UNCLE ERIC GIBBS AND AUNT INEZ

 

My cousin, Roderick, wrote the history of his parents, Eric and Inez, reproduced here.

 

He writes:

 

My mother, Inez Georgina Lampe, was born during the summer solstice, June 22, of 1908 to Jacob and Anna Lampi (the family name has spelling variations). Her original first name was Aino, reflecting her Finnish heritage. Aino was a beautiful,  stubborn character in the Kalvella, Finland’s  epic folk narrative, who drowned herself  rather than marry the old man chosen for her to marry. She returned as a salmon.

 

Inez would have many trials of the heart herself. Her siblings (Jenny, Irene, Tessie, Charlie and Jack) called her Inez perhaps because of exotic Spanish characters in the movies of the time. Later Inez would play the piano at the local movie theatre during silent movies era of the 1920s.

 

Her parents, Jacob Lampi and Anna Nyman , were pioneers of the Minnesota north woods. Anna supposedly walked many miles through the forest to get to Ely from Duluth. They were of tough Finnish stock with Jacob using money from a mine accident to start a lumber camp and the Ely Bottling Works making Kist pop with cream soda and Plus 4 (like 7 Up) being my favorite.

 

Inez really wanted to see the world and get on with life showing up for grade school a year early. Then in her mid-teens she headed to Chicago to the Bush Conservatory ( no longer in existence) for theatre training.

 

In Chicago she often ushered shows with the world’s greatest actors and supposedly was entertained by mobsters of that colorful era.

 

Soon she was on the road with various traveling companies like the Sue Hastings marionette show and the fabled Chautauqua tent show circuit which spread culture visiting small Canadian towns.

 

Marjorie McEnaney recalls in her autobiography:”One day we were driving somewhere near Guelph, Ontario, in our new panel truck with the marionettes stowed safely in the rear , when a larger truck loomed out of the blizzard, travelling in my rut. It was his rut too…..We were hit broadside, and our beautiful conveyance, the best any of us had ever seen on the Chautauqua circuit , was crushed and the marionettes were strewn rudely and crudely in the snow drifts.”

 

Thankfully they were able to drive the battered truck back to Toronto that night. According to Karen (but never revealed to me), Inez married a fellow performer, but he was killed in a car crash. Despite these car experiences Inez always drove her many VWs with verve.

 

It was while on the Chautauqua tent circuit performing in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest that she met a young roustabout named Eric Gibbs.

 

Eric was taking a summer job with the company while studying for a law degree at the University of Alberta. One of the actors got sick and Eric stepped in to his part opposite Inez.

 

After graduation Eric gave up the law and became a reporter for Hemingway’s one time paper, the Toronto Star.

 

In the winter 1935 he contacted Inez in New York, who was considering another marriage proposal at the time, and asked her to come to Toronto and marry him.

 

But at the border Canadian immigration officials took her off the train since a single woman traveling alone was obviously a prostitute.

 

After a call to Eric who then contacted the publisher of the Toronto Star, a call was made to release her forthwith.

 

So on New Year’s Day in 1936 Inez and Eric were wed with four friends in attendance. Just like Eric’s sister, Christiane, the marriage was not popular with their mother.

 

The couple rarely returned to Edmonton perhaps due to Eric’s mother’s skepticism about him marrying a widow and actress to boot.

 

The couple moved to Windsor and Inez began broadcasting on CBC as “The Storybook Lady”, a children’s show.

 

Eric covered the struggle in Detroit to unionize the auto industry. In a story about Walter Reuther he called him “The Sultan of Squat” for his leadership of sit down strikes based on Babe Ruth’s moniker as “The Sultan of Swat”.

 

But even as storm clouds were appearing over Europe, Eric wanted to make his mark there.

 

Supposedly on the boat over he made some contacts and using his artistic talent did a column called Heads and Tales for the London Daily Sketch.

 

Eric would make a caricature and then try to interview the person to show their personality - among those drawn and questioned were Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, Baden Powell and Noel Coward.

 

Inez continued her acting career in London, appearing in the famous play, The Women, later made into a noted movie and written by Clare Boothe, who married Henry Luce, the Time/Life media tycoon and Eric’s future boss

 

Clare had come in for the London rehearsals in 1939 and had suggested that Inez play her character differently.

 

When she left the director told Inez to go back to the way she had done it before.

 

The show closed when the war broke out and the largely American cast fled back home.

 

As the war approached Inez began broadcasting from London to the embattled Finns who were fighting Stalin’s Russian invasion.

 

Inez had attended both a Methodist and Finnish church in Ely and her family spoke Finnish so she had good knowledge of the language - when I was a kid she would sometimes sing to me Finnish lullabies.

 

But when the war broke out and the Finns allied with the Germans, she had to stop the broadcasts.

 

Eric, meanwhile, was doing CBC radio reports back to Canada, just like his college and lifetime friend Matt Halton, who became the Edward R. Murrow of Canada, broadcasting direct from the battlefield during the war.

 

Eric spoke of the “black moths from across the channel” coming to bomb London.

 

Eric signed up for the Canadian army in 1940 and became an officer in the Public Relations branch and ended up heading the unit.

 

He was awarded the Member of the British Empire (MBE) at Buckingham Palace and the Bronze Star from the Americans for his aid in helping the US plan for handling of journalists during the D-Day invasion.

 

During the war Inez toiled in an aircraft factory and other war-related work. One day she was returning home and walking over a Thames bridge when a Luftwaffe bomb exploded nearby sending shrapnel into her face and knocking out some front teeth.

 

Their first apartment in central London was hit during the Blitz so they moved to Putney by the Thames.

 

One night the apartment buildings across the street were wiped out by a stick of bombs. While in London they welcomed my uncle, Jeffrey, still in his uniform, back from the Dunkirk beaches.

 

Inez had perhaps several miscarriages during the war but on July 3, 1945 –between VE Day and VJ Day – I was born in Bramshott Canadian Military Hospital.

 

Inez said she received little care because, when Eric excitedly tripped on the way into the hospital and turned his ankle, the doctors tended to the colonel not the mother.

    

After the war Eric began working in London for the then influential Time Incorporated.

 

Eric covered the war in Indo China though many of his dispatches were rewritten in New York to conform to Time’s political slant.

 

He then became the first non-American to be a bureau chief  in Bonn, Germany, covering the Iron Curtain countries also as well as the Arab-Israeli war.

 

He was the first journalist to interview David Ben Gurion after Israeli independence.

 

Because of his French heritage he spoke French like a native and had insisted that I first learn to speak French (which was a chore for Inez until she ended the experiment) and I was educated in French schools in London and Bonn.

 

So Eric was delighted to be made Bureau chief for Time Inc in France with an office on the Place de la Concorde.

 

We lived first in Chatou in a crumbling chateaux and then in Paris on the intimate Rue Berlioz, where la Belle Monde used to keep their mistresses. 

 

Mother became an ambitious Cub Scout den mother and directed me and the pack in many ambitious multi language programs such as the Civil War and the Indians versus the Pilgrims.

 

My brother, Charles Gregory Gibbs, was born in the American Hospital in Paris on March 5, 1952 and was considered a miracle baby since women of 40 rarely had children at that age.

 

Henry Luce and Clare Boothe Luce later visited with Eric to supervise the Time/Life media empire after a wine tour of Bordeaux.

 

Inez hosted a meal for the celebrity couple, but for some reason that night she did not mention she had been in Clare’s play in London.

 

 

While covering the Geneva Convention on Indo China on May 12th, 1954 Eric was found dead in his hotel room from his endemic heart condition – he was just 43.

 

Mother left for Geneva without telling me the news. Matt and Jean Halton happened to be in Geneva at the time and Matt gave the funeral oration.

 

Henry Luce flew in from Rome and offered to take Mother out for lunch. He then found he had no Swiss money so Inez covered the bill.

 

Eric’s obituary in his former paper, The Windsor Star, concluded: “For sheer brain power few could equal Mr. Gibbs. We have been told that for intellectual capacity some ranked him as among the top ten men in the United Kingdom. His death at 43 ends an extremely brilliant and useful career.”

 

Inez then decided to move to London. The Haltons invited us to live with them on the top floor of their Georgian home at 14 Oakhill Avenue in Hampstead.

 

I was sent to a tutor to learn finally how to read and then to a boarding school, Hawkhurst Court in Sussex.

 

Fortunately for me, Inez decided to help her handicapped mother in Ely, Minnesota in 1956, so I was spared taking the 11-plus exams.

 

Inez and Greg left before my term was over and rode the family VW bug from New York to Minnesota.

 

I was put aboard a plane by the Haltons and after stops in New York and Sault St. Marie was driven by mother’s sister, Irene, and husband Bill across the frozen winter tundra to Ely, Minnesota near the Canadian border.

 

We lived with Anna , Inez’s mother, who was blind and deaf but full of spirit.

 

After several years mother decided it was time for a career so we moved to the harbor city of Duluth where Inez got a speech communication’s degree with honors at the University of Minnesota in Duluth.

 

One day she was visiting with her favorite professor at UMD when a call came through and Inez got a job offer in the idyllic college town of Northfield, Minnesota.

 

Inez travelled around to many schools in the area in all weather in her trusty VW.

 

I went off to Northwestern University to study journalism and English literature in 1963 and six years later Gregory went to the University of Minnesota.

 

After college I spent two years in the Peace Corps in Ghana and then became a conscientious objector to the Viet Nam war working with emotionally disturbed teenagers in Chicago.

 

I married my college sweetheart, Karen Ann Hundley (born February 2, 1946), on June 16th 1970 in a gothic chapel at Northwestern University.

 

Karen’s mother, a trained opera singer, was French born like our grandmother, but did not speak French to Karen when she was growing up.

 

Karen’s father, Roger Hundley, originally from Louisiana had changed his family name from Clyde Vernon Breithaupt to his mother’s family name because he had planned on being an actor.

 

He was no actor, but became a vice president at the renowned Best and Company store on Fifth Avenue, New York.  

 

Karen and I both became teachers of English, film and speech in large high schools outside Chicago, while Inez remained in Northfield after retirement and had a strong circle of friends.

 

She often drove to visit us in Illinois well into her late 80s. She had a close relationship with a doctor from the nearby Mayo Clinic, but he died suddenly from a heart attack. She told Karen she had been “unlucky in love.”

 

Gregory married Jillayne Holter in 1979 and eventually became a paralegal in Minneapolis and had two daughters, Sonia born June 7th 1980 and Sasha born June 7th 1988, who uses the moniker of Inez.

 

In 2002 Karen and I were going to drive Inez up to the family cabin in Ely, but we delayed the journey one day so she could attend the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis with friends.

 

While in the lobby of the theatre she suffered a stroke. Mother lived five months more and passed away quietly at the age of 93 on February 25th, 2002. She had lived an incredibly interesting and active life during a century of dramatic events.