Genealogy

 

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 Sǿren 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 4^th 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 65^thand 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 66^th 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 73^rd 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 16^th, 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 26^th..  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 28^th was his date of birth, and May 5^th 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 111^th 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 20^th 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 60^th 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 21^st 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 62^ndand 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.

9/4/2025

 Thursday, September 4, 2025

D+303/228/-1234

1957 Governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, called out the National Guard to prevent 9 black students from entering Little Rock's Central High School

1970 Marxist Salvador Allende won a narrow plurality of votes in Chile's presidential election

2016 Mother Teresa was canonized by Pope Francis in a ceremony at the Vatican

2017 US President Donald Trump announces the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program will be stopped

In bed before 10, up at 4:20, from relentless thoughts of clearing out the basement, the basement stairs, of helplessness and hopelessness.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 7:15 a.m.  55°, high of 63°

A year ago today started out like today, in bed at 9:45, up at with my thinking of Lilly's being 'on her last legs,', Jane Kenyon's Otherwise, and dismal thoughts of Erik Erikson's theory of integrety vs. despair in old age.  I wrote the lyrics to Motherless Child, including "Sometimes I feel like I'm almost done, /  a long, long, way from home."  It's sort of curious that I made a pot of bacon cauliflower soup that day and two days ago I bought a cauliflower and a pound of bacon to make the same soup probably today.  I had also gone 4 or 5 days without watching any televised news, I was so sick of the Trump/Harris election.

Two years ago today was Jimmy's last day with us.  Steve A. was here to accompany him tomorrow to Alexandria and Silverado. "Jim is here for Italian Beef sandwiches, fresh sweet corn, and homemade bundt cake.   When he left, touched me and said "if I don't see you tomorrow, love." He reminds me again of the fact that he has become a friend over the last 3 and 1/2 years, more than an in-law. Tomorrow will mark the end of a chapter of our lives."  He has been at Silverado for 3 years now and we are receiving news that the staff is reporting that he is becoming "difficult," unwilling to shower or change clothing, resisting the nurse changing his catheter, sleeping in the common area, etc.  They want to move him to the second floor where "difficult" demented residents are stored, presumably sedated.  "I weep for Adonais - he is dead."

We decay

Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief

Convulse us and consume us day by day,

And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

Kitty died on 3/3/22, Jimmy left on 9/5/22.  Tom died on January 18, 2023, and Ed on June 23, 2024.  A half-litany of losses.

Telling the truth.  The Wall Streeat Journal has an editorial this morning about Trump ordering the air attack on what he said was a speedboat carrying Venezuelan narcotics to the U.S.  This "kinetic response" was ordered instead of the usual pracrtice of the Coast Guard stopping and searching the boat and arresting the occupants.  I assume the attack was illegal: blowing up and sinking a civilian boat on the high seas, the death penalty for all the occupants with no due process.  I don't address that aspect of the act and the editorial, but rather this: "A war on narco traffickers won’t end America’s drug-abuse epidemic, which has ruined so many lives, because U.S. consumption is a demand problem. It would help if public officials at least tried to discourage young people from ingesting mind-altering substances."  We as a people and our government have pretty consistently ignored this fact for decades because it hides the fact that so many of us, and our children, find thier lives in our country and in our culture unendurable (perhaps too strong a term) without relief from drugs.  Perhaps we should add alcohol to the list of illegal drugs, and marijauna with its dual legal/illegal status.  There would be no drug cartels operating in Mexico, Venezuela, and elsewhere and no lucrative fentanyl supply line starting in China without America's enormous appetite for mind-altering drugs.  We want to believe that it starts with simply a desire for 'recreation' or 'entertainment,' perhaps an illicit thrill, like some sex, but we know it goes deeper than that.  It calls into question our values, our religions, our obscene wealth and income inequallities, the stresses and anxieties of modern American life.   In yesterday's journal, I suggestd that we tolerate much crime and poverty in our cities because it is so concentrated amoung Blacks and Browns.  That is not as true of illicit drug use, but it is nonethless accurate to say that the most powerful, the most successful, the wealthiest and most comfortable of us are not a significant part of the users of heroin, fentanyl, opioids, and methamphetimines.  What we have come to refer to as "deaths of despair" in the United States, i.e., deaths attributable to abuse of alcohol and other drugs, and from suicide, occur mostly to people, increasingly young men, who suffer from a sense of hopelessness, of having no desireable future, or despair.  This, in 'the greatest country in the world, in the history of the world.'   Happy horseshit.

Aging from the inside out.  I participated in the second weekly meeting of this group discussion at the VA.  We lost two participants from last week, "Jay" the Puerto Rican Army vet, and Marvin Pratt.  We gained two new members, Lee, who sat next to me, and J.T., who wore a Jesus hat of some sort.  A. J., Kenyatta, George and I returned.  The racial composition of the group was 4 Black, one White southerner, and me,  It's a friendly group in a welcoming setting, another good experience.

9/3/2025

 Wednesday, September 3, 2025

D+302/227/-1235

1965 Pope Paul VI published the encyclical Mysterium Fidei

1967 Nguyễn Văn Thiệu was elected President of South Vietnam under a new constitution

1978 Pope John Paul I was officially installed as the 263rd supreme pontiff

2017 1.4 ton WWII bomb defused in Frankfurt, Germany with 60,000 people evacuated, the largest postwar 

In bed at 9:45. up at 5:43.  62°, high of 68°, rain much of the morning,  windy.   

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 9 a.m.  (Again at 11:45, after refilling pill boxes.😢😡😠😟)   

Urban violent crime rates.  I give Trump credit for shining a spotlight on the reality of violent crime rates in American cities.  Even if he loses in court his push to have National Guard and militry troops patrolling our (Democratic) cities, he will win politically with the voting (and non-voting) public and the Democrats who oppose him on this issue will look like they are tolerant of horrendous violent crimes, as I suppose they and most Republicans are, because of the racial dimension of the situation.  In Chicago Mayor Johnson says crime is down some 30%, but it’s still one of America’s most crime-ridden cities, especially in poor, i.e., mostly Black but also Hispancic, neighborhoods. Eight were killed last weekend alone. In 2024 there were 573 murders, the most in the country for the 13th year in a row.  The numbers are appallingly high in a great many American cities:

Chicago, IL - 573 homicides

New York, NY - 377 homicides

Houston, TX - 322 homicides

Philadelphia, PA - 269 homicides

Los Angeles, CA - 259 homicides

For homicide rates per 100,000 residents, the top cities were:

St. Louis, MO - 52.9 homicides per 100,000

Memphis, TN - 38.0 homicides per 100,000

Baltimore, MD - 35.6 homicides per 100,000

New Orleans, LA - 34.1 homicides per 100,000

Detroit, MI - 32.1 homicides per 100,000     

In 2024, Milwaukee recorded 132 homicides, according to data from the Milwaukee Police Department.  For homicide rates per 100,000 residents, Milwaukee had a rate of 22.86 in 2024, based on a population of approximately 577, 222.  While Milwaukee does not appear in the top tier of either list, its homicide rate is still notably higher than the average for the rest of Wisconsin, which has a five-year average rate of 2.17 per 100,000 outside Milwaukee. Notably, the city has a large Black population while the rest of state is mostly White.  The city’s 2024 homicide total of 132 represents a 23% decrease from 172 in 2023, showing a significant decline but still elevated compared to pre-pandemic levels (97 homicides in 2019).

Back to Chicago, Trump's next target for troop deployment:  I asked Grok for the racial breakdown on gun crimes in Chicago and the numbers are quite consistent both for victims and for arrests,  about 80% Blacks, about 15% Hispanics, and less than 5% Whites and "others." Violent crime in American cities, especially gun crimes, is overwhelmingly a Black phenomenon, both in terms of perpetrators and in terms of victims.  Secondarily, it is an Hispanic phenomenon.  As has long been true, racial crime rates correspond closely with racial poverty and unemployment rates.  In Chicago, Blacks make up about 28% of the population, but 46% of those in poverty.  Hispanics make up about 29% of the population, but with a poverty rate of 14.8%, about 43% higher than the White rate.  Whites comprise only 32% of the population with a poverty rate of 10%.  Poverty is concentrated on the South and West side neighborhoods where rates can exceed 40% in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods like Englewood, where my parents, my sister, and I grew up,  and Riverdale, where my parents and my sister Kitty owned their first homes.

I mention this out of frustration over our country's inability or unwillingness to be honest about Race in America.  I don't have the wherewithal to get into it today, or perhaps on any other day anymore, but I expect an explosion on of these days if Trump keeps sending troops into our cities.  I can't predict what will trigger it, but something will.  I wonder whether Trump and his people are hoping for it to happen to provide him with his Reichstag fire moment.  

I include some Chicago history from my memoir, not only because it has some relevance to Chicago's "American carnage," but also because I have often wished I could put the entire memoir online, to have it more accessible, even though the only one who wants to read it is me :

I mentioned in the last letter that the Church Kitty and I grew up in was racist, and so it was.  It would paint a more accurate picture, however, to acknowledge that the world we grew up in was racist and the Church reflected that world.  Chicago was a racial cauldron the entire time I lived there, especially on the South Side.  Perhaps the more accurate metaphor would be ‘pressure cooker,’ with us South siders never knowing when the lid would blow off.  

There were two great black migrations from the rural South to Chicago.  The first was during the First World War.  The War increased demand for many of Chicago’s manufactured products but also halted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe which had provided laborers for ‘grunge work.’  Southern blacks were able to obtain employment that had been closed to them before the War.  They were also able to escape the sharecropping and Jim Crow culture of the South which guaranteed them a life of economic penury, social degradation, and political powerlessness.  The blacks who came to Chicago were mostly from Mississippi, as was the case in Milwaukee.   Most lived in ‘the Black Belt,’ originally a strip of residential housing between Cermak Road (22nd Street) and 31st Street along south State Street. Over the years the narrow belt grew longer and wider and eventually came to comprise most of the South Side and much of the West Side.  As my mother and father were growing up in St. Bernard’s parish around 65th and Stewart Streets, the  northern border of the Black Belt was just south of their neighborhood, at 63rd and State Streets.  After the horrendous Riot of 1919, race relations were relatively calm in Chicago.  As my father told, me, “They stayed out of our neighborhood and we stayed out of theirs.” 

Blacks were hardly welcomed by most white Chicagoans, especially the working class.  The blacks were sometimes used as strikebreakers, notably in the packinghouses around the huge Union Stockyards.   Even without the tremendous tensions between management and labor, involving communists, socialists, anarchists, and ‘Wobblies’ or International Workers of the World, the blacks were filling jobs that Irishmen, Germans, Bohemians, Italians and Poles and other ethnics wanted for themselves.  After the War ended, between July 27th and August 3rd of 1919, there was a race riot, specifically a riot of whites, that resulted in the deaths of 23 blacks and 15 whites and in injuries to 342 blacks and 195 whites.  It took the Illinois National Guard to quell the riot.  The riot started when a black teenager crossed the invisible line between “white area” and “colored area” at the 29th Street beach.  Forty-two years later, in 1961, there was another violent racial confrontation on the beach that the Clausen and Cummings kids used, Rainbow Beach between 70th and 79th Streets.  

The second great migration occurred during and after the Second World War.  Again, industrial demand for labor was high and with 16,000,000 men in the armed services the labor supply was low.  Many blacks filled the gap.   When the war ended, a number of factors came into play to increase racial conflict.  First, the return of the veterans meant competition for available jobs was intense.  Blacks didn’t want to give up the employment gains they had made and whites wanted to return to the status quo ante bellum.  Second, there was a tremendous shortage of housing.  Third, in the 1940’s, the mechanical cotton picker became prevalent in the South, making life even harder for poor rural blacks.  This led to continued black migration into northern cities creating even greater pressure for housing and greater competition for employment. This all occurred in a city that was intensely ethnic and parochial.  Hence the metaphors of ‘cauldron’ and ‘pressure cooker.’  This was the setting for Monsignor Malloy’s exhortations from the pulpit to “keep out the undesirables.”

        In 1960 and before, Auburn Gresham had a population of almost 60,000: 98.7% white and 0.2% black..  In 1990, the population was still just under 60,000 but with the demographics reversed: 98.7% black, 1.1% white.  In 2000, the population had dropped to 55,928: 99.4% black, 0.5% white.  Just to the north and east of Auburn Gresham was Englewood, my parents’ old neighborhood.  A look at the demographics of Englewood provides a good picture of the racial pressures on Auburn Gresham as the Black Belt expanded.  In 1930, Englewood had a population of 89,063: 98.7% white, 1.1% black.  In 1940, the population was 2% black and in 1950, 11% black.  By 1960, the population had grown to 97,595: 30% white, 70% black.  In 1970, the population was 96% black and in 1990, the population had dropped to 48,434: 99% black..  By 2000, the population had dropped to 40,222, still virtually all black.  The Wikipedia entry for Englewood is “a vacant town with buildings falling apart and 43% of the residents living below the poverty line.  Over 700 murders have occurred there in just 10 years.”  

The Catholics in the Auburn Gresham district belonged to St. Leo parish and St. Sabina parish, just west of St. Leo.  The two churches were only ¾ of a mile apart; Mapquest’s estimated traveling time is 3 minutes.  Yet the number of Catholics in that neighborhood was ample enough to support two thriving parishes each offering at least 4 Sunday masses, often standing room only (unless Monsignor Malloy was cramming the pews.)  St. Leo had Sunday mass in the church every hour on the hour till noon and every hour on the half hour in the high school chapel.  

To white Southsiders, the expanding Black Belt was a metastasizing cancer.   When blacks moved in, whites moved out.  There were efforts to foster integration, but they all eventually failed, usually quickly.  A neighborhood was going to be either black or white, never both, at least not for long.  One black family moving in was like one cancer cell taking up residence in an organ.  Hence Monsignor Malloy’s crusade to “keep out the undesirables.”  What he saw coming was his entire parish of urban Irish and German Catholics evacuating, being displaced by poor rural Mississippi blacks almost none of whom were Catholic.

What Malloy saw looming at the parish level, Cardinal Stritch saw at the archdiocesan level.  Catholics in the path of black expansion were abandoning their parishes by the thousands, leaving Catholic churches and schools struggling to keep their heads above water in a tidal wave of black Baptists, African Methodist Episcopals, Church of God in Christ folks, and assorted evangelicals, pentecostals and ‘holy rollers’ of all sorts.  Storefront churches popped up like dandelions, with self-appointed pastors renting spaces formerly occupied by small white retail and service establishments.  This presented Stritch with many challenges.  What to do about the old churches and schools and rectories and convents and devalued real estate in the newly black neighborhoods?  Support them out of archdiocesan funds or close them? How to deal with the need for new churches and schools, etc. in the white-flight suburbs?  How to deal with the black pressure to integrate Catholic parishes, their churches and schools and Catholic hospitals and other charities in light of deep-seated white resistance?  “Keep out the undesirables” or work toward integration?

While Kitty and I attended St. Leo Grammar School there were no black students enrolled.  There were no black students at Leo High School during my days there, nor at Visitation High School during Kitty’s stay there. In fact, Visitation parish, centered at Garfield Boulevard (55th Street) and Halsted Street, was notorious for the efforts of its parishioners, supported by its pastor, to keep blacks out of the parish.  The Garfield Boulevard Improvement Association, which met in the parish hall, was a Chicago version of the White Citizens’ Councils in the deep South: dedicated to preserving segregation, especially in housing, churches, and schools.  In 1949, when I was 8 years old, there was a riot in Visitation parish when a black couple visited the home of a Jewish couple who lived in the parish.  Rumors spread that the blacks were about to move into the parish and mobs of whites, many and probably most of them Catholics, attacked the home of the Jewish couple.  Worse riots by whites occurred in Cicero in 1951, again with working class Catholics leading the way.  An article in the Jesuit magazine America said the rioters wore “sweaters with [Catholic ] school names or crests on the back, Knights of Columbus lapel pins and rings, scapulars or other medals seen through an open shirt . . . some fairly definite physical symbols of Catholic faith.”

Cardinal Stritch himself was a Southern racist.  He believed in converting blacks to Catholicism, but not in living near them, going to school with them, or worshipping in the same pews with them. Steven Avella, a history professor at Marquette published a history of the Chicago archdiocese under Cardinals Stritch and his successor Albert Meyer.  Regarding the racial tensions in the archdiocese, he wrote:

Cardinal Stritch was least well-equipped temperamentally and philosophically to deal with this aspect of change in Chicago Catholic life.  Stritch was indelibly southern in his attitudes on racial issues.  He displayed this in private conversation, when he would refer to blacks as “niggers.”  Once, he accused one of his Milwaukee priests of leaving his quarters at a Catholic high school “unfit for a nigger.” Chancery official and later Bishop Cletus F. O’Donnell was once ordered by Stritch to “give this nigger a good tip” in reference to a railroad porter who had carried the archbishop’s luggage on board a train.   In a letter to his chief theological adviser, Stritch wrote from Hobe Sound, Florida: “Do not choose the winter climate of Florida if you have some deep thinking to do.  Here you take on the habits of the colored folk and do as little as is consistent with being alive.  (This Confident Church: Catholic Leadership and Life in Chicago, 1940-1965.)

Stritch did not introduce institutional racism to the Chicago Church.   His predecessor, George Cardinal Mundelein, set the archdiocese’s race policy within a year after becoming Chicago’s third archbishop.  There was one black parish in Chicago in 1916 when he became archbishop, St. Monica’s.  In 1917, he decreed: 

I desire St. Monica’s to be reserved entirely for the colored Catholics of Chicago and particularly of the South Side . . .  It is, of course, understood that I have no intention of excluding colored Catholics from any of the other churches in the diocese, and particularly if they live in another part of the city, but simply excluding from St. Monica’s all but the colored Catholics. (Edward Kantowicz, Corporation Sole)

In fact, black Catholics were not welcome in the other churches in the diocese and their children could not be enrolled in the parochial schools.  Thus, any Catholic who was black had to belong to St. Monica’s if he or she wanted to have full membership in a Catholic parish.  So saith Cardinal Mundelein.

I think it is a fair guess that a majority of the white diocesan priests and members of religious orders in mid-century Chicago were also racist.  It was hard not to be racist in the circumstances that existed.  Racial fear and loathing were in the air we breathed and the water we drank.  It was everywhere.  Monsignor Malloy was not risking disapprobation when he rallied the parishioners around the “keep out the undesirables” flag, he was only preaching to the choir.  Personal racism and institutional racism reinforced each other.  

How did all this affect me?  

First, it was scary.  We learned to be afraid of black people generally and we were afraid of the intense emotions that racial issues called forth from whites.   Usually, the closest we got to blacks was riding the Englewood “L” through slum neighborhoods on the way downtown.  The view from the “L” was the back porches and yards of overcrowded, badly maintained duplexes and triplexes and larger apartment buildings with bedding or newspapers in the windows and trash strewn about the back yards.  We were scared of blacks.  They looked different, talked different and seemed to be from another planet.  We were scared of whites who harbored deep hostility towards blacks and freely expressed it in front of children.  I don’t recall my mother ever badmouthing blacks but my father did on occasion.  Despite my father’s infrequent intemperate lapses, my overall recollection is that both my parents urged Kitty and me not to harbor hostile feelings towards blacks who were, as my mother reminded us, children of God just like us.

Second, it was confusing.  The organized racism came from the pulpit of St. Leo Church.  The message of segregation was delivered not by a Klansman in hooded sheets in front of a burning cross but by a Catholic priest in brocaded vestments in front of an altar and crucifix.    What did this suggest about the relationship between the “undesirables” and the Undesirable on the cross?  What was “undesirable” about our kind and gentle friend Moses, alone each night in the guard shack reading his Bible in a neighborhood where he was to many residents simply “a nigger”?  What was a Catholic child to make of this?

When I graduated from St. Leo Grammar School in 1955 and moved on to Leo High School, Catholic schools were still very much segregated.  The only Catholic high school for blacks was St. Elizabeth, which had succeeded St. Monica as quasi-official black parish in Chicago.  We had boys of many ethnicities at the school but no blacks.  I daresay that those of us who thought about such things thought that the legal segregation of whites and blacks in the South was a bad thing, but most of us were more than content to tolerate the de facto segregation by housing patterns in Chicago and other northern cities.  Our only contact with black Catholics was when Leo High School played St. Elizabeth’s basketball team, usually a powerhouse in the Catholic League.  The black St. Elizabeth fans sat on one side of the gym and we sat on the other side.  They had girls as cheerleaders because St. Elizabeth was a co-ed school, the only co-ed Catholic high school in the archdiocese to my knowledge.  Making the school co-ed saved the Cardinal the expense of supporting two schools for blacks.  Thus the black Catholic adolescents got to go to school together, occasions of sin be damned, while white boys and girls were kept in separate educational enclaves lest they be occasions of sin for one another.  

I will write more about segregation and integration and the civil rights movement when I tell of your mother’s and my move back to Milwaukee after I was discharged from the Marines.  The point I make in this letter is simply that the Catholic Church that I grew up in took almost no leadership role in the turbulent race relations in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s.  I think it is accurate to say that the role the Church played was much like that of a large property owner, concerned mainly with loss of property value and revenue streams.  Justice was rarely the concern of the Church; rather, it was net worth and cash flow.  So much for “the brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God.’’  When push came to shove in Chicago’s race situation, as far as the Church was concerned, it was about money, property, wealth.  I recalled this as I watched, in unspeakable disgust, the sordid scandal of priestly pedophilia and unforgivable cover-up by the bishops.  For those guys, business is business and their first duty was to protect and maximize their assets, justice and the ‘docile flock’ be damned.

 

 

 

9/2/2025

  Tuesday, September 2, 2025

D+301/226/-1236

1945 Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent from France (National Day)

1945 V-J Day, formal surrender of Japan signed aboard the USS Missouri,  the end of World War II

1983 Yitzḥak Shamir (Likud party) was endorsed by Menachem Begin for Israeli Prime Minister

In bed at 9:10, up at 5:20.  56°, high of 74°, sunny all day.  Hand and finger pains, pain in big toe on my left foot - gout returning?

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 9:15 a.m.  

Trump's War on History.  On the way out to Waukesha for the work on the Volvo, I listed to WUWM's On Point, with Meghna Chakrabarti interviewing Yale historian David Blight on DJT's war on history.  On March 27th, President Trump signed an executive order that targets two recipients of federal funds: The Smithsonian Institution, a vast collection of research centers, museums and galleries, including the Air & Space Museum and the American Art Museum; and the monuments and memorials overseen by the Department of the Interior.  

The order is called "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" and the White House says the goal is "revitalizing key cultural institutions and reversing the spread of divisive ideology."  It says that the Smithsonian promotes "narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive" and directs Vice President JD Vance — who is on the Smithsonian's board — to eliminate "improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology" from the museums, and to work with Congress to keep from funding exhibits or programs that "divide Americans by race."  

The executive order also directs the Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Parks and other public lands, to restore markers, statues and other memorials that have been "improperly removed or changed in the last five years to perpetuate a false revision of history or improperly minimize or disparage certain historical figures or events. 

This is but one part of Trump's and his fascist supporters' project of mind control, right out of Orwell's 1984. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”  ‘War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.’  Notably, 1984 is set in England when it has become a ONE PARTY STATE in which thinking the wrong thoughts can be a crime.  The protagonist is Winston Smith, who works for the Ministry of Truth where old historical records are altered, to remove any embarrassing facts that don’t fit with the party line.  Are we on the way???

A video that gave me the willies over the weekend was of Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi laughing, shaking hands, and schmoozing with Xi Jinping in Beijing.  Thirty years of American diplomatic efforts to tighten the relationship with India as a counter to China - down the drain with Trump's 50% punitive tariffs on India, the world's 4th largest economy.  25% as punishment for buying Russian oil, while he continues to decline harsher penalties on Russia itself.  A deadly combination: his fixation on tariffs and his love affair with Putin.  America loses, Russia and China win.

More willies.  From Tom Friedman's column this morning: 

[W]e believe the biggest geopolitical and geoeconomic question goiong forward is: Can the United States and China maintain competition on A.I. while collaborating on a shared level of trust that guarantees it always remains aligned with human flourishing and planetary stability? And, just as crucially, can they extend a system of values to countries willing to play by those same rules — and restrict access to those that won’t?

I wouldn't bet on it.  "I'm sorry,  Dave.  I'm afraid I can't do that."

I'm already behind the times.  I started using free AI about a week ago, mainly Elon Musk's Grok and Chat got.  This morning I went into Google's Gemini and asked 'what is entropy.' The response was truly amazing.  Google gives us sources where we can find the answers to our questions; Gemini gives us the answers.  I can see that I am getting hooked on AI already, simply as a source of answers to the relatively simple questions an 84 year old, retired lawyers can ask.  The tools potential is every bit as scary as Tom Friedman states in his op-ed.

Volvo maintenance today, replacement of coil springs, wheel alignment, and replacement of rearview camera stailizing fixture.  I arrived at Field's Volvo in Waukesha at 9:45 for my 10 a.m. appointment.  I was told that the work will probably take until 2 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon.  I could rent a loaner, go home, and come back, or have someone drive me home and pick me up, but home-to-Field's is about an hour and a half round trip, so I opt to stay and wait.  After more than an hour of waiting with a few more to go, I am reminded of taking Andy to Children's Hospital at 17th and Wisconsin Avenue 45 years ago or so, and waiting patiently in the waiting room.

Asphalt placement today, 6 days after the job began, Labor Day weekend intervening.  Big job, expensive job, about $20,000.  Watching the workers do the job with their huge heavy construction equipment makes it easy to understand why the project is so expensive.  There are about 12 workers, all wearing yellow and orange construction vests that make them look like worker bees when half a dozen or so are gathered and working around the freshly laid asphalt, sweeping, moving, shoveling, whatever.  Quite a sight. . . .  Arriving home after the trip to Waukesha, I am very pleased with how the driveways look.  I was disappointed however to learn that we have to wait to drive on them.  

O, fortunati!  I was thankful for how fortunate I was this morning.  Traffic was tied up for miles on northbound I-43, while I sailed smoothly on southbound 43 and westbound 94.  The estimate for the time required for the repair work on the Volvo was until 2 or 3 p.m.  In fact, the job was done by 12:30.  The tie up on I-43 northbound was over when I traversed it going home.  O frabjous day.

9/1/2025

 Monday, September 1, 2025

D+300/225/-1237

1939 Adolf Hitler ordered the extermination of the mentally ill, arguing that wartime "was the best time for the elimination of the incurably ill"

1939 Germany started World War II  by invading Poland 

1941 Jews living in Germany were required to wear a yellow Star of David

2015 Pope Francis told priests to pardon women who have had an abortion, in a letter released by the Vatican

2016 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt in protest during the national anthem objecting to racial injustice and police brutality in the US

2018 Memorial service for Senator John McCain at Washington National Cathedral with his daughter Meghan McCain, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush speaking

2021 Texas law banning most abortions after six weeks came into effect, now the most restrictive in the country

q2w

In bed at ?, up at 6:40.   High of 72° and sunny all day.

Meds. etc.  Morning meds at 1:30 p.m .    

Our neighboring turkeys.  I got out of bed late this morning morning and didn't open the venetian blinds until 7 a.m. or so, when the group of 5 tom turkeys were already enjoying breakfast under the feeders. The photo to the left is one I found on the internet.  I've been wondering what the collective noun is for this group.  Results of internet search:

There isn’t one single name to describe these groups, instead, they vary according to circumstances and include flock, gang, rafter, gaggle, and even posse.

Historically, groups of domesticated turkeys were known as rafters. This term is not in common usage today, although it is still used among turkey farmers. Although it’s unclear exactly when this term originated, one theory is that the name comes from a turkey’s habit of roosting up high overnight, in the rafters or eaves of a barn, or in the wild in the branches of a tree.

Another name for a gathering of turkeys is a ‘gang’, or less commonly a ‘mob’. This refers to the noisy and sometimes intimidating behavior when large groups of young and older male turkeys assemble.

Occasionally a group of noisy turkeys may also be called a ‘gaggle’, calling out the loud, gobbling sounds that are characteristic of a large gathering of turkeys (and geese!).

In the wild, mixed groups of turkeys are sometimes also known as ‘runs’, while groups that consist solely of adult males (known as ‘toms’) might be referred to as ‘posses’.

Groups containing young turkeys are often referred to as broods and consist of a female, with several young. 

 It's a beautful, summery day.  Geri has spent much of the day working with her gardens.  I've made two two runs to stores.  The first was to Meijer's looking for Breadsmith's sourdough bread; they were out.  The second was to MetroMarket to get two strip steaks and two baking potatoes and some corn for dinner tonight, a rare treat.  We hardly ever have steak for dinner.  Geri didn't want to tonight, but I prevailed on her.

Why do I write anything on Facebook?  Should I post something like this?

To my friends who have long indulged my rants on Facebook:  First, to those who have read those rants and commented on them, thank you.  Secondly, to those who have read those rants and refrained from commenting on them out of kindness, thank you.  Thirdly, to those who have learned to skip my rants and move on to more uplifting postings, thank you also.  To all of you, I share some personal thoughts.  I have become an old man.  I’m not sure when this happened.  It may have happened early in my life without me knowing it, but it surely has happened late in my life.  At 84, there is every reason to belief I am not only ‘playing the back 9,’ but on the 18th green.  This is a challenging but rewarding time of life.  In it, I have developed a much deeper appreciation for people, places, things, and events that, for a lifetime, I took for granted, or failed fully to treasure.  This has been a gift for which I am deeply grateful.  I remind myself a bit of Emily in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, who died young but returned to life only to be beset by how the living fail to see so much of the beauty and goodness all around them.  She laments of the living: “We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. All that was going on in life, and we never noticed. . . Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?.”  Had Emily lived into her 80s, she would probably have come to look at ‘all that was going on in life’ and to be grateful for so much good and so much beautiful.  It’s a gift that comes as we slow down. 

But old age also brings burdens, regrets, and fears.  I won’t tax your patience by describing mine except for the one that prompts me to write these thoughts, and that is what has happened to the United States of America in my lifetime and what is happening now.  I was born when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, America was coming out of the prolonged Great Depression, and about to enter the Second World War.  I’ve lived through 15 presidents. I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s when the country was at its apogee after the war, through the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam horror in the 60s and 70s.  There was a time when I believed America was headed in the right direction, when I at least hoped that Martin Luther King, Jr. was right that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  Actually, I may have lost that hope in Vietnam, but I was encouraged in the 60s and 70 not only by the passage of much good legislation under both LBJ and Richard Nixon, but also by public acceptance of the goals of that legislation: equal justice, expanded economic opportunities, clean air and water, safer workplaces, etc.  There was some pulling back of that public acceptance during and since the Reagan era, but there was not a fundamental change in the identity or public perception of the nation and its government as a constitutional, democratic republic with a diverse citizenry and a government of limited powers operating under the rule of law.  All that changed on November 5, 2024, when Donald Trump was elected to a second term of office as president. 

I will not further try your patience of any who have read this far by repeating my many rants against the current administration of this nation.  I do however want to focus on what is becoming our national character.  When I was a boy, movies about Nazi Germany were still popular.  We all grew up with movie images and mental images of a deluded people hailing a morally twisted leader of a government that persecuted all it disfavored for any reason and all who disagreed with its exercise of power.  Those who can’t see the resemblance of our government and that government are closing their eyes to reality or haven’t seen enough Nazi movies or read enough history.  What most characterized the Nazi government and the German populace in the 1930s was cruelty on the part of some (indeed, many) and a widespread indifference on the part of others to the sufferings of yet others who were not members of the dominant group of ethnic Germans.  It was that cruelty and indifference that let led to the Brown Shirts, and then the Gestapo, and the SS.  How much cruelty or heartlessness do we see in our own government’s policies and actions?  I focus, as our government has, on immigrants because they are the current targets of government 

I can't figure out where to go with this.  Focus on cruelty?  on lawlessness?  forget about it? Scatterbrained.  Manifesto of an old guy?

Photo by Tina Menotti, Worker''s Hands, 1927

8/31/2025

 Sunday, August 31, 2025

D+299/224/-1238

1928 Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weil's "The Threepenny Opera" premiered in Berlin

1941 "Great Gildersleeve," a spin-off of "Fibber McGee & Molly", debuted on radio

1946 Foghorn Leghorn, a Warner Bros. cartoon character first debuted

1997 Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash in a road tunnel in Paris

2023 Two leaders of the Proud Boys were given lengthy sentences for sedition for their assault on the US Capitol - Joseph Biggs 17 years and Zachary Rehl 15 years

In bed around 9, up a 5:10, 54°, high of 71°, sunny all day.    

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 10:45 a.m.

Minnows in the bait bucket: (1) I started the day patiently backing up this laptop which hadn't been backed up for the last four days.  I listened to Ezra Klein's interview of Phillipe Sands about genocide, impressed as usual with Klein's intelligence, erudition, and analytical ability.  Doubly impressed because he was such a 'lousy student' in his school days.  I also emptied and refilled the dishwasher, and filled the bird feeders.

(2) Da boids.  It didn't take long for the tom turkeys to show up.  I hope I haven't created a problem with their patronage.  I notice that the mourning doves tend to roost on the tray feeder.  This doesn't displease me, quite the opposite.  The bluejays have become more regular visitors, as have the crows and turkeys.  I'm wondering when the snowbirds will start showing up.

(3) Besetment is the rare noun form of the verb "beset."  It describes my condition concerning the selling of our house.  It's always at least in the back of my mind, as they say, and increasingly in the front of it.  I pulled up the website of Grandview Homes yesterday and would like to have them give us a quote on our house, but I need to be careful in terms of partnering with Geri on such a momentous matter.

(4) FEMA's Preliminary Damage Assesment from the Big Rain on August 9-10.  Damage assessments found 51 homes were destroyed — 46 of them in Milwaukee County, four in Waukesha County and one in Washington County.  More than 4,500 residential and commercial buildings were damaged. That includes 1,500 homes with major damage, 654 with minor damage and 966 categorized as "affected." In the three affected counties, home damages are estimated at $33 million. Between 0% and 1.6% of residents in those counties have flood insurance, and 90% of affected properties are located outside FEMA-designated floodplains.  In addition to home damages, damage to public buildings and infrastructure surpasses $43 million. That includes more than $34 million in Milwaukee County alone.  During the peak of the storms, about 38,176 homes lost power for an average of 10 hours in Milwaukee.

(5) The Riviera of the Middle East, or 'Thar's gold in them thar hills.'  I had thought DJT's pipe dream of converting the ruins of Gaza into 'The Riviera of the Middle East' was history.  Not so, according to this morning's Washington Post.  

Called the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or GREAT Trust, the proposal was developed by some of the same Israelis who created and set in motion the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) now distributing food inside the enclave. Financial planning was done by a team working at the time for the Boston Consulting Group.

And we know who will be first at the trough: Don, Jr., and Eric, with Jerod Kushner. $$$$$$$$$$$

(6) A lovely, emotional ride in the country, through Port Washington, and to Costco.  I took the last exit to Port Washington off I-43, driving down Wisconsin Avenue and then Grand Avenue, admiring all the beautiful homes; then down Highway 32, to County CC to County C and past the elk farm, watching the bulls in full antlers, running, in one corral and the cows and calves in another; then to Costco for a chicken, cookies, Kirkland VO cognac, and, tada!, Rao's eggplant parmigiana.  I got emotional during the Port Washinton and country legs of my outing, wishing as I so often do Kitty and my mother and my father were wish me to enjoy the drive and all the beauty.  In the Costco parking lot, I listened to Whitney Houston singing "The Greatest Love" and thought of how my mother would want be to be happy, not full of regrets, etc., and had one of those eyes-welling experiences.

(7) Character strengths assessment by questionnaire.  At the Aging From the Inside Out gathering last week, the leader provided us a handout that included a reference to an outfit called VAInstitute on Character.  It's not a part of the VA itself.  On their website, there is a lengthy questionnaire designed to assess character traits.  I took it and here is its assessment of me:

Charles Clausen

Your Free Results, 8/31/2025

Your Top Strengths

1. Appreciation of Beauty & Excellence -Noticing and appreciating beauty, excellence, and/or skilled performance in various domains of life, from nature to art to mathematics to science to everyday experience.

2. Love - Valuing close relations with others, in particular those in which sharing & caring are reciprocated; being close to people.

3. Gratitude - Being aware of and thankful for the good things that happen; taking time to express thanks.

4. Honesty - Speaking the truth but more broadly presenting oneself in a genuine way and acting in a sincere way; being without pretense; taking responsibility for one's feelings and actions.

5. Love of Learning - Mastering new skills, topics, and bodies of knowledge, whether on one's own or formally; related to the strength of curiosity but goes beyond it to describe the tendency to add systematically to what one knows.

Your Middle Strengths

6. Forgiveness - Forgiving those who have done wrong; accepting others’ shortcomings; giving people a second chance; not being vengeful.

7. Curiosity - Taking an interest in ongoing experience for its own sake; finding subjects and topics fascinating;exploring and discovering.

8. Humility - Letting one's accomplishments speak for themselves; not regarding oneself as more special than one is.

9. Perspective - Being able to provide wise counsel to others; having ways of looking at the world that make sense to oneself/others.

10. Social Intelligence - Being aware of the motives/feelings of others and oneself; knowing what to do to fit into different social situations; knowing what makes other people tick.

11. Prudence - Being careful about one's choices; not taking undue risks; not saying or doing things that might later be regretted.

12. Spirituality - Having coherent beliefs about the higher purpose and meaning of the universe; knowing where one fits within the larger scheme; having beliefs about the meaning of life that shape conduct and provide comfort.

13. Fairness - Treating all people the same according to notions of fairness and justice; not letting feelings bias decisions about others; giving everyone a fair chance.

14.  Judgment - Thinking things through and examining them from all sides; not jumping to conclusions; being able to change one's mind in light of evidence; weighing all evidence fairly.

15.  Kindness - Doing favors and good deeds for others; helping them; taking care of them.16 - Perseverance - Finishing what one starts; persevering in a course of action in spite of obstacles; “getting it out the door”; taking pleasure in completing tasks.

17. Teamwork - Working well as a member of a group or team; being loyal to the group; doing one's share.

18. Self-Regulation - Regulating what one feels and does; being disciplined; controlling one's impulses and emotions.

19. Humor - Liking to laugh and tease; bringing smiles to other people; seeing the light side; making (not necessarily telling) jokes.

20. Bravery - Not shrinking from threat, challenge, difficulty, or pain; speaking up for what’s right even if there’s opposition; acting on convictions even if unpopular; includes physical bravery but is not limited to it.

Your Lesser Strengths

21. Leadership - Encouraging a group of which one is a member to get things done and at the same time maintain good relations within the group; organizing group activities and seeing that they happen.

22. Hope - Expecting the best in the future and working to achieve it; believing that a good future is something that can be brought about.

23. Creativity - Thinking of novel and productive ways to conceptualize and do things; includes artistic achievement but is not limited to it.

24. Zest - Approaching life with excitement and energy; not doing things halfway or halfheartedly; living life as an adventure; feeling alive and activated.

I am not much of a believer in psychological assessment tools that are simply questionnaires.  They are necessarily crude devices.  The person responding to the questionnaire usually can't tell with any near- precision what the words in the questionnaire mean or what time period they may refer to, etc.  This assessment seems particularly unuseful in that it gives no numerical values to the different items in the rankings, e.g., how much difference there is between the differenat rankings, and the different categories of rankings, i.e., top strengths, middle strengths, and lesser strengths.  There's no subtlety or nuance to an exercise like this and the results are pretty useless.