Balancing Act: In a cardboard vodka box, decades of letters reveal a mother's life of love and loss, joy and sorrow
Ellen Smith remembers the bracelets and locket her mom wore to church every Sunday.
"Love, Bern" was engraved on the back of each one, and Smith, as a child, assumed they were an early gift from her dad, Bernard, to her mom, Gertrude. Although she'd never heard anyone, not even her mom, call her dad "Bern."
In 1973, Smith's maternal grandmother passed away. Smith was 15 at the time, and she and her two sisters spent a few days sorting through the belongings in their grandmother's little home near Holland, Mich. They discovered a box of newspaper clippings.
"You start reading them, and they're all about my mom's fiance's death," said Smith, now 62 and living in Glenview. "My mom's fiance's death! And this whole part of our mother we didn't know about suddenly opens up to us."
Her mom's fiance was Bernard Steenwyk. He served in the U.S. Army's 38th Infantry Division during World War II. He died Feb. 6, 1945, during the Battle of Zig Zag Pass, a fight against the Japanese for control of a
