Page 50 - WTP VOl. X #6

Oh You Can’t Get To Heaven
Every memory is a piece of time, but I always find myself first recalling the where, not the when. My earliest memory is of our house in St. Francis,
of me with my father, helping him shuck corn in the backyard. It was late summer, when the sweet corn ripened, and I was just three.
That backyard seemed to stretch on forever toward a railroad track in the distance, providing whole worlds for me to explore. I was sitting on a bench, unwrapping the cobs with my father, who loved fresh corn and praised my mother’s cooking. “Your lovely mother,” he repeated, and I sensed he understood the thrill of my relationship with her.
His words had a warmth that seemed to wrap you in their sound. He usually towered above me but be- came smaller and softer-voiced when he sat. In the distance, I could see the high rows of corn my mother had planted and the dusky, sunlit horizon, and I knew we would soon be spreading butter and sprinkling salt on the ears we’d stripped of their covering.
I was the second youngest of six children, and knew it meant something special to spend time alone with my father. I was “Brucey” to my older siblings and cousins, but only Daddy called me B.T., for Bruce Timothy, my middle name, suggesting we had a
secret understanding. St. Francis never changes in
my memory. It remains a patchy picture of paradise, but we were soon to leave our suburb for the city, for Milwaukee, where my father would run a tavern, and where I would reach the age of reason. It was the first of many moves we would make...
Fatback And Corn Liquor
“Won’t go hunting with you Jake, but I’ll go chasing women,” my father sang, and the customers hooted with laughter. “So put them hounds back in the pen and quit your silly grinning.” He had never hunted, never fished, never chased other women for that mat- ter, but he was the “personality behind the bar,” as my mother said, the owner and grand man the customers came to see—except when he wasn’t there.
“Oh, the moon is bright and I’m half-tight, and life is just beginning.” It was his trademark song on the “jute box,” as it always sounded to me. The custom- ers at Murphy’s bar plugged the neon-lit showcase
Excerpts From a Memoir in Progress
of 45s with coins and inevitably played “I Won’t Go Hunting with You Jake,” unless the “reprobate,” as Pa liked to call himself, wasn’t tending bar. “Where’s Murph?” they asked. “Where’s the old man?” My mother made excuses.
“Murph has gone and done it,” his letter to friends and business associates said, announcing the new tavern. He had quit yet another job, and now the family life was punctuated by jukebox numbers and country and western tunes, by “Running Bear” and “El Paso” and “Wolverton Mountain.” The tavern was launched with two grand opening nights with live music by accordion player and singer Concertina Millie, “of Radio and Television Fame on WTMJ and WTMJ-TV,” the letter announced.
The bar was just two blocks from our house, on 30th and Vliet, across the street from the Tastee Freeze, where you could get a dip cone with a waxy choco- late topping that hardened perfectly on the neatly swirled ice cream, and a hot dog for 15 cents.
The Vliet Street bus would take us all the way to Hoyt Park in Wauwatosa, where we swam all day and bought Milk Duds and Holloway bars. Usually, it was Sharon, Cathy and I. The three oldest, our brothers Brian, Brett and sister Pat, rarely hung out with us.
Those three helped clean and stock the bar, playing the jukebox for free—their one benefit until my brothers began sneaking the booze. It was the music of our lives. “The Tennessee stud was long and lean,” my mother sang while cooking or cleaning, but she usually flattened out the tune to a tired monotone. “The color of the sun and his eyes were green.”
On Saturday mornings, she left for the bar, to stock it and open by noon. Cathy, Sharon and I each had our assigned weekly chores, but there was no reason to rush. We’d watch “Captain Kangaroo” and “Sky King” and cartoons like “Heckle and Jeckle” and “Woody Woodpecker” on TV, eat graham crack- ers with peanut butter and Campbell’s Cream of Tomato with Saltines, and play my father’s old 78s and newer 45s, vintage records a friendly cop on the beat had given him.
We played cornball orchestral versions of “Lisbon” and “Near You” and punched out the deliriously
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BruCe Murphy