Song of Annie

By Marilyn

“Unky” Marvin was on a mission.  Maybe that should be mission with a capital “M”.  For the “mission” included: Marilyn; music; and marriage, for starters.  Oh no, not marriage to him, but the fact that his name also started with “M” might fit this tale as well.

It was not that many months after I started as organist at First Baptist Church of Park Ridge in August, 1974.  One of the delights of the position was Wednesday nights in choir rehearsal; I have always loved to accompany.  In the choir were several couples: Owen and Ruth Davis, Iraina and Var Murnieks (he was the choir director), Dick and Joyce Lucaccioni, and Marvin and Ruth Koehn.  Ruth was the church secretary, so I had gotten to know her upon starting at First Baptist.  They discovered that I did not live too far from their house in unincorporated Des Plaines and they had already met my three boys who lived with me in The Greens apartments on Lincoln Parkway.

One choir night, for some reason, Marvin offered to pick me up and take me home after choir.  No problem.  But that is when he started selling me on…..

His brother-in-law, Donald Lamken.  With words like, “nice guy”, “loves kids – he’s crazy about our five-year-old daughter Beth”, “never been married”, “always lived with his parents, but in 1969 he bought a house in Park Ridge and had them move in with him”, “makes good money as an electrical engineer for Commonwealth Edison”. 

Don was church treasurer, so I knew him slightly.  He gave me my monthly paycheck.  In October his parents, Carl and Helen Lamken, had been recognized during a church service for their years of marriage (couldn’t have been their 50^th – I recall celebrating that some time later with the family by attending the Second Baptist Church of Chicago and having a dinner at a German restaurant in the Logan Park area.)  At the time, when Don stood along with his parents during the service, I mused on where his wife must be.  Rather nice looking, very tall, but alone.  “Single” did not register in my mind.

On a Sunday morning later that year I was warming up before church service when this tall Treasurer man waved from the back of the church and hollered, “Hello, Virginia!”  I feebly waved back, not bothering to set him straight.  Weeks later I asked him why in the world he named me “Virginia”, and he said, “Well, I knew it was one of those first 13 states!”  He called me “Maryland” for the next sixteen years!

He started coming to choir rehearsal and singing with the group – couldn’t carry a tune, but that didn’t matter.  Guess he was on a mission too!  But it wasn’t until a bus trip the congregation took to Judson College in Elgin that I realized he was pursuing me.  What a warm wonderful feeling!

Tammy (Wynette) and I could both sing the song “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”.  It was a word we did not like, hated to speak out loud.  Nothing positive could be said about it, and when children were involved, it was especially painful.  I had been divorced in 1974 after two years of separation and over a year in group therapy at Lutheran General.  My former husband, Joe Vold, was returning to Minnesota to work at Luther Seminary, and he shortly got a call to be a pastor in Bijou, Minnesota.  Jonathan, Daniel and Joshua lived with me but our joint custody meant at least one big trip a year for them to spend time with him.  They got to know and love the people of Joe’s parish, and Joe continued to form them into thinking young men.

Being divorced with three children seemed to me an obstacle to a serious relationship with a new man, especially a devout Baptist.  It was not a problem for Don.  We started dating, but it was not long before his mother, Helen, cornered me at church asking if maybe I shouldn’t be returning to Minnesota where I came from!  For that is certainly where the boys really belong, she said.   In fact I had started putting out applications for teaching jobs in Minnesota, and the very weekend we started dating I had gone up for several interviews.  (In August, after our marriage, I got a call from Moose Lake School District with a job offer – too late!)  But I eventually learned that wasn’t the first time Don stood up to his strong-minded German mother.  When Marvin and Ruth were getting married back in the sixties, she also tried to break up that relationship, and Donald’s intervention the day of the wedding apparently made her accept the inevitable and attend their wedding after all!

Don gave me a ring during a small ceremony we held after choir practice one night.  June 25, 1975 we became man and wife.  Ruth was my matron of honor, and Ray Linke, a lifelong friend and neighbor of Don’s from the Logan Square neighborhood near Kelvyn Park High School, was his best man.  Dick and Joyce Lucaccioni gave us a garden reception at their home in Northbrook, and our wedding dinner was at the Como Inn in downtown Chicago.  Continuing that Italian theme, we honeymooned at Lake Como near Lake Geneva in Wisconsin.  Shortly after that we moved into the brick ranch Don owned at 840 Parkwood in Park Ridge.  (First he had to move his parents out of the house into an apartment.  That was not a comfortable scenario.)  We took a trip to Germany, Holland and Austria in October, and it was there that Don had first symptoms of gout.  But before that pain started, we had spent precious days with the Schwengels and Lamkens in the Halsbek and Westerstede communities in Ammerland, Germany, not so far from Bremerhaven, from where Carl, and then Helen, left for America in the twenties.

The Parkwood house was rather small for a family of five – two bedrooms with a den that we used for a bedroom for Jon.  As we would take evening walks we considered expanding upward, maybe adding a second story with a mansard roof.  We were casually biking around town the October Saturday after returning from Europe when we happened upon a house ‘way over on the east side, south of the downtown area.   It had a small yard, but what attracted us were the leaded-glass windows.  And it was for sale!

By December, 1975, we moved into the beige stucco house, circa 1912, with slanted pillars at the corners, and we asked our pastor, Dick Mitchell, to come for an evening visit and conduct a dedication of the house.  We wanted our life, every part of it, to be given to the glory of God.

Settling in included getting Dan and Josh transferred from Edison to Roosevelt Elementary School.  Jon was established at Lincoln Junior High School.  We made good use of the city pool, and it was there one sunny afternoon in 1976, while treading water, that I informed Donald we were going to have a baby!  That would not stop us from our planned trip to England, Scotland and Ireland, however. 

Anneliese Ruth was born April 28, 1977 at Lutheran General Hospital.  We were thrilled to have a little girl, and Helen and Carl were too!  That little 9 pound blonde changed Helen into a loving, accepting mother-in-law.  (That’s not quite fair; she needs more credit.  Those trips we took to Europe, and at least one camping trip to Starved Rock State Park nine months before Annie was born? We needed a kid-sitter for the boys, and Helen and Carl usually filled that role!  By then the Koehns and her parents were living two blocks away from us, near Hodges Park.)

The boys loved their new little sister too.  So did the members of First Baptist Church.  Anne brought joy to many people, but most of all her parents.  What a perfect gift of God for a 46-year-old father and 38-year-old mother.  The middle bedroom upstairs was decorated in a soft blue with yellow daisy accents, and it became a lovely sanctuary as I would nurse her in the old rocking chair I had gotten from my Aunt Viola many years before when Daniel was a baby in Maddock, North Dakota.

She grew, and Josh and Dan enjoyed flying her through the air (holding on firmly, yes) saying, “Super-Anne!!!”  Her giggles delighted us all (still do!).  Jon was fourteen, and he decided he wanted to move to Minnesota to live with his father and go to high school in Mahnomen.  So he was in the house just a few months after Anne was born, but visited every summer and many holidays.  And eight years later, after his four years in the Air Force, he came back to the 520 Stewart house to live, found a job at a factory, and began going to the University of Illinois Chicago campus.

Favorite recollections of Anne in her early years: many evenings she and I would meet Don at the train, three blocks away.  As she learned to toddle, then walk, she would see him walking down Courtland and run to meet him.  But as she got close, she would turn around with her back to him.  Guess she figured that would be an easier way for him to pick her up!

Her earliest friend at church was Allison Wenk.  Allison had to wear a cast on her lower body for the first year of her life when both girls were in the church nursery, but by the time they were three they happily pranced off to their Sunday School class hand in hand.  Following the lead of her cousin Beth, Anne went to St. Andrews Lutheran School and made good friends there who would help her celebrate her birthdays with Maypole dances and games.  She starred in plays, performed in dance, and played the piano.

Her best friends in the neighborhood were the Canfields next door.  Anne would spend hours with Veronica and Kay, two spinsters, and their elderly mother.  I never saw the inside of their house, but my daughter found it fascinating, and they loved her!  Beth Bransen was also a neighborhood friend, younger by a year, but a good playmate – although she was afraid of Anne’s big brothers!  Really scary.

Anne’s big brothers always called Marvin “Unky Marvin”.  His mission was accomplished and his favorite brother-in-law became a family man heart and soul, hook line and sinker.  The apple of Marvin and Donald’s eye, Beth Christine, had  Lamken cousins at last.