In the Shadow of the Courthouse: An Essay of House & Home

In the Shadow of the Courthouse
An Essay of Hearth & Home in the 1940s1

James R. Fisher, Jr.

© October 2005

Imagine coming of Age in Clinton, Iowa in the middle of the United States in the middle of the century, and in the middle of this farm belt community of 33,000, snuggled against the muddy banks of the Mississippi River during World War II. It was in this working class climate that I came of age In the Shadow of the Courthouse, while the nation struggled to come of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb.

There was no television, no mega sports, no big automobiles, or manicured lawns. There was of course radio, movies, high school sports, the Clinton Industrial Baseball League in the summer, where men too young or too old to go to war played baseball for the fun of it. Clintonians had victory gardens, drove old jalopies, took the bus, or rode their bicycles to work.

It was a time when the four faces of the magnificent Clinton County Courthouse clock chimed on the half hour, and threw a metaphorical shadow over young people’s lives. This made certain that young people would not be late for meals made from victory garden staples.

The courthouse neighborhood had most stay-at-home mothers in two-parent families. Few parents managed to get beyond grammar school, nearly all worked in Clinton factories, or on the railroad. Divorce was as foreign as an ancestral language.

It was a time in hot weather that people slept with their families in Riverview Park nestled against the Mississippi River, left windows open, doors unlocked, bicycles on the side of the house, and if they had an automobile, keys in the car, knowing neither neighbor nor stranger would disturb their possessions. In winter, schools never closed, even when snow banks were four feet high mounted on both sides of the walks.

This was my world and core neighborhood against the backdrop of the courthouse, St. Patrick’s Elementary School, Riverview Stadium, downtown Clinton and North Clinton, or Lyons. To the west was Bluff Boulevard, the site of Mount St. Clare College and Convent that provided teachers of my school and Mill Creek, where we waded in the summertime; to the east there was Beaver Slough and Joyce Slough, where we often fished and explored nature. There were other churches, schools, and hospitals throughout the city, including U. S. Army’s Schick Hospital, which brought the war to my home and city, tending battlefield casualties. There was also the USO, Chicago & North Western Railway, Clinton Foods that made everything imaginable from corn, and many other industrial workplaces, which were all working hard toward the war effort as seen through my impressionistic eyes as a boy from eight to thirteen.

It was a time when we kids created our own play, as our parents were too tired, or too involved in the struggle to support the war effort and make a living to pay us much mind. We would never again know such Darwinian freedom, or its concomitant brutality, as you only got to play if others thought you were good enough. If you were not chosen to play, you had to find on your own more suitable options. This was a time, place and circumstance of my home seen through my self-confessed imperfect vision.

Within The Shadow of the Courthouse was an Irish grocer, Frank Cramm, a family physician, Dr. Joseph O’Donnell, an eyes, nose and throat specialist, Dr. Ed Carey, a family dentist, Dr. John McLaughlin, a family barber, Robert “Ripper” Collins, family tavern keepers, Harvey Sullivan’s and Leon Cavanaugh’s places, and even a family mortician, Johnny Dalton. My Irish Catholicism was balm to my anxieties, and sanctuary to my soul. Ireland was never more insularly Irish than my courthouse neighborhood.

My da was never more at home than in the company of his kind. In our home, the coffee pot was always perking on the gas burner, filling our house with its aroma, my mother at the kitchen table busy singing to herself as she whipped up a chocolate fudge cake in preparation for the weekly arrival of the clan. The Wednesday group included railroad brakeman, Bill Knight, who worked with my da, my uncle Bill Clegg, the railroad car inspector, saloon keeper Leo Sullivan and his wife, Alice, Cleo Hyde, a girlfriend of my mother’s, and my mother’s brothers and their wives, uncle Frank and aunt Helen, uncle Bern and aunt Verna, and uncle Snowball, who was called that for his white-blond hair, and uncle Arne, who never married. The Clegg’s were “Orange Irish,” or protestant, and the rest were “Green Irish,” or Catholic.

I would be in bed, but would peek down the stairs to listen to their conversation. They would talk a bit about the work of the day, but quickly drift into storytelling. That is when my ears would perk up. My da was a listener, while my mother, who was hard of hearing, would busy herself cleaning the ashtrays, which always seemed to be stuffed with flaming butts, refilling coffee cups, and asking if anyone wanted more coffee. Perhaps one reason I have never smoked is that our tiny house with all those people formed a haze as the smoke struggled against the walls and ceiling to escape, but impossibly so.

Uncle Bill, the Protestant Irishman, would set the stage for his story as if writing a prologue. He would clear his throat. The room would grow quiet. Methodically, he would pack his pipe, light it, take a slow deliberate drag on it, and then theatrically launch into the preamble of his story. The sweet aroma of the tobacco would drift to my hiding place, so I never minded that his stories invariably were about his national misgivings about the war effort. His thoughtful confidence mesmerized me, as did his crusty voice: “Ask yourself the question, what are we fighting for; then ask yourself, does anyone know?” He would stop, look down at his pipe, approve its status, take another refreshing puff, and then look over everyone’s head as if seeing beyond them. “The country is going to hell in a basket,” he surmised in the summer of 1942, after we had been at war for six months. “Roosevelt’s not bright enough to deal with Churchill. (Wendell) Wilkie would have handled him much better. Stalin, too. As matters now stand, there’s no certainty we’re going to win this war.” No one ever interrupted uncle Bill. This was out of respect, as his son, Jack, a US sailor on a repair ship at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese suddenly attacked the island of Honolulu, was nearly killed. So, his words counted for something.

“Oh, no!” I gasped with a hand over my mouth. His voice rolled on but I heard no more. To say something against President Roosevelt in my house was as much a sacrilege as saying something against his Holiness, Pope Pius XII. FDR was my da’s hero, the Pope my mother’s. How could they allow this? Confused at this point, I would rush up to bed, having heard too much.

Our courthouse neighborhood house was our first real home. For the first eight years of my life, we moved constantly from one rental place to another, always having to leave because my da couldn’t come up with the rent.

Once we were in our new home, no doubt to get rid of me bothering my mother in the kitchen, she said, “Go and explore the house, then write it down, and I’ll read it, and grade you on it.” With her, school was never out, but she did this with a beatific smile that warmed my heart. Besides, exploring was natural to my nature.

Okay, I said to myself, we have always been renters, so what is special about this place? I paced off the distance from the house next door, high school coach Howard Judd’s property line, to where the milkman, Walt Lange’s property line started in three-foot steps: sixty-four feet. Then I walked from the curb at Sixth Avenue North to the alley at the back of our property: one hundred and ten feet. The house, I found, was forty feet wide, and thirty feet long, and the distance to the Judd’s place: twenty-four feet. I took my pencil out and wrote it down in my little notebook.

Next I surveyed the property. There was a delicious apple tree outside the dining room window. Directly behind the house were currant berry bushes, a small asparagus patch, and immediately behind it, a crab apple tree. I noted that a crumbling cement walk divided the backyard symmetrically, with intertwined green grape vines on one side and purple grape vines on the other with all the property ending with a chicken coop to the west of the walk, and a small garage to the east. These were nestled against the alley. We had no automobile, and my da was hardly a farmer, being born in Chicago, and so the dilapidated chicken coop and collapsing garage were little more than eyesores. I didn’t write this editorial comment down, only made note of the existence of these two structures.

But I must admit the chicken coop fascinated me. It was large and was once well constructed, much better than the garage, with roosting bins for hens, row on row on row, and three tiers high. With the happy prospects of not having to collect eggs or tend chickens, I envisioned this being my secret place, which it became. I could keep my comic books here, put pictures of my comic heroes on the wall, and write down my secret codes. I could make a small altar to the Blessed Virgin Mary during her “Month of May,” and not be criticized by my da for being too religious. I looked around and the place smelled of rotten eggs, disgusting! Besides, the place was a mess. It would take a lot of work to clean it up, but I looked forward to the prospects because it would be “my place” and no one else’s.

A plum tree was directly in front of the chicken coop, and a pear tree in front of the garage. Imagine an orchard, a garden, a vineyard, and a hen house and garage on such an incredibly small place. I laughed. My da could never appreciate this place, as I suspect the Irish south side of Chicago was unlikely to have a single fruit tree or chicken coop.

My new home was a one-and-one-half story white clapboard boxlike house with a green-shingled pitched roof, and was ten years old, and cost $3,000. My da borrowed the $300 down payment from my uncle Arne, which my mother told me he was never able to repay. But uncle Arne, who was single and worked on the railroad making boxcars, didn’t seem to mind. I sensed that he received suitable compensation in coffee, chocolate cake, shared cigarettes with my parents, and a place to go every night after work. He tried valiantly during some of those visits to teach me how to become a cartoonist, his first love, without much success.

Now, more than seventy years after the house was first built, it stands proudly and defiantly against time with its present occupants, but without the chicken coop, the garage, the grapevines, fruit trees, or the garden.

The house was small, a little over a thousand square feet, but still divided into four bedrooms, a formal dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and full basement. The basement had a terribly low ceiling, and I at eight, already four-eleven, could not stretch to my full height. It was damp and always cold, even in the summer. Like the house, it was subdivided into a washroom, fruit cellar, furnace room, and coal bin, the latter, which was under the front porch, with a utility room under my parent’s master bedroom. The basement was also notably void of a workbench, lathe, carpenter saw, electric drill, and other tools, which I am certain, had they been there, my da would have had no idea how to use them. As a consequence, to this day, the only tools I know are words and the craft of putting them together.

The small bedroom downstairs adjoining the stairwell was the radio room. A reading lamp, a large padded sofa, a love seat, and a small credenza occupied it. My mother would read to us out of books checked out from the Clinton Public Library, or we would sit around the radio and listen to the high jinx of Amos and Andy, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Fred Allen and His Tin Pan Alley, or on more serious occasions, to the “Fireside Chats” of President Roosevelt. We could laugh to our hearts content with the former, but had to be as quiet as little mice for the latter.

The master bedroom was out of bounds for all four of us kids with a glass door covered in lace curtains. My da would laugh, looking at the door, and say this was the closest we would ever come to being “lace curtain Irish.” I ventured into it anyway on this occasion. The room had a vanity dresser and mirror, a chest of drawers, a queen size bed, a reading lamp on one side of the bed, and ashtrays everywhere: on both sides of the bed, on the dresser, and on a chair. Everywhere! What made the room special, however, were ceramic frescoes of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mother, gifts of the Sullivan’s purchased on a trip to Chicago in 1940.

The only defining feature to the living room, other than a three-seat sofa, and two matching upholstered chairs, and a beat-up coffee table with doilies on all surfaces, were the framed pictures on the wall of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Pope Pius XII. Otherwise, the room was quite unremarkable in its nakedness.

Leo Cavanaugh, who owned the Silver Rail Saloon, repapered the walls of the living and dining room, and I noticed the patterns didn’t always mesh with the prints. It was as if he created a piece of art montage. I loved it. His wife, Bea, would sit in the kitchen with my mother smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, and laughing at his efforts. She had a delightful laugh that I can still recall.

My favorite spot was the dining room table, which was mahogany and large, and nearly filled the entire room with its four mahogany chairs jammed against its four corners, along with a mahogany bureau stuffed against its back wall. I would draw, and write my little stories, and imagine myself as always the hero. This furniture was an heirloom along with Waterford crystal cut glass bowls and candlestick holders. When I tired of reading or drawing, I would study the dictionary and then try my new words on my mother in often inappropriately constructed sentences with something approaching religious zeal.

“Language is the tool of the mind,” she would often say, “and since you must think with words, you must master them if you are to think clearly.” Then she would add for emphasis, “Since you weren’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you must master these tools if you are to find your way.”

What started my affair with words was “aardvark.” My mother was angry with me one day for breaking one of her crystal candlestick holders while attempting to dust them. When she saw what I had done, she said, “You don’t have the sense of an aardvark.” I was crushed, and even more so when I discovered what the word meant.

The kitchen was small and functional with a country-style sink and faucet, with second hand table and chairs, an icebox and gas stove. The kitchen cupboards were built above the sink and a pantry was beside the stove. I liked to stand beside my mother as she cooked meals and tell her all the things that were on my mind. She was especially serene when she was cooking as if she were in prayer. She would patiently tolerate my rambling, to a point, and that is why she chased me out of the house this particular day to survey the property inside and out. I now approached her as she prepared dinner with my copious notes of my extensive study, only to have her say with a smile, “Later Jimmy, can’t you see I’m busy?”

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1. This is an essay taken from my book, In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel, AuthorHouse, Bloomington, Indiana, USA, 2003.