When I Was a Boy

By Michael D. Langan

Michael D. Langan was born in Buffalo, New York, in1937. He grew up in one of its suburbs,Lackawanna, New York.He is a graduate of Canisius College and S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo.
Dr.Langan served in public and private educationfor a quarterof a century,19591984. In 1984, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he held several posts with the federal government.He retired from theDepartment of the
Treasury in 1999.Dr. Langan has written short stories for the BBC WorldService, articles for The Boston Globe and numerous bookreviews, stories and op ed pieces for The Buffalo News.
Thank you for letting me see your sketches from childhood. It is always a beguiling subject and you have touched it nicely and simply. - Paul Horgan, Wesleyan University.

A book well-written about a life well-lived. David M. Shribman, Executive Editor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Langans stories are brimming with wonderful characters and scenes of a small blue-collar city in the 1940s. They offer not only a marvelous sense of place Lackawanna, New York, in the heyday of Big Steel but more importantly, an evocative sense of time. This was the America when mothers feared a polio epidemic, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt thrilled citizens with a drive through town in an open car, and when the only way a young Catholic boy could get out of the house at night was to visit the public library. It wasnt very long ago, but it is long gone. Luckily, Langan has captured it through a childs eyes, and
were the richer for it. - Margaret Sullivan, Editor, Buffalo News.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 3, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453549421

Michael D. Langan

Michael D. Langan was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1937. He grew up in one of its suburbs, Lackawanna, New York. He is a graduate of Canisius College and S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo. Dr. Langan served in public and private education for a quarter of a century, 1959 - 1984. In 1984, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he held several posts with the federal government. He retired from the Department of the Treasury in 1999. Dr. Langan has written short stories for the BBC World Service, articles for The Boston Globe and numerous book reviews, stories and op ed pieces for The Buffalo News.

Book preview

WHEN I WAS A BOY

MICHAEL D. LANGAN

Copyright © 2010 by Michael D. Langan.

ISBN:                           Ebook                               978-1-4535-4942-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

84763

Contents

Introduction

Foreword

1.

NELLIE ROONEY’S WAKE

2.

THE PRESIDENT

AND THE PONY

3.

SELF RELIANCE

4.

THE JANITOR DID IT

5.

THE LETTER

6.

HEROES

7.

CLEANSING THE SPIRIT

8.

THE PIANO LESSON

9.

A PRESENT FOR JOHNNY

10.

CHRISTMAS, 1943

11.

HOME ON THE RANGE

12.

DOWN IN ADORATION FALLING

13.

A CRY FROM THE HEART

14.

THE LIBRARY

15.

REFUGE

16.

THE RAISED WINDOW

17.

THE SUMMER COTTAGE

18.

CHILD’S PLAY

19.

THE GIFT

20.

FIRST DANCE

21.

GRADUATION

This book is dedicated with love to my wife, Joanne.

Introduction

When our children were small, I used to sit on their beds each night and tell them stories of my childhood. I tried to put a moral in each little tale, to demonstrate how their father was rewarded for his good deeds, real or imagined.

That, at least, was the plan. Our children, Joanne, Jeannie and Michael were avid listeners, alternately giggling or holding their breath while I described how I was made to crouch under the teacher’s desk, or how I nearly lost my life in a Pennsylvania coal mine.

I don’t doubt that most parents have told their children similar, wheezy old stories from the dawn of time, replacing the desk and coal mine with club and cave, schooner or battlefield, adding, of course, the salt and pepper of fantasy to enliven the common fare of their boiled potato lives. But somehow, before I’d finished my last story, our children had grown up.

When young Mike was away at college, he asked me to write to him—but not—he said, boring letters which recounted where family members had gone during the preceding week, or listing what we purchased at the grocers, or whatever else most people fill their letters with. No, instead he wanted me to write down some of the stories I used to tell in the voice of a small child while sitting on his bed at night—the ones he called Dad’s When I Was A Boy stories. So I began to set them down, about one a week, usually sketched out early in the morning before my work day began.

I sent the stories off to him—one by one—as a kind of correspondence. But that wasn’t the end of them. His was not a grateful son’s pleasure, appreciative of receiving the stories and thankful for his old man’s cleverness. What developed instead was a series of return-mail critical reviews. My stories were sent back, corrected and red-inked for grammatical errors and suggesting ideas which might be highlighted and reinforced upon rewriting.

At first, I wondered who my son thought he was, improving on the writing of my old exploits. He was my son, of course, doing his best to be helpful. And I soon realized that through our correspondence we had established a strong, adult bond of friendship. My daughters, Joanne and Jeannie, were far more accepting of their father’s stories, and I have never ceased thinking that their mother’s long-suffering spirit rubbed off on them.

Joanne, my wife, encouraged me to finish this little volume when I might have preferred to put it aside. She, more than anyone, believed these stories were worth telling. I cannot say how much her love and confidence has meant to me.

Whatever blemish remaining in the work is mine, my wife’s and son’s fine editing notwithstanding. What I’ve written is true as I remember it, and I dedicate it to all those children who have never grown up. There may be some inaccuracies. If so, they are unintentional. It all happened so long ago.

Foreword

When I Was A Boy

He who remembers his childhood better

Than others is the winner,

If there are any winners at all.

—Yehudah Amichai, From 1924 (An Hour of Grace, 1983)

I remember a picture taken in the late ’30s of my mother, my father and me. She is sitting in an Adirondack chair outdoors. Her hair is a short bob. She wears a white blouse and skirt. Her stockings are rolled down around her ankles. I’m plopped in her lap, licking a sucker. I haven’t a care in the world. My father snuggles next to mother, arm around her, smiling. In a later picture, my father is gone. Mother and I are subdued. Our eyes indicate an unspoken sadness. It hadn’t always been this way.

In the end—after the divorce years later—my mother, Catherine R. Laffey, still loved my father, Eugene T. Langan. His time overseas during World War II, endless job changes when he returned, excessive drink, other relationships: all these vicissitudes corroded my father’s love. My mother hoped against the evidence. She still wanted him. It grieved her deeply that he acted as he did. For a time she pretended that he wasn’t so bad. Then she pretended she didn’t care. Finally she pretended that she didn’t love him. I didn’t see much value in play acting. But my mother had little else in her life. Her existence toward the end was febrile, tentative. She suffered a stroke and was depressed. My father didn’t call or write. I knew how she felt. She loved my father—but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say any more about it. My father said nothing. Mother silently hoped. This thin oxygen of possibility seemed to sustain her. It stopped in 1982 when she died.

What first drew them together? I can only guess. There must have been a spark of passion. Both were handsome people. They lived close to each other growing up—just down the block—in Lackawanna, New York. My father finished 8th grade. Mother was proud to have completed three years of high school. She spoke about this accomplishment as if she had finished Harvard. But her father, Mike Laffey, didn’t want his girls, Catherine and her older sister, Jean, in school. He saw no point to it during the Depression. He made my mother quit to work in Neisner’s Five and Dime Store. That way, she could help the family. But Catherine escaped my grandfather’s net. She married my father at Our Lady of Victory Basilica in 1935. The Buffalo Evening News reported the event:

Miss Catherine Laffey and Mr. Eugene Langan, son of Mr. Thomas Langan, were married Tuesday morning, November 28, at 9 o’clock in Our Lady of Victory Basilica, Lackawanna, by the Rev. James H. Lucid. The bride wore a gown of tropical blue transparent velvet, a veiled halo hat to match, black satin slippers, and carried pink chrysanthemums. She was attended by Miss Jean Laffey who wore a dusky rust transparent velvet, rust and bronze slippers and carried Talisman roses and baby chrysanthemums. Mr. Manus Langan was best man.

Mother, her older sister, Jean, and her brother Babe, worked from an early age. Babe washed dishes in the kitchen of a bar from the time he was twelve. Jean worked at Flint & Kent’s Department Store as a bookkeeper. Only their older brother Cyril escaped the family’s penury. He drank and danced the night away at the Dellwood Ballroom in Buffalo, coming home late, after my grandfather was asleep, to bathe and nap before his next outing.

My grandfather Mike Laffey, a former baseball catcher and later an umpire, was domineering and a heavy drinker. He was killed as he walked home after dark in a stupor, struck in a hit-and-run accident by a truck transporting bootleg liquor.

My father was handsome and happy-go-lucky. He was the middle child of six brothers and a sister. His father, Thomas, was a trolley car conductor who emigrated from Ireland. My grandfather Thomas died of diabetes in 1936, the year before I was born. My earliest recollections of my father are of driving with him in his coupé as he picked up horse racing bets for a bald man named Curly, who was a Lackawanna bookmaker and saloon keeper. In horse racing parlance, Curley’s choice of professions were an unbeatable combination.

Later, when the United States entered World War II, my father worked in the shipyards, hoping to avoid the draft. He didn’t. Instead he saw heavy action with the 90th Division of the U.S. Army in Germany. After that, he returned to Lackawanna in 1945 to become a policeman, then a fireman, and, latterly, a fire inspector. Finally my father cloaked himself in the mantle of a used car salesman, selling cars for L.B. Smith Motors, Streng Oldsmobile and I forget how many other dealers.

You gotta face it, Lula, he’d say to my mother. This job (whatever the current one was) is gonna make us money.

But no one ever faced anything in our house, really. The attempt at selling cars only fueled opportunities for my father to leave us every night, dressed to the nines, visiting bars, ‘making contacts.’ Finally, my father left for good. Mother got a job as a waitress at the Hotel Lackawanna. It was then that, for my two sisters Susan and Beatrice and I, life began in earnest. But this is getting ahead of my story. Let me begin at what I remember to be the beginning.

1.

NELLIE ROONEY’S WAKE

First, let me tell you a little bit about the early 40’s, to set the scene for what happens in these boyhood adventures. Before my sisters were born I lived in my grandfather’s apartment on the corner of Electric Avenue and Apple Street, in Lackawanna, New York, with my mother and father. Everybody called Lackawanna the Steel City, because Bethlehem Steel Company had a large plant there. The epithet bespoke a certain hardness; life with an edge.

I hope it doesn’t confuse you if I make both adult reflections on these exploits, as well as remember what I thought as a young boy about what was happening to me. They’re different perspectives. But I think you can distinguish between them.

Recognizing death for the first time is hard. It was there I first met Nellie Rooney. Nellie was an elderly woman whom I learned was my godmother. She worked as a maid at the Hotel Lafayette in downtown Buffalo. She also had a room with us, along with my Aunt Jean, Uncle Babe, Uncle Cyril and grandfather Mike Laffey. Our apartment was crowded. The Polish couple who lived downstairs and owned the house, the Doptiks, used to pound their ceiling with a broom when Uncle Cyril and my grandfather got to fighting over Cyril’s no-account life.

Mrs. Rooney was my favorite. She’d work all day making beds and come home on the bus. I’d be there with my mother when she arrived. I was about five years old. Mrs. Rooney would nudge me across the street to Luke Tarquino’s general store, where she’d buy two quarts of Iroquois beer. Then, as a reward when we returned, she poured me a small glass of beer to drink with her. I’d sit at the kitchen table and we’d talk. Sometimes she’d pour me another glass of beer. But never more than two. Just enough to be sociable, she’d say.

I’d listen to her stories of what a terrible mess she found the hotel rooms in that day, how beastly the woman in charge of the maids was, and so on. I tried to act as an adult, and would lick the foam from my upper lip so as not be messy when she talked to me. You can’t know how hard makin’ beds is, Michael. My back is nearly broke. I’ll tell you, it’s a hard life. Pause. Wipe yer lip. (She tried to teach me manners.) I didn’t know why she didn’t get married again, even if she were old, so she wouldn’t have to work so hard. My mother told me that Mrs. Rooney had a husband, but that he ran away on their wedding night and she could never find him after that.

My mother, father and I slept in the front