CULTURE

The Lioness in Winter

by Jeff Balch

Fri, Apr 18 2008

Stina motored slowly upstairs in her new power chairlift, her expression a mix of satisfaction, determination, and annoyance. She'd had the lift installed in her small townhouse as a reluctant concession to her increasingly creaky eighty-plus-year-old knees. But no one who knew Stina would have called her weak-kneed.

She was born in Waukegan to an immigrant mother from Sweden who worked as a live-in maid for North Shore families. Her father had committed suicide and her mother raised her and two young sisters mostly alone.

"She worked from 6 in the morning till 7 in the evening every day,
except for Thursday afternoon," Stina said. "We worked too, when we weren't in school. Ah, the grand life of a Swedish maid's family. Hah! Well, maybe a little tougher than some, since she was a widow. My dad I don't really remember, except for him hollering at my mom, and me hiding under the kitchen table. Then he blew his head off. Huh!"

Stina came of age during the Depression, and while Waukegan and Highland Park were good places to go to school, shady characters lurked.

"Plenty of trouble back then," she recalled. "Guys wandering all over. Once on my way from grammar school I was attacked and raped, hit from behind. Can't really remember it, but I remember dealing with the gonorrhea later. Huh! How about that?"

When Stina Met Carl

When Stina graduated from Highland Park High School in 1936, the Spanish Civil War was just breaking out in Europe. Stina got involved in raising money to support the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of volunteers willing to go fight Franco's fascists, and she met her future husband Carl Hirsch at one of the events.

"I was selling boutonnieres," she said. "Carl walks in and we start
playing the eyebrow thing. I was supposed to meet Kenny Mentzinger there, but Kenny walks in just as Carl and I walk out. He took me to his aunt's and we decided that night that we'd probably marry."

Neither made it to Spain. Carl joined the army when World War II began and Stina worked on the homefront--as a stenographer, a United Electrical Workers staffer and, later, a court reporter. Their first son Peter was born in 1943.

"They bounced Carl around a lot," she said. "The Georgia swamps, South Carolina. I never knew when we'd be together again and I wanted to have a piece of him. So later when he was in airplane mechanic training, he had an assignment in Detroit and I went to visit him there. Left my diaphragm at home. Hah!" Their second son, Bruce, was born in 1946.

"Got 'That' Changed"

Never a stay-at-home mother, Stina became active in the PTA and convinced her Waukegan chapter to shift from the traditional afternoon meeting time to the evening, "so that workers could get there." She also got active in local Democratic politics, once running for Lake County Clerk. "I lost by about eight to one. But it was good experience for later, like when I was working at Northwestern and they didn't allow staff to use the swimming pool. Not allow staff to use the pool! Hah! Got that changed."

After the war, Carl began writing young adult science books for Viking Press and Rand McNally. They covered a range of topics from the space age, mapmaking and navigation, to lithography, ecology and dream research. His 1973 book on the metric system begins "By the year 2000 young Americans may ask their parents, 'What was an inch?'" Another book on the perils of racism won a Judson award. Almost all are dedicated in part to Stina -- "who knows best" or "who helped in a thousand ways."

After her sons finished college, Stina went back to college herself. She graduated at age 60 and gave one of her class's commencement addresses. Her master's thesis at DePaul focused on the North Shore's overworked Swedish maids and their subculture:

"Whatever the horrors of the week, the Thursday off-workday was an antidote," she wrote. "The electric trains ran past all stops along the North Shore to Chicago. Along busy Belmont Avenue were shops where Swedish was definitely spoken, sometimes exclusively. This in itself was a release from the constant struggle with the English language in the home of the employer. Here one could meet new friends, perhaps a ‘landsman’ from the old country. For the ‘Torsdagsflickor’ [Thursday girls] this was a prime opportunity to meet young, single men with whom to exchange lonesome memories of Sweden."

"It was well-received in the department," Stina recalled. "I tried to publish it for three years, but no luck. By then, I was around 70. Time to move on!"

The Big Picture

Peter died in 1988, Carl in 1990, and Stina lived alone through her
eighties. She stayed active in the Unitarian Church of Evanston where a fellow congregant gave her a dog, Kirby, who became her constant companion.

Another congregant and fellow Swedish American, Lois Heimbaugh, saw Stina as a surrogate parent. "And not just to me," Heimbaugh said. "I'd say there were dozens like me who saw her as a mentor. She looked at the big picture of life, and gave it more meaning, and gave us a broader vocabulary.

"The first time I saw her," Heimbaugh recalled, "she was standing at the back of the church wearing a broad-brimmed hat. And with her bright eyes and open face, she looked kind of like a movie star. She and Carl were coming up on their 50th anniversary, and I didn't have anybody else in my life who had survived to that point, let alone survived and remained active and open-minded. The age difference between us became irrelevant. We talked about everything."

Barbara Pescan, the Unitarian Church's minister, saw Stina as a special kind of senior hero.

"She spent a lifetime trusting people enough to connect, and then she gracefully faced the challenge of winding down, banking her fires," Pescan said. "For example, she had to give up driving. It was really a blow, and it angered her. But she worked at it. I saw her get disgusted and sad about getting old, but never with regret.

"She left me a phone message one day that I really treasured," Pescan added. It came a few years ago, when Pescan and her partner Ann Tyndall were co-pastors of the church. "The message went something like 'I just want to tell you how much I value you both. No need to call back.'"

Goodbye Friend

I got to know Stina closer to the end of her life. My wife and I moved into a house near hers, and I saw her at a couple political events. I began stopping by with our two kids; they would take turns riding up and down in the chairlift while Kirby growled.

With some difficulty we took her to a movie one night--"Butterfly," about a leftist schoolteacher, elderly and doomed, in Franco's Spain--and we still recall her tears at the end. Not just unselfconscious tears. Proud, angry tears.

Another night I accepted an invitation to start a fire in her basement fireplace, and in switching the flue position I unwittingly closed it. Airing the place out took an hour, during which Stina sat happily dabbing her eyes.

She brought several firsts to our children. She was the first to give them money on their birthdays, reluctantly abandoning the idea of going out to hunt for the right gift.

She was the first adult who my daughter saw having a tantrum. I brought her for a visit one day and Stina happened to be having trouble with her knee. It was so sore that she couldn't even ride her motorized trike.

"Damn it!" she barked, banging her cane. "Can't walk! Can't ride! Can't do anything!" My daughter, then age four, stepped back wide-eyed. Then she came close and put a hand on Stina's shoulder. Stina's anger could be magnetic, as could her laugh, her tears, her ironic Swedish "Huh!"

Last month, after days without food, semiconscious, Stina was the first person our kids saw preparing to die. They kept their distance this time. There was no laughter or anger to draw them near.

Stina Hirsch (1919-2008) died on March 12th. A memorial service will be held at the Unitarian Church of Evanston on May 17th at 11:00 AM. For more information call the church at (847) 864-1330, or call the author at (847) 864-9468.