Illustrations, tables, schematics, statistics, graphics, excerpts of Fisher Books and empirical case studies of the Fisher Paradigm and other paradigms: 419 pages, $19.95, paperback; $5.99, e-book
BOOK DESCRIPTION
All of the ideas in this diverse collection of provocative essays were first introduced either via my blog, theperipateticphilosopher.blogspot.com, or contained in one of my books. I wish to emphasize that many of the concepts presented here relate directly to The Fisher Paradigm of Organizational Development (OD), a paradigm that evolved over my many working years.
You are so special to me, Jim. I know it’s your ability to be honest and not sugar coat or make excuses for things over which you have no control that resonates with me. I always look forward to whatever endeavors you work towards. Life is short. It is a pleasure to know someone who sees life for what it is and does what his heart urges him to do. I imagine much of this comes from your mother – it something that mine gave to me also. Bless their hearts. Unfortunately, life was not as welcoming back then as most people could not pursue their dreams. Thankfully, they urged us to follow our own paths. Thank you for sharing your gifts and hard work. Linda Casey, Clinton, Iowa artist, creative craftsman and friend
You Can’t Go Home Again!
Thomas Wolfe’s 1929 novel, “Look Homeward, Angel” made the Asheville, North Carolina native famous while “You Can’t Go Home Again,” published posthumously in 1940 translating into art his personal anguish coming out of a small mountain community that failed to have room or a mind capable to understand him.
He would not make it to his 38th birthday in life (1900 – 1938) but would be remembered as a 6’6” giant of American literature of his time. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, and Harvard University’s Graduate Program in the Humanities, his mother thought him an embarrassment if not a humiliation to her and his birth community for never having a regular job. He writes in his novel, “You Can’t Go Home Again”:
“He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out--through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused. Each thing he learned was so simple and obvious, once he grasped it, that he wondered why he had not always known it. And what had he learned? A philosopher would not think it much, perhaps, and yet in a simple human way it was a good deal. Just by living, by making the thousand little daily choices that his whole complex of heredity, environment, and conscious thought, and deep emotion had driven him to make, and by taking the consequences, he had learned that he could not eat his cake and have it, too. He had learned that in spite of his strange body, so much off scale that it had often made him think himself a creature set apart, he was still the son and brother of all men living. He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations. He realized that much of his torment of the years past had been self-inflicted, and an inevitable part of growing up. And, most important of all for one who had taken so long to grow up, he thought he had learned not to be the slave of his emotions . . .
“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America -- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.”
Many faceted artist and novelist Romain Gary (1914 – 1980) had a different experience. His mother hovered over him like a Roman candle turning him into her idealized image as to what he should be. Romain Gary’s telling autobiographical novel “Promise at Dawn” (1960) captures that tortured experience:
“I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me.”
Much accomplished, Gary was a celebrated French novelist, diplomat, film director, screen writer, WWII decorated aviator and winner of France’s most prestigious literary prize, The Prix Goncourt, not once but twice, a prize that could only be won, once!
Gary managed this by penning the novel, The Life Before Us (1975) about a female Holocaust survivor under the name of a relative. It was voted the greatest French novel of the 20th century. Among other accomplishments, Gary was fluent in six languages as well as French Ambassador to the United Nations, yet he felt he never lived up to his mother’s expectations, committing suicide in 1980 at the age of 66. Romain Gary’s life was a novel as he was the quintessential fabulist of his time.
“Promise at Dawn” begins as the story of a mother's sacrifice. Alone and poor, she fights fiercely to give her son the very best. Gary chronicles his childhood with her in Russia, Poland, and on the French Riviera. And he recounts his adventurous life as a young man fighting for France in the Second World War. But above all, he tells the story of the love for his mother that was his very life, their secret and private planet, their wonderland. He writes:
"Born out of a mother's murmur into a child's ear, a promise whispered at dawn of future triumphs and greatness, of justice and love."
Then imagine beautiful and innocent Jean Seberg (1938 – 1979) from Marshalltown, Iowa entering such a world. Seberg became instantly famous when chosen by film director Otto Preminger as a teenager to play “Saint Joan” (of Arc) in that 1957 film, winning that role over 18,000 other hopefuls after a worldwide search.
Seberg would marry international swashbuckling Gary Romain in 1962 and spin off into that heady world of ubiquitous anxiety that was “light years” from her pastoral Iowa home, being constantly harassed by the paparazzi, criticized by the literary media for her lack of sophistication, while under constant surveillance by the FBI for her alleged communist/socialist leanings only to commit suicide in 1979 at the age of forty.
Norman Vincent Peale (1898 – 1993) was pastor of the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City from 1932 until his death in 1993 with President Richard Nixon a personal friend, while Donald Trump with his family, regularly attending Sunday services in Peale’s church.
Pastor Peale became famous with the publication of “The Power of Positive Thinking” (1952) which became a runaway national bestseller although criticized by psychologists and other rationalists as being without depth advocating a form of hypnosis (autosuggestion) that played on the reader’s weakness for grand solutions in an attempt to avoid self-mastery. Despite this, the book spawned scores of self-help imitators to our present day.
Peale writes in “The Reader’s Digest” after becoming famous, of making a rare visit to his hometown, Bowersville, Ohio, and running into a high school classmate. The classmate chirped, “I remember you in school. You were nothing special. That is for sure. How do you explain the life you have now?”
Momentarily, thrown by this comment, Peale responded not sure he remembered the classmate. “Explain it. I don’t know what you mean.” “What I mean,” the classmate replied bluntly, “is that you weren’t a big deal in school. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember you distinguishing yourself in anything.”
In a modest way, I could relate to a similar experience. The committee for our 50th Class Reunion, asked me to give the keynote speech, being a published author with a national bestseller and another book nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Marquis Childs (1903 – 1990), a native Clintonian, graduate of the University of Iowa, syndicated national correspondent, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, gave the commencement address at my high school graduating class, the basis for nominating me to give that speech.
Ten years later, at the 60th class reunion in which my Beautiful Betty also attended, knowing when I prepare for giving a speech that I’m not much fun to be around. For the 60th class reunion, I had no role other than to be an attendee. The ingenious organizers of this reunion happened on the idea of having attendees collect the “signatures” of other attendees as an icebreaker. BB raced around asking people if they had gotten Jim Fisher’s signature, only for her to run into a dear high school friend of mine of those high school days, only to be rebuffed with the greeting, “Who the hell would want Jim Fisher’s signature?” This stopped BB in her tracks. An incredible cheerful and sensitive person, she collected no more signatures.
Later this same person accosted me with the question, “What happened to you Jim Fisher?”
What happened to me? Indeed! Over the previous sixty years, I fathered four children, graduated from the University of Iowa, spent two years in the Mediterranean on the Flagship of the US Sixth Fleet, USS Salem (CA-139) been a R&D chemist for a chemical food processing company, then joined another chemical company as a chemical sales engineer, rising to an industrial division manager, and ultimately to an international executive for that chemical company working on four continents, and living in Johannesburg in South Africa to facilitate the formation of a new chemical conglomerate, retiring (the first time) at 35, taking a two year sabbatical to read extensively and write (one book), returning to the university to earn a M.A. and Ph.D. in a totally different discipline as a social and industrial psychologist, acting as an adjunct professor for several colleges and universities, then consulting public and private sector organizations across the continental United States, and finally taking a position with a high-tech client first as a management & organizational development psychologist, eventually rising, once again, to an international executive for that company, living in Brussels, then retiring (the second time to write) at the age of 58.
This person remembered me as playing four sports in high school and little more. She never had a single high school class with me, which was the four year college prep program with four years of math, four years of science, and four years of English literature and two years of Latin.
She knew me as she knew me, which is true of us all, not knowing that I graduated in the top 10 percent in high school, and was a scholar throughout my university career, earning academic keys for Phi Eta Sigma (freshman academic honorary), Omicron Delta Kappa (leadership honorary) and Phi Beta Kappa (scholastic academic honorary) graduating Cum Laude, and Phi Kappa Phi (graduate school academic honorary). Awards are important as benchmarks to a boy who started out with so little promise.
Nor did she know that “Jim Fisher” had a mother who took the pedestrian mind of her son who flunked kindergarten and willed energy and purpose into that mind that would sustain him and it over a lifetime. In my middle years, I heard from Clinton acquaintances that a prominent Clinton doctor had put this “poor boy” through school. He did not. I never got a penny from anyone but earned merit scholarships in college, and had the G.I. Bill for graduate school which amounted to a considerable sum when attending a land grant institution and having a wife and four children as dependents.
Origin of the Fisher drive: Devlin, A Psychological Novel
Seamus Devlin wondered if people gave much thought to the things that changed them. We change by degrees, but do we only change in one direction? Or are we like a thermometer going hot and cold, up and down, back and forth? He didn’t think so. Once we changed, we stayed changed for better or worse, or at least it seemed that way to him. Much as he would like it otherwise he was finding innocence not a permanent state.
Writers see change as watershed moments, but how can they be so certain when changes are imperceptible? By the time watersheds have been perceived they are long past the moment of influence. We’re always playing catch up explaining what is already past. Seamus was distrustful of what others said was true through constant repetition. Life was made up as you went along, not only for him but for everyone. Those paid to tell us how we think were no better informed. He could see how you spiral into a whole other dimension without assistance, or knowing.
He remembers standing before the principal, his teacher and his parents. They loomed like
giants before him right out of the newspaper comics. The principal was explaining to his
parents that it was of the “Utmost importance for the future of your son that he should repeat
kindergarten.” My da acted as if a knife had been driven through his heart. “What the hell for?
Are you saying my son is slow, or just stupid? Goddamn it, lady, this is kindergarten, not high school.”
“You don’t have to swear, Mr. Devlin. We don’t know the answers to either of those questions,” the principal looked to his teacher who nodded in agreement, “we only know he is not here. Since he is not here he is not teachable. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t have any goddamn time for this, sorry,” my da said, “and I certainly don’t understand your saying he is not here. Goddamn it, lady, he’s standing right in front of us.” He shook his head. “I suppose I’m not here.”
The teacher looked at him with pity. “Mr. Devlin, we’re not saying that at all. We’re simply saying he is inattentive.” The principal realizing language set the father off, added, “We’re saying he doesn’t listen or do what he is told. He just sits there. Now, is that because he doesn’t understand, or for some other reason? We’re not at all sure. What we do know is that he will have trouble doing the work in first grade as matters now stand.” His teacher worked her head up and down in agreement.
His mother remained composed. When the principal ended her explanation, she smiled at the educators, rose, picked up her purse from the adjoining empty chair, and said. “We’re taking Seamus out of East School, and enrolling him on Monday in a parochial school.” Then looking daggers at her husband, “Meaning no offense, but we’re Irish Roman Catholics, and he should be in a Catholic school.”
The principal seemingly relieved, said, “No offense taken, Mrs. Devlin.”
His teacher echoed the same sentiments, “Perhaps that is for the best,” she said, pausing,
“For everyone concerned.”
Those words drove a chilling dagger into my da’s heart shown by the glaring hatred and violence in his eyes. He shook as he took a cigarette out of his suit coat pocket, then realizing where he was, put it back.
For his mother, it had quite a different effect. “I am not faulting either of you for not recognizing genius.” With that she took her husband’s arm and his hand and marched them out of the room with her head held high.
What was the problem? His mother read his report card to his da once out of the building. It said he lacked social skills, preferred being by himself, wouldn’t participate in class projects, and preferred to color with crayons anything including books from the school’s library to the school’s distress.
Moreover, it appeared that he could not talk, or preferred not to, did not know his numbers, had no idea what the alphabet was, while already towering over his classmates like a blond cherubic angel. He overheard his teacher whisper to the principal one-day when they were going out for recess. “My Seamus gives new meaning to the expression dumb blond.” They both laughed. This puzzled him. He wondered what his da would think, but he told only his mother. She was armed with this when they had this conference, promising never to tell his father. Her hand shaking as she smoked a cigarette, “God only knows what that man would do.”
They were a new family, only having been together since July when his mother came home from hospital and his da rented a house in the north end, their first real home. He was again with his little sister, Darcy, who was more precious to him than any puppy.
His da never got over his flunking kindergarten. It dogged him the rest of his short life. His mother accepted it as a workable problem and dedicated herself to redress these fault lines in his construction. She taught him the alphabet, his numbers, how to read, and then went a step further planting the seeds of a compulsive reader in him like herself and stimulating his curiosity never to take anything at face value, or to value anyone’s mind superior to his own. “Seamus,” she would say with that little chuckle, “no one knows about the quiet fire in your belly, but your mother. You will be a work in progress for the rest of my life.”
It was that day at East School, she told him years later, that she decided to make him a scholar and make the world take notice. Scholarship became a new temple of church, and Catholicism a new school of that temple.
With this rigorous programming, it seemed he was headed for the priesthood. His mother was a romantic, seeing him going from the black cassock of the priest to the red lined cape of the monsignor then to the red cassock of the bishop, and one-day resplendent in the red robes of a Doctor of the Church, an American Catholic Cardinal.
His da wanted him to be a medical doctor, least of all a man of the cloth. It looked as if he was going to get his wish as he was good in science, tried medicine, but became bored with it almost from the beginning realizing the best doctors who came from the working class poor were sons and daughters of plumbers, not dreamers and wordsmiths like he was, people who adapted mechanical aptitude to medical requirements when he was devoid of either the propensity or the drive. He would learn that he would lack motivation if his subtext did not match its context.
His preference was to be a professional baseball player, but he knew he lacked the Major League tools of the trade, and was destined at best to be a journeyman catcher in the minors.
Do choices make watershed moments or do watershed moments create choices? That was the puzzle. You would think that terrible start Seamus made as a student would have evaporated his misgivings, but in a way it was like a needle in his side never to allow him to relax; never to be content with whom he was or what he had accomplished. He always had to be more, do more, not to have more; no, not that at all; but never to waste time; never to be content; to keep pushing, ever harder, faster, more determined; never being unafraid to jump from one fire into another.
It was why labels didn’t fit him. People were only comfortable with people who fit comfortably in labels. To the credit of that first school, it had identified his true nature without realizing it had. He was imperceptibly outside of labels, but that was his genius not his weakness, as he was not meant to fit in or be understood. Did his mother make him that way, or did God? The point was moot.
Like his mother, he was enchanted with Irish Roman Catholicism, the weirdest of the many branches of Roman Catholicism with its talismans, superstitions, mysticism, violence, vengeance, righteous belligerence, and Celtic taste for freedom of expression.
Now, in his room at the YMCA, knowing he had blundered into the most momentous watershed moment of his life, he sat on the edge of the bed, rested his arms on his knees and bent his head in exhaustion, and thought of the Stations of the Cross. He looked around the room at the bare walls, the peeling paint, the rusted steam heater, the cracked linoleum floor, and the door to his room, alerting the residence in big red letters: You must vacate the room by noon, register for the next day, or be charged the full price of the room. He thought of the First Station of the Cross: Jesus is condemned to death. He whispered, Lord Jesus, crucified, have mercy on me! He fell back into the bed with his legs still touching the floor, and fell asleep.
Persistence is perhaps as critical as natural ability. Most people don’t lack ability; they lack commitment. This cannot be taught. It simply exists or it doesn’t. We have an inclination to freeze frame a person remembered on limited information in the best of instances. The obsessive flaw of our culture is with “comparing & competing,” measuring others in terms of ourselves. With this mindset, we are easily distracted from our journey into self-knowing, and likely to veer off on a tangent that is not our own.
My mother once said, “We all end up half-finished which can become worrisome; not because we are not diligent. No, not that at all, but because we are not focused. We fail to use ourselves as best we can. You have good looks, a decent enough brain, and an ungodly drive that I didn’t give you. My role was simply to release it, the rest was up to you. That doesn’t make you a big deal. It means you have promise and purpose. Few will remember you for this when you are gone. If that seems cruel, think again. That is life. You either have control of your life or everyone else does. Don’t worry about being understood; try to be understanding.”
So, all I said to this former high school friend is, “Diane, I got old.”
Promise at Dawn
Early in my life before I could read or write, there are patches of awareness that if I had been more self-aware I might have been less disturbed; might have appreciated a more involved and spontaneous exterior life. Romain Gary’s words come to mind:
“Others thought I suffered from lack of exterior, when I suffered from an excess of interior.”
Early childhood trauma is water off a duck’s back for some, but not for others. Trauma defines them if it becomes a constant interior dialogue. It made Gary the artist and warrior that he was, while never quenching the ambers of his raging consciousness.
My early life was less dramatic as I’m no Romain Gary nor do I purport to be. It does explain many things that I can now write about eight decades later.
As matters once stood for this five-year-old, he lived almost solely in his imagination, collapsing exterior visual images into interior dialogues without language to comfort his soul.
My earliest memory is when I was three and my sister Patsy Ann was one and we lived with “Aunt Saddie,” who was not our aunt, on North Roosevelt Street in Lyons, or the north end of Clinton, Iowa. We lived in the loft of a house that when it rained, we could hear the gentle pitter patter on the roof and its easements which was appealingly calming.
My sister was spirited, happy and adventuresome and my entertainment. She delighted me in everything she did, until she ran into the street one day to retrieve a ball she was playing with. A car nearly hit her driving instead into a tree, crushing the car’s front fenders, the driver clearly relieved that he had not hit the little girl.
Hours later a man came by who said he was our da, scolding me for not watching out for my little sister, causing me to cry, as I also blamed myself. The next day, Patsy Ann was gone, and another car came to take me to my great Aunt Annie and Uncle Martin Dean’s tenement house on Second Street off Sixth Avenue North just a stone’s throw from The Clinton County Courthouse. I would not see my sister again until I was five.
Aunt Annie and Uncle Mart lived in the front apartment of this two story apartment building with commercial tenants on the first floor and renters in the back three apartments on the second floor. Often children of the sons and daughters of the Dean’s stayed with them when their parents were between divorces.
My nights were spent on the floor at the feet of Aunt Annie and Uncle Mart, coloring the cartoons of The Clinton Herald, my favorite being Brick Bradford who conquered mechanical and other monsters in distant galaxies.
My days were spent on the back roof of the building that stretched nearly to the alley. Here I listened with fascination to the chiming of the giant green clock at the top of the Clinton County Courthouse, tolling every fifteen minutes and then chiming on the hour to tell the world in “the shadow of the courthouse” the time of the day or night. I would imagine Brick Bradford controlling this giant and marching it off to save the world. Once I told Aunt Annie what I imagined. She tapped my towhead with a smile, “That’s best kept to yourself, Jimmy Ray.”
The alcove of the second floor apartment extended over the sidewalk below with a wraparound window in which I could see my da coming to take me for a walk of a Friday. If he was late, as often he was, I would stand rigid looking down South Second Street with tears welling up in my eyes. Annie Dean once told my da, “Your Jimmy Ray must have the cleanest eyeballs in the county as he cries every Friday until you arrive.”
My da would walk with that cocky walk of his with one hand holding mine and the other his cigarette. He was a giant to me, and I thrilled every time we had these walks greeting everyone along the way with a happy face and cheerful banter. This was during The Great Depression. I always looked with anticipation as we approached the railroad station at South Second Street before the railroad bridge that separated Clinton proper from “South Clinton,” the origin of my family, which was known as a “working class neighborhood.”
Near the railroad station was a soup kitchen offering anyone coming by a giant bowl of chili and fresh saltine crackers, for free! How I loved that chili! In all these years, I’ve never had a bowl of chili to match what I had at that soup kitchen.
Then one day, after walking not even two blocks, we crossed the street, and entered a house with my da saying, “This is your new home.” Then out of the kitchen came a very pretty blond woman with a baby in her arms and Patsy Ann at her side. I rushed to hug my sister, and she smiled with delight in seeing me. I was so full of emotions I thought I would pass out, while my little sister was calm and composed, and almost stoic in comparison. Hadn’t she missed me the way I missed her?
“This is your mother, and this is your little brother, Jackie.” I looked at her and at the baby in her arms and came crashing to the floor. It was too much. My mother put the baby down and rushed to see that I was all right. I was. I could not remember my mother, although I was going on two when she went back into hospital, and I never knew I had a little brother. The pretty lady who was my mother smiled a lot and smoked a cigarette, something I had never seen a woman do before.
The next thing I knew I was being marched down a half block on Fourth Avenue North to St. Patrick Elementary Catholic School where I saw, for the first time, the Sisters of St. Francis in their black habits, their faces framed in a close-fitting white cap that held their headdresses in place with a white piece that covered their necks and cheeks, while the dome of the headdress was black and covered their hair while they were dressed in a flowing black gown accentuated with a large Crucifix on the front of their habits. Rather than being frightened, I was intrigued to the point of experiencing an incredible calm. With their cherubic faces, they seemed as if they rose out of my Clinton Herald cartoons as agents of good.
The 'Fisher Paradigm' has never been publicly promoted; yet it has been an indispensable tool in my work. To whet your appetite, I'll say only that it once literally saved my life and then launched my career as an organizational consultant and global executive. It's all explained in these essays. Not surprisingly, the 'Fisher Paradigm' has positively influenced my writing.
As a social psychologist, I am passionate about my ideas, principally because they address those dilemmas that directly impact our everyday working lives. My inclination is to delve into matters of common distress; things that tend to throw people off stride, disrupting their lives hurtling them into chaos. It's for that reason I am especially proud of this collection with it's potential to guide hard-working people through the straits of chaos that inevitably confront us all in our endeavors, especially where we work, that place we spend so much of our lives with such high hopes.
THE FOREWORD: THE LAST WORD
As a social psychologist, I am passionate about my ideas, principally because they address those dilemmas that directly impact our everyday working lives. My inclination is to delve into matters of common distress; things that tend to throw people off stride, disrupting their lives hurtling them into chaos. It's for that reason I am especially proud of this collection with it's potential to guide hard-working people through the straits of chaos that inevitably confront us all in our endeavors, especially where we work, that place we spend so much of our lives with such high hopes.
THE FOREWORD: THE LAST WORD
You are so special to me, Jim. I know it’s your ability to be honest and not sugar coat or make excuses for things over which you have no control that resonates with me. I always look forward to whatever endeavors you work towards. Life is short. It is a pleasure to know someone who sees life for what it is and does what his heart urges him to do. I imagine much of this comes from your mother – it something that mine gave to me also. Bless their hearts. Unfortunately, life was not as welcoming back then as most people could not pursue their dreams. Thankfully, they urged us to follow our own paths. Thank you for sharing your gifts and hard work. Linda Casey, Clinton, Iowa artist, creative craftsman and friend
You Can’t Go Home Again!
Thomas Wolfe’s 1929 novel, “Look Homeward, Angel” made the Asheville, North Carolina native famous while “You Can’t Go Home Again,” published posthumously in 1940 translating into art his personal anguish coming out of a small mountain community that failed to have room or a mind capable to understand him.
He would not make it to his 38th birthday in life (1900 – 1938) but would be remembered as a 6’6” giant of American literature of his time. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, and Harvard University’s Graduate Program in the Humanities, his mother thought him an embarrassment if not a humiliation to her and his birth community for never having a regular job. He writes in his novel, “You Can’t Go Home Again”:
“He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out--through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused. Each thing he learned was so simple and obvious, once he grasped it, that he wondered why he had not always known it. And what had he learned? A philosopher would not think it much, perhaps, and yet in a simple human way it was a good deal. Just by living, by making the thousand little daily choices that his whole complex of heredity, environment, and conscious thought, and deep emotion had driven him to make, and by taking the consequences, he had learned that he could not eat his cake and have it, too. He had learned that in spite of his strange body, so much off scale that it had often made him think himself a creature set apart, he was still the son and brother of all men living. He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations. He realized that much of his torment of the years past had been self-inflicted, and an inevitable part of growing up. And, most important of all for one who had taken so long to grow up, he thought he had learned not to be the slave of his emotions . . .
“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America -- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.”
* * *
Many faceted artist and novelist Romain Gary (1914 – 1980) had a different experience. His mother hovered over him like a Roman candle turning him into her idealized image as to what he should be. Romain Gary’s telling autobiographical novel “Promise at Dawn” (1960) captures that tortured experience:
“I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me.”
Much accomplished, Gary was a celebrated French novelist, diplomat, film director, screen writer, WWII decorated aviator and winner of France’s most prestigious literary prize, The Prix Goncourt, not once but twice, a prize that could only be won, once!
Gary managed this by penning the novel, The Life Before Us (1975) about a female Holocaust survivor under the name of a relative. It was voted the greatest French novel of the 20th century. Among other accomplishments, Gary was fluent in six languages as well as French Ambassador to the United Nations, yet he felt he never lived up to his mother’s expectations, committing suicide in 1980 at the age of 66. Romain Gary’s life was a novel as he was the quintessential fabulist of his time.
“Promise at Dawn” begins as the story of a mother's sacrifice. Alone and poor, she fights fiercely to give her son the very best. Gary chronicles his childhood with her in Russia, Poland, and on the French Riviera. And he recounts his adventurous life as a young man fighting for France in the Second World War. But above all, he tells the story of the love for his mother that was his very life, their secret and private planet, their wonderland. He writes:
"Born out of a mother's murmur into a child's ear, a promise whispered at dawn of future triumphs and greatness, of justice and love."
Then imagine beautiful and innocent Jean Seberg (1938 – 1979) from Marshalltown, Iowa entering such a world. Seberg became instantly famous when chosen by film director Otto Preminger as a teenager to play “Saint Joan” (of Arc) in that 1957 film, winning that role over 18,000 other hopefuls after a worldwide search.
Seberg would marry international swashbuckling Gary Romain in 1962 and spin off into that heady world of ubiquitous anxiety that was “light years” from her pastoral Iowa home, being constantly harassed by the paparazzi, criticized by the literary media for her lack of sophistication, while under constant surveillance by the FBI for her alleged communist/socialist leanings only to commit suicide in 1979 at the age of forty.
* * *
Norman Vincent Peale (1898 – 1993) was pastor of the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City from 1932 until his death in 1993 with President Richard Nixon a personal friend, while Donald Trump with his family, regularly attending Sunday services in Peale’s church.
Pastor Peale became famous with the publication of “The Power of Positive Thinking” (1952) which became a runaway national bestseller although criticized by psychologists and other rationalists as being without depth advocating a form of hypnosis (autosuggestion) that played on the reader’s weakness for grand solutions in an attempt to avoid self-mastery. Despite this, the book spawned scores of self-help imitators to our present day.
Peale writes in “The Reader’s Digest” after becoming famous, of making a rare visit to his hometown, Bowersville, Ohio, and running into a high school classmate. The classmate chirped, “I remember you in school. You were nothing special. That is for sure. How do you explain the life you have now?”
Momentarily, thrown by this comment, Peale responded not sure he remembered the classmate. “Explain it. I don’t know what you mean.” “What I mean,” the classmate replied bluntly, “is that you weren’t a big deal in school. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember you distinguishing yourself in anything.”
In a modest way, I could relate to a similar experience. The committee for our 50th Class Reunion, asked me to give the keynote speech, being a published author with a national bestseller and another book nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Marquis Childs (1903 – 1990), a native Clintonian, graduate of the University of Iowa, syndicated national correspondent, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, gave the commencement address at my high school graduating class, the basis for nominating me to give that speech.
Ten years later, at the 60th class reunion in which my Beautiful Betty also attended, knowing when I prepare for giving a speech that I’m not much fun to be around. For the 60th class reunion, I had no role other than to be an attendee. The ingenious organizers of this reunion happened on the idea of having attendees collect the “signatures” of other attendees as an icebreaker. BB raced around asking people if they had gotten Jim Fisher’s signature, only for her to run into a dear high school friend of mine of those high school days, only to be rebuffed with the greeting, “Who the hell would want Jim Fisher’s signature?” This stopped BB in her tracks. An incredible cheerful and sensitive person, she collected no more signatures.
Later this same person accosted me with the question, “What happened to you Jim Fisher?”
What happened to me? Indeed! Over the previous sixty years, I fathered four children, graduated from the University of Iowa, spent two years in the Mediterranean on the Flagship of the US Sixth Fleet, USS Salem (CA-139) been a R&D chemist for a chemical food processing company, then joined another chemical company as a chemical sales engineer, rising to an industrial division manager, and ultimately to an international executive for that chemical company working on four continents, and living in Johannesburg in South Africa to facilitate the formation of a new chemical conglomerate, retiring (the first time) at 35, taking a two year sabbatical to read extensively and write (one book), returning to the university to earn a M.A. and Ph.D. in a totally different discipline as a social and industrial psychologist, acting as an adjunct professor for several colleges and universities, then consulting public and private sector organizations across the continental United States, and finally taking a position with a high-tech client first as a management & organizational development psychologist, eventually rising, once again, to an international executive for that company, living in Brussels, then retiring (the second time to write) at the age of 58.
This person remembered me as playing four sports in high school and little more. She never had a single high school class with me, which was the four year college prep program with four years of math, four years of science, and four years of English literature and two years of Latin.
She knew me as she knew me, which is true of us all, not knowing that I graduated in the top 10 percent in high school, and was a scholar throughout my university career, earning academic keys for Phi Eta Sigma (freshman academic honorary), Omicron Delta Kappa (leadership honorary) and Phi Beta Kappa (scholastic academic honorary) graduating Cum Laude, and Phi Kappa Phi (graduate school academic honorary). Awards are important as benchmarks to a boy who started out with so little promise.
Nor did she know that “Jim Fisher” had a mother who took the pedestrian mind of her son who flunked kindergarten and willed energy and purpose into that mind that would sustain him and it over a lifetime. In my middle years, I heard from Clinton acquaintances that a prominent Clinton doctor had put this “poor boy” through school. He did not. I never got a penny from anyone but earned merit scholarships in college, and had the G.I. Bill for graduate school which amounted to a considerable sum when attending a land grant institution and having a wife and four children as dependents.
Origin of the Fisher drive: Devlin, A Psychological Novel
Seamus Devlin wondered if people gave much thought to the things that changed them. We change by degrees, but do we only change in one direction? Or are we like a thermometer going hot and cold, up and down, back and forth? He didn’t think so. Once we changed, we stayed changed for better or worse, or at least it seemed that way to him. Much as he would like it otherwise he was finding innocence not a permanent state.
Writers see change as watershed moments, but how can they be so certain when changes are imperceptible? By the time watersheds have been perceived they are long past the moment of influence. We’re always playing catch up explaining what is already past. Seamus was distrustful of what others said was true through constant repetition. Life was made up as you went along, not only for him but for everyone. Those paid to tell us how we think were no better informed. He could see how you spiral into a whole other dimension without assistance, or knowing.
He remembers standing before the principal, his teacher and his parents. They loomed like
giants before him right out of the newspaper comics. The principal was explaining to his
parents that it was of the “Utmost importance for the future of your son that he should repeat
kindergarten.” My da acted as if a knife had been driven through his heart. “What the hell for?
Are you saying my son is slow, or just stupid? Goddamn it, lady, this is kindergarten, not high school.”
“You don’t have to swear, Mr. Devlin. We don’t know the answers to either of those questions,” the principal looked to his teacher who nodded in agreement, “we only know he is not here. Since he is not here he is not teachable. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t have any goddamn time for this, sorry,” my da said, “and I certainly don’t understand your saying he is not here. Goddamn it, lady, he’s standing right in front of us.” He shook his head. “I suppose I’m not here.”
The teacher looked at him with pity. “Mr. Devlin, we’re not saying that at all. We’re simply saying he is inattentive.” The principal realizing language set the father off, added, “We’re saying he doesn’t listen or do what he is told. He just sits there. Now, is that because he doesn’t understand, or for some other reason? We’re not at all sure. What we do know is that he will have trouble doing the work in first grade as matters now stand.” His teacher worked her head up and down in agreement.
His mother remained composed. When the principal ended her explanation, she smiled at the educators, rose, picked up her purse from the adjoining empty chair, and said. “We’re taking Seamus out of East School, and enrolling him on Monday in a parochial school.” Then looking daggers at her husband, “Meaning no offense, but we’re Irish Roman Catholics, and he should be in a Catholic school.”
The principal seemingly relieved, said, “No offense taken, Mrs. Devlin.”
His teacher echoed the same sentiments, “Perhaps that is for the best,” she said, pausing,
“For everyone concerned.”
Those words drove a chilling dagger into my da’s heart shown by the glaring hatred and violence in his eyes. He shook as he took a cigarette out of his suit coat pocket, then realizing where he was, put it back.
For his mother, it had quite a different effect. “I am not faulting either of you for not recognizing genius.” With that she took her husband’s arm and his hand and marched them out of the room with her head held high.
What was the problem? His mother read his report card to his da once out of the building. It said he lacked social skills, preferred being by himself, wouldn’t participate in class projects, and preferred to color with crayons anything including books from the school’s library to the school’s distress.
Moreover, it appeared that he could not talk, or preferred not to, did not know his numbers, had no idea what the alphabet was, while already towering over his classmates like a blond cherubic angel. He overheard his teacher whisper to the principal one-day when they were going out for recess. “My Seamus gives new meaning to the expression dumb blond.” They both laughed. This puzzled him. He wondered what his da would think, but he told only his mother. She was armed with this when they had this conference, promising never to tell his father. Her hand shaking as she smoked a cigarette, “God only knows what that man would do.”
They were a new family, only having been together since July when his mother came home from hospital and his da rented a house in the north end, their first real home. He was again with his little sister, Darcy, who was more precious to him than any puppy.
His da never got over his flunking kindergarten. It dogged him the rest of his short life. His mother accepted it as a workable problem and dedicated herself to redress these fault lines in his construction. She taught him the alphabet, his numbers, how to read, and then went a step further planting the seeds of a compulsive reader in him like herself and stimulating his curiosity never to take anything at face value, or to value anyone’s mind superior to his own. “Seamus,” she would say with that little chuckle, “no one knows about the quiet fire in your belly, but your mother. You will be a work in progress for the rest of my life.”
It was that day at East School, she told him years later, that she decided to make him a scholar and make the world take notice. Scholarship became a new temple of church, and Catholicism a new school of that temple.
With this rigorous programming, it seemed he was headed for the priesthood. His mother was a romantic, seeing him going from the black cassock of the priest to the red lined cape of the monsignor then to the red cassock of the bishop, and one-day resplendent in the red robes of a Doctor of the Church, an American Catholic Cardinal.
His da wanted him to be a medical doctor, least of all a man of the cloth. It looked as if he was going to get his wish as he was good in science, tried medicine, but became bored with it almost from the beginning realizing the best doctors who came from the working class poor were sons and daughters of plumbers, not dreamers and wordsmiths like he was, people who adapted mechanical aptitude to medical requirements when he was devoid of either the propensity or the drive. He would learn that he would lack motivation if his subtext did not match its context.
His preference was to be a professional baseball player, but he knew he lacked the Major League tools of the trade, and was destined at best to be a journeyman catcher in the minors.
Do choices make watershed moments or do watershed moments create choices? That was the puzzle. You would think that terrible start Seamus made as a student would have evaporated his misgivings, but in a way it was like a needle in his side never to allow him to relax; never to be content with whom he was or what he had accomplished. He always had to be more, do more, not to have more; no, not that at all; but never to waste time; never to be content; to keep pushing, ever harder, faster, more determined; never being unafraid to jump from one fire into another.
It was why labels didn’t fit him. People were only comfortable with people who fit comfortably in labels. To the credit of that first school, it had identified his true nature without realizing it had. He was imperceptibly outside of labels, but that was his genius not his weakness, as he was not meant to fit in or be understood. Did his mother make him that way, or did God? The point was moot.
Like his mother, he was enchanted with Irish Roman Catholicism, the weirdest of the many branches of Roman Catholicism with its talismans, superstitions, mysticism, violence, vengeance, righteous belligerence, and Celtic taste for freedom of expression.
Now, in his room at the YMCA, knowing he had blundered into the most momentous watershed moment of his life, he sat on the edge of the bed, rested his arms on his knees and bent his head in exhaustion, and thought of the Stations of the Cross. He looked around the room at the bare walls, the peeling paint, the rusted steam heater, the cracked linoleum floor, and the door to his room, alerting the residence in big red letters: You must vacate the room by noon, register for the next day, or be charged the full price of the room. He thought of the First Station of the Cross: Jesus is condemned to death. He whispered, Lord Jesus, crucified, have mercy on me! He fell back into the bed with his legs still touching the floor, and fell asleep.
* * *
At the Veterans Administration Affairs Office where I went to sign up for the G.I. Bill, I told the VA officer that I planned to change fields and earn a Ph.D. in this new field at my advanced age of 37. He said to me, “If you do, Fisher, you’ll be the exception. Most vets I see milk the system doing as little as possible to get the benefits. How do you expect to do this?” I answered, “Going to school full time.” He countered, “For how long?” I reflected. “I have to take undergraduate courses in this new field, earn an M.A. and write a thesis before doing Ph.D. level work, then I have to write a dissertation. My academic advisor at the university believes that should take four to six years.” The VA officer smiled, “Good luck with that!” He was right. It was a grind, and it did take six years, but I stuck it out. I planned to go back and show the VA officer my degree, but never did.Persistence is perhaps as critical as natural ability. Most people don’t lack ability; they lack commitment. This cannot be taught. It simply exists or it doesn’t. We have an inclination to freeze frame a person remembered on limited information in the best of instances. The obsessive flaw of our culture is with “comparing & competing,” measuring others in terms of ourselves. With this mindset, we are easily distracted from our journey into self-knowing, and likely to veer off on a tangent that is not our own.
My mother once said, “We all end up half-finished which can become worrisome; not because we are not diligent. No, not that at all, but because we are not focused. We fail to use ourselves as best we can. You have good looks, a decent enough brain, and an ungodly drive that I didn’t give you. My role was simply to release it, the rest was up to you. That doesn’t make you a big deal. It means you have promise and purpose. Few will remember you for this when you are gone. If that seems cruel, think again. That is life. You either have control of your life or everyone else does. Don’t worry about being understood; try to be understanding.”
So, all I said to this former high school friend is, “Diane, I got old.”
Promise at Dawn
Early in my life before I could read or write, there are patches of awareness that if I had been more self-aware I might have been less disturbed; might have appreciated a more involved and spontaneous exterior life. Romain Gary’s words come to mind:
“Others thought I suffered from lack of exterior, when I suffered from an excess of interior.”
Early childhood trauma is water off a duck’s back for some, but not for others. Trauma defines them if it becomes a constant interior dialogue. It made Gary the artist and warrior that he was, while never quenching the ambers of his raging consciousness.
My early life was less dramatic as I’m no Romain Gary nor do I purport to be. It does explain many things that I can now write about eight decades later.
As matters once stood for this five-year-old, he lived almost solely in his imagination, collapsing exterior visual images into interior dialogues without language to comfort his soul.
My earliest memory is when I was three and my sister Patsy Ann was one and we lived with “Aunt Saddie,” who was not our aunt, on North Roosevelt Street in Lyons, or the north end of Clinton, Iowa. We lived in the loft of a house that when it rained, we could hear the gentle pitter patter on the roof and its easements which was appealingly calming.
My sister was spirited, happy and adventuresome and my entertainment. She delighted me in everything she did, until she ran into the street one day to retrieve a ball she was playing with. A car nearly hit her driving instead into a tree, crushing the car’s front fenders, the driver clearly relieved that he had not hit the little girl.
Hours later a man came by who said he was our da, scolding me for not watching out for my little sister, causing me to cry, as I also blamed myself. The next day, Patsy Ann was gone, and another car came to take me to my great Aunt Annie and Uncle Martin Dean’s tenement house on Second Street off Sixth Avenue North just a stone’s throw from The Clinton County Courthouse. I would not see my sister again until I was five.
Aunt Annie and Uncle Mart lived in the front apartment of this two story apartment building with commercial tenants on the first floor and renters in the back three apartments on the second floor. Often children of the sons and daughters of the Dean’s stayed with them when their parents were between divorces.
My nights were spent on the floor at the feet of Aunt Annie and Uncle Mart, coloring the cartoons of The Clinton Herald, my favorite being Brick Bradford who conquered mechanical and other monsters in distant galaxies.
My days were spent on the back roof of the building that stretched nearly to the alley. Here I listened with fascination to the chiming of the giant green clock at the top of the Clinton County Courthouse, tolling every fifteen minutes and then chiming on the hour to tell the world in “the shadow of the courthouse” the time of the day or night. I would imagine Brick Bradford controlling this giant and marching it off to save the world. Once I told Aunt Annie what I imagined. She tapped my towhead with a smile, “That’s best kept to yourself, Jimmy Ray.”
The alcove of the second floor apartment extended over the sidewalk below with a wraparound window in which I could see my da coming to take me for a walk of a Friday. If he was late, as often he was, I would stand rigid looking down South Second Street with tears welling up in my eyes. Annie Dean once told my da, “Your Jimmy Ray must have the cleanest eyeballs in the county as he cries every Friday until you arrive.”
My da would walk with that cocky walk of his with one hand holding mine and the other his cigarette. He was a giant to me, and I thrilled every time we had these walks greeting everyone along the way with a happy face and cheerful banter. This was during The Great Depression. I always looked with anticipation as we approached the railroad station at South Second Street before the railroad bridge that separated Clinton proper from “South Clinton,” the origin of my family, which was known as a “working class neighborhood.”
Near the railroad station was a soup kitchen offering anyone coming by a giant bowl of chili and fresh saltine crackers, for free! How I loved that chili! In all these years, I’ve never had a bowl of chili to match what I had at that soup kitchen.
Then one day, after walking not even two blocks, we crossed the street, and entered a house with my da saying, “This is your new home.” Then out of the kitchen came a very pretty blond woman with a baby in her arms and Patsy Ann at her side. I rushed to hug my sister, and she smiled with delight in seeing me. I was so full of emotions I thought I would pass out, while my little sister was calm and composed, and almost stoic in comparison. Hadn’t she missed me the way I missed her?
“This is your mother, and this is your little brother, Jackie.” I looked at her and at the baby in her arms and came crashing to the floor. It was too much. My mother put the baby down and rushed to see that I was all right. I was. I could not remember my mother, although I was going on two when she went back into hospital, and I never knew I had a little brother. The pretty lady who was my mother smiled a lot and smoked a cigarette, something I had never seen a woman do before.
Finally, the Fisher's are a family!: Patsy Ann, 3, Jimmy Ray, 5, & Jackie, 1.
The next thing I knew I was being marched down a half block on Fourth Avenue North to St. Patrick Elementary Catholic School where I saw, for the first time, the Sisters of St. Francis in their black habits, their faces framed in a close-fitting white cap that held their headdresses in place with a white piece that covered their necks and cheeks, while the dome of the headdress was black and covered their hair while they were dressed in a flowing black gown accentuated with a large Crucifix on the front of their habits. Rather than being frightened, I was intrigued to the point of experiencing an incredible calm. With their cherubic faces, they seemed as if they rose out of my Clinton Herald cartoons as agents of good.
At recess at St. Patrick’s, I would walk back to my home, and have to have my mother bring me back to school. I did this so often that Sister Mary Julianne watched me like a hawk at recess. Years later my mother told me that this troubled her greatly. “You didn’t make any ruckus. You simply didn’t want to be there, so you left. Why, I could never figure out, but it would become a pattern of your young life.”
Only five, my mother along with Helen Dean, Freddie Dean’s wife, the son of Uncle Mart and Aunt Annie, would take me to the movies every Friday at the Strand Theatre on Second Street and Fourth Avenue South. It was called “bank night” and the films were westerns of Gene Autry, Tom Mix, and Hopalong Cassidy with comedies of Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, or serials of Flash Gordon. It was exciting.
That idyllic situation changed when my da came home, from wherever he had been, as he had no job, and always seemed a little tense. “Freddie’s kid, Francis Martin, can tell time, and he’s like Jimmy, only five-years-old.” “So?” my mother answered distractedly, as she was making dinner. My da disappeared and came back with a clock with the glass face removed. “Does your kid know how to tell time?” My mother smiled, “No, he doesn’t, Ray, but I suppose you’re going to teach him.” “You goddamn right I am,” he thundered.” I had never heard him yell like that before but I would get used to it over the years.
So, he sat me down, and moved the long hand and short hand of the clock, and barked out what time it was. He did this for several settings moving his hand across the clock’s surface. “Now, Jimmy, you tell me what I have done; tell me what the long hand and short hand mean; tell me what time those hands are pointing at now.” I not only didn’t tell him; I didn’t respond at all. This only made him angry. “Goddamit, Jimmy, say something!”
“Ray, you’re frightening Jimmy.”
“I’m frightening Jimmy? I’m frightening your goddam kid? Is that what you’re saying I’m doing? Or are you saying he’s an idiot like his father, who has no job, never went to high school like you did, doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, and can’t support his family? Is that what you’re saying?”
“What I’m saying, Ray,” she paused as she lit a self-made cigarette, “you let Freddie Dean get to you like you know he can, who has his parents’ roofing business to support him or he wouldn’t have a job, simpleton that he is.”
With that Jimmy jumped a foot as the clock crashed against the wall with tears rolling down his eyes. Rather than say anything, his mother nestled him against her knowing that her husband wouldn’t be back to normal until his rage had simmered and died. “Let’s get you ready for bed,” she said with some finality, when he had had no dinner, but knew she would bring him something later.
In a strange way, this episode would stay with me all my life, finding me although high strung myself, becoming amazingly calm in crisis with everything seemingly to slow down. It happened in the navy when a destroyer’s gun mount “hang fired” during military maneuvers in the Mediterranean with a dozen badly burned sailors being brought aboard my ship as we had a complete medical hospital. I worked with the doctors on these badly burned sailors, one dying in my arms, for 36 hours without sleep. As a consultant with 550 sworn police officers threatening to mutiny in Raleigh, North Carolina, I uncovered the cause before the turmoil exploded into crisis, thus preventing a major community embarrassment. As a young father, when my three-year-old son could not breathe, and had turned blue, I rushed him into our little bathroom, turned the shower on to maximum heat, put him over my knee, slapping his little backside until he threw up a thick ball of mucous, his breathing returning to normal as well as his color.
Fast Forward
It has often occurred to me over my long life how important treatment by our parents, teachers, priests and nuns can be; or likewise, how damaging. Today, given the insular way I behaved when quite young, I suspect I would be diagnosed as autistic, indeed, to be suffering some neurological malady that perhaps might seal my fate; and of course, this would have been wrong. Likewise, the chances of me writing these words. My wonder is how often misdiagnosis happens. Obviously, psycho-neurological conditions exist, requiring special treatment, but if wrong, can kill the spirit of the child.
After East Elementary in Lyons, I went to school a mile north of this school at St. Boniface School on North Pershing Boulevard. Sister Mary Martini, a missionary nun from Ireland, taught kindergarten through sixth grade in a single first floor room. She was my teacher for the balance of kindergarten, first, second and third grade, transferring to St. Patrick’s school for fourth through eighth grade when my parents bought a house in the Shadow of the Courthouse, also the title of a book I would write on the subject.
Sister Martini was a no nonsense disciplinarian who reminded me in a way of my da, terribly gentle and loving one moment seemingly out of control the next. For some reason, she was always gentle with me. Perhaps that was because I gave her no trouble, was quiet and attentive as a mouse, and would pound out the chalk erasers to the blackboard at lunchtime, as one of her minions.
My little brother, Jackie, was a different story. Little for his age, even for a Kindergarten, mischievous and something of a cut-up, he was popular with his classmates and older students.
One day, Sister Martini left the room to go upstairs to talk to the seventh and eighth grade nun. Before she left, she advised us that no one should talk or get up from their desks. Of course, everyone talked and moved about.
When she returned, she asked if anyone had talked. My little brother, from his desk in the middle row in front of Sister’s desk, raised his hand with an innocent grin; no one else did. She motioned him to stand up and come forward, which he did. “Let this be a lesson to you all,” Sister said as she backed handed my little brother across the face sending him flying over his desk. There followed a diabolical silence across the classroom. “When I say ‘don’t talk’ I mean it!”
Little Arnold John, Jackie’s given name, didn’t cry as we walked home from school, but my sister Patsy Ann asked me accusingly, “Jimmy, why didn’t you do something? You’re our big brother.”
Why didn’t I do something? That hurt. My little brother had been treated brutally by Sister Mary Martini for which there was no excuse, penetrating my imprisoning cocoon in which I had been forever trapped. How could she be so nice to me and so wretched to my little brother? That puzzle would cling to me into my advanced years surfacing with some clarity with German American philosopher Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.”
“We can’t tell daddy,” my little sister declared, “or he will take us out of school, and I like my friends here.” I said nothing but agreed with her, as I walked home holding my little brother’s hand. Whatever was going on in his little mind, he would come to resent nuns, priests and Roman Catholicism with extreme prejudice. Secretive by nature, implicitly cynical, this would define his life moving forward. Adults in authority have no idea the permanent damage they can cause to a young awaking mind.
My sister and I, now in our eighties, still talk by phone every week, she from Iowa and me from Florida, as we have for years, while we have been estranged from our little brother who is also in his eighties. Our baby sister died two years ago after a long illness. She was a casualty of my da’s yelling which apparently got much worse when we left the homestead.
Yelling was his safety valve. Today, this behavior would be called, “verbal abuse.” That said, he never hit any of us, but the sting of his raised voice was nonetheless devastating. For instance, our sister Janice as a wife and mother was said to quickly retreat to the sanctuary of her clothes closet, should her husband raise his voice. Whereas Janice’s other siblings became used to the constant roaring and treated it as background clamor with no more danger to them than to what a Florida blue heron must feel prancing through a crowded noisy neighborhood.
My salvation growing up was books and conversations with my mother when my da was on the road in his job as a Brakeman on the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad, a run between Clinton and Boone, Iowa of 202 miles.
Then there was the respite of playing baseball over at the courthouse, basketball at St. Patrick’s, and football, basketball, track and baseball later at Clinton High School. Irish Roman Catholicism gave me form, the Sisters of St. Francis gave me confidence, academics gave me a language and platform for my thoughts and ideas, and athletics gave me discipline.
My family was working class poor but in a two-parent family where it was clear there was love between the parents, and for the children. It never occurred to me until I had children and grandchildren how important living and playing in a neighborhood could be. My children and grandchildren have lived almost exclusively in tiny self-contained islands with neighbors at a distance. Now these islands are even more isolated as most contact is electronically through social media.
American sociologist Peter Berger writes of modern consciousness as being a “homeless mind,” a mind that has been my focus as a writer for the past forty years. How so?
Work is now mostly for money devoid of pride in performance; management is for power and control devoid of purpose; family is now for status devoid of function; religion is for survival and self-preservation devoid of mission; government is for international clout and dominance devoid of integrity; and personal life narcissistic and self-indulgent devoid of community.
The mind of the time has lost its moral compass and its way. I’ve said about everything I have to say on the subject to the point of redundancy.
James Burke and Robert Ornstein write perceptively about what has been lost with this “cut & control” fixation in “The Axemaker’s Gift,” showing how runaway technology has captured and controlled our minds and culture to the point of self-estrangement. This finds us, paradoxically, no longer relevant as a species.
Lee Dembart of the New York Times captures the essence of The Axemaker’s Gift in his review suggesting that modern civilization has made a Faustian bargain:
“We have made a pact with the devil in exchange for the knowledge we have and the comforts we enjoy.”
Having written a score of books on the subject, it is time to move on.
Should God give me the stamina and will to write in the future, I would like to turn my mind to fiction where reality enjoys a more accommodating audience. In that sense, I wish all readers well.
Only five, my mother along with Helen Dean, Freddie Dean’s wife, the son of Uncle Mart and Aunt Annie, would take me to the movies every Friday at the Strand Theatre on Second Street and Fourth Avenue South. It was called “bank night” and the films were westerns of Gene Autry, Tom Mix, and Hopalong Cassidy with comedies of Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, or serials of Flash Gordon. It was exciting.
That idyllic situation changed when my da came home, from wherever he had been, as he had no job, and always seemed a little tense. “Freddie’s kid, Francis Martin, can tell time, and he’s like Jimmy, only five-years-old.” “So?” my mother answered distractedly, as she was making dinner. My da disappeared and came back with a clock with the glass face removed. “Does your kid know how to tell time?” My mother smiled, “No, he doesn’t, Ray, but I suppose you’re going to teach him.” “You goddamn right I am,” he thundered.” I had never heard him yell like that before but I would get used to it over the years.
So, he sat me down, and moved the long hand and short hand of the clock, and barked out what time it was. He did this for several settings moving his hand across the clock’s surface. “Now, Jimmy, you tell me what I have done; tell me what the long hand and short hand mean; tell me what time those hands are pointing at now.” I not only didn’t tell him; I didn’t respond at all. This only made him angry. “Goddamit, Jimmy, say something!”
“Ray, you’re frightening Jimmy.”
“I’m frightening Jimmy? I’m frightening your goddam kid? Is that what you’re saying I’m doing? Or are you saying he’s an idiot like his father, who has no job, never went to high school like you did, doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, and can’t support his family? Is that what you’re saying?”
“What I’m saying, Ray,” she paused as she lit a self-made cigarette, “you let Freddie Dean get to you like you know he can, who has his parents’ roofing business to support him or he wouldn’t have a job, simpleton that he is.”
With that Jimmy jumped a foot as the clock crashed against the wall with tears rolling down his eyes. Rather than say anything, his mother nestled him against her knowing that her husband wouldn’t be back to normal until his rage had simmered and died. “Let’s get you ready for bed,” she said with some finality, when he had had no dinner, but knew she would bring him something later.
In a strange way, this episode would stay with me all my life, finding me although high strung myself, becoming amazingly calm in crisis with everything seemingly to slow down. It happened in the navy when a destroyer’s gun mount “hang fired” during military maneuvers in the Mediterranean with a dozen badly burned sailors being brought aboard my ship as we had a complete medical hospital. I worked with the doctors on these badly burned sailors, one dying in my arms, for 36 hours without sleep. As a consultant with 550 sworn police officers threatening to mutiny in Raleigh, North Carolina, I uncovered the cause before the turmoil exploded into crisis, thus preventing a major community embarrassment. As a young father, when my three-year-old son could not breathe, and had turned blue, I rushed him into our little bathroom, turned the shower on to maximum heat, put him over my knee, slapping his little backside until he threw up a thick ball of mucous, his breathing returning to normal as well as his color.
Fast Forward
It has often occurred to me over my long life how important treatment by our parents, teachers, priests and nuns can be; or likewise, how damaging. Today, given the insular way I behaved when quite young, I suspect I would be diagnosed as autistic, indeed, to be suffering some neurological malady that perhaps might seal my fate; and of course, this would have been wrong. Likewise, the chances of me writing these words. My wonder is how often misdiagnosis happens. Obviously, psycho-neurological conditions exist, requiring special treatment, but if wrong, can kill the spirit of the child.
After East Elementary in Lyons, I went to school a mile north of this school at St. Boniface School on North Pershing Boulevard. Sister Mary Martini, a missionary nun from Ireland, taught kindergarten through sixth grade in a single first floor room. She was my teacher for the balance of kindergarten, first, second and third grade, transferring to St. Patrick’s school for fourth through eighth grade when my parents bought a house in the Shadow of the Courthouse, also the title of a book I would write on the subject.
Sister Martini was a no nonsense disciplinarian who reminded me in a way of my da, terribly gentle and loving one moment seemingly out of control the next. For some reason, she was always gentle with me. Perhaps that was because I gave her no trouble, was quiet and attentive as a mouse, and would pound out the chalk erasers to the blackboard at lunchtime, as one of her minions.
My little brother, Jackie, was a different story. Little for his age, even for a Kindergarten, mischievous and something of a cut-up, he was popular with his classmates and older students.
One day, Sister Martini left the room to go upstairs to talk to the seventh and eighth grade nun. Before she left, she advised us that no one should talk or get up from their desks. Of course, everyone talked and moved about.
When she returned, she asked if anyone had talked. My little brother, from his desk in the middle row in front of Sister’s desk, raised his hand with an innocent grin; no one else did. She motioned him to stand up and come forward, which he did. “Let this be a lesson to you all,” Sister said as she backed handed my little brother across the face sending him flying over his desk. There followed a diabolical silence across the classroom. “When I say ‘don’t talk’ I mean it!”
Little Arnold John, Jackie’s given name, didn’t cry as we walked home from school, but my sister Patsy Ann asked me accusingly, “Jimmy, why didn’t you do something? You’re our big brother.”
Why didn’t I do something? That hurt. My little brother had been treated brutally by Sister Mary Martini for which there was no excuse, penetrating my imprisoning cocoon in which I had been forever trapped. How could she be so nice to me and so wretched to my little brother? That puzzle would cling to me into my advanced years surfacing with some clarity with German American philosopher Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.”
“We can’t tell daddy,” my little sister declared, “or he will take us out of school, and I like my friends here.” I said nothing but agreed with her, as I walked home holding my little brother’s hand. Whatever was going on in his little mind, he would come to resent nuns, priests and Roman Catholicism with extreme prejudice. Secretive by nature, implicitly cynical, this would define his life moving forward. Adults in authority have no idea the permanent damage they can cause to a young awaking mind.
My sister and I, now in our eighties, still talk by phone every week, she from Iowa and me from Florida, as we have for years, while we have been estranged from our little brother who is also in his eighties. Our baby sister died two years ago after a long illness. She was a casualty of my da’s yelling which apparently got much worse when we left the homestead.
Yelling was his safety valve. Today, this behavior would be called, “verbal abuse.” That said, he never hit any of us, but the sting of his raised voice was nonetheless devastating. For instance, our sister Janice as a wife and mother was said to quickly retreat to the sanctuary of her clothes closet, should her husband raise his voice. Whereas Janice’s other siblings became used to the constant roaring and treated it as background clamor with no more danger to them than to what a Florida blue heron must feel prancing through a crowded noisy neighborhood.
My salvation growing up was books and conversations with my mother when my da was on the road in his job as a Brakeman on the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad, a run between Clinton and Boone, Iowa of 202 miles.
Then there was the respite of playing baseball over at the courthouse, basketball at St. Patrick’s, and football, basketball, track and baseball later at Clinton High School. Irish Roman Catholicism gave me form, the Sisters of St. Francis gave me confidence, academics gave me a language and platform for my thoughts and ideas, and athletics gave me discipline.
My family was working class poor but in a two-parent family where it was clear there was love between the parents, and for the children. It never occurred to me until I had children and grandchildren how important living and playing in a neighborhood could be. My children and grandchildren have lived almost exclusively in tiny self-contained islands with neighbors at a distance. Now these islands are even more isolated as most contact is electronically through social media.
American sociologist Peter Berger writes of modern consciousness as being a “homeless mind,” a mind that has been my focus as a writer for the past forty years. How so?
Work is now mostly for money devoid of pride in performance; management is for power and control devoid of purpose; family is now for status devoid of function; religion is for survival and self-preservation devoid of mission; government is for international clout and dominance devoid of integrity; and personal life narcissistic and self-indulgent devoid of community.
The mind of the time has lost its moral compass and its way. I’ve said about everything I have to say on the subject to the point of redundancy.
James Burke and Robert Ornstein write perceptively about what has been lost with this “cut & control” fixation in “The Axemaker’s Gift,” showing how runaway technology has captured and controlled our minds and culture to the point of self-estrangement. This finds us, paradoxically, no longer relevant as a species.
Lee Dembart of the New York Times captures the essence of The Axemaker’s Gift in his review suggesting that modern civilization has made a Faustian bargain:
“We have made a pact with the devil in exchange for the knowledge we have and the comforts we enjoy.”
Having written a score of books on the subject, it is time to move on.
Should God give me the stamina and will to write in the future, I would like to turn my mind to fiction where reality enjoys a more accommodating audience. In that sense, I wish all readers well.
James
R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
©
June 20, 2019 
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