Tom Brokaw (11 page)

JOHN “LEFTY” CAULFIELD

“I have only one regret. My kid never had a Corner.”

A
LTHOUGH THE WINDS OF WAR
had been blowing steadily across the Atlantic and Pacific for some time, it wasn't until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that everyone in the United States finally realized we could not stand idly by while the Axis rolled across Europe and Asia. That stunning surprise attack galvanized the nation as no speech or distant development could. While Pearl Harbor was the explosion that triggered five long years of death, injury, and separation, it also gave Americans everywhere common cause. They talk longingly now about the loss of that bond, that cohesion of national purpose and the personal ties that went with it.

It's a regular topic at the monthly meetings of the ROMEO Club, held in various diners at the edges of Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. John Caulfield, a burly former high school principal, started ROMEO. “Retired old men eating out,” he explains. Not just any old men. The guys from Kerry Corner, the Irish working-class neighborhood not far from the leafy sanctuary of Harvard Yard.

In the thirties, Kerry Corner made up about ten square blocks of Cambridge. Caulfield and the others are forever attached to those roots. “I tell ya, where we're from, every three-decker house had four, five kids to every floor, and every morning they were out the door and headed for St. Paul's School.” Wood frame homes were divided into three parts for the families that had emigrated from County Kerry, Ireland. These were large families whose lives revolved around work, the Roman Catholic Church, the Democratic party, and whatever sport was in season.

Every guy had a nickname. Hutch, Lefty, Nibby, Mac, Dude, Jabber, Spud, Bugs, Tea Pot—whatever it was, it stuck for life. They were a gang, but not in the modern sense of guns and dope and senseless violence. They were a gang of pals, and when they got into a fight it was with each other, and then, as one of them says, “We shook hands and forgot.”

As teenagers they led lives of innocent deprivation. They used the showers at the playground fieldhouse because no one had showers at home. There were no swimming pools so they took their dips in the Charles River. They organized their own baseball and basketball games without the current worries about uniforms and liability insurance. They got whacked by the nuns at St. Paul's, the neighborhood parochial school, when they stepped out of line; and if they went home and complained to their parents, they were likely to be whacked again. Their mothers stayed home and their fathers went off to jobs as laborers, policemen, firemen, plumbers, printers, railroad men.

When Pearl Harbor was attacked, they signed up for the Navy, the Army, the Marines, the Merchant Marine. Someone put up a big banner in the neighborhood—
KERRY CORNER
'
S CONTRIBUTION
TO THE UNITED STATES
—with a star for every young man who enlisted or who was drafted. Mothers and fathers would gather on the square to organize Christmas packages for the boys who were fighting their way across Europe or the Pacific as infantrymen, radar operators, aircraft controllers, helmsmen, and quartermasters. None became a highly decorated hero or senior officer, but the boys of Kerry Corner, and millions more like them from neighborhoods across the country, were the muscles and bones of the U.S. armed forces.

It was the biggest adventure of their lives. Before Pearl Harbor their world was defined by the ten square blocks of their neighborhood. As Eddie O'Callaghan remembers, “I was glad to get out and get back, but it really was an education because when we were kids a trip to Cape Cod was really a big thing—sixty miles away.”

John Caulfield (middle row, second from right), August 1942,
St. Paul's CYO baseball team

Not even the war could separate them. One of their favorite stories was told by the late Angie Backus, a Marine in the Pacific in 1942. His unit had been in heavy fighting on Tulagi for six weeks, with no reinforcements and no fresh supplies. Finally some more Marines landed, so Angie decided to take his mortar crew for a midnight raid on the supply depot. “We sneak down,” Angie said, “and we get stopped by a sentry. He looks at me and says, ‘Angie, is that you? It's me, Sonny Foster.' Way out in the Pacific, in the middle of the war, I bump into a kid I grew up next door to. Small world, huh?”

Remarkably, only a few from the Kerry gang didn't return. They can count only a half dozen. The others came home to the old neighborhood at the end of the war. But before long it began to change, under pressure from the expansion of Harvard and the rising prosperity in Cambridge. The lads from Kerry Corner were doing well too, and they were able to move to nearby working-class suburbs. In their hearts, however, they'll live on Kerry Corner, as friends, forever.

Some went on to college while others went directly to jobs as machinists, graphic artists, telephone company foremen, state highway patrolmen, or city cops. In the war they were the foot soldiers and common seamen, the men who made the war machinery work. They returned to perform the same invaluable service to greater Boston, just as other members of their generation were doing for other urban areas and small towns across the country.

John “Lefty” Caulfield, the organizer of the ROMEO Club, returned and went to Harvard, which he had attended briefly on a baseball scholarship before enlisting in the Navy. When he reenrolled in 1946, he had the GI Bill to pay the way—and many classmates who would later make their marks on the world, including Henry Kissinger; James Schlesinger, the former director of the CIA who was also secretary of defense and secretary of energy; Robert Coles, the distinguished psychiatrist who has devoted his life to the study of troubled children; and Amory Houghton of the Corning Glass family.

Caulfield, now a member of the Harvard Athletic Hall of Fame, played four years of varsity baseball, captained the team, and led the Ivy League in hitting. His favorite memory is beating Yale in 1948, when a young Navy veteran was captain of that Harvard rival—George Bush, Yale's first baseman.

That was an unexpected dividend from the war: the mixing of the likes of Lefty Caulfield with a future president of the United States from a country-club upbringing in Connecticut, a long way from Kerry Corner. Caulfield's father died when he was young, and the family was so poor he can remember blankets over the windows to keep the cold out and long waits at the local food bank for free grapefruits, cornmeal, and baked beans.

When Caulfield graduated in 1950, he began a career in education in the Cambridge schools, first teaching math and French while coaching the baseball teams. Later, he was appointed principal at Martin Luther King High School just 150 yards from his old home on the corner of Flagg and Banks streets. He had mixed feelings about the promotion. “I could do more for them as a principal,” he explained, “but I missed the family of kids I had as a teacher.”

We met upstairs at a ROMEO Club gathering at Charlie's Kitchen, a folksy bar and grill in Cambridge. A few of the members wore hearing aids and, on the whole, they were a pound or two over their ideal weight, but they're a healthy bunch for men in their seventies and eighties. They were wearing caps signifying their old military units or craft unions, a few sports shirts with the name of a club in Florida or down at the Cape. They present visitors with a tiny beaded pin of the American and Irish flags.

It was a big turnout the day I was there, eighteen guys from the old neighborhood and the one woman who's a member, Helen Sheehan, widow of Joe, a legendary figure who starred for the Boston College basketball team after the war. He was killed in an industrial accident later and Helen got his place at the table. When she lost her husband, their boyhood friend, they immediately organized a raffle and raised several thousand dollars so she would have ready cash. They also love to tease her in the most politically incorrect fashion. “Helen's one of the boys; we think she was a man before her sex-change operation.” Helen laughs as heartily as any of them.

Father Joe Collins, eighty-four, of the neighborhood parish, St. Paul's, was also there. He's married many of these men and represents the faith that's been such an important part of their lives. Only one has been married to more than one woman and that was because his first wife died. Father Joe always begins and ends the meeting with grace and benediction. When he finishes someone asks, “Is he gone now? Can we swear again?”

They've told and listened to the same stories so many times that when I asked James Maher how long he was in the service, the whole table answered with him in a singsong harmony: “Three years, seven months, and twenty-one days.” They all laughed. Mostly, however, they talk about the old days and the differences in life between then and now.

Caulfield believes these monthly gatherings typify the big difference. “I would say camaraderie and the affection everyone has to this day. It's fifty years of this.” And something else, according to Caulfield. “I believe we're being victimized by our affluence. We don't appreciate things because you don't work for them.” It's a common observation of this generation and all the men around the table nod in agreement.

That leads to a discussion of other lamentable changes, in their eyes. O'Callaghan, who was in one of the units that liberated Dachau, came home from the war and signed on with the Cambridge police department. “I was a detective in the juvenile squad and I took some neglected babies to my home until we could get them into a hospital.” Now, he says, hospitals that see evidence of child abuse won't even call the police.

John Caulfield picks up on the theme. “We're afraid to breathe. When I was a principal I hugged all the kids all of the time. The girls
and
the boys. I hugged them to praise them or to get their attention. But you can't do that anymore. Sexual harassment.”

John McGowan, a machinist for all the years after the war, says, “Too many people want others to take care of their kids. They're sending them to school at three years old just to get them out of the house.” Leo Doyle adds his observations about modern kids: “They don't know how to play, even. They're bored with each other.” An impossible concept for the ROMEO crowd. “They sit in front of computer screens. It may be educational but they don't know how to play tag, baseball, whatever the hell else. Part of growing up is learning to fight with each other.”

It goes on. Someone says, “You no longer know your next-door neighbor. If someone is sick or dies, no one knows it.” Work, which has been so central to their lives, has changed so much. “We went to work for a company and stayed there until we retired. Now they downsize; they're getting rid of you and they don't care.”

Someone else says, “Road rage! What's that all about? Why's everyone in such a hurry?”

Leo Doyle on Memorial Day: “When we were kids in grammar school the veterans from World War I would come into our classroom or we'd go down to the auditorium and they'd tell us about some of the things they went through. . . . I gave a talk in a school, and the kids kept strolling in like there was no tomorrow. Hell, when we were there you sat down and kept your mouth shut. I just got back from Wisconsin and I was talking to my great-grandchildren about Memorial Day, and they almost didn't know what I was talking about.”

The tone, however, was not bitter. The men of ROMEO and Kerry Corner are too proud and, in a way, so pleasantly surprised by how their lives turned out they have no time for bitterness. Besides, push them a little, and they'll tell you about the success of their kids, the schoolteachers and cops and lawyers. Joe Connally, who returned from the war to work in food services at schools throughout the Boston area, says, “You know, you forget there are so many good kids out there yet. I have a great feeling for the country and the kids coming along.” All along the table on the second floor at Charlie's Kitchen, the boys of Kerry Corner pause over their thick hot dogs and French fries, the hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, and beers, and silently nod in agreement.

After all, their own kids are doing well in their jobs and with their families. The promise of America has not dimmed for them, the sons and daughters of Kerry Corner's contribution to the United States in war and peace.

They don't have everything, however. Lefty Caulfield speaks for the table when he says, “I heard a guy say one time, ‘I have only one regret. My kid never had a Corner.' ”

HOME FRONT

Any war always has at least two fronts: the front line, where the fighting is done, and the home front, which provides the weapons, the supplies, the transportation, the intelligence, the political and moral support. The home front rarely gets equal credit, but World War II required such a massive buildup in such a short time, the home-front effort was as impressive as the fighting in Europe or the Pacific. On factory assembly lines or in shipbuilding yards, in government offices and top secret laboratories, on farms and ranches, the men and women who stayed behind were fully immersed in the war effort. They worked long shifts, rationed gasoline, and ate less meat. They rolled surgical dressings for the Red Cross and collected cigarettes for the boys “over there.” They waited for the mail and dreaded the unexpected telegram or visit from the local pastor. Some of them, pressed into duties they had never considered, found new callings in life. It was a radical transformation of America, an evolution still in progress, especially for women.

Charles Briscoe, high school, 1936