Irish Mongrel Child 5v4314

ISBN: 9781483503776

With loving memory of my

Mom, Alice LaVerne Naughton, Grampa, Leonard Joseph Naughton, Dad, Harold Lee Cooper, God Mother, Anna Melany Thompson, and nurturing Back-up moms, Tacy Armstrong and Mary McCoy

plus

The Village of Foxburg, PA 1943-1953

Special thanks to my daughters, Alice and Anna, who unfailingly and believe in me.

Irish Mongrel Child is based on the stories of my childhood between 1943 and 1953. I’ve done my best to them on as they were told to me and as I them, but my memory is ittedly faulty and unreliable. Since I am the only one alive left to tell them I’ve filled in the questionable areas and blank spots with my imagination. -rc

ion and Lust

Like many war babies, I am the product of ion and lust. My mom, Alice, a shapely, vivacious woman and my dad, Bud, a good-looking WWII soldier conceived me shortly before he was to be shipped off to Normandy where he would float through the sky, dangling from a billowing white parachute into enemy fire: nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Bud, perceiving himself to be a goner soon, pumped all the fear and anxiety of a man condemned to death into his seed. His desire was that of every man: to leave behind an heir, someone to carry his genes into later generations.

I’m sure my mother returned his ardor with fervent empathy, and embraced him with desire, comion and the combined juices of faith and hope; the ingredients he hung on to as his friends died around him before they even hit the ground.

I understand completely how he fell under the spell of the shapely Irish American woman whose gray-green eyes fringed with dusky lashes sparkled when she was happy, but smoked as obviously as a campfire made with damp wood when her mood turned. I loved her for fifty-five years.

Alice

At twenty-nine, Alice wasn’t a virgin, but neither was she dulled by a surfeit of dalliances. “Becoming pregnant was a surprise, and a huge disappointment,” she told me decades later. “If abortion had been legal back then I would have had one.”

Alice LaVerne Naughton was born in l913 in the hamlet of Foxburg, PA, population 500. Her brother Fred, four years her senior, was the apple of her eye. To hear her tell it, he was the handsomest, smartest, most popular guy around.

Mom in background wearing a giant hair bow, holding an unidentified baby. Uncle Fred is in the chair.

Not that she was a shrinking violet. She served as secretary of her senior class at Erie Academy, played the piano and sang in the choir. She also spent a great deal of time with her beloved mother whose superior cooking, she said, made her fat. Looking at her senior portrait it’s difficult to tell she weighed 180 lbs. Your eye is drawn to the lush auburn hair, threaded with strands of copper affirming the blood of ancient Vikings, that lay in deep finger waves framing creamy skin and sensual eyes like you’d see on a movie star. Her bones are not lost in the fullness of her flesh, but well defined. Alice was blind to that. Throwing the photo aside, she’d spit, “Look at that fat.”

Fat, and the feeling that she lived in the shadow of her brother’s exulted orbit caused her to feel inferior to him and other men who seemed to glide effortlessly through life. Nevertheless, she was popular. She loved to dance and was good at it. “I weighed a lot, but I was light on my feet,” she liked to say.

When Alice was twenty-five, five years before I was born, her Mother died of heart disease. Grief devoured the excess pounds that had concealed her voluminous breasts, sexy curves, and shapely legs––the Gates legs–-ed down by Grandma’s Nordic ancestors. She enrolled in cosmetology school in Pittsburgh, became a beautician, and a blonde.

The dark shapeless dresses she had always hated were replaced by fashionable wide shouldered, well-cut suits that accentuated her waist and ankles, and sculpted bias cut dresses made of the new rayon material that molded her sensual womanly body.

I would watch, rapt, as she dressed for evenings out. First she dusted her face lightly with a translucent powder to keep the shine down. Next she brushed her eyebrows with a small stiff brush then applied a bit of Vaseline on her lashes before curling them with a metal & rubber curler shaped like a half moon. Finally, she highlighted her cheekbones with a touch of lipstick she’d dabbed on her finger before applying it to her lips with a brush. The final act before rising from her dressing table bench was to kiss a piece of tissue to set the color. Mom complained that her lips were ‘too thin,’ but I couldn’t see it. I would press the red imprints to my own lips, and think they were just perfect.

Wearing a slip edged in lace, stockings with a dark seam running down the back, and high heels, Mom tried on dress after dress. She turned and twirled in the three long mirrors of her vanity table to look at herself from all angles. I especially loved a pale magenta dress that had a large slate gray heron woven into the threads. Its head began on her right breast and flowed down and across her body ending with its feet on the hem. The regal bird looked as if it was sitting at the edge of a pond, its eyes alert for fish. I asked her to save it for when I grew up. Of course she didn’t. It was a silly, childish request–-not to be considered seriously.

War

During this time, the nazi and fascist armies of Hitler and Mussolini were swarming over Europe, and Japan invaded China. and Britain declared war on . As yet, in the minds and hearts of Americans who were separated by an ocean, the war had not become personal. Americans were more concerned with Stalin and communism. Most folks still considered it Europe’s war. Nevertheless, each evening after supper, they gathered around their radios to hear Edward R. Murrow broadcast live from Europe. They listened closely, their ears tuned for nuance and inference as if they knew they would become involved, that they would be sending their sons across the Atlantic to fight. Americans in bars, barber chairs, corporate offices, and kitchens wagered if, or when it would happen.

On December 7, l941 Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The die was cast. America rallied. Fifty million American men between the ages of 21 and 45 ed for the draft. Distraught, but uncomplaining women gathered together to cook, sew warm clothes, and knit blankets for the troops. In industrial cities, grandparents watched young children while their mothers worked on factory assembly lines manufacturing war materials. Across the countryside farewell parties filled community and grange halls that were decorated with festive balloons and colorful “Good bye Johnny-We Love You” banners. Men, women, and children who already felt their loneliness forced themselves to smile as they danced the Beer Barrel Polka.

A steady stream of fresh faced boys, barely out of puberty, filled the enger cars of America’s powerful steam engine trains on their way to boot camps where they would be taught to kill other boys. The Pennsylvania or ‘Pennsy’ train, its engine, blacker than a moonless night, belched spiraling dark plumes into the blue sky above the graceful pines and mighty oaks as it labored with the weight of them along the Allegheny River’s edge into Foxburg. The small train

depot on Main Street, a few doors down from Grampa’s bar, bustled with sorrow as weeping families said goodbye to their boys–-maybe for the last time, although no one ever voiced their thoughts out loud.

The Vision

Mom, resigned to being pregnant, kept herself in good spirits by visioning her perfect baby: light eyed, adorably bald, and of course, good humored. She imagined the fantasy version, the flawless family that would appear on American television a decade later starring clever children and their patient wise parents: the Nelsons, the Cleavers and the Stones. She pictured herself cuddling and dressing her dimpled baby, tickling her chin to make her laugh, seeing her hazel eyes sparkle. She and her cousins would gather after church to stroll, pushing their happy babies in buggies along Hill Street or River Avenue. Afterwards, they would serve their families a dinner featuring a plump hen, roasted to perfection. Mom’s vision was exquisite–just as visions are supposed to be.

Unfortunately, no one had prepared her for the realistic trauma of the birthing experience and the ten days of confinement that hospitals forced on new mothers back in the old days.

During the decades before and after I was born in 1943, women in childbirth were routinely knocked out with ether, a poison that rendered them as unconscious as Sleeping Beauty. By the time the mother came to and a nurse put a bundle wrapped in a receiving blanket in her arms, the baby would already be several hours old, and frequently bruised by the forceps used to extract it from her womb. That and the residual effects of the ether: a splitting headache, nausea, and disorientation often diminished her zest and her ability to ponder her child’s features and, to assure herself that it was indeed, hers. Most mothers trusted the word of the nurse who handed them the newborn. My mom wasn’t one of them.

Mistaken Identity

Alice took one look at the dark eyes and hair on the round head that poked out of the pink receiving blanket and said, “This can’t be my baby! You have mixed my baby up with an Italian baby. Some distraught Italian mother is wondering why she has a bald baby with light eyes. Take her back to the nursery. Come back when you find mine.”

Since there hadn’t been a mistake, there were no unclaimed babies lying around the hospital nursery. If there were Italian mothers in the hospital at the time, they weren’t complaining.

Mom, bull-headed and righteous, qualities she would accuse me of later without any acknowledgement whatsoever that they might be genetic, held her ground. “Every few hours for two full days, the nurses brought you into my room expecting me to feed you,” she told me years later. “Each time I sent you back. But then, when they brought you in on the third day, there was a gash on the side of your head. A gash! Or maybe a dent. Like they’d dropped you or knocked you against something. I’m a comionate person. I felt sorry for you. I gave in. “Just because no one has claimed this baby does not mean she should be mistreated, I told the nurses.” “Against my better judgment, I agreed to feed you, but, mind you, only until your real mother could be located.”

Breastfeeding

Had Mom known this meant breast-feeding, she would have held out the entire ten days. The very idea disgusted her. Having a slurping, sucking infant pulling on her nipples wasn’t part of her perfect vision. It was bad enough that the baby had come out of “down there,” a dark sinister place between the legs that a good woman didn’t touch without a wash cloth in her hand.

“Forget it. I want to feed her with a bottle,” Alice demanded. The nurses refused. “Breast milk is the best possible nutrient for your child. Alice.” “ Alleged child,” Mom reminded them. “If this is my baby, and we’re not sure about that, I should be able to feed her the way I want.” “Well, Alice, when you take your baby home you can certainly do that. However, while you are at the hospital, you will have to breast-feed her.”

“So, when we got home I called Old Doctor Wellman.” I told him, “ She is sleeping now, but if you want her to have another meal, you should come up with a formula over the phone, because I am not breastfeeding her again.” That afternoon, she said, with loving, motherly affection, “you became a happy Carnation baby.”

By the Book

“I prepared myself for motherhood by reading a book on child-rearing,” my mom told me years later. “Well, not the whole book, mind you, the parts I felt would be useful to me.”

“How did you narrow them down?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, I don’t . Why would you care?”

The book advised mothers to keep their children warm in order to ward off colds, flu, dysentery, whooping cough and smallpox, which everyone knew could be fatal. Warm–—not a problem. Even though it was summer, Alice swaddled me from head to toe as if we lived in Alaska and I would be spending the days strapped to a cradleboard on her back. She was baffled when I developed an ugly red rash over 80 percent of my chubby Carnation body. Hadn’t she done everything by the book? When I continued to cry constantly and ran a fever, Mom believed the worst had happened: I had smallpox. I would be dead within days. It was the turning point in our brief relationship. She realized she would miss me when I was gone. She loved me.

Dr. Wellman looked on as Mom peeled off the layers of clothing she had dressed me in for traveling the two miles to his office. First she untied the bonnet that covered my ears and shielded my face. Next she unwound the swaddling blanket and removed the full-length dress that fastened down the back with buttons the size of tsetse flies and the matching slip underneath. Finally, she removed the little white leather shoes, which she later had bronzed and are still in my

possession, and the long socks that covered my dimply knees—God forbid I should get a chance to kick my feet and catch a breeze.

The doctor diagnosed a severe case of heat rash. His prescription was simple: I should spend the rest of the summer dressed fashionably naked and sprinkled lightly with cornstarch.

Weaning

Life was good for me until Mom read the “When to Wean Your Child” chapter of the book. Apparently, nine months was considered enough nurturing for a baby in the 40s. After all, these were war times that didn’t tolerate sissies. Sucking was for infants, and really, at nine months, you were almost grown. Well, at least I would be walking and looking for a job soon.

On May 6, l944, exactly nine months after I had been born and rejected, bashed around by the nurses, and finally accepted by my comionate mother, who attempted to smother me with love, she weaned me. Overnight. As she fed me what would be my last bottle, she explained the situation: “Enjoy this bottle. It’s your last one. Tomorrow your milk will be in a cup.” While I slept, Mom threw all the bottles out. She was proud of how quickly I adapted. “When I gave you a cup instead of your bottle, you threw it on the floor. Repeatedly. You cried your little heart out. But I was patient. All in all it didn’t take more than a couple of days for you to adjust.”

Home & The Porch

Our home was a spacious flat above Jimmy’s, the Irish bar owned by my maternal grandfather, Leonard Joseph Naughton, the main man in my mom’s and my lives. Although my dad had returned from the war, he moved in with his parents a couple of miles down river from us. The marriage never got off the ground.

My dad holding me when I’m three weeks old, and my paternal great grandparents.

Grampa’s building was directly across the street from the Allegheny River. A roomy porch the width of the building hung over the sidewalk in front of the bar. At one end were a wooden swing and a few comfortable old wicker chairs. The other end was usually filled with my stuff—tricycles, dolls, items that varied with the seasons and my age. This porch was where Mom executed her next essential lesson from the book: Do not teach your child your fears.

Mom was terrified of thunder and lightning. Even a slight darkening of the clouds made her panic. “No one should feel as frightened as I do of a natural act of God,” she told me, “even if it is the vengeful Old Testament God, who with one stroke renders lovely homes a pile of rubble and the families homeless. If I can make you braver than I am, I will enhance your life. It is my job as a mother to go to uncomfortable measures for my child. Motherhood is no cakewalk.”

During the summer, frequent electrical storms flashed and roared through the river valley as if all hell had broken loose in the heavens. Our porch gave us front-row seats for their spectacular light shows. Mid-August was prime time.

I was just a few weeks old when a major thunderstorm rolled over the mountains. As the clear blue sky changed into an angry royal purple, Mom got ready. With trembling hands and a pounding heart, she dressed me in warm clothes (this time they were appropriate) and laid me in my buggy. Fear blazed green in her eyes as she opened the door and got into position.

I can see her smoothing her wavy hair as she and her shepherd dog huddle

together, waiting for the next boom of thunder. Bam—–jagged lightning rips through the dark sky, throwing serrated shards of garish patterns across us. Mom snatches me out of the buggy and holds me in the air. “Pretty! Pretty!”

Then, as her story goes, she put me back in the buggy and left me on the porch to watch a bit more of the storm while she and her dog retreated into the safety of the house.

“Jesus, Mom,” I said after she told me this, “you left me on the porch in the middle of a storm, in a metal baby buggy!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. You didn’t die. You aren’t afraid. So, it worked.”

Flower boxes made by Grampa’s handy man, Artie, set along the edges of the porch. Each spring Grampa and I planted bright red geraniums, marigolds and colorful pansies in them. I especially liked the pansies because each one had a different expression on its freckled face and reminded me of people I knew. Among the flowers, he planted slender hot white radishes. He told me the radishes kept the bugs off the flowers, but I think it was just an excuse, because he ate them as fast as they grew. He’d pull one out, brush most of the dirt off, and eat it right there. I didn’t get it. They were so hot just one bite made my eyes water.

Silver Fox Inn

Built on the riverbank directly opposite our house was the elegant Silver Fox Inn. After the war, the handsome inn, made of native sandstone, would come alive on the weekends. Mom and her friends, seductive in gorgeous dresses that nipped their waists and flared when they danced showing their shapely legs, and proud men in their best suits, their hair slicked back with Brylcreem, waltzed and jitterbugged under the moonlight and the soft glow of oil lamps to the sound of big bands. Mom’s favorite was Glen Miller’s, ‘In the Mood’. The sight was a kaleidoscope of living color. The war was over. Hitler was dead. Good had triumphed over evil. Americans were ‘in the mood’ for life to be peaceful and prosperous.

Mom, Cat, and Tacy dressed for summer dancing.

My best friend, Jeannie, and I, transfixed by the glamour, listened and watched the revelry from the porch. With our arms around each other, we danced across the wooden floor, fantasizing that it was us down there, dancing with someone at least as handsome as Roy Rogers.

Jeanie and I used the porch to pull occasional mischievous pranks on tipsy customers as they left the bar. Sometimes we’d pour a bit of water on a guy’s head, not too much, just enough to confuse him.

“I think it’s startin’ to rain,” he might say, touching the wet spot. This would cause his buddy to look up into the clear sky. “Nah. It’s not.” The guy would shake his head in confusion. A few times we dropped small amounts of soggy dog or cat food on some unsuspecting soul. He’d pull the glob from his hair and inspect it. “Jaysus, what the hell is this dropped on me?” our victim would say. “Looks like bird shite.” “What kind of damn bird shites that?” he would say examining the mushy contents in his hand while Jeanie and I, hiding behind the wooden slats, convulsed silently with laughter.

Foxburg

Foxburg nestled peacefully on the mountainside like a classic scene on an oldfashioned American greeting card. During the summer Kids roamed unfettered until dusk. I kept my mother busy driving my friends and cousins to various creeks that fed into the Clairon and Allegheny Rivers. Not that she minded. While we slid on our butts down slick rocks, screaming when we hit the pool of icy mountain run-off, she stretched out on a flat rock in the sun with a book as content as a lizard while her skin baked brown.

Kids built perilous forts and tree houses in the woods and explored deep rocky caves with flashlights we sneaked from out parents in case they were inhabited by bears or rattlesnakes. Fortunately the critters were smart enough not to lodge in high traffic areas and avoided us.

My friend Elaine and I spent entire days riding her cousin’s ponies, Tony and Molly at her grandmother’s (Mom’s friend, Tacy’s mother) farm in Sligo. After Grandma Stewart fed us big mugs of Hershey’s bitter cocoa made with fresh whole milk sweetened with sugar, and thick slices of buttered toast made with homemade bread we’d set off riding bareback to explore the countryside and all its wonders. “Be back by dinner or you’ll go to bed hungry,” she’d warn us as we rode off.

Come autumn the trees would burst into a wonderland of brilliant yellows, golds and reds. People and squirrels alike vied for the plentiful nuts that littered the ground. Chestnuts roasted in fireplaces or heavy iron skillets and were eaten hot except for some that were saved for the stuffing in Sunday’s roast chicken. Women labored to put up the bountiful fall fruit and late vegetable harvests for the winter. They loaded and unloaded racks of Mason jars full of crisp apples,

pears, tomatoes, beets, peppers and cabbage from steaming blue canning pots on their stoves. Sweet, pungent aromas of fruit, cinnamon and nutmeg filled the houses. As the jars cooled, each one emitted a “ping,” announcing that the seal was secure. When the entire batch was sealed the jars were labeled by both date and contents before being stored in the pantry or cellar, ready to eat during winter.

Winter was magical for us kids. We watched the hardwood trees shed their final leaves and couldn’t wait for the snow to arrive. The majestic evergreens that had taken a back seat to the gaudy beauty of gypsy colors in the fall took center stage come the winter. Fancy hemlocks and several varieties of elegant pines representing every imaginable hue of green stood in gorgeous contrast with the pristine white snow. Wild turkeys, grouse and songbirds fed from their seeds, and in a pinch the needles even provided food for Pennsylvania’s magnificent white-tailed deer.

The first day of snow was an unofficial holiday. Every kid in town pulled his or her sled out of the basement, shined up the runners, and as fast as he could, pulled on his snowsuit, hat, gloves and boots and ran up the closest hill, filled with excitement anticipating the wild ride down. We had contests to see how many kids could fit on a sled. We’d be piled on top of one another three or four deep, the last person pushing to get us going before jumping on top. The sled laden with screaming kids would careen at breakneck speeds down the packed, icy streets inevitably dumping us before we could make it to the bottom. The trickiest part was going over the railroad tracks. Either you flew over, barely touching them or the metal rail stopped you abruptly resulting in stitches and lost teeth.

Besides the “Pennsy,” the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, or “B&O,” carrying cargo also ed through town. It ran along the side of the mountain through the middle of town and across the river on a noble, one-lane, steel-trestle bridge. The train route was retired before I was born, but the bridge provided foot and motor traffic age across the river until just a few years ago when it was regrettably

torn down.

Foxburg was settled by Mikel Fox, a Scotsman who won the land in a wager from William Penn. Penn allegedly granted him as much land as could be run from sunrise to sunset. A clever businessman, Fox had an Algonquin Indian run it. He established the first known golf course in the U.S. on the hill over looking the river valley. The original log club-house now houses the Golf Hall of Fame.

His mother had the lovely sandstone Episcopal Church where I was baptized built. The elegant cemetery on the church grounds overlooking the river valley, is where the bones and ashes of my family, including my twin sons rest, as mine will one day.

Ladies dressed for winter on the steps of the Episcopal Church.

The cemetery is a place of time travel. As I wander through the granite and marble, reading the names and ing the people who were the weavers of my colorful childhood and had a hand in shaping my character, my stories come to life. My Godmother, Anna Melany Thompson, who died when I was ten giving birth to her first child, lies with her tiny daughter Sharon in the crook of her arm for all eternity.

It’s comforting to know that at the last rest stop on what has been a long circuitous highway, I’ll be not only among my immediate family, but also reunited with the close-knit community that nurtured me as a child.

Mom

Mom wasn’t demonstrative or physically affectionate. I wasn’t touched much aside from when it was necessary: when she bathed or dressed me. I was never spanked. On several occasions, Mom told me of an incident that apparently demonstrated that my stubbornness trumped hers, that when it came to battles of will, I would win every time.

I was a chubby baby sitting on her lap when I grabbed a small china dish off the shelf beside us. Because it had been her mother’s, she treasured it. She took it from me and put it back. I took it again. She put it back and lightly slapped my hand. I did it again. This game apparently continued for several minutes, her slaps becoming harder each time. Finally, she saw that my little hand was red from all the slapping. She knew she couldn’t hit me again.

“You win. Keep it,” she said, handing me the dish. I put it back. For me, a simple game was over. For Mom, our roles had been established.

During frequent severe earaches as a child I would sit on Mom’s lap, my head against her ample chest that smelled like fresh coconut while she read to me. Our (well, maybe her) favorite book was the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which she had borrowed permanently from the Foxburg Library when she was a child.

Foxburg Free Library

Mom had colored in the black-and-white illustrations with bright primary-color crayons and drawn patterns in the margins, creating the impression that the stories were light and childish. They were anything but. Disney had not romanticized the German stories yet. In these stories you could not count on a happy ending; the big bad wolf ate the grandmother before the hunter shot it, and witches were ubiquitous. They lived next door, lurked in the woods, attended parties dressed in drag. Rapunzel was a slut, pregnant with the prince’s baby when the witch cut her gorgeous hair and chased her into the woods. (Slut is my word; the brothers Grimm probably didn’t call her that). Mom read the stories as they were. Sugarcoating life’s harsh possibilities was never a consideration for her. I’ve wondered if her sweet fragrance and comforting breast softened the grisly endings I always knew were coming.

When she wasn’t working or doing someone a favor—because, although she wasn’t tender, she was always generous and considerate—Mom spent the evenings in our living room playing her blond spinet piano. Her clear alto voice rang through the house as she sang plaintive hymns—“Rock of Ages,” “The Old Rugged Cross”--the Andrew Sisters and Frank Sinatra. My favorites were the boogie-woogie numbers she pounded out, filling the house with joy.

On rare occasions she would levitate a small chair or card table for me and one or two of my friends. Sitting on a stool or chair she placed her hands lightly, with only her fingertips touching, on the object to be levitated and asked us to do the same. In a soft voice she would coax. “Up table up,” or “Up little chair up.” Speaking quietly she’d continue, unwavering in her power of persuasion. “Come on table, just a little bit for the girls. You can do it. Up table. Up.” She would tell us, “ picture the table levitating in your imagination. I need your energy to make it work. Help me out. Say it: Up table up. Up table up.”

Sure enough, the object would begin to vibrate a bit and start to rise-maybe an inch or two. Sometimes two legs, sometimes all four legs would rise off the floor and hover in the air for a couple of minutes. Once she set a plate of cookies in the middle of a card table and levitated the table enough to tip the cookies and plate. (The tables never tipped above her knees, but from a different side.)

My friends and I were always surprised and delighted at her unusual talent. When we asked her how she did it she said, “there’s a scientific explanation for it, but I don’t know what it is.” Occasionally kids looked under the object she was levitating to make sure she wasn’t doing something with her legs to make it rise, but no one ever detected any physical interference.

Mom was also exceptionally comionate about animals. We usually had a couple of pet dogs and cats that she’d rescued along the country road or that people dumped in town. Mostly she cleaned them up, got them rabies shots, and adopted them out. We found my favorite dog, Nikki, on the streets of Oil City when we were shopping.

She was a pathetic puppy, just a few months old, lying on the pavement when we saw her. Too hungry and weak to even get up, she just looked at us with big sad brown eyes that stole our hearts and made Mom disgusted with humans. “How could people treat a puppy like this?” she groused. “How could people walk past this sweet face and ignore it?” We couldn’t, and didn’t.

We walked a few blocks to a beer distributor that did business with Grampa. Mom explained the situation, got a box, went back for the puppy and took it to him until we were finished shopping. He put a small container of coffee cream in the box for Nikki.

When we got her home Mom got some crude oil and hauled a tin basin into the

alley. She poured the oil over Nikki’s body while I held her head. Over and over she poured and combed, poured and combed. Each time the ticks filled the comb. Finally, when the ticks had all been combed out of her body and picked by hand off her head and ears, Mom bathed the puppy in clean water and soap until the oil was gone and dried her off in a big towel. As I brushed her damp hair this beautiful puppy with white, brown, and black long silky, wavy hair-like a fancy paint pony emerged. I named her Nikki. She became my long time childhood playmate and companion.

Nikki and I in California. 1953

Until I was five, Mom and her friend Tacy had a beauty shop upstairs in a large room next to our living room. I didn’t go into the shop often, because I didn’t like the smell of the chemicals or the way the women discussed me in the third person as if I wasn’t there. “Oh, doesn’t she have the prettiest blond curls. Too bad they’re baby curls and won’t last.” “She has the Cooper nose all right. And, the eyes, too. Darker than the Naughton eyes.”

They were prescient. The curls didn’t last long. As all children do who have easy access to scissors I took a pair outside one afternoon and gave myself a crewcut. Mom and Tacy found me on the back porch, my curly locks littering the floor around me. They both burst into tears. After five years, Mom closed the shop. “Women complain too much. It took the joy out of it,” she said.

Alice’s Restaurant

Thinking that people are less inclined to complain about food, she opened Alice’s, a small but popular home-style lunch counter downstairs, across the hall from the bar. Four sets of unmatched oak tables and chairs of varying sizes filled the small room. Covered with brightly patterned tablecloths, their centers held colorful bowls of green tomato relish, corn chowchow and assorted crunchy pickles that Mom canned herself every summer. The condiments weren’t intended to be the whole meal, but some folks would finish off a bowl and order a piece of pie. Mom would shake her head in amazement.

Alice’s was small and intimate. Even if the customers were strangers when they sat down to eat, most of them became friends during their meal.

A small counter in front of the kitchen had four round red stools you could raise or lower by turning. When I went into the restaurant to ask for a favor—a ride somewhere or a pony—I would sit on a stool with my feet held off the floor and spin in circles while I made my request. The spinning irritated Mom to no end, but it always led to a quick decision, which I figured was good for both of us.

My mother discouraged loitering in her kitchens: upstairs or in the restaurant. She fed me whatever I wanted, but when I’d had my fill, she encouraged me to leave. “Why are you here? Go outside. Get out from under my feet. Don’t you have better things to do?”

One summer evening after dinner, I called several friends to ask if they could go out and play, but they were all helping their mothers do dishes. I pulled up a

stool next to the sink where Mom was washing hers. “Mom, when are you gonna start me on dishes?” She looked at me for a minute, thinking. “You can start on dishes when you have your own. I don’t want you breaking mine. Either sit and talk to me while I do my dishes or find something else to do.”

From Mom’s kitchens wafted aromatic stimuli. The scents of her daily various specials coursed through the building and out onto the street, causing noses to perk up with desire: fresh-baked Parkerhouse buns, spicy-sweet stuffed peppers, pickled beets, and bulging cabbage rolls studded with caraway seeds that always surprised me when I bit into one. Mom sang as she cooked, her contentment seeping into the ingredients, making her dishes satisfying for the stomach and the soul.

As good as her meals were, her baking was legendary. Piecrusts were perfectly flaky, filled with succulent fresh seasonal fruit and berries or cream puddings. Her chocolate pie disappeared within hours. It was so yummy my son asked the Tooth Fairy to bring him one when he lost his first tooth. When I explained that the Tooth Fairy was much too small to carry pies and would probably leave him a dollar instead, he held his ground. “Mine brings pie.” And so she did.

My favorite was her banana cake. This magnificent cake, iced with real whipped cream made from cream she skimmed off the top of milk delivered fresh every morning, had five layers, counting the sweet, succulent banana pudding she ladled generously between the moist, slightly nutmeggy cake. I always asked her to make me one for my birthday. Finally when I was thirty-something, she refused. “For God’s sake, I’ll give you the recipe. You can bake your own damn banana cake.” I was crushed. Maybe I made one, but I never made one that tasted as good as hers, so I stopped trying. It was the love, I guess—the love hidden between the layers.

Grampa

Grampa was the oldest of seven children of Irish immigrants, and as is often the case for the oldest in big families, he had been largely responsible for looking out for his younger siblings. When he was sixteen, he was forced to become the head of the family.

One evening when he and his brothers and sisters were gathered around the dinner table doing their homework, the doorbell rang. Their mother, who was in the front room, or parlor, as it was known then, perhaps listening to the radio while she knitted winter scarves for her children, got up to answer it. Her bloodcurdling scream and the loud thud that followed sent the terrified kids running to her aid. Grampa was the first to see her lying where she’d fainted beside her husband’s dead body, his arms and legs sprawled at odd angles where some thugs had dumped him after shooting him for allegedly cheating in a card game.

Grampa quit school, lied about his age and got a job as a brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad to his family. Unfortunately, two years later his mother, my Great-Grandma Naughton, who had never totally recovered, suffered a complete nervous breakdown and was committed to a mental hospital. Grampa kept his job, but the rest of the kids were sent to live with various relatives.

A few years later, when the train he was working on ed through Foxburg, he saw “a beautiful woman with sparkling copper hair hanging clothes on a line.” It was love at first sight. “I’m going to marry that woman,” he told his friends. Two years later he did. They were married for twenty-five years-until she died of heart disease at age fifty-seven.

In a studio photograph I have of Grampa, Grandma, Mom, and Uncle Fred, Grampa is exceptionally good looking. He looks relaxed in his suit and tie. His dark wavy hair is combed back just right, and his lanky frame makes him seem taller than his average height. In his sixties he was still a handsome man with a full head of silver hair and the graceful bearing of a man who is comfortable with himself. I him as always dressed in a clean, pressed white shirt and slacks even if we were fishing along the riverbank or he was teaching me to ride a bike. Grampa laughed easily but didn’t engage in small talk much. Mostly he listened and observed, or asked questions as if he was genuinely interested in what you thought. I never heard him raise his voice, nor did he ever seem to be in a hurry.

I loved the stories he told me about Ireland that had been handed down from his dad and grandpa, I’m sure with changes in the details at each telling. He taught me how to ride a bike, plant a garden, make a bird house, wash the bar glasses, and did his best to teach me to fish.

Sometimes on summer days after his evening bartender took over, we would walk down river to do a bit of fishing. We rarely caught anything, and if we did he put it back in the water. Mostly we just sat there relaxing while the fish jumped out of the water to catch the dragonflies that seemed to tease them.

However, the day I caught my first fish became a legendary story. As usual we were sitting on the riverbank only casually paying attention to the fishing lines swaying in the water when suddenly the pole jerked out of my hand and headed into the current. Grampa, in his slacks and black oxfords, leapt into the mud at the edge of the river and grabbed it just in time. I hollered and jumped around while he struggled to bring the big fish close enough to identify it as a walleye, evidently a trophy fish and good to eat. Flopping and gasping the big fish kept slipping away from him as he tried to remove the hook from its mouth. I stayed back, afraid it would bite me. By the time the hook was out it seemed exhausted and lay panting in the mud.

“What do we do now, Grampa?’ “We’ll take him home and have your mother cook him.” I panicked. “Oh no! Grampa. Don’t let him die! Please! Grampa? Put him back in the water, Grampa. Please,” I begged.

He laughed. “ Why are we fishing if we aren’t going to eat the fish?”

I couldn’t answer that, but he pulled the fish back into the water where it stayed a couple of minutes before swimming off. The story of ‘the giant walleye that got away,’ was one of Grampa’s favorites. The next time he asked if I wanted to ‘go catch a walleye,’ he winked.

Jimmy’s

Grampa’s bar reflected his personality. It was a warm, homey place with aged hardwood floors perfect for dancing or for a little kid to slide around on in her socks. For a nickel, you could play three songs on the flashy Wurlitzer jukebox, a game of shuffleboard or, if you were good at it, pinball for a couple of hours. Most people just drank beer and hung out. In the bar I learned that folks come in a variety of colors and speak different languages, and I heard Irish poetry, jokes, limericks and proverbs. Even the quietest guys at the bar always had a joke or a limerick to share:

There was an old widower, Doyle, who wrapped up his wife in tinfoil. He thought it would please her to stay in the freezer and, anyway, outside she'd spoil.

The veins in the long polished black walnut bar shone like deep, rich chocolate as if it were alive still rooted in the ground. Sitting on it were wide-mouthed gallon jars of pickled pigs feet, gigantic sour pickles and hard-boiled eggs turned a stunning magenta in Mom’s tangy pickled beet juice.

At the center of the shelves of liquor bottles behind the bar was a plaster cast of a black stallion with flaring nostrils and a flying mane that I’d named Bud because the word Budweiser was embossed on its base. A beer distributor in

New York City had given it to me during a buying trip Grampa had taken me on when I was six. Because I considered Bud so special and handsome, I gave it to Grampa to put on the shelf for everyone to ire.

We’d traveled first class to New York on the Pennsy, the train line on which he had once been a brakeman. The dining car sparkled with white table–cloths, fresh flowers, and shining silver. The impeccable Negro waiter who served us called me Miss Cooper and treated me like a princess.

At bedtime we retired to a Pullman car. I claimed the top bunk. Maybe it was because of the jostling of the train that, in the middle of the night, I peed the bed. I hung my head over the side. “ Grampa. Grampa. I peed.” He looked up. “You let the Allegheny in, did ya?” He pulled me out of my wet bed and helped me take off my pajamas and put on dry ones. I slept the rest of the night snuggled up against him in his cotton long johns, made as soft as cashmere by the pounding they regularly got between the wringer rollers on Mom’s washing machine. When we woke up, it was time for breakfast. We had just finished eating when the train pulled into Grand Central Station.

Our first morning was spent doing business at liquor distributors. Afterwards we went to see the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and walked around Times Square. That night we ate at a Chinese restaurant. The bowls of spicy noodles and fish tasted different than anything I’d ever eaten before, but I liked it. The language they were speaking also fascinated me. “It’s Cantonese, Grampa explained. That’s their language. We speak English. They speak Cantonese.”

The tall buildings and busy people in New York scared me. They pushed against each other to get on the bus, shoving me out of the way. I felt lost, small, and unimportant. I kept a tight hold on Grampa, scared that I might lose him. But on the second day I forgot all about my fears.

One of his friends took us to Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens. It was the most amazing sight I’d seen in my young life. The noise, the smells, the palpable excitement and despair—it was an experience I’ve never forgotten. I’d been around horses and ridden ponies, but I had never seen a thoroughbred in the flesh, up close. I couldn’t imagine how the diminutive men riding the magnificent long-legged creatures could stay on at breakneck speeds or why the horses galloping so closely together didn’t knock each other down. I insisted on standing next to the entryway so I could see them up close as they entered and exited the track. I was transfixed, spellbound by their snorting, their wild eyes, the way they pranced as if they knew winning was important. When Grampa explained that we were going to bet on some of them, that if our horses won we could get rich, I was confused. I thought we were already rich. He told me to pick a horse and said he would bet two dollars on it for me, that I could keep the money if it won. I declared that I would use my winnings to buy a pony. I figured Mom, who opposed the idea, had no room to argue if I paid for it myself.

Grampa and I stood along the wooden wall watching the horses up close. He pointed out facts about some of them: “powerful but has been held back,” “has beaten the favorite horse before,” “has yet to show his stuff.” I pointed out a gorgeous dappled gray I liked a lot. “She has class,” Grampa said. “You have a good eye. She’s a winner if she can she carry the extra weight?” I was hooked. For years I loved going to the track, until I learned that most of these gorgeous creatures lead dismal lives and that when they don’t win, they are discarded or abandoned. Except in the case of high-priced studs, there is no dignity or comfort in being an old racehorse.

Work

I was about four when Grampa told me he had a job for me-as his primary glasswasher. At first I protested. “You can’t make me work!” He calmly pointed out that I was always there anyway and might as well be useful. And he promised to pay me. Truthfully I’m sure he just wanted to keep an eye on me.

I stood on a solid wooden box so I could reach into the deep double porcelain tubs. The left one held hot soapy water and had a mounted brush for washing, and the right one was filled with clear, cool water for rinsing. Over and over I would plunge the glasses into the frothy bubbles, scrub them up and down on the brush to remove any lipstick and then dunk them into the rinse tub and place them on the drain board to dry. I could see the customers as they came in the door. As I worked, I listened to the jukebox and conversations going on at the bar. I probably didn’t work more than fifteen or twenty minutes at any given at a time, but I loved my job and worked there until I was ten.

Grampa paid me in chits, small pieces of paper on which he jotted down the amount I had coming to me each day. He kept them by the cash to be redeemed when requested. Since I couldn’t read, I didn’t question his calculations. There were always enough of them to provide me and many of my friends with unlimited red pistachio nuts that stained our fingers, pinball and shuffleboard games, and money for ice cream and other essential stuff at Harry Gross’s Market down the street.

A secondary job of mine was painting dots on nickels with red fingernail polish so the vendors who came to collect the money from the games and the jukebox would know that those nickels were ours and give them back.

Grampa’s afternoon clientele were mostly men who had worked the early day shift for the railroad or at the Quaker State refinery a few miles upriver. Unless I said something to draw attention to myself, I was ignored. On the rare occasions when they acknowledged my existence, they referred to me as “the midget.” I saw them as a sort of chorus line because they frequently thought and spoke in harmony with one another. When one man said something, several others would nod their heads in agreement and make the same stock reply as if they were attached to puppet strings. I got more than a few laughs mimicking them for my friends.

Since it was during the mid-forties, the country was in post-WWII mode. Life was easier for many folks. There were affordable mortgages and most people had jobs. President Truman was popular. His remark “The buck stops here” was heard often because he was considered a hard-scrabble man-of-the-people and they felt he had taken responsibility for the state of the union.

The main complaint of Grampa’s clientele was the damn pope. “He, who never even had a woman, much less children, wants us to produce more Catholics no matter how difficult it is to feed them,” they grumbled. Running a close second was women. Unanimously, the men agreed that women were necessary, but troublesome. They talked a lot about getting “it” or “any.” That they weren’t getting it or any was the damn pope’s fault. I was very confused. Finally, one day when I was working I asked, “What is it?” You could have heard a pin drop. They looked at each other. Grampa looked over at me but didn’t say anything.

“Aye. The midget wants to know what ‘it’ is,” one said.

After what seemed to be a long silence, another guy said, “Tisn’t a subject for midgets. Ya need to ask yur mammy.”

When I did, she said ‘it’ just wasn’t a subject people talked about.

Killing Chickens

One afternoon I was playing jacks on the sidewalk in front of the bar when Mr. Geary, an old man who lived in the back of the house next door, drove his rickety pickup truck into the alley that ran alongside our building. The bed of the truck was filled to overflowing with wooden crates full of squawking white chickens, their bright red combs and wild eyes sticking out between the crate slats.

I couldn’t imagine why Mr. Geary had a truckload of chickens. Keeping close against the wall, I followed the truck to the dead end. I watched him unload and stack the crates next to a crude scaffold. A wooden pole was planted vertically in the ground, and sticking out from the top of it was a horizontal post held up by a diagonal board between the two. At the end of the top post, a rope with some dangling smaller pieces hung above a big round galvanized-aluminum tub.

“What ya doin’, Mr. Geary?” I asked.

“Killing chickens.”

“How come?”

“To eat. What else? Somebody’s got to.”

Except for a few occasions when I’d seen fish dying in a bucket, it had never occurred to me that the food on my plate had been alive.

I watched, transfixed, as, one by one, Mr. Geary pulled the terrified chickens out of the crates, tied their feet together with the dangling ropes and left them hanging upside down. The chickens shrieked and beat their wings furiously against each other. Paralyzed, I watched quietly, unable to take my eyes off the horror as he took a knife from his pocket, opened it and ran the blade through each chicken’s head.

The flapping wings of the screaming chickens seemed to propel them in a circle like the swing ride at the carnival. Fresh blood flew through the air, only a small portion of it landing in the tub below. Within minutes or maybe seconds the chickens’ ceased their struggle and hung limp. Dead. Their blood soaked lipstick red heads, and their once pristine white feathers neon pink, still dripping into the bucket. My face and hair and yellow sundress with green stripes were splattered with blood-red polka dots.

Suddenly my mother appeared. “Oh my God! I’ve been calling you! Nobody knew where you were. Why are you watching Mr. Geary kill chickens? Oh my God! You’re covered with blood. I’m going to be sick.” She dragged me through the alley and up the stairs to the bathroom, yelling the whole time. “Don’t you know when to ignore things? Where is your good sense?” In the bathroom she yanked off my dress, put me into the big claw-footed tub in the middle of the room, turned on the spigot and pushed my head under it.

With my head crunched against my breastbone, I watched the pink water run into the drain as she scrubbed the sticky chicken blood off me with hot water and soap so hard that she left pink blotches on my skin. When she was satisfied that my body was clean, she wrapped me in a towel and had me sit on the toilet while my dress soaked in a white enamel bowl. Pink water rose to the rim. To this day I am not fond of the color pink.

The episode was over, but the effects lingered. When we were eating dinner that night, Mom put a piece of meat on my plate. “Is it chicken?” I asked.

From that day until I was bullied into eating a hamburger at age eleven (incidentally the same age my cousin told me what “it” was), I was a vegetarian. I questioned everything Mom put on my plate. In her customary style, she rose to the occasion. She borrowed a book on vegetarian cooking from the Foxburg Free Library. My meals contained protein in the form of rice and beans, puddings, cheese and small yellow yolks of undeveloped eggs from freshly killed chickens.

Word of my trauma traveled fast. One day when I was washing glasses, I heard “mooo.” A cow mooing? It was an odd sound, out of place in town—at a bar. I looked up from washing the glasses. The guys were looking at me. Their expressions betrayed mischief, expectation. I waited. Finally a burly regular at the bar who had several kids said, “Hey, did you hear that. Maybe Mr. Geary is killing a calf.” They all laughed.

“Aye,” another guy answered. “He’s an enterprising one, that Mr. Geary. No tellin’ what he’ll be killing next.’

I looked at Grampa.

“It’s not true, is it, Grampa?”

“No honey, it isn’t. And whoever made that sound needs to stop or find another

place to have a drink.”

“Aw, I was just having some fun,” the perpetrator said. “I didn’t mean harm.” He produced a small round box with a picture of a cow on top. He turned over the harmless toy. Mooooo. The guys all laughed again. Grampa said, “you need to keep your toys at home for your kids to play with and leave my girl alone.”

I turned back to washing the glasses. I started to think that I needed to be aware, that not everyone thinks the same things are funny; or can be trusted.

Foxburg School

When we were six we started to school. On the first day, Jeanie and I skipped gleefully up the hill to the little red schoolhouse with the bell on top. We were ready to learn to read, write and do arithmetic. We each had brand new pencil boxes filled with pristine Crayola Crayons, colored pencils, and bright yellow number 2s with unsullied erasers, and although the school was only a few blocks from home, we carried tin lunch boxes depicting colorful cartoon characters, or personal heroes. Mine featured The Lone Ranger and his equally brave sidekick, Tonto; Jeanie’s, Dale Evans and Roy Rogers. Each box had a matching fragile glass thermos full of fresh whole milk from Farrington’s Dairy, and a peanut butter and honey, or baloney and mustard sandwich on homemade bread wrapped in waxed paper. Dessert was usually a piece of fruit picked fresh or a cookie baked by our moms the previous night.

The building had two rooms on each floor: a classroom that held four grades each and a room for storage and activities such as rare spankings of the bigger kids—of which I was once a recipient in the seventh grade. Wide wooden desks, scarred and gouged with the initials of students who had preceded us, and seats lumpy underneath with petrified hunks of ancient Juicy Fruit and Double Bubble gum were arranged neatly in linear rows.

Miss Kraus, a spinster who wore no-nonsense oxfords and shapeless dresses (clothes that mirrored her teaching style) taught grades 1 to 4 downstairs. Mr. Stewart, a portly, kind man with a sense of humor, taught grades five through eight upstairs. Each grade had only eight to ten students at the most, but forty kids generated substantial energy and required considerable creativity to balance such a wide variety of abilities, levels, and personalities. To keep us engaged the teachers moved us from grade to grade according to individual abilities similar to the Montessori method.

My initial enthusiasm for school was short lived. I had a hard time sitting in one spot for more than a few minutes and I had difficulty hearing—–due to a genetic defect. My hearing loss had been suspected early on, but when I was three, about the time Grampa was ready to make an appointment with an ear specialist in Pittsburgh, as Grampa described it, a miracle occurred. We were upstairs in the kitchen one evening when I pointed to the sink and announced “ umaginkafar.’) “She’s talking,” Grampa cried.

Mom, not convinced, demanded I say it again. Repeated speech is not an accident. “Umaginnkafar. Umaginkafar.” Grandpa leaped up from the table. “She wants a drink of water! Is that it, Sweetheart? Do you want a drink of water?” I pointed to the sink again and shook my head yes.

My fidgety behavior coupled with an apparent inability to keep quiet, the result of a combination of Attention Deficit Disorder or ADD, which I learned about as an adult, and a hearing deficit caused by a genetic defect, understandably vexed Miss Kraus. When repeated onishments and seating changes failed to stop me from whispering, she would isolate me in the cloakroom. Unfortunately, I didn’t mind being there and as soon as I returned to the classroom my irritating behavior would resume. Next she tried to humiliate me by making me stand in the corner in front of the class. I didn’t mind that either. As soon as her back was turned, I would make my classmates laugh by mimicking her. I irritated her further by complaining about the Dick and Jane books. “They’re boring. I told her.” “We should read about the dog Buck or witches and wicked stepmothers that lock children in towers or serve them up for dinner.” I’m sure Miss Kraus wished a witch would find me and lock me up. Unfortunately her punishments only made my Irish temperament more obstinate and fueled my desire to make life worse for her, not understanding that I was undermining myself in the process.

Finally, exasperated, Miss Kraus cracked. I don’t what I’d done, but she punished me by ordering me under her desk. There I was, my knees bent

against my chest, my head down because there was no room to lift it, crammed against the solid modesty designed to prevent perverted students from trying to glimpse Miss Kraus’s sensible panties. I was dispensed of—forgotten. I remained crouched for a few minutes, until her back was turned, at which point I left. I went straight to the bar, to Grampa, where I knew I’d find a safe haven.

“Is school out early today?” he asked.

“Nah. I quit.”

“Quit? Does Miss Kraus know you quit?”

“Nah.”

“Sure, the midget’s learned enough now in the first grade,” a member of the chorus line said. “She can work full time washing the glasses.” Grampa ignored him. “I’ll fix you a cherry Coke and get your mom.”

A few minutes later, I described the situation to Mom and Grampa—the desk part, not my dreaming up ways to make Miss Kraus mad. They agreed that my decision had been reasonable given the circumstances, but Mom set me straight. “You’ll be going to school at least until you’re sixteen. You might as well make the most of it. Once you learn to read you can borrow any book you want from the library. I won’t be reading to you forever.” Grampa said, “Miss Kraus has a hard job with all those kids, some of them, unlike you, don’t understand how important learning is. Don’t make it harder for her. I know it’s difficult for you to sit still, to make your mind struggle with new stuff. But, I know you can do it. You’re a good girl. And smart.” The next day I felt a bit guilty, maybe even

ashamed when Mom took me back to school.

After that, when Miss Kraus wasn’t directly teaching my class, she had me sit with a partner, an older, studious kid who would keep me occupied with learning. Eventually, although I was never a model student, I adjusted and began to learn.

When school was dismissed I’d go to directly to the bar, climb onto the stool closest to the window, order a cherry Coke and do my homework. If I got stumped sometimes the guys at the bar would help me. Over the months and years, my homework became a group activity. As the material became more difficult, the ever-vigilant Miss Kraus, tipped off by the varying styles of handwriting on the pages, grew suspicious.

“Are you doing your homework yourself, Cheryl?”

“Yes, Miss Kraus,” I lied.

“Can you explain why the handwriting is different on the pages then?”

“Maybe my hand gets tired because there is too much homework.”

She sighed the sigh of frustrated teachers all over the world.

“Cheryl, the men at the bar have to quit helping you with your homework.

You’re becoming smarter than they are.”

That evening I told Grampa what she had said. He thought about it a bit. “We won’t tell them,” he said. “It will hurt their feelings. Many of them had to quit school to go to work to their families. Maybe they’re learning, too. It won’t hurt to give them the problems on a separate sheet. She doesn’t need to see it.

Women’s lib.

During a fourth-grade recess, I was playing football when a boy tackled me, pulling my corduroy pants with an elastic waistband several inches down on my boyish hips. He insisted it had been an accident. I didn’t believe him.

That afternoon I demanded that my mom buy me pants with a zipper and a belt. We looked in the Sears Roebuck catalog. There was nothing appropriate in the girls’ section. Current fashion did not accommodate physical sports for girls. We were expected to play jump rope or with dolls, not football. From the boys’ section, Mom ordered a pair of fashionable powder-blue jeans that I insisted I just had to have, and a pair of regular Levis.

I was so excited when my jeans arrived! However, I wasn’t prepared for the mean teasing and taunting I got from the boys. “Cooper Pooper is a boy! Cooper Pooper pees standing up.” I cried telling mom what they’d said that afternoon. “They just aren’t used to seeing a girl in jeans,” Mom said. “Ignore them. Wear what you want. They will quickly forget.”

She was right. Within a few weeks, Jeanie had a pair, and Lucy was wearing her brother’s. We were ready to take the boys on in their own sports. Women’s lib had come to Foxburg.

Thirty years later, at a grade-school reunion, Miss Kraus told my friend Tad, one of the brightest kids in my class, and me that we had been her two subversives.

Trains

For my first Christmas, when I was four months old, Grampa bought me an O gage Pennsylvania Railroad starter train—engine and coal car, boxcar, flat car and caboose—to go around the tree. Each Christmas he added to it. By my fourth Christmas, the first one I really , we had two engines, separate transformers and switchbacks. The complex track was permanently mounted on sheets of plywood, numbered and stored in the bar’s storeroom. During the winter months, his handyman Artie and I worked on building accessories for the trains.

The trains ran through a village complete with houses that we’d built with bits and pieces of wood glued together and painted: snow-covered pine trees, a white church with a steeple, windows that lighted up. People wearing coats and scarves strolled to church. I thought it looked a little like Foxburg. Our trains ed a farm complete with a red barn and fences to contain the livestock, stopped at a platform where a stiff little man loaded milk jugs onto a car and continued through a papier-mâché bridge I’d painted Jackson Pollock-style.

Mom generously allowed us to keep the train set up in the living room from the first week of December to New Year’s Day, however, she reminded me regularly that the plywood was totally inconvenient for her and her friends who had to tiptoe over the train to sit on the couch. Regardless, most evenings in December, Grampa and I became ‘Pennsy’ engineers when our trains and his memories sprang to life. Chugging and belching black, sooty smoke, the trains circled and intersected as they traveled through our make-believe land, carrying fresh milk, logs and even people to places I couldn’t wait to visit when I grew up. Wooooowoooo.

Hitchhiking

One afternoon when I was seven, I asked my mom to drive me to my friend Gary’s in St. Petersburg, about three miles away, so I could ride his pony. When she said she didn’t have the time I decided to hitch. Instinct told me she wouldn’t approve, that I needed to be careful. But, I reasoned, boys hitched all the time so why not me? I intended to ride in cars with people I didn’t think my mom knew.

I walked up the hill by the golf course-where I figured I would be away from the traffic coming out of the bar or restaurant so I wouldn’t be recognized. It didn’t occur to me that wouldn’t be possible in our close knit rural community. I positioned myself behind a mountain laurel bush at the top of the hill where I could see the cars coming, but they couldn’t see me. Crouched behind the bush my heart pumped double time; my skin flushed rosy as if I was sunburned. Thrill combined with fear-I was experiencing my first endorphin rush. I liked it. Decades later, as a comedienne I would feel the same excitement before my shows and my hitching hiking days.

Suddenly a truck rounded the corner driven by a guy I’d seen a few times but didn’t know. I stepped out from the behind the bush and stuck out my thumb. He stopped. I jumped in the front seat. “Where you headed, kid?”

“Petersburg.”

“No problem. Tell me where to drop you.”

Just like that. Easy.

This practical mode of transportation served me well for several weeks until a woman who had picked me up began to scrutinize me from the rear view mirror as I sat in her back seat.

“What’s your name?”

“Lucy. Lucy Brown.”

It was my friend’s name and I’d always envied her the name Lucy. “You look a lot like Alice Naughton’s girl.”

“I never heard of her.”

“Really? It’s an amazing resemblance.”

“Well, Lady, I don’t know her. We don’t have anybody named Alice in the Brown family. Nope. No Alices’ that I ever heard of.”

To my horror she slowed the car down and turned around. Dread filled my heart. My summer was ruined. I would be grounded until school started-–in fact, double grounded: once for lying and once for hitching. My life was ruined.

“I think I will drop into Alice’s for just a minute if you don’t mind before we head to St. Petersburg.”

“If you don’t mind, I would rather just head on to Petersburg. ”

She looked at me. A flat look. Maybe she considered it. I felt a twinge of hope.

“It will just take a minute.”

When the lady pulled up in front of the restaurant, she got out and opened the rear door where I sat like a stone in the back seat.

“Come in with me for a minute, Lucy. I’ll buy you a lemonade.”

“Lemonade.” Just what I need,” I thought.

“No thanks. I‘ll just stay here while you go in there.”

““No. You come along inside with me," she insisted.

Reluctantly, I walked behind her. When she opened the screen door she pulled me up beside her. Mom, behind the counter looked up. When she saw me her face ed surprise. “Hi Alice, said the lady. How are you? It’s been awhile.

I just picked up this child hitch hiking by the golf course. She says her name is Lucy. Lucy Brown. Do you know her?”

“Hi Madeline.”

My mom, looking more embarrassed than mad came out from behind the counter. She put her hand on my shoulder and looked directly at me, directly into my eyes.

“Ummmm. Where were you headed, Lucy?”

I looked down at my feet. “Gary’s.”

“Thanks Madeline, for bringing her back. I appreciate it.”

“No problem. Hitching is not for little girls, Lucy,” she said. “It’s not safe.”

Mom, pinching my shoulders tight, lowered her voice. Using the deadly tone she reserved for submerged rage she asked,

“Why, why, why, must you do these things, Cheryl? Do I need to watch you constantly? Put a leash on you? Must I worry every minute? Don’t I deserve some peace of mind? Can’t you use your common sense and stay out of trouble? For God’s sake, what will it take?”

I resumed my hitching the following summer.

Irish Mongrel Child

One quiet summer afternoon I was playing jacks on the sidewalk in front of the bar with my friend Joanne when we got into an argument. The reason for the argument has long been forgotten, but versions of the story were recollected and told by each of us through the years with totally different details. Mine starts with her yelling at me.

“I’m a Dago, and you are nothing!”

I had no idea what a Dago was, but I knew for sure I was not “Nothing.” I hit her and ran crying to Grampa. She ran home crying to tell her mother that I’d hit her for no reason.

With my arms wrapped tight around my Grampa, I sobbed. “Joanne says she’s a Dago and I am nothing. What am I Grandpa?”

The chorus looked at one another. “Ahh. A Dago is she?” said one. “Eyetalian,” added another.

“Sure the Midget wouldn’t be Eyetalian,” they agreed. Tell us, Grandpa. “What is the midget?” Grampa held me tight while he pondered the importance of the question. Finally, he said. “You’re an Irish Mongrel Child. That’s what you are.”

“Mongrel! Why am I a mongrel, Grampa? Dogs are mongrels. I don’t want to be a mongrel!” I wailed.

“It’s not like the dogs, sweetheart. “It’s a good thing. The Irish are brave, proud people. You are Irish. But, you’re an Irish Mongrel like the rest of us, because: well, because the Irish slept with everyone who came up the coast.” (Like the dogs)

The chorus hooted and toasted Irish Mongrels.

“Sure it is. Bein’ an Irish Mongrel is a grand thing!”

The Village

Each summer, Mom and her girlfriends spent several weekends at The Village, a beachfront resort/casino on Lake Erie. They rented small wooden cabins that were scattered along the edge of the sand fifty yards or so from the main building. They spent their days sunbathing and frolicking on the beach, slathered liberally with baby oil and iodine looking as sleek and slick as graceful seals.

Cat Galina, Em Bushy, Morna, Tacy is beside Mom who is driving

When evening came, they scurried about like sorority girls, flitting from cabin to cabin, curling each other’s hair, applying mascara, rouging cheeks, giving advice. Sipping cocktails and laughing and singing, they helped each other fasten jewelry and achieve perfect waves and hourglass waists. Finally, transformed into glamorous works of art, their tanned bodies gleaming in the moonlight, they walked arm in arm to the bustling nightclub.

Although it was considered an adult “girls weekend,” I was occasionally allowed to go. Sometimes they invited me to them for dinner or let me stay and listen to the band for a while. Occasionally, one of them or a male friend of theirs would give me a handful of nickels to play the slots. On a good night I doubled my money.

Stepping inside the nightclub was like entering fantasyland. Softly glowing lanterns mounted on the walls contrasted with the bright blinking lights surrounding the slot machines. All the women seemed to be beautiful, all the men especially dashing and handsome. The chink of coins tumbling into metal bins and the whooping cries of those who’d won a few dollars prompted cries of exaltation the likes of which preachers dream about.

Mom and her friends didn’t spend much time playing the slots; they had come to dance. And dance they did. With hardly time to catch a breath, they and their agile partners whirled around the ballroom to romantic waltzes, exuberant foxtrots, jitterbugs and the sexy rumba.

One man stood out from the rest. In fact, he is the only one I . Smiley, the leader of the orchestra, was first-generation Irish. His head overflowed with unruly golden-brown curls, his hazel eyes, more green than brown, sparkled like Champagne, and the dimples on each side of his mouth captivated the most sober of souls. When Smiley would our party for dinner, he kept everyone laughing with his stories and Irish jokes. He had a special talent for making each woman at the table, including me, feel special and beautiful. Occasionally when dinner was finished, he walked with my mom and me to our cabin. The best nights were when he and Mom sang me an Irish lullaby. I would drift off to sleep listening to his pure, clear melody mingled with the smoky flavor of Mom’s alto harmony:

Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, too-ra-loo-ra-li,

too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, hush now, don't you cry!

Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, too-ra-loo-ra-li,

too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, that's an Irish lullaby.

One day I asked, “Mom, are you going to marry Smiley? I’d like him to be my dad.”

She smiled. “It’s not likely, honey.”

I felt sad.

Evil

The year I turned ten, my grampa married Eva, a woman who had started coming regularly to the bar. I was confused. Why would he do such a thing when he had Mom and me? It was obvious that she wasn’t good for him. Her face was too made up. She laughed at things that weren’t funny. She was false. I tried to warn him, but he wouldn’t listen. Eva, or Evil, as I called her, became the wicked witch in my fairy tale.

They moved across the river into a sprawling house built on the riverbank that Grampa owned. The life I knew came to an abrupt end. He sold the bar. I lost my job. Mom closed her restaurant.

A short time later she announced that she, Tacy, my dog Nikki and I were going on a road trip. We would spend the summer driving Mom’s Ford Sunliner with the see-through Mylar top across the country to Santa Monica, California. Along the way, we’d camp in America’s beautiful national parks. They assured me that when we got to California, I’d see movie stars and some of the famous cowboys I ired.

Excitement took the edge off my melancholy. I promised my friends I would bring them back autographs of Roy Rogers and maybe even the Lone Ranger.

Road Trip

Mom’s goal was to be in California by late July. Although neither she nor Tacy had ever camped, we were amply supplied. The car’s trunk bulged with a large green army tent, still in its original wrapping, canvas cots, sleeping bags, a kerosene cooking stove, lamps, cooking gear and tinned food. There was barely room for our clothes. It never occurred to Alice or Tacy to practice setting up the tent before we left. How hard could it be?

Bears

As we drove into Yellowstone National Park, the traffic was backed up for what seemed like miles. We inched along, not understanding the reason for it. Then we saw them. Dozens of huge bears, brown and black, were panhandling, working the crowd. Cubs, from toddlers to adolescents solicited alongside their protective moms. Bears leaned their massive bodies over the tops of cars, climbed onto hoods and filled windows with their huge heads as they peered inside looking for food. Tourists gave them sandwiches, apples, pretzels, potato chips, deviled eggs, candy bars and cookies. It truly was a Teddy Bears’ picnic.

Directly in front of our car, a large brown bear was peering into the driver’s-side window of a small black convertible. Suddenly it stood up on its hind legs and leaned over the top of the car, apparently to get a better look. Seconds later, with one paw it tore the top back as easily as if it were made of paper. The astounded driver threw open his door, hitting the bear about mid-thigh with the door. The bear surprised at the assault, stepped back a foot or so still looking at the car. The obviously insane man still shrieking at the bear, stepped out of the car. Mom screamed. Tacy was paralyzed behind the wheel, too frightened to move. We fully expected the bear to kill the man on the spot, to rip his head off as easily as it had decapitated his car. Instead, the perplexed animal looked down at the crazy man in apparent disbelief. What the hell? Then, much to our astonishment, it turned away and sauntered toward us.

Mom and Tacy were not aware that I had been throwing chocolate-covered cherries out the back window before the convertible incident had occurred, and had attracted a bear that was hovering just a few feet from us. Now there were two. I ran out of cherries and began to throw graham crackers. The problem was, I couldn’t throw them as far as the cherries, so the bears moved in closer. Nikki began to growl. Mom looked back, saw the bear through the window and screamed at Tacy. “ Drive the car! Drive the car!” The curious bear stood up on

its hind legs and looked through the Mylar. “Oh my God, oh my God,” Mom cried. Nikki barked. Tacy inched the car forward a couple of feet, but there was nowhere to go. The bear’s gigantic face and paws just moved with it, its face a surreal green through the Mylar as if it were a cartoon character. It’s expression looked curious rather than angry. It pawed at the plastic a couple of times, which made an unnerving, grating sound inside the car. Nikki was hysterically jumping and barking. When the roof didn’t rip, and there was no more food to be had the bear sauntered off.

In the meantime, the first bear I’d attracted was still outside the back window. I opened it a crack and threw out the rest of the crackers. With its huge paw, it scooped them up as nimbly and carefully as any human could. When it had eaten them all, it too, left.

It was happy hour in Yellowstone. The complacent bears were in no hurry. They just moseyed on to the next car when the food ran out.

Camping

That evening the comedy team of Tacy and Alice tried unsuccessfully to pitch the tent. After what seemed like hours to me, and I’ve no doubt, a few cocktails later, they got it upright, but it listed to one side and the roof sagged so much it touched the cots inside. When their laughing subsided Tacy, dressed in short shorts and a sexy halter-top tramped through the woods to a Boy Scout camp she had seen earlier in the day. She returned shortly with the scout leader and several scouts, who within no time it seemed, skillfully and graciously pitched our tent and built us a roaring fire.

Later that night, after we’d sung camp songs and roasted marshmallows, the scoutmaster returned for cocktails. I fell asleep listening to them tell stories and laugh into the night.

A few hours later a ruckus outside our tent woke us. Tacy peered through the tent flap. “Oh my God,” she whispered, “a giant bear is riffling through our food.” The food had been left conveniently on the table, and it was only natural that the bear would help itself. While it took its time inspecting the premises, the three of us, and Nikki huddled together, keeping as quiet as possible. Eventually, apparently satisfied with our dinner leftovers and the next day’s breakfast cereal, the bear left as quietly as it had come. It didn’t bother to look into the tent.

That day we hiked through the paths in the woods to see Old Faithful spout and bought more groceries at the park store to cook for dinner. At night, the scouts came by to secure our food by hanging it from the limb of a tree.

However, there was to be no sleep that night either. Booms of thunder followed by lightning that lit up the tent as if it were high noon woke us up. We lay there on our cots listening to the wind and the rain beat hard against the cloth tent. I was drifting back to sleep when Tacy began to rub the tent above her to see if it was leaking. It wasn’t, at least until she rubbed it some more. She asked Mom if her side was leaking. Mom rubbed. All the rubbing of the waxy waterproof coat caused the tent to begin to leak around them. They decided we should spend the rest of the night in the dry car. Even though my section of the tent was dry, and I insisted that I was comfortable, they refused to allow Nikki and me to stay alone in the tent even if the car was only a few feet away. I figured it couldn’t be any more dangerous than having them there, but my objections were overruled. We dashed through the pouring rain into the car, where we slept fitfully in our damp pajamas until daybreak. In the morning, the scoutmaster invited us over to their campsite for breakfast. Afterwards the scouts took down our tent, packed up the gear and took it away, never to be seen again. It was our one and only camping trip.

Mary Leslie

When we finally arrived in Santa Monica, CA. Tacy and I checked into a motel near the beach. Mom went somewhere else, ostensibly for a few days. I wasn’t told where. I didn’t ask.

Tacy and I kept busy by exploring the Santa Monica Boardwalk, Hollywood and playing on the beach. At Universal Studios, I was shocked to find that the mountains and, canyons where my favorite cowboy shows were filmed were mostly painted sets. I saw cowboys and Indians, enemies in the filmed episodes hanging out together, waiting for their scenes. There was no Wild West in site. “Maybe there isn’t any, anywhere. Maybe it’s all made up,” I told Tacy. It was like finding out there was no Santa Clause. She said it didn’t matter how it was done, that the shows were entertaining was the point. She was right of course, but I was disappointed. Still, when I met Jay Silverheels—–aka, Tonto, the dashing Lone Ranger’s partner—–and got to have my picture taken with him, I was thrilled.

One afternoon Tacy and I went to Grauman’s Chinese Theater to see the footprints of the movie stars in the sidewalk and the movie Shane, starring Alan Ladd. At the end of the movie, when Shane, a handsome cowboy with a loving, generous heart, goes off alone to die, Tacy began sobbing-big racking loud sobs that made her shoulders shake and caused people to shush us and look at us with irritation. I slid down in my seat so no one could see that I was with her. Decades later I found out that Shane had been a catalyst for personal sorrow. Tacy had been crying for her best friend, my mother.

While we were having a good time being tourists, Mom was alone in Santa Monica Hospital giving birth to a daughter she would never see, one she had decided to give up for adoption. I had not even known she was pregnant.

Because of the rigid religious morals of the 1950s, innocent illegitimate children were shamed into adulthood for their parents’ purported sins, or so Mom believed. She had seen it happen to a man in Foxburg; she would not allow such a stigma to be attached to a child of hers. Better she should suffer.

Mom kept her secret locked tight in her heart for thirty-seven years, until the constant strain forced it to break through spewing the contents awkwardly into the open.

We were getting ready for my daughter’s high school graduation. Mom was in front of the bathroom mirror applying mascara. I was sitting on the toilet beside her. My son Kirk was in the next room lying on a bean bag chair, watching Sally Jesse Raphael on television. In response to sad tales of lost adopted children on the Sally Jesse Raphael show, he lamented loud, audible, sadness. Mom turned to me, her eyes dark gray, as if a cloud had descended on them, blocking the color. “You think you know everything about me, but you don’t. You have a sister.”

My sister, Mary Leslie Sten, like myself, was a product of ion and lust. However, the juices that conceived her were not spawned by perceived impending death during the war, but by postwar gratitude celebrated with music, dancing and the belief that all things are possible. Her father is Smiley, the orchestra leader at The Village.

I haven’t met her, but I imagine Mary Leslie is the perfect combination of her parents: Irish romantics who didn’t bother with the consequences, who allowed themselves to be swept away by too much joy. I wonder if sometimes, believing herself to be Swedish like her adopted parents, she questions why she is struck by occasional spontaneous urges to recite poetry, tell jokes or sing an Irish lullaby. I would love to tell her about her grand Irish Mongrel heritage.

Back Home

While Mom was giving birth, Grampa suffered a minor stroke and was diagnosed with lung cancer. We hurried home. Within a few weeks, he was confined to a rental bed set up in his living room. There he spent his days watching the river—–and, I’m sure, a life’s worth of memories–—go by. During this terrible time, Evil harped at him constantly, as if he had deliberately gotten cancer to make her life miserable. To cheer him up, I gave him my stallion, Bud, to remind him of me and some of our good times. He was touched. He had me put Bud right in the middle of the fireplace mantel where he could see it from his bed. After his funeral, I went to claim my cherished keepsake, but it was gone. I asked Evil where it was. “Oh, that ugly thing. I threw it out with the trash where it belonged.” I hated her. I ran as fast as I could up the hill into the woods cryinghurting from the inside out.

Epilogue

My childhood was a tightly woven, colorful tapestry made by the hearts and personalities of a small village. Everybody knew everybody and because Grandma Emma was from a big family, I had scores of cousins. The folks in Foxburg looked out for each other. They worked hard and enjoyed life. Stray animals were adopted or fed; nobody I knew of went hungry or without toys on Christmas. Liberal thinkers, Mom and Grandpa based their values on tolerance, acceptance and respect for individuals and their differences.

The first time I saw a black person I was at a doctor’s office in Pittsburgh with Grampa. “Why is the man so dirty?” I whispered “Doesn’t he have money for soap?”

“He’s not dirty. God made him brown,” he explained. “Like our garden has all different colors and shapes growing in it, people and animals are the flowers of God’s garden—–all different. He thinks we’re all beautiful.”

Still, by my eleventh birthday, it was clear to me that even if God considers everyone beautiful, I had a difficult time seeing it in some. And, I had personal proof that they can’t all be trusted. I had seen Evil with my own eyes.~