Category: Observations and other stories

A Lonely Hero says Goodbye

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

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

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

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

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

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

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

———-

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

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

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

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

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

——————

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——–

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

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

Major General George L. Mabry

“Them Changes”

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

-a song by Buddy Miles from 1976.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——————

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

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

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

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———-

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

———

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Save

Joints

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

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

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

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

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

 

 

——————

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——————

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

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Famine Walls

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tattoos

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of Ice Cream and Miracles

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

salk
Dr. Jonas Salk

Five Little Life Lessons

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

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

1 – First Important Lesson – Cleaning Lady.

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

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

  1. – Second Important Lesson – Pickup in the Rain

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

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

Sincerely, Mrs. Nat King Cole.

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

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

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

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

Every obstacle presents an opportunity to improve our condition.

5 – Fifth Important Lesson – Giving When it Counts…

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

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

Rags and Old Iron: A Story of Attitude Adjustment

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

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

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

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

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

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

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

O young Lochinvar is come out of the west,

Through all the wide Border his steed was the best;

And save his good broadsword he weapons had none,

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

So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,

There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——————

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

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

Send Lawyers, Guns and Money

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

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

-the late, great songwriter Warren Zevon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————

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

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

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

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Close to Death…a reflection on losses

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

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

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

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

———

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

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

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

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

——-

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

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

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

Dinner with a Holy Man.

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And you too, Eminence,” I said.

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

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