5/2/23

 Tuesday, May 2, 2023

In bed at 10, awake at 5:35, and fell back to sleep until 6:30 with a dream of being a blind date for a friend of Nikki at a prom of some sort in Madison.  I was friendly, non-threatening, talkative, and old.  She was shy, reticent, and considered herself homely. 😕😳 It's 40℉ looking forward to a high of 46℉, wind NW at 17 mph, 12 to 26 mph during the day, gusts up to 33 mph, after another cold windy day yesterday, wind chill is 31℉, with .4" of wintery mix in last 24 hours.  Spring in Wisconsin. Sun rose at 5:44, and will set at 7:54, 14+10.

Sharon is 45 today, the youngest (I think) of our children's spouses, though I'm not sure of Anh's age.  I was 45 in 1986, which seems like a million years ago.  Ronald Reagan in the White House, started to dodder at age 75.  It was the year that about 5,000,000 people held hands to form a human chain from NYC to Long Beach, CA to raise money to fight hunger and homelessness in America.  Could that happen today?  Also the year of the Chernobyl meltdown, the U.S. bombing of Libya, the Iran-Contra scandal, and an American cruiser and a destroyer entering Russian territorial water near Crimea under a right of 'peaceful passage.'  It wouldn't happen today.  Could Chernobyl, maybe at Zaporizhzhia?  I think I was practicing law, involved in the seemingly endless Occidental Petroleum/Waste Management litigation, the seemingly endless Raintree Publishing-Robert Maxwell litigation, and starting the Black and Veatch /LaCrosse County litigation.  

Debt Ceiling Brinksmanship.  June 1 is now the magic date.  The unthinkable has become thinkable again.  Retirement savings at risk for millions of oldsters.  Who will blink first?  No telling with McCarthy.

LTMW at chickadees nabbing nesting materials from our supply depot.  The first sight this morning on opening the Venetian blinds was our acrobatic squirrel hanging upside down working on the suet cake.

VA this morning for pelvic floor muscles therapy.  The 'internal work' was fairly painful,

American Dystopia.  In a suburb of Houston, TX this week, a neighbor who was asked to stop shooting his AR-15 combat rifle so a baby next door could get to sleep used that rifle to shoot and kill the neighbors with the restless baby, including a 9-year-old victim.  Just in the past month: A teenager was shot in the head (but fortunately survived) in Kansas City, Mo., for approaching the wrong house to pick up his siblings. A young woman in Upstate New York was shot and killed when the car she was in mistakenly pulled into the wrong driveway. A man and woman making a delivery in Florida were shot at for going to the wrong address.  In the Houston area outrage, Republican governor and misanthrope Greg Abbott dismissed the victims as "five illegal immigrants."  In Wisconsin this week we learned that Re[ublican legislative leaders are planning to strip out almost all of the gun safety legislation proposed by Democratic governor Evers in his budget plan.  Democracy is not working; autocracy here will be right-wing and worse.  Wherein lies hope?

Coronation nausea.  Everything about the crowning of King Charles III is abominable but perhaps (could be worse stuff) the worst is the pledge of allegiance the king will ask all his "subjects" to voice at his crowning: “I swear that I will pay true allegiance to Your Majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law. So help me God,”  Please, pass the basin.👑

Grammarly.  Madeleine Kelly Lubar introduced me to this writing app when each of us was working on our eulogies for TSJ.  I downloaded the free version and have been using it ever since January 22, 4 days after Tom's death.  It's very useful for catching typos of which I have many.  It also reinforces my tendency to hyphenate words and phrases, like "6-years-old."  Now it is regularly e-mailing to me weekly statistics about my writing, like: (1)  442,019 total words analyzed by Grammarly since Jan 22, 2023 (15,453 last week), and (2) I've used more unique words than 91% of Grammarly users, and (3) my 'Grammarly writing streak is 14 weeks.   The kind of information one really needs, like exactly how many words one has typed into one's laptop and how Precisely how many words since January 22, 2023.😕

E. Jean Carroll vs. Donald J. Trump.  I am reminded every day of Hartmann's crime against my mother, especially by how Carroll was treated on cross-examination by Joe Tacopina.  I'm thinking of how the Chicago press made my mother the subject of notoriety.  From my memoir:

[September 30, 1947] It was that night that a 15 year old boy who lived 3 blocks south of us, broke into our apartment, threatened to kill Kitty and me, slashed my mother with a knife, ripped her clothes off, and sodomized her.

The following day, October 1st, the Chicago Daily News ran a front page story about the crime, stating that my mother, who was forced to “commit a sexual act under threat of death to her 2 children,” was not able to identify the assailant from certain photos shown to her.  The following day, however, there was no longer any mystery as to the identity of the attacker who, it turned out, had stabbed another woman to death in a parking lot near 63rd and Halsted Streets.  The Daily News ran a full page banner headline “BOY’S OWN STORY OF SLAYING.”  The story was accompanied by a three column photograph of the attacker, James Hartmann, surrounded by Chicago detectives.  A separate story about Hartmann’s actions in our home appeared on page 2.  It included the following:

The detectives had questioned 200 neighbors in the vicinity of the home of Mrs. Mary Clausen, 25, of 7303 S. Emerald av., who was slashed on the wrist before she finally submitted to an intruder Tuesday.  . . .

At the station [Hartmann] said he intended only to commit burglary at the Clausen home.  However, he unexpectedly found Mrs. Clausen at home lying on a bed clothed, and he made an indecent proposal.

He admitted ripping her clothes off and then forcing her to submit to him.  He denied threatening Mrs. Clausen’s two children, 6 and 3, with the brown-handled, five inch blade knife he carried.

At the police station last night [Hartmann] was viewed by four witnesses to the Bush slaying, and by Mrs. Clausen.

Mrs. Clausen was near collapse after identifying him.  . . A brother of Mrs. Mrs. Clausen leaped up from his chair, lunged toward the boy, and missed a haymaker.  A half-dozen police restrained the man.

The same day, a photograph of my mother appeared on page 2 of The Chicago Daily Tribune, accompanying the following that appeared as the lead story on the front page of the paper under the 5 column banner headline “KNIFE KILLER, 15, CONFESSES.”

James Hartmann, 15, of 710 W. 76th Street, pupil in the Chicago Vocational School, confessed last night that he stabbed to death Mrs. Gracelyn Bush, 32, wife of a minister, in an attempted robbery in the parking lot near 63rd and Green Sts.

He told the slaying story after acknowledging, upon being seized for questioning, that he committed a sex crime against Mrs. Mary Clausen, 25, of 7303 S. Emerald Avenue, Tuesday night.  Mrs. Clausen’s wrist was slashed with a knife and she was dragged out of the bed in her basement apartment where she had been sleeping with her two small children.

       Mrs. Clausen identified Hartmann.  Afterwards she fainted and was assisted out of the room by her husband and detectives.  While Hartmann was being taken to another office through a corridor, a spectator said to be a relative of Mrs. Clausen lunged at him.  Hartmann fought the detectives holding him in an effort to retaliate.

The Chicago Sun, predecessor of the Sun Times, ran a full page banner headline, Boy Confesses Stab Murder! including the news that “Mrs. Clausen was “robbed and slashed in her home at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue [and was] forced to submit to indignities.”  The Daily News filled the entire back page of the paper with photos of Hartmann with Chicago detectives obviously straining to be included in the news photos.  One showed a detective pointing to the knife Hartmann used on Mrs. Bush and the one he used on my mother.  

The Chicago Tribune published a photo of my mother at the police station and a map showing exactly where we lived and our address, 7303 S. Emerald Aveune.  On October 3, the Tribune ran a follow-up story, including this:

Hartmann will be charged with robbery and a crime against nature for his offense against Mrs. Clausen, 7303 Emerald Avenue, whom he pulled out of bed and mistreated in her home Tuesday night.  He robbed her before fleeing.

The Chicago Sun ran another front page story, with a photograph of Hartmann being comforted by his step-father.

Remorseless and alert, Jimmy Hartmann scrawled his signature to two confessions in which he told in detail of the knife murder of Mrs. Gracelyn Bush, 35, on September 24 and the sex torture and robbery of Mrs. Mary Clausen, 25, last Tuesday night.”

After reading the two confessions, [State’s Attorney] Touhy released to newspapers the youth’s story of the Bush murder but withheld the statement on the Clausen case.

"It was one of the most shocking I have ever read,” the prosecutor said.  “It is too appalling, too atrocious to be read by the public.  "Considerations of Mrs. Clausen would also require that it be withheld.”

On October 6th another Tribune story appeared stating that Hartmann forced my mother “to commit a sex act when he threatened to kill her child.”  

I was that child.

Over the next few months, the Chicago newspapers carried many stories about Hartmann and his murder of Mrs. Bush and sexual assault on my mother.  The Chicago Sun seemed to take particular delight in the story, running many, many photographs of Hartmann day after day, one with his visiting parents in the office of the warden at the Cook County Jail, one with his lawyer, another with his step-father, even one of Hartmann resting on his bed in his jail cell, with an accompanying story about his crying in his cell and being bothered that he wasn’t the focus of attention of reporters and photographers.  The text of the news stories referred to Hartmann as a “sex pervert” who confessed to “a degenerate attack” and “a fiendish attack” on my mother, but the photos all seemed calculated to generate sympathy for “pudgy” 15 year old and his family, with nary a word about the families of Gracelyn Bush and Mary Clausen.

Paul Harvey, then 29 years old, reported the crime against my mother on his radio show on WENR, with the spin “Wife of young Marine, veteran of Iwo Jima . . .” My mother’s name, address, and photograph and the nature of the crime against her were publicized to everyone in Chicago who could read a newspaper.  

Hartmann was referred to four psychiatrists for sanity assessments.  On December 2nd, the Tribune reported that all four (two for the prosecution, two for the defense) agreed that Hartmann had a “psychopathic personality” but was legally sane.  On January 20, 1948, a jury found him guilty of murder of Mrs. Bush and, notwithstanding the prosecutor’s plea for the death penalty, he was sentenced to 25 years incarceration.  The news of the verdict was carried on a banner headline across the entire front page of the Tribune: “25 Years For Boy Killer.”  With ‘good time,’ he could be paroled in 13 years and 9 months.  Toward the end of the story, it was reported that he would be tried later for the assault on my mother and “for looting her apartment.”  The March 9th edition of the paper carried the story that Hartmann had pleaded guilty to burglary and a crime against nature and ‘thrown himself on the mercy of the court.’  He received a sentence of one to ten years for breaking into our apartment, dragging my mother out of her bed, slashing her wrist, tearing her clothes off, threatening to kill her child or children, sodomizing her and looting her apartment.

My mother was 25 years old when she was slashed, sodomized, and otherwise brutalized by Hartmann.  The crime occurred just after ‘birthday season’ in our family.  My father had turned 27 three weeks before the attack, Kitty and I had just turned 3 and 6 a few weeks before.  I remember hearing the name “Hartmann” when I was a child and thought I remembered hearing of his being captured in the Wieboldt’s parking lot in the 63rd and Halsted Streets shopping district.  As the Tribune story reveals, however, my memory was faulty.  That parking lot was where he killed Mrs. Bush a week before breaking into our apartment and attacking my mother.  The crime was never mentioned around me or Kitty as we grew up.

My mother told me that Hartmann had held a knife to my throat and threatened to kill me.  I thought she told me that the crime had occurred in an apartment on the first floor of our building, where she was babysitting for our friends, the Baxters, and that the crime had occurred when I was about one year old, which would explain why I have no memory of the event.  The Tribune story, on the other hand, reveals that the crime occurred in our own miniscule basement apartment and that I was six years old, not a baby.  I had just started the first grade at St. Leo Grammar School.

Reading the newspaper accounts of the attack in the course of preparing these letters set me back on my heels.

My mother was dragged out of the bed on which she was lying with Kitty and me. Her wrist was slashed with Hartmann’s knife.  This kind of wound is a defensive wound; she had her arm up to defend herself or Kitty or me or all of us against Hartmann’s knife.   The slashing of her wrist and the dragging her out of bed occurred on the bed I was on in our crackerbox of an apartment, where no space was far from any other space.  I learned only recently that my father got home from his second shift job at 1 o’clock in the morning to find police cars with flashing lights around our apartment building and many police present.  How could I not have awakened and witnessed what happened?  How can I have no memory of this?

For years I have had a recurrent nightmare.  It is a simple one: it’s the middle of the night and dark and there is someone in the room, a stranger, menacing.  When I experience the nightmare, I make a loud moaning sound as if I am trying to scare away the intruder by making scary sounds.  Your mother has been awakened by this moaning, as has Geri and my college roommates and perhaps also my tentmates in Vietnam.  I never associated this recurring nightmare with anything until I read the Tribune story.  What did I see?  What did I hear?  Was I cowardly?  Did I hide under the covers and moan?  What did I do?

I told you earlier of my second earliest memory: sitting on the floor of the living room with my father shouting at me.  I had always thought that that incident occuroccurred shortly after he returned home from the war.  I now believe it occurred after the attack by Hartmann, as we were waiting to be taken to my grandparents’ house on Racine Avenue while he and my mother dealt with the police. 

This crime occurred in 1947.  We continued to live in that tiny apartment for at least another six or seven years.  (Neither Kitty nor I can remember the year when we moved next door.)  How could my mother and father have continued to live there?  How did they live with the associations that space must have occasioned?  I suspect that the answer is that that tiny basement space with the steam pipes overhead and the cockroaches underfoot was all they could afford.  It had to be dirt cheap and in those years we were dirt poor.

How was my mother affected by the slashing of her wrists, the threatening of her children’s lives, the “sexual torture” by a ‘degenerate pervert’? How was she affected by having her name, her photograph, her address, and the fact of her violation spread across the front pages of all the Chicago newspapers? Every member of the family (except we children), every neighbor, every friend, every co-worker, every St. Leo parishioner, every busybody and tale-teller knew of the “indignities” she suffered, the “sex torture” and “crimes against nature” committed on her, the perversions forced upon her. Almost overnight, she had gone from an anonymous young mother of two trying to cope with an emotionally wounded husband home from the war to front page news, from anonymity to notoriety. Anyone in Chicago with 4¢ to buy the Sun or 5¢ to buy the Tribune or the Daily News could ‘read all about it!” It is inconceivable to me that she did not have her own PTSD to deal with, but I have no memory of symptomatic behavior on her part – no alcohol abuse, no emotional withdrawal, none of the behaviors I remember with respect to my father. This is not to say that she did not have symptomatic behaviors; I am quite confident that she must have. I simply do not recall them, just as I do not recall the crime itself, though I was present throughout it. I have blacked it out, as I have blacked out many memories from those days and other painful memories. I remember my father’s behavior only because its worst features were so profound and long-lasting that it has been impossible to forget.