Not everyone celebrates Father’s Day.
Less than a month after this much trumpeted occasion, so special and meaningful for so many, the Lewandowski family gathered last Saturday in Park Forest to remember their father’s atrocities.
They met to acknowledge his fork stabs to their hands as they reached for bread at the table; to mentally finger their missing teeth, the results of his alcoholic rages; and, ultimately, to massage the undying pain of loneliness and self-loathing he afflicted on each one.
This casual scene of back-yard gossiping was atypical Americana, an Anti-Father’s Day coalition, yet still a celebration in spite of its journey to the dark side of family life.
It was a symbolic defeat of Eugene Lewandowski’s spiteful decision to tear apart his family 48 years ago when he kidnapped his youngest daughter, 10-month-old Virginia Mae, from their home at 910 W. Chicago Ave. and fled into obscurity, never to be seen again by his other seven children.
The mother, Dorothy, suffered a breakdown a few weeks after Eugene and Virginia Mae vanished. With no parental guardian, the remaining minors were dispersed to foster homes and orphanages. Their collective nightmare of self-doubt and isolation had begun; their crude Father’s Day cards and good wishes as youngsters seemingly a cruel joke being played on them.
But Saturday, five of the eight Lewandowski children held a reunion of staggering magnitude to them, though it was newsworthy to no one else. There sat Virginia Mae at the picnic table, just off the plane from O’Hare Airport, the first time three of her siblings had laid eyes on her since that fateful day in 1947 when she was ripped from her cradle and the family.
Her brother, Ron, would tentatively lay a hand on Virginia’s neck Saturday, then encircle her waist with a warm hug. He couldn’t stop from holding what he had lost so many years ago.
“You’re right, Arlene,” Ron, visiting from South Carolina, told another sister. “I understand what you meant. You have to touch her to make sure she’s real.”
Arlene Kramer, at whose house the clan was renewing old times, the picnic table strewn with old pictures and a music box, wiped tears from her eyes. She had been the first to meet Virginia when her 38-year-old search finally paid off and she flew to Virginia’s home in Las Vegas last month. This was only proper, for Arlene to get there ahead of the rest, because her father had forced Arlene to dress Virginia the day she was taken away. She has felt an accomplice’s responsibility and guilt ever since.
“A blue velvet outfit,” Arlene recalled. “How I hated that outfit. And Virginia tells me now she remembers hating that outfit when she was little.”
Arlene had heard her father say he intended to also take the second youngest with him, 2-year-old Geri. Unable to save Virginia from her fate, 8-year-old Arlene hustled Geri under the porch and stayed there with her until Eugene had stormed away, gun in hand and angry about something that remains forever unknown.
“I knew he was in a hurry, because he went and got the gun from a locked room we were not allowed to go in, went out with it and came back in a hurry, wanting to leave,” Arlene said. “We always thought maybe he had used it on guy, thinking our mother was cheating on him. But she never did, we know that.”
None of the children know details. The facts were buried with Eugene in 1983 and in 1987 when Dorothy died. The warring pair never saw each other again after 1947. However, that sad story isn’t what counts in the end. This is a story, instead, of doggedness, of love eternal, and of the refusal of the Lewandowskis to give their sister up as lost.
“Since I was 18, I’ve been looking for her,” Arlene said. “I met a lot of sham artists along the way, people who wanted to take your money. It can be very difficult on someone with limited funds to find a lost relative, especially since our father used aliases.
“For years, I ran into nothing but roadblocks. Then, when Mom died in 1987, I gave up for a year. I didn’t want to deal with it. But anyone who knows me, knows when I set a goal, I stick to it until I get there. So I started looking again.”
Her break came last April, when she saw an 800 number on the “Jenny Jones” show for an organization called “Find People Fast.” Leery of what the fee would be, she was flabbergasted and pleased to learn it was just $30. Using Virginia’s Social Security number, “Find People Fast” accessed a credit history and was able to provide Arlene with three addresses.
“My husband and I had been away for the weekend and I remember coming back Monday and my daughter coming into the room and waving a letter, saying `Mom, don’t you have a sister somewhere named Arlene? Here’s a letter from her,’ ” Virginia said.
Virginia was so taken aback, she had to have the letter read to her. When she dialed Arlene’s home number, she doesn’t quite remember what she said.
“I kind of lost it,” she said.
“I’ll say,” Arlene added. “She kept screaming, `I’m your lost sister, I’m your lost sister.’ She was crazy and I was afraid it was a crank call.”
Now, on this perfect summer Saturday, they continued to compare notes.
“She likes Ginger Snaps and we like Ginger Snaps,” Ron said, amazed at what others might consider a mundane coincidence.
“She’s wearing the perfume–White Shoulders–that has been my favorite perfume since I was 14,” Arlene interjected.
There is one difference, though. The father Virginia remembers never hit her or treated her anything but kindly.
“You’re talking about a whole different man,” she tells her siblings.
“Yeah,” Ron said, “a monster.”
Virginia talks about one of her father’s favorite stories, telling her that her oldest sister, Helen, was sliding down a cellar door once when she snagged on a nail, caught the edge of her underwear and fell, knocking out her two front teeth.
“No, no, no,” said Helen Ozenbaugh, 65, here from Arkansas. “I lost my two teeth all right, but he knocked them out. He was a charmer to other people, but he was devious, as you can see by his made-up stories. Other people thought we had the nicest father in the world. Little did they know.”
Arlene added: “And now we find out that all four of us girls went on to first marriages with abusive husbands, three of them alcoholics.”
As another step in her ongoing inner journey, Arlene recently sat down and wrote her autobiography, just to face all the anguish.
“It hurt; there were a lot of painful things in there,” she said. “When I finished at 1 o’clock in the morning, I called Helen. I felt relief.”
Relief is probably the preeminent emotion here, too, on this Saturday filled with so many emotions washing back and forth on the grown children’s faces.
For Virginia, who was raised in Barstow, Calif., it is relief that she is wanted. Her father told her that her mother hated her, and her brothers and sisters were not interested in seeing her. He told her to forget about them.
She considered herself an only child and bounced from foster family to foster family as her father pursued a vagrant life on the railroad.
“I’d go weeks sometimes without seeing him, sometimes months when he was on a drinking binge,” Virginia said. “Some foster families were nice to me and, at some, I was treated as their slave. But I think he knew he couldn’t always take care of me and was doing what he thought best.”
Her three sisters and brother grimace at her tolerance.
“That man robbed us of our childhood,” Helen said. “I never felt like a child at all.”
“He gave us responsibilities we never should have had at those ages,” Arlene said.
Virginia added: “Well, I used to think, `Why don’t they come find me? Maybe it’s true what he said. Maybe they do hate me.’ I used to think, `Someone come find me.’ “
The tears began again for Arlene at this point. Her search is done, but now there are 48 years to put behind them. They have the rest of their lives to do that and, by the joyous looks on their faces, their constant touching for reassurance, they are off to a comforting start.
At long last, they have something their father can’t take away.
They are a family again, complete and whole.
