“I can’t understand it. Why would people who aren’t Nusinows keep this junk safe for nearly a hundred years?” asks Bernard Nusinow. He shakily pulls another milk bottle down from an antique Dutch cabinet in the Nusinows’ living room and adds it to the fragile pile balanced in his arms.
Bernard picks up the largest cream jug and twists it in the late afternoon sun reflecting off the lake—you can see Oak Street Beach out the living room windows. The room, dark and narrow, is anchored on one side by a giant antique French monkey cage almost the size of Betty Fae and the big Dutch cabinet on the other. “It’s a little funny that we keep the bottles in there, with all the expensive china,” says Bernard.
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After graduation they married and moved to South Shore and had two daughters. Bernard started working for Betty Fae’s father, who owned a jewelry store in Hammond. After nine years of that Betty Fae insisted he take classes in interior design at the Art Institute. “It’s important that a man do work that he loves,” she says. “He’d always had an eye for art and design, and somehow I got the feeling working at a jewelry store wasn’t his life’s work.” He opened Bernard Nusinow Interiors in 1958, and the Nusinows moved to this Gold Coast apartment in the 70s. “I was a small-town girl dying to live in the big city,” Betty Fae says.
Ten years ago Betty Fae met a vendor at the Kane County Flea Market who dealt in milk bottles. Without letting Bernard know, she asked the dealer if he’d ever seen a bottle from any of the old Nusinow dairies. “He said no, he hadn’t, but he’d write the names down in his little notebook and he’d call when something turned up. Well, I forgot all about it. Six years later I get a call saying, ‘I’ve got your bottles, do you still want them?’
“Real cream, can you imagine?” Betty Fae says, almost purring.
“—so he must have started the dairy before he left, because when he came back he couldn’t work at all. Then my grandfather must have had a hand in it, though when he was in the Ukraine he had never worked a single day. He just prayed and learned the Torah—”
