Mean Dads for a Better America Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Denise, Agnes, and Louise

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1 BE AFRAID

  CHAPTER 2 BE PRACTICAL

  CHAPTER 3 BE SATISFIED

  CHAPTER 4 BE THRIFTY

  CHAPTER 5 BE COMPETITIVE

  CHAPTER 6 BE CONFIDENT

  CHAPTER 7 BE CREATIVE

  CHAPTER 8 BE DEDICATED

  CHAPTER 9 BE RECKLESS

  CHAPTER 10 BE PREPARED

  CHAPTER 11 BE REVERENT

  CHAPTER 12 BE A GENTLEMAN

  CHAPTER 13 BE YOURSELF

  CHAPTER 14 BE BOLD

  CHAPTER 15 BE OPEN-MINDED

  CHAPTER 16 BE(AT) IT

  CHAPTER 17 BE ROGUE

  CHAPTER 18 BE NEW WAVE

  CHAPTER 19 BE SUPPORTIVE

  CHAPTER 20 BE A (SLIGHTLY NAÏVE) JOKER

  CHAPTER 21 B MINOR

  CHAPTER 22 BE PROUD

  CHAPTER 23 BE GRATEFUL

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  INTRODUCTION

  WHEN I MARCHED OFF TO MY FIRST DAY OF kindergarten in September of 1971, I had no idea where my school was. “Just walk in the same direction as all the other kids!” my mother yelled to me from the porch, and off I went. I quickly found a pack of kids about my size moving along with their lunch boxes and I joined them. We all wandered along together like cattle, and eventually ended up at school.

  I have such strong memories of my childhood during that time. Whenever you see a movie or TV show that’s set in the late 1960s or early ’70s, everyone’s decked out in headbands, beaded vests, and bell-bottoms like they just left the Woodstock Festival and are on their way to a Vietnam War protest, but that’s not what most of the world looked like. I grew up in the town of Norwood, Massachusetts, and like 99 percent of the country at that time, it was a lot closer to Mayberry, with dads that looked like Andy Griffith and kids that looked like Opie.

  On July Fourth and Memorial Day the Shillues would go down to the center of town and watch the veterans march, followed by the Colonial Boys playing in the fife and drum corps in the yearly parades. We waved American flags and saluted the soldiers as they walked by, and although there may have been protests about all kinds of things happening on faraway college campuses, we didn’t hear much about them. It was still Cold War America, the U.S.S.R. versus the U.S.A., and we knew who the good guys were.

  The secret to my happy childhood, I believe, was in the contrasts. I think my family was the only one in Massachusetts driving around in a Volkswagen bus with a Nixon/Agnew sticker on the bumper. We were surrounded by the art and music of the peace movement, the mainstream stuff anyway: the Kingston Trio, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles, and Three Dog Night played from our hi-fi in the living room, and there were Peter Max posters in our bedrooms and peace signs decorating our refrigerator. But, somehow, my mother managed to embrace the hippie aesthetic of the 1970s without succumbing to its worldview. So when we were piling out of the Volkswagen looking like a gang from a collectivist commune, we were headed into St. Catherine’s church together.

  In many ways, this meant we got the best of both worlds. My childhood was like the Bing Crosby movie The Bells of St. Mary’s, set to the soundtrack from the musical Godspell. It was Freedom, Love, Peace, and Fierce Individuality, all mixed up with Parental Authority, Moral Absolutism, and Fear of God. A rich, hearty recipe for happiness if ever there was one.

  The TV we consumed was mostly syndicated reruns from the ’50s and ’60s. We watched The Rifleman, My Three Sons, Andy Griffith, and Dragnet, shows with moral codes matching their black and white palettes. The Boy Scout manual I used as a kid was an old hand-me-down from my uncle, but its contents matched the curriculum my troop followed: the same exercises, the same merit badges, the same Scouts honor. Why did I need a new one? The ideals in it were enduring. There was also no talking back or “positive discipline” then. There was no hugging it out or sharing our feelings or family meetings. You did what you were told as a kid and then you got to have fun. A+B = C, or something like that.

  I think the decade of the 1970s was probably the greatest time ever to be a kid, but only if it came with the teaspoon of castor oil that was 1950s America. There were many tumultuous issues of the day—Watergate, the Vietnam War, gas shortages, birth control, the ERA; these issues weren’t for kids, though. They were simmering in the background. In the foreground were Church, God, Country, baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, Chevrolet, parades, heroes, and the Red, White and Blue.

  I might have grown up in the ’70s but I was raised by the ’50s.

  Things started to change when I became a teenager, as they usually do. I know this because when I was in high school in the 1980s I kept a diary beside my bed. It wasn’t my idea—I’d gotten it from a pro football player who had come to speak at one of my high school assemblies. During a Q&A session, he was asked if he had any advice for young people, and he said, “Keep a diary. It doesn’t matter what you write in it, just do it. Try to write something every day. Otherwise you’ll forget everything from this part of your life.”

  Well, that was all I needed. Diaries had always seemed like kind of a girl thing, but since the recommendation had come from a football player, I went right out and bought a blank, unlined book and began filling it. Such is the power of male role models. And the football player was absolutely right. My memory from my high school years is no match for the vivid recall I have from my youngest days, so without the diary I don’t think I would remember half of that time.*

  I recently opened mine up, and it was quite enlightening, as well as a little embarrassing—it’s quite heavy on the words I, me, and myself.

  Here was an entry titled “self-evaluation”:

  I, like many other people constantly wonder what other people think of me. I’m an extrovert. This means I’m very sociable, very outspoken, and even loud sometimes.

  In fact, I often wonder how some people get through life without much attention at all. If I tried to go a day without purposely calling attention to myself, I would find it difficult.

  I probably should have titled it “self-absorption,” but nevertheless my analysis was spot on. It was 1984 and MTV was new; I was embracing the new wave music scene and doing everything I could to draw attention to myself at school. I was listening to the B-52’s and DEVO, and I colored my hair David Bowie–red with henna, and dressed like a Discount Duran Duran. (It all seems very mainstream now, but believe me, in the New England suburbs where “Zeppelin Rules!” that was enough to get you labeled a “Wicked Weeid-oh!”) To be honest, I was treating my high school life as a performance and trying to establish myself as different, unique, avant-garde. Having grown up conservative and straight-laced, I was clearly seeking to spread my wings and try out a new persona. And you can tell from my diary, I relished my status as an outsider.

  I wonder however about my nonconformity. I try my utmost to nonconform to anything—groups at school, Mom and Dad’s expectations, the entire country in general. I honestly don’t know how I will feel about certain things until I find out about how the masses feel.

  Then I almost always take the other side. If there is a conservative versus liberal argument, I take the liberal. I love being a liberal . . .

  I’m so glad that I have this down in print. None of my adult friends would believe it otherwise. There is an old saying that if you’re not a liberal when you’re twenty, you have no heart and if you’re not a conservative when you’re forty, you have no brain. Well, I’m living p
roof. I don’t think anyone who watches me on Foxs News Channel would say I “take the liberal” side about anything at all. While my commentary doesn’t usually involve deep policy discussions, I’m more likely to take the “traditional” side on any issue. Some viewers may be inclined to describe me as “charmingly old-fashioned,” while others may opt for “anachronistic and regressive.” I’m just fine with this.

  My teenage progressivism would manifest itself in passionate lunchroom discussions and afterschool arguments about tolerance and open-mindedness, in which I always took the side of the underdog. I rarely “won” these arguments, but I always found a way to throw in a quote from Jonathan Livingston Seagull or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (my two deep-thought standbys). But I think I developed my love of liberalism for mostly practical reasons:

  I love being a liberal . . . and arguing on the left, because it is always so idealistic and humanistic, that you can broaden your argument to ideals, while the conservative must stick to the issue at hand. For example, with a nuclear debate, the conservative must take a definite stance—“the Russians are bad guys, we must protect ourselves against them, we need missiles for security.”* The liberal can stray from the topic all he wants—“Look, we’re all human beings. Look what we’re doing to each other. Neither of us wants war, so why don’t we just disarm?” You see? Both views are right, and the liberal will understand the leftist approach, the conservative the right-wing approach.

  I believe that liberalism is fundamentally correct while conservatism is more practical in our society. If everyone were a liberal, the world would be a nice place. If everyone were a conservative, the world would be a very orderly, unfriendly place, kind of like a business. But as it is, the world is very interesting and argumentative. I’ve strayed from the topic of self-evaluation. I’ll continue later.

  The attention span of a high school student being what it is, I never did continue the topic later as promised. So, perhaps it’s time! All this looking back got me thinking about how I got here. How did I go from small-town radical to big-city conservative? Was I able to hold on to my heart and keep my brain? Well, if I did, I’m pretty sure it has to do with how I was raised. So why don’t we start from the beginning?

  ON MOST SATURDAY MORNINGS, MY BROTHER BILLY and I would wake to my dad’s voice: “GET IN THE CAH.”

  It was Darth Vader with a Boston Accent. The tone, the breathing, the dramatic pause, followed by the sudden sweeping exit. My dad didn’t need the helmet and cape, he had the attitude. He was six feet tall, average height, but seemed like a giant to us. He had the same weathered Irish American looks that most other dads in Norwood, Massachusetts, had, but he had an extra, brooding intensity. The kind that comes in handy when you’re leading a Galactic Empire through fear and intimidation, or trying to get two young boys to wake up early on a weekend morning and get in the car.

  Billy and I would immediately scramble downstairs and get into the back seat of Dad’s Dodge Dart. Back then seat belts were optional, by law and by custom. Even if you did get those lap belts on, they fit pretty loosely, so if your dad took a left, you went sliding all the way over to the right; then when he took a right, you slid back to the middle. We felt perfectly safe, even though we probably wouldn’t have survived a minor accident. My dad would drive in silence, always leaving us to wonder where we might be going. We were never told, and we knew better than to ask. We wondered, Would it be to the site of the Boston Massacre? A walk on the deck of Old Ironsides? A climb up the steeple of the Old North Church? Perhaps a stroll along the Freedom Trail?

  Clearly, our excursions tended to involve the Revolutionary War, but it wasn’t because my dad was some kind of colonial buff. We lived in New England in 1976, and everyone was stricken with Bicentennial fever. It seemed that we had been celebrating this event for my whole childhood, actually: every town was preparing for its own Bicentennial celebration, and in school we would perform Bicentennial plays, sing Bicentennial songs, and paint Bicentennial dinner plates. I heard the word almost daily, but I was unclear on what it actually meant. To me, it was just synonymous with Revolutionary War.

  One day in our third-grade class our teacher, Miss Barnacle, asked Brian Ridikas, “In what war did the minutemen fight?” and he answered, “The Bicentennial.” As everyone laughed and Miss Barnacle scolded him for his ignorance, I remember thinking that I might have given the same answer.

  On those Saturday trips with Dad, Billy and I always enjoyed whatever historical exhibit we visited, but getting there was a challenge. Carsickness ran deep in our family. My mother did not believe in drug therapy for this condition; she believed that the main cause of motion sickness was the presence of too much visual stimuli. Her solution was to simply make us all wear sunglasses in the car, so she kept many of her old pairs in great supply in the glove compartment. She would pass them out and instruct each of us to put them on whenever we traveled, which was supposed to keep us from looking out the windows and getting dizzy. I’m not sure how well this worked, but if we ever did complain of nausea, my mother would never blame her remedy. She always blamed our behavior. “Sit still and let the glasses do their work!” she would scream. When the car would stop at a rest area, all of us would pile out gasping for air and dripping in cold sweat, but all wearing oversized ladies’ sunglasses. We must have looked like we were in the witness protection program.

  Complaining was really not an option when traveling with my dad, so my brother and I would try to sit still in the back seat and grind out the nausea as best we could. It didn’t help that we were always hungry, probably because we had been woken up Vader-style before dawn. Despite the fact that our stomachs were technically empty, we always had something down there from dinner the night before that we could manage to throw up. There would be no warning. My dad would be driving along, deep in thought, as Billy and I in the back seat were slowly turning yellow in the face. All of a sudden, there was a splashing sound on the floor mats.

  He would silently pull over to the side of the road, and we’d all get out to assess the damage. My brother or I would shake off our clothes as best we could (the rest would dry and fall off on the way up Bunker Hill), while my dad would take handfuls of dirt from the roadside and shake it over the mess on the floor mats, covering it with a layer of dust. Of course, none of this masked the smell; it just turned the wet vomit into dirty vomit. But it was a good try—real American ingenuity at work.

  Throwing up was like rebooting the system, so at least the carsickness passed after that. As my dad drove on, Billy and I were faced with a new dilemma—finding ways to suppress our growing hunger.

  Our greatest desire on any of these sightseeing day trips was to stop at a McDonald’s. You did have to actually stop and go into the McDonald’s, as these were pre-drive-thru days, (which was a good thing considering the vomit-covered floor mats).

  We would pass one every ten minutes or so thinking, would this be the one? As a Golden Arches sign approached, we’d stare straight ahead, following it with our peripheral vision, and pray. We’d attempt to control the car’s movement with our minds: Pull into the driveway . . . take a right into the parking lot. . . . Pull in right . . . now! Most times our car would drive right by. But on those rare occasions that my dad did pull into a McDonald’s, did we scream with pure delight? Oh no, we reacted with complete indifference. Our expressions didn’t change at all.

  My dad would break the silence, “You boys hungry?”

  “Mmmm . . . I don’t know,” Billy would say, casually. “I guess so.”

  “Uh . . . maybe . . . OK,” I’d add without emotion.

  It was an unwritten rule between us: that showing our true excitement for McDonald’s would lessen the chance of future visits. Not only was it unwritten, it was unfounded; based on nothing that my dad ever said, but on our assumption of our dad’s overriding philosophy: “Expect nothing, because you deserve nothing.” It existed entirely in our heads. I’ve recently confirmed this
with my brother. My father never once actually expressed this philosophy, but we believed it wholeheartedly, especially in regards to McDonald’s. We never once spoke to each other about this in our childhood, but we both instinctively had strong feelings about the McDonald’s rule, and acted accordingly. We probably thought we were pulling one over on my dad with our casual routine, but I’m sure that even the least perceptive adult could have guessed our real feelings once we got our food. We tore through the paper covering on those hamburgers like a couple of raccoons.

  The reason it was usually just me and my brother with my dad was that on Saturdays, my parents split up us kids; Mom took the girls and Dad took the boys. Kathy was the oldest, and the most serious, as the oldest tends to be. Ann was a little wilder, prone to singing at the top of her lungs whether anyone wanted to hear her or not. During my childhood she was the second oldest kid, now she’s a few years younger than me (that does happen). Next was my brother, who had a mind for the mathematical, the rational, and the statistical—he was everything I was not. I’ve often remarked that if he and I were combined into one, we would make a pretty impressive man. As I was the youngest (for the first six years of my life, anyway), both girls considered me their plaything, and would dress me up and parade me around the house in costume for laughs—my very first performances. Mary Ellen was the last to arrive, a late addition to our family for sure, but probably just in time for me, relieving me from the terrible burden of being the cutest thing in the house.

  But back in the early days, Saturdays meant two girls with Mom and two boys with Dad. It was probably never planned that way; chances are one morning my dad just said “Get in the cah” to my brother and me and a tradition was born. I don’t really even know what Mom and the girls did, but I’m sure it had to do with The Bicentennial.

  I do recall one special day when it was all of us; my two sisters, my brother, and me. There we were in the Volkswagen with my parents, on the way home after a long day trip to the New England Boat show. My dad took us to many of these boat shows. Year after year he would take us to the convention center and we’d follow him as he walked the aisles, stroking his chin and trying to decide if he should take the plunge. For him I think all the fun was in the shopping. He did eventually buy a twenty-foot sailboat (not at a boat show—he got it used through the want ads like a real man) and kept it moored in Boston Harbor for a few years, but if you added up all the time he spent on the water, it would not even come close to the time he spent shopping for it.