This is the beginning of my life story. As the third son of two Ukrainian immigrant parents who raised six children in the Greatest country in the world, I have lived the American dream. Like so many others, Iwan and Parania Dudycz arrived post World War Two, in the United States via Ellis Island in late 1949, with three small children in tow.  Sophia was the eldest, aged 3, Petro was one and a half and  baby Bohdan not quite one year old.  Mama was five months pregnant with her fourth child, soon to be named Walodymyr Wasyl (later Americanized to Walter William). I was born in Chicago’s Cook County Hospital at 8:55 p.m. on March 11, 1950. Thus, began my journey in this life.

Some of my earliest memories consist of playing in a second story apartment shared with other families, and being bathed in a tub right in the middle of the kitchen floor. My childhood was quite happy, with many memories of my siblings and I doing what most children did;  playing in the park, wrestling and enjoying each other and our family life. No one ever told us we were poor, so we never considered it. As a factory worker and machinist, Tato (our dad) held numerous jobs. He would always bring goodies home from work, whether they were slightly bruised jars of preserves from the canning factory or wooden crates for our stove from the glass factory. He once made a metal mailbox in the early 1960’s from scrap metal during his lunch breaks at Beardsley and Piper Company. That is the same mailbox that still collects correspondence, bills and advertisements at Mama & Tato’s home today.

Now Mama was (and still is) the strict disciplinarian in the family. To be fair, she was also the glue that kept the family intact by maintaining religious & ethnic traditions that required all of us to attend, no matter where we lived. I’ve always said that if my mother was born in this country, as a man, her raw talents and instincts would have made her financially and culturally successful. But, as fate had it, she was the daughter of peasant farmers, who was taken from her family in a small village near Lviv, Ukraine, in her teens, to work as a slave farm hand in Germany during the Great War. But time is a great equalizer.

This woman, who worked as a cleaning lady in an office building as well as side jobs cleaning private homes was to raise six children and see each grow up to be successful in their own right. I often chuckle to myself, thinking that my mother, who used to wash the toilets in the offices of the Commissioners of the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicagoland, lived to see many years later, the Commissioner’s successors lobbying her son, an Illinois State Senator, for legislation benefiting their jobs and industry. (to be continued)