Dorothy Yehl

Interview Date: May 22, 1978
Interview Location: Narrator’s home, 6025 Lincoln Avenue, Morton Grove
Interviewer: Denise Rossmann Christopoulos
Duration: 1 hour, 38 minutes

Introduction

Miss Dorothy Yehl’s family was of German extraction and among the first settlers to arrive in Morton Grove in the 1840s. She has lived at 6025 Lincoln Avenue all her life. This is the two-story house that was moved in 1984 by the Morton Grove Historical Society and is now the Haupt-Yehl Historical House.

Miss Yehl describes the physical details of the house and blends this with an accounting of a warm and loving upbringing by a strong vital mother, and a close family life. In the interview, Dorothy Yehl describes Lincoln Avenue as a “muddy dirt road” when she was a child and tells stories about holidays and especially Christmas.

Her father was a rose grower for the large Poehlmann Brothers Greenhouses, and Miss Yehl talks about the Depression years hitting her family hard. Of particular interest is Miss Yehl’s remembrances of the family’s first washing machine, gas lights coming into their home, her mother’s medicinal home remedies and the jitney, an open-air bus that used to come through parts of Morton Grove.