Wisdom of the Aged by Craig Hattersley - HTML preview

A typical American family of five, we enjoyed an “Ozzie and Harriet” sort of existence in Fifties America. Older Bro and I proudly wore our coonskin caps when Fess Parker lit up the screen as Davy Crockett, younger Sis had her Barbie dolls and stuffed animals. When finally Dad sprung for one of the new-fangled black-and-white TVs, we tuned into the Mickey Mouse Club and sprawled on the floor enthralled by the heroics of celluloid heroes John Wayne and Audie Murphy as they battled their way through enemy hordes in the Big One, World War II. We lived and breathed American exceptionalism, drilled in each morning in school beginning with the pledge of allegiance to the flag (appended in 1954 when I turned five with the phrase “under God”). And nobody wanted to be seen as different. We were all good little citizens. I remember in 1956 during an informal poll in class not raising my hand to support my family’s fave for prez, Adlai Stevenson, when all else but one supported Ike.

When not in school, we freely roamed the neighborhoods without worry, returning only in the evening at bellows from the parents signaling dinner. Life was good in the bedroom community outside Rochester, New York, blissfully unaware as we were of the titanic struggle with “godless communism.” Our only inkling came in elementary school, where we learned to duck and cover—hide under the desk and cover the back of the neck in the event of nuclear attack. It all made some sort of sense, and we did as instructed. We lined up outside the nurse’s office to suck on our own personal sugar cube, which contained, we learned, the incredible new Salk vaccine to ward off polio. Good citizens all, we learned of the outside world from one of three television networks.

Our world view was decidedly Middle American: Dad and Mom came from Montana, moving east so Dad could finish studies in photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology (R.I.T.), ultimately transitioning to teaching there. Son of a Montana circuit-court judge, Dad had served in the Navy during WWII, stationed as a photographer’s mate in the Caribbean after his brother Frank went missing in the Pacific theater. (He later turned up.) He tried his hand at painting, complete with a show in Chicago of his works, then gravitated toward photography, where he would gain some repute through the years.

As Dad worked teaching six days a week, organized religion played only a small role in our lives, aside from an egalitarian sensibility that illumined our upbringing. Given the option of going to church on Sunday or relaxing with Dad, we stayed home, gorging on the pancakes he’d make for breakfast. Easter morning and other holidays, we duded up and attended mass, but became more estranged as time went on, with the foreign-sounding words aped in unison by the devout churchgoers and their prim religiosity in Sunday school lording it over our poor untutored souls. Better to be gone than to be different.

Which is not to say we weren’t raised to believe in what’s right. Dad and Mom, staunch FDR democrats, laid down the law about racist taunts, for instance—or any kind of mockery making light of the less fortunate. We couldn’t recite the catechism, but we knew the substance.

Only in later years did I come to find out just how progressive Dad’s views really were. When R.I.T. debated over whether to employ a gay man as a photography professor, he lobbied in his behalf, leading to the hiring of Minor White at the school. Our suburban home also served as party central for a generation of young photography students, gathered for the occasional “beatnik party” (to which we, as “just kids,” weren’t invited). Black-and-white photos of some of these bashes still adorn Dad’s section of the archives at R.I.T.

Amid the unremitting normality of life in Upstate New York, we did our best to fit in, with half-hearted stabs at little- league baseball, the occasional fishing trip, a couple of interminable cross-country trips on Greyhound to visit the grandfolks in Montana. We attended elementary school in a progressive district in Brighton, a suburb of Rochester, where I began conversational French in third grade and exchanged letters with a penpal in France. Show-and-tell, an integral part of the third-grade socialization process, generally saw me presenting on some neat rocks I had found, or my latest exploits in Cub Scouts. We were the bears.

Yeah, you look like a bear, Hattersley. Guffaw.

Until that one day.

Passing on the latest from Mom, as is the wont of unfiltered kids, I proudly announced that we were considering moving to Israel and living in a kibbutz.

Hunh?

What in hell was that about?

Unbeknownst to us kids, kept from the horrors of real life, a marriage had disintegrated around us. The why and wherefore never became clear to me, though sketchy details would lay bare the blame on one side or the other over time. An affair, maybe two, anger, recriminations—all well hidden from us—leading to a “mental breakdown,” as Mom would assert. And Dad, diagnosed as a manic depressive, fell prey to the tender mercies of the medieval psychiatric practices of the day: electro-shock therapy and massive doses of Lithium.

Not yet privy to the ugliness of the dissolution, we only slowly grew aware of the ramifications of the big D, Divorce (virtually unheard-of in those times), as our happy little universe warped into something entirely different. Dad no longer lived with us in our quiet little suburban neighborhood. Mom, with the first of a string of fanciful notions, a pioneer woman striking out against all odds, determined that maybe we should do the kibbutz thing. She had, after all, fought skunk families and rattlesnakes teaching all grades in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Montana before marriage. And somewhere in the dim reaches of her family tree, there had been some Jewish blood.

Of course, the practicalities of the situation never led to any real attempt to move to Israel. For one of hard-headed Irish-German stock, Mom still never let facts intrude on her extravagant fantasies. She then determined she would strike out on her own, realities be damned, and took a job working at a chain of small-town weekly newspapers, asserting nobly that she asked only for the minimum alimony support in the divorce. She would become the intrepid newswoman—hard-drinkin’, hard-livin’ woman of the world.

The first of a long string of boyfriends, met during production of a summer-stock play Mom became involved in, parked his ’57 convertible Plymouth in the driveway, showing all the neighborhood what this divorced woman was about in a time when this was just not done. Of course, that changed our standing in the ’hood drastically. The longtime friend next door that Sis grew up with could no longer play with her. The good-catholic sentiment of her family dictated that we were now personae non gratae on the block, which infuriated momma bear. Mom angrily avowed that she’d done her duty, religion be damned. She had gone through seven pregnancies, but because of her RH-negative blood type, only the three survived.

She upped and sold the house we’d grown up in, after threatening to list it with the NAACP to “serve them all right,” moving us thirty miles down the road to small-town Canandaigua for her newspaper job. Thus began a cycle of moves between rent homes and apartments, back and forth to Rochester, in increasingly run-down areas.

Dad moved into a rental near the R.I.T. campus, where the kids would take turns staying on weekends. There I first experienced hanging out with the black kids in the neighborhood, learning how to spit righteously and fashion shivs from wooden dowels and car parts. Still running free, with little or no adult supervision needed.

That arrangement served for a short time, until Mom cracked up her car one icy winter evening. We didn’t know how serious it was then, but Dad had to come shepherd us through the next couple months until Mom could again fend for herself, complete with horrible scars, a plate in her head, and a metal rod holding her arm together.

Sooner than later, small-town Canandaigua wore on us. My only friend had been Johnny, who lived next door, son of some older bible-thumping holy rollers. Though older even than Bro, he too had few friends and took me under his wing, and I accompanied him to high school wrestling each day, serving as his practice opponent, and became something of a team mascot, traveling with them to matches. I made few friends my own age.

My sole sortie into pre-teen society had ended on a sour note, one of those painful memories that subsume any fond recollects. I wanted badly to be a part of things, and so took lessons in the foxtrot and box waltz at Miss Botsford’s School of Dance, culminating in the grand formal dance. I showed up dressed in the one white shirt I owned, neatly pressed, and found, to my mortification, that all the other boys sported suits and ties. When queried about my sport coat, I allowed as how I’d hung it up when I came in, and bluffed and blustered my way through the evening, exploding in tears in the car as Dad drove me home. I’d had enough small town.

As it was, however, Mom soon recovered enough to begin working again, this time at the paper’s home office in Rochester. So in my second year of junior high (always the Dark Ages for blossoming teenagers), we moved back—into Strathmore Circle, a small project in a tough Italian neighborhood of inner-city Rochester. The denizens there sported greased-back hair, black-leather “fence-climber” boots with pointed toes, and tight, short high-water jeans approximating the James Dean look of the times. I learned to fight to find a slot in the pecking order, despite efforts to remain relatively invisible in the rowdy school halls.

This proved difficult at times, given our deteriorating economic situation. Each new school year involved a cheap upgrade to our limited wardrobes, which meant that going into junior high in Rochester I had just two pairs of pants, one a light-tan corduroy pair that barely fit as my weight steadily climbed. To my horror, these had been washed with a red sweater in the project wash area, and they turned a decidedly pink color. But with no other choice, I had to wear them, and suffer the consequences. A chubby kid in pink pants drew a fair share of macho derision—and worse.

Our transient status contributed to a growing isolation, as we hadn’t much time between moves to develop any lasting friendships. This didn’t really faze me, as I was ever the introvert anyway. I managed to pull in decent grades despite the problems created by dislocations, in part because Mom never remembered to transfer our records to each successive new school district and I invariably wound up in the “middle track,” where they stuck kids of indeterminate intelligence. This did allow me, at our inner-city stop, to gain favor and some small measure of protection by providing answers to test questions to the football stud in my English class. But it didn’t totally remove me from the scrabble to find some sort of identity in the volatile projects.

One incident led to my first encounter with the authorities. While waiting for the school bus one morning, I squared off against Bruce, for whatever reason du jour. He popped me one then, before I could return the favor, took off running. When all efforts to corral him failed, I ultimately climbed onto the bus when it arrived and settled, seething, in the back. Bruce stood in front, occasionally turning to smirk at me, adding no end to my festering mood. I bided my time. Then, nearing the last stop, when he had given off keeping an eye on me, I strode to the front of the bus and, in my best John Wayne style, wheeled him around and landed a haymaker on his nose, declaring, “You can’t run now, Bruce.”

Blood flew, girls screamed, and we grappled in the aisles, flailing away until the bus driver jerked the bus to a stop and yanked us apart. Hence my first visit to the principal’s office, where momma bear declared that it was Bruce’s fault, hitting me then running. The principal couldn’t disagree but suspended me nevertheless. Oh well. Some time off to watch soaps (all that daytime TV offered) and ponder what cachet my schoolbus bravado might attach to my rep.

It did provide some measure of relief from the constant clash of testosterone-induced swagger, the bloody encounter testifying to the fact that I would throw punches. Most fights of the time involved frantic wrestling around until one chokehold proved devastating and the bout ended with a quick “I give.” This upped the ante a bit, giving me some brawler cred—no small matter.

Mom had little clue about any of this. She continued her charge into a newspaper career from the new location, hanging and drinking with her peers and various politicos, achieving some measure of notoriety of her own. This left little time for much in the way of parenting. As Sis later noted, we raised ourselves. Dinner often meant a bag of cold burgers brought home by our tipsy mother long after dark, or a quick trip to the Golden Point in Rochester, a precursor to McDonald’s, where we’d each get a dollar to stuff our bellies. We soon learned the merits of Hamburger Helper, which served to fill kids quickly on a late evening. Seafood was limited to fishsticks or Howard Johnson’s fried clams. Breakfast often was a half-dozen donuts to split, secured the night before—and often eaten then.

As the middle child, I tended to roll with it, swallowing my turbulent teenage emotions. That’s the way Mom was, so I dealt with it, even as disappointments piled up. Her limited view as a part-time parent saw me as the kid who did well in school, for which I enjoyed some sort of favored status as a result. And besides, at a young age I decided I would be president some day, and prudently plotted out my ascension: To be president, you have to be a politician; to be a politician you have to be a lawyer. A mother’s pride—the son who wants to be a lawyer.

I proudly assumed the title of anointed one, Momma’s little capitalist. I was a mercenary little bastard. I wanted nothing more than to be rich and famous. From grade school on, I always hatched some sort of scheme to make money to augment any pittance of allowance. Early on, I found a rapt consumer class in third grade for a product I marketed devised with straight pins: I loaded on three designer colored beads and a piece of boondoggle and made tiny swords, which I pinned to a display cloth and sold at three for a nickel. Big seller. I always sported a pocket bulging with small change.

As soon as I came of age, I started throwing a paper route, carrying on through various stops in Rochester and Canandaigua—a tough way to make a dime during the frigid pre-dawn mornings of Upstate New York, though kids in the clime were pretty inured to the worst that winter could offer. We frolicked in the drifts of arctic blasts and delighted in the days when weather precluded attendance in school, choosing then to build snow forts and toboggan down local hills till impending frostbite drove us indoors.

An otherwise-erratic home life, however, caused increasing conflict, given Mom’s desultory attempts at parenting, her drinking, and a marked bad taste in men. A series of forgettable liaisons with boyfriends of questionable repute, some of whom ultimately wound up dead (including one minor-league Mafioso type) aggravated the tension. Bro, who as eldest probably had the best sense of what was going on, fought heatedly with her, and Sis, ever the daddy’s girl, couldn’t countenance putting up with a one of these deadbeats. I sublimated as always, marinating in teen angst, and held it in.

I only began to realize how far things had gone one morning in the projects as I was getting ready to catch the schoolbus. I ducked back into the room I shared with Bro to grab something and saw him, hunkered down between our beds hiding. He shushed me, telling me not to say anything. He was skipping that day. I didn’t rat him out, of course, though I muddled through the day wondering what the hell was happening to us.

Two seemingly incongruous events of that school year—1963–64—served ultimately to open cracks in the façade of an American dreamscape. In November 1963 John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, quickly adjudged the work of a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, but left simmering in doubt in subsequent years. (The Church Committee in 1978 would allow that it was “probably” the work of a conspiracy.) Thus began the slow seepage of revelations over succeeding years about the dark workings of our hidden government in the U.S., with its penchant for, among sundry other black ops, assassinating foreign leaders who might threaten American corporate interests—all in God’s name.

Of course, none of this had yet disturbed the common ethos of American exceptionalism. Yet I remember hearing the announcement over the school loudspeaker about Kennedy and falling into an anxious funk, aggravated on the bus ride home from school by junior-high girls chittering away as usual, oblivious to the news.

A second event, in February 1964, at the time a seemingly frivolous paean to a gaggle of girls, was the appearance of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show in front of 73 million Americans—three-quarters of the total adult audience in the United States at the time. Adult America rolled its eyes at the sight of teenage girls in the audience screaming and crying over the band. Years later, a young friend remarked that her father believed fervently that the Beatles were the sole cause of Sixties turmoil. Maybe true, but perception oftentimes stands in for truth. In any event, the show drew the nation’s attention to the mop-top band.

The next day in class, I jokingly combed my Vitalis-sodden locks down onto my forehead, just fleetingly, though at least one girl remarked how good it looked like that. (A morning ritual at the time involved flooding the hair with the noxious stuff, combing it back into the de rigueur ducktail, which then hardened into an immutable coif sculpted with the ladies in mind.) I wasn’t going to go there, though, and quickly slicked it back into place. It would be years before the dry look took over. None of us was enough of a trendsetter to readily adopt the mop haircuts (not of a very manly nature, and mocked by mature America), though ultimately we did go dry, with the carefully tousled look structured for hours before a mirror. Dress codes enforced in school at the time ensured no hair would slouch down past the collar, and only society aberrants would dare wear a shirt not tucked in. That was enough to be hauled from the school hallways and dressed down.

We were, after all, raised to be extremely proper, with attendant good manners and a young person’s tendency towards meticulous appearance. Our whole generation, a product of the times, was preoccupied with odor and its eradication. Only the rare student didn’t tote a pack of gum for fresh breath and the rare teacher who didn’t have some sort of publicized regulations concerning penalties for its use.

Young-man fashion ultimately decided that we made the scene redolent of colognes like Canoe or English Leather. Always au courant, we rejected Old Spice as something you bought your father for Christmas (a nice little gift set, including soap-on-a-rope or the like). My father probably went to his grave with cases stowed away in his attic. Part of our morning ablutions included a liberal sousing of the day’s dress till we reeked, such that our appearance in any room was foreshadowed by bilious clouds of fragrance—strong enough to clear an asthmatic’s nasal passages.

Thus, our preoccupation with conforming to the norm shielded us from a growing malaise in the country. Unbeknownst in our narrow little worlds, tensions already strained at the seams of our society. In 1963, when George Wallace became governor of Alabama, he defiantly proclaimed “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!” In May 1963, Alabama Public Safety Commissioner “Bull” Connor later unleashed fire hoses and police dogs on the demonstrators and arrested them by the score. In August, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to an audience of some 250,000 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. By 1964, it had begun to boil over, with the Harlem riots hitting the news, followed directly by similar riots in Rochester in the old neighborhoods Dad had recently vacated. In the insular white neighborhoods, the prevailing sentiment ran to what in hell did they want? As things settled down in Upstate New York, good citizens everywhere put away their guns, clean and well-oiled.

To our itinerant family, it might as well have happened in another universe, as we had hunkered down in another move away from Rochester. Mom had become editor of the weekly newspaper in Canandaigua, some thirty miles south. During summers for a couple years at that point, absent any cheap daycare options for three kids, she’d dump us at the Canandaigua Swimming School—where the locals took swimming lessons on the lake during the day—with fifty cents each for our lunch of choice (ostensibly for a burger and soda or the like, though I’d just as likely opt for a bag of Cheetos and a carton of chocolate milk). Sometimes, though, bro and I might go out on a limb and gamble lunch money in an anxiety-ridden game of Euchre against one of the lifeguards at the school, older guys in college. A win and you’d eat big for the day, a loss and you’d go hungry. One good upshot of summers thus spent was that through all the lessons taken I became quite the swimmer, and even progressed into teaching young’uns myself.

At some point, Mom had decided that the daily commute from Rochester didn’t work, so we moved back to Canandaigua—right in the middle of the spring semester of my freshman year in high school, 1964. This proved disastrous to my grades, as I suddenly had a month to prepare for finals in classes I hadn’t been taking over the course of the year. Particularly adept at the laziness of youth, I had been accustomed to doing just enough work at school to get my grades and skate by. My GPA took a hit I would struggle to overcome, as we stayed there until I finished high school, though in several different locations around town.

I labored as well to find my place in a well-defined teen society there. Though we had lived briefly in Canandaigua previously, the small town was essentially a bedroom community where most of the kids had grown up together, and by high school local teens had gravitated into cliques to which one did or didn’t belong. I wasn’t cool, good-looking, athletic, or any of the other established norms that allowed for ready acceptance, and I fell into a carefully crafted persona of the brash, bold, and witty outsider. I soon happened upon a small crowd of like-minded miscreants, and one particular varmint, Carlito, would remain my partner in crime over the next fifty years.

If anything, Canandaigua epitomized small-town America, nestled as it was in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. The name means “chosen spot” in Iroquois. It’s worthy to note that the Iroquois Federation of tribes ruled an empire in the Northeast that at one time dwarfed even the Roman in size and extent. In the 21 years I lived in New York, I never met an Indian. By the Sixties, the tourist and his vacation dollar were king, with Canandaigua Lake and its amusement park the court.

High school reverie, as such, generally consisted of cruising Main Street quaffing a tallied amount of illicit six-packs in the back seat of an older dude’s clunker, in search of forbidden fruit. A fruitless quest, mostly, because sex in its most common form nestled only within the folds of Playboy magazine—and in the fevered dreams of pubescent boys. The search, nevertheless, proceeded apace in all earnestness, however ineptly.

Ultimately, frustration and the predetermined, defined path to success—college—led young Canandaiguans out into the world. By high school, we had all mapped out, as our parents expected, our personal paths to glory. Given the times, with the escalation of the war in Vietnam, the real options had become more and more limited. If you went on to college, you would be exempt from the draft. That point was made perfectly clear when the body bags from earlier graduating classes began arriving home. Still, ever the good citizens, we told ourselves: “I’ll do my duty if I’m called upon by my country. But I think I’d rather be getting on to college.”

Besides, college was the defined road to success. We never believed that cowardice entered into the decision. We felt for sure that we would fight if we had to, but wouldn’t go looking for it. At that time and beyond, Vietnam was a blue-collar war, waged on the backs of hoi polloi progeny for the politics of national honor—or some such. We believed the government rationales on communism and domino theory. And we partied on.