Memories of a Southside Chicago Catholic Girlhood
by Mary Catherine Wright Lyons, Fort Collins, Colo. 2011
The fuzzy black-and-white photograph shows my parents ducking rice as they leave Saint Dorothy’s Church on
Somehow the photographer on that Thanksgiving Day in 1935 managed to shoot them from above, surrounded by a smiling throng. Jack and Gen Wright will be married for 48 years and have eight children. He is just under 30, handsome and grinning. She is barely 28, slim and gorgeous in white pane velvet with Juliet cap and sheer veil. In the formal wedding portrait my father wears a smirk and spats with his formal attire. My mother’s two sisters look pleasant. My mother herself looks doleful. Her other attendant, Josephine McManus, who was later murdered by one of her grade school students, is grinning. My father’s ushers are his friends Scotty and Jimmy Conway, the Newberry librarian, and his brother Bud and brother-in-law Phil, on the way to becoming a successful attorney.
I’m the firstborn, nine months and ten days later, at
The Depression was winding down. Jack had a good job as a patrolman in the Chicago Police Department. He had lied about his age to get the job. It helped that his future father-in-law was a
Jack was able to buy a new red Nash auto in which they drove from
My first memories are fear of being closed up in the closet with the Murphy bed if Mom failed to notice me when she made the bed. I also remember watching fish in an aquarium at Mrs. O’Hallaran’s house, where I was babysat while Mom worked at
My mother left me alone in the apartment at six months so she could attend Mass with a friend. She locked herself out and had to be let in by the building’s superintendent. At that time it was considered necessary to “air” your baby daily, no matter the weather. I was a compulsive thumb-sucker so wore a leather thumb guard. Alone in my buggy three stories down in 20 degree weather, I was discovered by a passing woman. She rang all the doorbells to find out whose baby was out “with a thumb frozen in the cold.”
One night when I was about two Dad planned to join his buddies for drinks and poker. Mom objected and a loud argument ensued. When he left our third-floor apartment, she opened the window and hurled my toy refrigerator out, attempting to make him change his mind. Luckily, she missed him. I missed the refrigerator years later.
In a photo I’m sitting, propped up by a large pillow in my high chair, recovering from pneumonia at six months. My mother claimed that at 11 months I answered the door to our apartment and ushered in her women guests to an afternoon party, greeting them by name. I don’t recall this, although I recall at about two years being carried sobbing from the Rhodes Theater during a showing of Snow White when the terrifying witch appeared.
Another early memory is of being at a Chicago-area race track with my parents, where I picked up discarded tickets from lost bets. When I returned home, I asked if any of these pastel cards were “winners,” but none were, of course.
When I was three my sister, Julie, was born and we moved to 7938 Eberhart, where we lived on the first floor of a red brick three-bedroom two-flat. Dad’s older brother Joe, who had preceded him in the Chicago Police Department, had loaned them the down payment.
My mother’s sister Eileen and her
I was the oldest. Then came Marty Sheahan, my cousin upstairs, the oldest Sheahan cousin. Then cousin Eileen, followed by my sister, Julie, and brother Tom. Girls, who started out ahead as the older children in the Wright/Sheahan pile-up, soon became out-numbered by little brothers four to twelve. What good were younger brothers? They had no interesting friends and were a terrible handicap to have around while talking to eligible neighborhood boyfriends.
As the eldest, I had to break my parents in to receive reasonable privileges while the younger ones simply reaped my hard-pleaded-for benefits such as later bedtimes and curfews.
My sister, Julie, wasn’t all bad, although she had annoying habits such as practicing her singing at 2:00 a.m. in the double bed we later shared and needing special attention for her waist-length hair braiding. It’s ironic that now she wears her hair short while for 45 years mine was longer. We had many squabbles over “property lines” when we occupied the front bedroom after the war. When we were both old enough to read, Julie and I had a “dark club” that featured reading by flashlight under the covers after bedtime. Sometimes she wasn’t in the mood for Nancy Drew or Little Women and sulked when I switched on the flashlight.
The Sheahan family would increase to nine children, seven boys and two girls. The Wrights would be seven—five boys and two girls. I was the oldest of the 16 who survived. The fourth Wright, Delores, born on D-Day, died after two days, from kidney failure. My father agonized about whether to allow her body to be used for research, but finally consented. My father thought he would have three girls and a boy, but five time he heard the doctor pronounce, “It’s a boy, Mr. Wright.”
After a disastrous first Easter when we kids received a dozen baby chicks, the families cemented the small backyard between the back porch and the garage, making it possible to roller-skate or hang laundry there on dry days.
Each flat had three bedrooms, living and dining rooms, a single bath, and a screened back porch, usable only in the warm weather. Together, the two flats accommodated 21 of us with two bathrooms. Sometimes my job was to polish the brass plate on the front door.
Our front bedroom was often occupied by a soldier on leave from World War II or relatives and children, such as my aunt Kay Ryan and her baby girls, between war-disrupted households.
My dad or his friend Jim Eager, home on army leave, would take me on walks through our neighborhood alleys, picking up metal washers and other useful items.
Our neighborhood consisted of many Irish American families as well as Italians and Austrians who had fled Hitler and a few Swedes and Poles. Its safety was shattered when Williams Heirens murdered six-year-old Suzanne Degnan and stuffed her in a sewer near us. I was nine when I went alone to look at the innocent-seeming manhole. Everything in the surroundings seemed surprisingly ordinary (no crime scene tape in those days).
I went to kindergarten intermittently at two local public schools—
“No, but I’m not allowed to cross busy streets alone.” Later, Johnny and Bill (Beadzo) often ventured away together on adventures, got lost, and were returned home to my distraught mother by the police.
Kindergarten consisted mainly of boring naps on a little rug we furnished from home. Ruggles had a wonderful large dollhouse that we never were allowed to play in. One day a photographer came to get a story. The dollhouse was magically available to us as long as the photographer was in the classroom.
Seventy-ninth Street held wonders such as Bert Vest’s, a restaurant with addictive French fries and a kind of proto-TV that showed movie-type shorts, Murph’s milk store, the Chinese takeout with a pond in the back garden, the Rhodes movie theater, and an old-fashioned drugstore on one corner where you could sit at the counter and have a Coke served to you for a nickel (for six cents you could get a cherry or lemon Coke). At Mr. Levine’s quality shoe store you could see your toes wiggle in his x-ray machine. Clerihan’s Tavern was owned by a relative and Thompson’s florist belonged to the Thompsons, who had Bing and Cookie, the twins with whom I later went to Saint Dorothy’s school.
My cousin Marty Sheahan from upstairs was my first playmate. One day we were left alone to play and I took a pair of scissors and cut off his curly brown hair and chopped my velvet dress. It was years before I got another scissors. Then I cut a neighbor’s blonde curls because everyone said, “I wish I had those curls.”
My parents were avid newspaper readers. We followed World War II in the Tribune, which we had delivered every day despite its right-wing stances—a tradition my mother continued until she died at 90. Because of his vital police job and growing family, my father was exempt from the armed services. I had several uncles in the service. Uncle Buddy, Dad’s youngest brother, was the most glamorous because he was in the Air Force in
Sundays we got every big newspaper in
“Not me!” Alas, it was true and terrifying, to think I would look like that after I died.
A souvenir from World War II that I found on the sidewalk and brought home was a “jewel”-encrusted lady’s powder compact embossed with a Nazi swastika. I also found a sharpened fencing foil; both were confiscated by my father.
My early movie phobia, based on Snow White, was confirmed at six when I went to a war movie at the
I replied, “It had to be if they took a picture of it.”
Later I became a big movie fan. Some of my favorites were Lassie Come Home and National Velvet. After we saw The Unfinished Dance with Margaret O’Brien I told my sister and cousin Eileen, “Lie back and dream, girls.”
On Saturday mornings we went to 25 cartoon shows for 25 cents and sometimes later to double features in the afternoon for fourteen cents. I didn’t like cowboy movies (except Shane) but loved Bambi.
I grew up surrounded by great aunts and uncles and cousins. My maternal grandmother, Annie Sexton Ryan, had emigrated from
“That’s God, and they killed him and your mother was the worst one!”
Annie (known as Nance) had come by steerage from
Annie’s husband, Mike, was a formidable police lieutenant. He was 6’4”, the youngest of seven children who had come from
The ocean crossings of my four grandparents must have been perilous, but I can only imagine the frightened, lonely thoughts that spurred them—with gratitude for my existence. They never got over their indignation at the unwelcoming treatment and prejudice they found when they arrived in
Grandma Ryan was always ready for a card game of 45, hearts, or poker. She was an excellent cook of plain, hearty fare—soups and brown biscuits. Once I saw her eat an entire meal of onions. She made a memorable roast goose with potato stuffing. Her house at 78th and
Her house was a typical brick bungalow. It featured a backyard of grass, trees, and flowers, unlike the bare cement at our house. A picnic at Grandma’s on “Aunt Maggie’s blanket” featured “thumb juice,” an iced tea concoction with lemon, sugar, and ginger ale. My father named it because he claimed to have seen Grandma’s thumb inserted. When you walked over to her house, you were treated royally.
My father’s mother, Kate Beehan, Grandma Wright, had been widowed for many years when I was born. She was affable and unflappable. Her husband had been hit by a trolley car and was unable to work for years before he died. They, too, had emigrated from
Grandma Wright, who was outwardly the mildest of women, was addicted to lurid crime magazines. I recall sitting in the corner of her living room bungalow at 55th and
One of our neighborhood residents was Roy Saint Aubin, whom we referred to as a midget. When asked to define a midget I said, “He’s a man who looks like a boy, but he has money in his pockets.”
Outdoors, we played hide and seek, kick the can, doggie, who’s got your bone?, marbles, softball, jump rope, roly-poly, red rover, tag, hopscotch, and roller-skating in the neighborhood. With daring and enthusiasm, we climbed high on neighborhood building projects.
The Catholic school kids generally stuck together. We felt superior to public school kids because we started school in the fall a day after they began the day after Labor Day.
Church and School
Saint Dorothy’s Church and School were big factors in our family lives. They were only a block and a half away across
My first day of school was traumatic. My mother was busy with my younger siblings and my father was at work, so I was sent off alone to school. I knew where it was, but I never anticipated going alone to the huge gymnasium in which all the other six-year-olds gathered with their parents. I had no knowledge of alphabetical order. I knew my address but didn’t realize my name, Wright, was at the very end of the roll call.
As the Argentos through Brady, Corcoran, and on to Trail names were called, I began to worry that I wasn’t on the list. Finally, seeing my distress, Mrs. Corcoran, mother of Annette, came to my rescue. When she heard my name was Wright, she told me that I would be the last one to be called. I became the last one in the last row of most grade school classrooms. We were seated alphabetically in rooms of about 55 kids.
In first grade I didn’t realize that you were supposed to be able to make out what was written on the blackboard in the front of the classroom and I didn’t know how to read yet, but once I did and got glasses, all became clear. What a revelation! You were supposed to recognize people across the street. You were meant to distinguish separate leaves on trees. Someone meanly asked me whether I was sorry to need glasses, to be “four-eyes.” On the contrary, it was wonderful to be able to see. I rejoiced in my newly acquired sight. Then I didn’t mind being in the last seat in the last row.
After first grade, I believed I knew everything—reading and adding and subtracting. What was the point of continuing to attend school?
The nuns, of course, had no assistants. Some of them inflicted serious corporal punishment on the unruly boys. I recall an instance when a boy had to pound his hands against the blackboard until he broke a hole in it. Others had to suffer the humiliation of staying after school.
As Catholic school students, we were obliged to wear uniforms, which we hated, starting October 1. Before then, we could wear our own dresses or skirts and blouses (no trousers were ever allowed; jeans were unheard of). My mother and I shopped at local shops for a few ugly outfits for the first three weeks. For girls, uniforms were a white cotton short-sleeved blouse and a dark blue cotton jumper with SDS on the top pocket for “
We always attended Mass on Sundays, seated with our classmates at the children’s Mass, and sang hymns we had learned during the school week. A major illness was the only excuse for missing Mass on a Sunday or Holy Day of Obligation.
After school, at home I was required to clean the single bathroom (for nine people) before I could go out to play, saddled with one of my younger brothers. I wasn’t always kind to them. I occasionally pushed their stroller hard and let it fly down the street recklessly.
In the ceiling in the kids’ back bedroom was a round blue glowing lamp my father had installed to ward off illness. Obviously it didn’t work, for we had all the usual childhood illnesses anyway—three kinds of measles, chicken pox, mumps (despite a trial vaccination that left me with a sore leg for weeks), sore throats, strep, colds, etc. We slept all night with the “germicidal lamp” on above our beds. We also were subjected to a nightly dose of cod liver oil, which we dreaded as it left a horrible aftertaste for the whole night. But once in a while my father told a bedtime story, which was a treat. We played “murder in the blue room,” which involved lights out and trying to determine the murderer. A rule involved hopping from bed to bed without ever touching the floor.
Neighbors
One advantage of growing up in a
I was shocked by the punishment her parents meted out. She had to take a branch from the mulberry tree in their front yard, strip the leaves, and bring it in to be beaten with. (My punishment of “sitting on a chair and not reading” was mild in comparison.) The older Walshes were also great teasers: When I bemoaned the fact that my feet were getting large, they informed me that my feet would definitely shrink as I got older to more closely resemble my mother’s size six and a half. They’ve gotten quite a bit larger—now size nine and a half or ten.
Cleta Walsh was one of our babysitters. One night I asked her what she was eating. She said, “A sweet roll.” Then I asked her if I could have some of what she had. By then she was washing her hands so she came in and put the bar of soap in my mouth.
When I called for Ann I called loudly, “Oh Ann, come on out and play with me.”
The Rosenbaums lived on the second floor of the three-flat next door. Their marriage was a case of “Abbie’s Irish Rose.” Kay was a good friend with whom I spent many an hour after school listening to radio serials, cutting out paper dolls, and designing dresses for them. She had an older brother who was the terror of the neighborhood. He told me there was no Santa Claus; and when I cried on my birthday, he chanted, “When you cry on your birthday, you cry all year long.” Dickie also was famous because when he got braces, he ripped them out and threw them in the bushes. I decided to teach him a lesson so I took a blackjack and crouched by our back door, ready to hit him when he came over. I was discovered and my weapon was confiscated.
Other neighbors were the Shenks (he was a high school principal with two grown daughters). When they complained about our large loud parties and threatened to call the police we replied, “We are the police.”
Edwee (Edward) Ryan lived down the street. His mother often had treats for us. Once she wouldn’t let us in because she claimed to not have her girdle on. So we yelled, “Aunt Mae, put your girdle on and let us in.” (Later, Edwee offered to carry my drugstore package home for me, but embarrassingly it was Kotex for my mother.)
The Bedwells, on the corner, were public school kids so we had little to do with them. One day Brent Bedwell was taunting my sister, Julie, so she picked up a clump of dirt and hurled it down the block at him. By a wonderful chance, it landed in his open mouth.
Next door lived the Gettys. Mr. Getty trained hundreds of homing pigeons for the Army in his garage so we always had them in our backyard, but I never succeeded in catching one. His yard consisted of carefully manicured grass and flowers. His son Jimmy, who did amazing handstands on their lawn, was later famous for being the court-appointed lawyer for Richard Speck, the murderer of 13 nurses.
I had two pet ducks, one of which I accidentally dropped on the cement floor, regrettably from the high tavern bar in our basement. He limped ever after. The duck was later adopted by Mr. Getty. Imagine my horror when I peeped in his basement window to see him slaughtering my pet for his dinner.
Another pet was a white rabbit, who later turned out to be rather dull. For a short while we had a dog, jointly owned by the Sheahans. Its untimely end occurred after he was dropped from the second-floor back porch by Julie, who wanted to discover whether he would land on his feet as cats were rumored to do.
I always tried to get stray dogs to follow me home, but they were always claimed by their owners.
Followed
One night a man followed me home. I managed to get into the house and lock the door before he caught me. But then he appeared at the back door, peering through the window. As we were on a telephone party line with the Sheahans, I picked up the phone. Uncle Joe came dashing down and ran through the back alley (with his .38 police revolver), but the creep got away.
Babysitting
Besides babysitting for my six younger siblings (once when changing my very young baby brother, John, he rolled off my parents’ bed! Guilt!), I sat for many neighbors’ and relatives’ children, beginning when I was 10 years old. It was essentially a boring job at night if the kids were already in bed asleep. If they needed to be put to bed, it was a different story. (Years later my aunt Kay chastised me for not cleaning the house after I got five of her daughters put down for the night.) The usual pay was fifty cents an hour, or two dollars for the whole evening. I did my homework and read whatever magazines were available (no TV then).
Uncle Tim and Aunt Mary had only Timmy, who was usually asleep when I arrived. They subscribed to The New Yorker and other magazines I found fascinating. They left cold cuts for sandwiches for me, an unusual treat. The problem with their apartment was that it was on the second floor of the busy corner of 79th and
Across the alley from us on
Also behind us lived Rabbi Melvin Rush and his wife and kids. They provided an endless supply of pistachio nuts but were considered cheapskates for paying only 35 cents an hour. (I have never been able to look at a pistachio since then.) To get revenge for being underpaid, my sister, Julie, called our local bakery and ordered two large birthday cakes to be delivered to the Rabbi, inscribed “Happy Birthday, Melvin.” The order taker at the bakery had asked for a telephone number and Julie unfortunately gave ours. The rabbi refused the cakes (it wasn’t even his birthday) and the bakery called my mother. Julie had to confess. Mom had the bakery remove the birthday message and send both cakes to the parish convent for the nuns to enjoy. Julie had to pay out of her babysitting money.
Babysitting for my aunt and uncle, Frank and Anna Mae Ryan, was another story. Frank was a bookie (a natural activity for the son of Irish horse race-loving immigrants). Phone callers would try to arrange bets with me while I babysat and would give up in disgust. (It was a tricky occupation for Frank with a father and two brothers who were
Babysitting at their apartment, I first experimented with cigarettes at 15. I smoked Pall Malls (“Refreshing—and They Are Mild”). With the second floor window open to disperse the smoke, I hacked away with burning lungs until, unfortunately, I got used to smoking—a habit that lasted ‘til I was 28 and pregnant, when I smoked two (20-per-package) packs of Lucky Strikes daily. I quit cold turkey for good at the hospital.
We smoked on our walks from
Alleys
Alleys were play places for Red Rover or Kick the
We collected newspapers and gum wrappers, cans, and tin for the World War II effort. Classes at school competed so see which grades could bring in the most of these desirable objects.
Building sites were great play places. Alone, I climbed on the inner frames of two- and three-story apartment buildings. Luckily, I never fell. Not so when biking or roller skating.
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Saint Patrick’s Day was a major celebration at school. We sang many Irish American songs, such as “All Praise to Saint Patrick,” “It’s a Great Day for the Irish,” and “The Same old Shillelagh.” The words to that song included: “Many’s the time he used it on me to make me understand,” which I now realize was outrageous. But I was never hit—ever in my life—by my parents or anyone else.
Triumph
Smoking
Smoking was the ultimate act of parental defiance for me. My mother had been a smoker when she married and was unable to quit. (To my father, smoking was fine for him but was “unladylike.”) When I was about six, he tried to turn me into an informer on my mother’s habit, and I was appalled. It seemed so sophisticated and glamorous in the movies. So I was hooked—up to two packages of Lucky Strikes (unfiltered, of course) a day until I was 28. At that time the first surgeon general’s warnings were published (a far cry from “More doctors recommend
Jump Rope Chants
Whenever three or more girls got a length of clothesline, we jump-roped. We had some cruel chats:
Fatty, fatty, two by four
Couldn’t get through the bathroom door
So he did it on the floor.
(This was not directed at any particular kid, but was a general chant. Actually, there were rarely any obese kids around. I can only recall one in a Saint Dorothy’s school class.)
And some outrageous ones:
Fudge, fudge
Call the judge
Momma’s got a brand-new baby.
(It’s not a boy, it’s not a girl
It’s just a brand-new baby.)
Open the refrigerator
Send it up the elevator
First floor—miss
Second floor—miss
Third floor—kick it out the door
Momma doesn’t want the baby anymore
Some chants were innocuous:
Down in the valley where the green grass grows
There sits (name of some girl) as sweet as a rose.
Along came (name of a boy or “crush”) and kissed her on the cheek.
How many kisses did she receive?
Then the jumper would jump fasties—double-time jumping—to determine how many kisses she would get (until she missed). Then the jumper took a turn on one end of the rope, turning for the girl she replaced.
Another, more complex chant needed a fourth person Two girls jumped simultaneously from both ends, facing each other and chanting:
Changing bedrooms one by one (and passed each other in the middle to wind up at the opposite ends). Then two more jumped in and the chant was,
Changing bedrooms two by two.” We never got to three by three. (Maybe that chant was really not so innocuous.)
Songs
The worms crawl in
The worms crawl out
The worms crawl into the dead man’s snout.
The puss comes out like whipping cream
And me without a spoon.
We live for you
We die for you
The National Embalming School
We do our best
To give you rest
The National Embalming School
And when you die and go to sleep
We wrap you in
A great big sheet
And drop you down
‘Bout six feet deep
The National Embalming School
In the south of
Where they do the koochie dance
And the dance they do is enough to kill a Jew
And the Jew they kill is enough to fry a snake
And the snake they fry is enough to tell a lie
And they lie they tell is enough to go to hell.
Apparently saying “hell” was worse than killing a Jew, but we never thought about it. Anti-Semitism was never conscious. We knew Jews and they were just like everyone else who wasn’t Catholic. Some, like Kay Rosenbaum, were best friends.
Irreverent Joke
When accused of saying, “Jesus Christ, God Almighty,” we pretended it was “Cheese and crackers got all muddy.”
Teeth
I was fascinated by elevators and escalators. At 79th and
Once I reached Dr. Starshak’s office, it was no longer fun. He rarely used Novocain or washed his hands after puffing on a cigar or using the phone, while you sat rigid with fear. The only thing that got me through was knowing that he would want to stop for lunch. Years later, on my last visit, he spent years one day attempting a root canal. Finally he announced that he would try using the dreaded “German instruments.” (My thoughts froze at Holocaust tortures.) Later dentists have admired his work, but I suspect they’re all trained to do that.
Braces—now, that was another torture chamber instance. I had and still have a serious overbite and large front teeth. From ages thirteen through seventeen I was subjected to primitive orthodontia involving cemented-in wires, rubber bands, and ugly retainers. No extractions were involved, but the orthodontist was cheap—$200 for the whole horrible shebang—and nearby. (I envied Dickie Rosenbaum, who had ripped out his braces and thrown them away on the first day.) After my braces came off (they didn’t do me any good), I wore the painful green turtle-back-resembling retainer for years.
Racism
The presence of a black person in our neighborhood who wasn’t a coal man or servant was a cause for suspicion. This is a racist song taught by the nuns:
Stay in Your Own Backyard
Curly-headed Pickaninny
Coming home so late
Crying cause his little heart is sore
All of them white folks playin’ round with skin so white and fair
None of them with him will ever play
His mother advised him to “stay in your own back yard.”
This was in response to “white flight” from our neighborhood—a phenomenon that still exists in
Slogans suggested, “They’ll never cross
Many in my family were blatantly racist at that time, but it never took with me. I argued fiercely with my uncle Joe from upstairs as to whether blacks had souls, as we did. He denied it just as fiercely.
When asked to do an unpleasant job, we asked, “Who was your nigger last year?”
The only black person I knew at all was Lorraine Montgomery, a pleasant black lady who took care of us while my mother worked at
Language
Our language at home was fairly circumspect. I never heard my father say “shit” or “fuck.” In fact, I had no idea what “fuck” meant when I heard it later, probably as a teenager. Occasionally when a crisis occurred, my mother would say, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” or “Holy Mother of God,” but never “Goddamn.” This must have been an Irish influence. When one of my brothers did something outrageous, my mother would say, “The devil’s on your hump. Get the devil off your hump.”
My grandmothers used Irish expressions such as “Yerra Musha” or “Amidan” (Idiot). To her three daughters, Grandma Ryan said, about the clothes she bought for them, “Let ye wear them to and fro.” Regarding housework she said, “It’ll be after you (meaning, I think, there’ll always be housework, but not always you.) Grandma Wright said, “Put it on your head and drink it,” meaning “Drink it out of the bowl.” When asked how she was, she invariably said, “I’m growing down like a cow’s tail.” To my father she said, “That’s family life, Johnny,” as he despaired of trying to clothe and feed seven hungry growing children.
Vaccinations
Once a year the whole
My Most Memorable Vacation
For some unknown reason, one summer I had a chance to stay for a week at my aunt and uncle Joe and Josephine Wright’s summer home in
The cottage stood above a sloping lawn leading directly down to the lake. A perfectly good beach was nearby, but I determined to clear the lake’s shoreline below the cottage to create a closer swimming spot. I waded in and began clearing what seemed like a ton of weeds and other debris but finally gave up, defeated by the scope of my project. I emerged from the lake, legs covered with leeches.
My First “Dirty” Book
Among my ambitions was to read all the books in the Chatham Branch of the library. When I exhausted the children’s section—lots of fairly tales but none of the coveted Nancy Drews (apparently considered unsuitable by 1940s librarians), I branched into the adult section. One of my adult choices was The White Peacock by D. H. Lawrence. After a few chapters, I decided it was a bit advanced for my sexually innocent eyes. When I was eleven, I read Gone with the Wind, which my parents had purchased (an unusual event for them). I didn’t know anything about “birthing babies,” either.
We always had the Readers Digest (which my father had a lifetime subscription for; he had paid $100), the Saturday Evening Post, and various Catholic magazines such as the Catholic Messenger and the Chicago Catholic paper, The New World. Of course, we had the Daily Tribune and the evening Daily News. But Sunday was the big day for reading the papers—the Sun, Times (later combined), Herald Tribune, and Chicago Tribune. Before I could read I latched on to the “funnies”—Teenie Weenies, Dick Tracy, Smiling Jack, Little Orphan Annie, Katzenjammer Kids, etc.
Adventures at the Rhodes Theater
Once I recovered from my early movie trauma, I became an avid movie-goer, often required to bring along the oldest of my siblings, Julie and Tom, to a 25-cartoon show on Saturday morning. We were allowed a nickel each for candy or popcorn. Tom claims to this day that Julie and I made him give his nickel to the Red Cross collection during intermission.
One Easter Saturday, after we broke our Lenten non-movie-going forty days, we set off for the
You could bring your own goodies into movies in those days and not need to pay outrageous prices in the theater—no signs reading “No Outside Food Allowed.” Once a rumor spread that the candy store across the street had received a supply of bubble gum. We stood in a long line for 1¢ pieces of Double Bubble (severely rationed). Movie popcorn was always a treat. We sat in the balcony at the
It was a challenge to break into the
Once, we had two fake dollar bills and were going to the
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One of the hardest things I ever had to do—and I recall getting through it when I have some difficult duty to perform as an adult—was going alone to the convent at Saint Dorothy’s and asking for the scholarship to Mercy High School. The convent was a formidable place and I had never been inside before.
I had always been in competition for the “smartest girl” with Joan Gregg (although we were good friends) and she might have had a better chance for the scholarship. (The smartest boy, hands down, was Kenny Mormon, but Mercy was for girls only, so he was no competition. The three of us had once appeared together on a radio quiz show.) My nervousness at the thought of boldly asking for the scholarship—it covered $70 a year of the annual $100 tuition—was acute. Seventy dollars was a major amount on a policeman’s salary. But the nun in charge consulted some record and awarded me the scholarship. What a relief! Ever since, when I have something hard to do, I think, “I managed that trip to the convent as a thirteen-year-old; I can do this. It’s not as hard.”
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We often drove to my grandmother Wright’s bungalow on
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We had a paper boy who delivered the daily papers on Eberhart. He was harassed by my brothers and the Sheahan boys. Once he yelled, “You are the essence of poverty and the epitome of swine.” We thought it quite clever of him and no one resented the insult.
Nicknames
We all had family nicknames. I unfortunately was Mare Dare Dirdle, now Derd. Julie was Jul-Queen or JuJuBee. Tom was Tommusibus (later Topper). Bill was Beadzo. Jack (Johnny) was Booful Teeta (for beautiful creature). Robert was and is Bo, and Philip was Phinny or Phim baby (now Felix). Martin Sheahan was nicknamed Rubberlegs by my father and James Sheahan was so thin he was named Skinny, which he goes by to this day. John Sheahan was and still is Head, and Pat Sheahan is now “Governor,” as he looks like Illinois Governor Pat Quinn. Thomas Sheehan is Tucker.
Halloween Part I
Even as a three-year-old, I knew Halloween was a big deal for kids, so I prevailed on my father to take me out on that night. What I didn’t know was how scary it would be. Ghosts, witches, and goblins menaced us and shouted, “Boo!” At six feet tall and 180 pounds, my father was not intimidated. We walked down dark streets. Finally, unable to enjoy anything, I said, “I’m willing to go home now.” (Later, when I discovered the spoils of trick-or-treating, it was a revelation.)
Halloween Part II
Trick-or-treating was a very big deal in 1940s and 1950s
Our costumes were never store-bought. We would shamelessly blacken our faces to be a tramp or cut holes in a ghost sheet. I was never a successful princess or other glamorous character. We supplied ourselves with pins to stick in doorbells of houses where the occupants pretended to be away, and candles to wax their windows or their cars. I guess we were fairly ruthless and unafraid of dark alleys and deserted stairways.
Food
My mother always fixed us breakfast before school, usually oatmeal or Cream of Wheat and occasionally a boiled egg. We listened to the radio while we ate, often to Two-Ton Baker, the Music Maker. He played piano and sang songs like “The Green Grass Grew All Around,” or “Today Is Monday. . . .”
We came home for lunch; sometimes bologna sandwiches. Friday’s lunch fare was always meatless, usually horrible
My mother did all the cooking. Shelling peas or stringing green beans was all I did. Her specialty was Irish chop suey, which featured beef, pork and veal stew meat and Chinese sprouts and molasses. It had no connection with
At school they offered milk every day. White milk was 1 cent, but more desirable was chocolate milk. But that was 15 cents a week, so we never had it.
Jell-O was the inevitable dessert, until we later switched to Neapolitan ice cream, precisely cut into even portions, or had the rare treat of apple slices from Lambrechts’ bakery.
Sunday dinner was baked or fried chicken or roast beef, often with a chocolate devil’s food cake my mother had baked. If the cake fell, it was sometimes propped up with a knife or other cutlery.
On rare occasions, we had takeout Chinese from the restaurant on
The first meal I cooked, suggested by a Calling All Girls magazine, was a slit hotdog filled with Velveeta, wrapped in bacon, secured by a toothpick and broiled. The second was probably canned corned beef, heated with mustard. The third was pork chops I fixed for the family when my mother was in the hospital. They were so leathery that, to my chagrin, my father got up from the table to go out for an edible meal.
Gravy was a big feature in our meals. The “Ryans discuss gravy from meals they had twenty years ago,” was a family saying.
Christmas
Christmas was always a very big occasion for our family, although there wasn’t much money for presents. I always felt very underprivileged when other kids described their loot. Mine fell far short of my hopes. For example, I badly wanted figure skates but received hockey skates instead. I received a new pajama outfit for a doll I no longer played with instead of a glamorous story-book doll. I got
After Dickie Rosenbaum next door told me when I was six that my parents were Santa, I diligently searched for the hidden presents. Once I found them tucked behind the heating oil tanks under our back porch. My mother never wrapped anything, so there was no surprise on Christmas morning. At school when others compared notes, I blatantly lied and said, “I got mittens and a lot of other stuff.”
When I was a little older, I annually constructed a makeshift crèche in our fake white brick fireplace in the living room.
We always put our Christmas tree up late and decorated it with lots of lights and tinsel. (My father didn’t believe in using ornaments, to my chagrin.)
The Sheahans upstairs always had plenty of ornaments and presents, although they had as little money as we did on a police salary.
I always bought presents for my parents and siblings from my baby-sitting money, such as a giant bottle of toilet water for my mother and a hideous tie for my father, plus toys for my sister and brothers, at the nearby dime store.
Midnight Mass on Christmas was really thrilling. The eighth graders sang for it. I was delighted to be a part, singing the glorious carols. I had fixed my hair for the big night, put on some oily preparation like Vitalis under the rollers. The result was a disaster when I rolled it out. But staying up that late, singing, and walking home in the falling snow was wonderful.
*****
A big highlight of one school year was the time the boiler broke down in the winter and we had days off until it could be fixed.
*****
My mother was very fearful for us, especially if we were injured. My brother Tom was amazingly accident prone. He hit his head or knees on many occasions and split them open—e.g., on a radiator or on stakes in people’s lawns. He’d come crying home and my mother’s reaction was to lock herself in our only bathroom and cry out from behind the door, “Is it bleeding?”
I would say, “Mom, let me in so I can wash the cut to see how bad it is.” I tried to tell whether it needed stitching at the emergency room. If it did, he’d be taken, often in a police car, to
Mass
The first time I remember being at Mass, I was probably four or five years old. It was summer and I begged to go with my parents to Saint Dorothy’s Church on Sunday. I was wearing a sun suit, not really proper attire. My most vivid memory was having other Mass-goers staring at me, something I didn’t like at all. Feeling conspicuous wasn’t my thing. Later, of course, I went every Sunday after I started school. In those days females wore hats—or, as an emergency measure, pinned a Kleenex or handkerchief on our heads. We spent a fair amount of time in church, even on certain school days, learning hymns or practicing for first communion and, later, for confirmation. Incense at high Masses always made me sick—sometimes enough to cause vomiting on the church steps. Once I had an uncontrollable twitching of my face and nose during
In seventh grade, our class undertook the project of performing a whole Catholic Mass before the whole school in the gym. It was the Trinity Sunday liturgy. I had a solo speaking role, one of the short post-communion prayers. Kenny Mormon was the “priest.” I envied the girls who recited the epistle: “Oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!” The Mass was a big success.
In seventh grade, we received the sacrament of confirmation. We studied hard and worried about what question the bishop might ask us. Bishop Cousins was to slap us on the cheek and we hoped to be brave and not flinch as we became “soldiers of Christ.” It was a good time to collect money presents, as we had at our first communion. (I remembered getting $44 from relatives, which my parents quickly confiscated for the party afterwards.)
Camp
One year I nagged my parents to send me to camp. I researched all the Catholic girls’ camps that were advertised in The New World, the Catholic weekly newspaper. The cheapest one I could find was
The camp’s location was bare dirt with no views worth admiring. A tramp down a dusty road brought us to a lake. Ours would be a bare-bones camping experience; there was no money for extras like horseback riding. After a long bus ride, we arrived at the camp after dark and the counselors assigned Julie and Eileen to a different cabin than mine, to my relief. This was short lived when I realized that I had not brought a flashlight, necessary to navigate the dark way to the outside toilets. We went to bed and I waited until I was fairly desperate and decided to sneak into the counselors’ inside bathroom. Naturally, I was caught and bawled out.
Another problem was making my bed satisfactorily right after rising in the morning before inspection. I solved this by never messing up the bed by pulling out the tucked-in corners at night so it looked okay. Most of my fellow cabin mates had already had their first menstrual period and, as I hadn’t yet, I was left out of their whispered conversations. The food was awful. We drank bug juice, an early form of Kool Aid, and ate mostly hot dogs. We had to wash our hair in the muddy lake. I braided a belt of leather and did little else except archery.
We endured nap time every afternoon. Those were the polio years—probably the reason for the naps—when the dreaded disease was rampant and parents feared for their children’s health. Some of my Ryan cousins got mild cases of polio, but we Wrights and Sheahans escaped, luckily.
I wrote my father from camp asking him to send me a flashlight and some hangers. He answered that he couldn’t immediately find a flashlight, so he just “shipped it.” I waited every mail call for the promised shipment, but it never arrived. Only when I returned home did I learn that he had written, “I just skipped it.”
I felt very alone at camp. Most of the other campers seemed to know one another previously, but the only ones I knew were my pesky little sister and cousin. Julie was especially annoying because she had waist-length hair that took ages to braid every day. The counselors resented having to braid it. I was relieved when our two weeks ended and returned home to gladly finish the summer going to the pool or playing around the neighborhood. We caught fireflies and stayed out until after dark running around.
*****
In seventh grade the nuns decided to civilize us a bit with ballroom dance lessons in the gym. Of course, the most popular girls were chosen first as partners, while we others waited in agony until some unfortunate asked us to dance. Another civilizing attempt was a course called “Christian Charity,” in which we were taught how to introduce an older to a younger person.
Once I was left in charge of the classroom while the nun went away. She told me to write the names of all the misbehavers and they would be held behind when the dance lesson met. As soon as she left, several boys ran to my desk in front of the classroom to demand that their names be written so that they could get out of dancing lessons.
The school was old and of course overcrowded. We weren’t there long enough to see the new school built. Meanwhile, they used two portable units for two of the classes. Their primitive heating system didn’t work well.
In one class, one of the boys broke into hysterical laughter. When the nun asked what was so amusing, he answered, “I’m laughing at the second syllable of Thomas Cunneas’s first name.”
Naturally, we sent notes to our friends and frequently were caught, with dire consequences.
The Basement
The basement was a great place for roller skating and for performing plays I wrote, with friends and siblings in leading roles. We dragooned parents as audience and strung the curtains on clotheslines.
We had a family club, which I naturally ran with an iron hand as the eldest. I once barred my cousin Mike Sheahan from a meeting because he failed to bring his nickel dues. I unilaterally decided that the dues should be combined to buy a community pencil sharpener for the basement.
The basement had formerly had a direct entrance from the middle of our first floor flat, but it was removed and the ceiling plastered over after I fell down the twelve steps as a three-year-old and hit the cement. The basement then was an unobstructed space without the central stairway, with a front and back entrance.
Once, for a teen party I gave, my friends were enlisted to paint the floor—sort of a Tom Sawyer thing—but as none of my friends were usually allowed to use their family basements for parties, they were willing to help. The problem was, during major
From the ceiling near the wash tubs a clothes chute deposited laundry from both floors. A favorite trick of my brothers on the first floor was to hang whomever they could catch by his heels and drop him through the chute. Luckily, no one ever got stuck.
Once, when playing hide and seek, I hid in the closet with the chute, reached up on the shelf above it, and found a hidden wallet with ID and a $5 bill. I received a $1 reward from the family of the grandfather to whom it belonged.
My father had a money-making scheme that went wrong. He bought 400 wrinkled black wool women’s army uniform ties for 25 cents each at an army surplus warehouse and expected my mother and Aunt Eileen to iron each one. (The ties had a defect of being too short for men.) After all, they already ironed for twenty family members in the cool basement to escape the summer heat. My brothers slid down the clothes chute and “swam” in the ties. One brother hid there after he wet his pants. I don’t think my father ever sold a single tie.
The basement also featured a long glass-backed bar from a tavern and a round poker table, complete with a hanging green-shaded lamp. There was a large blackboard and a supply of white chalk for drawing and tic-tac-toe and other games.
The basement was a godsend to my mother and Aunt Eileen because down there they could send their noisy active broods to play on bad-weather
The basement was the scene of many poker parties and family gatherings. I once washed dishes for 65 family and guests. During Saint Dorothy renovations, our basement was the site for church meetings of the men’s Holy Name Society and the women’s Altar and Rosary Society. It often smelled strongly of beer in our front entryway.
*****
Aunt Eileen upstairs was more relaxed than my mother in taking care of her family. She also had an elderly female helper who shared the front bedroom with her daughters. She let me make cherry pie in her kitchen and use the treadle (non-electric) sewing machine in the hall to sew a green cotton jumper for myself. I always considered handmade clothes inferior to purchased new ones. My jumper certainly was. Unfortunately, I had no patience for sewing. I once altered a police shirt of my father’s from long to short sleeves using big hand stitches that showed, which my father didn’t appreciate.
*****
Once my father took me with him to Joliet State Prison on a police errand. He asked me if I would like to try out a cell there. Locked in that dismal cell for only a few minutes has kept me from a life of crime.
*****
In summers my father or Uncle Joe rigged a garden hose sprinkler on the garage to provided needed relief from the blistering un-air-conditioned
But the summers also provided an annual treat for me. I slept on a brass bed in lonely splendor on the enclosed, uninsulated back porch. The battleship gray-painted porch was useless except for cold storage in the winter, but it was screened on two sides to catch any breeze. I hung my movie idols on its walls. My father forbade me to buy comic books. He considered them a waste of money (10 cents each) and a bad influence. (Of course, I read them at other kids’ houses.) But he didn’t object to magazines like Photoplay so I cut out John Derek, Alan Ladd, Peter Lawford, and other stars and taped them up for the summer.
We walked a mile to
*****
While my mother was in the hospital giving birth to my brother Robert (Bo), my sister, Julie, was having her appendix removed on another floor of the same hospital. To my amazement, she sent a message to me that she loved me. This had not been evident before. We shared a bedroom and a double bed and had many arguments over her making free use of my wardrobe.
By then we had a TV I’d won and always looked forward to the Friday night movies, which featured long intermissions. Unsupervised, my brother Tom and I stayed up to watch illicitly. During the seemingly endless intermission, I made our special popcorn with grated cheese. Tom ate a few handfuls and began to writhe on the living room floor. I “gently” prodded him with my foot and said, “Get up, you faker.” His appendix had burst so he was rushed to join his brother, mother, and sister in the hospital. (I’ve been a little leery of popcorn ever since and still have my appendix.)
*****
Murph’s Milk Store, a pre-7-11 on
When we had a nickel to spare we would use a pay phone to call Murph and ask politely, “Is this Murph’s on
*****
When Bo was six weeks old and I was 13, my parents left me to take care of things for him and my siblings, Julie, Tom, John, and Bill, and went for a week’s vacation to Turkey Run in
*****
My parents entertained a lot, often other relations, in our dining room. My father was a wonderful joke- and storyteller. He had many police stories. For example, the cop who insisted on the word “derbis” for “debris.” (To this day, that’s what we call rubbish.) A macabre incident happened after all the police had a course in performing artificial respiration. When a man jumped from a very high
The Valentine Caper
All during grammar school I had crushes on some boy or other in my class. In second grade, I had a big crush on Bobby D. The third grade shared a classroom with us second graders and he was a star third grader. When Valentine’s Day approached I decided to send him a heartfelt Valentine. At the time, you could buy a packet of ready-made valentines with varying sentiments cheaply. But for Bobby D., I decided a homemade valentine with lace and red construction paper was better. Naturally, I couldn’t spell his last name. We were encouraged by Sister Cyrilita to send everyone in class a valentine and a large decorated box with a top slit was provided. Sister read out the names from the envelopes one by one. Imagine my dismay when she misinterpreted my valentine to Bobby D. in third grade to mean Bobby D., a second grader of severely limited charm. Second-grader Bobby gave me an odd look.
*****
When I was 11, my mother had a nervous breakdown and she went to stay at Sacred Heart Sanitarium in
Aunt Mickie locked me in a bedroom with the two boys. I remembered a trick for escape from my detective story reading. She had left the key in the door, which I knocked out from the inside onto a newspaper I had slipped under the door. I pulled the paper inside and opened the door with the key. She was astounded.
I took advantage of the new neighborhood to learn to ride a two-wheeled bike. The kids across the street had a small two-wheeler and I mastered it after many skinned knees.
We went to visit my mother at Sacred Heart. It was a long car trip. Sacred Heart seemed creepy to me. My uncle Martin had told me that it was my fault that my mother, his sister, was there because I hadn’t helped enough around the house. She was clearly overworked, trying to keep up with a growing household and endless housework and cooking, but was it my fault?
My First Two-wheeler
I was promised a two-wheel Schwinn bike for my twelfth birthday but that seemed an endless time in the future. Imagine my surprise on a summer Saturday before my birthday as I walked home from a dance lesson to find my Uncle Buddy bicycling toward me on a brand new Schwinn he had bought for me early. It wasn’t the blue color I preferred, but I was thrilled and thankful. Unfortunately, it was soon stolen.
Games
Roller skating, first in the backyard or basement and later on neighborhood streets, was fun. Skates attached to your shoes and were tightened by a skate key you kept on a string around your neck. Traffic was light, but we never ventured on busy streets like
The neighborhood kids plus Julie and I were playing Doggie, Doggie, Who’s Got Your Bone? one summer day. In the game, the person who was “it” tried to guess who had sneaked up behind their back and stolen the “bone” (a small stone). I had seen someone trip another person in a movie and I thought it looked simple. Without really thinking about it, I instinctively stuck out my foot as Julie ran up to steal the “bone.” She fell and required several stitches in her head where the bone had penetrated.
Dance Lessons
I badly wanted to be a dancer from the time I saw Margaret O’Brien in The Unfinished Dance. It seemed incredibly glamorous. My first lessons were held at
Piano Lessons
When I was in third grade, we acquired a baby grand piano from my Grandma Ryan. It took up a large portion of our living room. My father sounded out pop tunes by ear on it, but I received piano lessons weekly from the music nun at Saint Dorothy’s. I wasn’t as enthusiastic about piano lessons as I had been about dance lessons. I rarely practiced and the repertory was severely limited—mostly religious hymns of a mawkish nature. Schubert’s “Ave Maria” was labeled “forbidden in church—profane, theatrical” by the stern nun teacher. I was assigned to play the hymn “Come Holy Ghost” to accompany my classmates’ singing. A piano recital before the assembled eight grades had some rough spots for me.
One fateful Sunday I was given the privilege of playing the church organ softly during Communion, but my memory failed and I began to hit the wrong notes. The nun knocked me off the organ bench and took up playing the hymn herself. It was a humiliating experience. I never touched the organ again. Of course, all adults warned me I’d regret not practicing more, but it was not a priority. The piano went to my aunt Mickie’s and was used as a payment for an organ, which turned out to be a better use for it.
*****
A common confession was “I disobeyed my parents X times and I lied X times.” Real sins, such as calling a recent widow and impersonating her dead husband, didn’t register with me as sins that were necessary to confess.
*****
Once my father threatened me with a strap, but before he could use it my mother rescued me. He had suspected me of engaging in sexual exploration with a neighbor boy, but I was entirely innocent. Another time my neighbors hold my parents that I had been seen smoking a cigarette at age ten. I had lit a white candle and was innocently dripping wax on a sheet of wax paper to later scrape off to make a wax bracelet (not a lasting piece of jewelry). I was exonerated.
*****
In sixth grade my close friends and I formed a club known as JUG (Just Us Girls) at Saint Dorothy’s. I had known Sandy Hein since I returned her tuition card, which she had lost near our house. The club regularly met all through high school. By then it was known informally as “The Mary Club” because it included me, Mary Alice Finnegan, Mary Healy, and Marianne Chalefoux, as well as Sue Murphy, Sue Neff, Ann Fairfield, and Sandy. We met mainly to eat pizza or cheeseburgers and drink Pepsi, discuss boys, and make crank phone calls.
One call I made was to the developer who was building on our only vacant lot on the corner of 79th and Eberhart. I told him that there had been an accident there, an injury after the workmen left for the day. I left Julie behind to tell the developer, when he rushed over, that someone planned to sue him. (We had been devastated to learn that the kiosk on the corner was torn down for his building project. The kiosk had been a favorite spot for our lemonade sales.) Did I consider this call a sin? Probably not.
*****
One day I vomited on Rich Galvin, who sat in the desk in front of me. He had been unusually well behaved for most of the day. (He feared losing his paper route if he didn’t turn up on time because of detention.) As my friend Jimmy Ryan recalled years later, the final bell was scheduled to ring in ten minutes when I upchucked on Rich’s hair and back. (He had to stay and clean it up.) His revenge on me was not washing his hair for a week.
*****
We had some very unsafe classrooms. One room was above the front of the gym, reached by a narrow set of winding stairs. I don’t recall any fire drills when I was a student in that room in eighth grade, but it certainly was dangerous.
*****
My father taught us to shoot craps with matchsticks for money. My parents played lots of poker. Our indoor children’s games, too, were mainly card games, particularly “Fish” and two kinds of war or solitaire. We also played checkers or Monopoly.
*****
Once while walking down Eberhart toward
Clothes
I can’t recall my first girdle. It was needed to hold up our stockings (with seams), but was never a comfortable item of apparel. After World War II, when we could buy real nylons, our leg covers changed. Before that, we wore ugly snow pants whose only advantage was that they were worn on the cold walk to school. Clumsy galoshes were also necessary in the winter.
When she wasn’t pregnant, my mother was always fashionably dressed; not so me. Sometimes she took me downtown to shop at a wholesaler. There she purchased two of the ugliest coats I ever owned—one was a woman’s three-quarter coat in a bright green that fit me and one was a huge “storm coat” with a big fake fur collar.
Once when we shopped for “back-to-school outfits,” we were directed to the chubby girls’ department. I was horrified and shocked. That visit inspired my first diet, which involved entirely eating cheese without crackers. It worked!
Numbness
When I was about nine, washing my hands in the basement washtub, I discovered that I had no feeling in my right-hand fingers. Suddenly my nose felt numb and the right side of my mouth and face were also feeling-less. I was kind of scared, but after a few minutes sensation started to return. I’ve had this happen all my life intermittently, about once a month. Along with it I get a migraine prodrome—usually no headache, but I see a chevron pattern and my eyesight diminishes from the sides. Neurologists can’t explain it.
Spin the Bottle
My first boy kiss turned out to be a humiliating experience. A mixed group was in our basement; I don’t recall how old I was. A boy spun the bottle and it pointed to me. Everyone else left us alone. He said, “Let’s just pretend we kissed.”
I said, “Okay.” (He wasn’t anyone I had a crush on anyway.) My first real kiss came years later.
*****
Grandma Ryan knew many folk remedies. Sometimes they worked. Once I hobbled to her house with a very painful ingrown toenail. She fixed it up expertly with cotton and disinfectant under the nail. Another time, however, I had a bad insect bite on my right arm. She advised me to put “drawing salve” on the bite, effectively sealing in the infection. It had to be painfully lanced by the family doctor. I still have the scar.
For the World War II effort we were encouraged to save paper and foil and grow a victory garden. With our cement backyard and unpromising “gangways,” unsunny six-foot spaces between two flats, it was necessary to find plots elsewhere. I went several blocks away to 80th and
After the war, we were encouraged to send food to the vanquished Germans. I bought some canned condensed milk and wrote my name and address on the label. I received a letter back from the grateful recipient, but of course, it was in German. My Austrian neighbor, Mrs. Trepan, translated it for me.
Prayers
My mother taught us all many prayers (which my siblings and I can still repeat today). One was called “Night Is Falling.” Another was “Can You Say Today in Parting?” One prayer, “Rabboni, Rabboni,” contained the lines, “Rabboni, Rabboni, how glad I shall be / When the lamp of my life has been burned out for thee.” This was not a sentiment we shared. A more lighthearted prayer was:
Now I lay me down to sleep
With a bag of peanuts at my feet.
If I should die before I wake,
You’ll know I died of a bellyache.
Aunt Alice
Our aunt Alice, my father’s only sister, was probably our wealthiest relation—at least the one who paid attention to our family. She had been expelled from her Catholic high school and made an unfortunate early marriage. The problem was that she was divorced and had remarried a non-Catholic outside the church. My mother didn’t approve of her and felt she couldn’t recognize the marriage. Nevertheless, we had Christmas dinners at her house with her second husband, Bill. One memorable dinner after Bill served potent martinis to the adults, he attempted to carve the turkey but it flew across the room. We ate it anyway.
Aunt Alice had no children of her own (although my mother claimed she had faked a pregnancy) so she took us out for treats and to first run movies like Easter Parade and Song of the South. (We never considered how insulting to blacks that movie was.)
Once at a dime store, Aunt Alice told me I could pick out anything I wanted in the store. I hesitated to choose anything very expensive and I don’t remember what I got, but I’ll never forget that offer. She bought nice Christmas presents for me and my six siblings, which we really appreciated.
Unfortunately, she also bragged to my mother about all her household help (“I left three niggers working at my house”) as my mother struggled with heavy housework. She had a clothes dryer for two people. We had none for nine people. (Incidentally, when her first husband died much later, she married Bill in a Catholic ceremony.)
Graduation at Last!
Eighth grade graduation marked a major transition. We were proud to wear our pins that proclaimed Marian year 1950 and blue and white ribbons. I was shocked on graduation night when many of the rowdier boys were drunk. We had parties and my relatives gave me cash gifts.
We graduates had a celebratory luncheon in our best clothes (no uniforms!) and I sat at the head table. We wore cap and gown and marched into Saint Dorothy’s Church for the ceremony to “Pomp and Circumstance.” When the priest handed me my diploma, he said, “You done good.” I resisted correcting his grammar.
Going to all-girls’ Mercy High, with over a thousand students, was a real breakthrough for me.
© 2011 Mary Katherine Wright
