The Clausen- Case (Kees) and Hannan- Davis Lines
My father’s father was George Dewey Clausen. He was the son of Jacob Jensen Clausen who was born on May 1, 1862 in Denmark, locality unknown, whence he emigrated at the age of 12 to the United States. His mother was Martha Case Clausen, born in 1865 in Holland, whence she emigrated to America at a time and from a locality unknown. The spelling of Martha’s name is most probably Anglicized from the Dutch “Kees.”
The surname Clausen was purely a patronymic until about 1826 when Denmark gave in to modernity by becoming the last European nation to require its citizens to use family surnames instead of patronymics. Despite the legal requirement, however, it wasn’t until about 1870 that family surnames were regularly used. Until then, “Jens Hansen” meant no more than Jen’s father’s name was Hans and he would have no necessary relation to SÇ¿ren Hansen who lived on the next farm or to Annelise Hansdatter across the street. The fact that your paternal great-great-grandfather, Jacob Jensen Clausen, was the son of Jacob and Christina Clausen, suggests that the use of Clausen as the family name probably started with your great-great-great grandfather Jacob. Jacob Jensen Clausen died at home in Duncombe, Iowa in 1950 at age 87; Martha joined him in death the following year at age 86. They are buried in the cemetery down the street from the family homestead in Duncombe.
Jacob’s family originally settled in Davenport, Iowa, but moved to Clinton, Iowa where Jacob went to school. He and Martha were married in Clinton on December 22, 1883, the year of the last stagecoach robbery and the first rodeo in the U.S. The young couple soon moved to Duncombe, a rural hamlet that lies a few miles east of Fort Dodge, county seat of Webster County. They lived in a large white house at the western edge of town. Jacob eventually owned the grain elevator that served the farms surrounding Duncombe. At one time he was the mayor of Duncombe, a fact that I thought was pretty significant in my childhood but which I now attribute to his economic stature in the town as owner of the grain elevator or, considering the size of the community, perhaps simply to a custom of rotating the mayor’s duties among the village elders. The Clausen patriarchal home was still standing when I stopped at Duncombe several years ago on my way to the funeral of my friend Mike Hogan’s father in Fort Dodge. One of the two town cemeteries is within sight of the home with many Clausen grave markers present, including Jacob’s and Martha’s. According to the Fort Dodge telephone directory, only one Clausen still lived in Duncombe in 2001, although there are others scattered about in Webster County.
Martha and Jacob Clausen
My grandfather, George Dewey Clausen, was born on April 16, 1898 and died in June, 1967. He was two weeks old when Admiral George Dewey sank Spain’s Pacific fleet in the Battle of Manila Bay in the Spanish-American War. Thus his name. He was never called ‘George’, always ‘Dewey.’ Dewey was the youngest of four sons: Roy, Raymond, Carl, and Dewey. He had three sisters: Myrtle, Hazel, and Dorothy. Roy was the only son to become a farmer. Raymond was a banker and Carl owned and operated the grocery store on Main Street in Duncombe. Dewey worked for the Automatic Electric Company in Fort Dodge. I do not know the situations of Myrtle, Hazel, and Dorothy in their adult lives.
Dewey married Charlotte Davis who was born on April 20, 1900 and died on October 2, 1995. Charlotte lived in Fort Dodge, daughter of Grace Hannan and Alfred Davis. Charlotte was the youngest of the four children born of the marriage. Her oldest sibling was Charles Davis, whence my father’s and my given names and your and Peter’s middle names. Her only sister was Ann, who married Dewey’s brother Carl and had 13 children, ‘double cousins’ of my father and your great-aunt Monica. Charlotte had another brother named Gomer[1] who drowned on the 4th of July at age 14. His death was a devastating loss in the family. My grandmother remembered her mother screaming, falling to the ground and weeping on learning of her son’s death.
Charlotte Davis at 16 or 17
Charlotte’s mother Grace Hannan was Irish American and a school teacher; her father Alfred was an immigrant Welsh miner and, as I understand it, uneducated. They divorced sometime during Charlotte’s childhood and Grace married Albert Miler, a Webster County farmer. I suspect, without benefit of any evidence, that the death of Gomer played a role in the dissolution of the marriage. I knew Grandma Miler and Albert from their occasional visits to Chicago. Albert reminded me of the strong stoic farmer in Iowan Grant Wood’s painting “American Gothic”; Grandma Miler reminded me of a kindly Grandma Moses. It was always a big event when they would travel from their retirement home in Newton, Iowa, to visit us in Chicago. We were all on our best behavior.
Grandma Miler and Albert
Dewey Clausen and Charlotte Davis married in 1916 , when they were both teenagers. Their firstborn, Monica, was born on December 13, 1917; my father, Charles Edward, was born on September 9, 1920. In 1922 or 1923, Dewey and Charlotte traveled the 450 miles from Fort Dodge to Chicago where Dewey had a job as a shipping clerk for Automatic Electric Company (subsequently named Western Electric and subsumed by GTE and then Lucent Technologies, now Alcatel-Lucent), which manufactured telephone switches and about 80% of the world’s dial-operated automatic telephone equipment. He also attended “barber’s college” during his free time.
The family’s first living quarters in Chicago consisted of two rooms on Jackson Street near Halsted Street. In Chicago’s street numbering, Jackson is 300 South (Madison = 0) and Halsted 800 West (State = 0). Thus they lived in the neighborhood now known as the West Loop, and more ethnically as Greektown. Their apartment was some blocks west of Union Station and a few blocks south of the Chicago Northwestern railroad terminal, my embarkation and debarkation points for my trips between Milwaukee and Chicago during my college days. They were also not far north and west of the then-thriving and teeming Maxwell Street flea market which they (and later my cousins and I) visited with some frequency. They walked past Hull House, Jane Addams’ famous settlement house now on the campus of the University of Illinois-Chicago Circle, to get to and from Maxwell Street.
I can hardly imagine the culture shock that Dewey and Charlotte experienced moving from Webster County, Iowa, to a tenement on the edge of downtown Chicago, especially in the early 1920s. Prohibition and bootlegging were in full flower and Al Capone was working his way up the gang ladder to become mob boss of Chicago, or at least of the south and west sides. Irish gangsters still controlled the north side. The entirety of Duncombe Iowa could have fit within the area taken up just by Union Station and its approach tracks and train yards. Within just a few blocks of Jackson and Halsted were Italian enclaves, Bohemian enclaves, Polish enclaves and other ethnic communities. Chicago was a boom town and they were in the heart of it, straight from the Iowa corn fields. What excitement, and undoubtedly anxiety, that change of residence must have occasioned for Dewey at age 24 or 25 and his 22 year old wife. Whatever exhilaration was occasioned by the move, however, was soon overborne by tragedy.
The roomers at the Jackson Street residence shared common bathrooms. On one bitterly cold night during their first winter in Chicago, Dewey set about cutting my father’s hair in their rented rooms. While he worked on the haircut, he put Monica in the empty bathtub in the warmest space on their floor, the bathroom across the hall. The bathroom was warm because it was small, unventilated, and heated by a kerosene space heater. Monica climbed out of the bathtub and her cotton nightie brushed the space heater and caught fire. Before her screams brought her father and others to her rescue, she had been badly burned on her back, neck and shoulders. She spent a long time recovering in the Jackson Park Hospital. Burn treatments in 1924 were primitive and skin grafts, prohibitively expensive and dangerous because of the risk of infection, were not performed. Monica bears the scars from that fire to this day.
The family moved from the Jackson Street rooms to an apartment in Englewood, near St. Bernard’s Church at 65thand Perry Avenue, a couple blocks west of State Street. For some time they lived in an elegant six story apartment house on the northeast corner of 66th and Yale Avenue, a building which is still in occupied and still elegant looking (at least from the outside.) Although it is not evident from the street, the apartments in the building surround a central courtyard so each apartment receives light and ventilation both from the building’s exterior and from the interior courtyard.
After the burn injuries, Monica was unable to return to school in Chicago, probably because of the large number of students, jostling and so on. Charlotte, Monica and my father returned to Iowa to live on the farm with Grandma Miler and Albert. Albert took Monica to the local one room schoolhouse every day. For a number of years, Charlotte, Monica and my father returned each summer to the Miler farm. Monica and my father have the very warm memories of Grandma Miler and Albert, especially Albert, who was a tall, strong, quiet, religious, gentle, farmer devoted to his family. My father remembered him saying grace before every meal. Monica remembers especially his driving her in his truck to and from the one room schoolhouse each day over the dirt roads of rural Webster County.
Monica and Charles on the farm
with Grandma Miler and Albert
Dewey worked at Automatic Electric until 1962 when he retired and he and Charlotte moved to North Port, Florida. Charlotte did not work outside the home. Throughout most of my childhood, Dewey and Charlotte lived in the upper flat of a duplex they owned at 73rd Street and Racine Avenue, 4 blocks (actually 9 Chicago “short blocks”) west of where my parents, Kitty and I lived on Emerald Avenue. The lower flat was occupied by my Aunt Monica and her three children, James, Christine, and Douglas Cummings. Monica was divorced sometime after Doug’s birth from James Cummings, a handsome immigrant from Scotland. Cummings looked a bit like Errol Flynn, a swashbuckling movie hero and an infamous womanizer, boozer, and a cad.. Apparently James Cummings emulated Errol Flynn in his behavior as well as his looks. He was never mentioned during my childhood. It was as if he had never existed. Jimmy, Christine, and Doug on the other hand were like brothers and another sister for Kitty and me. Aunt Monica worked as an operator for Illinois Bell Telephone, probably starting when she and James Cummings separated. The Cummings kids and the Clausen kids were all born within 5 years of one another, from September 5, 1939 for Jimmy till August 19, 1944 for Kitty, and we spent a lot of time together as we grew up.
The Healy[2]-O’Shea Line
My mother’s father was Dennis M. Healy who was from[3] Kilgarvan, County Kerry, Ireland, 6 miles upstream from Kenmare where the Kenmare River empties into the Atlantic. He grew up in the era of Fenianism, Michael Davitt, the Land League, and the long battle between constitutionalists seeking Home Rule and the more radical separatists seeking complete independence from Great Britain, with Charles Stuart Parnell straddling the divide. The country had been hit by agricultural depression starting in 1879 and “outrages” (murders of landlords and agents, maiming of cattle, etc.) in the West where the Healy clan lived rose to three times the ‘normal’ incidence in 1880-82. The struggles with Britain and the Ascendency for land reform, the end of landlordism, and Home Rule and the struggle for complete independence continued well past his emigration to the U. S. and continued through the Easter Rising, the war against Britain and the Black and Tans, the establishment of the Free State and the civil war. It must have seemed a good time to leave Ireland in search of greener pastures. He left in 1904, the year the Abbey Theater was founded and Joyce started writing Dubliners (and had his first outing with Nora Barnacle on June 16th, Bloomsday.) “On the other side,” it was the year Teddy Roosevelt became president.
The immigration records make it clear that the emigrating Healys were almost certainly poor, landless and with no prospect of acquiring land. Their ‘occupation or calling’ is always listed as ‘laborer’ or ‘servant.’ According to some anecdotal evidence I found on the internet, most of the Healys in Kilgarvin were not native Kerrymen but had migrated to Kilgarvin after evictions by the Earl of Donoughmore during the “Penal Times.” The barony of Donoughmore lay about 25 miles northwest of Cork City, about 40 miles east of Kilgarvin. Kilgarvan is now a town of about 550 people in a mountainous area with scant possibilities for eking out a living. I suspect it had a considerably larger population in 1904 but even fewer opportunities to scratch out a living. There was a workhouse in Kenmare, down the road from Kilgarvan, and chances are the only options Dennis and his siblings saw were the Kenmare workhouse or emigration.
Dennis sailed to New York on the White Lines steamship Oceanic, departing Queenstown (now Cobh), County Cork, May 19, 1904 and arriving May 26th.. On arrival, he gave his age as 24 as that is the age listed on the “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers” in the Ellis Island records. That would have made 1880 the year of his birth. Years later, however, when he executed a Declaration of Intention to become a citizen, he gave his birth date as May 5, 1883, which would have made him barely 21 when he arrived. Adding further confusion to the issue, the ‘holy card’ from his wake and funeral gives his birth date as April 28, 1887, which would have made him barely 17 when he arrived in New York. It may be that April 28th was his date of birth, and May 5th the date of baptism. To complete the confusion, the Itasca County birth register entry evidencing my mother’s birth on April 15, 1922, gives her father’s age as 36, which suggests that he was born in 1886, making him barely 18 when he arrived in the United States. Whether he was born in 1880, as the immigration record declares, or 1883, as the naturalization record declares, or 1886, as my mother’s birth registry declares, or 1887, as the death record states, is anyone’s guess.
At Ellis Island, he stated that his passage to America had been paid by his brother (no name given) and that he was on his way to meet his sister, Mary Healy, who lived in the Lakota Hotel in Chicago. He had a railroad ticket to Chicago and $6 in his pocket. He stated he had never been an inmate of a prison, an almshouse, or of an institution for the insane, nor had he been a ward of charity, an anarchist or a polygamist. According to the manifest, he was able to read and write. I never knew of any siblings of my grandfather, but the Ellis Island records suggest that the Healy clan of Kilgarvan was not small. There were six or seven “Mary Healy”s from Kilgarvan who passed through Ellis Island between 1898 and 1910, all in their teens or early 20s, including one who arrived only two months before my grandfather, in March 1904. Which was the sister in the hotel in Chicago? Who was the brother was paid the passage? I don’t know. (My Aunt Monica told me that her mother told her that my mother lived with “her aunts” for some period before she married my father. My father, on the other hand, said my mother lived with her father and brothers, not with any aunts. Such are the limitations of having to rely on oral histories.)
My mother’s handwritten note on the
back of this photograph identifies the
woman on the left as “Aunt Julia” and
the woman on the right as “Aunt Mary.”
My hunch is that the woman in the middle
is my grandmother, Catherine O’Shea Healy
holding my mother or one of her brothers.
The Oceanic was only 5 years old in 1904, built in Belfast in 1899 by the shipyard that was later to build the Titanic, the Harland & Wolff shipyard (of Leon Uris’ Trinity fame). When launched, she was the largest ship in the world and was still the longest ship at 705 feet when Dennis boarded her for America. He was a steerage passenger. There was a lively competition among steamship lines for steerage passengers and, in 1904, the steerage fare (on some ships at least) was only 2 ₤ or about $10. Dennis was one of almost 60,000 Irish emigrants that year who departed Ireland for destinations outside of Europe and the Mediterranean, generally the U. S., Canada, Australia or New Zealand.
How did it happen that he ‘left hearth and home’ for a country far away? Did he go alone? Did he walk across the mountains of south Kerry and west Cork to Cobh? Even today there is only one rail line in County Kerry from Tralee to Farranfore to Killarney to Rathmore and points east, all towns considerably north of Kilgarvan. Cobh is only about 70 miles east southeast of Kilgarvin, now only an hour and a half drive along N22, the Killarney-Macroom-Cork highway, but in 1904, traveling that distance over the challenging terrain of counties Kerry and Cork on foot must have been taxing, even for a young man.
In any event, I know nothing of Dennis’ early life other than he was married to Catherine (or Katherine) O’Shea, also an Irish immigrant, sometime before October 2, 1918 when, as a resident of Taconite in Itasca County, Minnesota, he executed a Declaration of Intention ‘to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince . . . particularly George V, King of Great Britain and Ireland, of whom I am now a subject . . . [and] to become a citizen of the United States of America and to reside permanently therein.” He gave his occupation as ‘pipefitter’, which would indicate welding skills, and 3½ years later, his occupation was listed as “plumber” on the Itasca County birth registry for my mother, but as far as I knew as I was growing up, he was a common laborer, not a skilled tradesman. Prior to 1922, wives did not execute separate Declarations of Intention; thus, I have no clue about Catherine’s place of birth, other than “Ireland.’ I seem to have a vestigial memory, however, that her roots were in County Cork. As to her age, my Aunt Monica informs me that, according to Dennis, Catherine was considerably younger than he was, a typical Irish marriage, but the birth registry for my mother gives her age as 35 when my mother was born, only a year or so younger than Dennis. The anecdotal evidence from my aunt, however, supports the statement on the Oceanic’s Manifest of Alien Passengers that Dennis was born in 1880, which would have made him 42 when my mother was born.
Dennis and Catherine had five children: Cornelius James (called ‘Jim’), born in Chicago on January 25, 1918 (according to his Navy discharge papers); Donald (called ‘Bud’), place and date of birth unknown, but probably Grand Rapids, Minnesota: Mary Norma my mother, born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota on April 15, 1922; and Dennis Brendan (called ‘Bim’) born in Chicago on November 22, 1923 (according to his Certificate of Baptism executed in 1931.[4] The fifth child must have died at birth or in infancy before the births of my mother and my Uncle Bim, for the birth registry states that my mother was Catherine’s fourth child. In 1927 or 1928, when my mother was 5 years old, her mother died of pernicious anemia, an autoimmune deficiency (perhaps hereditary) causing non-absorption of vitamin B-12 needed for red blood cell production. The timing of her death was particularly tragic, for in 1926 scientists had discovered that regular feeding of liver was effective in treating pernicious anemia and in 1928, a chemist at Harvard succeeded in producing a liver extract that was 50 to 100 times more potent than simply eating liver. Pernicious anemia ceased to be a fatal disease just as my mother’s mother was dying from it. Dennis never remarried.
I theorized for some time that my grandfather moved from Minnesota to the Englewood district in Chicago after Catherine’s death, but when I traveled to Grand Rapids and Taconite in October, 2006, to look at the Vital Statistics records at the courthouse, there was no entry in the death records for Catherine Healy in 1927 or 1928. Also, I later ascertained from his baptismal certificate that Brendan was born in Chicago in 1923 indicating that the family’s move back to Chicago occurred sometime during the 19 months between my mother’s birth and Brendan’s birth. I later came across the “In Memoriam” book from Dennis’ wake and found in it a schematic of the family burial lot in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery on 111th Street in Worth, Illinois, just southwest of Chicago. It shows Dennis buried in Grave #6, Lot North 1, block 13, Section 2. Grave # 7 contains the remains of Catherine Healy and grave # 8 the remains of Mary Healy, who I believe were my grandmother and great aunt. Mary Healy was probably Dennis’ sister in Chicago referred to on the Oceanic’s Manifest of Alien Passengers. Thus it appears that Dennis and Catherine lived in Chicago until my Uncle Jim was born in early 1918, moved to Taconite, Minnesota some time before October, 1918 when Dennis executed his Declaration of Intention for naturalization, and moved back to Chicago sometime in 1922 or 1923.
Pernicious anemia is a debilitating and progressive disease and it is dreadful, literally. The body is unable to produce enough red blood cells to carry oxygen to its vital organs and thus the disease is a long, slow suffocation. Its onset is usually insidious and vague. A sufferer experiences fatigue and loss of appetite, a sore and often swollen tongue, and numbness or tingling in the fingers and toes. Untreated, the anemia leads to anorexia, weakness, loss of propriosensation, clumsiness and an unsteady gait. Eventually, the neurological damage can cause symptoms mimicking Alzheimer disease: memory loss, irritability, and senile dementia. Eventually, the sufferer may succumb to congestive heart failure or a heart attack or stroke. These symptoms occur and accumulate over a protracted period before the patient dies. It may be that Catherine developed the disease some time after my mother’s birth and went steadily downhill until her death a few years later. At the time of Catherine’s death, she and Dennis had four children between the ages of 4 and 9. Dennis would have needed to work to keep food on the table, a roof over the family’s head, clothing on their backs, and probably to pay medical bills. With the slowly dying Catherine too weak and too ill to care for herself and for the children, the family probably moved to Chicago to get help from Dennis’ sisters and Catherine’s family, probably including the “John O’Shea” and “Catherine O’Shea” who were godparents of my Uncle Bim and who are buried in the family plot next to Dennis and Catherine Healy. If the entry in the birth registry in Grand Rapids is correct, my grandmother would have been 41 year old when she died, ten years younger than the age at which her only daughter, my mother, your grandmother, died
Your Paternal Grandparents
My mother and father met in the Englewood neighborhood where their families lived in the 1930’s.
My father attended Brownell elementary school where his nickname, perhaps not surprisingly, was “Pickles.” He moved on to Parker High School and then transferred to Tilden Tech, but left before graduation. My mother attended the parish school, St. Bernard’s, and then St. Martin High School, which specialized in preparing Catholic girls for office work. My cousin Christine would attend this school years later. My mother also left school to work. The Great Depression was still going strong during my parents’ high school years. The average salary for a full time worker in those days was $108 per month, the minimum wage was 43¢ per hour, and 45% of American homes had no indoor plumbing. Male life expectancy was less than 61 years, females a bit more than 68.
I have no doubt that my mother left high school for economic reasons. Prior to her marriage, my mother had been living on her own in a rented room in a house owned by Mrs. Horigan. Mrs. Horigan’s daughter Mary would become the wife of my mother’s brother Donald, or “Bud” and thus my “Aunt Mary.” My father did not have to quit high school for economic reasons. His father was employed throughout the Depression and even owned a car, but money was tight and my father wanted to ‘earn his keep,’ and have some spending money. His sister Monica had left school to get a job and contribute to the household and he followed her lead.
My father was slender and good-looking and took pride in his appearance. Each Sunday, he and his life-long friend Al Braley put on their suits, spats, fedoras and gloves (I’m not making this up; I have this information ‘from the horse’s mouth.’) to go to Mass at St. Bernard’s and then to hang out in front of a drugstore on Wentworth Avenue watching the girls stroll by, with my father hoping that one of them would be Mary Healy, by whom he was thoroughly smitten.
My parents married at St. Bernard’s Church on August 3, 1940. My mother was 18 and my father a month shy of his 20th birthday. They were practicing Catholics and they were virgins. They were not only virgins; my father had never “touched” my mother, a fact he shared with Geri during one of their long intimate conversations. If Charles and Mary were to embrace and physically love each other, according to the laws of the Church, they would have to be married and married they became, still teenagers, only a few years beyond childhood, unable to conceive of the challenges, the extraordinary hardships they were to experience in the years ahead of them. They married as German troops were sipping good French wine in recently occupied Paris, as the first Jewish and Gypsy prisoners were being sent to Auschwitz, and as Japan was occupying coastal cities in China and in French Indochina, now Vietnam. The threatening international picture isn’t reflected in their wedding photographs, and indeed they were oblivious to it, as my father confirmed in his 80s when I asked him about it. He didn’t say it but we know the truth: they wanted to fall asleep next to each other at night and to wake up next to each other in their mornings, to make love to each other when the Spirit moved, to face life together, to draw strength from each other, to be supported by the love of each other, all without facing the eternal hell fires threatened by the Church. And so they got married in their youth, their adolescence.
The wedding was formal, with my mother in a beautiful bridal gown and formal dresses on her bridesmaids and tuxedos for my father and his attendants. Where in the world did they get the money to fund the wedding? My father’s tuxedo was rented, I’m sure, and my mother’s dress, I’m sure, was borrowed. The wedding reception was in an apartment or a rented room, perhaps theirs for the term of the rental, They were married in any event by their favorite parish priest, Father William Cousins, who later become an illuminatus, Archbishop Cousins of Milwaukee, the eponym of
“The Cousins Center,” soon to be sold to cover some of the costs of the sins of the Church that drove my parents, at such a young age, to marry, to commit themselves under pain of eternal damnation to staying together no matter what
After the marriage, Chuck and Mary Clausen lived in very modest circumstances, i.e., a succession of furnished rooms with Murphy beds, which is to say, their home consisted of a single room with a fold-up bed built into one of the walls. They took a room on the north side of Chicago once, for reasons never explained to me by my Dad, but felt out of place there and quickly moved back to the South Side, in or near Englewood. When they ‘scouted out’ rooms to rent, my mother could tell as soon as she entered a room whether it was infested by bedbugs; they had a special smell and she was sensitive to it, undoubtedly from living with bedbugs during her young life. My mother’s sensitive nose, however, did not work with cockroaches, at least of the Oriental type, for the three small rooms at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue that we lived in for the first twelve or thirteen years of my life were always infested with those large black shiny cockroaches that cracked when we were rarely able to step on them and that we euphemistically called “water bugs.” We lived with them for years.
My mother was a beautiful woman, with milky white skin, dark and bright blue eyes, and long, thick, coarse dark hair. My father and my Aunt Monica have often referred to how beautiful she was and my childhood memories of her confirm their judgment. When she would come to school to visit the nuns, my classmates remarked to me how pretty my mother was.
I was born on August 24, 1941 in Englewood Hospital at the southwest corner of 60th and Green Streets, a block west of Halsted Street. I was a bit more than 8 pounds, with blue eyes and hair that was red and that stayed red throughout much of my childhood. The attending physician at my birth was Dr. Coopersmith, our family doctor for many, many years. As was usual in those days, my mother was in the hospital for 10 days and the hospital bill was $100, paid by my Grandfather Dewey. My mother was 19 years old, my father two weeks shy of his 21st birthday. According to the Census Bureau, I had a life expectancy of 62.81 years. I was christened at Our Lady of Sorrows Church and 62ndand Sangamon Streets. My godparents were my Aunt Monica and my Uncle ‘Bim.’ My sister Kitty, who was dear to me throughout our childhoods and still is, was born three years later, on August 19, 1944. Each of us seems to have been conceived around Thanksgiving Day.
Sailor Boy with new sister
August 3, 1940
St. Bernard Church, Chicago, Illinois
[1] In the Book of Genesis, Gomer was the first son of Japheth who was the third son of Noah. The same spurious genealogy that made Noah’s cursed son Ham the forbearer of Africans had Gomer as the progenitor of Europeans or Caucasians. The name didn’t become a term of derision until the 1960s television comedy Gomer Pyle, USMC., in which “Gomer Pyle” was at best a simple rustic, at worst, a rube and a clown.
[2] Irish names are tricky things. The “Healy” name, for example, in its various permutations, could be: O’hEalathaigh, O’Heluightho, O’Healeithe, Healey, Hely, Haly, Heely, O”Healy, O’Healey, O”Hely, O’Haly, O’Haley: you get the idea.
[3] The “fromness” idea is not so easy to get a handle on, either. When I first wrote this piece, I wrote that Dennis Healy was “born and raised in” Kilgarvan. In fact, all I know is what he declared when he sought naturalization.
[4] Bim’s godparents are listed as John O’Shea and Catherine O’Shea, the latter presumably a cousin of my grandmother Catherine.
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