Category: Family Stories

Stories of the Wogan family.

Gil, or Joe

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

This eulogy was written last year, shortly after my brother passed on July 16th, 2021.

Over these last few months, there were a lot of things I wanted to say to my brother, but his injuries and the progression of his illness made communication pretty difficult. As some of you may know, I try to do a bit of writing, so I thought perhaps I might put in a letter some of those things I wanted him to hear. With your permission, I would like to share that letter with all of you today. It starts like this……….

“Dear Joe,”

You know it still seems funny to be calling you Joe, considering I and all the other residents of 5347 Monroe Street called you “Gil” for twenty or so years. But you deserve the right to tweak you name and be addressed as you like. After all,  our  mother hung some pretty interesting nicknames on most of the children, and she didn’t ask for any permission. Names like Minnie, Binky, Pood, Soona and Tassi. So, Joe it is.   

I have a lot of good memories of you, Joe, but one that always makes me smile is those young years making plastic models in the converted coalbin in the basement . We made models of airplanes, jets , tanks, ships, cars, you name it. You were a better model maker than me. You had a stubborn streak that focused your attention on even the smallest detail. And you possessed patience, something I did not have a lot of. 

Among your better jobs was a model of the submarine U-505, familiar to all Chicagoans because the real one sits in a museum on the South Side. As it happened, we were studying WW II in 8th grade, with each student expected to do a small presentation. I needed your U-505 model for my turn and pleaded with you to let me borrow it. I ended up going to a higher court, our mother, and you reluctantly handed over the model. I placed it in a shoebox, surrounded it with tissue, and taped the box shut, awaiting my moment in the sun the next day.

When that moment arrived, I stood in front of my classmates, removed the top, carefully reached through the tissue, and extracted…., a porcelain statue of a ballerina, which you placed the night before. Yeah, you got me on that one, Joe.

But kids grow up, and I remember the day you left us to enlist in the Army. You were 18, looked a bit nervous, but determined to  enter this different world. When you came home a few months later, in uniform, you seemed much more confident, assured, and older.  And you had orders for some place called Viet Nam. We did not know much about Viet Nam in 1964, but our mother knew a war when she saw one.

A few weeks later, while in the Oakland Staging area in California, you were called out of a formation and handed new orders, this time for South Korea, where you served 18 months.

It was some 35 years later, at a family gathering, that our mother casually mentioned that it was she who had those orders changed. It  seems she had written Sen. Everett Dirksen, a powerful Illinois politician and she appealed under something called ‘The Sole Surviving Son” act. Due to your fathers’ death in WW II, you were exempt from serving in combat. We were dumbfounded to be sure, but I think she may have saved your life.

Like everyone, the path of your life could be altered by luck, both good and not so good luck. Surely, your luckiest day was that day you met Jeannine. Your love for each other over the years was evident to everyone who met you. Yours was a marriage that a friend of our once said was “a marriage one could envy.”  And to be sure, Jeannine’s caring for you throughout this long illness has been the definition of devotion.

Less lucky was the Parkinson’s diagnosis, but throughout the last 25 years, you met it with courage, a bit of that stubbornness, and even some humor. You staved it off as long as you could through swimming, exercise classes, and even boxing. And Jeannie was by your side.

You were a good husband, a good son, a good father figure, a good soldier, and a good friend to many. And though our last names were different, you were always our brother. God bless you, Joe.             

Uncle Jimmy

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

How many “standup guys” have you had the good fortune to know in your life’s journey? That person whose sense of humor, inner strength,  and whose shared bottomless life experiences kept your ship upright, when events and upsets threatened to capsize your spirit. That person whose personal needs never seemed to surface. That person perhaps not at the center of your family life, but always nearby, always ready for the task at hand.

He can have any name you like, can be either man or woman, for that matter. But for me and my siblings, it was Uncle Jimmy, and this is his story…..

I can still see him in my memory, eyes focused on the task at hand, the tip of his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth, the strong hands gluing or shaping some tiny part of a model ship, or airplane, or tank. He would be sitting at his kitchen table on which no food was ever served. The table was perpetually covered with model parts, or to be more precise, works in progress. And my brothers and I, also into making models in the restored coal bin just feet from his door, could often be found watching the master modeler.  

He lived for a time in the perpetually damp basement apartment of our two-flat on west  Monroe Street. It was in every sense a Man-Cave, in desperate need of a woman’s touch.  He was in his forties at the time, still single, his parents recently deceased, and his share in the family home near Austin and Augusta sold to his recently married brother, Tommy.

He was a cop at the time, a “wagon man” in the parlance of the day. The “Paddy Wagon” as it was known back then, was a knock on the Irish, who were assumed to be drunk most of the time, and in need of transport to a jail. But the far more common use of the wagon was as an unofficial hearse for the indigent.

There wasn’t much competition for the wagon job, as the bodies of the indigent were usually located by sense of smell in alleys, gangways, and apartments with unread newspapers piled at the door.   

————–

He went by various names at different points in his life. As a young man it was “Red” the typical nickname hung on a red-haired young man. The last several years on the police, he was known as “Number 1” to all of the cops in the 15th  District in the Austin part of town. Annual furloughs were assigned by longevity in the district, and he was first in line for years. But he was always “Uncle Jimmy” to me, my siblings, and a small army of cousins.

———

James Oates was one of six children born to Mike and Teresa Oates. The birth order looked like this: Dolores (Dee), Rita (our mother), Evelyn (Evie), Jimmy, Tommy, and Noella (so named for her Christmas Day arrival).

Jimmy arrived in 1926, three years before the Great Depression took from this family their home, their money, and, for a time, their unity as a family under one roof. At eighteen, with World War II aflame, he enlisted in the Navy. Following boot camp in Great Lakes, he was shipped to Seneca, Illinois, a sleepy little town on the Illinois River. Seneca had a specialized shipyard, one that could turn out shallow draft, 327-foot-long ships known as LSTs, or Landing Ship Tanks.

As soon as the new ship slipped into the brown waters of the Illinois River, the recruits and their newly minted  officers would join a veteran training crew. Together they  began “shaking out” their just-launched vessels as they wound their way into the Mississippi River, and down to New Orleans. When the training crew finished their teaching duties, they would depart the ship, and the rookie crew would be on their own.

They sailed on into World War II in the Pacific, in time to land tanks and troops on several islands, including Okinawa, the last major invasion of the war. And those crew faced suicidal kamikaze fighters while lying beached on the shores as they scrambled to offload their human and metal cargo.

After the war, he joined the Chicago Park District Police Department, as it was then known. On December 31, 1958, the Chicago Park District Police Department was disbanded and absorbed into the Chicago Police Department.

In the mid 1960’s he met Marsha, a widow and mother of six who owned a hobby shop on Chicago Avenue. My brothers and I were thrilled that our favorite uncle living in our two-flat now had access to the models and Lionel train stuff we craved. But Jimmy was a bit gun- shy of jumping into a marriage in his forties and taking on a ready-made family. I once overheard my mother lecturing him as he agonized about what he should do. I think Marsha had given him the “fish or cut bait, sailor” ultimatum.

Happily, they married soon after and began a new life together near Belmont and Austin, where my family would move following my father’s death in 1968.

Jimmy took to fathering naturally, and to fixing up the bungalow that was now their home. His model making gradually gave way to home improvement, and he was a pretty good amateur.

As the children moved on and out, Jimmy and Marsha moved to a small home in Park Ridge. After his retirement from CP, he worked for a time as chauffer/bodyguard for Judge John Clark, a notable longtime figure on the judicial benches of Chicago’s court systems. 

Marsha passed in 2008 and Jimmy in the summer of 2010.

———

Some Uncle Jimmy stories:

Delivering ‘Stiffs”

Working the “Paddy Wagon” in the 1950’as ands 60’s meant that you spent a lot of time picking up the indigent. No one wanted them, except for the owners of local funeral homes, who would be repaid by the county for a simple “no frills” burial. And they tipped the cops who brought the dead, known as ‘stiffs,” to their back doors. They actually competed for the trade and had a mutually agreed upon price under a “gentleman’s agreement.”

Pete Conboy, a second-generation undertaker and contemporary of Uncle Jimmy, told the story about Tommy Gibbons, a legendary old country Irish competitor, who let it be known among the “wagon men” that he would pay a premium to the cops for all deceased delivered to his door. Pete’s dad and others got wind of it and added an even bigger premium to the cops. Tommy folded and business went back to normal.

Ah, Chicago

Giving Uncle Jimmy his red hair back.    

Late in his life, Jimmy asked me for a favor. He assumed that I was some kind of computer genius because I used computers in my business. I was not, but the notion was stuck in his head.

One day he handed me his recruit photo from Great Lakes Naval Base. This little brittle wallet size black and white photo showed him with a laconic smile on his face, navy blues and sailor’s hat. He also handed me his actual uniform ribbons from the war. “Tommy, you’re a computer genius,” he told me. “ I’d like you to use one of your computers to put my ribbons on my chest in this photo.”

How could I refuse? I ended up taking the tiny, wrinkled photo to a local portrait studio, only to find out that such requests from the old Vets were quite common. The end result was an 8 x 10 color portrait, ribbons painted in by an artist. The artist even restored his head of red hair, long since gone,  as a bonus. When he asked me how I did it, I told him we a special computer for that.

The original recruit photo

Jimmy and the retouched photo (courtesy of Arthur Garceau)

Saving my butt as a teenager.

You can read more about this in an article I wrote entitled ”Send Lawyers, Guns and Money” (http://uncletommyonline.com/send-lawyers-guns-and-money-2/. The gist of the story is this: I screwed up as a teenager (robbing a parked train with some high school buddies) and Jimmy got me out of the jam.

Jimmy the cook for the masses.

Jimmy loved to cook for his family, for a family wake, holidays and all that. But let it never be aid that anyone left hungry, as I think his Navy experience dictated to him the size of the meal to prepare. His lasagna would come in epic size, often two or more pans. Italian beef would arrive in a small swimming pool of gravy. His fried chicken would make you believe that somewhere an entire coop had been destroyed.

—————-

Every family should have an Uncle Jimmy, I think. Not the actual Uncle Jimmy who graced my immediate and extended family, but that special person who helps define the best things to be found within a family. That quiet, dependable, and perpetual shoulder on which to lean. The one who serves as a sometime guide, not in the center of your family, like your siblings, but on the side, and always ready to play the role as needed. 

Glad you passed our way, Uncle Jimmy!

Room with a View

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

Day or night, it was an amazing vista, the ever-changing skyline of one of the world’s great cities…Chicago. From 2000 until we sold our condo at 15th and State Street in 2018, it was our view, and it never got old.

Our condo started out as a weekend retreat for my wife and I, a bit of “alone time” from our three children who were hovering at various heights of finishing their educations, finding a life partner, and launching. An excellent time for a weekend getaway address; I heartily recommend it for those of you in that life-stage.

The South Loop was beckoning, in its early stages of gentrification. The Printer’s Row area, in particular, was jumping. I knew and had worked the area selling typesetting there in the 1970’s. Back then it was dirty, scruffy, and industrial, and I could never imagine wanting to live there. It was printers, lithographers, typesetters, and related print trades, all thriving, and unable to see the dawn of the digital age and of the Internet that would render their products and services obsolete. Many of the buildings still bear the names of the companies that built them.  Our building was built as a frozen food warehouse for Meadowgold Butter. Old time Rock Island Line riders recall seeing that big butter sign for years.

What these buildings had in common was that developers bought them at the low end of their value, gutted them to remove all traces of industry, and built out condos or apartments that appealed to both “fifty-somethings” like us, or parents of students enrolled at more than a dozen downtown colleges. Views were important, but so were amenities. In-building restaurants, workout rooms, party rooms and decks drove the buyers in big numbers.

I remember feeling blessed to be able to afford such a view. Business was good. We loved walking all around downtown, the art fairs, new restaurants opening almost weekly, even the Catholic parish of Old Saint Mary’s, once the ugliest church in town at Van Buren and Wabash, now reborn in splendor at 15th and Michigan. At the invitation of the pastor, Maureen signed our names onto the concrete floor underneath the tile of the sanctuary, so I guess we were among the first there.

We loved showing off our view to anyone and everyone who wanted to come downtown. It even gave us a little bit of a “cool factor” with our friends, most of whom lived in the burbs, and perhaps thought of us as adventurers.

My mother sent us a card when we closed on the condo, congratulating us on our “additional home” as she put it. It had us wondering what “additional” meant. Were we showing off, was it something we did not deserve? But when her sister Evie came to town, she could not wait to get her down there, to showcase her “successful” kids. Ah sisters. Do they ever stop competing?

—————–

The Lights………

I remember watching a violent summer storm as it swept through downtown. Bolts of searing white lightning struck the huge white antennas on top of Sears tower. The lightening seemed to strike every 30 seconds or so. And when it did touch, the blinding white streak lingered two or three seconds, as if it took a little time to offload its raw energy into the building.

One of my favorite summer activities was helping to land commercial aircraft as they reached for O’Hare. Their lights would appear in the west, seeming to drop from the blackness above them, as if they were parachute flares fired from some celestial mortar.  

They would form a yellow-white necklace of lights, five miles apart up there, but appearing to be part of the same string from my balcony. The string would head east over the lake, then slowly turn north, then west, and begin to descend out of sight somewhere on the north side.  

I knew those pilots needed my guidance, which I freely offered, wineglass in hand.

In the early years, before the architectural explosion stole our view to the northeast, we would watch fireworks weekly throughout summer. It got to the point where you sort of took it for granted. Afterwards, we discovered that the glass exterior of Trump Tower acted as movie screen of sorts, and we watched real-time reflections of those same fireworks. 

Lights could be funny at times. Our bedroom was a partition walled room, about eight feet high in a twelve-foot-high loft. The north facade was all glass and when a southbound Rock Island train came by at night, its oscillating  headlamp raced above our heads and made crazy lighted patterns above us.

Two mornings  a year, in January, when the sky was clear and the conditions were right, a beam of blinding light from Trump Tower pierced right through our condo. It lasted only a few minutes, but it was like trying to look into the sun itself. 

The office lights at night in the skyline told a different story.  The unseen workforce of cleaning workers would turn whole floors on or off as they labored all night.

The Sounds……

The South Loop seemed loud at first, then a bit quieter, and then your mind tuned the sounds out altogether. The Orange and Green Lines of the CTA shared elevated tracks across State Street. They rumbled and squealed by almost as frequently as that “El” in the Blues Brothers apartment. And the Red Line ran silently under our building on its way to Cermak and the south side, or downtown and to the northern city limits.

Throw in the parade of firetrucks, ambulances, police cars, street traffic below us and commercial aircraft above us, and you had a perfect storm of noise. Only we stopped hearing most of them after a while. They blended into our unconscious as loop dwellers.

And I recall the deafening silence that followed 9/11 for several days: an eerie and mournful absence of life and activity.

The wind…….

There were many times we could observe “lake effect” snow clouds high up and out over Lake Michigan, held offshore by winds aloft and destined to be dumped on unlucky Hoosiers to our south and east.

The cranes also acted as wind indicators, at least on the weekends. The crane operators unlocked the cranes when they were not lifting, and they tended to rest in the path of least resistance from the wind. So, if all the cranes on a Saturday were pointed east, you knew the winds were out of the west. An expensive weathervane, to be sure. 

Cranes were also indicators of both atmosphere and finances. From 2001 until 2008, one could count at least a dozen construction cranes from our deck. We watched as our original view all the way to the colorful lights of Navy Pier slowly vanished as the cranes spun their webs of glass and steel into taller and taller buildings.  And in the spring of 2008, when everything crashed into the Great Recession, the cranes went away. By 2015, they were coming back and are adding to their number to this day. 

The people…….

Life in an area so densely populated as the South Loop is a daily immersion in the diversity of the city itself. Your fellow building occupants, the building staff,  pedestrians who share the sidewalks and parks with you, shopkeepers, eatery staffs; White people, Black people, Asian people, Muslims, and Hispanic people, all interacting every day.  Medical workers, office workers, first responders, salespeople, educators, and retail workers were your neighbors, and the racial stereotypes of your old neighborhood did not apply much. The black man down the hall who played classical piano was a surgeon. The gay couple upstairs were successful realtors. The Korean woman who ran the in-house cleaners read classic literature when not waiting on you. If nothing else, it helped to keep your mind free of first impressions and faulty stereotypes.

These are among my favorite “people” memories of the South Loop….

  • Thanksgiving dinners in Tapas Valencia Restaurant The owner of this “small plate” restaurant in our building sponsored a free turkey dinner for the needy each Thanksgiving. The needy came in many varieties: the obviously poor, large immigrant families, the guys from nearby Pacific Garden Mission, women from battered women shelters, and some folks who could clearly afford a meal, but just wanted to share the day with someone. The restaurant managers, Jose, asked the residents to volunteer to wait tables, bartend, and buss tableware. We worked under the supervision of the young people who waited on us every time we ate there, which was often. It was a day of reversed roles for all involved, and it was fun.
  • Our condo balcony was right near the larger building patio, or party deck. If a wedding reception were in full swing on the big deck, revelers  were only fifteen feet away and would invite us to join them. I am embarrassed to say how many times we accepted.
  • One summer day, we witnessed the unusual sight of dozens of people walking on the elevated tracks, accompanied by police and firefighters. Behind them was a vintage  “el” train, circa 1940’s or 50’s. As it turned out, the people were “train buffs” who had paid for a special ride on the old train. When it broke down above 14th street, they had to walk to the Roosevelt stop. When we encountered them on the street level, they were in “train buff heaven.” They were absolutely thrilled.
  • Early Saturdays in May and again in October, the bridges went up to accommodate the Lake Michigan boaters on their way upriver, whose tall masts needed the clearance. The annoyance of the less privileged in their stalled cars inevitably degraded into group horn honking, growing in intensity as the time passed.
  • Public disturbances were common and came in several varieties. First, real protests for almost any cause you could think of, attended by a patient, if somewhat bored, police force, protecting their 1st Amendment right to peaceful protest.  Megaphones were your first clue.   
  • Columbia College art projects could easily be mistaken for a riot. My favorite was the twelve students dressed as a single caterpillar, slinking down State Street. The third type were Indian weddings, usually near the Hilton. The key players were the guests, often more than 150 of them, chanting, ringing bells, and clapping as they circled the hotel several times. The object of all this craziness was the groom, wearing colorful Indian garb and sitting astride a white horse, gilded in gold. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere but there. 
  • The homeless, were, of course, everywhere. For a time, they lived near the south branch of the Chicago River in a small tent city. They could be found in every park, especially in warm weather. As it turned cold, they sought the overhead cover of viaducts from 18th Street to Foster Avenue, far to the north.  It was good to see the cops checking on them near the river each night and to read of a remarkable dentist who shelled out $200 each night to bring them McDonalds coffee, burgers, and blankets. 

The beauty…….

There was so much of it…….

The great skyline itself at sunset and after dark as the lights came up, Maureen turning our little deck in to a blazing garden each summer, the rebirth of the River and the coming of the Riverwalk, concerts in Millennium Park, the art fairs, and so much more.

By 2018 it was time for us to go: our ages, the need for more space, proximity to the kids and grandkids, lowering our financial load as we contemplated retirement and, yes, personal safety, all factored in. And it was good to begin again, this time in the peaceful and quieter southwest suburbs.

Chicago gets a bad rap in the world’s press, but it is one of the world’s great cities, and for a time we lived right in the middle of it. Our South Loop years were among the best of our lives.

Easter Mondays

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

The glass suddenly shattered outward in the big window of the General Post Office, known to the locals as the GPO. Armed men, many wearing the yellow armband of Irish Volunteers, others in various military uniforms, had used their rifle butts to announce their arrival. It was the first warlike sound made, the first of many, in what would become known throughout the world as the Easter Rising. Shortly thereafter, a uniformed man by the name of Padraig Pearse came out to read a Proclamation to the confused and somewhat rattled crowds of passersby. He announced the birth of a new nation, the Republic of Ireland, free of the tyranny of Great Britain and determined to chart its own course among the other nations of the world. Later that day, they would use captured wireless equipment in the GPO to send out what would become the very first radio broadcast the world had ever heard: their Proclamation in Morse Code. It was Monday, April 24, 1916. Easter Monday.

Great Britain, already immersed in the Great War, and with a large standing army, acted swiftly to put down the rebellion. It poured thousands of troops across the Irish Sea and into Dublin, supported by artillery which was trained on the buildings and streets of central Dublin. Their gunboats navigated part of the River Liffey and blew apart other fortified positions of the Irish rebels. By April 29th, Dublin mostly in ruins, it was over, and the rebels surrendered.

The Rising might well have ended there, except for the arrogance of the local British Commander, Gen. John Maxwell, who chose to hold trials and execute fifteen of the leaders, one by one, over a period of several weeks. Each volley of shots echoed louder and louder in the souls of the Irish people, and by mid-May, the Rising had matured into the full anger of the Irish Rebellion, with fighting raging across the soon-to-be nation.
——————–
We were just about recovered from the flight from O’Hare to Dublin, 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 fears.

Our mother was gone. My wife saw the shock on my face as I absorbed the tearful words from the other side of the ocean. As I stammered what I heard to the others gathering in our room, the gaiety of a joyful family reunion spiraled down 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 Monday, April 21st, 2003. Easter Monday.
——————-
Those two Easter Mondays, separated by some 87 years, somehow mark both the close proximity and the great distances between Ireland and America. They stand out in my mind as signposts in the timeline of my life and the lives of my ancestors. One marked the reasons my Irish family emigrated to America and the other marks the passing of a person so significant in our family’s return to Ireland.

There are millions of American families who can trace their origins to Ireland. Between 1846 and 1950, more than 6 million emigrated. Among them were three of my four grandparents, and the parents of my remaining grandmother, Theresa Oates. It didn’t take them long to establish themselves, get the jobs, start families, buy homes, and build neighborhoods.

People don’t emigrate from countries where life is good. When there is money in your pocket, food on the table, and opportunities to better yourself, people stay put. Take any one of them away and they will head for the door. The tyranny of British rule, the inability of an Irishman to own land within his own country, the failure of crops, particularly the sustaining potato, and a general sense of futility drove millions to the ports of Queenstown (now Cobh), Dublin, Belfast, and Liverpool.

They didn’t so much move as they were pushed to their new destination and new hope 4,000 mile to the west, in the United States. Most of them never thought they would return and most didn’t. Their voyage was long and difficult. I can remember asking my Grandmother Wogan several times if she would ever go back to Ireland, even pointing to the planes flying over our home in Chicago. In her mind, those planes didn’t go to Ireland.
—————

But where most Irish-American families look on Ireland as their distant origin or maybe just a nice place to visit, my family went in a different direction. In 1977, my sister Mary Ann and her husband Jim Heneghan made the decision to move their small family from a bungalow on New England Street in northwest Chicago back to Jim’s home in the Partry Mountains. His village was Tourmakedy in County Mayo, a dozen or so miles from Westport or Castlebar. They had several reasons for considering such a move, but chief among them was the health of Jim’s parents who were ageing and beginning to fail in health; most of his siblings were here in Chicago.

Most of my siblings were in some process of starting their own families, as was I, so I recall we took the news of the move with some surprise, thinking it temporary at best. I recall helping to load a large shipping box that was dropped by a crane truck in their back yard. We loaded the box with their furnishings and tied it all down for travel by ship. Then they packed their bags, scooped up their young son JJ and headed to the airport. At the last minute, Jim received news on his U.S. citizenship, which meant he would have to follow Mary Ann about a week later. So my sister took the step into this unknown new life with just herself and her son.

She had been to Ireland once before, following her high school graduation, when she vacationed there with her cousin, so the culture was not entirely new to her. What she found upon arrival in this fairly remote part of Ireland, was a badly neglected house and farm, and two people very much in need of assistance. She set about the business of turning things around. Tapping into her bottomless supply of humor and wit, she dubbed her new location “Shangri-La” from the movie about a magical, mythical kingdom.

And so she settled into her new life, adding three more children to her family, and was joined a year or so later by another sister, Terese. “Tassi” as named by our nickname-addicted mother, initially worked in a nearby shirt factory, and in time met Eddie, her future husband, and started her own family of six. Their two homes are about a mile apart from each other.

The Ireland of the late 1970’s would be very different from the Ireland today. When my brother Bill was killed in a car accident in 1979, we had to break the tragic news to my sisters at the local pub which had the only phone available. They knew that a call from America to the pub was bad news. Mary Ann, nicknamed “Minnie” by our mother, could not leave her young family and was herself expecting. Tassi, still single at that point, came home for the funeral. I remember at the time feeling that my sisters lived in a very distant land.

It was later that summer that we pooled our funds to buy our mother a plane ticket to stay a few months with her daughters. We didn’t know it then, but that trip would in great measure define the remaining 25 years of her life. Mom spent at least two to three months each year in Ireland, growing strong bonds with her children and grandchildren in both nations. She came to prefer the spring, the time of “lambing” when the baby lambs were born. She enjoyed the backbreaking work of pulling the sod from the bog, then critical for winter fuel. She brought with her bags and bags of delicacies not then available in Ireland, like Hershey’s Kisses and, most especially, Duncan Hines cake mixes. She was gregarious by nature, so she made friends all through the area in and around my sisters’ homes. She embraced her life in Ireland every bit as much as she embraced her life in Chicago.

And over the years, Chicago and County Mayo go closer and closer to each other. By the time my wife and I could manage to travel, Ireland was much closer and much more within financial reach. Consider that very first ticket we bought my mom in 1979. That $600 would have felt like $2,300 today, according to economic scales. And yet today you can fly there for roughly the same $600, some 40 years later.

———–
Without that long ago Easter Rising in 1916, no one today would consider making Ireland their new home. The country that emerged from “The Rising” on Easter Monday was a long time coming, but by the 1960’s could claim its own destiny, its own economy, and the tides of emigration slowly began to recede. And from 1979 until 2002, our mother’s annual trek to Ireland prompted us to renew the family ties with our own travel and we did so more than eight or ten times until her passing on Easter Monday, 2003. The distance between Ireland and America shrank from several weeks at sea to 7 or 8 hours in the air.
————–

Last June, I stood in front of the General Post Office in Dublin with my wife, my children and their spouses, and our five grandsons. The GPO is now both a functioning post office as well as a museum to the cost of Ireland’s freedom. My mind was filled with thoughts, memories, and emotions.

I thought of those fifteen martyrs to their cause. I thought of my sister Minnie’s late father-in-law, James Heneghan, Sr., an Irish rebel who fought in County Mayo. I recalled my sister describing how she and the women of the village prepared his body for the funeral at his death years later. I thought how different that experience must have been for her, growing up in Chicago. I thought of my mother’s many visits that slowly closed the distance between the two countries. I thought of the sacrifices and hardship that went into forming an Ireland where Americans would return and make their lives and raise their families.
Mostly, I felt a quiet pride and a sense of being blessed in being there with our little band of twelve.

My grandsons took their first “crossing” in stride, not at all impressed by the miracle of flight, but very much into the history of this new city. A few days later, when we reached my sisters’ farms, they dove out of the cars and ran headlong into the fields to see the lambs and bullocks up close. In that moment the distance between the two countries seemed to disappear altogether.

I guess I will always be a little haunted by Easter Mondays, but it’s a good thing to be a little haunted at times.

Chicago Fire

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

The little 8 inch square red brick stone at my feet had etched into it the words:

“2nd Deputy Fire Marshal Paul H. Conners

October 8th, 1954”

The red brick stone was one of a few hundred in a seldom visited memorial to fallen Chicago firefighters and paramedics just south of McCormick Place, and really only accessible by bike or footpath along the lakefront. The stones are loosely arranged by date and the more recent names I remembered from newspaper accounts or in a few cases because I actually knew them once. Or they were part of my neighborhood or perhaps because members of my family had attended a benefit for their families.

But this stone touched something in my memory. A story my mother told me because my father, himself a firefighter, almost never told fire stories. At least not to his children. And he had been at some of the more famous blazes in Chicago history: the LaSalle Hotel fire, which claimed 61 lives, the Our Lady of Angels fire, which claimed 95 lives (92 of them children), and the Mickleberry Plant fire the same year he died, which claimed 4 firemen and injured scores more. That doesn’t even begin to include the countless fires that had no names, only addresses and memories that disturbed their sleep.

Actually, he did confide one to me, but it was more of an observation than a story. He had been driving the Chaplain, Msgr. William Gorman to a big apartment fire. The good monsignor, not a line officer, had no problems issuing orders to fireman on the scene, apparently, and he told my dad to check around the back of the building for signs of fire. The back of the four story building was a solid brick wall and my dad said he started down the alley, seeing no signs. He told me he had a bad feeling about it, a premonition perhaps, and he stopped and turned to quickly exit the alley on a dead run. The entire wall collapsed, a single brick near enough to knock his helmet off, smashing the bronze eagle that adorned the old leather helmets. I have that helmet, sans eagle, today.

This story, however, did not involve my dad, but his close friend Thomas ”Scotty” McNaughton. I met Scotty once a month, along with my brothers, when my dad drove us down to the old Fire Department Drill School, which stood where the Jane Byrne Interchange now stands. Scotty had been injured in a fire years before and had been given the duty of night watchman at the Drill School until he could take his pension. Scotty was also a barber on the side, and I suspect a better firefighter than a barber. He never asked you what kind of haircut you wanted because he only knew one kind. We sported chopped hairdos for quite a few years, but with eight kids, you cut your expenses where you can.

The old man would sing out something that sounded like ”Oat, Laddie” to let Scottie knew we were there. He was always glad to see us and he talked the whole time to my dad while he butchered our hair. I guess he appreciated the break in the watchman monotony.

——————–

The death of a high ranking fire official would be front page news today. The newspaper account of Chief Conners’ death, however, ran deep in the paper, on page 37 of the Tribune on October 9th, 1954. A single column with a photo, it ran next to ads for Elgin watches and some classified ads. He died heroically, at age 60, after being on the job for 36 years at a fire he didn’t even need to be at. He had heard the calls over the radio and directed his driver to take him there.

The fire on October 8th was at the Streamline Cafeteria, 3648 Roosevelt. The restaurant was closed in observance of a Jewish holiday, so the fire had hours to build inside unnoticed. On the fourth floor, Chief Conners felt the floor giving way. He yelled at the three nearby firemen to get away. One of them, Scotty McNaughton, then 37, of Engine 95 (also my dad’s engine, but not his day to work) told the reporters that “Conners yelled get out quick and then he disappeared.” Three fireman, including Scotty, clutched hoses and were later pulled to safety, though injured. They found the Chief’s body after three pumpers drained the water from the basement some four hours later. That was Scotty’s last day as a working fireman due to his injuries. According to my mother, Scotty followed the pipes in the basement to get to safety, something he had learned in the coal mines of Scotland.

The last time I saw Scotty was many years later when he was retired and working at Brookfield Zoo. He was carrying buckets of water for the elephants that day and I don’t think he knew me.

—————-

We stood, feeling awkward and a bit uncomfortable, in the Council Chambers of City Hall, as my son in law, Kevin Durkin, and another fireman/paramedic were given citations for bravery. They were returning from an ambulance run one night and saw an apartment building on fire. Bailing out of their rig, they banged on doors to awaken and alert the occupants, all of whom escaped. I believe a policeman on the scene wrote it up and they were decorated for saving so many lives.

We are not used to being in the public glare and standing in and among people you see on television can be disconcerting. We endured, however, had our pictures taken with Kevin, who considered the whole event needless and way over the top, the mayor, some alderman types and Fire Department brass. It was, looking back, a proud family moment. I couldn’t help but think of the family link of fire service going back all of those years.

————–

As I left the memorial on the lakefront, two thoughts occurred to me. The first was the sheer number of stones engraved with the names of the fallen; more than a hundred. The second was the number of blank stones still waiting to be etched. Each one will someday mark the loss of a man or woman sworn to protect us and I pray that those stones will be etched as slowly as possible. But I know someday they will all be filled and they will need to add more stones after that.

They take risks every day and do their jobs and, like my father or Scotty or Kevin, mostly keep the scary stuff to themselves, but they know the danger is out there. There is honor in all honest work, but somehow those little red stones speak to an honor of a higher order.

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.

 

“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.

 

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.

 

 

 

“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.

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.

 

 

 

 

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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1LT Gilbert J. Finn

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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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

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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.