By Ted Kleine
So Michael Leider passed on the invitation to his 37-year-old grandson, Mike, whom he’s been grooming since boyhood to do two things: grow flowers and preserve the Leider family’s obscure heritage. Mike started working at the greenhouse when he was 12, and he started hearing about Luxembourg when he was barely out of the cradle.
When he was 31, Mike was diagnosed with leukemia. A bone-marrow transplant from his sister Mary saved his life. After he recovered he told her, “I’ll take you anywhere in the world you want to go.” Of course Mary wanted to go to Luxembourg. The siblings went to Toddler, the village Mike’s great-grandfather emigrated from over a hundred years ago. When they visited his old house, they found it was still occupied by Leiders.
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Luxembourgers began arriving in Chicago in the 1880s, settling mostly in Rogers Park, Niles, and Skokie because there was still good farmland in the area. An agrarian people, many of them started greenhouses and truck farms. Mike Leider’s great-grandfather, Michael Leider Sr., came over in 1893, at the age of 18.
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Just after seven o’clock, officials from the Luxembourgian consulate began clearing a path to the podium at the back of the room. His Royal Highness Crown Prince Henri was about to make his entrance. Everyone stared at the carved double doors, then rose to their feet as a slight man in a wrinkled charcoal suit strode across the carpet. He looked squinty-eyed and windburned, as though he had come straight from the ski slopes of Gstaad. After singing along with the national anthem, “Ons Heemecht” (“We Wish to Remain as We Are”), and receiving a copy of Michael Jordan’s new book, For the Love of the Game, from the staff of the consulate, the heir to the throne of Luxembourg stood at the microphone and addressed the room in a soft, almost diffident voice that could have belonged to a continental banker.
