Eight Days to Seventy

Now fully ensconced in community life in Chatham and reunited with Diane and Pat (and their spouses) from CHS days- Joe coached boy's little league and worked part time at the deli. My mom helped out with the kids - they could run through our back yard to her front door -. My sister Patsy lived nearby in Boonton and her oldest and my youngest were born right around the same time. Our kids loved visiting their big old house, looking at movies in the attic and swimming in their in -ground pool.

In 1972 I ran for Borough Council on a platform of starting girls' sports, specifically soccer, in town. My cousin, Judy, a CHS senior was my campaign manager. She created all my Snoopy themed posters and fliers - no hate/smear campaigns in those days. She also helped organize neighborhood gatherings including one in my mom's backyard which also featured Congresswoman Ann Kline. Hubert Humphrey sent a representative and invited me to one of his events. Running as a Democrat in Chatham was like defying gravity and I lost. I got more votes than any other Democrat before me and in the next election a Democrat, classmate Joe Marts, did win and go on to become mayor. AND several years later the girls sports program in Chatham got underway.

In 1973 Joe -now working for Arthur Andersen - was offered a promotion/transfer to Chicago. So, once again, we did the Birofka Goodbye thing. Joe went to Chicago, taking Colleen and Kevin with him. They lived in a company apartment at 2 East Oak Street and were on their own all day. They regularly punched all the buttons on the elevator on their way out the door in the morning - causing the building manager to call Joe at work. Andersen flew me out to Chicago where we looked at houses - Joe used a compass to draw an area with an acceptable commute time and we chose River Forest, which I described to my mother in a letter as "an Irish Catholic ghetto where you weren't okay unless you had lived there for 2 generations." Luckily, it was where Joe had gone to St. Luke's School and we moved to the same block as Carolyn O'Leary, his classmate who had been there for 2 generations. She introduced me around and later became the kids piano teacher. I stopped crying after about 2 years.

In between selling the house in Chatham and closing on the one in River Forest, we spent about 2 months in Arizona with Grandpa Jack and Joe's sister Jeanne. Jeanne's daughter Cecilia and our two oldest got lost for hours in Sabino Canyon and re-appeared just before we called out the militia. They had stumbled upon nude bathers in Sabino Creek. What a fun summer. Some highlights of our new life in Illinois.

• The kids attended Joe's old school
• We got to know Joe's side of the family well
• Uncle Bob took a van full of his nieces and nephews to his island in Canada
• Joe was on the St. Luke's School board
• Colleen traveled downtown on the "el" to classes at the Art Institute
• Our neighbors thought we were weird because we went downtown - they also thought we were strange because we had Jewish, Black and "Mexican" friends

In 1978 I gave up full time motherhood and got a paying job. A friend from Chatham had moved there when her husband accepted a job at a bank in Chicago. We socialized with them and one thing led to another and voila - the girl who was going to write the great American novel became the 38 year old bank clerk - even though she flunked the typing test. The bank had a tuition reimbursement program, so I signed on at Rosary College a few blocks from our home and went to school at night - wrecking the curve for all the 18 year olds who couldn't translate a fraction into a decimal. I was realistic this time and majored in business. That novel would have to wait.
In 1979 we ended the decade at the old Masonic Temple (now Bloomingdale's home store) where Joe received his Masters in Accountancy from De Paul. It was colder than you know what - and our car wouldn't start- so we had to pile all the kids in their Sunday best into Pendergast's van with no seats in it and drive like the dickens to make the ceremony- with the kids rattling around in the back. Today we would have been arrested for child abuse for doing that.