'I let him wonder where I was.'

My grandmother loved my grandfather, but she had a secret mission. And it involved a savings account.

My grandmother married when she was 16.

This was 1947, when it was uncommon for women to have their own bank accounts, and I’ll never forget the story of how she eventually got one.

Let’s go back to that teen marriage.

Her husband, Ed, would become known as a great man, a stern coach and a tireless teacher who eventually worked himself to an early death at age 63 from diabetes and heart disease.

After his passing, he’d have a basketball tournament and gymnasium and scholarship named after him, but I knew him when poor health had stolen his patience and personability.

He couldn’t have been so grumpy as a 20-year-old who fell head-over-heels for my grandmother and married her before anyone else did.

He couldn’t have been so grumpy when he was welcoming his babies to the world and winning state championships and sharing kind, if tough, guidance to his hundreds of athletes and students. 

But after decades running up and down basketball courts and football fields, he lost the lower half of one of his legs and the former collegiate athlete struggled with the loss of mobility.

I remember those final years through the fuzz of early childhood, but as I’ve grown older, I realize that he was somewhat insufferable long before he fell ill.

My grandmother loved him deeply, but during her last decade in life, during our many phone calls where we’d catch up like old girlfriends, she’d tell me about the ups and downs of her relationship with my grandfather. I was in my unexpectedly single season, so I’ll tell her about my dates and potential boyfriends, and it became clear that both of us longed for a fully supportive spouse who celebrated our independence as a critical part of the marriage. 

I’m not sure if she ever fully got that support from her husband, but she pushed for her independence in ways that she could.

You see, even though her brother went to West Point, college was never really on the table for Gaga. But after her kids weren’t underfoot, she trained to become a dental assistant in the 1960s. Feminism and the idea of gender parity didn’t come to Aurora until much later, so this was a bit of a rarity at the time.

She eventually worked for many decades for the same dentist, and he became one of her closest companions. The relationship never crossed into actual intimacy, but I know their friendship filled her in ways her marriage never could.

Ed tolerated her working. I’m sure he would have preferred her to stay at home, but she had a quiet way of standing up for herself that I can now trace to her mother and even her grandmother, who immigrated from Sweden in the late 1800s.

He kept up a grueling schedule and achieved a lot in his life because of it, but his family paid the price of sharing him with the whole community. The town, in turn, repaid them in accolades and praise. (More than 30 years after his death, my mother still hears from his former football and basketball players about how much Ed meant to them.)

While he was out changing kids’ lives, Gaga was changing her own.

Earning money empowered her in a way that marriage never could, and after she’d been working for a while, she started squirreling some of her paycheck away in a savings account that she didn’t tell Ed about.

She wasn’t saving up for a trip or a new outfit or Christmas presents for the kids or even a divorce. Leaving Ed was never an option. She just wanted to have a stash of money she could call her own. 

Through that savings account, she was scratching out her own identity beyond her relationship to this larger-than-life man.

I’ll never forget her telling me about this inner change during one of our visits about a decade ago. She explained that women didn’t call out their husbands for their bad attitudes or controlling behavior in those days. “That’s just the way it was,” she told me sitting at her kitchen table. “You expect grumpiness because men got by with it.”

Right around the time she started saving that money, she also adjusted her workweek so that she had Fridays off.

“I just let Ed wonder where I was sometimes. I’d go to Springfield and do a little bit of everything. He didn’t like that. He’d ask, ‘Well, what’d you do? Where have you been?’ I didn’t tell him everything. He finally got used to it. He didn’t like it, but he got used to it. I thought, ‘You know, I’ve got a life,’ too, so I finally started standing up for myself. I was 50 before I started thinking like that.”

With a little money in her pocket, she needed him a little less each day.

The tables turned as his health declined. He came to rely on her, and she took care of him until the very end.

She mourned Ed, but at some point, I remember her having one boyfriend, but she never pursued a long-term relationship after my grandfather.

When she died in 2017, she was still carrying his torch in some ways, showing up at football and basketball games and overseeing the Ed Cook Scholarship each year.

She was always known as “Ed’s wife,” but I never thought of her that way, and I think a big reason for that is because of what happened after she got that savings account.

This wasn’t a story she broadcast. Publicly, she never hinted at the darkness she endured so that her husband’s light could shine.

But I saw her light.

And I’m so glad I got to hear the story about how she figured out how to make her own sunshine.

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I’m publishing this week’s newsletter from the Fort Wayne, Indiana, where I’ve been all week for a press tour of the region that has been full of all kinds of surprises.

I’ve been kayaking and learning about the history of the area, but the main reason I was here was to go to the Allen County Public Library’s Genealogy Center, the second-largest genealogical library in the county. I have so much to say about what I’ve been experiencing on this trip, but I thought I’d dig into my drafts and publish a piece I started long before my grandmother died.

I don’t know what took me so long to finally publish this piece, but I think I started it way back in 2016 when she was still alive. I’m sure I was worried about telling her story incorrectly or overstepping on my assessment of the family dynamic, but the more time that has passed, the more I think this savings account was really the beginning of a new life for my sweet Gaga.

Having spent the week wearing her pearl necklace — and visiting her brother in Washington D.C. (so many stories to share!) — I decided now was as good a time as any to share it.

Thank you so much for your support of this newsletter. Your subscriptions are what make it possible for me to dedicate this time to write it. I am so, so grateful, as always.

I hope that stories like these shed light on your own history and the people who shaped you. The invisible thread. It connects us all.

Addie

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