My mom was an amazingly strong woman and in the 1940’s through the ‘60s, was quite a dish. In the ‘30s, as a small child, she emigrated with her family from a failed cotton patch in the Texas panhandle and eventually settled in Sacramento, California in that wave of migration known as “Okies.” She said it was just like The Grapes of Wrath, Hoovervilles and all. She experienced a lot of bullying in school because of her poor dress and “Okie” accent. She worked hard to lose that accent, picking up a neutral way of speaking by the time she was in high school. Her father built homes and the family did pretty well within a few years. She also shed her father’s Baptist religion (He was a travelling preacher at one time, wrote a hymn that is still sung in the Southern Baptist churches in Texas). She associated it with ignorance.
She married a very good looking, young Marine fresh out of the Pacific theater, my father. He was a cherry-picking Catholic who wanted a lot of children, an excellent provider, and turned out to be a philanderer of the first water. After the first 3 children when we were living on a small ranch, a woman showed up at the door with a baby. It was my father’s former secretary and the baby was my half-sister. My mom took the baby and she was raised along with us, most of us never giving a thought as to the baby’s origin, although mom explained it the best she could that very night. She said the baby needed a home and that we now had a new little sister. I don’t think this was a problem at all, I know it wasn’t with me. I don’t even remember when we found out that she was my dad’s daughter from his secretary. It just wasn’t an issue that I can remember.
Eventually there were seven of us kids. Although I don’t think she really ever bought into the whole thing, she took classes and converted to Catholicism for my father. We all went to Catholic schools. Both my parents stressed education as both came from poor backgrounds. She was a great mom, but quite harried, with 5 boys all born very close together. I don’t remember the girls giving her much trouble, the we boys definitely kept her busy. I got along with her fine, but there wasn’t a lot of time for her to devote to us individually. I do remember times when I would entertain her after school and those memories I cherish. On the other hand, I spent a lot of time on my bike exploring to get away from the chaos of a crowded household and I was able to get away with this because mom was so busy with the four younger kids. But she always read to us at night. She raised us to believe the world was like a Capra movie. Everyone was basically good and the world was a safe and wonderful place for children. This was supported by the nuns at school. She was a wonderful person.
My father was distant and, on serious issues, like playing hookie or stealing a candy bar from the store, he was the disciplinarian. He had a very large belt he called a strop, but used it sparingly and never on the girls. He was an executive in the aerospace industry, but bought a small ranch so us boys would ”what hard work is.” I remember my big brother had a black cow, a black dog, a black pig, a black sheep, and a black horse. I had the same, but all mine were white or brown. The little kids helped raise the animals, but my brother and I had ultimate responsibility over them. He was a good teacher, not bad at all considering he was rather new to the whole thing himself, being raised in a Baltimore slum.
He used to take us up into the nearby Sierras and, along with my maternal grandfather, taught us to fish and shoot. Those were great days.
My parents never fought in front of us. I thank them for that. I didn’t know it until later, but there was a lot of problems between them. He evidently attracted women like flies and couldn’t resist the temptation very well at all. I’m sure this nearly drove my mom nuts, but not a hint of it came to us until we were adults and they divorced. She was lucky to later marry a very good man, my father’s long-time best friend. Interestingly, the three of them remained cordial after the divorce. I’m glad she found someone who treated her right after all those years of emotional abuse. She died a happy content woman many years later.
My parents, especially my father raised us as what I would call Kennedy Liberals. You treated people as you would them to treat you. You used your strengths to help people less fortunate than yourself, because that’s why you were gifted you with those strengths. People different than you were never to be denigrated in any way. We were very fortunate to be living the way we were and there were others not so fortunate, not necessarily by their own doing. This was always to be remembered when dealing with others. And don’t complain, fix it, but never be afraid to ask for advice. We were to never use swear words, this was a sign of ignorance. My mom especially stressed that one. She hated anything she associated with ignorance. We were punished severely (the strop) if we ever said the word n***ger, or any other racial slur. You didn’t damage anyone else’s property or person, and you fought only if you were backed into a corner, and then only until the guy was down. You didn’t kick someone when they were down. Good ethics that have served me well and I thank both of them for that.
I never felt abused or unsafe as a child, and there was never any doubt that my parents loved me. It was a shock to me when I got older and ran into adults who were “bad.” I thought they were only found in movies.
After the divorce my father quit his job and leased a bunch of closed down convenience stores. This was during the last big recession in the ‘70s and everybody was downsizing. He had a cookie cutter floor plan for neighborhood pubs designed for these buildings and renovated four of them under his new corporation. “People drink during a depression,” he said. I was in my early twenties and needed a job to help get me through university, so I went to work for him as floor sweep, bartender, purchasing, managing, etc., etc. This is when I got to know my old man for the first time. One night he broke up a fight between men who were half his age. One had the temerity to take a swing at him. He beat the shit out of the guy and left him in the parking lot. Didn’t call the cops. I learned he never liked cops. I was really surprised at how good he was defending himself. Another night he just took an irrational dislike toward an Asian man who was talking to some girls at the bar. He refused to serve him and escorted him to the door. I asked him why and he said, “I hate nips.” And that was that. I could only guess this had something to do with his experiences in the Pacific during WWII. Soon I found out he had a lot of racial prejudices that he had hidden from us kids. I asked him about it. He said that they were his and he knew it was wrong, like his philandering, but he also knew that the chances for us kids to make it into the middle class would be hurt if he passed these things on to us. My mom later confirmed this. He was an amazing, complicated guy. He always said he loved my mom more than any other woman and never spoke of his girlfriends.
After he died, I found a big manila envelope crammed with love letters from these women going back to the early fifties. They were not only passionate, but incredibly sincere. These women were hopelessly in love and struggling with the idea of being involved with a man with a wife and seven children. It was all quite poignant. A man wold be lucky to meet just one woman with this kind of passion in his lifetime. I remember meeting two of these women when I was a kid, he introduced them to me and my big brother as his secretaries on the rare occasions he took us to his office on Saturdays. They were beautiful. He was a strange guy. In his last years his best friend was a defrocked priest.They used to sit in their sunchairs at the beach, smoke Cuban cigars and handicap the horse races for that afternoon. I’ll never figure him out and accepted who he was years ago. He was who he was. I thank him for not passing all that baggage onto us at an impressionable age. That took foresight.
My stepfather was a pilot with the 8th Air Force out of England during WWII. He was the classic fly-boy bachelor. When the war was over, he went into lower level executive positions in the aerospace industry. That’s how he met the old man in the early fifties. He had been married about five times by the time he began writing my mom after her divorce. He wasn’t much interested in being a father, but he always brought home the paycheck and treated my mom very well. They loved each other. But he was a bit of a prick. He thought education was a waste of time, and my youngest two siblings, who were in their teens really paid for that later. He encouraged them to get jobs right out of high school (and get out of the house) and they never went to college. There is a big difference in the way they think and the way the older kids do. This man really changed the dynamics of my family. He became increasingly conservative, blindly backed Reagan on everything and eventually became a daily Rush Limbaugh addict and his views on life outside of his marriage to my mom sounded bitter and much of it directly from a Limbaugh script. I could barely speak to him for a long time. But he treated my mom so well, I hid a lot of my feelings toward him for the sake of familial peace. I think she knew, though. She was a smart woman. They didn’t talk politics, thank god. I think she ignored that part of him for the same reasons I did. He was loyal and loving to the end. We all swallowed our differences and treated him as the family patron in return. But she held all the real power and we knew it, so it wasn’t too bad to be around.
My fondest memories of my mom were of later on, just a few years before she died. We had a lunch date for every other Tuesday during the last couple of years. It was light talk mostly, how things were going, etc., but every once in awhile we would talk about what was going on when we kids were little. Some of it was necessarily tragic, but much of it was quite funny. She held no bitterness for my father, she kind pitied him. He blew it. This really was the right woman, and he blew it. I remember once, just out of nowhere, I think we were laughing about all the weird stuff us boys use to cause around the house, and I suddenly used a pause in the conversation to thank her for being such a good mother, that she did a great job under incredibly difficult circumstances and we all turned out to be good people because of her. She just stared at me for a second with a surprised look on her face and her eyes welled up with tears. I was really surprised at he effect. She said thank you very quietly and grabbed a napkin off the table to wipe her eyes, and we were soon off on a different subject. But while we were talking I remember thinking, Damn, I thought she knew that. It is my fondest memory of her.
Ooops, that extra-caffeinated coffee strikes again. Sorry people, but I really enjoyed writing this.
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