24. My Father's Vices; Or, Prohibition Begins at Home
My father's one point of vanity was his hair. He seemed not to notice his short stature or his potbelly, but he did pay attention to his hair. Its fine, white strands billowed out luxuriantly, as though shampooed and blow‑dried a couple of times a day. Because the tonsorial technology of the blow‑dryer was years in the future, the way his hair looked had to have something to do with the special nature of it and his particular way of taking care of it.
“Massage your scalp every day,” he often told me, continuing: “A barber told me that if I massaged my scalp every day I'd have a full head of hair all my life.”
He told me how to take care of my hair and how to play ball. If he was home when I played softball across the street, he would walk over and silently watch, then later coach me on how to improve my play. Here he was facing a lost cause, for I have some of the blood that coursed through the veins of that legendary German family of failed athletes, the von Klutzes.
16-inch softball In the playground we played softball. That’s what we called it, softball, but it was a special kind of softball, played with a ball so big—16 inches in diameter. That’s a lot bigger than the ball you’d see in softball games elsewhere. With a 16-inch softball, gloves aren’t used, and hitting for distance is difficult. And after the ball has been used in a few games, it’s so soft that the sport is also known as mushball.
16-inch softball dates back to a game played at the Farragut Boat Club in Chicago on Thanksgiving Day 1887. It’s remained popular and has its own leagues, hall of fame, and museum (and a lot of coverage on the internet).
Not to worry, though, because I got plenty of rest when my team was at bat. Rarely did I get a hit, so rarely did I have to tire myself out by running the base paths. And when I did get on base, I was in a land so strange to me, so foreign, that my excursions around the infield provided welcome comic relief, a respite from the serious aspects of the game.
Worse, I did not understand the game and had no real interest in it. Here I let my father down horribly, for baseball was his all‑consuming passion. If he could not get to a game, he would listen to one on the radio. Years of financial distress did not seem to upset him, but a botched double play would cause him to mutter and curse under his breath.
The Chicago Cubs were his team. He knew by heart the players' records, and he
had a mind's‑eye picture of the
dimensions of Wrigley Field, the Cubs' home grounds. It wouldn't surprise me one bit to learn that
he'd moved to Chicago just to be near the Cubs.
In fact, one place that we lived, Dirty Six North Ravenswood, was within
easy walking distance of Wrigley Field.
One summer he found a gold mine. The Rock‑Ola juke box company operated a small stadium on Irving Park Road, an easy streetcar ride from where we lived. A women's professional team played night games there, so night after night he was off to Rock‑Ola stadium, often taking me with him. Once he even convinced my mother to go.
My father smoked a little in those days. When Chicago's weather permitted, he sat on the front porch in the evenings, smoking his pipe or a cigarette or two, nodding at passersby, and just relaxing by staring off into the distance.
He liked to eat uncooked ground beef. My mother would buy round steak at the butcher's and grind it in a hand‑cranked grinder fastened to the sink. No sooner would the ground beef be in the refrigerator then he would grab a handful and munch on it. Words such as botulism weren't in his vocabulary, or, if they were, he didn't worry about them.
As he grew older he developed the condition that magazine ads euphemistically referred to as “getting up nights.” His solution was to keep a coffee can under the bed to use as a chamber pot.
Baseball was okay, to my mother's way of thinking. She could also put up with my father's smoking and his eating raw ground beef, although she repeatedly warned him that his love of uncooked meat would kill him. As for the coffee can‑chamber pot, she reacted to that by wrinkling her nose and making a face when he carried it into the bathroom in the morning to empty it and rinse it out. Those things she could tolerate, but she could not tolerate his drinking.
Although my mother could smile and laugh, she was in the main a gloomy person who never seemed to have any fun. To her, the idea of a man enjoying the company of other men in a saloon, well, that was something that just couldn't be possible, couldn't be tolerated. Besides, drink cost money, it was against the tenets of Christian Science, and it was the ruination of my sister's life.
For a long time, my father's drinking pleasure consisted of having a few snorts in a saloon on the way home from work, maybe a couple of nights a week. I never saw him drink at baseball games where beer could be bought in the stands, and I don't remember seeing him drink in the homes of friends or relatives who served alcohol. He did not go on benders, and I don't remember ever seeing him drunk.
Still, he drank, and my mother would have none of it. Her hatred of alcohol and the damage that it brought would have fit right in with the temperance movement started by reformers in the nineteenth century. Temperance, however, is the wrong word, for there was nothing temperate about people in the temperance movement. They demanded total abstinence from alcohol. So did my mother.
My father thought he had found a way around the problem. He would abandon the saloon and drink at home. Quart beer bottles were popular in those days, and quarts of beer began to appear in our refrigerator. The sight of the bottles set my mother off something fierce. Whenever the bottles showed up, an argument always ensued, my mother dominating it and overruling my father with “Don't argue with me, Walt! I know I'm right!” Then she began breaking his bottles in the sink, and as the glass shattered and as his suds disappeared down the drain, all he could manage to say was a plaintive “Now, Lou. . . ”
Shades of Carry Nation, the 1890ish star of the temperance movement. Nation, armed with a hatchet, would enter a saloon and set about to destroy the place—chopping up furniture, breaking the mirror behind the bar, and smashing bottles.
Washing beer down the kitchen drain does nothing to slake a man's thirst, so my father resumed stopping off at a saloon on the way home from work. In retreating to this sanctuary, he would be in the company of other men, some friendly, some happy, some sad, some obnoxious. Whatever mood they were in, at least they didn't break his bottles.
I honestly believe that at this point my mother was doing her best to ignore the problem. Still, she couldn't help but crack occasionally, like the time one afternoon when she and I were standing in front of the house chatting with neighbors when my father came home. “Walt,” she snapped, “take a look at yourself! You can't even walk a straight line!”
Our neighbors turned to stare at my
father while my mother continued her harangue:
“You're drunk! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
My father's usual poker face snapped to an expression of shock and dismay, but he said nothing. Well, of course he was staggering. He wore cheap shoes, and he'd been on his feet all day at work. And it's not stretching a point to say that he'd been on his feet as a cutter for a half century—he was in his late sixties when this happened—and his aging legs had a right to be a little wobbly just from wear and tear. But in my mother's eyes, he was drunk.
The call of the saloon continued to beckon, as it did one day after I'd been in the air force for a year. I was home on leave, and he and I left the house to run errands. At one point, he spied a saloon and darted inside, telling me over his shoulder that he wouldn't be long. He didn't invite me in, for I was under twenty‑one, the legal drinking age in Illinois. When he came out, we continued about our business, eventually returning home, sharing an unspoken agreement to say nothing to my mother about the detour.
He eventually did quit drinking, just as he quit smoking. Both habits went by the wayside about the time he retired, as a matter of economics. Neither he nor my mother had enough retirement income to pay for frivolities, so my mother's long temperance crusade came to an end.
25. Someone Gave Me a Book!
There it was—The Road to Oz, by L. Frank Baum. On my bedside table. A book, a book of my very own! I was reading a lot—comic books and, when I got a library card, any kind of adventure, Western, or mystery tale. But now I had a book of my own.
The Road to
Oz is the fifth of L. Frank Baum's Land of Oz books and was originally
published in 1909. The full title, in
the style of the time, tells more than you need to know: The Road to Oz: In
Which Is Related How Dorothy Gale of Kansas, The Shaggy Man, Button Bright, and
Polychrome the Rainbow's Daughter Met on an Enchanted Road and Followed it All
the Way to the Marvelous Land of Oz.
So now I had my
first book, my very own book. A quiet,
reserved kid, I lost control. I read my
Oz book and reread it, sometimes finishing a reading of it, and returning to
the front to start all over again right away.
Sad to say, I
have no idea who gave it to me. And over
the years, the book did not survive our moves. It’s gone.
Baum died in
1919, twenty years before his Oz story made it to the screen in the movie The
Wizard of Oz. I didn’t see the movie
then. I was in my Western-movie years, and
Oz was not on my approved list of shoot-‘em-ups.
But I have since
seen the movie, and I recently read a library copy of the book that so
enthralled me years ago. Good
entertainment all around.
26. “Don't Ya Know There's a War On?”
Attack on Pearl Harbor; Declaration of War
On Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, the Japanese navy staged a surprise attack on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. For two hours, Japanese pilots bombed and torpedoed and strafed, reducing America's great bastion in the Pacific to a shambles. Six battleships anchored at Pearl were disabled; two others, the Oklahoma and the Arizona, were destroyed. Many other naval vessels were sunk or disabled, and 149 airplanes on the ground were destroyed or damaged.
The next day, while Chicagoans were reading Tribune accounts of the previous day's attacks, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appeared before Congress to ask for a declaration of war. In a session that lasted only an hour Congress voted for war on Japan.
Other declarations of war aligned nations around the world as members of the Allies or the Axis. The Allies consisted of the United States, Great Britain, China, France, the Soviet Union, and forty‑five smaller nations. The Axis powers were Germany, Italy, Japan, and six smaller nations. Among the Allies, Communist nations found themselves in bed with democracies as a matter of expedience. Both ideologies had a common foe: Adolf Hitler.
The Allies saw Hitlerism—the view of Germans as a super race who would control the world by annihilating the Jews—as a dark force that had to be destroyed. Japan and Italy—in their attempts to conquer more land—were not seen as being as threatening as was Hitler. As a moral crusade, the aims of the war were reduced to one—to rid the world of Hitler.
As for the Japanese, they were thought of
by many Americans as being sub‑human, racially and physically
inferior. We called them Japs, not
Japanese. Anti‑Japanese hysteria was so
great that in early 1942 the federal government forcibly moved 110,000 Japanese‑Americans,
about two‑thirds of them American citizens, from their West Coast homes to inland
detention camps; they lost their homes and jobs as a result. Germans and Italians living in this country
were not similarly treated.
A Faraway Thing
Viewed from the safe vantage point of the Paxson household on North Tripp, the war was a faraway thing.
While American fighting men were dying overseas, the turmoil of warfare at home meant nothing more serious than living with shortages and rationing. Coffee, sugar, some canned goods, butter, nylon stockings, and meat became scarce; ice cream was limited to ten flavors. Shoes were rationed. And, horror of horrors, the government even went so far as to ban the use of metal in lobster forks, bird cages, asparagus tongs, hair curlers, spittoons, corn poppers, cocktail shakers, and beer mugs!
On the home front we saved old newspapers and magazines for waste‑paper drives, and we flattened tin cans to give to scrap‑metal drives. The nation's auto manufacturers switched from making cars to building airplanes and tanks during the war, so new cars weren't available. Tires and spare parts were hard to get. People tended to baby their cars so that they would last.
Movies, newspapers, and magazines ran home‑front slogans:
Time
Is Short.
Remember Pearl Harbor.
World War II passed our household by. We knew no one in the war, and scarcities and rationing were minor inconveniences. My most vivid remembrance of home life during World War II was watching my mother sit at the kitchen table and mix margarine.
Margarine, sold because butter was hard to come by, was white when it came out of the container; to make it look yellow like butter, my mother stirred in a coloring agent that was sold with the margarine. It was said that the only reason margarine was not sold yellow was because the butter industry objected.
During the war, the subject of conscientious objectors came up in our household. These people easily won the support of my father, for he was a pacificist and descended from Quakers.
When newspaper articles criticized conscientious objectors, my normally quiet father explained their position at great length and outspokenly defended them to me. They had a right to their view, he emphasized, and they shouldn't be criticized or punished for it. It was one of the few times that I ever heard him express an opinion. It was also one of the rare instances where he felt a subject important enough to try and educate me about it.
We learned to use a new form of currency—ration books and ration coupons. When you bought a rationed item, you handed over cash and ration coupons. If you were a child then, someone might give you a nickel or a dime, but never a ration book.
In the main, World War II struck a patriotic nerve, and anyone who complained was likely to get a snarled response: “Don't ya know there's a war on?”
Complaining was the loudest when it came to gas rationing. Because the Paxsons of North Tripp didn't own a car, gas rationing didn't inconvenience us. But many Americans, honest people at heart, became very creative where gas rationing was involved. Gas coupons were issued in A, B, and X denominations. An A coupon went to pleasure drivers who were allotted three gallons per week. A B coupon went to the driver who used a car to go to work or as part of work; the holder of a B coupon was authorized gas based on the number of miles driven per day. An X coupon was good for an unlimited amount of gasoline and went to operators of ambulances, hearses, taxis, buses, or other for‑hire vehicles; ministers, physicians, surgeons, veterinarians, and nurses; most government officials; passenger cars used for commercial purposes such as messenger service or the hauling of materials, tools, or work crews.
When these rules were announced, the national purpose immediately solidified. Practically every driver figured out a way to qualify for a B or an X coupon. Moreover, an honor system was used, and no one checked on compliance. Justice prevailed, to some degree that is, for public opinion forced many of the hogs to surrender their B or X coupons and put up with three gallons a week.
Some people put their cars on blocks. Others formed carpools. Although coupons were supposed to be good for only the vehicle described on the front cover of the ration book, that stricture didn't stop many Americans from illegally pooling their ration books and using one car for a pleasure drive in the country or to the mountains. And where gas was the scarcest, motorists would get in line behind a tank truck and follow it to a filling station.
To most Americans, the war was brought home mainly by the movies. Movie theaters showed newsreels, documentaries, and feature films that offered war‑oriented entertainment, enlightenment, inspiration, patriotism, and propaganda. The sight and sounds of combat never really hit home, however, for the federal Office of War Information instructed film directors to limit movie scenes of death or injury.
On many a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, I sat in the Rivoli theater on Elston Avenue, the war being played out before me. With the Marines I was in the mud of Guadalcanal, and with the Air Force I was yelling “Bombs away!” over Germany—my Milk Duds and popcorn going down as fast as I could chew.
Besides movies, one other reminder of the war was a Gold Star family who lived a block from us. In their front window hung a small purple banner containing a solitary gold star. The star represented a son who had died in the fighting.
Another contact with the war was a boy named Kenny, big for his age, a young man of about seventeen when I knew him. Early in the war, Kenny had dropped out of elementary school and lied about his age to join the Merchant Marine. The Merchant Marine was the civilian fleet that carried war supplies through waters infested with enemy submarines.
Near the end of the war, Kenny returned to Belding to finish elementary school. He'd seen the world and was years removed from his classmates. When he did deign to talk to mere boys who were still wet behind the ears, he regaled us not with stories of being shelled or torpedoed but with tales of sexual conquests of exotic girls in strange places. He also talked of the wonderful power of Spanish fly, a potion that, he said, would make a girl do anything for you. Truly I learned a lot more at Belding Elementary than I really had use for.
27. 1945—Quite a Year
What a Year! The president died. World War II ended. The Cubs made it to the World Series. And I was (I guess) in puberty.
Death of the President
By early 1945, the Russians were defeating German forces in eastern Europe while other Allied armies drove Nazi armies back from the west. In the Pacific, the fighting drew closer to Japan, and B‑29 Superfortresses began making mass incendiary‑bomb raids on Tokyo.
Then, on April 12, 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Roosevelt had been president for so long that it was hard for most people to imagine anyone else in the job; he seemed to be immortal. Yet his death was not a surprise. He suffered from heart disease and high blood pressure. Photographs taken about the time of his fourth inaugural three months earlier showed a gaunt, sickly man; his eyes were sunken, and the magnificent smile was missing from his careworn face.
To someone taught, at school but not at home, of the many great things that Roosevelt did, I was saddened by his death. And I was shocked to hear a neighbor say that she hated him and was glad he was dead.
Those were the reactions that Roosevelt got. Many Americans loved him because of his economic policies and social programs; to these Americans he was George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and St. Augustine rolled into one. To others, those who saw in him the death of the Old Order and its laissez‑faire capitalism, he was a combination of Machiavelli and Judas Iscariot. Despite how people saw him, he was a leader of his people through times when they needed leadership, the Great Depression and World War II.
Roosevelt's successor was his vice president, Harry S. Truman. Truman was a Missouri native who had been an artillery officer in World War I, an unsuccessful owner of a men's clothing store in Kansas City, a county judge (a position similar to commissioner in states other than Missouri), and Senator from Missouri. He never finished college but was a voracious reader and probably one of the most well‑read presidents this country ever had.
He was quite a change from Roosevelt. Where Roosevelt had been imperious and aristocratic, Truman was ordinary. Where Roosevelt looked like a president, Truman looked like the failed haberdasher that he once was. Where Roosevelt had been eloquent, Truman was blunt, outspoken, and given to rough language when lashing out at his critics.
Possessor of a strong personality and a fighting spirit, Truman was criticized for being undignified and loved for being an honest, straightforward man of the people. Whatever he was, he was also president at one of the most crucial moments in United States history. His first full day in office was Friday the 13th.
V-E Day
While the Axis powers in Europe were collapsing in ruin, horror, and despair, representatives of the Allied nations met in San Francisco. Their purpose was to prevent anything like World War II from happening again. Out of their meeting came the United Nations. And as the United Nations came into being, the war in Europe ended:
V‑E
DAY TODAY!
UNCONDITIONAL
SURRENDER SIGNED
Chicago Daily Tribune, May 8, 1945
That was the end of the war in Europe as reported to us by newspapers, radio, and the movies. What the media didn't tell us, however, was of a super‑secret project that had been in existence for several years. Over 1939‑1940, the United States had started work on an atomic bomb. Nuclear physicists knew that atomic fission—splitting an atom—was possible and could yield the deadliest and most powerful bomb ever made. The grave danger was that the Nazis would produce atomic bombs and give Hitler what he wanted, the power to conquer the world.
American research on the bomb continued, and on December 2, 1942, a group of scientists working under the stands at Stagg Field at the University of Chicago achieved a major breakthrough: They were able to control a chain reaction, the almost simultaneous splitting of uranium atoms, needed to make the bomb a success.
Work on finishing the bomb itself started in May 1943 on a lonely mesa at Los Alamos, near Santa Fe, New Mexico. In early July 1945 the completed bomb was moved to an air base at Alamogordo, New Mexico. There it was detonated on July 16. Work on two more bombs was rushed forward while the United States demanded Japan's unconditional surrender.
The Japanese ignored the ultimatum, so Truman ordered the bombs dropped. One hit Hiroshima and killed at least 70,000 people including every man in the Second Japanese Army. The other bomb fell on Nagasaki. There about 40,000 people died in the blast. Thousands of others in both cities later died of burns or radiation poisoning.
As devastating as the explosion over Hiroshima was, it caused fewer civilian casualties than the B‑29 fire‑bombings of Tokyo. To continue the war with conventional weapons meant that bombers would have to wipe out one Japanese city after another. The devastation would have been far more complete than the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
V-J Day
Had the atomic bombs not been dropped, a bitter invasion of Japan would have been necessary. Invading troops would have faced a 2‑million‑man Japanese army and 5,000 kamikaze (“divine wind”) suicide pilots. Battles would have been protracted and fiercely fought; a long conflict on Japanese soil would have left wounds that time could hardly have healed.
Moreover, on August 8, Russia had declared war on Japan, and Russia's partnership in a conquest of Japan would have meant that Japan would be partitioned as happened to Germany.
GREAT
WAR ENDS!
Chicago Daily Tribune,
August 15, 1945
According to the Tribune, news of the Japanese surrender reached Chicago late in the afternoon. By ten o'clock that night, a half million people had poured into Chicago's Loop, or tried to make their way through the mob to get there. They shouted, they sang, they laughed, they danced, and they had a hard time getting drunk. Immediately upon public announcement of the surrender, saloons closed their doors. But with the saloons open or closed, the entire nation took two days off to celebrate!
Doing Time on My Way to Puberty
On
V-J Day, I was doing time in a church camp at Naperville, a Chicago suburb. My status in the family had changed. I was no longer a latchkey kid, at least
during summer vacation. I was still
often home alone when my parents worked, but this summer, I was at that great
age of twelve pointing toward thirteen, and something had changed. I doubt that I knew much about puberty or
hormones, and I was abysmally girl-shy—afraid that if I touched one, she’d shatter
into a thousand fragments or turn me over to an enforcer and I would be shamed
beyond belief. Truly, I was in the forefront
of social distancing.
So
this summer and each summer until I finished high school I was consigned to some
form of organized, supervised activity. Often
I did time at one of the day camps operated by the Chicago park district. One summer I lived with an aunt and uncle in
South Bend, and another I stayed with my sister and her family in Elgin.
But
on V-J Day I was at a coed church camp operated by the Presbyterian church in
our neighborhood. We played a lot of
volleyball and did artsy-crafty stuff, and we kept our rooms clean. That was where I excelled, for I won an award
for having the neatest room. You see—that’s
me: While the other boys were
learning about girls, I was wimping around with a dust cloth in my hands.
The year wasn’t ended yet.
The World Series: Life Goes On
And then there was October 1945, when the Chicago Cubs faced the Detroit Tigers in the World Series. In Detroit, Chicago won two out of three. The Series moved to Chicago, where Cubs fans began gloating about home‑field advantage. Detroit, however, treated Wrigley Field as home turf, winning games four and five. In a real squeaker that went twelve innings, the Cubs won the sixth game 8‑7. The Series was tied.
For the seventh game, time stopped in Chicago. My father said when he came home that night that the whole city seemed to slow down as if people all over Chicago were doing nothing but listening to the radio. At Belding, classes were not given a chance to slow down but were outright canceled while the game was being played.
Students and teachers filed into the
auditorium. There we sat and listened to
a radio placed on a chair at the front of the room. And there we slumped lower and lower in our
seats as the Cubs went down the drain 9‑3.
In Belding's auditorium on that fine autumn afternoon, I learned the
lesson that applies to the hapless, long-suffering Cubs or any other
calamity: Life goes on.
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