I find it hard to explain how completely isolated I was.
I had no friends, and didn’t know how to go about making friends. My community had always been my family: my brothers and sisters, really. But John was in the Air Force – had been for six years – and in 1960 Margaret had gone off to Catholic University. That left Joe, Barbara, and Paul – respectively, 15, 13, and 11 – not much company for an 18-year-old, and in any case I didn’t see them much. Working nights, I left the house before 4 p.m. and returned sometime after midnight. That meant I was not there for supper, nor was I up when they had breakfast, and during the week they had lunch at school. And both my parents had jobs at that time, my mother having gone back to work the previous year after 23 years of child-rearing, and dad was selling real estate for Uncle Lewie. I scarcely saw anyone except on weekends. At least, that’s the way I remember it.
My life had been reduced to a few aimless midday hours, with nothing to do and no one to talk to. Looking back, I can see that I might have used that time to advantage, if I had had an aim, but I did not.
It’s easy to forget, today, how few were the resources we had in those days. Radio was on a continual downhill slide, declining from the source of local news into an invisible jukebox programmed from far away, prepackaged without local content. Television consisted of the three network stations out of Philadelphia and the educational TV station in Wilmington, Delaware, a UHF station that didn’t seem to have much to offer. It would be nearly 20 years before the personal computer began to enter people’s homes. There was no internet, no social media, no email. In 1964, we were on our own.
Vineland was a small town with a Carnegie library. That library, and whatever books we had in the house, and the Saturday Evening Post and Readers’ Digest, were all the intellectual resources available to me. We did have one bookstore downtown, which I often browsed, but in those days I had to think carefully before spending, even on books. Prices look incredibly cheap by later standards, but that is because inflation progressively eroded the value of the currency. In 1964 an average paperback cost a quarter, maybe 35 cents, an expensive volume like Winston Churchill’s memoirs of World War II $1.25 apiece – but in 1964 I was making $1.50 an hour. Besides, since I had never had money to spend, spending it did not come easily. And, I was giving half my pay to my parents.
Nor was I in any way prepared to make good use of my time. Instead, I spent the few hours between sleep and work reading history and fiction until it was time for me to suit up for work: white pants, white shirt, white bib apron extending nearly to my ankles, rubber boots. Then I would re-enter the world that I had drifted into, a world that otherwise would have remained forever closed to my imagination.
Nothing in my background fits into easy categories.
- Vineland itself was neither city nor suburb nor country. Not quite a farm town, it was very much aware of how different it was from the neighboring cites of Bridgeton and Millville, basically factory towns. Vineland had begun life in 1861 as a planned community. The original one-mile square boro and the surrounding township had merged a few years back, to create a city of 68 square miles, including entire farms, all within a few miles of the central business district. Neither flesh nor fish nor fowl, Vineland had pretensions. Like me, it didn’t quite fit with its surroundings.
- Then there was the matter of class. My father was a farmer, so we were usually cash-strapped, but this didn’t lead us to identify with the working class. Farmers are neither labor nor management, but both. They may be dependent upon weather, market conditions and a thousand other intangibles, but they are no one’s employees; their independence is very real, and don’t think they don’t know it.
- And culturally, was I middle-class or peasant? I was pulled both ways. My parents were not college-educated but they were not ignorant. They were neither rich nor poor, but middle-class in a way that was taken for granted in postwar America. They had grown up in the Depression; they knew what it was like to be unable to find a job, and they were grateful that the world had changed. they shared many values and attitudes, and yet in some ways they were on opposite sides of a cultural divide that they made no effort to bridge.
My mother’s family was solid town-oriented middle class. Her father, having begun life wanting to be an artist, was a successful painting contractor whose children went to the Catholic school and therefore received a first-rate education. (And a lifelong loyalty to the church.) Mom had grown up in a house with genteel manners and wished her children to be refined, cultured. I was bookish, and I had strands within me that apparently remembered upper class life. (As one example, sometimes the shirts I wore to school took French cuffs, and I remember enjoying wearing cufflinks.) But I was well aware of the civil war between my mother and my father, and I had other strands that were on dad’s side.
His family were farmers. He grew up among animals and farm work; he went to the public schools, with Catholicism being mostly a Sunday thing, I guess. Again, he was not ignorant, not uneducated, and a long way from stupid. But he wasn’t particularly verbal – certainly not like his wife and children – and he didn’t care about using correct grammar. He spoke like the people he had grown up among, even if his mental reach far exceeded theirs. (In that, he was something like Lincoln, and I can see now that in some ways he may have identified with the man on his birthday he had born, and whose surname was his own middle name.) Dad was so habitually contemptuous of things that he considered impractical or highfalutin, and anything that he considered affected would certainly qualify. Yet, so strange, to find a high school book report he had written on Ivanhoe. I try to imagine him fitting it alongside the rest of the life he was leading. Parts of me identified with the manners and expectations of French aristocrats, but other parts identified with pioneers and woodsmen.
So there I was: Some threads encouraged me to adopt my mother’s values; others sided with dad’s, and will others took advantage of my reading to align me with values and attitudes derived from neither one. How else did a middle-class son of Italians parents come to identify with the English? (If Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans agreed on any one thing, it was distrust of England.) Why else would I have been drawn to Winston Churchill, as unerringly as to Lincoln or Kennedy? None of that came from my parents, or my schooling, or from the people around me. If I was not resonating to invisible, unsuspected inner threads, where did it come from?
Maybe from past lives?
Years later, my wife would say, “You are here, now. Even if you were somebody else before, what does it matter now? What difference does it make?” I didn’t know why it mattered. I only knew that it did. It mattered a lot.