I grew up just outside of New Haven. When I graduated from high school I went directly to Yale University. It was a beautiful campus, a mixture of red brick colonial, late 19th century neo-gothic and astounding 20th century architecture including a rare book library with translucent marble walls and no windows, plus a turtle-shaped hockey rink called (for some reason) “The Whale.” The architecture of one of the 12 undergraduate colleges was based on a remote Algerian Village…or so it seemed.
For me the center of the campus was the Sterling Library with its tall, substantial tower filled to the brim with books, its wings with little rooms for quiet study, a grand central hall and a giant reading room with chandeliers where hundreds of students could quietly read and write.
The Sterling Library was central to me because it was there I began my work…as a laborer for the Shelton Roofing and Sheet Metal Company, learning to replace damaged slates and repair leaky gutters.
I wasn’t a student. I wasn’t a professor. I was a roofer.
The crew I worked with could have formed a painting by Norman Rockwell. The foreman was a quiet, low-key man with a kind face and even disposition. I never once heard him raise his voice. There was the big Polish guy, the cooly smiling Italian fellow with a constant eye for the ladies, a Jewish crew member with a constant stream of observations and jokes that were sometimes actually funny. I was the Irish kid. That was the way folks categorized one another at the time.
I loved the physicality of the work and the sun and the relatively fresh air several stories up. But, when the weather began to change, I wanted a warmer work environment. Thanks to a member of the local Dems who knew my mother, I got a job at the Armstrong Rubber Company factory in West Haven.
I grew up in a working-class household, amid numerous aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and neighbors who shared that same status. I loved it. I had been adopted at a young age as was my sister. We both felt fortunate and grateful. Four of my eight uncles on my mother’s side were factory workers at the Bridgeport Brass Company, as was my father. One of them left the factory to work as a roofer. He was the one who got me my first job after high school.
While my aunts were all Irish, my uncles identified as Irish, Italian, German, Polish, or Yankee (English). Some were Catholic. Some were Protestant. Almost all were Democrats. It was clear to most in my family which Party best represented our interests. Not one of my sixteen aunts and uncles attended college but several of their children, my cousins, did.
My best friend from sixth grade was the son of an artistic couple. He was a reader of books and our friendship helped make me one too. I didn’t much care for the classroom, but I came to love books. When my sixth-grade Jewish buddy went off to Columbia College we wrote to one another often. It sharpened my writing skills. Ultimately, by luck, I was given a chance to go to the local State College. Fifty dollars a semester…a hundred dollars a year. I took that chance and it changed my life. I even got to go to graduate school part time in New York and took seminars with one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century, Hannah Arendt.
But here’s the thing…I went to college. I went to graduate school. But I still loved my parents and my aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. There was no reason not to.
I did not become a member of some “college educated elite” and it’s ironic, absurd or just plain nutty that a former college professor like Newt Gingrich or the muddled, unseemly braggart running for President as a Republican pushes that idea. If you don’t have a college degree, they think they can convince you to hate Democrats because, “you know how they are! Elite!”
I came of age in a culture and economy derived from Roosevelt’s New Deal, preserved by President Eisenhower, which JFK was committed to improving.
I was a senior in high school when I participated in the 1960 Kennedy campaign. In our working-class household, JFK was “our man” but in my childhood there was a fifth member of our household, my mother’s mother. I loved bringing her coffee to her in the morning. Once, sitting with her on her bed, watching her little black-and-white TV, she said, “I love that old man!” pointing to President Eisenhower who appeared on the screen. She may even have voted for him. I don’t really know. But what I do know is the political conversations I remember from that time were firmly partisan…but not hateful.
How times have changed.
Trump is a very rich man, thanks to his father, even though he has probably lost more money than he’s ever earned. He is unstable and dangerous, a liar and a manipulator who cares only for himself. He will win, he thinks, by making us hate each other, using lies, deception and disinformation
He needs to be defeated.
If he is not…we are in trouble.
Jim Walsh lives in Nahant.
