Remembering my sister

I am documenting the heck out of important aspects of my life while I am still able. I have already recorded memories of:

• my mom – Mildred Freeman
• my dad – Hal Elson Freeman

Someone’s missing, and that someone is my sister Milly!

Milly Margaret Freeman was born on April 19, 1940 in Cleveland Ohio.

She had an older brother: Hal Jr, aka Butchie.
He lived for to 10 years old, from 1937 to 1946.

My young years were carefree and optimistic, as we want them to be for all kidsI

But Milly was not so lucky in her young years. She grew up with the dark cloud of having her older brother dying in the next room.

This was during and after WW2.
My dad was a doctor in a Long Beach military hospital.

I’m picturing a small apartment or house with Butchie living at home in one bedroom, wasting away from a disease that was deadly then, but would have a miracle drug cure with the decade.

In the other bedroom was young Milly trying to live a normal little girl life.

I hadn’t quite made it to my first birthday when he passed.

• I was born a couple of years later, but there was still a lot of sadness..
• Although the therapist I talked to in the 90’s suggested that my tendency to be a bit of a “pleaser” might’ve come from that time.

Butchie dies, parents divorce, we all go back to the midwest

My parents got divorced in 1949.
I think that Butchie’s death had a lot to do with it.

The next year we all moved to Springfield, Missouri, where my dad’s family was from.

Whatever the reasons, it adds up to a less than great childhood for my sister. Her older brother dying and her parents getting divorced in roughly the same year, when she was in third or fourth grade.

Just doing the math, she must have started grade school in Long Beach and done junior high in Springfield and high school in Louisville.

Louisville

We moved to Louisville in the summer of 1954. My mom bought a little house in the middle-class suburbs where we both lived.

I was excited about starting first grade in our new . She was excited about starting ninth grade!

She went to Atherton, the best public stownchool in Louisville, as any graduate will be happy to tell you :).

She did very well there. She was an academic star her whole life.

She was 8 years older, so even though we were in the same house, we were in entirely different worlds.

I was a dorky little grade-schooler and she was a new-in-town, attractive but difficult-to-know high schooler.

She had a boyfriend in high school named Gordon that was pretty into her as I remember it. He came over to our house all the time! But she was not so enthused. That romance didn’t survive past the high school graduation summer.

She did SO WELL at Atherton that she was admitted to Smith College.

In late summer of 1958 we packed up the Chevy and delivered Milly to Northampton MA. It’s humid in Louisville in the summer of course, but there was something stiflingly uncomfortable about the humidity in central Massachusetts that June that I still remember!

Timelime and a note on the last decades

• The timeline below is to help me keep track of events.
• You will notice some important dates missing in the last few decades …
  • When did she marry Sigmund ?
  • When did they move to Florida?
• I decided to publish this without those dates.
  They will be easy enough fill in later if they turn up.
• So here we go:

1940	born in Cleveland, April 19, 1940
1941	Army moves the family (no me yet!) to Long Beach
1949	The war is over, Army moves the family back to Missouri
1954	My mother, sister and me move to Louisville. She starts 9th grade at Atherton High.
1958	Graduate Atherton in June. Start Smith College in September.
1961	A.B., Smith College in June Start graduate studies at Yale in September.
1964	PhD in Art History from Yale. (I’m still a high school sophomore.)
1964?	Marry Ralph Morrill
1965	After they both got Yale degrees, he got a job teaching Architecture at Auburn U. Milly taught in the art department. They thought they were too cool for Auburn. 🙁 I don’t think I visiting them there.
1970’s	Live the bohemian life of architect and artist husband and wife in upper New York State. I’m in Cambridge then DC.
1980’s	Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo CA for a coupla years. I’m in SO Cal.
late 80’s	Ralph worked for the government of Kuwait
	Milly leaves Ralph in Kuwait, comes home, gets divorced
	Ends up in Buffalo NY, working at the Albright-Knox gallery
	Milly meets Sigmund. They get married in Buffalo. We’ve moved to Nor Cal
	They move to Florida, have some good years
May 99	Sigmund dies
2002	Milly and Johnanna at the Sawmill in Florida
2010	I visit Milly at the Sawmill – fun!
2017	Milly and Julie at Mease Manor
Oct2018	Milly dies 26 Sep 2018 (aged 78)

She’s at college, I’m still home

I don’t know know much about her life at Smith.

I was still in high school in Louisville, while she was learning the ins and outs of being a sophisticated East Coast intellectual. 🙂

• I guess she came home for the summer, but I don’t remember it.
  • We really were in different worlds:
    • grade school vs a summer stopover from the Ivy League :).
• One change for me was that most summers we headed East for our big summer trip rather than West.
  • One trip sticks in my mind, where we took a nursing buddy of my mom’s back to New York to visit her family. I
    • don’t remember she and Milly in the car together, so I’m guessing that is was a spring trip going to get her.
    • We drove from Louisville to New York with the annoying friend, dropped her off,
    • then drove on to Northhampton MA to pick up Milly.
• June 1968 was a memorable trip because we drove up for her graduation from Smith (with Honors!).
  • Louisville was hot and humid in June, we all expect that.
  • But central Massachusetts in June was so stiflingly humid and miserable (in our dress up clothes to look good for the easterners 🙂 …
  • It’s funny to me that after spending my childhood in the south, the icon that stayed with me for unbearable heat is a June in Massachusetts. 🙂

Milly moves 100 miles south and east to New Haven CT to work on a PhD in Art History at Yale University. That’s where she met her unfortunate first husband Ralph.

• I have a vague memory of the first time the my mom and I met him at a restaurant up there somewhere.
  • Me, Mom and Milly showed up together,
  • and Ralph showed up to meet everybody.
  • He had some kind of stress attack!
    • He started sweating profusely, got dizzy and knocked a table over!
    • The story later was that the stress of meeting his future wife’s high school brother and her kindly gray-haired mom was too much for him to handle.
    • That seems pretty seak to me, but I was there!
• The universe was telling Milly as clearly as it could that Ralph was bad news and she should Run Away!
  • But she didn’t, so he was part of our lives for the next 15-20 years.
• He was a licensed architect, and a pretty good one I think.

They graduate Yale, move to Auburn Alabama

They both got their advanced degrees from Yale, then headed out into the world!

The went to Auburn University, where Ralph was an Associate Professor of Architecture and Milly taught in the Art Department.

The internet tells me that Ralph was part of a design team that won an award in 1965.

A pattern of Ralph’s career is that he never stayed anywhere very long. He was an abrasive, unpleasant fellow who thought he was smarter than everyone else.

By the late 60’s he’s worn out his welcome at Auburn.
He and Milly dropped out of the academic rat race for the moment, and became more or less bohemians in upstate New York:
Antler Lake, Wevertown, NY 12886

I’ve nosed around the internet looking for records of my sister and Ralph and found precious little.

Done with Universities, live the bohemian life

He was a working architect. She was an artist.

He built a really cool cabin for their friends Barb and Vlad, a Czech fellow and his cute blond wife who was Milly’s friend from college. I still remember hanging around the campfire with them. Vlad holding his ciggie in a thumb/finger grip Euro-style, ranting about how powerful the Soviets were and eastern European politics in general.

Cooking thick steaks and drinking large amounts of red wine was their favorite entertainment. (not so bad! 🙂

For the first few years of their interlude in the Adirondacks Laura and I were still in Cambridge, so we hopped over there MANY weekends!

They were still there when we lived in Maryland and DC.
DC to Wevertown is a pretty simple 8-hour drive on 2026 highways.

Milly’s time with Ralph

Cal Poly

I don’t remember eactly why or when, but at some point they gave up life in Wevertown to return to academia.
I’ll bet a steady paycheck factored into the decision.

Ralph got a professor gig at Cal Poly University in San Luis Obispo.

We did visit them there. By that time Laura and I were in Southern California (Encinitas) so visiting them in Central California was a beautifulm scenic road trip, and great deal all around.!

I remember Morro Rock and going to the Madonna Inn. 🙂

Kuwait

As mentioned above, Ralph never stayed anywhere for very long. Whether he got tired of them, or (more likely) they got tired of him I don’t know, but after only one (or two?) years in lovely San Lius Obispo they moved on.

Ralph to take a gig as an architect in Kuwait!
… Which paid a lot better I’ll bet:)

I wish I knew more this interlude!
Was he employed by the government? What did he work on?

What I do know is that it was very bad for Milly. It was the end of their marriage, and a blow to her mental health for a few years.

They both drank, and he was emotionally abusive. By that point in his mostly unaccomplished life he might have been physically abusive also. A non-Muslim woman from a far away place with an abusive husband didn’t have much of a support network available to her in Kuwait!

Buffalo and Sigmund

Again, I wish knew more details, but Milly somehow left Raplh in Kuwait and got herself back to America and got a divorce!

For some reason she landed in Buffalo New York, working at the Albright–Knox Art Gallery
[as it was then called – now it’s the Buffalo AKG Art Museum]

In her telling she came back from Kuwait an emotional wreck. She met Sigmund Golonka In a recovery place in Buffalo.

Her memorable phrase:
he was that rarest of creatures, a nurturing male! 🙂

I know us nurturing males do exist out there 🙂 but I guess she didn’t have the knack for finding them. She was at a low point, beat up and fragile, and Sigmund found her help her get better! That’s pretty cool!

They got married and lived in Buffalo for a few years.
He had five adult daughters from his first marriage.

Buffalo and Sigmund

• We visited them in Buffalo at least once.
• We flew all the way cross country to support Milly after very rough time with Ralph.
• We were kind of surprised that she had already found a new guy!
  • That didn’t take long! 🙂
• My very specific memory is that Sigmund took me to the shoe store to get me a decent pair of shoes!
  • I was aging hippy that wore Converse high-tops and other forms of tennis shoe all the time.
  • He got me a pair of black shoes, thick soles for comfortable walking, and waterproof for making it through sloshy Buffalo sidewalks.
  • They weren’t very stylish, but I still have them and I still wear them for any kind of dress occasion when it is wet outside!

Sorry for the digression, but sharing my memories is kinda the whole point here! 🙂

Anyway after a couple of years Sigmund and Milly Golonka moved to Florida.

An unsolved mystery is that I remember a lot of daughters in Buffalo, but then when they moved to Florida, I remember a lot of daughters there also. Did some daughters move south when he did, or were there daughters in both places? I should have paid more attention 🙂

In Florida: Sigmund dies, Milly moved to the gay campground!

the Sawmill!
Outside Dade City, middle of the state N of Tampa, W of Orlando

I visited Milly there in November 2010! It was great fun!

• Big Gay Thanksgiving 2010
• I rode my little bike around! Everybody was very nice!

The fact of Milly finishing out her years as a lesbian was utterly un-explored between me and her !

That’s all on me. If I had asked, she would have told me I’m sure, I just didn’t have the emotional clarity to ask when I could have..

There were no issues, no judgement from my side. I got along with her bossy female partners at least as well as I did with her bossy husbands. 🙂

I’m totally supportive of the change and I’ll bet she was a lot happier living with the ladies that the men she had chosen.

But I DO have questions:

• Did she know it all along and just didn’t act on it till late in life?
• Did something happen after Sigmund died to change her outlook?

I’m guessing the former. I’m picturing her dabbling in hte local gay bars (not hard to find in Fllorida) after Sigmund died and she was on her own, eventually hitting it off with Johnanna (yes, that really was how she spelled it!) and moving in with her at the Sawmill.

I quite enjoyed my three nights at the Sawmill visiting her in 2010.

it’s outside Dade City, middle of the state north of Tampa, west of Orlando

From Sawmill to Mease Manor

The two links below are to my WHUFU road trip blog:

• 2010 – at the Sawmill, living with Johnanna
  • The report is sadly light on details.
  • WHUFU posts re about documenting road trip sights.
    Details of a family visit just don’t fit.
• 2018 – at Mease Manor, living with Julie.
  • The first half of this post is me looking forward to visiting my sister for the first time in 8 years!
  • A few days before I got there the news that she had died!!
  • So instead of visiting my sister I signed papers at the Cremation Society.

These two places are probably a million miles apart in lifestyle, but are only 60 miles apart on the central Florida map! 🙂

I am sure it is significant somehow that Mease Manor is less that 10 miles from where our mother lived out her last years in a different old folks home the Clearwater/Pinellas Park area.

I reminisced with her friend Julie.

I visited the Cremation Society and was handed a box of Milly’s effects to take back to California!