Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (25 page)

Discipline was not a problem. The nuns patrolled the halls in their black veils, black robes, and black leather lace-up shoes. As Sister Timothy Ann paced the hallways, she swatted a ruler into the palm of her fist, displaying her readiness to use it. “Everyone knew the nuns had the authority,” said Stan. If anyone disrupted the class or misbehaved, the rest of the class witnessed the consequences. The wooden ruler was merely symbolic. Corporal punishment was unnecessary. The nuns wielded a much bigger weapon.

“
We could kick you out of this school whenever we want to,” the nuns threatened the troublemakers in front of their peers. “Plenty of kids are waiting to take your place!”

Plenty were. The baby boom boomed the loudest in Catholic households, with lots of families of 12 or 13 kids sending them all to Saint Lawrence Martyr. There were so many kids that the school had to schedule staggered recesses and lunches, because there wasn’t enough space for all the kids to play at the same time on the soccer field, the baseball diamond, and the three expansive asphalt playgrounds. There were always more kids on the waiting list during those years than the beleaguered nuns could accommodate.

The nuns couldn’t even replace all the kids who were kicked out or who left the school for other reasons. Thanks to the merciful God-given blessing that kids grow larger over time, some attrition was absolutely necessary to keep squeezing the ever-larger kids into the same-sized classrooms year after year. Perhaps the nuns calibrated the enrollment capacity of each classroom based on the average physical size of the kids. By the end of the eighth grade, there were only about 50 students per classroom, down from the 70 or more who had enlisted together in the first grade. On average, each eighth-grader needed about 16 square feet of space, including a larger desk. Fifty of the eighth-graders would occupy 800 square feet. Therefore, there simply was no room for a teacher plus more than about 50 eighth-graders in each 840-square-foot classroom.

By far the biggest national event of that era for the people of Saint Lawrence Martyr was the presidential election of 1960. Prior to that year, Dad and Mom had always belonged to the opposing political parties so they could receive the propaganda from both sides before deciding how to vote. But in 1960, there was no contest. It was Kennedy, hands down.

“
Kennedy is the first Catholic ever running for president with a real chance of winning,” Dad could hardly believe his own words about the barrier-breaking candidate.

“
And he’s so handsome!” Mom swooned.

“
But he can’t really win, can he?” Dad kept managing his expectations late into the night on Election Day while watching the inconclusive returns on the black-and-white television set. So evenly did the electorate split its votes that the country went to bed not knowing who had won.

The next morning, there was still no confirmed victor. Mom felt like she was in the tenth month of pregnancy. But when she drove the kids to school, she felt heartened by an immense banner that she saw unfurled along the brick wall outside Saint Lawrence Martyr. “Look at that!” she pointed from behind the wheel. “Can you read that?”

“
Kennedy 1960,” answered the six-year-old Genie.

“
Oh, yeah!” Mom glanced heavenward with another prayer. “John F. Kennedy! Oh, yeah!”

About two hours later, the announcement came over the airwaves that Kennedy had won. The first triumph of a Roman Catholic nominee was taken by many Americans as proof of the country’s freedom from bigotry, despite the fact that Kennedy might have lost more than four million votes from people in his own party who would not support a Catholic candidate.

Upon hearing the news at home, Mom made the sign of the cross in euphoric gratitude and scurried toward the phone, where she resided for much of the rest of the day and into the evening. “I’m just so happy I could live to see this!” she kept telling people. All the talk all day long with all the relatives—Aunt Mafalda across town, Uncle Ralph and Aunt Mary in Orange County, Aunt Elsie in Mason City, and Father Joe in Grand Rapids—was all about the astonishment that a Catholic had actually won. “Balls o’ fire!” Aunt Elsie hollered over the phone later that night. “I’m so happy I can’t sleep!”

One of the first books Stan read in its entirety was
John F. Kennedy and PT-109
. At the age of eight, Stan wrote a biography of Kennedy based on the book, which told the story of the young naval lieutenant whose 80-foot, wooden-hulled, patrol boat had been sunk by a Japanese destroyer in the South Pacific in 1943. Left for dead at sea, Kennedy and ten other survivors swam 15 hours to reach Nauru Island, which was under Japanese occupation. The crew were rescued on that island thanks to a message that Kennedy had carved into a coconut and passed along to a native to carry to rescuers. For his courage and leadership, Kennedy earned the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Medal. Stan knew that Kennedy was close to Dad’s age and that Kennedy had fought in the big war in the Pacific, just like Dad. “He was definitely a hero,” said Stan.

“
And so, my fellow Americans,” Kennedy exhorted the nation over the television during his inaugural address on January 20, 1961. “Ask NOT what your country can do for you. Ask what YOU can do for your country!”

Just a kindergartner, Geri watched in awe, her tiny jaw ajar. “I knew exactly what he was talking about,” she recalled much later in life. “I felt moved!”

The era of Fort Godges, Spiritual Boot Camp, and Catholic Camelot left entirely different impressions on Stan and Genie. It was a time for Catholics in America to redefine their place in society, which also made it an opportune yet precarious time for Stan and Genie to begin to define their roles in their family and community. Stan and Genie were still just kids, but lots of adults around them and on the television set were debating what it meant to be a Catholic, as opposed to being an American, as opposed to being a Catholic American. Some commentators made finer distinctions between Catholic Americans and American Catholics. All those meanings were up for grabs. Stan and Genie grabbed onto different ones.

Stan felt privileged for everything that he had—an echo of how his Aunt Elsie had felt decades before. For Stan, his childhood was a time of immense pride and promise. He felt enormously proud of his parents, mostly because of how well they had performed in school. College graduates were rare back then, and Dad was one of the few college graduates on the block. Stan was especially proud when other people in the neighborhood came over to ask Dad for help with their tough accounting questions. Stan admired everything about Dad—from the way that he had built a fortress for the family to the way that he had traveled around the country for the sake of the family to the way that he had nevertheless found time to have fun with the family. “I didn’t put Dad on a pedestal,” Stan recalled. “He was higher than that. I felt that the only one higher than Dad was God.” As for Mom, Stan remembered the newspaper picture of her as the top girl in her high school class. No other mom on the block could say that. Stan also felt lucky to go to a Catholic school. He couldn’t read as well as his friends there, but he could still read better than his buddies on the block who went to the nearby public school. He felt superior to the kids who went to the public school. He felt better off than everyone else in that neighborhood. He felt triply privileged because of who his dad was, who his mom was, and what his school was. Stan didn’t like studying as much as he liked playing with his buddies on the block with their bikes, go-karts, and makeshift skateboards fashioned from two-by-fours and roller skates. But no matter how much temptation he felt to slack off with his pals, he felt an even greater sense of pride in his family. His parents had made him proud, and he would make them proud, too. He would uphold the family honor. He would study hard. He would learn Latin as an altar boy. He would stand up for those around him who were “good, God-fearing people.” He knew that Dad and Mom made friends with people of different nationalities, races, and faiths, but all those friends were “good, God-fearing people.” They were never atheists or communists. “Those were the same things back then and the scariest things of all,” said Stan. He knew that Dad and Mom associated mostly with other Roman Catholics, but Stan believed that was only natural, just like people of any ethnic group naturally gravitated toward their own kind, “like members of the same family.”

Genie felt grateful for what she had, too, but something troubled her about the home front—an echo of how her mother had felt decades before. Even during Genie’s first couple years in elementary school, the academically precocious little girl sensed that Fort Godges had its dark side. The six-foot wall around the front yard served a noble purpose, but the wall was also a concrete demonstration of a threat mentality. Dad and Mom knew that the outside world could be a hostile place and sought to protect their children. But as Genie saw it, there were clearly demarcated boundaries not only around the front yard but also around the type of community in which Dad and Mom felt truly comfortable, and that community was the Catholic community. Genie felt that all of her friends were welcome to visit—but that her Catholic friends were more welcome than others. Dad and Mom greeted Genie’s friends from the Catholic school more enthusiastically than they greeted her other friends, she recalled. “If there were other Italian kids at the school, we were ready to
adopt
them!” she laughed. Unfortunately for Dad and Mom, there were only a smattering of Italians and almost zero other Polish kids. But there were hordes of Irish kids, and they were still loved, even if some of them were “shanty Irish” whose families couldn’t keep their houses clean. The Irish were still “one of us,” after all, because they were Roman Catholic. So Genie became chummiest with the Armstrongs, the Jordans, the McElroys, and the O’Briens. She could play at their houses just about any time. But not far beyond that most holy and precious emerald realm, the outside world was the enemy. “The outside world was out to getcha. You had to watch out. You couldn’t trust people who weren’t Catholic, and they probably couldn’t trust you.” Genie didn’t buy it. She didn’t understand what made Catholics so special and non-Catholics so evil. She had never experienced anti-Catholicism. She had experienced just the opposite: anti–non-Catholicism. Paranoid Catholicism. Anything that threatened the Catholicity of the family seemed to threaten the family itself. Dad and Mom never said anything like that to Genie in so many words, but they said it in other ways. “Too bad Genie’s so dark,” they used to tell people. “She looks like a little Jew!”

The pundits of the age might have dubbed Stan an American Catholic and Genie a Catholic American.

No matter how hard Dad worked for raises and no matter how many coupons Mom clipped, they could never save enough money to build their dream home in the shadow of the church. The construction costs grew faster than the savings. It would take thousands of dollars and a couple months just to level the subdivided lot, which sloped downward in two directions away from the church. The lot needed high cement retaining walls on three sides just to make it livable and then extra dirt hauled in from the outside to give the kids a flat back yard. Dad calculated the total construction costs at about $58,000. He had $5,000. He needed $20,000 in cash just to get the builders started and to convince a savings and loan company to finance the rest of the construction.

Even if he could sell the house on Calle de Ricardo at a high price and move everyone into an apartment, he could maybe squeeze $10,000 of equity out of the sale, still leaving him $5,000 short. He thought about selling his 1960 sky-blue Super 88 rocket-engine Oldsmobile station wagon to make up the difference. Perhaps he could take a bus to work. But even that wouldn’t be enough. The construction costs were simply beyond his means.

For the fourth time, he couldn’t pay for a house on his own. He agonized. Having already borrowed money from Aunt Leola to purchase the lot, he couldn’t bring himself to ask her for an additional loan to build the house.

He chatted with the elderly couple across the street, Floyd and Pearl Barlow. They had watched Dad and Mom work hard and try to raise a decent family. Mom and Pearl used to talk for hours about their kids. Dad used to help the Barlow grandsons with their accounting lessons. Dad let Floyd know about the financial situation. “I made him aware where we were,” Dad recalled. But he didn’t have the nerve to ask for the money.

“
Well, Joe,” Floyd volunteered. “We can loan you and Ida $15,000.”

“
Oh, that’d be beautiful!” Dad sighed.

It was January 1962. The builders started immediately. They estimated that the construction would take eight to nine months.

Dad promised to repay the Barlows $10,000 as soon as he could sell the house on Calle de Ricardo. That would leave $5,000 remaining on top of the rest of his construction loans.

“
I really stuck my neck out,” said Dad decades later. “But I knew that you children did not beg to come into this world. We needed to provide a space for you. And we wanted you close to the Catholic school.”

Finance and faith had reinforced one another.

Dad became reflective in his recollection. “That lot. The property. The house. It was really an answer to our prayers.” He paused. “Thank God for Floyd Barlow.”

Mom gave birth to me by Caesarean section in April 1962. I was her sixth child in less than ten years. I nearly killed her.

Immediately following the surgery, she started bleeding internally, requiring another surgery. For days, the doctors didn’t know if she would make it.