Category: Chapter 8: Fay and Agnes

Fay and Agnes

Sometime in the early 1950s, Fay met Agnes. No one can say when or where and no one can say if they somehow knew each other previously. But they would change each other’s lives and develop a friendship that lasted for the next three decades.

Agnes was married to a harsh man who became harsher as he grew older. He took on religion, became a Seventh Day Adventist, and made his three sons read the Bible every night. They were rebellious kids and the clashes sometimes became violent. Agnes needed some help and she turned to Fay.

My mother and aunt remembered that Fay hadn’t been the father they imagined they wanted, so maybe this was his chance, a new start. Or maybe it was happenstance like so much of Fay’s life. Whatever the motivation, Fay’s life was attached to Agnes’s sons and they meant a great deal to him. It seemed to have settled him down, kind of.

Fay with Shirley and Barb when they were still teenagers

Rocky’s relationship with Fay was the most lukewarm of the brothers. He stayed on with Fay for two years and then joined the paratroopers, where he lost an arm after an accident. He was a stock car racer at some point and then went on to get an extensive college education. His youngest brother Bernie said Rocky tolerated Fay.

It seems that he was the least accepting of Fay’s gayness when it was discovered.

The Fifties

When Glen turned 15 in 1954, he moved in with Fay and he remembers those times as some of the best. “He was special. He treated everyone with respect and he got a lot of respect from other people,” Glen said of Fay.

Glen and Fay in the mid-1950s

He still speaks of Fay with affection, decades after their time together. He saw Fay as a father figure and said he loved Brad (the name he always used for Fay) as a son loves a father.

Glen told me he looked to Fay for guidance about how to live a good life and Fay had a lot of thoughts about how to maneuver oneself in the world. Glen remembered these gems as Fay’s rules for life:

Glen remembered Fay as a great patriot and pro-American. After returning from the war, Fay never ate dark rye bread, didn’t like cabbage and never owned a foreign car. It was his protest against what he had experienced in the German POW camps.

“I remember once I wanted to buy a Volkswagen and the look I received was clear message that I was supposed to buy only from one of the big three American car companies,” Glen said.

Throughout his youth, Glen wanted Fay to be proud of him, didn’t want to be seen as failing. Glen remembers Fay being angry with him once and he never wanted it to happen again. “He looked at me with big sad, puppy eyes. He was disappointed with me and I could tell he expected more of me.”

Fay also tried to encourage Glen to reconcile with his father, but Glen stubbornly refused. “Poor Brad had to take a lot of verbal BS from me every time he broached the subject of maybe mending the hurt between me and my father.”

Fay and Glen at Christmas dinner with my brother Jerry and sister Tricia

Glen at 20

Glen decided to enlist in the air force in 1960 when he was 22. Fay had recently been in ill health as a result of his POW experience and had been hospitalized. It was clear to Glen that he needed to let Fay get well and he needed to get on with adulthood.

They remained friends until Fay died in 1985.

I was only three years old when Glen enlisted in the Air Force, but I remember him as a big part of my childhood. We have a lot of photos in our family albums with Fay and Glen so even though I wasn’t there for most of those events, it was as if I had been.

Fay, Barb and Glen with me in the foreground

Glen and Barb in 1958

Glen also ended up living in Traverse City where our family moved at around the same time he went into the service. Much later, my sister Tricia was married at the local Country Club where he was a chef. We knew him when he was married to his first wife and knew his daughters when they were babies.

And all of us in the family thought that our Grandpa Fay and Glen had been lovers. It seems so absurd now, but it was how we pictured a gay life at the time. That Fay was almost 35 years older than Glen made it seem that much more exotic. We fancied ourselves as open-minded.

Glen ultimately left Michigan, ended up in the National Guard in Hawaii and then moved to a town near Seattle. He remarried and had two more sons with his second wife.

Fay and Glen continued to talk from time to time and they meant a great deal to one another. “He made me understand that I was not alone. I could call him collect whenever I needed to. He was there to help me and I was there to help him.”

Barb and Jay

Life in Lansing proved to be a good one for Barb and Jay. My mother thrived at the Ingham County Tuberculosis Sanatorium and loved the bigger hospital atmosphere.

Nursing in the 1950s

Even though the discovery of the antibiotic streptomycin, which cured tuberculosis, meant the need for sanitariums would soon be obsolete, my mother developed a love for the operating room during that time while assisting surgeons in doing lung resections. This surgery was often used in concert with the new antibiotic for the most difficult cases.

The combination of the newly discovered antibiotic streptomycin with surgery helped put an end to the tuberculosis epidemic. Selman Waksman (far right) is credited with the discovery of streptomycin and won a Nobel Prize in 1952.

Barb in her early 30s

Barb stayed on there for four years during which the hospital transformed itself into what later became Ingham Medical Center. She moved on to other hospitals, but throughout her career she almost always worked as an operating room nurse, a place that called for no-nonsense professionalism, which she had in spades.

She would always work and she would always earn more than my dad.

After Jay decided that college wasn’t for him, he did a number of things for work. He didn’t mind working, but he wasn’t particularly ambitious. He was always well-liked wherever he worked. He had a disarming Irish charm and wit and so what he lacked in drive he made up for in being simply delightful.

Charming Jay in the 1950s

My parents loved to laugh and Jay made Barb laugh and I think that was good enough for her for a long time.

Sometime before Beki was born, a couple of things happened that would change our lives. My father contracted rheumatic fever for the second time in his life. An autoimmune disease that develops if strep throat is not treated properly, rheumatic fever adversely affects the heart and joints, ultimately damaging a patient’s heart valves causing crippling heart disease.

MY FATHER’S ILLNESS ULTIMATELY BECAME THE CENTRAL FOCUS OF OUR FAMILY LIFE. HE ENDED UP HAVING TWO OPEN HEART SURGERIES IN THE 1960s, AN EARLY PATIENT FOR THIS KIND OF MAJOR OPERATION. HE RETIRED FROM WORK AT 45, NO LONGER HAVING THE STRENGTH TO CARRY ON. BOTH OF MY PARENTS WEATHERED THIS AS BEST THEY COULD, BUT IT WAS HARD AND THEY HAD FIVE KIDS TO RAISE. SOME OF THE JOY GOT LOST ALONG THE WAY, BUT THEY ALWAYS REMEMBERED TO LAUGH WHEN THEY COULD.

Jay had originally contracted the disease shortly before his father died when he was 15. It was a chaotic time in his life and he ultimately ended up living with his older sister. In those pre-war years, antibiotics were not readily available to most working people and the cure for the fever was bed rest, which was not a great introduction of Jay into his sister Helen’s somewhat newly married life.

Jay missed a year of school at the time.

Although, Jay weathered the disease as a youth, he was forever prone to a possible relapse of rheumatic fever. By the time of his relapse in the late 1950s, the treatment was more sophisticated and those with strep throat were given penicillin. However, the strep throat infection kicked off the autoimmune disease once again and he developed rheumatic fever. This time, there was no time for bed rest, he had a family he needed to help support.

Streptococcus

Grandpa Fay

Grandpa Fay with Tricia and me

During my parents almost 10 years in Lansing, Fay was frequently in the picture. Both Barb and Jay were still young and they loved a good time, and Fay was always fun when he was around. My mother didn’t really trust Fay and she had a lot of feelings about all that he did for Agnes’s sons, but she couldn’t maintain a grudge for very long.

We kids loved Fay right from the beginning.

In 1960, Jay was offered an agent position with Metropolitan Life Insurance, but the family would need to move back up north to Traverse City. My mother found a job in the operating room at Munson Hospital, the big one in town, and they bought a house.

Me at our new house in Traverse City 1960

Jay at the new house 1960

So my parents and us four kids packed up and moved out of the trailer in Lansing. We had a backyard and could see Lake Michigan from our new house, the first one my parents owned. My dad brought a swing set home from Chicago when he went down for insurance agent training.

Jerry was 11, Tricia was seven, I was three and Beki almost a year old.

Our youngest sister Janene wouldn’t be born for another eight years.

Tricia, Beki and I with our new piano

One Christmas, many years after we moved to Traverse City, my mother asked her father to buy our family a piano. Fay had always loved music and he even had a small organ in his apartment. It’s pretty clear that Fay never had the kind of money needed to buy a piano, but my mother insisted and Fay acquiesced.

Fay’s betrayal of Barb as a young girl, about the age my older sister was when the piano request was made, still stung and she resented the time, money and energy that Fay seemed to lavish on Agnes’s boys. My mother felt we should have a piano and she felt her father owed her such a gift.

Maybe Fay was looking for forgiveness, or maybe he just couldn’t figure out how to say no this time. He bought the piano. We were forced to learn how to play. The beat went on.