Life Itself: A Memoir Read online

  My own little radio. I would lie on the floor under my bed, for safety, while listening to The Lone Ranger. I thought Arthur Godfrey and His Friends were friends about my age. I listened carefully to the lists of the FBI’s most wanted men, whose descriptions were read by J. Edgar Hoover at the end of The FBI in Peace and War. Caution—do not attempt to apprehend them yourselves! From my hideout under the bed I used binoculars to search for them in the clothes closet. I had a bookcase in which I carefully arranged first childhood books, and then books about Tarzan, Penrod, the Hardy Boys, and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Also Huckleberry Finn, the first real book I ever read and still the best.

  When I was sick it was the best time. I could stay in bed and listen to Our Gal Sunday, which asked the question, “Can this girl from a little mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?” Before that there was a local program Penny for Your Thoughts, where people got a penny just for calling up Larry Stewart and talking to him. Larry Stewart was also “the voice of the Fighting Illini,” my father informed me. The Illini were the University of Illinois, the world’s greatest university, whose football stadium my father had constructed—by himself, I believed. It was there that he had seen Red Grange, the greatest player of all time. Also in that stadium were seen the world’s first huddle, the world’s first homecoming, and Chief Illiniwek, the world’s greatest sports symbol (“Don’t ever call him a mascot,” my father said. “Chief Illiniwek stands for something.”)

  The university also had the world’s largest arched roof, over the Armory. The cyclotron, where they worked with atoms. The ILLIAC computer, in a building filled with vacuum tubes that could count faster than a man. My dad worked in there sometimes. “Your father is an electrician for the university,” my mother told me. “It can’t run without him. But I’m afraid every day that he’ll get shocked.” I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded almost as bad as being “fired,” a word I also didn’t understand, although thank God that had never happened to my father. There was the Natural History Museum, with its stuffed owls and prehistoric bones. Altgeld Hall and its bells, which could be heard all over town in the summer, and which my father had personally installed, I believed.

  The town also contained a cemetery where we would go to see swans float on the pond. And a Cemetery Graveyard, next to the Atkinson Monument Company in a lot overgrown with trees and shrubbery, where the corpses of broken gravestones could be picked through for the rock garden my father was building in the backyard. If you got lost in the Cemetery Graveyard, the ghosts might come for you. There was the Boneyard, a creek running through town, where the Indians had buried their dead and at midnight you could see their bones. An airport where we could see Piper Cubs taking off. A train station north of town, in Rantoul, where we could watch the Panama Limited and the City of New Orleans hurtling through, the world’s fastest trains.

  I attended Mrs. Meadrow’s Tot’s Play School during the day. This was because my mother was a Business Woman—in fact, the president of the Urbana Business Women’s Association. She was a bookkeeper for the Allied Finance Company, up a flight of stairs over the Champaign County Bank and Trust Company. It was run by Mr. R. V. Willis. On the first of every year they worked all day to get the books to balance. When they succeeded, Mr. Willis would take us all, including my father and me, to dinner at Mel Root’s two doors down Main Street. In between the bank and Mel Root’s was the Smith Drug Company, where Mr. Willis bought me by first chocolate soda. My parents smoked Lucky Strikes, but Mr. Willis smoked Chesterfields.

  Our house had a concrete front porch on which rested four steel chairs that bounced on springy legs. My father painted them in pastel colors. On summer nights my mother would make lemonade and we would all sit out there. They would smoke and read the papers, and talk to neighbors walking past. Later you could see fireflies. The sounds of radios, voices, distant laughter would float on the air. On spare days, there were jobs to do. Pulling up dandelions. Picking tomato worms off the tomato plants in our vacant lot. A riskier job, climbing a stepladder to pick bagworms off the tallest evergreens. The paper bags containing the worms would be gathered in a pile, sprinkled with kerosene, and set alight. “Don’t worry, boy. They’re only worms and can’t feel anything.” The most exciting job, in the autumn, was putting on old clothes and swimming goggles and crawling up the big air pipes of the furnace while dragging the vacuum cleaner hose, to pull the dust out.

  In winter I was awakened by the sound of my dad shoveling coal into the stoker. In summer, by the clip-clops of the horse wagons of the Urbana Pure Milk Company. The horses knew their routes by heart and stopped at the doors of customers. Sally Hopson’s family owned the milk company. In summer, the whistles of passing trains could be heard through open windows all through the night.

  When you entered the house from the front porch, you were in the living room, with our fireplace. My father would place tablets on the burning logs that would make the flames burst into colors. Here we sat on Christmas Eve listening to Bing Crosby and his family. He had a son named Gary Crosby who I thought was just about my age. Off the living room was the dining room, nearly filled by the table. Most of the time the table’s center boards were out, so my mother could let down the ironing board from the wall. Then came the kitchen, where my father made his chili and let it sit in the icebox overnight.

  A hallway had doors opening to the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, and both bedrooms. When Chaz and I revisited the house in 1990, a woman named Violet Mary Gaschler, who bought the house from my mom, asked us to come in and look around. I saw the alcove in the hallway where our telephone rested. We were on a party line. When the phone would ring at night, my mother would hurry to it, grab the receiver, and say, “Is it Mom?” My grandmother had heart trouble. Having a Heart Attack was worse than being shocked or fired. On that same visit with Chaz, I went to the basement and felt chills down my spine. Hardly anything had even been touched. On my father’s workbench, a can of 3-in-One oil still waited. The chains on the overhead electric light pulls still ended in toy letters spelling out E-B-E-R-T. Violet Gaschler let me take an “E.” The basement’s smell was the same, faintly like green onions, and evoked summer afternoons in a lawn chair downstairs, reading Astounding Science Fiction.

  It was from the basement that I operated the Roger Ebert Stamp Company, buying ten-cent ads in little stamp magazines and mailing out “approvals” to a handful of customers, who must have been about my age. These I addressed on an old typewriter. One day two men came to the door and said they might want to buy some stamps. I proudly took them downstairs and showed them my wares. My mother hovered nervously at the head of the stairs. The men left quickly, saying they didn’t see anything they needed for their collections. Nevertheless, they seemed to be in a good mood. As they were driving away, my dad walked in from work. “What did those men want?” he asked. We told him. “Their car said Department of Internal Revenue,” he said.

  On April 22, 2009, the city of Urbana honored me by placing a plaque at my childhood home. At first I resisted. Far greater figures had lived in Urbana, such as the sculptor Lorado Taft; the poet Mark Van Doren; the novelists William Gibson, David Foster Wallace, Larry Woiwode, and Dave Eggers; the newspapermen William Nack, James Reston, Robert Novak, and George F. Will; the Nobel winner John Bardeen, who invented the transistor; and the Galloping Ghost himself, Red Grange. You see that Urbana truly was the Center of the Universe.

  The city fathers assured me they planned to dedicate plaques to many other worthy sons and daughters of Urbana, and so I agreed to the ceremony. As I stood in front of 410 East Washington, I reflected that this was the first and only home my parents owned. Here they brought the infant Roger home from Mercy Hospital. Here they raised me, and encouraged me in my dream to be a newspaperman, even if it meant working after midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Here my father refused to let me watch him doing any electrical wiring. Here he told me, “Boy, I d
on’t want you to become an electrician. I was working in the English Building today, and I saw those fellows with their feet up on their desks, smoking their pipes and reading their books. That’s the job for you.” Among the old neighbors who turned out for the occasion was Sally Ormiston, who lived across the street and used a big toy clock face to teach me to tell time.

  In the 1970s, an article appeared in the News-Gazette about the restoration of the bells in Altgeld Hall. It said the crew had found a note tacked to a beam up in the tower. It read “We repaired these bells on…” I forget the date. It was signed with three names, one of them Walter H. Ebert. On that early visit to Urbana, I took Chaz to visit my parents’ graves. Close by, my father’s parents are buried. My grandfather’s name was Joseph Ebert. Joseph is my middle name. I must have noticed that many times when I visited those graves with my father, but that day, for the first time, I felt a bond with the man in that grave.

  2 MY PEOPLE

  MANY YEARS AGO during a drinking dinner at the house of the sociologist Howard Higman in Boulder, he refused to serve me dessert until I had heard him explain the difference between the European and American ideas of family. In Europe, he said, one’s family roots went down, down, into the past. In America, they went out, out into the society. “An Englishman knows who his great-great-great-grandfather was,” Howard said. “An American knows who’s on his bowling team.”

  By his definition I am an American. I didn’t realize until I began to write this book how little I know about my ancestors on either side of the family. It is a custom that all memoirs contain a chapter about the author’s descent from long lines of Italian aristocrats and Mongolian yurt-dwelling camel hair jobbers, with an American bootlegger or Nazi sympathizer thrown in. I will disappoint.

  I was a late child. My father was forty when I was born, my mother thirty-one. On my father’s side, my grandparents died before I was born. On my mother’s side, there was one grandmother. My father had three sisters. Two of them died spinsters, and from the third descended all my cousins. My mother had two sisters and three brothers, who together produced two children. I have three first cousins, which a European would find inadequate.

  My father’s parents appear in America from Germany in the late nineteenth century, leaving no memories. I never heard a word about my German relatives, nor do I know the names of my great-grandparents. My mother’s Irish grandmother, known to me only as Grandma Gleeson, sailed to America during the potato famine, and my cousin Ethel Doyle produced a mimeographed record of Grandma’s memories, with photographs mounted in it, which I cannot find. The only oral history I remember is that her sailing ship was blown back to shore by fierce storms six times, or eight. No Irish immigrant ever had a pleasant crossing.

  My grandmother Anna Gleeson married a Dutch-American farmer named William Stumm, who was adopted and possessed no blood ancestors he knew about. He knew about his adoptive parents, but I don’t. He must have had the spark of wit, because in my aunt Mary’s family album I find a small display ad from September 12, 1901, reading: “W. H. STUMM. The game of billiards is brain-food for the over-worked businessman; an invigorator of the system that is exhausted thru studious attention to the routine of worldly affairs. East Side Billiard Parlors.” This shred suggests he had a gift for drollery.

  Anna had a sister I knew and visited, my aunt Ida in Chicago. Her daughters Ethel and Blanche lived with her, and died spinsters. Anna had other brothers and sisters, but none I remember meeting, except Uncle Charlie. I remember visiting his house in Taylorville as a little boy. He stood on the front steps and played “Turkey in the Straw” on his fiddle. After his death he wasn’t much mentioned. When he was, his name was used as if everyone knew who he was, but I didn’t. There was also an Aunt Mary Magner, but I believe she was an honorary aunt. She lost her only son when a two-by-four fell off a truck and flew through the window of the car he was driving, beheading him. He was an exemplary son who remained faithful to his pledge to his mother never to smoke or miss Sunday Mass, “although he was such a good man that he always carried a pack of cigarettes in his pocket so he could give them to friends.”

  On that side of the family I have two first cousins, Colonel Tom Stumm in Virginia and Marianne Dull in Colorado, who I see from time to time. Tom and I met in South Bend to bury his mother, Margaret, and I’ve visited Tom and Gloria in Virginia. Marianne and I have met when I’ve been in Colorado, and Tom’s daughter Kathryn, an assistant district attorney and now a teacher, lives in Denver with her children. Many second cousins in the Stonington and Taylorville area were well known and frequently visited by us, and I am in touch with Tom Stumm and his children to this day, but distantly: weddings, a funeral, a Thanksgiving, a Fourth of July, Christmas cards. Tom’s children and some grandchildren came to visit in Michigan. We like each other and are happy when we meet, but we have gone our own ways.

  On my father’s side, there are also two close cousins. I was raised with Jim and Karol Ann Pickens in Champaign-Urbana, and Jimmy inflamed my envy at family gatherings by playing “Lady of Spain” at breakneck speed on his accordion. Their mother, Reba, was the daughter of my father’s sister Mame. This would have been on Christmas Eves at the Ebert family home on Clark Street, where my aunts Hulda and Wanda still lived. Karol Ann married Dwayne Gaines, and they had Tim and Shelly. Karol Ann helped run the University of Illinois Employees Credit Union, which her parents Glen and Reba had founded. Dwayne, Karol Ann, and Tim were heroic in the care of my mother, Annabel, in her later years. This often involved expeditions into dangerously drifting snow to carry her to hospitals or department stores. Dwayne has spent years restoring a Ford Coupe to such perfection it can hardly be risked to exposure at auto shows. I have good contact with Tim, who is the only person on either side of the family who can be called a movie fanatic, and thus can make good use of his old cousin. Jimmy Pickens spent his life as the town pharmacist in Watseka, Illinois. He and his wife, Bev, have four children, Todd, Susan, Steve, Kristin, and with them at last we strike gold in the reproduction department. They produced so many children and grandchildren that a photo taken at their fiftieth wedding anniversary looks like a church social.

  In general, however, my grandparents on both sides began a population implosion. This fact, and age and geography, have resulted in my sense that I grew up pretty much alone in the world. I had warm relations with my mother’s sisters Martha and Mary, and her brothers Everett, Bill, and Bob, but they were more than usually older than me, and after Bill died twenty years ago there was no one left.

  Fortunately, it was at about that time I married Chaz Hammel Smith, or as she later became, Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert, because an American can have a double-barreled last name but there is little practice for a triple-barreled one. By marrying an African American, I was suddenly propelled from a void with few relatives into a world with relatives without number. Some months before my marriage, a reader wrote me about African-American families, “What you won’t be prepared for is the relatives. The entire extended family is in continual communication, and it is a slow year without at least three weddings and three funerals.” This is true. My white family valued and kept in touch with what few relatives they had, but in moderation. Chaz and her family are living genealogists. I once heard her on the phone asking about how Sharon was. I know two of her cousins named Sharon, and asked her which she was asking about. “Neither one,” she said. “This Sharon is the daughter of a former neighbor of one of my brother Andre’s girlfriends.”

  Many of her family have become my own family. I love and am loved. There are no strangers in her family, and as a member of another race I have without exception been accepted and embraced. Her children and grandchildren are mine. The grandchildren have six living grandparents. These people are good and kind to such an extent that I am on warm terms with Chaz’s first husband, Merle Smith, and his wife Donna. Chaz’s niece, Ina New-Jones, is greatly valued by me because she’s one of those rare people who always think I a
m funny. A bad comedian would never learn the truth from Miss Ina. She and I can instigate laughter in each other almost to the point of unconsciousness. I have spent most of my life perfecting the skills and compulsions of a very funny guy, and Ina is the only person who always agrees with me.

  Chaz’s family transcends time and distance to stay in touch. Road journeys between Minneapolis, Chicago, and Atlanta are undertaken not only for weddings and funerals, but for birthdays, anniversaries, and graduations from college, high school, grade school, and kindergarten. At the other end of the age scale, there are retirement dinners and testimonials not to be missed.

  My two families overlapped just barely. After my grandmother’s death in 1960, Martha and her lifelong friend Jean Sabo continued to live in a house at 807 West Clark with Martha’s brother Bob. After he moved to the Champaign County Nursing Home, crippled by emphysema, my uncle Bill retired from teaching and with Martha and Jean bought houses in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and later in Wapella, Illinois.

  Bill, Martha, and Jean came to live in my guest cottage in Michigan during the summer of 1988. “I love you and I don’t have much time left,” Martha explained. She had a heart attack on the evening of Bill’s Thanksgiving dinner in 1988 and died in a nearby hospital three days later. On her deathbed she desperately tried to tell me something but failed, and shook her head “no” when I tried to guess. It wasn’t “I love you.” It was something very important. The two of us looked more alike than anyone else in the family, and I wondered if she was trying to tell me she was my real mother. That would have been unlikely. I have my birth certificate and a photo record of myself in my mother’s arms beginning on the day of my birth. All the same, haunted by her urgency, I asked Jean if she knew of any family secrets she could share with me. “Not that I can think of,” she said.