galoshes blog

Galoshes – A Memoir

PART IV 

By Gavin Murphy

Fifth Grade

When school resumed in the fall, I was relieved to find that we had a lay teacher – a person, usually a female, who is not a nun – as our assigned fifth grade teacher. She was a young woman, but her’s was a brief tenure as we were such a difficult class to manage that she soon quit. 

An older lady was brought in as a replacement. The woman was a kindly sort, which meant she was a sitting duck for mistreatment at the hands of the more hardcore delinquents in the class, who were used to having to put up with nuns and who scoffed at the threats from a mere lay teacher.

We were not, however, to escape completely the attentions of the habited ones. A nun named sister saint something or some such angelic sounding adopted title, was sent in on a regular basis to teach us, ironically, Religion. She was not an old nun, but it was difficult to really gauge the age of nuns below the age of fifty or so. 

One thing I do know: She was the meanest, nastiest person I ever knew in my life, or have ever known since.

For some reason she took a particular disliking to me. I don’t know why because I was not one of the misbehavers. In fact, at this point in my career at Our Lady of Fatima, I was still too terrified of her sort to be any kind of a discipline problem. I knew if I got in trouble at school I would be in trouble at home and be punished twice. I don’t know what it was, whether she simply hated young boys or what, but not only was she violent and brutal, she was vindictive and cruel.

One afternoon she gave a test. It was her habit to patrol the aisles looking for any sign of cheating while we trembled in our desks lest she so much as even look at us directly. She passed by my desk, then suddenly, as I watched in horror, she reached down to my test paper and put a big zero on it with her red pencil. She thought I had been cheating, which I wasn’t.

I was terrified, because I knew that this was just the beginning. She would surely have some hideous punishment in store for me and sure enough I was not to be let down. 

It was her custom, that after administering a test, we would each have to bring our test paper to her at her desk in front of the class. In this way she could individually mock us and humiliate us in front of the whole class, one at a time.

She called us one by one to the front of the room and it was torture as I waited for my turn. When it came, I took my goose egged test in hand and shuffled to her desk. My fear was obvious, but it only seemed to feed her aggression and antipathy toward me. She watched me approach with an expression of utter contempt on her flaccid face. She accused me of cheating and my denial provoked in her a fearsome rage. She reached out and grabbed me by my hair (as I now had grown my own pompadour in order to fit in). She shook my head violently, held on, and yanked my face up against hers. Her cheeks turned bright red and her eyes burned with an expression of anger and disgust that seemed way out of proportion to any transgression a kid my age could have committed. I don’t remember what she said, but she screamed at me with spittle flying until I broke into tears. Yet not even this satisfied her, as she held onto my hair and berated me some more.

Finally, I was released. I returned to my desk, hot tears on my cheeks, completely humiliated and embarrassed to be crying in front of my classmates. I sat down and slowly regained control of myself. Then something strange happened. My emotions gradually shifted from fear and anguish, to numbed anger and also resentment. It was the beginning of a subtle hardening of the heart, a sudden loss of childhood innocence, an innocence that had been ripped away in only a few moments by someone who claimed to represent God and all his great mercy. Even though I had been taught that to hate was a sin, I detested this person, and I resolved that I would never cry like that again no matter what she did to me. 

Now I also better understood some of my more alienated and incorrigible peers. Their sullen faces when the nuns screamed at them suddenly seemed like expressions of quiet dignity. Their calm indifference to threats and intimidation reflected a hard earned inner tranquility. Most of them had been in this place since the first grade! They were hard cases by now. Instead of disdain for them, I had respect. From that day on I would become a lot more like them: more defiant, irreverent and a lot more opportunistic. The nuns were now the enemy and we, my classmates and I, were prisoners of war who depended on each other for survival. From then on I started to have a lot more fun too, because I didn’t care anymore and I no longer believed what they told me about anything. I was liberated that day, and I have Sister Psycho Saint somebody to thank.

This new attitude would help me survive in the coming weeks. The second lay teacher only lasted a couple of months before she had a nervous breakdown. There was to be no lay teacher replacement this time. Mother Superior herself took over the class. Order was to be restored.

Meanwhile my siblings were facing many of the same challenges I was coping with, including dealing with bullies.

My brother Brendan was tall and big-boned (he eventually topped out at 6′ 4″). But he also was sensitive, with a gentle personality. So we were surprised when he got into a couple of confrontations with other kids. Bren at this time wore corrective shoes. In fact, all of we kids except myself had worn corrective shoes. My mother said this was because her womb had tilted with my birth and had shifted more with each birth thereafter and this had caused my brothers’ and sister’s feet to be misaligned.

My sister had worn corrective shoes in California – a pair of white baby shoes with a metal bar attached to the soles – that she wore at night. I don’t think they make any kid wear anything like this apparatus nowadays. Back then, fearing she would somehow fall out of her crib in this contraption, my parents moved my bed into her room. I was to watch over her to make sure she didn’t injure herself. I was the one who ended up injured.

My sister’s crib was filled with toys, and, as she was a toddler with no real responsibilities, she could amuse herself to all hours of the night playing with these toys. I was in grade school and had to get up at oh-dark-thirty in order to make it to class on time, so I wanted to get some sleep, at least when I wasn’t clandestinely listening to my little plastic radio with an earplug that operated by connecting an alligator clip to the metal window sill. No battery or electric plug required.

There was a night light in the bedroom with a little dial that adjusted the brightness of the light, like the phases of the moon. When I would attempt to adjust the night light so my portion of the room was little darker, Ann would cry that it was too dark and she was scared, even though she really wasn’t. Worse yet, she decided that the only thing more fun than playing with her toys in her crib was throwing those toys out of the crib at me in my bed, a short trajectory. Some of these toys were more like weapons than playthings, including sturdy Fisher-Price products made of wood and steel. Her aim was pretty good and the toy would be hurled and land squarely on my body. I would yelp and look up to see my sister’s cherubic face smiling at me over the headboard of her crib. Complaints to my parents garnered no sympathy. Eventually the device was removed and I was sent back to the bedroom I shared with my two brothers. It was like being in a barracks but it was better than being used for target practice.

Brendan’s corrective shoes, which he wore during the day, made him look a little gawky, and apparently some kids decided to harass and make fun of him. This was a mistake. One reportedly was knocked off the sidewalk into a gutter and another tossed into some bushes. We had learned that Brendan, sweet as he was, had a temper.

Speaking of bullies, around this time one hot summer afternoon myself and my brother Tim and a couple of other boys made the several block trek to a large park that seemed a fair distance from the suburban Philadelphia row house neighborhood we lived in, at least in kid distance. There was a creek in this park that was much deeper in spots than the one that meandered through our neighborhood. The best swimming hole was in an isolated spot under an old railroad trestle. We eagerly removed our sneakers and shirts and still in our shorts waded into the water, which very likely contained DDT and god only knows what other cancer causing contaminants. There certainly were no trout making their home there, just minnows and a few snapping turtles that seemed to be able to survive in any type of fetid liquid. We were happily splashing and swimming when several older punk kids, a couple boys and a girl as I recall, appeared and started to harass us. They called us names and made fun of us. They tossed our clothes and shoes into some bushes and threatened to beat us up. They terrorized us a good while and as I noted about the “big kids” who threw rocks at us in California I could very well see these guys in a few short years torching villages in Vietnam. At one point one of the boys threatened to try and force me to perform a sex act on him, something I had never heard of before and couldn’t imagine why one would want such a thing performed on them. Eventually these delinquents grew bored with harassing us and left, but not before telling us to say nothing about our encounter with them or they would seek us out for retribution.

I believed them and kept my mouth shut but one of the younger boys was traumatized enough that he told his parents and they called the cops. The cops apparently easily figured out the perpetrators and we victims and our parents were called to a meeting at the police station where we identified them. I don’t think the cops ever charged these punks with anything as they were juveniles.

When I told my dad what the one boy had said he was going to make me do dad grimaced and made a face that suggested he had never heard of such a terrible act before and was shocked. Years later I realized that he had of course heard of such behavior and I thought he had missed an opportunity to begin cluing me in about such things as I was on the cusp of adolescence and my ignorance made me more, not less, vulnerable to predators. Dad never did get around to telling me about the birds and the bees. I was left to learn about such things from my peers, which didn’t always lead to the most accurate information.

Eventually I discovered, that in addition to the centerfold, there were in fact informative articles and an advice column in Playboy magazine, which I read eagerly when I could get my hands on one.

In the row house we three boys were tucked into a small chamber with two windows while my sister had her own room not much bigger than a large closet. Bedtime was chaos, with all of us procrastinating about brushing our teeth and having to go to the bathroom one more time and my dad downstairs threatening to come upstairs with the belt and wail on us if we didn’t get our asses in bed this instant.

My brother Tim always managed to be the last one into bed. He would dash into the bedroom and leap into his bed as if it were a trampoline. One night, I decided that booby trapping Tim’s bed would perhaps dissuade the annoying little brother from further late night displays of aerial ability. I gathered up a collection of hard and sharp-edged objects, building blocks and such, and spread them out beneath his covers. Then I propped myself up in my own twin bed and waited. Sure enough, after shouts of ‘get in bed’ from downstairs, Tim bounded into the room, went airborne, and got his just desserts. 

There was a cry of surprise, followed by a pitiful wailing, an outpouring as artificial as it was loud. Tim had figured out years before how to get me into trouble with my parents whenever I got physical with him, which was often enough as he frequently needed a good thwacking. He had learned, for example, to grab his crotch, fall to the ground and moan: Gavin kicked me in the testicles! Aannnhhhh! This would send my mother into a frenzy as she would go crazy at the notion I had targeted a sex organ and had in the process diminished her prospects for healthy grandchildren. 

Tim had quickly surmised I was the culprit who had booby trapped his bed and he launched into an award winning performance, claiming injury and screaming in agony. The commotion sure enough brought the parents charging upstairs and almost got me whipped by the belt.

Trick or Treat

When Halloween came to this neighborhood, there was an outpouring of trick-or-treaters that made the streets of Mumbai seem deserted by comparison. The logistics of row house trick or treating resulted in a tremendous take of sweets. And unlike California, Philadelphia had a fall season. The leaves turned and the moon came out and it was even a little spooky.

Easter was another big holiday. Many of the neighborhood kids got new dresses and shark skin suits and they spent the day parading around in their expensive new finery. 

We didn’t. One year I got a new Navy Blue double-breasted blazer, which was the style at the time, but mostly my parents were perfectly happy to accept used clothes from the neighbors, even though my dad probably made as much money as most of these people. These folks would never have accepted hand me downs, but my parents eschewed such false bourgeois pride. 

My mother started a tradition of lining us all up on the front lawn in our new used clothes to take an Easter photo. My dad had heard, I imagine from one of the pro-photogs he worked with, that for a photo to come out properly, the sun had to be behind the photographer, preferably at an angle over the shoulder so that it shone directly on the subjects. This meant that we were told to look directly into the sunlight. The result was a series of annual photos that capture us, hands clasped behind our backs, lined up as if condemned before a firing squad and squinting into the camera as if lemon juice had just been injected into our eyeballs.

Our Lady of Fatima had a big beautiful modern church, but even on Sundays we were not spared from the oversight of the good sisters. The Baby Boom years had so taxed the facilities, that Masses were held in the basement of the church to accommodate the overflow from upstairs. As a method of crowd control, it was determined that we students were not to attend Sunday Mass with our parents, but attend church with our classmates at assigned times. So the sixth graders went to 9 a.m Mass and sat together and the seventh and eighth graders went to 10 a.m. Mass and sat together. Of course the appropriate nuns were on hand. So even on Sundays we had to look at their scowling faces, listen to their threats of recriminations to follow on Monday morning and put up with being dragged about by the ear lobes and other appendages.

It was about this time that altar boys were recruited and a I think about a half dozen of us boys were selected as finalists for the privilege to serve Mass and perform other duties with and for the priests at all hours of the day and night. I’m not sure how I was selected to be a finalist – I don’t think it was exemplary piety – but they only took five of us and I would have been the sixth. I wanted to be chosen – the altar boys often escaped class when called to perform some sacred duty – so I was disappointed when I wasn’t among them. I largely got over it when I saw that the chosen often had to show up to serve Mass well before the sun came up in all kinds of bad weather.

As I also mentioned earlier, I attended sixth grade classes in the basement of this church. We had a lay teacher that year, for which I was grateful, because I could hear the nun who taught the other sixth grade class on the other side of the church basement haranguing her charges as only one inspired by a vocation could do. 

Our teacher was a younger woman, the sort hired at low salary to teach in Catholic schools: dedicated and conscientious with a sincere desire to relate to the children and leave them better for the experience. At least until she was tossed into a classroom of 60 kids with little or no support from the nuns who in fact must have relished the suffering of these poor women doomed to a life without vocation and who would one day probably end up having a slew of their own sniveling brats as they had chosen to forego the celibacy route.

That fall I went out for the football team, which thrilled my dad as he liked to see me participate in sports. Fatima was part of a CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) league and the sixth grade team was the junior varsity. The problem with being JV at Fatima was you didn’t get very good equipment, because the school saved its money for the varsity team of seventh and eighth graders. Many of us sixth graders didn’t even get kneepads. So within a couple months, after being blocked, tackled and bashed about, I developed water on both my knees. The doctor evaluated me and told my parents I had to quit the team, at least for the duration of this season. It was obvious that this doctor thought football was the worst thing a kid could play. But, he said, if you’re gonna play next year, at least get some knee pads. I played tackle for the next couple of years and one year we were the champs in our league.

I don’t remember my dad coming to any of my actual games, but I do remember him coming to one or two practices. I remember glancing over to him on the sidelines. When he saw me looking, he energetically ran in place, kicking his knees as high as possible. This is what he thought I should be doing. It was maybe a Notre Dame thing, how they did it on the old gridiron to break a tackle or just show aggressiveness. Later he wrote a column in the Inquirer describing how he had visited his kid’s football practice, and while we efficiently ran the plays, we didn’t play with the same intense ferocity that he and his peers had exhibited in their rough and tumble depression-era sandlot games back on the South Side of Chicago. Nevertheless, in eighth grade, with the help of a new young coach from Villanova, Fatima was undefeated for the season.

This taught me an important lesson about sports: It’s way more fun to win.

Mostly I was just bored during school. I was becoming an avid reader, devouring Hardy Boy books and other adolescent fare, including the appropriate classics – Call of the Wild, Treasure Island etc. (My dad encouraged my reading, buying me books from time to time, including Farley Mowat’s then recently published Never Cry Wolf.) I had learned how to covertly place a book inside a text book to make it look like I was reading said text when I really was reading something else, such as The Count of Monte Cristo. I actually managed to read all of the unabridged Dumas novel, hundreds of small print pages, in this manner, all the while relating to Edmund Dantes’ seemingly endless incarceration in the infamous island prison before his triumphant escape against overwhelming odds.

All this reading apparently had me primed, because when I took a standardized reading test that year it revealed I had a tenth grade reading ability. Because I didn’t display any exceptional ability in the classroom, I was told to take the test again to verify the results. The results of the second test were the same. This would haunt me.

Now I had drawn attention to myself. The parents were summoned to the school and the Mother Superior conferred with them about my failure to live up to my obvious, quantified, academic ability. I believe it was she who said I had a “lazy brain” and that expression was thrown in my face countless times by my mother during my ensuing academic career. 

The Pioneer Patrol

That summer I turned 12 and all I wanted to do was join the Boy Scouts so I could go camping. My parents never went camping. In fact they hardly ever went anywhere and rarely took us anyplace. Once my dad piled us into the old station wagon he used mainly to drive to the railroad station and drove us out to Valley Forge to see the historic battlefield from the Revolutionary War. It rained, so we sat in the car parked near a couple of cannon replicas and ate Colonel Sander’s Kentucky Fried Chicken. Another time we went out for a pizza to a place owned by someone my dad had written about at the Inquirer. The owners felt they needed to repay my dad for whatever it was he had written, so when my dad ordered a pizza with anchovies they put so many of the little salted dead fishes on it that we couldn’t eat it and had to throw it away.

My dad, a liberal Democrat by party affiliation, was convinced that the Boy Scouts were run by a bunch of right wing nuts, closet fascists who liked to parade around in brown shirts. And some were perverts to boot. I didn’t care about any of that and eagerly joined the local troop as soon as I could. I wanted to carve things with knives, shoot rifles, hike around, go canoeing, camp and light campfires. I liked nature and the woods and I didn’t really care if dad, the city boy, didn’t. I became a member of the Pioneer Patrol. Our patrol patch featured a frontiersman character in a coon hat. 

Sometimes we camped in tents, sometimes we stayed in one of the cabins at Camp Delmont, located in what was to us at the time the wild country someplace north of Philadelphia. I’m pretty sure nobody in our troop got the cooking merit badge. I recall an attempt to make eggs for a camp breakfast using powdered milk or powdered eggs or both. Of course the result was inedible. On weekend camping trips we survived on snacks and candy. Somebody once brought some giant sized gum drops that one night in a cabin became weaponized. We were supposed to be asleep in our sleeping bags, but instead were engaged in gumdrop warfare. This lobbing of sticky big gum drops back and forth across the cabin went on for a couple of hours despite threats from the scoutmaster to cut our adventure short and transport us home first thing the next morning.

When it came time to go to summer camp – the big event of the scouting year – it was required to bring a parent to sign up. Usually it was the father who showed up, but dad said he wasn’t gonna go down and sign me up because the Boy Scouts was just a crock and he wasn’t going to have any part in enabling my participation in such ridiculousness. In a panic, I told my mother that she would have to do it. My mother, who at this time didn’t even have a driver’s license let alone a car, huffed and stamped around the kitchen. Usually she and dad maintained a united front when it came to disciplinary matters and the denial of permission to do something fun. But she knew I really wanted to go to summer camp and if I couldn’t because dad was being an obstinate jerk that I would hold this against him – them – for the rest of my life. So mom said she would do it despite the fact that it would be a major hassle for her to do it and she would be embarrassed likely being the only mother at the sign up meeting… Realizing that mom was aligning with me on this one and that she actually was getting pissed off at his stupid recalcitrance about something so trivial as my desire to be a Boy Scout, the old man finally said awright! He would do it, even though he didn’t want to and let’s go before I change my mind.

We went to the sign-up and my dad hung about on the periphery with his arms folded across his chest and a derisive expression on his mug because he wasn’t one of these yokels excited to see their kid in a pansy scout uniform. But I didn’t care what he thought, just as long as he signed me up, and he did, but he never participated in anything having to do with the Scouts (even though he himself had been a Sea Scout as a kid in Chicago and this was an experience that led him to later join the Coast Guard).

Fortunately for me, my neighbor was the scoutmaster and he or one of the other dads drove me to campouts and other events so I managed to participate and have a good time even though I was once almost struck by lightning and another time was stranded in the middle of a lake when I forgot how to turn the canoe around when going for my canoeing merit badge, which I didn’t get.

I continued to have encounters with reptiles. Once we scouts were doing “conservation” work on a stream, actually just tossing rocks around and building a dam for no apparent reason but to give us something to do. One of the boys turned over a rock and screamed: Snake! It was a beautiful red and copper banded specimen I would later learn was a milk snake. It was retreating down a hole so I reached down quickly and pulled it back out, then swiftly grabbed it behind the head, holding it so it couldn’t bite me, as it was now trying to do. The scoutmaster saw the reptile coiling itself around my arm in constrictor fashion and its gaping jaws and he pretty much freaked out, fearing I was going to be injured by this horrible serpent. But I assured him I knew how to hold the snake and wouldn’t be injured or injure the snake for that matter. I didn’t let the snake go as I probably should have but put it into a box or something. 

There happened to a be a naturalist at the camp, a guy who kept a nonvenomous snake in a wooden crate and had a buzzer he buzzed to try and scare us into believing he had a rattlesnake. He wanted my milk snake. I knew I couldn’t bring the snake home so I struck a deal with this guy. After some negotiation I came away with $15 and a box turtle, a reptile the scoutmaster would transport home and my mother would let me keep. I kept it in a big box in the garage for a bit but started to feel sorry about incarcerating a wild thing like that. I took it to the woods and let it go.

Next:

Alfred E. Neuman would be proud

Posted July 2024