Treasury of Joy & Inspiration (11 page)

Humor in Uniform

A distraught
driver was grateful when our Marine son, Jim, stopped to help put out a fire in her car. “I prayed, ‘Please let the next car stop,' and it was you,” the woman gushed.

Jim's mother was also pleased when she heard the story.

“Who would have thought,” she told him, “that you'd be the answer to any girl's prayers?”
Richard Bell

She Gave Her Father Life

By Henry Hurt

November 1996

J
eanne Szuber
groped in the darkness for the telephone beside the bed. The voice was unfamiliar as her eyes found the green numerals of the digital clock: 4:40 in the morning.
Surely a wrong number,
Jeanne thought, as she tried to make sense of what the woman with the polite Southern accent was saying.

“Heavens, no,” Jeanne said gruffly, a frown crossing her strong face. “Our daughter does not have a tattoo of a little feather on her foot. What are you talking about?”

The caller, from a hospital emergency room in Tennessee, explained that a young woman, said by a companion to be Patti Szuber, had been in a car accident. A chill swept over Jeanne Szuber. “Wait a minute,” she said, her voice weakening. “Maybe Patti does have a tattoo. She asked me if she could get one and I said no. Maybe she did it anyway. And she is on a camping trip in Tennessee.”

There was silence. Jeanne felt her husband, Chester, stirring at her side. Then the woman spoke again: “The girl's in very bad shape.”

Jeanne's body tightened as her mind held on to an image of effervescent, bright-eyed Patti, 22 years old, the youngest of their six children and one of only two still living at home. She managed to squeeze barely audible words from her throat: “How bad?”

“I'm so sorry,” the voice in the night said gently. “I have to tell you that death may be moments away. I'm so very sorry.”

Jeanne looked at her husband of 37 years. “It's Patti,” she whispered, though she knew that Chet knew. “They don't think there's a chance.”

Chester Szuber went to the kitchen, where he picked up the phone and sought more details from the hospital in Knoxville, 500 miles away from the Szuber home outside of Detroit. He learned that Patti had sustained a traumatic head injury when the car she was riding in crashed on a curving road in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

An empty misery settled over him. The greatest joy in Chet's life was his big, close-knit family. He and Jeanne cherished the sight of their four sons and two daughters prospering and starting their own families. Though Chet would never pick a favorite child, everyone knew that, to him, Patti was very special. Her high spirits and exuberance had always charmed him.

From the earliest days, Chet and Patti were so close that the Szuber children liked to joke: “If you really want something from Dad, put your hands on your hips like Patti and bat your eyes.” The jest was based on a good measure of reality, but no one seems to have resented it.

As dawn broke on that August 18, 1994, Jeanne and Chet sat looking at each other—numb, glassy-eyed, saying little, waiting for their children to arrive so they could decide what to do. Patti's elderly gray and white cat, confused by the break in routine, prowled about the kitchen. She had been “rescued” 11 years earlier from what 12-year-old Patti insisted would be a miserable life without the Szuber family. To Patti, the cat was one of the most beautiful creatures she had ever seen. And she had given it the most elegant name she could think of: Ashley Marlene. Where the name came from, no one knew.

“Am I dreaming?” Chet said to Jeanne, as Ashley Marlene, in the loaf position on the kitchen floor, looked up at them. “Is any of this really happening
to us?”

Jeanne Szuber
cradled the newborn baby, rocking her and smiling as she studied the funny little face. “Patricia Jeanne” was the name they'd chosen for her.

“She was the most beautiful baby,” Chet says. “She was so pink and good-natured, and she just kept getting prettier and sweeter for the rest of her life.”

Jeanne and Chet took little Patti home to Berkley, a suburban town next-door to Detroit. Located on tree-lined Phillips Street, the Szuber house is one of hundreds of small, well-kept homes in a neighborhood where families have known each other for generations. Jeanne Szuber grew up a block away. She speaks with affection for her neighborhood—and notes with pride that the Szuber house and the three next to it have produced 20 children.

“The church told us to have all these kids but then didn't tell us what to do with them!” Jeanne says, laughing. But it was this bounty of children—and the powerful love for them—that made the neighborhood the perfect place for Patti Szuber, her four brothers and her sister.

Chet and Jeanne were happy in their early years, but they also lived with a chilling concern. Something was wrong with Chet's heart.

For their first ten years, Chet never had a signal that he wasn't completely fit. Six feet tall and 160 pounds, he loved to play center field on a team in a men's baseball league. But when he turned 32, all of that began to change. While jogging one day, Chet's heart went crazy—“thumping and racing like it would jump out of my chest.” Doctors disagreed about what was wrong. Some even insisted that they could detect no symptoms of heart trouble.

But the terrifying spells became a regular part of Chet's life. Finally, after one particularly painful week, a battery of sophisticated tests led to a devastating diagnosis: Chet had suffered a heart attack. “Mr. Szuber,” the doctor told him, “you have the heart of a 70-year-old.”

The doctor explained that due to advanced arteriosclerosis, Chet's arteries, including those immediately around his heart, were clogged with plaque—hardened far beyond anything to be expected in a man in his 30s. The result was myriad occlusions in the arteries, leading to a heart attack.

“But how is this possible?” Chet countered, citing his healthful life-style and his seemingly good physical condition. “My grandparents on both sides lived into their nineties.”

Then Chet remembered something he usually tried to push out of his mind: his mother—perfectly healthy as far as her family could see—had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 56.

“You may have inherited your mother's heart,” the doctor said. “Whatever the cause, the point is, your heart is in bad shape.” In those days, nearly 25 years ago, few of today's medical options were available to help a man in Chet's condition.

At 37, four months after his heart attack, Chet underwent his first surgery. Over the next 20 years, he experienced many more heart attacks and five more surgical procedures.

Three times—in 1973, 1982 and 1987—Chet had major bypass surgery just to replace clogged arteries around his heart. During the last operation, he was walloped by a massive heart attack while he was still on the operating table. It was miraculous that he ever woke up.

Patti's birth in 1971, just a year before her father's first major heart attack, coincided with Chet's realization that he had a lousy heart and that he had better enjoy his children while he could. The youngest Szuber child by five years, Patti also took her place as the youngest among the Szubers' neighborhood friends.

From her first days, she was cuddled by just about anyone who came along. The other Szuber children competed to see who would get to hold her and feed her and put her to bed. Out of this arose a confidence that made Patti quite certain she was welcome anywhere—and a generosity that made her want to share the warmth and caring others had lavished on her.

When she was still tiny, she used to ride off on her tricycle to make visits around the neighborhood. While attending Pattengill Elementary School a few blocks away, it became her habit to walk home at lunch time with a friend in tow, often a child who was new to the area or feeling a little lonely.

Patti was a child who was full of affection and high spirits. She was always laughing and talking—hands moving, face smiling.

To Jeanne, one of Patti's most endearing features was that she loved to lean against her mother. Standing or sitting, Jeanne would soon enough notice that Patti—as a toddler and later as a teen-ager—was leaning on her, giving her small hugs.

In another sense, Patti also leaned on her no-nonsense, businesslike father. The son of Polish immigrant farmers in northern Michigan, Chet grew up working on the family farm in the late ‘40s. He dreamed of going to law school, but in college that dream disappeared when he met Jeanne Wood. Soon they were married.

An extremely articulate man with a heavy, squarely built face, Chet found himself well-suited to work as a salesman, and for 16 years he sold home appliances and supplies for Sears. To make extra money at Christmastime for his rapidly growing family, he began trucking in Christmas trees from Canada and selling them at Detroit's sprawling open-air Eastern Market. Soon enough, the whole family was involved—even Patti, the littlest, who worked decorating wreaths.

In those early days Chet's heart was steadily deteriorating. In 1980 he gave up his Sears job for good. His health made it impossible to continue, and he had to stay at home. By then, Patti was eight years old. Because of his illness, Chet and his daughter spent even more time together.

And nowhere did Patti and her dad enjoy each other more than during Christmastime at the Eastern Market, an Old World extravaganza where hundreds of vendors gathered throughout the year to offer every imaginable product—from fresh and smoked meats and garden produce to live chickens, ducks and rabbits. Fresh fish from the Great Lakes were displayed in large beds of shaved ice. Baked and home-canned goods, as well as all sorts of trinkets and home accessories, were for sale everywhere.

All through the usually frigid Decembers, Chet and his children sold their trees and wreaths. Like the other sellers, Chet hoped for bitterly cold weather. It helped the customers make up their minds more quickly, he always said. Patti loved the carnival atmosphere of the market—the Christmas music, hot chocolate and foods such as roasted nuts, pretzels and steaming sausages. And she loved tagging along with her father.

On Christmas Eve, when the tree selling was finally over, Chet was so tired that he fell into bed. But for Patti the excitement was just beginning. She had made sure that the Szuber Christmas tree was picked early, and she had a big say in how it was decorated.

Paul Pelto, one of the Szubers' closest friends, still remembers one Christmas Eve vividly. He arrived at the Szubers' dressed as a jolly Santa Claus, bringing gifts for the children. Standing back in awe at who was in her living room, little Patti—about four at the time—kept staring at him, smiling shyly. Pelto began to wonder if she suspected who he really was.

“Then,” he says, “she grabbed her favorite doll and ran over and handed it to me, like she wanted to give a gift to Santa before he gave one to her. That's the kind of little kid she was.”

There was
also a strong, feisty side to Patti. She refused to tolerate prejudice, fiercely defended the underdog and, above all, loved lost creatures such as the homely Ashley Marlene. This instinct became the source of many disputes between Patti and her father.

One of their biggest disagreements was about Patti's friendship with an erratic free spirit named Todd Herbst—a neighborhood boy Chet viewed as “a major nuisance.” From Chet's standpoint Todd constantly had big plans but never delivered. As Chet would say to Patti, “That kid's all show and no go.” Chet saw Todd as a shiftless young man who paraded about in outlandish clothes and wore hairstyles calculated to outrage normal people like himself.

But Todd and Patti had known each other since fifth grade. They rode bikes together, went camping and played pinball at Van Dyke Sports Center. They liked to hang out and talk at the local graveyard—always sitting on the big stone near the middle marked with the name “Gilbert.”

The two grew up together, and when they were older, they maintained their bond. They enjoyed going dancing or having dinner at one of the fancy restaurants where Todd worked as a waiter.

In spite of Patti's close friendship with Todd, Chet worried that Todd was a bad influence on his daughter. Jeanne, however, argued that Todd was another person Patti felt needed her help—like the lonely children she used to bring home from school. But Chet remained unconvinced.

What made matters worse was that Todd was at the Szubers' house often—with his hair dyed green and, later, orange. Whenever Todd would appear at the door, Chet would look through the young man and call out, “Patti, your friend is here.”

Chester Szuber was at least grateful that Todd and Patti had no romantic interest in each other. In fact Patti had plenty of regular boyfriends, but they never interfered with her durable, uncomplicated friendship with Todd Herbst—whatever the color of his hair.

Patti once explained their friendship to her mother: “When you tell a girl something, she blabs it. But I can count on Todd. He is totally trustworthy. Who could have a better friend?”

After high school—motivated by her father's precarious health—Patti went on to college to study nursing, planning to become an operating-room technician. In her spare time she earned money interning with a doctor and, later, working as a front-desk clerk at a local hotel.

As for Todd, he continued to wait on tables in restaurants, taking pride in the fact that the restaurants that would hire him were increasingly fancy.

Whatever he and Patti were doing, their friendship remained as steady as before.

Two decades after he began selling Christmas trees, Chet, with the help of his family, began turning their 400 acres in northern Michigan, where he had grown up, into a tree farm. It was Chet who plotted the growth of the trees and the development of the business. Although it was a long process, by the early ‘90s he was selling thousands of his own trees each year at the Eastern Market. But by then he was so debilitated he could get around the farm for only a few hours a day.