Dark Eyes: The Search for My Grandmother

After twenty-four years of trying to find information about my mother's birth mother, I suddenly received an email from her other granddaughter three years ago and I thought my search had reached a definitive conclusion. I was wrong. It turned out that my grandmother had lived a life very much apart from that of her known four children. And my newly-found cousin and I decided to roll up our sleeves and work together to figure out what our grandmother's life had really been like. In the back of my mind, I still needed to know the identity of my grandfather. I was and remain motivated in that pursuit.

In the 1920's, Ada B**** gave birth to my mother and her twin brother in a Chicago maternity home two doors down from where the St. Valentine's Day Massacre would occur. It was the same hospital where John Dillinger's girlfriend gave birth. In the 1930's, the family told me, my grandmother could walk into any nightclub in Miami Beach and, upon seeing her arrival, the bandleader would immediately start playing the Russian gypsy song Dark Eyes. I had to wonder: Who was this woman? Where did she come from? Where to start?

90 percent of my research success has come from the internet. After finding an early census in which her name was listed as "Ida B****" instead of Ada, I began searching with the new spelling. And, in a Cedar Rapids, Iowa online newspaper archive, I found her. Ida B****, the "pretty fifteen year old" girl from Minneapolis had been tracked down with her twenty-one year old boyfriend. From the multiple stories printed as the 1920 story unfolded, it went something like this: A young medic fresh from WWI was stationed at Fort Snelling in Minneapolis. There, he met and fell in love with Ida, who was "attending business school at the West Hotel". The solider had questioned her age, but had been assured by Ida and her friends that she was "almost eighteen". They met in secret for months, then ran away together to get married.

There was a problem. Ida's father discovered their correspondence in her bedroom and set off in pursuit of his fifteen year old daughter. Successful owner of a Minneapolis scrap metal and auto supplies business, Sam B**** arrived late at night in Cedar Rapids, offering $500 to anyone who would tell him where his daughter was. At the time, the average annual income was $1236.00. The two were discovered and brought to police station for questioning.

This is where the story gets even more interesting. The police interview with the soldier paints a portrait of a terrified and confused young man. He explains that he truly believed Ida when she'd said she was almost eighteen, that he wanted to marry her, and that more than anything, "I just love the girl". Then, the paper printed an interview with Ida. She's very sketchy on details, but apparently, while it turned out the soldier was broke, a well-off dentist had just treated her to breakfast in a good restaurant. As for the soldier? "I don't care if he goes to prison now," was her non-chalant response. And he did. Two years of hard labor at Leavenworth. And Ida? Months later, she was married to the first of her three husbands.

Sometimes, in light of a discovery, I overlook a detail. Re-reading the articles, I thought it strange that Ida would have attended "business school" at the West Hotel. So, last week, I did research on the West Hotel, which had been demolished in 1940. The prominent fact about it in that era seems to be that Isadore Blumenfeld aka the notorious crime lord, Kid Cann, had run all of his operations out the the West Hotel in the 1920's. I spoke with a librarian at the Minnesota Historical Society and, after consulting an old city directory, it was clear there was no "school" operated in the West Hotel, just Kid Cann's businesses that were usually used as fronts. To those of you who watch Boardwalk Empire, he ran his operations from the West Hotel just as Nucky Thompson ran his in Atlantic City. And, for those of you who don't watch Boardwalk Empire, think of Kid Cann's position in Minneapolis being parallel to that of Al Capone in Chicago or Charlie "Lucky" Luciano in New York. "Business school" indeed.

I know my grandmother was smart. As an adult, she left almost nothing of a paper trail. She frequently changed the spelling of her surname and would randomly use the surnames of former husbands. You won't find her on a census or a voting register. But, she could have never imagined the information available on the internet. She could have never known that she'd have granddaughters in hot pursuit of the truth and that they'd question older relatives who still have clear memories. We know the geographic path of her life now: Minneapolis to Chicago to Miami Beach to Key West to Jamaica to Los Angeles and back to Miami. And, little by little, the puzzle pieces are fitting together to form a very unexpected picture.

The Rise and Notorious Downfall of Aunt Kay

It's true. My reaction to many of my discoveries of my recently-found-mother's-side-of-the- family has been something like, "What? What?!? WHAT?!?!" I've shared a few stories with a handful of people. Other revelations have remained in the family until we have time to process the information. My cousin and I have become a detective team, opening cold case files others never knew about. Or never spoke about. Understandably, I have to be careful about what I write when it could affect other members of the family. But, it's been agreed that I could safely write about Aunt Kay Brunell. After all, that was never her real name in the first place.

Technically, Aunt Kay is my great aunt, only sibling of my grandmother. The younger of the two by a couple years, Aunt Kay was born Kate B**** to Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants. In her teens, Kate moved from Minneapolis to Chicago, writing obituaries for The Chicago Herald.

Suddenly, Kate B**** disappeared. In the 1930 U.S. Census, she reappeared under the identity she would claim for the rest of her life: Kay Brunell, "author of books", daughter of an Anglo-sounding couple from Pennsylvania. In the next paper trail we've found, she was living alone in New York City in a Park Avenue apartment. A fashion editor for film and fashion magazines, there are newspaper articles about her attending rooftop parties at the Pierre Hotel and suing another hotel for refusing to allow her Beddlington terrier to stay there with her.

When she was very young, my cousin visited Aunt Kay in her spectacular apartment. She remembers Kay smoking a cigarette in a long holder while my cousin felt the soft fur coats that filled a whole closet. Aunt Kay, in her deep, raspy voice, commented, "Maybe someday you'll have a closet full of fur coats, too."

But, soon after that, things began getting shaky. The tide of good fortune that had carried Kay along for decades was shifting. Instead of working for fashion and film magazines, she became a fashion editor for True Romance, a pulp fiction publication. She soon left that position to become a stockbroker. The house of cards she'd built was about to collapse.

In the 1961, Kay registered with the SEC to become the sole proprietor of Kay Brunell Securities Company, 277 Park Avenue, New York. And, her registration was denied by the SEC due to the small fact that she'd been using fraudulent claims to sell shares in a shady Florida racetrack. As my cousin and I frantically did more research, we discovered that soon after the SEC rejection, Aunt Kay's long-term boyfriend was involved in a headline-making stock market scandal. The trial lasted 11 months, the longest federal case on record at the time. There were indictments and plea bargains. And it was just about then that Kay contacted Christie's auction house to sell an original Sir Joshua Reynolds oil painting that had hung in her lavish apartment.

It's difficult to track the next seven years of Aunt Kay's life. Without children and having lived an invented life, there are no photos of her since childhood--aside from a few, grainy, unflattering newspaper pictures. We know she died in 1971, alone, penniless, and in pain, in a shoddy nursing home in Miami. She'd been put there, then ignored, by her sister. My grandmother.

To be honest, my grandmother's story is more exciting and dangerous than Aunt Kay's. But, it's so complex and there are so many privacy factors to consider that I always feel thwarted when I try to write about it. It may be easiest to fictionalize parts of it. In fact, it may be best if I used a pen name for it. The alias K. Brunell comes to mind as being perfectly appropriate.