The Roujet Symphony: An American Revelation in Four Movements

By Paul Reidinger

A great American story – a true American story – an intricate orchestration of themes intimate and grand: love and war, pioneers and politicians, medievals and moderns, charters and constitutions, names and blood, revolution and civil war, wealth and poverty, disappointment and determination, ambition and temptation, desire and deceit, high position and scandal, adultery and illegitimacy, suicide and cover-up, bitterness and recrimination and, last but not least, lawsuits and more lawsuits.

The boom-bust cycle of American dynasties tends to be abrupt, dizzying and spectacular, but never more so than in this chronicle, a blend of history, psychology, literary criticism, investigation and personal testament about a once-great American clan that crashed while still climbing, written by a descendant and survivor of that clan who never dreamed his ancestry was illuminated by so many dark stars or that he would ever undertake to write about it. But it was, and he did, and this is it, a heretofore untold tale of American history and the people who made it.

The text considers, among other matters, the public careers of U.S. Senator Alexander Wiley (R.-Wis., 1939-1963), U.S. Representative John J. Jenkins (R.-Wis., 1895-1909) and Justice Roujet Marshall of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin (1895-1918).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Reidinger
• Release date: May 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311661678

Paul Reidinger

Paul Reidinger is the author of several novels, including The Best Man, Good Boys, The City Kid, and The Bad American. His other books include a memoir, Lions in the Garden, a collection of essays and criticism Patchwork, and The Federalist Regained, an essay on the Constitution. He grew up in Wisconsin, was educated at Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and lives in San Francisco.

Book preview

Introduction: the Great Matter

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, the Russian writer Lev Tolstoy tells us at the outset of his great novel Anna Karenina, but he could as easily have written that every unhappy family keeps secrets, and the bigger and more dangerous those secrets, the more troubled the family. A family arranged around a powerful secret becomes a house divided against itself, and, as Lincoln and the Bible warn us, such a house cannot stand. It collapses or descends into strife. It becomes a battlefield, a war of all against all.

What follows is a seeking after the secret at the heart of my own unhappy family. The secret turned out to be a truth that had lain buried but un-dead for more than a century, waiting for someone to come along, find it and tell it.

That someone turned out to be me. I was summoned to the task. By ways and means still quite mysterious to me, I was appointed to tell the tale, and in telling it I have found myself to be, by turns, biographer, psychologist, eyewitness, journalist, literary critic, private investigator, accidental historian and giver of personal testament.

The artifact produced by these efforts – this book – is, in one respect, a work of original history that reaches from the deeps of the past to the living present. It rests on original research and, to a considerable extent, on primary sources that became available to me only through the good offices of family members. Even damaged families do not entirely lack for affection and support.

At the same time, the tale begins and ends with my own life. It could not be otherwise. There was no other way for me to tell this story than through my own experience, since my portal of entry was a curiosity about why the family I had grown up in had been so steeped in so much misery.

I am the only writer who could ever have written this book. Of that I am quite sure. I am lucky to be able to make such a statement, perhaps the most gratifying statement any writer can ever make. It seems likely to me that I know more about this matter – what I have come to think of as the Great Matter – than did even the people who lived the events it describes. I know more about those events and their long aftermath than anyone ever has or, maybe, ever will.

I regard it as a privilege and honor, or perhaps just a stroke of luck, that this large and important story presented itself to me as the most unexpected of visitors, knocking at the door, asking to be told. It is a difficult story but also a great one, a great American story, and my role as the writer of it has largely involved not getting in the way. The story, once it revealed itself to me – once its essential shape became apparent -- required no embellishment in the telling. It is a true story; it rests on facts, some of them quite sensational, insofar as I have been able to determine those facts.

•••

Fact is a small word for a large and complex subject. The facts in this narrative are like the pieces of a huge and intricate jigsaw puzzle. Many have gone missing, leaving gaps in the record, as we might expect in a story whose principal events occurred more than a century ago and several of whose players were cunning and sometimes quarrelsome lawyers and politicians of ruthless ambition.

While some of the attrition of facts is natural, in other words, some is not. Some facts were washed away by time and neglect, while others were intentionally hidden or destroyed. There was a concerted effort at concealment in the distant past. That concealment – itself a fact, as I believe I establish beyond any reasonable doubt -- is an important dimension of the story.

I cite my authorities when I make assertions of fact. Where facts go missing, I do speculate and interpolate, but I have tried to be careful, throughout the text, to indicate where I am speculating or interpolating. The words might, must, maybe, possibly, probably and seem turn up often in this connection. They signal the author’s awareness that a gap in the facts has appeared and that the powers of logic, deduction, common sense and, sometimes, intuition are being deployed in an attempt to fill that gap.

I have done my best not only to give the tale the sturdiest possible factual footings but also to identify those footings for those who might inquire further, or even for those who just want to be reassured that the author knows what he is talking about. At the same time, I have elected not to use footnotes. They bring too much scholarly clutter and place too great a burden on the readerly eye. Instead I have mentioned as many sources in the text proper as I judged that text could bear without congealing.

References that seemed too involved, clumsy or obscure for the text I have numbered and put in an appendix. The numbers correspond both to hyperlinks and, more or less, to wider regions of the text. There are no associated numbers in the text proper, but in addition to the hyperlinks there are words that can be easily searched, so that the reference can be aligned with the relevant section of text. This is by no means a perfect system, since in effect it offers numbered footnotes without guide numbers in the text. But the hyperlinks are, I hope, a serviceable substitute, and my method does perhaps preserve some fluidity in the telling of a long and complex tale while discreetly establishing the factual bases for the events recounted and personalities described.

The many photographs run with the text and appear in it at relevant points. They are not otherwise identified or linked.

•••

If adherence to the facts, to the extent that they can be established, is an aspect of honesty, so too is fairness. I have done my best to do justice to the many actors in this tale, despite my own, often strong, feelings about some of them and their deeds. I do not pretend to be dispassionate or impartial about these figures, but I have tried to see them as others might have seen them and as they might have seen themselves. I have tried to be empathetic if not exactly sympathetic.

•••

One night in 2015, as I was in the midst of composing this tale, my grandmother Doris – the heart of the story, the eye of a hurricane that blew for more than 40 years -- paid me a visit in a vivid dream. I last saw her not long before she died, more than a quarter-century before, and she had been a very old woman then, past 90 – but in the dream she was much younger, younger indeed than she’d ever been in the nearly 30 years I’d known her. She appeared to be in her mid-40s, with her dark hair just beginning to go gray.

And she was glad to see me, visibly glad, her face flushed with a gladness I’d never seen while she was alive. She’d never seemed glad about anything in life; I’d never had the impression she was glad to see me. She’d been polite and gentle with me, and kind enough, but I’d never felt any real warmth coming from her. Generally she seemed to be elsewhere. Her thoughts and her heart roamed elsewhere, and I, one grandchild among many, was an afterthought, an intermittent occurence. I didn’t mind; I didn’t think much of it. It was all I’d ever known from her and of her. I expected nothing else. What I took to be her benign indifference was a constant of my ordinary world.

Yet there she was, Doris, in a dream, glad to see me, even smiling. Those details struck me. I don’t remember much else of the dream, but I remember being aware that she knew of this project. She knew what I was doing, and she approved of it. She knew that, however belatedly, I was coming to her rescue. She knew that I had happened upon her story and would tell it. She knew that her story, lost and buried for so many years, for decades, would be told at last. The truth would be told at last.

I. Cold War

The author in the winter of 1962. I have just turned three. The Cuban missile crisis lies some months in the future, to be followed by the birth of a brother, the assassination of President Kennedy, and kindergarten. (Author archive.)

One winter morning long ago, my kindergarten self awoke to learn that the temperature outside our little house in our little Wisconsin river town was 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Below. And that was the air temperature, not the wind chill. In the mid-1960s, wind chill factors were not yet calculated, though anyone who’d felt an icy winter wind blowing straight down from the north into his face knew what wind chill was. It needed no explanation. It was self-explanatory. Such cold chafed and lacerated, it could split your lip and take your breath away, and it could be dangerous. If given the chance, it could kill you.

Even in a part of the world on familiar terms with bitterly cold weather – in a part of the world where, as in the wastes of Siberia, it was not unusual for air temperatures to remain below zero for days at a time in the depths of January and February – a reading of 30 below zero was notable. It was not an everyday occurrence. Ten below was a common enough occurrence, twenty below was not unheard-of, but thirty below was exceptional. It was exceptionally cold. It was severely cold. It made the news. It brought warnings. It meant that my father surely would be deploying his block heater, a lamp-like electrical device he sometimes fitted under the hood of his car overnight so that the engine had a sporting chance of starting in the morning, and even that might not be enough when the cold became historic.

I had personally selected the car for him a few years before. We had walked onto the showroom floor of a dealership in the nearby town of Chippewa Falls, and I’d immediately seen something I’d liked.

That one, I’d said, pointing at a champagne-colored 1963 Ford Galaxie 500 with four doors. He bought it.

The bad weather did not mean that school was canceled. School was rarely if ever canceled in those days, and certainly not for cold. In all the years I spent going to school in my native town, only a handful of times at most was school ever canceled because of weather. And that weather was always snow.

In very heavy snowfalls, the plows could fall behind, and roads, especially country lanes, could become blocked. A fair number of students in the school system lived on outlying farms along those lanes. If the snow were heavy enough, school buses could not collect and deliver these rural passengers, and there was no point holding classes for students who weren’t there. We called those rare days snow days. They were sometimes speculated about and often hoped for, but they almost never actually occurred. One way or another, people almost always got themselves to school. The pioneer spirit still abided then, I would say, a certain sense of hardiness. In our time, school is sometimes called off because of rainstorms or wind.

On that gelid morning, as on every other morning, I walked the four blocks to my school, Arlington Heights Elementary School – a public school, first in the series of public schools I attended in my 13-year career as a public-school boy. In that time and place, public schools were good schools, each as good as all the others, and you went to the one closest to you, often by walking. Little children first learned about democracy by walking to school. The intense campaigns waged by today’s urban parents to get their offspring into the best possible public schools – or, failing that, into such private ones as they can afford – were then unknown, and if they had been known they would have been regarded as unseemly, a sign of some terrible social failure.

Out the front door I went that frigid morning. I would have made my way down the icy concrete steps, turned left at the sidewalk (lined by elm trees soon to be felled by an outbreak of Dutch elm disease) and walked one block to the corner, the dry snow crunching like gravel under my boots. Snow in extreme cold becomes a kind of parched grit.

At the corner, I would have stopped and looked both ways before crossing the street, as I had been taught to do. Pedestrians in those days took account of cars and regarded them with wariness. They did not assume that, by some magical operation of law, they were invincible and absolutely entitled to proceed without so much as a glance at traffic.

Having crossed, I would have turned right and walked a short block to the stop lights at busy Brackett Avenue. There I would have waited for the Walk sign before continuing two more longish blocks past the National Guard Armory, with its World War II-era tank sitting in the middle of a snowfield that was, in summer, the front lawn. Moments later I would have reached the brick school building and its special entrance for kindergarteners.

At that early stage of my life, I thought nothing of the bad weather. I knew the route, and snapshots in photo albums tell me that I would have been well outfitted in a down parka with hood and scarf, insulated snow pants, insulated pac boots and heavy wool mittens. I would have looked like a hobbit setting off for the Klondike. Extreme cold did not discourage me in the least; as a five-year-old boy I burned hot, like a match that had just been struck, and I was too fascinated by the clouds of steam puffing out of people as they moved along, as if they were 19th-century locomotives, to be bothered by, or even feel, the cold myself.

I was fascinated, too, by the steam coming out of my own mouth and nostrils, and the delicate icicles it quickly formed around my eyebrows and eyelashes. An arctic day had its own sort of drastic beauty; the coldest air in that part of the world is usually the clearest, and the most brilliantly lit. The sun would have been hanging low in the southern sky before me as I walked, a blue-white orb of flaming ice.

All the other mothers drove their children to school that day, my mother told me years later, as she lay dying. She told me the story with an embarrassed laugh. She laughed more easily in the course of her final illness. Perhaps she felt relieved of the burdens of life, or perhaps the disease, along with the barbarous treatments administered to her in a futile effort to slow its progress, affected her brain. Perhaps a bit of both.

I had no memory of that kindergarten day, but clearly she did. Clearly the memory of it stayed with her to the end. Clearly she regretted sending her five-year-old son out by himself into the dangerous cold that morning, when she could so easily have fired up her (garaged) car and driven me those few blocks. It would have taken her ten minutes at the most.

Did she spend the next forty years thinking she’d been irresponsible or reckless? Did she suppose, in retrospect, that her expectations of me were too high? Did she consider herself lucky that the phone had not rung that morning with the news that I’d been found, dead and frozen stiff as a board in a snow bank somewhere between home and school, still clutching my milk ticket?

She was not a coddler, that much was certain, just as her own mother before her had not been a coddler. Children were not to be coddled, and I was a child who was not coddled. Children were to be taught their manners and to be self-reliant. They were to be seen and not heard, as the old chestnut put it. They were to be taught how to make their way in a world full of harshness and unkindness.

It was a realistic view. The world was, and is, that way. It will remain that way. It was a gift to be treated, at age five, as if I were perfectly capable of looking after myself in a world full of problems and perils. If my mother thought so and communicated as much to me, then it must be true. If she thought I would be fine and did not worry, then I would be fine, and it didn’t even occur to me to worry. Yet it turned out that she had worried, secretly, and her worry ripened into a regret that lasted the rest of her life. What did she regret?

It would never have occurred to the kindergarten me to wonder whether my mother loved me. Small children cannot and do not wonder such things. They take what they are given, like grunts in an army hash line, and they fashion their understandings of the world from those helpings of hash. They call that hash love, whatever it is, whatever is in it, because there is nothing else to call it, certainly not hash. There is no other word to describe a mother’s feeling for her child.

Over the years, people have often asked me whether my mother loved me. Of course it is an absurd question, strictly speaking. It is not for me to say what her feelings were. They would have to ask her. Only she could give an authentic answer to that question, and she is long gone. She took that information with her. She was not one to talk about her feelings in any case. I can merely guess about them. I can only speculate.

But what these inquirers are really asking is whether I believe my mother loved me, and the only reason they ask me is because they wonder if the answer just might possibly be – impossibly -- that I believe she did not. The question would not be asked otherwise.

A mother’s love, like gravity or the rising of the sun each morning, is one of the great givens of earthly reality. It is a fundamental assumption of virtually every life. It goes without saying. To ask the question, then, is to answer it, and the answer is chilling and upsetting. People do not like to be chilled and upset. They do not like upsetting answers. They do not like to have their basic understandings of the world called into question or cast into doubt.

My reply, which I have refined through years of thinking and wondering about the matter, is that my mother did not know how to love her children. She knew that she should, she knew that she was supposed to, and she was a creature of duty. If she thought she were supposed to do this or that, she would make every effort to comply. She was dutiful and compliant. She would not shirk what she took to be an essential obligation.

She was certainly a conscientious mother. She took motherhood seriously. She understood it to be a series of expectations, burdens and requirements. She made (and kept) regular appointments with pediatricians and dentists, she exercised caution about food, nutrition and exercise, she saw that I had and wore proper clothes, she took me to church, she took me to the symphony and the theater, she cleared the way for intellectual growth, cultural curiosity and athletic adventures. If being a mother were a checklist, she would have been able to tick every box.

•••

When my father was two, he lost an eye. An older boy attempted to seize his tricycle on a playground, and my father counterattacked. The older boy met the counterattack with a counterattack of his own, which involved a poke to the face with a stick. Doctors decided to remove the affected eye to protect the other eye from infection. That was the thinking in 1930.

My father, Thomas P. Shanty Reidinger (left), and his older brother Jim, in about 1930. Jim would grow up to become my Uncle Jim and my mother’s nemesis. (Author archive.)

I cannot help but wonder whether it was wise to trade an eye for a tricycle and whether this exchange established a pattern of dealings in my father’s life. Of course, two-year-old boys are not wise. It is debatable whether boys of any age are, even after they grow large enough to be called men.

After losing the eye, my father once told me, he was regarded as something of a deserving case by the rest of his family. His mother fretted about what was to become of him. At a very tender age, then, he became the object of unusual concern and pity – of sympathetic attention and, perhaps, indulgence.

Also at a very tender age, my father made the acquaintance of alcohol. By the age of five, he was being dispatched to a local tavern to fetch for his bibulous grandfather and uncle what my mother, in relaying the story to me decades later, called pails of beer. We would call them growlers – little kegs. As a reward for his efforts, the boy was given, of course, beer. Beer was the coin of that realm. He was initiated as a tot into the fraternity and cult of beer drinkers, of which he remained a life-long member.

Beer quickly wove itself into my father’s story. Beer became his mother’s milk. He became one with alcohol. He merged with it. It was impossible to imagine him without it. As he became a creature of alcohol, so his personality became the personality of alcohol itself.

Alcohol, like all intoxicants, does have a distinctive personality. In the manner of a charming, ruthless politician – Lyndon Johnson, say, or Bill Clinton -- alcohol is friendly and amiable at first, winning and disarming, a relaxer of inhibitions. It is fun.

Later it is less fun. Later it carries its acolytes to the dark side of the moon, a realm of headaches, hangover, queasiness, irritability, and a renewed and irresistible need to feel better and have fun again through more alcohol. Alcohol both causes hangover and cures it. It is both poison and remedy.

When the cause is the cure and the cure is the cause, you are addicted. You have become a drug addict. Alcohol is addictive, and an alcoholic is a drug addict, fixated on the next fix. Meanwhile, someone is making a lot of money selling you this charming cause-cure, over and over again.

Drink, though central to my father’s early life, did not win an outright victory over him. Drink might have captured and shaped him, but it did not destroy him. He became alcohol’s faithful servant but not quite its slave. He managed to get through high school and to graduate from college. He became a star football and baseball player in high school and then in college, a running back and a pitcher. He was so impressive an athlete as to attract professional attention in both sports.

He came to be called by the nickname Shanty. A shanty is a rough dwelling, and the house he grew up in, though sprawling, was a shanty, a rambling, unheated hovel in a rough part of town atop a low hill that overlooked a smelly rubber plant. The family shanty had a view of smokestacks, loading docks and rail sidings. It was like something from The Simpsons.

Shanty also means shanty Irish, lower-class Irish, a nether caste of boozy, combative, clannish thugs, some of them charming, a few quite brilliant. Lord Macaulay, in his magisterial History of England (first published in 1848), describes the Irish as being distinguished by qualities which tend to make men interesting rather than prosperous. They were an ardent and impetuous race, easily moved to tears or to laughter, to fury or to love. Alone among the nations of northern Europe they had the susceptibility, the vivacity, the natural turn for acting and rhetoric – for attention-seeking – which are indigenous on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. But in mental cultivation, he adds, Scotland had an indisputable superiority.

Other British writers took a bleaker view of the Irish – or at any rate expressed themselves more bluntly. The historian Thomas Carlyle called Ireland a drunk country fallen down to sleep in the mud and the Irish a brawling, unreasonable people. In 1862, the British magazine Punch supposed that the Irish were the missing link between man and ape. And, according to the American historian Thaddeus Russell (in his 2010 book A Renegade History of the United States), an unnamed English observer of the 12th century noted that the Irish live like beasts and do not avoid incest.

Shanty grew up in a clan whose circumstances generally answered to these descriptions, though he did so under the German surname bequeathed to him by his father. Shanty, my father, was a shanty Irishman and shanty-dweller with a German surname – an excellent if grim joke.

Still, Shanty was no dope, and the evidence suggests that even early in life, he was looking for a means of social ascent. His athleticism offered possibilities. He was briefly considered a pro football prospect by the Chicago Bears (and once received a personal letter signed by George Halas himself). As a high-school senior, he was also identified as a pitching prospect by a man named Eddie Stumpf, who in the 1940s worked as a scout around the Upper Midwest for major-league baseball’s Cleveland Indians (of the American League) and New York Giants (of the National League). Stumpf noted Shanty’s naturally sinking fastball, which would tend to produce a lot of ground balls and double plays. He also liked Shanty’s curve ball.

In fact Stumpf was so taken by Shanty’s pitching prowess that (according to Shanty) he appeared at the family home in August 1945, bearing offers from both major-league clubs. Shanty was at football practice at the time, so it fell to his father, Tony, to talk to Stumpf. Tony told Stumpf that he wanted his son to be paid by the parent club instead of a minor-league one, and Stumpf supposedly agreed to this proviso.

But Stumpf had a proviso of his own. Both big-league clubs, he told Tony, would require that Shanty give up his senior year of high-school football. Apparently neither the Giants nor the Indians wanted their pitching prospect taking any undue, and unnecessary, physical risk. If Shanty agreed to a deal with either of the teams, Stumpf told Tony, he wouldn’t be able to play any more football.

He won’t go for that, Tony told Stumpf. But when Shanty came home from football practice, Tony did tell him about Stumpf’s visit and the results of their discussion.

Although Shanty, toward the end of his life, insisted that he’d indeed wanted to play his senior year of high-school football, even if doing so meant sacrificing the prospect of a career in professional baseball, I find it hard to believe that any high-school senior, let alone one who’d lost an eye as a child and been raised in a welter of underclass dysfunction – let alone one as determinedly upwardly mobile as Shanty proved to be -- would kick away such a golden opportunity.

If he’d made it to the major leagues, he would have had money and quite possibly fame. He would have jumped from near (or at) the very bottom of the social hierarchy to near the top. Pitcher is the most conspicuous and glamorous of baseball’s positions; it is the equivalent of playing quarterback in football. All eyes are on the pitcher. He stands there on his mound, at the center of the game’s drama. Like a quarterback, he holds the ball and decides when, where and how to throw it. The game turns on those choices. The game moves with him.

The story of a young man who’d lost an eye in a childhood mishap but nonetheless went on to pitch in major-league baseball would be a story for the ages. It would be hard to imagine an athletic prospect’s overcoming a more serious physical obstacle that nonetheless left him capable of playing at the highest levels. Shanty stood to become a unique figure in the annals of baseball. His name might easily have become as recognizable as that of Dizzy Dean, Cy Young or Sandy Koufax.

But events quickly ran in another direction. Eddie Stumpf, perhaps not hearing the immediate Yes he expected to hear, or perhaps for other reasons, did not return or make further contact, and the possibility of Shanty’s playing pro baseball vanished with him.

Did you ever hear from him again? I asked a very elderly Shanty.

Nope, he said, using a word and a curt but rising tone that suggested bafflement, pain and perhaps a tinge of bitterness to me.

Shanty played his last year of high-school football and then, in the spring, of high-school baseball. He went on to play both sports in college. In a college football game, making a tackle, he separated his right shoulder, and while it eventually healed, he told me, his pitching was never the same. The road not taken had become a road no longer takeable, no longer even visible.

I asked him what he thought had happened with Eddie Stumpf.

I don’t know, he said. Those were words he rarely uttered.

It seemed odd to me that Eddie Stumpf would have walked away from signing up a promising baseball prospect just because the prospect’s father had indicated that the prospect would have to be talked out of playing one final year of high-school football. If Eddie Stumpf really had been that enthusiastic about Shanty’s future as a pitcher, he might have wanted to meet the young man, talk with him face to face and explain what was at stake. If Eddie Stumpf’s offer of a shot at the majors was indeed to be rejected, he might have wanted to hear that rejection come directly from the prospect himself.

But that did not happen. The story simply ended. The narrative simply stopped, like a freeway overpass ending abruptly at a line of orange cones. It is possible Stumpf did not know about the lost eye until he called at the prospect’s home and spoke to the prospect’s parents. It is within the realm of plausibility, it seems to me, that Shanty’s coaches might have been reluctant to disclose that kind of volatile information, which might endanger any deal the prospect might have of making. Let others give that information. Let the prospect’s parents pass the word.

It is possible that Eddie Stumpf, on learning of the eye issue, whenever he learned of it, concluded that he could not take a chance on such a prospect. The possible upside could not justify the risk incurred. He surely preferred whole boys, not damaged ones; he needed to know that his prospects were physically equipped to meet the demands of professional baseball. And he might have thought that the risk of serious injury to the other eye and perhaps even blindness, while remote, was real enough so that the prudent course was to move on.

But in this matter it is possible now only to speculate, not to know.

My conversation with Shanty that afternoon drifted to another sports hero, Brett Favre, who had so memorably quarterbacked the N.F.L.’s Green Bay Packers for the better part of two decades.

Brett, he was tough, Shanty said with unmistakable admiration.

I noted that he’d been a second-round pick in the 1991 NFL draft.

Yeah, Shanty said ruminatively, he might have gone high in the first round if not for ... . His comment trailed off into vague remarks about Favre’s character. Shanty noted that Brett hadn’t married his wife until seven years after the birth of their first child. He did not mention Favre’s drinking, carousing and general wildness. He did not have to. Favre’s fun-loving tendencies had never been a secret.

I wondered about all this. I wondered how, exactly, Shanty’s shot at playing professional baseball had miscarried. American boys routinely dream of careers in professional sports, and routinely those dreams come to nothing. Most such dreams never amount to anything more than dreams. That Shanty’s brief flirtations with the Giants and the Indians ended in silent estrangement thus cannot be considered in any way unusual as a statistical matter. Virtually all such flirtations end far short of the major leagues. Even most of those who do sign deals to play pro baseball end up in the minor leagues, riding buses to games in dusty little towns and being paid peanuts while waiting for the call-up that seldom comes. That is the usual way.

But Shanty was not a usual figure. He was an unusual, even exceptional, figure, laboring under a physical handicap that made extraordinary his being considered for any kind of career at all in professional sports. Did the lost eye help him – help him attract the attention of those who made such careers – or did it help do him in? It might have done both, or it might have played no role. It might have been irrelevant, or it might have been one factor among several that ruptured the prospective deal.

That the rupture of the deal caused Shanty serious and long-lasting pain I do not doubt. To the end of his life he was haunted by the pro career that wasn’t. Two roads once diverged on a baseball diamond, and he wasn’t even allowed to choose between them. That choice was made elsewhere, by others, and he was not so much as consulted. His fate was decided by others; his voice was not heard, except in the long and awkward aftermath that became his life. My mother liked to say, with one of her rueful laughs, that life was what happened to you while you were making other plans.

It is one thing to try and fail. There is honor there, if not success. It is altogether another matter to be deprived of the chance of trying. In such a case, honor vanishes as an element of the equation. There is no honor. Instead of honor – of having the chance to show what you can do -- there is nothing.

Perhaps, as a result of such an episode, honor diminishes generally as a value in the life of a person so treated. If a young and impressionable person is taught, through a sharp lesson on an enormous question in his own life, that honor does not matter, he is likely to take that lesson to heart. He is likely to suppose that in the real world, the world of adults and of men, of famous sports heroes and other big shots, honor is irrelevant and a waste of time. In that lofty world, honor is honored mainly in the breach.

The loss of the eye taught Shanty further life lessons. It taught him to be physically careful, I believe, as perhaps nothing else in life could have done. Over time, along a path that was by no means straight or smooth, the need to conserve his remaining eye guided him away from the use of force, of physical coercion, to other ways and means of achieving his ends. It obliged him to develop more subtle, even artful, methods of getting what he wanted. The wound enabled him to survive. Bad boys generally are not survivors and do not age well if they do, but Shanty, baddest of bad boys, proved to be a survivor who lived to an immense age. He beat immense odds in doing so.

•••

In the years before I was born in 1959, Shanty did play semi-pro baseball to make some extra money, but his main job, the real job he finally drifted into, as if he’d survived a shipwreck and washed up on a remote beach, was as a traveling salesman of Caterpillar tractors. In that capacity he drove endlessly around our large and lonely corner of northwestern Wisconsin, peddling graders, scrapers, back hoes and other massive pieces of earth-moving equipment to road-building contractors. The building of the Interstate Highway System, from the late 1950s, was a great boon to Shanty and his fellow tractor salesmen.

By then he had married my mother. She and Shanty had met as young teenagers in junior high school. They had grown up on opposite sides of the city – literally on opposite sides of the railroad tracks – in social and family environments that could hardly have been more different. When Shanty first came calling at my mother’s family’s house, at 1219 Graham Avenue, he was awestruck.

That great big house! he later told me. I’d never seen anything like it.

Nowhere recorded is the reaction of my mother’s mother – the formidable Doris, my grandmother -- to the appearance of this shanty-Irish lad in her grand house. Did she recognize his significance? Did she understand who had come calling? Did she perceive what the future would bring? Did a premonition tell her that the fate of that house, her house – her past, her story, all she held dear -- would fall, many years later, into his hands?

•••

Decades before, in January 1898, in another big house in a nearby town, Doris had turned two. She lived then with her family in a Victorian dwelling at 240 Coleman Street in Chippewa Falls, just a few miles up the river from the town I grew up in. Little Doris’s surname name was Jenkins, and the house had been built just a few years before by the newly married Walter and Esther Jenkins to accommodate their growing family.

One of my very earliest memories is a glimpse of that house: a gloomy, two-floor, turreted clapboard dwelling on a small hill, at a point where two street grids intersected at a 45-degree angle. Esther, or Essie, as she was usually known, had died in October 1959 at age 88, and her son Harold, who had lived in the house with her for many years, was moved to a residence hotel, the Hotel Northern, in the autumn of 1961.

That probably was about the time I was taken along to see the house, which was soon to be sold off. My mother and her mother must have been saying their goodbyes to the place. I have the dimmest memory of being inside, a glimpse of old furniture, drawn shades and dust, a funereal tableau. I have the dimmest recollection of autumnal weather outside: no snow, but no leaves on the trees, either, with a chilly wind and gray grass. I would have been two.

I am surprised that I remember that house – that I carry an image of it from my earliest days. From our deep childhoods, we tend to be able to recall mainly what is traumatic or shocking in some way. Shanty, to the end of his life, remembered the trauma of losing his eye at age two.

There was nothing shocking or traumatic to me about the Coleman Street house, and I had no emotional association with it – I never ate Christmas dinner there, I never went trick-or-treating there, Essie never looked after me and I have no memory whatever of her – but for some reason the house cast a lingering shadow in my young mind.

Many years later, when I was in my mid-50s, I would seek out the house again and find it much as I so dimly remembered it. The house did

The Jenkins house at 240 Coleman St, Chippewa Falls, Wis., in about 1914. My grandmother Doris grew up in this house. The steep stairs are just visible at the extreme left. My great-uncle Harold Jenkins sits at the wheel of the car. His and Doris’s mother Esther, or Essie, sits on the running board at lower left. (Author archive.)

The house at 240 Coleman St., Chippewa Falls, Wis., in April 2014. I first saw this building in the autumn of 1961, when I was two. I would not see it again for more than half a century. It had changed very little in that interval. The steep steps are still visible to the left. (Author photo.)

indeed sit at the crest of a hill, but the hill was steeper than I remembered. The concrete steps from the street to the house were worn and uneven – rather treacherous. The house had turned a robin’s-egg blue, though perhaps it had always been blue. My ancient memory told me only that it was dark and colorless, like murky water. The building seemed to consist of more than one unit – had it been divided into apartments, was it being rented out? I could not tell.

Doris finally sold off Essie’s house because she had no use for it, having long ago left Chippewa Falls to take up a new life as a schoolteacher and married woman in Eau Claire, ten miles downriver, and because she’d almost certainly come to the conclusion that Harold could not manage the house on his own. In August 1960, less than a year after Essie’s death, Harold had signed a document granting Doris sweeping powers of attorney to deal with his affairs. He was further described in court filings of that time as incompetent and Doris’s ward, while she became his guardian. How Harold came to this humiliating pass, neither family lore nor legal documentation tells, though he was said to have been gassed in World War I and never to have properly recovered.

•••

In the late 1920s, Doris and her husband Spence had acquired a house of their own, at 1219 on a street then known as South River Street because part of it, though not their part, ran parallel to the Chippewa River along its eastern bank. The street would later be renamed Graham Avenue.

The house, built in 1913, belonged to the Prairie-Craftsman family of design rather than the Victorian, as did Essie’s, but it was at least as big as Essie’s house, and it was grand. It wasn’t quite a mansion, but the distinction would have been lost on me as a small boy. It was a spacious and complex place, full of beautiful rooms, high ceilings, sweeping staircases and chandeliers – wonderful for running around in or just being in.

Little boys are natural surveyors, and my grandmother’s house was a large and absorbing region in need of assessment, a sizable and important new province to be mapped. There was a great deal to be examined. The house had a basement and, above the second floor, an attic, making four floors in all. A real mansion, such as those the 19th-century lumber barons had raised just a few blocks away, along the river, could hardly have been a more satisfactory forum for exploration, adventure and game-playing.

Doris’s house – it was her house, no question, she ran it, she was its mistress and ruler – featured a wide front porch with a swinging lounger, a kind of suspended love seat you could cause to sway back and forth as if it were a piece of playground equipment. The multilight front door opened into a proper vestibule, the small chamber that divided the cold outdoors from the great warm indoors.

Once through the vestibule, you stood in the large foyer. At the back a broad staircase rose, via a landing and a turn, to the second floor and the bedrooms. Above the second floor floated the attic, where I never set foot. To the left of the foyer, through a French door, was a small salon with a piano; to the right, through more French doors, lay the main parlor with its fireplace.

An archway at the back of the parlor opened to the dining room. Here Doris laid her fine plate, crystal stemware and silverware for holiday dinners. Doris’s dinners were formal and ceremonial. A meal at her table, with its beautiful and impressive appointments, was a ritual not to be taken lightly. It was gracious and orderly, an exercise in tradition and well-considered aesthetics. It was not that different, in fact, from a church service.

I’m sure the adults had a good time at her gatherings, and I’m