An Immigrant's Story and a Building Whose Life was Well-Lived

Yokum Brook Farm - ca. 2006 -- the Vahle homestead
(The old tailor shop is visible at the rear of the house)

On 27 Jun 1908, a son Franz Vahle was born in Fürstenberg, Wesel, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany to Wilhelm and Elizabeth Whittler Vahle. He was the youngest of the three children of a Roman Catholic family.

Franz trained to be a tailor. Both of his parents died before 1928. As the drums of war were beating in Europe, in 1928 Franz’s older brother Josef, a carpenter and a German veteran of the First World War, went to Rio de Janeiro. Josef sent money to Franz and told him to go to New York and find work there – that life in Europe was about to become a nightmare. When Franz was settled, he should write to Josef in Brazil and Josef would come to America. [That did happen and Josef came to Newport, RI, and worked as a cabinet maker for the U.S. Navy.]

Steamer Alfred Ballin (Ancestry.com)

On July 19th, 1930, with a few dollars in his pocket, and filled with fear and courage – Franz arrived at the Port of New York aboard the steamer Alfred Ballin. He spoke no English but the little he had tried to learn on the passage.

Franz spent his last dollar on a piece of apple pie and a cup of coffee and settled on a bench by a church in the city to plan what his tomorrow should be.

That evening two Catholic nuns befriended him. They heard his story. And they changed his life. They brought him to talk with their priest. Then for some months, he worked at odd jobs in the convent and nearby church and rectory; the sisters taught him English, the church gave him shelter, and food.

Immigrant Franz Vahle ca. 1931
German Tailor
(photo from naturalization file)

In April of 1931, nine months after he arrived in America, they told him that a Jesuit Seminary in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, was looking for a tailor to make new and repair worn cassocks and raiment for the brothers and priests there. They provided funds enough to get Franz by train from New York to Stockbridge, where the carriage from Shadowbrook fetched their new German tailor to his new home.

Franz was enormously successful as a tailor to the Jesuit clergy. Families of newly ordained Jesuit priests and brothers hired him on to outfit their young family clergymen heading out to new assignments and missions in odd corners of the world. 

In less than three years, Franz had carved out his place in the United States. He worked very hard, and was very, very good at what he did. In April of 1933, the Jesuit brothers helped Franz submit his Declaration of Intention to become a U.S. Citizen.

Also by 1933, Franz had met a young woman in nearby Lenox, a short walk from Shadowbrook Seminary. Anna Smith was the eldest daughter of a Polish (Prussian) Catholic couple with an indecipherable surname who had immigrated in 1902. Anna was born in New Jersey in 1905.

The popular tailor to the Jesuits of Shadowbrook and the bright young Anna were married on November 6, 1933 at St. Ann’s Church in Lenox and the marriage is also entered in Stockbridge where Shadowbrook then stood. Never was the union of two poor immigrant families blessed and celebrated by so many clergy.

They rented a small farm on West Road in Lenox, and for a few years, Franz continued to work at the Seminary building. Anna worked in the office of a local fuel company. The first of their six children was born in September 1934.

In September of 1935, a priest and a brother from Shadowbrook witnessed Franz’s Petition for Naturalization. His citizenship was granted June 29, 1936 at the Superior Court in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Signatures of Rev. John Madden and Brother John Maher on Franz's Naturalization Petition

The next three children followed in 1937, 1939, and 1941. His Jesuit friends at Shadowbrook were apparently politically well-connected around the globe. Late in 1940, the priests told Franz to buy the new tires his old truck needed because “soon you won’t be able to buy them”.

By 1942, the population of priests and novices were outgrowing the facilities of the old Carnegie mansion they had christened Shadowbrook. Franz and Anna’s family was outgrowing their small rented place in Stockbridge. So Franz and Anna bought a six-acre farm bordered by Yokum Brook in Lenox – a place with a large barn for livestock and equipment, a three-bedroom house, an old ice house and outhouse, and a variety of sheds and buildings for chickens and pigs and sheep. Grazing land and fields to grow their own food. Like in the ‘Old World’, they could be self-sustaining with the help of their three growing sons and a daughter.

And Franz could move his clerical tailoring operation out of Shadowbrook to his new location about a mile or so away.

On June 16, 1942, with the help of his Shadowbrook friends, Franz and his children moved to their new home in Lenox, while Anna was at the hospital giving birth to their fifth child, fourth son, John Joseph Vahle. (Their sixth child, a second girl, was born there in 1945.)

To set up his business as Tailor to the Clergy, Franz needed a building separate from the house and the clamor of five children. There was a gas station on the corner of the road down the street apiece. They were going to put a new building there, so Franz bought the old gas station building and moved it to his new home – setting it perhaps twenty feet behind the house. He put in a kerosene heater, added shelves for his bolts of cotton and gabardine, set up his sewing table, ironing table, and cutting table and his sewing machine – a gift from the religious brothers he served. Until the day he died, he devoted his days to making cassocks, Roman collars, and three-peaked birettas for Jesuit priests in all parts of the world.

Franz with his truck ca. 1950

In March of 1956, the Shadowbrook Seminary burned to the ground. It was an awful event, easily seen from the Vahle farm. The priest and the brother who sponsored Franz’s naturalization were among the many who died in the fire, as was the Shadowbrook mechanic who sponsored his original Declaration of Intention. Franz spent endless hours, working in his shop day and night, to replace some of the religious garb the survivors would need. 

Shadowbrook was rebuilt in 1970, but Franz had never recovered from the fiery loss of so many of the friends who had helped him build such a good life so far from the land of his birth.

Franz died in that house in 1974. Anna remained there until her death in 1991.

In 1991, the property came into the hands of the son John who was born the day the family moved into it. Since 1992, John and I have lived here, maintained the house and the barn and the old tailor shop and an old chicken coop. Essentially, yes, John has lived here all of his seventy-five years. I am an old Irish-Yankee Cape Cod girl who moved to the Berkshires in 1969, but John has always been a Massachusetts highlander.

The house and barn are in fine fettle, but the tailor shop and the chicken coop have not aged gracefully. They became dangerous as time took its toll.

The old tailor shop on Friday August 18, 2017

The old gas-station-turned-tailor-shop stood in the place where Franz originally put it until today, August 21, 2017. It was demolished this morning. The chicken coop will be gone by the end of the week.

In cleaning out the old shop, we found one last lonely cassock with a small tear in a sleeve. There were metal patterns for the Roman collars and the birettas, too. The cassock would never survive a washing, so I fluffed it in cold air in the drier for an hour with a softener sheet. The vile odor of mildew is gone. I packaged it carefully in fabric safe plastic. I don’t know what will become of it, but it’s will to survive is astonishing.

In place of the tailor shop, we will be placing a new Amish-built shed – a beautiful building about 10’ by 12’, with barn-like doors, and windows, and shutters – a building which would have given Franz all the space he needed to cut and sew and press all those yards of black gabardine. It will be more functional for a couple of aging folks – now it will house a lawn tractor, snow blower, snow rake, and miscellaneous garden tools. It will be guarded by my mother’s small garden statue of St. Francis sitting in the window.


MRP
Lenox, MA




For more on Shadowbrook, please see:

In a Facebook post in 2014,  Fr. James Martin, SJ  refers us to an extensive collection of photos of the "Old Shadowbrook" and the Shadowbrook fire, from the archives of the New England Province, and Holy Cross, curated by Alice Howe:

http://college.holycross.edu/…/ex…/shadowbrook/sb_index.html

On Why Do They Hate Me?

I have 118 Facebook friends. I am not a 'collector'. At one time, before the political wasteland hit last fall, I had 123. One deleted her Facebook last fall for personal reasons. Three of them I unfriended because they never stopped reposting truly offensive political/gender memes. One unfriended me because I decided to try my old hand at growing pot, now that it’s legal here.

I use the Friends lists feature in Facebook. Sometime last fall, I divided my friends into to lists – Trump and Trumpnot. I use those lists on occasion to avoid posting or sharing things that would offend someone in one or the other list. Sometimes I forget. I'm sorry.

A dozen of my friends are old ones from around these parts, folks I worked with, folks I played with. The 102 that remain are a nice mix of roughly 1/3 blood relatives to one degree or another, 1/3 genealogy and lineage group friends, and 1/3 old friends from high school. There are crossovers, of course. Many of the genealogy group are bound by blood to me, and vice versa. Same for lineage groups.

Together, my friends are a mix of liberals and conservatives; Democrats, Republicans, and Independents; Christians, Jews, and none-of-the-above. They are spread from England, across America, to Australia. Most of them are tolerant of divergent views. A few are not. Two or three are Calvinists and believe in the total marriage of church and state. (Fortunately, the Constitution protects us from that, so I don't have to argue with them.) 

Most of them know we don’t see eye-to-eye on one thing or another, but we have enough in common to agree on nearly everything else, or at least have no opinion.

But, at least five of these people hate me, and maybe they don’t even know it. I have been trying to assess just why those folks want to see my grandchildren suffer from lack of insurance, lack of clean water, lack of clean air, lack of a needed bootstrap if life turns sour. There is other damage they want to do to my grandchildren, but those are the four that concern me the most.

I have reviewed them by gender, category, economics, and lifestyle. I think I finally have figured it out. They don’t hate me, so much as they don’t identify at all with my place in this world. They are mostly self-centered folks, too. Each of them wants to be the center of their world, the lodestone of their community, the reason for the party, if you will.

First, I am going to let my cousin in Florida off the hook. He is a self-made millionaire. He came from ordinary middle-America and worked hard to achieve all he has. He is a conscientious Roman Catholic. He gives generously to charities, tithes his money and time to the Church. He simply needs a business-friendly administration in Washington to continue building his fortune, and is willing to take the bitter with the better. He needn’t worry about his grandchildren’s health care or their environment, though I would bet he does worry about them. He’d set them up in Canada or Ireland or anywhere without contaminated air and water, if the need arose. He’d pay for their illnesses and surgeries, and even their chemo and rehab. If he knew my own core family was in dire straits, he would provide help in a heartbeat, though I’d never ask. He is always kind and never offensive. He is ultra-conservative in his business, and generous in the extreme with his family and community. He gets a pass.

Of the remaining four – all are limited in what they read and view – and all are egocentric. They are predictable, and sometimes boring on Facebook because they share memes, and only memes, to make political points. Not a one of them has ever posted a personal opinion with back-up sources. Not a one of them has ever posted a link to a reliable media article that might lead to my better understanding of their feelings and positions. I know that all of them are literate, and could do better than that.

Two who hate me are women who espouse extreme and vocal disregard for those things I hold dear, and are quick to criticize my views. They both had government sector careers. Neither will be needing Social Security. They both are childless women who feel they have nothing invested in the future of the planet, no need to care if it lasts past their own lifespans.

I have many relatives and friends who are childless, but still they care about leaving a clean planet behind. They have nieces, nephews, and neighbors and care about their futures. It’s only these two specific women who think that when they exit, it doesn’t matter who else is coming down the road. They have no idea why not everyone sees things their way.

The other two who hate me are men who had lifetime military careers and will have lifetime pensions and medical care. One of the two has inherited wealth that will outlive him, no matter how fast or how much he spends. Both of these men have children and grandchildren. Neither of them are the least concerned about possibly leaving a trashed planet to their grandchildren.

I’ve known both of these men for six decades or more.  Their disregard for environmental conservation appalls me. I hope someday to understand why they don’t care that their descendants may be drinking contaminated water or breathing smog. Perhaps the military lifestyle encouraged them to feel at when their days are done, the mission is complete – the next person in the barrel can worry about things in a world they no longer have to abide. Perhaps their careers kept them away from home for so long, their children are strangers who don't matter in the grand scheme of all things 'Mother Earth'.

I am no longer perplexed by the stubborn ones, the careless ones, the selfish ones who can’t be bothered to think of any future other than their own. For them, the ‘greater good’ applies only on the inside of their own front door. I still like sharing a piece of their daily lives, their families, their pets, their vacations, their ancestral 'finds' -- the things we have in common. I just won't count on them to seek a clean environment and reliable health care for either my family or their own.

They dislike me because I do care? By George, I think I’ve got it!

MRP

On Having Pneumonia in a Nor'easter

Two geezers with pneumonia stranded in a nor’easter. Food enough for a few days; cat food enough for a few days. Oil enough for a few days. Drugs enough for a few days. We’ll worry about the storm cleanup -- in a few days.

I was born on a ‘5’, 1945. So, to me the word ‘decade’ is a 5 to 4 sort of thing. I’m in my eighth decade (2015-2024). I once pictured my ‘golden years’ much differently than what I see coming. As a result of a recent election, my calendar has been returned to my third decade – 1965 - 1974. My body is still in my eighth decade, but the world around it has regressed fifty years.

If I hadn’t hated that third decade so darned much, I’d welcome the do-over, but only if the body clock could be set back, too, but not the technology clock. Yeah, I'd like a conditional mulligan. On my own terms.

There are so many things I would do differently. I would actively protest unjust war, racial inequality, and women’s inequality. I would wear more pant suits and fewer skirts. I would wear comfortable shoes instead of high heels. I would wear pants and shorts on the golf course, rather than abide by men’s dress-like-a-woman codes. I would play golf before noon and challenge them to remove me. I would not marry, but I would have children anyway. I would go to law school. I would be a lawyer now. Like my friends Steve and Karen.

They say long-term memory hangs on better than short-term memory. Theoretically, when I get that ‘déjà vu’ feeling now, there’ll be a good reason. It’s not just a passing memory. I’m not going tapioca. I’m not watching too much ‘Murder She Wrote’. It’s not a re-run. It’s reality. That’s so reassuring.  

Oh! How I wish I’d seen this coming. I could have done so much good with that half-century, and be better equipped to handle this unexpected déjà vu time of my life. But, I made choices based on more progressive expectations, and I have been caught a little short because of them. I will adapt because, indeed, I have been here before.

We have years of Throwback Thursdays ahead of us. And Throwback Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays and Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays, too.

I can make new choices this time around. I have with me the fifty years of experience I gained seeing my country through ill-conceived wars, racial injustice, and the oppression of women and minorities. I have in my genes the memories of the intolerance toward my Irish immigrant families and their religion. I am duly armed.

There is a wide range of tools available that weren’t there in my third decade. We have the internet, a place chock full of all the knowledge since the beginning of recorded time. And we have social media to bring folks in San Diego together with folks in Boston. We have telephones that keep track of our calendars and contacts, and let us talk with each other.

One priceless thing we have is satellite radio, because one of the best products of my third decade was the music. The music of protest: Bob Dylan; Credence Clearwater Revival; Peter, Paul and Mary; Barry McGuire; Buffalo Springfield; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. The unforgettable "Jesus Christ Superstar" score. We had John Denver to celebrate our earth; we had James Taylor – well, we still have him.

SiriusXM has music channels for the 60’s and the 70’s. Our old music is richer and more available on a platform fifty years newer. And we can hear it in our cars, on our phones, and on our computers. I never saw that coming – but I am so glad it did.

Coughing, fevered, and tired, I look out at the fifteen inches of snow the blizzard has left in our yard. I give thanks that I no longer have that ’62 Falcon or the ’70 Torino, with their tire chains, and those old bias ply tires. Do NOT want a do-over on those. 

We have Jeeps now with all their gidgets and gadgets and let me tell you – they will move through fifteen inches of snow with ease when you really need to get to the mailbox. If you clean them off, first, so you can see the mailbox.

 MRP

On Being a NIMBY

Today Granny became a NIMBY. For a while.

I am elderly. And I am a woman. And I live in a country whose government declines to protect either.

Hey, now. Being a NIMBY isn’t an all negative thing. If everyone takes care of the people, problems and resources in their own back yard, then collectively we’ll be just fine and dandy. Someday we'll be together  again and we'll each have saved a piece of something. 

In fact, being a NIMBY can be a good thing. That’s what I’m going to strive for over the next few years. You can be as callous, prejudiced, greedy, and stupid as you want in someone's back yard. But Not In My Back Yard. My neighbors and I will decide what belongs in our back yard. That’s how a revolution begins – people taking care of their own families, their own neighbors, and their own back yards. Everything for The Greater Good begins in one's own back yard.

How big is my back yard? I care about my neighborhood, and my daughter’s. On a wider scale, I care if it happens in Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, or Connecticut, basically anywhere along the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers, and between the Berkshires and Boston (sing a chorus of ‘Sweet Baby James’ here).

You want to hate on people? Not in my back yard. My back yard was a battleground in the American Revolution. My back yard was a stop on the Underground Railroad. My back yard sent proud Union soldiers to fight the Civil War. In fact, my back yard sent soldiers to every war you had, both real and fabricated. 

My back yard gave birth to public health care and gay marriage. I’ll stand up for my neighbors, with my neighbors, for the inalienable rights of all the folks who live in my back yard. There are a host of different cultures, skin tones, languages, and faiths in my back yard. We don’t want outsiders messing with that. Take your hate to somebody else’s back yard.

You want to sell your charter schools to help bring back segregation of the races and the classes? Not in my back yard. My neighbors and I won’t go down without a fight. If necessary, we’ll found the biggest, best-ever home school programs since the American Revolution just to keep our kids out of your damned socially regressive charter schools. We want our kids to learn a lot of everything: English, Spanish, foreign languages, local history, world history, civics, math, art, music, sports, science; we want them to know about evolution and conservation, algebra to zoology. We believe our different faiths make us stronger, and our kids more open to new ideas, more tolerant and more prepared for the whole wide world abroad. We believe in separation of Church and State, and that public education is the responsibility of the State.

If a woman needs health services in my back yard, we’ll take care of her. If our criminal justice system gets out of hand, we’ll let them know. If our civil rights are at risk, we’ll deal with it. We aren't suspending the Constitution in my back yard.

You want to frack for gas and drill for oil? Level grand forests? Build pipelines from nowhere to nowhere? Not in my back yard. My neighbors and I will fight every inch of the way. Take your humanity-hostile greed programs elsewhere. We don’t want you here. Go where someone doesn’t care about his own back yard. If there is such a place.

You want to sell public lands for private development? My real, genuine back yard is an Audubon Sanctuary, it's private – and you’re not welcome here. I’m pretty sure lots of other people will feel the same when you come to destroy their back yards.

You want to kill insurance programs for the weakest among us, folks like me? Not in my back yard. We had a head start on you here in Massachusetts. We’ll get our own program up and running again. We’ll take care of the folks in our own back yard.

Oil spills from offshore drilling? Not in my back yard. Earthquakes from fracking? Not in my back yard. Frack-polluted water? Not in my back yard. We’ve worked very hard to keep our land and waters clean. We don’t want you destroying that, not in my back yard.  

We have clean energy here, wind, water, sun. We have the kinds of things people DO want in their back yards. We have organic farming here. We’re not dependent on your GMO crops and agent-orange weed killers. In winter, we already pay the price to import clean farm foods.  Life is fine in my back yard. And we’ll work to keep it that way.

We try to keep ourselves healthy in my back yard. We are a suburb of Canada here. They send us clean water and clean air, and it gets forward it on. We send it to south, as clean as it can be. What happens after it leaves our back yard is in someone else’s back yard, not our problem any more.

If we need expensive medications or eye surgery, Canada is a cheap, short, and pleasant train ride away. They are good neighbors, those Canadians, and we love them. They are good to us. They are our back yard neighbors.

If you’re concerned about the natural and unnatural disasters, global warming, the quality of your education, your health care, your natural resources and wildlife, the quality of your food supply, the quality and price of your drugs, your civil rights or your voting rights – you’d best take care of your own back yard. My neighbors and I will be busy taking care of ours. For a while.

MRP

On a Failing Filter

Getting on in years can make a gal pretty crotchety. You find, like Maxine, that there are lots of things that ran around in your brain for years and got trapped in your mouth filter. Now they are falling out, willy-nilly, often without invitation or provocation.

There is no medical process to replace a worn out mouth filter. Eventually, those things you didn’t say for a half century will come tumbling out. The real ‘you’ that few people know is exposed. The worst of it is that the thoughts that festered unspoken for fifty or sixty years, when finally spoken, can expose a lifelong hypocrisy. That’s what Granny’s Desk is for – to give mine a soft landing.

For much of my life, I tried to be trustworthy, loyal, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. I trashed obedience some time ago. It was too constraining, with too little return. Reverence left the room, too. Irreverence is so much more fun. Courtesy is probably next up. The page about being nice just for the sake of being nice is fading from my playbook. Thrift is a no-brainer when you are competing with church mice for survival. Clean is optional unless somebody else is paying for the water.

I am counting on trustworthy, loyal, and brave to see me through to the end. They still fit well. Cheer may be the last to go. I like laughter. I plan to die laughing.

My mouth filter is failing, but I'm not upset in the least. I guess I am prepared for the fallout, because I’m not too bothered about letting it all out any more.

When I finally announced to the world, on social media no less, that I will exit the planet as a registered Democrat – that was part of my failing mouth filter process. It was the public admission of long-held private and unspoken opinions. I will not leave the planet as a hypocrite. There will be no untold tales, and few secrets to baffle visitors to my grave. No mysteries unrevealed, if I can help it.

I am a Democrat because I want historical government records to show, long after I am gone, that this year I openly stood in opposition to the majority of my newly elected government. And that I had the courage to stand by my beliefs in a public record and on a public platform.

Between 1773 and 1783, a host of my direct blood ancestors spoke up for their convictions. Most fought openly to separate the colonies from the King. Two were loyal to England; they left the colonies for Canada. Whichever their choice, it was public, and their names and faces were attached to their actions, and still live in public records. Their mouth filters didn’t filter their political choices. They had courage. I owe them no less than to show my own.

And while we are on the subject of courage. Although I acknowledge the historical significance of the Boston Tea Party, I have believed for at least sixty years that the perpetrators were cowards. Those men dressed up as Natives, Indians, to make their dubious tax point by destroying private property for which an innocent shipmaster was fully responsible. How brave was it to take that action and shift the blame to someone else, an entire population that didn’t give a rat’s ass if white man’s tea was taxed? If they had gone to the party without the costumes, and taken responsibility for their revolt, and repaid the shipmaster for his cargo, then that would have made it a courageous act. Don’t brag to me about your Tea Party ancestors. I call bullshit. None of mine were there, but I'd feel the same if they had been.

Whew! I’ve kept that one in for a long time. Dear Lord – for so many decades. I’ve so seldom called Bullshit!, even when I saw it, even when I smelled it, even when I was standing in it. [Although, I do remember a my colleague Tom Porter saying “Tell me how you really feel; don’t hold back.”]

My friend, the late and very dear Barry Kittler. Barry bought a new truck once- about 1999. A small Dodge. He wouldn’t pay for power windows or air. The first July after he bought it, he whined incessantly about the heat inside his truck, and the smell from his dog. All because he wouldn’t pay for air or power windows. When I had had enough of his whining – and my mouth filter failed and I said “Not my fault you don’t have air and can’t reach to put the windows down, so suffer, you cheap prick.” We laughed for years. People still remind me of that. Especially when we remember Barry.

Don’t ask me how I feel about privatizing American education. I might just tell you. And it won’t be pretty. Be aware that my obscenity filter is a little compromised, too.

If you're an Evangelical, don't proselytize to me. I will choose my own method of salvation. I may be unkind in rejecting yours. Don't risk it. It's my defective mouth filter, you know. 

Don’t test me if you can't bear to hear an old lady rant. My mouth filter is failing. I will probably tell it as I see it, and you likely won’t describe the response as ladylike in any way. If you can live with my handicap, the broken mouth filter, bring it on. I'd love to talk with you.

MRP

On Moving Forward to the Past

I was raised and educated in the America of the fifties and sixties, started my own family and began my career in the late sixties and early seventies. I retired in 2007. This year, eight days after the coronation of our first ever openly misogynistic and racially prejudiced authoritarian leader, I will turn seventy-two. At my age, this could be my last go-round with an election as I face losing Social Security and Medicare which are crucial to my retirement budget.

I told you in an earlier blog about my being raised as the product of a religiously mixed marriage; but I was also raised in a culturally mixed marriage.

My father was the descendant of the families who founded America between 1620 and 1640; more than one of whom believed strongly in educating their daughters as well as their sons. Specifically, the descendants of Edmund Hobart (1573 - 1648) married educated women, and provided educated wives for their sons-in-law. And their women weren’t restricted to becoming teachers and nurses. No. Their men were needed to labor at and run the family businesses, the women managed the offices and kept the books and records – and bore a dozen or more children, and managed the family home as well. At least from just prior to the American Revolution (early 1700's) there are public records to support those facts. At sea, the women managed everything but the crew of the ship – and some even did that (which you know if you’ve read my book).

My mother was a descendant of poverty-stricken mill-worker immigrant Irishmen. She was second-and-third-generation Irish-American, the product of a culture where grown women were kept almost literally barefoot, bare-ass, and pregnant – and in the kitchen. Those families didn’t begin to educate their daughters until, well, until the nineteen sixties when my girl-cousins and I went off to college, about a hundred years after our Irish families first came to America. Of course, early on in Irish immigrant families, if a girl was physically ugly or had had her virginity compromised, thus being ineligible for marriage and motherhood – she would be educated just enough to become a nun, or a teacher, or a nurse – because she would need some means to support herself in her disgrace.

My father’s family knew no bias toward people from other countries, other races, other faiths. They were mariners and tradesmen. They accepted everyone who would sail with them, work with them, or do business with them. My father never felt or acted superior to anyone. Or inferior. He treated everyone as his equal, from the wealthy to the poor. His great-uncle (also an Edmund Hobart descendant), fought for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment – unable to conceive why it was a contentious issue at all. The family simply felt that everyone who wanted an education must have one, and that any adult should have a vote. Not one person was singularly any different from another, regardless of gender.

My mother’s family were Irish, and Catholic, as you know from the first blog. Her people were the objects of deep social and economic discrimination because of their heritage and their faith. My mother fought every day of her life, from the eighth grade on, to prove she was as worthy and equal as any other woman, all the non-Irish, non-Catholic women. That Nineteenth Amendment? It was passed the year she was born, and her immediate and extended family didn’t believe it was appropriate to have such a law. They didn’t educate their ‘girls’, either. She lost a scholarship to Columbia University because her father wouldn't allow her to go. (If she had gone, though, she might never have met my father.)

I grew up in a small city where young people my age accepted each other based on some invisible measure, completely unrelated to family economics or ancestry  – a sliding scale from ‘jocks’ to ‘brains’ – athletes, greasers, ordinary folk, and academic sparklers. By the grace of my DNA, I was among the latter – academically successful in nearly all that I cared to touch. Neither of my parents accepted less than perfection in every subject – or as close as they could reasonably expect to perfection, given that I was a poor student of biological sciences.

I spent my social time with other academically gifted friends, both boys and girls. I never felt that being female made me in any way unequal. The males among my friends certainly didn’t treat the females as different from themselves. We all read the same books, studied the same subjects, talked about events and ideas, and generally hated gym classes. One of my high school friends (a male), once posited the idea that he wanted to study all religions and attend all churches – because he didn’t want to commit to Christianity, then die and find himself unprepared in the arms of Buddha. Yes, that was in the early sixties, friends, and those were the kind of questions we debated. Before Vietnam, before Civil Rights, before Equal Rights. As a female, I never felt discrimination or inequality. Ever.

I went off to college in the fall of 1963. I entered as an ‘English – Journalism’ major. I loved to write. Later that first year, I found myself frustrated and bored with my studies. My father gave me a subscription to Time Magazine – and told me I had until June to decide which section of Time I would like to have written. I chose Business & Finance. With my father’s encouragement, I applied to transfer from the School of Liberal Arts to the School of Management. That was when I discovered for the first time in my life that there were social and educational stereotypes for women.

I was assigned an adviser, a Dr. Young. Apparently, his job was to discourage me and send me packing back to Liberal Arts. There were only three ‘girls’ in the Business curriculum, he told me, and all three were Accounting majors. I wanted to study Business Law & Collective Bargaining. After some heated arguments, he agreed that I could ‘try’ that major for a semester – knowing I would be the only ‘girl’ in my classes. I stayed and I succeeded. That led to my career in both applications and systems software engineering. None of my fellow students treated me as 'different' because of my gender.

I went on to earn two MBA’s – one in Small Business Practices, and one in Business Computing. In the course of my career, I only once came across open gender bias. During an interview with Jack Welch, then an up and comer with General Electric Plastics Division, Jack told me I should go home, take care of my husband and baby, and not be looking to take a man’s place on his team. Ultimately, he moved on to be much more powerful in GE, and so did I – I helped to save his ass and keep his plastics company on the map as Project Leader of the Y2K effort, 1998 - 2000. Besides the put down from Jack, in the course of my career I never felt gender discrimination. I was always paid an equivalent salary to my male colleagues. I was never a second class citizen in my techie world.

Now I see a despicable fat ugly old white man changing forever the America that was so good to me, my personal land of opportunity, left to my care by courageous ancestors. I have failed the men and women who came before me. It could mark an end to the legacy of the descendants of Edmund Hobart. My granddaughter may never know the land of her forefathers. I cannot stop it, but I will accept my share of the blame, the shame.

As a token nod to Equal Rights, the new sovereign will appoint two women to his council. They will serve in traditional female roles. Education, transportation  - the soccer mom roles. Women’s work. Keep the girls happy. Contented cows give better milk. And one of them doubles as his token Asian. There's a small win for someone there. [Yes, he did appoint some women to minor roles, but these are his inner circle councilors.]

And he will appoint his token black man to lead where he perceives that only a man of color belongs and could succeed – management of inner cities and slum housing.

Otherwise, his proposed council members are much like himself: mostly fat, mostly old, mostly ugly, all white men. A distinct scarcity of eye candy all around the table, including the monarch himself. Together, they will lead society back into the sixteenth century at best, and the fourteenth at worst. [I am pretty sure that in the past year or so we have transited rapidly to seventeenth century culture by just watching this runaway debacle.] 

The future was yesterday.

The past awaits tomorrow. 

MRP

On Christmas – On Advent

Christmas Day 2016 will be my seventy-second Christmas.

I have been through the seasons of my childhood; I have been through the seasons as a young adult; I have been through the seasons as a Mom; I have been through the seasons as a Granny; I now face the season as … whatever new me is emerging now.

I hardly remember a single solitary one of those seasons – except perhaps for Christmas 1973. My infant daughter was hospitalized with severe croup that night, and the roads were icy, and the trip from Lanesboro to the hospital in Pittsfield was scary – and I remember that trip because my father drove us all to Pittsfield and that made me feel safe. Oh! And Christmas 1999, a month after my father died. That was the saddest day ever. My daughter went to Montana with her new husband; my mother was 150 miles away; and my friend and I went to the movies and had dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

The rest of my Christmases are a blur of indistinct memories, none particularly delightful. But I do remember that always, no matter what was going on in our world, Jesus still had a birthday and little children awaited Santa Claus.

I was a ‘War Baby’, born during the last legitimate war the United States ever fought, the last declared by Congress. There have been other military conflicts in my lifetime, but those were not declared wars – they were politically inspired or reactionary conflicts dreamed up in Washington, designed to boost the American economy, and kill off a few young men and women as population control, and to keep unemployment stable. 

I was born three months before Adolph Hitler committed suicide during the Battle of Berlin, four months before VE Day – Germany’s surrender, the end of World War II in Europe; I was born seven months before VJ Day, Japan’s surrender, the end of World War II in the Pacific. I was born seven months before the Atom Bomb.

For my first five Christmases, I lived with my mother and her parents in Fall River. I remember getting a rocking chair, a doll crib, and a doll carriage – only because there are photos. My grandchildren have the rocking chair and the crib now. The carriage is long gone.

My grandfather Connors was a stern, sober, religious Irishman, but he kept a roof over our heads and food on the table. My father was a Merchant Marine officer then. He was at sea more often than not, as he had been since 1940 and for the duration of the last true war. He helped support our household in Fall River, but he was rarely there. My mother would go to New York to spend time with him when his ship was in at Pier 57.

Monica - Christmas 1947 in Fall River, MA

After the war, my father sailed on merchant/passenger ships, ships which carried both passengers and cargo. I really have no recollection of his being with me for Christmas, and there are no photos of him at those times. I am told he was there at Christmas 1949 – when he was deciding whether to leave the sea because an American conflict was on the horizon in Korea. He’d had enough of war and transporting soldiers to die in foreign lands. He had left friends in Bataan to die there. He wanted no more of that. It seems I DO remember ‘helping’ him to assemble a jig saw puzzle he had received for Christmas that year. 

By Christmas of 1950, we had moved to Attleboro, and my father went to work at the electric company with his uncle. And the holiday life I remember most had begun.

It was then, my sixth Christmas, when I began to develop my love for the season of Advent. That time leading up to Christmas Eve became somehow both holy and magical for me as we counted off the weeks with the Advent wreath. I was in school, had developed a love for books, made some friends I still love today, and spent a good deal of time in church – loving the music and the flowers and the fellowship of the season. That Christmas I got my birthstone ring. A garnet. I still have it. And I still love Advent.

After 1950, I do recall that Christmas Day was always a big tiresome let-down for me. I dreaded it more each year. But, that made me love Advent all the more. I had four weeks of joy, while others had but one day.

Monica - Christmas 1951, Attleboro, MA

Regardless of the weather, we always spent Christmas Day on the road. We were up very early to do a quick ‘Santa’ thing when I was younger, and did our gifting on Christmas Eve when I was a little older. Off to Fall River before noontime Christmas Day to spend time with my mother’s sister and her brood of hellions, my Fitzgerald cousins. Christmas dinner there – always a hassle of teaching her kids (eventually eight of them!) to behave at the table. Intimidating. Unhappy. Yes, miserable at best. 

Then after the havoc of the Fall River Christmas Day, we drove to Brockton to visit with my father’s family and have a peaceful evening dinner with all of them. I was always tired by that time of day, but those visits were relaxing – the presents thoughtful – the people happy and hassle-free. I still have the Chinese Checkers I received at one of those paternal side get-togethers. Then, we went back to Attleboro late at night, and I was usually sleeping before my father put me in the car. 

After my cousin Maureen was born on December 26th, 1953, we had to make yet another trip to Fall River the day after Christmas, so she could have a separate birthday celebration. So you see, Christmas Eve was my last real moment of Peace.

Monica - Christmas Eve 1953, Attleboro, MA

Little wonder that after 1967, more than a quarter century later, when I was a woman grown, married, and eventually with my own home and family – I refused to leave my home at Christmastime for any reason. But I still celebrated Advent with a solemn joyous passion. Christmas Eve meant entertaining, presents, lovely centerpieces, good wine, and generally the homey atmosphere that I missed in my own childhood. Those were the best Christmas years ever. Even the year my baby was sick, we were home. We were with family. We had had a special Advent season.

Monica - Christmas Eve 1967, Fort Lewis, WA

Eventually, things change. Life changes – sometimes suddenly, sometimes so gradually you barely notice. That Christmas season of 1999 was the end of the twenty or so years of Christmas the way I loved it most. Oh yes – and I worked outside my home during those two decades. After my daughter was in her teens, I always volunteered to stay in the office, or take the on-call, while my colleagues partied or went home to their own young children. It was my gift to them. I didn’t believe in celebrating the coming of Christ with a hangover. I did believe that children are little for such a short time – that young parents needed to spend time with them as I had done in earlier years.

My first grandchild was born in 2003. For twelve years now, I have visited my grandchildren in their own home every single Christmas Eve. Christmas Day in their home was for Santa and presents and visiting with their father’s family, but Christmas Eve was for us, their Mom’s family, our gifts and our love. It was a very special decade or so. I didn’t mind the travel – for it meant they could be at home with their parents, their tree, and their pets, and their presents.

This year, my grandchildren aren’t little ones any more. They will spend Christmas week in St. Thomas with their father. Yet, we have had a good Advent season, feeling our way through our new holiday reality. We have no more big presents to buy for anyone. No big meals to plan. No need to gift the grandchildren before Epiphany. 

Christmas 2014 with grandchildren - Galway, NY

We’ve given our bigger gifts to charity this year. And we adopted a young kitty. Maybe my daughter will be with us for Christmas Eve, maybe not – I certainly hope she will – we have the new kitty for her to meet. We’ll probably go to that Chinese restaurant again. And we will look forward to whatever is to become our new concept of Christmas. But – Advent – that will never change. I will always have that special time leading up to Christmas Eve.

Merry Christmas - 2016

MRP