Eva Marie Michalski, 1934–2020
Celebrating the arc of her life
My mom passed away recently from complications after a stroke, after 86 years on the planet that started out pretty bumpy — particularly her family’s getting out of Berlin in 1939 when she was 5 — soared for a good long while during her best years, then slowly lost altitude.
In this time of Coronavirus pandemic, Eva’s passing was peaceful and had little to do with the virus, aside from its interfering with my in-person visits and our outings to see the world. In that we were lucky.
As my parents’ only child, having no kids of my own, I’m the end of this tiny branch of the tree of humanity, so I wanted to chronicle my mom’s life as an honest tribute to her time with us. Someday I’d like to write something similar for my dad, who passed away in 1983, as well as something more autobiographical.
We’re very lucky my dad was a good and frequent photographer, a love and skill he passed on to me. He took most of the photos you’ll see in this post and in this album online. If you’d like some mood music while you read this post, I’ve created this YouTube playlist of my mom’s favorite tunes that you can play in the background.
Let’s begin this story of Eva’s bell-shaped life at the top of that bell, then go back to the beginning, and wrap with her final years.
Glory days
At her peak, in Peru and Argentina, Eva was a glamorous hostess living an expatriate executive wife’s life. Her husband, my dad Jack, was the senior American in country for US construction and engineering firms, mostly in South America.
We had a privileged, expat lifestyle. As our homes got nicer, we had servants. We threw very nice parties. I think Dad had a chauffeur at one point. Mom was often the life of the party.
At the peak of this period, Jack might call Eva mid-day at the Los Incas country club, where she was playing bridge, and tell her that eight people were coming to dinner. She would call home, set the menu, then stop by the hairstylist on the way home. They would come home, dress up and entertain in style. The heavy lifting would have been done by Guadalupe and Teófilo. I have a few great memories of them.
Somewhere along the way, Eva took an Ikebana course and absorbed it perfectly, becoming a magician with flowers for the rest of her life. I have good memories of going with her to florists in Lima and Buenos Aires, returning home with armfuls of flowers, and watching as she spent an afternoon transforming them into art around our home.
One day in Lima, Eva and Jack went to the hipódromo (horse races; it may have been their only time there). They discovered at the gate that ladies were expected to wear dresses to the races, but Eva was in a chic pantsuit. Undaunted, the story goes, Eva went to the restroom, took off the pants and rolled them up, put on Jack’s blazer and they headed on in. This photo is from that episode.
Not bashful about voicing her opinions, Eva wrote letters to the editor to the US news magazines of the day: Time, Newsweek and Fortune. Occasionally, one would get published.
Eva had style: she was chic, and I don’t know where it came from. Her parents didn’t have it, and I don’t know of any friends of hers who did, but Vogue and Bazaar magazines were always on our table, and Eva always aimed to look like her inspirations, Audrey Hepburn and Princess Grace. Eva would visit her seamstress with a few pages from the fashion magazines, and a few weeks later, voilà: fashionable new outfits.
Her chic extended to interior decoration. She discovered Knoll furniture, and had a bunch of it shipped to Lima. So I grew up with Eero Saarinen’s gorgeous (and functional!) pedestal table and Tulip Chairs as our dining set. His extremely comfy womb chairs and Harry Bertoia’s Diamond Chairs graced our living rooms.
This would be cool enough, but there’s a twist. We rented three homes in Lima in the decade we were there. At one point, when we were in the second home, Eva accompanied a friend to see an open house that was out of town a ways, with no intention of moving. It turned out that the owner of that house, Graziella Laffi, had a store downtown where Eva had previously bought a chess set (which I still have). They hit it off and got talking. (And holy beans, I just Googled Graziella for the first time!)
As a result, Graziella sort of invited herself over for coffee, possibly to see how Eva had decorated her home. It looked like this, but there was a hitch: the rent Graziella was asking was twice what we were paying in San Isidro. Unexpectedly, Graziella offered to rent her place to us for the amount we were already paying — half of what she was asking. She also offered Eva the use of any antiques and decorative items that were in the house (it was stuffed with them); the rest we could put in storage. So our last house in Lima, the Laffi house, was spectacular, and beautifully decorated.
Eva and Jack were in many ways opposites, but they were a perfect match to create the perfect party. Mom had the decorating instinct; Dad could make anything, beautifully. Both of them were great conversationalists. He also stayed up late, with me, making party-tune mixtapes from the radio, using his TEAC reel-to-reel tape recorder.
The party I remember best was in the Laffi house, with a Charlie Brown/Peanuts theme. Jack was a very good artist, so he drew and cut out life-sized images of the major Peanuts characters, and we scattered them around the house and grounds. Charlie Brown greeted guests at the door; Lucy and Pigpen were out in the yard somewhere. I remember over one doorway was a great rendition of Snoopy being shot down in his imaginary Sopwith Camel, yelling “Curse you, Red Baron!” The hand in the art could have been Charles Schultz’s (alas, I haven’t found any pictures of this event).
Alas, the situation in Peru got worse and worse. We were lucky to leave when we did: soon after, it would turn into decades of Shining Path attacks, petty crime and corrupt governments. Jack found a new job based in Buenos Aires, where we lived for two years.
Our life in BA was also very social, though without a country club. It did feature one very memorable event that occurred a couple months before we left, because Argentina, too, was falling into chaos.
One afternoon, as we were entertaining a couple in our back yard, a man came walking up our driveway. Jack went to find out what he wanted, and the man pulled out a handgun. He and his four teammates ushered us all into the house, then into our basement, where the lock didn’t work, so one of them sat on the stairs guarding us, revolver in hand.
At one point, I remember the guard aiming his revolver at my dad, in a menacing gesture. Then Eva started talking with him. He had a crucifix dangling outside his shirt, and she commented that the crucifix and the gun didn’t go very well together. He tucked the crucifix inside his shirt. She asked why a nice guy like him was out pulling armed burglaries, and he related how they were too far down that path already: the police would shoot them on sight.
There’s more to the story, but the police arrived promptly — three hours after we managed to call them. When we were at the police station later, we ran into another family that had been burgled by men who they described were laughing, wearing women’s wigs and sunglasses: Eva’s. Turns out they’d robbed five homes that night, including our next-door neighbors.
BA being a bit too hot to handle, we moved to the States, to Miami, to a very different life: no servants, no clubs, few friends, no parties. It was 1972 (or 3).
Jack ended up with a project that had him traveling a big loop that included London, New York and a jobsite in Ferkessédougou, way inland in the Ivory Coast. Mom and I moved to Berlin to live with her parents, my Omi and Opi. We were there for ten months (the Wall was still up, and I could ride a bus or U-Bahn across town for the child’s fare of 40 Pfennigs: ten cents).
One day in Berlin, Eva got a call that Jack had gone missing during the overnight train ride out to the jobsite. A day later, she got a second call that they had found him, alive. It turned out that just before turning in, returning from the restroom, he had gone to a doorway to get a breath of fresh air just as the train zigged — at 50mph. He zagged out the door, breaking five ribs and his pelvis out in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night.
Luckily, rail workers found him in the morning, rescuing him from a growing number of vultures circling above him, coming lower and lower. Every time he told the story, there were more vultures and wild animals, and the adventure got livelier. Eva joined him in Abidjan for three months of convalescence, her only time in Africa.
After Berlin, we returned to Miami for another year, then Jack got a job with Fluor Engineering, so we drove across country to move to Southern California, where we all discovered tennis — especially Eva.
In Lima, Mom’s sport had been golf, often followed by a game of bridge in the clubhouse. She was more passionate about bridge than golf, and played duplicate bridge at pretty high levels until she stopped, some time around 2000. One of the other players at that level in the places she played was Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens. But I don’t remember her ever picking up her golf clubs once we moved to the US. Tennis took over, and kept Eva fit and slim until her left hip stopped cooperating in 2019.
Tennis became her anchor for the rest of her life. She was a member of several tennis clubs in different cities, and her tennis buddies were an important part of her social circle.
She was never a powerful tennis player, but she was patient and indefatigable, able to return shots you were sure she wouldn’t reach. Beware Eva’s lob. She was also very happy when on the court.
In 1976, when we were renting a house in Huntington Beach, California, Eva somehow smelled the California real-estate explosion in its earliest stages.
That year, with their life savings of $5000, plus $5000 they borrowed from Omi and Opi, my parents bought a house in Newport Beach for $72,000. Yes, $72,000. Before moving in, we painted the interior and customized a few things. Then Jack went back overseas for work, as he did for much of the last decade of his life. We would see him for maybe a month a year, usually around the holidays.
That house in Newport Beach doubled in value in a year, and Eva went to the bank, got a second trust deed on the appreciated value, and bought a second place. Then a third. By the end of this era, she had bought, and was managing, five properties in Orange County. We had occupied each of them in turn. At one point Jack returned from overseas to find us living in a completely different home.
In 1980, we moved across country again to McLean, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC, so Eva could work for the CIA at their headquarters in Langley, a job she had applied and interviewed for in California. She did a good job of telling me very little about that job, though it was a strange feeling to drop her off at the front entrance to the CIA now and then. She did mention that at the end of every day, everything had to be cleared away and put in safes, including the ink and correction ribbons in their IBM Selectrics.
Then, in 1983, Jack died suddenly, and Eva’s whole design slowly unraveled. Jack had been diagnosed with multiple kidney stones during a general exam. He felt just fine and hadn’t passed any stones, fortunately, and went in for elective surgery to remove them, feeling perfectly healthy but very nervous. That night, at midnight, he died.
It took a decade, but Eva had to sell all the properties. She went through all her assets and was being evicted when she (finally) told me about her situation, in 1994. At that point, in retrospect, she became my dependent, and our futures got intertwined more than they should have.
After Jack’s death in 1983, Eva didn’t return to the CIA, but instead took a series of jobs, none of which really stuck. She tried her hand at interior decorating, but couldn’t adapt to other people’s preferences. She knew what looked best. She was an executive assistant at the Wine Institute, she sold couture dresses at Nordstrom, and she assisted a stockbroker in Alexandria — her favorite post of all.
That last job turned the glowing embers of interest in the stock market into a bonfire that lasted the rest of her life. She tried her hand as a stockbroker, but couldn’t drum up business with people she didn’t know. So she turned to people she knew, including me. And it turned out her trading skills weren’t as good as her real-estate skills.
Eva got online, and really liked it. Her first adventures were on AOL — remember AOL? — as user EvaMarieM. She spent so much time and energy jousting with conservatives in the New York Times boards on AOL that it made a small dent in the Universe: One day we went to a bookstore for a Tom Friedman book signing. Tom is a longtime NYTimes columnist. When she asked that he autograph his book to “EvaMarie,” he blurted out, “You’re EvaMarie?!” It was a good day at the intersection of cyberspace and reality.
Another sign that her labors on AOL were paying off was when someone created the username EvaMaricM, which could easily look like hers, and started apologizing for her earlier posts. We never did find out who the impersonator was, and the incident didn’t last that long. Those days sure look more innocent than our online present. Or maybe they were just the warm-up.
Over time, Eva stopped trying to find work that would take her outside her home, and she cut back correspondence with friends. She also followed me to San Francisco, then to Portland (Oregon). So let’s rewind to her beginnings, then catch back up here.
Early days
Eva’s early years were rocky, but lucky. She was born in Berlin in 1934, a year after Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany. She was apparently teased for having the same first name as Hitler’s mistress.
I knew that her family had gotten out of Germany in 1939 and ended up in Cochabamba, Bolivia, but I didn’t know how or why.
When I was 24, pestering her for more family history, Eva told me that Opi’s mother — her paternal grandmother — was Jewish. A branch of my family tree was named Horowitz. This was fully a surprise to me when she told me.
It was also a dangerous background to have in Berlin in the late ’30s. Later I found out that family members had run a Konditorei (cafe) in Berlin. As the Nazis came to power, they opened an outpost across the street from their cafe — and shut the cafe down.
None of my elders told me the difficult stories of their past. They wanted me to have a happy childhood. As I became an adult, I didn’t press them for details, which I regret to this day.
I know little about how they got out of Germany, but piecing together some documents and the few stories I do have, it seems that Opi worked the German bureaucracy to get official permission to leave the country, right at the time that most borders worldwide were closed to people without sponsors.
The document you see here is a certificate clearing them to emigrate. If you look closely to the left of the signature, you’ll see the stamp has a swastika.
The document also lists their home address in Berlin at the time, which turns out to be walking distance to the famous Charité hospital. (I highly recommend watching the German video series dramatizing Charité’s history.)
The family traveled on two ships out of Hamburg (Opi travelled alone; I imagine he had much more trouble getting out) and somehow met up in the Caribbean, then somehow got to Cochabamba, Bolivia. They managed this before mobile phones, never mind that they no longer had fixed addresses and couldn’t speak the local languages when they arrived.
Apparently, my family was aided in its escape by the Germany Emergency Committee, a Quaker organization formed in 1933 to help Germans leave Nazi Germany. I only know this because I’ve been mapping my family tree in Ancestry.com, and their databases yielded the document I’ve added here. Fifth line from the bottom, you’ll see the Krauthammer family got £12 in aid.
Once in Cochabamba, they opened a dry-goods store and started selling clothes that they made.
The nerve-jangling part of their exit from Germany I discovered in correspondence from my grandfather (Opi) to the German government after the war. He was asking for reparations. In that letter, he described the two trades he knew: shoe sales and dressing merchants’ windows. Then he said he had lost his job selling shoes for being Jewish. And then he described Kristallnacht, the night his remaining way of making a living — dressing Jewish merchants’ windows — was surgically wiped out.
After reading that letter, I walked around their flat for an hour, chills going up and down my spine. I can’t imagine the terror they must have felt. I’m sure that their possible hesitation about leaving Germany disappeared then, and became a desperate search for a way out, and a place to go. They succeeded, which is why I get to write this.
At some point in Cochabamba, Omi began to suffer from the altitude, so the family moved to Buenos Aires. At that point, it so happened that the president of Argentina was married to Eva Perón. Yes, that Evita. It was inevitable (pun intended) that mom was teased there, too.
So Eva grew up in Bolivia and Argentina speaking German at home (and I think at school), Spanish with locals, then learned English in her late teens. Her whole adult life, she spoke English with a “hard-to-place” accent, which of course I could not detect.
I never did get the story of how she and Jack first met, but she was his bosses’ secretary in Cochabamba at a small engineering company named Thompson-Cornwall; I think the boss’s name was Bill Leahy.
After they got engaged, Eva flew from Bolivia to the US (for the first time), to catch up with Jack. (Another Ancestry nugget here on the left: the stamped arrivals document from Miami, which must have been her port of entry into the US.)
Jack met her in Los Angeles. She remembered landing there at night, descending over city lights that seemed to go on forever, hoping that their plan would work and she would find him at the end of this trip, because she knew nobody else.
They got married in Reno, got pregnant on their honeymoon and ended up in San Diego, where I was born. Eva, who had never lived on her own, now had a kid. Jack found engineering work in Lima, Peru, and the road from there to her Glory Days was pretty smooth.
Last days
Eva’s last years weren’t as smooth.
For the last five years of her life, Eva had increasing bouts of paranoia. In flat after flat, even as the neighbors changed, the story escalated, but stayed consistent: her upstairs neighbors wanted her flat. They could hear everything she said, and knew exactly where she was in her flat. They were making noises intentionally to disturb her, then throwing things through the floor at her, distressing her so much that she would bang on the ceiling with a broom, shout from outside and make noise in other ways to get them to shut up.
She wouldn’t countenance that this might be her problem, not her neighbors’. Eva had always feared aging, and would do no planning for it. It became my job to soften her landings. When I found her a top-floor flat, therefore with nobody upstairs to “attack” her, the plot merely shifted to her next-door neighbor.
These behaviors got Eva evicted several times, and got me friendly with the Lake Oswego Police Department, both because she called them (about the neighbors’ “intolerable” behavior), and because later her other neighbors called them after finding Eva outside in the rain in her robe and slippers, disoriented, calling out for me. Twice in one day.
I also got to know staff at the county’s department of Adult Protective Services, Kaiser Permanente’s doctors and psychiatrists, and the managers of her apartment complexes. We were fortunate: every professional who crossed Eva’s path was patient, respectful and kind.
Eva’s last year was in an Assisted Living facility in Oregon City, which had the ability to make her comfortable, and when the pandemic hit was able to keep her safe.
The other good news is that the Coronavirus’s only effect on her life was to limit her freedom of motion through restrictive lockdown conditions, as well as limiting my ability to visit with her. Also, Eva did not end up on life-support systems or in an alien environment. She had a stroke on November 15, and passed away from complications on December 5, in her own flat, surrounded by her own things. During that time, I was allowed to visit her daily, hold her hand and try to keep her comfortable.
Right up until the stroke, Eva could walk unaided (thanks to a new left hip in July 2019, courtesy of Kaiser Permanente), look chic, text with her iPhone, and hold a conversation, although her memory kept failing her. Life was pretty normal, especially given the pandemic raging outside.
Epilogue
I am left with many memories of my mom’s adventurous, elegant life, and the many ways she shaped me. I’m learning not to flinch when my phone buzzes, because it will no longer be bad news about Mom. And I’m appreciating her many gifts to me, including a carefree, privileged childhood as a towheaded gringo kid in the land of Incas, a love of grown-up conversations from a very young age, and a little bit of her sense of style.
You can find more pictures of Eva’s life in the online album I mentioned up top. If you have any to add, please send them to me. Thank you for reading through this post. It means a lot to me, and it would have meant even more to Eva.
