Latest / In My Hometown / A Secret Family Just 6 Miles Away | A Conversation with Author Mike Zimmerman

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A Secret Family Just 6 Miles Away | A Conversation with Author Mike Zimmerman · In My Hometown

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_04: Hi, everybody.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_04: You're in my hometown with Jamie and Pascal.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_04: And today we are diving into a story that's almost impossible to believe.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_04: Imagine for a second that you discovered your father had a double life.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_04: He had another wife.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_04: He had other kids.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_04: He had another house.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_04: He had a completely different family, just miles from where you were growing up.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_04: Well, it's the incredible story that happened to our guest today, Mike Zimmerman.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_04: And it's also the story behind his memoir, Suburban Bigamy: Six Miles Between Truth and Deceit.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_04: Stay with us for this fascinating conversation.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_04: Well, today we're talking with Mike Zimmerman, who you have written an incredible memoir called Suburban Bigamy: Six Miles Between Truth and Deceit.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_04: And I read it.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_04: It is, it is incredible.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_04: It's really, it's about betrayal, it's about pain, but it's also about resilience.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_04: It's about moving forward after trauma.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_04: It's about empathy, incredible empathy.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_04: Welcome.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_04: Well, thank you.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_04: And we we, full disclosure, we went to high school together.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_03: We did.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_04: Um, we did not.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_03: You're originally from Chicago, am I right?
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, from he grew up in Wineka.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_04: And I mean, I grew up in Wilmot.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_04: We didn't, we were not friends.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_04: We were not in the same group, but I I remember you.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_04: And yes, exactly.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_04: And it's really wild, and the story is wild.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_04: And I took it to Pascal and he was like, of course we have to talk about this.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_04: So take us back, Mike, to the time that you found out that your father had a completely double double life.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_04: He was living a double life.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_04: And what gave you that clue?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_04: Like, how did that happen that you found this out?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it was fascinating.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, my father was always a fisherman.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: And um, as he got older in his life, he started to go fishing more often with colleagues from the automobile business that he was in.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, he'd take off on long weekends to places like Wisconsin and Missouri.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, Father's Day 2013, he was on a fishing trip in Missouri, and my mother got a phone call and he said, Hey, I wasn't feeling well on the trip.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I drove back to the hospital.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: As it turns out, I had a stroke, and I'm gonna be here doing rehab for several weeks.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it just the story had some holes in it.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: My mother was thinking, Well, wait, you were in Missouri, did you leave the guys that you were fishing with in Missouri?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Who drives six hours back to Chicago when they're having a stroke?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, red flags went up.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: My mother called the hospital and identified herself as Norm Zimmerman's wife.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the nurse says, Oh, I just met you.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And and this didn't register with my mother because she was calling from their house in Arizona.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: So there was an awkward silence, and my mother hung up and she called me, and I said, Hey, I'll call the hospital.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I called and I got a nurse on the phone, and they were also transparent.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: I would just say, Hey, it's Mike Zimmerman, my father's there.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm on the East Coast.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know how he is.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, Oh, he came in on Monday for elective heart valve replacement, and he had a mild stroke during the procedure that affected his leg, and he'll be here doing rehab for several weeks.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Okay, um, that's great.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to make sure someone's checking on my dad.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, Oh, yeah, your mom and your sister and her baby are here.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Oh, that's okay.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think those are my relatives, but I'm glad someone's checking on him.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I hung up the phone and I called my mom and relayed that story.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we jumped on the internet.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: We're long distance on the phone, hammering away on the keyboard, doing people searches on our names, our father's name.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And you would pull up all the things you would expect to see our immediate family, the addresses we lived in in Winnetka, our phone numbers, our approximate ages.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then there was this one other name that kept showing up with ours.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: And we're thinking, hey, maybe this is a cousin of dad's.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we started searching on that person's name.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: It was a woman a little bit younger than my mother.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: And we'd pull up her information, and it would be my father and a male and female adult about the same age as my brother and I, and they had addresses in Glenview.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And we're like, gosh, this kind of looks like a family unit.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so our fears were beginning to feel real.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: We kept searching, there's numerous different sites, and they would all pull back the same information.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: So we hired a private detective, and after a couple weeks of us continuing to dig into it and the private detective coming back, we had the whole picture.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Complete other family unit.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_03: It must have been a but let me let me ask you, let me say one thing.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: First of all, Zimmerman is a very well, I mean, it's like a very common name, like a Rosenblum, Rosenthal, you know.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's like there is thousands of him.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_03: So, so first of all, what is your dad did for a living?
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_03: You said it be he is a fisherman.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, the fisherman is a hobby, I was like his hobby, right?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so what was he doing for a living?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: For his profession, he owned a Lincoln dealership in Schaumburg.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, so he was financially comfortable to be able to, uh Yeah, the money aspect is a big part of it, that he was able to um have two complete households.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: That that aspect is mind-boggling.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: You think about having two households on the North Shore.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_03: And not Fafing Shadow because we'll made and and and in Glenview is we're well six the the book is six miles.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_04: Six miles from truth and deceit.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_03: Six miles, you know.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's it's very close.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_03: And you never really uh suspected anything.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_03: Uh oh for all those years, you father had that uh that other lifestyle?
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: We we really didn't.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we knew where he was 85, 90 percent of the time.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, he was he owned a retail business, it was open six days a week.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: He was there a lot, but it also gave him the freedom to come and go.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so it's a valid question.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Where was he?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, were there red flags along the way?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: There were definitely moments in time where there were red flags that individually didn't necessarily rise up to be suspicious.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: But now, of course, you look back and you have this whole story.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: It tells a story.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_03: How old was your father?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_03: How old was you, Father?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_03: When would that happen?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_03: Uh he was.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry, I didn't have the chance to read the book, but I promise you I will.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_04: I said that was fine.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_04: I read the book for us.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_04: And it's okay that you would not.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_04: You ask all these, you know, questions that are that uh that you have for happiness.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_03: They're great, great questions.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_03: So so so so how old was your father when all that happened?
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_03: He was 76.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Whoa.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: So he had he had pulled this off for over 40 years.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_04: And so when you talk, Pascal, about the Zimmerman being a common name, let's let's go back to this.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_04: Is the internet was there at the time that you so you you found I'm sorry, when you found out that he went in the hospital for this surgery and all of this, you were already past college.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_04: How old were you at this time?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: I was 42.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you already three, right.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_04: So I read the book, but I guess I missed it.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Did you see you missed a lot of time?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_04: So you were already 42 at this time.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: So right.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: If you think about what he pulled off.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: In the seven, most of the the the meat of the story when the kids were growing up was the seventies and eighties.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: So we're all social media out there.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Social media news today.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: In a way that we're not today.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_03: Little exposure, no, no, no, uh, how you call a Snapchat, pictures, internet.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_03: So that was you could keep this completely separate.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_03: But the question I have for you is how was living with him at home?
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_03: How was the uh uh uh his presence?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_03: What kind of father was he to you?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_03: Because having a two, you know, I mean I I know personally that if I'm involved in a relationship, I give my hundred percent.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_03: But if somebody comes up and I'm involved, all of a sudden I'm not the same.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm hiding, I'm lying.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um so how was the relationship at home?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_03: How were you raised, and how many brothers sisters do you have?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_03: And you know?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: So he you had no idea.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: So he was a great actor, right?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: When he was home, he was a thing with us, he was completely present always.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I have a younger brother, a few years younger than myself, and um, he was very involved.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I always felt like he was my best friend.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: I really looked up to him, and he and I had a great relationship all throughout my life.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I worked for him at various times uh at the car dealership.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: We skied together, he coached our little league teams.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: He was a really big part of our lives.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: He went on our Boy Scout trips.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um he was present enough that you didn't have any inkling that this was going on.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_03: And has the relationship between him and your mother?
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_03: Did they have a uh good relationship?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Were they uh, you know, maybe sure.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: They did have a good relationship.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: I I when I got into my teenage years and I was more aware of things, I was certainly um cognizant of the fact that my mother wanted him around more.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And but I just figured, hey, he he's running this retail business, it's open six days a week.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: They were open till 9 p.m.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: five days a week.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and and obviously now we knew he had this huge financial burden.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so ensuring the success of that business was really important.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so I never questioned why he was working a lot.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we just didn't know how successful he really was.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_04: And you write in the book, which I thought was so poignant or just uh just so resonant with me, is just that when you're a child, you sort of go with what you're told.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_04: So your dad wasn't there certain times, or he had to go and do this, and you just took that at face value, that that's where what he was leaving, or he had to go do that.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, very true.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um as a as a kid, you you believe in your parents.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: You love your parents and they they love you, and there's no reason to question the relationship or the things that they're mentoring or guiding you with.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_04: And what you found out later was that um he did he have the apartment later on downtown, or did he always have that apartment?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: He had the apartment later on.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, all right.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_04: So so at the beginning, what you found out was that he had had these two different households.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_04: Sh the other home family was in Glenview, and you are in Winnecca.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_04: And for people that don't know the North Shore suburbs, it's literally six months.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_04: Six months.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_04: I know, I know.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's so crazy.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_04: And so, but he was mostly sleeping at your home, do you believe?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_04: He was you were the primary, and you make also a point of this in the book that you were the primary family.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: We were.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: We were the primary family, we were the legal family.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: My parents were legally married in the state of Illinois.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um so and and based on the amount of time that we had with him, we knew he was around 85-90 percent of our lives.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh about once a month, he would call from the car dealership on a Saturday afternoon and say, Hey, I'm gonna go fishing up in Wisconsin.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you guys tomorrow night.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: And this is pre-cell phones, so there's no way to find him.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_03: How often did that happen?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_03: How often once a month.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_03: Once a month.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_03: So basically once a month you suspicioned and he was spending time with that odofamily.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we we come to find out after the fact um that that's in fact what he was doing.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: That that once we're gonna be able to do that.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't really fishing that much.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe he was never fishing.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_04: He was a few.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we fished with him as kids.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you did.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: So we did, and um, but that was a convenient escape for him.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and my mother didn't question fishing because we'd all fish together.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: You got to drive pretty far to go fishing six miles away.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_03: I know.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_04: Or the holidays um with you know, Christmas and things, he was able to do sort of split the time, what you came to find out.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: He was, um, and that's really interesting because that would have been a huge challenge for anybody to juggle.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, my father, or before he got in the car business, was an attorney, um, and he's Jewish.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so he had always was playing cards with other Jewish attorneys on Christmas Eve.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's the the story that he had told my mother forever.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_03: Don't say the boy, don't say the boy Christmas.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but my mother was Protestant and we celebrated Christian holidays, so Christmas was a big deal to us.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so my mother never questioned, all right, you're gonna play cards on Christmas Eve.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: We all went off to a neighborhood Christmas party with a bunch of neighbors every year.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and my father was always there on Christmas morning.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, come to find out, Christmas Eve was when he spent with the other family.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and they had a story that they believed that every Christmas he was flying to Florida to see his college buddy Sheldon Becker.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And because they knew he was Jewish, my father was Jewish, they didn't expect him to be celebrating Christmas.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and of course, the other family, they were Catholic.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: So there was no question that's the one.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_04: The logistics are hard to get my mind wrapped around, but in the book you go through too, just his clothes.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_04: Because I mean, also, how does someone switch homes within the same sets of clothes?
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_04: Well, yes, but you talked about too how he dressed, even that it was sort of nondescript cloth uh, right?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_04: Two identical sets of clothing.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And which which totally makes sense because at any point uh during the week he could drift between both households and he he couldn't look out of place.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: So he had to be wearing outfits that each household recognized him in.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: So he kept identical sets of clothing.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: So of course you think about Father's Day and Christmas and birthday, and we give him a tie or a new shirt, and inevitably he found some fault with it.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: Didn't like the color, didn't like the fit, it had to go back.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because if it didn't fit the outfits that he already had that both families would recognize, it couldn't stay.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it is.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_04: And I mean, I think we could talk about the logistics piece, but I think there's this other whole piece, which is just the the deeper piece, the piece of, you know, what um what was he doing?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_04: What was he thinking?
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_04: Like how how why he just got into a lie.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_04: You mentioned in your book something I thought was really great.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_04: The the the lie impacted us long before the truth ever did.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_04: What what do you mean by that?
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: So you know, I firmly believe he got stuck.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: He was married to my mother and he had a mistress, and his mistress was pregnant with my half-brother, who was born about a year before I was.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then I come along a year later.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And he's stuck.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: He's a young attorney, and he made the decision to take care of both families.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then he continued to have children with both women, which was crazy, but he did, and so he was committed to this lifetime forever, this this lifestyle and maintaining it forever.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so he he was literally lying to everybody all along for over 40 years.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone he knew.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um he had to, he was the only one who knew what was going on because he would, if he told anybody, he could risk being exposed.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so he carried that lie forever.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you know, in France, okay, we have what we call a mistress.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_03: You know, usually men are married and it's what is it called?
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_03: Mistress.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_03: Oh mistress.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, of course.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_03: In France, you know, I mean the uh President Pompidou, when his funeral, when he died, he had his wife and his mistress.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so that's been very well known.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_03: Then in Europe, men are married and got mistress, but to the extent of having children with them, okay, that's that's the going overboard.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_03: And I could understand a new dad had an affair, and I could understand and she got pregnant, and I could understand and he said, Hey, I can leave her behind, it's my kid.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_03: And they there was feeling there.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_03: What what I what I have a very difficult time to grasp is is how do you how do you love those two people and and and being and being uh such a great actor, then but both of them never knew.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's what is mind-boggling to me.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: You're right, it it's fascinating.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um he committed to it, he did it.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: As time as the details came out, we learned a little more from my father about uh the situation with the other woman.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it sounded very much like she she accepted being a kept woman.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: She didn't know the details about us, um, and but she accepted him being gone all the time.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: So the other detail I should mention is that they didn't know he owned the car dealership.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: They thought he was traveling on business five, six days a week.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: They thought he was still an attorney and that he was gone all the time.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: And they accepted his absence, and that was it.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: There was no question about it.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_03: But the the ten the ten is six miles away in the community.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_03: Jimmy and I know very well the sabers.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_03: And the, you know, I mean, I go to the grocery store and I bump to you, and uh, you go to the the Oh, I don't think it could happen today.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_04: Do you think it could happen today?
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_04: No, no.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, no, today it wouldn't happen because of the social media.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_03: Better not be happening.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, no.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, no, I I don't think it could happen today because of the social media, because of the internet, because of all that stuff.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_03: But I mean, same ten without internet, without social media.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, uh the winnetka and and and and and it's it's such a close community.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, the grocery store, just the grocery store alone, the walking down the street, I mean to walk in with your wife uh with your mother down a street or going to the restaurant.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_04: Or just going to dinner in restaurants that are across.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, the these two suburbs, Glen.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I guess Glenview doesn't feed into the high school that you went to, right?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so that's the half siblings were in Glenbrook South.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_03: And he was in Wynetka, in Nutri, whatever it is.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_04: But it is well, so you uh because uh reading the book, I I I think I came to feel that the that his that the other woman, um she, the other woman wife, uh mistress, she knew something.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_04: She might not like so you're saying is she didn't know that he was married.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_04: Wait, uh so what do you think?
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: We think and and and a lot of these details came from my father, because we were able to s extract some.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: How could you believe your father?
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's very true.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I mean, how could you believe your father?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, whatever he wanted to say.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, if he was able to hide 40 years, his credibility was shot.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't believe anything he said.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it was hard.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't say much.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't say much.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, once my mother filed for divorce, the first five, six months after that were an extended interrogation where I was trying to stay neutral as a means to extract as much information as I could from him about the situation, how it happened, why it happened, who the other family was.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because we didn't have a lot to go on other than the search information we found on the internet.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I was able to glean enough information to know that they didn't know about us.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the other woman had really accepted this role as a kept woman.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, if she had information about us, she could have leveraged it and exposed him at any point in time.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, and that never happened.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: So she was in the dark.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: And at one point my father said to me, both women were lied to.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: So even though she was kind of an accomplice as his kept woman, uh, she was lied to as well.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_04: But a kept woman, but she took his name and she raised her children as his children, and she uh uh for all intents and purposes, her children thought that he was their that he was their only guy.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_04: It's really incredible.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_04: So what what was your first emotion, do you think, like when you first found out?
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_04: Like you said, it sort of unit revealed itself over a little bit of time.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: We were shocked.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there was that that initial shock, and we spent several weeks trying to figure out what to do.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: And my mother really arrived at filing for divorce was the right thing to do right then and there.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: We were paralyzed by fear as well because he had had the stroke during surgery, and we were worried about additional complications.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: And if something serious happened, we might never get answers.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: So we really tread lightly in the weeks that followed the revelations.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_04: Because you didn't run to the hospital.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't, and that's a regret.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like in retrospect, I should have gone in and visited him.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_03: And where were you living at the time when your dad was hospitalized?
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: I was in Philadelphia.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, so you were in Philadelphia, so you were not just a driving distance, and where your mom was living in Winnetka?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_03: She was spending most of her time at their house in Arizona.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so she wasn't long so far away.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: And then and then your father where was in the hospital in Illinois here in China?
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: She was here at Northwestern Illinois.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_03: So but I personally think then if my wife or my husband is here and in the hospital, I pop the first plane and I'm by seven.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_04: They were already separated though, were they not?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Or did I they were.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um he had had an affair with an employee in the 90s that my mother found out about.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: As if two families weren't enough.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: He was also having an affair with a stud.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: He had let's just say this he had a lot of energy.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus made.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_04: I told my husband this story, and he was like, I could never, I mean, I could never keep up.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, knowing what we know, do we really think it was just the two wives and the Woman at the at the dealership.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but because of this affair at the dealership, they had physically separated but stayed married.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: We were still a family unit in the sense that my parents talked every day.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: My father supported my mother.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: We still got together several times a year as a family for holidays and birthdays.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um how long before how long before he had his heart attack and hospitalized, and your mom found that then he had an affair, and then they start taking their separate way.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: How many years between that was about 16, 17 years of the separation?
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so they were separated for a long time.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: They were and and my mother had really always thought when he retires and sells the car business that he would come and retire in Arizona with her.
• 22:46
  unknown: Okay.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in retrospect, you know, he worked way into his mid-70s.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and he always said, Oh, if you retire, what are you going to do with yourself?
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: Your health's gonna go.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in reality, he kept working because he still needed to generate a lot of income.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, he had two house, a maîtress, and we don't know how many he's had that, right?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_04: And so you were we really regret, so like you said, back to that, you did not go to the hospital and sort of confront him because there was all of this other um considerations that you were getting.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a huge regret.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but but we were shocked and we're a little bit paralyzed by fear of if something additional happened to him, we'd never get answers.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then my mother progressed with filing for divorce and she she had him served while he was still in the hospital doing rehab.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I got the phone call.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: He called me and said, uh, Mike, uh, do you know your mother's divorcing me?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, I know, Dad.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, Well, why?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Well, Dad, we found out you have a secret double life with a whole other family.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, Oh, I better call your mother.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_04: That's his reaction.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: That was, oh, I better call your mother.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then an hour and a half later, my mother calls me and describes their conversation.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: And he didn't run from it.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: We knew too much information.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: We had the names of the other families.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: He was caught.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: He was caught and he knew it.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: And he admitted there there were going to be revelations.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and he had two questions.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: He asked my mother, How much money do you want?
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: Which she said, I don't know how much money you have.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then he said, I guess this is the end of my relationship with the boys, meaning my brother and I.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that was really shocking.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: And but of course, he had more insight into the whole picture.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: He knew who the other family was.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: He knew that as this unraveled, the other family would never accept the fact that he had us, this other family.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_03: So you're telling me then the other family didn't know that you existed?
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_03: We they didn't know about us at all.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_04: I mean Well, we're a couple minutes ago, you must have been zoning out.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_04: I was asking about the other woman and saying that she must have known something.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_04: Her kids even though she must have been known.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_04: Or a sociopath.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think to me, to be able to, for them to not figure.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, a woman likes to be kept, no doubt.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, I mean, but there is a certain extent to the point where they want to have the true, they want to spend time, they want particularly when they have children.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: She accepted their lifestyle.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: And they saw him Sundays, and that's something we found out after I did have one conversation with my half-sister along the way as the details unraveled.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we had one conversation, and that was really helpful, I think, for her and I to really piece together the details.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: We filled in the gaps for each other.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: We, you know, Sundays, he would often get up and we'd have breakfast, and then he'd say, Hey, I'm headed to the car store.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: I've got a lot of paperwork to do.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then he'd come home eight, nine, ten hours later, come to find out.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: Sundays were the day he spent with the other family when they knew he he wasn't traveling on business.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_04: So you say in the book you had this conversation with your half-sister, and you thought that that might sort of be the beginning of more conversation.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_04: You were, I don't know if you let yourself think of what the relationship you were going to have, but you definitely thought you were going to be talking to her more.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_04: And then what happened was they just sort of cut off and they sided, right, with with the other.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: They did.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, leading up to that, after about five or six months of my parents' negotiation, uh, during during the divorce proceedings, uh, my mother was diagnosed with with breast cancer.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so we felt like that was gonna put pressure on my father to hurry up and settle.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: And he wasn't, he was dragging his feet, he was being difficult with disclosure and his finances.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: So after we figured out the other family didn't know about us, I put an anonymous letter.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna say that I don't we put an anonymous letter in the mail to my half-sister, and within a couple days, she looked up my mother's phone number and called her.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then my mother gave her my phone number and she and I spoke.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: And we filled in the gaps.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of details were exchanged about how we were raised and what our lifestyle was like and what hers was like.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I came away from that thinking, okay, we'll probably talk more because there was more to discuss.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a real opportunity for both sets of kids who I felt like we were equal victims.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: We we were innocent in all of this, um, could learn a lot from each other, and it would probably help us with healing from the situation.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: They went, the other family, the other children went and confronted their parents and they circled the wagons.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_04: But he was most upset with you telling this half-sister.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: I got a phone call from my father.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: He he he questioned why I spoke with my half-sister, and he said, You told her too much.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, Dad, we told each other a lot of stuff.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: She told me stuff, I told her things, and we're really just telling each other about our lives.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_03: What was it what how how you half sister, I would say, how was she raised?
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, she was in a luxury like you were in Winnetka, where you raised in the upper class, or uh how how was she raised?
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_03: What did she have a good relationship with your father?
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_03: She did she call him dad?
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_03: Did she uh yeah, yeah.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, she had a great relationship with my father.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um and they had a nice house in Glenview.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: They had a nice house in Glenview.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's a good school district, similar to New Trier.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so I got that phone call from my father, and he was really mad that I disclosed the details.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: And in the background, the other woman is yelling and screaming.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: I can't believe they told them.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: Meaning we told their kids.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_04: Like you were supposed to hold that secret for their benefit.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: For their benefit.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: And and that was very revealing.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that she was upset at us rather than at my father meant she knew that she was part of something.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_03: And it's like she knew what's going on.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_03: She just didn't know about us.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, she didn't know about it, but she knew what's going on.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: She she knew that she was in on this, lying to her children about the fact that she really probably wasn't legally married to my father.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: She took his name, raised those kids as if she was legally married to her.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_03: Did she do anything for a living?
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_03: Was she working?
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_03: Was she or just kept woman?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_03: She's kept woman.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_03: So you father had to work very hard.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_04: And well, and and I think what's interesting is, um, and we talked a little bit that that these, you know, some of these memoirs are just so they're just fascinating.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_04: These are very well written.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_04: I I suggest that anyone get this book.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's really the book, guys.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, that's a good idea.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_03: Suburban big.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_04: Um and I just uh it's it's crazy.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_04: But there's another memoir that's being talked a ton about right now called Strangers, which is by this Bell Burden, and it's all about this divorce and but the parallel, you know, there's a couple parallels, but the one I wanted to draw today was about the finances and just this idea that she didn't know anything about her or as much as she should have about her finances, and maybe it could have protected her.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_04: And I think here, had your mom been more, you know, it's different times too, but because it was the 70s and 80s, but had she known more about the finances, finances, she would have seen the discrepancies potentially.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_03: Is your mom was a working woman or is she just a stay-home and taking care of you guys?
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: So uh when we got closer to middle age, middle school, um she started her own interior design business.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um she had gone to college, wanted to be an architect, and and that was in an era when women weren't architects.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um she had always had an interest in design work, and so she launched her own business.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, she was very involved in the community in Winneka.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: She was president of the Board of Governors at the Wineka Community House.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, she was very busy and involved in in our community.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_04: Um But you did say that at one time she was being awarded something and there was a picture, and and your father didn't want to take the picture because it was maybe the little thing.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: So um at various different times, uh she was she co-chaired the Wineka Antique Show.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: So there was there were media opportunities around some of these events in Winetka.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: And my mother, once we we found everything out, she started to recount red flag moments.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: And one of them was whenever there was a cameraman around, he ran because he didn't want to be in the photos.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: And he'd always say to my mom, it's your award or it's your honor, you should be in the photo.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so he never wanted his photo taken.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: There was one time he got in a photo, uh, I'm sure he had probably had a panic attack, worrying about who in his other world might see them that media piece.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_04: So does this did it make you question your whole childhood?
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_04: Did you go there?
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_04: Or did it make you like what I I'm just so curious?
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_04: May talk a little bit about in the book, but what yeah, it's a great question.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh my father and I were really, really close.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: And if if I'm honest, I really missed the guy I thought he was.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but but in reality, that guy didn't exist.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I've had to really come to grips with that.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, the hardest part, uh and even as we were learning about the details for the first 12 to 18 months, I was still very much of the mindset that, well, this guy's been my best friend my whole life.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: He's gonna step up to the plate and make this right.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: He'll he'll own it, he'll settle quickly with my mom.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: And if I was him, I honestly would have settled quickly to make this go away.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: But he dug his heels in and fought my mom.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a part of me that was kind of waiting to see is what's he gonna do for my brother and I?
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: Is he gonna, when the divorce is final, is he gonna sit down with us?
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: He always said, I'll sit down with you guys and explain everything.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I was open to that idea uh that he would want to make amends and show contrition.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, he didn't do any of those things and he never gave us the conversations we wanted.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I've got a lifetime of great memories with my dad.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: And now I'm thinking to myself, what do I do with all this?
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's almost like I've boxed everything up and put it on a shelf in a closet in a room you never go in.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: And ordinarily, if if my father prior to this happening, if my father had passed away tragically from a a sudden health event, there'd be the grief that follows.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and certainly with this, there was grief uh and trauma that went with it.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: But over time, you just kind of lost all the warmth and there's no nostalgia for that, all those great memories that you had your childhood.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: It really was.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um initially, the writing was about pulling together all the details.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: We we were learning so many things, not only about my father and what he did, but the other family.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just like a way to keep track, heads or tails of all this stuff.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: And you'd peel back a layer of the onion and you'd learn something new, or you'd learn something about the other family.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the writing became a way to capture it.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: And if you occasionally would share the details with with people, and someone would say, Gosh, this is a lifetime movie.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, that sends your mind to a whole other lifetime movie.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_03: But but the the the relationship you had, you and your brother, the relationship you have with you with your father was very close, very genuine.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_03: So you have a lot of respect for your father.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_03: If you never knew what happened and he would have passed away, you would have mess him and grieved him as a as a great greatest father of all time.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_03: Am I right?
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_03: So basically, when you found out when he got healed, that's when you find out the true.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_03: And then all of a sudden, you felt the resentment, the lie, the be the betrayed.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_03: Betrayal.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_04: But you say your brother had a little bit of a different experience than you.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: He did.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: They my my brother and my father were not as close as my father and I were.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: And um younger brother or he's he's three years younger.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: And he they never had the same bond.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so it affected my brother differently.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think my brother might actually have been angrier because now he had a deeper understanding of why my father wasn't there in the way that he needed him to be.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think my brother needed my father more than I did.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: I was more independent, and that's probably why it was easier for my father and I to click and just be.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas my brother needed more and didn't get it.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: And now all of a sudden he had a reason to understand an explanation for that.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_04: I want to go back to what Pascal was sort of, I think, starting on before, which is this thing.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_04: Do you do you maybe do you think you have trauma that you don't even know because he wasn't fully there?
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_04: Or was he fully there when he was there?
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_04: But he I mean, to have this like secret that's so big, is there somehow that it seeps into you in some way that you must have felt it, or no?
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I think over that five-year span, like it really unraveled my life.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: There was a five-year downward spiral after we learned of everything.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: How old were you at the time?
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_04: 42.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: 42.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: 42, okay.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: And for five years it really unraveled.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_03: I just want to uh remind listener.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, of course.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_04: I am totally kidding because I've done that too.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: It it really unraveled me.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um and when I came out, finally came out of the other side, I I felt like I'd really processed everything in a way um that it doesn't hang over me anymore.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now I can certainly look back and honestly say, you know, my father was not overtly displaying or modeling bad behaviors.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: But he wasn't necessarily modeling all the good behaviors he should have been, right?
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: He he was very independent.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: He he set boundaries, and he kind of came and went on his terms.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so he he modeled this very independent, do-your own thing attitude um towards relationships.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that impacted my brother and I.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: We I didn't get married till I was 49, and my brother's still single.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I imagine that subtle influence or lack of modeling the right relationship behavior impacted my brother and I.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_03: But as you think, then you know, I asked you earlier, how did your father treat you, you and your brother?
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_03: And you said, you know, he was the greatest father.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_03: So so knowing all that and him raising you to 42 years old and being a there for you and being a good father, find out what happened after that.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_03: I could understand that there is a certain type of drama and betrayed and uh and mistrust.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_03: But if you had a very tough childhood, if your father wouldn't talk to you, if your father was tough on you, if your father didn't give you the thing you wanted, I think I could understand you built in a lot of resentment with it, but you had a wonderful life.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_03: Your father chose his, he didn't he didn't hurt you by living the life he lived.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_03: You he hurt the in the end, he hurt you because you felt betrayed.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_03: But besides that, you shot wood was great.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: Am I right?
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, 100%.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: But but reconciling.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: Do you understand where I'm going, Jimmy?
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_04: No, I do.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: I get it.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: You don't you understand where I'm going?
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: I do.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that's been a real struggle for me because reconciling that betrayal has been really challenging.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the happiness he gave you.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean, we you get 42.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: You have answered.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_04: You said that in the book.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_04: You have an answer.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: I do, and and you know, he got stuck.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: He made bad choices and he got stuck.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_00: He got stuck.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result of the decision to ensure that everyone was taken care of, he made a commitment to this live for the rest of his life.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, he planned to take this to the grave.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: He he didn't want this coming out.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: Of course.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: And he got caught and then it unraveled on him.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I certainly have empathy for the fact that he probably didn't have a great life because he was stuck between both worlds where I don't think either spouse was really happy with him all the time.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: And he spent his life working really hard to support both worlds.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I don't know that there was a ton of joy in his life.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and even along the way, um, they lost a child along the way.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: They had the other family.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, their second born um passed away when she was an infant at 12, 12 months, 18 months old.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: What was the and um Ryze syndrome?
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: The baby was sick and she was given aspirin.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: And um then the the another daughter was born who is the current half-sister.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I can't imagine the pain he endured when when he lost a child.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_04: That was secret, right?
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_04: That was a secret, right?
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_04: I I think you're very generous to, and maybe that's half-of-therapy that you are sort of giving giving that.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_04: And I think what Pascal is saying is really what changed?
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_04: You were you already were in adulthood when you learned this, but I think there there was financial impact.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_04: He did leave his his legacy, if you will, to the other family, his financial legacy.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: He did.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, when everything shook out, uh, my parents' divorce happened about a year after the revelations.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: And literally the day after the the divorce was final, the other woman took him to the courthouse and married him.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: So her four decade ruse as a kept woman was over.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_04: And she became the primary beneficiary, right?
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: Is that she was in the driver's seat.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_00: I went to visit my father the day after that, not knowing they'd just gotten married.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_03: Is your your father got married with constant men, or because he was ill?
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_03: Did he marry her because he wanted to marry her?
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: Was he divorced at the time with your mother?
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_04: So it's a good question.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: My parents got divorced.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: He was in poor health, and he really needed someone to take care of him.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so that basically And I think that was something this the other woman probably really wanted.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_03: How younger was she from your mother again?
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think she's about four years younger than my mother.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so that's sim age.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: Similar age.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I showed up at their house, not knowing that he just married the other woman.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: And my father let me in the house.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: He was very anxious.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: She wasn't home at the time, and he was very worried about what was going to happen when she came back in the house.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, here I am thinking about this in a more sane fashion, thinking, well, why is this a problem?
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your son, and she knows about me now, so why should this matter?
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, you know, she's just not gonna understand it.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: And she came roaring into the house when I was there and and lost it.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: She went crazy at both my father and I yelling, screaming, obscenities, and she just wasn't having it, wasn't having me a part of my father's life.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that was probably just all her pent-up anger.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's the first time you met her?
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: First time I met her.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think she had, you know, she had made a deal with the devil, and for over 40 years, she had kept it inside.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then she exploded.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: She turned to him and said, You gave me one day of happiness.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when it dawned on me.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: I said, you know, they got married yesterday.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: They got one, she she felt it was one day of the happiness when she got married.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_03: How old was he when he got married?
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: When was that?
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: That would have been he was 77.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: He was married to her.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_04: It's incredible.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_04: So uh what do you what has been the reaction to the book?
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_04: I'm curious too, of some of the people that you grew up with and in the community of Wanaka that is pretty small.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_04: What has have people come read the book and said, you know, I'm shocked, or hmm, this makes sense, or it's interesting.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, most people are shocked.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's a shocking story.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: The the scandal's shocking.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: The fallout is crazy.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: If you think about, you know, I guess to a certain extent, there's kind of some stereotypical clashing going on.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, when two families are, there's a tug of war.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um but as you alluded to earlier, you know, once they he married the other woman, she got all the finances.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: My brother and I were written out of the estate plan.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um people read the story and they're blown away.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: And there's always um people have been very supportive.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: When I went through it, that that five year span, I felt very alone because.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can't Google, hey, father's double life, other family six miles away, what do I do?
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: You're flying blind in the fog about how you navigate this.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: So it was really challenging.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: And but then the book comes out and there's been a ton of empathy.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I've done some speaking engagements, and people will come up to me afterwards and say, Hey, you know, thank you for sharing your story.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's wow, it's crazy, and that took a lot of courage to talk about it.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then they turn around and say, You talking about that has helped me think differently about my own personal situation.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: So that kind of empathy that people showed me, and then and the vulnerability to share their own story has been really surprising and wonderful to hear.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so the support's been great.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_03: And is that so how's the relationship with you and your half-sister?
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_03: Do you have any?
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_03: We don't have any relationship.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_03: No relationship.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_03: Never try to get connected and and and and connect the data.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_04: Well, read the book for the rest of that.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_04: We have to leave something for Levon.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_03: Because he's gonna before I want to know, I want to be ahead of the book.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the other thing when when they circled the wagons, we felt like there were a couple scenarios.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: And one of them was um my father and the other woman brainwashed my half-siblings.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe he could promise them money if they stayed in line.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: But they have shown no interest or curiosity whatsoever to and I didn't have any false illusions that we were going to start spending holidays together.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't think about it that way.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was thinking, like, honestly, we could learn a lot from each other, and it would probably help us all get more closure.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_00: And they didn't share that curiosity.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a amiss.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's sad, it's sad, it's sad.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_03: It's sad because you know, I mean, I got married once, I have a children with my first wife, and I got married a second time.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_03: I got two children, and the from obviously two different fathers, but my my children from my first wife and my second wife are very close.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_03: They're sharing their life, they're talking to each other, spend time in vacation together.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_03: And that's sad to see then that the two of you who are innocent, you know what happened to being able to build up a relationship and and get to know each other as a have brother sisters.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: I I agree with you 100%.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: I I do think, and and they all handled what I would deem, they handled the whole situation very poorly.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: And to a certain extent, I feel like their upbringing may have informed how they responded to this.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: We responded to it from the mindset that, and my mother said this more than once, she said, I would never deny any children access to their father if the roles were reversed.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I think because we had a a much more functional household, uh, we've approached this much more openly in the sense that, hey, children are all equal victims.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's no reason why we couldn't communicate with each other.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, whereas the other household, there was there were some things going on.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: And and and I only know a little bit what my father told me and some of the details he disclosed along the way.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I've had a couple conversations with former neighbors of theirs who came out of the woodwork, and what they described was a very strange house in the neighborhood where they would see my father show up one day a week.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_00: Those kids weren't allowed very a very long leash in the neighborhood.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: So they weren't allowed to go play in other other homes.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I imagine that's because there was a fear of details coming out.
• 47:44
  unknown: Wow.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_03: So it's it's hard to believe because you know, I mean, I know that in school, uh, if you take the Nu Twitter and you take the Winnetka or Glenco, they all have games where they practice they they they team against uh Glenko versus Winnetka, and the kids never really get and tell oh, I saw your dad uh with that woman.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_03: You never mean it's mind-bogging.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_04: You never saw them in a cross-country meeting like that, right?
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_03: This is six miles away, which is a such a close neighborhood.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_03: I know that when my son was in Nutware, he used to go and and compete against the guy in Glenview, and Glenview compete with the guy that we netcast.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_03: So there was always parents involved and stuff like that.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_00: And wow, you thought this day and age, right?
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the those siloed communities that existed in the 70s and 80s don't exist anymore.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we everyone kind of knows everyone through social media.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the other thing I think that's changed so much more is sporting leagues and activities cross towns, and there's travel teams, and all that is much more common now than it was 50 years ago.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's incredible and incredible the type of person that he must have been to have.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_04: It sort of reminds me of even the Bernie Madoff story of just having like this just constant lies and lies and lies.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_04: And I mean, there was truth in it, you're you're the love of your family, but it's just crazy.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_04: So you mentioned you have a bit of regret about not confronting him.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_04: How do you find closure then?
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_04: You weren't speaking to them the him the last couple of years of his life.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_04: You wanted to.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_04: His wife cut cut off the communication.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_04: You went to the home, the police, you you know, you couldn't get in.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_04: So how do you how do you move on?
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_04: Because that's really, I think, where we want to understand.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: And and and it it took a long time to get there.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, that five years was really tough.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, eventually you start just time elapses, time helps.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: Heal the wound.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and and then my son was born uh near the end of 2019.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I was, you know, I was almost 50 when he was born.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I was very aware of the fact that my life was going to change from the standpoint priorities would change, um, your purpose, where you spent your time was going to change.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_00: What I wasn't prepared for was just how much love this child was going to bring in my life.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_00: And he gave me the purpose and the closure that I needed from that situation.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so now everything I've been able to do is look forward with my son.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_00: And and before he was born, I didn't have that.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: I was still kind of trapped in this what happened with my dad?
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: My dad didn't give me closure to the situation.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_00: And when is when is the whole thing going to shift in a positive direction?
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so the presence of my son and enjoying all those cool first moments with him has been obviously life-changing, but healing.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really what's given me that final piece of closure.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, certainly I'm experiencing things with my son that I know I did with my dad.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so inevitably, my mind does go back to things with my father.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but I also know just from comments my mother makes, she says, your father didn't spend near as much time with you and your brother as you spend with your son.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_03: Did she say that out of resentment, or did she say that as no out of positive support?
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_03: Was it was it true?
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_03: Was it true?
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you said your dad was there for you.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_00: He was there, but he was working so much uh when we were young.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so I and I work from home.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I've had this great, awesome experience picking him up midday from preschool.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_00: Or I'm I'm with him every day, putting him on the bus, or taking him off the school bus to kindergarten.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I've been able to be so immersed in his world and he and mine, and and that's gone so far in the healing process for me.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_04: Good.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_04: I'm so glad.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_04: I'm so glad you're here to tell us a story.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_04: Well, thank you.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_04: It is a very fascinating story.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_03: I suggest DC Du Boot.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, suburban bigamy, six miles between truth and deceit.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_04: And Mike Zimmerman, thank you so much for sharing your story with us.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you both.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I love that.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's been great to be here.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 51:56
  unknown: Okay.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_03: Wish you the very best.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.