Remembering a Cousin

Remembering an Older Cousin and a Bygone Era

Written by Dan McDonald 

            I had four grandparents – I guess that is pretty common.  I was the youngest grandchild born of those four grandparents.  Both of my parents were the youngest children of their parents, and I was their youngest child.  All my grandparents were deceased by the time I was born.  Both of my grandfathers were born in 1872, and my grandmothers were born before 1880.  I guess I was destined to never be able to live a modern life.  My older cousin was more like most people’s uncle to me.  He was nearly thirty when I was born.  I grew up playing with his two sons.  I’ve been thinking of him lately.  He passed away, but lived to see the Chicago White Sox win their only world series during his lifetime.  I started out a White Sox fan in my earliest youth but never forgave them when they traded away Luis Aparicio, their slick-fielding base-stealing shortstop in the 1960’s.  But my cousin was a Sox fan for life from the time when he was a little boy and got to meet Luke Appling, one of the greatest unremembered hitters in all of major league history.  Appling’s playing days were over by the time baseball was being televised into America’s homes, but one home run hit by Appling made the baseball reels when at 75 years of age he hit this homer in an old-timer’s game played in Washington when Washington was without a major league baseball team.  I’ve sort of forgiven the White Sox for trading Aparicio, but when I pulled for the Sox to win it all, it was for my cousin’s sake.  I wanted the Sox to win it once just for him, and he was almost 80 when they did win it for my cousin and in my cousin’s mind for Luke Appling, and maybe for a third baseman named Buck Weaver, and for the diehard fans that pulled for the team from the south side.

            My older cousin is gone now.  I remember, as a kid about one Saturday a month my Dad taking me with him to get a haircut at Ray’s Barber Shop.  After we’d get a haircut, we would drive about a block or two away and go to the tavern that had been started just after Prohibition ended by my cousin’s dad and my aunt, my mom’s sister.  The tavern exists only in memories now.  I can sort of almost see it in my mind as I take a journey with my Dad, in my memories, into my cousin’s tavern.  The town we came from had two things in abundance; churches and taverns.  The churches and tavern owners got together and limited the liquor licenses to somewhere in the low 40’s as I remember – the churches not wanting any more dens of iniquity and the tavern owners not wanting any more competition.  In a town of 16,000 mostly Germans, Polish, Slovaks, Italians and some English, Scots, and Irish thirty or forty taverns was about the right number to insure the tavern owners could feed their families.

            My town was bigoted in many ways and never knew it, but it was also sort of tolerant in its own way.  It survived prohibition.  Most of the ethnicities composing our town had been accustomed to traditions of using alcohol for a thousand years.  It was sort of humorous to them that somebody would try to outlaw the use of alcohol.  Prohibition was an experiment of a little longer than a decade attempt to change a thousand years of tradition.  Most everyone knew it was a Protestant attempt to make Lutherans, Catholics, Jews, and Orthodox see the light.  But my local town took it all in stride with a sense of tolerance.  You understand that in my town no one got upset with those people that obeyed the law of prohibition in the secrecy of their own home.   Prohibition was tolerated and anyone that wanted a drink got one just like they had for a thousand years.

            I can remember the tavern my cousin owned.  There were photographs in it from the decades it existed.  Its heyday was in the Depression, right after Prohibition ended.  It was hard times.  So on either Friday night or Saturday night or both, the tavern would offer a turtle dinner for a very reasonable price.  The idea was that if someone provided a snapping turtle to be cleaned and cooked, then they would be able to eat free when otherwise they might not be able to afford a night on the town.  So in came the snappers and turtle soup was the delicacy of the place.  There would be a dinner and when dinner was done being served, the tables would be cleared, the tables would be moved, and then there was dancing, mostly swing I would think.  I’m not sure if there were live bands, plenty of accordion players existed in my home town in those days.  Maybe it was to the radio that they heard Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and of course Glenn Miller.  I remember going into the room where I had heard how they used to dance to the music in those days.  The whole building was decaying when I would go there on Saturday morning.  The turtle dinners and dancing to the sound of big bands was all a memory, and now the dance floor was a place where boxes were stored.  But I had heard enough stories that I thought I could imagine seeing some of those scenes taking place before me.

            It is all gone now.  In its original beginnings the tavern had been a place of community, where people trying to stretch their nickels and dimes had a turtle dinner and danced to some band even if it was a juke box or radio.  Then over the years as the building decayed except for the grand bar, ah it was a wonderful bar where a pint could slide from one end of the bar to a customer near the other end of the bar.  Then it became sort of a working man’s joint.  A railroad yard, trucking companies, glass factories were all not far from the tavern.  After a hard day’s work a worker would come for a shot, a mug of beer, some talk, and a way of changing gears on the way home to be with the family after a frustrating day.  A tavern owner is a sort of priest.

            Yeah, this tavern had its share of people who had wasted their lives.  Usually they were wasted by the time their lives had descended to where they would enter this tavern.  There was the commercial artist and his wife.  It was the 1960’s.  Here was a commercial artist, who had once been one of the two or three highest paid commercial artists in Chicago.  His wife had a Master’s Degree, when few women had attended college.  But they lived lives of begging drinks, and neighbors took care to watch to it that their children were fed.  My Dad made sure I knew that story.  We were a family that enjoyed a brew, a mixed drink, a holiday toast, but also a family reminded that abuse destroyed lives.  Maybe prohibition hadn’t been so crazy, but maybe in the end you can’t change a thousand year tradition in a decade or two.

            Eventually I became an Evangelical, something of a fundamentalist.  I almost lost my humanity in my religion.  But the first stand I made to retain and maintain a bit of humanity was to remember to drink a beer with my Dad when he offered me one.  I had been to my cousin’s tavern too many times, and had since being a little child in my Dad’s lap sipped from his beer glass.  A thousand years of tradition was too strong for the fundamentalism I was imbibing.  I was torn between those who said Christians don’t drink and my sense that in moderation it was good.  One night after every one had gone to bed, instead of drinking tea as I did with my Bible study, I had a beer.  I too had survived prohibition.  For me that might have been the first time I decided that whatever others said I would struggle to maintain my humanity within my Christianity.  I suppose this makes no sense to some, and lots of sense to others.  I mean nothing against those who never allow a drop of liquor to cross your lips.  You won’t have to think about the possibility of becoming the commercial artist and his educated wife begging for drinks.  But for me, I retained a bit of my humanity when everything human in me was close to being lost in a fundamentalist sort of zeal, that sometimes is sort of like being on a drunk not by drink but by religion.  My next beer will be in memory of my cousin, and maybe next year I will pull once more for the South-sider Sox, but at least my cousin got to watch them win it all.  My parents and cousin, that tavern, some of the railroads and most of the glass factory industry is gone from the town I left so long ago.  I suppose its former way of life will soon be forgotten for the ages, but it will be a part of me to the day I die.  I want everyone to become a Christian, to know God’s love, to share in the life of Christ, and to grow in grace as long as they grow in age.   But I want no one to lose their humanity and it is as easy to lose one’s humanity to religion as to drink.