Author: tom.wogan@comcast.net

A Mother’s Quiet Act of Love

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

In 1963, my brother Gil was standing in formation at the Oakland Staging Area in California. This was the final stop on the way to Vietnam for countless thousands of young soldiers, and he assumed that his orders would take him there, along with all of those standing in the formation. He was eighteen, an enlisted Army volunteer, and had been trained in communications at Fort Gordon, Georgia after doing “basic” in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He was probably going to be assigned as a radio operator (RTO) in an infantry unit, which meant that he would be target number two, after the officer or sergeant leading the unit in the field.

Gil was really my half-brother, as his father, Gil, Sr., had been killed over Japan in June of 1945. My mother remarried in 1948 to my father, a young widower and single parent and father to my half-sister, Maureen. Six more children, including me, followed.

Gil, like his dad, was slightly built and about 5’6” with curly blondish hair. He kept his father’s last name, Finn, in part to honor his dad’s memory and sacrifice, but also because of the V.A.’s ever-changing rules and because my mother knew he would receive an insurance inheritance from the V.A. upon turning twenty one. A name change complicated that reward. The words “half-brother” or “half-sister” were never used in our house, anyway.

—-

Gil heard his name called out and took a step forward. Whoever called it out handed him new orders. He would be going to Korea, not Vietnam. He didn’t know why, and the Army isn’t given to long explanations, so off he went, returning a year and half later with some exotic stereo stuff and some cool silk suits and some great stories. But returning alive, unlike some 50,000 others.

A few years before my mother died, we were sitting at a party in my sister Rita’s back yard, when the talk somehow drifted to Vietnam. Someone talked about the “tunnel rats”, the slightly built G.I.’s who weaseled down Viet Cong tunnels to flush out the enemy. My mother, nursing her “highball”, (never more than two!) casually mentioned that that was why she had kept her son out of Vietnam. A bit cynically, I suppose, I asked her how she managed that.

She had read an article in Life Magazine on “tunnel rats” and figured her slightly-built son Gil would end up as one. She told us how she had researched the “sole surviving son” act, the same one that is the premise for the movie “Saving Private Ryan”, and that she had written her senator, who I believe was the legendary Everett Dirksen at the time. On the premise that Gil’s father had been killed in World War II, Gil was a sole surviving son, and therefore exempt from combat. The Senator had enough juice with the Army, and Gil got his orders changed.

We were astounded, and Gil most especially, who never knew why his name was called that day. She had kept this amazing story from all of us for some thirty five years before casually sharing it with us. A mother can show her love in countless ways, but I have never forgotten this quiet, determined act of love, nor the strength if took to actually pull it off; and then to be content for so many years to keep it to herself.

Happy Mother’ Day, Rita Wogan.

Reginald Van Gleason, III and The Fireman’s Club

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

If you are of tender years, you probably never heard of the late, great Jackie Gleason, known in the bygone black and white television years of the 1950’s and 1960’s as “The Great One”. He first became a star in a weekly TV variety show called “The Cavalcade of Stars” which later became “The Jackie Gleason Show.” In the show, he created a sketch which quickly evolved into the weekly comedy series known as “The Honeymooners”, where he played the bus driver/husband Ralph Kramden, along with his wife, Alice, played by Audrey Meadows. They lived in a tiny, dingy apartment in New York, where you only saw their kitchen and sometimes the fire escape as the set. Their downstairs neighbors were the dimwitted loveable sewer worker Ed Norton, played by master comedian Art Carney, and his wife Trixie, played by Joyce Randolph. The plots were usually built around Ralph’s endless efforts to strike it rich and Alice’s efforts to keep his feet on the ground. Ralph would occasionally shake his fist at Alice and say, “To the Moon, Alice, to the Moon!” Alice wasn’t fazed.

Jackie, with his rotund frame and round Irish face also created other characters etched into the memories of my generation, among them Joe the Bartender, The Poor Soul, and Reginald Van Gleason, III. For the purposes of this story, you might want to catch a bit of the Reginald character at the link below: (He appears about two minutes into the skit.)

https://youtu.be/i4VUCZRasLs?list=RDi4VUCZRasLs

—————————

My father was a Chicago Fireman from 1944 until his death in 1968. He and his fellow firemen on the west side saw a lot. While with Truck 66, my dad was at the LaSalle Hotel fire in 1946, which claimed 61 lives. We have newspaper pictures of him making rescues on a ladder. In 1958, he and the crews of Engine 95 and Truck 26 responded to the Our Lady of Angels fire, which took 92 children and three nuns. Those were big events, but most of their fires and accidents had no names and claimed victims in more modest numbers, yet they dealt with deaths and injuries on a regular basis. I don’t imagine that men go through those kinds of experiences without developing some sort of bond, and that is what happened at “95’s House” at Crawford (now Pulaski) and Wilcox. The fireman there enjoyed each other’s company and they developed a tight bond of friendship, so they formed a “club” for socializing with their wives. “Club” would rotate the meetings from home to home every few months, or so.  They went on meeting even after transfers, injuries, retirements and deaths, and, I believe, it ended in the early 1970’s. The memorable cast of characters I can see today as if they were standing next to me.

Rick and Darlene were an outgoing, fun loving couple, Rick with his slicked back hair and always with a ready laugh. I thought he was a hero because once a year, at the Fire Department Thrill Show, staged at the old Soldier Field in sweltering mid-August, Rick would dive from the top of a makeshift four story building, set afire for the crowd; he would land with a “wump” in a safety net held by the firemen on the ground and everyone cheered. Attendance at the Thrill Show was mandatory for the Wogan children.

Jim and Peg were my favorites, largely because of Jim’s wise guy voice and wisecracking ways. Jim was the Lion from Wizard of Oz, minus the fur and the tail. Jim and my Dad were especially close. Jim, whom my Dad called “Junior”, and my Dad, whom Jim called “Shorty” were at each other as only close friends can be. One famous story went that a passerby at the firehouse inquired why city workmen were knocking out bricks below the spaces where the firehouse windows had been. Apparently the new windows were lengthier than the old. Jim replied, “So Wogan can see out.” The story continued that my Dad chased him all over the firehouse.

Frank and Mary were a little older than the others, and had two children. Their daughter, Mary Eileen, had been born with a medical condition that took her life at about seventeen years. She was a friend of my sister Maureen, and I remember her being so upset when she passed. Frank had fallen from a fire truck some years before and had been pensioned off, but remained part of the Club. Nice people.

Eddie and Millie were the life of the party. Eddie was their Lieutenant in the firehouse, and even though he commanded their respect, he was one of the boys. Millie also did hairdressing for a number of the club ladies. They always brought a bottle of whiskey to the party of mostly beer drinkers.

Sam and Kitty rounded out the crew. Kitty had a smiling Irish face and Sam was a big, loveable Jewish guy. His faith mattered not at all to this mostly Catholic crowd; once inside a burning building your particular religious beliefs were less important than your tolerance for heat and smoke, your ability to open a roof, or your willingness to put it on the line for your fellow firefighters. Sam, I guess, was all those things.

It was my parents’ turn to host the party in October of that year and my mother, no doubt in conjunction with the other wives, decided on a costume party for Halloween. When she told my father of the plan, he flat out refused. He would do everything else: get the keg of beer, the booze, food, whatever, but he was not getting into some sissy costume, even for one night. His words, not mine.

And that was that. I don’t recall my mother and father fighting very much, and I think they retreated to the bedroom if they really had to have words in a house filled with eight children, but I do recall my mother being really ticked on this one. More than once she dropped 500 pound hints that she was disappointed, that he was being a party pooper, no fun, etc. He wouldn’t budge.

The night of the party, the kids were allowed to stick around long enough to see the guests, before being banished to my grandmother’s flat below ours in the two flat building we called home. The keg of beer was on the porch, carefully and lovingly tapped by my father, and the guests began to arrive. Rick and Darlene arrived as devils, bright red horns and pitchforks. Sam and Kitty came as convicts, black horizontal stripes and all. Frank and Mary came as hobos, the old Halloween standby choice. Jim and Peg were Roy Rodgers and Dale Evans, complete with lassos. Eddie and Millie came as a priest and nun, dating against the rules of the Vatican. My Mom was dressed as Shirley Temple, bow in her hair curled especially for the occasion. And my Dad was in a plain white shirt.

After a little bit of drinking and joking, the party moved, as parties do, into several smaller parties, the wives chatting away in the living room, and the men standing guard at the tabernacle of the keg on the porch. No one noticed my Dad’s absence when my mother announced that it was time to judge the Best Costume. The men reluctantly abandoned the keg and trooped into the living room. My siblings and I had stolen back to the alcove off the living room to catch this part. My mother looked a little annoyed as she looked around for my Dad; one of the guests offered that maybe they should wait for Tom to get back from wherever he was.

Just then, the bedroom door flung open and my father strode into the living room, wearing a preposterous tall black top hat, black cape, black bow tie, white gloves, a glued-on floppy black mustache and a cigarette dangling from his lips. In his hand was a black cane, which he twirled over his shoulder as he announced “”Goooood evening!” in his best Reginald Van Gleason III imitation. The illusion was perfect.

My Dad, having much the same physical frame as Jackie Gleason, brought down the house. My mother was at once totally surprised and caught somewhere between her lingering annoyance with my Dad and an awakening delight that he had played her as well as he had. She threw her arms around him and kissed him, while the Fireman’s Club cheered and awarded him the cheap plastic dime store trophy for Best Costume.

—————-

I was amazed at what I saw. My Dad actually had a sense of humor! Hell, he was a prankster of the first order! He must have had this thing planned for days! And my Mom and my Dad had a relationship with each other!

It’s hard for kids to see past the veil of parenthood, but I was allowed this one little glimpse. My parents were real honest-to-god people, even though I, like most kids, usually saw them as providers, disciplinarians, and the enforcers who dictated the rules of the house. I never imagined them as two people in love with other, as capable of having a little fun with each other as my Dad did that night with his costumed surprise. It was a revelation to see my Mom acting not a lot like my Mom, but more like a girl.

I suppose it’s always this way for kids and their parents, but it’s nice when life peels back the curtain a little and lets you see that moms and dads have the same multiple dimensions in their lives as the rest of us. Good one, Dad.

Rags and Old Iron: A Story of Attitude Adjustment

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

Author’s note: You may not have read or even heard of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, but if you want a quick look at the plot go to http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/play-summary/merchant-venice/.

I was a freshman at Quigley South in 1963, sitting in my English class, where Fr. Cahill presided. Fr. Cahill was a very tall forties-something priest with crew-cut snow white hair, and huge hands, either one of which seemed to cover both the front and back covers of whatever book he was holding. Over his white collar and black shirt and trousers, he always wore the priest’s cassock, sort of a black full length covering that all ordained faculty wore back then.

The grapevine said that he had been a star high school basketball player before finding his vocation, and he looked every inch the part; those oversized hands must have been useful on the ball court. He was a good teacher, too. His method was largely lecturing, but peppered with lots of questions to keep you in the game. In this class, we were knee deep in our first Shakespearean play, The Merchant of Venice. We’d been at it for weeks and I was way past the point of caring what Portia, Bassanio’s new bride disguised as a male lawyer, had up her sleeve. I thought Shylock was a creepy old guy, and Bassanio and Antonio seemed especially dense. Antonio who made the “pound of flesh” deal with Shylock, and Bassanio who couldn’t recognize his new wife dressed as a man? C’mon.

As a student, I got pretty good at reading the different ways that teachers would unconsciously telegraph their decisions as to who to call on next. Fr. McLaughlin, who taught Latin, would look for someone who hadn’t made eye contact yet, and call on him. My counter-strategy when unprepared to answer, which was almost always, was to look directly at him, as if eager to translate. Worked every time. Mr. Lang, who taught math, worked a list of students in alpha order, so you only had to be prepared when he got in the general neighborhood of your name. Fr. Henckle, who taught history, called on the first eager beavers to shoot up their hands, and it was always the same four or five guys. Free ride.

Fr. Cahill was a lot trickier, because he had memorized our names and could call yours without warning from anywhere in the room. Caught unprepared, caught with your mind wandering, or just plain lost, you bought yourself an extra writing assignment that night, due the next day. And it was the same punishment time after time: write out all seven stanzas of Sir Walter Scott’s “Young Lochinvar.”

God, how I hated that knight. Here’s the first stanza of this seven stanza nightmare:

O young Lochinvar is come out of the west,

Through all the wide Border his steed was the best;

And save his good broadsword he weapons had none,

He rode all unarm’d, and he rode all alone.

So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,

There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.

If you ask me, Sir Walter was having an off day when he wrote this one.

We had reached the point in the Merchant of Venice where Shylock’s gig was up. He can have his pound of flesh as part of his evil bargain, but not one drop of blood. Shylock is outraged that he has been outfoxed. At this point, Fr. Cahill asked the class, “How does Shylock react to this news?” Then, “Mr. Wogan?”

Now on the west side of my youth, every week an old man in a horse drawn wagon would come down our alley singing his mantra, “rags and old iron”. Even though we were long past the era of horse-drawn transportation, this old tradition somehow stayed alive. He was the junk man, and because he was Jewish, he was referred to as the “Rag Sheenie”. I had heard my father use the term a hundred times, and never in anger or in derision. He just used the expression “screaming like a rag sheenie” as one his stock phrases. Even my grandmother, as simple and unprejudiced a person as you could hope to meet, would use the term. I even heard a nun say it once. I never gave it any thought; the old guy with the horse was a part of my neighborhood scene and he was stuck with this sad title.

Years later I would find out that yes, indeed, these guys were almost always Jewish, and that they rented their horses from a nearby barn on a daily basis. Most of them were very poor and whatever they could scrape from selling scrap metal was how they lived.

So I gave him my answer, confident that Young Lochinvar would stay the hell in the West and would still be riding alone tonight. What I said was, “He’s screaming like a Rag Sheenie, Father.”

From out of the corner of my eye I saw it, but it was too late. One of those huge hands caught the side of my face, not like a slap, but more like a sweep. It picked me up out of my seat and deposited me, with a thud, on the floor. My classmates instantly showed a renewed interest in what they were reading, as if not wishing to be caught up somehow in my crime. I looked up with confused wide eyes at Fr. Cahill, now taller than ever from my new seat on the floor. “That’s an ethnic slur, young man,” he said evenly. “I never want to hear that from you again.”

I didn’t know what slur meant. I didn’t even know what ethnic meant. I just knew I wasn’t going to say Rag Sheenie anymore. Oh, and I had to write out Lochinvar again.

——————

Looking back on it, it strikes me that I might have accidently demonstrated the main point of Shakespeare’s play. Merchant of Venice has been interpreted by many, but at its heart it’s about prejudice and in particular prejudice against Jews. Some of those interpreters claim that this was Shakespeare’s way or illustrating the evils of racial and ethnic bias. Others claim that it was his way of pandering to the anti Semite tendencies of his audience. It’s not hard to imagine some of those sitting in those seats at Stratford-on-Avon smiling with satisfaction as Shylock’s fortune is confiscated and he is forced to convert to Christianity at the plays ending.

My ethnic slur was a result of my youth and ignorance of the world around me, and that’s a pretty good definition of a fourteen year old boy. Today, as I watch the current embarrassing national political circuses, I wonder what excuse they can use for some of the fear and prejudice being sold on a daily basis to the angry and the scared. And I wish we had a Fr. Cahill’s hand big enough to administer a correction.

Send Lawyers, Guns and Money

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

“Send Lawyers, Guns, and Money, for the shit has hit the fan.”

-the late, great songwriter Warren Zevon

When I was 14, I robbed a train. Don’t look for it in the storied annals of Chicago Crime. You won’t find it in the dusty files of some long-gone police station or in the basement of the old City News Bureau. It never made any newspapers;  the story exists only in my memory, the memories of my two accomplices, and maybe some really old 15th District coppers who were once young 15th District coppers on that long ago day.

It was in the spring of 1964, I was a freshman at Quigley South, a preparatory seminary for adolescent boys who thought they wanted to be priests. I was fourteen, and I’m not sure how fourteen year olds could have had a life plan that went much beyond their next meal, let alone a whole career plan, but that’s the way it was back then. We arrived at Quigley as celibate virgins and the priests that ran the seminary system wanted us to stay that way, not that there was much chance of losing either status at that age. They wanted to minimize our contact with the opposite sex, so they gave us Thursdays off and had us come to school on Saturdays. In this way, they would sabotage Friday night and minimize our exposure to makeup, curves, eyes and those “near occasions of sin” known as girls.

We loved it. We weren’t interested in girls yet anyway and besides, as we would find out in a few years when the hormones fired up, there were girls for whom Wednesday night worked out just fine for the right guy. And we enjoyed unfettered access to everything each Thursday while the rest of the world worked or was being schooled: empty bowling alleys, gym floors at nearby parishes, movie houses, wide open golf courses and Wednesday night poker games. Because it was only the Quigley guys, it was natural that you made your plans on Wednesday, as those magical teenage communication tools known as cell phones and texting were then still the stuff of science fiction.

My plan on that nice spring day was to bike it over to Danny’s house and then a group of us would bike to Saint Francis of Rome’s gym in Berwyn, where the gym was open to us all day. When I got there, his mother told me he had left and wasn’t sure where he had gone.  I 7knew where he was. Danny lived a block from a wide train switchyard that ran east to west, south of the great ditch now known as the Eisenhower Expressway, but then as the Congress Expressway.  We had spent hours there among the slow moving boxcars and tank cars of the big switching yard, placing pennies on the tracks and letting rail car wheels flatten them out into razor thin copper wafers as large as silver dollars. There were few railroad workers on foot to chase us away, and most of the others were not inclined to get down from their locomotive perches.

Our other pastimes included hitching short rides by jumping on the train handler’s ladders on the slower moving box cars and throwing stones against the tank cars to create a “bonging” sound. Rocket scientists we were not.  Our parents had all warned us to stay out of the train yard, that a boy had lost a leg there and that it was no place for kids. In fact, in this time before “Safety” was invented, it was a perfect place for kids, and besides, no one could quite remember who that unlucky boy was and when it had happened.

I spotted Danny and another Quigley guy, Patrick, both walking down a line of stalled boxcars on one of the many sidings. They had dropped their bikes by the side of the fencing and were about a block away. Every so often they would stop, work some little piece of bright silver off the boxcar door lock, then grab the big door handle and swing it outwards from the car. With a push, they would slide open the boxcar cargo door and expose the cargo inside. Curious, and sensing some new form of rail yard hilarity, I decided to give it a try.  I stayed on my bike, having had one stolen not long before that, and circled around to another opening in the fence, then shackled my bike to the fencepost and joined the fun. We were about fifty yards apart, and I yelled over to them asking if they had found anything interesting. They hadn’t and told me so.

So I picked out a big brown boxcar for myself, eyeballed the little tin strip that secured the door lock in the hasp, and began twisting the metal strip. After a few twists, it broke, and I opened up the big car. It was filled top to bottom, nose to tail with Diamond matches, the well-known brand printed in red on the cases.  I had no use for matches, certainly not tens of thousands of them. I turned to the next car and started to perform the same operation. This time I noticed the word “Federal” printed on the little tin strip. I didn’t give it much thought.

Two gunshots rang out. I don’t think I knew they were gunshots at first, but then I saw a man in a suit standing behind my friends, a still-smoking silver handgun pointed in the air. I started to back away, thinking my friends were in deep trouble. That’s when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Another man in a suit, also holding a gun, yelled ”I’ve got the lookout!”

Me, a lookout? Obviously not a very good one. The suit who had me in tow was a serious Italian looking guy, black hair, five o’clock shadow and an expensive looking leather jacket. He smelled like too much cologne. He held me while the other suit, also Italian looking, brought my friends over to me. Patrick was shaking and staring to cry. Danny was trying to hold it together and looking at his feet. The suit who fired his gun, Detective Smug, just exuded self-confidence; he informed us that we were in huge trouble and would most likely be going to jail. Danny lost it and joined Patrick in tearing up. For some reason, maybe because I hadn’t yet processed it, or maybe because they were the ones he was near when he fired his gun, I didn’t. My suit, Detective Serious, said nothing.

They marched us to where their car was parked and placed handcuffs on Patrick and Danny. Patrick was so skinny the cuffs slid off. Pissed, Detective Smug placed them on him again and told him he had better not let them slide off again. Patrick held his arms out straight.  I thought the next set of cuffs would be for me, but they only had two sets. “Don’t try to run or we’ll have to shoot you”, Detective Smug warned me. Detective Serious turned away, so I couldn’t see him smile, but I caught it. They drove us to Chicago Avenue’s 15th District Police station, hauled us out of the car, Patrick still holding his arms out straight as if sleepwalking. They paraded us up the front steps, coppers glancing at us curiously as they came in and out. I guess we didn’t fit the profile of true regular thugs. They sat us on a wooden bench in a hallway and Detective Smug went in to make his report. Detective Serious lit up a cigarette and kept his eye on us. It began to sink in, and I started shaking, too. I could see the Angel of Death hovering high above me, looking for me. He was a large black bird-like thing, but he also resembled one of the countless WW II model warplanes my brothers and I had assembled in our coalbin-turned-hobby room in the basement on Monroe St.

Detective Smug came out and told us we could use a phone in the office he had just come from to call our parents. The Angel of Death turned, starting down on his bomb run, wings flared and teeth bared. I got my mom on the first try, tearlfully telling her that I was in a police station. She was shocked, I could tell, but asked if I was OK and told me to wait. Patrick and Danny made their calls. Here is what I didn’t know. My mom made three calls, one to my father, and one to each of her brothers, my uncles Tommy and Jimmy. Tommy was a fireman who lived close to the station. Jimmy was a police sergeant, and not just any old police sergeant, but the desk sergeant at the 15th District, my current location and my first stop on the way to a life of imprisonment. My father was a fireman, too, but he worked as the Chaplain’s driver and, not being tied to an engine or truck, had a greater degree of freedom than most others in his firehouse. I later learned that he stopped home, probably to calm my mother down, and when asked by one of my siblings where he was going, famously told them, “I have to go spring Capone.”

Tommy arrived first, within minutes, it seemed. Tommy, God love him, went straight  at Detective Smug, got right in his face and began to ask him questions. Detective Smug rattled off all of the charges he was planning to file. I didn’t really understand what he was saying, but it sounded like he was charging us with every crime going back to the Chicago Fire. Tommy cranked it up a bit and Detective Smug got louder and rattled off more charges. I think he now wanted to include us as accomplices in the Fort Dearborn Massacre. The argument began to draw a crowd of young coppers getting ready for a shift change. The Angel of Death was screaming down now, his ragged finger on the release button.

Here’s something else I didn’t know: not all coppers are created equal. Detective Smug and Detective Serious were known as “Railroad Dicks”, an inferior life form among the Chicago Police. The fact that they were in the private employ of the railroads meant somehow they weren’t good enough to be CPD, or maybe they just got paid better.  And they were Italian to boot, awash in a sea of Irish faces. The crowd parted as Uncle Jimmy arrived, not in uniform as it was his day off. This 15th District office was his domain. He was the desk sergeant and his primary job was to keep order and make sure nothing bothered the Watch Commander in his office. He looked over the Detectives and looked over us. He asked me if we were OK. I choked out a yes. The crowd of young coppers was drawing closer now, growing in number, perhaps anticipating that this was the main event.

Uncle Jimmy asked which one was in charge. Detective Smug assured him that he was, smugly. He told him to start at the beginning and tell him what happened.   Smug began to tell his tale, warming to the task as he went on, but when he got to the gunshots, Uncle Jimmy stopped him. He asked, very slowly, to repeat what he had just said. Smug was a little thrown by that. His face inched closer to Smug and there was something different in Uncle Jimmy’s tone, as if somewhere a fuse was lit.

A few seconds later, the fuse had run its short course. “You mean to say that you fired your weapons over the heads of these unarmed, underage kids?” he fairly shouted and snarled. I think we all jumped a bit on our bench. Detective Smug felt the ground shift under his feet. He stammered that these were only warning shots, fired harmlessly into the air. The Angel of Death suddenly veered off the bomb run, unsure of his target.

“How do I know you didn’t just shoot at them and miss, you dumb son of a bitch”? Jimmy yelled in his face, his own face a bright red. Detective Smug was near panic now, and the crowd of young coppers began to grin, sensing where this was going. Detective Serious glanced around, looking for an escape path. None appeared. Some of the coppers were inching forward, hands on the butts of their revolvers. Jimmy had heard enough. “Lock these two assholes up”, Jimmy said with a tone of total disgust to his more-than-willing minions. As one, the coppers moved on the Detectives, who by now had completely surrendered.

Serious put his hand up and spoke for the first time. He said this was a big misunderstanding and that he was sure something could be worked out. Smug was devastated, beyond the point where he could even look up or speak. “In my office”, said Uncle Jimmy.

The door slammed, I could hear more shouting, mostly Jimmy, and some mumbled comments from them. Ten minutes later, the Detectives emerged, broken, with eyes downcast. A smirking patrolman returned their handcuffs to them and they had to leave via the front stairs, past two rows of Chicago’s finest, who shook their heads sadly and muttered comments about railroad dicks. The Angel of Death appeared to be returning to base. “Your Dad’s on his way”, Jimmy told me. The Angel of Death veered back onto his bomb run.

Patrick’s and Danny’s parents had arrived, taking their wayward and now suspect seminarian sons home. I looked out the window and saw Uncle Jimmy talking with my Dad. I dreaded having to meet him like this. My Dad came into the station, looked at me, hooked his thumb over his shoulder and said, “Get in the car, goofy.” Goofy, by the way, was a mostly firehouse term used by my father and his fellow firefighters and maybe some coppers to describe crazy people, politicians, criminals, people who took unnecessary risks, and imbecile children.  I am sure Walt Disney never saw a penny in royalties.

And that was it. He didn’t say a word about it in the car, that night, nor ever again in the four years he had yet to live. I wondered what awaited me at home, and when I got there, my siblings sort of backed away from me as if they might be accidentally struck by some parental disciplinary shrapnel, or maybe suffer collateral damage from what was soon to be my certain destruction. But it never happened. My mother looked me over, told me I had certainly had a big day, and went back to cooking dinner. Confused, and certain that the Angel of Death must still be about, I served early mass the next morning and the pastor,

Monsignor Doyle, told me to come by the Rectory after mass. This explained it. My family was just being kind to me, knowing that my doom would come from a different, and much higher quarter.  I sat in the Pastor’s office and he came in with a cup of coffee and sat at his desk. “What happened yesterday?” he asked. I told him of the prank that had gone bad…really bad. I told him no one was charged. I told him we were all real sorry. He sipped his coffee and listened. The Angel of Death was loud in my ears now, moments away from releasing his ordnance. ”Don’t do anything like that ever again”, he said. “Now go on to school”. He dismissed me and went back to his coffee; the Angel of Death exploded in mid-air, pieces and parts raining down all around me, but none hitting me.

I’m guessing that night that the story of the Great Train Robbery got a good laugh out of the priests in the rectory, sitting around sipping their twelve year-old scotch. My father probably told it to a few buddies at Wallace’s Tavern, and maybe his buddies shared stories of the capers of their own idiot children.

———————

What a wonderful thing it is to have a big family, and to have them close around you and ready to take up your defense. My uncles, responding to their big sister’s phone call, dropped what they were doing and were there to take my part, to see to it that adolescent stunts don’t need to be taken somewhere they shouldn’t go. How much was I loved when people like my uncles got so worked up on my behalf?

There was one other thing I didn’t know or appreciate that day: I had witnessed firsthand the art of parenting. People who had been through Great Depressions and wars could distinguish between Trouble and Real Trouble, decide which one it was, and give it only the attention it deserved. I have tried to remember that lesson in my time as a parent, when my children made their mistakes, but it was usually only my wife’s good heart that could gentle my anger and force me to remember that I was far, far from the perfect child.

The difficult business of being a parent to children is a very complex series of tasks. It’s all about providing, nurturing, planning, coaching, enforcing, guiding, encouraging, commiserating, and creating the stable base of a home. And in most homes you only get two people to share all of that work.Only when you get into trouble do you get the chance to see parenting at its best.  The art, the true of art of parenting, like all art, will always live more in the heart than in the mind.

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Close to Death…a reflection on losses

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

We were in Dublin, Ireland, having just awakened from a jet-lagged midday nap. This was a family trip, planned for months by my wife and me for my brother and his wife, a friend who had lost her husband, and one of my four sisters. Another sister remained behind in Chicago, and the other two lived north of Galway, but had taken the train over to Dublin to meet us and spend a few days in the city before all of us headed west to their homes and the real heart of our vacation.

It was the Monday after Easter, a bank holiday in Ireland, and nothing but pubs and taxies were operating. When my Ireland sisters arrived, we were just about recovered from the flight, having napped and showered. Our mother was in a hospital in Muncie, Indiana, scheduled for a routine gall bladder procedure earlier that day and, once we are all together in our room, my sisters urged me to call and see if we could talk to her. I had arranged to call my Muncie based sister-in-law and my brother who I guessed were bedside around then, and my sister-in-law answered on the first ring. The tremble in her voice hinted my worst fear and that feeling of stepping off a ledge from a great height rushed toward me.

My mother was gone. My wife saw the shock on my face as I absorbed the tearful words of my sister-in-law from the other side of the ocean. As I stammered what I heard to the others gathering in our room, my sister’s legs went out from under her. My wife did what she was born to do, and which she does better than anyone, which was to give comfort to those around her. The gaiety of a joyful family reunion spun into a chaos of disbelief, bewilderment, a hundred questions. The next few days were a blur of last-minute travel arrangements, tearful phone calls and a coming home to be all together. It was April, 2004.

———

I was eighteen, and was sleeping in the back bedroom of the two-flat we lived in on the west side of Chicago. I was between colleges and was working as an entry-level guy in the newspaper printing plant below the Chicago Tribune. I had been thrown from the languid pace of the college freshman into the world of hardworking, middle aged, tough men and there had been no orientation session. The work paid exceptionally well, but the hours were brutal and the environment somewhere between downright unhealthy and medieval. Up until that point in my life, it had been the hardest I had ever worked. The army would up the ante later, but I didn’t know that then.

Somewhere around 3 a.m. my mother woke me, clearly panicked. I woke my older brother, and together we ran into the living room, where my father lay on the floor on his back. He was wearing his usual nighttime summer wear, boxers and a white t-shirt. His eyes were fixed toward the ceiling, not focused, as if he were looking far beyond the plaster layer that was eight feet above him. A look of almost amused surprise was on his face.

I was working on pure adrenalin, scared, but not paralyzed. My brother had been in the army and had learned something of first aid and perhaps emergencies. He knelt down next to our dad and began mouth to mouth resuscitation. My mother had found a bottle of whisky (old Irish remedy, I guess) and poured a small glass of it into his open mouth. It ran out the corners of his mouth and onto his chest and then to the floor.

I straddled his chest and had my hands on his heart, which was beating wildly, as if it wanted to get out of his body. I felt it literally banging inside his chest for however long I can’t remember, and then a hesitation, two weaker beats, then nothing. A few moments later he gave up what I later learned was the “death rattle”, a sort of final rush of mottled air in the lungs, tinged by the smell of the whiskey. His big frame seemed to partially collapse under me. My father was gone. It was July, 1968.

——-

I have reflected on these two experiences of loss many times over since then, and especially my proximity to the two events. In the case of my mother, death reached out over 3,600 miles to touch me with its electric shock. In my fathers’ case, death had to reach only a few inches from his face. Same shock. Yet many years later, my personal proximity matters not at all, except as good stories.

I have shared an abbreviated version of these two stories only a few times, and usually only with those grieving for the loss of someone close and that grief aggravated by their not having been there to share the goodbye moment. I have shared the stories in hopes of easing that part of the pain for them. Did it help? I don’t know. I talk a lot and maybe it seemed like just so much more talk to them. Or maybe talk wasn’t what was needed at that time.

I only know that as time works its magic, when I ponder how blessed I was to have those two people in my life and as my parents, it’s the thousand little memories, the good stories, the little lessons and kindnesses they left in their wake that grow in importance and meaning. Where I was when the gift of their lives went away from where I was at that moment drifts into insignificance. Goodbye will always be goodbye, but the smiles remain. And the gratitude.

Dinner with a Holy Man.

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

I don’t recall ever giving much thought to the existence of Holy Men. At age sixty five, this world, which can be so very beautiful in so many ways, can wear on you, turning you cynical. Perhaps living that life in Chicago, where wise guys abound and where the greatest crime is being a chump, has made me more so. I did know a lot about the big hitters in the Holy Man game: Jesus, John the Baptist, Gandhi, et al. Twelve years of Catholic schooling, four of those in a minor seminary, will give you almost lethal exposure to the lives of the saints, the sacraments of the church, and the rules of the road as set forth in the Baltimore Catechism.  But Holy Men? Didn’t think much about them.

The Minor seminaries in 1960’s Chicago, high schools really, were two schools, both gone now. Quigley North was the overcrowded original, back in the days when every mother prayed for at least one of her sons to take up the cloth. In my case, my grandmother was putting money away for my chalice when I was fourteen. The money later served as a down payment for a 1965 Plymouth, my first car, but that’s another story.

The Diocese, happily seeing no end of future priests, and not foreseeing the seismic changes to religious life which would be brought on by Vatican II, decided to build a second, larger seminary/high school on the South side. That was, aptly, Quigley South, and that was my school, even though I lived on the west side. Both schools were designed to capture religious vocations early, and the attrition rates were high, as each class was evaluated yearly by the faculty for priestly worthiness. I never got caught, somehow.

Over time, as the alumni aged into old men, the Quigley you attended and exactly when you attended seemed to matter less and less to those who carried the torch of reunions for all of us. There was something about having gone to Quigley, to have once aspired to the priesthood, which drew you into a common bond with your fellow once-seminarians, and you were invited.

And so it was that on a December night in 2014, I accepted the invitation from this loose confederation of alumni, whose criteria were that you once attended one of the Quigleys and that you were still alive. I met the group in the bar of The Greek Islands on south Halsted. It was warm, welcoming, with men who might have been strangers a moment before shaking your hand and asking which school, what year, did you know this person or that, whatever became of so-and-so. After cocktails, it was family style dinner, and seating was random.

There was a big man on my right, friendly face, but a little reserved. He was dressed in jeans, work shirt, and a sort of hunter’s vest. He had a bushy head of brownish grey hair and bushier moustache. While the others and I talked about our careers, retirements, grandchildren and told stories we had told a dozen times to a group that still wanted to hear them again, this fellow smiled, asked questions, asked others to expand on their stories.

Later, he spoke briefly of a few places he had been in his travels, and they weren’t places I had been. Cuba, Guatemala, North Africa. I wondered what business he had been in, to take him to such exotic locations. He mentioned that he now lived in Cicero, a suburb once known as the center of mob rule in Chicago, but these days just a down on its luck blue collar suburb. Curious, considering the Quigley crowd tended to be pretty affluent and lived at much tonier addresses. When he got up to use the facilities, my friend John across the table mentioned that the big fellow, also named John, had always been admired by his classmates. Several readily agreed. One pointed out that he had been the president of his class.

After he took his seat again, it seemed to me that, in a quiet way, he seemed to be almost presiding over the get together. Not in any overt way, but by his manner, which was sort of “favorite uncle by way of the favorite teacher you remembered”. He exuded a sort of care for all of us and in no way did he try to dominate the talk. His did not talk with his hands, nor use any body language that said “OK, now it’s my turn.” I noticed that others at the table would occasionally look his way and give a sort of unofficial salute, a nod of approval, a small sign of being glad to be in his company. They were proud of him, somehow.

It became nine o’clock and old men don’t party till dawn. As we began to break up, I said to my friend John, “Funny, you don’t see lot of ordained priests at these things, just lay people like us.”

“Just two tonight.” The guy down on the end, who I don’t really know, and of course, the bishop, sitting next to you.”

I was speechless for a moment. “That guy was a bishop?” Suddenly it all made sense. The travels to different mission lands, the Cicero rectory, the pastoral manner, the esteem in which the group seemed to hold him.

I caught up with the Bishop outside as we awaited our cars from the valet. “Nice party”, he said. “And it was nice to meet you, also.”

I replied in similar fashion and we made small talk about the weather, Greek Town in the old days, the White Sox. His car arrived first and he shook my hand and wished me a Merry Christmas.

“And you too, Eminence,” I said.

He turned as he got in his car, a small smile. Was he pleased I had recognized his Office, or irritated that I wouldn’t let him take the night off from his job? Did I even get the title right for a bishop with “Eminence”? (I got it wrong, it was Excellency, but I wouldn’t have gotten that out with a straight face.)

Driving home, it occurred to me that you simply don’t meet all that many people in life who seem to project that kind of pastoral good will, that priestly concern, and that warmth without a hint of judgment. Was I in the presence of a Holy Man? I think maybe I was. Maybe that’s why they made him a bishop….even the Catholic Church gets it right, now and again.