Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (26 page)

“
Mommy’s very sick,” eight-year-old Genie informed two-year-old Mary Jo. “Maybe Mommy’s not coming home.” Genie dressed Mary Jo and changed her diapers. “But it’ll be okay,” said Genie. “I’ll take care of you.”

“
That was the hardest I ever prayed in my life,” said Dad in retrospect. “Imagine what it would’ve been like to raise you six kids without Mom’s help.”

The moms on the block once again showered our house with food.

When the news spread around the block one afternoon that Mom was on her way home from the hospital after all, the kids from one end of the block gathered in the street near the bottom of the hill to wait for her. When her car turned into the neighborhood, they crowded around the car and walked alongside it as it puttered slowly up the hill. Meanwhile, the kids from the other end of the block ran from the park to greet Mom at home. The throngs of chattering kids from the two ends of the block converged in front of the house as her car arrived and rolled into the garage.

She stepped from the car and looked at everyone, a sea of young, energetic faces before her. But she was so weak that she couldn’t wave. She merely drooped her head.

The kids fell silent as the night. They had never imagined her in that condition.

The showers of food grew into a torrent—a continuous, coordinated flow of aid for all eight of us dwelling in that three-bedroom home on Calle de Ricardo.

Our new home emerged in the shadow of the church and within easy earshot of the daily choruses of bells at noon and 6 p.m. The city of Redondo Beach paved the dirt road leading north from the church and named the street Prospect Avenue. At the time, the only two houses on the newly paved street were our house, which was under construction, and the original house next door.

The people who lived in the original house were exactly the type of people whom Dad and Mom had wanted as neighbors: another big Catholic family. The parents, Ray and Pat Jersin, had four kids of similar ages to Stan, Genie, Geri, and Joe. Stan, Genie, Geri, Joe, Connie, Colette, Ceci, and Mark had already begun attending the Catholic grade school together up the hill. Ray and Pat Jersin had already become my godparents. The two families were quickly cementing a stronghold of devout Catholicism in that undeveloped corner of Redondo Beach. The little colony of two houses among the dunes was less of a G.I. Row and more of a California mission outpost.

Nine-year-old Stan felt prouder than ever. He believed that his house was going to be the biggest and best house in all of Redondo Beach. He watched the construction in progress through the chain-link fence at the northernmost edge of the school playground about 300 yards away. “No other kid in school has a house like that,” he told himself. He knew that for a fact. He had selected the intercom system, the terrazzo stone tiles for the entryway, the kitchen tiles, the cabinetry knobs, and the linoleum floor for the kitchen and dining room. Stan also knew that Dad had somehow finagled a way to make things better financially for the family. Dad had even drawn up the blueprints for the house himself. “No other dad I know can do that,” Stan reckoned.

We moved into 1606 South Prospect Avenue in September 1962, a few days after school started. The buyers of the home on Calle de Ricardo immediately tore down the fiberglass sections of the fortress walls.

The new home was everything Dad and Mom had prayed for. They designed the home in full accordance with post-war, baby-booming standards. “It was practical, not plush,” said Mom. With six bedrooms and four bathrooms in two stories, the home was “big but not fancy.” It was designed like a boarding house for children, and it was nearly as unruly. “I spent half my life on the floor cleaning up after you kids,” said Mom.

Dad made sure that nobody had to study—as he had once studied—on the top step of a staircase by the light of a bare bulb. Two of the bedrooms had twin sets of built-in desks, drawers, and bookshelves. Stan and Joe shared one of those rooms. Genie and Geri shared the other. Mary Jo and I shared a third bedroom that functioned as a nursery adjacent to the master bedroom.

The remaining two bedrooms, along with a bathroom sandwiched between them, were designed as an in-law suite in case the grandparents wanted to move in. But Dad and Mom filled the in-law suite first with boarders, because Dad needed the rent badly to pay off his loans.

Three of the four bathrooms had two sinks to accommodate at least two grubby kids or two territorial adults at a time. A pink-tile bathroom for the girls. A blue-tile bathroom for the boys. A white-tile bathroom for the boarders or in-laws.

The master bedroom was no larger than any other bedroom, and the master bathroom was the only bathroom with a single sink. The only remarkable thing about the master suite was that it contained a tiny office just off the bedroom.

The office was so small, with barely enough space for Dad’s desk and file cabinet, that he called it his “doghouse.” He worked like a dog in that doghouse, paying bills, filing papers, studying stocks, and preparing taxes hour after hour in the evenings and on weekends. We hardly saw him, except for meals. He toiled behind double doors, first the master bedroom door and then the sliding doghouse door. The impact of the double doors swung both ways. Although Dad had designed the doghouse to shield us from his suffering, the doors also isolated him from the action in the rest of the house.

And, boy, was there action. There was a toy room attached to a playroom with a sliding glass door that spilled out onto a back yard with a basketball patio, green lawn, and fruit trees. The playroom had a hardwood floor not for decoration but because the kids needed a flat surface for playing with their blocks and a Lionel train set. There was a piano in the playroom downstairs and another piano in the living room upstairs. The kitchen had an indoor barbecue for charbroiling burgers and hot dogs for the kids and their friends year round.

The house was also a Cold War redoubt. Just in case of World War III, the house had a fallout shelter for protection against nuclear attack. The 15-by-15-foot bunker beneath the house was encased in six feet of concrete, dirt, and more concrete on all sides. The only access to the fallout shelter was through a narrow, echoing, cement-block passageway that served as a radiation barrier. The shelter had a crank ventilator to pump fresh air into the room during prolonged attacks. The shelter was the only one in the area and, as far as we knew, one of only two private fallout shelters in south Redondo Beach. We didn’t want people to know about it. In case of World War III, we didn’t want half the people in that half of town banging on our fallout shelter door.

For even greater protection, a small plastic crucifix hung in the middle of the most prominent wall in every room of the house, except for the bathrooms, the toy room, and the fallout shelter, which had cement walls. Palm fronds from Palm Sunday rested on each crucifix, cushioning the broken and battered body of Christ against the unforgiving cross.

Despite the scale of the 3,000-square-foot house, its façade was intentionally unpretentious. Built for heavenly and earthly protection, the house bore the appearance of something that was a cross between a grotto and a garrison. Most of the structure dropped unobtrusively below street level, having been carved into the hillside that sloped downward from the street. From the front, passersby could see only a garage door, a small gate to the left of the garage, a single window to the far right, and a central entryway that looked more like a deterrent than an invitation. At the front of the entryway stood two mighty gates of vertical wooden slats. When latched together, the gates formed a virtually impenetrable veil, creating the impression of a seamless curtain across the face of the house. Beyond the veil of gates lay an enclosed walkway of stone tiles that led another 20 feet to the front door. On the rare occasion that the gates were open, the front door still remained mostly invisible to the outside world. The subdued appearance of the house reflected its heart and soul: It was a sanctuary conceived and constructed in the image of Dad’s deepest dreams.

The house was painted a faded shade of coral.

A month after we moved in, Floyd Barlow came over to watch the grim news on our television about the Cuban missile crisis. The drama and dread of nuclear brinksmanship unfolded on the black-and-white screen.

Stan, who was then ten years old, thought we might have to use the fallout shelter. He aligned his blocks on the hardwood floor in an unusually pensive way.

“
Are you making a blockade?” Mr. Barlow asked.

“
Yes,” said Stan. “I am.” Like many who watched the alarming events throughout those 13 days of October 1962, Stan feared that the end was near.

Eight-year-old Genie lay awake at night because of her fears of the atom bomb. Staring up at her darkened ceiling, she decided that if the bomb fell, she would not run to the fallout shelter. “I’d rather die,” she resolved, “than go down there and then walk out and see everyone else dead and the land shriveled all around us.”

Thirteen months later, Genie and her friends in the fourth grade, wearing their white blouses and burgundy plaid skirts, bounced the ball on the playground at recess. It was Friday morning, November 22, 1963. When the bell rang prematurely just after 10:30 a.m., the playground fell silent.

The principal announced over the loudspeaker: “Attention. May I please have your attention.” She paused to allow the chatter to subside. “President Kennedy has been shot.”

Genie’s best friend, the normally soft-spoken Molly O’Brien, responded with an announcement of her own: “I’m gonna KILL whoever shot him!”

The children from the playground followed the instructions to file into their classrooms. The nuns turned on the radios. Everyone in every class listened to the news.

The sixth-graders were already in class when the principal made her somber declaration. Stan’s worst fears seemed to be coming true. “My God!” he wondered, gazing at the loudspeaker high on the wall at the front of the classroom. “Is the world gonna come to an end? Do I have time to get to the fallout shelter?”

At 11:38 a.m. Pacific time, the veteran newscaster Walter Cronkite announced in a tearful voice that President Kennedy had been pronounced dead in Dallas.

The attentive nuns led the distraught children from the 16 classrooms to the church. “He was assassinated,” the kids were saying, “because he was Catholic.”

“
Kennedy was
our
president,” Stan flashed back to the moment. “We felt vulnerable.”

“
Oh, NO!” the sixth-grade boys started groaning as they approached the church. “L.B.J.’s gonna be president.”

The eighth-grade girls led the entire student body in the rosary.

At noon, Genie ran home for lunch. She found Mom leaning over her desk, trying to find a clear station on the radio, and finally hearing the news for herself.

“
Oh, my God!” Mom made the sign of the cross in despair. “He died!” She dropped her head onto the backs of her hands.

“
For Mom,” Genie remembered, “it was like a relative had died. A really close relative.”

Some people suspected a connection between the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Cubans and the Russians. “We were worried we wouldn’t be here the next day,” Stan continued his flashback. “It’s the same thing we felt with the Cuban blockade. We didn’t know if a bomb would go off.”

Even without a bomb, the country changed irrevocably on that day, according to Stan. “Something great was taken away. Things weren’t gonna be the same anymore. I knew my future wouldn’t be as good as it was, because he was gone. I knew there’d be problems for me in the future personally.”

Stan began to worry particularly about the long-simmering conflict in Vietnam. Kennedy had increased the presence of U.S. military advisers and equipment in Vietnam, but he had refused to send combat troops there.

In fact, just six days before his assassination, the Kennedy withdrawal plan had begun to become public knowledge. “U.S. Cutback in Vietnam,” affirmed the front page of the
Los Angeles Times
of November 16, 1963. A similar story ran the same day on the front page of the
New York Times
. The stories explained that 1,000 U.S. servicemen would be withdrawn from South Vietnam by the end of 1963, reducing the American contingent to about 15,500. Kennedy had also ordered the Pentagon to prepare a plan for complete American disengagement by the end of 1965. Some people believed that Kennedy had been preparing to end the war following the elections of 1964. But nobody had a clue what Johnson might do.

Our whole family watched the funeral procession on television on November 25. The horses and carriages. The hearse. Jackie Kennedy and her kids. President Johnson. Everyone else behind them. The gun salutes. The bleakness. The world watched as we in America mourned.

Genie recalled the one ray of hope. It came when John Jr., who turned three years old that day, saluted his father’s casket as it was being moved from Saint Matthew’s Cathedral to the final resting place at Arlington National Cemetery. Genie remembered that gesture for the rest of her life.

“
If a little boy could be buoyant and strong, then the rest of the country could be, too. At that moment, every mother and every little girl my age wanted him to be her little son or little brother to take care of. We really didn’t know what was gonna happen to the country. But Jackie gave us something to hope for in her little boy.”

The two surviving children, Caroline and John Jr., were the only people at the funeral not wearing black. On the black-and-white television screen, they stood out as a shade much brighter.