An Alternative Education, Part 1

(Detail from “General Highway Map Butler County Kentucky” [1970] prepared by the Kentucky Dept. of Highways. The Lonesome Pine is marked by the little square above the “u” in Huldeville.)

In January 1974 I began a second stint of volunteer work for Glenmary Home Missioners in Butler County, Kentucky. (I’d worked with this small Catholic order the previous year in McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania.) I had just finished my first semester at Ohio University, enjoyed my time there and made friends, but I’d run out of money and held no thoughts of asking for help. (As the oldest of ten kids, I’d simply concluded I was on my own.) A high school classmate, Bill Kirk, was interested in volunteering with Glenmary and looking for a wingman, someone who’d join him on this venture. A West Akron kid, Bill had come a long way from the freckle-faced, sandy-haired imp I’d known as a freshman. Coming of age in the late sixties under the guidance of the Jesuits, we had all grown. I told Bill, in the words of Leonard Cohen, “I’m your man.”

Butler County is located in what is known as the Western Coal Field region (on the land of the Yuchi, Shawnee, Cherokee, and Osage peoples), a dry county just north of Bowling Green, home of Western Kentucky University. Some farming, some strip mining, some small industry and small businesses, lots of rural poverty. The population of the entire county at that time was a bit under 10,000, and about 1,400 people lived in Morgantown, the county seat. The Catholic church in Morgantown was not much more than a missionary lifeboat adrift in a sea of Baptists. Glenmary had stationed a priest and a nun there. The priest was forgettable; the Irish-born nun, Sister Nora, was a holy terror whom I learned to steer clear of, as no-nonsense and severe as her grey habit and the silver crucifix she wore around her neck. 

When Bill and I arrived, we were met by another Glenmary volunteer, Kent, who was coincidentally from Hudson, the town just north of my hometown in northeast Ohio. He welcomed us and helped us settle into the house he’d been renting. We called it The Lonesome Pine for the big cedar beside the front porch. It was located on a single-lane dirt road about seven miles northwest of Morgantown and a little more than a mile off the blacktop, near the unincorporated community of Huldeville. The house had a front room, a middle room, and a kitchen. There was a full-length front porch and a back porch that provided access to the well from which we drew water by letting down a galvanized bucket and hauling it up. The other backdoor off the kitchen led to the outhouse. We had electricity and a coal stove for heating. We all slept in the front room, our de facto dormitory. It was all thrillingly rustic.

Our mission was rather vague. Brother Al had given me the names of a couple of teenage boys in Morgantown whom I should try to befriend. They played basketball, pretty much the state sport of Kentucky, so I started scouting the outdoor hoops located beside most any free slab of blacktop, looking for opportunities to join pick-up games. We attended Mass on Sundays and visited afterward with the priest and Sister Nora and the handful of parishioners. The Phelps family were among the most active members – Walt and Betty Phelps and their five children lived about a half mile from us. Walt was a gruff, taciturn ex-Army mechanic from Brooklyn, New York, who had been stationed at Fort Knox, where he met Betty. A Butler County girl, Betty was the emotional backbone of the family, warm-hearted and quick to laugh but also solid and unflappable. After Walt left the service, they moved back here. We visited with them often and played with their kids. I wish I could remember their names – the oldest daughter was thirteen or so, the youngest boy was three or four. Walt had a Volkswagen repair shop located in the drive-in basement of a friend’s house. We often hung out with him while he was working on a car. The family surely lived well below the poverty line, but they somehow got by. For all that they didn't have, they did have a wealth of joy and happiness. Seeing this in action was a meaningful discovery for me.

Morgantown has never been served by a railroad line, but the Green River flows through it and was an important means of transportation until the 1920s. There were two main restaurants in town, the Farm Boy and the Kuntry Kitchen. They both featured Green River catfish and hush puppies on their menu. I composed a poem about this, using all the local color and dialect I could muster. In retrospect, the poem’s commentary on the role of women is a bit cringey, but it was what it was. The Phelps kids loved the poem – I think because it celebrated a place and way of life they knew – and almost any time I saw them, they’d ask me to recite it: 

Green River catfish 

got the best taste –

when ya feed ’em to the kids, 

ain’t none left to waste.

Sittin’ on the banks

of the ol’ Green River,

sippin’ from a fruit jar, 

messin’ up your liver.

Catch a couple cat – 

they gonna give ya a fight.

If you can’t fish a lick, 

you might be there all night.

Take ’em on home, 

give ’em to your ol’ lady,

say: “Make ’em taste right, 

I’m gettin’ hungry, Sadie.

Fix me up some home fries, 

a mess of collard greens,

and to wash it all down, 

a pot of sassafras tea.”

Take a chaw off your plug, 

sit right where you’re at,

stay a spell and brag 

about Green River cat.

Carpe Diem Days

The summer of 1973, I had returned from nine months . . .

This piece is dedicated to the eleven friends who shared the experience of attending an all-boys Jesuit high school from 1967 to 1972 and who recently reunited via Zoom and long email chains. (Would this have happened without the Covid quarantine forcing us all to focus our attentions in some way?) One of the emails threads was “What happened to X?” This inspired a memoir of an unlikely intersection with one of my classmates . . .

The summer of 1973, I had returned from nine months of volunteer work with Glenmary Home Missioners (and with high school buds Jon and Michael) in McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania, near the Maryland border. We were helping Brother Ralph (one of the most sweet-tempered men I’ve ever known) build homes for the Black families who lived on the Ridge, a segregated community a mile or two outside of town on the slopes of the Tuscarora Mountain. We were inspired by what that religious order considered a secondary objective: “to lift up and improve the moral lives of the people around us, regardless of their beliefs or lack of beliefs; regardless, even whether they will ever accept the Faith or not.” And we loved working with Ralph and learning the carpentry skills – actually all the skills – involved in building a house. For us, it became a gap year before the concept had really become popular in the U.S.

But now I was back home in Akron, Ohio, having been gently told by my girlfriend Bobbie that she’d found someone else in her first year at the University of Denver, having lost the rough carpenter job I’d held for a month or so. Restless, searching for the answers to hastily conceived questions, I set out in the blue 1952 Chevy Impala that Brother Ralph had bequeathed to me. I returned to McConnellsburg to help Ralph on his next building project. I was then invited by Brother Al Behm to come to Vanceburg, just south of the Ohio River in eastern Kentucky, where Glenmary had a summer camp of sorts for Catholic high school boys looking for meaning or purpose in their lives. I became an informal camp counselor based on cred I’d earned by the physical and emotional work I’d already put in. There I met up with an old high school classmate, News (Jim Ward). We never hung out much in high school. I don’t remember ever sharing a class with him. We weren’t from the same town. But we connected in those two weeks in Vanceburg, those late nights around the campfire, talking about who we were becoming or hoping to become. I discovered more depth to News than I’d ever sensed from our four years sharing the hallways and commons and parties of high school. We made plans to meet up later that summer.

From Vanceburg, I drove up to Ann Arbor to hang and party with Prch, Jimi, Grins, Alain, Keloir, Joy – were they all there? – and then headed to Cape Cod to meet up with Owen, Peggy and Schlemmer – and whoever else might be stopping by – in Provincetown, where they were working tourist industry jobs during the day and partying at night. En route, I got busted coming back across the U.S. border at Niagara Falls with two scruffy hitchhikers and a quarter-ounce of pot that Prch had given me to give to Owen. After letting me sweat for most of a day in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection office, looking at posters outlining New York Governor Rockefeller’s new get-tough drug laws, I was released with no charges. (And that, my friends, is called White Privilege.) I had to scrape together $100 to get my car out of impoundment, twice what I had paid Brother Ralph for it, and then was on my way to Cape Cod.

I arrived before sunrise at the funky little beach apartment that Owen, Schlemmer, and Peggy shared. Jon and Billy Kirk were also visiting, and they had barricaded the door because of storms and electrical outages and ghost stories the previous night. After breakfast and tales of the road, I climbed into my sleeping bag and crashed in some corner of the apartment. That night we shared stories and bottles of tequila and got lost in the dark on the dunes. News met up with me there, with plans to drive up to Maine in his panel van and hike the last part of the Appalachian Trail and climb Mount Katahdin. We did spend a couple of days on the trail. I remember stopping in the evening at these sweet little lean-tos and huts along the trail. We hiked up Katahdin but didn’t reach the summit. 

Some of these memories are a blur. I was just saying yes to whatever opportunity came along, with little forethought or afterthought. I was, at the very least, game, living in the moment, which is what you should do when you’re nineteen. News swung back by Provincetown to drop me off so I could pick up the Impala and drive Jon and Billy Kirk back to Akron, where I packed up to start school at Ohio University in Athens. On that drive, Billy talked to Jon and me about working with Glenmary, and because I sensed he was looking for a wingman, I volunteered. News and I exchanged a few letters after that, and then we lost track of each other, as I did with so many of these friends of my youth.

Anatomy of a Neighborhood Gang

When I was five years old . . .

When I was five years old my family moved from our southside Akron, Ohio, apartment on Voris Street to the suburbs, a house on Lakeview Boulevard in Stow. You couldn’t actually see Silver Lake, but it was a mere fifteen-minute walk cutting across the vast manicured lawns of the Village of Silver Lake. We didn’t live in the “village,” but we knew it. At Silver Lake Country Club we caddied for the lawyers and doctors and bankers and assholes who lived in those houses.

But our neighborhood gang centered around the three parallel blocks of Lakeview, Englewood, and Adaline. We were all Holy Family Catholic school boys. Mark and Mike Huscroft lived on Englewood – I could see their front door from our kitchen window. I hung out with Mark a lot until he skipped a grade after third grade. He would kick my ass on a regular basis, but I kept coming back for more because - what choice did I have? I had no older siblings and somehow knew that I needed toughening up, and the Huscrofts were the guys to do it. They were good-hearted bullies.

The Domingo brothers lived on the corner of Englewood and Lake Road. The younger one we called Werewolf because he had the hairiest back we’d ever seen on a kid. Doug Wynn, and his older brother Bill, lived two houses down from the Domingos on Lake. Cattycorner across the street from the Domingos lived Chris Feliciano, and next door to him lived Joe and Beej Mariola. Beej, whose family owned the only built-in swimming pool in the neighborhood, was a year younger than Mark and Doug and me. Jim Harry and Bill Wojno lived up the block from me on Lakeview. Pit Moushey and his older brother Tom lived on Adaline. I remember Pit referring to someone as a “brown-noser” with such sneering disgust that I decided at that moment that I never wanted to be that guy,  even though it took me a while to figure out what the word meant. Mike Keller, who lived across the street from Pit, had flunked back into our grade. One of twelve kids, he became my newspaper route partner. Pat Flowers, two years younger than me, lived next door to me. 

We were far from the wildest gang of kids, flirting with modest acts of juvenile delinquency. Lots of homes were being built in the neighborhood, and we played on the work sites after the construction crews had quit for the day. Somebody would get hold of some cherry bombs and we’d figure out what we could blow up. We made crude skateboards out of one-by-eight boards and roller skate wheels. We played on the concrete storm sewer sections before they were buried, and after, we removed the manholes and crawled through the sewer until it emptied into the creek in Wetmore Park. Football and basketball and baseball and bike riding and fishing. We had a ball diamond in our backyard that worked better for kickball. Capture the Flag, Kick the Can - games that spanned and connected three or four backyards. Because it required less space and fewer participants, we played endless games of Smear the Queer that often ended in nigger piles. And this is how homophobia and racism were woven into our play.

Lots of sleepovers or sleep-outs. I got out of the house whenever I could, not because it was particularly awful there but because I wanted to know more about the world. Because Doug and Mike and Pat had older brothers and sisters, and because we didn’t have a stereo at home, this was my real introduction to rock music. I remember listening carefully to Rubber Soul with Doug in 1966, and to After Bathing at Baxter’s in 1967 at Keller’s house, and to The White Album in 1968 with Pat and his older siblings Jimmy, Jeannie, and Marianne. 

As we got older, we would look up to the Huscrofts and Pit and Wojno and Harry, who were all a year or two older than us. I remember them crafting elaborate nicknames for each other. Mark was Modé or Moders, Mike was Midders. Bill Wojno had an equally obtuse nickname that I’ve forgotten. In the summer of 1964 I became Du-babes, thanks to Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe.” By the time I started high school, it had been shortened to Du, and that’s what I went by all through high school.

The thing about the neighborhood gang is that those guys were not my only options. I think I unconsciously chose them because they were a little bit rougher and wilder than me, quite willing to get into some low-grade trouble. I can remember the summer I turned eight or nine, sneaking out of the house with a pair of jeans that I changed into behind the woodpile, stuffing the shorts my mother was forcing me to wear into a chink in the woodpile. And then I was off for the day, ready for blue jeans action, maybe grabbing a sandwich for lunch at a friend’s house or picking fruit from an unsuspecting neighbor’s tree, trying to figure out what kind of person I wanted to become.