The End of the Neighborhood

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Millie Schumacher lost her husband 27 years ago, but not her determination to ride out her time in the house on 17th Avenue in Grafton, Wisconsin where they'd raised eight kids. She stayed every day of those 27 years, until just after her 100th birthday. She needed a paid caretaker and some of those kids to watch over her fading status, but she and Ed had planted their flag, and there she would stay. Until the other day, when her incredible run ended.

As next door neighbors, we had gained something of an auxiliary family status. We played football, baseball, hide-and-go-seek, tag, and other things together. The parents stopped by each other's houses for a break, for a laugh, for a chance to celebrate a new car with something brown in a bottle, the level of which would get very low very fast. There were some conflicting moments, but they were only moments. It was a real neighborhood, the type of which are fading now with transience, in which kids and parents watched out for each other, exchanged gossip, and food.

We had a chance to relive some of those times at Millie's wake at St. Joseph's Church, where she and Ed had remained faithful Catholics for decades. Not all of the eight children were there--two had medical issues which wait for no one--but the stories flowed freely and old connections were renewed. We had plenty of laughs.

I couldn't stay for the perfunctory luncheon afterwards. I had an eye appointment back on the East Side of Milwaukee. That was fairly close to my current residence, but more than half an hour from Grafton. Damn thing took all of five minutes, too. But St. Joseph's Church was still more or less in the neighborhood, about a ten-minute walk from our houses. Its parking lot, once a recess playground (I wonder if it still is), borders 17th Avenue. I could have turned left coming out the backway and helped myself half a block to Highway 60 en route to the freeway, or I could turn right and drive past the old neighborhood on the way to a side road that got me eventually to the same place at a different entrance. I chose the latter.

It had been at least ten years since I had driven past the old neighborhood. Nostalgia may be fun for a moment, but eventually weighs one down because the only way anything in the world moves is forward--not necessarily in improvement, but connected with change. Wishing one had another chance at some station in life pursues a chimera that never gives back.

But good memories do. There's a house, now, on the open lot north of the Schumachers where we used to play baseball. Lots of runs were scored because there were just two on a side--we claimed a 'two-field' hitting restriction; left and center or right and center, the one undeclared being an automatic out. It's where I learned to hit the ball to right field, something that followed my career through high school and college. We had to be careful, too, when ground rule doubles bounced through the lot into and across the street so we avoided (sometimes barely) being smacked by passing cars.

It wasn't just a passing interest in baseball, either. Both Dads took their boys to Milwaukee Braves games in the late '50s and '60s when that franchise thrived here. I remember piling into various station wagons and sitting in the upper regions, which is all that either household could afford. In particular, I recall three games: 

• Ed Schumacher, that family's patriarch, was left-handed so he loved going to watch one of the greatest left-handers, the Braves' Warren Spahn, pitch against someone else who happened to be pretty good. One game pitted Spahn against the Pittsburgh Pirates' ace, Bob Friend, and Friend emerged as a 3-2 winner;
• In September 1960, very late in the season and after the Braves had been eliminated from pennant contention, another all-time great, Eddie Mathews, hit a homer off the right field foul pole to beat Pittsburgh in the 10th inning--on the day that the Pirates clinched the National League pennant because St. Louis had lost. We walked into the parking lot listening to them celebrate through open windows; and
• On what was called Spahnie Night in 1961, organized in honor of the 300-game winner, the San Francisco Giants came to town and routed him, with Willie Mays smashing a grand slam homer.

We played football by sharing both the lots on the Schumacher and Cebulski premises. It wasn't tag. The four of us older boys--Andy and Charlie Schumacher and Jeff and Mark Cebulski--all wound up playing in a more organized fashion in high school. Pete Schumacher, who came along later but who wanted to play with the big boys, was apparently told, as he repeated at the funeral, that he'd better not complain or cry or else he'd wind up in the house playing with Barbie dolls. So much for sensitivity training. He played in high school, too.

But high school also split us up. All eight Schumacher kids continued their Catholic education at Dominican High School in Whitefish Bay, getting rides there before they could own their own cars. The Cebulskis went to Grafton High, not very far from the neighborhood, just up the road from St. Joe's. So the neighborhood didn't take long to diverge. With different pursuits come different conversations, so we soon lost track of each other.

It diverged again when Lana Ross and I both attended Lawrence University. But she had already met Charlie, so dating her was out of the question. We saw each other every so often, so I kinda sorta kept in loose touch. I never saw her with another guy. As we moved through college, marriage looked more and more inevitable. They've been together more than half a century.

My most direct connection during that post-college time were two, both as Santa Claus (as I enjoy playing with my own extended family). I visited a couple of times to excite a few of the grandchildren during the '90s, after I'd been in the suit at our old home in the couple of years when we held the traditional Christmas Eve there. It had a feel of Santa making the rounds and added to the fun of it for me. The kids colored pictures for Santa and I kept several on the frig for a number of years.

Remembering that, perhaps, about 2008 or so, Millie's daughter Mary persuaded me to put on the suit for a luncheon at Jack Pandl's restaurant in Whitefish Bay, which at that point wasn't far from one of my many residences. I put on the get-up on a day where the high temperature didn't reach zero and the wind chill had to be -30. Millie, whose lucidity was flagging even then, was stunned and thrilled. Despite long underwear, I damn near froze to death but emerged pleased that I'd been a Good Samaritan. I did it for the neighborhood.

For the first time ever, the Schumacher home looked dark and empty as I rode past it. Millie had demanded the opportunity (an expensive one, I hear tell, with hired caretaking) to live in the family's original home until, well, she was done living. She got what she wanted, all the way through age 100. It had been more than just a place to stay. No matter when anyone came in through the breezeway into the kitchen, you couldn't help but catch the scent of yet another pie or cake or meal being cooked. Raising eight kids and welcoming their own kids back home was a full-time job, one Millie never shied away from, though for 19 years, she somehow managed to work at Smith Brothers restaurant in Port Washington, doing most likely what Mom did--raise money for the kids' college fees. Her positive energy resounded. Her smile wasn't perpetual, but it was her inclination.

Mom and Dad had moved to residency for the aged some twenty years ago. They are still with us at ages 99 and 97, respectively, never expecting to last this long. Our house was sold to one of Millie's granddaughters and her husband. As I headed past it, I noticed that there was a car parked in the circular drive in front, something that Dad was particularly proud that he had added to the property. It still looked like, and felt like, home.

I didn't mourn at that as much as I absorbed it. With the Schumacher home soon to change hands, the old neighborhood would just be that--a memory of a place and a time that felt more secure and welcoming and  vital, a place where families put their roots down and didn't think about going elsewhere. A simpler time and place where people weren't afraid to leave their front doors unlocked. Roots, yes, and wings; the irony was that, of course, none of us could stay.

The neighborhood houses still look well cared for, the kind which people could start a life and a world again. Millions would be jealous of what we did and how things ended up. This was America, spanning Eisenhower to Biden, the Cold War to the War on Terror, Marilyn Monroe to Taylor Swift. This was, if not the peak of world civilization, one that had earned its way that most of the rest of us who forged ahead and settled for: If not sheer excellence or opulence, a life that wasn't too bad. We never wanted for anything. 

It was reasonably secure, too. Crime was a distant concept from which we were immune. In the middle of a continent separated by two oceans, we were relatively safe, too, from the worst that the rest of the world could threaten except for one terrifying moment in 1962 when two leaders had a gut-check and concluded that now wasn't the time to blow each other's nations into eternity.

So we made it, the neighbors and us. The houses still stand as tribute to a generation that did its due diligence, that put its head down and got through first a horrifying depression and then a world war that welcomed back those who survived and then decided not to have anything like that happen again. After 70 years, the neighborhood will completely change hands now. But it'll never be just another street, though. Not to me. I drove south past what used to be Zirtzlaff's and Kroner's and Wagner's, up that little hill, then turned left on Falls Road. And was gone.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark