Go back to Charlotte Thearle: A Woman Led Them.
It didn’t happen overnight. By the early 1930s, the national economy began to slide into rigor mortis. Advertising budgets are naturally one of the first casualties, and Henry’s agency lost practically all its clients. After it had to shut its doors, Henry moved all the files into the basement of the house on Kenwood Avenue and dedicated his life to paying off creditors. Most of the banks failed, taking their savings accounts with them.
Sandy remembered the biggest changes as being the ones he saw in his parents:
The Great Depression was not just an economic low spell, it was an earthquake which changed my family’s interpersonal relationships. From 1930 on, my father’s health was wrecked. He had always been confident, fast moving, jovial, out-going – a gifted mandolin player, singer and actor. Suddenly he was none of these things.
My mother, who had been a bored housewife, became a dynamo who led the family, determined that the kids would get educated to the “better things” even if she had to work… the real hero of the period. Her energy was boundless… she gave singing lessons, and speech lessons. For six months, she worked for the Wurlitzer Music Company flying around the US opening stores. She worked for a correspondence school teaching public school and instrumental music (you must remember how relatively few women worked back in those days).
Sandy Sulcer, Draft of a letter to Merideth Sulcer
Even as Charlotte began living up to the leadership role implied by her old school motto, she also managed to keep composing. She performed for a women’s club in Hyde Park an original composition, accompanied by a friend on the violin. She set the poems of the minister of First Baptist Hyde Park Church, Rolland Schloerb, to music and arranged women’s voices to be sung “a capella” – a piece she called Silence and Exaltation. That same year, she performed a holiday cantata that she wrote for the occasion at Bond Chapel on the University campus (her daughter Eleanor – my Aunt Teen – was an usher for the event).
With the family’s reduced circumstances, everybody had to pitch in. Hap joined the ROTC to save tuition and juggled odd jobs, from driving an ice-cream truck to spraying insecticide. When the family took in boarders for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, young Sandy gave up his bedroom and slept under the dining room table.
He remembered his father Henry brooding over his old client files in the basement. Looking at these with his father sparked Sandy’s later interest in advertising.
As Chicago gradually climbed out of the depression, the advertising business finally started making a comeback. A new agency named Lane, Benson and McClure was organized in 1940 by old associates, and they brought in 59-year old Henry. It didn’t last, however, perhaps due to Henry’s fragile health. Within two years he was spending his days back home in Hyde Park, or in Lakeside, Michigan, as the family had given up the Lake Geneva property during the depression.
Toward the end of her life, Charlotte was plagued with anxiety and phobias, including a fear of birds, and had to spend time in the country for “rest”. They gave up their house and spent their remaining years living with Sandy, then an undergraduate at the University, in a small flat in the Windermere Hotel near the lake, one of the darkest times in Sandy’s memory.
Towards the very end, they moved up to Winnetka, just north of Chicago, leaving Sandy to fend for himself at the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity house. Henry died in December 1947 at the age of 66. They were a very close couple, and Charlotte survived him by a mere week. With this doubled shock, their children buried them side-by-side in the Thearles’ Mount Greenwood plot, Charlotte being the last of her family ever to be laid to rest there.
Although there will be much more to explore about their ancestors, and the families that sprang from them, this is the end of my narrative about Henry and Charlotte themselves.
Perhaps this story seems to end in anti-climax: that after all the journeys, characters, and experiences that came together to form this family, it winds down in a few short years with their mutual decline in health and economic fortune. I would like to think that they knew that in their children, the spark of those special years was alive and well and would be passed on, even though they did not live to see their many descendants spread out both East and West from the Chicago Sulcers to form creative (and often musical) families of their own, many of whom may not have even known the source of this legacy.
Go back to the Family History page.
Sources
- Letter to Merideth Sulcer, 11 March 1997, used with permission of Sandy Sulcer
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, Library of Congress, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1934
“U. of C. Settlement Vesper Service on Dec. 13 and 14”, Hyde Park Herald, 8 December 1933, p. 1 - “Lane, Benson, and McClure Organized in Chicago”, Broadcast Advertising, Sept 15, 1940, p. 69
- recollections of Sandy Sulcer shared with me
