Growing up Catholic in rural Indiana in the 1960’s was, well, challenging to say the least. At the time, when my family moved to a small community from Fort Wayne, there just weren’t a lot of options if you wanted to place your kids in a private school. Fort Wayne on the other hand had an entire Catholic school system from first grade through college. In our new, little hometown we had Sacred Heart, a one through six grade school with maybe 200 students attached to a modest church. I fell in love with it immediately.
Like most parochial schools, Sacred Heart had a uniform policy. White buttoned up blouses and a pinafore dress for the girls and light blue shirts with little, navy blue clip-on bow ties for the boys. The reason we all dressed alike, as was explained to me like a hundred times, was to eliminate any class system from developing. We were all to be equal, regardless of our family’s position in the community. I think it also eliminated a lot of individual expression as well but as you might imagine, Catholic institutions in the Heartland in 1961 were hardly beacons for going your own way. In simpler terms, it was pretty darn strict. There were a lot of rules and consequences if you broke them.
Rule number one, never, ever, show up at school without your little blue bow tie. The punishment? The complete and total humiliation of having to wear a large, bright red ribbon in your tie’s place for the entire day. The shear horror of that possibility could keep you up at night and ensure that your bow tie never left your sight. So, naturally, one morning I found myself walking down the hall to my classroom and some kid next to me said “Hey, where’s your tie?” I instantly grabbed my throat and panicked. Sweet Jesus! I ran back to the Boy’s Room where I had just been and scoured the stalls. I looked everywhere but no little blue bow tie! “OK, OK, calm down” I thought to myself. Let’s be a man about this. I decided to be grown up, do the right thing and face it. So, I turned and ran out the door all the way home.
It was cold outside so I took my stocking cap out of my coat pocket and put on my head. It was one of those tall jobs with a little red beany ball on top. I only lived a couple of blocks from school. I knew my mother would still be home so I didn’t dare go inside. I would wait until she left to go to work or the store or wherever mothers go when you are supposed to be in school. I didn’t have anything else to do so I started to circle the house. Later my mother would tell me that she saw the little red beany ball go by the window more than once. When I got to the backyard, our beagle Freckles started going nuts, barking and pulling at her line. The more I tried to quiet her the more she went crazy. Then, I heard my mother’s voice, even chillier than the air outside say “Paul Stewart?” Now its common knowledge that when you are a kid and your mom addresses you by your first and middle name, its never a good thing. I turned around and in her hand was my little blue bow tie.
My parents would eventually have four boys. That was a pretty modest sized Catholic family in those days. Heck, I had an aunt that had ten or eleven children, I lost track after a while. We would only visit them once or twice a year so I don’t think I ever saw her when she wasn’t with child. Anyway, my folks were on a pretty tight budget raising four growing boys and there wasn’t money for a lot of extras, like food. They would go to the Kroger every Friday night to buy the groceries. Not again on Saturday if they had forgotten something or the middle of the week. Friday, period. So, as you can imagine, when they got home from the store we were in Food Heaven. We would storm the kitchen and tear at the brown paper bags, grabbing cereal and milk and anything else that was edible. All the while, my father would sit in his recliner. A voice, from behind a newspaper would say ” Go ahead, eat it up. But when its gone, its gone.” We never listened though and by the time the next Thursday rolled around the cupboards were bare, and we were starving. But my parents never caved. They stood by their convictions and would not return to the store until Friday. You would be surprised by what you will eat when you are starving. Ketchup sandwiches, beets from dented cans, and the last remaining cereal box from the Variety Pack, Special K!
At Sacred Heart, in those days anyway, it seemed we went to Mass almost every morning before class. I calculated that in the six odd years I attended that school I must have gone to church over a thousand times. Not to mention going to Confession. Now, let’s face it, between the Mass time and the class time there wasn’t much time for sin. I went to mandatory confessions so often that I ran out of stuff to confess. About the only sins I could come up with were looking up girl’s dresses after they fainted in church because they forgot to eat breakfast and my selfish, gluttonous, candy habit.
When I was a kid, candy was the currency. Like cigarettes in prison, you could never have enough. On Halloween, one of the greatest kid holidays ever invented, second only to Christmas, we would trick or treat for two nights, filling up pillow cases with chocolate bars, Sweet Tarts, Milk Duds and Dots. Sometimes we would receive an apple or an orange from a well-meaning old lady. We would yank them out of our bags and shout ” Screw this!” and hurl them down the dark street as we ran wild in our sugar crazed madness. My favorite though, were Pixy Stix. Pure, flavored sugar in a festive, striped straw. I never shared them. One summer, I was doing a two week stretch at CYO Camp. That’s Catholic Youth Organization camp for those of you who never went. During those weeks your candy stash was your very lifeline. One of my barrack mates, a very annoying kid with a couple of teeth missing, had run out of money and candy prematurely and was bumming off of everyone else. I decided to fix his wagon but good. I opened up the bottom of one of my Pixy Stix and ate half of the yummy goodness inside. Then I took some sand I got from the shore of Lake Winniwhatever and poured it in the straw, closed it and turned it right side up. “Here” I said as I handed it to him. “Don’t ask me again”. He never did.
Believe it or not, Sacred Heart actually had a flag football team. We would play against all the big public schools in the area with names from dead presidents like Adams, McKinley and Lincoln. We got our asses kicked regularly. We were called the Vikings. The Sacred Heart Vikings, go figure. Our helmets were white with a an image of a little red Viking dude on the side. Later on, I read about the real Vikings and some of the kinds of things they did. Maybe if we could have played our games against villagers we might have won more too.
When I was in the Third grade my teacher was named Miss Summers. One Friday afternoon, we had just returned to class from the lunch room. Miss Summers was about to start History when someone opened the door and motioned her to join them in the hall. She was out there for some time as we sat quietly. When she returned she had a strange, almost sad expression. She announced that there would be an early release today and the buses were on their way. All of my classmates were excited. We were getting out early on a Friday. But I just kept looking at my teacher’s face.
When I arrived home the house was quiet. I walked slowly, until I found my mother, alone in the living room. She was just standing there, her back to me, looking out the picture window at the road. When she felt my presence, she turned around. I could see that she had been crying. That day was the first time I had ever seen my mom cry. It was Friday, November 22nd, 1963.
Somebody once said that ninety percent of Life is just showing up. A long parade of unremarkable, pleasant days that all seem to blend into one. I learned that particular day, that the other ten percent are the days you never forget.
PSW