The author’s
parents, William
J. Fitzpatrick and
Doris McGowan:
in their youth,
and from recent
years.
When the Poughkeepsie, New York weather
prevented us from venturing outside, my younger
sister Donna and I would often play in our dimly lit
second story attic. Dad, who built much of the home,
never got around to finishing the attic flooring so
we had to be careful not to avoid stepping on the
uncovered insulation.
“You’ll end up on the first floor if you do,” mom and
dad told us, in their matter of fact way.
Mom stored much of her cherished memorabilia
in the attic, including a large collection of Big Little
Books. This Great-Depression-era genre featured familiar
characters such as Buck Rogers, Dick Tracy,
and Nancy Drew. Mom had traditional books, too,
including a series featuring the exploits of the precocious
girl-sleuth, Kay Tracey. Our mother was born in
1919, a year before women had the right to vote.
As much as we enjoyed mom and dad’s old books
and games, we really liked our parent’s old photo
albums. Was our often self-absorbed mom really a
nurse during World War II? Did our quiet and easy-going
dad kill anyone while he served in the army?
In November 2016, Donna and I were again
sifting through mom’s belongings, but this time in
Pinehurst, North Carolina. We thought she would
live to be a hundred years old but she didn’t, missing
the mark by just three years. Our always youthful
dad died in 2007. The week before he died, seemingly
oblivious that he was eighty-seven years old,
he climbed a ladder and replaced a few damaged shingles
on the roof.
“Mom and dad were quite the pair,” Donna said as
she emptied mom’s closet of the latest fashions from
Chico’s, a fashionable retail chain. A local store had
wished for mom to be in their December fashion show.
“They never thought of themselves as old.”
November was one lousy month for me, made
so, of course, by my personal loss, but also by the
sense that something else had died with the election
of Donald F. Trump. The New York Times editorial team
felt the loss, too, writing on December 10, 2016:
The institutions that once generated and
reaffirmed that shared reality—including the
church, the government, the news media, the
universities and labor units—are in various
forms of turmoil or even collapse.
Well, their list is not quite complete. The New
York Times should have included the most important
institution of all, the American family. Today, over
half of America’s kids are born outside of marriage, a
sharp contrast from the not so distant past. I cannot
imagine what life in a single parent home might be like,
but I do know what it was like growing up in the home
of William Fitzpatrick and Doris McGowan, members
of our country’s Greatest Generation, a group that
whole-heartedly supported “the institutions that once
generated and reaffirmed that shared reality.”
Mom and dad were on the fringes of their generation’s
two defining events, the Great Depression and
World War II. My mother, who never met a story she
couldn’t twist and stretch, once spoke to me about the
Great Depression.
“Billy, it was an awful period of time in the country
and our family. My father had to work two low paying
jobs for us to keep food on the table.”
“Hold on a minute, Mom! In every one of your
photos from the 1930s, you’re dressed in the finest
outfits. Look! Here, you are at a tennis camp. Here you
are at the White House. Here you are at a fancy resort.
Nice bathing suit, by the way. Here you are surrounded
by a number of good-looking well-dressed men, none
of whom resemble dad.”
“Billy, those clothes were hand-me-downs! I didn’t
get to take a nice trip every year!”
“Oh!”
Still, my mom, who was the 1937 Class Valedictorian
of Torrington High School, enjoyed a very privileged
life from birth to death.
Dad never talked about his service during World
War II for a good reason—he had nothing to talk about.
He served near the end of the war in a unit that was
responsible for maintaining the peace in Italy, Austria,
and Switzerland. Oh, those damning photos! There’s
dad in the Swiss Alps. There’s dad feeding the pigeons
in Venice. There he is swimming at Lido Beach.
When the United States Army provided our family
a flag for his grave, my mother
sniffed, “Well, he’s not going to
like that! He hated the army!”
So my parents were two
very ordinary members of the
Greatest Generation. My highstrung
mother—an only child
with a penchant for fine clothes,
a need to talk, and a smoldering lifelong resentment
from the discriminations that prevented her from
having a business career—and my quiet dad. Like my
mom, who as an only child was doted on by her adoring
father, he had his own family issues as a kid.
“Marry Doris McGowan and we will disown you,”
his father told him, but he married her anyway. He then
worked two full-time jobs and saved $10,000—a huge
sum in the 1940s—so they could buy a home. After the
war, he and mom went about the task of raising a family,
and achieving the noble American goal of providing
a better life for their children.
Our family went to church, every Sunday. Sniffles,
snowstorms, or family vacations brought no respite
from the requirement. When my dad once offered that
maybe instead of church we could go to the beach on
a Sunday morning, mom shouted her reply. “I will not
allow my family to turn into a bunch of heathens!”
We were expected to do well in school, but not at
the expense of a balanced childhood. “Get out of the
house and play,” mom usually ordered, after we arrived
home from school.
Dad, who remained a distant and quiet figure
during my childhood, would arrive home from work
around 5:30, pour a scotch and water, then switch his
attention between the newspaper and the CBS Evening
News with Walter Cronkite. “Uncle Walter,” as our nation
called the calm anchorman, was one of the most trusted
men in the country.
“Dinner’s ready,” Mom would shout, and the entire
family would gather. But outside our suburban homes,
the times were a changin’.
Is God Dead? Such was the question that Time
magazine posed in 1966, one of the many markers that
announced to the country that those moral certainties
we once held dear were now questioned.
The unshakeable trust in our government faded
during the Vietnam War, then Watergate. Divorce became
more common, chastity less common. These
changes, all of which assaulted the institutions that
our parents had supported or defended, ripped apart
many American families, sometimes pitting the patriotic
dads of the Greatest Generation against their warprotesting
sons. Our family never splintered.
“Donna, I believe that acceptance and presence
were our parent’s greatest gifts. I never felt any moral
judgment, just love and support. Sometimes we would
think mom wasn’t listening to us, but then a few
days later, an old shoe box lined
with wax paper and filled with
homemade cookies would arrive
in the mail.”
After dad retired from IBM
in 1983, he became much more
of an engaging personality. In
the early 1990s, he lived with
me, away from his wife, for four months to oversee the
construction of a new home. One evening, I told him
that mom had called earlier in the day.
“What did she want?”
“To come here to help me pick out colors and furnishings.”
“She can’t visit, that would ruin everything! You
need to call her and tell her that she can’t come yet!”
I laughed, immediately understanding that sure,
he wanted to build the house and help me out, but he
also wanted a four-month “time-out” from what would
turn out to be a sixty-three-year marriage.
My wife and I still live in the home that dad built.
Like Donna, I treasure the small and simple possessions
from our time with mom and dad. In the
corner of my home-office, for example, is mom’s red
plaid knitting case. I use dad’s old tool chest as a set
of drawers. But my favorite is a chest he made for
my daughter, Molly. Inside the chest, you see, are albums
of old black and white photographs containing
just part of the story of my mom and dad.
“You’re right, Donna, we were so blessed.”
Americana is a monthly column highlighting the cultural and historical nuances of this land through the rich story-telling of columnist Bill Fitzpatrick, author of the books, Bottoms Up, America and Destination: India, Destiny: Unknown.