Author: tom.wogan@comcast.net

My Year Among the Savages

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

My Indian name was Running Horse. My son’s name was Straight Arrow. We were both members of the Blackhawk Tribe. My son being about ten years of age, someone had suggested that we join the local chapter of something called the Y Guides, a program loosely overseen by the YMCA. It was a father/son thing and we knew a few other families with boys that age and so I thought we would give it a go. Tommy got to pick our Indian names. I got mine because at the time I was jogging. Not sure where he came up with his, although considering he chose politics as his career, where one meets fewer straight arrows than some other career choices, it’s kind of ironic.

The overall “council” was composed of small tribes of about 10 boys and their dads scattered across the southwest Chicago area. Each little group was encouraged to meet once a month at a member’s home. There would be little projects we could work on, some snacks, a beer or two for dads, that sort of thing. There were no uniforms like in scouting, which made it easier.

The first meeting was in one of the dad’s basements in September. This particular dad liked to decorate his basement with posters featuring nude women with breasts that defied the laws of gravity, not to mention their proportion to the rest of their bodies. The boys got to the basement before the dads and it seemed to me they were being unusually quiet. What they were was transfixed by such magnificent displays of fictional female anatomy. We got them out of there over their grumbling and had a little talk with our knuckleheaded host, who insisted that boys had to figure this stuff out at some point. Not at ten years of age, we assured him.

Each meeting also featured a story by the tribe’s “sachem” or wise man. Ours was Pat Rohan, who never disappointed. Among our favorites was the touching story of a young Indian brave and his forbidden love for an Indian maiden; both swam to the middle of a lake to be together and drowned. Pat called the story “Lake Stupid.” It killed the ten year old crowd.

They held a Christmas party for the whole council, where each boy got a present from Santa, always the same item like a backpack or a flashlight. The gifts weren’t wrapped, but dumped out on a table and bulk issued to each tribe, with all of the Christmas magic of a military supply dump. The party resembled one of the rings of Dante’s Inferno, with about 120 little madmen screaming, running, shouting, and crying, as some of them told others the truth about Santa. And Santa himself looked pretty hammered, fake beard drooping and pillow augmented stomach lopsided.

And all the more experienced dads kept talking about the coming of the great spring pilgrimage to somewhere called Camp Pinewood.

———

Camp Pinewood is a YMCA camp facility just outside of Muskegon, Michigan. It was one of the longest three days of my life. We arrived by car, me, my son and another father and son combo after a four hour ride. It started out well enough. A lunch of hamburgers, then a sort of rally with camping songs and exhortations by the staff to “enjoy and be safe”. Off to our little cabins we went. When we got there, I noticed that the cabins windows were just square holes cut into the walls. No glass, no screens, just air. And we were about to find out that we were in the middle of mosquito central. There was no plumbing either, save for a communal toilet and shower point about 100 yards down a hill. Fun at 2 a.m.

But it was still daylight and the fun was beginning. You had your choice of swimming, sailing, archery, fishing, or the rifle range. My son wanted to try fishing, but on the first cast the reel flew off the rod and hit the water. No problem for dad, I waded in and retrieved it. That was when I discovered the leeches on my feet and legs. The lake was leech ridden, which may be why no one was swimming. Thanks for the heads up.

After de-leeching with help of a cigarette, we decided on archery. That was when I noticed that most of the dads were gone. I was to learn later that the main reason the dads looked forward to Pinewood so eagerly was that they could dump junior off at the camp and head into town for a three day bender. So when we got to the archery range, we discovered arrows flying in almost every direction. No staff, no dads, just heavily armed kids turning the range into the Little Big Horn. Unlike Custer, we beat a hasty retreat.

What staff were on hand manned the rifle range, which I guess was the greater of two evils. Here kids were popping away at targets with .22s and pellet guns. I gave them credit for at least getting all the ammo going in the same direction.

We got eaten alive each night by clouds of mosquitos, arose about 4 a.m.to the sounds of the returning dads, who were mostly trashed.

Finally, the finale. The last night featured a visit from the Great Chief himself. There was to be a giant bonfire, which the now sobering dads built all day into a 14 foot high pile of wood. From the top of the woodpile ran a wire which sloped downward from a nearby tree. On the wire, at the tree end, was an oversized wooden arrowhead on a pulley that would allow the arrowhead to be lit afire, then roll down the wire until it hit the woodpile. This was to be the coming of the Great Spirit.

Logs for seating were placed all around the woodpile and at about dusk we began gathering at the site, awaiting dark and the arrival of the Great Chief. We heard the distant drumbeats first, coming from the lake. Then the low chant, indistinguishable at first, but clearly men’s voices. As they came closer to shore, we could see a man standing upright in a canoe, arms crossing his bare chest, the canoe paddled by two others. He was clad in a full chieftain headdress, his Indian loin cloth straining under a most impressive beer gut. Two more canoes followed.

It was the Great Chief himself, actually a neighbor of mine who shall remain nameless in this story, and he and his natives were chanting away. Finally we could make out the words they were chanting: “I want a beer, I want a beer.”

Up the hill they came, the Great Chief scowling and holding his folded arms across his chest. The loin cloth was beginning to lose the battle with the beer gut and his underwear band was showing. Thank God for the underwear at least. And as he reached the center of the circle, someone lit the arrowhead and pushed it with a stick. Now flaming, it slowly headed toward the giant woodpile. And as the flaming Great Spirit reached the pile, the entire woodpile exploded into about forty or fifty burning logs, each one flying out from the center. Dad’s instinctively grabbed their sons and ran backwards as the burning logs landed in and among us. No one was hurt, somehow.

As it turns out, the crew building the log pile wanted to make sure of a good ignition and so were pouring kerosene on the wood pile most of the day. I guess as the beers went down they sort of lost count of how much fuel they added, because they got the kind of ignition one usually associates with a launch at Cape Canaveral.

We packed up for an early escape on Sunday morning, glad to be out of there. The other dad and I talked all the way home, shaking our heads in disbelief and marveling at the entire experience known as Camp Pinewood. We never returned to the group and my son turned to scouting, which was run by moms and run as a pretty tight ship.

————-

I don’t mean to disparage the many good works of the YMCA, which provides affordable housing, recreation opportunities nationwide (their ranch in Colorado must be seen to be believed) and fun camp experiences for thousands of kids each year. I guess if anything, my Y Guides experience was one where the best intentions, left without leadership, can go off in some pretty weird directions. Clearly the inmates were running the asylum.

Men do a lot of things well when it comes to forming young lives. I have always been impressed by the many good volunteer coaches in all sports who dedicate countless hours to teaching their game. I have known scoutmasters who dedicate whole vacations to scouting. But when a void in leadership occurs, when we all hesitate to raise our hands and take on the job, invariably the wrong guys will fill that void and take us places we never thought we would go. Chaos follows in their footsteps.

You can draw all the comparisons you like on this one.

 

The Best of Old Men

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

“How I long for to muse on the days of my boyhood

Though four score and three years have fled by since then

Still it gives sweet reflections, as every young joy should

That merry-hearted boys make the best of old men”

-from the Bard of Armagh, as recorded by the Clancy Brothers.

The three small boys awakened on one of the best days of the year for small boys, and that would be in the woods of northern Wisconsin, where their little family shared a summer home with the rest of their dad’s family. For most boys, as it was for me in my youth, there are too many days in the year where school duties run the house. Too many days of obligation, of homework and tests and a hundred kinds of anxiety. The cottage days, like Christmas morning, were important and wonderful days. Days that tasted like freedom. Days filled with swimming and fishing and boating and campfires. Little boys are made for such days.

That morning, like most cottage mornings, they would awaken to the sounds of water lapping at the shore, of birds singing, and they would be drawn to the water. When you live in a city, awakening to a lake carries its own magic appeal and something in you urges you to get closer to the water, to be part of the lake, to see little minnows, hear the croak of a frog, catch the jump of a gamefish, and take in the sun dancing off the surface. But that morning would contain an added surprise.

For there on the shore was a lone bottle and inside the bottle some sort of note. Excitedly they extracted the note, only to find it wasn’t a note at all, but a map, the edges burnt and ragged. The map indicated an island and on the island the location of a buried treasure. An adventure was afoot! They got their dad and showed him the map. He thought it might be the island in the lake right in front of them and agreed that they should set sail in the family pontoon boat at once and see it they could find this mysterious treasure. Probably left by pirates.

Fairly bouncing with excitement, they boarded, while their dad fired up the engine, docking at the nearby island a few minutes later. Following the map, they soon came upon some white stones which formed an arrowhead and pointed to a spot on the map where buried treasure lay. Digging away as fast as excitement would allow, they soon unearthed the treasure chest. And inside was an incredible trove: fake gold coins, gaudy costume jewelry, play money, eye patches, bandanas, some toy pistols. A true haul of wealth for the imagination of little boys who at that point had bought in 200% to the adventure.

Of course, it was their dad, my son-in-law Luke McKee, who cooked it all up the night before, not even telling his wife. He was recreating the magic someone had created for him as a small boy, I guess. And here’s the beautiful thing about this: you get one chance and one chance only to get this magic right. They wouldn’t fall for it a second time, or if they were older and more cynical. It was exactly the right magic at exactly the right locale and exactly the right ages and it was a memorable bit of parenting genius.

The “Treasure Hunters”, Luke, Tim, and Sean McKee

——————

Grandpa Hayes wasn’t really our grandfather, but we called him that. My family rented a cottage for many years from the Hayes family, and both families grew close. Grandpa Hayes was a retired master pressman, once called all over the world to fix newspaper presses. I only knew him in his last years, but he fascinated me and my brothers with his tales, practical jokes, and outright whoppers.

He had us convinced that old Daniel Boone had somehow made it to Sister Lakes, Michigan, and showed us the tree in which were carved the words: “Dan’l Boone kilt a bar here.” We bought into it. He told my brother Gil that a large flat rock he had found was, in fact, an unfinished tomahawk that some wild Indian didn’t get around to finishing. Gil hung onto that rock for years. He had a hundred stories.

He was an inventor of sorts. When we needed worms for fishing bait, he had developed this device that featured a metal probe at one end and a t-shaped wooden handle at the other. You plugged it into the wall socket, shoved the probe into the ground and the night crawlers came zooming out of the ground to get away from the current. It was as fascinating as it was dangerous. He nailed the heads of large bass caught by his son or grandson to a tree, creating this ghoulish monument which we treated as if it were a sort of holy shrine. If you can recall the famous “Injun Summer” cartoon from the Tribune that they run every year in the fall (or don’t run, depending on the political correctness climate), that old man in the cartoon would be Grandpa Hayes.

—————

The merriest of all dads is a fellow named Pat Rohan. He is in his 60’s now, and shows absolutely no sign that he intends to grow up, God bless him. Pat is my friend and former neighbor on the south side of Chicago, and he moves through life as if it were some sort of amateur hour contest in which the guy with the zaniest idea wins. He is a true local legend, especially on Spaulding Avenue, where he once re-created an Irish Pub, complete with faux-thatched roof, for a block party. One year, with the rest of us obsessing about weed control and good sod, he dug up his entire back yard to create a miniature moto-cross range for radio controlled model cars. His garage will never fit a car inside, but is filled with pieces and parts for a lifetime of outlandish projects yet to come.

Pat doesn’t have a lot of formal education, but I have seen first-hand that he is a conceptual genius. He has the ability to look at a broken device, a construction project, or fabrication need of any sort and see the solution. Once in the early days of my business we were trying to build out a call center, and we needed to find a way to bring voice and data wires down from the ceiling in twelve different locations in a large empty room. Logistical and engineering genius that I am, my solution called for lots of expensive custom wire molding  and looked to cost about $20,000, which we didn’t have. Pat looked at it for about 2 minutes and came up with the solution on the spot. Run plumbing PVC pipes down from the ceiling, hide the wires inside and paint it to match the décor. The solution ran less than $250 and looked great.

Most of us don’t think of heating our home as a hobby, but Pat loved it. One year he had married the gas fired furnace with a wood burning Franklin stove. When the wood gave out the furnace kicked in and the damn thing actually worked, although a strong wind could push wood smoke down the stack and into the kitchen. But he liked the wood smoke smell, so it was a winner.

He and one of his brothers added a second story, complete with diving board, to a pontoon boat in Michigan, but I don’t recall that working out quite as well. He once invented a way to modify my little 5 horsepower fishing motor to accept fuel from an outside fuel tank, using, of all things, a condom. It worked well. He has built theater sets that could rival professional works.

His high holy days are Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day. His costumes take him weeks to fashion, look as uncomfortable as all hell, and he could care less, as long as it gets a laugh. His kids and grandkids worship him for his always unpredictable projects and his unconditional affection for all of them.

Pat with his grandkids

 

There is a world of good dads and granddads out there, each fathering in his own way; I believe there are far more good ones than bad ones. But the really great dads and granddads seem to have the ability to think like a child, to generate delight, to play to imagination and whimsy and to take the time to be silly. That’s where the art of fatherhood moves into the neighborhood of genius.

May we all strive to become the best of old men.

 

Not my Best Moments

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

Yes, I can be like Homer Simpson. Sometimes all of us can.

We can all think, say, and do some pretty dumb things in our lives; make bad decisions, suffer from gullibility, open our mouths at the wrong time, and all that. Kind of like those suddenly lonely Trump voters I know who’d really rather we didn’t bring it up again, if you don’t mind. OK, I feel for you. You’re not bad people, you just make bad voting decisions.

So in the spirit of the eye-popping stupidity that currently defines our Commander in Chief, I’d like to share three of my better “faux pas” moments. If nothing else, it will serve to illustrate that we all have our moments we’d rather forget. It’s just that I would never presume to run for public office based on the following true incidents.

————–

It was a sunny fall Monday on a secondary road between Omaha, Nebraska and Sioux City, Iowa. I had a business in North Sioux City, South Dakota, just the other side of the Big Sioux River from Iowa. I love secondary roads and, time permitting, will take them over highways any day. Secondary roads show you the true beauty of America; highways show you only cold, uncaring concrete.

The 90 mile drive north between Omaha and Sioux City was very pleasant that day. The corn was being harvested, the trees turning golden, and the waves of brown grass on the low hills where buffalo were being raised were gently rolling in the breeze. It was about ten o’clock on that Monday morning when I saw the three school kids walking on the side of the road about a mile ahead of me. Funny, I thought, why aren’t they in school this time of day? These God-fearing Cornhuskers are pretty serious about their childrens’ education.

As I closed the distance on them I could see they had no school books or any other baggage. Odd. And one other thing, why were their heads so small and their butts so big? Members of the same family with similar physiques? These kids needed some exercise.

As I got within about a city block of the three kids, they must have heard my engine sounds, because, as one, they lifted their arms, began to rise from the road and to slowly fly off into the low corn off the side of the road. Yes, they were three adult wild turkeys, who scooted off the road as I came near. Wild turkeys like to walk the road when the traffic calms in Nebraska. Doh.

Not Schoolkids

————————

It was a lovely May morning in Manhattan. The Big Apple can be at its best in May and it is one of the world’s great walking cities. My wife and I were staying in a little hotel off Central Park on 62nd and Central Park East, if you know Manhattan. If was a four day holiday and we had plans to walk all the way down to about 28th to visit a friend who now worked there. Nice day, nice walk.

I got this great romantic notion. I would surprise my bride of some 43 years with a visit to the one New York location every woman who has ever watched “Sleepless in Seattle” gets all teary-eyed about. Yep, the top of the Empire State Building. Got to keep the magic going somehow.

So we walked and walked, taking it all in. New York, especially Manhattan, is a continuous feast for the eyes and it bustles with an energy that even Chicagoans can feel is taking them to the next level. I kept my eye on the top of the Empire State Building to make sure we didn’t veer too far east of west as we closed on this great surprise. Block by block, we were gaining on the objective. At last we were abreast of it. So I casually said “Let’s check out the lobby” and she went along with my whim. This is going to be a great little surprise, I thought. She’s going to love this.

A uniformed man behind a desk noticed us, and asked in a pronounced New York accent if he could help us. “Sure,” I said. “Can you tell me where the elevator to the observation desk is?” He looked at me as one might look at a confused child or someone with mental deficiencies. “This is the Chrysler Building, Sir.”

In the blink of an eye I turned from a savvy, sophisticated big city dweller into a small town goober. I might as well have been dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, sandals with sweat socks, and a camera slung around my neck, along with my conference or trade show credentials showing, so that every pickpocket in town could spot me. I sheepishly thanked him and we slunk out of the lobby. I could almost feel him slowly shaking his head at the sad misguided tourists.

Over wine later, I told Maureen of my original romantic notion. She smiled and patted my hand, as if she knew my intention all along and didn’t have the heart to tell me; she has long recognized my ability to be an occasional dolt, but she appreciated the gesture. Doh.

Not the Empire State Building

————–

I saved the best and the worst for last. In the mid 80’s I was building my business and I made a lot of sales calls. On this particular fall day I was headed in my car to a mid-afternoon meeting in Glenview, a meeting in which I hoped to come away with an order. This was the era of Palm Pilots, not cell phones, if you are old enough to recall that device that once seemed so magical and now seems as primitive as a flintlock musket. I was performing a sort of early texting with the office and my mind was focused on the upcoming conversation with the potential customer.

I didn’t have time for lunch, unless I could grab something quick, and as I headed up River Road, sure enough the Golden Arches appeared in Des Plaines, Illinois. Still pre-occupied, I swung into the lot and found a space between two vintage 60s muscle cars. “Must be one of those road rallies,” I thought to myself. You know, those rallies at drive-ins like Duke’s on south Harlem or SuperDawg on North Milwaukee.

Still studying my Palm Pilot messages, I barely noticed that this McDonalds was set up like an old one, where you stood in line outside. So I took my place in line, about five back from the counter. I could hear laughter, soft at first, then growing in intensity and then some muffled cat-calling from across the street. I looked up and saw that I was standing in a line of mannequins. The one in front of me was a dummy in a brown suit, and in front of him a plaster women dressed like June Cleaver.

The laughter and cat-calling was coming from the real McDonalds on the other side of River Road. I was dummy #6 in the very first McDonalds store, which is now a museum. God, how they were enjoying this. I did a quick right face, got back in my car and roared north, my face, I am sure, a bright red. No way was I going to stop across the street now. Big Doh.

————-

Yes, there have been a few times in my life where I have been intuitive, smart, perhaps even brilliant. Problem is you can’t tell those stories without sounding like a pathetic braggart. Kind of like the Don ….nah, we won’t go there again. So if it’s true that confession is good for the soul, these three little stories probably mean my soul is good for another 100,000 miles. And I might not be done.

Not a McDonalds store

 

“My first husband bombed Osaka,” and other stories of the late, great Rita Wogan

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

The young Japanese girl was living in my sister Terese’s home in the beautiful Partry Mountains in the west of Ireland. She had been sent there to learn English, although the notion of sending the Japanese to Ireland to learn English always struck me as kind of curious. The Irish have put their own twist on the language centuries ago and it’s not mainstream Oxford English or American English, but its own wonderful concoction of unique phrases, words turned upside down, and meanings that are very different to the Irish than they might be to the rest of the English speaking world. Case in point: my mother (she spent several months each year visiting her daughters and grandkids in Ireland) often used the word “fanny” as in “Child, you better start behaving or I’ll paddle your fanny.” However, “fanny” in Ireland translates into the word “vagina”; my nieces had to work up the courage to tell their grandmother that she was talking like a porn star. Another example: my Irish brother-in-law Jim refers to a nursing home as a “home for the bewildered.”  Try that one stateside.

My sister had taken in several Japanese students over the years, allowing them to pick up some of the local culture along with their adopted tongue. This particular girl, perhaps because she was terrified to be in a new country by herself, or overwhelmed by the activity levels in a house filled with six kids, or just being simply a timid soul, had barely uttered a word since her arrival. My mother, Rita Wogan, among the most verbal of people, set out to remedy that situation. She began to query the timid girl, trying to pry out of her a name, which she did, and her age, which she also got. My mother pressed on, asking here what part of Japan she was from. The girl shyly blurted out that she was from Osaka, Japan’s second largest city. Delighted that they finally had something in common, my mother exclaimed, “Osaka, why my first husband bombed Osaka!” Which in point of fact was true back in 1945, but I have tried without success for many years to think up a comeback for that line.

—————–

My mother gave my wife and me the gift of her time when we were both just starting to travel a bit. We would take four day jaunts to various cities once a year or so and she would stay with the kids. They loved her visits, which were filled with stories, lots of baked goods and some pretty goods meals. The meals, just like our lunches at home on a school day, were often accompanied by lectures. Topics varied from the depression, the war, the holocaust (her personal favorite), to issues of morality. On one such visit, my two daughters, then in their teen years, got an earful of her views on the problems with modern relationships. The problem, she stated was the “C” word, of which there was not enough of, apparently.

My daughters were understandably confused, so Eileen ventured a guess as to what she meant by the “C” word. She guessed “condoms”. My mother was horrified and sputtered “Commitment! Commitment!” “How did you girls ever hear about condoms?”

Mom had just learned what the prosecuting lawyers in the O.J. trial had learned the hard way. Don’t ask any question to which you don’t already know the answer.

—————-

My friend Christine Clancy once confided that when she first met me, she thought that there were twenty or more children in my family. A logical mistake, given Rita Wogan’s penchant for giving most of the kids in the Wogan family a nonsense name, or two names, or three. I won’t embarrass them by repeating them here; they have had to suffer with those names all their lives. We often still call each other by those names.

But Minnie, Poodie, Tassi, Soona, the late Binky, and Finn-man, you know who you are. As Herman Melville said in the last line of Moby Dick, “I alone escaped to tell thee.” Oh, and my sister Maureen escaped without a nonsense name, too.

—————

Put the word “teat” in front of twelve year boy and you’re off to the races. During another of my mother’s kid-watching visits while we travelled, she told the kids how she helped a lamb on one of my sisters’ farms in Ireland. Lambs tended to come into the world all around the same time, I guess, and mom loved “lambing season.” One of the adult lambs had a cracked and sore nipple, so she told the kids how she saved the day with her Mary Kaye moisturizer. She sold Mary Kaye products for years, and she honestly believed they had a product that would solve any problem from acne to insomnia.

What she told the kids, with my then 12 year old son in attendance, was that she restored the lamb’s ailing spigot by applying Mary Kaye’s cream to the lamb’s teat. My son lost it in a fit of laughter, which is about what any 12 year old boy would do. My mother, somewhat indignantly, asked him, “Well, what you have me call it?” He lost it all the more.

—————-

She once enlisted the aid of my Uncle Jimmy and some poor nun in stealing a plaque from the chapel in the old Resurrection parish. The bronze plaque, which hung at the back of the Memorial Chapel in the basement of the “Old School”, contained the names of parishioners lost in WW II. Her first husband’s name was on that grim, heroic list. When she heard that the school building was about to be razed, she made a visit to the chapel. Resurrection Parish in that year was (and still is) a lot like a war zone, but that didn’t stop her. She brought her brother Jimmy, a retired copper, for firepower.

She located the plaque, now gathering dust on the floor, and asked the pastor if she might have it. He declined, probably thinking she was a bit off to be hanging about in this neighborhood to begin with. So naturally, she enlisted some poor nun who was formerly at the school and the three of them returned and walked in and calmly loaded the plaque into Jimmy’s massive Mercury Marquis trunk. Mercury Marquis, by the way, are the preferred weapons of choice for senior drivers.

She needed to find it a new home, and learned of a Chicago Firefighters museum that was being planned. So her logic went like this: Resurrection was the parish whose pastor was also the Fire Dept. Chaplain, Msgr. William Gorman. My dad was one of his drivers. So therefore, the Firefighters Museum would want this plaque. When I explained to her that the names on the plaque included dead soldiers and not dead fireman, she was unmoved. The firefighter museum guys were equally confused by this circular logic.

She eventually gave it to the Irish American Heritage Center where it supposedly sits with the other archives from a long ago West Side. She could be stubborn.

——————–

My siblings and their children each have their “Mom” or “Grandma”stories, which we share every time we’re together. She remains a happy point of light in all of our lives, especially looking back. Her many kindnesses, her ability to drive you nuts with her projects, her admonitions to “get over your pity party” to complainers and those feeling sorry for themselves, and her joyous approach to life has marked us all. We all miss our moms, I guess, but they have a way of living on in their stories and those stories take some of the sadness away from their departure. She still makes us smile.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the Moms.

 

Sisters

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

“A soldier of the legion lay dying in Algiers,

There was lack of woman’s nursing, there was a dearth of woman’s tears”

-from the poem “BINGEN ON THE RHINE” By Caroline E. Norton (1808 – 1877)

 

We stood at attention in our platoon formations, four or five abreast, ten ranks deep, all in uniform, on a crisp September morning. Our platoon leader stood in front of our formation, back to us. Other platoons were all around us, same uniforms, with their platoon leaders in front of them. We all faced toward the center of the large asphalt covered yard, toward the empty flagpole. In spite of the great numbers assembled, more than a thousand, it was utterly quiet. You could hear birdsong from the nearby park. Shortly, two drummers and two buglers and a lone uniformed young man came into view. The small detachment marched to the military tattoo being rhythmically played out by the drummers. When they reached the flagpole they stopped marching and drumming. The young man took an American flag from under his arm, unfolded it enough to fix the grommets on the flag onto the catches on the rope.

The buglers began to play and the drummers started a slow roll of backdrop as the flag slowly began to rise to its position at the top. The music stopped. We raised our right hands over our hearts and, all as one, recited the Pledge of Allegiance. When we finished, the platoon leaders led us, formation by formation, into the nearby buildings. Once inside, we could hear John Phillip Sousa’s Washington Post March blaring over the loudspeakers as we marched to our assigned positions.

No, I was not in the Army, at least not yet. I was seven years old and beginning my first day of first grade at Resurrection School on Chicago’s west side.

It seemed a bizarre, scary place to this scared first grader. I came from a big family, but they were all in other grades. I was on my own. It didn’t seem at all like kindergarten I attended the year before at nearby Robert Emmett Public School; that school was only a few hours a day, and offered naps and treats and games and playtime. Not at all like today’s kindergarten programs, which feature foreign languages and in which you may be required to defend your dissertation. This was loud, and crowded and scary, with kids of all ages.

My platoon leader/ classroom teacher was Sister Mary Owen, RSM. She was young and pretty; at least I thought she must have been if you could see past the habit she wore. It showed only her face and hands, that pretty face encased in a framed white starched cardboard headpiece. Her dress was black and she wore a starched white breastplate and wore a large black rosary as both a belt and a sort of accessory running down one side. She wore a black veil over her head. This was the official outfit of a Religious Sister of Mercy. There were other flavors of nuns, I would learn, and they had their distinctive outfits, also. Sisters of Providence, Franciscans, Little Sisters of the Poor, and the Sinsinawa Dominicans, who I always thought sounded like a ball club.

We were about fifty kids to a room (we had a class photo every year, and the proof of those numbers is there), the products of the post war baby boom, when millions of G.I.’s, sailors, and airmen came back with pretty much one idea in mind. And millions of lonely women thought it was a pretty good idea, too. Procreation was practically the national pastime in the late 1940’s and early to mid-50’s and it filled classrooms quickly.

Our uniforms were tan shirts and maroon ties for boys, tan blouses and maroon plaid jumpers for the girls. The girls’ jumpers also carried a patch with the Resurrection logo on it. If you were number one or two in the family birth order, you probably wore new shirts, or blouses and jumpers. Come later to the party and you were probably wearing hand-me-downs from an older sibling or a neighbor. Kids mostly carried their books in book bags or by hand, backpacks being reserved at that time for mountain men, soldiers, and Sherpa guides. When the Chicago weather arrived, you hung your coat in the “cloak room” which ran alongside the classroom and, as I recall, where discipline was sometimes distributed to children whose behavior was unacceptable.

———————-

It seemed to this boy that I had entered into a world run by women, which I believe could be said of most elementary schools. The principal and almost all of the teachers were nuns. The few lay teachers were women. And in such a world those things that are important to most women come to define the rules of the day. Things like order. Things like having a plan and then processing in an orderly fashion. Things like discipline. Things like kindness.

I was scared that first day. So many strange faces, and when Sister Owen called the role, asking each student in turn to raise their hand and speak their name, I could only raise my hand, too scared to speak. She let me off the hook and we set about the business of learning our ABCs, mostly reciting after her.

At some point, my nervousness got the better of me and I had an accident, and not the kind any kid wants to have. Sister Owen was quick to spot it. She swooped me up and carried me to the restroom, then known as the lavatory,  dismissing two older boys with a glare, who knew better than to mess with “Sister“. Like a mother caring for her own child, this young woman cleaned me off, asked me if I was OK, soaked my soiled undies and wrapped them in cellophane (who the hell carries cellophane?) and brought me by hand back to the classroom. I was somewhere between mortified and grateful. I’m not sure the other kids even noticed.

At the end of that first day, she handed me a note for my mother, explaining my little accident and telling me to have a better day tomorrow. I joined the orderly procession out the door, feeling utterly miserable and alone. And that is when I saw my oldest sister Maureen at the top of the stairway. She had on her plaid jumper, her black hair in curls and was talking to the girl next to her. My sister was a “good eighth grade girl” as the nuns would say. “Good eighth grade girls” could be depended upon to perform any task from cleaning the blackboards to tutoring slower students, to probably running the whole school, if asked.

She turned her head and saw me at the bottom of the steps and broke into a wide, welcoming smile. It was the kind of Big Sister smile that says, “I see you. It’s going to be OK. I’ve got you.” And I knew then that I wasn’t alone and that there were people there who cared about me. I was going to be OK. She carries that same smile even today and she has always shared it freely with all who need it.

God bless all sisters, those who took vows to earn that title and those who were members of your family. We’re lucky to have had them.

Goodbye to the Singing Bridge and other stories of Sister Lakes

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

If my family has a spiritual home, it must be in Sister Lakes, Michigan, for that was the site of our many annual pilgrimages each summer, usually for two or sometimes three weeks. The tales from these vacations have been retold so many times that you can often hear a groan in the room (usually from a long suffering in-law) when someone decides to pop one open again. Some of those memories actually happened, though they have put on some weight in the retelling. Some sort of happened and have been happily distorted by the re-teller of the tale. And some probably never happened, having been reengineered in the minds of various family members about what should have happened or what they wish had happened. Although I have, at times, been in all three of those camps, I’ll try to keep my telling of this tale as accurate as I can.

Chicago is surrounded by many popular vacation lakes: Lake Geneva in Wisconsin, Cedar Lake in Indiana, the Chain of Lakes near the Wisconsin border, Michiana’s shoreline and the Michigan side of the Great Lake itself, to name only a few. Every family probably has its favorite and thousands of Chicagoans filled all of those cottages each summer, so I am sure that each of those families could tell their own version of a vacation story. The late, great PBS storyteller Jean Shepherd, author of the classic Christmas Story, wrote an unforgettable and seldom seen sequel entitled “Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss” and it touches many of the same summer vacation memories.

Our story was mostly Sister Lakes in Southwest Michigan, about 110 miles from the West Side of Chicago. Six small lakes surrounded by little frame cottages, many built in the thirties and forties. Their names were Little Crooked, Big Crooked, Dewey, Magician, Cable and Round Lake, all within a circle of no more than a few miles. Most of my memories are from Round Lake, where we rented from the Clancy family and a few from Little Crooked Lake, where we rented from the Hayes family. The vacation I am describing here was from about 1957, 1958, or 1959.

Mighty preparations.

Today most people would think nothing of driving 110 miles there and back on the same day, if necessary. I know I’ve done it a few times. But in the 50’s and 60’s the Interstate system of highways we take for granted today was in its infancy. 110 miles took about five hours, not the hour and forty give minutes it would take in an off-traffic period today.  Then, your car was “flying” at a whopping sixty miles per hour, where today eighty-two is the unofficial legal speed limit on the open road.

My mother and father prepared for those five hours as if we were embarking on a trans-oceanic voyage. My dad would have the 1955 Chevy wagon car tuned up, tires looked at, oil changed. That year, he had some friend of his hook up a do-it-yourself window washer, which consisted of a water bag that rode on an inside fender and a metal lever the driver could pull to wash the windshield. When fired, it shot over our windshield entirely and watered the window of the car behind us. We tried to keep from laughing.

My mother began planning meals for ten people as if there was no food for sale east of the Indiana State Line. Do the math for three weeks times three meals a day, factor in the limited refrigeration of the time, and you’ll see her challenge. Our mobile refrigeration consisted of a red metal Coca Cola cooler, and it amazed me how much she managed to fit in there.  And then there was clothing. We had one or two cloth suitcases, but everything else was in duffle bags, boxes, or gym bags.

All of this had to fit in one nine passenger wagon, augmented by the “carrier”, an aluminum deck with suction cups that rode on the roof and which no one really trusted to stay on the roof, but it did for years. Of course, it wouldn’t all fit. My father would enlist someone with a car, that year Frank and Mary O’Brien. Frank was a former fireman pensioned off from having fallen off a fire truck years earlier, and their two children were older than us, so they had the time and they were just giving, warm people by nature. The O’Brien’s were given some of the cargo load, plus one or two kids.

Launching the Mission

The Saturday morning when we left for vacation was the best morning this side of Christmas. Our own personal Wogan Family “Great Getting’ Up Morning”, as it might be called in the Old Testament (Book of Exodus, to be exact). We woke up on our own, early, got dressed, had a sweet roll from Schneider’s Bakery, a rare treat which my father had picked up that morning to mark this great day; it was also to hold us over until we arrived at a real breakfast, still several hours away. Our cousin, Billy, having been given a parole by his parents so that he could escape from his seven sisters, had been dropped off and was eager to put 100 miles between him and them.

My mother would grow more and more frustrated with the lack of cooperation she was getting. Finally, when we heard her say, “We’re Not Going!” we knew we were getting close to launch.

Luggage, boxes of food, bags of clothing, fishing poles, tackle box, golf clubs, dolls, beach toys, blankets and bedding, towels, comic books, and seven or eight children plus one cousin ready to board. My father had no intention of second guessing all these little bladders, so a mandatory bathroom stop was ordered before being assigned a seat.

In the Time Before Safety

It should be noted here that by current safety standards, my entire family should have been wiped out several times over on these trips. There were no seats belts installed in the car, my dad chain smoked his Salem’s out the window the whole way, various kids would stick heads and hands out windows until scolded back in, my mother would usually be holding one of the babies in her lap, and three of us rode in what we called the “poop deck”. This was a plywood bench my father had made by some fireman that could be inserted into the flat bed at the rear of the station wagon. It was attached to absolutely nothing and held in place by gravity and, well, us.

Because air conditioning for cars was still on the horizon, we would open the tailgate window and lock it in the “up” position. Three of us actually fought for the honor of traveling on this suicide bench, spending the entire trip making faces at the people in the car behind us (if it was the O’Brien’s, we behaved) and wondering what it said on the printed side of road signs we passed while looking backwards.

Once at the lake, I can’t recall that we ever owned even a single life jacket, except for a small red and yellow striped one in which a toddler could bob around. My brothers and I would sometimes row across the lake at night to catch frogs, with neither parent aware of our absence, our lack of flotation devices, or our lack of sanity. As long as you were in the rack by the time they got to bed, life was good.

Points of Interest along the route.

It was very important to my father that our little caravan go by his firehouse on Crawford (now Pulaski), Engine 95, or later Harrison St, Engine 113. Dad would slow down, honk a few times and wave, a big grin on his face. The other fireman came out from the apparatus floor to wave back and smile. I think some of them were happy for us, but most of them looked relieved that it was us and not them on this little journey. All they had to do was continue going about running into burning, exploding, or collapsing buildings now and again, a relatively easy choice by comparison.

On to the Singing Bridge. The Congress Street Bridge over the Chicago River sits just east of the old post office. As your tires meet the rippled steel that makes up the part of the bridge that can be opened for boat traffic, they change their noise to a sort of high pitched whine. We would wait for it, and then break into uneven sing-songy nonsense to mimic the tire noise. Great fun. My parents would look at each other, roll their eyes and smile at each other, as if to say “What a collection of idiots we’ve produced.”  A few years ago, the bridge was replaced, and lost its voice to some new kind of construction material. Nothing lasts forever, I guess.

You travelled by way of the soaring Skyway, then the Indiana Toll Road through the steel mills, then off to back roads for a few miles. After a few more miles, you could pick up the Michigan Freeway, the massive super highway under construction from the East Coast toward Chicago, growing closer each year, and now known as I- 90. When the bridges turned blue in color, you knew you were in Michigan.

Finally, near Stevensville, Michigan, we turned off into Ritter’s Restaurant. There we would unload and pile into the long table which awaited us, via my mother’s phone calls days before. Today I have grandsons, the youngest seven, who can sit in a restaurant, scan a menu, and order a meal with the practiced ease of a travelling salesman. Not so with us. We got two restaurant breakfasts per year, one at Easter and this one. My mother, always organized, had learned from our first trip here that it took us longer to order the food than it did for the restaurant to cook it. We would gaze at the menu and ponder its meaning, as if it were written in ancient Hebrew.  So she borrowed the menu from that first trip and the week before leaving, we placed our order with her. She would pull out the list of food selections for the whole group, neatly typed on her trusty Underwood manual typewriter, and hand it to the astonished waitress.

Exit 12 was Napier Avenue, and we began to get excited. You passed little crossings and hamlets like Spinks Corner and Coon’s Curve and migrant worker’s shacks until finally you crested a hill and Round Lake at last came into sight. Nerds that we were, we would cheer and break into applause. It still makes me smile when I crest that hill even today.

The cottage

Clancy’s Camp Geraldine was on the side of a hill facing the lake. It consisted of two buildings, each hosting two cottages, one up and one down. Marshall and Eleanor Clancy and their four sons spent the entire summer in one upper cottage. We thought they were the luckiest guys in the world. P.J. Clancy, the old undertaker from the west side, and his wife Minnie Bell, a true Southern Lady in voice and style and grace, occupied the other upper cottage. We rented the cottage below them.

The main lake road ran right past the doors of the upper cottages and the elder residents sat most of the time at street level on outdoor chairs, chatting, smoking, sometimes cooking, and after four o’clock or so, drinking. Upon our arrival, they would flock over to greet us, my Dad saying his hellos and my mother anxious to survey the inside of the cottage. As we all piled out, we were given standing orders not to go down the stairs empty handed, and also to drop our loads at the door, until my mother could figure out where every item was to be stowed. If the weather was warm, it was hard not to try to get a bathing suit on and hit the lake. Not before your stuff was stowed and not before the car was emptied.

Round Lake

The true heart of the vacation was the water. The water you splashed in, swam in, raced in, rowed over, skied over, fished in, and bathed in. Two hundred acres of water, only sixty feet at the deepest, usually weed choked beyond the beaches, and full of fish and turtles to catch. To look across that lake was always liberating for city kids, for the opposite shore seemed so far away. It did a visual number on you. Your big city life afforded you only a look into the window across the gangway or the house across the street or alley. The only obstructions breaking the water’s surface were the piers, the rowboats, and the white wooden rafts, floating on 55 gallon drums and anchored about twenty feet out from the shore; an early rung on the ladder to maturity was achieved when you could swim to the raft by yourself. And always the surface of the lake itself, still as glass in the early morning, so bright you adverted your eyes in the noonday sun, sometimes wild and surly during a storm.

Round Lake was surrounded by cottages, in some ways as tightly packed as the block of two flats we called home in Chicago, but different. There were wooden piers every twenty yards or so, countless rowboats, motorboats, pontoon boats, and little sailboats tied up to those piers. Almost every cottage had a floating raft, too, something kids could swim out to and play “king of the mountain” as a child and for moonlit romance when you were older.

Round Lake was also the death of sanitation for a few weeks. Our cottage contained only one bathroom with a single toilet and a washstand. No tub or shower. Bathing consisted of taking a bar of soap with you into the water, maybe some shampoo for the ladies, and cleaning up alongside the white wooden pier. My mother believed that kids who spent six to eight hours a day swimming, which was a typical warm weather day for us, had to be clean enough by default. I think she was right.

In Search of the Largemouth Bass

I had no idea what my sisters did for those weeks, but my brothers, cousin and I fished constantly, usually clad only in our bathing suits. The lake coughed up bluegill, sunfish, and perch and bullheads. The fish worked in shifts: daytime for the panfish and perch, then exclusively bullheads after dusk. Almost at any time of day and anywhere you dropped a line you could find fish, but our prize was the largemouth bass, the king of freshwater gamefish. We had a tackle box full of guaranteed bass killers, but invariably we grew too impatient and went back to the trusty gas-station- purchased night crawlers and a bobber. We caught some little bass here and there, the most notable of which might have been the one my brother Bill caught on an improbable rubber frog.  He had bought this pale green rubber abomination earlier that summer via mail order and we needled him and laughed at him for weeks. On the first cast, he caught a largemouth that weighed about two pounds, then a record for us. He became an insufferable “expert” for the rest of the summer.

How inexperienced we were as fishermen was pointed out to me one morning when Old Joe Hayes came off the lake as we got ready for church one Sunday. A relative of the Hayes family we knew from Crooked Lake, Joe went fishing only on certain days when the weather conditions were right. He started out before first light and was done by 8 a.m., using a method he called “spatting” which consisted of dangling an unlucky live white baby frog from the end of a twelve foot bamboo pole. He only fished in front of our cottage and maybe twenty or thirty yards in either direction, an area he called “bass lane”. He got out of his boat carrying a stringer full of five to six pound monster bass that I could only dream about catching.

Cold Weather Plans: Deer Forest, Driftwood, the Roller Rink, and the Bowling Alley.

There may be no greater challenge to parents than what to do when the weather turns too-cold in a too-small cottage full of too-bored children. One answer lay in nearby Coloma, Michigan. Deer Forest was a sort of demented amusement park built especially for those “too cold to swim” days. Its main attraction was a lightly wooded forest inside of a fenced-in enclosure full of small deer, ranging from fawns to yearlings. For five cents you could buy some dried corn in a Safe-T-Cone (a popular ice cream cone then) and walk into the enclosure. The deer would immediately swarm in and mob you, knowing you had food. If you held your cup of corn behind you, you would find out the deer already knew this trick and send one or more of their number behind you. Your cup of corn would disappear in one toothy deer gulp. Preschoolers would scream and grade schoolers giggled and laughed, as did parents watching their kids alternately laughing, crying, or shrieking. The deer didn’t care; they only understood free food.

Deer Forest had also never heard of the ASPCA. It featured caged displays such as the Dancing Chicken and the Piano Playing Duck, both live, both standing on metal plates that passed low voltage through their feet if they didn’t dance or play for you. They had all sorts of tired, tied up animals like ponies, lambs, and one honest to god ancient reindeer. They had a Santa’s Workshop in which you could meet with a perspiring Santa and add your Christmas wish to his book. One lady ahead of me in line had written that she hoped the owners would be jailed for creating this awful place.

Driftwood was within walking distance of our cottage, and hence a daily visit. It was a two story structure on the lake consisting of the owner’s apartment on top and one of the cheesiest gift shop-pinball hall-soda fountain-vacation sundries places you could ever hope to see. For me it represented illegal fireworks and comic books. It stands there today, having passed from owner to owner, but somehow always the same. It was always noisy with the sound of pinball machines, teenage music, and kids. I can still taste the ice cream.

The bowling alley and the roller rink were across the street from our cottage. The bowling alley was a late comer; the Ramona Roller Rink appeared to have been built before time existed, an old dried wooden construction, painted green and white. The roller rink was all about being a teenager, so we had no business there. Besides, only girls roller skated in our world.

There was another and sadder world intermingled, yet separate from all of this. We were too young to know or care much about the people we called “berry pickers”, but they were there. These were the migrant workers from Mexico who followed the crops; July and August found them in strawberry and blueberry country. We passed their low tarpapered shacks on the way in from the city, and we might see them washing clothes at the Laundromat, but beyond that, they stayed invisible. While we were families of blue collar workers, perhaps without a lot of material wealth to show for it, they were the true working poor.

We didn’t know that they couldn’t use the lake, nor were they welcome in the Silver Creek Catholic Church we attended, nor were they allowed in the bars or stores. Their children did not attend schools. You can find them toiling there still today, but the living conditions are a little better and the social barriers are mostly gone, reduced but not eliminated in the long struggle for equality and civil rights of the sixties, seventies, eighties and beyond.

—————-

Tolstoy once wrote that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We were and still are a happy family, like most families, I suppose. Our individual and collective memories of those family times bind us together and give meaning to that happiness. My kids have their own memories from the same lakes in later years, but those memories belong mostly to them, as mine do to my brothers and sisters.

Round Lake, indeed the whole area of Sister Lakes seems to change more slowly than the rest of the world, certainly slower than bustling Chicago. The old red hay barn across the lake that framed so many long ago sunsets is finally itself gone now. Some of the humble pre-war cottages have been replaced by 6,000 square foot year-around “McMansions”. Some of the new powerboats are too big for the lake they are on.

But it does slowly change, and, I suppose, will someday go the way of the Singing Bridge. Still, the memories can make you smile and keep you young.

 

 

 

The Flying Cowboy. First Responders to the Heart.

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

The Italian authorities were going from village to village in the valleys and gorges below the mountains along the Amalfi Coast. They were asking the same questions of everyone…did you see anyone fall from the mountains? Where did you see it? When? Finally after a few days a little boy in one of the villages told them he had seen a man in an American cowboy hat flying through the air one day recently.  There was no flying cowboy, of course, but what he had witnessed was how our new acquaintance Murray had met his death on a beautiful September day in 2007.

Until then, it might have been the best vacation we ever took. Five days in Rome with our more seasoned travelling friends, Dennis and JoAnn, acting as our tour guides. We saw the soaring architecture of the Vatican and several dead popes lying around in their glass caskets, the Coliseum, the Sistine, the Palatine Hill, the Tivoli Gardens, Trevi Fountain and those great open piazzas that seem to show up every few blocks. And everywhere the warm, friendly and incredibly hospitable people of that good country. There was no part of Rome that seemed dangerous and no restaurant that wasn’t delicious and memorable. We walked and walked.

The second part of our trip was further south, past Naples, in the region of the Amalfi Coast. It was a hiking tour and we were tagging along with part of a much larger group of American Airlines employees who had arranged all of this. After an endless train ride with about thirty stops, our group met in a decent little hotel in San Angelo and met our hiking guides. They were English, mostly retired engineers, and were in great shape for this work. Each day offered a different hike and you could assign yourself to easy, medium, or hard trails. Being a guy, I assumed we would try medium, but that only lasted a day. With tongues hanging out, we reassigned ourselves to easy, which wasn’t really all that easy, but we had been training for months in the mountains of Chicago, which of course don’t exist.

We walked up the side of Mt. Vesuvius, down into the lava covered ruins of Herculaneum (also buried along with Pompeii, but less famous) and along an old mountain trade route for mules high over the Mediterranean known as the Walk of the Gods. We walked down the sixty or so stories of the vertical cliff-side town of Positano and had wine and cheese and olives on the beach, only to learn that the single way back up was the way we came down. We slept pretty well those nights.

One of our group was a tall thin attorney from Toronto named Murray. He and his wife Sonia had been on many such hiking trips, but she confided quickly that these trips were all about Murray and his passion for hiking. He was in good shape, always taking the “hard” route and each day wearing his official olive drab hiking pants, shirt and hat, which in the military would have been known as a “boonie hat”, but had sort of the shape of a cowboy hat. Each night he would wash his sweat soaked outfit in the bathroom sink and hang it out to dry for tomorrow’s adventure. He took his hiking and I guess his life pretty seriously.

Like us, Murray and Sonia were not part of the American Airlines s group to which our friends Dennis and JoAnn belonged. Dining seating was your choice and, as groups will do, they tended to gather with fellow employees to share the dinner table. A loose dinner confederation formed consisting of my wife Maureen and I, Murray and Sonia, a very eccentric but hysterically funny octogenarian woman from the Isle of Guernsey, a retired British Air Force mechanic, and a few others.

Over dinner and a few other times, Murray shared with us that he was not happy with the degree of difficulty of our hikes thus far. He had been on many hikes and this one was not pushing him. It was sure pushing the rest of us, but we listened politely. And so it was on Wednesday that we got the day to ourselves. You could go sightseeing, shopping, or, if you were Murray, seek out that more challenging hike. The guides were against him going alone and tried to talk him out of it, but he had already picked the place and made it clear to them that he intended to go. They made him show the location on a map the night before and warned him that their insurance would not cover any misadventure like this. He was the soul of confidence at dinner that night, his last on earth, and seemed pleased that he would at last be on his own, free of less able hikers and guides.

We spent the day in Sorrento shopping, grateful for the break in the activity. At dinnertime back in the hotel Murray had not returned and Sonia wasn’t worried; she was sure he got held up somehow. Cellphones didn’t work too well internationally in 2007, by the way. By 8 p.m. she was nervous, but still sure it was just a delay of sorts. It had happened once or twice before, she said. By nightfall, about 9 pm. in that region, she was clearly worried. Maureen sat with her in the lobby of the hotel while I made pointless trips to the street every 30 minutes or so to spot him if he should come by. I didn’t know what else to do. Eventually, Maureen told me to get some sleep and that she would be up later, but I awoke alone the next morning. Maureen had sat with her all night, the realization dawning more clearly by the hour that something was wrong. Very wrong.

By morning the tour guides were on the phone to headquarters in the U.K., police were in the lobby and the search was on. The hotel management gave Sonia a private sitting room off the lobby and she asked Maureen if she would sit with her. And sit she did, holding Sonia’s hand much of the time. The rest of the group went on a final hike and, upon returning and learning that Murray was still missing, did what people so commonly do when a near certain tragedy is about to befall someone. They distanced themselves from Sonia and the room in which she and Maureen sat. They weren’t comfortable, and to be honest I couldn’t blame them. It can be hard to know the right thing to say, if indeed there even is a right thing to be said.

Maureen sat with Sonia until on Friday we had to leave for Rome and a flight home; we had a big family wedding on Saturday. She made sure Sonia finally made the inevitable phone calls to Canada that made it official. Murray was missing and they needed to come to Italy. His brother arrived the next day.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that Maureen found an online newspaper article written in Italian, but it contained the words Toronto, Murray and the Italian word “morte”. We learned from a letter from Sonia a few months afterward what had transpired.  His body had been located after an extensive search by over 500 local police in a remote valley after a child told his story of the flying cowboy. He had changed his mind about where to hike and they thought he might have climbed above the cloud line where the rock is wet and lost his footing, falling more than 200 meters to his fate.

———————–

A few times in our lives we have learned that close friends have suffered the sudden loss of an adult son or daughter. There may be no greater shock and sadness for a parent to absorb. Like in the Amalfi Coast, Maureen has known exactly where to be and what to do. She insisted we go right now to their homes to be with them. There was no argument to be had, her resolve was that strong and that clear.  Every instinct in my body told me not to do this. We’re intruding. We’re not their closest friends. Their family will resent us.  It’s somehow not the right thing to do.

And she was right each time. It was exactly the best thing to do. Our friends were bleeding and we needed to be there not to stop the bleeding, but to bleed with them. Their bleeding would slow, and eventually stop, but that is the function of time passing. And even time can’t remove the scar that would form and always be there. But when the tragedy first strikes and your friends are at their most vulnerable, the shocked and brokenhearted need their friends closer, not further way.

We honor first responders, the police officers, firefighters, paramedics, nurses, and soldiers who run toward danger while the rest of us run the other way or at least move aside. But there are other, less recognized first responders like Maureen. I think of her and those precious few who share this remarkable quality as first responders to the heart.

I have a hundred reasons for loving my wife, and maybe another hundred more for admiring her, but this is where her light shines most brightly. I don’t have the instinct and I surely don’t have the skill set to offer much comfort at those times, but I am lucky enough to be married to someone who does.

A Lonely Hero says Goodbye

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

“Old soldiers never die, they just fade way”-

-Gen. Douglas MacArthur addressing a joint session of Congress upon his retirement.

Fort McCoy sits in southwestern Wisconsin, roughly forty miles east of La Crosse and the Mississippi River, and nestled between the towns of Tomah and Sparta. Today, and for the last twenty or so years it has been the jumping off point for thousands of young soldiers on their way to Iraq or Afghanistan. Units would receive “acclimation” training prior to being inserted into the Mideast warzones.  When it was time to go, the presence of nearby Volk Field made it ideal for quickly deploying whole units without a big city airport scene, crying spouses, screaming children, and the press that would go with it.

It wasn’t always this way. For many years it was only Camp McCoy and the site of Annual Training, the two-week active duty obligation for National Guard units from around the Midwest.  Many a vacationer can recall, and none too fondly, getting caught behind endless military convoys on their way to or from McCoy. “Summer Camp” as it was called by some, could be two weeks of fairly tiring training to keep a military unit in reasonable shape, or it could be a two week beer blast, for the less motivated or well-led units. My unit, the 2nd Battalion of 129th Infantry, was squarely in the former category, thanks in no small measure to the dedication and “hands on” leadership of our commander, Lt. Col. Bernie Taczyk. He was a Korean War combat vet and he brought passion to his posting.  Officers who didn’t like to work or provide strong leadership tended to find other places to billet than under Bernie.

In July, 1979 I found myself in a remote corner  of this post, with about 60 soldiers and non-coms (read sergeants) reporting to  me. We had a virtual wall of wooden boxes containing some 600 high explosive 81 mm mortar rounds and about 300 illumination rounds to be disposed of in a short period of time. You disposed of them by dropping them, one at a time, down the barrels of 81mm mortar gun tubes and firing them at targets about 3,000 meters downrange. The targets were mostly old tank hulls, and, on occasion, the unlucky lost cow. (Note: No animals were harmed in the writing of this story).

That quantity of rounds might not sound too impressive, but when you factor in that each fire mission consumes only about 12 rounds and takes about an hour (much less time in real-world firing, but we were training gun crews here, and it took time), well, you can do the math. The illumination rounds were for lighting up targets at night, lest we get too rested in our labors.

———-

How did I get there? Glad you asked. In 1971 I was entering my last semester at DePaul University, was engaged to the love of my life, had been accepted for student teaching, and was poised to begin adult life. We couldn’t wait for school to end and our lives to really begin. There was, however, the little matter of the military draft and the specter of Vietnam, which hung over most young mens’ heads like a cloud. By 1971, it was becoming apparent that we were losing, or at least not willing to win anymore. Very few people wanted to go to Vietnam in 1971.

Up until then, the deal was simple: go to college and get a student deferment, which meant you couldn’t be drafted until after you graduated and, hey, it might be over by then.  Don’t go to college and you would likely be drafted within a year of high school. But that year, in an effort to level the playing field, the government ended the student deferment and instituted a lottery. I drew number 161, not immediate draft bait, but not safe either. I decided I would enlist in the Air Force, probably having heard too many of my mother’s stories of her first husband and my brother’s father, Lt. Gilbert J. Finn. He was a B-29 bombardier killed over Japan near the war’s end.

After a series of written tests, eye tests, physical tests, and tests of my patience, I was informed that I would be accepted into the navigator program for B-52 bombers. I was told, and subsequently told Maureen, that our first four years of marriage were going to be in the military. She didn’t return my engagement ring, so that became the plan. When it came time to sign on the dotted line, the contract read six years, not four. I informed the officer of the obvious error, and he informed me that the government was going to invest a lot of money in my training so that I could guide a big airplane full of bombs to the right place and drop them on the enemy, and that I should sign the contract. The meeting did not end well.

So, I found an Army Reserve unit on the Southeast side, did my basic and advanced training in scenic Fort Polk, Louisiana, and returned home. About a year later, my commander asked me if I wanted to become an officer, as a few slots had opened up in the Illinois Guard OCS program. I guess I was flattered to be asked, but that soon wore off as I discovered what a rigorous program it was. We started with about 90 candidates and graduated less than 50. I was one.

The OCS Program, as rigorous as it was, was also the most exciting military experience I had encountered. Helicopters, radios, things that went boom, C-rations and all that. And I was young. After a year back in the reserve unit, I applied for a transfer to the Guard, and was assigned to “ A” company of the 129th, in Elgin, Illinois. The Major who assigned me told me I was to be a mortar platoon leader. I told him I had seen a mortar, but had no  experience with the weapon. He looked at me as one might look upon an addled child and  he suggested I get up to speed.

——————

It was a hot, humid summer day, and my crews were hard at it, sending fire mission after fire mission volleying out into the impact zone. Far behind us, larger guns were firing their ordnance into the same zone, and you could hear the big shells whooshing overhead. It took a little getting used to.

It was about noon and getting hotter still. I told my platoon sergeant to pass the word on the sound powered phones to stand down and secure the guns, find some shade and get some lunch. The troops didn’t need to be told twice. A few minutes later the sound of a jeep engine could be heard coming our way. “”Visitor,” I thought, “maybe brass”.  Within a short time the jeep rounded a turn and we could see it was a solitary soldier at the wheel, fatigues, soft cap, and no helmet or field gear or weapon. I knew it couldn’t be anyone important, so I returned to some form I had been filling out.

The jeep pulled up a few yards from me and the driver got out. He has an old man, short, very spare in build, wire glasses, and he smiled as he saw me. He wore the two stars of a Major General on his collar.

Now there is one immutable law of the military…..generals do not travel without a small circus in their wake. In that circus will be vehicles, aides, probably an attractive female solider as a personal assistant.  And a few “strap hangers”, probably your own staff officers tagging along to mitigate what you, as an idiot lieutenant, might say or do to embarrass the unit.

His nametag read “Mabry” and he extended his hand, but pulled it back momentarily to return my salute that I launched as, half in shock, I took in his rank. My platoon sergeant, having learned long ago that nothing good happens around generals, began to slink around the side of the field tent we were using to run operations. “You in charge, Lieutenant”? the General asked in a  southern drawl. I told him I was, and asked him if there was anything I could help him with. I wondered if he was lost.

“Tell me what you’re doing here today”, he said, but not in the sort of “cross examination” fashion to which I had become accustomed from previous visits by various ranking officers. I explained that this was a three-day live fire exercise.

He told me that he had been a solider since the beginning of World War II, had served a lot of years, and that he planned to retire from the service in a few weeks. He wanted to spend his last few days around soldiers, and he asked me if I would mind if he talked to my soldiers by himself. Inasmuch as young lieutenants don’t disappoint Major Generals, I pointed out the line of gun crews, now enduring their C-rations and sweltering in the heat. He walked toward the first crew who, predictably, jumped to their feet as they saw the stars. He waved them off and told them to sit back down, and joined them. I could see he was asking questions and appeared to be actually listening. Rare quality in a General.  After a few such visits to the crews, he accepted a C-ration can from one of the men, took out his G.I. issue P38 can opener and consumed  some warm Del Monte peaches. You could see the men becoming impressed with his easy style. Ever more amazing.

He came back to his jeep, shook my hand, and complimented me on doing a good job and for having such fine troops under my command.  He got in, smiled a sort of sad smile, put the jeep in gear and drove off into the dust.  I wished him well and cranked off my best OCS salute.

About forty minute later the circus did appear, this time in the form of three jeeps carrying my battalion commander and most of the senior staff officers. They pulled up, jumped out and began grilling me about the General’s visit. It would seem that the good General had side-stepped convention and not made them aware of his presence. Had he done so, it probably would not have made it possible to do these sorts of informal visits.

Mostly, they wanted to know if I had said or done anything wrong, non-military, or just plain dumb. I told them it was mostly a non-event, although I was still impressed that he travelled alone. They informed me that he was not just anyone, but a recipient of the Medal of Honor. He never mentioned that to me or anyone else, as I would later learn, during our visit.

Now, in civilian life, he would be a hero maybe on the Memorial Day or the Fourth of July parade, but in the army, living Medal of Honor winners are big medicine. You get to be a certified hero 24/7. More incredible, they told me that he won it as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Hurtgen Forest during World War II. High ranking officers are mostly not in the thick of any kind of fight, so this guy must have been something very rare indeed. Al Gore had not invented the Internet in 1979, so I had to wait until I got home to look him up. You can find him easily today on Wikipedia. His full name was George Lafayette Mabry, Jr, and he hailed from Sumter, South Carolina. Read his citation for The Medal and you’ll be impressed. Among other feats cited, he cleared an enemy minefield by walking through it and marking the mines. No, thank you. This was not someone you would want to piss off.

——–

I think back on that unusual day from time to time, on what McCoy was then, and what it is now. I think about the melancholy General Mabry, closing out his long career, and just wishing to be with young soldiers once again in his twilight. And I think of all the young men and now women, the children of 9/11 who passed through McCoy on their way to their wars, and on their way to dangers most of us can’t even imagine. For guys like me, McCoy was a two week exercise that kept it real, but then you went back home. For the General, it was a long goodbye after so many years of service. For those kids on their way to the Mideast, it was the first step on a journey into the unknown.

Here’s to all those who went willingly or unwillingly to their war, a war either just or unjust, but they went.  Patriots, all. And a few heroes thrown in as well.

Major General George L. Mabry

“Them Changes”

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

-a song by Buddy Miles from 1976.

 

That first car.  Does anyone ever forget that first car you owned? You can close your eyes and you still see it, maybe even see your young self at the wheel, youthful master of your own little steel and glass speed machine. You may own or lease a dozen or more cars in your lifetime, some good, and some lemons, most of them forgettable.  But not that first one.

Mine was a 1965 Plymouth Fury I, reddish in color, with ” leatherette” bench seats that in the summertime heat scorched the backs of legs of mini-skirted young ladies. It was powered by a Mopar “slant six” cylinder engine, small enough that you could change the sparkplugs (look that one up if you are under fifty) while standing with your feet on the ground inside the engine compartment.  My car was actually brought to life by an amazing mechanic, one Mr. Matusiak, father of my friend Christine Matusiak (later Clancy).  He worked for Gladstone Cab Company in Elmwood Park and bought wrecks from local police departments, who, because of their frequent high speed chases, offered a steady supply.

He would cannibalize an un-wrecked front end and marry it to an un-wrecked back end and voila! he crafted a workable taxi cab. Somewhere along the line, he promised to make one for me and in 1970 he made good on that promise. It was a rebuilt police car, or rather the remarried halves of two former police cars, and it still had the hand operated floodlight that the driver could point and illuminate at will. My wife, then my girlfriend, and I would have great fun on our way home from a date seeking out her teenage brother and his sidekicks swilling beers in the nighttime alleys; we would light them up with the high beam, watching them scurry, beers flying, because they thought we were the fuzz.

My friend charged me all of $450 for that car, which was an incredibly charitable price even then. I doubt he broke even, but he sure made my year by giving me what all American boys want: their own set of wheels. And I paid him from the account my grandmother had been building for my chalice, saved at the rate of $5.00 per month since 1963. Yes, I said chalice. As in the metal vessel from which the priest drinks wine at mass. For I was, at least for four years of Quigley Preparatory Seminary and two months at Niles Minor Seminary, on my way to being a Catholic priest. That all came to a screeching halt on Halloween night, 1967.

Niles was the first time I was away from home, and anyone who has ever gone away to college knows how heady that time can be.  Your parents might be footing the tuition, room and board, but you feel a false sense of freedom, of giddy independence. All of life is still in front of you and amazing opportunities are all around you, and you are young and immortal and a little crazy. So when Halloween rolled around, and the announcement was made that there was a planned religious service that night, four of us quietly booked out the back door and into someone’s car. We went looking for adventure and we found some.

Our first stop was at DePaul University in Lincoln Park, where somebody got the bright idea of taking the fire extinguishers out of an old building known as “the Barn”. We had four of them on board and headed north toward Evanston, occasionally firing a watery burst at costumed revelers with our new toys. Great fun until we took the Evanston Police under fire. As it turned out, they were fighting a race riot a block away and mistook us for radicals and troublemakers. Which, of course, we were.

They were not amused. They stopped the car, made us get out, searched us, cuffed us, and threw us into the back of a wagon. One of our group made a run for it and got away, a young cop drawing a bead on him with his sidearm and then thinking better of it.  We arrived at the station, got photographed and fingerprinted, and traded our handcuffs for a shared cell, two customer per. At some point we were asked if we wanted our phone calls. I was not about to call my parents, particularly my father, and drag them 80 blocks north to bail out their prodigal son.

It was sobering, to be sure.  I remember sleeping on and off on the thin, dirty mattress and I remember the fried egg sandwich that was offered as breakfast. Can still taste it. And around 10 a.m. they trotted us out before a judge to hear the charges. We were being charged with disturbing the peace. The judge, as it turns out, had attended Quigley North for a few years and had a hard time keeping a straight face.  He released us with a stern lecture, again, straining to keep his composure. The car had been towed to the station, and we got in and drove back to the seminary at Harlem and Touhy.

Our fame had preceded us. The guy who got away had told the story, and within an hour everybody on the whole campus knew about the four desperados who spent the night in the Evanston lockup. Our dorm director, himself a priest, thought it was pretty funny, but upstairs in the rectors’ office the good Monsignor who ran the place was already changing our fates.  By day’s end we were told to pack up and go home. A special tribunal would review our case and decide our fate.

So I went home to the west side and spilled out my story. My parents were good about it. My father drove livery for funeral homes on his days off from the Fire Department, one of them in Evanston, The funeral home director was also a powerful politician in Evanston and the photos, fingerprints and court records all vanished in that magic fog known in Chicago as “clout.” Thanks, Dad.

My grandmother took it hard, though.  Irish grandmothers think having a priest in the family is Big Medicine, so she kept growing my chalice account even after I got the phone call that told me I could finish out the term but would then have to leave. I would be reconsidered after a two year period of “discernment” which I believe is a Catholic term meaning “once you get your head out of your rear end.”

I never went back. 1968 was a year of radical change for me and my family. My father died suddenly that summer and we moved from the two flat my family had occupied since 1916, driven by the winds of racial change in Chicago. It was a pretty radical year everywhere, it seemed, with the assassinations of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the Tet offensive in Viet Nam, marches, protests, and riots. Oh, and televisions’ first interracial kiss (Cpt. Kirk and Lt. Uhura).

After three long months in the Tribune pressroom, I enrolled in DePaul, the same school whose fire extinguishers I helped boost, and joined the secular world.  I would make new friends and then meet a little red headed girl named Maureen that autumn, fall in love, and feel like for the first time like I had a real purpose in life. All in about ten months.

And within a few years, the seminary system itself began to fall apart, driven by the changes of Vatican II, many of its priests, nuns and brothers doing a bit of discernment of their own and striking out toward new lives. I still meet them now and again as ordinary people. It seems strange to meet someone today in the neutral role of fellow person instead of their role as a religious, which conferred upon them some air of authority. Maybe that air of authority or that conferred legitimacy was what attracted me to the priesthood in the first place. I think maybe it did.

The seminaries are mostly gone now; populated today it seems by children from other lands, many with their “old school” Catholic beliefs.  I wish the church leadership would open their eyes and remove the barriers to ordaining women, or at the very least finally renounce celibacy and allow marriage. We’ve all paid far too steep a price for the sexual aberrations brought on, in part, by an irrational insistence on denial of normal sexual relations.  And I know dynamic and committed married or single women and men would breathe a much-needed new life into the ministry; they would be far better as the homilists we all seek and so seldom find in the meager talent before us today. We need good ministers as much as we need good cops, lawyers, politicians, doctors, nurses, and teachers.  Maybe more so.

——————

I guess most people have “Them Changes” in their lives. This was mine. Kind of like the chalice turning into a 1965 Plymouth, I changed from the seminarian into just another college student, on my way to a career, a marriage and a life. I looked like the same guy, but I wasn’t the same guy at all. Thank God for the ability to screw up when you’re young and to let fate, or a deity, or maybe just dumb luck point you in a new direction in life. I’ve never regretted it for one minute.

Billy Joel once wrote and sang that “your mistakes are the only things you truly can call your own” and I, for one, happen to agree with him.

If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

                                        -advice given to new reporters at the old City News Bureau

It was an incredibly loud, dust-filled world made of gray steel.

Gray steel decks on which you walked and labored, gray steel racks overhead carrying wires and pipes, dirty gray steel tracks in the floor ferrying curved aluminum plates. And above all, the monstrous grey steel Miehle Goss Dexter presses, called MGDs. They were ten feet tall and bellowed overpowering, pounding noise and ink and paper dust that covered your skin and got into your lungs. The MGDs seemed to be saying the same word over and over again, faster and faster, as they ran up to top speed. It sounded like the name of a Mexican city:  “Chapultepec, Chapultepec, Chapultepec.”

It was a world without windows or sunlight and it was manned by ink covered steel-tough men who smoked through the dust and cursed and laughed and made the machines work. It was a world in which I suddenly found myself inserted into in January, 1968. It was the pressroom of the Chicago Tribune, some three stories below the ground in the bowels of the venerable Tribune Tower at 435 N. Michigan. After the leadership of the Catholic seminary system somewhat abruptly invited me to seek another career choice, I began to work there. Remember that job in college that made you really want to finish your degree? This was mine.

Paper converted to steel and back to paper again, that was what the whole place was really all about. Writers on the floors high above would spin their stories, moving their thoughts into their fingers and their fingers to the keys on a metal typewriter and from there onto a piece of paper. The article would always end with the number -30- at the center bottom of the page to indicate “nothing follows”.  A copy boy would be summoned by someone yelling the word “Copy!” and he would then take the paper to an editor who would add, subtract, question, or rearrange the paper words and send it to a typesetter. The typesetter sat at a machine called a Linotype and typed in the words, only this time the letters that came out were in little metal slugs, giving meaning to the phrase “line of type”. When the metal words were completed, another typesetter picked larger metal letters for the headline from a specially organized wooden rack, called a “California job case” and arranged the letters in order within a steel frame. His fingers were so practiced that he didn’t even need to look at the job case to see what characters his hands had learned to choose.

If there was a picture to go with the story, the piece of film would be re-shot into a “half-tone”, where the image was broken up into tiny dots on a metal plate. A stereotyper would mount the half tone onto a metal plate to join up with the words. And when the headlines and copy and photos were finally all assembled, they cast the whole thing into a plate maker, which produced a shiny aluminum curved plate that looked like a miniature airplane hangar, about one foot in height. It was a backward-facing newspaper page, but made of shiny silver metal. And it would journey slowly down to the press room a few floors below on little tracked rollers in the floor, motivated by gravity. Somewhere along the route, someone would paint in bright red ink a press number and page number, large enough for someone to pick it out from the others.

My job title was “flyboy”, a non-union job. I had two tasks really, one to watch the little parade of shiny metal plates moving down the tracks in the floor for the ones with my press number on them and then to pick up the plates and set them by the press bank unit with the corresponding page numbers chalked on them by the pressmen. Each main press (there were 24 total) was connected to as many banks as needed to produce the next day’s newspaper. A Saturday edition was the smallest and might use four banks. Sunday editions were the biggest and might use as many as twelve. Each shift started with this process of getting the right metal plates sorted and then mounted onto the press banks. The press foreman and his union helpers, all wearing their homemade hats made of newsprint, made anew each day by the wearer, would fiddle with adjustments that I was forbidden to touch, feeding the plain white newsprint into the banks from enormous rolls from the “reel room” one floor below.

When they finally started the press, all the banks fed into the main unit, which blended all the pages together, cut the sheets, folded them and created the end product: the newspaper that landed on your doorstep. Paper converted to steel and back to paper.

The other part of my job was to watch the output from the press, looking for little red tags called “pasters” The press had to recycle itself every twenty minutes or so and it would produce about ten papers that printed a front and pack page only, with the rest of the inside copies all blank newsprint. The press affixed the red “pasters” so that I could spot them and pull them out of the run. Wouldn’t want someone to sit down with their first cup of coffee and find that their morning Trib was a hollow joke.

An unbroken chain of finished papers moved from the mouth of the press via wire racks up to the bundling machines above us and from there onto the docks from which the trucks fed the city its daily diet of news.  And on a Saturday evening, when all 24 MGDs were cranking at top speed, the metal decks fairly jumping below your feet, one could be forgiven for thinking he had wandered into hell. Such an incredible volume of noise and so much ink dust was in the air that the crews were given 30 minutes on and 30 minutes off to get out of the room. Pressmen were legendary drinkers, so they naturally gravitated to the nearby Billy Goat’s under Michigan Avenue during their “off” times.

The shift was not dictated by the clock but by the number of papers you were assigned to print. A gauge labeled “Papers per hour” whose hash marks were one thousand each (60,000 per hour max) told you where you were. If you were lucky, and the press did not need to stop for breakdowns or a breaking story that required you to literally “stop the presses!” for new plates, you might meet your quota in 5 hours, and get paid for 8. Strong unions. After your shift, you were too dirty to get on public transportation, so showers were available. Each shower had containers of powdered “Lava” soap on the walls. It removed most of the ink along with some of your skin. After a few weeks, you were the whitest guy on your block.

———-

That pressroom is gone today, as are all of the union jobs with it. Pressmen, stereotypers, linotype operators, plate makers, bundlers, and yes, flyboys are all dim memories. Their unions, organized into “Chapels” instead of “Locals” have slipped away, also. The steel and the dust are gone, the papers now printed in a modern offset plant on Goose Island. But the paper is much reduced in size, content, and quality, and the plant produces fewer print copies each month as more and more of us open our “Trib” on an iPad, Surface, or laptop.

———

I watch sadly as newspapers slowly die from the inside out, victims of the Internet.   When the Internet removed the economic engine of the newspapers, namely the classified ads, newspaper organizations started to make cuts. They started with the editors and the more expensive and experienced writers. Economic reality forced them to turn their backs on what made them so valuable in the first place: sources of reliable information where facts were checked before they were printed.

Newspapers like the Tribune begin now on computer screens, move to digital files, and are assembled in “pagination” software. The conversion to steel is certainly gone, but something more important than the steel is gone, too. Into the vacuum of reliable reporters and experienced editors vetting their information rushed the Internet, virtually void of controls, shrieking non- truths, half-truths, and outright lies. When you consider recent polls, you begin to realize what we’ve lost:

  • 25% of American still believe the U.S helped plan the 9/11 attacks.
  • 45% of Republicans believe Hillary Clinton was involved in some sort of child sex ring.
  • 45% of Republicans cling to the Obama “birther” myth.
  • 46% feel that millions of illegal votes were cast in the last election.
  • 23% insist the stock market went down in the Obama era.

And 61 million of us just drank the poison Kool Aid and voted against a competent, if unlikeable, woman about whom incredible lies were told. We just put the most dangerous child in the world unsupervised into a room full of loaded weapons.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous 19th century observer of American culture was credited (some say incorrectly, which certainly fits this story) as saying:

 “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”

Part of me wishes we had the steel back, both the steel of the ponderous newspaper production process and the metaphorical steel that was the shared effort to be accurate and fair and scrupulous in publishing information. I know I won’t see either again and I have a sense we as a nation don’t feel very good about ourselves right now. But I’ll keep double-checking what is passed on as truth and I hope you will, too. If enough of us do, then I think we can someday regain some of that goodness.  I’d like to feel good about America again, but I may have to wait a few years.

Save

Joints

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

His name was Johnny Holly, but everyone knew him as “Ding Dong” and he tended bar at Wallace’s Tap on the corner of Adams and Laramie in the old West Side.  He was a short, square little man, with thick eyeglasses and a smile that never seemed to leave his face.  He made a big fuss and gave a loud welcome to everyone who came through the screen door, and he made you feel good. He talked to me like I was an adult, although I was only 15 or 16. I liked that.

“Ding Dong” got his name, I was told, from his first job, which was on the old streetcar system. Conductors accepted the five cent fare from riders and then placed the nickel in a slot on top of the fare box. When the conductor pulled on an attached rope handle, the nickel disappeared into the fare box and a bell went off. You guessed it…it went “ding dong.”  Conductors were widely assumed to augment their income by pocketing fares, and I guess Johnny was no exception. Late one night, according to a story my father loved to tell, a Chinese gentleman got on board and handed him his nickel fare. When Johnny pocketed the nickel, the man inquired “No dingy-dingy?” Johnny replied “No dingy-dingy after 12, Charlie.”  The man turned out to be an inspector for the streetcar line and Johnny both lost his job as well as earned his immortal nickname on the same night.

(Author’s note: I know that the story is politically incorrect in 2016, that the man is now Asian, not Chinese, and that “Charlie” was an ethnic slur. but political correctness hadn’t been invented yet. At least not on the West Side.)  

Like any good bartender, “Ding Dong” loved to tell stories, and the one that stuck with me was one he told often. He had been sent by the Army to Alaska during the war where their real enemy was boredom.  An officer had warned the men about their excessive drinking so he and his friends decided one night to drink only until the sun came up. You get it.

 

 

——————

They were called Taverns, Saloons, Bars, Joints, and Taps and they were the province of workingmen. Their neon signs advertised Schlitz, Old Style, Hamm’s, Drewerys, Meister Brau, Miller High Life, Budweiser, Pabst, or Blatz. “Lite” beer was a generation away. Beer route sales guys fought hard to get their beer on tap, and rewarded bar owners with free or greatly reduced beer signage for their windows. Wallace’s, a Budweiser joint, was owned by Mike Wallace; he and his family lived upstairs. It was typical of so many taverns back then, always dark, always cool and smelling like an exotic combination of draft beer, cigarette smoke and something you couldn’t quite put your finger on, but it was reassuring and in my mind I can still recall the “feel” of the place.

Men, and usually only men, sat on the stools at the long bar. They had their cash on the bar in front of them, something that is peculiarly Chicago. Go to another city and place a twenty on the bar and the confused bartender will assume you just want one drink and will then be leaving.

There were booths along one wall, and sometimes small kids would be found in them, sipping their Cokes and munching on bags of Lay’s potato chips while the Old Man had a few beers. It was their version of “watching the kids.” Ball games would be playing on the black and white televisions, later to be replaced with primitive color sets, the greens and reds bleeding into each other.

Women were, under some unspoken set of rules, allowed into Wallace’s. However, a woman would never walk in alone, lest she be thought   a “barfly” or, worse, a “floozy”. Their words, not mine. Sitting there with my dad, I once saw a pretty young woman, nicely dressed, walk into Wallace’s unescorted and Mike came out from behind the bar and asked her if she was lost. She turned around and walked out, leaving me to wonder what had just happened.

A woman needed to be accompanied by her man. In my mother’s case, it was usually after they attended parent-teacher conferences at Resurrection grade school, where all of us received our education from the Mercy nuns. I guess like most families we spanned the scale from marginally good to just marginal, but my mother and father would begin the healing process after five or six such conferences at Wallace’s. My dad’s friend Vinny would often bring his fiancée of some thirty years, Julie, to the bar, and that was OK, too. Thirty years and they never did get married.

While the language was usually rough, it was mostly confined to hells, bullshit, and goddamns. With ladies present, you could receive a not-so- gentle reminder from a bartender or husband to watch your mouth.   The F-bomb, thrown so often and easily by either gender today, would have been rare and contain much more explosive power back then.

Bars also shared a number of services and features that made them as predictable and as dependable as a McDonald’s menu or a Holiday Inn’s rooms. Men ordered draft beer and not long necks, mostly. If you were a regular, you could write a check for cash. Bartender’s held the stakes for wagers made on everything from horseraces to prize fights to disagreements on historical facts. Their back bars seldom changed, so if your picture hung there for some reason, or your trophy was on display, you were practically immortal. Throwing a punch in a bar could get you banned for life, the sole judge making the decision being the bar owner.  Juke boxes were common, but if the patrons at the bar weren’t in the mood for music, it was not uncommon for the owner or a surly patron to unplug it in mid-song. Package goods (bottled beer in quart bottles) were always available from the cooler, so you could keep the party going at home.

Some bars would cash your whole paycheck, the better to keep you drinking there. My wife likes to tell the story of Hanna Higgins, whose iron worker husband was paid every Friday in cash. Each week she would allow him his hour or two in the bar, then head out, broom in hand, to chase the old man home before he drank away the rent and grocery money. As a teenager, I would be sometimes allowed to accompany my dad and drink Coke while he drank his Budweiser. My father also favored a Sister Lakes bar known as Ade’s Glass Tap, a place where time stood still. I swear the memorabilia I saw on the back bar at age twelve was still there when I was fifty-two.

As a young man, it was my father in law, Marty Hawkins, who introduced me to the bar scenes around Division Street and North Avenue. Marty would go to the bar each night at precisely 10 p.m. and leave about 11:30 p.m. Saturdays he stayed a bit longer. He had his rules. He only drank Buds in a short beer glass and smoked only when he drank. His smoking style was right out of a British movie, where you pinch the cigarette between forefinger and thumb and raise it to your lips with the remaining fingers splayed out.  A devout Catholic, he still went to the bars in Lent, but drank only 7-UP. His family quietly prayed for the coming of Easter.

He favored three of four local bars, including a hole-in-the-wall joint known as Joe Pouch’s. Joe had owned bars his entire career and made enough money that he didn’t really need the business. He installed a buzzer entry system on the front door and Joe and only Joe decided if you were worthy enough to gain entry. It was as close to a private club as I’ve ever seen. There were no more than eighteen to twenty five people he allowed in. Frustrated would-be patrons would pound on the door, clearly seeing the drinkers inside, Joe would wave them off, snarling at them to go away. It was great street theater.

O’Neill’s was another regular stop. Frank O’Neill was a short tempered, baldheaded Irishman who was purported to be an IRA gun money guy. As it turned out, the Feds really had been following him for years. O’Neill’s featured a pipe organ on a revolving stand at the bar’s center, and it was definitely more elegant than most joints around the neighborhood.  A woman would feel a lot better about being at Frank’s place than most of the bars on North or Division. And I never saw Frank offer a free  beer to a living soul.

——————

The bar scene today is very different. Describe someplace today as a saloon and someone will ask you where you parked your horse. Pubs, Brewpubs, Clubs, some noisy, some glitzy, some straight, some gay, have largely replaced the workingman’s pub. You can still find them in many neighborhoods, but somehow they don’t seem the same, or maybe I just aged out of the scene. In a lot of cases, they have become “Sports Bars”, with more T.V. sets than you can count, in case you didn’t want to miss the hockey game between Bulgaria and  Senegal. The unspoken rules of gender in a bar are long gone. The need to cash a check at the bar has been replaced by the ATM. Disagreements on historical facts? Google.  Sponsoring softball teams, ladies nights, Super bowl parties, bachelor and bachelorette parties and any other gimmick you can think of to pack them in is the ticket to success for bar owners.  And they are loud places or I’m just too old, not sure which.

I think sometimes of those hundreds of bars around Chicago, serving my immigrant grandfathers, my first generation father and father-in-law, and then guys like me. These men were short on formal education, and they worked the trades, put out the fires, kept law and order, drove the trucks, manned the offices, and set the stage for the next generation to get college degrees and become the managers and bosses. Simple men for whom family was everything, and who needed a place now and again to get away and talk with other men. When I recall those old joints, I see my dad in his white tee shirt and dark pants (shorts were for sissies, I was informed) sitting in Wallace’s blowing cigarette smoke and shooting the breeze, asking Vinnie when he was going to marry Julie, while watching the White Sox on T.V. A contented man on a warm summer’s day.

I also see Marty Hawkins standing, not sitting, reading his evening paper, cigarette in the ashtray and short beer in front of him. He is friends with most of those in the bar, but they respect his desire for solitude and give him his space. He talks now and then and when he does they listen, because they know him to be an educated man and not a loudmouth.  And he takes a quiet pride in having his sons and son-in-law sometimes tag along with him, something most other men envied.

In my memories, it was always summer and the beer tasted cold and crisp and you were in a place where men felt good about being in each other’s company . I know it wasn’t always that way, but I love my defective memory. It brings me comfort.

 

 

 

 

Save

Great Garloo, The Meeting Birds, and a Visit to the Coalbin- Tales of Christmas

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

If I asked any of my young grandsons to describe what coal is, they would probably point me toward a bag of Kingsford briquettes near the outdoor grill. Or maybe Google it or ask Siri and produce more information than I would ever like to digest on the subject.  But they wouldn’t know what a chunk of anthracite coal looks like or feels like, all shiny black and leaving dark dusty traces on everything it touched; they would not know what a room full of coal looked like, or coal-2appreciate how much of a part of our everyday lives it was in the 1950’s and 60’s.

Heating a home with coal is something you won’t find much in use today, at least not in Chicago, but in the 1950’s and 60’s it was pretty common on the west side. Coal fired boilers heated water in pipes that led to radiators in every room and hallway. Those radiators were the warm spots in otherwise drafty houses; school kids quickly learned that they were the best places to get dressed on cold winter mornings.

We had a coal bin in the basement of our two flat. It was a big room, more than half the basement, and in the early fall the coal company would drop a small mountain of coal in the alley behind our house. They also dropped off a wheelbarrow, a shovel, and a lone black man. He would move the mountain, coalmanone barrow load at a time, into that room, through a basement window. When he had packed the room floor to ceiling, wall to wall, he would roll up the canvas tarp that ran from the alley to the window and wait for the coal truck to pick him up at day’s end.  He never spoke and no one spoke to him and I think it was the only time I saw a black man in my neighborhood. I was about ten years old.

How the coal got from that bin to the boiler was up to me and my brothers. On winter nights we would fill buckets with a small shovel and drop them into the open hatch of this creature next to the boiler called a “stoker”.  It resembled a VW bug without wheels and it held about twenty buckets of coal. The stoker fed coal slowly all night to keep the boiler burning and the water hot.  And at the other end of this process was the burnt out coal, fused with other lumps into something we called “clinkers” because, well, they clinked when you hit them together. Clinkers needed to be raked from the bottom of the furnace regularly and then be dumped outside. They also served, once ground up, as a poor man’s rock salt, making it easier for cars to get through snow.

And that leads to my first Christmas story…the night my father, being in a playful mood no doubt inspired by a few holiday Budweisers, decided on a late night visit to the coal bin. He placed a lump of very dusty coal in each kids stocking before my mother got around to filling them. When she awoke on Christmas morning, she was greeted by children whose faces, hands, pajamas and robes were covered in black coal dust. I recall she was not very happy.

—————–

Christmas in our two flat was celebrated on two levels. On the first floor, my Grandmother’s floor, we held the entire living room captive with our Lionel train set. On the second floor, where most of my family dwelled, was the rest of Christmas.  The tree in the front window, mounted in a metal cylinder stand with three colored lights, fabricated by some long ago fireman buddy of my dad. The Christmas manager lived in one of the bookcases, the night sky backdrop coming from a roll of blue Red Cross cotton packaging with saliva activated silver stars pasted on. Italian lights had not been invented yet, so our lights were all on the tree, plugged into one impossibly overloaded outlet, ala Christmas Story. Stockings were hung across the living room mantle, in order of age.

My mother was a Christmas mastermind on almost every level you could conceive. With a family of eight children, she somehow managed the entire process from buying the gifts to hiding the gifts, to getting them all correctly placed in the living room, each set of gifts placed for each child in a clearly marked area corresponding to the placement of their stocking,. She knew what the Christmas season, with all of its hype, did to us. It turned normally well behaved little Catholic boys and girls into shrill, self-centered and above all greedy little SOBs, driven half-mad to locate their gifts prior to the Big Day.

Jesus and Mary and Joseph were the reasons for the season, or so the nuns told us at school, but as the day approached, we continued to regress.  Ironically, the Church was said to have invented the placement of Christmas Day on the 25th of December to offset the pagan rituals of that time of year. But by Christmas Eve we were mostly proper little pagans, eager for our loot.

—————

train
Tom, Gil, and Bill with the family train set.

The train set was another story, another little world really. Those Lionel train sets were iconic in the 1950’s and 60’s. I’m guessing every kid-occupied house in our neighborhood had one. But while most of them chugged in a circle around the tree, ours was an oval layout some ten feet long by five feet wide, and in the middle of that space was a rapidly growing little town known as Plasticville. The Bachmann Company, seeing opportunity from those millions of train sets, made these snap together buildings that needed no glue and could be easily disassembled and stored.

It started with a small replica of a malt shop with the name Frosty Bar, but each Christmas my brothers and I asked for more and more buildings and Santa delivered. My mother, perhaps not wanting to see the town go to hell, also located a church that played Silent Night, and soon became the center of town. The little town hit boom times when my Uncle Jimmy, then a bachelor living in the basement apartment, began to date a widow named Marsha. Marsha, later Aunt Marsha, owned a hobby shop on Chicago Avenue. Jackpot.  Our little town soon featured an oil well that bubbled, switch tracks, and anything else Jimmy could buy to further his cause with his new love.

We were geeks, to be sure, and played almost the entire Christmas vacation with the train set, complete with figures we painted, named, and assigned various positions in town. Being boys, of course, meant the town required destruction two or three times each day.  The Attack of the Giant Dog, featuring the current puppy, was a favorite, as was frequent invasions from our collection of green army soldiers. But the absolute best was the Christmas our sister Maureen, now working for the phone company, bought us Great Garloo, a battery operated plastic robot monster just made for the job of destroying small towns.  Old Garloo could be depended upon to pick up houses and drop them on other houses, push speeding trains off tracks, topple light towers, and generally strike terror into the small plastic hearts of the town’s occupants.  Heck, it was usually too cold to go outside anyway. garloo

We were typical kids of our time, getting limited outside information from the scarce programming on our black and white television sets and radios. Telephones were still pretty much the property of adults and off limits to us, and our world centered on our home and church and school and extended no further than the range of our bicycles. But there were lots of kids on our block and in our schools, and I think we were sort of “rough around the edges” city kids. I think we thought of ourselves as tough kids, whether or not we really were.

My mother wanted nice kids, not tough kids, and she tried, like most mothers, to keep alive our belief in Santa Claus as long she could. Not easy when there are so many different ages in one household and some know the truth. She told us from the beginning of Advent that “Santa was watching”, but we knew he couldn’t be everywhere.  My brother Billy was convinced that it was a tale concocted to drive our good behavior, nothing more than a scam.  He asked her one day how Santa could see everything, be everywhere, like God, for crying out loud. And that was when my mother pulled out the Meeting Birds.

She pointed to the electric wire outside the kitchen window, where sat a flock of sparrows. She asked us if we ever noticed how they seem to be discussing things with each other, turning their heads, chirping? These were the Meeting Birds.

The sparrows on the wire, she told us, were looking in our windows, observing our behavior all day long, comparing notes with each other, and then flying back to Santa to record their observations. Did we notice how they weren’t there at night? They weren’t just mentally challenged birds, unable to figure out how migration worked. They worked for the Big Guy! We were stopped cold in our tracks. Santa was an abstract, maybe a legend, but you could see the damn birds right outside your window. What if she was right?  You would not want to take that chance.

It was and still is an artful and inspired bit of parenting.   10342660-pigeons-on-the-wire

————-

Christmastime always pulls us back to our homes, to our beginnings, our families and their stories. As the world gets crazier, colder, louder, more dangerous, and as information washes over us in ever increasing waves, memories of those Christmases become a very dear safe harbor. To be sure, time softens the edges of those memories, drops disappointments to the rear, and air brushes out any pain and discomfort that certainly had to accompany the joys of those days. Time acts like a salve, dulling the aches and enhancing the good memories.

Leo Tolstoy, the author of Anna Karenina once wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I am grateful looking back through those years that my family was like so many other happy families we knew. I remember we seemed a simple people, closer to poor than wealthy, but not really wanting for much.  We had our common faith, we had our jobs or our schoolwork, and we had good friends and good neighbors. We felt safe, even if it was the safety that comes from being insulated and protected from most of the world.

As families grow up, the children go down many different paths, achieve different levels of education, accrue different amounts of material wealth, live in different zip codes, and sometimes have different values. But when I think of those long ago Christmas days, I always see my brothers and sisters as sort of the same child and the child looks and sounds a lot like me.  As if somehow we were just one child and we were happy.  If there is magic in Christmas, it lives somewhere around there.

Save

Save

Orbit

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

 

 

Walking alone in the crystal Arizona dawn his senses came calling.

He felt a moment: summer slipping, autumn gaining.

And he wished he had the gift to write it, but he didn’t.

So I did.

It works like this:

We stand on the earth as it spins and orbits

We don’t ever feel it.

New seasons dawn unseen and we turn to look back.

But sometimes we see,

Our senses wake and we feel the tiny shift of a few degrees.  Smile at the fog which is our breath.

Notice surprised the first tree blazing.

The gentle breeze after too many frigid ones. First buds.

We note where the sun finally sat tonight.

We orbit through life, only now and then noting time or sign and one day, one instant,

we get off the earth and look over and say,

“Thanks for the ride” and the earth smiles back, continues on its unending route.

And we begin to trace our own timeless orbit where there is no need of season

and no markers matter.

Famine Walls

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

 

 

 

I was standing at the base of a rocky green mountain in the austere, blustery region of Ireland known as Connemara, my eyes tracing the low rock walls that started from the base of the mountains and wound their way to the top. They were straight walls, about the height of a man and maybe two feet thick, made of countless stones and with no earthly reason for being there. There was a wall every hundred yards or so, each tracing a route to the top of the mountain.

I was listening to the tour guide explain how these walls came into being and I found myself getting angry. These were Famine Walls and they were built during the Famine of the 1840s as a means to keep the hungry masses out of the estates of the landowners. We learned it was the usually homeless Catholics who built the walls, for a few scraps to eat. According to our guide, massive, largely pointless work projects like the Famine Walls and the Famine Roads kept the masses barely alive during the four years that the potato crop failed. The British rule had proclaimed that the poor had to work for sustenance and not be given charity. And that stoked my growing anger.

I have a long fuse. It takes a lot to provoke me and I think the last time I threw a punch was in eighth grade, but the anger was welling up and I could not tell you from what source. I am a second generation American of Irish descent and a Catholic, but that wasn’t it. I grew up in a mostly Catholic, largely Irish Chicago neighborhood, but it seemed in the 1950’s and 60’s that it was more important to be an American, just as it had for the generation before. The things we took pride in were American things: landing on the moon, winning the world war, JFK, our position as world leader, our great democracy.

On top of that, immigrants to the United States have always known the importance of assimilation, of becoming part of the American Dream. With assimilation comes access to better jobs, more education, bigger homes, and opportunities denied to those just “off the boat.”   The Irish knew this better than most, and cemented themselves into power in Chicago and elsewhere. It seemed to me that only in the last twenty or thirty years and with a new generation on board that we amped up our celebration of heritage, with bagpipes, Irish dancing, and an ever escalating emphasis on St. Patrick’s Day and all things Irish.

So I was much more American than Irish. But the anger was there, anger against the British. Those were the same British I had been taught were America’s Best Friends. Our Cousins. Our staunch allies in two wars, the country that produced Winston Churchill, that stood alone against the Nazi menace. The same country whose language we spoke.  Now I was both angry and confused.

Those British who managed to turn the Great Famine into a near genocide were long gone… gone even before my grandparents were born in Ireland, but there was a connection to them I did not recognize until that day. And it was not an intellectual connection, but an emotional one.  But from where? Was it some faint echo of the emotions of my ancestors who perhaps had to help build those walls? Was it a lost fragment of the passion that caused someone in my family tree to pick up an IRA rifle in 1918?  Was it the dim memory of the shame and hatred one feels when you are part of a class that others look upon as lesser beings because you are poor, or Catholic, or both?

We are who we are, as defined by our behavior, our values, our duties and station in life, and those we love; but we are also the accumulation of so many other lives already lived and ended.  Our DNA is the blueprint that dictates our physical appearance, our health, lifespan and more. That accounts for tall people and short people, red hair and no hair, ears like car doors, and all things physical.  It is passed along, parts of it refined, parts of it suppressed from generation to generation, strands from mothers and fathers comingling with their pasts and forming new variations that become us.

But do memories, thoughts, and feelings somehow come along for this genetic ride? Can the anger, shame and fear felt by the hungry workman on the Famine Walls be passed along not just in stories and songs, but in our souls?  Can powerful memories somehow imbed themselves in that complex genetic coding, invisible and undetectable to even the most intuitive of scientists? Or are these feelings only lurking like ghosts at the foot of that Connemara mountain, waiting to inspire emotions only when you actually get to that place on the map?

I’ll never know. My anger cooled and I shifted my attention to the more pleasant things to see and do in Ireland; especially the precious time we could spend with my sisters’ families. My sisters returned to Ireland as young women and have spent their adult lives there, raising their families. They retain their American pride, but they are much more Irish than I, and that’s as it should be. But I still recall the unexpected visit from an anger I did not even know existed, and I wonder if, in fact, I am more Irish than even I know.

famine-wall-burren-691x464

Save

Coming Full Circle

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

The bright silver B-29 Superfortress was named “Dina Might” and featured on its fuselage a buxom girl in a swimsuit, sitting on a lit explosive. It shook and roared as it powered down the Tinian runway, its four big Wright R-3350 engines surging, as the biggest bomber in the world lifted off on its way to attack the Empire of Japan. In its bomb bay it carried more than a 14,000-pound bomb load, a destructive payload unthinkable even a few years before that.  This day’s target would be the Aichi aircraft plant at Eitoku , near the city of Nagoya on Japan’s largest island of Honshu. Fourteen other sites were on the list as alternates.  It was June 26, 1945 and the end of the war was less than 45 days away.

(Just four miles away on the Island of Saipan, a young Army PFC from the 77th Division, recovering from his wounds incurred in the Okinawa campaign, was indulging in his favorite new pastime.  PFC Marty Hawkins was from Chicago, and had also fought on Guam and Leyte, where he helped to take those islands from the Japanese Army. Now that his shrapnel wounds were healing, and lacking any military duties as a patient, he and a few buddies would find a shady spot, maybe grab a Coke, and watch the giant planes take off and land over on Tinian.  The two islands were part of the Marianas Chain and the seasonal, dry sunny weather made for a tropical paradise. That was one of the reasons for building both the airstrips and the hospitals.)

“Dina Might” was lead bomber on this mission and was soon joined by 64 other Super Fortresses as it flew toward its target. Its captain was a young West Point graduate (and eventually a three star General) who had grown impatient with the bombing skills of his previous bombardier, and who had used his “West Point status” to get a new lead bombardier.  Lead bombardiers were important: when they dropped their ordnance, everyone else followed. Success or failure of the whole mission hinged on this one man’s skills.

In the nose of the big plane was the new lead bombardier, 1st Lt Gilbert J. Finn, on his second mission with this crew. His previous 23 missions over Japan were with another crew, that one flying in a plane called “Big Boots” and captained by a big man, its namesake, Captain Art Tomes.  Gil was a young husband and father, though he had yet to see his infant son. He had been flattered when the Group Commander recommended him for the lead bomber position, but was reluctant to leave his crew. He and Art talked it over and, largely because Gil had some ambitions to stay in the air service after the war, he moved to the new job.

—————–

img_0570
Nose Art for “Dina Might”

As the Japanese coastline loomed the Flight Engineer was digging out the flak suits to distribute to the crew.  All hell broke loose as the big plane crossed the coast. A Japanese fighter burst from a cloud, setting two of the four engines on fire with its cannon fire. Riding in the exposed Perspex nose, Lt. Finn was killed instantly on its first pass. Captain and crew struggled to gain control as other enemy fighters saw smoke and oil pouring from the plane and closed in for a kill. The crew got four fighters before the plane’s luck ran out and the electrical power was lost.

At 9,000 feet it was time for the ten survivors to bail out. The left gunner, crew chief, and other officers went from the bomb bay.  The tail gunner made it through his hatch, pulled his ripcord and watched as his chute failed to open. He began to pull it out with his hands, only to find it riddled with bullets. It opened, but he hit the water with a tremendous impact, and somehow survived.  The radar operator and the right gunner went from the rear escape hatch: their chutes were spotted and later reported by the others, but neither was ever seen again.

One other officer, a Major Carr, along for the ride to get his flight pay, moved Gil’s body, beyond help, to an area where he might be aided. He was last seen sitting on his parachute near Gil’s body. He never jumped. Thirty seconds after the crew got out, the big plane exploded.  Within a few hours, submarines on picket duty had them safely on board. (Author’s note: This account was from a letter written by 1st LT Burton Coit, Flight Engineer on that doomed flight.)

Two months and two atomic bombs later, the war ended.  Art Tomes and his remaining crew, PFC Marty Hawkins, and millions of other GI’s, airmen, marines, and sailors found their ways back home. Back to Chicago for Marty, where I would later become his son-in-law and friend; back to Minnesota and a career in commercial aviation for Art.  They knew they were lucky to have made it, and they carried the fierce pride of having done their job, and done it well.

They were finished with their war, but the war wasn’t quite finished with them. Most spent years trying to make some sense out of it, to get answers that would never come, to wait for the nightmares to fade. Many tried to reconnect with the families of the lost to express their sorrow, and perhaps seek at least temporary release from the curious guilt one feels to have survived when the man next to you did not.

Gil’s widow, Rita Finn, shattered by the loss of her husband, went back to work as the crack secretary she was. Like so many other young war widows, she found love again after a few years. She married a young fireman named Tom, himself a widower with a child, and both forged a new life out of the ashes of the old. Her infant son, Gil, Jr., and Tom’s young daughter Maureen would become the start of a new family.

—————-

Gilbert J. Finn, Jr., the infant son now 55 years old, picked up the phone to hear Art Tomes’ voice. Art had been trying for years to locate Gil’s mother, Rita Finn (now Wogan), but was having no luck.  In those “pre-internet” days, simply remarrying and changing your name could create a pretty big dead end for anyone trying to find you, particularly in a city the size of Chicago.  Art had found Gil’s name, spelled exactly as his fathers’, in an Aurora, Illinois phone directory and gave it a try. And so a few weeks later, I found myself driving my mother and Gil to a house in Merrillville, Indiana, owned by Art’s daughter.

It was an uneasy ride for my mother and, I think, for Gil. We were about to reconnect with one of the last living persons his father had known, a man who had flown 23 missions with his dad. What would we learn, what would we say? How to begin?

As I pulled into the driveway, the big man, now old and a bit stooped but looking every inch the command pilot he once was, came out to greet us. He looked at me a bit confused. My brother and I look nothing alike; Gil has his father’s slight build and my genetic award was my father’s square one.   He must have been wondering how Gil’s son could look so different than he expected. Once he saw Gil emerge from the other side of car, he smiled and went to him, draping him in a huge bear hug. I could see the tears forming at the ends of his closed eyes and I wondered if he was making good on a 55 year-old promise to hug Gil’s child if the worst happened.  Then he saw my mother, whom he had met those many years ago when the crews trained together across Florida, Nebraska and Texas as they moved toward combat. They knew each other immediately, and both reached out their hands to each other.  They didn’t say anything for a few moments, but both of their eyes were glistening.  The silent flood of emotions was almost palpable.

They talked at the kitchen table for hours, Gil and I mostly listening. There were details and subtext to the story that we had never heard.  Names of crewmen, the nature of that final mission, did this person survive, where does he live now? And then both Art and my mother did something extraordinary. They each produced a letter and gave it to each other. My mother’s letter was from Art, expressing his sorrow and relating the circumstances of that final deadly flight, as he knew them, and what the wartime censors would allow. It was written in 1945 in his classic cursive style. The letter Art produced was from my mother, dated a few weeks later, thanking him for letting her know the circumstances of Gil’s death. I could see the familiar feminine cursive style of her writing and the fragile paper and envelope. Both letters had the word “free” where a stamp should have been. The postal service didn’t charge for letters to servicemen during the war.

We began to wrap things up when Art made one final comment that still haunted him and in a way maybe haunted all of us. His gaze shifted to some unknown point in the distance and he said” I’ll never understand how a fine young man like Gil lost his life so many years ago, and I got to live out the rest of mine.”

—————–

Handwritten letters are rare now, at least as a common means of communicating. If I see one in my mail, I tend to open it first, I am that curious. We exist in a transient trivial world of texts, emails, Twitter feeds, and Facebook postings. Our written communications seldom outlive a single day.

The careful crafting of sentences and paragraphs and the framing of a message has fallen into disuse, as has the Palmer Method of cursive writing. Keyboarding, not handwriting is taught today in schools. But I still marvel at the enduring power of those two letters, the emotional commitment it must have taken to write them, and how, once written, they attained great value, something to be kept throughout the years.

Those letters that were exchanged that day somehow closed the circle surrounding this tragedy. More than 50 years they had both kept those letters, and neither could have foreseen a day such as this. Somehow, when they made their way back to their original authors, it was as if we could finally lay 1LT Gilbert J. Finn to rest.  During the ride home I don’t think anyone said a word; we were each in a private, personal place. A place of remembrance, a place of solemn pride, maybe, at last, a place of peace.

img_0569
1LT Gilbert J. Finn

Save

Save

All New Rules for Voting!

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

The All New Tom Wogan Voting Rules for 2016

“People tell me all the time how great these rules are and how they are gonna be hugely popular and just amazing”

                                                                                                                            -Source: Anonymous

 

I’ve had it with this election. And with Brexit, for that matter. 65 million people in that country just found out that almost all of the things they voted for will never happen. Jeez, Brits, we thought you were smarter than that.

The loonies are taking over and it appears that sanity and reason have taken a back seat. It’s all noise 24/7 now and most of it not very kind. For example, take that half lit jerk with a room temperature IQ at the end of the bar shooting off his mouth. He hasn’t picked up a newspaper (real or digital) in twenty years, he gets all of his news from Fox or some conservative radio demagogue, and he gets the same vote as me! I’m tired of having my well researched, well thought out and absolutely correct viewpoints and votes negated by some Algonquin Roundtable of knuckleheads. (Go Google that one, kids.)

Not anymore. I have a new voting system, one that respects your right to vote as guaranteed by the Constitution, but also adds or subtracts the weight of your vote based on your ability or willingness to reason things out and to tolerate divergent views. I’ll also factor in your general kindness or lack thereof toward people who don’t look like you or speak your language, and your sense of what’s right, or at least what should be right.

And whether or not I like you.  As Spike Lee said, “Do the Right Thing”.

Rule #1: Everyone starts with 100 votes.

Rule # 2: I and I alone reserve the right to subtract your voting power based on any of the following:

  • If you get all your news from the same source every day, lose 50 votes.
  • If you don’t ask questions of anyone, ever, lose 75 votes.
  • If you repeat things newscasters say as if they were gospel, lose 50 votes.
  • If you deduct the tax from your dining bill before calculating your server’s tip, lose 60 votes.
  • If you believe Rush Limbaugh has ever told the truth, lose 99 votes.
  • If you think John Wayne was the world’s greatest actor, lose 75 votes.
  • If you are anti-abortion and pro-death penalty and don’t see the problem with that, lose 99 votes.
  • If you are a “merge weasel” while driving, lose 25 votes.
  • If you’re really good at it, you may regain those 25 votes.
  • If you are absolutely opposed to Affordable HealthCare and have no idea why, lose 75 votes.
  • If you have ever actually answered your cell phone in a theatre while the performance is underway, lose 75 votes.
  • If you still believe in trickle-down economics and make less than $100,000 per year, lose 50 votes.
  • If you drink wines like Barefoot or “Two Buck Chuck”, lose 50 votes
  • If you really think a wall across our southern border makes any sense, lose 99 votes.
  • If I find you offensive, lose 99 votes.
  • If you’re still not comfortable with a president who happens to be black, lose 75 votes.
  • If you’re wearing your hair as a comb-over, lose 65 votes.
  • If you are still trying to find a reason for voting for the “presumptive Republican nominee”, lose 75 votes.
  • If you are still working from a flip phone, lose 60 votes.
  • If you claim to hate Hillary, but can’t tell me why, lose 75 votes.
  • If you are still texting while driving, lose 0 votes. You won’t be here to vote in November, anyway.
  • If you want to arm all Americans to make us safer, lose 99 votes.
  • If you can’t parallel park a car, lose 20 votes.
  • If you lived through 2007 and still think we need less government oversight of business, lose 99 votes.
  • If I can’t picture you doing a belly laugh, lose 99 votes.
  • If you believe labor unions are the root of all evil, lose 99 votes.
  • If you have more than two body piercings, lose 50 votes.
  • If you have more than three tattoos, lose 50 votes
  • If you have both of the above, you may regain a single vote. Fair is fair.
  • If you haven’t read a book in the last twelve months, lose 50 votes.
  • If you believe people who are homosexual need to be cured, lose 99 votes.
  • If you really got into “Duck Dynasty”, lose 75 votes.
  • If you believe global warming is a hoax, lose 99 votes.
  • If you believe Saddam Hussein masterminded 9/11, lose 75 votes.
  • If I find you dull and unimaginative, lose 99 votes.
  • If your heart longs for the glory days of Ronald Reagan, lose 50 votes.
  • If you work for the TSA and scream at people, lose 30 votes. Your job sucks, but you don’t need to scream.
  • If you watch more than one reality show regularly, lose 25 votes.
  • If you own more than one gun, live in a safe neighborhood, and are not in law enforcement, into skeet or trap shooting, or hunting, lose 50 votes.
  • If you don’t care for my blog, lose 10 votes.
  • If you try to rewrite my blog for me, lose 99 votes.

God that felt good! Now share this with at least five people and you will receive lots of money in the mail within 30 days. From a guy in Nairobi, I think.

Tattoos

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

We are one inked up nation, over these last few generations. What was once the exclusive province of bikers, over-served sailors on shore leave, and carnival “carnies” has now become the norm for almost everyone in their late teens or early twenties. Years ago, tattoo parlors were only located in the same part of town as the “bucket of blood” bar, the local whorehouse and the pawn shop. Now they can be found in almost every neighborhood.

Our skin has become our canvas and what a canvas it is! You can express your love for another person, your lingering memory of the departed, your favorite team, a unit in the military in which you served, what a badass you wish you were, or what an incredible and unusual lover you must be. Location of the tattoo can be public, private, or extremely private; in the case of the ubiquitous “tramp stamp”, it can serve as an “open for business” sign over the doorway.

It’s painful and unsanitary, and mostly permanent, and for sure I don’t get it, but hey, it’s not my generation’s problem.  At least I won’t have to sit around some rest home someday watching barbed wired biceps when the wire goes slack or when the heart with your old boyfriend’s name starts to wrinkle.  There are other drawbacks, too, especially when you exit the world of youth and take your inked-up self into the workplace.

I see bridesmaids trying to camouflage that heart with Johnny’s name inside it just above the right breast. She can see his name every morning in the shower, but Johnny is a distant memory and her husband is Eddie and how does he feel about it?  Or professional women in their 30’s, trying hard to come off as cold steel and all business, but betrayed a bit by the winding vine on their lower left leg, reaching up for, well, somewhere. Young businessmen suffer from having older people question their maturity and judgment when they spy the tip of a lightning bolt or a Celtic cross peeking up from that necktied collar. Ah, youth.

I have an unproven theory that the smaller the town you come from, the more inked up you are likely to be by age twenty. Body piercings follow roughly the same curve. I base this theory on too many years of observation in towns like Blaire, NE (Pop. 8,000), Fremont, NE (Pop. 25,000) and North Sioux City, SD (pop. 2,500). All nice towns, but your younger employees will make your office look like a circus train overturned nearby.

——————————————

My wife and I were 22, newly married and teaching school for a living. I taught in a Catholic girl’s high school in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Maureen taught in a Catholic elementary school in the heart of a Mexican and Polish neighborhood in the near downtown area (North and California) known as Humboldt Park. For whatever reasons, those two groups seem to coexist easily in Chicago. Maybe it’s their shared Catholic faith and their propensity for hard work, but there are several Mexican-Polish neighborhoods around town.

Maureen had made friends with another teacher in her school, St. Fidelis.  Helen was in her forties or early fifties, an attractive middle-aged woman of Polish descent with accent to go with it. Maureen admired her skills in the classroom and I think Helen served as a sort of mentor for her. Helen also served as moral support for her, as Maureen looked way too young to be in charge of a classroom and the principal who hired her was a nun who was very skeptical at first. By the end of the first semester, Maureen had won the principal over and she and Helen had become fast friends.

A few months later, Helen invited us to dinner at her house and the chance to meet her husband Bishof, which translates into “Bill”. In those days of lean paychecks, we didn’t turn down too many free meals.  Bishof was a distinguished looking man, about Helens’ age, and an old country Polish tailor, who made all the clothing for both he and Helen. These were the terrible days of polyester, the photos of which no one really wants to recall or see again, so he was decked out in his blue polyester jacket and slacks. I don’t know what I wore, but I am sure it was equally hideous.

It was a wonderful dinner with ham and a number of Polish delicacies, Zywiec Polish Beer and some wine. We chatted about al lot of things and they showed us around their home, so proud of every room and every detail. After dessert, we drifted into some contemporary topics, one of which was a newly-surfaced theory that the holocaust in World War II was a myth, that nothing like six million people died. It was a ruse being used by the Israelis to get support for their cause.  I’m not sure who floated the idea or why, but it was getting lots of ink in the papers.

Bishof and Helen grew quiet and then, seeming to nod to each other, Bishof took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeve. Helen did the same. There, on their left forearms, were the tattoos, six numbers each, the unmistakable and permanent marks of concentration camp survivors. I could not have been more stunned had they undressed and stood naked before us.

You can read about it, see movies about it, and see the newsreels of corpses piled high, but it’s not the same.  My uncle was with the 82nd Airborne and had overrun a few of these camps at war’s end, and had talked a bit about it, but it sounded like just stories from long ago.  My mother lectured us at lunch about it and felt very passionate about the holocaust.  But here standing before us was living proof of this word holocaust. Here were two normal, likeable people who somehow survived the most lethal killing machine ever seen on earth.  That machine was built under the blatant lies and half -truths of a ruthless political party selling nationalism and racial purity. And a misguided nation bought into it and in so doing brought the world into a global struggle to end the murders and punish the authors of Nazism.

That ended that discussion, and we drifted on to other topics that night, but I never forgot it. Our new friends had honored us with their tattoos, as if to say “It really happened…it happened to us, and we were the lucky ones. Six million others were not.”

—————–

Nationalism is being sold again, both here and abroad. The British people are now dumbfounded to learn that they have been hoodwinked by the loud voices of separatism, the suspicion, hatred and banning of immigrants, and a return to the “glory days” of Britain, which were never that glorious to begin with. The final tally was barely announced before members of the U.K. announced their own plans for referendums to leave Great Britain. The leaders of the “Brexit” movement within days had renounced most of their pre-election claims and had removed themselves for consideration for higher office. They sold their “big lie” and have now left it for others to resolve.

Here at home, we have, of course, Mr.Trump. Plenty of people would rather vote for anyone but him, but there he stands. His supporters demand only that he continue to boast, insult, and demean. His deficiencies, and they are many and deep, matter not at all. He plays to our basest, most unlikeable self, the absolute worst angels of our nature. His base is mostly white, more male than female, not very bright, angry about almost everything, racist, and plyable.  They are buying into the myth of “Make America Great Again’, which is a transparent lie they refuse to see through.  Watching their behavior makes me think that the only difference between them and the “Brownshirts” of 1938, breaking the windows of shops in Berlin’s Jewish quarter, is the uniforms.

I believe we are a better country than this and I believe he will implode and his frantic supporters will cry foul, but then go back to their fear and loathing on a local level, polluting their own towns and cities with their misplaced hatred.

The great British Parliamentarian Edmund Burke once said “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Do the right thing, Americans. I have seen enough tattoos.

Of Ice Cream and Miracles

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

One warm late May evening in 1955 my parents told us we were going for ice cream at Hiller’s Drugstore. I had my suspicions. There were, I think, six of what would grow to be eight kids in the family at that point and we seldom, if ever, got taken out for anything all together at one time.  And why now? It was not an occasion, nothing to celebrate, just a weeknight and a school night at that. Something was up.

Hiller’s was one of two drugstores that were nearby.  Finkelman’s Drugs was at Lotus and Madison and was the more “fun” drugstore, with comic books and candy for sale and a big soda fountain. Hiller’s, the more proper drug store, sat on the corner two blocks east at Lockwood and Madison and was below a number of medical doctors’ offices on the second floor. Hiller’s only departure from serious medicine was a little ice cream cooler, usually manned by a teenage employee with a scoop.

So we walked to the corner and it was there we saw the line outside Hiller’s. Only the line didn’t lead into the store; it led into the doorway of the stairwell leading up to the second floor, where our family doctor, Dr. Nash, had his office. Dr. Nash was a gruff old World War II surgeon with a blunt bedside manner. He had only three fingers on one hand which had been caused, I was told, by his holding newborn babies up to a fluoroscope and had irradiated his fingers. Probably didn’t do too much good for the babies, either, and I think I might have been one of them. Like many doctors in these unenlightened times, he chain smoked.

My siblings and I began to walk a little slower, sensing danger, but unable to figure out what kind. My parents were alert to our sudden reluctance, and it was my mother who told us that we had to see the doctor for a quick minute or two, but that we would indeed get our reward after that.

So we took our place in the line and I noticed that it was all kids. The parents were merely escorts, or perhaps prison guards assigned to keep us from running. Whatever was going on up there was producing an occasional wail, muffled by closed doors. And kids were only going up the stairs; there was no one heading down to tell you what awaited you. They were being ushered out the back way.

My father broke it to us as we were distributed along the bottom six steps, with no way out. We each had to get a shot for something called polio. He told us it would save our lives and every kid in America was getting one, so we had better behave.  At least we knew.

So we stood in line with all the other condemned, finally taking our individual turn in the office. A nurse told me to turn my head, rubbed my arm with alcohol, and gave me the shot, which I can still recall hurting. Needle technology has come a long way since then and most shots today are almost painless, but not so that year. I think I yelped, but then we all got our ice cream.

 

 

———————

At my age, I didn’t know that April 12th of that year was the day a nation learned that the polio vaccine worked. This was the day on which they broke the news that a giant, nationwide test involving Dr. Jonas Salk’s miraculous vaccine and some 440,000 kids proved to be over 90% effective. They announced it on the date of the death of polio’s most famous victim, President Franklin D. Roosevelt.   The year before that, over 58,000 other kids and young adults were diagnosed with polio. It was bad enough that families avoided beaches, movie theaters, parades, and other crowded events. How it got transmitted was unclear, but it attacked limbs, lungs, and other organs, and it could kill you.  It was an epidemic and it brought fear into American households.

I can remember being scared of a few things when I was six years old, but nothing scared me more than the prospect of ending up in an “iron lung”, a sort of casket you lay in, but with your head sticking outside. The machine pushed on your chest to force polio-disabled lungs to draw in and exhale air. It seemed like a kid would be buried alive in that device, never to run and play again.  It was one of my nightmares.

So we stood in line for our first polio shot, along with kids in lines across America, the immunization effort raised to an almost wartime emergency  level by the medical authorities. Within a few years, polio went away and a nation and then most of the world got healthier.

——————-

I have watched with a grandparent’s sense of helplessness as first one, and then another of my grandsons was diagnosed with Type 1 Juvenile Diabetes. I remember our disbelief at first, then the hospital classes we all attended to learn how to care for the condition. We took turns around the table sticking each other’s fingers to draw blood for glucose levels. We practiced giving shots, thankfully with needles finer and less painful than the polio shot. We learned the language of Type 1: bolus, basal levels, carbs, insulin, and the like. We grew a little resentful of those who didn’t understand the condition, or whose parties featured food and drinks that did not acknowledge the condition.  We grew more resentful of those who dismissed it as a minor issue, not worthy of much attention.  We grew to hate diabetes itself and to be impatient for its cure.

And when I get too resentful of those people who, like us, never had to think about Type 1, I remember that twenty or more years ago my sister Mary Ann had to deal with this for her daughter in Ireland without any of the support network and much of the technology we enjoy now.

I marvel at the resiliency of my daughters and their husbands who have not only embraced the daily and nightly struggle of balancing glucose levels in the blood of their children, but have provided comfort and leadership to families of the recently diagnosed.  Those parents don’t know at the outset the size and consistency of the burden, how it will take over and change their lives, but my daughters know it.  The newly diagnosed families don’t realize that phrases like “spur of the moment” and “on a whim” have left their lives, to be replaced by words they and we never wanted to learn. They don’t know they have embarked on a daily treatment that is both science and art in its administration. And they are part of a rapidly growing club, because Type 1 is on the rise for reasons not entirely understood.

My daughters have become leaders and champions of this fight, teaching schools about snacks, fighting the rules brought on by ignorance and the reluctance of institutions to change, and leading the fundraising for a cure. I take a quiet pride in the courage and confidence my Matthew and Sean have shown as they grow and continue to adapt to this condition and as they move rapidly toward becoming their own caretakers. Smart, tough kids.
We raise the funds, we devour and share every article about possible breakthroughs for a cure and we stay abreast of the best new devices for monitoring.  The technology helps, and the technology keeps getting better, but I pray for a day like that long ago day at Hiller’s Drugstore, when miracles appeared at the corner of my block. It happened once; it can happen again.

 

salk
Dr. Jonas Salk

Five Little Life Lessons

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

(Author’s note: I can’t take credit for these great little stories. They were sent to me by my good friend and former co-worker Paul Belsky.)

1 – First Important Lesson – Cleaning Lady.

During my second month of college, our professor gave us a pop quiz. I was a conscientious student and had breezed through the questions until I read the last one: “What is the first name of the woman who cleans the school?” Surely this was some kind of joke. I had seen the cleaning woman several times. She was tall, dark-haired and in her 50’s, but how would I know her name? I handed in my paper, leaving the last question blank. Just before class ended, one student asked if the last question would count toward our quiz grade. “Absolutely, ” said the professor. “In your careers, you will meet many people. All are significant…They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say “hello.”

I’ve never forgotten that lesson. I also learned her name was Dorothy.

  1. – Second Important Lesson – Pickup in the Rain

One night at 11:30 p.m., an older African American woman was standing on the side of an Alabama highway trying to endure a lashing rain storm. Her car had broken down and she desperately needed a ride. soaking wet, she decided to flag down the next car. A young white man stopped to help her, generally unheard of in those conflict-filled 1960’s. The man took her to safety, helped her get assistance and put her into a taxicab. She seemed to be in a big hurry, but wrote down his address and thanked him. Seven days went by and a knock came on the man’s door. To his surprise, a giant console color TV was delivered to his home. A special note was attached.

It read: “Thank you so much for assisting me on the highway the other night. The rain drenched not only my clothes, but also my spirits. Then you came along. Because of you, I was able to make it to my dying husband’s’ bedside just before he passed away…God bless you for helping me and unselfishly serving others.”

Sincerely, Mrs. Nat King Cole.

3 – Third Important Lesson – Always remember those who serve.

In the days when an ice cream sundae cost much less, a 10-year-old boy entered a hotel coffee shop and sat at a table. A waitress put a glass of water in front of him. “How much is an ice cream sundae?” he asked. “Fifty cents,” replied the waitress. The little boy pulled his hand out of his pocket and studied the coins in it. “Well, how much is a plain dish of ice cream?” he inquired. By now more people were waiting for a table and the waitress was growing impatient. “Thirty-five cents,” she brusquely replied. The little boy again counted his coins. “I’ll have the plain ice cream,” he said. The waitress brought the ice cream, put the bill on the table and walked away. The boy finished the ice cream, paid the cashier and left. When the waitress came back, she began to cry as she wiped down the table. There, placed neatly beside the empty dish, were two nickels and five pennies. You see, he couldn’t have the sundae, because he had to have enough left to leave her a tip.

4 – Fourth Important Lesson.. – The Obstacle in Our Path.

In ancient times, a King had a boulder placed on a roadway. Then he hid himself and watched to see if anyone would remove the huge rock. Some of the king’s wealthiest merchants and courtiers came by and simply walked around it. Many loudly blamed the King for not keeping the roads clear, but none did anything about getting the stone out of the way. Then a peasant came along carrying a load of vegetables. Upon approaching the boulder, the peasant laid down his burden and tried to move the stone to the side of the road. After much pushing and straining, he finally succeeded. After the peasant picked up his load of vegetables, he noticed a purse lying in the road where the boulder had been. The purse contained many gold coins and a note from the King indicating that the gold was for the person who removed the boulder from the roadway. The peasant learned what many of us never understand!

Every obstacle presents an opportunity to improve our condition.

5 – Fifth Important Lesson – Giving When it Counts…

Many years ago, when I worked as a volunteer at a hospital, I got to know a little girl named Liz who was suffering from a rare & serious disease. Her only chance of recovery appeared to be a blood transfusion from her 5-year old brother, who had miraculously survived the same disease and had developed the antibodies needed to combat the illness. The doctor explained the situation to her little brother, and asked the little boy if he would be willing to give his blood to his sister.

I saw him hesitate for only a moment before taking a deep breath and saying, “Yes I’ll do it if it will save her.” As the transfusion progressed, he lay in bed next to his sister and smiled, as we all did, seeing the color returning to her cheek. Then his face grew pale and his smile faded. He looked up at the doctor and asked with a trembling voice, “Will I start to die right away”. Being young, the little boy had misunderstood the doctor; he thought he was going to have to give his sister all of his blood in order to save her.

Roots-Grandma Wogan

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

When I try to remember my Grandma Wogan, I always end up in the same place and it’s probably where my siblings and most of the Monroe Street neighbors end up, too. I can see her on a warm summer day, sitting in her wicker chair in which she logged thousands of hours. She would be on the front porch of

the two flat, the porch guarded by two white stone flowerpots filled with petunias, wearing her print dress with an apron, glasses on, her white hair in a bun, and she would be rubber-banding newspapers. The Daily News, the Austin News, The Austinite, or Goldblatt’s circulars, depending on which boy had which paper route. Her hands were always busy, as befitting someone who was an expert seamstress for many years.

She was a caring, loving, old time Catholic grandmother, who bore on her back the lonely burden of young widowhood, making it somehow work for her two sons without the social welfare benefits so many enjoy today, and going it alone in her adopted country. But she mostly kept whatever joys and pains she felt to herself. To be honest, she was not warm, at least not outwardly so and certainly not given to outbursts of any kind; maybe that was the cost of dealing with her lot in life, which she met with determination and courage, and usually all alone.

But she was not dull. At the risk of making a generalization, there are two words not often used to describe the Irish: nuanced and subtle. She could be blunt, as was her way, but it made for some pretty good stories. My mother told me how she and my dad shared the news of my impending arrival with her. She is said to have responded, “So, two wasn’t enough for you,” referring to my older sister and brother. And yet, upon my arrival, again according to my mother, she swooped me up in her arms and I was not seen again for about the next twelve years. My mother was a little prone to hyperbole.

My father told the story of her being invited to her relatives, the Lancaster’s, for dinner. Theirs was a fancy home off Columbus Park, and the husband was the all-powerful Alderman Lancaster. In those days, power descended from the Lord God Almighty through the Mayor of Chicago to your Alderman and finally to the local Police Commander and maybe the Catholic Pastor.  According to my father, she was uncharacteristically quiet throughout the fancy dinner, served by maids on fine linen and china. When asked by Claire Lancaster how she liked the evening, she replied, “Well, you’ve come a long way since you used to haul a loin of pork to your father’s tavern.” That was their last invitation.

————

Mary Maeliff

My Grandma was born on July 17th, 1881 but we never celebrated her birthday. She never cared to and I never knew why and, by extension, I guess we learned to overlook it in a house full of birthdays every year. As a consequence, we lost track of how old she was, and I think maybe she did, too, but she was just shy of 95 when she died on April 9, 1976.

She was born in County Westmeath, Ireland in a little nothing of a village called Tinnymuck, near the larger town of Moate. My Irish brother-in- law Jim will be only too happy to tell you that Tinnymuck translates into “Pig’s House,” the better to get a rise out of his wife, my sister Mary Ann. I found Tinnymuck on my first visit to Ireland years ago, and the “village”, once located after asking directions twice from the locals, consisted of four houses in a row and dog named “Doogan” who I had to kick out of my way in order to drive the car down the road. If ever I wondered that I might be descended from wealth, that visit took care of it. My father’s cousin, Mary Colgan, now deceased, lived in the house then, a humble home with the smell of countless turf fires burned into the walls.

Grandma and her sister Kate left the hunger and joblessness of Ireland in 1905, seeking the America of hope and freedom that countless other Europeans sought. My brother Terry found her ship’s passage documents and most notably that her Captain was also the same Captain Smith whose luck ran out a few years later as skipper of the Titanic. Glad you dodged the iceberg on their trip, Captain.

Kate and Grandma worked as maid and cook for a Protestant businessman, we were told, until she met Thomas Wogan, a man from Tullamore. They were wed in 1914, and the Marriage Certificate said she was 28 years old and he 29. The numbers don’t work, by the way, because she was 33, but if we want to start arresting every woman who fibbed about her age, the jails would be overflowing.

He would be dead four years later of tuberculosis that he probably carried with him to the New World. She was left with her sons Bill and Tom, my dad, then about six months old. She and her husband had purchased a two flat at 5347 Monroe, where three generations of Wogans ended up living until 1968. I can’t even begin to imagine how scared and alone she must have felt at that time in her life. There was no welfare network back then, no social security, and probably little or no insurance. My father told me that she was advised to sell the house, but she didn’t.

A word about two flats, that marvelous economic engine that allowed immigrant generations to own a property, many for the first and only time in their lives, and pay for it with rental income while keeping a roof over their own heads.  Three bedrooms and a single bath on each floor, a wooden back porch, coal furnace, and hot water radiator heat. The west side was and is a virtual sea of two flats. Having grandparent owners on one floor and your family on the other was quite common. The Lithuanians and Bohemians in Cicero took it a step further, adding a basement or “Garden” apartment and renting the top two floors, building their wealth and security faster.

My Grandma lived on the first floor and rented the second floor to make her mortgage payments. Years later, in the 1950’s I believe, she added a basement apartment as an additional rental unit. She took in sewing to buy the groceries and she toughed it out for all those years.  She worked outside the home once, during World War II at Simpson Electric. Because single apartments were scarce after the war, she also took in “roomers”, single men looking for a private bedroom and breakfast, the original “bed and breakfast”.  I remember a parade of them as the occupant of one of the three bedrooms. They could tie up a bathroom mightily in the morning, and more than once my brothers and I ended up using the standpipe in the basement. First class accommodations.

—————–

These are some of my favorite Grandma Wogan stories……………………

Wash Day

She was locked in mortal combat with Mrs. Stack, the grandmother of the Junius family two doors east. On wash day, if she looked out her back window and saw that Mrs. Stack had hung her bed sheets to dry on the clotheslines that crisscrossed the small back yards, it was if she had spotted an enemy sail on the horizon. She would moan that “The Stacks have their laundry out, the day is gone!” Then quick to the basement to get her sheets out of the washer and put a shot across Mrs. Stack’s bow.

Baseball

She loved baseball and the White Sox and listened to them in her back bedroom on summer nights on an old Philco Radio. The radio was a rounded four foot high wooden box, with about fifty knobs, only two of which ever seemed to do anything. She had a television, but didn’t trust it, having been around before even the invention of radios. I can still see her clapping her hands when Nellie Fox got a hit and drove in “Leetle Louie” Aparicio from second base. What mystified me was how she learned the game. Baseball is perhaps the most complex of modern sports and she really did know what was happening on the field. My dad and uncle both played ball into their late teen years, so she picked it up from her sons, I guess.

Don’t mess with my religion

Grandma Wogan was very devout, praying always to the Virgin Mary and fingering her rosary beads at least once a day while muttering to herself the Hail Mary’s, Our Fathers, and Glory Be’s. So when Vatican II came along and made so many changes in the 1960’s, the biggest of which were turning the altar around and killing off Latin (which needed killing, in my opinion) she was understandably a bit confused. One day, walking back from church, she sked me, “Who’s this fella Yahweh they’re always talking about? Does he live in the parish? “I didn’t quite know how to answer her.

Apparitions in the night

She managed one stormy night to scare my cousin Billy half to death. By brother Bill,  our cousin Bill and I had been awarded the most coveted sleeping spot in the whole house… the pull out bed on the screened in back porch. On hot summer nights, it was as close to air conditioning as you were likely to get. One particularly bad stormy night, with lightening flashing and thunder booming, my cousin Bill awoke to a sight my brother and I had long grown used to. My Grandma Wogan in her white flannel  floor length nightgown, white hair undone and falling around her shoulders, walking through the kitchen saying prayers and tossing holy water (holy or not an excellent conductor of electricity) from a small vial about the house. It was her way of asking God to spare 5347 Monroe and perhaps smite someone else’s house.

The lightening flashed and lit her up like an apparition from the Other Side and Cousin Bill must have been sleeping soundly, because he let out a yell and bailed from the bed, headed toward the back door. We caught him in time and needled him for weeks about it.

The Apple Story

I have told this story to my grandsons and, for whatever reason, it has stuck with them. I was watching my Grandma eat an apple and she simply consumed the entire thing. Stem, seeds, core and all. I was probably ten and I remarked to my Dad that I had seen her do this. He sort of shrugged, looked at me with a smile and said, “You’ve never been hungry.” It struck me that I hadn’t ever known hunger, never in my life for more than a short time. None of us had, but she remembered what it felt like to not have food, and for your body to miss it and to let you know it missed it. She could remember going to bed with an empty stomach. And she was never going to let food go to waste again.

Housing Arrangements

My siblings needled me about being “the king” because I got to sleep in the front bedroom and the rest of them shared bedrooms upstairs. Over the years, however, I shared the bedroom with my brother Bill, and later my sister Mary Ann occupied the back bedroom, after the parade of ”roomers” ended. The basement apartment, always smelling damp, was occupied by a string of renters, some memorable and some notorious. The last one was my Uncle Jimmy, who kept Eskimo Pies in his sort-of freezer and built models of all sorts. You can’t get cooler as an uncle than that.

The Phone

I always thought it ironic that in my business we made and received millions of phone calls over the years, but Grandma never made a single phone call in her life. In those days, phones could only be leased, not purchased, and the phone company kept a strict control over ownership of phones. My Dad knew a guy in the Linesman Union who rigged up a bootleg office phone in my Grandma’s flat, then ran a buzzer from the legitimate line upstairs to this illegal extension. The extension had neither a ringer not a dial because the phone company was known to dial into homes and check the voltage. Too much voltage and they knew you had more phones than you were paying for each month. They would send an inspector over and he would locate and remove the device. Small wonder no one liked the phone company.

Grandma Wogan never did get the hang of telephonic communication. When the buzzer rang she would pick up the handset and say hello, but if the call was for me or one of the other kids, she would hang up and call your name, disconnecting your call. The few times the call was for her was when a relative named Tom Byrne called in to report on the death of someone. She would listen to Tom, whom we christened the “angel of death”, and then say “Ok, Thanks” and hang up. Not one to waste words, Grandma Wogan.

Last Rites

I remember when I was ten or twelve, she got sick and my parents called for a doctor, then a priest. Over her headboard hung a crucifix that also served as a handy kit for entering the next world in a properly Catholic fashion. The crucifix was about two inches thick and made of wood. Push Christ’s body up and to the right and the front part of the cross swung out to reveal all of the pieces and parts needed for Extreme Unction, or Last Rites. Candles, a little holy water, a small purple stole.  I’ll bet you that crucifix hung in every Catholic home in Chicago. We might not have a first aid kit handy, but by God, we weren’t shoving off without the Last Rites.  She didn’t die, by the way.

My Grandma the Physician

I cannot verify these little tales, but here is what I was told:

She fixed my Uncle Bill’s forehead which had been slashed somehow. She used scotch tape.

She noticed one of the newborns, Bill, I think, was tongue tied and solved it with a snip of her sewing scissors. My mother was horrified, but it worked.

This one I can verify: When I was twelve I caught a bad cold. No problem, Grandma fixed me up a hot toddy. Warm whiskey and lemon juice in an eight once glass. I drank it down and lost two days that I flat out don’t remember. Mom was not too happy.

——————

It occurs to me that I only really knew my Grandma Wogan as Grandma, from the time when she was about 70 until her death. I did not know her as a girl, a young immigrant, a young wife, or a young widow. I did not know much about her life through two World Wars, the Roaring Twenties and the GreatDepression, her years of motherhood. In the same way, I only knew my parents from their mid-thirties through the rest of their lives. I can look at pictures of them as children or as beautiful young people, but I can’t know, no one can, what they were like at that point in their lives. Would we have been friends if somehow we were the same age? Would we have been alike or different from each other?

Only one sort of relative knows your story from the beginning through today. Only your brothers and sisters make the journey with you from start to finish, know you as a child, a teen, a young adult and all of the stages of your life. For that reason alone, we should value each other all the more and count ourselves blessed that there are those out there who know us best, celebrate our successes and forgive our faults.

————

Special thanks to my brother Terry and my sister Mary Ann for providing the research on this.