Germany all came back stamped “Address Unknown”

After the war was over and the troops started coming home Grandpa also returned to American soil. We learned he had been in a “friendly” concentration camp because over there he was considered an alien. When he was released he met and fell in love with a Czechoslovakian lady whose dream was to come to the United States. Germany no longer held a spell over Grandpa and he returned to his old job in Chicago as a carpenter on the new Fair store under construction and re-joined the union.

Lots of changes had taken place in our lives and more dramatic ones were soon to come. None, however, as dramatic as the knowledge that we once housed a genuine Nazi spy!

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