Last Sunday, Evelyn Zukowski, age 95, was busy preparing six o’clock dinner for her siblings, brother Bernard (Bernie) Mulvihill, 96, and sister Margaret (Margie) Erickson, 98.
Sunday supper at six at Evelyn’s house is a tradition they’ve carried on for 30 years.
“Evelyn started it,” Bernie said. “We do it rain or shine. One time there was a tornado in the afternoon and we still had Sunday night dinner at Evelyn’s.”
The trio are the oldest of seven children born to Susanna and William Mulvihill of Northeast Minneapolis in the early 1900s, and these three have outlived the younger four. Their extended family, which includes Evelyn’s eight children and Margie’s four, is large, and nearly all of them have lived very close to each other all their lives.
Margie said that when she married Walter Erickson they lived at 611 Madison and then moved to 615 Van Buren, where they lived for 59 years. “We’d get a new baby and move to a bigger house in the same neighborhood.”
Family members have attended St. Boniface Catholic Church since their birth. All of them were baptized there, including their mother. Beanie (Jean) Suek, Evelyn’s daughter, said that when her relatives show up for Sunday mass, everybody sits in the same seat in the same pew every week. Her late uncle, Bill Mulvihill, did maintenance work at St. Boniface for 20 years.
Evelyn, Bernie, and Margie attended St. Boniface Elementary School (where Evelyn said, “Except for the yearly fish pond and the carnival, we didn’t have any fun there. The nuns were mean.”). They went to Sheridan Middle School and Edison High School. Evelyn and Bernie talked about their favorite Edison teachers, Mrs. Tift, an English teacher, and Mrs. Buckle, a history teacher. “I really liked Edison. Bernie and I shared a locker, because there weren’t enough for everybody.”
They talked about their youth, shopping on East Hennepin at the S & L store, J.C. Penney’s, Eklund’s, National Tea, Jim’s Bakery, and the B & C Furniture store. They went dancing at the Margaret Barry house and the Nut House (the old nickname for the Northeast Neighborhood House, which is now East Side Neighborhood Services), and PNA Hall, which had Rolig Drug Store downstairs.
“We did a lot of dancing,” Margie said. “We learned dances at Logan Park and my aunt made us costumes for shows. We thought they were great, but you probably wouldn’t think so today. She used a lot of crepe paper.”
Bernie said that they all spent a lot of time at Logan Park. “There was ice skating and in the summer there were band concerts every Friday night. I remember the popcorn wagon.”
Bernie worked for the United Press before he went into the service in World War II. He was a messenger who delivered news copy and worked on the teletype machines. He got drafted when he was 21 and served 45 months in the medical section attached to the Air Force. He traveled to England, North Africa and Italy as a medic. “I didn’t see any combat. We took the wounded off of B-17s.” After the war he worked at Grinnell Wholesale Plumbing Supply as the head of the billing department for 24 years. He also worked as an accountant for the Catholic Aid Association in St. Paul for 16 years.
His sisters reminded him of the time he bowled a 300 game at Holy Cross bowling alley and was awarded a big ring. He bowled in St. Boniface’s bowling league with his brother Bobby, with whom he shared a house for many years at 216 8th Ave. NE. “We hosted Christmas Eve dinner for the family for 55 years, in a four room duplex. The highest number we had was 65, it was standing room only,” he said.
Evelyn and Margie talked about hot summer nights, before anybody had fans or air conditioning. “You’d take your pillow and your blanket and go over to Sheridan School. There was a big grassy hill, and we and everybody else would sleep outside,” Margie said.
What did they do for entertainment? Bernie said he walked to baseball games at 30th and Nicollet. “If we had a nickel, we took the streetcar.” They went to movies at the Ritz and Princess Theaters in Northeast. “It cost a nickel or a dime to get in, and we watched a lot of cowboy and Indian movies.” Bernie played softball, golf, and tennis at Logan Park, and went swimming at John Ryan Baths and Lake Calhoun.
When asked about their jobs, Margie said that she worked for a while as a waitress at My Place Bar, “but that was not my calling.” A stay at home mother, she went to work at Dayton’s after her children left home, where she stayed for 22 years. “I made those little shopping plates. They were the early credit cards.”
Neither she nor Evelyn ever drove a car; they said they have been walking everywhere all their lives.
Bernie’s first car was a 1929 green Nash. “It was real fancy,” he said. “It was the first car in our family.”
Evelyn raised her eight children, ages 1 to 17, alone, after her husband died when he was 42. She was a teacher’s aide at St. Cyril, the librarian at St. Boniface and a secretary at Holy Cross School, where she worked until she retired at age 80.
Beanie and her sisters Barbara Bishop and Marilyn Manly all showed up for dinner at Evelyn’s last Sunday night. Beanie said that Aunt Margie, who used to share some of the cooking, had been famous for her pot roast and dumplings. The family typically celebrates holidays together. There might be 25 or 30 people, for instance, gathering at Evelyn’s for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Other dinners are “just lots of meat and potatoes and vegetables,” Beanie said.
“Everybody gets along so well,” Barbara said. “I think the secret is that we don’t drink. We laugh a lot, play bingo, and go to Hinckley. We all like each other.”