Navigating the Zeitgeist. Helena Sheehan
He said the locals didn’t like to speak about those who died or emigrated, because they themselves were descended from those who survived. Some even prospered and accumulated property from the abandoned farms. My sense of this time comes from works of academic history or historical novels more than anything passed directly to me through my own ancestors. Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine and Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea are haunting accounts. One of the saddest fragments revealed to me from my direct line is that my great-grandfather Richard Sheehan joined the US Army and fought the Apaches in Arizona. Why did he feel justified in fighting the Apaches? It was the story of all wars: the oppressed are the foot soldiers against other oppressed people. Buffy Sainte Marie’s song “Universal Soldier” evokes the lives of those who fought from below at the behest of those who ruled from above.
Like many others, my ancestors eventually came up in the world, but not exactly according to the rags-to-riches storyline. By the 1930s, they owned the modest roofs over their heads. However, both Sheehans and Kernans lost their houses during the Depression—not because they were not paying their mortgages, but because the banks had called in the entire value of their mortgages as single balloon payments. As home prices plummeted, the houses became negative equity and worth far less than the mortgages. After the New Deal, the banks were prohibited from changing the terms of mortgages and repossessing homes in this way, but back then they could do so with impunity. The Sheehans then bought another house at a lower price. As my grandfather’s credit rating was destroyed, he bought the new house in the name of his wife’s sister, who lived with them. The Kernans could not afford to buy another house, even at depressed prices. The family then moved to my grandmother’s family farm in Virginia. My mother, going to school in both North and South, learned about the Civil War from both sides. She was told in the North that it was about slavery and in the South that it was about states’ rights. She spoke of the Civil War as if there were equal merit on both sides. After they moved back to Pennsylvania, my mother and her sisters attended public school rather than Catholic school, because they could not afford the uniforms. Nevertheless, my parents and all my aunts and uncles graduated from high school, except for my disabled uncle, who never attended school at all. None of them went to university. Both families lived frugally during the years of my parents’ youth, but they were little different from everyone else they knew. Many endured even harder times.
When I look at photos of my parents in their teens and twenties, they do not look poor. Quite the opposite: some show them promenading on the Atlantic City boardwalk in their Easter outfits, the men in suits and fedoras, the women in tailored suits or dresses, elaborate hats, and high heels. Except for the shoes, my mother made everything herself. Another striking feature is the formality of their dress, making them look not only much more prosperous, but also much older than they were.
The Depression was ended by the war, but these were even harder times. In their world, that of the working class, almost all men went into the armed forces and women went to work in industries supporting the war effort, such as munitions factories. Like most of their contemporaries, my parents spent most of the time during the early years of their marriage apart from each other. When babies were born, our fathers were absent and there was always the possibility that they would not return home at all. My mother sent a constant stream of photos of their newborn daughter to the battlefields of Europe, to be shown proudly to the other young fathers with their own similar photographs. If they ever got mixed up, it would have been hard to tell the difference.
My mother and I lived with her parents in Upper Darby until my father returned. For a time, he too lived in this tiny house, along with my mother’s parents, sisters, brother, and aunt, until he found it intolerable and we went to live in Atlantic City in a small summer house a mile from the ocean, owned by his parents. He commuted every day between there and Philadelphia to his job as a draughtsman at Philadelphia Electric Company. Later we moved to rented accommodations in Philadelphia.
Eventually they saved enough to buy a house with the help of the GI Bill, and we moved to Roslyn, Pennsylvania, in 1949. By this time, there were five of us, as two brothers had arrived in the intervening years. (In all, my parents had nine children, although the youngest died as a baby. I had six brothers and two sisters.) For a while, my father worked as a construction detailer by day and a real estate agent by night. Since before I was born, my mother never worked outside the home. I didn’t know any mothers who did otherwise in those years.
We began a suburban life. There were many places like Roslyn and many families like us. The fathers had fought in the war and went to work every day, primarily in Philadelphia. The mothers stayed home and kept their dream houses with their new laborsaving gadgets and looked after their ever-expanding broods of children. The neighborhood kids bonded by playing games in the yards and in the woods. Our strongest relationships were with those who were Catholic. Everyone was either Catholic or Protestant. Suburban routines became established. Every day there were deliveries by the paperboy, the breadman, the milkman, and the mailman. There were periodic visits from the Avon Lady, the insurance man, and many door-to-door salesmen. A photographer came to the door with a pony and left a photo of me sitting on it dressed as a cowgirl, incongruously in front of the suburban picture window. Every year we had our pictures taken with the department store Santa Claus. The mothers read magazines such as Life and Better Homes and Gardens and read books by Emily Post, Benjamin Spock, and Norman Vincent Peale to learn the correct ways to live in this new setting. This was all part of a consolidating national culture that was overriding various subcultures based on class, ethnicity, locality, religion. There was much popular psychology in the air, with concepts such as “inferiority complexes” and being “well adjusted” entering everyday speech. It seemed to many that this was the best of all possible worlds, and that there must be something seriously wrong with anyone who was ill-adjusted or malcontent in it. After years of depression and war, my parents and their generation did have a sense of moving with a rising tide of increasing prosperity. As a child, I accepted their version of the world and was blissfully happy in it—for a while.
Life was full of nursery rhymes and fairy tales and toys delivered by Santa Claus and baskets of jelly beans and chocolate eggs left by the Easter Bunny. There was always something new and fun to fill our play: hula hoops, comic books, trading cards, coonskin caps, Mouseketeer ears. There were swings and sliding boards in the playgrounds and merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels and bumping-cars in amusement parks. There were circuses and carnivals. Every story ended with everyone good living “happily ever after.” We ate sugary cereals, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, potato chips, pretzels, hot dogs, hamburgers, cookies, and popsicles. Occasionally, we had more nutritious food, especially when we stopped to buy fresh tomatoes, corn-on-the-cob and watermelons sold along the road in New Jersey on our way home from the shore. My mother bottle-fed us all, thinking it both more modern and more modest. I saw my aunt, her sister, breastfeeding once and sensed my mother’s disapproval.
I spent summers in Atlantic City with my grandparents, aunt, and uncles. We spent all day at the beach and most evenings on the boardwalk. I was spoiled there and ate far more candy than my parents would have allowed. I got caught up in the Miss America pageants and my aunt’s movie magazines. Hollywood was a source of many wonders. The spectacle of Grace Kelly, a native of our hometown, marrying a prince from a faraway land was a modern-day fairy tale. I accepted it all at face value. My aunt, the one who introduced me to movie magazines and often took me shopping, seemed as glamorous as Grace Kelly to me. She married a medical student and made me a flower girl at their wedding and I saw it as our own fairy tale. He may have been a poor Italian immigrant, whose mother scrubbed floors, who worked his way through medical school, but he was soon a doctor. They bought a beautiful split-level house with a swimming pool in Rose Tree. I baby-sat for them, as the babies arrived one after another. One night I overheard my uncle speak about a baby he had just delivered, who was neither male nor female. I couldn’t really understand that, but couldn’t ask, because I wasn’t supposed to know.
Going to the movies was a great thrill. The smell of the popcorn, the darkened social space, the grainy newsreels, the trailers for forthcoming films—all built up anticipation for the feature films. Many of these were set in the past. Hollywood possibly did more to form our sense of history than any other medium. We understood the ancient world in terms of Land of the Pharaohs, Quo Vadis, and The Robe, the