First, an apology: I don’t think there will be anything about Social Security in today’s column. But after 28 years of writing these weekly articles (that would be more than 1,450 columns about Social Security), I hope you'll indulge me around this Valentine’s Day as I spend one column sharing a couple funny stories from the early days of my 50-year-and-counting marriage to my valentine: Becky Margenau.
We met in 1973 when I left my hometown of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, to begin my first posting with the Social Security Administration at their newly opened branch office in Litchfield, Illinois. One of my first jobs was to verify Medicare numbers for a clerk in the local hospital’s billing department. That clerk was Becky Bachstein, who called me daily to verify numbers for hospital patients on Medicare. Eventually, Becky’s matchmaking boss invited me out to the hospital to meet Becky. Long story short: A few months later, we were married!
Not long afterward, I transferred to a Social Security office in Chicago. Becky and I found an apartment in the leafy suburb of Oak Park, former home to such luminaries as Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway. Becky got a job in the billing office of West Suburban Hospital, right on the dividing line between Oak Park and Chicago. And after a while, she moved from the billing department to a maternity ward. (Did I mention she was pregnant?) And the delivery of our son, Mike, in March 1976 makes for an interesting story.
After about three hours in a labor ward, Becky was finally wheeled into the delivery room. I went along. And back then, it was still kind of an experiment to have the father in the delivery room. We were in for a bit of a surprise when we got there. West Suburban was a teaching hospital, and the delivery room was actually a small amphitheater. The seats were filled with about 20 or 25 student doctors and nurses. I don’t want to get too graphic here, but imagine poor Becky, her legs up in stirrups, with a small crowd staring down at her!
Becky’s doctor was a very short, thin woman. That becomes important because the delivery was getting difficult. The doctor had to use forceps to try to deliver the baby. But being so small and slight, she simply didn’t have the physical strength to bring the baby out! We noticed concerned looks. We saw doctors and nurses huddling and talking. Then one of the nurses ran out of the room! What was going on?
We soon learned she was sent to get a “relief doctor.” This doctor turned out to be a huge woman who spoke with a heavy German accent. When she stormed into the room, she looked around and almost barked at me, saying, “Who are you?” When I timidly explained I was the father, she ordered me out of the room. I will always remember her loud Germanic command: “You vill get out ov here!”
Of course, now I was really scared. Becky later said she wasn’t worried. She just wanted things to be over with! I remember walking down the hall after leaving the delivery room when a nurse came running for me and said, “Come on back, you have a son!”
Becky told me later that the big doctor just used her heft and muscles to yank little baby Mike out. (There’s probably a more delicate way of putting that.) And poor Mike was born with a pretty ugly and not too delicate dent in his head from the use of the forceps by the Teutonic practitioner who must have skipped the “bedside manner” class in medical school!
Anyway, just a few weeks later, we'd be back in a hospital with little baby Mike—but this time in Billings, Montana. And therein lies another story.
In the months leading up to Mike’s birth, I had been trying to get myself transferred out of messy Chicago. I was essentially willing to go anywhere. And I ended up getting sent to Billings, Montana!
Mike was just two weeks old when we left Chicago. He traveled across the country in a blanket-lined chicken box in the back seat of my old Pontiac. I had picked up the box from a local grocery store before we left. The box said it had once held a dozen frozen chickens. (This was long before baby car seats were common or required.)
After a bit of a scary wintertime ride in our old car across the frozen plains of Minnesota and South Dakota, we pulled into Billings, Montana, on a Saturday afternoon. We checked into a pleasant mom and pop motel in a residential area.
That evening, our first night in Billings and our first night in this motel, and one of our first nights a thousand miles from grandmas (who knew something about parenting), Mike started to cry and wouldn’t stop. He cried and cried. And it got louder and louder, or so it seemed, what with the thin walls of a motel room. Nothing we did—from rocking him to feeding him to singing to him—quieted him down. Eleven p.m.—Mike was crying. Midnight—Mike was crying. One a.m.—more crying! What could we do?
We called our mothers back in the Midwest and woke them up. But of course, they were of little help being a thousand miles away. So at about 1:30 in the morning, we finally decided to head for a hospital.
When we got there, the emergency room waiting area was full of drunks and gunshot victims and other assorted Saturday night maladies. There is a chance that time and my imagination might be playing tricks on me, but I even think there was a guy with an arrow sticking out of his arm! Remember: We were in the Wild West!
We went to the receptionist and explained our dilemma. She tried to talk us into going back home, telling us we would have to wait around for hours to see a doctor. We told her we were desperate, didn’t have a home, and would be willing to wait.
Reluctantly, she started filling out registration and insurance papers. This was before computers were commonplace, so she was using a manual typewriter. I sat at her desk, holding baby Mike in my arms, while she typed away and Mike cried away.
But all of a sudden, little baby Mike squirmed and got a funny look on his face. And then he threw up. And not just little dribble-y baby puke. No, this was a serious case of projectile vomit! It went all over the receptionist’s desk, her clothes, her typewriter, etc. She was in shock. Becky and I were in shock. Who knows, maybe little Mikey was in shock.
The woman jumped up crying, “Oh my God, follow me!” And so we ran behind her as she scrambled to find medical help. We went right into an examining room where a doctor rushed in and checked Mike over. And guess what his prognosis was? A serious disease? A life-threatening illness? Nope. The doctor said, “He’s got a cold!” He told us it was a bad cold, pretty severe for a 2-week-old baby, but it was still just a cold. We were sure relieved. We thought our young son was suffering from some strange disease, and he turned out to have a bad case of the sniffles!
Anyway, those are just two stories from a 50-year marriage full of stories. I guess someday I'll have to write a book that’s about my life with my Valentine, Becky, and not about boring old Social Security!
