More On His Family And Early Years

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All Right.
Let's Get Back On Track Here.
You Called Our Graduate Student's Mother
A Murderer.
Then You Said You Wanted To Be Fair
And Point Out Her Good Side,
So You Said She Was
A Fascist Like Mussolini
And Had The Personality Of General Patton.
Sounds Like A Nice Lady.
Ha Ha. Very Funny.
Well, she WAS driven,
and disciplined,
and organized.
That made her an excellent mother
in many ways.

How So ?
Well, the house was always clean,
and so were the kids and their clothes.
She got up every morning
and cooked the family
a nutritious breakfast.
She self-educated herself about nutrition,
listed to Carlton Fredericks on the radio.
She had a nutritious, well-balanced, hot meal
on the table every night at 6pm.

Our graduate student remembers that well.
Every day after school he put on his playclothes
and got on his bike and went off
to play baseball or football.
He had to be home by 6pm for dinner, and he was.
He clearly and distinctly remembers one evening
when he was standing by the kitchen table at 6pm.
The church bells a short city block away
were ringing as they usually did at 6 o'clock.
At that very moment,
his father came home through the door.
He usually caught the same train
and then the same bus,
so he always came home about that time
and, sometimes, just as the bells were ringing.
It was a little like Opie and Andy and Aunt Bee.

Then, after dinner,
they had to do their homework and be in bed by 9pm.
In the younger grades, and sometimes in later grades,
she would 'hear' their homework.
"Bring your homework here and let me hear it,"
she would say.
They'd bring the assignment
and the completed work to her
and she'd review it.
If it was spelling, she'd test them,
"say it, spell it, say it".
If it was a composition,
she'd read it.
If it was something they had to memorize,
she'd make them recite it.
Then they had to bathe,
and if their was time, watch a little tv.

And the tv program had to be wholesome.
Of course, that's pretty much all that was on
back then in the fifties and early sixties.
You know, family programs
like "Leave It To Beaver", "My Three Sons",
"Donna Reed", "Ozzie And Harriet",
"The Life Of Riley", "The Honeymooners",Disney stuff.
Usually she'd be there watching too,
and often sent her eldest son
running off to get her favorite ice cream treat,
"a half pint of strawberry and coffee"
"WITH THE COFFEE ON THE BOTTOM !",
sometimes they'd all recite that part in unison.

So She Really Did Run The House Like Clockwork.
Thats Right.
Nothin' wrong with that.
Lots of parents were much less attentive.
Left their kids to grab their own
breakfast and dinner,
didn't help them with their homework,
didn't make sure they bathed,
let them stay up late.
Lots of different parenting styles.
Hers was very attentive and consistent.
She had standards.
Got them from her family.

She imposed her cultural standards on the house.
Wouldn't led our graduate student
watch a horror movie like "Frankenstein"
even if all the boys in school
were talking about it.
No comic books were allowed in the house,
but they were allowed to read
the comic books at the barber shop
when they went to get a haircut.

She had discriminating tastes in programming, too,
She LOVED "Oliver And Hardy",
couldn't STAND "abbott and costello".
She LOVED "Sandy Becker",
HATED "soupy sales",
LOVED Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason,
HATED the three stooges and red skelton.

In the Summertime, they were
allowed to stay up later,
and our graduate student regularly
watched "The Steve Allen Program" with his mother
in about the 11 pm slot,
and maybe "Oh Susanna !" after that.

She loved Gene Shepard
and turned our graduate student
into a regular Gene Shepard listener, as well.
Gene Shepard was on every night
Monday thru Friday, 9-10 pm.
In high school, our graduate student had a clock radio,
and he'd set it to WOR radio at 9 pm
and set the timer for one hour,
and he'd go to sleep each night
listening to Gene Shepard spin his tales
about Flint Michigan, Flick, the army, and whatnot.

She seemed to instinctively understand,
(or maybe she was openly taught it at home)
the importance of high cultural standards
as illustrated above.
She didn't want her boys
acting like the three stooges,
but Gene Shepard and Steve Allen
as role models ?
Definitely Yes !

And She Valued Education.
That's Right.
She had a high school education,
but no college,
but she would often argue
that her high school education
at a girl's Catholic high school
in Jersey City
was the equivalent of a college education.
At first our graduate student dismissed
that contention as mere hyperbole.
But, in later years,
when he contrasted his mother's mind
to those of many college students and grads,
he conceded that maybe she had a point there.

Also, she married a college graduate.
William Scully graduated from
St. Peter's College in Jersey City,
and was an accountant for AT&T
at its headquarters on Broadway,
right near Wall Street, for 48 Years.
Quite the cosmopolitan environment.
Only a small percentage of men
had college degrees in the thirties.

To her, giving her sons
the best possible education
meant sending them
to be educated by The Jesuits at
St. Peter's Prep which was attached
to St. Peter's Elementary School
in downtown Jersey City where she was raised.
Remember, she attended
St. Peter's Elementary School
and she was very happy there.

So, Our Graduate Student
Got An Excellent Education
At That Jesuit High School,
St. Peter's Prep ?
Well, Yes and No.
You can get an excellent education
at a lot of different schools,
and educational outcome
is largely determined by the student's input,
given an adequate educational environment.
"All Education Is Self Education,"
one of his teachers once said,
and that idea stuck with him.
Jesuit schools may be the best education
that CATHOLICS have to offer,
but by no means are they
the best schools in the country.
There was a lot of old-fashioned
rote learning and memorization.
Jesuit schools are very rigidly structured
and dogmatic and hierarchical.
They're kind of militaristic.
And there's religious indoctrination.
After all, it IS a religious school.
And a lot of educated people
consider religions to be just
superstition and ritual,
and the Catholic religion to be medieval.
A year after he graduated,
he returned to St. Peter's Prep for a day
and chatted with a former teacher
who offered this opinion of
Jesuit prep schools and colleges,
"Yes, they have this veneer of liberalism
on the surface, but underneath
they are very conservative and authoritarian."

Having said that,
I will tell you
that our graduate student has told me
that he would send his son
to a Jesuit high school
if he thought he would be happy there
and do well there.
They're stable and solid,
they have good values
and dedicated staff,
lots of good tradition,
and a community of excellent parents
who have continued the tradition
of Jesuit education through the generations.

Our graduate student recently read
a memoir written by Tom Fleming, an alumnus
and very distinguished scholar and a graduate
of that Jesuit high school,
St. Peter's Prep,
that they both attended.
Fleming is a generation older,
and graduated in 1945.
After serving in the Navy in WWII,
Tom Fleming then went on to attend
Fordham University, a Jesuit college
in New York City.
Fleming presents a compelling critique
of Fordham that our graduate student
found extraordinarily similar
to his thoughts and feelings
about St. Peter's Prep
and St. Peter's College
which he attended for a semester and a half
in the 1968 - 1969 school year."

Here are parts of Tom Fleming's critique,
from "Mysteries Of My Father", (pp.289-290)
"I was not happy at Fordham.
The Jesuits all struck me as incredibly parochial...
They treated us as if we had arrived
straight from a Jesuit prep school,
humbly eager to absorb their wisdom
and accept their discipline...

"In one English literature course,
the Jesuit professor told us that no Catholic
could read the "New Yorker" magazine
without risking an "occasion of sin"
because the magazine's prevailing point of view
was so secular.
We literally laughed in the man's face.
Some Jesuits, carried away
by their huge GI Bill-financed enrollments,
saw themselves creating
a separate American Catholic culture...

American freedom was
the driving force in our souls,
not a right turn
into some sort of
authoritarian state within a state."

After a year at Fordham,
Tom Fleming applied to Princeton, (p.292)
"Soon a letter arrived
from the famous university,
informing me I was accepted.
But there was a catch.
I would have to start over again
in freshman year.

Not one course I had taken at Fordham
was deemed worthy of a Princeton credit."

"Youth is a time of impatience" (p. 293)
so he stayed at Fordham.

"In my junior year at Fordham, (p. 294)
I finally reached that supposed intellectual summit
of the Jesuit educational system, philosophy.
What a bummer.
As far as the Jesuits were concerned,
there was only one brand of that large word -
Scholastic Philosophy, as taught in the Middle Ages.
Modern philosophy - Descartes, Kant, Schopoenhauer,
Nietzsche, James, Dewey - was out of our league.

"I was disgusted.
I had already been reading on my own in the subject.
with a special interest in the existentialists,
so I had some idea of
what most of my classmates were missing.
Our teacher, David Cronin, S.J.,
at least recognized
the absurdity of the curriculum
and discussed modern thinkers in class.
But for the final exams,
we had to regurgitate the standard answers
from the scholastic philosophy textbook."

About three years ago,
our graduate student fled California,
his home of 35 years,
in fear of severe political punishment,
and returned to the Northeast, to New Jersey.
He decided that he'd reconnect and,
to that end,
he called St. Peter's Prep
to inquire about
the next class reunion for his class.
His call went to voice mail,
"Ello ! Ow Ah Ya Mate !" (paraphrased)
It was a foxy female
with a hip Australian accent.
"Oh my !" he thought, "They are quite clever.
They certainly DO try, don't they ?
Do they buy those recordings over the internet,
or did they actually have someone come in
and record it ?"
It was that veneer of hip liberalism
that the Prep teacher had referred to in 1969.
"Just like the public schools,
they sure put a lot of effort
into public relations," he mused.

We'll talk about St. Peter's Prep
and St. Peter's College
a little more, later,
especially wnen we get into
those very formative years
from 1968 to 1972
when all hell
was breaking loose
all around him.

But, first, let's say a little more
about his mother and father
and maybe his siblings and friends.

OK
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