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The Family Journal

That scuffed-up, cattywonkus house by the winding wild of Minnehaha Creek is physical bedrock to our family landscape. It’s the only home Jim and Ro and I ever know. Even Mom and Dad have never lived so long in one place.

Before they landed in Minnesota, Dad’s work as a sportscaster had led them round the Midwest: Omaha to Kansas City, Tulsa, Des Moines, and Sioux City. Each of The Olders was born in a different city.

By the late ’40s, Dad was such a successful radio personality he was offered a job in New York, sportscasting for a major network. After talking it over, he and Mom concluded that New York was not a good place to rear children. (She was pregnant yet again, this time with me.) Instead, he took a new job as DJ at WDGY in Minneapolis. They liked the City of Lakes, and he’d no longer have to follow teams on the road.

One night in December 1951, shortly after moving house, Mom feels familiar contractions. Dad knows the signs of labor, but not Minneapolis. He puts Kako in charge, helps Mom down the icy sidewalk to the car, hops in, guns the engine and speeds down Nicollet Avenue, deliberately running red lights until a patrol car pulls him over.

“My wife,” says Dad. “How do I get to the hospital?”

“Follow me.” Cherry-top spinning and siren wailing, he escorts us to the hospital. I arrive safe and sound, with a bit of fanfare.

After four boys, everyone is glad for another girl. Mom especially. They name me after her beloved aunt. But newborn joy is snuffed by the shock of Dad’s heart attack a few weeks later.

Mom can’t drive, nor has she friends in this new city. For weeks, she’s forced to take the Nicollet Avenue streetcar to visit Dad in the hospital. She’s gone several hours each day, and what a frigid hell she must suffer, waiting alone in subzero air at the shelterless stop, aching with postpartum soreness, exhaustion, and hormones and icy with fear for her husband’s life. Tears freeze in Minnesota even when they never leave your eyes.

That means Kako, thirteen, has to make meals, clean the house, get Pogo and Tom off to school, and tend two-year-old Skip and infant me. Much of my early care, then, is in the hands of my sister and brothers.

Dad’s physical heart slowly recovers, but at this time, post-coronary protocol means abstinence from any kind of exertion and exercise. Dad had been a sportsman—a swimming and diving champ. Though he takes up fishing and swaps cigarettes for a pipe, his broken heart never recovers from that loss of vigorous physicality. It must be hard to have a houseful of children pulling on him, wanting to play, hard to tell them he can’t wrestle, can’t even toss a ball.

(Well, not every kind of exertion; within a year Mom’s pregnant again.)

Just as Dad gets well, Pogo fractures his skull playing football. During his long convalescence and absence from school, Mom devises ways to keep this bright boy engaged and entertained. Chief among them, The Family Journal.

•••

Mom has made up a bed on the sunroom couch for Pogo so she can keep an eye on him. Because of his head injury, he’s barely supposed to move at all. She comes in with her afternoon cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes.

“How are you feeling, son?”

Silence. He’s buried in a book.

“What are you reading, dear?”

“Count of Monte Cristo.”

“It’s a good book, but you’ve been reading for hours.”

“Yeah, well, it’s good.”

“I’m going to write a letter to our relatives and let them know how well you and your father are doing.”

She pulls the typewriter up out of its foldaway haven in the desk.

“Typing? Now? Can’t you just write?”

“I have to make copies, son. Carbon is the only way.”

“Please, Mom, I’m reading!”

I like to think a ray of golden late-day sun beamed onto the desk just then.

“How would you like to be the Editor of a Newspaper?”

“What do you mean?”

“Instead of me writing a letter, let’s do a newspaper. You be the Editor and dictate stories. I’ll be the Printer and type them up and send them to everyone.”

“Hot dog!” We all want our names in print.

“But you have to stay still, son. Doctor’s orders.”

So begins The Family Journal, a fetching little freshet in our landscape.

The first issue is dated December 4, 1952.

Designated both “Editor” and “Reporter,” Pogo dictates short items while “The Printer” types them onto onionskin, complete with masthead, headline, and columns, making ten carbon copies in the process. Every night, the one-page original appears on Dad’s dinner plate; every week, the carbons are mailed to out-of-town relatives.

It’s published intermittently through 1955—sometimes there’s a new issue every weekday; then none for several weeks.

The one hundred or so issues in the morgue are a sweet, funny, and intimate record of one lively mid-century American household as told by its children.

News items range from awards and school plays to blizzards, colds, earaches, and the occasional original verse. Here we see family rituals, budding personalities, kid humor, and how we entertained ourselves in the early fifties. Our family with our “Waltons” faces on.

It’s where “Kracked Barrel Head,” “33 crimes in Minneapolis,” “the lost carving fork,” and the lyrics to the Milkman song are found (as if I could ever forget them).

The emphasis on manners threads from repeated rotations of The Milkman’s Job through our behavior in public at the rare event of a restaurant dinner (both Mom and Dad write how proud they were of the family) and the creation of:

“POLITENESS DAY—everyone treats his brother or sister not as a brother or sister, but as a person! A great success.”

The pages are a salmagundi of Bishop Sheen, Andy Griffith, and Art Linkletter, noting Saint’s Days and altar boy practice, classroom achievements, humorous anecdotes, out-of-town visitors.

Charitable works: sewing pads for cancer patients, making scrapbooks for hospitalized children.

Building a beautiful snow fort. Birdwatching. Butterfly hunting (“Caught one, but let it go.”) Stamp-collecting. Listening for distant radio stations. Playing Scrabble and Clue (“The new rage in the O’Brien household!”) Exploring the new paint-by-number sets. (“Looks just like a real painting!” Even Dad does one or two.) Scanning the neighborhood with binoculars, spotting a turtle, capturing it, identifying it (according to The Book of Knowledge, a Snapping Turtle), keeping it as a pet awhile before releasing it.

Want Ads:

“Wanted—person to do fifth-grade homework at low fee. Must be very honorable. Ask for Tommy.”

“For Sale: snow shovel. Cheap. Please do not notify Dad of this sale. Contact the boys.”

Next day: “Retraction: snow shovel not for sale. Dad read the paper.”

“Wanted: Cleaner boys. For sale: grimy boys.”

“Anyone who has not read Tommy’s magic book is requested to refrain from doing so. He needs an audience and it isn’t much fun to do tricks before people who already know about them.”

Three-year-old Skip wants a tricycle license, so Mom issues one:

“Skipper O’Brien is licensed to operate a 1952 tricycle, signed President of the Department of three-wheeled vehicles in the O’Brien household.”

In addition to Pogo and Dad on the mend, the paper reveals that someone is always sick: a cold, an earache, or the flu. And one kid or another is always saying The Darndest Thing.

Skip: “That’s so funny it makes my nose laugh.”

Kako writes about three-year-old me:

“When I asked her what her upper lip was, she informed me that was where she put her mouth. When I asked what her shoulder was she told me that was where she put her arm. When I asked her what her ankle was she said it was ‘where I put my sock on.’ ”

You get a sense of the intellectual and moral issues posed at our dinner table. Here’s the resolution of the earlier debate:

Dec 31, 1952

“We had a good discussion last night on whether it was a sin to kill a man if he paid you to do it. We reached the conclusion that the only time you can kill is in self-defense. It was a very interesting discussion ranging from the last war to the martyrs.”

One night, a practical exploration of the legal process:

Jan 13, 1953

O’Briens Hold Court Last Night; Pogo Found Guilty; Jury Deliberates Two Min.

“Pogo was tried and found guilty of the crime of calling Tom a fig. Judge Don O’Brien presided, and accusations of Badgering the Witness and Contempt of Court were rampant. A countersuit was planned by the defendant.”

There are also sweetly mundane items. A trip to the drugstore on a summer day “for ice cream and reading material.” The children get comics, Mary Kay buys a photography magazine, and Mom selects “a couple pocketbooks and a Bartlett’s.” (I love this about her and about the drugstore—Bartlett’s Quotations among Band-Aids and cotton balls.)

Newsflash from Pogo:

“While I was dictating the first story I was also eating an orange. I was about to take it apart to put it into sections, and I was doing so when it went off. A steady stream shot at me from about a foot. It hit me right in the forehead and it was one of the longest, most accurate streams of orange juice that ever hit me.”

We all eventually have columns, and each is beautifully, unconsciously revealing. In the first Kako’s Kolumn, she shyly tells us her column is short, “So she doesn’t take up too much of the paper.”

She’ll often comment on me. To my surprise, I learn from these pages that Kako, not Mom, is my principle caregiver.

As Editor and Reporter, Pogo’s humor and verbal dexterity are evident throughout.

Tom’s Topix is rare, but his columns display two outstanding characteristics. First, he’s highly motivated by rewards. He wins a jacket by selling the most newspaper subscriptions. Another time, he gets $5.00 for earning a better grade.

Second, he often voices the extreme desire we all share to excel:

“The play I am in is tomorrow. I am wearing a girl’s coat in the part of Santa Claus and hope that I will do well.”

“I hope and pray that I will do well.”

“I hope and pray I do a good job…. If we change the bird’s cage for thirty days, we get a dog.”

•••

Catholic bits are woven in and out. Father Dudley stopping by to bless the house. Dad going on retreat. Getting our throats blessed on St. Blaise Day. (You kneel at the communion rail. The priest crosses a pair of beeswax candles around your throat, saying, “May Almighty God, at the intercession of St. Blaise, bishop and martyr, preserve you from infections of the throat and from all other afflictions.” Very important in a broadcaster’s household.) Patron Saints and pagan babies peppered throughout.

The Journal notes that Dr. Richdorf pays a house call and says Pogo can go back to school half-days. After two months of home-schooling Pogo, Mom includes rare personal commentary. She clearly misses him:

“It was lonesome with Daddy taking the children to school and just the three of us left.” (Skip, me and her.)

•••

The ticking pendulum and golden chime of our grandmother clock sounded throughout our early childhood. Its arrival is noted. Pogo tells us that “It was bought off a covered wagon by the sellers’ ancestors.”

•••

You can feel Dad healing in these pages—by March he can broadcast the fights, which he relishes, especially now that he can’t exert himself. And he proudly covers a Yankees game—he loves the major leagues.

And now there’s more money—the following September, we read that Kako can transfer from public high school to Holy Angels and next year Pogo will be able to attend a Catholic military academy. Like Dad, all the boys will have a Jesuit education—morally sound and intellectually vigorous.

The Jesuits are sometimes called the Marines of Catholicism. As all O’Briens learned to be, they are devotees of philosophical debate, propagation of the faith, and the progress of the soul. Jesuits echo all over James Joyce.

We girls receive good Catholic education, too, including collateral Jesuit training since Dad and the boys love to debate and practice on us.

When I learn about Wall Street, I ask my father, “Do we have any stock?”

“All our stock is in our children,” he says.

They invested in us.

•••

In 1953, The Family Journal masthead includes: “Reader: Don O’Brien; Newsboy: Skipper; Society Editor: Irene. (Though I am but two years old, it surely tickled Aunt Irene, who had been Society Editor for the Omaha World Herald.)

Mom’s voice turns up from time to time:

“Printer’s Note:

The Editor is on the phone, the society editor is screaming in the printer’s ear because it is too late to go outdoors, the TV set is on so loud I can’t think—Pogo and Tom have been having a conversation with one at the head of the stairs and the other at the bottom—in other words, zero hour, and the noise is terrific. It will all subside in a little while. Tom is serving Stations at 7:15. MK has a baby-sitting job at 6:30, Daddy has a game tonight, and the Littles go to bed—and then it will be lonesome for Pogo and me.”

“I have to stop being The Printer and turn into The Cook.”

•••

Plump, motherly, warm Anna Hansen, an intermittent fixture of our childhood, is mentioned here. We’re well-off enough to hire a cleaning woman. She also made us the best Swedish pancakes on earth—with crispy buttery edges. She’d whip up a batch for Tuesday lunch and leave extras for us to eat after school—cold, rolled up with a spoonful of sugar. Proust never ate anything better.

According to Anna, at eleven months, “Irene is a wonderful child to entertain herself the way she does.”

Designs for a basement rumpus room are solicited. Plans for a root beer stand discussed. Parties are noted. Mom holds a meeting of Sacred Heart Alumnae:

“By dint of hard labor on the part of every member of the family… MK made brownies and tiny tea cookies and we served twenty Ladies! …The table looked very pretty with a centerpiece of white carnations and blue iris.”

On such occasions Kako dressed me up:

“I put a pinafore on Irene this afternoon and she has been calling herself Alice all afternoon and asking if anyone has seen her rabbit.”

•••

Here’s the surprise party thrown by the Olders for Mom and Dad’s fifteenth anniversary, featuring balloons, favors, hats, and “ice cream with a bell in it” for dessert. Mother gives Dad a combination pencil-lighter. He gives her a Swedish crystal vase and fifteen roses. Our gifts to them: “Bing Crosby’s My Girl’s an Irish Girl and Galway Bay, playing cards, a magazine for Dad and a green pencil for Mom, a comb for Dad and a comb for Mom.”

•••

There’s a summer gap from July till early September, when Pogo enters eighth grade and becomes a Junior announcer (his father’s footsteps). After a few issues, though, there’s a whopping hiatus of nearly two years, during which Jim is born.

But in January 1955, the Editor and reporters pick right up again for what will be the last three months of the paper until I assume editorship in 1964.

With the various school uniforms, “The O’Brien household looks like a Pentagon.” Kako’s a junior, Pogo’s a freshman cadet at the military academy, Tom’s in seventh grade, Skip’s in kindergarten, I’m watching “Ding-Dong School,” and baby Jim is in “Goo School.”

The basement rumpus room, begun two years earlier, is completed at last by the three Olders, who “decided to get the job done once and for all.” It’s great for ping-pong, “Done up brown with green and yellow paint.”

“Wanted: Sure-fire paint remover for basement floor. NOT the kind that requires elbow grease.”

“Wanted: some good words for poor Mary Kay who is being woefully beaten at Scrabble every night by her parents.”

“Wanted: someone to play with Tommy, who owns the game.”

“Wanted: someone to feed the cub reporter while Mom gets dinner.”

Heard in the kitchen:

As we were sitting in the kitchen eating breakfast prior to the last mad rush for school, in comes Irene clad only in a pair of panties. When Daddy asked why she was not more appropriately dressed, she replied: “But Daddy, I can’t find my sock!”

•••

I can be heard not only echoing my brother Skip—

“At prayers the other night, after Skipper said, ‘God bless Skipper and make him a good boy,’ Irene said, ‘God bless Irene and make her a good girl.’”

—but asserting myself as well:

Skipper: “I just finished Irene’s soup. All that good food going to waste. God made food for man to eat.”

Irene: “God made food for Girl, too.”

•••

On March 7, in an item about watching Peter Pan that night, we find this sweet reveal: “This is the show that Dad saw five times as a boy.” (How wonderful his parents took him.) The next day:

Family Watches Peter Pan—‘Renie Can’t Fly:

Seeing Mary Martin fly prompted Irene to say in a mournful tone: ‘I never learned how to do that.’ ”

Proof that by the age of three, both technique and memory of my stairway flights had vanished.

Pogo is now distinguishing himself as an expert marksman, a strong swimmer (“I learned how to swim last summer in order to avoid being a social outcast in our group”), and a fine young writer (“I got a ninety-seven on my short story and he wrote ‘I enjoyed it very much’ on it. PS: Copies of Pogo’s short-story furnished free on request.”)

Tom is industriously refinishing the living room tables and soliciting enough orders for his paper route to win the jacket. One of the most dramatic Family Journal stories shows his gallantry, courage, ingenuity, and humility all at once:

“When I was coming down the hill from school, I heard some yelling by the creek. Naturally, when I hear screams, I follow the path of the noise. It seemed that a girl had dropped her books while on the bank of the creek, and at this time of year that is always covered with ice. The book slid onto the creek on a thin layer of ice. The girl, presumably her name was Joan, tried to get it and slipped in herself. Since she was heavier than the book, she went in up to her ankles. It was so slippery she couldn’t get out by herself. The other girls couldn’t get her out, either, so they screamed for help. I got there, and discovered the situation, and you know the Irish, always willing to help. First, I grabbed a tree and told the other girl to hold on to my other arm, she did so and I pulled her out. She was crying. Then there was the problem of rescuing her 45¢ book. Some of the girls said, ‘Joannie’s life is most important, don’t try to rescue the book—you may fall in too.’ But I was willing to try. On my way down the bank, I got a jumping rope from one of the girls that I tied onto a tree and lowered myself down sensibly. I got the book with a stick. Then they said ‘Thanks a LOT, Tom’ while they were seeing that the book and Joan were OK. I sneaked away quietly.”

•••

Kako notes that her Junior-Senior prom (she’s a junior) is “tripping up on cat feet,” a month away.

“Mother and Mary Kay are beautiful again, they hope, after their permanents. We spent all Sunday afternoon in curlers and we hope that the Lord understands. And when the frizz comes out, we should be fashion models!”

Mary Kay Gets Formal:

“After an afternoon of looking and trying on many formals, Mom and MK came home with a BEAUTY! It’s blue net with a dropped shoulder and tiny puffed sleeves… It has a lace bodice, and a full net skirt. Tiny pink roses are scattered on the skirt. I just love it and Irene said, ‘Oh Kako, it looks so pretty. You look like Alice!’ (Alice in Wonderland, Irene’s highest compliment—if you look like Alice, you’re in!) We also bought Irene a new Easter hat—white with pink flowers on it and ribbons down the back, and when we showed it to her she said, ‘Oh mommie, I knew you would bring me a cowboy hat!’”

•••

Even I think it sounds like a riot to grow up in this family, like Cary Grant saying, “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”

But between the lines on those yellowed onionskin originals, unspoken fissures of anxiety emerge.

The last issue of the first run on March 29, 1955, informs us that the cabin at Prairie Lake in Northern Minnesota has been reserved. Up at the lake. Out in the woods. Lifelong gifts.