DIVISION STREET REVISITED EPISODE 3: DELLA REUTHER: The Homemaker Who Couldn't Stay Home In January of 1994, a woman named Della Reuther died in Phoenix, Arizona. The local newspaper ran a tiny death announcement, noting that she was 83 years old and had been a homemaker. A homemaker. That is not the first word most people who knew Della Reuther would use to sum her up. A few other words: Hog butcher. Union organizer. Anti-war protester. She’d been interviewed by a famous author. STUDS: Was that the first time you were arrested? DELLA: First time in my life and I’ve done some things that I should have been arrested for. I was 16 years old. I cooked moonshine and they could smell it. The chief lived right across the street, never pinched me… But death reduces everybody to less than what they were in life, and it’s true, Della Reuther was—also—a homemaker. For years, she made a home with her husband—her third husband—in a tavern just outside Chicago. She raised two kids there. After her husband was paralyzed in a fall, she took care of him in the little bedroom next to the bar. She did all of that in addition to running the tavern. Customers knew not to mess with Della. She stood five-foot-ten, weighed 300 pounds.  Talked loud, laughed loud. [DELLA LAUGHS] Sometimes she’d sit down at the bar, sip champagne, smoke a cigar. And belt out her favorite song: [SOPHIE TUCKER: “SOME OF THESE DAYS”] One night—in 1965—a guy named Studs Terkel showed up at Della’s door, carting his big tape recorder. Studs was a popular Chicago radio host, and he’d recently embarked on something new.  He was interviewing so-called ordinary people, and gathering their stories—stories told in their own words—for a book. It would be called Division Street: America. Studs sat with Della until nearly midnight, asking question after question. STUDS: What’s your feelings about the Civil Rights revolution? STUDS: When you hear talk about the H-bomb, what are your thoughts? STUDS: What is it, in the world, that disturbs you the most today? In 1967, Division Street was published.  The book became a bestseller, praised as a portrait of a diverse, divided country. Della Reuther was in it under a pseudonym – Eva Barnes.  The night Studs came to visit Della, they talked a lot about fear. How Americans were so afraid of so many things–and how fear left them so confused. STUDS: Bewilderment, confusion. DELLA: Fear. What's going to happen to us? What's going to happen to our kids, our grandchildren? “What's going to happen to us?”  I’m Mary Schmich, and this is Division Street Revisited.  A show in which we set out to answer that question about Della Reuther and six other people in Studs’ book.    What did happen to those people? And their descendants? How can their lives illuminate the world we live in? Today, the tale of a homemaker--the daughter of immigrants--who defied the boundaries set for women of her time. [PAUSE/MUSIC] Della’s parents were part of a great wave of Lithuanians who came to the United States in the late 1800s. Lithuania is in northern Europe, way up by the Baltic Sea and Russia. Population 3 million. It’s a modern country now, but back when Della’s parents left, it was a place of forests and farms, deeply poor. Southern Illinois was poor, too, but Della’s father found work in the coal mines. And it was there that Della began to learn just how brutal life can be. DELLA: Every time that whistle blew in a coal mine, there was that fear of who’s dead now, who got hurt now? Many times I run down the railroad track to the coal mines to see who was it? Was it my father? Was it my uncle? Women’s work was hard in a different way. Women had babies. They cooked, they cleaned. A woman who wanted her own money had few options besides taking in boarders or making bootleg. Della dreamed of more. So she did the thing her Lithuanian parents had done. She moved. DELLA: Two months before I was 12. I came to Chicago and was in wintertime, I had 65 cents in my pocket. Today, that may sound like the plot of some hokey Disney movie. In Della’s time and place, it was common for kids to work, in factories and mines, on farms. Della got in line for a job at the stockyards. DELLA: Employment manager comes out and he says, “Hey, you big one over there.” He points his finger at me. “You. “You big one.” I turned around, he says, “Don’t turn around. You! Come here.” I said, “Me?” He says, “Yes, you. How old are you? About 19,” I says, “Mm hmm.” I was afraid to open my mouth. I was only 12 years old. “You know how to sharpen a knife?” Well, back in the coal mines, we used to butcher our own hogs and our own beef. And I said, “Sure, I know how to sharpen the knife. So he hands over a steel and a knife for me and I start sharpening. He says, “Okay, you’ll go to work.” Did you ever read “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair? It’s about a Lithuanian immigrant who works in the Chicago stockyards in the early 1900s. The book describes the stockyards as a horror show: dingy meat factories, rivers of hot animal blood, train cars full of moist animal flesh. Flies and rats, and a smell like the craters of hell. Twelve-year-old Della went to work trimming pork for sausage. Eventually she moved on to other jobs, like cleaning hog guts. DELLA: Working on these guts, they were cut open and I had to sterilize them, wash them and the ones that were condemned, you couldn't touch them because if you did, you would get a hog itch. And you had to keep your hands – a cold shower on them all the time to get that hog itch off of you.  When Della was 16, she got married – to a man she’d met only through an exchange of letters. Her new husband was a Lithuanian immigrant. A coal miner. Two decades older. He drank a lot. By the age of 18, Della was divorced. And had a son. She went back to the stockyards. The hours were long, the pay was lousy, diseases swirled in the crowded packing plants. By the age of 21, she was organizing for the union. [MUSIC POST] DELLA: I had 40 women the first day I went out. We’re doing the same kind of work men are doing, trimming meat, sharpening our own knives. Why don’t we get paid same like the men?” They were only paying us, I think, 28 cents an hour and the men were getting 59 cents an hour. Della had remarried by that point, and she had another son. That marriage didn’t last either. And then, finally, she married a man she could stay with.   A strong, tall Lithuanian named Felix Sabutis. Felix was a beef lugger—one of the men who carried 200-pound slabs of meat from the freezers to the train cars. It was work that wore a body out. Felix and Della yearned for better jobs, but finding one was hard. DELLA: He's too old and I'm too fat. We couldn't get a job. I was young enough, but too fat. So, what are we going to do? So we went in tavern business. There’s a stretch of Halsted Street in Chicago that was once known as the Lithuanian downtown. It’s in a neighborhood called Bridgeport, not far from the old stockyards. In Della’s day, Lithuanian taverns lined the street. Today, there’s just one left. Bernice’s. It’s just a block or so away from Della’s first tavern, and one Friday night, my colleague Bill and I drop by to get a glimpse of Della’s old world. The room is small, dark, and narrow. A couple of musicians are setting up in a corner.  We meet Steve Badauskas, who took this place over from his Lithuanian parents. He leans on the old, wooden bar as he recalls Bridgeport in the 1960s. STEVE: There was still a Lithuanian bakery, a Lithuanian butcher shop, a Lithuanian barber, Lithuanian shoe repairman, a Lithuanian TV repair shop next door that I worked at when I was 10 years old. These days, Steve’s customers are students, teachers, computer people. Not Lithuanians.  And yet, in this room, it’s easy to picture Della—in a headscarf and a big white house dress, serving beer to Lithuanian laborers who smell of sweat and hog guts.  That was a long time ago. By the 1980s, the stockyards were gone. So were most of the Lithuanians–headed off to warmer climates or Chicago’s suburbs. STEVE: It seemed, anyway, to me that the great American Dream, if you're living in Bridgeport, was to get the hell out of Bridgeport, ya know. And that’s what Della did.  x In the 1940s, Della and Felix bought a little wooden tavern, on 11 swampy acres, cheap, just outside the city. MARY: What do you remember about the tavern in Oak Lawn? MIKE: Oh! Everything. Mike Sabutis is the youngest of Della’s four children, and the only one still alive.  He’s in his early 80s. x
  We tracked Mike down in Louisville, Kentucky, where he moved to be near his daughter.  MIKE: And I am a retired air traffic controller after 39 years, 11 months, 29 days, 7 hours and about 20 minutes or so. He’s on the phone in his little home office where he keeps an award for that time he saved a plane from crashing onto the runway at O’Hare. Mike and his sister grew up in their parents’ tavern, and when he says he remembers “everything,” he means tending bar at the age of 8.  And looking out his upstairs bedroom window to watch the brawls in the tavern parking lot. He means carting milk bottles full of his paralyzed father’s urine away from his bedside. MARY: When you were growing up that way, I mean, did you think: Oh, man, this is a really hard childhood or was it just: This is the way life is? MIKE: Oh, that's the way it was. I had free Cokes. You know, I could get candy whenever I wanted. We had fish fries on Friday and fried chicken on Wednesday. Della had two sons older than Mike, from her previous marriages. I’ve been told that those sons felt neglected growing up. Mike, on the other hand, felt loved and cared for. Even so… MIKE: She was a tough woman. I mean, she took a shotgun away from a guy who came in there and beat him over the head with a blackjack to get the shotgun away from him. And a customer was in there one time making fun of my dad after he was paralyzed and she came around the bar and grabbed him by the neck and picked him up. As I learned about Della’s life, that word brutal often popped into my mind.  She’d witnessed the brutality of the coal mines. Of the stockyards. Of drunks in the tavern. Of how men treated women. She wore that experience like a coat of armor. DELLA: I’m not afraid of nobody and nothing. In truth, Della was not fearless. She was always afraid she wouldn’t have money to pay her taxes. Another thing that scared her? That her sons would grow up to be violent men. When Mike was a policeman for a while, in his 20s, she warned him: He’d better not use his gun, unless it was in self-defense. DELLA: …Even the other day I said, "If I ever find out you take a bribe or deliberately set a trap for somebody just because take advantage of your policeman's job," I said, "I'll be the first one to..." Never got a whippin, but I would beat the s*** out of him. I would. [PAUSE/MUSIC] And then the 1960s arrived. Della’s husband Felix had died by then. She had emphysema, and leg ulcers, and a bad heart.   And she was ready for the revolution. She went to Washington, D.C., to march against the atomic bomb.  She went to Washington again to march for Civil Rights. She got on an airplane—her first plane ride—for a group tour to Lithuania. She came back to the U.S. with rave reviews of the beautiful youth centers, and the great, free medical care.  At the time, Lithuania was ruled by the Soviet Union and Della’s praise incensed one of her sons. He called her a Communist, which to many Americans in those days was tantamount to traitor. Della scoffed. She wasn’t a communist. She was just a woman with a strong belief: That people shouldn’t have to struggle so hard to meet their basic needs.  And she believed that if you wanted to make change, you had to stand up and speak out. DELLA: Anything good for the people or for the country is never given easily. It’s never given easily. [PAUSE]   By the mid-1960s, the United States was embroiled in a war in a far-away country–Vietnam. It was the first televised war, and Della–like the rest of America–could watch the bodies and the bombs on the nightly news. She hated war. Her first husband was maimed in World War I. Her fourth husband—-she’d remarried after Felix died— had been gassed in that same war. Her two older sons had served in wars. Now, she was terrified her son Mike would be summoned to Vietnam. So Della put on her big, black orthopedic shoes — and joined the anti-war marchers. [PROTEST AMBI] Out on the streets, she got arrested. More than once.  She told Studs about the first time. How at the jail, they took her fingerprints and her photo. Took away her purse and her reading glasses. They locked her in a cell, where the lights glared all night and the cot was way too small for her big body. But the thing that really bothered her was the jail matron who scolded her: DELLA: "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Why don't you stay home and mind your own business – take care of your family instead of mingling with all these hoodlums and bums?” Those hoodlums and bums? Della knew them as professors, doctors, lawyers, students, clergy. Intellectuals. Della—with her seventh-grade education—was proud to march in such company. 
Just a reminder: None of this was in the death notice for Della Reuther, the homemaker. We’ll be back after the break. [BREAK] I’m Mary Schmich and you’re listening to Division Street Revisited. A show exploring the lives of 7 people featured in Studs Terkel’s 1967 book Division Street: America. One of the things we’ve tried to understand, as we explore the people Studs interviewed, is: What gets passed down in a family, in a culture? What gets lost? I’ve talked with five of Della’s grandkids. They all remember her. As the loud, scary grandma. Or the brave, flamboyant grandma.  But only one of them knew her well, and though they all feel a connection to Lithuania, none of them speak the language. As for politics? In the words of one grandson, they’re “all over the place.” One of her grandchildren is an artist who doesn’t consider herself a big activist, though she has marched in a civil rights protest. Another is a business executive who calls himself “five degrees to the right of center” but not “crazy right.” He’s played for a Lithuanian basketball team. x But when I asked him whether his three daughters - the next generation - identify with the country, or with Della, he said not at all. Their ethnic identification? “Hardcore Chicagoans.” And yet there is one big thing of Della’s that survives. A house. In Arizona. [MUSIC] In 1970, Phoenix was growing like crazy. People came for the jobs and the warm winters, for the seemingly infinite space of the desert. Phoenix was where you went if you wanted to change your life. Della was ready to change her life. Her kids were grown and educated. Her fourth husband—Henry—had died. So Della—who’d moved alone to Chicago as a girl of 12—headed off alone, at the age of 60, for Phoenix. Only now she had money. Enough for a mortgage on her dream home. HOLLY: Her bedroom was this front room right here. The window on the left where the flowers are hanging over was her closet. I’m standing outside Della’s old house, talking to Della’s granddaughter, Holly Richardson. Holly’s in her fifties, tall like Della, but thin. x She knew Della far better than the other grandkids I talked to, and for a simple reason—when Holly was three years old, she, her parents and her sister moved in with Della. Shortly after Holly’s family arrived, they built a pool out back. And Della—a woman who’d once cleaned hog guts in the stockyards and sewage from her tavern—could float in peace in the Valley of the Sun. But all these years later, the pool sits empty. The brick house is rundown. The yard is scraggly and full of junk. And yet, it’s peaceful.  We pull chairs into the shade of a giant palm tree, and Holly talks about how Della shaped her life. HOLLY: I just had insomnia a lot as a kid. …She’d wander over to Della’s bedroom.  HOLLY: And then knock, knock, knock. And she would say come on in. She knew it was me…”I can’t sleep.” And she’s like OK, well, what do you want to eat? Kugela was a big favorite, for potato pancakes. Her grandma’s side of the house was a refuge. HOLLY: When my parents fought a lot, I would run to grandma’s and just, you know, you don't want to hear all that chaos. I can remember her hearing yelling and coming around and banging on the door, like grabbing us and saying, “They don't need to hear that. You come over to grandma’s. You come over here.” And yeah, I love that she was right there. Eventually, her parents divorced and her father moved out. Holly didn’t inherit Della’s activist streak. And yet she still takes courage from her grandma’s stories. Of marching for Civil Rights.  Of standing up for co-workers in the stockyards.  When Arizona elected its first female governor, Della took Holly to the senior center to meet Rose Mofford. HOLLY: Anything that showed progress for women and you know, equal rights for people. Holly’s quick to say her life has been easier than her grandma’s was.  She never had to clean hog guts. But hardship comes in different forms, and Holly’s struggled with her health and her finances. Through it all, one thing in her life has stayed stable: Della’s house. Which, after some family wrangling, became Holly’s.   She’s been out of touch with everyone in her family for years. But all this talk about her grandma has made her want to repair things. The yard. The house. Relationships with the rest of Della’s scattered family. MARY: What part of her remains with you? In you? HOLLY: I think just her strength. Her perseverance. I think of her sometimes when things are kind of overwhelming and I think, Well, grandma would have kept fighting, moving forward. [PAUSE/MUSIC] Della died in a Phoenix hospice on a winter’s day in 1994. She was thinner by then, her voice was weak, but she was still cracking jokes for the nurses. Her son Mike and his wife came to visit.  They asked if she’d like to see a priest. No priest would come to see me, Della said. She hadn’t been to church in years. But a priest did come. He gave her absolution and last rites. Mike said it made her happy. [MUSIC] A few months later, all of her sons, along with their wives, and some grandkids, gathered at the Lithuanian National Cemetery near Chicago. Della’s ashes were laid in the ground. A priest blessed her grave. It was the grave of a bold and complicated woman. A homemaker– and a whole lot more. MARY: If you could talk to your mom today, what would you say? MIKE: I would say, You were right. She demonstrated with Martin Luther King. That was right. She demonstrated against the Vietnam War. And she was right about that. She was right about her union organizing in the stockyards. And she was right about that. She was right about all that. [PAUSE/MUSIC] When Studs Terkel wrote Division Street: America, America was different. Women have far more opportunity now—though there’s still plenty to fight for. There are still anti-war protests, but they’re for different wars, and there’s no draft that sends Americans into battle. One thing that hasn’t changed: People from all over the world still emigrate to this country. Where they come from has changed. [AMBI] One day while I was learning about Della, I drove up Halsted Street, through her old neighborhood. Past Asian and Mexican restaurants where all those Lithuanian taverns used to be. Past Bernice’s. And then, there, outside a dilapidated industrial building I spotted a crowd. Men, women, kids. It was a shelter. For Chicago’s newest immigrants. Not the immigrants of Della’s day—no longer Lithuanian, Polish, Italian, German, Irish. These are mostly Venezuelans. Looking for the same things Della’s immigrant parents were seeking. Jobs, food, safety. Home. And I imagined them asking the same questions Della did: DELLA: What’s going to happen to us? What’s going to happen to our kids, our grandchildren? [MUSIC] Decades after Studs Terkel interviewed Della Reuther, her voice was still in his head.  He remarked that Della, like others he’d interviewed, had found a remedy for despair. That remedy was to go out. Join with others. Do something. DELLA: I gotta be one of the people to be counted. I can’t sit home. Division Street Revisited is the brainchild of Executive Producer Melissa Harris. Bill Healy produced this podcast. Cate Cahan and Mark Jacob were our editors. Sound Design and Mixing by Libby Lussenhop. Our Associate Producer is Chijioke Williams. The show features original music by Chris Walz. Additional music from Sophie Tucker and Epidemic Sound. Special thanks to the Chicago Public Library’s Research Center, Iris Lieberman, Eileen LaCario, and Ernie Lane. Special thanks to Angel Cepeda and the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture, Giedrius Subacius, Carol Mikenas Chiarello, Bob Mikena, Mike Sabutis, Jr., Tina Brown and the Packingtown Museum. Major funding for this podcast comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Additional funders include M. Harris & Co., the Field Foundation of Illinois, the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, the Susan H. Schwartz Charitable Trust, Debra Schwartz, and Julia Stasch. Archival audio comes from the Studs Terkel Radio Archive at WFMT, and the Chicago History Museum. It was digitized by the Library of Congress. Special thanks to WBEZ Chicago. Division Street Revisited is distributed by PRX. Our theme song is “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”. I’m Mary Schmich.