Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (39 page)

“
The pope may be representing God here on earth,” the Jesuit theologians taught Stan, “but the pope is only human.” Therefore, a good Catholic could make independent deductions about where the church currently was and where it was going. The most important teachings to follow were the teachings of God, not the teachings of the church. The teachings of God were the Old Testament and the New Testament, and everything flowed back to the Ten Commandments and our common Jewish roots. “Just follow the Ten Commandments,” the Jesuits boiled things down, “and you can go ahead and make your own decisions about right and wrong.”

That was all Stan needed to hear. He ran back to the lab.

In his senior year, he took the Dental Achievement Test. He scored slightly above average in the sciences, blew away the competition in the vocabulary, and scored the highest possible score in perceptual motor abilities. He applied to every halfway decent dental school in the country and was accepted at every one.

He chose the University of the Pacific, in San Francisco, because it was a newer school, had newer equipment, emphasized clinical work over bookwork, and gave each student a separate cubicle and dental chair. It was one of the most expensive schools per year, but it was just a three-year program instead of the standard four.

Either way, Dad and Mom couldn’t afford it. It was 1974, just as Dad’s career was waning, and he still had to put aside college tuition money for the other kids. Meanwhile, Mom was still working as a crossing guard—hardly lucrative enough to send anyone to dental school. Dad and Mom just didn’t have the money for Stan.

The first infusion of cash came from a reliable source: Stan’s biggest fan, his Aunt Elsie in Mason City. She loaned him $10,000 for the dental kit that he needed to buy in his first year. The amount was roughly equivalent to an extra year of tuition.

But somebody else had to pay the tuition, room, and board. Even with generous student loans, Stan found himself short about $6,000 for the first year alone. Mom and Dad couldn’t scrape together the difference. All they could do was pray in earnest.

For once, God responded without delay.

An unassuming grandmother of about 50 years old picked up her grandchildren at Tulita Elementary School. She was a Saint Lawrence Martyr parishioner who had befriended Mom at the crosswalk. “Hello, Ida!” the grandmother struck up a conversation, grandkids in tow. “How are things going for you and your family?”

Mom told the grandmother all about Stan and dental school and the money crunch and the loan from Aunt Elsie and everything else about our family.

“
Okay, see you later,” the grandmother drove her grandkids home. She then returned to the crosswalk. “I have the money, Ida,” she said.

“
Huh?” Mom looked up from her afghan.

“
I have the money.” She handed over a brown paper bag, a typical lunch sack. “It’s filled with $20 bills that my deceased mother earned from babysitting.” Three hundred nights of babysitting at $20 a night. Three hundred $20 bills. Six thousand dollars. The 50-year-old grandmother had hidden the money from her husband. “I want to remain anonymous,” she said. “I don’t want my husband to get mad.”

The anonymous angel wasn’t a wealthy woman. She collected aluminum cans to raise money for her grandchildren’s savings bonds. But she also wanted to loan $6,000 to Stan. She had never met him. But she liked Mom.

Mom carried the sack home to Dad. “Here’s the money!” she sang.

Dad couldn’t believe it. He counted the money. He then counted it again. He found that the angel had miscounted. In fact, there were 301 bills for a total of $6,020.

Stan promised to pay back all 301 bills. The generosity from a stranger left him in awe. But his dependence on an angel also reminded him how desperate he really was.

With the loan from Aunt Elsie plus the loan from the angel plus the student loans, Stan eked out an existence for the first year of dental school, living in a studio apartment nearby. He couldn’t pay his electricity bill, so he ran an extension cord into the hallway of his apartment building.

There were two more years to pay. Stan couldn’t expect Mom to stumble upon any more angels. The only way for him to finish dental school without burying himself in debt was to apply for a scholarship from the one institution that he had been dodging for the better part of a decade: the U.S. Army. The army offered a Health Profession Scholarship that could pay for his last two years of dental school on the condition that he serve as an officer in the medical corps for two years upon completion of his degree.

His two lifelong goals of survival, so consonant with one another throughout high school and college, collided head-on. He had to choose between penury and the army.

He bit the bullet. As he filled out the army application in 1975, it comforted him to know that U.S. troops were no longer being sent to Vietnam. Maybe, just maybe, the interminable war that had haunted him since childhood was finally coming to an end.

“
Do you realize what your father did in World War II?” the dazzled army officers asked Stan during his scholarship interview.

“
Yes,” Stan closed his eyes and nodded somberly.

The army awarded him the scholarship.

Stan was convinced that he received it not on his own merits but because of Dad’s three beachhead invasions in the Marine Corps. “They knew our family had paid the price,” Stan said in hindsight. “The military helps its own.”

Stan didn’t wear his uniform for the next two years for fear that people on the streets of San Francisco would pelt him with eggs. He fended off the distractions from the political and social maelstroms that were engulfing the city in the mid-1970s. It was the era of anti-war activists maturing into professional peaceniks. Of free-loving hippies evolving into gays. Of the Grateful Dead extolling the highs of the Haight-Ashbury. Of Carlos Santana giving an indigenous voice to The Mission district. And of the doomed People’s Temple congregating on Geary Street just a half mile from Stan’s apartment. But Stan would not be led astray. He kept a 12-gauge double-barrel shotgun beneath his bed. Nothing would deter him from his single-minded purpose.

Except for Cathie. They wed in Redondo Beach on December 26, 1976, exchanging their vows amid the Christmas trees and the manger on the altar at Saint Lawrence Martyr Church. It was the same structure for which Dad had solicited pledges in the 1950s and in the shadow of which Stan had grown up in the 1960s.

The ceremony was an elaborate tribute to family, to tradition, and to the universality of Catholicism. Both Stan and Cathie were the oldest children from big families. They had spent their entire lives trying to honor the wisdom and wishes of their parents, trying to set good examples for their brothers and sisters, and trying to keep the younger kids from deviating from the straight path. The sense of family responsibility had been ingrained in Stan and Cathie. When they decided to marry, they knew that they were marrying not just each other but the two families as well.

“
The purpose of our wedding,” said Cathie, “was to keep both families happy. Nobody was left out.”

There were seven bridesmaids and seven groomsmen, allowing Stan and Cathie to include all eight of their brothers and sisters in the wedding party along with six close friends. Each coupling of a bridesmaid and a groomsman strode down the aisle together wearing one of the seven colors of the rainbow in the order of the spectrum: purple, blue, dark green, light green, yellow, orange, and red. The bridesmaids wore their colors in Mandarin jackets over floor-length white gowns, while the groomsmen sported their colors in bowties and cummerbunds over black Western tuxedos.

The organist, a friend of the family since the 1950s, filled the capacious church with age-old hymns. The parish tenor sang two versions of “Ave Maria,” one by Bach and the other by Schubert, both in Latin. There were two priests, which was exceptional. One was a Jesuit professor from Loyola University who had taught Latin to Stan and Cathie. The other was a Chinese priest and translator who interpreted the Mass for the guests from Hong Kong.

Everything not in Latin was bilingual in English and Chinese: the invitations, the programs, the liturgy, and the toasts given afterward at the Lobster House overlooking the sailboats in the Redondo Beach King Harbor. Everything was kaleidoscopic in all seven colors: the clothes worn by the wedding party, the carnations upon the altar, and the decorations at the reception.

But everything was in harmony. Everything was in balance. Everything demonstrated the pride that Stan and Cathie took in their families and in their faith. Most of all, everything reinforced the example that they wished to set as a couple who upheld their family traditions and religious beliefs while transcending cultural barriers.

Back in San Francisco, only Cathie could distract Stan from his schoolwork. She held his hand and showed him the best of the city’s bustling Chinatown and the hidden delights of Golden Gate Park. With her by his side, he couldn’t completely insulate himself from the dynamic city in which he lived. To his surprise, he liked it.

But he liked dental school even more. It was hands-on work, like his summers growing up in Iowa. It drew on his perfectionism. He couldn’t rest—he didn’t want to rest—until the filling was securely and inextricably in place, until the face of every tooth lined up flawlessly in a smooth arc with the face of every other contiguous tooth, until every sculpted ridge and valley interlocked with its mirror image above or below to restore or to create the most natural and effortless bite possible, until the shade of white on a cap matched indistinguishably with the shade of white on a base, until a root canal or tooth extraction or gum reconstruction could return a mouth, jaw, and throat to perfect health—and until all of that could be accomplished without any pain whatsoever to the patient. Nothing pleased Stan more than a job done perfectly. For Stan, heaven was a place freed from the annoying distractions from work.

He discovered that dental school was heavenly in ways even more divine. In dental school, collegial cooperation on behalf of quality craftsmanship had replaced collegiate competition for grades. In dental school, the students had arrived. They were professionals. They helped one another. They made it together. For the first time since childhood, Stan made lasting friends. With each cavity he filled for a patient, he was filling another within himself.

Aunt Elsie continued to be his greatest fan. As Cathie completed her graduate studies in occupational therapy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Aunt Elsie flew from Iowa to live with Stan in his studio apartment in San Francisco so that she could sit in his dental chair, serving as the model for his several weeks of board exams. Fortunately for Stan, Aunt Elsie needed just about every kind of dental procedure he was obligated to perform: fillings, crowns, partial plates, root canals, and gold foils.

Once the jobs were done, the board examiners inspected everything inside Aunt Elsie’s elfin mouth. They poked, prodded, and pulled—determined to dig out some error.

“
Jesus Criminy!” Aunt Elsie finally yelped. “You HURT me!”

Stan passed the boards.

As soon as the swelling went down, Aunt Elsie could once again bite with impunity. “Oh, GAWD!” she hollered in delight. “Food never tasted so good!”

Stan finished dental school in 1977 and reported for duty at Fort Bragg, near Fayetteville, North Carolina. Army personnel referred to the base near Fayetteville as “Fayettenam.” Joining the army and going to Fayettenam was the last thing Stan had ever wanted to do. But in some ways, it turned out to be the best thing he ever did.

For two glorious years, he didn’t have to worry about the money. He could devote his attention to delivering ideal dental treatment. He could gain experience and keep learning. Better yet, he believed in the mission of supporting the troops. He loved the camaraderie of everyone working together toward the same patriotic goal. He revered the unbroken chain of command, forged and fired up by mutual reinforcement. All the while, he basked in the freedom from financial struggle. It was the way life was supposed to be. He reenlisted for three more years.

In 1981, he gave the army notice that he would not reenlist again. He had passed the state dental boards in North Carolina, bought a dental building, interviewed dental assistants, and lined up private patients. In the meantime, Cathie had launched a promising career in occupational therapy. Stan and Cathie were happy in North Carolina and didn’t want to leave.

But two weeks after Stan gave notice, the army enticed him with an offer to enroll in a prestigious general dental residency program at Fort Ord, California, near Monterey. Stan could become a “superdentist” armed with five specialties: oral surgery, endodontics, orthodontics, periodontics, and prosthodontics. Of course, he would need to serve two additional years in the army thereafter. He and Cathie surrendered their North Carolina dream, packed up, and moved back to northern California in 1982.

As soon as he was crowned a quintuple specialist in 1984, the army dispatched him for a year, without Cathie, to Korea. He became the officer in charge of Mobile Team No. 2 of the 10th Medical Detachment. He oversaw five sub-teams of dentists and support personnel at five camps—Camp Howze, Camp Page, Camp Pelham, Camp Red Cloud, and Camp Stanley—strung along the width of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Stationed at Camp Red Cloud, Stan hopped from clinic to clinic by helicopter, treating the dental and facial trauma of the troops who’d been injured in accidents during military exercises.