Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (27 page)

The Kennedy assassination could have obliterated the hopes of millions of Americans, not just Catholics. Only three months before the assassination, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom had articulated the dreams of the black civil rights movement in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. The movement had grown out of the black Protestant churches. White religious leaders—a Protestant, a Catholic, and a Jew—and a white labor leader had closed ranks behind the black leaders at the vanguard of the march. The marchers had congregated in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial and looked to President Kennedy as their greatest hope for legislative redemption. Having marched in support of his civil rights bill, they directed their appeals to the U.S. Congress. His assassination could have justified all of the paranoia ever felt by anyone who had ever been made to feel somehow unacceptable to mainstream America.

Yet the simple salute of a three-year-old boy pointed toward something greater.

In early 1964, what little sense of security and heavenly protection remained in our home came under further fire. As chief internal auditor for the McCulloch Corporation, Dad could see that the chainsaw company was quickly and irretrievably losing money. As revenues declined from month to month, Dad grew increasingly tense. He started looking for other work and asked a previous boss for referrals.

Dad was laid off in August 1964. Day and night, his temples flared in nervous agitation. To add injury to insult, he had a tooth pulled, because he didn’t have the money for a root canal.

Mom reacted philosophically, if darkly. She taught us the dour lesson to be learned: “Whenever you think everything is going just right, something will happen to make it all go wrong again.”

That was her way of handling both happiness and hardship. She lived her life somewhere between a healthy mindfulness of ever-present dangers and a sullen expectation of ever-impending doom. For that reason, she made the most of the good times, because she knew how fleeting they could be. She tried to teach us never to become too attached to material things, because those were the most fleeting things of all.

Stan, however, learned a completely different lesson from the layoff.

“
Did your dad lose his job?” a buddy asked Stan.

“
Uh-huh.”

“
What’re ya gonna do now?”

Stan didn’t have a clue. As the oldest of six kids, he assumed the role of protector whenever Dad no longer could. Each time that Dad left on business trips, he asked Stan to be the man of the house, and so Stan looked after Mom, took out the trash, mowed the lawn, and strove to uphold everything Dad had built and achieved. Even when Dad was home, Stan locked all the doors in the house every night, made sure everyone was securely in bed, went to bed, wondered if he really had checked everything thoroughly, got up to recheck everything, rechecked everything, and then went back to bed.

The layoff increased the pressure on Stan even more than it did on Dad. It dawned on the 12-year-old boy that dads can lose their jobs, that families can lose their homes, that people can end up living in cars, and that the world can fall apart because of things far less catastrophic than nuclear bombs. His worries crystallized into an almost religious vow to protect the family from external dangers by whatever means necessary.

His childhood ended at that moment. He was 12 years and 1 month old.

“
I can sell my bike to help pay the mortgage,” he offered to Dad and Mom.

They rejected the offer, but that just confirmed for Stan how hopeless the situation must have been. Not even the ultimate sacrifice of his bicycle could save the house.

He pulled ten-year-old Genie aside in the back yard. “You know, Dad lost his job. So we may lose this house,” Stan dropped his chin toward the grass.

Genie said nothing.

“
I’m just telling you,” he said.

Money started to become very important to Stan. He had once considered becoming a priest, but he decided that the vow of poverty was not for him. He saw how difficult it was for Dad to make ends meet. Stan did not want to struggle like that for money. Moreover, he did not want his family to suffer because of money, to feel insecure in its own home because of money, or to be deprived of anything important because of money. Assuming personal responsibility to shield the family and its legacy from risk and ruin, he vowed to become greatly successful financially.

Dad was unemployed for less than a month, thanks to a good referral that led to a job as the corporate assistant director of internal auditing at Rexall Drug & Chemical Company. The job was a boon for Dad, but it soon tested his commitment to what was most important.

He was assigned to a project at the company’s St. Louis laboratories. His bosses in Los Angeles were so impressed with his work in St. Louis that they offered him the high-ranking position there of controller, which commanded a considerably higher salary than what he was already earning. “You’ll be our number two man in St. Louis!” his bosses patted him on the back.

Dad wasn’t sure what to say. “Wow,” he finally sighed, “that’s a big move.”

“
You bet it is, Joe!” one of his bosses cheered.

“
Overwhelming, isn’t it?” the other applauded. “We’re thrilled for you, too!”

“
Could I have some time to think about it?” he stalled.

The bosses shot each other awkward glances, as if their gift had been spurned. “Well, all right then,” the top boss responded. “Just let us know what you decide by the end of the week.”

Dad wrestled with the decision for days. Having been just recently laid off, he found the offer of a big hike in pay to be tremendously tempting. However, he felt torn between the chance to make the family more secure financially in a different city and the importance of keeping the family secure emotionally right at home. Earning more money would make life easier for him, but dislodging the family could very well make life harder for them. By his final calculation, the question boiled down to a choice between who would end up sacrificing more: him or his family. And then he knew his answer.

“
I can’t leave the Los Angeles area,” he informed his bosses at the end of the week. “I have six children in a new home close to their church, school, and friends.”

His bosses were no longer impressed. “If you remain in the Los Angeles office,” they warned him, “your salary will be capped permanently at your starting salary.”

Dad chose to remain in Los Angeles anyway.

In one crucial respect, Dad was anything but the typical company man. He believed that the most important thing was not to advance his career but to keep his family where it was. He didn’t like it when kids moved around a lot. He would never uproot his kids like he had been uprooted from Poland. He refused to disrupt our lives.

He paid dearly for that decision, forfeiting any hope of promotions or pay raises. Even worse, his refusal to relocate the family meant that he had to travel on business all the more, distancing himself yet further from the family. As he traveled around the country on business, he received other job offers in other cities, sometimes very good offers. But he refused them all.

We were thrilled that we never had to move, but it became harder and harder for Dad to relax. He knew that the best he could do at work was to survive. There would be no glowing referrals to work elsewhere, because he had made it known to his bosses that his priorities did not lie with the firm. Family came first. For that reason, his job was forever insecure, which made the family finances forever insecure. We didn’t have to know about it, though, as long as we could stay in the house. Or so Dad thought.

We began to see less and less of him. When he wasn’t traveling, he withdrew into his doghouse and buried himself in paperwork. He joined us for dinners, but his nightly drink of Canadian Club whiskey and 7-Up became just whiskey and a dollop of water. Sitting next to Dad at dinner every night, Stan had the best view of Dad’s whiskey glass.

The tight finances almost forced Dad into another moral dilemma. On the one hand, he could barely pay the bills on his own. On the other hand, he never wanted Mom to work outside the home. That would have violated his adamant conviction about the sacred role of a mother staying at home with the kids.

But he had grossly underestimated his second mother. His Aunt Emily, in her late sixties, rode the train from Michigan for a visit to California in the fall of 1965. There was finally an in-law living in our in-law suite. She was a widow then, with four adult children. She wasn’t sure what to do with herself.

“
You wanna make yourself useful?” Mom suggested. “Then stay here and help take care of my kids. I’m going to work.”

Dad helped Mom fill out an application to TRW, the local aerospace giant.

She started work there as a keypunch operator on December 8, 1965, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. After 14 years as a housewife, Mom was back in the payroll department of a big company. She felt lost for a couple weeks. Everything seemed like a different world. But then it all began to click.

Back at home, Dad’s Aunt Emily was the closest thing we ever had to a Polish grandmother. She seemed to live in a perpetual state of war. She hated the Germans, having lost a lot of the men of her youth to German bayonets during World War I. Her beady blue eyes twinkled except whenever we said anything German like
danke schön
. Then her eyes turned fierce, and she chased after us with a rolling pin. If we said
gesundheit
, she slapped us over the head. She harbored painful memories of her middle-aged years during World War II as well. Heaven forbid anyone uttered the words “Hitler” or “Stalin” or “Russia is a nice country.” Even a patriotic reference to “Frank-lin De-la-no Roo-se-velt” sent her into a tizzy because of his concessions at Yalta. Otherwise, she was pleasant and cheery. And she guaranteed a full-time presence of motherhood during a shaky financial time when Mom had to go back to work.

Dad was never thrilled with Mom’s working. But he was always thrilled with her paychecks.

Dad even felt financially flush enough to treat the kids to an afternoon out on the town. On George Washington’s Birthday in February 1966, Dad drove Stan, Genie, Geri, Joe, and Mary Jo to the swanky Egyptian Theater in Hollywood and bought six tickets for
The Sound of Music
.

The movie was named best picture of 1965, but it was the movie of a lifetime for Dad. It portrayed Central Europe “in the last golden days of the thirties.” It portrayed a virgin mother who sang all the time. It portrayed her seven kids at similar ages as the six of us. It portrayed their father as a noble military man with firm moral convictions. It portrayed nuns outwitting the Nazis, faith conquering fascism. It portrayed everything Dad believed in. It was balm to the post-assassination American Catholic soul.

Dad bought the sheet music to the songs. Stan, Genie, and Geri played the songs on the piano, and Geri sang along no matter who played. Between the songs, Geri made her first vow. “I want to be a nun when I grow up, just like Julie Andrews in the movie!” And then Geri sang some more.

Stan performed some of the songs as the pianist for his eighth-grade musical revue on May 6, 1966. He, Genie, and Geri were 13, 12, and 11 that spring. Like many of their peers at Saint Lawrence, they had been roused by the hymn sung in the movie by the Mother Abbess.

In her exalted soprano, the Mother Abbess had asserted that the convent was no place to hide. She had exhorted the novice, Maria, to seek her salvation far beyond the convent walls. It was a message that spoke volumes to the kids at Saint Lawrence, especially to the eighth-graders who had spent most of their lives together under the watchful supervision of the nuns but who would soon scatter for different high schools. “You have to live the life you were born to live!” the Mother Abbess had implored.

Stan performed the song of the Mother Abbess for the finale of the eighth-grade show. All 100 of his classmates, having assembled on the stage, sang along as he played: