Photo by J. Adrian Wylie
Born Mary Margaret Lauth, she’s “always been called Moni.” At ninety-nine she still cooks her own breakfast and lunch, keeps up with numerous family members and acquaintances, writes letters, discusses politics and social trends, and reads voraciously. The books stacked on the coffee table in her All Seasons apartment are topped by Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom and Barbara McQuade’s Attack from Within.
“I’m wearing black because I’m in mourning over the election,” she says on a November visit. “My grandmother marched for the vote. The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified only five years before I was born. I was hoping to see a woman president in my lifetime.”
Her mother was a flapper with bobbed hair. Her father belonged to a tight-knit German family living around Grosse Pointe Park, where Moni was raised. She started school amid the fear, hunger, and homelessness of the Great Depression.
“Those were hard, hard times for so many people,” she sighs. Her family was more fortunate, since her father never lost his job—but money was very tight.
“My most important memories are flashes from my childhood,” she says. “In my earliest memory, I see a tiny dark-haired girl wearing a little white dress sprinkled with rosebuds swirling across the room, to the admiration of my uncle and aunt.”
It was her only school dress. Moni’s mother washed and ironed it every night, so her daughter could wear it clean and fresh to school the next day.
Prohibition was still in force, and rum running was Detroit’s second-largest industry. Her childhood friends included sons of one of the city’s biggest crime bosses. She remembers seeing her uncle, a police detective armed with a machine gun, driving through the city streets in a patrol car.
In 1933, President Roosevelt closed the banks, and Detroit’s city government printed its own greenbacks. “Scrip was a substitute for real money, but not all stores honored it,” Moni explains. “When I needed shoes, my father drove me to several stores and told me to wait in the car while he asked if they accepted scrip. He didn’t want me to be embarrassed if they turned us away.”
“World War II defined, shaped, and transformed my generation,” Moni says. “It is our milestone. None of us who were young during those years escaped the challenges and sorrows of the war.”
On December 7, 1941, she was about to say goodbye to a friend heading to boot camp when they heard Roosevelt announce the Pearl Harbor attack. “We immediately squeezed into the family car and drove Ben to the train station—which was packed wall-to-wall with military personnel and their families,” she recalls. “The air was full of fear and tears—parents didn’t know if they’d ever see their sons again.”
By the time Moni graduated from high school in 1943, most of her male classmates had gone into the service. That summer, she had a front-row view of Detroit’s race riots. The city had gone through a population explosion, thanks to the war industries, bringing with it housing shortages, competition for jobs, and racial issues. “Between the war and the riots, that was a terrible, terrible summer.”
Moni began college classes but, worried she wasn’t doing enough for the war effort, she tried to join the navy WAVES. But the minimum age was twenty, and before her birthday the war had ended—and close friends had died.
Her sweetheart, Robert VandeVurst, was an Army Air Force navigator about to return home after his thirty-eighth flight when he volunteered for one more mission. “His plane was shot down,” she says softly, clutching a small leather folio that holds his last letter and a newspaper clipping about his death. Letters from two other friends are also there: Joey Miela died at Monte Cassino. John Ginther was killed in Luxembourg just days before Germany’s surrender.
By then she was working for the navy supply corps. “V-E [Victory in Europe] Day was very quiet,” she recalls. “We smiled quietly, but we remembered the friends we’d lost, and we knew we had a war against Japan to win.”
The news of Japan’s surrender in August “caught us by surprise,” she says. “V-J was a glorious day, absolutely glorious! People everywhere rushed onto their front porches to bang pots and pans.”
In 1946, she met John Strouss, a supply corps officer. They married in 1947, after John left the navy for Dow Chemical in Midland. “John was nice-looking, very gentlemanly, with a fun sense of humor and quick wit,” she says. During their sixty years together, they raised four sons as his career took them to Washington D.C., Hong Kong, New Jersey, Midland, and, ultimately, Ann Arbor.
In 1965, Moni joined a busload of Michigan women who marched on Washington, demanding an end to the Vietnam War. “I was opposed to the war, but I was horrified at the way returning servicemen were treated—even spat upon. I’ll never forget that,” she says, shuddering. And she witnessed renewed race riots in Detroit in 1967.
The family was in Hong Kong when the Vietnam War was raging and tensions with China were high. At one point, the FBI advised the couple to evacuate to one of the U.S. Navy ships lying offshore. “We could take our sons and one suitcase each, if we could leave within twenty-four hours.” But the Strousses decided to stay, and the crisis passed.
“Those years were life-changing,” she recalls. “We had the chance to really immerse ourselves in Asia, its people, culture, and conflicts. And we traveled around the world twice—a fabulous education for our boys.”
When the Strousses returned to Michigan, their sons began enrolling at U-M, and Moni enrolled at Oakland University. “It wasn’t easy going to school when I was raising a family, but finishing my degree was something I had to do.”
Moni and John moved to Ann Arbor forty years ago. She immersed herself in International Neighbors and the Unitarian Church, taught Great Books classes, and volunteered to bring art into inner-city schools.
When John was diagnosed with dementia, Moni nursed him until his death in 2008. Two of their sons died prematurely of a hereditary heart condition.
“I’ve had great losses and sadness,” she says. “But I’ve also had a wonderful life.”
