EXTRA   MATERIAL

Chapter Two - 1893-1901
An Education Inside a Catholic Grade School
and Outside

School

Apparently Sr. Mary Blanche tried to interest one of the young assistant priests of the parish in the Sodality.  One may have been appointed to the task but did very little.  (This would sometimes be the case in the later Sodality movement: that the real energy and leadership for the parish Sodality did not come from the parish priest.)

But the meetings were good.  We said the Office with a genuine affection and devotion.  [The Office is a book of daily prayers based on the Psalms.]  Sr. Mary Blanche communicated to us without ostentation her own love for our Lady.¹

Lord would later look back on his youth and comment:

Our playground was a quadrangle of gravel and cement, destructive of shoes and fatal to clothes.  . . . We raced and wrestled and threw one another about, played tough games like prisoner’s base and something that sounded like pum-pum-peelaway.  In the latter game two lines formed on the far ends of the yard with one boy in the center.  Each side in turn raced across the yard, and the one lad in the center tackled, threw, and made prisoner of another boy.  Then the two in the center of the yard tackled the line as it charged to exchange sides.  At the end all the boys except one man of might, muscle, and dexterity were in the center.  And when he tried to break through, the pile-up was mountainous.  At the end of the recess we returned to class breathless, our shoes scuffed and the soles worn through, our clothes in rents and tears.  It was a very, very nice game indeed.  Gentle, too, as you will notice.²

Dr. G. T. Bailey

Lord described the local doctor: G. T. Bailey:

It was the fatherly homeopath who vaccinated me, and I can still hear the rumbles of the contemporary fight on the subject of vaccines; as I recall with deep and not too intelligent pathos the fact that his own young doctor son, destined to succeed him, died either because he took vaccines or did not take vaccines or was given the wrong ones. . . . . how hazily the hot subjects of the hour float through to a child.  I just know that the fine old doctor suddenly became a bent, broken man, who came to the house without his wonderfully young doctor son, and no hope of a successor stepping into his practice.³

Then, with the wonderful courtesy which some men have for small boys, he turned me loose in his library, an excellent one.  During my sixth, seventh, and eighth grades I was reading every thing I could carry away from his bookshelves.  The Index of Forbidden Books had not dawned on my consciousness, so I fell under the spell of Dumas.  I came in contact with the florid imagination of Jules Verne.  I paged through exciting books of travel.  Here was a new and different education, and I lapped it up, hardly knowing what I got.  In the case of the French novels the names baffled me; I solved the problem by remembering the character’s first initial and the approximate number of letters which followed it.  Never did I ever pretend to pronounce it.  So the Three Musketeers to me were just P ------ and A------, and D’Artagnan was simply a chap named D apostrophe-A.⁴

Miscellaneous

At home for many years Daniel, slept on a cot, and then the sofa in their small homes.  He remembered breakfast:

Breakfast was a sort of English institution among us.  I do not recall any form of fruit juice or cooked or uncooked cereal.  I do recall bowls of fruit, platters of chops and steaks and sausages and bacon, eggs in all their forms, a variety of bread (no toast) sweet rolls, and limitless preserves.⁵

The young boy enjoyed parades:

On the other hand, while the handful of regulars marched in the Decoration Day parades and shot off salutes on the Glorious Fourth, I often persuaded my mother to take me down to the Labor Day parade and, hardly at the age of reason, came in contact with the growing ferment of organized labor.  The floats impressed me, with their tableaux of the honest workingman standing at the door of his shop under a huge sign that read, No scabs need apply.  I found the marching men in overalls dull in contrast to the smartly stepping regulars in their blue military uniforms; but I sensed that here was something at once grim and hopeful, fraught with promise and maybe a little dark with threat.  I was still very young indeed when, coming home from school, I saw the union strikers stone two scabs or strikebreakers, and watched from behind the shelter of a friendly tree when, bloody and terrified, the men ran madly down the street with the pack in full cry.⁶

Lord later described the world in which he lived.  America at the time was isolated from international events.

The uncrossable moats of two gigantic oceans surrounded the castle of our land, and Mr. Geddes, who had escaped from Germany to avoid military service and become the martinet manager of the Grand Theater, could shake my small hand and congratulate me in a heavy accent on being a boy in a land which had no army and needed only the small fleet that made good-will visits round a peaceful globe.⁷

My dear old grandmother lived through the famous Chicago fire and had no contact, I regret to confess, with either Mrs. O’Leary or her arson-minded cow.  She used to delight my childhood years with tales of things that people rescued from that fire: bird cages, and empty fishbowls, and mattresses that they dragged along the street, and old family portraits of ancestors whose names had been forgotten, and flatirons, and coal scuttles, and an occasional silk hat.

She never mentioned that any of them saved their favorite book of poetry or jumped into the fireman’s net while they were clutching to their bosoms great classic novels.  They did not even bother to rescue a pocket-size treatise on the care of burns or on how to deal with fire insurance companies.⁸

The young Lord became a voracious reader.

We met Taggert and Barbour.  We followed the adventures of Moondyne Joe and shipped for Two Years Before the Mast.  We came to know Father Spalding and Father Copus.  Ben Hur is a volume fatter than Anthony Adverse, but the kids agreed that if you could get over the first hundred pages it was great stuff from there on.  We suffered with the Victim to the Seal of Confession.  We found the boys’ books of Mark Twain.  We met for the first time Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and incomparable Sherlock Holmes.⁹

Sherlock Holmes, first published in 1897, was something new at the time.  Imagine a world where children talked about reading Ben Hur instead of the latest video game.

Money and Family Life

Lord’s father worked 12 hours days, six days a week as a clerk for 8$ a week at Stanton Grocers, the fancy grocers in downtown Chicago.  He left at 7 in the morning and returned at 7:30.  At one point they had a maid who was paid 9 dollars a week plus meals.  As Lord recounted these details in his autobiography, he commented: Thank heaven for the wages-and-hours law!¹⁰

Economics?  I think back to twenty-five-cent haircuts, children on weekdays fifteen cents.  The best candy in the city twenty-five cents a pound, a beautiful five-pound box for a dollar.  A Sunday chicken for a quarter.  The best pair of boy’s dancing pumps, two dollars and a half; a boy’s good suit, five dollars.  The top and absolutely best seats for an all-star play, two dollars.  A dinner in the best hotels, which meant all you could eat of everything you wanted from the menu, one dollar.  Rent for an eight-room apartment thirty-five dollars a month.  An ice-cream soda five and ten cents the latter if you wanted fresh crushed-fruit flavor.

But on the other hand, incomes about one fifth of what is the current average.  Office boys at three dollars a week.A good male clerk for fifteen dollars.  The home visit from your physician, a dollar.  A half an hour’s music lesson from a private teacher, who came to your house to give it, fifty cents.¹¹

We were beginning to hear rumbles about terrible things called trusts; but as my father was a staunch Republican and as my mother, Democratic like ninety-nine per cent of the Irish, had no vote, I could hear a counter rumble from a father who thought that trusts might well be the kind of big business which our big country needed.¹²

The Neighborhood Synagogue

Daniel Lord grew up with Jewish friends.  All told, the Jewish boys and girls were grand companions and decent kids, and we got along beautifully.¹³  But when more and more Jews moved into the growing neighborhood the Christians resented them.  Lord even heard a successful Jewish merchant say to his father: I’m moving away, Mr. Lord.  These damn Jews are ruining the neighborhood.¹⁴  The Jews built a synagogue and the Christians started moving out.  The Christian kids still in the neighborhood stopped playing with the Jewish kids.  Lord would later write against anti-Semitism and racism.  Having played with Jewish kids, prejudice against a group people because they were different made absolutely no sense to him.

The Isaiah Temple synagogue, built in the neighborhood in 1898 at 4501 South Vincennes, still stands.  Daniel Lord remembered a silent film crew coming into his neighborhood to make a movie.  For the robbery scene, they used the front of the synagogue with its Ionic columns as the bank.  The neighborhood continued to change and, in 1921, the building became the Ebenezer Baptist Church, an African-American church.  The church would be the birthplace of modern Gospel Music.  The choir would be led by Thomas A. Dorsey, who wrote Precious Lord, Take My Hand and Peace in the Valley.  Mahalia Jackson, who would go on to become—according to some—the greatest gospel singer, sang in the choir and the future Bo Diddley played trombone at the church.

Growing up, Lord learned the lessons of life, such as seeing wealth and prosperity frittered away.  A wealthy man named Storey died while building an enormous mansion.  Storey’s Folly, the abandoned partially-built home, became a play site for children who used it for their imaginary forts and castles.

Another neighbor ran a prosperous laundry.  He delighted the neighborhood kids with rides in his carriage with his daughter, who looked like a princess.  He took them to the park where he bought the children lemonades while he drank several of his own lemonades.  Sadly, his alcoholism led to his losing his wealth, his business, his home, and his carriage.  The father of another friend turned his sewing machine factory into a bicycle factory and in a few years retired a multi-millionaire.  He then bought a racing stable and learned that slow horses can lose money faster than swift bicycles can make it.¹⁵

Home Entertainment in the 1890s

Lord grew up at a time when entertainment was all live.  Recording technologies were still in their infancies.  Most people today see the essence of entertainment as being recorded entertainment while live entertainment is the exception.  Lord grew up with the attitude that entertainment was something people did themselves which is so different from the attitude of modern people who see entertainment as turning on electric and electronic devices.

It was the goal of most middle-class and wealthier homes to have a piano and someone in the house who could play piano so music would be available.  Listening to a family member play the piano from sheet music while others sang along was a common entertainments.  Families gathered around the piano, and not the TV screen.

In the 1800s, Stephen Foster (1826-1864) was the first big music marketing success, but it was all sheet music.  (Foster did not get rich from the sale of his music.)  Into the mid 1900s, sheet music was a key part of the business of music stores.  Salesmen played songs on the piano for potential buyers.  This type of store can be seen in the 1947 Frank Sinatra movie, It Happened in Brooklyn.  Today very little money is made on sheet music since so little of it is used and it is so easily copied and pirated.

Entertainment in Lord’s youth was something someone had to do in the moment.  If you were not at a theater or concert hall then someone in the group had to play something, sing something, or start dancing.  Entertainment was active and not passive.  This was Lord’s whole way of seeing and living life.  Most entertainment now is passive.  Today, very often, a party for children involves the kids watching a movie and often the children have seen the movie dozens of times before.  If alive today, Daniel Lord would scratch his head in disbelief.

The Spanish-American War

When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, Lord and friends joined in the patriotic enthusiasm for what he would later call The Gay Spanish War.  But years later he learned the facts of the war.

I saw our country as a big bully picking on a small boy.  I marveled that Americans could sell to their soldiers shoes with paper soles and food that was green with disease.  I hoped that I’d never have to fight an enemy with anything but Fourth-of July fireworks.

Yet it was war, and from my present position in life I like it less and less—and all war less and less¹⁶

I believe that most honest Americans admit that our war on Spain in 1898 was a pretty shabby affair.  Our newspapers, notably the Hearst sheets, whipped our nation to a frenzy.  The letter which the queen regent of Spain sent to our president, offering conciliation, was suppressed.  The blowing up of the Maine was not investigated until many years later, and even then the public was allowed to know nothing of the evidence.  We rushed in and beat a supposed enemy that had never really approached our shores.¹⁷

NOTES

•   ¹ Played by Ear, 241.
•   ² Ibid., 62-63.  Wikipedia spells the games as Pom-pom-pullaway.  It is also called Pom-pom-Pete-away.
•   ³ Lord, A Patient Speaks His Mind,, 4.
•   ⁴ Played by Ear, 65.
•   ⁵ Ibid., 347.
•   ⁶ Ibid., 368-69.
•   ⁷ Ibid., 368.
•   ⁸ Lord., We Pick Books For a Desert Island (QW, 1946), 4-5.
•   ⁹ My Mother, 27.
• ¹⁰ Played by Ear, 31.
• ¹¹ Ibid., 373-74.
• ¹² Ibid., 368.
• ¹³ Hi, Gang!, 84.
• ¹⁴ Ibid., 84.
• ¹⁵ Ibid., 147.
• ¹⁶ Ibid., 157.
• ¹⁷ Lord, The Pope in the World Today (QW, 1938), 43.

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Copyright 2021 Stephen Werner