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Memories
of a Gay
Catholic
Boyhood
This page intentionally left blank
Memories
of a Gay
Catholic
Boyhood
coming of age in
the sixties
john d’emilio
Duke University Press Durham and London 2022

© 2022 duke university press All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Designed by Courtney Leigh Richardson
Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro and New Century Schoolbook
by Westchester Publishing Services
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: D’Emilio, John, author.
Title: Memories of a gay Catholic boyhood : coming of age
in the sixties / John D’Emilio.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2022.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021050641 (print)
LCCN 2021050642 (ebook)
ISBN 9781478015925 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781478023166 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Gay men—New York (State)—New York—Biography. |
Catholic gay men—New York (State)—New York—Biography. |
Catholics—New York (State)—New York—Biography. | Italian
Americans—New York (State)—New York—Biography. | Italian
American gays—New York (State)—New York—Biography. |
Bronx (New York, N.Y.)—Biography. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE /
LGBTQ Studies / Gay Studies | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY /
LGBTQ | LCGFT: Autobiographies.
Classification: LCC HQ75.8.D44 A3 2022 (print) | LCC HQ75.8.D44
(ebook) | DDC 306.76/62092 [B]—dc23/eng/20220121
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050641
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050642
Cover art: Photos of the author. Front, top to bottom: At an essay contest
award ceremony, 1962; playing with his brother, circa 1959; at his desk,
senior year. Back: His brother’s first birthday, 1958 (top); with trophies,
1964 (bottom).
This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents,
Sophie Scamporlino D’Emilio (1925–2010)
and
Vincent Anthony D’Emilio (1924–2020)
Contents
Preface ix
part I
An Italian Boy from the Bronx
Chapter 1—An Italian Family 3

Chapter 2—Big Grandma’s House 11
Chapter 3—School: Becoming a Big Boy 17
Chapter 4—Baby Jim 25
Chapter 5—Change, and More Change 32
Chapter 6—A F
amily of Friends 40
Chapter 7—God Help Me! 49
Chapter 8—A Beginning and an End 57
part II
A Jesuit Education
Chapter 9—A Whole New World 65

Chapter 10—Striving to Win 76
Chapter 11—My Sexual Desires 84
Chapter 12—Another Ending 94
Chapter 13—Working in the City 105
part III
Everything Changes
Chapter 14—God Is Dead 119

Chapter 15—War and Peace 128
Chapter 16—This Is Me 140
Chapter 17—I Come Out, Sort Of 148
Chapter 18—Her Name Is Margaret Mead 160
Chapter 19—And Then I Studied 169
Chapter 20—Now What Do I Do? 182
Chapter 21—A Door Opens 194
Postscript 205
Acknowledgments 207
A gallery appears after page 116
viii Contents
Preface
For three decades, I taught undergraduate college history courses that covered
the 1960s. When I first began teaching, many of my students w ere of an age
where they had older brothers and s isters who had participated in the events
of the decade and from whom they had heard many stories. By the time my
teaching career ended, the sixties had become the experience of my students’
grandparents. But over t hose decades, one thing remained unchanged. Across
identity lines of class, race, and gender, students displayed a deep fascination
with the events and movements of that era. The fact that young adults—many
of them college students like themselves—were at the heart of the turbulence
only made the decade more compelling to them.
Many of the histories of the 1960s highlight headline-making names, whether
Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon or promi-
nent leaders of social justice movements, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mal-
colm X, or Betty Friedan. But my students w ere most curious about the lives
of young adults like themselves, youth who came from ordinary, not-privileged
backgrounds and might best be described as “faces in the crowd”—those many
individuals who sat down in the streets and blocked traffic, rallied in front of
government buildings, and paralyzed campuses. How did so many young people
move from the quiet of their f amily backgrounds to the social and political up-
heavals of this seemingly revolutionary era? What kinds of experiences provoked
their shift in outlook? How did they become agents of change? And how did
their lives change because of this? What kinds of life paths opened up for them?
As the sixties move farther into the past and as our nation lives through
an era in which so many Americans seem to have outlooks at odds with the
hopeful progressive vision of social justice that the sixties projected, the need
to bring this period back to life through the experience of ordinary Americans
seems more important than ever. In the midst of a Black Lives M atter move-
ment against police violence, a #MeToo movement against sexual violence and
abuse, a movement to save the planet from climate change, and an effort to
challenge gender binaries with a queer vision of identities, it is worth recalling
how a previous generation of young people moved from the routines of daily
life into a new world of activism, dissent, and nonconformity.
I was one of those many faces in the crowd in the second half of the 1960s, when
protest and dissent w ere at their height. But anyone who had observed my life
growing up in the conformist decade of the 1950s would never have expected
to find me in such a role just a few years later. At the height of the baby boom
years, my large, multigenerational f amily of Italian origin was making e very ef-
fort to be good Americans. We watched the benevolent family comedies that
television networks were offering, celebrated Memorial Day and the Fourth of
July with backyard picnics of hot dogs and hamburgers, and sang the praises
of Dwight Eisenhower, our war-hero president who projected a calm, reassur-
ing demeanor and promised to protect America from communism.
How does a boy from an Italian immigrant family in which everyone went
to confession regularly and unfailingly attended Sunday Mass become a lapsed
Catholic? How does a family who worshipped the politics of Senator Joseph
McCarthy and whose members w ere loyal to Richard Nixon to the end of his
political career produce an antiwar activist and pacifist? How does a multigen-
erational family in which the word divorce is never spoken and where no adults
leave home u ntil marriage raise a son who comes to explore the hidden gay sex-
ual underworld of New York City? How does a politically engaged intellectual
whose work, later in life, w ill help shape a historic Supreme Court decision,
emerge from a family in which almost no one ever read a book?
In addressing t hese questions, I hope that this book sheds light not only on
the life of an individual but on the larger baby boom generation whose experi-
ences are still shaping the United States today. Its three parts will take you from
the working-class neighborhood in the Bronx that I almost never left during
my childhood, to the Jesuit high school for academically gifted Catholic boys
that introduced me to the wonders of intellectual life and the culture of Man-
hattan, and finally to the Ivy League campus of Columbia and the political and
social upheavals of the late 1960s.
Part I, “An Italian Boy from the Bronx,” re-creates the flavor of my large,
extended Italian immigrant family and the Depression-era housing project in
which I grew up. I lived within the boundaries of “Big Grandma’s house,” where
x Preface
aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered e very chance they could, where the adults
spoke Italian, and Big Grandma was adored by all. Family, I learned, was every
thing, and it deserved an unbending loyalty. At the parish elementary school,
nuns and lay teachers taught us catechism e very day and imposed a firm
discipline upon us. I learned to be a good Catholic boy, or else pay the price,
on earth now, and l ater in hell for all eternity. Relief came from the occasional
teacher who treated us with kindness and, most of all, from the school and
neighborhood friendships that formed among the boys. We ran wild together
through the neighborhood in the hours after school, until this band of boys
came to seem more important than my Italian clan.
Part II, “A Jesuit Education,” covers the adolescent years of high school, which
took me out of the boundaries of family, parish, and neighborhood. I won ad-
mission to Regis, a Jesuit high school located on Manhattan’s elegant Upper East
Side. Regis brought together academically gifted Catholic boys from the greater
metropolitan area. Its Jesuit and lay male faculty introduced us to the world of
classical learning and held out high expectations for our future mission in life
as committed Catholics. I was chosen to be mentored in the speech and debate
society, and soon I was traveling throughout the city and across the country to
tournaments, where I won state and national championships. I had friends to die
for, and together we explored Manhattan—its museums, its parks, its grand old
movie palaces. A boy who had almost never left the Bronx was suddenly enveloped
by a world of intellectual engagement that my family could scarcely appreciate.
Meanwhile, these years also saw this good Catholic boy drawn into an
underground world of male homosexual desire. On the subways of New York
and the streets of the theater district, I found men who had sex with men. In
subway restrooms, along the edge of highways in the Bronx, in the bushes by
railroad tracks, and in tenement buildings in Manhattan, I had sex with men
whose names I never learned and whom I never saw again.
Part III, “Everything Changes,” revolves around the campus of Columbia
University on Manhattan’s Morningside Heights in the second half of the 1960s.
Black Power activists, antiwar protesters, and student radicals committed to over-
throwing “the system” w ere holding rallies, marching through campus build-
ings, disrupting classes, and frequently shutting down the university. Almost
immediately, the campus had an impact on me. During freshman orientation, I
learned from the campus Protestant minister that “God is dead.” In my Western
Civilization course, I found myself unable to challenge the logic of the great
philosophers who proved that God did not exist. I encountered radical priests
and nuns who believed that war was always evil and needed to be opposed as
a matter of conscience. My rejection of Catholicism and embrace of pacifism
Preface xi
provoked intense conflict with my conservative Catholic parents. Meanwhile, as I
struggled with the draft, declared myself a conscientious objector, and counseled
other young men on how to avoid military service, I was slowly discovering a hid-
den gay social world on the streets of Greenwich Village, in the standing-room
section of the Metropolitan Opera, and among some of the pathways in Manhat-
tan’s parks. I met a man who became my lover and introduced me to New York’s
secretive gay life. I came out to a small circle of friends.
The political radicalism and emerging sexual revolution of the late sixties
led me to reject the professional career options that an Ivy League education
held out. Instead, I landed an entry-level job in a Brooklyn library, continued
my activist work against the war, and maintained my ties to New York’s gay ge-
ography and the safety it seemed to provide for exploring my forbidden desires
and developing a gay social world. When my work in the library exposed me
to a new radical literature on American history, I realized that my intellectual
abilities and my activist impulses had found a place where they could come to-
gether. Rather than return home, as a good unmarried Italian boy was expected
to do, I embarked upon a life path that nothing in my family background and
upbringing could have prepared me for. The sixties had changed profoundly the
direction that my life was meant to take.
Recounting one’s life story a half c entury or more after the events occurred
can offer challenges. Fortunately, my training as a historian impressed upon
me early the value of preserving evidence from the past. My personal archive
of correspondence with friends, especially from my college years, allowed me
to reconstruct both events and my responses to them. As an adult, I preserved
connections with some elementary school, high school, and college friends,
and we have exchanged many reminiscences over the years. I also reread the
Columbia Spectator from my years on campus in order to capture the range of
activities and protests during my time as an undergraduate.
The culture of the Scamporlino and D’Emilio clans has also been a great
resource. From the time I was a child and into my decades of adulthood, family
members never failed to tell over and over the stories that I grew up hearing
about as well as those that I was a part of. And my mom, Sophie, who appears in
many of the pages of this book, was meticulous in preserving materials from the
family—and my—history. She carefully put together photo a lbums, treasured
the home movies, and collected and saved local news clippings about my victo-
ries in speech and debate tournaments as well as in other student competitions.
I hope I have done her justice in retelling some of those tales from the past.
xii Preface
part I
An Italian Boy
from the Bronx
1
An Italian F
amily
In 1977, in his first year in the White House, President Jimmy Carter made a
celebrated trip to the Bronx to prove that a peanut farmer from Georgia cared
about our cities. Images of crumbling buildings and rubble-strewn lots flashed
across television screens. A corner of America looked remarkably like a devastated
war zone. Soon after that, I began to notice a new line dividing native New Yorkers
from everyone e lse. If I told someone I was from the Bronx, a New Yorker said,
“Oh! What neighborhood?” Everyone else said, “Oh” and looked at me sadly.
To me, the Bronx where I was born after World War II was special. It had
the biggest zoo in the world, with its own pair of Chinese pandas. It had the
Yankee Stadium of Joe DiMaggio and Casey Stengel. On the Grand Con-
course, the Loew’s Paradise stood with star-spangled vaulting so spectacular I
could forget the movie I was watching and just stare at the ceiling. We had the
best Italian ices this side of Naples. On warm summer evenings, you could stroll
forever along Pelham Parkway or r ide a roller coaster on Bruckner Boulevard.
Bronxites knew we were the best. Had you ever heard anyone say “the Brook-
lyn” or “the Manhattan”? But the Bronx: it just rolled off the tongue.
My part of the Bronx was the best of the best. I grew up in Parkchester
in the 1950s. Parkchester claimed the distinction of being the world’s largest
housing project. More than forty thousand people filled its twelve thousand
units, making our two hundred acres among the most densely populated in the
world. The buildings w ere brick, seven or twelve stories tall, with one-, two-,
and three-bedroom apartments. The halls were well lit, the elevators always
ran, the apartments w ere painted every three years, and everything—from the
grounds outside to the floors inside—was immaculately clean.
Parkchester opened in 1940 so that, when I was a child, it still possessed a
spanking new quality. A product of the Great Depression, it was built, owned,
and operated by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to provide decent
housing to working people—as long as they w ere white. For those privileged
to live t here, it was the best of corporate paternalism, even if no Parkchesterite
ever called it that. The housing was as good as New York offered for the money.
With New York’s rent control program, you could live there for decades and
never see your rent increase. Good citizens that they w ere, my parents volun-
tarily signed a new lease every three years and accepted a modest rise in rent. To
them, living in Parkchester was a gift, and they were thankful for it.
They had reason to be. Each had spent their first two decades in the South
Bronx, my dad by way of a few years on the Lower East Side. The tenements
they lived in were built to turn a quick buck at the expense of immigrant fam-
ilies. Mom’s family had left the old neighborhood just before the war ended,
but Dad’s sisters and mother (“Small Grandma,” to distinguish her from “Big
Grandma,” my maternal grandmother) still lived on 147th Street.
Every couple of months, we visited on a Saturday and always took a cab. It
made the trip a great adventure because nothing else ever caused Mom and Dad
to splurge on anything as extravagant as a taxi. The block Small Grandma lived
on was lined with an unbroken row of tenements several stories high. Only the
fire escapes interrupted the old brick fronts. They hung so precariously, ready
to fall at any moment on anyone foolish enough to linger u nder them. As soon
as Mom had me out of the taxi, I slipped my hand out of hers and ran as fast as
I could into the building to avoid so grisly a fate.
But inside wasn’t much better. The hallways were dark and narrow. The
climb to the third floor was steep and scary. There was no elevator. The two-
bedroom apartment was smaller than our one-bedroom. The floors tilted. The
walls were lumpy and rough. The bathroom had a tub but no shower fixture. A
chain attached to an overhead tank made the toilet flush. It rumbled so much I
was sure it would collapse on top of me.
And then there was Small Grandma. I knew I was supposed to love her, but
to a little boy she was very scary. She looked older than Methuselah. She dressed
completely in black. Not quite five feet tall, she was thinner than any living
human being I had seen. Her arms w ere nothing but bone, the skin stretched
so tight that her veins almost popped out. Small Grandma didn’t speak English,
4 chapter One
but words crackled out of her as her bony fingers reached for my cheek and
pinched it sharply in greeting.
These visits always happened on a Saturday when everyone was likely to be
home. Small Grandpa died when I was an infant, and Small Grandma moved
out of her own apartment, a few buildings down the street, into one with Anna,
her eldest daughter, and Felix, Anna’s husband. She occupied a tiny bedroom
just off the kitchen, having displaced my cousins Donald and Johnny, who now
slept in the living room on a sofa that opened into a bed at night.
Johnny was the saving grace of these visits. He was a year older than me, which,
at age three or four, seemed a big deal. Our best times came when we hid in the
bathroom. Above the tub a window opened into the kitchen where the adults
sat and talked. By standing on the edge of the tub and stretching our small frames,
we could almost see over the window ledge and secretly listen. At some point,
someone was sure to say something that struck us as funny, and we quickly slid
down into the tub and held our mouths shut to keep from laughing aloud and
being discovered.
Mom’s father—Big Grandpa—still owned a store a few blocks away on
Morris Avenue. Sometimes we strolled there from Small Grandma’s apartment
before hailing a cab to take us home. We knew he’d be t here. He worked in the
store 365 days of the year. His only concessions to leisure were the half days he
took off on Sundays, Christmas, New Year’s, and other holidays.
Big Grandpa sold olive oil and tomatoes, anchovies and cold cuts, macaroni
(what “pasta” was routinely called back then), and other staples of an Italian
family’s kitchen. Everything canned or boxed was imported from the old coun-
try, which is to say, Sicily. Much of the time Grandpa had a simple display in the
window: boxes of rigatoni or cans of peeled tomatoes stacked pyramid style. But
if he was between displays, he let me climb onto the built-in window seats. It was
so diff erent from the view out of our sixth-floor Parkchester apartment. I could
hear the noise of the buses and delivery trucks and watch the small dramas
played out among pedestrians. Sometimes my presence in the window would
elicit an “Oh, what a cute little boy” look from an adult passing by.
Grandpa opened the store e very day in part b ecause his signature item was
the mozzarella he made each morning. It kept customers returning, even
after the war when the ranks of Italians in the South Bronx w ere dwindling.
More than thirty years of shaping the curd into mozzarella and twisting the
end until it made a nice head had mangled the shape of his right hand. Grandpa
could always extract fright from me by calling me over, holding out his left
hand, the palm facing me and the fingers spread, and then whipping out his
right hand from behind his back. The tendons and muscle joining the thumb
An Italian Family 5
to the rest of his hand had worn away, eroded almost to the wrist. I’d scream in
terror while he, laughing, reached out to draw me close in a big hug.
The grocery store allowed Big Grandpa to weather the Depression, and
by the war years, he had saved enough to buy a house in the northeast Bronx.
Its twelve rooms, plus basement and attic, must have seemed like a mansion to
my mom and her s isters. It was large enough for three generations of the f amily
to live there. Big Grandma quickly planted a fig tree in the backyard, a reminder
of Sicily. E very fall, when the chill in the air turned steady, she lovingly wrapped
the tree in layers of cheesecloth to keep it alive through the winter. The tree
never produced more than a handful of figs each season, but to Grandma they
were as precious as gold.
The house was less than a mile from Parkchester. Just out of high school
when the family moved to Silver Street, Mom managed to get a job as a book-
keeper in Parkchester’s main office. This meant she could leapfrog over the
hundreds of families on the waiting list for an apartment. She and Dad had
been engaged for three years. They timed their marriage for when an apartment
became vacant. With the housing shortage after the war, this was a real coup.
Mom also wrangled a janitor’s job for her brother-in-law Phil, and soon Aunt
Lucy, Uncle Phil, and my cousin Paul were also living in Parkchester.
I grew up thinking I lived in the closest thing to paradise this side of Eden.
Parkchester was made for kids. Its two thoroughfares intersected at the dead
center of the housing project, creating four large quadrants. Th ere were play-
grounds and ball fields and handball courts, lawns and grassy fields and winding
paths, and benches where older folks sat and young m others rocked their baby
carriages. Protected from the dangers of traffic, young c hildren played and ran
without ever having to cross a street. With my short four-year-old legs, it seemed
like I could run forever without ever reaching the borders of my kingdom.
Since Mom defined the essence of overprotective, it’s a sign of how different
New York was in those years that, even before I started kindergarten, she let
me go to a nearby playground without her. One of my earliest vivid memories
of childhood is of racing down the hill behind our building, a big smile on my
face, my short legs straining and my arms pumping to get me there as quickly
as possible. The playground was a wealth of delights, and I remember having
the time of my little life, feeling strong and full with the freedom Mom was
giving me. Th ere were swings, slides, and monkey bars, a basketball court, and
a tetherball. By age five or six, my favorite game was tetherball. I took to this
game quickly and was pretty good at it—so good in fact that the older kids
who dominated the playground let me line up to play with them. I gave them a
run for their money as I strained and stretched and jumped, pounding the ball
6 chapter One
with all my strength. The bigger kids cheered me on, and sometimes I actually
triumphed.
When the weather was rainy or cold, the playground was not an option. On
those days I stayed home. Mom often had laundry to wash or carpets to vac-
uum. She dusted and polished furniture, scrubbed countertops, and kept the
windows sparkling clean. In the lingo of the day, her floors w ere clean enough to
eat off them. When not doing h ousework, she was on the phone. She talked
every day with Big Grandma and with her s isters Lucy, Anna, and Jenny. During
those hours I kept myself busy in the bedroom. I had a wooden puzzle of the
forty-eight states, and long before I understood what Minnesota or Wisconsin
was, I knew that they fit together along the top edge. I had a set of wooden blocks
and built forts and skyscrapers. I had Smokey the Bear and a stuffed panda as
playmates. Panda was as tall as I was. I would drag him onto my parents’ bed,
lie on top of him, and rub my nose in his face.
But Panda and the forty-eight states held my attention for just so long. Even-
tually I made my way to the living room or kitchen to find Mom. If I caught her
between tasks, I would climb onto the sofa and sit next to her.
“Read to me,” I said, with a puppy dog eagerness that I hoped was
irresistible.
Mom never read on her own. She sometimes opened the Bible and stared at
the page for a long time. Or she looked through a cookbook, seemingly con-
sidering recipes, but never making them since our weekly meal schedule was
as dependable as the sun rising and setting. But when I spoke my plea, she re-
sponded. She had decided early on that school was my f uture, and so our small
apartment was filled with children’s books that she stocked for me.
Fetching one—Aesop’s Fables, Hans Christian Anderson, a children’s ver-
sion of the Bible—she pulled me close so I could see the illustrations. She took
me to a world where donkeys spoke back to their masters, little boys who were
bad had their arms turned into flightless wings, and violent floods almost wiped
out life on the planet.
But reading w asn’t Mom’s thing. She inevitably tired of reading before I
tired of listening. I always fared better if I spoke the magic phrase.
“Tell me a story,” I begged.
“What do you want to hear a story about?”
“Tell me about Grandpa and the store.”
“Well, you know, Grandpa didn’t set out to open a store.”
“What did he want to do?” I asked.
An Italian Family 7
“Grandpa wanted to be a priest. His f amily raised goats in Sicily, and they
had a few olive trees too. But Grandpa didn’t want to work in the fields. So,
he set out one day with his clothes rolled in a sheet. The seminary was several
towns away, but he never got there. And it’s a good thing because if he had, he
never would have met Grandma, and you and I would never have been born.”
“Really?” My eyes widened.
“Really.”
“How come he never made it?”
“He met a friend who was going to Americ a. His friend told him, ‘You’re
crazy to be a priest. Come to America. There’s gold in the streets. My cousin
is in New York; he w ill get us jobs.’ So, Grandpa got on the boat and came to
America instead.”
“Then did he open the store?”
“Oh, no, he had lots of other jobs first. The one he liked best was as a deliv-
ery man for Sheffield Farms. They taught him to drive a truck, and he went all
around the city. Oh, how he used to tell us stories about those days!”
“But what about the store?” I reminded her.
“Well, Grandpa was a good worker, and his supervisor was German and liked
him, and he gave Grandpa the best routes. But he got promoted, and Grandpa
got a new supervisor, an Irishman. He expected Grandpa to grease his palm.
That’s when Grandpa decided to open the store. He said to himself, ‘I w ill never
work for anyone else again.’ ”
This wasn’t enough of a story, and Mom was on the edge of falling into one
of her rants, so I pressed on. “How did he meet Grandma?”
“Grandma worked in a factory with Grandpa’s sisters. Grandpa had brought
Aunt Connie and Aunt Anna over, since t here was no real work for young girls
in Sicily. When Grandma came as a teenager, she got a job in the same dress
factory as his sisters. They became good friends b ecause they w ere all from
Sortino.”
“Did they know each other in Sortino?”
“Oh, no. They w eren’t from the same society. Grandma’s family had nothing.
They w ere so poor that her mother took her out of school when she was seven. She
took care of her younger b rothers and sisters and did all the h ousework, while
her mother cleaned the houses of others. Grandma had a very hard life. She
never learned to read or write. She had nothing before she came to America.”
“How did they meet?” I wanted to know.
“Well, Grandma and Aunt Connie w ere walking back to Morris Avenue after
work. He saw them and thought, ‘That’s the w oman for me.’ Grandpa was already
over thirty. He needed to marry or else he’d be an old bachelor. Grandma was
8 chapter One
from the same town. She was a paisan. And she was beautiful. You should have
seen the pictures of her in her wedding dress. She was thin, with long hair that
she wound into a bun and—”
“Big Grandma was thin?” My eyes almost popped out in disbelief. Grandma
was so heavy that when she laughed, the fat on her upper arms rolled steadily,
like waves heading toward the shore. That was why she was “Big Grandma”
instead of “Small Grandma.”
“Oh, yes, she was thin, like Aunt Anna is now. But Grandpa told her she had
to fatten up. She needed to be strong, like a h orse, to work in the store and have
children. And so he fed her eggs and macaroni and ricotta. L ater it made her sad
to look at t hose pictures from when she was younger, and she tore them all up.”
Mom could talk like this about her family forever. She had a story about
every twist and turn in the saga of Vincenzo and Jessica Scamporlino and the
five daughters they raised in the old neighborhood. Mom’s eyes lit up and a
smile spread across her face as she described Grandma peeling tomatoes in
the back of the store, where the f amily took its meals. Just like Mom did with
me, Grandma bustled around as she told stories about the old country, about
the donkeys that wandered through Sortino, about her own parents and the
brothers and sisters she missed so much.
I never tired of Mom’s stories, no m atter how often she told them. There
was the time her older sister Lucy came to the dinner table wearing lipstick and
Grandpa shouted “Puta!” as he slammed his fist down and made the dishes rattle. I
heard about the day Grandma took her daughter Vincenza to enroll in first grade.
Unable to speak English, she was helpless when the principal said, “Vincenza?
That’s not a girl’s name. We’ll call her Jenny.” I heard how Jenny, the daughter
who never married, loved to dance and was popular with the boys. With her
girlfriends she formed a club, “The Gay Teens.” They sometimes skipped school
and gallivanted around the city. Not to be outdone, Mom formed “The De-
buteens.” One time, they headed to Coney Island and met up with a group of
boys from the neighborhood. They rode the Cyclone, feasted on cotton candy,
and took pictures of each other smiling happily, the ocean in the background.
When Anna, the eldest, later saw the pictures, she snatched them from Mom
and ripped them to pieces. Anna knew there would be hell to pay if Grandpa
found evidence of his thirteen-year-old daughter flirting with boys at an amuse-
ment park.
As someone who never put pen to paper except to write a shopping list or
scrawl greetings on a Christmas card, these tales were Mom’s way of doing
history, of keeping alive the times and places that meant the most to her. And
her storytelling had a purpose. She had lessons to teach, and she was not shy
An Italian Family 9
about making them explicit. She’d look up from the vegetables she was chop-
ping, shake the knife in my direction, and announce: “Obey your parents and
never speak back to them!” “Show respect for your elders.” “Blood is thicker
than water. Family is everything.” She always insisted—and I mean always—
that hers was the happiest family in the world, that she loved her Mama and
Papa to pieces, and that they w ere the best parents a girl ever had. I should
consider myself lucky to be growing up in the Scamporlino clan. Nothing was
more important than family.
But there were also lessons she didn’t intend. They lingered in the air, long
after the telling, like the smell of Sunday’s roast chicken when it cooked too
long or Wednesday night’s gravy if it scorched the pot. Sadness and tragedy,
anger and resentment wafted through these narratives. There were the tears
shed by Anna, Mom’s oldest sister, when Grandpa took her out of school after
ninth grade so that she could learn dressmaking and work in the garment indus-
try during the early years of the Depression. There was the tragedy of Lucy, a year
younger than Anna. Grandpa also pulled her out of school, but Lucy, who loved
her movie magazines, used dressmaking school to learn how to make clothes
in the latest Hollywood fashion. She wore her creations as she strolled along
Morris Avenue, and she sold dresses to girls in the neighborhood. But then,
struck with crippling arthritis that deformed her hands and made walking
painful while still in her early twenties, she s topped going anywhere except to
church on Sundays. There was Jenny, the sister with whom Mom was closest. By
everyone’s account Jenny was the pretty daughter, with an outgoing personality
and lots of boyfriends. She too did well in school, winning oratory contests and
excelling in dramatics. But when Grandma had a last child late in life, Grandpa
forced Jenny to leave school before graduating. He needed Grandma to work in
the store, and Jenny had to care for her infant sister. Mom told how Jenny cried
and cried, begging to stay in school.
Mom, of course, never pointed the finger at her papa for any of the things
that happened to her sisters. Instead, I learned through Mom’s storytelling that
the Scamporlinos w ere a “hard luck” f amily. Whenever good fortune came our
way, someone cast an evil eye in our direction. I learned that I must keep my
successes to myself because bragging would provoke someone’s envy, and they
would rain curses on my head. The wrongs done to us were many. Even so, in
Mom’s eyes we were still the happiest family there ever was, and I must always
be thankful that I was born into it.
10 chapter One
2
Big Grandma’s House
Big Grandma’s house was the place where that happiest of all families gath-
ered with great frequency. A few blocks from Parkchester, her h ouse on Silver
Street was my second home. E very Sunday and holiday, e very weekday during
the summer when school was not in session, in fact any day Mom could manage
it, was a day spent there.
“Family” never meant just me, Mom, Dad, and later my brother, Jimmy. It
was the whole Scamporlino clan. Anna, the eldest daughter, and Tommy, her
husband, lived on the second floor of the house with their children, Vincent,
Sylvia, and Laura. Lucy, the next eldest, started married life there but then, with
her husband, Phil, moved to Parkchester. Their son, Paul, was born a month
after me. Jenny, never to marry, lived in the house too, as did Fran, the “baby”
of the family. Five daughters, three husbands, six grandchildren: we were always
together, it seemed.
Sometimes the crowd swelled to include the family of Grandpa’s sister
Conchetta, or Aunt Connie as we called her. She and her husband, their four
daughters and husbands, and the grandchildren lived together in a three-story
house, two neighborhoods away in Throgs Neck. For birthdays or wedding an-
niversaries, everyone came over. My u ncles pushed the large dining t able flush
against the wall, and Grandma crammed it with plates of cold cuts, cheese,
olives, eggplant, and roasted peppers. Dad put records on the phonograph. He
played music from the thirties and forties when the big bands performed in
Manhattan’s ballrooms. Cousins Yonnie and Danny, who, as Mom put it, w ere
“good on their feet,” spun their wives around the living room. But mostly the
women danced with each other, two sets of sisters who had done this in their
teens more times than anyone could count.
Laughter is what I remember most from these gatherings. When the daugh-
ters w ere with Mama, troubles slipped from sight and everyone was happy.
Anything might provoke fits of giggling. A favorite card game was “donkey.”
It lacked complicated rules and required little strategy. When the dealer said
“pass,” everyone passed a card to the left. The first person to get four of a kind
raised a finger to their nose, and that set off a scramble among everyone to do
the same. The last person to touch their nose got a letter—“D . . . O . . . N . . .
K . . .”—until the word donkey was spelled out.
To the adults it was pure fun, and the best part was watching Mama. Inevi-
tably, at some point, she started to laugh. Maybe she had four of a kind and was
pleased by her success. Maybe she was the last to notice and, having gotten a
letter, was embarrassed. But once the laughter started, t here was no stopping it.
First one daughter and then another saw Mama laughing, and it spread around
the table until my aunts were wiping the tears from their eyes.
Often the laughter involved television, which to the adults was still new and
thrilling. Sometimes wrestling matches were on. Mom and Dad said they were
“fixed,” everything done to put on a show. But Grandpa watched religiously.
He winced, or raised his hands to protect himself, when one guy was the target
of a particularly fierce attack. If someone landed with a thud, Grandpa’s groan
filled the room. And then his d aughters would start to laugh, exiting quickly in
order not to show disrespect, and hugging their sides in the next room as they
enjoyed Papa’s faith in what he saw on the screen.
Grandma, too, liked tv. She didn’t need much English to grasp the antics
of Milton Berle or Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. But her favorite was women’s
roller derby. Like wrestling, a lot was show. Brawls were part of the game. An
elbow jabbed into an opponent provoked another player to make a body slam
that drove a third over the railing, and then all hell broke loose. The women
were on top of each other, punching and slapping and pulling hair. Without
fail, Grandma would start laughing, quietly at first but soon matching in its
fullness the intensity of the fight. When she laughed hard, her w hole body
shook. Soon her flesh was jiggling up and down. If Grandma was watching
roller derby, everyone knew this would happen, and we all watched in anticipa-
tion. Grandma’s laughter was contagious, and soon the w hole room was laugh-
ing with her, the television forgotten.
12 chapter Two
ere was a reason her daughters loved her the way they did. This was a
Th
woman who wouldn’t—couldn’t—hurt a fly. She always projected a jovial
mood. She smiled easily and wanted you to smile too.
Food was her instrument for keeping spirits high, her universal language of
happiness. On summer days when Paul, Laura, and I were playing in the yard,
Grandma would come to the back door and summon us to the kitchen. There
she displayed large bowls with watermelon and cantaloupe, cut into perfect
bite-size balls. Through her cooking magic, she even transformed the meatless
Fridays of Catholics into feasts. Grandma sautéed garlic and onions in a pan
filled with olive oil until the scent of garlic wafted through the house and the
onions had turned yellow and sweet. S he’d add mounds of escarole, stirring and
stirring until it wilted. She pressed heaps of this mix into loaves of Italian bread
and served us vegetable heroes for lunch. Or she fried thinly sliced potatoes
ever so slowly so they became soft rather than crisp. She beat eggs together,
turned the gas up high, and poured them in. The eggs crackled as they hit the
pan, and soon the mix was on our plates, along with chunks of crusty bread to
soak up the extra oil.
Every Sunday evening, the family of fifteen gathered around the dining
room table, extended to its full length. No one was absent—ever. The food was
always the same: ham, salami, pepperoni, and prosciutto; sliced cheeses and
olives; lettuce and tomatoes. Once we were seated, Grandma came from the
kitchen with two large brown paper bags and turned them over. As sandwich
rolls spilled out, hands grabbed from e very corner of the table, pulled open the
rolls, and filled them with cold cuts.
From the time I was old enough to sit on my own chair, these Sunday meals
were precious to me. At home during t hese years, I rarely had dinner with Mom
and Dad, since Dad got home too late for what Mom considered an appropri-
ate supper time for a young child. Instead, she cooked early for me and sat at
the t able as I ate. L
ater, when she and Dad ate, I might be watching tv or playing
with my wooden blocks. But on Sunday nights, I got to be part of the big people’s
world. I heard what they talked about and, sometimes, even argued over.
During summer, the topic was often baseball. Mom was a rabid New York
Giants fan. Anna’s husband, Tommy, the “cut up” in the f amily, loved to pro-
voke her into snapping at him—never a hard thing to do—by bad-mouthing
her team and championing the Yankees. Politics, too, caused sparks. Maybe
because he owned a grocery store and was his own boss, Grandpa became a
dyed-in-the-wool Republican, and his daughters followed suit. The men who
married into the family, like my Dad, took on their wives’ affiliation. But not
Tommy. A contrarian, he knew how to drop just the right remark to get things
Big Grandma’s House 13
g oing. I d idn’t have much clue as to what was g oing on, but I learned at t hose
Sunday dinners to hate Franklin Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, and to love
Senator Joe McCarthy, the rabid anti-communist whose name became sym-
bolic of t hose Cold War years. Communists inspired everyone’s hatred. Mom
was overjoyed when Joseph Stalin, the Russian dictator, died. She took credit
for his demise, since she had prayed for it to happen for years.
Occasionally on Sunday evenings, after the meal, Dad lugged a heavy
16-millimeter projector into the living room. B ecause Dad worked as book-
keeper at a small camera store, he got free film and didn’t pay to have it devel-
oped. So he bought himself a movie camera, and now and then Mr. Berkey, his
boss, let him bring home a projector for the weekend. It was the one luxury our
family had, and the one thing that made Dad seem special, since he was the
keeper of the family movies and the projectionist. As I got older, there were
more reels of film to choose from, and family members shouted out their favor-
ites: “dancing around the Christmas tree” or “the Fourth of July barbecue” or
“Laura’s first birthday party.” Watching t hese films at age six or seven and seeing
myself in some of them, I experienced the thrill of being in the movies. These
were the Scamporlinos’ version of Hollywood.
My favorite was Mom and Dad’s wedding. They had hired someone to film
it, from the wedding at St. Raymond’s Church to the reception afterward at
the Hunts Point Palace on Southern Boulevard. Mom was beautiful, her wavy,
black hair in a pompadour style. Her wedding dress had a long train that her
sister Jenny carried from behind, and it made her look glamorous, like the
movie stars of the 1930s with their floor-length gowns. Her deep brown eyes,
high cheekbones, sharp-edged nose, and the smile on her face suggested the
beauty of Barbara Stanwyck, whose old movies played on television. Every
time the camera found Dad, he was beaming. Almost paper thin, with hair
much lighter than one expected among Italians, he projected the sense that in
marrying Sophie, he had received a miraculous blessing from God. Meanwhile,
around them, my aunts and uncles and their cousins were dancing across the
floor. Every time the family watched the film together, the same scenes pro-
voked laughter, and none more than the moment on the receiving line when
Nicky, a friend from the old neighborhood whom Mom had once dated, leaned
in to kiss her and wouldn’t stop.
Meals and home-movie time aside, the grandkids were pretty much on our
own. As the adults did whatever it was that adults did together, and the teen
agers were out with their friends, Laura and Paul and I were inseparable. We
filled our time as best we could. Laura knew where her sister Sylvia kept her
James Dean scrapbooks, and we took them out when no one else was upstairs.
14 chapter Two
Sylvia had photos of Dean with Natalie Wood and Liz Taylor, photos where
he looked tough and mean, and others with a smile so big it melted your heart.
We shared forbidden things from the adult world. We smoked cigarettes
from a pack of Chesterfields that U ncle Phil left unguarded and drank from a
beer we found on the kitchen c ounter. Laura showed Sylvia’s bras to Paul and
me and explained that they covered big lumps on Sylvia’s chest. I refused to
believe that they were anything more than a fashion, like high heels and skirts,
to keep us from confusing men and women, but Laura insisted that, yes, women
really did have lumps on their chest.
Summer was the best time of all. We made excursions out of the neighbor-
hood. Restaurant eating was not a common thing. Dad took Mom and me
out on Mother’s Day, and a couple of times a year we walked to our neighbor-
hood Chinese restaurant. But for the most part, restaurants were a luxury. Why
spend money when we could eat more cheaply at home? And so there were all
those Sunday meals and parties at Big Grandma’s to celebrate one birthday or
another.
Except in the case of Grandma and Grandpa. Their birthday Sundays in
June and August w ere the two times a year when, as a clan, we all made a trip to
a restaurant. When the day was bright and clear—and the sun always seemed
to shine for Big Grandma—the family made its way to Amerigo’s in Throgs
Neck. The waiters sat us at a long t able in the center of the room. At first the
mood seemed somber, as the adults stared long and hard at the large menu. But
once the ordering was done, the tone brightened, and it was like Sunday din-
ner at Grandma’s, with conversation jumping from topic to topic and frequent
explosions of laughter.
But the best days were the Sundays when the adults said to me, Paul, and
Laura, “We’re going to Bruckner Boulevard.” Bruckner Boulevard was the set-
ting for a children’s amusement park. Though nothing like Coney Island in
Brooklyn, it had enough rides to keep us squealing with joy. We got strapped
onto one of the pony seats on the merry-go-round. There was a children’s
roller coaster that pulled the screams out of my mouth. But best of all w ere the
bumper cars, where Paul and I could smack into o thers at full speed and have it
be considered fun rather than making trouble.
Trips like this, w
hether to an amusement park or restaurant, w ere unusual.
They cost money, and in our family every penny got counted and every expense
carefully calculated. But even when we stayed close to home, summer was the
best because Paul, Laura, and I could be outside. We could make as much noise
as we wanted and run ourselves ragged. One summer Grandma bought a rubber
wading pool. On the hottest days she filled it with w ater from the garden hose,
Big Grandma’s House 15
and we splashed around until we tired. Every Memorial Day, Fourth of July,
and Labor Day, Tommy dragged a small grill up from the basement. As the
coals turned red-hot, I waited expectantly for the hamburgers and hot dogs—
American food for American holidays—that the family never cooked other
wise. On t hese days when everyone was outside eating, Laura, Paul, and I put
on little theatricals. The adults applauded as we enthusiastically sang “How
Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” and “What Did Della Wear?”
The Brucker family lived in the h ouse next door, with a d aughter, Ingrid,
about our age. The four of us ran back and forth between our yards, screaming
at the yellow jackets that buzzed around what we called the “bumblebee tree.”
We had many hours of fun with Ingrid, who was skinny as a stick and, even in
summer, unnaturally pale. The Bruckers w ere Lutheran, a fact that always got
mentioned with slightly lowered voices, so that early on it seeped in that this
was not good. Once, Laura told me that Ingrid had fed her dirt pies. I was out-
raged. Marching into the yard, I flung in her direction the worst thing I knew
to say: “You’re going to hell! You’ll burn forever!” Ingrid bravely threw back, “I
am not,” but without much conviction, and soon tears were flowing.
Grandma was outside in a flash. She shooed me back into the house and of-
fered Ingrid one of the biscuits she always seemed to carry in her apron pocket,
wiping Ingrid’s tears until the sobs were just a whimper. I was mortified by what
I’d done, less for how it made Ingrid feel than that I’d provoked Grandma’s dis
pleasure. But when she came inside, she drew me to her. In a voice so patient,
she repeated, “Giovannin’, Giovannin’,” the diminutive of my name, with the final
vowel clipped in Sicilian fashion. She pulled me close, played with the head of
blond hair that she couldn’t quite believe belonged to one of her grandchildren,
and then extended to me a biscuit that told me better than any words could,
“We are family. No matter what you do, I will always love you.” It was a message
that echoed through her house every hour of every day.
16 chapter Two
3
School: Becoming a Big Boy
With its church and elementary school, St. Raymond’s was familiar to me for as
long as I can remember. We passed it every time we walked to Grandma’s house.
The church was a big, impressive building standing back from the road, with a
parish cemetery in front of it where priests who had served in earlier times were
buried. Two tall, rounded towers stretched toward the sky, and a large stained
glass window shone above the entrance.
Mom and her older s isters had gone to public school in the old neighborhood.
But when the family moved to Silver Street during the war, the kids—Aunt
Fran and my older cousins, Vinny and Sylvia—were enrolled in St. Raymond’s.
Perhaps it was a step, along with homeownership, that signified upward mobility?
Perhaps Anna and Lucy picked up from the Irish families in the neighborhood
that this was the thing to do? Whatever the reason, the parish school became
the place where my cousins and I got our education.
When the f amily arrived in the parish, the school was h
oused in a dark, three-
story brick building, dating back several decades. It was a grim, primitive place.
The hallways were long and narrow. There was a twisting staircase protected by
a floor-to-ceiling metal-linked fence. Presumably the fence was meant to save
young ones from tumbling over the banister to an early death, but it seemed
more like a cage intended to secure a pack of wild animals. All the toilets w ere
in the basement, with its concrete walls and floors and with water pipes visible.
By the time I started kindergarten in 1953, the parish had constructed a
brand-new building to h ouse the expanding enrollment of baby boomers. The “new
school,” as everyone called it, was everything the “old school” was not. The halls
were wide and full of light. Th
ere were bathrooms on each floor. It had a huge au-
ditorium and a gymnasium large enough for a full-size basketball court.
The summer before I turned five, Mom began preparing me with tales of
how wonderful school was going to be. I would learn to read and write. I’d
make lots of friends, learn my catechism, and be a good Catholic boy. By the
end of summer, school was sounding like heaven on earth. When the first day
arrived, I was dressed and ready before Mom was. We headed along Unionport
Road t oward Tremont Avenue, me holding Mom’s hand tightly and trying to
pull her along to get there faster.
As we got closer to the school, a group of w omen approached, talking ex-
citedly, and Mom stopped to ask them something. Suddenly she was pulling
me. Mom, who was never late for anything, apparently had the time wrong
for when school began. Sure enough, no one was assembled outside when we
reached the building. She found the room I was assigned to and stood outside,
looking hesitantly through the glass-paneled door.
The woman who came to the door introduced herself as Mrs. Utsinger. As
she and Mom talked, I peeked inside. There were maybe forty boys and girls,
sitting at long tables in groups of six or eight. They were busy doing something,
but I couldn’t tell what. As I looked around the room, I noticed picture books
spread open on top of low bookcases that were pressed against the walls, and
stuffed animals perched on tables.
Suddenly I realized Mom was leaving. She had her worried-smile look on her
face and waved to me as Mrs. Utsinger took my hand and led me to a t able with
an empty seat. All the kids had paper and crayons and were busily drawing and
coloring. Mrs. Utsinger told me to draw whatever I wanted and then moved to
another table to see how her new pupils w ere doing. I reached for some paper,
but there was not a crayon around. I could feel the worry in my tummy, and
tears were starting to well up when the long-haired girl sitting across from me
said, “Here, take some of mine.” She pushed two or three crayons in my direc-
tion, smiled, and went back to coloring. It felt like the nicest t hing anyone had
ever done for me.
I liked kindergarten a lot. Unlike my neighborhood playground, where I never

knew who might be there and the cast of characters kept changing, at school
the same kids showed up every day and we each had our assigned seat. Before
18 chapter Three
long we had become familiar enough to recognize each other as we walked to
school with our moms. We became this steadily growing pack of kids heading
toward the corner of Purdy Street, where we obediently waited for our moms
to catch up and take us across the street. When the day ended, the process was
reversed. We poured out of the building, shouting and r unning to our moms,
and then the pack made its way through Parkchester. Mom and I were always
the last of the group since we lived farthest from the school.
The time in kindergarten was fun too. The supply of crayons and paper never
seemed to run out. Every day, Mrs. Utsinger read us a story in a voice so sooth-
ing that I felt like she was cuddling me in her arms. We played games: musical
chairs; red light, green light; pin the tail on the donkey. And unlike in the play-
ground, we w ere all the same age. In Mrs. Utsinger’s classroom I didn’t have to
compete with kids twice my age.
Fun as this was, the rules of kindergarten seemed to elude me. At the play-
ground I could run around and jump up and down whenever I wanted. But
now we all had to start and stop according to Mrs. Utsinger’s wishes. When she
told us to go to our seats, we did. But a few seconds later I might run to another
table to pin the tail on Tommy Porter or tag Vincent Gallela, or squeeze into
a seat with Marilyn Martin. Mrs. Utsinger’s face never betrayed anger. But she
made it plain that I w asn’t following the rules, and I spent a lot of time standing
in a corner, facing the wall as punishment.
Unlike Mrs. Utsinger, S ister Perpetua Mary, who taught first grade, never
cracked a smile. She looked the age of Big Grandma, but instead of the warmth
and laughter that Grandma brought into every room, Sister Perpetua stood
glaring at us in her nun’s habit. As a Sister of Charity, she was covered from
head to foot in black, as if dressed for a funeral. The skirt reached to just above
the ground. Her top stretched up to her neck and down to her wrists. She wore
a black cap, tied to her head with a long, thick black ribbon, so that only the
front of her face showed.
Religious instruction was woven into e very day of class, but since we w ere
just learning our alphabet, it came not in the form of a catechism but through
Bible stories that Sister Perpetua read aloud. In her grim voice, she took us
through the Old Testament. Snakes slithered about and spoke to people. Older
brothers murdered younger ones. Rain poured from the sky until all the people
and animals drowned except for a few lucky enough to squeeze into a big boat.
After p eople filled the earth again, an army of soldiers drowned when a sea closed
over them. A young boy named Daniel was trapped in a cave with an angry lion.
Mom had been reading to me from a children’s version of the Bible for years. I
snuggled next to her on the living room sofa and looked at the illustrations as she
School: Becoming a Big Boy 19
spun out what seemed to be wonderful adventures of another time and place.
I must have carried her version of these stories with me as Sister Perpetua spit
out her tales, because they didn’t make much of an impression. But that was not
the case, apparently, for my classmates. Soon I was hearing Mom telling Dad
over dinner how the other m others were all talking: their c hildren were having
nightmares, and it had something to do with Sister Perpetua and the Bible.
But even Sister Perpetua couldn’t dampen the excitement of learning to read
and write. Mom had taught me some letters to prepare me for school. Now, at
school, we went through the alphabet from start to finish. S ister Perpetua had
us copy letters over and over u ntil we knew them by heart. Soon we progressed
to readers and spelling books. There was a dog named Spot, a cat named Puff, a
boy named Dick, and a girl named Jane. We copied each lesson u ntil we could
recite the spelling of every word in it.
I took to reading and writing like I had taken to the playground a c ouple
of years e arlier. Mom went through the lessons with me, and soon I was racing
ahead of my classmates. Before long, when Sister Perpetua began a new lesson, I
already knew the story by heart and had memorized every word on the page. All
this made for very good grades on the report cards that became a regular feature
of life. But it also made me “antsy,” as Mom put it, sitting at my desk with the
assignment already done. Sometimes I leaned across the aisle, to see how an-
other student was doing. I showed my sheet of paper, with all the words neatly
printed on it, to my neighbor. My strong performance protected me from the
worst of S ister Perpetua’s wrath, but when I heard her announce, “Turn around
and sit quietly, young man,” I knew I needed to obey.
One morning, I went too far. Sister Perpetua was having us line up, an aisle
of students at a time, to show her our homework. As I sat waiting for my row’s
turn, I saw Jane Halligan standing on the line. Jane was among the group of
classmates I walked home with every afternoon. She had long brown hair and a
sweet smile. As I watched her, a wave of love washed over me. The next thing I
knew I was running over to where Jane was standing. I planted a big kiss on her
lips. She looked back, surprised at first, but when she saw it was me, she began
to giggle. I kissed her again.
By this time the class had noticed, and some kids w ere laughing and clap-
ping. That’s when I heard Sister Perpetua roar, “What are you doing, young
man? You should be ashamed of yourself ! Jane! D on’t let him do that! Slap
him on the face like he deserves!” Jane’s eyes had widened, and she was starting
to cry. She looked at me, confused about what to do. She raised her hand to
slap me; her face seemed to say “I’m sorry.” Meanwhile, Sister Perpetua was
approaching me and still shouting. “Get back to your seat,” she screamed, “and
20 chapter Three
d on’t get up u ntil I tell you to!” I walked back, but the screams kept coming.
“You should be ashamed, young man, ashamed! I w ill teach you never to do
that again. I’m keeping you after school. You’ll be locked in the basement
overnight where the rats will eat you!”
The room had quieted. Not a sound was coming from anyone. S ister Per-
petua returned to the front of the room and gestured for the next student to
approach with their homework. The morning continued. When the lunch bell
rang, we made our way outside to our waiting mothers. As I looked for Mom, I
was aware that many of the kids were looking at me as they took their mothers’
hands and began the walk home for lunch. Mom collected me and my cousin
Paul, who was in a different first-grade class, and we walked as usual to Paul’s
apartment in Parkchester, where Aunt Lucy had prepared our lunch.
I couldn’t tell Mom what had happened. S ister Perpetua was a servant of the
Lord. If she said I had done something wrong, then God was speaking through
her. If I told Mom, she might add to the punishment, though it was hard to
imagine what she could do after the rats had eaten me. As we ate lunch, I looked
up from my sandwich and blurted out, “I don’t feel good. I’m sick.”
“What’s wrong?” Mom asked, a look of concern on her face. “I d on’t know,”
I moaned. “I d on’t feel well.” She touched my forehead. “Your forehead isn’t
hot,” she said.
“No, I’m sick,” I continued. “I can tell. I’m getting sick.”
Mom got up and headed toward Lucy’s bathroom. I could see the annoyance
on her face. She returned with a thermometer and stuck it u nder my tongue.
“Normal temperature,” she announced. “Finish eating so I can get you back to
school.” I tried to protest, but she was having none of it. She got my coat on and
practically pulled me out of the building, and we began the walk to St. Raymond’s.
I was holding on tight to Mom’s hand, trying to pull her in the other direc-
tion, away from school. Soon I was crying and tugging at her, saying over and
over, “I w
on’t go back to school, I w on’t. Take me home.” As we turned onto
Purdy Street, I could see m others and students gathered by the schoolyard. By
now I was kicking and screaming, as Mom dragged me along. If there was any-
thing she hated, anything that worked her up, it was public embarrassment. She
did not want to look foolish to the “outside world,” as all except family were
called, and here I was, creating a scene that made everyone stare.
When we reached the schoolyard, S ister Perpetua was standing there, hands
tucked inside her habit. I quieted down immediately, and Mom pushed me into
the yard as she started to talk to S ister Perpetua. “I’m sorry, S ister. He’s usually
not like this,” I heard her saying, while I tried to vanish among the students
in the yard. As they continued talking, Mom threw glances in my direction.
Then she left, the bell rang, we marched to our classrooms, and the afternoon
went on. The bell rang, signaling the end of the school day, and I left with all
my classmates. No basement, no rats. The incident was never mentioned again.
I survived my year with Sister Perpetua. I adapted to the discipline expected
in a St. Raymond’s classroom. But never completely. I still found myself with
time on my hands, since I did my assignments quickly. Before the fall ended I
often had worked my way entirely through our reader and the lesson books we
got each year. I learned to hold still u ntil our teacher left the classroom for a
few minutes or was writing on the blackboard with her back toward us. Then I
might slip from my desk and crawl quietly along the floor, sneaking up behind
Donald Gallagher and untying his shoelaces, or lifting up the skirt of Linda
Gokey. They knew not to make noise in response, because then they might get
caught up in the wrath of our teacher.
Each year, the first weeks of school were the edgiest. I nervously tried to
figure out what this person at the front of the room was like. They weren’t all
cut from the same cloth. Mrs. Utsinger had been warm but firm. S ister Perpetua
embodied the wrath of an angry god. Miss Leahy, my second-grade teacher,
was the kindest h uman on the planet. Third grade brought Miss McManus.
Extremely grumpy, she seemed more interested in talking in the hallway with
Mrs. Dunne, another third-grade teacher, while we sat at our desks endlessly
copying words from our speller. And then t here was Miss McGlynn in fourth
grade. It was impossible not to love her. We all competed for her attention, each
of us wanting to be the best student possible, doing whatever it took to make
her smile grow even wider.
Besides the playmates and the pleasure of learning to read and write, school
brought another change, but this one at home. At some point in second grade,
Mom upgraded me to “big boy” status.
The first time I heard that phrase came one evening just before dinner. Ever
since I had grown tall enough that she could dispense with the high chair and
have me sit at the t able, the routine was that soon after five o’clock, she called
me to the t able and served me dinner. While Mom was a wonderful storyteller,
she was also a good listener, and dinner was my time to talk. In the years before
I started school, I might babble about the kids at the playground or the games I
had played in the bedroom. But once I started school, there was so much more
to say. Mealtime was the chance to recite my lessons again, tell stories about
other kids, or describe the “special activities” like art and m usic that occasion-
ally broke the routine.
22 chapter Three
Mom always seemed to enjoy my stories, but eventually, my plate empty, she
picked up the dish and glass and utensils and headed to the kitchen to prepare
dinner for herself and Dad. I returned to the living room and lost myself watch-
ing Roy Rogers on television as he rode Trigger through the open spaces of a
West I could only imagine existed.
At some point, the sound of a key in the door meant that Dad was home
from work. Once, early on, eager to tell him about an adventure that day, I ran
to the door and threw myself at him. But carrying a whole day of tension from
his job, he roughly brushed me away. The next night, as Dad’s arrival home
approached, Mom made clear what I was not to do. “Don’t bother your father
when he gets home,” she said. “He has his routines.”
And so, when the key turned in the door, I knew to let Dad’s routines un-
fold. He put his newspaper on the table. He put his coat and jacket in the closet.
He went to the bedroom, changed out of his white shirt and tie, and walked
through the apartment picking up the bits and pieces of the day’s rubbish. He
gathered them in a single bag and carried it to the building’s garbage chute,
where he dumped the bag. Then, back in the apartment, Dad was now officially
“home” for the evening. He and Mom had dinner together and talked about
the day. A
fter eating, they retreated to the kitchen. Dad proceeded to wash the
pots, pans, and dishes. Mom dried each item and put it away. Through it all,
they talked. Once they emerged from the kitchen, Mom announced it was my
bedtime. She, not Dad, helped me into my pajamas, led me through prayers,
and kissed me good night.
Dad had other routines that kept me at arm’s length. On weekends, his fa-
vorite place in the apartment was the living room sofa. There he sat, the Daily
News in front of his face, reading every line of the sports pages. Then he shifted
his position a bit and, his face down, did the crossword puzzle. Or he might
listen to music, his one real pleasure. Dad had quite a collection of records,
from the big bands of the 1940s to selections of classical m
usic. With the album
cover serving as a wall separating him from me and Mom, he read over and over
the notes about the music.
Eventually, an edge of annoyance in her voice, Mom shouted from the
kitchen, “Listen, DeMille! We have things to do!” Dad then roused himself
and did what Mom had in mind—a trip to the dry cleaner or to Sid’s Deli or,
once in a long while, a trip with me to the local diner where f ather and son had
lunch together. But these w ere temporary cracks in the wall he erected between
him and a world, including me, that in his view existed only to bother him.
But now, as a big boy who was attending school, I got to sit e very night at
the dinner t able with Dad as well as Mom. I listened to their talk about the day.
What Mom said was usually no surprise, since she was discussing the familiar—
calls to her sisters, the doings in the neighborhood, my reports from school. But
Dad? Everything he said was new. The mysterious world that he disappeared
into each day was as unknown to me as the places described in the geography
books that Mom and I brought home from the library.
Work was a source of deep anxiety for Dad. He often said that, if he didn’t
need to support a wife and child, he would have been content to remain a mes-
senger, his first job out of high school, and buy himself a hamburger for dinner
every night while he read the newspaper. More than once as a young child, I
remember being awakened in the early morning by noises coming from the
bathroom. It was not the sound of the shower or an electric razor. It was Dad
retching into the toilet, throwing up his guts. From my crib, I could see Mom
pacing in the bedroom, that familiar tightening of her jaw whenever she was
upset, with a look on her face that was part worry and part anger. “Inventory,” I
heard her mutter. I had no idea what it meant, but I knew it couldn’t be good.
Now I got to learn about inventory and many other things as he talked
about his day at Peerless Camera. Th ere was Mr. Berkey, who founded the busi-
ness and whom Dad spoke of with reverence. There were the two friends with
whom Berkey developed the business: Mr. Simon, who, according to Dad, was
hard to work with, and Mr. Dunn, who was kind. There was inventory. It came
with the “tax season.” Each January, Dad had to count up everything—rolls of
film, cameras, anything that could be sold—and then add up how much it all
cost and report it to something called “the irs.” Dad’s voice sank to a whisper
when he said those letters.
Then t here were the times, not nightly but often, when conversation would
be interrupted. Dad might pause in the middle of a sentence and belch. Or he
entwined the fingers of his two hands, pressed them toward his chest as his el-
bows pointed outward, and suddenly cracked his knuckles. Whether a belch or
a crack, Mom’s response was the same. “DeMille!” she spit out. The message was
clear: do not do that at my t able! And Dad’s rejoinder was similar too. He forced
out another belch or found another knuckle to crack. Mom made a face back at
him, and Dad giggled as he turned toward me and said, “I guess I got the boss
mad.” And soon we w ere all laughing as Mom and Dad r ose from the table,
cleared the dishes, and began their washing and drying together. Just another
night at the dinner table, where food brought the family together.
24 chapter Three
4
Baby Jim
For years I didn’t seem to notice that I was an only child. Among the cousins
I played with, all of us were either the only child or the youngest. Our parents
had stopped making babies a fter us, and I never gave it a second thought, u ntil I
started school. Now I had a set of friends whom I saw daily. I played with them,
talked with them, and got to know them well. They w ere rapidly becoming part
of my life and how I saw the world.
One Saturday during first grade, Mom and I w ere walking on Unionport
Road. We had delivered some clothing to the dry cleaner. As we came onto the
street, I saw a classmate, Eddie, and waved to him. He was holding the hand of a
younger boy, while a w oman, his m other, pushed a baby carriage. She and Mom
introduced themselves and started talking.
With his hand on top of his b rother’s head, Eddie wheeled him around to
face me and said, “Billy, this is my friend John.” Then he pointed to the carriage.
There was a little one, his eyes wide open and his tiny hands wiggling in jerky
motions as if he was slapping away a horde of flies. Eddie waved his hand at
the baby, who turned his head and laughed. “He had his six-month birthday
yesterday,” Eddie said.
I didn’t know there were six-month birthdays, but I knew that I liked this
little creature, and little Billy, too, who was tugging at Eddie’s sleeve. They w
ere
so much better than stuffed animals. They moved on their own. They could talk
when they got to be as big as Billy. You could play with a little brother forever,
I thought, and by the look of things they played back with you. I decided I
wanted one.
When we got back to our apartment, I told Mom, “I want a little brother.”
Dad was sitting on the sofa, doing the crossword puzzle. He put the paper
down and looked up.
“Well, it’s not as easy as saying you want one,” Mom replied. “It’s not like a
toy that you buy at Macy’s.”
“So where do we get one?” I asked. “Where did you get me?”
“We brought you home from the hospital.”
“So, let’s go now. Let’s go to the hospital and bring home a little brother.”
Dad came over to the table and sat down. “It doesn’t work that way,” he said.
“Babies come from God. We prayed to God to bring us a baby and eventually
He brought us you. A baby grows inside a mommy u ntil it’s big enough to come
out, and then we go to the hospital where the doctor takes care of everything.”
That night, I added a new wish to my bedtime prayers. I asked God for a
baby brother. I asked him to make a baby grow inside Mom. Each night, I re-
peated the prayer. Now and then I asked Mom if a baby had started to grow.
Even though Mom said that we c ouldn’t buy one at a toy store, as Christmas
drew near and I made my list for Santa, I put “baby brother” on it. After all,
Santa was Saint Nicholas. Maybe he had some influence with God.
This went on for almost two years. Early one September, just as I started
third grade, Mom told me I could invite some school friends to a party for my
eighth birthday. This was a big deal. Non–family members rarely set foot in our
apartment. Birthdays w ere family affairs, always celebrated at Big Grandma’s. I
came up with a list. Mom gave me envelopes with cards inside, and I passed them
out to my friends. When the day came, they all showed up after school. The liv-
ing room was decorated with a “Happy Birthday” banner that hung on the wall.
A colorful crepe paper tablecloth was on the dinner table, which had been
extended to its full length. Everyone brought me a present, and Mom had
gotten my favorite cake from Lambiasi’s Pastry Shop and topped it with nine
candles, the extra one for good luck. A fter everybody sang “Happy Birthday,” I
closed my eyes, made a wish, and blew out the candles. You can imagine what
I wished for.
That evening, after we had dinner and Mom and Dad had cleaned up, they
sat back down at the dinner t able and called me over. “We have something to tell
you,” Dad said. “We have a special birthday gift for you. Mommy is g oing to
have a baby.”
26 chapter Four
My joy was uncontainable. I leapt out of my chair, threw my arms around
Mom, and began jabbering away.
“When, when? Should we go to the hospital?” I shouted.
“Now, d on’t get impatient,” Mom said. “Dr. Manfredi thinks the baby w ill
come sometime around the holidays. Maybe for the New Year.”
“Are you sure? Maybe he’s wrong. Maybe it’s time!”
“No, no, calm down. The doctor knows. When a baby is inside, a Mommy’s
tummy starts to swell. Put your hand here. Can you tell? My tummy has to grow
much bigger before the baby will come out.”
“There’s one more thing, though,” Dad chimed in. He seemed worried. “We
can’t know if it’ll be a boy or a girl until the baby arrives.”
I had never given this a thought. But I knew what I wanted, and it d idn’t
occur to me that anything else was possible. “Oh, it’ll be a brother,” I said, as if
I was privy to the secrets of the universe. “I’ve been praying.”
That Sunday, as always, we went to Grandma’s h ouse. The door had hardly
opened when I raced through the hall and into the living room screaming, “I’m
getting a baby b rother! Mommy’s having a baby!” Grandma came out of the
kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron and laughing at my excitement. I found
Laura and Paul, who were upstairs playing, and told them my news. “We al-
ready knew,” Paul told me.
“It was a secret,” Laura said. “We weren’t supposed to tell.”
Apparently, I was the last to learn. But what did it matter? I was in heaven.
Not long a fter the big announcement, Mom sat me down one afternoon for one
of her serious talks. “I’m glad y ou’re happy,” she said. “But having a baby b rother
or s ister isn’t just fun and games. You’re going to be the big brother. That means
responsibility. Now you really are a big boy. You don’t just get to eat at the din-
ner table with me and your father each night.” Mom explained that, with a baby
to take care of, she wouldn’t be able to do everything she usually did. I would be
in charge of food shopping. There was still time for her to teach me how to do
it, but once the baby arrived, it would be my chore.
Thus began a training in shopping for food as precise as the multiplication
tables I was learning in school. Supermarket shopping was like a science for
Mom. As with everything, there was only one right way to do it, and she alone
knew the right way.
Training began the next afternoon. She sat me at the t able and began to print
on the back of an old Christmas card a list of items. Next to each she placed a
Baby Jim 27
number that signified how many we w ere to get. We got the shopping wagon
out of the front closet, went down the elevator, and walked on to Unionport
Road. I had been to Safeway with Mom dozens of times, so I automatically
turned left when we hit the sidewalk.
“No,” she said. “You can’t go that way.”
“How come? Safeway’s right there,” I told her, as I pointed to where the store
was located.
“That’s the way you go with me,” Mom replied. “But that way there’s only a
crosswalk, and you’re small and the cars might not see you. I don’t want you ever
crossing that way! We’re going to the traffic light.”
I turned around and headed toward the traffic signal.
“Wait a minute, buddy boy,” Mom called out. Being the big brother was
getting more complicated by the minute. “When you start g oing to Safeway by
yourself, you’ll have to wheel the shopping wagon.”
Mom handed the wagon to me. Its h andle reached my shoulder. I almost
bumped into a couple of pedestrians in my first effort to drag it along the side-
walk. Mom was trying hard not to laugh and, I have to say, was more patient
than she normally was.
Once we got to Safeway, Mom showed me how to attach our wagon to the
store’s grocery carts. Then we began our trips up and down e very aisle. I learned
how to judge just the right proportion of yellow and green on a banana skin. I
was to make sure t here were no soft spots on each apple I picked. As we moved
to the packaged foods, Mom gave me lessons in brand names. Among the ce-
reals, Kellogg’s yes, Post no. Among the breads, Arnold yes, Wonder no. Del
Monte was the favored name in canned vegetables. For macaroni, it was always
Buitoni.
There were other lessons to be learned about the science of shopping. On
Thursdays and Sundays, Safeway took out full-page ads in the Daily News, the
paper of choice in our family. The ads listed the sales that week; they also in-
cluded coupons to save money and, best of all, to get extra Gold Bond stamps.
Gold Bond stamps w ere my reward for being a big boy. Whatever stamps
I received on a shopping trip, I kept. I began applying my arithmetic skills to
earn as many stamps from Safeway as possible. Sometimes an ad said “100 free
stamps with $5.00 purchase.” It was fine with me to make two five-dollar trips
to the store.
It required a few trips to absorb all of this. But I got plenty of help. There
weren’t many eight-year-olds rolling carts in Safeway’s aisles. Every clerk came
to recognize me. They pulled down cans and boxes from shelves I c ouldn’t
reach. They weighed my produce and stood patiently as I tried to decide if I
28 chapter Four
was buying too much. The checkout clerks knew me by name. They smiled as I
counted out my money and helped load the wagon with the bags they packed.
It turned out that Dr. Manfredi’s prediction was almost exactly right. Early in
the evening, the day after New Year’s, Mom started feeling pains. Dad called
Aunt Lucy and Grandma and packed a few things fast. We went downstairs to
hail a cab to the hospital. Pretty soon Mom was being rolled away in a wheel-
chair, and Dad and I waited until Grandma arrived with Aunt Fran. Excited as
I was, after a few hours I could not stay awake, and Grandma took me to her
house to spend the night. All the next day I waited, playing with Laura, won-
dering when it would be over. In the evening a call from Dad gave us the news:
I had a baby brother.
I was always told that the children of Italians were named for the baby’s
grandparents. I was named after Dad’s father, Giovanni. That meant my brother
would be named Vincent, a fter Big Grandpa. But Dad was also named Vincent,
and so was a cousin, and Mom wasn’t having four Vincents in the family. Jimmy
was Big Grandpa’s nickname, and Mom had the idea to name the baby James.
Then, when we called him Jimmy, everyone would know whom he was named
after. So there we were, John and James, the two b rothers, the favorites of Jesus.
The first day Jimmy was home, Mom had me sit on the sofa and brought him
to me, wrapped in a blanket. She told me to stretch out my arms to hold him.
She showed me how she cradled his head against her upper arm. “Babies can’t
hold their heads up for the first few weeks,” she said, “so you have to be careful.
We don’t want his neck snapping back.” That was all I needed to know. I pulled
my arms away quickly and shook my head back and forth. I wasn’t going to be
the cause of a snapped neck.
But that didn’t stop me from showing my fascination with this tiny creature.
He was the littlest t hing I had ever seen, smaller than my Smokey the Bear. His
face was red, his nose tiny, and all his features seemed scrunched together. That
winter and spring, I d idn’t at all mind not g oing out to play. Jimmy was much
more absorbing than anything the playgrounds in Parkchester offered. Each
day with him was like a new adventure.
In those first months, when Mom wasn’t holding him, Jimmy spent his time
in a cradle. It will be a while, Mom explained, before he can see clearly and rec-
ognize us, but from the beginning he heard t hings. I stood by his cradle, shaking
the little rattle that someone had given him. He turned his head to follow the
noise. Every few days brought something new: the first time his eyes followed
the finger I moved in front of his face; the first time he recognized my voice
Baby Jim 29
and smiled; the first time he grabbed my finger; the first time I was finally brave
enough to hold him. Eventually, he graduated to a playpen. Soon Jimmy was
crawling around and sitting up and eventually standing while he held on tightly
to the bars. By the time we were celebrating his first birthday, Jimmy was mak-
ing his way around our apartment, though one of us always followed nearby,
ready to pull him up if he toppled over.
Once Jimmy was mobile, I created worlds of play that w ere all our own. On
Saturdays, when I d idn’t have school and we d idn’t trek to Big Grandma’s, we
seized possession of Mom and Dad’s bed. Around this time, a new cartoon series,
The Huckleberry Hound Show, had premiered on tv. It set its title character in
the Wild West among cowboys and c attle thieves. With the help of his side-
kick, Quick Draw McGraw, Sheriff Huckleberry always outsmarted the ban-
dits. Jimmy was transfixed by it. One Christmas, Santa brought him a stuffed
Huckleberry and Quick Draw, and with them we improvised our own chase
scenes and shoot-outs. If we got too loud, Mom came in to assert her own
version of law and order.
Game time aside, Jimmy was mostly a quiet baby. He didn’t howl or scream,
and he seemed to go along with the program that Mom set out for him. But
there was one big exception: he didn’t like to eat. As the transition to solid food
began, he became colicky. In his high chair, he’d throw his head back and twist
from side to side as Mom raised a spoon with food to his mouth.
Mom wasn’t good with any kind of “no,” so Jimmy’s refusals drove her crazy.
Mealtime became an ordeal, with Mom insisting and Jimmy stubbornly resist-
ing. Around the time he started to talk, Mom had the idea of distracting him
as she tried to feed him. She took out an alphabet book that she had once used
with me and opened it in front of him. A picture of a bright red apple appeared
on the page.
“Look,” she said. “A is for apple.” She pointed to the A and then to the apple,
as she mouthed the sounds in exaggerated fashion. Jimmy’s eyes opened wide,
and he stared at the page. Mom turned the page and repeated the routine with
“B is for boy.” She turned another page and said “C is for cat.” By this time
Jimmy was waving his arms as he reached for the page. Twisting his head back and
forth, he looked quickly from the book to Mom and back again. Mom returned
to the first page and repeated “A is for apple.” This time, Jimmy pointed too, and
fixated on the page, he began to imitate what Mom was saying. As he opened his
mouth, Mom put a spoonful of food in. He swallowed without protest.
Mealtimes now became transformed into reading lessons. My two-year-old
brother was learning to speak and read simultaneously. He moved through
the alphabet and graduated to elementary readers. This was happening at the
30 chapter Four
time that I started taking trips to the public library without Mom, and Jimmy
now sat with me as I pored through the books that I brought home. He went
through Swiss Family Robinson so many times that he must have committed it
to memory. Before long he was reading at the same grade level as I was, and I was
already several grades ahead of my classmates. At Grandma’s on Sunday, Mom
had Jimmy demonstrate his skills. This always provoked sounds of wonder.
Mom was e ager to get Jimmy into school, but when she went to enroll him
in kindergarten, she learned that St. Raymond’s had changed its admission cycle
since I had started eight years e arlier. Now it was tied to the calendar year. With
Jimmy’s birthday on January 3, it meant she had to wait until he was almost six
before he could start school. “Impossible,” I heard her mutter in the kitchen,
after she got back home. “What w ill I do if I have to keep him home another
year?”
The following week, Mom decided to “take things into her own hands,” as she
was fond of saying. She gathered a couple of books and, with Jimmy and me in
tow, went to St. Raymond’s and headed to the principal’s office. Mom explained
the situation to Sister Helen. I could see the skepticism in her face as Mom re-
cited Jimmy’s achievements and made a case for letting him start school. Jimmy
was small for his age, and having him be the youngest in class would only make
him seem tinier.
Mom’s prospects weren’t looking good, until she noticed that Sister Helen
had a globe on her desk. “It’s not just reading,” Mom said. “He knows geogra-
phy too. You can test him. Really, he knows where everything is.”
“Is that true?” Sister Helen asked. “Do you really know where everything
is?” Jimmy nodded.
“Well, why don’t we have a little test? I will spin the globe and point to dif
ferent places, and you can tell me what country it is.”
She spun the globe and pointed. “Brazil,” Jimmy said. She spun again. “Egypt.”
She spun a third time. “Philippines.” Mom was smiling, almost on the verge of
laughter. I was excited too. “He knows the capitals of a lot of countries,” I heard
myself saying.
“My, my,” Sister was saying. “You’re a very impressive young boy. What do
you want to be when you grow up?”
“A paleontologist,” Jimmy replied.
For a moment, Sister Helen stared in disbelief. A four-year-old had an-
nounced his intention to be a paleontologist. Then, with the slightest smile
on her face, she agreed that, yes, it would be appropriate for Jimmy to start
kindergarten that September.
Baby Jim 31
5
Change, and More Change
“He always was, always will be, and always remains the same.” That’s what our
Baltimore Catechism declared about the nature of God, in one of its earliest
pronouncements.
It was Mom’s philosophy too, not just about God but about everything. She
never quite said it outright, but how she lived her life—and wanted everyone
around her to live theirs too—rested on the conviction that change was bad. It
had to be resisted at all costs.
Everything in life could be reduced to a predictable routine. Take breakfast,
for instance. Each morning, from the time I started school, she poured some hot
coffee into a blender, added milk, cracked a raw egg into the mix, and turned on
the blender. I had coffee-with-egg for breakfast every morning from the age of five
until I left home for college. Or dinner: on Mondays she made lamb chops; on
Tuesdays, meatballs and macaroni with Italian gravy; on Wednesdays, soup and
chicken; on Thursdays, steak. Friday was our “no meat” night. Saturday dinner
was predictable in its unpredictability. Each Sunday, it was soup and chicken
again for the main midday meal, with the chicken delivered on Saturday morn-
ing by Uncle Felix, who worked at a poultry market nearby. Occasionally, Mom
surprised us with a different weeknight meal, with pork chops or pot roast, but
the change itself served as a reminder of the routine being broken.
Even newfangled things like television supported the view that life rolled
along in unchanging fashion. Lassie and The Ed Sullivan Show were always
there on Sunday evenings; The Mickey Mouse Club came on at the same time
every afternoon. This was how life was, and I never thought to question it.
Then Jimmy was born, and everything seemed to change, in one short con-
centrated period of time. But it w
asn’t so much Jimmy’s arrival, though that was
certainly a big change, and a good one at that. Through the spring and summer
of 1957, one event a fter another upset the rhythms and routines, the very feel,
of everyday life.
Apartments in Parkchester w eren’t available in an open rental market. The

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company kept tight control not only of who
moved into the project but of moves within as well. Larger apartments were
dispensed to deserving families. “Deserving” meant your children h adn’t gotten
into trouble with Parkchester’s security force and that you paid the rent on
time. It also meant that the f amily was growing and needed more space. So once
Mom knew she was pregnant, she and Dad asked to be put on the list for a two-
bedroom place. By May, when Jimmy was four months old, the application was
approved and we moved into the larger unit.
In some ways the move hardly changed anything. The buildings in Park-
chester all looked the same. The hallways and elevators were alike, as was the
arrangement of the eight apartment doors on each floor. Our new apartment
was even in the same location on the floor. The first time I walked in, I thought
we h adn’t moved at all. The entrance opened into a small foyer, with a closet to
the right and a doorway to the kitchen. The foyer led into a living room of the
same size and shape as our old one, and a door from the living room led to
the bathroom and sleeping area.
But when I walked through that door, I might as well have tumbled into
the rabbit hole of Alice in Wonderland. Beyond the living room were two bed-
rooms. I was given the smaller one, and for the next few years, until Jimmy
stopped sleeping in a crib, I had a room to myself. To make this even more
special, Mom and Dad bought me a desk. Now I could do my homework in
private, instead of at the t able where we ate. Or I could close the door (at least
until Mom shouted, “What are you doing in there, young man?”) and lie on my
bed listening on my transistor radio to the current top songs.
But the biggest deal w asn’t getting a room of my own. Our apartment on
Unionport Road had been at the far edge of St. Raymond’s Parish. When I
Change, and More Change 33

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American Composers: John Alden Carpenter, Charles Martin
Loeffler,
Henry F. Gilbert Campbell-Tipton.
Finishing in his earliest period with the strictly German influence,
Gilbert had also done with the exhibition of a predominating modern
French influence before his colleagues had awakened to the
existence of such a thing. It is, however, significant to note that the
'Negro Episode' for orchestra, and arranged also for piano, dates
from earliest days. An orchestral 'Legend' was a companion piece.
The modern French influence appears in the richly colored and
highly poetic soprano aria, 'Salammbô's Invocation to Tänith,' on
Flaubert's text; in the very imaginative songs, 'Orlamonde'
(Maeterlinck), and 'Zephyrus' (Longfellow), and in the fanciful tone-
poem for piano, 'The Island of the Fay,' after Poe. From this general
period came, in strong contrast, the barbaric and famous 'Pirate
Song,' as well as the delicate 'Croon of the Dew,' and the 'South
American Gypsy Songs.' A strong Celtic influence now asserted
itself, based upon the Irish literary revival and a study of ancient
bardic and other Celtic folk-songs. The chief results were the
'Lament of Deirdre,' a remarkable song of intensest pathos and
mood-heaviness; four very individual songs called 'Celtic Studies';
and the 'Fairy Song,' all on verses of the Irish poets. A fine piece of
American savagery from this period, presumably deriving from
Whitmanic influences, is the song on Frederick Manley's poem, 'Fish
Wharf Rhapsody.' These various phases finally yielded to a strong
impulse toward a bold expression of Americanism, and Gilbert
composed the 'Comedy Overture on Negro Themes,' a vigorous and
jubilant work which has been widely heard and has awakened much
interest in the composer. A less important 'Humoresque on Negro
Minstrel Tunes,' for orchestra, followed, and a massive orchestral
'Negro Rhapsody,' first produced at the 'Norfolk Festival' under the
composer's direction in 1913. 'The Dance in the Place Congo,' for
orchestra, after a vivid word-painting by George W. Cable, is the
composer's most extensive work. There are also for orchestra
'American Dances in Ragtime Rhythm,' and, in another vein, an
impressive 'Symphonic Prologue' to J. M. Synge's 'Riders to the
Sea,' conducted by the composer at the MacDowell festival at
Peterboro, N. H., in 1914. There is a song on Whitman's 'Give me
the splendid silent sun,' a chorus with orchestra, 'To Thee, America,'
five 'Indian Scenes' for piano, and other works. Often rough in
technique, though greatly resourceful, and rich in orchestral
imagination, it is to the spirit of the time and nation that Gilbert
makes his contribution and his appeal. He is the avowed enemy of
tradition and fashion, whether in art, dress, or speech, and a fighter
for freedom and individuality in music.
A. F.
Arthur Farwell is a composer who may well be called

representatively American, inasmuch as his work contains elements
which exemplify the spirit and aims of our native art. Mr. Farwell is
perhaps most widely known for his studies in Indian music and for
such of his compositions as are built from this material. He has
realized, however, that presenting as it does only one phase, and
that a more or less exotic one, Indian music in no way can stand as
an accepted basis of our national musical art. Mr. Farwell has kept
well abreast of the tide of modern music and has cultivated a style in
which its idioms are employed with considerable originality and
imbued with the rare poetic feeling that is his. It is with this
broadness of view also that Mr. Farwell conducted the Wa-Wan
Press, established by him in 1901. This institution had as one of its
principal missions the promulgation of the Indian and other folk
elements in American composition and the exploitation of such
works as employed this element. Its pages were, nevertheless, open
to all native composers, irrespective of 'school,' who had something
to say, and its founder has to his great credit the record of having
lent early recognition to a number of the younger and progressive
American composers.
Farwell's earlier compositions reveal the usual sway of varied

influences with a tendency to the original harmonic treatment that
has remained the distinctive feature of his late work. He may be said
to have first 'found himself' in an overture, 'Cornell' (op. 9), written
while he was a musical lecturer at Cornell University. Combining
Indian themes and college songs in a sort of American academic
overture, the vigor of style and effectiveness of scoring has gained
for this work a permanent place in the orchestral répertoire.
Following this Mr. Farwell devoted himself for some time to the study
of and experiments in Indian music, and thus follow in his list of
works several of his best-known compositions; the book of 'American
Indian Melodies,' for piano; 'Dawn'; 'Ichibuzzh'; and 'The Domain of
the Hurakan.' The orchestral version of the last-named work is a
score of great impressiveness and of brilliant color. It has had
several conspicuous performances which have done much to win
recognition for his larger gifts.
The 'Symbolistic Studies,' comprising opera 16, 17, 18, and 24, are
tone-poems with a generic title. The composer describes them as
being 'program music, the program of which is merely suggested,' an
attempt, in other words, to create a form that shall offer the
composer the means of unrestricted expression, while its musical
coherence shall preserve an intrinsic worth and general appeal as
absolute music. In the 'Impressions of the Wa-Wan Ceremony' (opus
21) and the 'Navajo War Dance' (opus 29) Mr. Farwell has made
further interesting and effective treatment of the Indian color. The set
of pieces comprised under the former title contains some very
atmospheric pages in which the strange monotony that marks the
Indian song is obtained by novel uses of diatonic material at once
bold and beautiful. The barbaric crudity is still further implied in the
'Navajo War Dance,' where Farwell has renounced almost all defined
harmony, preserving only the vigorous rhythm of the dance in the
bold intervals of the Indian melody.
Mr. Farwell was one of the first composers to write music for the so-
called community pageants. In the 'Pageant of Meriden' and the
'Pageant of Darien' he has obtained a remarkable success by the
masterly skill with which he has welded the diffusive elements of
pictorial description, folk-song suggestion, dances and choruses, into
a coherent and artistic whole. Equally successful along similar lines
was Farwell's music for Louis N. Parker's play, 'Joseph and His
Brethren,' and Sheldon's 'Garden of Paradise.'
In his vocal compositions Farwell shows some of his best
inspirations. Among the larger of these works is a tone-poem for
voice and orchestra, opus 34 (the words from Sterling's 'Duandon'),
a score of rich color and poetic description in which the voice has
little of what has heretofore been known as melody, but performs a
more modern function of sounding the salient notes of harmonies
that are woven in an ultra-modern profusion of color. The same is
true of several other large songs, such as 'A Ruined Garden' (opus
14), 'Drake's Drum' (opus 22), and 'The Farewell' (opus 33). In the
second section of 'A Ruined Garden,' however, there is a clearer line
of melody over a harmonic scheme of haunting loveliness. This song
is one of the more popular ones of Mr. Farwell's list, having been
sung frequently by Florence Hinkle and others of note. There is an
orchestral version of the accompaniment which enhances its rich
color effects. In his two most recent songs, 'Bridal Song' and
'Daughter of Ocean' (opus 43), the composer has applied in a more
modern and highly colored scheme some of the experiments with
secondary seventh chords that lend such interest to his later Indian
studies.
In some of his shorter songs Farwell has again made some valuable
contributions to the nationalistic development. Besides the
interesting cowboy song, 'The Lone Prairie,' already mentioned (see
Chap. VII), there is a remarkable utilization of the negro element in
'Moanin' Dove,' one of the 'negro spiritual' harmonizations beautiful
in its atmosphere of crooning sadness. In concerted vocal music
Farwell has made a setting of Whitman's 'Captain, My Captain' for
chorus and orchestra (opus 34), a 'Hymn to Liberty,' sung at a
celebration in the New York city hall (1910); some male and mixed
choruses, and part-songs for children.
B. L.
Harvey Worthington Loomis occupies not merely a unique place in

American music, but one which is elusively so, and difficult of both
determination and exposition. To place the delicate and fragile spirit
of a Watteau or a Grétry in the midst of the hurly-burly of American
life would seem a sorry anachronism, as well as anatopism, on the
part of the Providence which rules over the destinies of art. Yet it is
some such position that Loomis occupies, a fact which tends to
explain why he has not received the attention at the hands of his
countrymen that the rare originality, charm, and finish of his work
merit. The court of Louis XVI would have opened its palaces and
gardens to him, but the America of the twentieth century with
difficulty finds standing room for him in the vestibule. Bringing with
him such a nautilus-like spirit as animated the artists of an earlier
France, he matured it in an America which as yet knew scarcely
anything of any musical system or spirit beyond the German. It is,
therefore, a wholly amazing phenomenon of art that, out of materials
thus solid, Loomis contrived to fashion his aerial and delicately tinted
fairy edifices of tone, of a character totally different from those of
Teutons of the subtler sort, and foreshadowing the achievements of
the later Frenchmen with a newly devised medium at their command.
It is evidence of the purest kind of the yielding of matter to spirit.
Consider that exquisite masterpiece, 'In the Moon Shower'—a very

epitome in miniature of Loomis' genius—a setting of Verlaine's
L'heure exquise for singing voice, speaking voice, piano, and violin.
It seems not to contain a harmony or a progression with which we
have not long been made familiar by our Germanic system, and yet
how complete the departure which it makes from the spirit of
German tradition, and how utterly it dissolves the medium which it
draws upon to re-materialize it as the shadowy reflection of a
Verlaine dream. It is not that Loomis has not become familiar with,
and in a measure assimilated, the later French idiom, but that,
without the knowledge and employment of it, he earlier
spontaneously breathed forth the quality of spirit which we now
recognize in a Debussy or a Ravel. Loomis has also been
exceedingly hospitable to native aboriginal themes and has treated
them in the spirit of a delicate and refined impressionism. His
technique is invariably of the nicest, with minute attention to every
detail.
Loomis has produced much. There is a grand opera, 'The Traitor
Mandolin'; two comic operas; incidental music of most aristocratic
artistry to the plays 'The Tragedy of Death,' by René Peter, and 'The
Coming of the Prince,' by William Sharp, and music of similarly
refined mood to a number of pantomimes—a favorite form of Loomis
—'The Enchanted Fountain,' 'Put to the Test,' 'In Old New
Amsterdam,' 'Love and Witchcraft,' and 'Black and White.' There are
many piano compositions of charm, sprightliness, humor, and
impressionistic interest, including two books of 'Lyrics of the Red
Man'; and many songs brimming with poetry and character, among
them 'In the Foggy Dew,' 'Love Comes, Love Goes,' 'Hark, Hark, the
Lark' (a delightful conception inviting no comparison with Schubert),
and songs of negro character, such as the exquisite 'Hour of the
Whippoorwill.' Loomis has written choruses and part-songs, and a
stupendous quantity of excellent children's songs for schools. The
composer was born in Brooklyn, N. Y., in 1865 and makes his home
in New York. He started upon his musical career in the National
Conservatory, where he was awarded a free scholarship by Dr.
Dvořák.
II
If, thus early, it may be said that the many musical ideals and
influences which have struck root in America have centred and
blended in any single composer, that composer is Frederic Ayres.
The true eclecticism which constitutes the latest phase of American
development, to have value for musical art, must necessarily involve
the complete submergence and assimilation of hitherto unreconciled
influences in a single new creative personality. Of such a new and
authentic American electicism Ayres stands forth so clearly as the
protagonist that a claim for him in this rôle will hardly be successfully
disputed. This occupation of such a position is, however, a purely
spontaneous circumstance, arrived at by obedience to no theory, but
only through creative impulse.
Without being unduly extravagant, informal, though logical, as a
formalist, Ayres commands his many qualities for the expressive
purposes of a spirit eager for the discovery and revelation of perfect
beauty. Such a perfection of beauty he by no means always finds;
indeed, his earlier experimental excursions not infrequently left the
ground rough over which he trod. And even at the present time he is
only entering upon a full conscious command of his material. Only a
keen sensitiveness to every significant influence, European and
American, could have led to the development of so rounded and
typical a musical character. Taught, in the first instance, by Stillman-
Kelley and Arthur Foote, his broad sympathies led him early to blend
the German, French, and American spirit through a devotion to no
less striking a group of composers than Bach, Beethoven, Stephen
Foster, and César Franck. A constant contact with natural scenes of
the greatest grandeur, in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, has
undoubtedly exercised a broadening effect upon his conceptions.
While he has not employed native aboriginal themes, or even made
a special study of them, many of his melodies have a strong Indian
cast, which is difficult to explain except on the basis of some
psychological aspect of climatic and other environmental influences.
The trio for piano, violin, and 'cello (opus 13) abounds in supreme
qualities of freshness and spontaneity. Taken as a whole, it is typical
of the manner in which the composer rises, easily and blithely, out of
the ancient sea of tradition into the blue of a new and happier
musical day. The work was first heard on April 18, 1914, at a concert
of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, and has since had various
public performances. The violin sonata (opus 15) is of great beauty
and rich in characteristic qualities, and presents an interesting study
in formal originality. A piano sonata (opus 16) and a 'cello sonata
(opus 17) have been completed. Ayres has written songs of
surpassing loveliness and originality. His 'Sea Dirge,' a setting of
Shakespeare's 'Full Fathom Five,' from 'The Tempest,' reveals a
poignancy of imagination and a perception and apprehension of
beauty seldom attained by any composer. Other highly poetic
Shakespeare songs are 'Where the Bee Sucks,' 'Come Unto These
Yellow Sands,' 'It was a Lover and His Lass.' A richly colored vocal
work is 'Sunset Wings' (opus 8), after Rossetti. 'Two Fugues' (opus
9) and 'Fugue Fantasy' (opus 12), for piano, of American
suggestiveness, Indian and otherwise, are striking tours de force of
originality. The 'Songs of the Seeonee Wolves' (opus 10), from
Kipling's 'Jungle Book,' are vivid presentations of the composer's
conception of the call of the wild. Ayres was born at Binghamton, N.
Y., March 17, 1876, and lives in Colorado Springs, Col.
One of the most keenly individualized of American composers, and

one of the most daring and original in the employment of ultra-
modern resource, is Arthur Shepherd, formerly of Salt Lake City and
at present connected with the New England Conservatory of Music
in Boston, Mass. His work, as a whole, is almost unique in American
music in the completeness of its departure from the styles of any
individual composers who may earlier have stimulated or influenced
him. The dominating factor in his work, almost from the beginning,
has been the will to express himself in a certain manner, wholly his
own, and on this positive ground extraneous influences have been
able to gain but a scant foothold. Of the Brahms and Wagner
influences which he acknowledges, the former can be traced only in
his earliest pages, and the latter seems nowhere to appear. His
harmony would make any other German than a radical Strauss
enthusiast shrink with horror, so sweeping and so subversive of the
usual order are its departures from the accepted scheme, while, on
the other hand, it can be said to be very little suggestive of the
characteristic harmonic quality of the modern French school.
Especially it eschews the luscious and velvety harmonic surface of
Debussy. In both melody and harmony, the saccharine—even the
merely sweet—the sensuous and the languorous, Shepherd
dethrones with the sedulous intolerance of a Pfitzner and, like that
composer, exalts in its place a clear and luminous spiritual beauty.
Otherwise he works in lines that cut, in chords that bite and grip, and
rises often to great nobility of conception and expression. In his
latest works, 'The Nuptials of Attila,' a dramatic overture after George
Meredith, and a 'Humoreske' for pianoforte and orchestra, he has
fought against the tendency toward over-complexity manifested in
his earlier work, and has gained a greater clarity of harmonic texture.
The pianoforte sonata in F minor (opus 4), with which the composer
took the National Federation of Musical Clubs' prize in the 1909
competition, is a massive work of great breadth of conception. The
second movement shows Shepherd's peculiar power of evoking
deeply subjective moods; it presents an almost ghostly quality of the
elegiac and has much of nobility. The third movement makes bold
use of a cowboy song and has a magnificent original melody of a
broad Foster-like quality, but the composer holds 'nationalism' to be
merely incidental to a broader artistic function. He rises to an
unusual naturalness in this movement, which, like the others, is
highly virile. 'The City in the Sea,' a 'poem for orchestra, mixed
chorus, and baritone solo,' on Bliss Carman's poem, is a large work
of extraordinary modernity and individuality. 'Five Songs' (opus 7)
are worthily representative and contain much of beauty. There are
also 'Theme and Variations' (opus 1), and 'Mazurka' (opus 2), for
pianoforte, and a mixed chorus with baritone solo, 'The Lord Hath
Brought again Zion.'
Noble Kreider, through the possession of that more exalted sense of

beauty and flashing quality of inspiration which illuminates only the
rarer musical souls of any period, takes his place with those in the
forefront of American musical advance. In this capacity, however, his
place is less that of a militant than that of a standard-bearer of ideals
of beauty. He has the further distinction of being the only American
composer, of first rank at least, who has found the complete
expression of his personality and ideals through the medium of the
piano, and who, as an inevitable corollary of this circumstance, has
more intimately and sympathetically than any other made the piano
speak its own proper language. American composers write seriously,
and sometimes admirably, for the piano now and then; Kreider lives
and breathes through it. It responds to him sensitively and with its
whole soul, as it did to Chopin. It has become identified with his
imaginative quality.
Chopin has, indeed, been the strongest influence in the formation of

Kreider's musical character, and while, in his earlier work, nothing
was more evident than this fact, in his later nothing is more evident
than the emergence of his own individuality. So distinct, however, is
Kreider's personality that it is unmistakably present even in much of
his earliest music. A mystery and sombreness, as of an influence of
the North, foreign to Chopin, dominates certain of his moods; and
then Kreider is more of a pagan than Chopin was.
The 'Two Legends' (opus 1) have beauty and inspiration, if not a

particular distinction of modernity. The 'Ballad' (opus 3) is of heroic
and Ossianic cast, restless, like much of Kreider's music, with
contained passion—a passion which at times flashes forth in
unexpected lightning strokes. A 'Nocturne' (opus 4) is haunting in
melody and of an almost Oriental languor. The 'Impromptu' (opus 5)
is a darting and upspringing inspiration, with a middle section of
great lyrical warmth and beauty. Opus 6 comprises two 'Studies,'
both containing a very high quality of beauty with special technical
interest. 'Six Preludes' (opus 7) are characteristic, at times
Chopinesque, and always fresh and inspirational. The 'Prelude'
(opus 8) is a broad and powerful processional of great cumulative
dynamic force. 'Three Moods' (opus 9) show the full emergence of
the composer's individuality; the second, 'The Valley of White
Poppies,' is a rarely perfect and ecstatic inspiration. Opus 10
contains a 'Poem' and a 'Valse Sentimentale.' There is also an
unpublished work for 'cello and piano and a very original 'Nocturne.'
Kreider's development has been chiefly self-directed. His birthplace
and home is Goshen, Indiana.
Benjamin Lambord is a composer whose work reflects in a striking

manner the evolutionary upheaval which, in the present generation,
has carried the nation from the end of the old epoch to the beginning
of the new. There could not well be a closer fidelity to the old
German musical spirit and style, especially as pertains to the Lied,
than in Lambord's early songs. Even that restricted medium,
however, lent itself to all levels of creative impotence or dignity, and if
there is a particular distinguishing characteristic in Lambord's work in
that style, it is to be found in a peculiar depth of sincerity, an
adumbration of personality yet to emerge in individualized
expression. This quality will be observed in the first number,
Christina Rossetti's 'Remember or Forget,' of the composer's opus 1,
which consists of three songs. 'Four Songs,' opus 4, fall under the
same dispensation; all indicate a leaning to poetry of high character.
A trio for violin, 'cello, and piano (opus 5) from the same period
shows good impulse and bold and well-defined themes, but is
conventional in harmony and structure generally. An elaborate 'Valse
Fantastique' (opus 6) shows a similar energy and boldness of
contour. The modern musical ear must search diligently, however, to
discover its fantastic element. 'Two Songs' (opus 7), on poems of
Heine and Rückert, are deeply felt, and 'Lehn deine Wang' in
particular manifests a tendency to enrich the older medium.
With opus 10, 'Two Songs with Orchestra,' however, the composer
stands forth in a wholly new light, as an ultra-modern of exceptional
powers, and with a subtlety, an imagination and a rich and varied
color-sense of which the earlier works can be said to give no
appreciable indication. The second of these songs, 'Clytie,' on a
poem by André Chénier, is a highly mature expression in the ultra-
modern Germanic idiom, technically speaking, though in its musical
quality there is much of subtle individuality. The voice part is
managed with an appreciation of both delicacy and power, as well as
the requirements of artistic diction, and the accompaniment is a web
of sensitive modulation and dissonance pregnant with sensuous
beauty at every point. The upbuilding of the climax is masterly. The
song was presented with much success at a concert of the Modern
Music Society in New York in the season of 1913-14, when it was
sung by Miss Maggie Teyte. At the same concert, under the
composer's direction, was heard a number from his opus 11, 'Verses
from Omar,' for chorus and orchestra. Here Lambord adds to his
expressional scheme an effective pseudo-Oriental quality, gaining an
insistent atmosphere with very simple means. Particularly interesting
is the way in which he has varied the manner of employment of his
main theme, showing a keen sense of thematic organization.
Peculiarly gratifying is the a cappella rendering of the lines beginning
'But ah! that Spring should vanish with the rose' after the powerful
climax for chorus and orchestra combined. The composer also has
an 'Introduction and Ballet' (opus 8) for orchestra, a work of
considerable elaborateness and much rhythmic and melodic variety,
one which shows his thorough grasp of orchestral technique. With
the nationalistic school Lambord has nothing in common. He is,
however, a native New Englander, being born in Portland, Me., in
1879, and his earlier studies in composition were pursued under
MacDowell at Columbia University. Later he travelled in France and
Germany and studied orchestration with Vidal in Paris.
III
In the modification of the romantic through the influence of the ultra-
modern school, the musical development of Campbell-Tipton
presents a circumstance which is typical of the experience of many
American composers whose formative period coincides with the
present transitional epoch. The style of the composer's earlier work
rested upon a broad Germanic basis, modern, yet scarcely having
passed from the modernity of Liszt to that of Strauss. His work in the
earlier vein is vigorous, structurally firm, definite in its melodic
contours, and warm in its harmonic color. Force of personality
asserts itself, even if the means employed are not highly
individualized and lean overheavily upon tradition. To this period
belong 'Ten Piano Compositions' (opus 1); 'Romanza Appassionata'
(opus 2), for violin and piano; 'Tone Poems' (opus 3), for voice and
piano; two 'Legends,' and other works, especially songs. The
culminating expression of this period is the 'Sonata Heroic,' for
piano, a work of solidity and brilliance, in one broadly conceived
movement. It is quasi-programmatical and is founded upon two
themes, representing the 'Hero' and the 'Ideal,' the latter in particular
being a melody of much warmth and beauty. These are variously
interwoven in the development section, and lead to a return upon the
second theme and a climax upon the heroic theme. The work has
had various public performances in America and Europe. 'Four Sea
Lyrics,' for tenor with piano accompaniment, on poems by Arthur
Symons, belong, broadly speaking, to the period of the sonata. They
are works of distinguished character, 'The Crying of Water' being
especially poignant in its expressiveness. The somewhat elaborately
worked out 'Suite Pastorale' (opus 27), for violin and piano, and 'Two
Preludes' (opus 26), mark no particular departure in style, except
that the second of the latter is so modern as to have no bar divisions.
With the 'Nocturnale' and 'Matinale' (opus 28), especially the former,
comes a marked departure toward impressionism and ultra-modern
harmonic effect, with a gain in color and a corresponding loss in
structural quality. The 'Four Seasons' (opus 29), symbolizing four
seasons of human life, bear out the tendency toward impressionism
and harmonic emancipation, and at the same time seek a greater
substantiality of design and treatment. There is an 'Octave Étude'
(opus 30), for piano, and a 'Lament' (opus 33), for violin and piano.
Among other songs are 'A Spirit Flower,' 'Three Shadows,' 'A Fool's
Soliloquy,' 'The Opium Smoker,' and 'Invocation.' An opera is in
process of completion. Campbell-Tipton was born in Chicago, in
1877, and lives at present in Paris.
Arthur Nevin would be deemed an out-and-out romanticist were it not

that the authorship of so significant a work as an Indian opera,
drawing freely upon Indian songs for thematic material, places him in
the ranks of those who have proved the existence of available
sources of aboriginal folk-music in America. Nevin is not, however, a
nationalist, avowed or otherwise, but with the freedom and
experimental eclecticism which has come to be so general a
characteristic with American composers, he is ready to draw upon
any promising new source of musical suggestion or inspiration. The
opera in question, 'Poia,' text by Randolph Hartley, is based upon a
sun legend of the Blackfeet Indians of Montana, with whom the
composer spent the summers of 1903 and 1904 collecting material.
'Poia' was produced at the Royal Opera, Berlin, Dr. Karl Muck
conducting, on April 23, 1910, under stormy circumstances, due to
the violent opposition of an anti-American element in the audience.
The composer was, nevertheless, many times recalled at the close.
The orchestral score is elaborate and modern in instrumental
treatment. While Nevin acknowledges Wagner as the chief formative
influence upon his musical character, the music of 'Poia' presents
little or nothing in the way of obvious Wagnerisms. It is freely lyrical,
often very melodious, and, where not boldly characterized by Indian
themes, is built on modern German lines. A second opera, 'Twilight,'
in one act, has not been performed.
'The Djinns,' a cantata on the metrical fancy of the same name by

Victor Hugo, won, with the a cappella chorus, 'The Fringed Gentian'
(Bryant), the divided first prize of the Mendelssohn Club of
Cleveland, Ohio, in 1912. The cantata is composed for mixed chorus
accompanied by two pianos. The composer has chosen not to follow
in his musical rhythms the metrical caprice of the poet, but to employ
the words freely in a piece of modern musical tone-painting,
following the single emotional crescendo and decrescendo of which
the poem consists. The work is thoroughly representative of the
restless energy of Nevin's muse and contains examples of the
sustained lyricism and melodic and rhythmic charm which
characterize much of his music. The miniature orchestral suite, 'Love
Dreams,' had its first performance, under the composer's direction,
at the Peterboro Festival in 1914. Other works of the composer are a
pianoforte suite, 'Edgeworth Hills,' 'Two Impromptus' for piano, two
mixed choruses on poems by Longfellow, 'At Daybreak' and
'Chrysoar,' and many songs of much charm, including a very direct
and sincere piece of expression, 'Love of a Day,' the well-known
'Egyptian Boat Song,' and the exquisite 'Indian Lullaby' on a
Blackfeet Indian melody. A piano trio in C major and a string quartet
in D minor are in manuscript.
Charles Wakefield Cadman, despite his sympathetic and successful
entrance—successful, very likely, because sympathetic—into the
field of Indian music, can scarcely be justly classed as a downright
nationalist. None of the reputed 'nationalist' composers of America,
for that matter, will bear strict analysis as such, for in all cases their
compositions upon aboriginal or other primitive melodies peculiar to
America constitute but one department of their endeavor, and
represent but one element of their ideal. Cadman, nevertheless, had
he composed nothing beyond the famous Indian song, 'From the
Land of the Sky-Blue Water,' would have done enough to prove the
most important and valuable contention included in the nationalist
creed, which is that aboriginal American folk-songs may be a
stimulus to the making of good music of a new sort, and that there is
nothing inherent in Indian melodies to repulse popular sympathy.
Like other American nationalists, Cadman is at heart an eclectic. The
nationalism of Grieg, Tschaikowsky, and Puccini interests him, but
not so much as the American freedom of choice.
The song mentioned is one of a set of four which first brought the
composer into public notice, in 1907. The others are 'Far Off I Hear a
Lover's Flute,' 'The Moon Drops Low,' and 'The White Dawn is
Stealing.' In his treatment of these Indian themes he does not
accentuate their aboriginal character, but enfolds them naturally in a
normally modern harmonic matrix, with very pleasing effect. These
songs were followed by 'Sayonara,' a Japanese romance, for one or
two voices; 'Three Songs to Odysseus,' with orchestral
accompaniment (opus 52); 'Idyls of the South Sea'; and 'Idealized
Indian Themes,' for the piano—revealing various phases of the
composer's versatility and fertile fancy. A representative recent work
is the 'Trio in D Major' (opus 56), for violin, violoncello, and piano, of
which the leading characteristics are melodic spontaneity and
freshness of musical impulse. Everywhere are buoyancy, directness
of expression, motion, but little of thematic involution or harmonic or
formal sophistication. It is the trio of a lyrist; from the standpoint of
modern chamber music it might be called naïve, but the strength,
sincerity and beauty of its melodies claim, and sometimes compel,
one's attention. There are strong occasional suggestions of Indian
influence, probably unintentional on the composer's part, as there is
no evidence revealing this work as one of nationalistic intention. The
trio has been widely performed.
Cadman has a completed three-act Indian opera, 'The Land of Misty

Water,' libretto by Francis La Flesche and Nelle Richmond Eberhart.
Forty-seven actual Indian melodies form its thematic basis. Other
works are 'The Vision of Sir Launfal,' a cantata for male voices; 'The
Morning of the Year,' a cycle for vocal quartet; and many works in
various small forms. Cadman won the second prize in its class in the
National Federation of Musical Clubs Prize Competition of 1911 with
a song, 'An Indian Nocturne,' and one of the 'Four Indian Songs' was
awarded a prize in a Pittsburgh Art Society competition.
The recent sudden appearance of John Alden Carpenter among

American composers, with work of singularly well-defined
individuality and notable maturity of style, is a phenomenon which
calls to mind Minerva springing full-grown from the head of Jove.
Except for a sonata for violin and piano, Carpenter's published work
consists wholly of songs. The first set, 'Eight Songs for a Medium
Voice,' show forth at once the unique personality of the composer. It
is Carpenter's distinction, in a sense, to have begun where others
have left off. He is a personality of the new musical time with its new
and transformed outlook upon the art. The margin of advance gained
by the most recent developments of modernity, more especially from
the French standpoint, becomes his main territory, while it would be
well-nigh impossible, from his work, to suspect that the old ground of
tradition and formula had ever existed. Far from his modernity
meaning complexity, it is attained generally by means of a veritably
startling simplicity. It is the principles of modernity which interest him,
and he seeks the simplest means of their exemplification. Above all,
he takes high rank in the sensitive perception of beauty. These
characteristics are all manifest in the 'Eight Songs' which comprise
the richly beautiful 'The Green River' (Lord Douglas), a limpid setting
of Stevenson's 'Looking-Glass River,' a setting of the Blake 'Cradle
Song' which combines science and poetry in a remarkable degree in
view of the simplicity of treatment, the somewhat overweighted 'Little
Fly' (Blake), the lusty Dorsetshire dialect song, 'Dont Ceäre'
(Barnes), a crisp interpretation of Stevenson's 'The Cock Shall Crow,'
and characteristic settings of Waller's 'Go, Lovely Rose' and
Herrick's 'Bid Me to Live.' Of four highly modernized and colorful
Verlaine songs, Le Ciel and 'Il Pleure dans mon Cœur,' attain the
most modern scheme of musical thought with astonishingly simple
means; the Chanson d'Automne is sympathetically set, and
'Dansons la Gigue' is sufficiently sardonic. 'Four Songs for a Medium
Voice' contain the mysterious tone-painting 'Fog Wraiths' (Mildred
Howells), 'To One Unknown' (Helen Dudley), and two poems by
Wilde, Les Silhouettes and 'Her Voice.'
In the somewhat elaborate settings of poems from Tagore's 'Gitanjali'

Carpenter wrestles with the problem of setting prose poetry to music,
often with felicitous effect and yet not always convincingly, despite
the intrinsic beauty of his musical ideas. The violin sonata in its
themes, its strikingly individual harmonic intuitions, and its structure
generally, is of great beauty and interest. The composer was born in
Illinois in 1876, graduated at Harvard and studied music with
Bernard Ziehn and Sir Edward Edgar. In 1897 he entered the
business established by his father in Chicago and has since directed
it.
An American ultra-modernist of extensive attainments, but whose

work has as yet come very little into public attention, is T. Carl
Whitmer. In an age when sensationalism and sensuousness have
predominated in the taste of the musical world it is not surprising to
find but slight public progress being made by a composer whose
whole tendency is in the direction of a highly clarified spirituality, as
is the case with this composer. Whitmer has a spiritual kinship with
that small group of composers (Arthur Shepherd in America, Hans
Pfitzner in Germany, and d'Indy in France may be included in it) who,
however different they may be in musical individuality, unite in
banishing utterly from music not only the vulgar but also even the
more distinguished aspects of the sensuously sweet, which chiefly
and most quickly (except for the rhythmic element) recommends
music to the multitude the world over. Whitmer's music is
psychologically subtle and spiritually rarefied; in color it corresponds
to the violet end of the spectrum. It shuns realistic and elemental
qualities and seeks an ethereal expression which gives it not
infrequently a sense of over-earthliness. Its salient characteristics
are well represented in a soprano song, 'The Fog Maiden,' an
achievement of extraordinary originality and distinction of mood.
Among the composer's many other songs are the scintillating and
crisp 'My Lord Comes Riding,' the poignantly expressive 'Song from
the Gardener's Lodge,' the sanely ultra-modern 'Just To-night,' 'Song
from Pippa Passes,' 'My Star,' 'Ah! Love, but a Day,' 'Cloud and
Wind,' 'Nausicaa,' 'Willowwood,' 'Ballad of Trees and the Master,' 'I
Will Twine the Violet,' 'Christmas Carol,' and 'Our Birth Is but a
Sleep.' Whitmer's manuscripts include no less surprising an offering
than six 'Mysteries,' or spiritual music-dramas, 'The Creation,' 'The
Covenant,' 'The Nativity,' 'The Temptation,' 'Mary Magdalene,' and
'The Passion,' upon which works the composer has published a little
essay entitled 'Concerning a National Spiritual Drama.' For chorus
with orchestra is an 'Elegiac Rhapsody,' and for orchestra alone a
set of 'Miniatures,' originally for piano, of which 'Sunrise' is the most
important. There are an 'Athenian' sonata for violin and piano,
various organ works, anthems, and women's choruses, and a
number of 'Symbolisms'—readings of original texts with piano
accompaniment.
IV
William Henry Humiston has not given out a large quantity of work,
but all that he has done bears the stamp of a genuine personality
and indicates a composer of rich and sincere musical feeling. One

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In the somewhat elaborate settings of poems from Tagore's 'Gitanjali'

An American ultra-modernist of extensive attainments, but whose

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