My Life: A Story of Resilience and Love

By Tom Delebo

MY LIFE: A Story of Resilience and Love is a memoir that celebrates the beauty of how much self-expression resides in each of us. It is an uncommon saga of unique depth that tracks eight transformative decades, beginning with circumstances that dare the imagination and that became a personal marker for Tom Delebo. From childhood, Tom put his dreams into action with fearless individualism, expressing himself in one endeavor after another, a blueprint for how to live an engaged life. He would learn, too, that fueling his relentless drive was a profound quest for personal connection and love. It has been quite the ride.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781684565351

Book preview

Part I

1

January 1, 1932

T he baby seems gone. There is no more I can do. We need to concentrate on the mother. We need to try to help her.

Those words rang true. The newborn lay listless and was presumed dead, without a trace of life, gone before it arrived, lying perfectly still on a rectangular oak table.

The mother had gone into labor the night of December 30, 1931, as expected. Although she was approaching her fortieth birthday, Rose Pollock Delebo was a strong, hardworking, and courageous woman, the eldest of eight children, and it was assumed this birth would be business as usual. Born in 1893, Rose first stepped onto American soil in June 1908 with her parents and seven siblings after a long journey from Eastern Europe, most likely Ukraine, and made their way to Langdon, North Dakota, where she eventually met her husband, John Delebo, whom she married in 1913. Rose had logged extensive miles, giving birth with a proven track record: nine births and now this expected child on its way, the tenth of what would be eleven children. She had birthing down.

Although bringing children into the world had become uneventful for the family, what followed wasn’t always glorious. Three Delebo children died before this latest pregnancy. Olga died in 1921 from scarlet fever, surviving a mere three months. William died two years later, in 1923, at the age of eight, the result of a horrifying horse and buggy accident (more on that later). Two years later, in 1925, Mary passed at the tender age of three, another scarlet fever victim. By the time the tenth was scheduled to arrive, the six of nine siblings who survived the often-harsh North Dakotan life spanned nineteen years between the firstborn and the newest arrival, although one of them later joined his three passed siblings, dying at the age of fifteen from rheumatic heart disease.

Rose always gave birth at home with the helpful guidance of midwives. Like every prior Delebo birth, the two trusty family midwives were at the ready for the latest: Sister Mary Immaculata, a Catholic nun, a.k.a. Katherine Pollock, and Marcella. Both were aunts, Marcella the wife of Uncle Peter (Rose’s brother) and Sister Immaculata, Rose’s sister. Sister Immaculata was the lead family midwife of choice.

John Delebo—a name change from Dalebeck—was the youngest of four children and the only one in his family to place foot on US soil. John immigrated to the US in 1907, also from Eastern Europe, leaving virtually nothing and no one behind. After initially spending eighteen months with an uncle in Rochester, New York, he made his way to North Dakota, where he hired out as a tenant farmworker in various towns in Cavalier County like Munich, Sarles, Wales, and Dresden before eventually settling in Langdon, where he purchased a run-down single-story shack. In 1927, he became a naturalized citizen. John was singularly focused on improving the meager family lot. Standing a modest five feet and five inches and saddled with a limp due to an old badly healed broken leg, he was nonetheless a powerful, skilled, and determined man. To keep pace with the steadily increasing family membership, in between his farm duties and whatever supplemental employment he secured in town, over time he revamped the shack into a six-room two-story wood-framed structure with double-framed windows, the beloved family palace.

The Delebos lived south of the tracks, literally south of the Great Northern Railway tracks, at the bottom of a hill, in a section many derisively called south Langdon. The rest of Langdon considered those below the tracks second-class citizens. The Delebo home sat on a corner lot on land bordered by unpaved alleys and streets, none of which sported a street name. To the west lay a sprawling pasture where the family dumped cow dung but where they weren’t allowed to pasture the cows. The family herded the cows a mile away to a pasture owned by a farmer whom John helped out now and then. The cows were the source of family milk, cheese, and butter and some revenue through sales of milk to neighbors.

Several other family homes sat on the continuous patch of dirt to the east of the Delebos and a few others on an adjoining lot farther east, each living in downtrodden structures when compared with the well-maintained Victorian homes with smartly coiffed lawns that decorated the upper-scale expanse north of the tracks. Few families at the time in south Langdon had electricity, and none had interior plumbing. The entire area of the Delebo neighborhood had two streetlights, sometimes working, sometimes not. The families in this looked-down-upon part of town tended to be large. In the 1940s, seventy-nine children of all ages and their parents, including two families with single moms, lived in the Delebo neighborhood, as well as five bachelors, two bachelorettes, three widows, and two older couples whose children had flown from the nest. Despite its rough-edged appearance, the neighborhood enjoyed a gentle harmony.

The family home was well suited for a birth. The internal layout of the Delebo house was efficient, a euphemism for small and well used. The first area upon entering was a snowshed, the closest the family came to a foyer. During the long winter months, that was where everyone shed themselves of whatever layers of winter apparel protected them from the often-unforgiving, frigid outdoors. The shed also stored wood for the kitchen woodburning stove. Ironically, the heat from the stove rarely found its way into the snowshed, which motivated the children to free themselves of winter outerwear with enthusiasm so they could make a beeline to the kitchen stove to stimulate blood circulation.

The bottom level of the house had four rooms. The snowshed led to the main part of the first floor, a large space that functioned both as the kitchen and dining area. Because the house had no central heating, that woodburning kitchen stove became the prized appliance of the house and received great attention all year around. Blackish gray and made of cast iron, it stood proud to the immediate right upon entry to the house, drawing your eyes instantly. Its flat front rose three feet and contained three sections. The middle section had a handle that opened the oven door. Each section on the front side of the oven door had two compartments, the top to place wood to heat the stove and the bottom to collect dusty particles from what got burned. The front also had a rod across the top to hang grill tool utensils. Above the three front sections lay a flat cooking grill, about nine square feet, extending to the back of the stove, which included a circular lid in the middle that could be removed for making toast. The back wall of the stove had shelving for storing additional cooking utensils and a ventilating pipe that rose straight up and through a flue in the ceiling to outside the house, where it distributed combustible gas and smoke from burned wood.

The dining area contained a rectangular oak table that provided barely enough sitting space to fit the entire family for a meal, as they often sat bunched together, shoulders, elbows, and legs touching, sometimes caroming off each other. The otherwise nondescript oak table was cast in a supporting role on January 1, 1932, as was the kitchen stove.

The dining area led to a tiny living room nestled in a corner of the house, which featured a dilapidated but popular couch and bare wooden floors. The living room had a small coal-burning stove, about five by four feet, which provided heat for the immediate area and, through openings in the living room ceiling, limited and uneven warmth to the second floor. The living room had a doorway leading to the master bedroom, where Rose and John slept and that anchored another corner of the house. The master bedroom contained a double bed sitting on bare floors, a pine chest of drawers, and a closet. The kitchen had a doorway that led to another smaller bedroom, where the girls slept. The girls’ room was situated between the master bedroom and the snowshed, adjoining the kitchen stove (which provided a little more heat for the girls).

Interior designing was not in the family budget. Every wall in the house left much to the imagination, each utterly bare. Artwork or even photographs were luxury items the family didn’t enjoy in those days. The wooden-plank floors throughout the house (save the linoleum on the kitchen floor), while rickety and squeaky in spots, did not buckle.

The snowshed included a stairwell leading to the second floor, where two bedrooms, no more than thirty-five square feet, functioned as the internal stomping grounds for the male children. The modest privilege that the boys had was that an entire wing of the house—the second floor—was dedicated to them, a sanctuary of sorts.

The family operated without electricity back then, relying on daylight and then kerosene lamps when natural light waned. The downstairs floor had two windows in the common areas, and each bedroom had a tiny window. The house had no bathrooms or interior plumbing, relying instead on a trusty outhouse fifty feet east of the house. The outside also included a pump-operated water well—dug and maintained by John Delebo—from which the family brought water into the house in buckets and kettles. There was a large haystack outside, which fed the cows during the winter. Next to the haystack stood a two-story barn with five cow stalls, a place to hang pigs killed for food, and a window for throwing cow dung into an adjoining alley. The upper floor of the barn stored the current rotation of hay to feed the cows. There was a shed for the chickens but no coop since the family raised chickens for meat and not to produce eggs. There was also a covered pigsty for the pigs. Cats roamed where cats tended to roam, often collecting in the barn to take full advantage of bovine body heat, not to mention the constant flow of uninvited mice and an occasional weasel. A few of the children had their own dogs, cats, and a goat, to top off the Delebo menagerie. All livestock were accounted for.

Underneath the main floor of the house sat a dark and damp basement, which featured a vegetable root garden and stored supplies. The basement seconded as a safe haven from tornadoes, a small risk in Langdon. At some point down the road, John added a sunporch as a relaxation refuge for Rose and an exterior white picket fence to surround the house, also to please his beloved wife.

Sister Immaculata, as everyone called her, was charged with getting the house ready for the new arrival. That included setting up the master bedroom, the planned location of the birth, as it had been for some of the preceding Delebo children, as well as creating a generally clean environment, getting necessary birthing supplies ready, such as they were then, and preparing the bed and floor with protective covering.

The birth was off limits to the children. While most of them had taken turns helping with the birth of farm animals, a human birth was an entirely different matter. This was not an occasion to press them into birthing service or even award them bystander status. Better they await the arrival of the next sibling elsewhere than potentially get in the way. And so when Rose started labor, the children at home were consigned to neither-seen-nor-heard lockdown status upstairs and another two alleys down the street to the home of Rose’s parents, Henry and Barbara Pollock.

As the night of December 30 took hold, Rose’s contractions came as expected, sending her to the master bedroom to get delivery ready for her tenth baby. John was out and about, doing various household tasks, including taking care of the cattle and other family livestock, leaving the birth, as the custom in those days, to the midwives and Rose. As with most families then, gender generally dictated family roles. Besides, this birth, like all the others, promised to be straightforward, and John had work to do.

As the contractions commenced, early labor proceeded normally enough over the first twenty-four hours or so. Once active labor kicked in, the timing of contractions became sufficiently tight, and Rose began the rhythmic ritual of pushing to the beat of the encouraging sounds of her two midwives as the tenth Delebo child lay inside in comfy confines, poised to enter the brave new world.

The process, however, hit a major snag. Rose made little progress despite enormous effort and began to tire. By the wee hours of January 1, after checking the pelvic area and birth canal, Sister Immaculata realized that the baby was breech, meaning its head was not leading the way out of the canal, as with normal births. Rather, the crown of the head was positioned 180 degrees in the other direction, wedged in snugly where it could not help and instead could do harm. In its place, the butt occupied the lead position. No one had planned for this possibility, as Rose had pulled off nine previous deliveries in textbook fashion.

Sister Immaculata moved to plan B: trying to manually reverse the position of the baby with abdominal manipulation. By this time, Rose was dazed and presumably unaware of what was happening. The abdominal work went on for hours, with no success. For whatever reason, the baby was having none of it and content to be ass-backward, as it were. A C-section obviously was not an option, and Sister Immaculata was unwilling to thrust her hands inside the birth canal, a procedure farmers often did for cattle, to try turning the fetus around from the inside. In all her midwife work, this had never happened, and she was simply unwilling to assume the risk of that route. But while she continued with the external work, she got nowhere, and worse, Rose began bleeding and had grown increasingly weak. Sister Immaculata went to alert John, who had returned to the house and was defrosting near the stove. They needed a plan C.

Sister Immaculata described the situation to John and said, with escalating alarm, John, Rose is very weak. She is getting weaker and weaker. I can’t get the baby turned around. We need help. We need a doctor. John didn’t need convincing the situation was grave. He knew his wife was tough and Sister Immaculata not prone to drama. A weakening Rose was no trifling matter.

The specific call to arms was for John to retrieve Dr. Victor Mulligan, the town’s local physician. That, however, was no simple task. The family had no telephone and no access to transportation. Also, a North Dakota winter had taken hold. The town was covered with fresh packed snow from a recent storm, and it was bitter cold. Langdon temperatures in January 1932 ranged from thirty-two degrees below zero to thirty-four degrees above. It was no comfort that the temperature that particular morning hadn’t dropped below zero as it often did. John had to brave the country-mile journey to Dr. Mulligan’s home on foot, at best a speed walk—a shank’s mare in farmer parlance—in biting cold worsened by unsympathetic windchill forces.

John did not dillydally or debate. He took off on foot immediately.

What was going through John’s mind as he braved his way on foot for medical assistance? Was his heart beating faster than what a brisk walk might normally stir during an early winter morning? While John was a man of few words and unexpressed emotions, he was toiling in unmapped lands. He had lost children before, and while losing another was obviously nothing to push aside, losing his wife, too, could be more than he could bear. Not being prone to panic didn’t mean not being capable of fear for the worst. Did each step he took along the way, alone in the frigid outdoors, fill him with unsettling concerns, or did he numb his mind from all worry to stay focused on his singular mission? And what would he do if Dr. Mulligan didn’t answer his knocks on the door? The hospital was in an entirely different direction and couldn’t be presumed a viable option as each minute that ticked off the clock lowered the odds his wife and unborn child would survive.

John finally arrived at the Mulligan home, knocked on the door, and waited. Nothing. He knocked again, more firmly. After what seemed much more time than it was, he heard footsteps. When the door opened, standing in the doorway was Dr. Mulligan, evidently still working off the effects of the prior New Year’s Eve celebration. The word around town was that its local physicians liked their liquid spirits. Indeed, one Langdon physician who had consumed too much to drink fell en route home and froze to death overnight. So you can imagine what he was like mere hours after he and others festively ushered in the New Year. Regardless, the discovery of an at-home doctor was doubtless a relief, presumably washing away some of whatever eagerness had consumed John. The additional good news was that Dr. Mulligan, who lived north of the tracks, owned a car, reducing the return trip to a fraction of what it took John to complete his vigorous jaunt.

About forty-five minutes after John left on his trek for medical assistance, Dr. Mulligan and John arrived at the Delebo home. To their surprise, there was the baby, a boy, in the arms of Sister Immaculata, wrapped in a large white towel, free of the umbilical cord. Dr. Mulligan asked Sister Immaculata how she was able to make the birth happen. She explained she simply resumed her manipulation efforts, managed to turn the baby around, and coaxed Rose into enough pushes, and voilà, out the boy came. She aided the process by pulling him across the finish line (an effort that dislocated both shoulders of the baby). That she did not yield to despair would surprise no one who knew her; Sister Immaculata rarely took no for an answer. A 1989 obituary described her as tough and a person selflessly dedicated to others, who, standing a robust five feet and two inches, rejoiced in doing little and big things for people no matter who they were. When it came to giving help, especially for family, Sister Immaculata was all in.

On the instruction of Dr. Mulligan, Sister Immaculata placed the baby on the dining room table, and there he lay, eyes closed, neither moving nor hardly breathing, and sporting a distinct blue hue. Dr. Mulligan examined the baby and announced there was nothing more he could do. He was presumed dead and was going to stay that way no matter what the doctor did. Dr. Mulligan promptly went into the master bedroom to examine Rose and, after doing so, issued a second pronouncement:

She’s in bad shape. We have to take her to the hospital. She’s in danger. There is no hope for the baby. The baby’s gone, I am sorry to tell you. There is nothing I can do for it. We need to concentrate on the mother. We need to try to help her.

He urged the family to focus all attention on Rose. She needed to get to the hospital pronto, or she would join the baby in line at the pearly gates, where, as far as Dr. Mulligan was concerned, the newborn was en route.

Dr. Mulligan and Marcella helped Rose out of the house and into Dr. Mulligan’s car. Aunt Marcella accompanied Rose and Dr. Mulligan in the car, while Sister Immaculata and John stayed behind with the siblings (still upstairs and unaware of what was happening) to wait further word about Rose. Once Aunt Marcella and Dr. Mulligan rushed off to St. Mary’s hospital, Sister Immaculata left John alone with the baby, lying as still and unresponsive as before, while she went to tidy up the master bedroom and deal with the afterbirth.

John Delebo, by nature, didn’t rattle. The guy made his way alone from Eastern Europe at the turn of the century to start a new life by himself in upstate New York and then North Dakota. He was tough and resilient. He was also a natural problem solver with an uncommon ability to focus keenly on tasks at hand. When he got dialed in that way, if you were smart, you stayed out of his way. In this moment, John knew what he had to do. He had experience reviving calves struggling to survive upon birth. Without saying a word, he left the house—with the baby lying inert on the dining room table—and returned with a sizeable batch of fresh snow filling his outstretched hands. While Sister Immaculata remained in the master bedroom, John began to rub the seemingly lifeless body with snow, concentrating mainly on the head and the neck’s carotid artery. After more than an hour, he stopped, grabbed a baking pan, wrapped the baby in that same large white towel, and placed him in the pan. He then opened the woodstove door, which had a two-foot opening, and placed the baking pan with baby tucked inside at the edge of the oven, which had been burning low the entire time. There the baby lay, like a Delebo farm chicken ready for roasting, except with a safer temperature. John sat down where he could keep an eye on the oven and waited.

As the boy baked in the oven, Sister Immaculata emerged from the master bedroom and, not seeing any life form on the table, asked what happened to the baby. John, characteristically pithy, said, The boy is in the oven. He then explained what he had done. Sister Immaculata, although taken aback, said nothing, took a wary peek at the oven to reality check what she thought she heard, and nodded acknowledgment. Plan D was underway.

The waiting began in earnest. How long did they intend to wait? What was the protocol? Was there a point of no return? It was not as if they had a meat thermometer or timer to gauge success or failure. Did it matter? Was it a nothing-to-lose proposition with only an upside no matter how long they waited? Stillness filled the house as it became pin-drop silent, save for the sporadic, soft shuffling of children’s feet heard faintly through the floorboards upstairs. John and Sister Immaculata sat in silence together, left to their own undisclosed thoughts—waiting. What were they thinking? John was always a tough read. Regarding Sister Immaculata, the smart money was she was praying.

At some point, faint murmurs could be heard drifting from the general direction of the oven. These easily could have been animal sounds, a distinct possibility on the family property. Both John and Sister Immaculata looked up at each other for a moment and, again, said nothing. Then in a flash, sustained whimpering could be heard, which quickly turned into crying, the unmistakable sounds of a newborn flexing his lungs. At that point, Sister Immaculata moved toward the oven, took out the baby, turned to John, and said, with a barely suppressed smirk, John, I think he’s done.

Indeed, he was. They removed the baby from the oven as it continued to cry and replaced the child in a deep copper boiler, wrapped in the white towel still, on the dining room table in the same spot where Dr. Mulligan had left him for dead. Sister Immaculata proceeded to clean the child. After that, she told John, We have to feed the baby. Not so fast. Rose was in the hospital, meaning breastmilk wasn’t on the newborn breakfast menu that morning. John, once again, knew what to do. He grabbed a bowl, cleaned it, and left the house. He returned fifteen minutes later with the bowl full of freshly squeezed milk from a family cow. After cleaning his hands, John dipped a finger into the pan, collected some milk, and let the boy feed off his finger, a darn decent meal in the circumstance to start things off.

The door to a new life, moments before bolted shut, had swung wide open.

Wood stove that was in the kitchen and into which I was placed by my Dad

Sister Immaculate, midwife at my birth and instrumental in the breech delivery

2

You Surprised Them

After a traumatic birth and fatherly intercession—a journey from the womb to blue silence to an oven to life—and a first taste of cow’s milk, that is how I, Thomas Raymond Delebo, entered the world and began my almost nine decades’ life journey. I lived more than five decades before I learned anything about my unusual birth. Dad never shared what happened that extraordinary day. Nor did Mom. I had assumed my birth uneventful, to the extent I assumed anything about it at all. We didn’t talk about those sorts of things; there was no point usually. Life could be rough in Langdon, like the death of a baby at birth, which happened more than you might think, or the loss of a child at any time. Take the young south Langdon girl who started to crawl under the boxcar of a stationary train as a shortcut en route to downtown Langdon—as we kids did countless times—not knowing that literally a moment later, the train was about to leave, and was killed instantly as the boxcar ran over her. Or a classmate and friend of mine who asphyxiated because she decided to stay in the car we used for a joyride one night with the engine running to stay warm on a cold summer night. Or the young boy who drowned in the off-limits reservoir where we all sneaked a swim during the hot summer days. There was no getting away from the fact that these instances were at once awful and of a piece with North Dakota life.

Closer to home, when parents bury four children, as mine did, you can be changed in ways others might not be able to grasp. Take the death of my brother William, who died in 1923, at age of eight, nine years before I was born. One day, I summoned the courage to match my natural curiosity and asked Mom about William’s death. She gave scant detail but enough to leave a pain in my heart. As she recounted, Dad was hauling bricks on a job in a horse and buggy he had borrowed and had William up high in the shotgun seat. At one point, the horse jerked, forcing Dad to attempt a sudden stop that catapulted William forward from the buggy and underneath its still-moving wheels, crushing his chest. He died soon thereafter. Mom said no