Jennifer Shepard and Linda Bauer

[00:04] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Hello. My name is Jennifer Shepard I am 51 years old. Today's date is August 14, 2024. We are located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And I will be asking my friend Linda about her grandmother today.

[00:26] LINDA BAUER: Thanks, Jennifer. My name is Linda Bauer. My age is 80. We are here in Philadelphia on August 14, 2024. As Jennifer said, we are in Philly, and my relationship to Jennifer is family and friend. So, Jennifer, you were going to have some questions for me?

[00:52] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Yes. Well, first of all, thank you to storyboard, of course. And it's remembering a loved one. So, Linda, what was your relationship to your grandmother?

[01:08] LINDA BAUER: My grandmother on my mother's side came from Sweden, and the relationship we had with her is at various times during our lives, we lived with her in her home in Cicero, Illinois, which was one of those bungalows that were built around 1890 or so. And so we shared our family, which was my brother and myself, and my mother and father shared my grandmother's home with one bedroom and a single bathroom. But we lived with her for a number of years before my father got transferred and moved to Cleveland. But we were Chicagoans through and through.

[01:55] JENNIFER SHEPARD: That's great. Wow. What is your best memory of your grandmother?

[02:01] LINDA BAUER: My grandmother was an interesting person in that she had arrived from Sweden and eventually landed in Chicago, married and had four children. And that's where the stories really get interesting. I think the best part of my grandmother is the stories that she told us. So the first of which was the way she got to America was the fact that she was a princess in Sweden. She happened to be 6ft tall at the time, she said, and she's telling this story. Tufts were little kids with big eyes and believing her. And so she said she was riding in a coach in the forest, and she was kidnapped and brought to the United States. None of which was true, but we as kids believed it.

[03:01] JENNIFER SHEPARD: That is beautiful. I'm sure that part of it is true, anyway. And you said you mentioned that she had four children. And I don't know if you want to tell us an anecdote about one of them, like something funny.

[03:14] LINDA BAUER: I think the best one. The best one is about my Uncle Paul. I'll name him. He's no longer with us. But Uncle Paul was a true character in all senses. And during his youth in Cicero, he hooked up with the gang of Al Capone, the gangster, and was part of the action that they had in Cicero. His brother had to share a room with him because it was a small house. And so what we heard from his brother was that he was Always frightened because Uncle Paul had a gun under his pillow. And he was never sure what Uncle Paul was going to do. But Uncle Paul did his stint with the Capone gang, But now none of us quite know why, what happened. But at some point in time, he had apparently done something that displeased them, and he had to ride the rails out of town and headed for New York. Never went back to Chicago during that time.

[04:22] JENNIFER SHEPARD: My goodness. Incredible. So if your grandmother were here with you today, what would you ask her?

[04:33] LINDA BAUER: I would ask her how she got the courage to come at an age of 18 or 19, to get on a boat from Sweden in, like, 1890, to come to a country that she would have known very little about. She left her family behind. She brought one sister with her, but they were a family of seven children in Karlskoga, Sweden, which was kind of a farming town. And so I think that's why after she got here and went through Ellis island, they had friends who were farmers out in Iowa. And so her next trip, I guess by rail, would have been out to the farm in Iowa.

[05:22] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Wow. That's incredible. That is incredible. So besides what you mentioned about her being a princess and being, you know, taken. What. What. What other? What other? Like, what is your most vivid memory of her?

[05:41] LINDA BAUER: I guess it would be the way she would get dressed as though she were headed to a very important event. But she was actually just going up a couple of blocks up the street to go to the lo. Meeting the Swedish women there, because there was a community of them had a lodge, and they would play canasta, and they would play Bunko, which is another dice game, and they would all get dressed up to the nines to go to the lodge.

[06:18] JENNIFER SHEPARD: What do you miss most about your grandmother?

[06:20] LINDA BAUER: I think the fact that she was understanding. I'll tell you a story that will help with this. One Christmas, when I was first in New York and my parents were still in Cleveland, I brought someone home with me for Christmas. The fellow I happened to be dating, who was of another faith and brought his dog with him. And we showed up at my mother's place for Christmas, and it didn't go well at all. And when my mother told her friends about the fact that we had visited, she never mentioned him. She just mentioned Linda came home with the dog. So we knew what that was. After it was all over, my grandmother said, you have to forgive your mother. She said she doesn't understand that you're not like her and that you need to be your own person.

[07:24] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Oh, that's Great. That happens with grandparents quite a bit, actually. Much less judgmental, that's for sure.

[07:32] LINDA BAUER: I think. I think they understand that. The situation in which my mother grew up was very different from the one I did. I mean, they didn't. She didn't go to college. I did all those things. And the world was changing during that time, too. So they were. They were fairly insulated in Chicago, and the world had opened up. People were different. People did different things, and it's hard to understand that.

[08:00] JENNIFER SHEPARD: What year was that?

[08:02] LINDA BAUER: Do you remember? Oh, I'll date myself now. It's back in the 60s.

[08:08] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Yeah, yeah.

[08:09] LINDA BAUER: So things were happening rapidly in the 60s, that's for sure.

[08:16] JENNIFER SHEPARD: So besides her living interesting and very varied time periods throughout her life and all these challenges, what do you think? Throughout her life, maybe especially here in the US Were her biggest obstacles that she was able to overcome once she got here.

[08:39] LINDA BAUER: She came from basically nothing in terms of first working out on the farm and then coming to Chicago. And she eventually figured out that the way for her to make an income and support her family was that she could do housework. But instead of just doing regular housework, she and her sister plotted a plan to get connected to the wealthiest families in Chicago and would dress in there in their black and white maid outfits, get on the train, go to Glencoe, where all the wealthy people lived. And she and her sister were housekeepers for people like, you know the store in Chicago called Marshall Fields?

[09:24] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Sure.

[09:25] LINDA BAUER: It was Marshall Fields House where she worked.

[09:27] JENNIFER SHEPARD: The house.

[09:28] LINDA BAUER: Okay, there's the Palmer. The Palmer House Hotel. She worked for Potter Palmer. And so what she was able to do then is she adopted all the things that she saw in terms of the way they held themselves and behaved and had parties and things like that. And so in her little house in Cicero, when there was an event, all the silver came out. All you would have thought you were at someone else's house. But she learned from them what to do.

[10:03] JENNIFER SHEPARD: So I guess she also had a very good sense of humor. Sounds like it. Anyway. Do you have any favorite jokes that you remember?

[10:11] LINDA BAUER: No, I think the jokes were basically all part of life and the situations that we found ourselves in. I mean, the uncle that I just talked about before eventually wound up being a steward on the Pennsylvania Railroad and had the line between Chicago and New York. And there were a lot of celebrities. I mean, there wasn't airplane travel at that point in time. So if you had something important to do in New York, you got on that train. And because it was overnight and they were Meal service. Uncle Paul was the steward on that train. And so he would come back with all these stories about the people that had been in the dining car. He would come back with. He would come back with a slew of singles that he would show to us kids and flip it so that we understood what was going on. And he would also, if the chef had anything extra that didn't get used during the time, he would wrap these big crab legs in newspaper and bring them home, and we had them as if we were eating in the dining car. So life was colorful and fun, and that's where I think the humor comes from.

[11:31] JENNIFER SHEPARD: That's beautiful. That's great. Well, those are funny moments. Do you have any other. I don't know, any other stories you want to share?

[11:42] LINDA BAUER: I don't think so, other than. I still think back to the fact that she left her family when she did. And one of my cousins went over and did meet one or two of the brothers who at that point were like in their 90s. And one of them opened his hand and he said, this is the coin that Maria gave me when she left.

[12:07] JENNIFER SHEPARD: So they hadn't seen each other since she was 18?

[12:10] LINDA BAUER: No.

[12:11] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Ever?

[12:12] LINDA BAUER: No. Again, I mean, they would airmail each other back and forth, but you didn't have telephone connections the way we do now. No Internet, no anything like that. So it was. You'd mail a letter and you'd wait for a couple of weeks for somebody to respond. And it wasn't quite like the pony express, but it certainly was different and slow.

[12:34] JENNIFER SHEPARD: And if. That. If, you know, if communications were hard, I can imagine traveling back and forth from one end to the other was probably more difficult. So they didn't see each other?

[12:45] LINDA BAUER: No, she never went back.

[12:48] JENNIFER SHEPARD: She kept in touch with her sister that was in the US as well.

[12:51] LINDA BAUER: Her sister was. Yeah, her sister was in the US and stayed in Chicago. So it was really. We had a family that was tight knit for a while, while we were still there, because three of them, my mother, her sister, and her one brother, stayed in Chicago for that period of time. And so all of the holidays and all the events. Oh, I'll tell you one funny story, which is my father, who was not used to a nuclear family like that, where everybody gets together all the time. And I remember him saying to my mother, as we were getting ready for one party one time, he said, will all the goddamn relatives be there? She said, that'll be enough. Yes, of course they will be. And have a good time. But, yeah, he never quite adjusted to the fact that if you invited one, you got about 30.

[13:57] JENNIFER SHEPARD: It's amazing how she was able to configure and produce all of her descendancy and have all of these relatives. As your father would say that I think that's wonderful. And to create a family out of two sisters that came on their own, that's pretty amazing.

[14:15] LINDA BAUER: Yeah, yeah. So it was, it was, it was an opportunity to be part of a clan.

[14:20] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Yeah, it's really cool.

[14:21] LINDA BAUER: Which was very cool. Which was fun.

[14:23] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Do you miss that?

[14:24] LINDA BAUER: Sure.

[14:24] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Yeah, sure. Of course. You? Yeah. And how old were you, Linda, when she passed? I think you told me.

[14:31] LINDA BAUER: College. Oh, yeah. Would have been in my 20s, I guess she was 95.

[14:36] JENNIFER SHEPARD: So you had her around for a while.

[14:37] LINDA BAUER: That's good. Yeah, yeah.

[14:39] JENNIFER SHEPARD: That's wonderful.

[14:39] LINDA BAUER: Eventually, when she couldn't live in her own home, she came to my mother's place in Cleveland. And so when I went to school, she moved into my room.

[14:49] JENNIFER SHEPARD: And I'll just have this room.

[14:52] LINDA BAUER: So that's. I mean, that's what family is.

[14:54] JENNIFER SHEPARD: That's great. That is great. Well, I really love that. I don't know if you have any other things you want to share.

[15:03] LINDA BAUER: Probably not publicly.

[15:05] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Okay.

[15:07] LINDA BAUER: I think we've exposed enough of the family at this point in time, but I'm curious to know more about. About you, Jennifer.

[15:15] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Okay.

[15:16] LINDA BAUER: And, and, and your family.

[15:19] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Sure, sure. I guess we could talk a little bit about that. And we're remembering our. Our long lost loved ones, so that's important. Yeah.

[15:29] LINDA BAUER: So who would you like to talk about?

[15:32] JENNIFER SHEPARD: So on this occasion, and maybe we'll get more occasions, I would like to remember my dad. Yeah.

[15:42] LINDA BAUER: What? Tell me and tell them who are listening to this more about him. What was he like? What did he do? That kind of thing.

[15:52] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Thank you. What was he like? He was super funny. He had an amazing sense of humor. I always remember that about him. And where was he from? He was from Boulder, Colorado. So he grew up. And he was a very. I remember asking him, dad, what's a hippie? And he's like, oh, no, hippies now. I was a beatnik. I'm like, what's that? And so he, like, tried to explain, you know, he's like, you know, we love nature and mountain climbing and we love wearing black turtlenecks. I was like, okay. So that was back in the. What was that? Like, 60s? Definitely 60s. Yeah. So he was, he was very. A very laid back, very American kind of guy. It's interesting because later in life he married my mom, who came from the other side of the world, as most people do, I guess. She's from Bolivia. So he was a mountain climber. Mountaineer. And he loved the Andes and the Bolivian mountains. So much so. And he had been all over, you know, Asia. So anyway, he joined the Foreign Service, the U.S. foreign Service, to be able to kind of. I guess that was his excuse, travel around. So he became a diplomat and he traveled around a lot and was very good at his job. But what he most loved was the mountains and climbing and, you know, getting my mom involved into all that. So.

[17:23] LINDA BAUER: Yeah, he sounds like a very interesting person.

[17:30] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Yeah, he was.

[17:31] LINDA BAUER: And what's your best memory of him?

[17:34] JENNIFER SHEPARD: I don't know if I have one best memory. You know, it's hard when you get asked that because you kind of have to choose. I mean, I had him with me till I was about 21. I just remember funny things. Like, I would be in the kitchen, like, you know, getting mad about something pertaining to school or whatever, and he'd come in and he was always funny about it. He was always like, don't worry, you know, it'll be okay. And he was always going on how everything would be just fine. So, yeah, I miss that.

[18:09] LINDA BAUER: Was he always that positive?

[18:11] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Yeah.

[18:13] LINDA BAUER: That's great. Yeah, that's great. That definitely makes a difference. So what do you remember most about him?

[18:29] JENNIFER SHEPARD: He liked to draw. I mean, besides the whole mountain climbing thing. And he would always draw teddy bears and, like, cartoons, and he loved to do, like, cartooning. And so he had little, Like, I still have those, like, little cartoons about the family. And it was funny. Yeah. Yeah.

[18:51] LINDA BAUER: So. So when you think back, and I can see you smiling now, anyway. But what are. What are the very special things that bring a smile?

[19:04] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Yeah, just his sense of humor and how he projected that onto everybody else, besides the cartooning. He had a lot of, like, little things he would chant. So when I would be in a bad mood, and I always do this to my kids as well, is he would sing a song. I don't know if you heard about. You've probably heard the song. I'm sure it's. Everybody knows it, but it goes, nobody loves me, Everybody hates me. I'm going to eat some worms. You know, he would go on, big, fat, fuzzy ones. Long, slim, slimy ones. And he would always have that kind of, like.

[19:37] LINDA BAUER: He had verses.

[19:38] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Oh, very long ones, too. Yeah. I was like, okay, so, yeah, A.

[19:44] LINDA BAUER: That's. That's great. Do you have any favorite jokes he would tell?

[19:48] JENNIFER SHEPARD: I definitely think that was one of them. Pretty funny. Would always get me in a really good mood. I don't remember any, like, particular jokes, though. Yeah.

[19:57] LINDA BAUER: And so you said that he was with you till he was. Till you were 21 or so?

[20:03] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[20:04] LINDA BAUER: Can you talk about what happened?

[20:06] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Sure, sure. I mean, it's good. It's good for it to go down in history somehow. So he had retired in Bolivia, and we were all living there because my mom's family is from Bolivia, my family. So we had all, you know, I had graduated from school there, and we were all there in Bolivia. It was like his second year of retirement, official retirement. And he was doing what he loved, which was, on the one hand, cre. He created or started a startup about mountain clothing. Mountain Mountain earring clothing line. And he would, you know, he started a little bit of exporting with, you know, places like Aspen and stuff like that. But on the other side, when he wanted to have fun, he continued to do his mountaineering, climbing, you know, hiking and skiing out in the Bolivian Andes, where pretty much no one goes. I mean, there's, like, very little. It's virgin country there. It's, like, completely not habitable, so it's difficult to access. Very difficult to access. And we're talking about peaks that are around 25,000ft high. So he would go down there and take a lot of, you know, other American climbers down there and take them on tours and things. And he would go down every weekend and he would, you know, he went through really harsh mountain storms and things like that. So one day it was. I think it was a Thursday or Friday. I don't remember. It was really. There was like a really bad storm on one of the most remote areas of the Andes called the Kim Sa Cruz mountain chain. And so he got a. The embassy. The U. S. Embassy got a phone call saying that three, you know, U.S. citizens, three U.S. citizens were stranded out in the high Andean mountains and that they needed, you know, they needed him to go and help because, you know, not a lot of people knew how to actually get to those places. So they were setting up a mission of him and two other people from the embassy to go. So I remember at night, he's like, I have to go. I'm like, don't go. Oh, I'm gonna go. So I'm like, don't go. Just, if you go, you drive. Because I knew he was very good at driving through these areas. And he's like, okay, promise I will. And I'm like. And if you see, it's really Bad. Just turn back. He's like, okay, I promise I'll turn back. Don't worry. It'll be fine. Unfortunately, the next day, my mom and I got a phone call from the embassy saying that, unfortunately, there had been an accident, and the whole vehicle that they were driving in had plummeted. I don't know how to, like, a thousand, like, 200 meters down the mountain, and that the other guy survived. They were all, like, badly wounded, but he had not survived.

[23:06] LINDA BAUER: Oh.

[23:07] JENNIFER SHEPARD: And I was like, where was he sitting? And they're like, oh, in the passenger seat. I'm like, oh, he was sitting in the passenger seat. So.

[23:14] LINDA BAUER: So he wasn't driving?

[23:15] JENNIFER SHEPARD: No, he wasn't driving. He wasn't driving. So that happened. And then they had to, you know, go out and rescue and, like, they sent helicopters down into the Kimsa Cruz, and they had to talk with the local people that were, you know, a lot of villages there, like, to try and access this very difficult location to access. So, yeah, it's. That was. That was what happened. That was in 93. Wow. 92. Sorry, 1992.

[23:46] LINDA BAUER: And you. And you were living. You and your mom were living in Bolivia at the time.

[23:50] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Yeah. And my mom had just. She was a politician, but she's a Bolivian politician, not a US So she had just been promoted. Not promoted, given this really important. What is it called, you know, a position. Position in the government that had to do with immigration and all that. So she was super happy. This had happened, like, two days before, so she was, like, happy. She's like, don't go. We have to celebrate. And then. Yeah. So we were living there. She continued to do that job. But it was hard. It was hard because obviously we had to switch plans around a lot. My brother was, you know, hadn't finished high school. I was in my second year in a Bolivian university because my dad wanted me to have that experience. And I was supposed to be traveling to the US Next semester to go to college here. So that didn't happen. And I stayed with my mom and my family, and it was. Yeah, that's what happened.

[24:49] LINDA BAUER: And here you are raising a family in Bolivia.

[24:53] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Yep. Yep. Because I'm half Bolivian, and so I married, you know, a Bolivian guy, and I have my three kids who I love and created a little bit of family the way your grandmother did. So. Yeah. Yeah.

[25:06] LINDA BAUER: And you've got one heading to school in the US as you had planned.

[25:10] JENNIFER SHEPARD: That's right. He's off. He's. He's got to go off to a good college. And he's, you know, gotta do his best.

[25:17] LINDA BAUER: This cycle goes on.

[25:19] JENNIFER SHEPARD: The cycle goes on, Linda. We'll see what he has to say in a few years. Yeah.

[25:28] LINDA BAUER: So that is. That is so cool. That is so cool to watch. To watch it from the beginning.

[25:35] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Yeah.

[25:35] LINDA BAUER: To the next generation. Sorry, but I think. I think this has really been fun.

[25:44] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Yeah.

[25:44] LINDA BAUER: Although you can hear it in my voice, but.

[25:48] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Yeah. Yeah.

[25:49] LINDA BAUER: So thank you, Jennifer, for doing this. I really appreciate it.

[25:52] JENNIFER SHEPARD: Well, thank you, Lindy. You know how much I love you.

[25:55] LINDA BAUER: The same here it.