Leaving behind Knox College, Galesburg, Filter Queens, and the peachy predicament at Meadow Gold, I persuaded my fiancé to accompany me on one of the greatest risks of our lives, moving to Chicago for me to pursue a doctorate.
I continued working at the dairy as long as I could, until two days before our wedding, because we needed all the money we could save for the next year at the University of Chicago. I came back to Havana for a wedding in the First Baptist Church, we enjoyed a brief honeymoon in Arkansas, and then headed for the Windy City.
The move from downstate Illinois to Chicago presented us with a dramatic shift in lifestyle. My wife, Virginia, had spent a year at a religious school on the north side of Chicago, but it was a kind of boarding school situation insulated from city life. I had only been to Chicago on a senior high school sightseeing bus trip. Living in Chicago, a completely new experience, initiated us into the advantages and disadvantages of an urban environment.
On one of our first walks around our Chicago neighborhood, we heard what we thought was a firecracker. We learned later that a student from the Divinity School, where I was enrolled, had been shot. Learning to live with crime introduced us to a downside of any major city.
Chicago also treated us small towners to exciting events. We took the CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) downtown to hear young pianist Van Cliburn perform a summer concert by Lake Michigan, two years before he won the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
The university faculty and its student body were quite active in politics. Virginia and I went with classmates to the Black Hawks hockey arena on the eve of the 1956 presidential election, singing our hearts out for “Stevenson, Stevenson,” but could not help his doomed campaign against Eisenhower.
My wife and I came from working class families. Her dad spent more than three decades in the foundry at International Harvester in Canton, Illiois, while her mom ran a small diner in our hometown. My family owned and operated a frozen food locker. We grew up expecting to work and make our way. My entrance into graduate school presented an anomaly, because I had gone to college but did not end up with a bachelor’s degree or a paying job. Graduate student was my “occupation.” Virginia took a secretarial job at the university to support us while I got my degree. The working wives of graduate students jokingly referred to the gender inequity of the situation by saying their husbands were going for a Ph.D., while they were working for a Ph.T.—putting hubbie through.
Our early married life was a constant scramble to make do with limited finances. For a few months I bussed tables at a university dining hall to help make ends meet. Eating out was beyond our imagination. Our idea of a splurge was a homemade pizza on the weekend. I still remember going to the grocery store to buy the small cardboard box of Appian Way pizza ingredients—flour, yeast, tomato sauce, and powdered cheese. We mixed the dough and let it rise, then spread it on a cookie tin and poured the sauce over it, topping the pizza with cheese, and baking it. For us, that was a treat.
We had reached Chicago in early September, in the midst of a late summer heat wave. Our university housing had no air conditioning, so we slept with windows open. The first few nights we bolted upright in bed as fire trucks raced down the street. It took us a few weeks to get used to the sirens, just rolling over and going back to sleep.
In our first year of marriage, when Virginia worked at the university, we walked together to the quadrangle; she entered the administration building and I went on to class or the library. To get to the university, we passed Stagg Field and its squash court, the site of the world’s first chain reaction in 1942. On our first trip by this non-descript location, we stopped and read the bronze plaque marking this historic event that ushered the world into the atomic age. Later, we just ignored it.
Stagg Field represented a good symbol of our situation. We students mingled with the leading scholars of the world, most of the time taking for granted their great achievements. At other times we shuddered at the thought that the university expected us to contribute to that greatness. My field, the study of religion, within the humanities, chalked up no remarkable achievements such as chain reactions. In rather idealistic terms, we concerned ourselves with ethereal topics such as the meaning of life, ethical problems, and existential questions.
My personal position in this context was unusual. Leaving college without a degree and entering graduate school was unheard of, except for a few innovative institutions such as the University of Chicago. The university and its Divinity School provided the opportunity to study for a doctorate, but with no guarantees for succeeding in a highly rigorous program. We had plenty of freedom and latitude to pursue our studies without a specific timeline or narrow boundaries. To be perfectly candid, I and my fellow grad students often were floundering, high on idealism, but short on specific educational and degree goals. More than a few of us fell through the cracks and never completed a doctorate.
Sometimes life has a way of interfering with academic and occupational plans. In our case, “life” came in the form of a medical crisis. Virginia had severe stomach pain, and then became practically bedridden with weakness and some bleeding, which she called “spotting.” While I had been spending most of my evenings at the library, she had been volunteering at our local family doctor’s office. She called their office, and a nurse relayed the doctor’s message that flu had been going around, so wait a few days before coming to the office.
As her condition worsened, she got so weak that I had to carry her to the bathroom. Worried, I called the doctor’s office, and finally got to speak with him. He was rather exasperated, repeating his over the phone diagnosis of flu, to take several aspirins, and call back in a day or two.
At my wit’s end, fearing for my wife’s health, I felt, even without any medical training, that my wife should to go to the hospital. The doctor became impatient, saying that was not necessary, but if I absolutely insisted, he would officially admit her. I couldn’t argue with his medical expertise and diagnosis, but because he left it up to me, I told him to contact the hospital to admit her.
I called my college friend, Jerry Long, who entered the Divinity School the same year as I did. We linked our arms together to form a kind of chair, and carried her to the car, where I drove her to Michael Reese Hospital. From that point, filling out papers, I saw little of Virginia, except for wishing her well for surgery as I signed the consent form.
I had heard of tubal pregnancies, and that possibility had crossed my mind as I cared for Virginia at home, but I never imagined this might be her problem. Her Fallopian tube had burst, and she was slowly bleeding to death. The surgeon told Virginia later, “You didn’t have enough blood in you to keep a chicken alive.” Before they operated, they had to give her transfusions, but couldn’t draw any blood (to check her blood type) using normal procedures, having to resort to a “cut-down” to a vein in her ankle.
While I was in the waiting room during Virginia’s surgery, not knowing if she would survive, our family physician, who had said, “Take two aspirins and see me in the morning,” walked in. He didn’t mince words, scolding me for not recognizing Virginia’s symptoms. “Didn’t you see that she didn’t have any color in her fingernails?” He calmed down, and assured me Virginia’s surgeon was top notch and would save her life.
At the moment I was too flustered to reply. Later I figured out that the surgeon had called in Virginia’s family physician and chewed him out for almost letting Virginia bleed to death. This family doctor then passed on to me the tongue-lashing he must have received from the surgeon.
I had been hesitant to question the family doctor’s diagnosis and advice, but looking at Virginia’s condition, I stuck my neck out and insisted that she be hospitalized. This doctor had been exasperated with me, but my persistence probably saved her life.
This was the mindset my wife and I took to the University of Chicago. I could pole vault over a bachelor’s degree and enter a doctoral program, but we could not ignore a life-threatening crisis.
After she recovered, we took up again our pursuits of a Ph.D. and a Ph.T.
H. Byron Earhart 