COMMENTARY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Note: What follows is my response to Joseph H. Brown’s column in the Sunday edition of The Tampa Tribune. Mr. Brown is an editorial writer for this paper, whom I have come to respect, and with whom I often correspond. His Sunday columns are always though provoking, reasonable and reasoning. He looks at various issues in the community and comments on them, while sometimes extending these assessments to the wider national community, especially as it might relate to African Americans and their challenges. We have never met but have some dots that connect us. He is a Midwesterner, reared in Chicago, but is an alumnus of the University of Iowa as I am as well. Although he is black and I am white, I often find his comments as relevant to me as to African Americans because we share a common culture. Many years ago, while calling on a client in Jamaica, a black physical chemist trained at the California Institute of Technology, he made a comment that resonated with me, “Real differences in people are not a matter of color but of culture.” I have always believed that to be true even when the evidence suggest some contradictions to that assessment.
In the present column to which I make reference, titled “Lady Justice Smiles On Debra Lafave.” She is the young lady that recently was given a sentence of house arrest and community service when, by law, she could have been sentenced to serve many years in prison for having an affair with a teenage boy. The mother of the boy wanted the matter to be done with, and not to have her son exposed to a national tabloid assassination.
Mr. Brown’s article, however, focused on the double standard of justice for men and women when it comes to sex with teenagers in their charge.
But that is not what prompted my response to Mr. Brown. It was this comment by him:
“What did disturb me about this case was the observation by a psychiatrist on one of the local morning shows: if she had been an ugly woman, she would be going to jail.”
Mr. Brown continues: “For years I’ve believed that the symbol of our criminal justice system – a blindfolded woman holding scales to be unbalanced by evidence – was outdated, if in fact it ever was realistic. Most Americans would agree that race, social status and wealth can radically tip the scales of justice.”
I wanted to confirm, in fact, corroborate his suspicion with regard to justice, but even in a broader context. So, I wrote the following:
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Joseph,
The most poignant comment in your column today was your reference to crime and justice being influenced by the "good looks" of the defendant.
There is precedence for this in psychology and psychiatry. Both have been shown by studies to (a) be more apt to see the client making a full recovery; and (b) to insist on a somewhat protracted therapy and counseling to that end.
Conversely, ugly people were shown to be regarded as much less likely to respond positively to therapy, and psychologists and psychiatrists were more apt to discourage continuing sessions with them.
Similarly, in industry, it has been my experience that not only were we more apt to hire good looking people of lesser qualifications than uglier applicants, we were even more likely to promote them, not so much on the merits of their actual achievements as to the fact of their physical appearance. Obviously, an elaborate rationale justifying such hiring and promoting has been sophisticated to an art form if not a pseudo science.
I once remarked to a fellow director when I worked for Honeywell Europe that there wasn't a single director under six feet of height, and although men are not routinely known to be good at gauging handsomest, the grooming of these people clearly stood out compared to their direct reports. It was as if everyone subscribed to “Gentlemen’s Quarterly.” He looked at me quite astounded, he a handsome man of six-three, trim and athletic, "Why does that surprise you? It's as it should be."
But should it? There once was a US senator who was quite brilliant by the name of Frank Church, who was discouraged from running for the presidency of the United States by his party promoters "because his face was too round." Senator Church suffered the photogenic anomaly of a trim body and a fat countenance.
In my writing, I've referred to our cosmetic culture, which supports cosmetic interventions, which in turn inevitably produces cosmetic results, and then we wonders why the problems that haunt us are never solved.
Subjectivity is natural to man, but it is a little disingenuous when man flaunts objectivity in the face of this narcissistic subjectivity, only to then wonder why justice is seldom served.
Debra LaFave, the person you refer to in your column, is indeed lucky. She got off without prison time for having an affair with a 14-year-old student, but that is not my point.
My point is that a definitive pattern has been established in our culture. She would seem simply representative of it. Viewing her on television, she looks more like a porcelain doll than a flesh and blood person. She seems to have perfect skin, perfect make-up, not a hair out of place, and the precise smile and movement of, well, a mechanical wind up doll. With all due respect, she may be a nice young lady with confused priorities, but from a distance she appears the epitome of our wind up mechanical culture carried to its arbitrary and self-deceiving perfection.
The same could be said of that young lady that accidentally killed those two young black boys, and then fled the scene of the crime with the support of her parents in the cover up, claiming, "she feared for her life" because it was a black neighborhood, as if blackness was an ominous threat.
Recently, we learned of a young black man, about her same age, who accidentally killed a person with his van. He attempted to go to the aid of the person injured. Unfortunate for him, he came from the islands, was an immigrant with no prison record, and no extended support system, and so was sentenced to a large term prison sentence for vehicular manslaughter. The press gave him little space or sympathy, and now he languishes in prison wondering at his fate.
O. J. Simpson got off allegedly murdering his wife and a young man who came to return her sunglasses left at the restaurant. A clever defense is offered as reason for his acquittal, but I don’t think it hurt that he had movie star good look and sport hero credentials.
Shelby Steele wrote a wonderful book, "The Content of Our Character," with his point being that whites are apt to see color before character. But the book’s premise, written by an African American, is just as likely to apply to whites seeing appearance before character as well.
It saddened me, but did not surprise me, when Moslem men in France, who were born into that culture, assimilated that culture, spoke the French language with a lilt and beauty as moving as any Frenchmen complained, "We are French, but when we go for a job, we are not Frenchmen; when we go to the police to complain of harassment, we are not Frenchman. Then we are Moslems.” Why are Frenchmen surprised at the recent riots among this population? There is only so much humans can take, any humans, before spontaneous human combustion occurs.
Would jail time be good for Debra LaFavre? I don't think so. It is not good for most people, but too often a training ground in hate and violence.
We take such pride in our technological advancement, but we remain primitives when it comes to culture.
As always, I enjoy your insights and humanity. Always be well,
Jim
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Friday, November 25, 2005
PROFILE OF THE LEADER IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY!
Profile of a Leader in the Twenty-First Century
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2005
To be a leader of men one must turn one’s back on men.
Havelock Ellis (1859 –1939)
I have given considerable attention on how the leadership has lost the tribe. Conversely, I have given little attention to what leadership is in the twenty-first century.
The leader cannot continue to be everything to everyone because he will end up being nothing to anyone. The leader must be consistent within himself and true to that self in a greater since, as for example was Abraham Lincoln in our American history.
The twentieth century generated a spate of such leaders, especially during the past fifty years in virtually every institution and industry of society, placing American society and its influence across the globe in deep jeopardy.
The thought occurred to me that it might be apropos to give a profile of what I sense a leader in this new century might embody. Obviously, this is not a definitive profile, and inevitably incorporates my personal bias, but it may contain some of the ingredients to a more appropriate slate for discussion. For, alas, the reader as leader must decide that on his own.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
A PRAYFRUL PERSON
Prayer is a powerful device for the leader to get in touch with his own center. Read "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius (121 -180), the Roman Emperor, and you are reading a prayer book of thought meant to be read by no one. Prayer was a powerful guide to leaders of the past, leaders whom we read about today thousands of years after their deaths.
The leader will practice prayer, but not consider it a ritualistic undertaking. Prayer allows one to tap into one's philosophy, and everyone has a philosophy, which guides one to self-realization or self-destruction. It is as impossible to live without a philosophy, as it is to live without the necessity of prayer in one's life.
One does not pray for show or influence. One prays with the will to clarify one's dedication to one’s appointed task. There is no need for church or chant, for genuflecting or crossing oneself, for being in high costume and sober countenance, or for bowed head and the rolling of beads.
These symbolic gestures distract one from the central necessity of the dedication of the will to finding resolution to what confounds it. The source of strength is never outside one, but always within one’s core essence. Prayer is the tapping of one's gifts to serve a common humanity.
PROBLEM SOLVING
The leader has a clear and synoptic grasp of what comes before him, assimilates it thoroughly and forms reliable judgments on it. He has a wide embracing and retentive memory, which enables him to cover much ground and to recall his conclusions for future use. His mind need not work quickly, certainly not hastily, nor need it be especially imaginative and inventive. Rather, his mind is the trustworthiest critic of what is presented to it.
Not uncommon, the leader has a prodigious ability to make order of any material presented to him, to comprehend it, to analyze it, and to put it together again, to remember both it and his own conclusions for future use. The leader knows that it is not the lack of solutions that tarries him from wise decisions, but his failure to romance the problem by defining it correctly.
REGARDING SCHOLARSHIP
The leader is not especially a lover or even comprehender of the classics. He sucks the juice out of literature as one sucks it out of an orange, but he does not necessarily distill from the whole fruit a particular essence.
This is a limitation not only of talent, but of time as well, for he must remain focused on what is of pressing concern, and abide scholars, intellectuals and the classics in which they live with due caution. Lord Acton was wise in suggesting that we give intellectuals everything but power, for it is power that corrupts and corrupts absolutely.
The leader is more at home with history, often ancient history. History he understands, for with history he can connect the dots as to how those who have gone before him encountered the wall, and found a way to negotiate it, if not penetrate this barrier.
The leader, by definition, is a man of action with little time for the luxury of contemplation. He understands the nobility of action. Therefore, history, which tells him the deeds of good to great men, is to him the best of all literature.
The quality of his mind is one built toward action, not sentiment. Verse deals with the deeds of good men and displays their noble sentiments in the best of poetry. The leader's poetry is what his actions imbrue, which is left for poets to record for posterity.
The sententious code of the poet is beyond the pale of the leader with his having no choice but to memorize the criticisms of others to interpret the depths of poetry's meaning. On the other hand, and this falls within his natural inclination, the leader is often a brilliant student of the law, and a stellar judge of his peers, where subjectivity is provided with some boundaries for preferred objectivity.
POWER OF MEMORY
The leader is not likely to be an original thinker, but an able processor of those that are.
His analytical and synoptic gifts are displayed in the powers of his memory. These powers may be so great as to constitute a quality of his genius and independent thought. Such a leader has been known to be able to appropriate printed briefs so completely that when answering questions of substance regarding them, he can see the printed page. Likewise, he may use the briefest of notes as a prop when speaking, or be given to holding papers in his hands as if they are the substance of his remarks, when to find later they are but blank.
ADMINISTRATOR
The leader is an administrator of superlative ability. He knows every part of his complex machine, often better than his department heads, a gift, which does not always endear him to his directors. He is often able to perceive the assets and limitations of the complex machines of other organizations, machines which complement or are in competition with his, providing him with a clear edge.
It would be wrong to assume the leader’s gifts of ordering, comprehending and remembering material as an academic predilection, but rather a fundamental aspect of his leadership. His mind is a sorting bin of ideas and information, position papers and secret documents.
What limits these gifts in a creative sense, and this is a problem when the leader is a prisoner of his own design, is when he blindly aims to preserve the culture of the status quo when it no longer serves him or his purposes. The antic of his soul needs periodic revisiting, and this is accomplished through prayer.
CONFLICT AND COMPROMISE
The leader must always wrestle with the horns of the dilemma, which are to fight or flee, whether to fight and win or lose or simply retreat to save honor.
The leader who leads with personality appeal is likely to treat opposition as a public relations snafu when it is clearly a matter of published policy. The inclination with such a mindset is to avoid conflict at any cost.
Conflict is often misunderstood when such thinking predominates. Managed conflict is the glue that holds the organization on task and together.
Leadership is a combatant role where conflict and compromise are its natural components. Peace loving is for poets far removed from the center of human combustibles.
The leader driven by personality appeal wants to give circumstances a chance, even when the circumstances, from a rational perspective, seem hopeless on the surface. He is a prisoner of his culture, of his history, religion, customs and language. He is likely to take comfort in what he knows and allows himself to be hostage to what he doesn’t.
TRUTH
Hard on the tail of the horns of the dilemma is the matter of truth. The leader knows that truth is a subjective component of objective reality. Since the leader is a person dealing with people, his objectivity is tainted with his subjective lens.
Therefore, leadership calls for tolerance and understanding, patience and courage to see the virtue in another’s truth when there appears to be none.
The leader most certain of his truth with little capacity to engage doubters is most likely to repel the worldly and attract the earnest, to divide his charges into true believers and passionate doubters, where there are the wicked and the good, the hedonists and the puritans, the lost and the found. It takes wisdom for the leader to recognize that these dimensions describe his own population.
Two kinds of people listen to the leader, those who hate what he has to say, and those who believe he has possession of the truth, and the answer to their dilemma.
There is a third kind of people, namely those who believe in the same truth as the leader, but are quite unable to recognize the leader as a custodian of it. They see the leader as seemingly champion of a morality that is narrow and joyless, and perhaps worst of all, pointless.
Because of this, these people hate or despise the leader, or both. Morality that has no foundation in fact, but is adhered to out of taste and habit, and nothing deeper, becomes too little and too late for a population requiring tools to deal with internal stress and external accelerating demands.
IDEALISM
The leader is a believer in the human future. He is fascinated with and by the human past, by the evolving new theories of man’s origins, by the various estimates of the length of true human existence.
The leader is much in thrall of creation than of the Creator. If the leader enjoys communion with his God, it is through the medium of creation, that is, concrete reality, and not an abstraction.
The leader’s own creative mind is excited by the evidence of a supreme creativeness. It is all around him, as well as within him. The leader, as idealist, is in thrall by the contemplation of man, and of man's history and prehistory.
If the leader has a defect, it is not the defect of having misunderstood man. It is the greater defect, to having believed in man.
This belief in man is the secret of the leader’s power. As a physicist might insist that matter can never be destroyed only changed, the leader as idealist would insist that truth, beauty and goodness could never be lost but only viewed differently.
The leader’s idealism does not come from books, but from trials in the world.
FREEDOM
The leader walks a narrow line between a belief in men and knowing absolute freedom appeals to the mindless majority.
Institutions purely democratic sooner or later destroy liberty and civilization, or both. Universal suffrage, for example, when the electorate is ignorant of its responsibility becomes a ploy for demagogues and power brokers to assert their will. Elections become Olympic like races to see who can raise and spend the most money. A campaign of ideas has lost its vigor and wastes away in the desert of the outcasts.
People in power play to the apathetic middle in politics, government, commerce, industry, academia and the religious. The mindless partisans are their focus in a climate devoid of scrutiny or challenge.
Freedom has become limited to a choral tribute sung by an entertainer in the introduction of athletic contests, and then put back in the drawer until the next contest.
Control is a function of order but not of liberty.
The harsh reality is that people cannot handle freedom. It is too demanding. It requires that they take control of their lives and not turn them over to someone else to define, manage, run, and dispose of.
The leader is not a manager, a controller, nor the owner of other people's problems but their reflection in terms of freedom or self-imprisonment.
Self-imprisonment requires nothing of people in return for their vote of ignorance. The health of society rides on its view and appetite for freedom, which is a measure of its wisdom.
The wiser of the Founding Fathers never intended to have universal suffrage. They believed the vote should be restricted to mature property owners who had a personal stake in good government. This is heresy to speak in such terms today. But should society be plundered and laid waste by barbarian minds before the leader seizes the reins of control? We are not only speaking of government, but of every institution of society. That is the question. That is the dilemma.
A leader need not impose draconian measures, but rather balance rights with privilege, which must be earned.
Privileges appeal to the popular, to those that believe industry is a function of morale, when it clearly isn’t. Morale is a manifestation of groupthink where the apathetic middle sues for the most while giving the least.
Rights are a function of motivation, which is a manifestation of freedom where the conscientious do all they can because they live in a climate where they can.
Read the letters of common soldiers in the Civil War and compare them to stump speeches of politicians today. The difference is the equivalent of an essay by a Ph.D. in the case of the soldier to that of a kindergartener in the case of the politician. The dumbing down of society is an escape from freedom.
“To be a leader of men,” the physician Havelock Ellis insists, “one must turn his back on men.”
Libertarianism is poetry without a population in mind. It is a hopeless cause as Europe is now finding in its attempt to reduce the social welfare system of work to a day's pay for a day's work. It is equally a hopeless cause in the United States as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid absolved people for taking control of their lives with guaranteed subsidies for their submissiveness.
It is a hopeless cause as American corporations try to retreat from entitlement programs given in their booming years, plagued now with the corpocracy disease of myopia.
Corporate generosity failed to be tied to productive work, and now millions are losing jobs the likes of which they will never see again, while their former employers plunge into the murky waters of bankruptcy.
It is a hopeless cause when freedom is not tied to responsibility and accountability.
SENTIMENT
It is never easy and often unwise to neglect popular sentiment, but the leader must have the strength to be able to set such sentiment aside in those cases where it is wise to do so.
By the same token, the leader can never justify his actions merely by reference to the existence of popular sentiment. He must at the very least be able to find adequate grounds for its existence.
If he is not satisfied that he is able to find such grounds, then it is his duty to refuse to give way to such sentiments. Leadership has descended into a popularity contest, driven by polls and questionnaires, when leadership is the compound of detachment, humanity, and efficiency that keeps critics at bay while fulfilling the role of leadership.
LIMITATIONS
The will to do is not everything. The prizes do not always go to those who work for them, nor do they necessarily go to the virtuous. Prizes go to those who are fitted for leadership, by no act of virtue of the leader's own to receive them. He is the instrumentality through which leadership is demonstrated while being manifested by the led. If he cannot touch the soul of the led, there is no leadership. There is only management.
Consequently, leadership teaches the leader that he has limitations, which no amount of virtue, or industry can overcome. In the final analysis, the leader is alone and prisoner of the ultimate will of the led.
He can seek counsel but cannot delegate accountability. The end of the beginning of his leadership is when he confronts and accepts his humanity in all its limitations.
He is often scholarly without being academic, humorous without being frivolous, who urges one to action without being intimidating, knowing that he is likely to fail as succeed, and once succeeding always the possible groom of failure over the horizon.
ASSETS
The leader may have enemies, which contain intrigues but no intrigues against him. He is himself free from personal hates and grudges. He does not excite them in others by the simple expedient of being himself.
This allows him to hold people to a task of diverse interests and beliefs, from those who are clear-headed to those who are bull-headed. The pursuit of survival and the pursuit of justice are two sides of Janus.
The leader can always see that underneath any apparent injustice there is a greater and more fundamental justice, even when the injustice was flagrant and the justice unseen.
We see this when one believes it is his duty to maintain diversity, and the other believes it is his duty to achieve unity. Good and bad men believed in slavery, but President Lincoln saw through them both with his eye on a higher goal, the preservation of the union.
SPIRITUALITY
The spiritual and invisible unity of a leader’s vision is very fine. The visible unity stabs at his heart and takes away his breath because a vision realized is one filled with unspeakable and painful joy. It is unspeakable because it is realized and the realized is unspeakable. It is painful because it is all like a dream, and who expects a dream to be realized?
Spirituality is humbling as it is moving, and brings out the humanity in the leader, and awareness of his frailty.
HUMILITY
The bridge between a leader and his leadership, between his will and that of the led is like a bridge put together by Isaac Newton without nail or peg or dowel to that if one piece were taken out the whole thing would fall to pieces.
A leader leads by making choices where freedom for some may mean the destruction of freedom for others, where the benefits to some may mean the sacrifice to others, where the good of some may mean the cost to others, where progress may mean substantive retreat in the long run.
It is equally humbling for the leader to be dilatory when he might better be decisive, or prompt when he might better be slow to act. Because of this ambivalence, leadership often resembles the leader throwing seeds into the wind in the hopes that they will find fertile soil. Nations have been known to go to war with such suspect justifications.
The leader walks across this bridge with his Creator realizing one piece out of place may set it tumbling. Small wonder it requires qualities of tenacity, courage and integrity, massive self-confidence devoid of arrogance, and a deep certitude of self that remains forever mysterious.
The irony is that the leader with a happy center, which is constantly nourished by his childhood, is never totally formed.
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About the author: Dr. Fisher is an organization/industrial psychologist and author of many books and articles in this genre. See his website: www.peripat
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2005
To be a leader of men one must turn one’s back on men.
Havelock Ellis (1859 –1939)
I have given considerable attention on how the leadership has lost the tribe. Conversely, I have given little attention to what leadership is in the twenty-first century.
The leader cannot continue to be everything to everyone because he will end up being nothing to anyone. The leader must be consistent within himself and true to that self in a greater since, as for example was Abraham Lincoln in our American history.
The twentieth century generated a spate of such leaders, especially during the past fifty years in virtually every institution and industry of society, placing American society and its influence across the globe in deep jeopardy.
The thought occurred to me that it might be apropos to give a profile of what I sense a leader in this new century might embody. Obviously, this is not a definitive profile, and inevitably incorporates my personal bias, but it may contain some of the ingredients to a more appropriate slate for discussion. For, alas, the reader as leader must decide that on his own.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
A PRAYFRUL PERSON
Prayer is a powerful device for the leader to get in touch with his own center. Read "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius (121 -180), the Roman Emperor, and you are reading a prayer book of thought meant to be read by no one. Prayer was a powerful guide to leaders of the past, leaders whom we read about today thousands of years after their deaths.
The leader will practice prayer, but not consider it a ritualistic undertaking. Prayer allows one to tap into one's philosophy, and everyone has a philosophy, which guides one to self-realization or self-destruction. It is as impossible to live without a philosophy, as it is to live without the necessity of prayer in one's life.
One does not pray for show or influence. One prays with the will to clarify one's dedication to one’s appointed task. There is no need for church or chant, for genuflecting or crossing oneself, for being in high costume and sober countenance, or for bowed head and the rolling of beads.
These symbolic gestures distract one from the central necessity of the dedication of the will to finding resolution to what confounds it. The source of strength is never outside one, but always within one’s core essence. Prayer is the tapping of one's gifts to serve a common humanity.
PROBLEM SOLVING
The leader has a clear and synoptic grasp of what comes before him, assimilates it thoroughly and forms reliable judgments on it. He has a wide embracing and retentive memory, which enables him to cover much ground and to recall his conclusions for future use. His mind need not work quickly, certainly not hastily, nor need it be especially imaginative and inventive. Rather, his mind is the trustworthiest critic of what is presented to it.
Not uncommon, the leader has a prodigious ability to make order of any material presented to him, to comprehend it, to analyze it, and to put it together again, to remember both it and his own conclusions for future use. The leader knows that it is not the lack of solutions that tarries him from wise decisions, but his failure to romance the problem by defining it correctly.
REGARDING SCHOLARSHIP
The leader is not especially a lover or even comprehender of the classics. He sucks the juice out of literature as one sucks it out of an orange, but he does not necessarily distill from the whole fruit a particular essence.
This is a limitation not only of talent, but of time as well, for he must remain focused on what is of pressing concern, and abide scholars, intellectuals and the classics in which they live with due caution. Lord Acton was wise in suggesting that we give intellectuals everything but power, for it is power that corrupts and corrupts absolutely.
The leader is more at home with history, often ancient history. History he understands, for with history he can connect the dots as to how those who have gone before him encountered the wall, and found a way to negotiate it, if not penetrate this barrier.
The leader, by definition, is a man of action with little time for the luxury of contemplation. He understands the nobility of action. Therefore, history, which tells him the deeds of good to great men, is to him the best of all literature.
The quality of his mind is one built toward action, not sentiment. Verse deals with the deeds of good men and displays their noble sentiments in the best of poetry. The leader's poetry is what his actions imbrue, which is left for poets to record for posterity.
The sententious code of the poet is beyond the pale of the leader with his having no choice but to memorize the criticisms of others to interpret the depths of poetry's meaning. On the other hand, and this falls within his natural inclination, the leader is often a brilliant student of the law, and a stellar judge of his peers, where subjectivity is provided with some boundaries for preferred objectivity.
POWER OF MEMORY
The leader is not likely to be an original thinker, but an able processor of those that are.
His analytical and synoptic gifts are displayed in the powers of his memory. These powers may be so great as to constitute a quality of his genius and independent thought. Such a leader has been known to be able to appropriate printed briefs so completely that when answering questions of substance regarding them, he can see the printed page. Likewise, he may use the briefest of notes as a prop when speaking, or be given to holding papers in his hands as if they are the substance of his remarks, when to find later they are but blank.
ADMINISTRATOR
The leader is an administrator of superlative ability. He knows every part of his complex machine, often better than his department heads, a gift, which does not always endear him to his directors. He is often able to perceive the assets and limitations of the complex machines of other organizations, machines which complement or are in competition with his, providing him with a clear edge.
It would be wrong to assume the leader’s gifts of ordering, comprehending and remembering material as an academic predilection, but rather a fundamental aspect of his leadership. His mind is a sorting bin of ideas and information, position papers and secret documents.
What limits these gifts in a creative sense, and this is a problem when the leader is a prisoner of his own design, is when he blindly aims to preserve the culture of the status quo when it no longer serves him or his purposes. The antic of his soul needs periodic revisiting, and this is accomplished through prayer.
CONFLICT AND COMPROMISE
The leader must always wrestle with the horns of the dilemma, which are to fight or flee, whether to fight and win or lose or simply retreat to save honor.
The leader who leads with personality appeal is likely to treat opposition as a public relations snafu when it is clearly a matter of published policy. The inclination with such a mindset is to avoid conflict at any cost.
Conflict is often misunderstood when such thinking predominates. Managed conflict is the glue that holds the organization on task and together.
Leadership is a combatant role where conflict and compromise are its natural components. Peace loving is for poets far removed from the center of human combustibles.
The leader driven by personality appeal wants to give circumstances a chance, even when the circumstances, from a rational perspective, seem hopeless on the surface. He is a prisoner of his culture, of his history, religion, customs and language. He is likely to take comfort in what he knows and allows himself to be hostage to what he doesn’t.
TRUTH
Hard on the tail of the horns of the dilemma is the matter of truth. The leader knows that truth is a subjective component of objective reality. Since the leader is a person dealing with people, his objectivity is tainted with his subjective lens.
Therefore, leadership calls for tolerance and understanding, patience and courage to see the virtue in another’s truth when there appears to be none.
The leader most certain of his truth with little capacity to engage doubters is most likely to repel the worldly and attract the earnest, to divide his charges into true believers and passionate doubters, where there are the wicked and the good, the hedonists and the puritans, the lost and the found. It takes wisdom for the leader to recognize that these dimensions describe his own population.
Two kinds of people listen to the leader, those who hate what he has to say, and those who believe he has possession of the truth, and the answer to their dilemma.
There is a third kind of people, namely those who believe in the same truth as the leader, but are quite unable to recognize the leader as a custodian of it. They see the leader as seemingly champion of a morality that is narrow and joyless, and perhaps worst of all, pointless.
Because of this, these people hate or despise the leader, or both. Morality that has no foundation in fact, but is adhered to out of taste and habit, and nothing deeper, becomes too little and too late for a population requiring tools to deal with internal stress and external accelerating demands.
IDEALISM
The leader is a believer in the human future. He is fascinated with and by the human past, by the evolving new theories of man’s origins, by the various estimates of the length of true human existence.
The leader is much in thrall of creation than of the Creator. If the leader enjoys communion with his God, it is through the medium of creation, that is, concrete reality, and not an abstraction.
The leader’s own creative mind is excited by the evidence of a supreme creativeness. It is all around him, as well as within him. The leader, as idealist, is in thrall by the contemplation of man, and of man's history and prehistory.
If the leader has a defect, it is not the defect of having misunderstood man. It is the greater defect, to having believed in man.
This belief in man is the secret of the leader’s power. As a physicist might insist that matter can never be destroyed only changed, the leader as idealist would insist that truth, beauty and goodness could never be lost but only viewed differently.
The leader’s idealism does not come from books, but from trials in the world.
FREEDOM
The leader walks a narrow line between a belief in men and knowing absolute freedom appeals to the mindless majority.
Institutions purely democratic sooner or later destroy liberty and civilization, or both. Universal suffrage, for example, when the electorate is ignorant of its responsibility becomes a ploy for demagogues and power brokers to assert their will. Elections become Olympic like races to see who can raise and spend the most money. A campaign of ideas has lost its vigor and wastes away in the desert of the outcasts.
People in power play to the apathetic middle in politics, government, commerce, industry, academia and the religious. The mindless partisans are their focus in a climate devoid of scrutiny or challenge.
Freedom has become limited to a choral tribute sung by an entertainer in the introduction of athletic contests, and then put back in the drawer until the next contest.
Control is a function of order but not of liberty.
The harsh reality is that people cannot handle freedom. It is too demanding. It requires that they take control of their lives and not turn them over to someone else to define, manage, run, and dispose of.
The leader is not a manager, a controller, nor the owner of other people's problems but their reflection in terms of freedom or self-imprisonment.
Self-imprisonment requires nothing of people in return for their vote of ignorance. The health of society rides on its view and appetite for freedom, which is a measure of its wisdom.
The wiser of the Founding Fathers never intended to have universal suffrage. They believed the vote should be restricted to mature property owners who had a personal stake in good government. This is heresy to speak in such terms today. But should society be plundered and laid waste by barbarian minds before the leader seizes the reins of control? We are not only speaking of government, but of every institution of society. That is the question. That is the dilemma.
A leader need not impose draconian measures, but rather balance rights with privilege, which must be earned.
Privileges appeal to the popular, to those that believe industry is a function of morale, when it clearly isn’t. Morale is a manifestation of groupthink where the apathetic middle sues for the most while giving the least.
Rights are a function of motivation, which is a manifestation of freedom where the conscientious do all they can because they live in a climate where they can.
Read the letters of common soldiers in the Civil War and compare them to stump speeches of politicians today. The difference is the equivalent of an essay by a Ph.D. in the case of the soldier to that of a kindergartener in the case of the politician. The dumbing down of society is an escape from freedom.
“To be a leader of men,” the physician Havelock Ellis insists, “one must turn his back on men.”
Libertarianism is poetry without a population in mind. It is a hopeless cause as Europe is now finding in its attempt to reduce the social welfare system of work to a day's pay for a day's work. It is equally a hopeless cause in the United States as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid absolved people for taking control of their lives with guaranteed subsidies for their submissiveness.
It is a hopeless cause as American corporations try to retreat from entitlement programs given in their booming years, plagued now with the corpocracy disease of myopia.
Corporate generosity failed to be tied to productive work, and now millions are losing jobs the likes of which they will never see again, while their former employers plunge into the murky waters of bankruptcy.
It is a hopeless cause when freedom is not tied to responsibility and accountability.
SENTIMENT
It is never easy and often unwise to neglect popular sentiment, but the leader must have the strength to be able to set such sentiment aside in those cases where it is wise to do so.
By the same token, the leader can never justify his actions merely by reference to the existence of popular sentiment. He must at the very least be able to find adequate grounds for its existence.
If he is not satisfied that he is able to find such grounds, then it is his duty to refuse to give way to such sentiments. Leadership has descended into a popularity contest, driven by polls and questionnaires, when leadership is the compound of detachment, humanity, and efficiency that keeps critics at bay while fulfilling the role of leadership.
LIMITATIONS
The will to do is not everything. The prizes do not always go to those who work for them, nor do they necessarily go to the virtuous. Prizes go to those who are fitted for leadership, by no act of virtue of the leader's own to receive them. He is the instrumentality through which leadership is demonstrated while being manifested by the led. If he cannot touch the soul of the led, there is no leadership. There is only management.
Consequently, leadership teaches the leader that he has limitations, which no amount of virtue, or industry can overcome. In the final analysis, the leader is alone and prisoner of the ultimate will of the led.
He can seek counsel but cannot delegate accountability. The end of the beginning of his leadership is when he confronts and accepts his humanity in all its limitations.
He is often scholarly without being academic, humorous without being frivolous, who urges one to action without being intimidating, knowing that he is likely to fail as succeed, and once succeeding always the possible groom of failure over the horizon.
ASSETS
The leader may have enemies, which contain intrigues but no intrigues against him. He is himself free from personal hates and grudges. He does not excite them in others by the simple expedient of being himself.
This allows him to hold people to a task of diverse interests and beliefs, from those who are clear-headed to those who are bull-headed. The pursuit of survival and the pursuit of justice are two sides of Janus.
The leader can always see that underneath any apparent injustice there is a greater and more fundamental justice, even when the injustice was flagrant and the justice unseen.
We see this when one believes it is his duty to maintain diversity, and the other believes it is his duty to achieve unity. Good and bad men believed in slavery, but President Lincoln saw through them both with his eye on a higher goal, the preservation of the union.
SPIRITUALITY
The spiritual and invisible unity of a leader’s vision is very fine. The visible unity stabs at his heart and takes away his breath because a vision realized is one filled with unspeakable and painful joy. It is unspeakable because it is realized and the realized is unspeakable. It is painful because it is all like a dream, and who expects a dream to be realized?
Spirituality is humbling as it is moving, and brings out the humanity in the leader, and awareness of his frailty.
HUMILITY
The bridge between a leader and his leadership, between his will and that of the led is like a bridge put together by Isaac Newton without nail or peg or dowel to that if one piece were taken out the whole thing would fall to pieces.
A leader leads by making choices where freedom for some may mean the destruction of freedom for others, where the benefits to some may mean the sacrifice to others, where the good of some may mean the cost to others, where progress may mean substantive retreat in the long run.
It is equally humbling for the leader to be dilatory when he might better be decisive, or prompt when he might better be slow to act. Because of this ambivalence, leadership often resembles the leader throwing seeds into the wind in the hopes that they will find fertile soil. Nations have been known to go to war with such suspect justifications.
The leader walks across this bridge with his Creator realizing one piece out of place may set it tumbling. Small wonder it requires qualities of tenacity, courage and integrity, massive self-confidence devoid of arrogance, and a deep certitude of self that remains forever mysterious.
The irony is that the leader with a happy center, which is constantly nourished by his childhood, is never totally formed.
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About the author: Dr. Fisher is an organization/industrial psychologist and author of many books and articles in this genre. See his website: www.peripat
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
EPISODES AND ANECDOTES LEFT OUT OF THE BOOK, IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE
SOME OF THE WRITING THAT WAS EXCISED FROM THE ORIGINAL PUBLISHED WORK OF
In the Shadow of the Courthouse
Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel
James R. Fisher, Jr.
© 2001
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
More than 3,000 readers have purchased and read this memoir written as a novel. Many have asked, having heard the book is abridged from the original manuscript, what was left out? These are examples of episodes and anecdotes cut from that original manuscript. There are twenty-one chapters in the book and what appears here was cut from the first twelve chapters.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE was published by AuthorHouse in 2003. The book was first copyrighted by the author in 2001.
CHAPTER TWO:
Mention is made that Clinton, Iowa is a conservative industrial community and mainly Republican and Protestant with nearly three times as many public as Catholic private schools.
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Today this differentiation is even more pronounced. True, there was Mt. St. Clare Academy and College, which continues to thrive today (2003). In 1891, Father James Arthur Murray, pastor of St. Patrick’s parish asked for five sisters of the order of St. Frances to open a school.
It was at a time when Clinton’s main industry, the lumber business, was in precipitous decline and more than 6,000 residents had left Clinton. Yet, the nuns bravely incurred a debt of $20,000 to purchase the Chase property. From the magnificent vista of Bluff Boulevard, on some five acres of pristine property, stood a well-preserved three story brick building. It provided ample room for these entrepreneurial nuns to open a boarding school and academy, and then a junior college.
In 1979, Mt. St. Clare College was accredited as a co-educational four-year liberal arts college offering a degree in business administration. The plight of several other long established Clinton Catholic schools has not been so fortunate.
Our Lady of Angels Academy for girls on North Fifth Street in Lyons was established in 1872. A phantasmal structure which might best be described as angelic stood high on a scenic hill overlooking the Mississippi River, but was dissolved in 1966 due to a teacher shortage. Vocations to the sisterhood were already in decline and are nearly extinct today.
So the elementary schools of St. Ireneaus established in 1840, St. Boniface in 1861, and St. Patrick’s in 1889 are no longer in existence as this is written. The Catholic school system in Clinton continues to shrink in the early twenty-first century with St. Mary’s elementary and high school now surviving as Mater Dei with an uncertain alliance with Mt. St. Clare Academy and College.
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Reference is made here to Clinton’s many frontier saloons at mid-century to be replaced today by the fast-food nation. What follows is also a segue from evening chats around coffee, cake and cigarettes of my uncles, aunts, my da’s railroad buddies, and his saloon keeper friends, who found therapy in storytelling and humor.
The piece also shows how men such as Disney and Kroc seeded our societal decline into a fast-food nation.
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These garish neon-lighted watering holes with their weather-beaten doors, once alive with excitement, are no more, replaced by 30 or so fast-food restaurant franchises, equally garish, but without the allure or style of the riverfront saloons.
Clinton is now part of the fast-food nation in all its offending colors – MacDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dairy Queen, and even local fast-food imitators. Indeed, imitation of the garish is the local as well as national mantra.
The few taverns that still exist have lost their gusto, symbolized in crumbling paint, rotting wood, stuttering neon signs with missing letters, the stench of stale beer, along with worn out patrons who have lost a kick in their step. I sense that Clintonians are not drinking less, or eating more, simply drinking at home, and eating out.
This cultural shift from a casual parochialism to a concerted homogenizing started with a pair of teenagers in 1917, who lied about their ages to join an ambulance unit destined for the Western Front in WWI.
They found themselves in the same training camp in South Beach, Connecticut. One of them was Walt Disney. The other one, only 15-years-of-age at the time, was Ray Kroc, the man who later made McDonald’s an empire.
When Kroc and his comrades went off to the nearest town on furlough to look for girls, Disney stayed in camp, drawing. Disney served in France and Germany, but WWI ended before Kroc was sent to Europe. Had he gone, it might have changed the history of fast food.
The mode of operation in the trenches fascinated both Kroc and Disney – the assembly line. Everything, the ammunition workers, the machine-gunners, the infantrymen, played their small, repetitive roles with as much speed and efficiency as they could muster. The Front was an industrial operation for the manufacture of corpses.
Moreover, Disney and Kroc were great admirers of Henry Ford (as incidentally was Lenin) and saw assembly lines as the embodiment of efficiency, order and consistency. The main drawback was people. They were the most inefficient, disordered, and inconsistent moving parts of the assembly line. They got sick. They had to be paid. They had to be taught what to do. The solution was to strip workers of skills and confine them to narrow and repetitive tasks.
In the 1930s, Disney set up a rigid assembly line system in his studio, where stupefied artists performed repetitive sketching and inking tasks against the clock. Disney never understood how this was dehumanizing, or why his people struck for better working conditions. He blamed it on Communism. Likewise, Kroc insisted, “The organization cannot trust the individual. The individual must trust the organization.”
The fast-food corporations have been fanatical in their determination to make their employees conform to their technology rather than the other way around. It has become the melodic march of the fast-food nation, but was already reflected in the mindless occupations of most of our working class fathers. It is not surprising, then, that they found relief from this dumbing down in each other’s company.
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CHAPTER SIX:
My neighbor and friend, George Jensen, crippled since a boy with poliomyelitis, was a big reader. He also ran the elevator at Van Allen’s Department Store in downtown Clinton. We would often talk about books and their central message, books that I had no idea existed.
George's favorite author was Shakespeare. One day in a euphoric mood he said that Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived. When I shared this with my mother, she informed me that it was not Shakespeare, but James Joyce who was the greatest writer in the English language. Joyce was another writer I was unfamiliar with, but one my mother assured me I would come to know.
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The episode that follows occurred while a sophomore in college taking a required course, Modern Literature, Greeks, and the Bible. It proved my mother prophetic.
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It so happened that I became ill and was in the infirmary when James Joyce’s "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” was the subject of a discussion. My professor, apparently not wanting to grade another essay, asked me to make an oral presentation of the book. The conversation that follows developed once I completed that oral presentation.
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Professor Armens seems transfixed. Shaking his head as he puts out his cigarette, and exclaims, “Fisher, you’ve given me an experience that I doubt I will soon forget. ‘I am Joyce.’ That’s precious.” He paces the room, laughs to himself, and whispers under his breath again, 'I am Joyce,' smiling like a winking shudder.
This exhilarates and confuses me. All I can think, does this mean I’m getting an “A” or not?
How could I not see myself as Joyce? His pain in the classroom, his anguish with priests, his ambivalence towards girls, lusting for them but being afraid of them, his strangeness with his da, his nonspecific anger with everything and everybody, his sense of exile in the company of his peers, his sensitivity and obsession with class, his awareness of the power of money and his contempt for it, his running lies and illusions of race. Of course, he was Joyce. Joyce’s life was his life. He, too, desired to fly the coop, to soar into the sun and greatness.
“Here is what I propose,” the professor says evenly, and then shows me a brochure. It is titled "The University of Iowa’s Honors Program in the Humanities."
“This is a relatively new program at Iowa," he continues, "It is being offered to select students to pursue a degree in Arts and Letters. What makes it unique is that it is essentially a tutorial program, involving extensive independent study. This includes reading the classics in philosophy, psychology, theology, literature, history and related disciplines in order to create a conceptual framework and artistic foundation. Incidentally, there is no compulsory attendance of classes.
"Oxford College at Cambridge England has a similar program." He can see I'm underwhelmed with the idea. “Before you say, ‘this is not for me, I’m a science major,’ go home and discuss this with your parents and come back next week and tell me of your decision.”
My head is spinning. I don’t know what to say. Reading uncertainty in my face, he adds, “In case you are wondering why I didn’t read your paper in class on the influence of religion in your life, I have a confession to make. I had to find out if you were for real. That is why I wanted this oral examination. Your paper on religion was intensely personal, intuitively constructed, and yet blatantly innocent. It was as if you were having a conversation with your God, and it didn’t matter if anyone got it or not.
"Joyce wrote like that. Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are not written for an audience. They are written for Joyce and his God. We now call these works literature.
“My concern if I had read your work in class is that it would have generated cynicism if not caustic comments doing you irreparable harm. You have a keen eye for what you see and a counterintuitive way of expressing it.
"You’re not an imitator. You’re the genuine article. That’s rare. But you’re also raw, unschooled and rough. You need honing. I am confident this program could go along way in that direction.” With that he excuses himself, and leaves me sitting enveloped in the empty darkness of the room and my mind.
Once home, I explained first to my mother Dr. Armen’s suggestion. “Are you sure this is what you want to do?”
“No, but I am flattered. It’s kind of amazing, mother, I’m not nearly as sharp as some of the other people in the class, yet he singled me out.”
“Don’t play humble with me. You know better. We’ll discuss it with your father after dinner, but not before, understand?” I nod.
Once my da has had his dinner, his coffee, and has read The Clinton Herald, my mother pats him on the shoulder. “Ray, Jimmy, has something he wants to discuss with you.”
“Yes? What?" He looks at me. "They kick you out of school?” I shake my head, but don't speak. Still anxious, he continues, “Did they cancel your scholarship? If they did, fella, there’s no goddamned reason for discussion." Then, turning to my mother, he adds, "He’ll have to go to work on the railroad, or get a job somewhere else. I’m not supporting him you better goddamned believe that, Dorothy!”
Ignoring his bluster as if an ill fated breeze, she says through a cloud of cigarette smoke, “No, he didn’t lose his scholarship.”
“Then for Christ’s sake, Dorothy, what is it? That goddamned kid of yours doesn’t come home less than something’s wrong, you know that, Dorothy! So, Jimmy, what is it?”
Nervously, I explain briefly the humanities program. When I am through, he looks at me with a prying glint in his eyes. “Jimmy, can I ask you a question?” I am expressionless. “Don’t try to lie. I love you and always will, and you’ll always be welcome here no matter what. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I had no idea what he was saying. “Nooo!”
“Jimmy, you’re not a goddamned fag are you?”
“A what?” Then it registers. “No! What gave you that idea?”
“I see those fairies on my trains, goddamned beatniks, loud, rude, long dirty hair, smell like goats, reading filthy books, dirty tennis shoes, shabby clothes, hugging each other, yes, Dorothy, goddamned guys hugging each other like it’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s disgusting that's what it is. You want your son to hang out with fairies?”
He throws his arms up in theatrical fashion. “Jesus Christ, when I ask them where they’re going, they tell me,” he gestures with effeminate exaggeration with his hands and mocks an effeminate whine, ‘we’re students at Iowa.’ Can you believe your son has come to this? I ask you again, Jimmy, are you a goddamned fag?”
“Nooo!” I literally scream. It is too much for me. I put my coat on and rush out the door. When I return some time later, the house is quiet, everyone is in bed. We didn’t discuss the matter again. It was obvious that I would stay in chemistry. There was absolutely no chance to live with him and become a scholar.
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Not knowing at the time, that St. Patrick’s church, rectory and school were going to be leveled to dust as if this historic landmark had never been, I left the following episode out of the book to my regret.
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Father Finefield’s successor at St. Patrick's parish was a St. Ambrose professor, Father John B. McIniry, who longed to be a parish priest after several years as an educator and administrator at this Davenport, Iowa institution.
Parish life at St. Patrick's for Father McIniry was to be the challenge of a strange and sometimes irritating culture. He seemed especially comfortable, however, around bleeding heart parishioners as if that was a parish priest's primary role. That said he was more successful carrying out some of Father Finefield’s sketchy plans than he had been, which you might not expect from a novice parish priest.
In 1961, Father McIniry purchased the land adjacent to the school and enlarged the playground and parking lot. He also created a parish committee to head up a fund raising drive to construct a Parish Center. Between 1961 and 1981, the parish budget grew from $30,000 to $130,000 per year, largely through his fiscal acumen and ability to profile parishioners with the deepest pockets. St. Patrick’s parish also grew to more than 1,500 members.
The oldest part of the school, which dated from 1924, was not a school at all, but the parish hall. With the caption in the cornerstone, it read “St. James Hall, 1924, James Davis, Bishop, J. A. Murray, Pastor.”
Now, in the early twenty-first century when this is being written, the school is empty, the building a tomb, the rectory unoccupied, and the parish a memory. Priests in Clinton, Iowa are as rare as the American bald eagle. The century vision of Father James Arthur Murray is manifestly sustained only by Mount St. Clare College and Convent, but the good priest left his heart at St. Patrick’s.
Meanwhile, St. Mary’s parish, once again dominates a shrinking universe, and disappearing Clinton Catholic community. The churches of St. Patrick, St. Boniface, St. Irenaeus, and Sacred Heart are in various states of terminal decline, having all but lost the struggle to stay viable with a corps of shuttling priests from church to church, while Mount St. Clare College, all but devoid of vocational nuns, continues to use the temper of the times to diminishing advantage.
The good sisters of St. Francis embrace non-practicing Catholics along with people of all religious persuasions with open arms. They are, indeed, a tribute to the order founded by St. Clare, who was a devoted colleague of St. Francis of Assisi.
Consider this against a Clinton County, which has shrunk from its apogee of nearly 40,000 citizens during WWII to little more than 29,000 today. St. Patrick’s church and school once stood buoyed by the spirit of its creator, who took on all factions and odds, even the opposition of the St. Mary "hill toppers" to the south.
St. Mary parishioners and priests saw little need for a church and school in central Clinton, but he did and he won. Now, that spirit is being buried under a planned Senior Citizen Housing façade. Alas, where are the Father James Murray’s of the world today. Are there no more leaders anywhere?
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CHAPTER SEVEN:
My family often had trouble paying its bills. It wasn’t a case of being extravagant. It was a case of being poor. This chapter ends when my da is humiliated in the presence of his nine-year-old-son when he tries to charge school clothes for him at the Martin Morris Department Store from an old grade school chum.
My da, a physically courageous man, would never back down from a fight with anyone no matter how big or powerful. The same could not be said about his emotional courage.
When the salesman said that he checked and found my da’s credit bad, my da’s shoulders slumped, his head dropped and he stood there virtually motionless. I was embarrassed for him, and angry with the salesman, taking control of the situation by saying, we didn’t want these purchases anyway, and marching my da out of the store.
Life is a series of emotional tests, tests that determine the construction of our
character. This, looking back now sixty years, was perhaps the most compelling test of my life up to that point. In my rush to make this book of “readable size,” I left this out.
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I’ve often thought about that day. My da didn’t belong in Clinton. He was an outsider. He didn’t fit in with either the counterfeit gentry or the rough and tumble crowd of Clinton’s youth of his generation. He was a displaced Irishman from urban south Chicago with the temperament of a street fighter where that no longer applied. He was a character out of James T. Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan,” and not a nice Catholic boy from a small town.
The animal in him ruled his humanity. He never got to the higher centers. Yet, where he had once been a drinker and a brawler of some distinction, he now needed the mental toughness of a father and provider that was not to be had. Unafraid as he was of any man, no matter his size or physical strength, counting on his courage to even the score, he was a man afraid. His fear was of life. He tended to exaggerate the mental toughness and superiority of nearly everyone. He failed to see the games people play, the charades of arrogance and posturing, the pretending to be in charge when clearly they weren’t.
Being unschooled in the world of books, he found most people more intelligent than himself simply because they read. Consequently, he gave people the benefit of the doubt, something he never gave himself. He believed himself a fraud and failure and once got angry when I said I never met anyone that wasn’t. My genes missed his natural bravado, his jaunty exuberance, but they also missed his condescending belief that everyone was better.
My mother knew this of him, and used it with cruel precision. My da’s cocky zest was all but gone by the time I was nine. His essence was buried deep in a personality of failure. He already felt defeated by life, defeated by the burdens of responsibility, defeated by having to comply, submit, surrender and confound in order to get by. Indeed, he was defeated by whom he was and what he had become. He was a man ashamed with nothing to hold unto, nothing to protect him from his fears except the invincible spirit of my mother. She was his savior and his nemesis.
St. Thomas Aquinas preferred a proud to a fainthearted man. Somehow my da missed this in his education. Aquinas noted that the former would do something while the latter most likely nothing at all.
That described my da, beaten down but not yet dead. His soul was all but dead to its possibilities, while his body stubbornly lived on in embarrassment. He was an Irishman to the core, who liked to look back, to dwell on the past, to what he never was to what he was now. He talked incessantly about Chicago as if it were Mecca. The talk kept his spirits, dim as they were, barely alive. The country killed what was left of that spirit. Clinton, Iowa killed my da. His Irish soul abandoned him long before his body consented to die.
Like all paradoxes, however, an inherent equilibrium prevails in the universe. I was in the navy on the U.S.S. Salem (CA-139), the flagship of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean when I learned he had multiple myeloma, a form of leukemia.
With this disease, the bone marrow refuses to produce healthy red blood cells, and the body wastes away, bit-by-bit, day-by-day. He learned of this disease in a routine fashion. He had gone to his dentist, Dr. McLaughlin, for his annual check-up. The dentist didn’t like the looks of his gums. He sent him to Dr. O’Donnell. Our family doctor then sent him to a specialist for a biopsy. When the results came back, Dr. O’Donnell said, “Ray, it’s a bad actor.”
Without hesitation, my da asked, “How long do I have, Joe?”
“A year, fourteen months at most. We don’t know much about this disease, and there are no drugs to treat it, only blood transfusions to keep your strength up.” My da had just turned forty-eight.
Most men given a death sentence retreat into themelves, look for pity, or wail about their lot being too young to die. Not him. When he got the news, it proved his greatest moment. He was accepting, and oddly enough even cheerful and more loving. He even regained his childlike affection for Irish Catholicism again, no doubt influenced by devout Dr. O’Donnell.
He, a changed man, met me at the train nation with my mother when I came back from Europe on emergency leave. He rediscovered his gift for storytelling and became a daily communicant at mass. Before, he hadn’t been inside a church for years. He no longer swore, no longer raised his voice, and no longer smoked. He found a peculiar happiness instead of dread in knowing his destiny.
One of the stories he now told was about being a first grader. The nun at school had taught the children a new prayer. He went to his grandmother and cried, “Granny, granny, I learned a new prayer today.” She asked, “What prayer might that be, Raymond?” He replied with pride, “Across the Street.” The prayer was actually the Apostle’s Creed.
His body shrunk, and the pain became more intense caused by his bones breaking from lack of nourishing blood. The soul that once took residence in Chicago now returned. Dr. O’Donnell allowed me to give him morphine shots for the pain on demand, as I was a hospital corpsman. The pain was reflected in his eyes, but he never complained.
The last several weeks of his life I was his constant companion, me who had always been distant from his center. We watched television together on a little nine inch black and white monitor. His favorites were Wagon Train, Gun Smoke, and The Bounty Hunter. Confined to bed, and seldom out of pain, he made every attempt to make everyone at ease around him. He loved my sister Patsy especially, and her husband, Bill Waddell, who was also home from the navy. He would light up when they would visit.
It was as if his personality emerged from a deep cold and dark cave into the sunlight of the day. He would hold my sister Janice’s hand and tell her she was beautiful like an angel. And he would kid my brother Jackie about how much he was a chip off the old block. With me, it was another matter. I remained an enigma to the end. “Your mother thinks you’re smart like she is," he said out of the blue one day, shaking his head, "I wonder. I know you think you'r as smart as anyone alive. Maybe that’s enough. I don’t know.”
He died on January 3, 1958, three days after his fiftieth birthday. He weighed forty pounds. Every bone in his body was broken.
“There will be no stopping for him in Purgatory,” Dr. O’Donnell told my mother, “your husband has taught us all about dying with dignity. He’s heading straight for heaven.” With that, he handed her a bill with the scribble across it, “Paid in full.” My mother hadn’t paid him a cent in my da’s yearlong illness.
It seemed poetic justice that his physical courage, which was legendary, became his defining attribute, as he met his Maker.
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CHAPTER TEN:
The chapter originally opened with my being still troubled by the letter Sister Helen had sent to my mother. She claimed I had a lot of quiet rage. So, the chapter opened this way:
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School is out, but my mind is not quiet. What Sister Helen said about the Diaspora, the scattering of the Jewish people throughout the world after the Babylonian Captivity still rings in my head. She says Palestine is the Promised Land for Jews, but why? I am Irish and far from Ireland, but I don’t think of Dublin as the Promised Land, nor of my Irish separate from my American.
My da told me our people left Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century because of the potato famine. He never spoke of anyone wanting to go back. The idea of a promised land mystifies me. It’s like a castle in the sky, while the courthouse is real, concrete, yet sacred to me, even these many years later.
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The next piece is about the courthouse and its affect on me: is this my Israel?
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My mind still races back without effort to those halcyon days when a sense of belonging smiled down on me from the courthouse’s watchful eyes. Even as I struggle to describe its hold on me now it seems unperturbed with my sluggish mind. Instead, it basks in quiet pleasure for my attention.
The courthouse is a motion picture in my head, a collection of magical moments that occurred a half century ago, that surfaces and come to light especially when captive to enforced quiet times, like a flight to some God forsaken place to give a speech. These moments are as real as if they are just occurring. I am a boy of ten again exhilarated but unconscious of my blessings.
The courthouse is in my bones, and vibrates with my soul. Is this my Israel? Is this what Palestine feels to Jews? The courthouse is here, where I am now, writing a book about long ago, and also wherever that might be in the future. It captured the rhythm of my heart the first moment I smelled the aroma of the courthouse lawn freshly cut by Mr. Roy Dunmore, the groundskeeper. He is father of Jack, one of our coaches, and Dick, one of my teammates.
Memory of St. Patrick’s always melts into the courthouse, which lies in its shadow. The courthouse was always a happy place, St. Patrick’s not always so. The courthouse puts me in tune with my nature. St. Patrick’s sometimes pulls me from it. The dour side of St. Patrick’s comes to me in sleep like a painting of a veiled shroud that blankets the courthouse, and records my dread of a misspent life.
I guess religion is all about guilt. Fortunately, before I wake from this nightmare, and this always happens, the sun comes out, the mist is burned away, and I see only the courthouse clearly. It is in this spirit that I jump out of bed with great relief when I'm a boy not yet nine.
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The nightmare of St. Michael.
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I like Marines, but my hero has always been St. Michael the Archangel. I named my youngest son after him.
In this painting in my mind, the vision of St. Michael is not pretty. He holds a heavy sword in his right hand, and in his left dangles a scale in which he is weighing the souls of the righteous, and the unrighteous.
To St. Michael’s left stands the Devil with his scaly tail and lascivious grinning face, the personification of evil, as he is prepared to claim his prize. I see a multitude of virtuous faces lifting pale hands in prayer, while the damned are reduced to a squirming mass of black potbellied openmouthed hermaphrodites.
Beside them, I see a group of less devils, the kind we run into every day, with pitchforks and chains. They are busily shoving victims into the jaws of an immense fish with teeth like a row of swords.
To the left, I see Heaven shaped into a castellated hotel with angels as doorkeepers welcoming naked souls. St. Peter is in a red bejeweled cape, and a triple tiara receiving the more important of the blessed. All are naked but those of rank wear headpieces, a Cardinal his scarlet hat, a bishop his red miter, a king or queen a golden crown, and the rest bareheaded and gradually reduced to a blur.
Many times I have returned to St. Patrick’s to see if this painting exists. Might it be a stained glass window? No. The St. Michael I see here is much more benign with none of the trappings of my nightmare.
I tell myself it must be at St. Boniface’s. No. Then at St. Iraneaus. No again. Then where? Perhaps in Rome, perhaps in the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, or some remote abbey or church that I have visited, say in Bucharest. But it isn’t there either.
Ah, then it must be in a Father Sunbrueller sermon? He often scared me to death at St. Boniface’s with his fire and brimstone. I’m not sure. It is like a mind map etched on my soul in rooted grooves tracing and retracing the same painting, and yet remaining hidden to me, surfacing only flash-like in nightmares at unexpected moments.
Perhaps that is why when the morning mist burns off and the dew on the grass dries up, and the courthouse looms brilliant in the morning sunlight in all its majesty, spreading the shadow of its magnificent arms over my young limbs, there is no nightmare. There is only joy.
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Hitting a baseball loomed a large challenge for me from the beginning as a boy of nine and ten. Gussie Witt worked hard on this to make it less so.
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"Read this," Gussie tells me, handing me a handwritten piece of paper, "think about hitting as if you’re in school." The pun is meant to make reference to my love of books, but the baseball hitting instructions are like a foreign language to me.
The paper reads:
Here are some flaws to hitting a baseball. Directness, not length, generates speed. From a strong athletic position, the hips and hands move directly to the ball and initiate the correct swing. The back foot rotates the knee in and aids the hips. The hands go to the inside part of the baseball with the bat barrel staying above the hands. The bat and hands level out at the point of contact. The hands should be in a palm up (top of the palm down). Ideally, your hips and hands move first and drive the front shoulder out of the way. When the opposite happens, your front shoulder goes first and pulls the backside through. This causes your head to come off the ball. Your first movement should be moving the hands toward the inside half of the baseball. The front arm starts soft or slightly bent, and remains soft during the swing. If you push away, your front arm straightens out. What this means is that on the approach to the ball, the back of your bottom hand turns so it faces up. When the back hand is up, the barrel of the bat is down too soon. The proper movement would be to keep the back of the hand facing the inside half of the ball during the bat approach. An improper pivot causes the back knee to collapse, forcing the front shoulder to be higher than the back shoulder. When this happens, an uppercut swing will result. In a proper pivot, rotate on the ball of the back foot so the back knee turns in aligning the knees and forming an “L” and not a “C.” To stop from upper cutting, turn your knee, and then hit the ball off your back knee. Your back knee then drives your hands. Every mistake in hitting is because the batter doesn’t get ready to swing. Nothing goes back. So the head slides first. What you want to do is run your hands across your face, take your swing, and then have a big follow through. You have to keep your head behind the swing. If your face goes up and out, then you have no swing because your hands can’t catch up to your face.
After reading this, I look at Gussie in amazement. “I’m going into fifth grade. Am I supposed to understand this?” I’m ready to cry, masking my distress by rubbing my eyes hard with the back of my hand, but I can’t control my heaving chest.
He puts his hand on my shoulder, “It’s okay, Rube.” He studies me as if I’m a specimen in a bottle, strokes his chin, and says, “Let’s try something, okay. Let’s try making you a switch hitter."
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True to my nature whenever faced with a phenomenon that pointed to a deficiency, in this case my inability to consistently hit a baseball, I would attempt to understand it intellectually. It appeared that I could hit a baseball more consistently and further batting left handed. This needed analysis long after my spent youth.
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It was as if sociobiology preprogrammed me to prefer using my left to my right hand. Could my genetic code prefigure this preference? Could the DNA of my chromosomes be so marked? I was naturally left handed, only forced to be right-handed by my da. Science suggests that those left handed oriented tend to be more influenced by the right-brain, the intuitive side, and those right handed oriented more by the left-brain, the cognitive side.
Both brains complement each other but one tends to dominate. This makes some sense to me, as my life has been a journey from trusting my thinking exclusively or left brain, to having greater confidence in the power of my feelings or right brain as I have grown into middle age.
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CHAPTER ELEVEN:
In the previous chapter, it is described how I split my fingers when Gussie Witt threw me a curve ball, and how he took me home and doctored my injury and calmed my mother, an injury we hid from my da. What was taken out of the episode was my da coming home after working a hospital troop train of wounded GI’s, and then discovering my wrapped fingers. My mother, once again, is equal to the test of circumstances.
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Circumstantial leisure has always given me a perspective on things. Turns out I’ve had more than my share. Splitting my fingers was the first of many such enforced respites. I couldn’t play baseball, couldn’t work around the house, couldn’t do much of anything, but look, listen and think. My powers of observation were put into play almost immediately when my da came off the road.
Surprisingly, he was in an uncharacteristic expansive mood. The GI’s on his hospital troop train must have been upbeat, as he invariably feeds off their collective mood. His face was alight with feeling as he stepped into the house.
“Dorothy,” he declares excitedly as he brushes passed us kids, embraces my mother, then collapses into a chair, “this one soldier I got to know pretty well was telling me about being on patrol on Guadalcanal.”
He pauses, my mother’s eyes wide with a patient ‘well, get on with it!’ Sensing her discomfort, he adds quickly, “a sniper in a palm tree shot him in the ass.”
My mother’s puzzled expression prompts him to add. “This was after our boys took the island. GI’s thought the island was secure of Japs. Imagine him telling me this, Dorothy, laughing as if it were nothing, him in plaster cast from his waist down. ‘I took off for camp so fast I could have beaten Jesse Owen in the hundred meters even with half my ass gone,’ he tells me. He was full of lead from an automatic weapon or hand grenade, he wasn’t sure. Took doctors more than 12 hours to dig it all out of him.”
My da grew teary. “Dorothy, can you beat that?” He slumps in the chair and puts his head in his hands. “Guy loses most of his ass, part of his leg, and has already been six months in hospital, and he can joke about it.”
I watch as he covers his sobs by taking out his handkerchief and blowing his nose. My mother comes over and puts her arm around his shoulders, cupping her cigarette in her other hand. It amazes me how she keeps from burning herself.
“Those boys put themselves on the line for us every day, Dorothy, yet they don’t show an ounce of self-pity about missing parts.” He wipes his eyes with his sleeve. “They’re amazing, Dorothy, amazing. And that’s not the half of it.” I can tell he’s winding up to a story.
My mother interrupts. She knows my da. “Ray, let’s get some food in you and you can tell us all about it later.” She takes his hat off, strips him of his brakeman jacket, and loosens his tie. He doesn’t protest. He seems numb.
There isn’t a troop train of wounded GI’s that doesn’t affect him in some way. When they are so badly wounded that most cannot talk or walk, he is close to speechless when he comes home. It shows first in his eyes. They seem to burn with pain. We kids know when to stay clear of him. It’s not us he wants to see anyway. We know he is a time bomb waiting to explode and needs quiet. Besides, he only wants to be with our mother, and we seem to understand this without really understanding.
When The Guadalcanal Diary came to the Rialto Theatre, Bobby Witt and I couldn’t wait to see it. It was a spectacular movie. I rode on the handlebars of his bike and we couldn’t stop talking about it on the way home. I told him some of my da’s Guadalcanal train stories.
“Boy, are you lucky! Your dad talked to real marines that fought there?”
“Uh huh.”
“Can I come over sometime when he’s talking?”
That didn’t seem like a good idea, given my da’s changing moods, but I didn’t know what to say, so I lied, “Sure, why not?”
It wasn’t just marines that fought so bravely at Guadalcanal, my da made clear, but I didn’t tell Bobby that. The movie was mainly about gung ho marines, but GI’s on my da’s Guadalcanal troop train were from all the branches of service. They were being transferred from west coast hospitals where they had already spent several months to eastern hospitals for rehabilitation, and training for return to civilian life. Seeing these GI’s on the mend made my da’s spirits soar.
Yet, when he told my mother he befriended a GI assigned to Schick Hospital, and invited his girlfriend to stay with us, I was shocked. Such generosity is totally out of character. The girlfriend I understand is from Dayton, Ohio and will be coming next week.
Wonderful! We already have two guys renting Jackie and my room upstairs, and Patsy, Jackie and I are crammed together in the smallest room in the house. Janice, who is only two, stays downstairs in her crib in the room off the living room, which is also small. The only other sleeping room is my parent’s in the front of the house. That’s it!
So, where’s this girlfriend going to stay? With the carpenters? I don’t think so. With us? You couldn’t fit her in our bedroom with a shoehorn. Then where?
I wrack my brain with these problems, forgetting about my split fingers. Then suddenly, I hear a familiar roar. My da comes out of the kitchen after a big breakfast, and sees me as if for the first time.
“God Jesus, Dorothy, what the hell’s wrong with Jimmy’s hand?”
“Nothing, Ray, just a little accident playing baseball at the courthouse.”
“Little accident my ass! Look at his hand?” The white bandage with the splint did look a little gross.
“Believe me, Ray, it’s nothing. A baseball bruised his fingers. That’s all. But it’s coming along. He’ll be as good as new in no time.”
“Where you get the money for the doctor?”
“No doctor, Ray, no big deal.”
“Let me see those fingers!” Obediently, I march over and put my hand out to him for inspection. The palm of my hand had turned a combination of yellow, blue and purple as if by magic in support of my mother’s notice.
“You can see the bruising,” she adds as he turns my hand over from palm up to palm down.
“Why are the fingers taped together?”
“Ray, come on! Think about it! Why do you think? So he won’t injure them again. You know what a klutz he is.”
“You goddamned right I know! Your kid has to be the klutziest kid in the whole goddamned neighborhood!” I look to my mother for inspiration. She looks past me, and lights a cigarette on the end of hers, and hands it to him.
“Here, Ray, let’s get you upstairs so you can get some sleep. I’ll rub your back to get the road out of you.” Like a puppy he follows her upstairs.
She won’t be back for an hour or two. So, I’m stuck here watching my little sister, my Honey Bunny Tinker Fritzes. But I don’t mind. I adore her. Janice Kay has to be the prettiest baby ever with a full head of black hair and an angelic face. She coos and smiles at me as if the world around her is milk and honey. I hope it will be.
I wonder what room they’re in upstairs. Probably mine. I hate that smell of cigarettes and sweat and stuff. But I’m not complaining. No way. My mother’s a genius. She knows all my da’s buttons. It’s something to see how he melts to her will. His eyes turn to butter and he gets that look in them. Aren’t they getting a little old for that cuddly stuff? After all, he’s already 34, and she’s almost 28. I don’t understand old people at all. They’re very strange.
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The episode that follows relates to my guilt and behavior after stealing a box of brand new baseballs before a Clinton Industrial League game. I return them with due speed to the general manager’s doorstep, unused and undetected.
The opportunity to steal came while convalescing with my split fingers, and unable to take the field and shag flies with my Courthouse Tiger teammates. It was a ritual during batting practice of the Industrial League players. Some teams gave us special access because we lived around the ballpark and were always there.
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Guilt and Confession then come into play. The sacrament of Catholic Confession is as monumental a matter to negotiate as the reason for it. Here Confession to Father Minehart at Sacred Heart’s is compared to Father Fieldfield of St. Patrick’s.
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Father Finefield trusts no one. I couldn’t confess my stealing with misdirection as I could with Father Minehart. He’d probe, ask how many baseballs, ask the condition of the baseballs, and demand that as part of my Penance that I return the baseballs and report my theft to the general manager.
It wouldn’t satisfy him at all that I had already returned the baseballs knowing the terrible error of my ways. There is also a good chance Father Finefield would insist that I confess my crime to the authorities, to the police, or to the sheriff, or both.
If Father Finefield was the only available priest in the city, and there was no Father Minehart option, I’m quite certain I would have done what I did, not out of principle, but out of holy terror. Guilt is a big motivator with me.
No matter what I confessed to Father Minehart, he would give me the same Penance of three Hail Mary’s and three Our Father’s, whereas Father Finefield in his most magnanimous mood would give me minimally the Penance of the Rosary, and quite certainly the Sorrowful mysteries, no chance at all for the Joyful mysteries for me.
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I take a look at crime in the city of Clinton, which is nonexistent and how boredom fills the void.
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If crime is not a problem in Clinton in the summer of 1943, then boredom surely is.
Temperatures often flirt with 100 degrees Fahrenheit with the humidity nearly as high.
When it rains, it rains buckets as if the humidity empties the clouds in contemptuous frustration. After the rain, the heat races back to show it is in command.
There is no relief anywhere as an Iowa summer is nearly as hot in the shade as in the sun. With little breeze and few electric fans about, it is equally cloying inside the jail, where we hang out when we are even too bored to play baseball at the courthouse. The deputies, and sometimes the sheriff, too, seek to create diversions from this sickly sweet and monotonous heat.
Jackie Fisher, my brother, and Thiel Collins, Bob Collins’s brother, both only six, are little bigger than postage stamps. Deputies Stamp and Gaffey, who hate custodial duty, have just completed some housekeeping of the outer office. In comes these two little devils, throwing spitballs around, and creating new debris. The deputies look at each other, smile, and say, “Let’s do it! Let’s teach them a lesson.”
Gently, they take the two little rascals by the scuff of the neck, Jackie and Thiel thinking this is too funny, that is, until the deputies march them off placing them in an empty prisoner cell. They lock the door with deputy Stamp placing the key ceremoniously in his pocket, and then walking away whistling.
“Let’s see how well they like it here.” Deputy Gaffey nods, “We’ll come back,” he lets that sink in, “maybe tomorrow and see if they’ve learned a lesson in good manners.”
Once out of the room, the deputies listen with their ears to the wall. No sound. Jackie and Thiel don’t cry. Yet, it is clear the little guys fail to see the humor in this as I peak in and see their eyes as big as saucer cups and their faces as white as milk.
Everyone in the outer office, including me, razzes them about being jailbirds.
Imagine our surprise when a minute later, they are standing there before us chirpy as frogs on a lily pad. This is too precious. We all roar with laughter. The joke is on the deputies.
Deputy Stamp, characteristically pulling on his right ear, says, “Okay, show us how you did it.”
Like two little peacocks, the little guys lead us back into the jail section and demonstrate by crawling back through the narrow slot used for the prisoner’s food tray, and then stand up momentarily pumping their chests, then crawling back through triumphantly to freedom again, giggling all the time.
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It wasn’t many days later that we were jolted out of our skin by the cacophonous clanking of an ear splitting jail bell with someone yelling, “Prison break! Prison break!"
Most of us courthouse guys were oiling our baseballs gloves at the time, sitting on the concrete jail steps. Immediately, we scattered like buckshot out of a shotgun, fleeing in all directions.
I ran to the courthouse which was a football field away not stopping until I was safely inside. No one followed me. I told the first person I saw that a prisoner had escaped the jail. He looked at me as if I were mad, and turned and went about his business. I waited for the police sirens. Nothing. All I could hear was typewriters humming in that busy staccato, and people moving in and out of the courthouse just as if it was another routine day.
I wandered about the courthouse for the next hour, finally going to the second floor and looking west to the jail. Nothing.
Sheriff Peterson had conspired with the only prisoner in the jail at the time to let him out to scare the belly bejesus out of us. Actually, it wasn’t much of gambit as the prisoner was a trustee and worked in the jail garage washing vehicles. He only spent his nights in the jail cell. We all knew him, and shouldn’t have been scared, but we were. I never did admit to the guys where I went. Afterwards, I made one of the longest visits of my life to St. Patrick’s church.
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Rastrelli’s and Candyland come into play as popular hangouts in this memoir, but left out were bowling alleys and pool halls.
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Bowling and pool playing always confounded me. Guys that were good at these “sports” were seldom good at baseball. Thiel Collins, who was not much bigger than a bowling ball, was already a student of bowling when he turned seven, and was also a fledgling student of pool as well. His brother, Bob, obviously a powerful influence, was nearly an expert at both. You might even call him a pool shark at twelve.
There weren’t a lot of bowling alleys in Clinton. One was across the street from The Clinton Herald on Sixth Avenue South between Second and Third Street. During the war, McEleney Motors, at the North Bridge on Main Avenue in Lyons, converted its automobile showroom into a bowling alley. No new automobiles were being manufactured during the war. McEleney’s was an Oldsmobile dealership, and so they called it the “Olds Bowl.”
A private club, the Odeon, also in Lyons, had it own bowling alley for members.
Some courthouse guys were setting pins at the Clinton Bowling Alley before they were teenagers, Bob Collins for one, Smiley Carlson for another. My mother claimed bowling alleys were dens of iniquity where kids smoked cigarettes and learned to swear. I took her at her word and avoided them.
But I had to admit to myself that guys that hung out at those places always seemed to be more interesting than I was.
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The Clinton Municipal Swimming Pool comes into play after watching a boring Industrial League game.
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One daring adventure that had a touch of danger to it was sneaking into the Clinton Municipal Swimming Pool at night. The first time was when Clinton Foods was beating Climax 11 to 0 in the third inning, and someone yelled, “Let’s go for a swim!”
Everyone knew what he meant. We left the ballpark, walked south through Riverfront Park, only about a quarter mile, and climbed over the four-foot wrought iron steel fence into the pool grounds.
I was never a strong swimmer, but the water felt wonderful. It was warm but not too warm and amazingly clean. Matt Price, director of the pool, kept the facility in near perfect condition. The dock in the deep part had a low springboard at one end and a 20-foot tower for experienced divers at the other. I stayed away from both the dock and the tower, and just lowered myself into the water like into a bath.
All the guys, except Bobby and me, were great swimmers. They played water tag, dove off all the boards, did canon balls, and made lots of noise. Not surprisingly, people heard us.
It brought out some girls in the area, who asked if they could come in. Even though it was the black of night, I shrunk in embarrassment. I was naked and so were the other guys. The girls said they didn’t mind. They stripped to their bras and panties and frolicked about, teasing the guys to get up on the boards and dive. Some did. I stayed in the shallow water like a hippo, as did Bobby, with only my nose above the water. They never seemed to notice us. Afterwards, walking home with Bobby, I grew serious.
“Do you think we have to tell that in confession, seeing those girls in their underwear?”
“What?”
“The girl thing.”
“What girl thing?”
“You know, those girls in their bras and panties, and that one girl who took everything off and waved them at the guys, that thing?”
“I don’t think so, Rube. You were miles from them. Heck, I couldn’t see you myself.”
It was impossible to see his face, but I wondered if he was laughing at me. Sensing this, he changed his tone. “We were hot. We cooled off in the pool. We couldn’t pay because the pool was closed. If I remember right, you were closer to the kiddy pool than to anyone of those girls."
He had to say that! The kiddy pool was only two feet deep. Well, I was by it but not in it. I was wadding next to it in four feet of water, but so was he. He laughs.
“Rube, what would you do if you didn’t have something to worry about? If you want to give Father Finefield a cheap thrill, confess.”
“But is it a sin, Bobby, that’s what I want to know. I don’t want to confess if it isn’t a sin.”
“Rube, it’s a sin if you think it is.”
“Do you?”
“Do I think it’s a sin? No. I think it is silly to think it is a sin. We didn’t do anything wrong, period.”
With great relief, I left him at his door smelling of chlorine and wondering if my mother would be able to smell it, too.”
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Some Clinton kids of my youth knew a world that I never visited and didn’t know until I did research for this book. It was a surprising thing to learn of another side of my community, a side that was so alive and such a learning place for many.
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Clinton in the 1940s was a booming place for adults. Prohibition had been repealed but Iowa liquor laws tightly controlled liquor distribution. Places such as the Odeon Club in Lyons politely ignored these restrictions. The Odeon Club was a bowling, partying, and drinking spot, which defied the law and sold liquor by the drink, and flouted gambling laws as well with a whole room full of slot machines.
Liquor came from Chicago and was unloaded outside of Fulton, Illinois just across the Mississippi River from Lyons, and transported by car across the Lyons Bridge and state line into Iowa. The liquor suppliers wouldn’t bring it across the state line.
At the time of one inventory by Federal Agents during the war, the Odeon Club was told it had the largest stock of liquor between Chicago and Omaha, and Minneapolis and St. Louis. Clinton was truly a jumping place although we kids didn’t have a clue that it was.
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Imagine a pool emporium as a learning institution. Well the Clinton Billiard Parlor under the management of Sam Knight was something like that.
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Bob and Thiel Collins, along with Kenny Tharp and Sam Annear were great fans of the pool shark, Sam Knight. He was Clinton’s best 3-cushion billiard player. These guys were all underage, but Sam, who ran the Clinton Billiard Parlor on Fourth Avenue South and Second Street, just around the corner from the Revere Candy Shop, treated them like family, that is, as long as they behaved.
Sam Knight played against such great players as Welker Cochran and Willie Hoppe. Heinie Witt, Bobby Witt’s father, was a pool enthusiast and played a respectable game of 3-cushion billiards. But Heinie’s preferred game was snooker.
A snooker table is five by eleven feet, larger than a championship billiard table, which is four and one half feet by nine feet. Anyway, Heinie Witt’s favorite game was the high run.
Negroes in Clinton were practically invisible, and didn’t associate in most white establishments during the war, but the Clinton Billiard Parlor was a notable exception. Julius Kent was black and a regular billiard and pool player at the parlor.
Sam Knight allowed young kids in, and permitted them to play some pool, but if they were caught smoking or swearing, they were tossed out, and not allowed back again for two weeks, and he kept track, so they couldn’t slip back in as if nothing happened.
Sam was also a devout Irish Catholic who sometimes acted more like a priest, a sort of Father Flanagan of Boys Town type. Even Clinton’s roughnecks, and there were more than a few, either respected or feared Sam and seldom stepped across the line.
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This is another episode while my split fingers were healing and I attempted to make myself useful to my Courthouse Tiger teammates.
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Unable to play baseball, watching the Courthouse Tigers in the summer of 1943, the thought occurred to me that they looked a little ragged. They needed something to spruce them up. I said to myself, they are a good baseball team, but they need uniforms! That’s it, that’s what they lack!
Well, uniforms are costly, and we didn’t have money to even buy baseballs, relying on our courthouse shaggers to get them when foul balls came over the roof at Riverview Stadium. So, getting uniforms wasn’t realistic. Then what was? What about an image that identifies them as Courthouse Tigers?
With time on my hands, and wanting to make a contribution, I suggested to the guys that they give me their best white tee shirt, and I would iron an image of a tiger on the back of the tee shirt with “Courthouse Tiger” over the image. I also said that everyone should purchase the same red baseball cap from Rod Fitch’s Sports Wear department at the Martin Morris Department Store, and that everyone should wear a clean pair of jeans with white tennis shoes.
They all agreed enthusiastically to my idea, and in a few days I had eleven sparkling white tee shirts with which to work. They were all new! Gussie Witt, who seems to know everyone, managed to get the tee shirts, baseball caps and sneakers from Rod Fitch’s at wholesale prices. The tee shirts cost each player $1.35, the baseball cap, ninety cents, and the sneakers $1.80.
My uncle Arnie Ekland, who never married, had a hobby of drawing cartoons, animals, and caricatures of people. Every Wednesday night after work at the Chicago & North Western Railway Shops on Camanche Avenue, he would take a bus to Sixth Avenue North, and walk past the courthouse ball field, seeing my guys playing ball.
So, he knew how important they all were to me. I told him of my plan, and asked him if it was possible to draw a tiger. Without hesitation, I watched him with fascination make circles, elliptical configurations, cross lines, and crossword puzzle like patterns, and then turn them all into the most impressive tiger face I had ever seen. He asked me if I needed a bigger or smaller pattern. No, I told him, the size was just right.
Now, came the hard work. I got a box of new crayolas and colored the pattern consistent with that of a tiger, along with large block letters “COURTHOUSE TIGERS” above the tiger image.
Then I put a piece of my mother’s wax paper over it, and then a handkerchief, and ironed the image into the tee shirt.
Voila! It was a perfect tiger head with the orange colors vibrantly brilliantly, reflecting the tiger’s menacing dominance. It was great. I was so proud. The problem was I had to re-crayon each image, and that seemed to take tons of time.
I made tee shirts for Bobby Witt, Phil “Legs” Leahy, Bill “Chang” Benson, Jim “Owl” Holle, Sam Annear, Walt “Fergie” Ferguson, Dick Crider, Dave “Pooper” Cavanaugh, Dick Dunmore, and Ken Tharp. I didn’t make one for myself because I couldn’t play with my split fingers, and besides I was completely pooped out.
The guys looked great playing in their new uniforms. The only problem is that the tee shirts had to be washed eventually, and the image faded, and faded, until the image all but vanished. Oh, well! It was a good idea at the time, and kept me involved with the guys.
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CHAPTER TWELVE:
The opening paragraphs of this chapter were cut out. Here they are.
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If there is anything more beautiful than an Iowa fall, it must be in heaven. The earth tones are dazzling in Indian summer brilliance. The leaves of trees are rich in deep yellows, bright reds, dark oranges, soft browns, hard purples, and moist greens, the color spectrum of infrared to ultraviolet light on display.
It is as if in the dying of things they come to life in Nature’s pent-up beauty, reminding us that nothing is ever lost, only changed in God’s magnificence. Soon the trees will be as naked as a winter’s cloudless sky. But now the Iowa fall is radiant with the many faces of God in picture frame quality, suitable for one’s mantle.
My heart is bursting with joy as I shuffle along Third Street kicking leaves and hearing them crunch under foot. I feel one with them. I don’t know why but I do. I pick up a leave and examine it. Pick up another and compare the two, then a third, and a fourth until my hands are full of leaves.
Some leaves look like triangular webbing, their veins prominent, others are heart shaped, and still others remind me of fans. They dance along the walk, whirl in the air, land and kiss each other, then part again as Nature’s playful children from the same family without a care in the world.
The fall is like a big brother to me. It is my favorite time of year. I hate the rains in the spring, the heat of the summer, and the sickening cold of winter. It is heaven on earth in the fall when no matter what direction you look it is like a priceless painting in God’s favorite colors. The sky is so blue that I feel I can see all the way to heaven. Gentle breezes caress my face like angels’ hands reminding me how lucky I am to be a native Iowan. When I die, I pray that heaven is like an Iowa fall.
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The passage that follows relates to my violent reaction when my classmates lock me out of school after recess. This meant I couldn’t play basketball after school. Only ten, I ripped the locked metal door handle from its wood moorings bending the metal at a tortured angle. The action released surprising strength in me. Scientists call this “akathisia.” The body at rest is like a quiet volcano capable of eruption if the conditions are right. In fact, the muscles of the human body, if they were all to work together at the same time, could lift 6,000 pounds.
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Violence is endemic to the American soul and has been since the Pilgrims came to this virgin continent. Violence is our collective heritage, but it is also our individual torment.
There are two categories of violence, instrumental and emotional violence. Instrumental violence is intended to achieve a particular goal or reward – money, status, territory, or advantage. A terrorist act or armed robbery is an example of instrumental violence. The Boston Tea Party leading to the American Revolution was a terrorist act as were the first shots fired by the Minute Men at Concord, Massachusetts in the Revolutionary War.
Emotional violence, on the other hand, can be triggered by feelings of rage, anger, hatred, fear, frustration, or jealousy. In destroying the locked door, I was displaying emotional violence. I was only ten but what Sister Flavian said was to prove prophetic, I was an angry child heading for trouble.
Characteristic of akathisia is hyperkinesis and hyperdynamism (HK/HD). HK is characterized by hyperactivity and extreme rapidity of motion. The average person is capable of motion much faster than can consciously be generated, say, catching a glass that falls off the table before it hits the floor.
HD is the rush of energy that comes with the extraordinary quickness of action. A specific trigger or psychological catalyst, such as fear or rage or some other emotion, brings on the HK/HD phenomenon.
Life magazine in 1946 wrote of a stunning example of this. William Anderby, a five-seven, 152-pound sailor, serving on a destroyer attached to a merchant ship convoy in the North Atlantic in World War II, during an attack by German dive bombers, lifted an unexploded bomb off the forward deck weighing 610 pounds, picked it up and carried it effortlessly to the railing, and flung it overboard, saving his ship.
Displays of HK/HD seem to fall into two general categories. The most common is the reflexive HK or HD reaction, that is, a momentary single act of supranormal strength, speed, or agility brought on by a reflexive response to mortal peril or extreme emotional shock, such as my ripping a bronze door panel off its hinges as if it were a piece of cardboard.
More rare are sustained displays of HK/HD, which are of a hysterical nature, such as athletes who play with broken bones, or Metal of Honor winners in warfare who exhibit sustained courage under life threatening conditions. According to research, HK/HD appears more common among people of Nordic origin, especially Celts, Scandinavians, and Germans. But I expect it is in everyone.
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More episodic evidence was prepared but not included that indicated that akathisia was not a “one time” phenomenon with me. These following episodes were left out.
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When I was fifteen, I came home after high school football practice, tired and hungry, to find my parents not home. I asked my sister, Patsy, whom I adored, to heat up my dinner. She refused. I grabbed her arm, and told her she was mean, and then heated up my own dinner. The next day my sister’s arm was tattooed with the precise imprint of my five fingers and palm on her arm as an ugly bruise. It is a wonder my da didn’t kill me.
When I was seventeen in football scrimmage at Clinton High, I hit Bobby Witt so hard coming around my end that he couldn’t practice the rest of the week.
“Rube, why’d you do that?” he asked in disbelief as we took the bus home from school. “God, know what, that really hurt. It was a cheap shot. It’s only practice.” Then shaking his head, “I hurt all over.”
I couldn’t explain it, except that fear might have triggered it, certainly not courage. We had another football warm up drill that illustrates this conundrum. We would stand apart about thirty yards, and a player carrying the ball would run at us with a blocker in front and we would try to get past the blocker and tackle the ball carrier, then reverse roles, go to the back of the line, and do it all over again.
It was just a drill, but for me it was an emotional release, as I hated scrimmage. Nobody wanted to face me because when I was the designated tackler I took it too seriously.
Such emotional release was something that I turned on and off like a light switch. The peculiar nature of this trigger deployment was illustrated when we upset Rock Island (Illinois) in the last football game of my football playing career.
I had had a vicious time with the guy across from me, often knocking him ass over applecart, and then yelling for him to get out of my face. We played both sides of the ball in those days, so I got to humiliate him on offense and defense, too. Once the game was over, however, the madness left me. Not him. I went to shake his hand, and he hit me and knocked me off my feet.
It didn’t hurt but stunned me. I sat there on the ground with no desire to retaliate. Red Butler came up and did it for me, pummeling him into submission with the Rock Island player finally saying, “Oh right! Oh right!”
This episode confused me. I wondered if I was actually a coward, and why the anger that had served me so well in the game, abandoned me afterwards so quickly.
The emotional violence of the Rock Island players didn’t end there. They trashed the visitors’ locker room of our high school. That was collective instrumental violence versus individual emotional violence.
With me, I never knew what might trigger my emotions. I considered when I was young and strong that I might be capable of killing someone while in a rage. It scared me.
The final summer of my working at Clinton Corn Processing Company while going to Iowa provided some evidence for my concern.
This was my fifth and final summer working there, a job that had enabled me to earn a college education. I owed the company and its good people more than I could ever repay. Even so, this inner restlessness or akathisia was to surface once again.
Perhaps because I’ve always been a loner, and never into any games, except sports explains why I’ve also never been into grab-assing games or pranks of any kind.
I was working the eleven to seven shift in the feed house at Clinton Corn. Here we took 140 pound feed bags off the conveyor belt and stacked them in box cars thirteen high for shipping. Only athletic type college guys were assigned to this detail with the crew’s regulars.
Nate Walton, an outstanding athlete at St. Mary’s High School, and now a student at St. Ambrose College in Davenport (Iowa), was a colleague of mine on the night crew. Ben Dorsey was the night superintendent, and very supportive of college kids.
On this particular night, during the waning hours of the morning, when we would soon all be returning to college, the superintendent was away doing paper work, and Clyde Powell was in charge.
Clyde was huge, as tall as I am, but seventy-five pounds heavier if an ounce. A nice guy, but a practical joker, he decided that he and his buddies would initiate us stenciling on our private parts with black ink as honorary members of the crew. They went for Nate first. Nate didn’t resist, and then it was my turn.
Casually, the six-man crew formed a half circle around me, sensing my resistance, with shit assed grins on their faces. I’ve never felt such terror or helplessness before. First, I was wracked with disbelief -- this isn’t happening to me! –- then unbridled fear.
My tongue was dry, and I was so frightened that I was shaking like a leaf. I couldn’t speak. I tried to and my lips quivered, but nothing came out. Nate said later that it appeared that I was about to cry, a twenty-one year old cry baby.
When the first man broke from the half circle and approached me, I gave a sigh of relief that it wasn’t Clyde, and hit him on the chin with such an explosive force that it sent him flying over a stack of feed sacks as if he was jettisoned out of a canon.
He landed out cold in a mist of feed dust, spread-eagled like a fallen bird. Everyone laughed, but me. “Holy shit!” was the cry, “did you see that?”
After a brief spell, the man shook his head, picked himself up, massaged his jaw, tried to stand, and then collapsed again, uttering some earthy expletive.
Seeing this, the other guys went back to work as if nothing had happened. It was over. I still think about it these many years later.
Akathisia was to visit me again while a member of the crew of the USS Salem in the Mediterranean during the late 1950s. A bodybuilding boatswain’s mate was always flexing his muscles as he rumbled through the passageway, hitting guys on the arm and laughing, “Oh, I’m sorry, did that hurt?” No one ever complained.
One day I told him as he gave me an especially stunning punch, “Don’t ever do that again!” It was a bruising punch on top a bruise given earlier in the day.
He stopped, looked at me in astonishment. Deck guys consider hospital corpsmen weenies, “short arm inspectors” and “pussies,” and not real sailors.
“Well, well, pretty boy doc is a tough guy.” Now he has a crowd as he is blocking the passageway. He hits me again in the arm and knocks me against the bulkhead and then turns his back on me, as if I don’t exist and moves off.
I was taller and quicker than him, coming up behind him and wrapping my arms around his thick chest from the back, and pulling him towards me with all my might. It sounded like piano keys being tuned as I crushed his chest and he collapsed in my arms with several broken ribs. One rib punctured his lung and he was struggling to breathe.
Others rushed him into sickbay, just ten feet away, while I stood there coldly with contemptuous hate in my eyes. I was living on my rage.
Word spread that he fell down the gangplank on the hanger deck where the weight room was located. He never challenged this description of his injuries. I could have received a General Court Marshall and Dishonorable Discharge, and possibly even jail time, but it never came up. The weight lifter made a recovery, but never bothered me again.
There was another time when akathisia worked indirectly but possibly saved my life. It was 1975, and I was consulting the Fairfax County Police Department, which is located outside Washington, D.C.
I had gone to a play with the Secretary of the State of Iowa, whom I had met when he attended one of my seminars in Kansas City, Missouri. We went to dinner afterwards and left each other in the early a.m. A police officer from Fairfax County was due to pick me up, but got delayed, and wouldn’t be around until 2 a.m.
I decided to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue in this cold early morning, when suddenly I noticed across the street walking parallel to me were three African American youths.
Alarm should have arisen, but it didn’t. At six-four and nearly 200 pounds, dressed in a three-piece Hickey Freeman suit and cashmere top coat, I felt insulated from danger by my apparent status, that is, until the three youths rushed ahead and crossed the street, and were standing under the street light jiving with each other some fifty yards from me.
When the distance was reduced to ten yards, I remembered that the senator from Mississippi had been robbed and stabbed and nearly fatally wounded in this same area during the wee hours of the morning.
Emotional panic rose in me fed by consuming fear, but not instrumentally as in the past, but in a cautionary form. Out of the blue, I recalled that whenever I interviewed plain clothed detectives at Fairfax, and asked them sensitive questions, they invariably adjusted their shoulder holsters.
Remembering this, when I was less than five yards from the boys, I made an exaggerated move to adjust my phantom holster, which they didn’t miss, followed with obvious false bravado, “Good evening, boys, little past your bedtime, isn’t it?”
Without missing a beat, I walked boldly by them, now with my back to them, rolling my shoulders again as if to withdraw my revolver in imitation of the cop that I wasn’t, I heard them whistling, “There goes the fuzz!”
When I told my ride this, he said, “Well, doc, I guess you could say that saved your white ass, but I wouldn’t recommend a repeat performance." xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Note: This material is copyrighted © by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., and is made available only for your private use, and is not to be published without the expressed permission of the author.
In the Shadow of the Courthouse
Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel
James R. Fisher, Jr.
© 2001
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
More than 3,000 readers have purchased and read this memoir written as a novel. Many have asked, having heard the book is abridged from the original manuscript, what was left out? These are examples of episodes and anecdotes cut from that original manuscript. There are twenty-one chapters in the book and what appears here was cut from the first twelve chapters.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE was published by AuthorHouse in 2003. The book was first copyrighted by the author in 2001.
CHAPTER TWO:
Mention is made that Clinton, Iowa is a conservative industrial community and mainly Republican and Protestant with nearly three times as many public as Catholic private schools.
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Today this differentiation is even more pronounced. True, there was Mt. St. Clare Academy and College, which continues to thrive today (2003). In 1891, Father James Arthur Murray, pastor of St. Patrick’s parish asked for five sisters of the order of St. Frances to open a school.
It was at a time when Clinton’s main industry, the lumber business, was in precipitous decline and more than 6,000 residents had left Clinton. Yet, the nuns bravely incurred a debt of $20,000 to purchase the Chase property. From the magnificent vista of Bluff Boulevard, on some five acres of pristine property, stood a well-preserved three story brick building. It provided ample room for these entrepreneurial nuns to open a boarding school and academy, and then a junior college.
In 1979, Mt. St. Clare College was accredited as a co-educational four-year liberal arts college offering a degree in business administration. The plight of several other long established Clinton Catholic schools has not been so fortunate.
Our Lady of Angels Academy for girls on North Fifth Street in Lyons was established in 1872. A phantasmal structure which might best be described as angelic stood high on a scenic hill overlooking the Mississippi River, but was dissolved in 1966 due to a teacher shortage. Vocations to the sisterhood were already in decline and are nearly extinct today.
So the elementary schools of St. Ireneaus established in 1840, St. Boniface in 1861, and St. Patrick’s in 1889 are no longer in existence as this is written. The Catholic school system in Clinton continues to shrink in the early twenty-first century with St. Mary’s elementary and high school now surviving as Mater Dei with an uncertain alliance with Mt. St. Clare Academy and College.
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Reference is made here to Clinton’s many frontier saloons at mid-century to be replaced today by the fast-food nation. What follows is also a segue from evening chats around coffee, cake and cigarettes of my uncles, aunts, my da’s railroad buddies, and his saloon keeper friends, who found therapy in storytelling and humor.
The piece also shows how men such as Disney and Kroc seeded our societal decline into a fast-food nation.
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These garish neon-lighted watering holes with their weather-beaten doors, once alive with excitement, are no more, replaced by 30 or so fast-food restaurant franchises, equally garish, but without the allure or style of the riverfront saloons.
Clinton is now part of the fast-food nation in all its offending colors – MacDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dairy Queen, and even local fast-food imitators. Indeed, imitation of the garish is the local as well as national mantra.
The few taverns that still exist have lost their gusto, symbolized in crumbling paint, rotting wood, stuttering neon signs with missing letters, the stench of stale beer, along with worn out patrons who have lost a kick in their step. I sense that Clintonians are not drinking less, or eating more, simply drinking at home, and eating out.
This cultural shift from a casual parochialism to a concerted homogenizing started with a pair of teenagers in 1917, who lied about their ages to join an ambulance unit destined for the Western Front in WWI.
They found themselves in the same training camp in South Beach, Connecticut. One of them was Walt Disney. The other one, only 15-years-of-age at the time, was Ray Kroc, the man who later made McDonald’s an empire.
When Kroc and his comrades went off to the nearest town on furlough to look for girls, Disney stayed in camp, drawing. Disney served in France and Germany, but WWI ended before Kroc was sent to Europe. Had he gone, it might have changed the history of fast food.
The mode of operation in the trenches fascinated both Kroc and Disney – the assembly line. Everything, the ammunition workers, the machine-gunners, the infantrymen, played their small, repetitive roles with as much speed and efficiency as they could muster. The Front was an industrial operation for the manufacture of corpses.
Moreover, Disney and Kroc were great admirers of Henry Ford (as incidentally was Lenin) and saw assembly lines as the embodiment of efficiency, order and consistency. The main drawback was people. They were the most inefficient, disordered, and inconsistent moving parts of the assembly line. They got sick. They had to be paid. They had to be taught what to do. The solution was to strip workers of skills and confine them to narrow and repetitive tasks.
In the 1930s, Disney set up a rigid assembly line system in his studio, where stupefied artists performed repetitive sketching and inking tasks against the clock. Disney never understood how this was dehumanizing, or why his people struck for better working conditions. He blamed it on Communism. Likewise, Kroc insisted, “The organization cannot trust the individual. The individual must trust the organization.”
The fast-food corporations have been fanatical in their determination to make their employees conform to their technology rather than the other way around. It has become the melodic march of the fast-food nation, but was already reflected in the mindless occupations of most of our working class fathers. It is not surprising, then, that they found relief from this dumbing down in each other’s company.
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CHAPTER SIX:
My neighbor and friend, George Jensen, crippled since a boy with poliomyelitis, was a big reader. He also ran the elevator at Van Allen’s Department Store in downtown Clinton. We would often talk about books and their central message, books that I had no idea existed.
George's favorite author was Shakespeare. One day in a euphoric mood he said that Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived. When I shared this with my mother, she informed me that it was not Shakespeare, but James Joyce who was the greatest writer in the English language. Joyce was another writer I was unfamiliar with, but one my mother assured me I would come to know.
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The episode that follows occurred while a sophomore in college taking a required course, Modern Literature, Greeks, and the Bible. It proved my mother prophetic.
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It so happened that I became ill and was in the infirmary when James Joyce’s "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” was the subject of a discussion. My professor, apparently not wanting to grade another essay, asked me to make an oral presentation of the book. The conversation that follows developed once I completed that oral presentation.
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Professor Armens seems transfixed. Shaking his head as he puts out his cigarette, and exclaims, “Fisher, you’ve given me an experience that I doubt I will soon forget. ‘I am Joyce.’ That’s precious.” He paces the room, laughs to himself, and whispers under his breath again, 'I am Joyce,' smiling like a winking shudder.
This exhilarates and confuses me. All I can think, does this mean I’m getting an “A” or not?
How could I not see myself as Joyce? His pain in the classroom, his anguish with priests, his ambivalence towards girls, lusting for them but being afraid of them, his strangeness with his da, his nonspecific anger with everything and everybody, his sense of exile in the company of his peers, his sensitivity and obsession with class, his awareness of the power of money and his contempt for it, his running lies and illusions of race. Of course, he was Joyce. Joyce’s life was his life. He, too, desired to fly the coop, to soar into the sun and greatness.
“Here is what I propose,” the professor says evenly, and then shows me a brochure. It is titled "The University of Iowa’s Honors Program in the Humanities."
“This is a relatively new program at Iowa," he continues, "It is being offered to select students to pursue a degree in Arts and Letters. What makes it unique is that it is essentially a tutorial program, involving extensive independent study. This includes reading the classics in philosophy, psychology, theology, literature, history and related disciplines in order to create a conceptual framework and artistic foundation. Incidentally, there is no compulsory attendance of classes.
"Oxford College at Cambridge England has a similar program." He can see I'm underwhelmed with the idea. “Before you say, ‘this is not for me, I’m a science major,’ go home and discuss this with your parents and come back next week and tell me of your decision.”
My head is spinning. I don’t know what to say. Reading uncertainty in my face, he adds, “In case you are wondering why I didn’t read your paper in class on the influence of religion in your life, I have a confession to make. I had to find out if you were for real. That is why I wanted this oral examination. Your paper on religion was intensely personal, intuitively constructed, and yet blatantly innocent. It was as if you were having a conversation with your God, and it didn’t matter if anyone got it or not.
"Joyce wrote like that. Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are not written for an audience. They are written for Joyce and his God. We now call these works literature.
“My concern if I had read your work in class is that it would have generated cynicism if not caustic comments doing you irreparable harm. You have a keen eye for what you see and a counterintuitive way of expressing it.
"You’re not an imitator. You’re the genuine article. That’s rare. But you’re also raw, unschooled and rough. You need honing. I am confident this program could go along way in that direction.” With that he excuses himself, and leaves me sitting enveloped in the empty darkness of the room and my mind.
Once home, I explained first to my mother Dr. Armen’s suggestion. “Are you sure this is what you want to do?”
“No, but I am flattered. It’s kind of amazing, mother, I’m not nearly as sharp as some of the other people in the class, yet he singled me out.”
“Don’t play humble with me. You know better. We’ll discuss it with your father after dinner, but not before, understand?” I nod.
Once my da has had his dinner, his coffee, and has read The Clinton Herald, my mother pats him on the shoulder. “Ray, Jimmy, has something he wants to discuss with you.”
“Yes? What?" He looks at me. "They kick you out of school?” I shake my head, but don't speak. Still anxious, he continues, “Did they cancel your scholarship? If they did, fella, there’s no goddamned reason for discussion." Then, turning to my mother, he adds, "He’ll have to go to work on the railroad, or get a job somewhere else. I’m not supporting him you better goddamned believe that, Dorothy!”
Ignoring his bluster as if an ill fated breeze, she says through a cloud of cigarette smoke, “No, he didn’t lose his scholarship.”
“Then for Christ’s sake, Dorothy, what is it? That goddamned kid of yours doesn’t come home less than something’s wrong, you know that, Dorothy! So, Jimmy, what is it?”
Nervously, I explain briefly the humanities program. When I am through, he looks at me with a prying glint in his eyes. “Jimmy, can I ask you a question?” I am expressionless. “Don’t try to lie. I love you and always will, and you’ll always be welcome here no matter what. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I had no idea what he was saying. “Nooo!”
“Jimmy, you’re not a goddamned fag are you?”
“A what?” Then it registers. “No! What gave you that idea?”
“I see those fairies on my trains, goddamned beatniks, loud, rude, long dirty hair, smell like goats, reading filthy books, dirty tennis shoes, shabby clothes, hugging each other, yes, Dorothy, goddamned guys hugging each other like it’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s disgusting that's what it is. You want your son to hang out with fairies?”
He throws his arms up in theatrical fashion. “Jesus Christ, when I ask them where they’re going, they tell me,” he gestures with effeminate exaggeration with his hands and mocks an effeminate whine, ‘we’re students at Iowa.’ Can you believe your son has come to this? I ask you again, Jimmy, are you a goddamned fag?”
“Nooo!” I literally scream. It is too much for me. I put my coat on and rush out the door. When I return some time later, the house is quiet, everyone is in bed. We didn’t discuss the matter again. It was obvious that I would stay in chemistry. There was absolutely no chance to live with him and become a scholar.
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Not knowing at the time, that St. Patrick’s church, rectory and school were going to be leveled to dust as if this historic landmark had never been, I left the following episode out of the book to my regret.
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Father Finefield’s successor at St. Patrick's parish was a St. Ambrose professor, Father John B. McIniry, who longed to be a parish priest after several years as an educator and administrator at this Davenport, Iowa institution.
Parish life at St. Patrick's for Father McIniry was to be the challenge of a strange and sometimes irritating culture. He seemed especially comfortable, however, around bleeding heart parishioners as if that was a parish priest's primary role. That said he was more successful carrying out some of Father Finefield’s sketchy plans than he had been, which you might not expect from a novice parish priest.
In 1961, Father McIniry purchased the land adjacent to the school and enlarged the playground and parking lot. He also created a parish committee to head up a fund raising drive to construct a Parish Center. Between 1961 and 1981, the parish budget grew from $30,000 to $130,000 per year, largely through his fiscal acumen and ability to profile parishioners with the deepest pockets. St. Patrick’s parish also grew to more than 1,500 members.
The oldest part of the school, which dated from 1924, was not a school at all, but the parish hall. With the caption in the cornerstone, it read “St. James Hall, 1924, James Davis, Bishop, J. A. Murray, Pastor.”
Now, in the early twenty-first century when this is being written, the school is empty, the building a tomb, the rectory unoccupied, and the parish a memory. Priests in Clinton, Iowa are as rare as the American bald eagle. The century vision of Father James Arthur Murray is manifestly sustained only by Mount St. Clare College and Convent, but the good priest left his heart at St. Patrick’s.
Meanwhile, St. Mary’s parish, once again dominates a shrinking universe, and disappearing Clinton Catholic community. The churches of St. Patrick, St. Boniface, St. Irenaeus, and Sacred Heart are in various states of terminal decline, having all but lost the struggle to stay viable with a corps of shuttling priests from church to church, while Mount St. Clare College, all but devoid of vocational nuns, continues to use the temper of the times to diminishing advantage.
The good sisters of St. Francis embrace non-practicing Catholics along with people of all religious persuasions with open arms. They are, indeed, a tribute to the order founded by St. Clare, who was a devoted colleague of St. Francis of Assisi.
Consider this against a Clinton County, which has shrunk from its apogee of nearly 40,000 citizens during WWII to little more than 29,000 today. St. Patrick’s church and school once stood buoyed by the spirit of its creator, who took on all factions and odds, even the opposition of the St. Mary "hill toppers" to the south.
St. Mary parishioners and priests saw little need for a church and school in central Clinton, but he did and he won. Now, that spirit is being buried under a planned Senior Citizen Housing façade. Alas, where are the Father James Murray’s of the world today. Are there no more leaders anywhere?
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CHAPTER SEVEN:
My family often had trouble paying its bills. It wasn’t a case of being extravagant. It was a case of being poor. This chapter ends when my da is humiliated in the presence of his nine-year-old-son when he tries to charge school clothes for him at the Martin Morris Department Store from an old grade school chum.
My da, a physically courageous man, would never back down from a fight with anyone no matter how big or powerful. The same could not be said about his emotional courage.
When the salesman said that he checked and found my da’s credit bad, my da’s shoulders slumped, his head dropped and he stood there virtually motionless. I was embarrassed for him, and angry with the salesman, taking control of the situation by saying, we didn’t want these purchases anyway, and marching my da out of the store.
Life is a series of emotional tests, tests that determine the construction of our
character. This, looking back now sixty years, was perhaps the most compelling test of my life up to that point. In my rush to make this book of “readable size,” I left this out.
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I’ve often thought about that day. My da didn’t belong in Clinton. He was an outsider. He didn’t fit in with either the counterfeit gentry or the rough and tumble crowd of Clinton’s youth of his generation. He was a displaced Irishman from urban south Chicago with the temperament of a street fighter where that no longer applied. He was a character out of James T. Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan,” and not a nice Catholic boy from a small town.
The animal in him ruled his humanity. He never got to the higher centers. Yet, where he had once been a drinker and a brawler of some distinction, he now needed the mental toughness of a father and provider that was not to be had. Unafraid as he was of any man, no matter his size or physical strength, counting on his courage to even the score, he was a man afraid. His fear was of life. He tended to exaggerate the mental toughness and superiority of nearly everyone. He failed to see the games people play, the charades of arrogance and posturing, the pretending to be in charge when clearly they weren’t.
Being unschooled in the world of books, he found most people more intelligent than himself simply because they read. Consequently, he gave people the benefit of the doubt, something he never gave himself. He believed himself a fraud and failure and once got angry when I said I never met anyone that wasn’t. My genes missed his natural bravado, his jaunty exuberance, but they also missed his condescending belief that everyone was better.
My mother knew this of him, and used it with cruel precision. My da’s cocky zest was all but gone by the time I was nine. His essence was buried deep in a personality of failure. He already felt defeated by life, defeated by the burdens of responsibility, defeated by having to comply, submit, surrender and confound in order to get by. Indeed, he was defeated by whom he was and what he had become. He was a man ashamed with nothing to hold unto, nothing to protect him from his fears except the invincible spirit of my mother. She was his savior and his nemesis.
St. Thomas Aquinas preferred a proud to a fainthearted man. Somehow my da missed this in his education. Aquinas noted that the former would do something while the latter most likely nothing at all.
That described my da, beaten down but not yet dead. His soul was all but dead to its possibilities, while his body stubbornly lived on in embarrassment. He was an Irishman to the core, who liked to look back, to dwell on the past, to what he never was to what he was now. He talked incessantly about Chicago as if it were Mecca. The talk kept his spirits, dim as they were, barely alive. The country killed what was left of that spirit. Clinton, Iowa killed my da. His Irish soul abandoned him long before his body consented to die.
Like all paradoxes, however, an inherent equilibrium prevails in the universe. I was in the navy on the U.S.S. Salem (CA-139), the flagship of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean when I learned he had multiple myeloma, a form of leukemia.
With this disease, the bone marrow refuses to produce healthy red blood cells, and the body wastes away, bit-by-bit, day-by-day. He learned of this disease in a routine fashion. He had gone to his dentist, Dr. McLaughlin, for his annual check-up. The dentist didn’t like the looks of his gums. He sent him to Dr. O’Donnell. Our family doctor then sent him to a specialist for a biopsy. When the results came back, Dr. O’Donnell said, “Ray, it’s a bad actor.”
Without hesitation, my da asked, “How long do I have, Joe?”
“A year, fourteen months at most. We don’t know much about this disease, and there are no drugs to treat it, only blood transfusions to keep your strength up.” My da had just turned forty-eight.
Most men given a death sentence retreat into themelves, look for pity, or wail about their lot being too young to die. Not him. When he got the news, it proved his greatest moment. He was accepting, and oddly enough even cheerful and more loving. He even regained his childlike affection for Irish Catholicism again, no doubt influenced by devout Dr. O’Donnell.
He, a changed man, met me at the train nation with my mother when I came back from Europe on emergency leave. He rediscovered his gift for storytelling and became a daily communicant at mass. Before, he hadn’t been inside a church for years. He no longer swore, no longer raised his voice, and no longer smoked. He found a peculiar happiness instead of dread in knowing his destiny.
One of the stories he now told was about being a first grader. The nun at school had taught the children a new prayer. He went to his grandmother and cried, “Granny, granny, I learned a new prayer today.” She asked, “What prayer might that be, Raymond?” He replied with pride, “Across the Street.” The prayer was actually the Apostle’s Creed.
His body shrunk, and the pain became more intense caused by his bones breaking from lack of nourishing blood. The soul that once took residence in Chicago now returned. Dr. O’Donnell allowed me to give him morphine shots for the pain on demand, as I was a hospital corpsman. The pain was reflected in his eyes, but he never complained.
The last several weeks of his life I was his constant companion, me who had always been distant from his center. We watched television together on a little nine inch black and white monitor. His favorites were Wagon Train, Gun Smoke, and The Bounty Hunter. Confined to bed, and seldom out of pain, he made every attempt to make everyone at ease around him. He loved my sister Patsy especially, and her husband, Bill Waddell, who was also home from the navy. He would light up when they would visit.
It was as if his personality emerged from a deep cold and dark cave into the sunlight of the day. He would hold my sister Janice’s hand and tell her she was beautiful like an angel. And he would kid my brother Jackie about how much he was a chip off the old block. With me, it was another matter. I remained an enigma to the end. “Your mother thinks you’re smart like she is," he said out of the blue one day, shaking his head, "I wonder. I know you think you'r as smart as anyone alive. Maybe that’s enough. I don’t know.”
He died on January 3, 1958, three days after his fiftieth birthday. He weighed forty pounds. Every bone in his body was broken.
“There will be no stopping for him in Purgatory,” Dr. O’Donnell told my mother, “your husband has taught us all about dying with dignity. He’s heading straight for heaven.” With that, he handed her a bill with the scribble across it, “Paid in full.” My mother hadn’t paid him a cent in my da’s yearlong illness.
It seemed poetic justice that his physical courage, which was legendary, became his defining attribute, as he met his Maker.
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CHAPTER TEN:
The chapter originally opened with my being still troubled by the letter Sister Helen had sent to my mother. She claimed I had a lot of quiet rage. So, the chapter opened this way:
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School is out, but my mind is not quiet. What Sister Helen said about the Diaspora, the scattering of the Jewish people throughout the world after the Babylonian Captivity still rings in my head. She says Palestine is the Promised Land for Jews, but why? I am Irish and far from Ireland, but I don’t think of Dublin as the Promised Land, nor of my Irish separate from my American.
My da told me our people left Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century because of the potato famine. He never spoke of anyone wanting to go back. The idea of a promised land mystifies me. It’s like a castle in the sky, while the courthouse is real, concrete, yet sacred to me, even these many years later.
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The next piece is about the courthouse and its affect on me: is this my Israel?
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My mind still races back without effort to those halcyon days when a sense of belonging smiled down on me from the courthouse’s watchful eyes. Even as I struggle to describe its hold on me now it seems unperturbed with my sluggish mind. Instead, it basks in quiet pleasure for my attention.
The courthouse is a motion picture in my head, a collection of magical moments that occurred a half century ago, that surfaces and come to light especially when captive to enforced quiet times, like a flight to some God forsaken place to give a speech. These moments are as real as if they are just occurring. I am a boy of ten again exhilarated but unconscious of my blessings.
The courthouse is in my bones, and vibrates with my soul. Is this my Israel? Is this what Palestine feels to Jews? The courthouse is here, where I am now, writing a book about long ago, and also wherever that might be in the future. It captured the rhythm of my heart the first moment I smelled the aroma of the courthouse lawn freshly cut by Mr. Roy Dunmore, the groundskeeper. He is father of Jack, one of our coaches, and Dick, one of my teammates.
Memory of St. Patrick’s always melts into the courthouse, which lies in its shadow. The courthouse was always a happy place, St. Patrick’s not always so. The courthouse puts me in tune with my nature. St. Patrick’s sometimes pulls me from it. The dour side of St. Patrick’s comes to me in sleep like a painting of a veiled shroud that blankets the courthouse, and records my dread of a misspent life.
I guess religion is all about guilt. Fortunately, before I wake from this nightmare, and this always happens, the sun comes out, the mist is burned away, and I see only the courthouse clearly. It is in this spirit that I jump out of bed with great relief when I'm a boy not yet nine.
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The nightmare of St. Michael.
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I like Marines, but my hero has always been St. Michael the Archangel. I named my youngest son after him.
In this painting in my mind, the vision of St. Michael is not pretty. He holds a heavy sword in his right hand, and in his left dangles a scale in which he is weighing the souls of the righteous, and the unrighteous.
To St. Michael’s left stands the Devil with his scaly tail and lascivious grinning face, the personification of evil, as he is prepared to claim his prize. I see a multitude of virtuous faces lifting pale hands in prayer, while the damned are reduced to a squirming mass of black potbellied openmouthed hermaphrodites.
Beside them, I see a group of less devils, the kind we run into every day, with pitchforks and chains. They are busily shoving victims into the jaws of an immense fish with teeth like a row of swords.
To the left, I see Heaven shaped into a castellated hotel with angels as doorkeepers welcoming naked souls. St. Peter is in a red bejeweled cape, and a triple tiara receiving the more important of the blessed. All are naked but those of rank wear headpieces, a Cardinal his scarlet hat, a bishop his red miter, a king or queen a golden crown, and the rest bareheaded and gradually reduced to a blur.
Many times I have returned to St. Patrick’s to see if this painting exists. Might it be a stained glass window? No. The St. Michael I see here is much more benign with none of the trappings of my nightmare.
I tell myself it must be at St. Boniface’s. No. Then at St. Iraneaus. No again. Then where? Perhaps in Rome, perhaps in the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, or some remote abbey or church that I have visited, say in Bucharest. But it isn’t there either.
Ah, then it must be in a Father Sunbrueller sermon? He often scared me to death at St. Boniface’s with his fire and brimstone. I’m not sure. It is like a mind map etched on my soul in rooted grooves tracing and retracing the same painting, and yet remaining hidden to me, surfacing only flash-like in nightmares at unexpected moments.
Perhaps that is why when the morning mist burns off and the dew on the grass dries up, and the courthouse looms brilliant in the morning sunlight in all its majesty, spreading the shadow of its magnificent arms over my young limbs, there is no nightmare. There is only joy.
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Hitting a baseball loomed a large challenge for me from the beginning as a boy of nine and ten. Gussie Witt worked hard on this to make it less so.
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"Read this," Gussie tells me, handing me a handwritten piece of paper, "think about hitting as if you’re in school." The pun is meant to make reference to my love of books, but the baseball hitting instructions are like a foreign language to me.
The paper reads:
Here are some flaws to hitting a baseball. Directness, not length, generates speed. From a strong athletic position, the hips and hands move directly to the ball and initiate the correct swing. The back foot rotates the knee in and aids the hips. The hands go to the inside part of the baseball with the bat barrel staying above the hands. The bat and hands level out at the point of contact. The hands should be in a palm up (top of the palm down). Ideally, your hips and hands move first and drive the front shoulder out of the way. When the opposite happens, your front shoulder goes first and pulls the backside through. This causes your head to come off the ball. Your first movement should be moving the hands toward the inside half of the baseball. The front arm starts soft or slightly bent, and remains soft during the swing. If you push away, your front arm straightens out. What this means is that on the approach to the ball, the back of your bottom hand turns so it faces up. When the back hand is up, the barrel of the bat is down too soon. The proper movement would be to keep the back of the hand facing the inside half of the ball during the bat approach. An improper pivot causes the back knee to collapse, forcing the front shoulder to be higher than the back shoulder. When this happens, an uppercut swing will result. In a proper pivot, rotate on the ball of the back foot so the back knee turns in aligning the knees and forming an “L” and not a “C.” To stop from upper cutting, turn your knee, and then hit the ball off your back knee. Your back knee then drives your hands. Every mistake in hitting is because the batter doesn’t get ready to swing. Nothing goes back. So the head slides first. What you want to do is run your hands across your face, take your swing, and then have a big follow through. You have to keep your head behind the swing. If your face goes up and out, then you have no swing because your hands can’t catch up to your face.
After reading this, I look at Gussie in amazement. “I’m going into fifth grade. Am I supposed to understand this?” I’m ready to cry, masking my distress by rubbing my eyes hard with the back of my hand, but I can’t control my heaving chest.
He puts his hand on my shoulder, “It’s okay, Rube.” He studies me as if I’m a specimen in a bottle, strokes his chin, and says, “Let’s try something, okay. Let’s try making you a switch hitter."
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True to my nature whenever faced with a phenomenon that pointed to a deficiency, in this case my inability to consistently hit a baseball, I would attempt to understand it intellectually. It appeared that I could hit a baseball more consistently and further batting left handed. This needed analysis long after my spent youth.
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It was as if sociobiology preprogrammed me to prefer using my left to my right hand. Could my genetic code prefigure this preference? Could the DNA of my chromosomes be so marked? I was naturally left handed, only forced to be right-handed by my da. Science suggests that those left handed oriented tend to be more influenced by the right-brain, the intuitive side, and those right handed oriented more by the left-brain, the cognitive side.
Both brains complement each other but one tends to dominate. This makes some sense to me, as my life has been a journey from trusting my thinking exclusively or left brain, to having greater confidence in the power of my feelings or right brain as I have grown into middle age.
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CHAPTER ELEVEN:
In the previous chapter, it is described how I split my fingers when Gussie Witt threw me a curve ball, and how he took me home and doctored my injury and calmed my mother, an injury we hid from my da. What was taken out of the episode was my da coming home after working a hospital troop train of wounded GI’s, and then discovering my wrapped fingers. My mother, once again, is equal to the test of circumstances.
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Circumstantial leisure has always given me a perspective on things. Turns out I’ve had more than my share. Splitting my fingers was the first of many such enforced respites. I couldn’t play baseball, couldn’t work around the house, couldn’t do much of anything, but look, listen and think. My powers of observation were put into play almost immediately when my da came off the road.
Surprisingly, he was in an uncharacteristic expansive mood. The GI’s on his hospital troop train must have been upbeat, as he invariably feeds off their collective mood. His face was alight with feeling as he stepped into the house.
“Dorothy,” he declares excitedly as he brushes passed us kids, embraces my mother, then collapses into a chair, “this one soldier I got to know pretty well was telling me about being on patrol on Guadalcanal.”
He pauses, my mother’s eyes wide with a patient ‘well, get on with it!’ Sensing her discomfort, he adds quickly, “a sniper in a palm tree shot him in the ass.”
My mother’s puzzled expression prompts him to add. “This was after our boys took the island. GI’s thought the island was secure of Japs. Imagine him telling me this, Dorothy, laughing as if it were nothing, him in plaster cast from his waist down. ‘I took off for camp so fast I could have beaten Jesse Owen in the hundred meters even with half my ass gone,’ he tells me. He was full of lead from an automatic weapon or hand grenade, he wasn’t sure. Took doctors more than 12 hours to dig it all out of him.”
My da grew teary. “Dorothy, can you beat that?” He slumps in the chair and puts his head in his hands. “Guy loses most of his ass, part of his leg, and has already been six months in hospital, and he can joke about it.”
I watch as he covers his sobs by taking out his handkerchief and blowing his nose. My mother comes over and puts her arm around his shoulders, cupping her cigarette in her other hand. It amazes me how she keeps from burning herself.
“Those boys put themselves on the line for us every day, Dorothy, yet they don’t show an ounce of self-pity about missing parts.” He wipes his eyes with his sleeve. “They’re amazing, Dorothy, amazing. And that’s not the half of it.” I can tell he’s winding up to a story.
My mother interrupts. She knows my da. “Ray, let’s get some food in you and you can tell us all about it later.” She takes his hat off, strips him of his brakeman jacket, and loosens his tie. He doesn’t protest. He seems numb.
There isn’t a troop train of wounded GI’s that doesn’t affect him in some way. When they are so badly wounded that most cannot talk or walk, he is close to speechless when he comes home. It shows first in his eyes. They seem to burn with pain. We kids know when to stay clear of him. It’s not us he wants to see anyway. We know he is a time bomb waiting to explode and needs quiet. Besides, he only wants to be with our mother, and we seem to understand this without really understanding.
When The Guadalcanal Diary came to the Rialto Theatre, Bobby Witt and I couldn’t wait to see it. It was a spectacular movie. I rode on the handlebars of his bike and we couldn’t stop talking about it on the way home. I told him some of my da’s Guadalcanal train stories.
“Boy, are you lucky! Your dad talked to real marines that fought there?”
“Uh huh.”
“Can I come over sometime when he’s talking?”
That didn’t seem like a good idea, given my da’s changing moods, but I didn’t know what to say, so I lied, “Sure, why not?”
It wasn’t just marines that fought so bravely at Guadalcanal, my da made clear, but I didn’t tell Bobby that. The movie was mainly about gung ho marines, but GI’s on my da’s Guadalcanal troop train were from all the branches of service. They were being transferred from west coast hospitals where they had already spent several months to eastern hospitals for rehabilitation, and training for return to civilian life. Seeing these GI’s on the mend made my da’s spirits soar.
Yet, when he told my mother he befriended a GI assigned to Schick Hospital, and invited his girlfriend to stay with us, I was shocked. Such generosity is totally out of character. The girlfriend I understand is from Dayton, Ohio and will be coming next week.
Wonderful! We already have two guys renting Jackie and my room upstairs, and Patsy, Jackie and I are crammed together in the smallest room in the house. Janice, who is only two, stays downstairs in her crib in the room off the living room, which is also small. The only other sleeping room is my parent’s in the front of the house. That’s it!
So, where’s this girlfriend going to stay? With the carpenters? I don’t think so. With us? You couldn’t fit her in our bedroom with a shoehorn. Then where?
I wrack my brain with these problems, forgetting about my split fingers. Then suddenly, I hear a familiar roar. My da comes out of the kitchen after a big breakfast, and sees me as if for the first time.
“God Jesus, Dorothy, what the hell’s wrong with Jimmy’s hand?”
“Nothing, Ray, just a little accident playing baseball at the courthouse.”
“Little accident my ass! Look at his hand?” The white bandage with the splint did look a little gross.
“Believe me, Ray, it’s nothing. A baseball bruised his fingers. That’s all. But it’s coming along. He’ll be as good as new in no time.”
“Where you get the money for the doctor?”
“No doctor, Ray, no big deal.”
“Let me see those fingers!” Obediently, I march over and put my hand out to him for inspection. The palm of my hand had turned a combination of yellow, blue and purple as if by magic in support of my mother’s notice.
“You can see the bruising,” she adds as he turns my hand over from palm up to palm down.
“Why are the fingers taped together?”
“Ray, come on! Think about it! Why do you think? So he won’t injure them again. You know what a klutz he is.”
“You goddamned right I know! Your kid has to be the klutziest kid in the whole goddamned neighborhood!” I look to my mother for inspiration. She looks past me, and lights a cigarette on the end of hers, and hands it to him.
“Here, Ray, let’s get you upstairs so you can get some sleep. I’ll rub your back to get the road out of you.” Like a puppy he follows her upstairs.
She won’t be back for an hour or two. So, I’m stuck here watching my little sister, my Honey Bunny Tinker Fritzes. But I don’t mind. I adore her. Janice Kay has to be the prettiest baby ever with a full head of black hair and an angelic face. She coos and smiles at me as if the world around her is milk and honey. I hope it will be.
I wonder what room they’re in upstairs. Probably mine. I hate that smell of cigarettes and sweat and stuff. But I’m not complaining. No way. My mother’s a genius. She knows all my da’s buttons. It’s something to see how he melts to her will. His eyes turn to butter and he gets that look in them. Aren’t they getting a little old for that cuddly stuff? After all, he’s already 34, and she’s almost 28. I don’t understand old people at all. They’re very strange.
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The episode that follows relates to my guilt and behavior after stealing a box of brand new baseballs before a Clinton Industrial League game. I return them with due speed to the general manager’s doorstep, unused and undetected.
The opportunity to steal came while convalescing with my split fingers, and unable to take the field and shag flies with my Courthouse Tiger teammates. It was a ritual during batting practice of the Industrial League players. Some teams gave us special access because we lived around the ballpark and were always there.
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Guilt and Confession then come into play. The sacrament of Catholic Confession is as monumental a matter to negotiate as the reason for it. Here Confession to Father Minehart at Sacred Heart’s is compared to Father Fieldfield of St. Patrick’s.
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Father Finefield trusts no one. I couldn’t confess my stealing with misdirection as I could with Father Minehart. He’d probe, ask how many baseballs, ask the condition of the baseballs, and demand that as part of my Penance that I return the baseballs and report my theft to the general manager.
It wouldn’t satisfy him at all that I had already returned the baseballs knowing the terrible error of my ways. There is also a good chance Father Finefield would insist that I confess my crime to the authorities, to the police, or to the sheriff, or both.
If Father Finefield was the only available priest in the city, and there was no Father Minehart option, I’m quite certain I would have done what I did, not out of principle, but out of holy terror. Guilt is a big motivator with me.
No matter what I confessed to Father Minehart, he would give me the same Penance of three Hail Mary’s and three Our Father’s, whereas Father Finefield in his most magnanimous mood would give me minimally the Penance of the Rosary, and quite certainly the Sorrowful mysteries, no chance at all for the Joyful mysteries for me.
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I take a look at crime in the city of Clinton, which is nonexistent and how boredom fills the void.
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If crime is not a problem in Clinton in the summer of 1943, then boredom surely is.
Temperatures often flirt with 100 degrees Fahrenheit with the humidity nearly as high.
When it rains, it rains buckets as if the humidity empties the clouds in contemptuous frustration. After the rain, the heat races back to show it is in command.
There is no relief anywhere as an Iowa summer is nearly as hot in the shade as in the sun. With little breeze and few electric fans about, it is equally cloying inside the jail, where we hang out when we are even too bored to play baseball at the courthouse. The deputies, and sometimes the sheriff, too, seek to create diversions from this sickly sweet and monotonous heat.
Jackie Fisher, my brother, and Thiel Collins, Bob Collins’s brother, both only six, are little bigger than postage stamps. Deputies Stamp and Gaffey, who hate custodial duty, have just completed some housekeeping of the outer office. In comes these two little devils, throwing spitballs around, and creating new debris. The deputies look at each other, smile, and say, “Let’s do it! Let’s teach them a lesson.”
Gently, they take the two little rascals by the scuff of the neck, Jackie and Thiel thinking this is too funny, that is, until the deputies march them off placing them in an empty prisoner cell. They lock the door with deputy Stamp placing the key ceremoniously in his pocket, and then walking away whistling.
“Let’s see how well they like it here.” Deputy Gaffey nods, “We’ll come back,” he lets that sink in, “maybe tomorrow and see if they’ve learned a lesson in good manners.”
Once out of the room, the deputies listen with their ears to the wall. No sound. Jackie and Thiel don’t cry. Yet, it is clear the little guys fail to see the humor in this as I peak in and see their eyes as big as saucer cups and their faces as white as milk.
Everyone in the outer office, including me, razzes them about being jailbirds.
Imagine our surprise when a minute later, they are standing there before us chirpy as frogs on a lily pad. This is too precious. We all roar with laughter. The joke is on the deputies.
Deputy Stamp, characteristically pulling on his right ear, says, “Okay, show us how you did it.”
Like two little peacocks, the little guys lead us back into the jail section and demonstrate by crawling back through the narrow slot used for the prisoner’s food tray, and then stand up momentarily pumping their chests, then crawling back through triumphantly to freedom again, giggling all the time.
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It wasn’t many days later that we were jolted out of our skin by the cacophonous clanking of an ear splitting jail bell with someone yelling, “Prison break! Prison break!"
Most of us courthouse guys were oiling our baseballs gloves at the time, sitting on the concrete jail steps. Immediately, we scattered like buckshot out of a shotgun, fleeing in all directions.
I ran to the courthouse which was a football field away not stopping until I was safely inside. No one followed me. I told the first person I saw that a prisoner had escaped the jail. He looked at me as if I were mad, and turned and went about his business. I waited for the police sirens. Nothing. All I could hear was typewriters humming in that busy staccato, and people moving in and out of the courthouse just as if it was another routine day.
I wandered about the courthouse for the next hour, finally going to the second floor and looking west to the jail. Nothing.
Sheriff Peterson had conspired with the only prisoner in the jail at the time to let him out to scare the belly bejesus out of us. Actually, it wasn’t much of gambit as the prisoner was a trustee and worked in the jail garage washing vehicles. He only spent his nights in the jail cell. We all knew him, and shouldn’t have been scared, but we were. I never did admit to the guys where I went. Afterwards, I made one of the longest visits of my life to St. Patrick’s church.
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Rastrelli’s and Candyland come into play as popular hangouts in this memoir, but left out were bowling alleys and pool halls.
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Bowling and pool playing always confounded me. Guys that were good at these “sports” were seldom good at baseball. Thiel Collins, who was not much bigger than a bowling ball, was already a student of bowling when he turned seven, and was also a fledgling student of pool as well. His brother, Bob, obviously a powerful influence, was nearly an expert at both. You might even call him a pool shark at twelve.
There weren’t a lot of bowling alleys in Clinton. One was across the street from The Clinton Herald on Sixth Avenue South between Second and Third Street. During the war, McEleney Motors, at the North Bridge on Main Avenue in Lyons, converted its automobile showroom into a bowling alley. No new automobiles were being manufactured during the war. McEleney’s was an Oldsmobile dealership, and so they called it the “Olds Bowl.”
A private club, the Odeon, also in Lyons, had it own bowling alley for members.
Some courthouse guys were setting pins at the Clinton Bowling Alley before they were teenagers, Bob Collins for one, Smiley Carlson for another. My mother claimed bowling alleys were dens of iniquity where kids smoked cigarettes and learned to swear. I took her at her word and avoided them.
But I had to admit to myself that guys that hung out at those places always seemed to be more interesting than I was.
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The Clinton Municipal Swimming Pool comes into play after watching a boring Industrial League game.
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One daring adventure that had a touch of danger to it was sneaking into the Clinton Municipal Swimming Pool at night. The first time was when Clinton Foods was beating Climax 11 to 0 in the third inning, and someone yelled, “Let’s go for a swim!”
Everyone knew what he meant. We left the ballpark, walked south through Riverfront Park, only about a quarter mile, and climbed over the four-foot wrought iron steel fence into the pool grounds.
I was never a strong swimmer, but the water felt wonderful. It was warm but not too warm and amazingly clean. Matt Price, director of the pool, kept the facility in near perfect condition. The dock in the deep part had a low springboard at one end and a 20-foot tower for experienced divers at the other. I stayed away from both the dock and the tower, and just lowered myself into the water like into a bath.
All the guys, except Bobby and me, were great swimmers. They played water tag, dove off all the boards, did canon balls, and made lots of noise. Not surprisingly, people heard us.
It brought out some girls in the area, who asked if they could come in. Even though it was the black of night, I shrunk in embarrassment. I was naked and so were the other guys. The girls said they didn’t mind. They stripped to their bras and panties and frolicked about, teasing the guys to get up on the boards and dive. Some did. I stayed in the shallow water like a hippo, as did Bobby, with only my nose above the water. They never seemed to notice us. Afterwards, walking home with Bobby, I grew serious.
“Do you think we have to tell that in confession, seeing those girls in their underwear?”
“What?”
“The girl thing.”
“What girl thing?”
“You know, those girls in their bras and panties, and that one girl who took everything off and waved them at the guys, that thing?”
“I don’t think so, Rube. You were miles from them. Heck, I couldn’t see you myself.”
It was impossible to see his face, but I wondered if he was laughing at me. Sensing this, he changed his tone. “We were hot. We cooled off in the pool. We couldn’t pay because the pool was closed. If I remember right, you were closer to the kiddy pool than to anyone of those girls."
He had to say that! The kiddy pool was only two feet deep. Well, I was by it but not in it. I was wadding next to it in four feet of water, but so was he. He laughs.
“Rube, what would you do if you didn’t have something to worry about? If you want to give Father Finefield a cheap thrill, confess.”
“But is it a sin, Bobby, that’s what I want to know. I don’t want to confess if it isn’t a sin.”
“Rube, it’s a sin if you think it is.”
“Do you?”
“Do I think it’s a sin? No. I think it is silly to think it is a sin. We didn’t do anything wrong, period.”
With great relief, I left him at his door smelling of chlorine and wondering if my mother would be able to smell it, too.”
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Some Clinton kids of my youth knew a world that I never visited and didn’t know until I did research for this book. It was a surprising thing to learn of another side of my community, a side that was so alive and such a learning place for many.
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Clinton in the 1940s was a booming place for adults. Prohibition had been repealed but Iowa liquor laws tightly controlled liquor distribution. Places such as the Odeon Club in Lyons politely ignored these restrictions. The Odeon Club was a bowling, partying, and drinking spot, which defied the law and sold liquor by the drink, and flouted gambling laws as well with a whole room full of slot machines.
Liquor came from Chicago and was unloaded outside of Fulton, Illinois just across the Mississippi River from Lyons, and transported by car across the Lyons Bridge and state line into Iowa. The liquor suppliers wouldn’t bring it across the state line.
At the time of one inventory by Federal Agents during the war, the Odeon Club was told it had the largest stock of liquor between Chicago and Omaha, and Minneapolis and St. Louis. Clinton was truly a jumping place although we kids didn’t have a clue that it was.
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Imagine a pool emporium as a learning institution. Well the Clinton Billiard Parlor under the management of Sam Knight was something like that.
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Bob and Thiel Collins, along with Kenny Tharp and Sam Annear were great fans of the pool shark, Sam Knight. He was Clinton’s best 3-cushion billiard player. These guys were all underage, but Sam, who ran the Clinton Billiard Parlor on Fourth Avenue South and Second Street, just around the corner from the Revere Candy Shop, treated them like family, that is, as long as they behaved.
Sam Knight played against such great players as Welker Cochran and Willie Hoppe. Heinie Witt, Bobby Witt’s father, was a pool enthusiast and played a respectable game of 3-cushion billiards. But Heinie’s preferred game was snooker.
A snooker table is five by eleven feet, larger than a championship billiard table, which is four and one half feet by nine feet. Anyway, Heinie Witt’s favorite game was the high run.
Negroes in Clinton were practically invisible, and didn’t associate in most white establishments during the war, but the Clinton Billiard Parlor was a notable exception. Julius Kent was black and a regular billiard and pool player at the parlor.
Sam Knight allowed young kids in, and permitted them to play some pool, but if they were caught smoking or swearing, they were tossed out, and not allowed back again for two weeks, and he kept track, so they couldn’t slip back in as if nothing happened.
Sam was also a devout Irish Catholic who sometimes acted more like a priest, a sort of Father Flanagan of Boys Town type. Even Clinton’s roughnecks, and there were more than a few, either respected or feared Sam and seldom stepped across the line.
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This is another episode while my split fingers were healing and I attempted to make myself useful to my Courthouse Tiger teammates.
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Unable to play baseball, watching the Courthouse Tigers in the summer of 1943, the thought occurred to me that they looked a little ragged. They needed something to spruce them up. I said to myself, they are a good baseball team, but they need uniforms! That’s it, that’s what they lack!
Well, uniforms are costly, and we didn’t have money to even buy baseballs, relying on our courthouse shaggers to get them when foul balls came over the roof at Riverview Stadium. So, getting uniforms wasn’t realistic. Then what was? What about an image that identifies them as Courthouse Tigers?
With time on my hands, and wanting to make a contribution, I suggested to the guys that they give me their best white tee shirt, and I would iron an image of a tiger on the back of the tee shirt with “Courthouse Tiger” over the image. I also said that everyone should purchase the same red baseball cap from Rod Fitch’s Sports Wear department at the Martin Morris Department Store, and that everyone should wear a clean pair of jeans with white tennis shoes.
They all agreed enthusiastically to my idea, and in a few days I had eleven sparkling white tee shirts with which to work. They were all new! Gussie Witt, who seems to know everyone, managed to get the tee shirts, baseball caps and sneakers from Rod Fitch’s at wholesale prices. The tee shirts cost each player $1.35, the baseball cap, ninety cents, and the sneakers $1.80.
My uncle Arnie Ekland, who never married, had a hobby of drawing cartoons, animals, and caricatures of people. Every Wednesday night after work at the Chicago & North Western Railway Shops on Camanche Avenue, he would take a bus to Sixth Avenue North, and walk past the courthouse ball field, seeing my guys playing ball.
So, he knew how important they all were to me. I told him of my plan, and asked him if it was possible to draw a tiger. Without hesitation, I watched him with fascination make circles, elliptical configurations, cross lines, and crossword puzzle like patterns, and then turn them all into the most impressive tiger face I had ever seen. He asked me if I needed a bigger or smaller pattern. No, I told him, the size was just right.
Now, came the hard work. I got a box of new crayolas and colored the pattern consistent with that of a tiger, along with large block letters “COURTHOUSE TIGERS” above the tiger image.
Then I put a piece of my mother’s wax paper over it, and then a handkerchief, and ironed the image into the tee shirt.
Voila! It was a perfect tiger head with the orange colors vibrantly brilliantly, reflecting the tiger’s menacing dominance. It was great. I was so proud. The problem was I had to re-crayon each image, and that seemed to take tons of time.
I made tee shirts for Bobby Witt, Phil “Legs” Leahy, Bill “Chang” Benson, Jim “Owl” Holle, Sam Annear, Walt “Fergie” Ferguson, Dick Crider, Dave “Pooper” Cavanaugh, Dick Dunmore, and Ken Tharp. I didn’t make one for myself because I couldn’t play with my split fingers, and besides I was completely pooped out.
The guys looked great playing in their new uniforms. The only problem is that the tee shirts had to be washed eventually, and the image faded, and faded, until the image all but vanished. Oh, well! It was a good idea at the time, and kept me involved with the guys.
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CHAPTER TWELVE:
The opening paragraphs of this chapter were cut out. Here they are.
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If there is anything more beautiful than an Iowa fall, it must be in heaven. The earth tones are dazzling in Indian summer brilliance. The leaves of trees are rich in deep yellows, bright reds, dark oranges, soft browns, hard purples, and moist greens, the color spectrum of infrared to ultraviolet light on display.
It is as if in the dying of things they come to life in Nature’s pent-up beauty, reminding us that nothing is ever lost, only changed in God’s magnificence. Soon the trees will be as naked as a winter’s cloudless sky. But now the Iowa fall is radiant with the many faces of God in picture frame quality, suitable for one’s mantle.
My heart is bursting with joy as I shuffle along Third Street kicking leaves and hearing them crunch under foot. I feel one with them. I don’t know why but I do. I pick up a leave and examine it. Pick up another and compare the two, then a third, and a fourth until my hands are full of leaves.
Some leaves look like triangular webbing, their veins prominent, others are heart shaped, and still others remind me of fans. They dance along the walk, whirl in the air, land and kiss each other, then part again as Nature’s playful children from the same family without a care in the world.
The fall is like a big brother to me. It is my favorite time of year. I hate the rains in the spring, the heat of the summer, and the sickening cold of winter. It is heaven on earth in the fall when no matter what direction you look it is like a priceless painting in God’s favorite colors. The sky is so blue that I feel I can see all the way to heaven. Gentle breezes caress my face like angels’ hands reminding me how lucky I am to be a native Iowan. When I die, I pray that heaven is like an Iowa fall.
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The passage that follows relates to my violent reaction when my classmates lock me out of school after recess. This meant I couldn’t play basketball after school. Only ten, I ripped the locked metal door handle from its wood moorings bending the metal at a tortured angle. The action released surprising strength in me. Scientists call this “akathisia.” The body at rest is like a quiet volcano capable of eruption if the conditions are right. In fact, the muscles of the human body, if they were all to work together at the same time, could lift 6,000 pounds.
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Violence is endemic to the American soul and has been since the Pilgrims came to this virgin continent. Violence is our collective heritage, but it is also our individual torment.
There are two categories of violence, instrumental and emotional violence. Instrumental violence is intended to achieve a particular goal or reward – money, status, territory, or advantage. A terrorist act or armed robbery is an example of instrumental violence. The Boston Tea Party leading to the American Revolution was a terrorist act as were the first shots fired by the Minute Men at Concord, Massachusetts in the Revolutionary War.
Emotional violence, on the other hand, can be triggered by feelings of rage, anger, hatred, fear, frustration, or jealousy. In destroying the locked door, I was displaying emotional violence. I was only ten but what Sister Flavian said was to prove prophetic, I was an angry child heading for trouble.
Characteristic of akathisia is hyperkinesis and hyperdynamism (HK/HD). HK is characterized by hyperactivity and extreme rapidity of motion. The average person is capable of motion much faster than can consciously be generated, say, catching a glass that falls off the table before it hits the floor.
HD is the rush of energy that comes with the extraordinary quickness of action. A specific trigger or psychological catalyst, such as fear or rage or some other emotion, brings on the HK/HD phenomenon.
Life magazine in 1946 wrote of a stunning example of this. William Anderby, a five-seven, 152-pound sailor, serving on a destroyer attached to a merchant ship convoy in the North Atlantic in World War II, during an attack by German dive bombers, lifted an unexploded bomb off the forward deck weighing 610 pounds, picked it up and carried it effortlessly to the railing, and flung it overboard, saving his ship.
Displays of HK/HD seem to fall into two general categories. The most common is the reflexive HK or HD reaction, that is, a momentary single act of supranormal strength, speed, or agility brought on by a reflexive response to mortal peril or extreme emotional shock, such as my ripping a bronze door panel off its hinges as if it were a piece of cardboard.
More rare are sustained displays of HK/HD, which are of a hysterical nature, such as athletes who play with broken bones, or Metal of Honor winners in warfare who exhibit sustained courage under life threatening conditions. According to research, HK/HD appears more common among people of Nordic origin, especially Celts, Scandinavians, and Germans. But I expect it is in everyone.
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More episodic evidence was prepared but not included that indicated that akathisia was not a “one time” phenomenon with me. These following episodes were left out.
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When I was fifteen, I came home after high school football practice, tired and hungry, to find my parents not home. I asked my sister, Patsy, whom I adored, to heat up my dinner. She refused. I grabbed her arm, and told her she was mean, and then heated up my own dinner. The next day my sister’s arm was tattooed with the precise imprint of my five fingers and palm on her arm as an ugly bruise. It is a wonder my da didn’t kill me.
When I was seventeen in football scrimmage at Clinton High, I hit Bobby Witt so hard coming around my end that he couldn’t practice the rest of the week.
“Rube, why’d you do that?” he asked in disbelief as we took the bus home from school. “God, know what, that really hurt. It was a cheap shot. It’s only practice.” Then shaking his head, “I hurt all over.”
I couldn’t explain it, except that fear might have triggered it, certainly not courage. We had another football warm up drill that illustrates this conundrum. We would stand apart about thirty yards, and a player carrying the ball would run at us with a blocker in front and we would try to get past the blocker and tackle the ball carrier, then reverse roles, go to the back of the line, and do it all over again.
It was just a drill, but for me it was an emotional release, as I hated scrimmage. Nobody wanted to face me because when I was the designated tackler I took it too seriously.
Such emotional release was something that I turned on and off like a light switch. The peculiar nature of this trigger deployment was illustrated when we upset Rock Island (Illinois) in the last football game of my football playing career.
I had had a vicious time with the guy across from me, often knocking him ass over applecart, and then yelling for him to get out of my face. We played both sides of the ball in those days, so I got to humiliate him on offense and defense, too. Once the game was over, however, the madness left me. Not him. I went to shake his hand, and he hit me and knocked me off my feet.
It didn’t hurt but stunned me. I sat there on the ground with no desire to retaliate. Red Butler came up and did it for me, pummeling him into submission with the Rock Island player finally saying, “Oh right! Oh right!”
This episode confused me. I wondered if I was actually a coward, and why the anger that had served me so well in the game, abandoned me afterwards so quickly.
The emotional violence of the Rock Island players didn’t end there. They trashed the visitors’ locker room of our high school. That was collective instrumental violence versus individual emotional violence.
With me, I never knew what might trigger my emotions. I considered when I was young and strong that I might be capable of killing someone while in a rage. It scared me.
The final summer of my working at Clinton Corn Processing Company while going to Iowa provided some evidence for my concern.
This was my fifth and final summer working there, a job that had enabled me to earn a college education. I owed the company and its good people more than I could ever repay. Even so, this inner restlessness or akathisia was to surface once again.
Perhaps because I’ve always been a loner, and never into any games, except sports explains why I’ve also never been into grab-assing games or pranks of any kind.
I was working the eleven to seven shift in the feed house at Clinton Corn. Here we took 140 pound feed bags off the conveyor belt and stacked them in box cars thirteen high for shipping. Only athletic type college guys were assigned to this detail with the crew’s regulars.
Nate Walton, an outstanding athlete at St. Mary’s High School, and now a student at St. Ambrose College in Davenport (Iowa), was a colleague of mine on the night crew. Ben Dorsey was the night superintendent, and very supportive of college kids.
On this particular night, during the waning hours of the morning, when we would soon all be returning to college, the superintendent was away doing paper work, and Clyde Powell was in charge.
Clyde was huge, as tall as I am, but seventy-five pounds heavier if an ounce. A nice guy, but a practical joker, he decided that he and his buddies would initiate us stenciling on our private parts with black ink as honorary members of the crew. They went for Nate first. Nate didn’t resist, and then it was my turn.
Casually, the six-man crew formed a half circle around me, sensing my resistance, with shit assed grins on their faces. I’ve never felt such terror or helplessness before. First, I was wracked with disbelief -- this isn’t happening to me! –- then unbridled fear.
My tongue was dry, and I was so frightened that I was shaking like a leaf. I couldn’t speak. I tried to and my lips quivered, but nothing came out. Nate said later that it appeared that I was about to cry, a twenty-one year old cry baby.
When the first man broke from the half circle and approached me, I gave a sigh of relief that it wasn’t Clyde, and hit him on the chin with such an explosive force that it sent him flying over a stack of feed sacks as if he was jettisoned out of a canon.
He landed out cold in a mist of feed dust, spread-eagled like a fallen bird. Everyone laughed, but me. “Holy shit!” was the cry, “did you see that?”
After a brief spell, the man shook his head, picked himself up, massaged his jaw, tried to stand, and then collapsed again, uttering some earthy expletive.
Seeing this, the other guys went back to work as if nothing had happened. It was over. I still think about it these many years later.
Akathisia was to visit me again while a member of the crew of the USS Salem in the Mediterranean during the late 1950s. A bodybuilding boatswain’s mate was always flexing his muscles as he rumbled through the passageway, hitting guys on the arm and laughing, “Oh, I’m sorry, did that hurt?” No one ever complained.
One day I told him as he gave me an especially stunning punch, “Don’t ever do that again!” It was a bruising punch on top a bruise given earlier in the day.
He stopped, looked at me in astonishment. Deck guys consider hospital corpsmen weenies, “short arm inspectors” and “pussies,” and not real sailors.
“Well, well, pretty boy doc is a tough guy.” Now he has a crowd as he is blocking the passageway. He hits me again in the arm and knocks me against the bulkhead and then turns his back on me, as if I don’t exist and moves off.
I was taller and quicker than him, coming up behind him and wrapping my arms around his thick chest from the back, and pulling him towards me with all my might. It sounded like piano keys being tuned as I crushed his chest and he collapsed in my arms with several broken ribs. One rib punctured his lung and he was struggling to breathe.
Others rushed him into sickbay, just ten feet away, while I stood there coldly with contemptuous hate in my eyes. I was living on my rage.
Word spread that he fell down the gangplank on the hanger deck where the weight room was located. He never challenged this description of his injuries. I could have received a General Court Marshall and Dishonorable Discharge, and possibly even jail time, but it never came up. The weight lifter made a recovery, but never bothered me again.
There was another time when akathisia worked indirectly but possibly saved my life. It was 1975, and I was consulting the Fairfax County Police Department, which is located outside Washington, D.C.
I had gone to a play with the Secretary of the State of Iowa, whom I had met when he attended one of my seminars in Kansas City, Missouri. We went to dinner afterwards and left each other in the early a.m. A police officer from Fairfax County was due to pick me up, but got delayed, and wouldn’t be around until 2 a.m.
I decided to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue in this cold early morning, when suddenly I noticed across the street walking parallel to me were three African American youths.
Alarm should have arisen, but it didn’t. At six-four and nearly 200 pounds, dressed in a three-piece Hickey Freeman suit and cashmere top coat, I felt insulated from danger by my apparent status, that is, until the three youths rushed ahead and crossed the street, and were standing under the street light jiving with each other some fifty yards from me.
When the distance was reduced to ten yards, I remembered that the senator from Mississippi had been robbed and stabbed and nearly fatally wounded in this same area during the wee hours of the morning.
Emotional panic rose in me fed by consuming fear, but not instrumentally as in the past, but in a cautionary form. Out of the blue, I recalled that whenever I interviewed plain clothed detectives at Fairfax, and asked them sensitive questions, they invariably adjusted their shoulder holsters.
Remembering this, when I was less than five yards from the boys, I made an exaggerated move to adjust my phantom holster, which they didn’t miss, followed with obvious false bravado, “Good evening, boys, little past your bedtime, isn’t it?”
Without missing a beat, I walked boldly by them, now with my back to them, rolling my shoulders again as if to withdraw my revolver in imitation of the cop that I wasn’t, I heard them whistling, “There goes the fuzz!”
When I told my ride this, he said, “Well, doc, I guess you could say that saved your white ass, but I wouldn’t recommend a repeat performance." xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Note: This material is copyrighted © by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., and is made available only for your private use, and is not to be published without the expressed permission of the author.
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