I grew up in the early 1950’s. Yeah, yeah. I know what you’re going to say. I must be as old as the hills. Well, I’m not that old, but I have lived a long time. And I have some stories to tell. So, let me begin with well, the beginning. My parents were married a long, long time ago, in 1929. Just in time for the crash of the economy, The Great Depression. Oh, you never heard about that before? Really, I’ll catch you up. The Great Depression occurred in 1929 when, in a period of ten weeks, stocks on the New York Stock Exchange lost 50 percent of their value. As stocks continued to fall during the early 1930s, businesses failed, and unemployment rose dramatically.
Girard College Philadelphia
I can’t say how the Great Depression affected my parents in great detail because my parents did not talk about it in detail. Other than my mother telling me at some point when I was a young child that they were married in 1929. The beginning of the Depression. My mother and father proceeded to create a family that included my brother, Hugh, my oldest sister, Jeanette, my sister’s Eileen and sister, Liz, and my fraternal twin, Karen and myself of course, Karen was born seven minutes before me.. My mother gave birth to twin boys, who were named Charles and Girard. They only lived a few weeks since they were premature at birth. And came only a year after my twin and I were born.
My father worked for PTC (The Philadelphia Transportation Company), the bus and trolley company in Philadelphia. Later, in the early 1960s, it was renamed SEPTA (South Eastern Pennsylvania Transportation Company). My father was a bus driver and apparently loved his job. But his mother, who was a widow, had other plans for him. She thought he would have more prestige if he worked in an office. She put a great deal of pressure on him, and he eventually complied with her decision.
For the next five decades of his life, my father worked in the office, eventually becoming the head dispatcher at PTC. He developed the system that still regulates the scheduling of the drivers’ buses and trolleys to this day. My father was a highly intelligent man. He was not a perfect man or father. He had faults and shortcomings. He liked to gamble, he played cards for money, he placed bets on horse races. In fact, he was a regular at the Garden State Race Track in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. He made many great friends through his “hobbies.” In fact, my father had a whole different life outside of his family life and outside of his employment as head dispatcher at SEPTA. His nickname was Smiley, which I always had a hard time understanding since he always seemed to be in a bad mood when he was home.
Maple Shade, NJ in the 1960’s
My life growing up in the small town of Maple Shade, New Jersey, was a childhood that any child would be lucky to experience. The baby boomer generation was born between 1946 and 1964. I was born on May 24th of 1951. I can speak to this from my personal experience. Aside from my experience of attending twelve years in Catholic School (which is a different experience altogether compared to public school), My generation had almost total freedom. My mother never asked me what I had been up to all day. If I came home relatively in one piece, no questions were asked. This was especially true during the Summer months. When we were out of school, we were allowed to stay out every night until dark, and then our parents would call for us to come in about the time that the mosquitoes were eating us alive.
I was never given any chores to do. My mother used to sit with me every evening during the school year after dinner and help me with my homework. She never complained. She was the most loving and caring person I knew in my life.
My father was not an affectionate person. He wasn’t one to give hugs and kisses, even when I was quite young. My father grew up in a place called Girard College. It was a school for fatherless boys. Funded by a wealthy American man whose name was Stephen Girard. My father’s father passed away when my father was about five years old. When my father came of age, his mother was able to get my father accepted at Girard College, which was a type of boarding school for boys who didn’t have fathers. My father’s father had passed away, and my father lived and was educated at Girard College until he was almost seventeen years old. He only saw his mother once a year on Christmas until he graduated from Girard College, where he was ultimately hired to work for PTC. He spent his entire working life there until he retired when he was sixty- two years old.
My father was not a perfect man. He rarely expressed affection or love toward any of us. But I believed deep down that my father loved each and every one of us in his own way. He just never learned the tools of expressing his love and affection for us because he grew up without a father and a mother that he rarely saw and didn’t grow up with since he lived at Girard College until he was an adolescent.
Still, my father had a great influence and impact on the development of my personality. He often said hurtful things if any of us were not being cooperative with whatever his agenda was at that time. I was always something of an argumentative kid, and if I didn’t agree with what someone was saying to me or telling me to do something, I didn’t want to do it. Well, I would argue and refuse to do what I was told. My father was always telling my mother,” That kid would argue with the pope.’ And I suppose as I look back at my childhood and adolescence, he was probably right. I would argue with the Pope. Or anyone else that tried to tell me what to do. And I didn’t want to do it.
In addition, I just was not your regular run-of-the-mill kid. I had strong opinions about what was right and wrong. I was not afraid to stick up for myself at home or at school. My personality didn’t quite mesh with the behaviors that were expected from the students in a Catholic Elementary School or an All Girls School that I attended, which was located in Haddonfield, NJ. Which was an upper-class neighborhood, to say the least. St. Mary of the Angels Academy. I continued to be the same sarcastic, argumentative, stubborn girl I was in elementary school.
My parents had to work all through my elementary and high school years because the tuition was high, especially at St. Mary’s, where most of the other students came from upper-class neighborhoods and upper-class families. My mother worked at Wanamaker’s employee kitchen, cooking meals for the Wanamaker employees, and my father, well, continued to work for SEPTA as the head dispatcher until he retired at sixty-two.
Looking back on those days, I realize that my parents had to sacrifice a lot to send all their daughters to Catholic School. And I never heard a word of complaint from either one of them, especially my mother, who not only worked at Wanamaker’s kitchen but also ironed other families’ clothes and cleaned houses on the side. There was never a moment when my mother wasn’t working hard every single day.
The only time I saw her rest was late in the afternoon when she would sit in her room, quietly say the rosary and read her prayer books. She also went to Mass every morning and said the rosary with the Altar Rosary Society.
Some people grow up in dysfunctional families, where they never feel loved or accepted. And I won’t lie here; sometimes, I don’t feel completely accepted. Why, you may ask? Well, the fact is I was not just your ordinary kik. Yes, I had a lot of friends in my small-town neighborhood. But somehow, I was different in some subtle way from the other kids in the neighborhood, even my best girlfriend.
OLPH Church, Maple Shade, NJ
I always had my own point of view about things. I wanted to do things my way. I wasn’t big on compromise. And then there was the fact that I was an exceptionally creative kid who liked to draw, make things, and tell stories. Sometimes, my siblings or even my parents didn’t know when to believe me because of what my mother called my wild imagination. They weren’t always certain if I was telling the truth or making it up. Or what my father always said, “ Marie, she’s putting the Irish on.” And I guess, at some level, I was.
Probably, because I just didn’t see things in black and white. I saw them in every color in a rainbow. I told stories that my parents could never completely believe. But, somehow, I did. But, still, they continued to listen and, at some level, enjoyed the most far-fetched story I told them.
So, here I am some sixty years later. I’m still telling far-fetched stories. And maybe I’m full of malarkey. But, all the same, I would change things about my past or present life. You know what Popeye used to say, “ I am what I am.” Well, people, I am who I am. Sometimes I will tell a long tale or sometimes I just might paint a beautiful surreal painting. But, it will be all me from top to bottom and from beginning to end. I am what I am, and that’s all that I am.
eek, my teacher gave me the name of a student about my age who lived in Ireland. And I started writing them. It turned out to be a girl about my age, and she even sent me a picture of herself. And she looked to be about my age. I didn’t understand the words she used in her letters, but I kept writing back, and she wrote me. She told me in her last letter that someday she would like to come and visit me in America. I couldn’t sleep for a week after that. I thought she was going to come any time now. But, she meant someday in the future, she would come.
