One Thing Leads to Another ...

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Contents

PROLOGUE..............................................................viiCHAPTER ONE Bankrupt In Brightside...................................1CHAPTER TWO Hotel Life...............................................19Sacred Heart School...................................................26The Campion Hotel.....................................................31Dad and Aunt May......................................................41Escaping from Sacred Heart............................................49CHAPTER THREE Chestnut Street Junior High School.....................61First Doubts..........................................................69Poets, Musicians, and Athletes........................................72Responsibility........................................................78CHAPTER FOUR Fitz....................................................81The Long Trail........................................................95Camping in Easthampton................................................99Seminarians...........................................................106The North End.........................................................108CHAPTER FIVE Reunion.................................................113The Sporting Life.....................................................121Getting Educated......................................................127Keeping the Faith - or Not............................................134An American Socialism.................................................139C.M.T.C...............................................................144To Bowling Green and Back.............................................150Car Crash.............................................................152CHAPTER SIX Working Man..............................................167News of War in Europe.................................................170Foundry...............................................................175CHAPTER SEVEN Hobo...................................................181Riding the Rails......................................................187Commonwealth College..................................................204CHAPTER EIGHT College Freshman.......................................219Classes...............................................................227No Fees or Credits....................................................234Leaving Bowling Green.................................................240CHAPTER NINE Hospital Orderly........................................245CHAPTER TEN U.S. Coast Guard.........................................255NY Social Life........................................................262Quartermaster Striker.................................................270Pharmacist Mate.......................................................284CHAPTER ELEVEN In The Pacific With The Navy..........................295Aboard the Callaway...................................................303Saipan and Leyte......................................................308

Chapter One

In 1927, just after my ninth birthday, my father's business went bankrupt. This catastrophic shock shattered my family. We had been a unity in a home on Beckwith Avenue in Westfield, Massachusetts, but were then splintered into three disparate locations. We were not really far apart - we were all in the Connecticut River valley in south central Massachusetts. Ruth, my older sister, and I found ourselves in Holyoke. My other siblings and stepmother were in West Springfield, and Dad was in Springfield. To me it seemed that the only adults I knew were out of reach and suddenly I was in a strange place among strangers. I did not anticipate that it would soon get worse.

Dad closed the door of D.F. McCALL, SHOES, on Main Street. The remaining stock had been confiscated. He lost his home and its fine furnishings and his Pierce Arrow touring car. Penniless and in debt, he returned to Springfield, where he had been born and reared, to look for a job. He ended up as a door-to-door salesman for shirts and socks and perhaps some other items. Earnings were uncertain and not enough to provide a home for his wife and children.

The failure of my father's business preceded the Crash of '29. It was a harbinger of coming events. Dad had bought shoes on credit from factories in Lynn and Brockton. He sold them on credit, as was then the custom. This was fine so long as he competed only with shoe stores like his own, but when a chain store opened in Westfield, it could, with economies of scale, undersell him.

A man would come into D.F. McCall's Shoe Store and buy shoes for himself, his wife and however many children he had. Each payday he would come by and make a payment of an agreed amount on his bill. That was one reason Dad needed a bookkeeper. Once the chain store sold cheaper shoes, Dad's customers bought what they needed in the new store for cash, but now having put out money for new shoes, they were short of what they should pay Dad for the shoes they had bought previously. Some paid something; many paid nothing. Even if he were to start requiring cash on delivery, his price would have to be higher than the chain store's. It didn't take long before Dad couldn't pay for the shoes he had bought on credit from the factories. Bankruptcy was inevitable.

It was devastating for him. Once he had been a successful small businessman, a member of the group that was the backbone of the community. He had a store on Main Street. People looked up to him, were happy to greet him. Subsequently he was a failure nobody wanted to notice, some because they owed him money that was never going to be repaid. Some felt pity for his fall, but others considered bankruptcy a disgrace. He had been an important person, albeit in a small town. Then he became a nobody.

Actually Dad had owned very little except his Pierce Arrow automobile, more impressive than a Model T Ford, and an expensive suit of clothes. He rented his house and rented his store; his inventory was not really his, being obtained on credit and not paid for till the stock was sold. If there had not been a merchandizing revolution with the coming of chain stores, he would have continued to prosper, but he began his career when an epoch was coming to an end. I am sorry for Dad because he always afterward thought he might "get back on his feet" and open another store, but that was never possible. But I am not sorry to have missed what might have been one of the consequences of a continued success. Being the oldest son, I would have inherited the business (or some part of it) had father prospered. I would have been brought up to expect it, educated in the way the business was organized, and probably been content to succeed in my progenitor's foot steps. From my perspective now, I am glad to have had an academic, rather than a commercial, career.

Dad later told me he had worked in a shoe store in Springfield, learned the business, saved some money, borrowed a bit more, and opened the store in Westfield. He didn't start up in Springfield because he considered his former employer, who had taught him what he needed to know, as his benefactor and didn't wish to compete with him. I accepted this story without question; I still think it essentially correct, but maybe there is a different proportion to be seen in the amount of money saved and...