Chapter Sixteen
That year Theron’s twin daughters, Arlene and Evelyn, were born. It was a shock adding two babies to the family at the same time, especially with the ongoing Depression. Theron was lucky to be employed, but money was tight. To stretch their budget, he started doing some semi-professional wrestling. Matches were held at the Avalon Ballroom, close to where Uncle Frank and Aunt Hattie lived on Copeland Avenue. Lila was never allowed to go (it wasn’t a place for young ladies), but she heard about it from Lyle and Cecil. The large ballroom had tiny lights in the ceiling, making it look like a sky filled with twinkling stars. Although Theron rarely won—Lyle complained that the matches were fixed
—he was strong and fast enough to be a solid competitor. He wrestled until 1937 when the Avalon closed due to a fire.
Those years were mostly a blur to Lila: endless days of cooking and dishes and laundry and going to school. But they were also marked by a string of tragedies. In 1936, Theron and Borgny had another daughter, Norma Jean. It should have been a happy event, but their father was still barely working, and their mother had become a recluse. Veda was constantly worried about the family’s finances. To earn cash, she started taking small jobs outside of the house, such as helping an elderly neighbor with the laundry or watching the neighbor’s children after school. Lila had to pick up the slack on the household chores, but she didn’t mind. Someone had to pay the taxes and utilities. When she was sixteen, Theron taught Veda how to drive. They didn’t have another car, but sometimes the neighbors would hire her to run errands with theirs—for example, to drop them off downtown and pick them up after a day of shopping. It was easy work, but the good fortune didn’t last very long.
One day, Veda was driving Mr. McCune and four of his grandchildren downtown for a performance at the Rivoli Theater, when another car sped through the intersection and crashed into them. The oldest grandchild, Lois, was thrown out of the car, fracturing her arm and skull. They were all badly bruised and shaken. Veda refused to go to the hospital and started walking home; by the time she walked through the door, she was sobbing. Although the accident was not her fault, it brought back terrible memories of the day Earl was killed. Veda stopped driving; in fact, she never drove again. Later in life, she would claim that she never knew how.
Lyle also had an accident. One Saturday he borrowed the truck from Theron and was on his way to pick up a date so they could go to the movie theater. Just two blocks from home, an elderly man stumbled into the road and Lyle was unable to avoid hitting him. The newspaper noted that the man had died as police were lifting him into the ambulance.
To her parents, the accidents were further proof that moving to La Crosse had been the wrong decision. Lila did not agree, but she was starting to wonder if the Slaback family was cursed. One day while she and Veda were in the basement doing laundry, she mentioned her theory. Veda’s eyes opened wide, and she said, Do you really think so?
Veda shuddered and added, Let’s try not to think about it. There’s nothing we can do whether it’s true or not.
That was also the year that Cecil became a father. The girl’s father was furious that his sixteen-year-old daughter was pregnant. They had a shotgun wedding,
and Gladys had to drop out of school to have the baby. It was an event that filled Lila with both horror and interest; she was struggling in school and often wished that she could drop out.
Notes
Since Theron was so much older than Lila, I didn’t know anything about him when I started writing this book. I learned about his brief career as a semi-professional wrestler by reading archival newspapers. Boxing and wrestling were popular entertainments in the 1920s and 1930s.
I learned about the car accidents from newspapers and did the math on Cecil and Gladys. These were not fun, family stories the Slabacks wanted to hand down to the next generation (like me); they were shameful secrets that nobody wanted to talk about. In this chapter, Lila is in her early teens. In her family’s silence, she is forming her own ideas about how the world works.
For more information, see Scott Beekman1, Jeffrey Sussman2, and Nicholas L. Syrett3.
Ringside: A History of Professional Wrestling in America (London: Bloomsbury, 2006).↩︎
Boxing and the Mob: The Notorious History of the Sweet Science (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman, 2019).↩︎
American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).↩︎