AN IMPRESSIONISTIC YOUTH MANY CHRISTMASES AGO!

AN IMPRESSIONISTIC YOUTH MANY CHRISTMASES AGO

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© Christmas 2005

As dreams are the fancies of those that sleep, so fancies are but the dreams of those awake.

Sir Thomas Pope Blount (1649 – 1697)
English Author

The Christmas Season was always a nostalgic period in my hometown of CLINTON, IOWA on the banks of the MISSISSIPPI RIVER, which often froze over because of the cold. Of particular significance was the ITEN CHRISTMAS DISPLAY, which the Iten family always erected on their majestic estate on South Bluff Boulevard.

Frank Iten, who with his brother ran and then sold the ITEN BISCUIT COMPANY, which was known in those mid-twentieth century days as The Snow White Bakery. The company was sold to NABISCO, which wanted to gain the patent rights to the brothers’ saltine cracker formula. So, now you know the origin of “Saltine Crackers,” an invention of two enterprising brothers in a little town of 30,000 on the Mississippi River.

The Christmas Display was a hobby of these two men that grew in eloquence and elaboration over the years, becoming a tourist attraction bringing people from far and wide to view this winter delight.

Author and Clinton historian Gary Herrity has poignantly captured the sense and sensibility of this attraction in his columns in The Clinton Herald, noting that the Iten brothers employed a couple dozen men to design, build, construct and set up the elaborate lighting and sound system to bring the display to state-of-the-arts perfection. This was the era before electronics, computers, or touch-of-the-button synchronicity.

This is all also mentioned here because Iten Christmas Display plays with the mind of an impressionistic youth in the Christmas following World War Two, when the display was moved.

What follows has appeared in a published story and will reappear in another form in the present novel I am writing, titled THE TRIPLE FOOLE.

I was a student at St. Patrick's Grammar School on Third Street and Fourth Avenue North, which has since been erased from sight if not history this past year. I had attended a Friday Novena, which is a series of Catholic worships on nine successive Fridays, with my mother, and was going to Warren's Grocery store on Fourth Street and Fourth Avenue North, or west instead of directly north to my home.

My mother was going straight home as the temperature was between 10 - 15 degrees below zero on this early December night. Christmas was weeks away, but the Christmas spirit had already lightened my mood in anticipation. It was a time when Christmas was treated as the Holy Season, and the focus was on the celebration of the birth of Jesus. The Clinton Herald was resplendent throughout the season with pictures of the Nativity Scene, the Madonna, and of the Three Wise Men.

I might add that this was a very devout period of my life, going to mass and communion every day, trying never to swear, think bad thoughts, or lie, preparing myself for what I thought was to be my vocation, as a priest in the Jesuit order. It was my mother's wish and I thought God ordained.

It was a very dark moonless night, crunchy cold, too cold to snow, but it had snowed the previous week. So, each step I took made that crunchy music with my feet like stepping on eggshells.

As I approached Fifth Avenue North on Fourth Street, after going to Warren's, on my way to Six Avenue North and home, I heard this ethereal music and saw this misty light emanating from Congregational Hill, what we had always called "Hoot Owl Hollow," but which had been purchased by the Congregational Church.

A faint light and even fainter sound emanating in that direction startled me. Instinctively, I stopped, made the Sign of the Cross, and then a vision of the poor children of Fatima crossed my mind. Between May 13 and October 13, 1917, The Lady of the Rosary, or the Madonna appeared at Fatima in Portugal on six occasions to three simple shepherd children, giving them profound messages for the Church and the world, many of which came true. I shuddered with the thought that I was about to be visited by the Blessed Virgin Mother, and I was not ready! I was not worthy!

I actually fell to my knees in the snow directly by the side of Kirkwood Elementary school, where the cylinder fire escape shoot snaked down from the second floor of the school, a slide I often crawled up to slide down, shivering now, not so much from the cold as from the idea that I was either losing my mind or about to have a beatific vision.

Not only was I not ready, I knew nobody would believe me. I wanted to retrace my steps from whence I had come all the way back to St. Patrick Church, but my legs wouldn't move. How can I escape the Virgin? I asked myself, answering, I can't!

My mind was oblivious to the few passing cars, and fortunately, no one else was on the street it was so cold. Then I made out the music as "Silent Night."

I picked myself up, so embarrassed and humiliated that I shouted with a vapor trail leaving my mouth, "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!"

I swore I would never tell a soul, not even my best friend, Bobby Witt, and never did, until I wrote about it. Not yet a teenager, it was, however, an experienced that changed me. I promised myself that I would take life seriously, but never myself. Only a boy, I realized how impressionistic my mind was, and how impressionable I was. It is probably why I became a chemist, and later a psychologist.

Some who think me a bit cynical, were they to know what I share here, could trace it like a wire back to its source where wisdom and folly reside.

If you read my more than a million published words, the hint of that night is buried in there somewhere, which all started when the location of the Iten Christmas Display was changed.

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