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When my father's family arrived in what was to be our neighborhood they attended mass in a small frame building run as a mission by St. Thomas Aquinas Parish. By the time I was born the mission had become St. Aloysius parish with its own church and campus. The church I attended was built with tapestry brick in Italian Renaissance style on the outside, with massive hand-hammered doors surmounted by a canopy containing a statue of St. Aloysius. The inside was Romanesque, with a main and two side altars of Carrara marble and Stations of the Cross made of hand-hammered bronze spread out on the walls. It sat around 1300. To me St. Aloysius church was a Taj Mahal.

The school was administered and staffed by Sisters of the Order of St. Joseph who lived in a two-story frame house on the parish campus. They were Catholicism's face for me; most of my time at St. Al's was spent with them rather than with priests.

The order of the Sisters of St. Joseph started in 17th century France with a half dozen or so women who joined together to help suffering people in the war-ravaged village of Le Puy. They searched the streets at night to find and care for the needy, wearing a full-bodied black robe with black hood and white surplice in order to be mistaken as widows rather than as prostitutes. This is the style of clothing they wore when I was at St. Al's.

A small group of them was sent to America from Lyons in response to a request from the first Bishop of St. Louis to begin a school for the deaf. The effectiveness of those few nuns led to new demands, one of which was to bring nuns to the Cleveland area for the education of immigrants.

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hostile to Roman Catholicism until the 1960s, the age of John F. Kennedy and Pope John XXIII.

In the 1930s there were a number of nuns' Orders teaching in Cleveland Diocese schools. I was lucky to be taught by Sisters of St. Joseph. They focused more on secular than on religious education, and they guided us in caring for those needier than ourselves. There were no well-to-do kids at St. Al's but the nuns taught us to look for and help those less fortunate than ourselves. It was a powerfully positive message in a number of ways. Nuns of some other orders emphasized the horrors of going to hell and sternly discouraged reading anything other than Church-approved literature.

The St. Aloysius campus consisted of the church, the two school buildings, the parish rectory where four priests lived, the nuns' house and an activities building, with a paved outdoor play area in the center. I got to know every square inch of all the buildings except the parish rectory and the nuns' house, in which my presence was limited to the entry rooms. If you took piano or violin or singing lessons at the nuns' house you were allowed into the music room.

Very little accommodation was provided for cars; hardly anyone drove to church. On Sunday mornings an hourly flow of mass-goers walked up and down St. Clair Avenue and its side streets. "You never walked to church alone," a parishioner recalled.

There was no kindergarten at St. Al's so I went half-days to a public school kindergarten at E. 105th St., off St. Clair Avenue. It would have been a grievous turning point in my life if my teacher had not miraculously intervened.

The Cleveland Public School system prided itself as a vanguard of modern, progressive education, so the school board was one of the first in the country to mandate use of intelligence and placement tests in all schools and grades, including kindergartens. My class was tested near the end of the school year. The test was given orally because very few children could read, let alone read instructions for a test.

I was doomed. My speech was miserably confused from speaking Czech with my bed-ridden maternal grandmother and English with everyone else. I uttered bizarre misnomers, like "lard" for "yard," or "cook" for "book."

My intelligence test results were clear and, as the prissy test-giver, whose eyes looked like fish in a bowl behind his thick lenses, declared, "This boy is retarded!"

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About a week later I was the subject of a meeting held in the school principal's office. The principal, my parents, my teacher Miss Smiley, the test-giver, a representative of the Cleveland School Board's Testing Services and I were present. Like the principal, the test-giver and the School Board's representative wore power clothing: suits with vests, shirts with ties. The prim test-giver announced to my parents the "clear, un-e-qui-vo-cal proof" - there it was in numbers! -- that I should be placed in a school for the retarded. This was, of course, for my own good, as determined by the latest pedagogical scientific canon.

My parents were willing to go along; they probably didn't know what else to do. But Miss Smiley, my teacher, in one of those moments one cherishes forever, cuddled me protectively in her arms and said, "This boy is not retarded. He is just the opposite. He is very bright. Do you know he can read?" My parents didn't. The principal looked confused. The test-giver challenged Miss Smiley but backed off when she offered to have me read something. I imagined, there in the warmth of Miss Smiley's embrace, that the fish behind his glasses were going berserk.

Years later I came to know the shortcomings of intelligence testing in schools. The scientific basis is unsound in many ways and those who administer the tests were middling students in high school and college. But back then, people like my parents assumed the opposite.

There was yet another obstacle to overcome before I could start first grade at St. Al's. My parents had considered keeping me out of school for a year because I was needed at home to cater my bedridden grandmother. When I was in kindergarten my mother and I divided the care-giving. I was at school in the mornings, she went to work as a seamstress from the time I came home to seven or eight at night.

No one was certain about state requirements on schooling. My parents believed their circumstances justified holding me back for one school year. Priorities were different then, particularly in a blue-collar city like Cleveland, where the first commandment was, "Put food on the table."

The authorities would have gone along with the waiver to keep me at home. If you were not on the dole, but just barely so because both parents worked, as was the case in our family, you qualified for such special considerations. My parents didn't apply because my mother found a job as a

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baker's assistant working from four to eleven in the morning and a woman down the street volunteered to care for

my grandmother for a few hours in the mornings. In exchange my father built a den in her basement.

First Grade

My first memory of St. Al's School is a dark and musty cloakroom to which I had been banished for disturbing class. My first-grade teacher, Sister Clemencia, said "Stand there until I call you" with a voice that demanded nothing less.

It was my first encounter with a nun. I'd sneaked glances at them in church, formidable apparitions in black costume, only the skin of their hands and their faces, like masks, appearing naked to the eye, propped and surrounded by stiff-as-a-board virgin white collars. Someone once described nuns in movement as pale women of indeterminate age skimming across floors as if on silent rubber wheels.

I stood in the cloakroom for what seemed an eternity and a day, until the stink of wet wool coats and mildewed boots prevailed. I grabbed my coat and bolted.

From there to home that day was a three-minute dash down St. Clair Ave. to E. 114th St., taking me past Abel's Funeral Home, the gully at Blakesly's pond, where we ice-skated in winter and crossed the creek by walking stones in summer, a cloistered nuns' home, in back of which I swear I saw a headless man walking around when I was five, and six or seven neighborhood stores. Sidewalks all the way, it was the kind of neighborhood where roller skates were used as much for getting around as for fun.

It was afternoon, so my mother was there when I arrived home breathless and excited. I blurted out something like "I ran away from school." She asked me where my boots and lunch box were as she put on her coat to take me back.

Sister Clemencia apologized amiably. She said she had just forgotten I was in the closet and she should have brought me back to the classroom before the inevitable frustration took charge. It was a gracious gesture to put the blame on herself. I appreciated it, though not enough to avoid more time in that desolate, malodorous cloakroom. I didn't run home again; I amused myself interchanging coat pocket contents, moving coats around, and turning coats inside out.

Second Grade

By the time I was in second grade my reputation as a class disrupter had spread through the nun's house, I figured,

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because the first thing my second grade teacher said to me was, "I hope you'll be as good a student as your sister

was." Considering that I received all As and my sister received Bs in academic subjects I figured the veiled threat must have referred to my Poors in conduct.

Lois and Tom always received Bs in academics and "Good" or "Excellent" in conduct. Such marks were the embodiment of a perfect student for my mother. When I brought home my first-grade report cards she looked at them as though they were something in a foreign language strange to her eyes, or as if she were learning to read, then she would sign and hand them back to me with a comment like "well, I'm not used to seeing 'Poor' for behavior."

She decided to deal with my idiosyncrasy when I brought home my first report card from the second grade, which revealed I had not reformed. She said nothing about my card, but sat down with me at the kitchen table and placed the reports Tom and Lois brought home next to mine on the red-and-white-checkered oilcloth. Deliberately, as though she were preparing to do something of national importance, she picked up Tom's card and, using what Lois and I called her "soap opera voice," recited the names of the subjects followed by the "B" as though she were revealing Aristotle's Golden Mean, then appeared to be ready to break out in joyous song when she said, "And look at that 'Excellent' in conduct!"

She repeated this performance with Lois's card. My father called such episodes "evening shows" to differentiate them from mere "matinees." When my mother began one he often asked, "Iz it ta be an evening show or a matinee, now, Helen?"

Finally she gingerly picked up my report card, holding it a further distance from herself than she had held the other two cards, and read, "A, A, A, A, A," sounding as though she were desperately searching for something to relieve her of a great pain. In grim voice, she concluded, "Poor in conduct!"

Cautiously she placed the card back on the table, got up from the chair, gave me a heavy look and exited the kitchen as though she was following stage directions written in parentheses after her last line.

Lois once asked, "Do you suppose she rehearses or is it all ad lib?"

The summer following my second year at St. Al's I began to see signs of President Roosevelt's government-sponsored programs to invigorate the economy. Each unit in our row

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house, as well as the individual houses on 114th Street, had a front porch. In summer people filled the porches and

spilled out on the front steps. That summer I saw fewer fathers sitting on their porches during the daytime. Many were working on Work Administration Projects, known by everyone as "the WPA".

The WPA put people on projects ranging from road-building to writing plays. One of our neighbors did landscaping, another laid bricks for a hospital extension. The father of a good friend worked on a history-writing project.

Critics of the WPA grumbled about "communism invading our country." I didn't know the words, but I liked what was happening.

I've been a bit soft on socialism ever since, but my opinion on the great debate between socialism and capitalism has evolved over the years to be more favorable toward capitalism, particularly after I spent four months as a guest lecturer at Moscow State University during the days of the Soviet Union. Trotsky said the Communist Party bureaucratic elite "shit all over the revolution, from head to toe." My months there suggested he was more accurate than those who proclaimed a "workers' paradise" had been created.

While the WPA enraged America's far right, those on the far left wanted even more government help for the poor. The Townsend Plan proposed a government check of $200-a-month for everyone over 65. FDR's Social Security plan was the compromise. My father and mother entered it in 1936. Years later when they were both receiving social security checks they were absolutely delighted and proud they could live in modest comfort on their savings and social security income.

The WPA was very popular in my neighborhood. I recall the father of a friend saying it was a lot better than working as a strikebreaking goon. Throughout the industrial revolution companies hired gangs of unemployed men to break up strikes. After the collapse in 1930 there was usually a crowd of men gathered early in the morning at E. 9th and Euclid Avenue, hoping to be selected as strike breakers. Company trucks and buses stopped, a selection would be made by a pointed finger at one of the men followed by a thumb jerking at the truck or bus. When they arrived at the scene of the strike these men would be given blackjacks, clubs and baseball bats before they were let loose on the strikers.

In later, economically-better, times, when work was easier to find and protected by unions, those men who had been

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strike breakers were outcasts and most of those I knew moved out of the neighborhood. My father was tolerant in

his comments about them, as was his way. He, like my brother, was seldom critical, usually forgiving in an offhand way. My mother insisted nothing like that had ever gone on, and if it had, certainly none of our neighbors did it. She didn't like things happening if she hadn't approved of them.

During the first ten years of my life the United States went from an essentially laissez-faire economy to a highly government-regulated economy, though we never adopted as much socialism as did other industrialized countries such as France and Germany.

Parish political ideology was liberal and progressive. At the turn of the century papal encyclicals set forth a doctrine of social justice, which didn't penetrate much further than Catholic scholarship. A few years into the Depression Catholic clergy and lay people at the grass roots became intensely interested in issues of social justice. Words from the papal encyclicals were quoted in Sunday sermons and in our classrooms we learned a commitment to government interference on behalf of redistribution of wealth. Most of St. Al's parishioners were Democrats.

Third Grade

"Confirmation" was in third grade, symbolizing my full-fledged commitment to the Catholic Church. At baptism I had been brought into the Church by my parents and godparents. At confirmation I was to accept Christ and renounce the devil on my own.

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Some of my Czech relatives were distressed by the Nazi blitzkrieg in the Sudetenland. They came over when my father wasn't home, ranting about it in Czech with my mother. After my kindergarten escape from the wisdom of the Cleveland School system, my father said he thought Czech should no longer be spoken in our home, which is something I'm sure he wanted to say for a long time because he barely understood a word. It was unlike him to make a demand like that, so everyone obeyed as though he were Moses casually handing us an eleventh commandment. When he was home, that is.

I couldn't understand them. When a group of Czechs argue, at least three agitated voices are heard simultaneously. The din seriously surpassed my Czech-language skills. My mother told me her relatives were almost as upset with her as they were with Hitler. She wasn't concerned at all about what Hitler did. For some of her relatives she was not far from being a traitor.

My mother was unsentimental about "the old country" and proudly oblivious to world events. Not until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and my brother's ripeness for conscription did rumors of war come to her attention.

My last third-grade report card intensified my mother's frustrations with what she saw as a square peg in her world of round holes. Some of the "A"s were followed by plus signs, which for her were surely satanic scribbles.

Even so, I detected signs she was wearying of the battle. Partly perhaps because Uncle Bill was now living in the neighborhood, at my grandparents' home, an unnerving presence for the family because he had become a member of the Eastside Irish mob. He claimed to be "really on the inside" but was probably more like a gofer.

Mobsters got their foothold and then flourished in Cleveland during the Prohibition years, 1919 to 1933, when the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic drinks were illegal. A lot of whisky made in Canada crossed Lake Erie in a shuttle service called the "Big Jewish Navy" because it was run by Meyer Lansky's Cleveland Syndicate. The Syndicate shared the booze with Cleveland's Italian and Irish mobs.

The booze remained in Cleveland or was shipped out to other cities via the Ohio Valley. Lake Erie, the Cuyahoga River running south from the lake, and major highways provided convenient transportation. Cleveland's corrupt political

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and police cultures also provided a helping, while outstretched, hand.

When Prohibition ended, the Syndicate turned to big-time gambling, bought off the authorities from top to bottom, and decorated Cleveland with casinos and bookie-joints. As with the booze business, the Italian and Irish mobs got into the action.

Uncle Bill said Cleveland's mobs invented the wire service supplying race results to bookies throughout America. On the national level, according to phone company records, the mobs were the third largest phone user in the country, just behind the Federal government and the military.

He bragged about playing poker with some of the toughest guys in the Irish mob, sharing smoke-filled rooms with real leg-breakers.

Eventually his losses added up to what the mob called "a debt to be paid." Uncle Bill went into hiding in my grandparents' home. My parents told me to deny knowing him, should I be asked about him. And I was asked. By behemoths in shiny suits with black turtle-necked sweaters. "Hey," they growled at me, "herd ya called 'Jimmy Heefee,' d'ya know Billy Heefee?"

Though Uncle Bill was not my favorite relative I do owe him a little because I gained status with my friends by having an uncle hiding from the mob. Those who heard me refuse to give him up to the behemoths spread the word, Heaphey's a tough kid. I needed that, along with the reputation for being dauntless in the presence of Edward. I was a skinny kid with rickets who needed all the muscle he could get via reputation.

Fourth Grade

For various reasons, some of which I understood at the time and some of which came to me later in life, the fourth grade was a very good year.

Going into fourth grade was a rite of passage; you left the small building and entered the big building. Those were the names all the kids used - "small building," for first through third grades, "big building," for fourth through eighth grades.

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retreat to the lower floor followed by a slow-motion walk back up. Most of them practiced a loose interpretation of

their authority. When a guard wanted to attract the attention of some girls, any fourth-grader in view was doomed. "You!" he would bellow, even when you were taking each stair at a snail's pace, brandishing a pointed index finger, "back down and up again, sloooow-ly!"

That was my first lesson in abuse of authority for personal gain. I wanted to be a stair guard.

The smell of cough drops was another distinguishing feature of the big building. All through the school year, cold and flu season or not, the too-sweet aroma filled the building, particularly in the sixth, seventh and eighth grade classrooms. Chewing gum was forbidden but open flaps of cough drop boxes jutted defiantly out of boys' trouser pockets. Girls, always stealthier than boys, not only kept them hidden but also could conceal that they were sucking them. Lois showed me how they did it, keeping the cough drop under the tongue. Luden's (orange box, black lettering) was the cough drop of preference. Cherry-flavored Luden's with a silhouette of Abe Lincoln on the front of the box was the favorite.

Sister Augusta Mulligan, my fourth grade teacher, opened the door of learning for me, encouraging me to go beyond the classroom, specifically to the Glenville branch of the Cleveland Public Library, which was a 15-minute walk from my house.

The Cleveland Public Library system, with neighborhood branches, was an Andrew Carnegie legacy. He offered large sums of money to cities willing to establish public libraries financially maintained by dedicated taxes. Cleveland seized the opportunity and built a world-class library system. I suspect the Glenville branch was particularly excellent because Glenville High School, in the heart of one of Cleveland's two largest Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, was noted for students who outclassed all other Cleveland public students in academic achievement.

Sister Augusta gave me an afternoon off and a letter of introduction to the Glenville library. I gave the letter to a librarian at the main desk. She told me her name and took me into the first of the library's four rooms, stopping at a stack of colorful large books under a window. I'd never been in the presence of a person who kept their glasses attached by a cord around the neck and spoke such lovely English in softened tones. I still remember the feeling of

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awe in her presence and I wanted to learn to speak as she did.

She explained we were in the children's reading room and the books in front of us were fairy tales graded to reading-level abilities by color. I should start at the lowest level and work my way up. She promised I would find them fun to read and would also be laying the groundwork for my future education because fairy tales are the basis for all of literature, whether popular or classical. All literary themes, she explained, such as courage, vengeance, love, and redemption were pioneered and explored in fairy tales. She really had my attention, and I will never forget that afternoon with her.

I went through the fairy tales in a few months. As I came and went to check out and return books I talked more with that librarian and got to know two others. In the following years I flourished in a magnificent new world of discovery, guided and mentored by those three women. They were ever available to talk about what I had just finished, and to recommend what I should read next.

Author Frank McCourt, recalling his own boyhood as an Irish Catholic, worded better than I could ever hope to, the epiphanies of reading. He was born around the same time I was, though his family was "dirt poor," in the sense that they lacked the two potatoes. In "Angela's Ashes," one of McCourt's teachers says, "you might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but stock your mind with good reading and you can move through the world resplendent. Your mind can be a palace."

Sister Augusta's guidance is one of the reasons I feel lucky to have been in the hands of the Sisters of St. Joseph. In the Cleveland Diocese there were two opposing views on what the young should be taught. Some priests, nuns and parishioners believed that kids should be kept within the ken of conservative Catholicism. Others believed that kids should explore beyond it. The unadventurous view was particularly favored in parishes where most of the parishioners were of one non-English-speaking immigrant group, such as my mother's.

My father didn't seem to care if I spent hours at the library and toted home an armful of books, but it distressed my mother. When, as she put it, I had my nose in books, she was demonstrably uncomfortable. I don't know how many times she said, "You should be out playing with your friends." I thought she'd wear out the phrase. If Sister Augusta had not been the one who was encouraging me, I

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think the pressure to stop reading would have been unbearable. As was the case at most Catholic supper tables,

"Sister says" trumped all other sources of authority at ours.

Even with Sister Augusta running interference for me, the situation required subterfuge. I was probably the only kid in Cleveland who told his mother he was going out playing when he was going to the library. Or, who had to hide books bearing names suspect to my mother, like Plato or Shakespeare. Lois suggested I disguise the books with comic-book covers.

It would be unfair to leave the impression my mother was peculiar because she feared education. Her Parish experience was fundamentally different from mine. Novelist Mary Gordon had experiences in a Catholic school similar to my mother's.

"I used to have to hide books under my desk," Gordon says. "The idea of reading a book was suspect or threatening."

Faith and knowledge have been tense rivals throughout the history of the Catholic Church. Though there are eminent Catholic universities and renowned Catholic contributions to humanism and science, the Church has always harbored a distrust, a fear that humanism and science undermine faith. Savonarola once famously expressed it in quoting a line from the Gospel of Paul. "I am going to destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to nothing the understanding of any who understand. Do you not see how God has shown up human wisdom as folly?"

I published my first article in the fourth grade.

At the end of each school year a publication titled "The Alogram" was mimeographed and distributed to seventh and eighth graders. On the cover page was a picture of the graduating class standing on the outside stairs of the little building. Seventh graders wrote most of the articles chronicling eighth graders' accomplishments. As a tribute to being in the big building the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades were each allowed one article about a school year event in their classroom.

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China or for miscellaneous American Catholic Charities, selling raffle tickets for the annual parish new car

lottery, or collecting food for distribution in Hoovervilles.

Raising money for charities was not a natural urge for kids like me. Most of us had to find jobs to pay for anything beyond the bare necessities. If you wanted to go to a movie you cut a lawn, shoveled snow, carried groceries from the store to home for older women, put cans on shelves or swept the floor in a store, or something like that.

The nuns encouraged us to pay attention to people worse off than ourselves; they used games and contests to put fun in it. Beginning in the second grade there was always something for which your class was raising money (literally, pennies).

The choice of zeppelin stickers as measures of our progress must have come from Sister Augusta's fascination with German dirigibles and zeppelins. She had pictures of the Hindenburg and Graf Zeppelin which we passed around and chattered about. I don't think it was part of any lesson plan. Sister Augusta wanted to share her joy. Perhaps because both of her parents were from Ireland, she was excited by stretches of the imagination. She told us Count von Zeppelin came to America from Germany to be an observer, high up in a balloon, for the Union army during the Civil War. After he returned home he invented the zeppelin.

Forty or so years later my memory of Sister Augusta was revived at a Gasthaus in Schweinfurt, Germany. On my first morning there, I was drinking deliciously strong coffee and putting too much butter on my kaiser rolls when I noticed some pictures on the wall next to my chair in the breakfast room. They were turn-of-the-century photographs of German army officers standing in front of balloons, dirigibles and zeppelins. Then I noticed that the entire room was decorated with the same kind of pictures. I got up and walked closer to another wall where I thought there was some printing underneath one of the pictures. Below a man looking regal in a Prussian army officer's dress uniform were the words "Count von Zeppelin," done in classical curlicue German lettering. Looking further down the wall I saw more pictures of the Count, in flight dress, various uniforms and civilian clothes, always standing confidently with impeccable posture.

When I asked the gasthaus frau about the pictures, she proudly informed me, "Yes, this is his house, this is the

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house where the Count was a boy." It was one of those moments when the lone traveler wishes a certain person from

his past were with him. I wonder if Sister Augusta had any notion about how she gave me, and who knows how many thousands more, dreams to be enjoyed the rest of our lives.

My essay on the stickers won. I stayed after school for three or four days writing and rewriting the article for the Alogram article. Sister Augusta critiqued them. When she was satisfied, the draft had to survive the critical eye of Sister Annunciata, the principal of St. Aloysius school. Unfortunately I was well-known to Sister Annunciata for my classroom misconduct. Sisters were allowed to punish us with time in the cloakroom or with after-school cleanup tasks. When they thought something more corporeal was needed they sent us to the principal's office where we would hold out our hands palms up for a painful swatting by a yardstick in the hand of what seemed to be a very powerful woman. I knew well the yardstick's sting.

I took the first draft approved by Sister Augusta to Sister Annunciata's office. She studied it with pursed lips, her face stone still, then she red-penciled notes on it; more notes, I thought, than the words I had written. She handed it to me without a change in her facial expression or a word. I ran back upstairs - one of the nice things about being in the school after hours was the absence of imperious hall guards - and showed it to Sister Augusta, who said the suggestions were helpful.

After rewriting I revisited the principal's office. This time she used her red pencil less. Back upstairs I went.

Sister Annunciata's red pencil was not silenced until the fourth draft or so. As this went along Sister Augusta gave me more and more encouragement, telling me she could understand if I was getting frustrated. She wanted me to know the principal was setting very high standards indeed for a fourth grader. I felt she was on my side and I loved her for it.

For years I talked about this as "a tale of two nuns," to show how really nice some nuns were, and how unreasonable some others could be. Not until many years later did I realize what was happening. The Sisters had played "good cop, bad cop," trying to bring out the best I could do. The lesson was important to me: after the fun of writing your first draft you must discipline yourself to do the tedious and unpleasant reworking any piece needs. How many times have I heard someone, often at a cocktail party, tell me he

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or she would love to be a writer because he or she had so much to say, as though writing is like playing a fun game,

and I have thought to myself: First show me you can survive the rewriting ordeal of Sisters Annunciata and Augusta.

And there's another point to be made. In those days publication was a major undertaking. First you placed sheets of special stencil paper in a (manual!) typewriter, set the ribbon control to "stencil" and typed your copy on to the sheet. You didn't use the ribbon because your object was to cut through the paper with the typewriter key. You hit the keys slowly, carefully. Typing mistakes were incorrigible monsters.

The finished stencil was placed on a mimeograph drum, the surface of which you had previously inked. You then turned the drum with a hand crank. A blank sheet of paper was drawn in from a tray, pressed against the drum so that the ink came through the stencil and printed the copy. Think messy! Your hands were soon covered with ink which quickly made its way to your clothes. Stencils wrinkled, making messy copies. Often the typewriter keys penetrated too deeply, resulting in "g"s and "o"s filled in by the ink. And the stench of hot wax and ink was only breaths away from being unbearable.

Tom was in eighth grade when I was in the fourth. He and his buddies constituted the nucleus of the St. Aloysius sports teams. All parishes had football, basketball, boxing and baseball teams competing in the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) League. Chicago Bishop Bernard Shell started the CYO in 1930 to, "give young men in this city an alternative to standing around on Depression street corners admiring Al Capone."

The weekly Catholic Universe Bulletin ran the latest standings and the previous week's scores, just like the Cleveland secular papers ran them for the Cleveland Indians baseball team, the Cleveland Rams football team and the Cleveland Barons hockey team. At that time only Catholic and other private schools provided organized sports in grammar schools.

Tom and his eighth-grade friends could never have imagined that four years after they wore St. Al's "blue and white" they would be carrying military weapons on foreign soil, or that at the end of the century Tom Brokaw would honor them in his book, "The Greatest Generation."

"With abandon" is an expression that might have been invented to describe Tom's participation in sports. In football he played fullback on offense and line-backer on

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defense with an enthusiasm that bordered on recklessness. He was carried out of almost every game, sometimes twice,

to the cheerleaders sing-song "He's the man, Whooo's the man, Heeee's the Saint Alo-whish-ous man, Whooooo, Heeee-fee!"

My sister was one of the cheerleaders. After games she would stare at the ground and say, "It is soooo embarrassing."

Father Hallinan was St. Al's sports' priest at that time. He directed all sports and sometimes coached when there were no parish volunteers. A youthful, witty, and charismatic man, Father Hallinan was a gifted after-dinner speaker for end-of-season sports nights, bingo events and wedding parties. His witticisms were Parish lore. When Bing Crosby played the beloved priest in "Going My Way" we were certain he took his inspiration from Father Hallinan.

He visited our house once, the day after Tom, going a bit too far with his derring-do, broke his arm in a game with Holy Name Academy. When a priest walked from the priests' house to one of ours he was always carefully observed once he turned off of St. Clair Avenue on to the residential street. What everyone looked for was the black extreme unction bag, indicating the last rites were to be administered.

I opened the door to his knock. First I saw the black trousers and jacket, then I looked for his right hand. Before I got my eyes there he raised both hands, spread his fingers wide, and gave me a big Irish grin, saying, "no bag! no bag!"

He came to see Tom more for physical than for religious reasons. There were no doctors' offices in my neighborhood. I dreaded the hour-or-longer streetcar ride to our doctor's building and the endless waiting in his office, always teeming with god-awful-looking sick people wheezing and coughing phlegm or moaning in pain. My father would say, "Sum a thim are sick as small hospitals."

Fortunately, routine eye-checks and other basic health needs were provided by a nurse at St. Al's. The priests and nuns could never be sure a child was receiving medical care beyond the basics because if the care had to be paid for it was assigned a lower priority than food. And that is why Father Hallinan came to visit.

I don't know what he would have done had Tom not been in an arm cast but I'm sure I imagined he would have known how to deal with a broken arm or anything else. I didn't believe

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in miracles, not even from him, but I believed he could do anything needing doing.

I invited Father Hallinan to sit in the living room. My father came in and said, "H'lo Father." Then he did his deadpan and said, "Oh my, Jimmy, what'ya done now?" My mother cried out from the kitchen "Jesus, Mary" in Czech.

Four years later, along with most of the players on that year's St. Al's teams, Father Hallinan went into uniform, serving as a chaplain in Australia, New Guinea, and the Phillipines. A Jewish GI gave a testimony to Chaplain Hallinan, saying, "He is the best friend any man in the service could have."

At a Mass he offered during a leave, Father Hallinan talked about the Cleveland Diocesan priests, altar boys, and sports players he had run into between battles.

"I met several times in New Guinea with Father Jim Murphy from Immaculate Conception parish," he said with a familiar twinkle. "We talked about the time St. Al's beat Immaculate Conception in the last game of the 1941 football season. That is, I talked about it, and he listened."

After the war the Church hierarchy noticed Father Hallinan's talents. He became a bishop in Cleveland and eventually was the Archbishop of Atlanta. During the 1960s he was a prominent voice and activist in the Civil Rights Movement.

In the spring of my fourth-grade year, the Cleveland Indians' strikeout king Bob Feller pitched the first no-hitter opening-day game, in Comiskey Park against the Chicago White Sox. Tom sat attentively by the radio for the Indians' games. About ten minutes before a game he would click the radio on, waiting for it to warm up; then he patiently worked on tuning in the station, which required slow-motion fingering back and forth across the station's number. During the game he kept batting statistics in a neat parade of boxes after the players' names and saved the sheets for years.

The day after Feller's no-hitter, Tom recreated every pitch of the ninth inning, throwing a tennis ball to me on the sidewalk in front of our house, while imitating the voice of Jack Graney, who covered all the Indians' games for a local radio station. "Fella stretches. There's the windup. There's the pitch. Blazin fast ball. Stee-rike three! Called!"

That opening day game spoke for the upturn taking place in Cleveland. The war in Europe created demand for producers'

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goods, such as machine tools and construction equipment, for which Cleveland was a prize resource.

I saw the revival no further away than the cluster of stores on St. Clair Avenue. Women were buying more at the two grocery stores, Kroger's and Fisher Brothers, so there was more demand for me and my wagon to get groceries from store to home. More empty delivery boxes were accumulating behind the stores, so it was easier to get a Saturday job flattening boxes and loading them on trucks. More business also meant more to clean up inside the stores at the end of the day. Shopkeepers who had been doing their own clean-ups hired kids to do it. I was earning so many dimes that I could afford a second-hand wagon with detachable sides.

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lids reattached very firmly so no air could enter. The jars were stored on wooden shelves in the basement.

Fifth Grade

When I was in fifth grade, Monsignor Daley, the head priest, visited our class to explain what was involved in becoming an altar boy. He took some questions and then left booklets containing the priest's invocations and the altar boys' responses, all in Latin. I was enticed.

Those were the days of Devotional Catholicism, when mass was called "the holy mass," novenas and saying the rosary flourished, singing was restricted to the church choir and soloist, always in Latin, and overall there was a distinct separation between the mystique of the altar and the commonplace of just being in attendance. Only priests and altar boys were allowed at the altar. The boys wore floor-length black cassocks, partly covered by white surplices with square-yoked necklines.

I seldom go to church these days but when I do I'm reminded of the Asbury Park love-ins in the 60s. The congregation sings, lay people are at the altar, Latin is a dead language, there are biblical-oriented meditation booklets, public penitential services, prayer groups and parish-mission statements. I'm reminded of my reaction to being a Unitarian for a few years, where mysticism is overshadowed by rational thought. Listening to the Sunday sermon at a Unitarian service reminded me of listening to undergrad philosophy lectures.

In a way, today's Catholicism is a return to the early 19th century. The first Catholics arriving in America had no priest, so parish leadership was left to laymen. When the priest arrived, the people and he had to learn how to work together. The governance system was similar to that of American Protestant churches; the priest worked together with laymen elected by parishioners. Liturgy was simple and the interior of Catholic churches was, like Protestant churches, plain and devoid of the decorative statues and paintings found in European Catholic churches. Solemn, complex liturgy along with decorative statues and paintings, Devotional Catholicism, emerged in the late 19th century.

The modern church emphasis on ecumenism is, I believe, very laudable. Too many priests were too critical of Protestantism in the early and middle-twentieth centuries. I was lucky. My parents and the religious authorities who influenced me as a boy left me with the impression that

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belief in and commitment to God is vital, but specific religions are not.

My neighborhood was ecumenical in its way, or at least religiously tolerant. I think this is illustrated in the relationship that the neighborhood kids had with Mr. and Mrs. Frantz.

Private cars were parked in front of only a few houses on 114th St. in the 1930s. The owners were usually former members of the well-to-do middle class who had fallen from the grace of affluence, like Mr. and Mrs. Frantz, a childless couple, who lived in the first house before our terrace. We kids liked them. They never complained when our street games invaded their front yard. They tipped when we cut their lawn. And they always bought St. Al's raffle tickets from us, even though they were Lutheran. For years I washed their car every weekend in spring and summer, a Hudson Essex Terraplane, daydreaming I was out in it cruising for girls.

Theirs was one of the houses we protected from Halloween out-of-towners' pranks. Out-of-towners were boys who didn't live in the neighborhoods they prowled. Being an out-of-towner was a few steps up the bad-boy ladder. Below them were boys like myself who dumped garbage on the porches of mean-and-nasty people in our neighborhood. Out-of-towners didn't discriminate between the good and the bad. They struck when the opportunity was there. Mr. and Mrs. Frantz were an easy target because their backyard area was very dark and they were usually in the front of the house handing out treats.

We protected the Frantz house in two-boy-teams, each team doing a 30-minute shift. The youngest took the first shifts, starting when the street lights went out, because they had to be home earlier. Armed with a whistle to call in support the two boys took strategic positions in the backyard of the protected house. Usually the whistle blast drove the out-of-towners away, but some were spoiling for a fight, so if you were on watch you prayed other boys would respond quickly, hopefully big ones.

Though I recall memories like Mr. and Mrs. Frantz with considerable good feelings and they bolster my support for ecumenism, I would not have wanted to become an altar boy if it had not been the age of Devotional Catholicism when the altar was the summit of mysticism, where the altar boy was physically almost indivisible from the priest in whom realization of all religious rites dwelled.

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The inside of St. Al's was mysteriously appealing, a place of compelling sensual experiences - the smoky smells from

candles, strident echoes of a person walking in an empty church, and the unreachably-high grand ceiling.

Inspired by the idea of being a member of the select few, I learned the Latin dialogue between priest and altar boys, then mastered the choreography for all four altar boy positions. But I came upon a stone wall in the test administered by the nun we called "the inspector-general."

Before I was allowed to actually serve at mass I had to pass five days of her neatness and cleanliness inspection, which included hair, ears, teeth, shoes and hands. Each morning before school I presented myself to the IG. By the third morning I was acceptable in all categories except knuckles and fingernails. I washed them before presenting myself to her, but I could not get them clean enough, at least not clean enough looking. She tsked-tsked, hurried away, came back with a stiff-bristled brush, stood at the sink and beckoned me to join her. She showed me how to scrub my knuckles and fingernails, vigorously with soap, almost-scalding hot water and a brush that felt like sand paper.

There were two obstacles to my passing the knuckles and fingernails test. In my home there was one bathroom for five people. The bathtub was filled only once each night. If you were not the first person to bathe the water was not even hot and certainly not inviting enough to spend time on fine points like knuckles and fingernails. In the morning everyone was in a rush and there was no hot water.

The second obstacle was the game of marbles. When I was ten, I was addicted to it. There is no way to get down on your knees in the dirt, shoot some serious marbles, and get up with anything other than thoroughly dirt-stained knuckles and fingernails.

To play marbles you begin by scratching a circle in dirt with your finger tip, about the size of a garbage can lid. The players agree on the number of marbles they will ante up from their pockets, drop them in the circle with their backs to it, then agree to a way of deciding who shoots first.

Shooters, or attack marbles, are as important to a dedicated marbles player as the sword was to a samurai. You get down on your knees, bend over with your shooter between your thumb and index finger, lay the rest of the hand at the edge of the circle's line without smudging it, site

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your prey, then propel your shooter with the skill and strength you have developed after hours and hours of

practice. When you knock a marble out of the circle, it's yours.

This was one of the few games at which I excelled. By the time I was eleven I could beat even Tom and his friends. Kids were known to go home crying after a match with me. One mother pounded on our back door one day to complain I had won all of her boy's marbles. My mother made me give them back. It was clear to me women have no stomach for the brutality of competition.

I carried my marbles including two shooters in my left pocket, ever ready for a match, your dirt or mine, or the city's. If I could find no opponent on my way to school I drew a circle and practiced. Before I left for church on Sunday, during those marble-addiction years, my mother would yell out, "Don't take your marbles, Jimmy!" It was not that she worried I would stop and play a game on the way on the Lord's Day. She saw it as another reason for me to have my hand in my pocket, stroking my marbles, getting my fingers dangerously close to "it." My mother feared the temptations of pockets even when they didn't have marbles in them. One night in a rage of chastity she sewed up all of Tom's and my pockets.

The IG was not to give up if she thought you were trying. She told me she was clearing me to be an altar boy at the 6:45 morning mass, for which I would have show up at 6:15 to scrub. Not even I wanted to get up early enough to get in a round of practice marbles in the dark, particularly in winter, when it could be relentlessly cold and gray.

Getting up so early for mass in winter made me the logical person to set up the day's heating system. Coal was delivered in summer or early fall by trucks backed up to our opened coal-bin windows, then tilted down towards the window so the coal would run down a chute into the bin. On coal-delivery days street windows were painted with black soot.

When we went to bed the furnace was banked so there would be something left in the morning to start the new coals. There was no thermostat. As soon as I awoke I would go to the basement, put on workman's gloves, and shovel coal into the furnace. We saved the ashes in bushel baskets to pour on icy stairs and sidewalks.

In the springtime of my fifth-grade year I decided I wanted to learn to play guitar. I told my parents I would pay for the guitar and the lessons. The Wurlitzer Company in

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Cleveland offered a year's program in which you bought the guitar along with the lessons on a weekly payment basis. As

usual my mother took over the parental position. She agreed to accordion, not guitar. Eastern Europeans love accordions. Guitars were less favored, perhaps because they were so prevalent in hobos' camps. I went along with my mother because I had bigger fish to fry with her regarding the kind of work I wanted to do in the coming summer, which I'll explain below.

I took accordion lessons for years and years, and practiced and practiced, and played with innumerable combos of little fame in night clubs and beer halls, at weddings and other celebrations. Along the way I taught myself to play imperfect piano, adding it to a performance package that included imperfect singing and arranging. I made what was called "good money" for my age, playing with popular, polka, and country groups. But there came a time when I just knew I didn't have the natural talent necessary to get to where I wanted. I learned there are things at which I would not succeed no matter how hard I worked at it.

I don't know if guitar would have made a difference. The thought it might sustains one of my conceits, because being a musician was the dream of my young life. Failure left me with only compromises in finding a job or selecting a career. It was accidental though fortunate that those many hours spent with my nose in books gave me a head start on school stuff, including graduate studies.

In the summer I turned twelve I made an audacious move in the world of work. Tom had begun to caddy the previous summer, bringing home really good money. I wanted to caddy. But there were two obstacles.

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I enlisted Church support for the inescapable battle with my mother over becoming a caddy. Father Hallinan listened to my argument and agreed to be in my corner if I promised to give him reports now and then on how things were going.

Poor Tom, my mother decided I could go if I stuck close to him, which was impossible once we arrived at the caddy shack and his number was called. Against his better judgment and certainly against his own wishes he went along.

Sixth Grade

Father Daley visited our sixth-grade classroom a few days before Thanksgiving to tell us about a St. Aloysius Christmastime tradition. Each year the sixth, seventh and eighth grade classes made cr�ches during the first week of December. Father Daley explained how the tradition got started and said he would like to start a new one, an annual sixth-grade Christmas play. He pinned a dollar bill on the wood frame of the blackboard and said, "Have a contest. The winner gets this."

Thanksgiving dinner was always held at "the house." At that time my father's parents were living with Uncle Ed and Aunt Theresa. Before dinner I asked Aunt Theresa to help me with my play. She was the romantic in the family, a pretty and lovingly feminine Irish lady who seemed to be always bubbling over with positive and good feelings about everything around her.

After dinner, following hallowed tradition, the men went downstairs to the basement-den, built by my father of course, to play ping pong and poker, the women cleared the dining room table to play canasta, and the children went to a movie. Aunt Theresa took me into the living room where we sat and talked about my play. I'd read a little Shakespeare and some Platonic dialogues; otherwise I was completely ignorant about plays and writing dialogue. I had a plot of sorts in mind. I doubt if Aunt Theresa had ever read a play. I needed her way of confidence-building, another of her gifts.

She suggested I start writing down the names of characters and the opening lines of dialogue. As I did so she would read and say something like, "Oh, Jimmy, how do you ever think of such nice ways to put things. This is so good." In a few hours we had a play. Well, a very short one-act play titled "Mickey's Christmas Dream," in which five-year-old

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Mickey begs his parents to take him to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, falls asleep at Mass, dreams he is at the

stable witnessing the birth of Jesus, and wakes up with a piece of straw in his hand.

I won the dollar and took Aunt Theresa out for a chocolate soda, which wasn't good for her because she had diabetes, but it was her favorite treat.

Aunt Theresa spoke often about how much she wanted to travel around the world. Except for military service, no one in my family went much further than a summer cottage at nearby Lake Erie. Beginning in 1952, when I was in French Morocco with the U.S. Air Force, I sent Aunt Theresa cards from countries around the world. It became a special connection between us. She called me her "magical genie who takes me to all these wonderful places." When I would go back to Cleveland and see her she would take out the cards and ask me questions. If I didn't know the answers she wanted me to make something up.

There was only one subject I could not talk about with Aunt Theresa, her standing in the Church. Theresa married a German Lutheran, Ed Daus, so they were not married in church. On a warm sunny day in June they made the rounds of family homes to show us Theresa's wedding ring. No one was really surprised, nor was anyone critical of a marriage happening without the church's blessing. That was not the family style.

Theresa and Ed were my role models for romance. They belonged at a Great Gatsby soiree, standing poolside with champagne glasses in hand, strikingly attractive and urbane. Ed had been a football star at Cleveland East High School. He was trim and fit with Cary Grant mannerisms. He used an FDR-type cigarette holder with casual finesse; just watching him smoke made me feel sophisticated. Theresa and he dated the six or so years he was at Western Reserve University getting a bachelors and then a degree in dentistry. She always appeared happiest when she was holding on with both hands to his tan sinewy forearm.

They had a grand, expensive house, by our standards, built away from the neighborhood, but close enough to be "the house" when they took in Paw and Grandma. Eventually they also took in Izabel, another of my father's sisters, who had a mysterious relationship with an unknown man ("drifter," my mother said) away from Cleveland for a year or so. From the day she returned she lived at "the house" helping raise the two Daus children, Judy and Bud.

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At that time Ed was the only person in my extended family who had gone to college. There were no college grads in my neighborhood. World War II and the GI bill changed this but

not by much. In my neighborhood, my brother and a few others went to college. Most of the others, and all the other members of my extended family, used the GI Bill to learn a trade.

Tom's college education was a compromise. Always reluctant to rock the boat, he spent just enough time studying at a local college to earn a bachelor's degree in accounting while working part time. My mother was pleased he wasn't spending a lot of time "with his nose in books" and the books he had around the house were about accounting, which was all right, plus he intended to get a job with the Internal Revenue Service, which was more than all right because she believed we should seek government jobs "for that security."

Years later Tom became fascinated with philosophical and psychological themes in literature, especially by conflicts in the human condition. He would read something like "The Moon and Sixpence," then seek me out to spend hours discussing themes and meanings. He was particularly interested in themes of unintended consequences and the inevitability of irony. I wonder if somehow he had a premonition of the madness waiting to take him prisoner.

When Tom and I discovered psychology we applied its theories and models to members of our family. We never did agree on my parents. Tom saw my father as a philosophical kind of man who had made peace with his condition in life, and had done so with remarkable grace and objectivity. "He has a gift," Tom said, "for putting things in perspective." My father was a role model for Tom.

My father had little time for anything but work when I was a boy. In his regular job he crated heavy machinery for truck and rail shipment. After a bath and supper he worked off part of our rent by being the handyman for the ten units in our row house. I respected and loved him but I did not want to be like him. There are misgivings in my head today about our relationship. I think I communicated clearly to him I wanted to have a better life than he, but I didn't communicate I would probably never be as good a man as he. Nor did I ever tell him about my fascination with his way of looking vaguely amused by a world in which he reluctantly participated.

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Tom and I were closer to agreement in our views of mother. We both saw her as a very hard-working woman who had better than average skills in household matters. She was a good Czech-like cook, sewed well, had reasonably good advice regarding health, had a truly lovely singing voice and enjoyed entertaining us with old show tunes.

We disagreed on how to interrelate with her. Tom overlooked, even went along with, her expectations regarding behavior and life-style, even though he knew she was not always right and found her advice stifling. When I decided to study for a doctorate in political science at Berkeley I called Tom about it before anyone else. He said, "Let me tell Ma." He meant that he could break it to her in a way that would soften the threat. He was right and I gratefully agreed to do it that way. If it had been me from whom she heard it for the first time she would have gone into what I would have seen as a stupid tantrum, to which I would have most probably reacted in kind.

My opportunity to know glory on the football field, as Tom had, came in the eighth grade. I made the team but was never carried out of a game and my name doesn't appear in St. Al's football hall of fame.

Tom had tried to get me ready. He and I played one-on-one, sort of, in our backyard. He played defense on his knees and ran slow motion on offense. In addition to being four-and-a-half years older than me he was far more of a natural athlete. Both he and my sister had my mother's large-boned thick body.

The difference in size was a source of incalculable embarrassment because all of my clothing, with the exception of my First Communion outfit, was hand-me-downs from Tom and Lois, mostly Tom. A favorite story of my father's was, "A long time after we lived on a hundred en fourteen, I run inta Pat aMalley downtown an he asks me if Jimmy ever growed inta his clothes."

Hand-me-down clothing left me at the mercy of kids who amused themselves taunting me because my sleeves had to be rolled up to expose my hands but far worse was the goading and bullying I (barely) endured riding around on my sister's hand-me-down bicycles. In those days a girl's bicycle didn't have a bar running from the seat to the handlebars; having a girl's bike was almost like wearing a dress. Years later I understood and enjoyed the message of Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" more than most of his fans.

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Furthermore, my fragile body was run down by rickets, a bone-weakening disorder that has been virtually non-existent in this country since 1950. Though it was not uncommon in the thirties, rickets was a mystery. The doctor, whom I seldom saw because of the cost and the awfully long streetcar ride between him and me, looked at my puny frame after glancing at the test results showing rickets. "You have an iron deficiency," he proclaimed as though his uttering the words would make it go away.

There were no iron pills then, so I sipped liquid iron from a huge glass straw with a bend at the top to keep the liquid from touching my teeth, which it did once, permanently staining a tooth on the bottom front, leaving me with even less of a chance to get girls.

Eventually rickets let go of me, not because I drank iron but because they started fortifying milk with vitamin D. Now, of course, we know breast-fed children can be susceptible to rickets, and vitamin D is the cure, so D is put into baby formula as well as milk. We also now know iron can be toxic to small children. Oh well.

Sometimes Tom choreographed memorable moments for our backyard scrimmages. First he'd tell me what had happened, then we'd run through it as he called out the radio commentary. "Hornung takes the snap from center and he's running to the wide left. Or is he? Hudson's out there all by himself. Hornung throws it. A per-fect spiral. Hudson is still running. Like a jackrabbit. His hands are out. He stretches. He has it! Touchadown!" Usually I was the one receiving the pass and if I was able to get to and hold on to the rolled-up newspaper wrapped in rubber bands I carried it triumphantly to the back fence as Tom cheered.

It's a well-earned tribute to Tom's imagination to tell you the backyard was about ten by twenty feet. And, our good-sized dog, Sandy, relieved herself there, in an age when people just let things like that sit around.

I tended to follow Tom's lead, wanting to do the sports and other things he did, but not all of his steps were traced. He became an Eagle Scout in the St. Aloysius Scout Troop. My sister was a girl scout. Scouting was too regimented and ceremonious for me. Or maybe I avoided it because I knew where my uniform would come from and dreaded the sight of myself lost somewhere in a too-big military-type uniform.

When I said "I made the St. Aloysius football team" I should have added, everyone who came out made it. Our coaches were two members of the parish who had played high school ball, so by our standards they were eminently

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qualified. There were around twenty of us there at the first practice. One of the coaches said, "I want the eighth graders to go stand on one of those circles. Pick a position you think you can play." There were eleven white-chalk circles on the tar-topped play yard area, corresponding to the way a team would line up in the "T-formation".

I thought I'd make a dashing right halfback, so I went and stood on the "RH" circle. The other coach yelled out "Griffen, you're here," and pointed at the "C" for center circle. Pat Griffen was easily twice the size of any of the rest of us. If you crossed him the wrong way he promised to catch you after school and sit on your head for an hour. Of course, Greg Moffat walked coolly to the "Q" circle. For reasons I still don't comprehend, the best-looking boy always played quarterback. I envied and hated Greg. He had thick curly brown hair. Even the older girls like my sister and her friends giggled his name the way I wanted to hear my name giggled by some of the girls in my class. He was destined to be what all young boys wish for; he would spend the rest of his life being the best-looking man in the room.

Father Hallinan was a chaplain in the Pacific, so our sports priest was Father Murray who lacked Father Hallinan's gifts. He was stiffly self-conscious, his voice and mannerisms robotic. When confronted by a difficult question about religion he would say something like, "Well, generally speaking, by and large, on the whole," barking out the first syllable of each word, swallowing the rest.

I think he was a decent man who was doing the best he could. It must have been very difficult for him, hearing parishioners rave about his charismatic predecessor. I wish we had been more sympathetic, but empathy and sympathy are not outstanding characteristics of fourteen-year-old boys, especially wannabe jocks.

We had no coach for the basketball team, so we just lined ourselves up and managed to get through a successful season. Father Murray probably feared stepping in and taking over because there was a possibility we would have found ways to humiliate him. He tried giving us a tip once and it came out badly for him.

We were practicing. Well, we were grabbing the ball when we could and shooting it. Father Murray took the ball and went to the foul line. "I'm going to show you the correct way to shoot a foul shot," he said in his bark-and-swallow voice. Then he went through what was then the right way to shoot

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fouls -- under-handed, controlling the ball with your fingertips. "OK," he said, to Tommy Yuranko, "you try it, the way I did it." Tommy stepped to the line and grabbed the ball with both hands as he started the underhand movement. "No, Yuranko," yelled Father Murray, "only use your fingertips, not your whole hand." Tommy tried doing it with fingertips. He didn't have the strength to get the ball more than a few feet in the air. And he was the strongest kid on the team.

Walking home we talked about how unrealistic Father Murray was. "He was tryin ta make me look shiddy," said Tommy. I wonder. When I put it all together now, recall Father Murray's face - how often I saw hurt and loneliness in his eyes - I think being a parish priest, perhaps especially being sports priest, made demands most men can't meet.

As I explored the new worlds I was discovering at the library from the fourth grade on I would sometimes be puzzled by references to strange places or customs. There were three librarians who were very helpful in directing me to my next discovery and in explaining to me puzzling references. Some of my questions got into areas they would not enter, such as Plato's references to homosexual practices. So I took some questions to certain nuns and two priests, Fathers Hallinan and Bechler.

Eventually Father Bechler became my primary St. Al's confidant on many subjects. A small, twinkling man, he was not at all shocked to hear I was wandering freely in the stacks of the public library. He was a rules bender. He was the one who would give us the key to the basketball court, of sorts, when we weren't supposed to be there. He was the one I went to when I was fifteen and needed a baptismal certificate stating I was sixteen so I could usher at the Uptown Theater.

He was also the one who spoke the most about how happy he was to be a priest, a step he had to put off until middle age because of family needs for income. It was "hot gossip" he'd been married. I couldn't have cared less.

It was not that Father Bechler let us do whatever we wanted or that he would bend any rule. His best gift to me was his tolerance for transgressions. If he didn't think I should be doing something he'd say so without making me feel guilty about asking. He convinced me that mistakes, big ones included, are part of being human.

Father Bechler was the first person who distinguished for me the difference between thinking and doing sinful things. Somewhere along the line I thought I had to declare evil

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thoughts, even those that never knew the joy of implementation. Father Bechler told me, resisting evil thoughts is a sign of being a Catholic in good faith.

Now and then missionaries visited our school. The most interesting were from the Far East. Their stories stretched my imagination and I was intrigued by persons who had actually been amongst such exotic people. Their presentations were not preachy, not even strongly religious, at least not as I heard them. Certain messages stood out: the people were more than dirt poor but high-spirited, our donations of pennies would help them receive food and medicine. I had a feeling that the missionaries went to the Far East with a mission to convert Asians to Catholicism but over time became care givers to a people they had come to love and respect.

The last visit by missionaries I remember was when I was in eighth grade. Two Maryknoll priests talked about Korea. I'll quote from the Alo-Gram of that year for two reasons. The author, a seventh grader, covered it as well if not better than my memory recalls it. Also, I think you might find it interesting to see the writing skills of a seventh grader at a school in a lower class neighborhood in 1944. The other day I saw a study of high school juniors challenged to write a paragraph about a haunted house. Only forty five percent could finish a paragraph that made any kind of sense.

Early in April the eighth grade pupils were honored by a visit from Fathers Carroll and Lenehan, two Maryknoll missionaries.

Father Carroll told of the primitive customs of the Koreans. Their roads are merely rugged paths. Bicycles and horses are the only means of transportation. They use stones for beds and blocks for pillows. As Father Carroll remarked, 'Koreans have all the modern inconveniences.'

In Manchuko Father Lenehan endured many hardships, such as living on light rations and suffering from the cold. After being a prisoner of the Japanese for six months he was permitted to board a ship en route to America and freedom.

Because of the vast amount of missionary work to be done both priests wish all those who have a desire for a religious life to think about being Maryknoll missionaries. When they return to their mission fields they hope to have some young St. Aloysius workers with them.

I think I remember their visit because in later years I went to South Korea many times, beginning in 1968, as a professor and as director of a program to train staff and

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build computer data-processing capacity for the Korean legislature. The missionaries who talked to us would be happy to see Catholicism is very strong in South Korea today. A Catholic was a recent President of the country, and around 20% of the elected legislators are Catholic.

I find the globalization of culture disappointing, so I enjoyed a Korean newspaper article about a Korean nun who brought to her classroom a mok-tak, a wood block used in Buddhist temples, and invited her students to a Buddhist-style meditation. It reminded me of Sister Augusta.

During my last year at St. Al's Tom was with Patton's Third Army in Germany. Like his peers, he was drafted a few days after he turned eighteen. Army life might have been a relief for him. During his junior year at Collinwood High he took extra courses and went to summer school so he'd be a high school graduate when he was drafted. He also worked a full-time swing-shift at an ammunitions factory along with some of his friends. The labor law required a worker to be eighteen before he could do this. Father Bechler overcame that little hitch with his baptismal certificate legerdemain, though it probably wasn't needed because the plants and factories were starving for manpower to produce war goods.

The United States was anything but a garrison state when we entered World War II. There was as much feverish urgency to getting war-needs production going as there was to raise a military force in enough numbers to compete with the Japanese and Germans. Near Tom's high school there were five or six major factories, such as Thompson Products (aircraft engines), General Motors (tank and gun parts), General Electric (fluorescent powders and chemicals), and Lincoln Electric (welding machines). Not only did the greatest generation fight and win the war, some of them made the weapons they would later use.

Many of our relatives and adults in our neighborhood spoke with my father about getting a high-paying job in a war factory. With his assortment of work skills, they said, he could command far more money than he was making. My father told me he never so much as thought twice about it. My mother was chagrined by his reluctance so she bombarded him with matinee and evening shows of her displeasure. And they fought, very close to physically, over it.

Dad was loyal to "Mr. Steiner," the owner of Turner Type Machines, because "Mr. Steiner" had given him a full-time job in the middle of the depression. Turner Type bought, repaired and resold used printing presses. My father crated

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the presses for shipment. He knew "Mr. Steiner" couldn't come close to matching a war-plant salary; he wouldn't leave him under those conditions, despite the serious and basic need our family had for more income.

Of all the members of my family I think I had the best insight into this implausible situation.

When I could play Christmas carols on the accordion, my father and I took the accordion, my music stand and sheet music to his workplace on the day that he and his coworkers had their holiday party. We took the streetcar to E. 54th Street, then walked two more blocks. The first time we did this, just before we entered the plant building, he asked, "Are ya scared?" I said I wasn't. "Naw," he said, smiling, "Yur Jimmy."

It was obvious that my father had a family of friends at work. Their respect and affection for him was palpable. The humor consisted mainly of in-jokes that had been told innumerable times. It was corny, but touching. He laughed more than I had ever seen him laugh anyplace else. Not because he was drinking. He never touched alcohol until he was older.

My father chose loyalty and work camaraderie over higher wages. It was the kind of choice Tom would have made had he been in that situation. I doubt I would have.

Throughout World War II St. Al's worked on support-the-war projects. A few weeks after Pearl Harbor there was a de-emphasis of the Christmas theme in the big building in favor of a focus on contributing to the war effort. At first we said rosaries and did prayer novenas for the Americans who died at Pearl Harbor. Then we took on projects such as gathering scarce material for recycling. When Crile Military Hospital was built on the outskirts of Cleveland's west side, the nuns took us there to visit and help the war-wounded on Saturdays. It had to be on Saturday because the trip to the hospital took over two hours on streetcars and buses.

When I was in eighth grade the school took on a project to respond to the U.S. Army's plea for contributions for jeeps. There were three types: land jeep, amphibious jeep, and flying jeep or "Grasshopper." Grasshoppers were the most expensive, at $3,000. The school raised $6,500 for two "Grasshoppers" through a variety of activities such as selling chances on money prizes at Church Fairs. To gain perspective, consider some costs from 1944: Average income - $4027, average three-bedroom home - $3,475, gallon of

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gasoline - 21 cents, pound of bacon - 41 cents, pound of bread - 9 cents, gallon of milk - 62 cents.

Tom wrote regularly during his first two years in the Army. Once a week his V-mail arrived, a perfect Palmer-style-penmanship review of his activities over the previous seven days. My mother read them aloud at the kitchen table during supper. Not because the rest of us had not read the letter; more so, I thought, because she liked to read aloud, adding flourishes with her voice and free hand. Commonplace statements, such as "we have breakfast every morning at six o'clock," became important historical events. If you didn't know the word "every" has three distinct syllables, you would never forget it after one of my mother's theatrical renderings. And then she hissed the "six," her striding sibilants searching for a stage.

Suddenly, the letters stopped coming. About a month went by before we received a short message from Tom, saying he was very sorry about not writing. The Germans had surrendered, he was very busy.

Hundreds of thousands of German troops had thrown their hands up, creating two new problems. What was to be done with such masses of POWs and who would do it? Patton wanted to blaze a trail to Berlin, convinced that if the Russians got there first Americans would regret it for decades, but Eisenhower, his boss, was under orders to restrain American forces, which required a direct order to slow down because the Red Army moved on foot and aged horse-drawn carts.

Tom was surely busy. But the real reason he stopped writing was far more interesting. He was having the most adventurous experience of his life. For six months he knew a life he later described as "wonderful" and "mind-blowing". I believe he knew enjoyment as he would never know it again.

The place was Berchtesgaden. Tom got there a few months after the first American GIs. In his celebration of E Company, "Band of Brothers," author Stephen Ambrose pictures what the GIs found in Berchtesgaden:

"It was a fairy-tale land. The snow-capped mountains, the dark green woods, the tinkling icy creeks, the gingerbread houses, the quaint and colorful dress of the natives, provided a delight for the eye. The food, liquor, accommodations, and large number of Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht service women, plus camp followers of various types, provided a delight for the body."

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Tom stepped into that fairy-tale and surprised himself by living it. As a master sergeant he was given a small but nonetheless sumptuous ex-Nazi's chalet on a slope in the grandeur of the Alpine soaring mountains and glacier-blue lakes. He learned to ski, partied in wine cellars stocked with beers, wines and liquors he'd never heard of, and lived with a German woman named Greta who was, as he put it to me when he deemed me old enough to hear such things, five years older than he in years, and much older in sexual experience.

Although he always spoke grandly of Berchtesgaden, often comparing it to the dreary flat landscape and unimaginative winters of Cleveland, he never revisited Germany or skied again, nor did he ever suggest he might do either. It was as though he had dreamed the whole thing and believed dreams come to you, that you can't go to them.

I saw Tom just before he died. He was 71. The schizophrenia that had haunted him for decades had now taken him captive. For brief moments he knew who I was, but his awareness faded in and out in the blink of an eye. We sat and talked for hours with coffee mugs in hand, as it had always been. He didn't say much by way of words.

I told him what a marvelous big brother he had been, repeated jokes we shared when we were boys, mentioned names of kids from the neighborhood, repeated some of Father Hallinan's funny lines. When I talked about how beautiful the German Alps remained he didn't, at first, seem to comprehend. But when I described the dramatic beauty of the area where he had skied and I had recently visited, he began to cry, trying unsuccessfully to say "Berchtesgaden." I stopped, but his wife urged me to go on because she had learned to recognize this kind of crying as an expression of joy.

His death moved me more than any other. It took me a lifetime to realize my admiration for his commitment to simplicity and his astonishing guilelessness.

A few years after Tom's death my wife and I returned to Berchtesgaden. I thought a lot about him there on his old dancing grounds. The area was being repatriated. The spot where General Patton's R&R Hotel had stood was a hole, a very large hole, in the ground. Spread around, in German orderliness of course, were I-beams, earth-moving equipment and gargantuan cranes, foreshadows of a German luxury spa hotel.

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We went on to Obersalzburg to visit Hitler's Eagles' Nest, a lofty teahouse residence given to the Fuhrer as a 50th birthday present by his sycophants. Neither of us had ever been there, and I wanted to see it because it was one of the sights Tom marveled at.

Getting to it was in itself an imposing trip. First we ascended by bus four edge-of-the-cliff miles up steeply-ascending hairpin curves. From where the bus left us we walked to the entrance of a large cave-like entrance with bronze-covered steel doors opening to a football-field-length tunnel blasted from the solid granite mountainside. At the end of the tunnel we entered a bronze-lined elevator, with twenty other people, which took us up through the heart of the mountain to a large hall in the teahouse.

We went through and walked out into the sun again, past an open area of patio tables overflowing with people enjoying beer and wurst, to a balcony on which Hitler danced a jig when he received the news his blitzkrieg of Poland was a devastating success.

The porch view was majestic. Across and below were mountains, valleys and fields of grass and trees, stretching endlessly away to who knows where. It seemed to me we were standing on history, that ever-changing canvas on which we paint such contrasting pictures, and looking at timelessness, at beyond history.

For reasons I'm unable to put into words I felt good about Tom, and I had a flash back to a neighborhood bar where my parents lived after they moved from E. 114th St. and became home owners. Tom, my dad and I were having a drink at the corner bar - although he avoided alcohol most of his life, dad liked a shot with a beer in his later years. Tom was talking about skiing at Berchtesgaden. I'd never heard my father say anything about Tom's experiences in Germany, so I was very interested in what he said, which was, "Ya got ta keep thim good times in your head."

I don't know how many good times my father kept in his head. He lived one day after another in just about exactly the same way, with one minor exception, the days following his mother's death. He just hung around, not going to work, for two or three days, until my mother, always on the alert for changes in behavior, chided him loudly in the kitchen about his "hanging around, doing nothing." He went to work the next day, and, of course, every day after. He was one of those people who didn't stay home sick with a cold.

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Uncle Bill showed up at the funeral. As always there was a good-looking woman hanging on his arm as though she were afraid to let go. Bill had a bulbous nose and a face ably depicting the kind of life he led, so I figured it had to be the "mob-connection" thing that drew women to him.

Somehow Uncle Bill settled his debts with the mob and eventually became a permanent fixture in our lives. He showed up one day at a family gathering with a wife, Lucy, a daughter, Emily, and a job as a temporary Cleveland policeman.

A year or so later, on the day after Christmas, Lucy hung herself with a clothesline in the basement of the apartment building where they lived, to be found that way by Emily. I was angered by my parent's explanation, "The Lord moves in mysterious ways." Now I know they were just plain dumbfounded, so they hid behind a religious bromide.

Uncle Bill remarried and became a bus driver for the Cleveland Transit System. This marriage and job lasted and Bill changed. As is so often nauseatingly the case with dissolute people who discover regular income and decency, he donned the guise of a moral conservative, spouting values such as responsibility and the work ethic. I thought he was barely a shade away from being despicable. I liked him better as a degenerate.

In the springtime of my last year at St. Al's, "MacBeth" was included in our assignments. I had read a number of Shakespeare's plays at the Glenville Public Library but had never seen one performed. During the last week of school the eighth graders were gathered in the meetings building one morning for an unannounced and unexplained event. There was a stage-with-curtains of sorts in front of us. Father Daley, himself, was maintaining quiet and discipline without any nuns about.

The curtains jerkily pulled back. On stage were three of our sisters, Annunciata, Martha, and Augusta, standing around a pot, pretending to stir. An incense burner on the floor provided a smoky milieu. There was absolute silence when Sister Augusta said in a screechy voice, "When shall we three meet again, In thunder, lightening, or in rain?"

They spoke the rest of Scene One, Act One, and I was enchanted.

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confessionals, we called them "sweat boxes," open from two to four o'clock exclusively for eighth graders.

According to our legends, every year the confessionals quaked throughout those two hours. Eighth graders, now assured of graduation, let it all hang out, shocking the priests' ears with declarations of sins that assured admission to Dante's deepest pits.

By the boys, that is. There was a profound mystery in Catholic culture regarding things going on between boys and girls, things obliging boys, but not girls, to confess them. Everyone understood and, after suitable atonement, forgave boys when they succumbed to irresistible temptations of the flesh. In the same breath no one thought of girls as anything but pure as driven snow. A girl who was not was beyond the pale.

After mass the graduates returned to their homes for whatever celebration their families had prepared. Diplomas were handed out at seven o'clock in the meetings hall, after which there was dancing for the graduates to scratchy records. Parents sat on folding chairs along the walls watching their offspring move clumsily through this rite of passage.

That the eighth graders were on the dance floor at all was a testament to Sister Letitia, one of the two eighth-grade teachers. Every school day during the last two weeks of May eighth graders collected in her classroom for social-dancing lessons. The desks-with-chairs were shoved together on one side of the room. On the other side Sister Martha brought forth sprightly fox trot music from an aged upright piano as Sister Letitia first demonstrated then guided our unsure feet with emphatic counting, "ONE two THREE four," using her pointer to imperil any two bodies close to touching.

On the day of my graduation from St. Al's, June 1944, D-Day began and Rome fell to the U.S. and its allies. The tide was turning against the formerly invincible Nazi military might. At home, the right of labor to organize and strike was established de facto; three years later it would be established by law in the Taft-Hartley Act.

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