Living History (2 page)

My father was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the middle son of Hugh Rodham, Sr., and Hannah Jones. He got his looks from a line of black-haired Welsh coal miners on his mother’s side. Like Hannah, he was hardheaded and often gruff, but when he laughed the sound came from deep inside and seemed to engage every part of his body. I inherited his laugh, the same big rolling guffaw that can turn heads in a restaurant and send cats running from the room.

The Scranton of my father’s youth was a rough industrial city of brick factories, textile mills, coal mines, rail yards and wooden duplex houses. The Rodhams and Joneses were hard workers and strict Methodists.

My father’s father, Hugh Sr., was the sixth of eleven children. He started work at the Scranton Lace Company when he was still a boy and ended up as supervisor five decades later. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man, quite the opposite of his formidable wife, Hannah Jones Rodham, who insisted on using all three of her names. Hannah collected rent from the houses she owned and ruled her family and anyone else within her reach. My father worshipped her and often told me and my brothers the story of how she had saved his feet.

Around 1920, he and a friend had hitched a ride on the back of a horse-drawn ice wagon. As the horses were struggling up a hill, a motorized truck plowed into the back of the wagon, crushing my dad’s legs. He was carried to the nearest hospital, where the doctors deemed his lower legs and feet irreparably damaged and prepared him for surgery to amputate both. When Hannah, who had rushed to the hospital, was told what the doctors intended, she barricaded herself in the operating room with her son, saying no one could touch his legs unless they planned to save them. She demanded that her brother-in-law, Dr. Thomas Rodham, be called in immediately from another hospital where he worked.

Dr. Rodham examined my dad and announced that “nobody is going to cut that boy’s legs off.” My father had passed out from pain; he awoke to find his mother standing guard, assuring him that his legs were saved and that he’d be whipped hard when he finally got home. That was a family story we heard over and over again, a lesson in confronting authority and never giving up.

Hannah strikes me as a determined woman whose energies and intelligence had little outlet, which led to her meddling in everyone else’s business. Her eldest son, my uncle Willard, worked as an engineer for the city of Scranton, but he never left home or married and died shortly after my grandfather in 1965. Her youngest, Russell, was her golden boy. He excelled in academics and athletics, became a doctor, served in the Army, married, had a daughter and came back to Scranton to practice medicine. In early 1948, he fell into a debilitating depression. My grandparents asked my father to come home to help Russell. Shortly after my dad arrived, Russell tried to kill himself. My father found him hanging in the attic and cut him down. He brought Russell back to Chicago to live with us.

I was eight or nine months old when Russell came to stay. He slept on the couch in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment while seeking psychiatric treatment at the Veterans Administration Hospital. He was a handsome man, with fairer hair and complexion than my dad’s. One day, when I was about two, I drank from a Coke bottle filled with turpentine left by a workman. Russell immediately induced vomiting and rushed me to the emergency room. He gave up medicine shortly thereafter, and jokingly called me his last patient. He stayed in the Chicago area, where he was a frequent visitor to our home. He died in 1962 in a fire caused by a burning cigarette. I felt so sorry for my father, who had tried for years to keep Russell alive. Modern antidepressants might have helped him, and I wish they’d been available back then. Dad wanted to tell his father about Russell’s death in person, and waited until my grandfather came for a visit. When he finally learned about Russell’s death, my grandfather sat at our kitchen table and sobbed. He died brokenhearted three years later.

Despite his financial success later in life, my dad was perceived growing up―by himself and by his parents-as neither as dutiful and reliable as his older brother, Willard, nor as smart and successful as his younger brother, Russell. He was always in trouble for joyriding in a neighbor’s brand-new car or roller-skating up the aisle of the Court Street Methodist Church during an evening prayer service. When he graduated from Central High School in 1931, he thought he would go to work in the lace mill beside his father.

Instead, his best friend, who had been recruited by Penn State for the football team, told the coach he would not come unless his favorite teammate came too. Dad was a solid athlete, and the coach agreed, so Dad went to State College and played for the Nittany Lions.

He also boxed and joined the Delta Upsilon fraternity, where, I’m told, he became an expert at making bathtub gin. He graduated in 1935 and at the height of the Depression returned to Scranton with a degree in physical education.

Without alerting his parents, he hopped a freight train to Chicago to look for work and found a job selling drapery fabrics around the Midwest. When he came back to tell his parents and pack his bags, Hannah was furious and forbade him to go. But my grandfather pointed out that jobs were hard to come by, and the family could use the money for Russell’s college and medical education. So my father moved to Chicago. All week, he traveled around the upper Midwest from Des Moines to Duluth, then drove to Scranton most weekends to turn over his paycheck to his mother. Though he always suggested that his reasons for leaving Scranton were economic, I believe my father knew that he had to make a break from Hannah if he was ever to live his own life.

Dorothy Howell was applying for a job as a clerk typist at a textile company when she caught the eye of a traveling salesman, Hugh Rodham. She was attracted to his energy and self-assurance and gruff sense of humor.

After a lengthy courtship, my parents were married in early 1942, shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. They moved into a small apartment in the Lincoln Park section of Chicago near Lake Michigan. My dad enlisted in a special Navy program named for the heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and was assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Station, an hour north of Chicago. He became a chief petty officer responsible for training thousands of young sailors before they were shipped out to sea, mostly to the Pacific Theater. He told me how sad he felt when he accompanied his trainees to the West Coast, where they joined their ships, knowing some would not survive. After he died, I received letters from men who had served under him. Often they enclosed a photo of a particular class of sailors, my proud father front and center. My favorite photograph shows him in his uniform smiling broadly, as handsome, to my eyes, as any 1940s movie star.

My father kept close ties with his family in Scranton and drove each of his children from Chicago to Scranton to be christened in the Court Street Methodist Church, where he had worshipped as a child. Grandma Rodham died when I was five and she was going blind when I knew her, but I remember she would try to dress me and braid my hair every morning. I was much closer to my grandfather, who had already retired with a gold watch after fifty years of employment when I was born. He was a kind and proper man, who proudly carried his gold watch on a chain and wore a suit with suspenders every day.

When he came to visit us in Illinois, he would take off his suit coat and roll up his shirtsleeves to help my mother around the house.

My father was always strict with his kids, but he was much harder on the boys than on me. Grandpa Rodham often intervened on their behalf, endearing him even more to us.

As children, my brothers and I spent a lot of time at his duplex on Diamond Avenue in Scranton, and each summer we spent most of August at the cottage he had built in 1921

about twenty miles northwest of Scranton in the Pocono Mountains overlooking Lake Winola.

The rustic cabin had no heat except for the cast-iron cook stove in the kitchen, and no indoor bath or shower. To stay clean, we swam in the lake or stood below the back porch while someone poured a tub of water onto our heads. The big front porch was our favorite place to play and where our grandfather shared hands of cards with my brothers and me. He taught us pinochle, the greatest card game in the world, in his opinion. He read us stories and told us the legend of the lake, which he claimed was named after an Indian princess, Winola, who drowned herself when her father would not let her marry a handsome warrior from a neighboring tribe.

The cabin is still in our family and so are many of our summer traditions. Bill and I took Chelsea to Lake Winola for the first time when she was not yet two. My brothers spend part of every summer there. Thankfully they have made some improvements. A couple of years ago they even put in a shower.

In the early fifties, few people lived off the two-lane highway that ran in front of the cottage, and there were bears and bobcats in the woods up the mountain behind us. As children we explored the surrounding countryside, hiking and driving the back roads and fishing and boating on the Susquehanna River. My father taught me to shoot a gun behind the cottage, and we practiced aiming at cans or rocks. But the center of our activities was the lake, across the road and down the path past Foster’s store. I made summer friends who took me waterskiing or to the movies that were projected onto sheets in an open field on the lake shore. Along the way, I met people Inever would have encountered in Park Ridge, such as a family my grandfather called “mountain people,” who lived without electricity or a car. A boy from that family, about my age, once showed up at the cottage on horseback to ask me if I wanted to go for a ride.

When I was as young as ten or eleven, I played pinochle with the men―my grandfather, my father, Uncle Willard and assorted others, including such memorable characters as “Old Pete” and Hank, who were notorious sore losers. Pete lived at the end of a dirt road and showed up to play every day, invariably cursing and stomping off if he started losing. Hank came only when my father was there. He would totter up to the front porch with his cane and climb the steep stairs yelling, “Is that black-haired bastard home? I want to play cards.” He’d known my dad since he was born and had taught him to fish.

He didn’t like losing any better than Pete did and occasionally upended the table after a particularly irksome defeat.

After the war, my dad started a small drapery fabric business, Rodrik Fabrics, in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago’s Loop. His first office overlooked the Chicago River, and I can remember going there when I was only three or four. To keep me away from the windows, which he left open for the fresh air, he told me a big bad wolf lived down below and would eat me up if I fell out. Later, he started his own print plant in a building on the North Side. He employed day laborers, as well as enlisting my mother, my brothers and me when we were old enough to help with the printing. We carefully poured the paint onto the edge of the silk screen and pulled the squeegee across to print the pattern on the fabric underneath. Then we lifted up the screen and moved down the table, over and over again, creating beautiful patterns, some of which my father designed. My favorite was “Staircase to the Stars.”

In 1950, when I was three years old and my brother Hugh was still an infant, my father had done well enough to move the family to suburban Park Ridge. There were fancier and more fashionable suburbs north of Chicago, along Lake Michigan, but my parents felt comfortable in Park Ridge among all the other veterans who chose it for its excellent public schools, parks, tree-lined streets, wide sidewalks and comfortable family homes. The town was white and middle-class, a place where women stayed home to raise children while men commuted to work in the Loop, eighteen miles away. Many of the fathers took the train, but my dad had to make sales calls on potential customers, so he drove the family car to work every day.

My father paid cash for our two-story brick house on the corner lot of Elm and Wisner Streets. We had two sundecks, a screenedin porch and a fenced-in backyard where the neighborhood kids would come to play or to sneak cherries from our tree. The postwar population explosion was booming, and there were swarms of children everywhere. My mother once counted forty-seven kids living on our square block.

Next door were the four Williams children, and across the street were the six O’Callaghans. Mr. Williams flooded his backyard in the winter to create an ice rink where we skated and played hockey for hours after school and on weekends. Mr. O’Callaghan put up a basketball hoop on his garage that drew kids from all over to play pickup games and the old standbys, HORSE and the shorter version, PIG. The games I most enjoyed were the ones we made up, like the elaborate team contest called “chase and run,” a complex form of hide-and-seek, and the near daily softball and kickball marathons played on our corner with sewer covers as bases.

My mother was a classic homemaker. When I think of her in those days, I see a woman in perpetual motion, making the beds, washing the dishes and putting dinner on the table precisely at six o’clock. I came home from Field School for lunch every day―tomato or chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese or peanut butter or bologna sandwiches. While we ate, Mom and I listened to radio programs like Ma Perkins or Favorite Story.

“Tell me a story,” it began.

“What kind of story?”

“Any kind.”

My mother also found lots of what people now call “quality time” for my brothers and me. She didn’t learn to drive until the early 1960s, so we walked everywhere. In the winter, she bundled us up on a sled and pulled us to the store. Then we held and balanced the groceries for the trip home. In the middle of hanging the wash on a clothesline in the backyard, she might help me practice my pitching or lie down on the grass with me to describe the cloud shapes overhead.

One summer, she helped me create a fantasy world in a large cardboard box. We used mirrors for lakes and twigs for trees, and I made up fairy-tale stories for my dolls to act out. Another summer, she encouraged my younger brother Tony to pursue his dream of digging a hole all the way to China. She started reading to him about China and every day he spent time digging his hole next to our house. Occasionally, he found a chopstick or fortune cookie my mother had hidden there.