galoshes blog

Galoshes – A Memoir

PART V

By Gavin Murphy

That summer I had my first “steady” girlfriend. The ritual of going steady involved the purchase of a cheap ring that you gave to the girl to wear. The ring was reusable i.e. when she broke up with you she would give it back to you – hopefully not throw it at you if you were the one to initiate a break up. Then you could give it to your next girlfriend. The routine was some kind of holdover from the fifties, like in the song – “she’s wearing his ring.” The more popular guys ringed several girls during the next couple of years. 

(Even though it was the mid 1960s, there were a lot of things around this time in suburban Philly that seemed held over from the 50s – clothing styles, hairdos, and even some of the music.)

A friend of mine from the neighborhood was dating my girlfriend’s friend, as these things seemed to work in pairs. So every day for a few weeks we headed over to where the girls lived, hung out with them, rode them around on the handlebars of our bikes and spent sometime making out someplace where nobody’s parents could see us. One day my girlfriend sent my ring back via messenger with the word that she had a new guy she liked better than me. So that ended that, but I did get the ring back.

THUNDERBIRD ROAD TRIP

We didn’t get to see a lot of the extended family and taking six people on a vacation was not something we could easily afford and not something my dad even thought of as a good idea. But when a guy my dad worked with at the Inquirer offered to take all of us along from Philly to Chicago on his way to a holiday somewhere in the midwest, my dad went for it. After all, the price seemed right – some gas money maybe – and the friend offered to do all the driving. The guy wanted company.

He had a mid-sixties Ford Thunderbird. Thunderbirds from the 1950s are classic hot cars. The Thunderbird over the years, like the Corvette, evolved into more of a luxury vehicle than a sports car, but it still was sleek and had a powerful motor. That Thunderbird could fly. It looked like a rocket ship on wheels. 

There was only one problem. Thunderbirds were not designed to transport families on long distance drives. There were two bucket seats up front. The driver and dad took those. Somehow mom and us four kids squeezed into the backseat, also designed with a bucket seat configuration and a console, upon which I sat. I’m sure there were no seat belts, at least not more than two for the backseat.

We took off from Philly around sundown. The plan was to drive overnight and get to Chicago by around noon the next day. In order to do this you had to drive fast, which we did. Still, it was a long ride. I wasn’t used to basically being up all night and I remember how eerie the rest stops seemed at 3 am. My dad didn’t like to drive and my mom said he was a nervous wreck the whole time worrying about his whole family being inside a vehicle flying down a dark freeway as his work friend chatted and pressed his pedal to the metal. It turned out being seated on the console, even though it lacked cushioning, was an advantage because I could extend my legs forward between the bucket seats in front, at least a little ways. There was some elbowing and complaining as we were packed in like sardines but my mother was back there too and managed to maintain order. A couple of times when we got too restless the old man stuck his mug between the bucket seats and glowered menacingly. All the while dad’s friend seemed to be enjoying the company, which was good, because I could imagine him pulling over on the side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the middle the night and telling us all to get out.   

Sure enough we made it to Chicago and were dropped off at my Uncle Jim’s place. He worked a night shift as a police officer and was still asleep when we arrived. Chez Uncle Jim was an apartment where he let us in, and growling a little like a bear, tried to make the place more welcoming by picking up tossed clothing and such. I remember he had an official police blackjack – a leather sap that contained lead that was used to “subdue” unruly prisoners. He said I could have it and he also was willing to present me with a sawed off shotgun he had confiscated from someone. My dad immediately vetoed my taking possession of the sawed off shotgun but didn’t really notice when I slipped that blackjack into my pocket. (A year or so later he would confiscate it when he spotted it on my person.)

My uncle and my dad took us to see my grandmother, who lived in a hotel that served as a retirement home for the elderly residents. She mostly complained about stuff but she seemed happy to see us nonetheless.

Soon mom and all of us except dad were on the Rock Island Railroad heading for Peoria and a visit to grandma there. Lola still lived in the house where for the most part my mom had grown up. She was a widow and lived there alone. It wasn’t as big as I remembered from our visit during winter a couple years earlier but it was comfortable, like a grandma’s house should be. It was summer now and we chased fireflies at night in the front yard.

There was a zoo nearby and one day I was allowed to go there myself. I couldn’t find the entrance so I just went around a fence and wandered around. It turned out I was in an area where I wasn’t supposed to be because there were caged animals there. I don’t remember actually encountering a lion or anything but I thought I heard some growling.

We were supposed to drive back to Philly with my dad’s friend but dad decided he was going to pop for the train as he had been so miserable on the high speed car drive to get to Chicago. So we rode back to Philadelphia in relative luxury and comfort on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Seventh Grade

In seventh grade, we had an ancient nun as our teacher. This woman had to be in her eighties, maybe close to ninety. She had some sort of palsy, so her hands shook and her lips trembled. She had seventy students in her class to control, and I almost felt sorry for her. Her title was something that somewhat rhymed with mumbles, so in light of her condition and because we were mean, we called her Sister Mumbles, among other names.

Like I said before, many of the kids in my classes were veterans who had survived Our Lady of Fatima since the first grade and I myself had become pretty recalcitrant since my arrival there in the fourth grade. By this point there wasn’t much anyone could do to us to keep us in line. The nuns could slap us, garret the boys with their own neckties, hit them with rulers, pointers and other objects, stick their heads into trash cans, hang them from coat hangers and make them stand outside in the playground in all kinds of inclement weather, but we could not be broken. So this was about the time the nuns started saying stuff like, soon you’ll be in high school – Catholic high school of course – and there the priests will teach you a thing or two about discipline. This would briefly strike a note of terror with us, because we knew the priests didn’t just slap you. They might just haul off and wallop you with their fists. But in the short run these threats only caused us to take greater advantage of the nuns while we still had the chance.

One of the nuns did come up with an ingenious method of punishment for the chronic misbehavers. We were out of the church basement now and back in the main building and these classrooms had a skylight that ran near the peak of the roof. This skylight was right above the first row of desks. 

When the weather was hot, the sun beat through this skylight and could become quite uncomfortable. There was no air conditioning in these classrooms and when spring rolled around it could get very hot. The nuns took advantage of this kind of weather to torment us, especially we boys, because we had to wear blazers as part of our uniforms. Days of hot weather passed and the temperature became truly ferocious before we would finally be allowed to remove these blazers. I guess the nuns wanted us to experience a little of what they did, having to wear their own suffocating uniform all the time no matter how hot it got. 

It was during this weather that the bad apples would all be moved to the first row, beneath the skylight, and they were not allowed to remove their jackets no matter how hot it got. We called this the ‘torture aisle” and it was pretty brutal. 

Speaking of how the nuns were outfitted, there was one very advantageous aspect, to us students anyway, in how the habits for our order of holy women were designed (different orders sport different habits). The headgear they wore – properly called a “wimple” (seriously) – covered the forehead and included a helmet of stiff white material that straddled their heads and faces. This design effectively functioned like horse blinders, eliminating peripheral vision. So, unless they were looking directly at us, they really couldn’t see us.

This allowed for much unseen nefarious activity in the classroom, and left the nuns dependent on their hearing and also the uncanny sixth sense many of them possessed for detecting any sort of fun or pleasure as it occurred. Because the nuns would very often know that we were misbehaving but didn’t actually see anybody in the act, this led to a lot of threats that if whoever shot that spitball didn’t stand up and admit it or if somebody doesn’t tell me who that person is, the entire class will stay after school for a week and you won’t get to go to the bathroom or get a drink for the rest of the day and it will be all the more time you spend in purgatory after you die.

Sister Mumbles was so old that her hearing wasn’t good and with the blinders on, she couldn’t see us most of time, especially if she actually was trying to teach us anything and had her back to us when she wrote on the blackboard.

The kid who sat behind me was a true comedian – completely deadpan. He could carry on a monologue that went on for hours. There were days when I was forced to stifle my laughter so often I almost pissed in my pants. When the tall kid who sat in front of me tried not to laugh his face turned deep crimson and he broke into a sweat. This tendency betrayed him almost every day and when Sister Mumbles scanned the class looking for guilty perpetrators his flushed face stood out like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. So she would call him to the front of the class and slap him a couple of times and he would do his best to look truly remorseful but then his lips would start to quiver and his eyes would bulge and another spasm of uncontrollable mirth would take over and he would bust out laughing and the furious nun would set into him again and we would practically fall out of our seats it was so damn amusing.

At the end of the day it was time to go to the cloak room and fetch our jackets and so forth. The cloak room was a series of hooks on the walls behind a partition with openings at either end. Boys hung their stuff on one side and girls on the other. We were dispatched one row at a time and were to enter one end in orderly fashion and exit the other. The nun stood in the front of the classroom and called out the rows. This situation provided opportunity for an end of day stress release. We would enter this darkened claustrophobic space, which was about three or four feet wide, and once out of sight of the nun, there would be an outbreak of much shoving and pushing. Instead of fetching our coats and exiting promptly, we loitered, creating a backlog of bodies, which would lead to more pushing, shoving, kicking and stifled shouts. Seated at your desk, you could hear the thumping and banging that got louder as more rows were sent back. With 70 kids in the class, it was nothing to have 20 or so packed into the cloakroom at one time, despite the nun’s shouted exhortations from the front of the class to promptly return to your desk. Eventually student lackeys were appointed to stand watch at either end of the cloakroom and call out the names of those misbehaving. These poor kids would stand there as if struck dumb, as coats and books and shoes sailed into sight above the shaking partition wall, with the nun shouting at them for names. Meanwhile, those causing the ruckus inside the cloakroom shook their fists at the unfortunate lackeys, threatening a beating if they ratted.

MAD

By now I was a big fan of MAD magazine. One day Sister Mumbles caught me reading a paperback edition – a “MAD book” – during class when my hide a book inside a text book technique failed. She confiscated the book. At the end of the day I mustered the courage to approach her desk and humbly request the return of my property. Shocked at my impertinence, she asked me if my parents approved of me reading such filth. I said they did. She said bring me a note that says you are allowed to read such trash and I will return the book to you, but not until then. With that, satisfied it would be the last she heard of the matter, I was dismissed from her sight.

I had no intention of confessing to my parents that I had been busted reading a MAD book in class, so I had pretty much written it off as a loss. A couple nights later, however, I was at the dinner table with the family and my dad was there, which wasn’t all the time because he worked odd hours at the newspaper. I tried to shut up but eventually heard myself telling my dad that the nuns thought MAD magazine was bad and that they had taken one from me and would only return it if he wrote to them saying he approved of me reading it. The expression of interest on his face immediately made me nervous. Sure enough, a couple days later he handed me a typed tome – two or three pages long – explaining that he approved of MAD magazine because it satirized our contemporary culture of crass materialism; it critiqued and exposed the hypocrisies of mass media funded by advertising that targeted children; it depicted most television shows and Hollywood movies as the trash they were and it was one of the only publications that did so, especially in a way that appealed to young people, who were bombarded with an endless stream of mindless pablum from the tube and being corrupted by salacious pop music and movies and wasn’t this exactly what the church was trying to teach but by different means and the good sisters surely could appreciate such humor and its place in a free society that valued its First Amendment rights.

I wanted to kick myself for opening my big mouth. Now I was gonna have to deliver this to Sister Mumbles and her reaction, I knew, was not going to be the enlightened one it appeared my dad seemed to actually expect. I took the letter to school and showed it to my amazed classmates before class. They watched with great interest as I stepped up to the nun’s desk. She saw me approaching with the letter in hand and her puzzled expression quickly shifted to one of annoyance as she realized what was happening. I quickly returned to my desk and watched as she opened the letter and read it, her jaw dropping in the process. Then, without a word to me or the class, she swept out of the room, carrying the letter, leaving us alone and unsupervised, a very rare event. My mates could barely contain their glee at the prospects for retribution that awaited me for this boner of a maneuver. You’re gonna really get it now Murphy, huh huh huh…

The nun finally returned, a smirk on her face, said nothing to me and started the day’s lessons, leaving me in suspense. I stared at the classroom door for what seemed like hours. Then came the sound of the bony knuckle tapping it. The door was opened and a bony finger curled at me to follow. I could hear the snickers and giggles as I rose and exited.

I followed behind the specter, down the hallway to the nurse’s office. For a moment I thought they must have installed a rack or some electric torture device that had to be administered by medical personnel. Why else would we come here? But we took a seat on the couch there and Mother Superior explained to me in a tone of voice that was only slightly contemptuous that while she did not agree with my father’s evaluation of MAD magazine, she respected his opinion and reluctantly, had instructed that my book be returned.

Triumph! I returned to class, a small smile on my face, which surprised and disappointed my classmates, who had no doubt expected me to come back chastened and maybe even bleeding.

Next: I become a newspaper boy

Posted July 2024