How Far I've Come

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In the fall of 1973, a photographer came to Mary, Queen of Heaven School to get a picture to run next to a contest-winning poem a young girl had written. Tammy Schwartz and another girl were randomly pulled out of class by the teacher to be in the picture. The photographer took the girls to a field of Black-eyed Susans just down the street from school. During the shoot, he handed Tammy a red balloon tied to a long black wire. She held the balloon while she bent down to smell a flower. The picture ran in the Kentucky Enquirer and eventually led her back to her mother.

By Elizabeth Hagedorn

  Driving down Fairfield Avenue in Bellevue, Kentucky is like driving through most small Midwestern towns along the Ohio River. The buildings are repainted to look just the way they did in the ‘70s. Small shops like Joann’s Hairstyling and Mrs. Teapots tea house fill the bottom of two-story houses. But for every booming local business there is a For Sale sign hanging in the window of an abandoned building.

            Dr. Tammy Schwartz speeds down this two lane road in her navy blue Hyundai Elantra. She knows exactly what lights to hit and what lights to speed through. After all, this is where she grew up.

“This place has changed tremendously,” she says before taking a bite of her Subway sandwich and washing it down with Diet Coke. “There it is,” she points to the right side of the road as we come to a red light on the corner of Fairfield and Foote Avenue.

It’s a two-story white paneled building. The shop sits on the first floor with two large display windows on both sides of the door. A maroon awning shades the costumers sitting on the wooden benches and says “Schneider’s Sweet Shop” in beige, cursive writing.

“We used to walk there and get ice balls. It was a summer treat. Sometimes I would get rainbow sherbet; that was my favorite.”

            The light turns green, she puts down her sandwich, and we drive one more block. Tammy pulls over in front of 612 Fairfield Avenue. She pushes her chestnut bangs off her forehead.  She tucks a lock of her pixie cut behind her ear, but it snaps right back out. Her dark blue eyes look up at the deep red brick house that sits back from the street. A long concrete path cuts through the neatly manicured lawn. It leads to five steps that open onto an outdoor porch supported by three dark red brick columns. Tall and narrow three-paneled windows with creamy yellow trim on the first and second floor overlook the front yard. A smaller two-paneled window sits near where the roof comes to a point in the attic.

“You can tell it used to be a wealthy person’s house back in the day. There’s a fire place in every room,” she says pulling her sweater tight around her stomach. The cream trim of the porch is starting to chip. The widows on the side of the house need repair. “It makes me sad they haven’t kept it up.”

            Tammy came to live in this house in 1970 when she was five years old. Just seven short years before that, her mother Mary Lions, 16, had fallen for a geeky boy in black-rimmed glasses. Charles Ryan was 19 and a senior at Newport Catholic High School. Mary was a sophomore at LaSalette High School, but the nuns kicked her out when they found out she was pregnant. Charles and Mary married before Tammy Ann Ryan was born on September 14, 1964. The couple added a daughter Angie two short years later and a son Joey two years after that.

In 1969, the young family moved from Park Hill, Kentucky to Lima, Ohio where Tammy’s dad got a job as the store manager at a Kmart. Even in a new town and a new job, Charles still struggled with his old demons. The situation became so unhealthy for the Ryan children that just after Tammy finished kindergarten in 1970 her maternal grandparents drove up to Ohio to get the kids. The Ryan children and their mother moved into the Lions’ house in Bellevue.

That is the same house Tammy sits in front of now.

            Tammy is 46. One chilly yet sunny day in March 2011, she makes the rounds of all six places she lived when she was a child. She first took this tour some sixteen years ago when she moved back from Florida where she had been working as a middle school teacher. “It was my way of saying, ‘Wow, I’ve been through a lot of crap in my life. Look how far I’ve come.”

            She holds onto the bottom of the steering wheel and looks over at the house. She pops a Baked Lay’s chip in her mouth as she admires her old home from her car.  “I loved living in that house,” she says. “Our lives were crap, but I didn’t know it.”

***

Back in 1970, Tammy shared a small bedroom in the two-story brick house on Fairfield Avenue with her mom and two younger siblings. When August rolled around, Tammy walked eight blocks everyday by herself to the first grade at Grandview Elementary. When it was Christmas time, the Lions’ household was over-flowing with family and German traditions. On Christmas Eve all the cousins and grandkids gathered upstairs as Santa delivered presents under the tree. The children heard, “Ho, Ho, Ho” and then ran down the steps, around the corner and straight to the presents.

In the summertime, Tammy was free to run around the large fenced in yard with her young aunts, uncles, and siblings. Some days she would stand in the front yard and yell the names of Mary and Helen Kern who lived next door. The rule of the neighborhood was to never knock on the front door, but to yell out the kids names until they came outside. The girls would run to the playground at the firehouse down the street. Or they would watch Tammy’s uncles Danny, 11, and Jeff, 8, race go-karts made from plywood and metal scraps in the alley behind their house.

             It was just beginning to cool down on a nice summer night when Tammy and her family gathered on the outdoor porch. Tammy rocked back and forth on the dark green metal glider that had been painted over so many times chips of paint flicked off as it moved. Her bare feet dangled over the edge of the swing. Her bangs stuck with sweat to her forehead and her brown frizzy ponytail bounced over her shoulders. Grandma was telling one of her stories to Tammy, Aunt Cathy, Uncle Tommy and Uncle Johnny. Tammy had heard this one so many times that she could tell it, but she loved listening to her grandma talk. Across the street, there was a crowd bustling into the Marianne Theater. The marquee lights shined on the front yard where Tammy’s siblings were playing barefoot in the grass, trying to catch fireflies. 

            She heard the gate shut and snapped out of her grandma’s story. Stumbling up the sidewalk was her father, Charles Ryan. He drunkenly slurred, “Mary, Mary, Mary. I’m taking those kids, Mary.” Grandma rushed the children inside as Charles approached the house. Tammy’s mother huddled in the living room. But Tammy didn’t hide. She lingered by the large three-paneled windows that stood open. She peeked through the curtains that were blowing in the wind even though her aunts and grandma tried to pull her away. She started to cry watching her Uncle Tommy, 19, try to get her dad to leave. Tommy pushed him back and told him to calm down. Tammy was thankful Tommy was there to protect them. But at the same time, she didn’t want him to hurt her dad. Finally her dad turned and stumbled away, Uncle Tommy at his back. Tammy left the window to comfort her mother.

***

We pull up to a one-story house with white vinyl siding—335 Eden Avenue. This is where Mary moved her kids in 1971, a couple streets over from her parents’ house. It is a lot less glamorous than the house on Fairfield. It is smashed between two skinny houses and the paneling is dirty and cracking along the sides of the house. The front door is hidden by the porch on the right side. On the porch, three plastic red chairs lean against the railing, balancing on the house next door. A toddler’s bike sits behind the chairs nearest the front door. There is a two-foot vertical window covered with a brown shade on the front of the house and a small basement window peeping up through the grass below it. A rusted chain fence blocks off the postage stamp-size lawn that is mostly filled with weeds and dead grass.  “It looked so much bigger as a kid. It seems so tiny now.”

*** 

For about a year, Tammy’s family lived on welfare inside the tiny Eden Avenue house. They got allotted a certain amount of money each month, but by the third week they would run out. Tammy waited in line at the welfare office with her mom to get the booklet of coupons they needed to survive. She still walked to Grandview Elementary everyday by herself; now it was about ten blocks for the second grader. She would also walk to the free clinics to get check-ups. Her family didn’t have dental insurance so Tammy’s teeth were tainted and crooked, something that she was ashamed of. She didn’t feel safe on Eden Avenue without any uncles to protect her, but she wouldn’t be there for long.

It was late summer of 1972, the sky was overcast, and there was a sense of change lingering in the thick August air. For 7-year-old Tammy, her world was changing faster than she wanted. Her mother didn’t have enough money to take care of her three young children and was forced to call their father to take over. Since Charles still lived with his parents, Mary hoped the grandparents would watch out for her children. It was the hardest decision she ever had to make.

Just two years after escaping her violent father, Tammy was about to get into his car and leave her mother for who knew how long. 

She sat on her bed on the left side of the fireplace in what should have been the living room, but had become a makeshift bedroom for Tammy and her sister Angie, 5. The walls were light blue and covered with paintings of Disney characters courtesy of her Mom’s efforts to make the house feel more like a home. Tammy, surrounded by her belongings, idled in her room. She hoped it wasn’t true; she prayed she didn’t have to leave. But as her father threw more of her clothes (still on their hangers, nothing in suit cases) into the trunk of his car, she knew there was nothing she could do to stop it.

She moved to the porch looking down at the bluish grey paint that was peeling off under her feet. Her dad wearing long pants looked skinny and he was starting to go bald. He slammed the trunk with the same powerful hand that he used to hit her mother when they lived Lima. Even at 7, Tammy could feel a negative energy exuding from him. “I could sense, ‘See I told you so, Mary. You couldn’t raise them. You are no good.’” He was boiling angry and Tammy knew he could erupt any minute. “I felt: ‘Holy shit, I’m headed back into hell.’ There was nothing I could do about it. I had to go.”

As the children piled into their father’s car and pulled away from their mother’s house, Tammy felt of sense of abandonment, but she didn’t cry. Neither did her brother Joey, 3, because he was too young to understand what was happening. But Angie cried. She was a skinny kid with dirty dishwater blonde hair in a pixie cut with bangs. She looked scared. Her eyes said, “Where are we going? Why is this happening to us?”

***

Tammy quickly pulls away from the house on Eden Avenue and doesn’t look back. Remembering that day, it doesn’t feel real. “We were these kids in these bodies, physical kids, but almost other entities outside of ourselves being afraid for these kids for whom this was happening. In a sense, it didn't feel like it was happening to me.”

As we drive toward Erlanger, Kentucky, Tammy remembers that day she drove there in the back of her dad’s car. "I felt like they took me to another universe," she says as we merge onto I-75 South. “But as I got older, I realized I could see the tip of the Carew Tower (in Cincinnati) and I knew my mom wasn't too far away.” She still doesn’t know where her mom was during that time. She’s never asked.

As we drive toward Exit 184 on I-75, Tammy becomes fidgety. She finishes her Diet Coke and places it back in the cup holder. “I don’t know why I drank that,” she says fussing with her hair. “I wanted tea, but they didn’t have any.” What she could really use right now to calm her nerves is coffee. These days, Tammy is a habitual coffee drinker: from sun up to sun down there is always a pot brewing outside her office. She brushes the crumbs from her Subway sandwich off her dark blue jeans. “I don’t like eating fast food, but I was starving.” She picks up her Diet Coke and shakes the ice, trying to get one last sip as we pull off the ramp and merge onto Donaldson Road.

We drive less than a mile down the road before making a right. As we turn onto Pine Tree Lane, Tammy turns off the radio because it’s getting on her nerves. She needs silence for what she is about to do—she is about to see the house that she called a living hell. She grips the wheel and slows down the car as we pass a No Outlet sign. There is no turning back.

She stops the car in front of 3387 Pine Tree Lane. It is a modest ranch house with a mixture of red and white brick. The small front yard is filled with crab grass. A concrete path leads from the driveway, pass the attached one car garage and up to the front door. Deep maroon shudders frame the sides of the main window to the right of the front door. There is a cat sitting on the back of the couch looking out that main window. On the left side of the front door, there are two windows surrounded by white vinyl siding. Tammy’s bedroom window was the second one in.

Tammy starts to cry. She puts her head against the steering wheel. “I miss my grandpa and grandma,” she says lifting her head and looking up at the house. “So this is bittersweet. There were so many good times and bad in that house.” Tammy stayed close with her grandpa and grandma who passed away in 1994 and 1999 respectively. She points to the two trees that tower over the back of the house. Her grandpa planted them that summer she moved in. They were small and so was she.

***

When Tammy and her siblings moved there in 1972, it was a new subdivision for lower middle class, upper blue collar people. Her grandmother got a deal on the house because it was a model. To 7-year-old Tammy, the three bedroom house was a mansion. For the first time in her life, she had all her physical needs met. She had food, clothes and a roof over her head.

On the outside, everything looked good. Her grandmother Loretta Laidlaw was a clean freak so the place was immaculate. Loretta’s husband died a year before Tammy was born and she married Dave Laidlaw, a World War II veteran. Her grandma was strict and Tammy used to joke that Grandma Laidlaw always laid down the law. She felt safe because her life had structure. She even loved being in third grade at her new school Mary, Queen of Heaven because she was able to write and read whenever she wanted. But there was one thing missing—her mom.

Tammy spent most nights crying in the small bedroom she shared with Angie in the front of the house. She wondered where her mom was and when she would be back or if she would come back. She stayed up late praying her mom would return.

Desperate to find her mother, Tammy asked her grandma to put an ad in the local community paper, The Dixie News. The ad read, “Looking for Mom. We miss you.” But that didn’t bring her back.

Tammy was stuck in a place where her dad’s temper could erupt at any minute and it often did. At least once or twice a week, her dad would become violent. If it was a small snippet, Tammy would hide in her room and pretend to do her homework. But if it was a bad night, she got involved. Because her grandfather was so greatly affected by the war, any kind of violence scared him. He wouldn’t stand up to her dad and neither would her grandma, but Tammy tried.

In the kitchen of that small house on Pine Tree Lane, 8-year-old Tammy shielded her grandma as her father opened the cabinets and threw anything he could find. Dishes crashed to the floor. Food splattered all around her. Tammy yelled at her dad to quit. She tried to block his swinging arms before they smashed into her grandma. But there was nothing that could stop him when he was that angry, so she crouched in the corner and cried. She cried until he stopped and held her breath until his would start again. Tammy held her breath for two long years inside the house on Pine Tree Lane.

In the fall of 1973, a photographer came to Mary, Queen of Heaven School to get a picture to run next to a contest-winning poem a young girl had written. Tammy and another girl were randomly pulled out of class by the teacher to be in the picture. The photographer took the girls to a field of Black-eyed Susans just down the street from school. He told them to run around and play while he snapped pictures. During the shoot, he handed Tammy a red balloon tied to a long black wire. She held the balloon while she bent down to smell a flower. The photographer snapped the picture.

On September 14, Tammy’s 9^th birthday, an 8 by 10 picture of Tammy wearing her plaid jumper, white shirt with a peter pan collar, and white and black saddle shoes in a field of Black-eyed Susans, smelling a flower and holding a balloon with a long black wire appeared in The Kentucky Enquirer. The picture ran next to this poem:

“A Childhood Day”

Slow, little child, intent at play,

take time to capture this fugitive day…

sunwarmed and carefree,

enchanted and gay.

Store it in memory, fresh and complete,

with other remembrances that time will wax sweet,

When all life is old

how rewarding to find

a childhood day, intact and sublime,

hidden in the treasure-trove of reminiscing mind!

                                    -Hazel Spaulding Franks

                                         R. 3, Williamstown

            The caption on the page read: Girl on Page 1. The pretty little girl in the photo which illustrates the poem, “A Childhood Day,” on Page One is Tammy Ryon (sic), 8, of 3387 Pine Tree Ln., Erlanger. A fourth-grader at Mary Queen of Heaven School, Donaldson Rd., Erlanger, she is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Ryon (sic).

One day, the phone rang. It was Tammy’s mother. She told Tammy she had seen her picture in the paper. That weekend, Tammy waited anxiously as her mom pulled up to the house.  As her mom walked up to the house, Tammy thought, “Oh my God, thank God almighty, I’m free at last.” She looked at her mom. She looked the same as when she left. Her long dark hair was pushed back from her square-shaped face revealing her rosy cheeks and dimpled chin. Her grey-blue eyes sat below her thin eye brows and filled with tears when she saw her children.

Every weekend, her mom picked up her children and took them to the Howard-Johnson motel. They piled on the bed and watched movies all day long. The motel was just down the street from her grandparents’ house, but Tammy felt like she was finally free. “It was like being able to breathe. It was like you’d been holding your breath for two years.”

Other weekends, she would take the children back to their maternal grandparents’ house in Bellevue, Ky. Tammy told her mother stories about what it was like living with her father in that house and her mother would pull her close and say, “Don’t worry. I’m going to get you out of there.” Those couple of days a week spent with her mother made Tammy feel safe again, but then Sunday night would come around.

Driving down I-75 South toward the Erlanger exit, Tammy would grow anxious. When the billboard for the Howard-Johnson motel became visible, she knew it was all coming to an end. She hated this part, the part where she had to say goodbye and walk back into her living hell. She would stand at the front door and take a deep breath as her mom drove away, counting down the days until her mom’s next visit.

***

“I want to go back and get that little girl and say, ‘It’s going to be okay, honey. It’s going to be okay.’”As we drive away from 3387 Pine Tree Lane, she wipes the tears from her eyes. “That was hard. That caught me off guard.”

We come to the end of the street and Tammy points to the overgrown trees on the right side of the street. She used to play down in the woods with her siblings and the neighborhood kids. She smiles, remembering the good times she had with her grandparents. But those few good memories are overshadowed by her father’s tantrums and her mother’s absence. During that time, Tammy often wondered why her maternal grandparents or even her aunts and uncles she lived with in Bellevue didn’t bother to call or get them out of there. She was just fifteen minutes down the highway from where she used to live and from her family, but she felt so far away.

As we drive toward the highway on Donaldson Road, we pass what used to be the Howard-Johnson motel (now the Comfort Inn) where Tammy spent weekends pretending her family was back in one piece. We head North on I-75, the same path her mother took when she finally had enough money to get a place for her and her children.  

            We cross over the river from Kentucky to Ohio as we make our way to Price Hill, a small section of Cincinnati that lies just outside of downtown.  As we climb a large hill, Tammy shows me a field where the free health clinic used to be. We keep driving around a corner and pull over on the side of a busy four lane street. There it is. It looks just like every other apartment building around here, but it means more to Tammy. It’s the first apartment her family lived in once they were reunited with their mother in 1974.

At 2821 Warsaw Avenue, a three-story red brick building sits atop a hill. The second and third floors have black wired fences across their balconies while the bottom floor is partly underground.

***

For less than a year when Tammy was in the fifth grade, her family lived in a second floor one bedroom apartment in the complex on Warsaw. Tammy and Angie shared bunk beds while Joey slept with their mom in a double bed on the floor. A big mahogany cabinet with a console radio stood against one wall. It was the only furniture in the room, and Tammy’s only source of entertainment. Her mother was gone most of the time working as a fitness instructor at a local gym so Tammy and her siblings would curl up in front of the radio to listen to their favorite programs.

A few months later after her mom got laid off from the gym, the family went back on welfare and tried to survive on food stamps. Barely able to get by day to day, Tammy didn’t have high expectations when Christmas time rolled around.

            In December of 1974, Tammy sat on the dark green carpet in the living room. She stared up at the tree a friend of the family had given them. The week before, her mom had collected pine cones from trees nearby and decorated them with glue and glitter. Now, the pine cones hung on the tree giving the empty room a little sparkle. As she lay on her stomach gazing up at the tree, she heard a faint, “Ho, Ho, Ho!” coming from downstairs. Even though she was too old to believe in Santa Claus, Tammy’s heart skipped a beat as she jumped to her feet. She ran to the door and saw her mom’s friend Jim Lacy. His tall, dark and muscular figure climbed the stairs with a bike over his shoulder. Tammy squeezed against the brick-sided stairwell and gripped the black iron handrails as Jim Lacy brought the bike into her small apartment. After dropping off one bike, he disappeared downstairs and reappeared with another bike. He went down once more and came back up with the third and final bike—one for each of the children. Tammy, Angie and Joey jumped around what would be their only present that Christmas. Tammy sat on her banana seat and ran her fingers through the fringe flowing from the handle bars. She didn’t care about the color. She didn’t care about the designs. She was just happy to finally have something to call her own.

***

            We merge back onto Warsaw Avenue and go through a couple stop lights before turning left on Grand Avenue. We pull in the gravel lot which is littered with cars facing every which way. A group of Mexican men stop working on their car as we put ours in park. A little boy runs from the car toward another group of people standing closer to the apartments. The three-story brick buildings are in a U-shape and Tammy points to the back left corner of the complex.

In 1975, after less than a year in the one bedroom apartment on Warsaw, Tammy’s mom moved the family into that basement apartment. Tammy’s bedroom window sat level with the grass. She would crawl out of that ground level window to get to school if she was running late and didn’t have time to walk around the apartment complex. Tammy stares in the direction of her small window, remembering just how easy it was for anyone to get in and out of it.

***

            One warm and sunny afternoon, Tammy opened her window to let a breeze come through the small bedroom she and Angie shared. There was no screen on the window so dust from the cars outside would filter onto her dresser, but she didn’t mind. She was only gone for one minute when it happened—someone reached in her window and stole the knick-knacks off her dresser. Tammy ran back into her room to see her belongings were gone. They wouldn’t be worth much to anyone else, but they meant the world to her.

***

            “I’ll be right back,” she says as she walks toward the crowd of people by the apartment on the right. I roll up the window and lock my door as one of the men walks closer to the car. Tammy gestures toward the apartment in the back left corner of the complex as she explains to the residents that she used to live there. She laughs and smiles at them before walking back to her car.

            “What did they say?” I ask before we drive away.

            “Nothing. They didn’t understand a word I said.”

            She stares ahead at her former home. It almost looks like she is smiling, but there are tears filling her eyes. She shakes her head, preparing herself for the next stop. We carefully reverse down the thin strip of gravel before exiting onto Grand Avenue and turning left on Warsaw.

            We drive down a couple blocks before we turn right on Considine Avenue and stop in front of a chained fence surrounding an open lot. This empty stretch of gravel and dying grass at 3189 Considine Avenue used to be Grandview Apartments; Tammy’s home for six years. The city knocked down the apartments a couple of years ago because of all the drug problems, but Tammy still remembers exactly what it was like living there.

***

When Tammy moved to the Grandview Apartments in 1976, the twelve buildings in the complex were covered in light grey bricks and stood three stories tall. Wooden balconies jutted out from each floor and overlooked the grassy field next door. There was a beautiful yellow ginkgo tree outside Tammy’s third floor bedroom window. In the mornings, Tammy lay in bed as the gorgeous tree filled her room with a yellow tint. Soaking in the tree’s shadow over her room, she daydreamed that she was far, far away. The destination didn’t matter, as long as it wasn’t 3189 Considine Avenue. 

***

Now, Tammy looks at the empty lot and remembers the three little girls she used to babysit who lived just a couple houses down the street. They always wanted to play at her apartment; she never understood why anyone would choose to be there. She remembers the Dale family who was on welfare and had eight people in a tiny apartment. But if Tammy’s family ever needed food, Mr. Dale would always give them some. “That’s the thing about poor people, they help each other out.”

            She steps out of the car and points to Glenway Park across the street. Although it is filled with swing sets and jungle gyms now, back in the day is was just a green space.

“That was a place of solace for me. I would take my journal over there and write poetry. I would pretend I was someplace else.” Someplace safe.

***

            When Tammy lived in the Grandview apartments, she was part of one of the few white families there. But in Tammy’s mind the apartment complex wasn’t divided by color; it was more of who’s going to harm you and who’s not. As she and her siblings would walk down the street to the grocery, neighbors bumped her, hit her, and yelled at her to try to start fights. But Tammy would keep on walking, keep on pretending she wasn’t scared.

As she lay in bed one night, 12-year-old Tammy heard the silver handle of the apartment’s door turn. She heard the dead bolt open. Then, the heavy door creaked open and slammed shut. “Mom, did you hear that?” she whispered to her mother who lay in bed across the hall. Her mom slid out of bed wearing her fancy, slinky nightgown and grabbed a wooden hanger—her only defense against the intruder. Tammy jumped out of bed and her cotton nightgown fell to her knees. She tiptoed out of her room, trying not to wake her sister or alert the man in her apartment. She slipped behind her mother and crept down the hall. The only phone was in the hallway right by the front door where the guy would be standing. Tammy held her breath as her mom reached around the corner to grab the phone. She was scared for her life, but more scared for her mom. Tammy was convinced the burglar was right around that corner, just waiting to shoot her mom.

Within minutes of the 911 call, over 20 police officers filled Tammy’s small apartment. But she still didn’t feel safe. “Check the closet! Check the closet!” she yelled at them. She had a feeling the intruder was hiding in the closet right by the front door. A police officer opened the closet door—no intruder. Tammy exhaled. She sat on the couch, still shaking as a FBI guy told her mom that the intruder was someone in the apartment complex. The cops had been keeping a close eye on them for a while because they were wacked out on drugs. Tammy looked up at her mom, standing her silky nightgown as the FBI agent said, “They were coming to hurt you.”

After that night, Tammy never felt safe in her apartment. Her uncles Danny and Jeff took turns coming over to sleep on the couch for a month after the break in, but she still couldn’t sleep through the night.

***

“I pretty much grew up never feeling safe, always feelings like I had to ignite this sixth sense so I could feel danger coming. I can’t tell you how nice it is to sleep in a bed and feel safe and eat what I want. People take that for granted.”

While living on Considine, her mom started working at Stouffer’s hotel in downtown Cincinnati and her family got off welfare. Just before moving to Grandview Apartments, Tammy was accepted into Cincinnati’s School for Creative and Performing Arts for theatre and vocal music in the sixth grade. The only place Tammy felt safe was at school.

Every day from sixth grade until senior year of high school, Tammy got on a school bus and escaped from her life. On that bus, she saw a world different than the one she lived in—a world beyond food stamps, public housing assistance, dangerous neighborhoods and unstable family situations. “That was a pivotal moment. I got on the school bus and out of the neighborhood. I saw a different way of living.”

The chance to break free from her world and attend a school where her teachers cared about her success changed her life. “The faculty was committed to their students and their education, but it was a really difficult transition.” For the next few years, Tammy focused on school as a way of dealing with the trauma in her life. 

Looking at her now, she seems so far removed from that scared little girl. But she still carries pieces of that girl with her. It’s a scar on her knee from where she was playing with the neighborhood kids as they looked into someone’s window and she fell. It’s the worry wrinkles on her forehead. It’s the laugh lines around her mouth that show her optimism even during the toughest of times. It’s the tear in her eye when she volunteers at Rothenberg Preparatory Academy in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati, helping inner city kids struggling to make it day by day, giving them an education so they can make it out, just like she did.  

She wipes that tear away. “This is hard, Elizabeth. What are you doing to me, girl?” She walks away and opens the door to her car. Before she gets in, she lingers. She wraps her waist length sweater around her stomach and hugs herself. She leans against the car door as she stares to her right at the open field. She starts to cry harder and gets into her car. She slowly drives away.

Epilogue:

Tammy Schwartz was accepted to Webster College in Missouri in 1982. Due to lack of finances, she moved home after one semester at Webster. She worked at a local bookstore while saving money to move to New York. In 1983, she transferred to Hunter College in New York. Tammy worked part time as a nanny on the upper west side while she studied geology. She left Hunter College in 1985 without a degree. She graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education. She taught social studies, art and language arts at Washington Park Elementary in Cincinnati for a couple of years before teaching at a middle school in Florida for four years.

Tammy came back to Cincinnati in 1994 and got a statewide grant to help spread awareness of teenagers and drunk driving. In 2000, she married Steven Schwartz. She got her master’s degree and doctorate in literacy from the University of Cincinnati before accepting a job at Miami University in 2001.

 In 2009, Dean of Miami’s School of Education, Health and Society Carine Feyten asked Tammy to be the director of the Urban Teaching Cohort. The program emphasizes in-depth experiences in urban schools including field studies of several weeks, student teaching, urban immersion programs where the students live in the community of the school, and volunteering in the community organizations.

Tammy often shares her story to inspire education students to help inner city children. She knows many children who grow up in poverty slip through the cracks, including her siblings. Her brother Joey went to Western Hills High School where his teachers didn’t care about him because was just some trash from Price Hill. Today, he is an ex-felon and ex-drug addict battling his problems for over ten years now. Tammy thinks another reason for his struggles stem from not having a father figure growing up. While Tammy hasn’t talked to her father since her grandma Loretta Laidlaw died in 1999, her brother stayed in contact with him. Recently, Joey stopped reaching out to his father because it wasn’t good for his recovery.

Tammy’s sister Angie also struggled to make it out. Angie went to the same public school as Joey and for the longest time she didn’t think she was worthy to go to college. At age 34, she graduated from Northern Kentucky University and is now a respiratory therapist.

Tammy dealt with the trauma of her childhood by immersing herself in her school work. “I worked really hard. I got involved in things I could control and I surrounded myself with positive people.”  

Although Tammy is not close to her father, who she believes suffers from an undiagnosed bipolar disorder, she is very close to her mother. Mary Hartman remarried when Tammy was in high school and now lives in Northern Kentucky. She worked as an executive secretary until she was diagnosed with Multiple sclerosis in 1993.

As an adult, Tammy understands why her mother had to leave her as a child. “Mom was trying to figure things out since she got married so young and had three kids. I feel the pain, but I don’t hold grudges.”

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