The Good Old Days


My parents’ romance was star-crossed from the start and would have never happened but for World War II.

In late September, 1945, my father was granted a 10-day liberty from the Coast Guard, which he had joined as a 21-year-old seaman at the outset of the war. But now the war was over and every available train, bus, and airplane had been requisitioned to transport demobilized servicemen. After a frustrating three days in Sacramento trying to book a passage home to Boston, he decided on the spur-of-the-moment to hitchhike to Lake Tahoe, instead, and spend the rest of his liberty at the casinos.

It was a decision that changed his life. He and my mother met at the ski resort where she was working as a hostess. He bedded the pretty redhead and, like the good Irish-Catholic boy he was, married her in Reno before the liberty was over.

My mom seems to have regarded the whole thing as a bit of a lark—at first. A party-girl from the San Francisco Bay Area, she had been married once before to a handsome milkman with a heavy drinking problem. Their short marriage ended when he turned up dead under mysterious circumstances in a sketchy Oakland hotel. Her subsequent boyfriends tended more toward worldly-wise tough-guys, than an earnest, sexually-naive man like my father.

Dad told me that, on the bus-ride back from Tahoe to San Francisco, when he had voiced his intention to look up a Catholic priest and make their union "legit," my mother had stared at him in open-mouthed amazement. “You're really serious about this, aren't you?” she had finally asked.

Indeed he was.

The couple muddled through 23 years of mutual bewilderment that only increased after four miscarriages, the birth of my brother and me, and a move from the Bay Area to Southern California. As I remember it, they were never, either one of them, much inclined toward introspection. They partied hard, drank heavily, and fought bitterly. Early on, my mother seemed to have held the upper hand, throwing my dad's sexual inexperience in his face during arguments and threatening on occasion to, “Pick up the phone and have any number of guys come running over to pick me up!”

It’s a threat she never carried out. As time ran on, the power dynamic shifted. In the years leading up to her suicide, my father held the emotional advantage and he criticized and taunted my mother—and my sweet, somewhat effeminate brother—relentlessly. He coined demeaning nicknames. “Say, you going to sweep the garage, Broomy?” to my tidy brother. Or, “The Golden Goose is ascending her throne!” crowed gleefully when my mother tried to retreat behind the bathroom’s closed door.

Derisive laughter became my father’s weapon of choice, wielded at the slightest hint of vulnerability. Nothing was off limits. He mocked physical frailties, bodily functions, personality traits, appearances; he even resorted to ethnic slurs. “Hey, Isadore the Jew, how about a loan?” was a routine taunt to my thrifty brother. I grew up thinking “Jew the price down,” was an acceptable expression of speech, until one day in my late teens when a Jewish shopkeeper angrily set me straight.

Surviving my family was like an 18-year tiptoe through an unmarked minefield. I learned early on to tread softly and keep my head down. Dare to challenge my father’s bullying, and he would take the offensive. “What’s the matter, you got no sense of humor? Aw, come on, I was only joking!” he'd say. “Can't you take a joke?”

The effects of his emotional bullying were devastating. My brother’s self-esteem was ripped to shreds before it had a chance to develop.

As the youngest, I looked on the emotional carnage and knew I never wanted to be a target of my father’s bitter humor. So, to my everlasting shame, I joined forces with the enemy. I embraced the nicknames, laughed at the put-downs, and joined my chorus of criticism to my father’s. Picking here, finding fault there, we became a relentless tag-team. Looking back, I realize I acted out of self-preservation—understandable, under the circumstances. But I am still so sorry.

But why did my father do it? Perhaps the answer lies in his own childhood. Deprivation and conflict run as themes through the stories he tells of that time. His birth, in 1920 in Boston, surprised his then 49-year-old Irish-born mother. There were seven children already. And seven years difference in age between him and his next nearest sibling; 18 between him and the oldest. While he speaks glowingly of his mother—a saint, who fed a family of nine on a shoestring budget and never turned away a hungry beggar from their door—he says little beyond the barest of facts about his father.

Rather, the stories of his Depression-era youth revolve around Boston winters so cold, you could see your breath in the air of his unheated, garret bedroom; older brothers who drank too much, ran with the wrong crowd and brought only grief to the family; fistfights between roving bands of neighborhood kids. And no affection ever shown by his father to his mother, or to the children.

I know my mother was beaten by her father; it seems likely that my dad was by his, too. Else why did they treat us as they did? “Shut up, or I’ll give you something to cry about!” was a common threat. And one carried out, too.

My memory is hazy on the details, but as I recall it, my mother’s violence was typically spontaneous—a shout, a quick grab of the wrist and a slap or two or three, usually across the buttocks. My father’s, on the other hand, was delivered in a cooler state of mind. “Wait ‘til your dad gets home!” occasioned hours of dread on the part of my brother or me. When the punishment was finally administered, it was bent over my father’s knees, with the belt he used to hold up his pants applied to our bare flesh.

Even worse, though, were the few times my father went off at my brother in a rage. One time, I remember looking on in horror as he picked my brother up and threw him through the air and against the wall of the bedroom.

I’ve completely forgotten the cause of his fury, whether or not he had been drinking, even what happened afterwards. Did my brother cry? Was he knocked unconscious? Did my father apologize, show remorse?

I don’t know. All I remember is the image of my brother’s body hurtling through the air—skinny 12-year-old arms and legs flailing—and slamming into the wall.

No bones were broken. No doctor called or authorities of any kind summoned. No one intervened that occasion or any of the times events spun out of control in our family. Back then, I believed such a level of domestic violence as ours was just the way families were.

I’ll never understand popular nostalgia for the 1950’s and 60’s. For me, it is an era filled with bigotry, denial, ignorance and shame, all mixed together under a veil of uncomfortable secrecy. No way I’d ever want to go back.