Page 53 - WTP VOl. X #6

“Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone,” she sang, going about her chores. “He’ll Have to Go,” by deep-voiced Jim Reeves, was another jute box favor- ite of hers, filled with longing for someone unnamed.
My father had hit his 40s on McKinley Boulevard, but was still ambitious to get ahead. One Christmas,
a business associate gave him an expensive gift, a deluxe collegiate dictionary with each letter in gilded type elegantly cut into the pages for ease of flipping to it. “He must think I’m a big wheel,” he exclaimed, and for the rest of the night we joked about it to each other: “You must be a big wheel.”
But he was clearly pleased at the notion. He was a high school truant who had worked to better himself, attending college courses at Milwaukee Vocational School and rising from one job to another. He worked at Thurner Heating, as a traffic manager for the Bank of Commerce, credit investigator for the Chamber of Commerce, traffic manager for Junior House, which manufactured women’s clothes, and a salesman for Aetna Insurance.
The insurance company had a contest to sell the most policies, with the winner getting an all-ex- penses-paid trip to St. Louis. On a weekly basis, he recalled with scorn, the sales staff was expected to stand and sing “Meet Me in St. Louie,” as the song went. Pa didn’t win.
So he quit that job and went back to Junior House for another five- year run and when Ma brought the fam- ily there on the rare occasion she drove the car you could tell he was a big deal, if not a big wheel, to the workers he managed.
But there was always a boss or owner above him who never did things the right way. We knew he knew more than the bosses because he told us so. Every promotion came too slow. He was a man in a hurry and “the grass was always greener” some- where else, my mother said.
That was the attraction of owning a “saloon,” as he called it. He could be his own boss. But his enthusi- asm curdled. The hours were long. The customers annoyed him. He wanted to own the building and he didn’t like dealing with the landlord, an old lady who lived upstairs from the tavern.
Not that he actually dealt with her. My mother visited to pay the monthly rent. “Does the noise ever bother you?” Ma asked. “Oh no,” she said, “I just turn off my hearing aid.”
She was the perfect landlady, my mother said. But nothing was ever perfect enough. Pa was sick of renting and besides, people were warning that the neighborhood would go as the “coloreds” moved in, though the one Negro boy in my class seemed fine to me. After six years on McKinley, and two years of run- ning a tavern, Pa wanted out of the house and busi- ness both and found a home in suburban Wauwatosa. So we saddled up and away we did ride.
The Mirror Shop Reflects Quality
The Murphy family arrived at St. Jude’s parish on Easter Sunday of my fourth grade year, attending church the morning after we moved to Wauwatosa. We were late for Mass, as usual, because Ma always had trouble getting Pa out of bed, which had become one of her added duties over the years, along with winding his watch, helping him dress and mak-
ing sure his shoes were shined and handkerchiefs pressed.
Compared to the guilty Gothic darkness and high- rising naves and arches of St. Michael’s, which seemed centuries old, St. Jude’s was newly built, modern and easy to grasp, with low ceilings, pastel colors, and bright stained glass windows that seemed to let the sunlight pour in approvingly. It was a church made for Easter, not Good Friday.
The Mass featured a spectacular choir with joyous harmonies, accompanied by trumpets, something we’d never heard at a church before, and their brassy high notes seemed to shout out the parish’s wealth. This was the land of doctors and lawyers, many lace-curtain Irish Catholics who had fled
the city and whose sons attended Marquette High School. Pa sold the home and tavern for a good profit, and now we had arrived, it seemed, the spe- cific location being 84th and Robertson in the lovely
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