Dear Mama

In 1936, a Nebraska housewife named Hazel Chandler Krajicek abandoned her husband and two young sons, ran off to Michigan, and never returned home. In Dear Mama, the American true crime writer David J. Krajicek explores the troubled life of Hazel, the grandmother he never knew. He learned that she was born into a raucous family whose home base was South Omaha's boisterous meatpacking district. Her kin included a heaping dose of miscreants--both major and minor--whose names popped up often in Omaha newspaper crime stories, including in connection with a cockamamie, booze-infused homicide that intimately involved Hazel's two sisters and their husbands. Hazel's story is told in part through dozens of heartrending letters from her sons, Eddie and Connie. "Mama, I don't want nothing for my birthday," the nine-year-old Eddie wrote in July 1937, nearly a year after she left. "Send me your picture if you can. That will be a birthday present from you to me." Hazel saved the letters for decades, and the author's father, Edward L. (Eddie) Krajicek, retrieved them after she died in 1981. The letters reveal Eddie's extraordinary sense of duty toward love a mother who rejected him. "You deserve all of the happiness in the world, mom," he wrote. His enduring kindness toward Hazel, on touching display in this book, serves as a paragon example of how one can graciously overcome a broken heart.