My gift that keeps on giving
My gift to Chicago's Newberry Library will keep giving to researchers and anyone interested in Chicago history for generations to come.
Redlined, two years old in the midst of COVID-19
Reading is essential during the COVID-19 "stay home" orders. "Redlined's" 2nd birthday is Friday. Share this page-turner with friends and teens who want a story for pleasure AND learning. Redlining's legacy will stay with us after the pandemic has passed. Read on.
Veterans Day evokes Thanksgiving Thoughts
On Veterans Day, I always think of my beautiful, young, handsome Uncle Frank Ebner, whom I never met in person, yet I feel I know intimately. Why? Because I have nearly 300 letters written to and from him from January 1943 to the end of September 1945. Then the letters stopped coming home.
Facing death. A letter home. Memorial Day & D-Day tribute
My uncle, Frank Ebner Gartz, known to the family simply as "Ebner," [ABE-ner] was a "prince of a guy," my dad said often. He was also a crack navigator on the B-17 Bomber during World War II. In one of Ebner's letters home, he speaks forthrightly of how he coped, facing death from the carpets of FLAK surging toward him over and over, as German fighter planes buzzed the B-17 to shoot it down. Then a tribute to the 75th anniversary of D-Day, which Ebner also wrote home about.
Mother’s Day and Mental Health Month
In May we're called upon to honor our mothers and to increase our awareness of mental health for ourselves, our families, and others. With this post I hope to do both: honor my mother for the anguished choices she alone, as an only child, could make about her mentally ill mother, and bring the choices she had to make at that time into focus in our own time.