April 2012

A small town boy from Texas

The big team’s big bet

Tall, slender, aged twenty-one

Ran like a race horse

Hit like houses falling down

Shoulder pads that bore

The hopes of millions

He knew how good he was

He stood looking around

Opponents, the world

About to be trampled

His cleat caught in the grass

He went down

Men ran to him

I heard it pop, he said

Trying to grin

Sweat bursting from his brow

There goes opening day

The coach said

I’ll be ready, he promised

Sweating hard

Unable to rise

The future is long

He told himself

Your career can wait an extra week

But the coach said he needed him

The team doctor said he could go

And it was opening day

Knee taped taut

Needled front and back

No pain, no distraction

He carried the ball again

And again

Until a busted play

Tacklers buried him

Never felt a thing

But his leg looked funny and

He could not get up

In the locker room

They scissored up his silver pants

Peeled back cloth

The tape torn to pieces

The works inside as well

Another hour passed

Before the pain came on

The coach assured him

He’d walk again

After the surgery

A matter of months

Don’t worry

And even run again

Possibly

Next year

Or the year after

He started to cry

But turned away

So no one could see

He went back home to Texas

A tall slender boy, aged twenty-one

This kind of explosive woman-against-woman argument has been going on for years. It is a lot more complex than it looks. The hostile debate starts by saying that women who work outside the home are superior to the women who stay at home. The woman who stays at home retaliates and fights back.  All kinds of nasty statements ensue and the war is on.

I remember a time when women were needed to work outside the home during World War II. Men were drafted and America needed women to work in the factories. Look up “Rosie the Riveter”.  When the men started returning from the war, Rosie’s job was done and she was sent home.

I remember a time when the nursing staff in hospital maternity wards would be angry at mothers who wanted to “breast feed” their babies. It was a five-day hospital stay at that time and the staff did not like the extra work bringing babies out of the nursery to the mother’s bed to breast-feed. It was easier for them to “prop-up” the formula bottle  so the baby could feed alone in the nursery. I always believed those attitudes were remnants of war propaganda and was necessary to weaken the mother/infant bond in order to keep mothers freer for work outside the home. It was cruel.

I began to see a change in the “anti-breast feeding” thinking in favor of the “mother-stay-at-home” thinking sometime in the 1960s when a prominent weekly magazine ran a full-page advertisement for a blouse company showing a picture of a new-born baby breast-feeding under a mother’s slightly-opened blouse. At that time, the picture was shocking, almost pornographic in nature. It was quite subtle and I could see neither the woman’s breast nor the baby’s mouth.  I remember thinking, “Am I really seeing a baby under that mother’s blouse?” America was finally beginning to say it was okay for mothers to breast-feed their baby and form a strong bond. Attitudes were changing right before my eyes.

Over the years I have seen women who were heartbroken and in despair when their “family leave” was up and they had to separate from their baby and return to work. It may be one of the most difficult things a woman has to do. I have also seen women who had dreams other than being in the home and took the road toward pursuing that dream.

As women, we cannot be having these fights over what is best for other mothers.  It is difficult enough to know and understand what is best for ourselves.  Choice can be an option for women, that is, if we are lucky enough

Unfortunately, many women do not have a free choice. Pressures from within the family sometime force us to go one way or another. If you have no money, there will be no choice. If you have a partner who says a “woman’s work is in the home”, there will be no choice.

If an argument is to be waged it will have to be directed toward those who prevent women from making their own decisions. We will have to team up with those who strive to get families decent wages so there is enough money and a choice to stay at home. Women will have to be on the same side instead of warring against each other and treating female compatriots as if they were an enemy.

Women have important and superior skills to offer both in the home and in the workplace. Let’s stop this bickering and look instead at what we can offer.  We need women to be free to make decisions about what they believe is best for them and their children.

April 16, 2012

     I had an uncle who lived into his early eighties. He never married. He didn’t hold down a paying job. He always wore black. He was always out of money and sometimes he slept in homeless shelters with street people. He would regularly beg for food and clothing and he was well known to the local police.

But, when he died in 1982 the flags in Washington, D.C. were lowered to half staff in his honor and more than 10,000 people from all walks of life–rich and poor, well connected and disconnected–came to his funeral.

His name was Horace.     When he was born the priest who baptized him grumbled that there was no saint named Horace. My grandfather is supposed to have said “Well, he’s going to be the first saint Horace.”

So his name was Horace.   Horace McKenna.    Father Horace McKenna, S.J.   Horace was a Catholic priest—a Jesuit.       His remarkable and inspiring life was a key reason

why I hung on to Catholicism long after I stopped trying to believe what it claimed.

He was and is my hero and I loved him a lot.   Let me tell you why my hero belongs in this Love Service. He would be very much at home with our saying “service is our prayer” and “to serve humanity in fellowship” because Horace worked unceasingly every single day of his life for poor people, particularly rural and urban African Americans. This was a guy who literally gave the very shirt off his back more than once to someone who didn’t have one.

Forty nine years ago when I was in college in Washington, D.C. I would visit him. He would take a carton full of cans of fruit or soup and we’d go out into the poor neighborhoods where he knew everyone. Very quickly the food would be gone and so would all the money he might have had in his pocket. He would end up with a list of who needed what. Mrs. Smith needed a

doctor, Joe Downs had to get his car fixed,  Lily needed another $15 bucks for the rent. The next morning Horace was on the phone making sure that help would come.  Sometimes he would sneak one or two homeless people into his own rectory bedroom for the night and sometimes he would go and sleep at the flophouses downtown so he would remember what it was like. He even had a guy living in his parish car for a while. This sort of love for the unfortunate went on day and night.

One day Horace took me to a funeral home where a penniless street person was being waked. Before the man died—literally in the gutter– he had told Horace that he had always hoped for a proper funeral. So, Horace cajoled the undertaker into giving him a wake and a coffin and he talked someone else into paying for a granite tombstone. Horace and I were the only two people who came to that man’s funeral.

We read about people like Albert Schweitzer, Ghandi or Dorothy Day—all dedicated people who lived their lives for the sake of others. While we admire these people we don’t love them in the same sense if we had really known them personally. People who knew Horace would talk about his presence—his charisma. There was a gentleness and calm quality he had that made him the center of attention. He could walk into a room full of people with a sort of mischievous look on his face and people knew he owned that room. It was easy to love him. That same demeanor had a style, too, that could quickly melt the sternest politician or coldest bureaucrat.

His relentless, genuine, loving concern for the poor wasn’t because he was a priest. It was something very real in him. When it came to changing the world he believed that doing good things in small increments could change the world. He called it “slow miracles.”  I  looked up to him with admiration and deep affection because he did what he believed about the teaching of Christ. He was an awesome hero.

He started a cafeteria called S.O.M. E.—So Others Might Eat. It now feeds some 900 people a day and has programs for addicts. He started another one called Martha’s Table for school children and he was the driving force behind two huge housing developments for the poor in Washington. And out in Colorado as well as in D.C. McKenna’s Wagon still delivers soup and sandwiches to the poor some 25 years after his death.

But my hero Horace was also a very controversial man. In the 1950s, well before integration was mandated, Horace let white and black students from rural Maryland sit together in the same fifth grade classroom and his church was burned to the ground because of it. He marched at Selma with Dr. King and could be found at many sit ins during the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam. One story I love about him was based on the fact that he saw nothing wrong with birth control. For Catholics in those days birth control was supposed to be a mortal sin and had to be confessed. Word got around that he would tell people in the confessional that they had not committed a sin by using birth control because, he said that Catholic Canon law states that “ a doubtful law does not bind.” When the word got out lines outside his confessional got longer and longer every week. Horace was a friend of Cardinal O’Boyle of Washington and the Cardinal had helped Horace with some of his work. The Cardinal, according to a book about Horace, “asked him on what authority he took a different position from his bishop and Horace gave
the classic answer: ‘Forty years in the confessional’”he said.  He was ahead of his time, too, in believing that there should be women priests and that Catholic priests should be able to marry.

As I said, more than 10,000 people came to Horace’s funeral. The service had to be televised on big screens outside his church. Flags in D.C. were hung at half staff.  Many pastors from many churches gave eulogies and one of them, a woman minister from the First Church of What’s Happening Now gave one of the most heartwarming orations I have ever heard. In essence she said Horace was the only person she ever knew who literally loved every one and knew no hatred.

This strong, humble and courageous man was a living saint and the memories I have of him bring me to tears sometimes because I love him and  miss him.

In a way he was attempting to bail the ocean with a bucket, but the magnificent thing was that he was trying. Ghandi once said “Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is important that you do it anyway.” That is known as Ghandi’s Paradox. And Horace McKenna lived by that idea. It is why I love him still, and why he’s my hero.

I was thirty years old and it was Christmas Eve. Early darkness was settling in and I told my husband I was going to drive down to St. James Church on Hempstead Turnpike for “confession” because I wanted to receive Communion at Christmas Mass the next morning. My husband would stay home with our infant son and four other children who were anxiously awaiting Santa Claus.

The Church inside was serene and peaceful with little flickering candles glowing all around the large room and the altar was covered with red poinsettias. It seemed like heaven. The scene was a marked contrast to the busy home I just left.

There were only a few people inside the Church. No one was standing and waiting for the confessional to become vacant. I walked straight into the curtained cubicle and waited until the priest on the other side of a small 12×12 inch sliding window opened to listen to me. I told him my story. I said, “Bless me Father, for I have sinned”. I said it was about nine months since my last confession. He listened.

I told him that I would be unable to keep the Church’s law any more. I told him I was having trouble coping with all my responsibilities and I would be unable to bear any more children. I knew I was at my limit. I had to use birth control. We talked at length. He asked me how much education I had. I felt intimidated by the question while at the same time I didn’t think the question was appropriate. I thought to myself, “Would he refuse to talk to me if I only had a high school diploma, and a poor one at that?” I mumbled something incoherent.

We continued talking and I told him how disturbed I was not only for myself but for all the people who go to church who cannot go to Holy Communion because they were not in a “state of grace”. I thought it was unfair and unjust. There should be a better law, I said; If you go to someone’s home you should be able to join in the festivities! The priest was extremely gracious and respectful in spite of asking me how much education I had.

It felt like I was in the confessional an awfully long time and I was beginning to get stressed thinking how my husband and children were doing at home since they were very excited when I left and I said I would be back very soon.

At last, the Priest told me he could NOT give me “absolution” because I would not say I would “try” and stop using birth control. I said I would only be telling him a lie if I made him a promise. We agreed. NO absolution. I had to go to Christmas Mass without receiving “the Lord”.

When I got up from my knees and stood, the Priest said to me, “Please pray for me”. I never heard a Priest make a request like that before and I didn’t know why he said it. It seemed like some kind of honor or substitution of absolution. It felt like a gift.

It’s been forty-seven years since my special Christmas experience. In that time I helped establish a Church like the kind I always wished for. The special Church continues today, but now does so without me. A Church which is a fulfillment of all good things, a willingness to care for each other, to be non-judgmental, to be mutually respectful, supporting each other and outreaching to the community. A Church that cares for their needy, and that shares the Eucharistic Bread, which is sometimes home-baked, and everyone in attendance sharing in the celebration.

I would like to think that the Catholic Church has changed for the better too. But sadly, the views of many of the Bishops and Priests and others toward women have not changed. The Church continues to think they know what is best for us and their job is to make decisions about our procreative and biological life. They tell us we are the sheep and they are the shepherds. The Catholic Church has always been, and may always be a “men’s club”, their motto being; no women need apply.

Reverence of women is shown ceremoniously by the men of the Church in the form of prayer to a molded figure made of plaster and lifted up high on an altar for all to see their adoration of her. There is one problem, though: The blue robed statue of the woman is, respectfully, “dead”. We women are alive today and we get none of the respect.

The women of 2012 will be moving ahead with or without the Church. It will be up to the Church to adapt to us. We have gone for too long obeying the Church’s unrealistic, unequal, and inhumane laws. The next move is theirs.

Lawrence,

I thought I would ask Rev. Al this question but I couldn’t find a way to get in touch with him so you are my second choice.(only because the Rev.has closer ties to “the street”) My question has to do with the female and male reproductive system and the intense interest by the Religious fanatical right and the Catholic Church hierarchy in trying to control ONLY the female reproductive system. They concentrate with intensity and watch the movement of the female egg through the female body from the moment it leaves the ovary, through the Fallopian tubes, and into the uterus, etc. It is not enough that they involve “sin” in the journey, but they want to legally legislate it also.

Why don’t these guys take the same interest in the journey of the male spermazoa?

They seem to be so holy and righteous about making sure the egg is fertilized and calling God and the Congress of the United States to make sure that little egg is not interfered with.

What a joke!

Why don’t they study those little wiggly sperm who seem to go places they shouldn’t be going. And some of these wigglies don’t even ask permission to go where they want to go. They force themselves on little boys and girls, their own children, their wives, girlfriends, and people just walking in the streets – as well as wasting them “on the rock” as the Bible says. I don’t hear any uproar from the so-called religious people over that.

The religious people destroy the clinics or kill the doctors who try to help woman, who, for whatever reason, cannot or will not bear a child that was fertilized by a misplaced or mistaken sperm.

Lawrence, do you think this is an issue that should be explored? Don’t you think the male should be given “equal rights”?

People wondered what his message was.

Was he warning us we’d better start behaving, or else?

Did the man himself believe it meant the end of the World?

Or was he being paid to carry the billboard for some secret reason, perhaps even to encourage shoppers to spend their money now, why save when “the end” was near?

Did anyone really believe he knew something the rest of us didn’t?

Whenever someone stopped to talk to him he’d ignore them.

Or so at least I was told, since I never actually saw such a man walking around carrying such a contraption.

Regardless of whether he was a truth sayer, or a mischief-maker, he was right. The end was near. It always is, because none of us know when our “end” might arrive.

I’m sure that most Americans know about the tragic fire in Stamford on Christmas morning when five people, three young sisters, and their grandparents, died in an early morning fire, the result of embers being removed from the fireplace to make it safe for Santa to descend. The embers were put somewhere safe, or so the mother believed when she fulfilled her childrens’ wishes to prepare the chimney for Santa.

She and a male friend (the divorced father of the girls was elsewhere) survived the fire, and neighbors overheard the mother saying, “My whole life is in there.” Not only her children, but her own parents as well died in that fire.

The “end” comes like “a thief in the night,” and no one knows when it’s coming, just that it is.

There isn’t anybody currently on this planet going to be around 100 or so years from now, not one of us, nobody, all 3 billion of us.

Pouf! Gone!

Forever?

We’ll be finding out soon enough. Or maybe not.

If I were God, would I have left everyone in the dark like this?

Would you?

It’s a guessing game, just like the billboard man said it was.

And I, personally, am in no hurry to learn the answer.

Happy New Year.

 Isaiah Clark House, Brewster, Massachusetts

Bed & Breakfast on Cape Cod

Isaiah’s Favorite Crispy Waffles

3 large eggs

1 1/4 cup milk

1/2 cup melted buter

1 tablespoon vanilla

2 cups flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

2 teaspoons sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

In a large mixing bowl, beat eggs until thick. Add milk, melted butter, and vanilla. Continue beating mixture for two minutes. Combine dry ingredients, sift into egg mixture and beat well for 2 minutes. If necessary, add more milk. Batter should be the consistancy of pancake batter.

Brush melted butter over the ridges of a hot Belgian style waffle iron. Ladle the batter over the hot iron and bake according to iron manufacturers instructions (usually about two minutes).

Top with your favorite fresh berries or sliced fruit (strawberries, peaches, poached pears, apple with cinnamon, etc.) and whipped cream. Mr. Robben loves only Vermont maple sirup. Just before serving you can sprinkle waffle with powdered sugar.

The yield will be about 6 – 8 waffles, depending on size of waffle iron. (I have used leftovers for pancakes the next day  and I added a little milk to make a thinner consistency.) They were wonderful!

Merry Christmas from Marge Robben and the Isaiah Clark House which we visited in the year 2000. I saved the recipe but didn’t make the waffles until Christmas 2011. I don’t know if the Isaiah Clarke House is still there, but its receipe for the greatest waffles and pancakes lives on………

As Kevin will remember, we sat in the Upper Deck, fifty yard line, row B, section 12 possibly still wearing the matching Eton suits my mother favored for “her boys”, directly under the Press Box which in the Polo Grounds hung off the lip of the roof high over our heads. A rather scary Press Box I always thought, once I got much older and began to frequent it. At one end of this Press Box sat the telegraph operators, their machines clicking, their fingers tapping out copy dot-dash-dot, letter by letter, as it was handed to them. They were, of course, in constant contact with their fellow telegraph operators in the Sports Departments of eight NY newspapers. That’s how the news was transmitted in 1941.

The public address announcer at Giant games was my father, friend of the Maras who owned the whole team then, not just half like now, particularly Jack Mara, his best friend. He was earning from the Times then $67.50 a week, down ten percent a few years back because of the depression. Or perhaps by then he had been reinstated to his full $75. He was not the columnist, only a sports writer, which is what he always called himself. He got, I think, $15. a game, which helped at home.

My father had a great voice for that stadium, I thought then and now, a great manner too, nothing fancy, just who carried the ball and who tackled him, and soon, every five minutes or so, he began calling out also the name of an Admiral or General, telling the man to report to his command at once. That was all. His voice was everywhere in that stadium: Admiral So-and-So is ordered to return to his base immediately. The crowd began to stir after a while, but no one knew what was going on. In section 12 where all the free tickets sat, players’ wives and reporters’ families (my father got six tickets to every game, and Kevin and I saw every game from 1937 on) we did know, for word came via some reporter kneeling in the aisle reporting to his wife sitting near us, he having got the news from his telegraph operator.

No one else would know what had happened until they got home.

In my column for the Daily News I recounted all this 60 years after the fact, and also (showing off a bit) I put in many of the numbers on the players’ backs, not just the Giant players, but Dodger players too, Not an act of genius but something entirely normal as I explained with a line I have always been proud of, though no one else ever noticed: When you’re 11 years old with an empty head, everything that goes in there sticks, and it sticks forever. The Giant players were easy. Mel Hein No. 7, Ward Cuff No. 14, Jim Lee Howell No. 21, and so on. The Dodgers were led by Ace Parker, a triple threat tailback, No. 7, and I looked him up as I was writing the piece, 90 years old and still alive. One of the Dodger players was an end named Perry Schwartz, No. 98, who that day tried the old sleeper play – he lay down close to the sidelines imagining no one would notice, leaving him uncovered for a possible touchdown pass.

I remember sitting there in Section 12 trying to puzzle out what the momentous news signified and asking my mother if we would win this war. She soothed all my conerns, and assured me it would be easy, and with that quote from her I closed my Daily News column.

On the way home, as Kevin says, we never got to hear the latest adventure of “The Shadow“, whose name was Lamont Cranston. That program always started with a dark voice intoning: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.” It would have started that way that day too. The Shadow was a helluva guy and my principal regret on December 7, 1941 was not getting to hear the show.

Bob

(Robert and Kevin Daley are brothers, and the father they speak of, Arthur Daley, won a Pulitzer Prize for a Sports of The Times column in 1956.  John Robben is their long-time friend from Fordham Prep and University. Robert now lives in Bronxville and Nice, France and formerly lived in Greenwich and New Canaan. Kevin presently lives in Greenwich. John Robben formerly lived in Greenwich now lives in Stamford and works in Old Greenwich) The three men, along with many other friends from the Bronx and other places correspond regularly.)

On the way home in our parents car, a 1941 Pontiac, my father had the radio on. At 5:30, Bob and I wanted to listen to “The Shadow“, which we always listened to on the way home from the Giant’s games. But we were shhhushed because they were listening to the war news. Little by little we began to catch on that something really big had happened. It had to be big if the news beat out “The Shadow“.

Bob, what do you remember?

My best,

Kevin

I had no idea where Pearl Harbor was. Most Americans didn’t. My father knew it was a Navy base on an island in the middle of the Pacific, but not much else.

We had just sat down to our traditional Sunday dinner at midday. There were just four of us: my parents, my grandmother and me. In the center of the table was a roasted chicken stuffed with Pepperidge Farm bread. It smelled good enough to eat, which is what it was intended to do. In smaller serving dishes were mashed potatoes, carrots, string beans and gravy. My grandmother had done the cooking. There wasn’t a better cook on the face of the planet!

We kept a small table model radio in the kitchen to listen to background music while we ate. The music in those days was very calm, slow, and easy-to-listen-to.

“We interrupt this program,” a voice said from the radio, “to bring you this news bulletin. Pearl Harbor has been attacked. Japanese planes have staged a raid on the Naval Base at Pearl Harbor. We repeat, Pearl Harbor has been attacked. As soon as we have more news we’ll be back. Now we are returning you to your regularly scheduled broadcast.”

“That’s impossible!” my father announced. “Pearl Harbor is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from Japan. It’s the most-heavily protected American military base in the world. No one would dare attack it!”

My father switched stations, still believing it was a fictitious announcement, probably another one of Orson Welles’ radio dramas similar to the one on Hallowe’en night in 1938 about Martians landing in Grover’s Falls, New Jersey which frightened half of America.

Additional bulletins kept being announced all that Sunday afternoon. My father switched stations to see if there were other newscasters saying the same thing, but he couldn’t find any. When he found the New York Giants football game being broadcast he stopped searching and we listened to the game. The Giants were playing the Brooklyn Dodgers that Sunday in the Polo Grounds.

One of the football announcers confirmed that Pearl Harbor had been bombed, and announcements were being made over the loudspeakers in the Polo Grounds that “All military personnel are to report to their bases immediately.” Thousands of people were exiting the stadium, most of them young men.

When you’re only 11, like I was, news doesn’t have the same impact that it does on adults, but I could tell that my father was having a hard time believing it. “What does it mean?” my mother asked him.

“It means we’re at war,” he told her. “We can’t allow another nation to attack us without responding. But I still can’t believe it. Planes can’t fly that far, not from Japan to Pearl Harbor. Do you know how large the Pacific Ocean is? They’re thousands of miles apart.”

Later that afternoon I went to the usual Sunday afternoon basketball game at the Church I attended. The gym was packed with spectators. I sat with some friends, preparing to root for our Church’s team. At halftime an official addressed us on the loud speaker system. He confirmed that the news about Japan bombing Pearl Harbor was true, and that much of the Naval Base was on fire and some of our warships had been sunk or were sinking. There were many casualties. He asked us all to rise, take off our hats, and stand while the National Anthem was played to honor those killed or wounded. It may have been the first time “The Star Spangled Banner” was played at a sporting event. That was 70 years ago, and they’re still doing it today.