Sunday 3 July 2011

Standing on the Shoulders of Immigrants

 

Sean Brodrick

Recently, my family got together for a reunion in Saratoga Springs, New York. Since my maternal grandmother had 13 children and many of those kids had big families, it’s a lot of people.

And there are some important lessons I’d like to pass along for you to do with your own family — in fact, something you should do as soon as possible. And it won’t cost you a dime.

Some, but by no means all, of the Duggan family at a recent reunion

Some, but by no means all, of the Duggan family at a recent reunion.

My maternal grandfather Robert was always hard-pressed to make a living, and the older kids’ memories are of growing up dirt-poor in towns in Eastern Massachusetts. My maternal grandmother Mae was a genius at keeping second- and third-hand clothes stitched together, and making a meal out of practically nothing.

So why have 13 kids? Because that’s what you did in those days, when you were Irish and Catholic and could trace your roots back to Dublin.

And we’re lucky they did. They made all of us, as one of my cousins put it at the reunion. We are standing on their shoulders, and that boost up allowed us to achieve the American dream.

here is a picture of my grandparents, Robert and Mae Duggan, in the autumn of their years.

My grandparents, Robert and Mae Duggan, in the autumn of their years.

Still, back in the day, they were desperately poor. In the 1930s, friends gave Robert and Mae a car, but for a long time it never left the yard because they couldn’t afford the $16 to register the vehicle.

When they finally were able to afford running the car, they had to wrestle with how to transport eight or nine kids along with my grandmother and any friends in one small car.

My Uncle Jimmy says that when the car stopped, passersby would do double-takes because it was like a clown car with this endless parade of kids getting out.

Lean times have an interesting effect on different children. For example, to this day, my Uncle John, now aged 80, refuses to eat leftovers. He says that’s because, when he was a kid, there never were any leftovers, and he never developed a taste for them.

My mother, on the other hand, never threw food away when I was a kid. Leftovers could always be worked into some stew or casserole. You never wasted food in Mom’s house. Never!

Hard Times Are Extra-Hard for a Man with 13 Kids

Robert was a happy-go-lucky guy, but he struggled to feed his wife and all those kids during the Great Depression. When World War II came along, he managed to put some money together working in the shipyards. When the war ended, he got laid off, and he got a bonus. He decided to put that money to good use, buying a farm in New Hampshire.

There are many people born to be farmers. Other people learn how to be farmers. And other people just aren’t cut out to be farmers. My grandfather fell into the third category.

He planted the potatoes upside down, and his bad luck didn’t stop there. One of my uncles remembers “if you’d done the exact opposite of whatever we did, you might make a decent living as a farmer.”

They had one horse, a retired show horse, who must have thought he’d died and gone to horse hell when he suddenly went from prancing in shows to being harnessed to a plow and forced to pull it through a rocky New Hampshire field. That horse couldn’t plow a straight furrow to save his life.

There were other problems.

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For example, my grandfather felt bad for the pigs. He was a short man, and he could and did ride the pigs like horses. Along with pigs, they tried raising other livestock, but they fell in love with the animals so often they usually couldn’t kill them.

They tried many times to make a go of a maple syrup business. That didn’t make money either. My mother remembers “dead mice caught in the sap, and dragging buckets of maple sap through waist-deep snow.”

“Oh, that snow was never waist-deep,” interrupts Joanne, my mother’s older sister.

“It wasn’t for you,” my mother shot back. “Because you’re older than me, and you were taller then.”

Poverty, especially in cold, rural New Hampshire, might seem grim on the surface, but it didn’t seem that way to the kids.

First of all, without the comparisons we may see today on TV, back then they didn’t know how poor they were. Second, their mother had wonderful help from family friends like Aunt Kitty and Aunt Winnie, and the eldest daughter Alice, who was like a mother to the younger children. I’m pretty sure Alice gave up a lot by giving so much to her younger siblings.

Third, they were having too much fun — with all those kids around, they had built-in playmates and the house was an all-day fun factory.

One of the easiest ways out of poverty was to enlist. Nine of the 13 kids were boys, and all the boys joined the military. My Uncle Jim, the baby of the family, says the decision to go into the service wasn’t exactly a decision. “It was what was expected,” he says. “Everyone went in.”

Telling the Old Tales

At the reunions, we stand and tell the old tales. For example …

Solving a Pig Problem: My uncles remember how their dad and some of the boys tried for more than an hour to get a stubborn pig in a truck for market, but could not get it done. Finally, a neighbor wandered over.

“What’s the problem?”

“We can’t get the pig in the truck.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” said the neighbor. He pulled out a pistol and — BANG! He shot the pig dead. “Now you can put it in the truck.”

Fowl Mood: On the farm, Uncle Laurie was woken up way too early by a whippoorwill outside his window. “Whippoorwill … whippoorwill … whippoorwill,” said the bird.

Seeing red, Laurie knew how to fix that bird: He pulled out a shotgun and fired it — at the crack of dawn, and inside the house — through the open window at the offending bird.

“It sounded,” remembered Uncle Jimmy, the youngest of the kids, “like a cannon going off, right under our roof.”

The dust settled. And then the bird started right up again: “Whippoorwill … whippoorwill!”

The 13 Duggan brothers and sisters in the 1970s. Only eight of them are still alive, but all their stories live on.

The 13 Duggan brothers and sisters in the 1970s.
Only eight of them are still alive, but all their stories live on.

The Old Tractor: Most of the equipment on the farm was held together with baling wire and spit. One day, Uncle Bud was driving an old tractor when he turned and the steering wheel came off and flew away into the field.

This was especially bad because the old tractor had no brakes, and no way to stop it without getting off the machine! Bud jumped down, hunted around for the steering wheel, then raced to catch up with slow-moving runaway tractor. He jumped back on, reattached the wheel and kept on driving.

The Color Barrier: Kids nowadays are used to seeing people of different colors, but in rural New Hampshire, everybody was white. Everybody. Except one time, my Uncle Arthur brought a friend back from the Air Force.

This friend was a black guy from the deep south. His hosts entertained him so much they drank him under the table (did I mention my family can hold liquor like a whale holds water?). So they laid Arthur’s friend out on the couch in the living room and all went into the kitchen.

A girl walked into the house, late to the party. She saw a man with black skin lying deathly still on the couch. Since she’d never seen anything but white people, the only reason she could think of that a man could be black was if he’d been burned-up dead. So she screamed. The poor guy woke up, which only frightened the girl even more, now that this burned-up corpse was moving around. She screamed louder.

Imagine you’re a black guy from the deep south in the 1950s, and you wake up to a white girl screaming in terror at you. What would you do? This guy jumped up, ran right through the screen door and down the road. Arthur had to jump in the jeep and drive after him, then drive alongside his still-running friend, convincing him it was okay to come back.

Flying with Lady Luck: My Uncle George was on a military transport plane flying back in to Boston. He had a seat next to the window. Another soldier asked him if he could switch seats. It was the other guy’s home town, and he’d never seen Boston from the air.

Of course, George said yes, and he took the other guy’s seat in the tail of the plane. The plane crashed on its approach, and only a few people lived — the people in the tail, including George. The guy who switched seats with him died on impact.

George was supposed to be traveling with his brother John, who didn’t make the flight. The news reached the family in rural New Hampshire that there had been a terrible plane crash and most everyone was killed, but one of their sons lay injured in a hospital.

In other words, the misinformed family thought one of their boys was dead, and they didn’t know which one. Boy, did that mess-up cause some heartbreak until it was sorted out.

The Atomic Uncle: Uncle John joined the Air Force just before the Korean War. He was the crew chief for a P-51, and stationed in Nevada where the government tested atomic bombs. “Nobody knew how strong the bombs were at first,” he said.

It turns out the atomic tests were too close for comfort. One day, John and his buddies woke up to a blast that took off the front and back doors of the barracks, blew out windows, blew out the stove, and knocked one soldier out of his bunk, breaking his arm.

The soldiers had never seen anything like it. So the next time a test was announced, they all went outside to watch. “We all got covered with atomic dust,” John said.

Last year, John was diagnosed with stomach cancer. The doctor told him it was due to the atomic bomb radiation he was exposed to, and told him he should sue. But John says that at 80 years old, he feels like he’s playing with the house’s money.

All the boys had adventures in the military, but Uncle Bill topped them all with his duty in the merchant marines in World War II. Bill was sunk three times! He often brought friends home to his mother’s house; out of all those who visited the family home, only Bill survived to see the end of the war.

What I Learned from My Family

My family’s story is a story of using perseverance and humor to cope with and get through hard times. It’s a story about getting in trouble over and over again and having the sharpness of wit to get out of it. It is a story of starting with rags and ending, if not with riches, at least with living the American dream.

It is not a Hollywood story. For one thing, there’s too much drinking without the requisite Alcoholics Anonymous resolution for this to end up on the big screen.
But I LIKE that it’s not a standard Hollywood story. Most of all, I like that it’s our story.

Start Sharing Your Stories Now

Here’s the best part: Your family has a story, and you NEED to start sharing those stories with your kids and your grandkids if you have them.

The alternative is to let your kids be raised and brainwashed by TV. Heck, if they spend four to six hours a day watching TV, and you don’t spend any time telling them your family stories, whose history do you think they’re going to be indoctrinated with? And I’ll tell you, the homogenized version of Americana that’s broadcast through the idiot box really roils my gut sometimes.

America is messy. Our lives can be chaotic. The trick is not to succeed when you start with money, brilliance and the right connections. The real triumph is to overcome your own shortcomings and the bad cards life deals you and still come out okay.

Secondly, I think the American dream is fading for a big chunk of the next generation. America’s ruling class has become a bunch of termites, hollowing out our country. There’s less opportunity to go around for everyone else.

So maybe it would help your kids to learn how to pinch a dollar until it squeals, like their grandparents did. Maybe it would open their eyes to hear how the older generations survived and thrived in hard times. Because those hard times may be coming ’round again.

Finally, there is a kind of immortality available to Joe and Jane American. And that’s to have your stories, your tears and triumphs, repeated on into the next generation — and the next.

You may not think your stories are interesting. I’ll tell you what, I’ve heard those stories about my relatives a hundred times, and they never get old. You tell your kids, and let them decide if the stories are boring. I guarantee you that you’re the hero of a story that has yet to be told — and the younger generation is aching to listen.

All the best,

Sean

P.S. The primary mission of monthly newsletter Crisis Profit Hunter, is to help build your wealth during these tough times. Following in the footsteps of my immigrant ancestors, I bring perseverance, good-old common sense and lots of hard work in making sense of the markets and finding ways to not only survive but thrive. Cli

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