Morsels of Mischief: Orphan Tales from My Childhood

Copyright 2008 Chris McClarren.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, ortransmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, orotherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Co-authored by Tom McClarren

Illustrated by Michael Kilfoy and R.J. Shay

Cover Design/Artwork by Michael Kilfoy, Studio X

Designed by Michael Kilfoy, Studio X

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isbn: 978-1-4251-8111-6

isbn: 978-1-4669-3027-8 (ebook) 

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

MORSEL NO. 1:

Mom

MORSEL NO. 2:

Becoming a Cursive Virtuoso

MORSEL NO. 3:

The Cubbyhole

MORSEL NO. 4:

In the Spotlight

MORSEL NO. 5:

Lady of Spain

MORSEL NO. 6:

The Broom Room

MORSEL NO. 7:

Stamps Are the Bomb

MORSEL NO. 8:

The Nuns’ Umbrellas

MORSEL NO. 9:

The Good, the Badand the Ugly

MORSEL NO. 10:

The Catalpa Tree

MORSEL NO. 11:

Cinderfellas

MORSEL NO. 12:

Getting My Dice Back

Gets Dicey

MORSEL NO. 13:

Starvin Orphans, NOT!

MORSEL NO. 14:

The Pious Thief

MORSEL NO. 15:

Sex Education

MORSEL NO. 16:

Life is but a Dream

EPILOGUE

Post-Orphanage for the Curious

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of all orphaned, abused, abandoned, and poor children ordered or placed into Homes.

Acknowledgements

FROM CHRIS MCCLARREN:

Thanks first to my sis, Cheryl Rae Roberson, I’m not sure I would have completed the book if she had not lovingly kicked my butt in gear with her incredible ability to wade through worries, chaos and excuses, Asking just the right questions, she listened for the essence of my problems with writing the book, She held my hand as we knocked down each barrier to my moving forward, Like a paring knife, she peeled away my resistance and had me organized and finishing the book with a solid sense of drive, discipline and confidence that astounded me,

Many kisses to my incredible mother, Rose McClarren, who kept believing I’d finish and read story after story, praising and encouraging from the first moment I started interviewing Dad to the last days of editing-and who kept me company when I most needed it,

Special love to my brother, Kevin McClarren, who was the best cheerleader anyone could have on the sidelines,

Thank you to all the folks who read a story here or there and told us they couldn’t wait until the book came out,

I cannot thank enough the love of my life, my honey and hubby, Andy Reago, for spoiling me with complete financial support, homemade gourmet meals, peanut butter cookies, blueberry scones, hours of listening to my woes, and for his tender endless forgiving patient love.

Lastly, thanks to my Dad, for trusting me-and sharing more than he ever planned.

FROM TOM MCCLARREN:

Thanks to my Mom, Marie Brady McClarren, for placing us in the German St. Vincent Orphan Home, for visiting and for persisting; thanks to the Sisters of Christian Charity for all their direction, discipline and education; thanks to my entire foster family, the Guccione’s-Mom (Mary), Dad (Joe), and their sons and daughters (Joe, Sal, Jim, Mary, and Rosalie). They gave me a sense of what a real loving and fun family life could be; thanks to my brother, Denny McClarren, for always being there; thanks to my daughter, Cherie, for my weekly elderly updates that included making sure I was getting my homework for the book finished; thanks to my son, Kevin, for offering supportive suggestions and ideas; thanks to my daughter, Chrissy, for the obvious.

Most of all, thanks to my wonderful wife, Rosie, for giving me a lifetime of encouragement and love. She is what my life is all about.

FROM BOTH OF US:

Our heartfelt thanks goes to Ellen Beck, our editor, for an amazing job and holding Chris’s hands when she felt lost; Lynn Giardina, Marilyn Ayres-Salamon and Will Martin for final proofreads; all the folks at Trafford Publishing for answering endless questions; Michael Kilfoy and Bob Shay at Studio X, for creating a gorgeous cover and layout; Bill McClellan and Ron Holtman for being the first to read and praise our book; everyone involved in the on-demand printing industry responsible for turning a manuscript into a book without waste; the cosmos, particularly earth, for giving us our lives and stories to begin with.

Preface

Shortly before Christmas in 1945, a few months after a small five-year-old boy with red hair and freckles named Tommy was placed in a Catholic orphanage in St. Louis, Missouri, it was discovered that the child had an uncanny knack for memorization, drama and storytelling. When he memorized the entire ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas story after hearing it only a few times, the nuns paraded him from classroom to classroom where he recited the tale to his astonished fellow orphans with his arms, hands and fingers gesticulating like a conductor (this hand dance still accompanies his stories today at the age of sixty-eight!) At the end of his stay at the orphanage, the then fourteen-year-old youth sang a beautiful rendition of Ave Maria prior to a donor’s wedding, his clear voice ringing throughout the chapel.

After leaving the orphanage, my father Tommy began using his innate talents to create a spoken history of his and other orphans’ lives, which he continues to recall with uncanny specificity and jovial irreverence. He remembers gobbling up the host, stealing money from the vigil light box, fending off castor oil and other countless mini-sagas oforphan courage, suffering, mirth and naughtiness. The gems presented to you in Morsels of Mischief are only part of an impertinent collection of remembrances from the ten years my father lived in the German St. Vincent Orphan Home, fondly referred to as the Home. Because of parental neglect and abuse, my father, along with his older brother and sister, were put in custody of the Home, where all three lived until they had completed the eighth grade. My father was released in 1954.

Although my father was at first unhappy to be taken from his parents and rarely allowed to see them, it turned out to be a godsend. For years, he thought he was to blame for the placement at the orphanage. Shortly before the placement, when they were still living with their parents, he had been playing with matches one morning and set some curtains on fire in their house. He remembered the police coming and, upon discovering that his parents weren’t there, taking him, his brother and his sister to a juvenile court, which placed them at St. Vincent’s due to parental abandonment. He also remembered the courts ordering social workers to go to the hospital where his mother was supposedly giving birth to twins (which he believed was the reason why she wasn’t home at the time) and putting the living twin (the other haddied) in a foster home, Much of what my father remembered did happen, but some of the details are incorrect, For example, he did play with matches, and some curtains did catch on fire, but no police came; he and his siblings were indeed put in the orphanage, but voluntarily by their mother for what she thought was going to be a temporary stay while she carried out a difficult pregnancy; his mother did have twins as a result of her difficult pregnancy, but not until after my father and his siblings had been living in the orphanage for some months; and the twin who lived was placed in a foster home months after her birth,

Years later, when my father sought out records explaining why he and his siblings had been put in the orphanage, he received a summary of his family’s files from St, Louis Catholic Charities, which was and still is the overseeing organization of St, Vincent’s, This summary clearly documented the years of unimaginable mistreatment of the children by their severely alcoholic father and their emotionally and mentally unstable mother prior to and after their placement, This was the real reason for the children’s permanent placement at St, Vincent’s through eighth grade, (at that time, St, Vincent’s only cared for children through the eighth grade, Upon release, my dad chose to live in a foster home and later at

Father Dunne’s Newsboys’ Home.)

If anything, my father is now grateful for his placement at St. Vincent’s; he realizes he was protected and well cared for there. The nuns, priests and other orphans who became his special extended family play an integral part in his stories. Although the Home was quite a staid environment and sometimes felt like what my father imagines prison must feel like, he credits it for giving him the two most important things he thinks all children need until they are old enough to craft their own lives: discipline and a sense of direction.

This doesn’t mean that adapting to life at an orphanage run by Catholic nuns was an easy task. Every single morning of those nine years, from the day he entered to the day he left, he was required to attend mass at the unforgivable hour of 6:30 AM. My father’s adaptation to the intense Catholic indoctrination he received transitioned through various stages. He went from the larval stage of a small boy’s intimidated paralysis and rote response to every rule, ritual and belief, to the caterpillar stage of learning all he could to become the best altar boy and model of Catholic virtue, to the chrysalis stage where he found the repetition and rituals not only boring but meaningless and intolerable. His full emergence from the cocoon as an older youth, with the determinationto make his world as full of adventure as possible, came last, It was at this stage when he devised clever ways to not only manipulate the many nuns hovering nearby (watching his every move and ready with resourceful and sometimes cruel punishments) but to make his hemmed-in life entertaining, (The rewards used to encourage discipline were often equally ingenious, You’ll have to read the stories to find out what they were!)

At the Home, they preferred to call the orphans students and to use the term graduated rather than released when a child finished eighth grade and had to find another place to live, In 1954, when my father graduated from St, Vincent’s, he began to bashfully share stories about those years, but it wasn’t until about ten years later when he began to relish telling the stories, It seemed all he had to do was tell folks he’d grown up in an orphanage and their ears would perk up with empathy, With no pretense whatsoever, he would hypnotize willing victims with an orphan story and keep them entranced with one story after another, Upon finishing the orphanosis session, he’d instruct them to remember everything and to beg to hear more stories each time they heard the word orphan, When he snapped his fingers, they would awaken as orphan story fans, Throughout the years, my daddeveloped quite a repertoire of stories and, despite his efforts to the contrary, became quite infamous for repeating himself unabashedly, even when he discovered a listener had already heard a story a number of times. (He’s still the same today.)

With that said, I will admit that he handed over his stories rather reluctantly. (If everyone reads them, how will he garner more of that prized orphan attention?) I managed to convince him by painting a glorious picture that appealed to his immodest nature. I said, Like a raffle ticket, each story becomes a chance for readers to win entrance to the spellbinding performances of the ‘greatest orphans on Earth’—all on the big screen with you as director! That worked like a charm! It’s fitting; anyone who knows him will admit that my dad’s never really enjoyed the role of the humble guy. He offers pictures of himself to make people feel better. He can’t help it. Ever since he was little, he’s been a showman; he’s a natural performer and can’t resist an opportunity to entertain folks. In fact, he has a wee bit of difficulty sharing the limelight. People think he has a huge ego problem (he does call himself Mr. Wonderful!) until they realize it’s his personal mission to make sure everyone is having fun. He’s convinced there’s nothing better than his stories to ensure that, but we forgive him. After all, he does have a knack for rememberingthe past and retrieving the juiciest parts, His refusal to put up with boredom is the main reason he has all these titillating stories to tell in the first place, (Of course, there’s much more that compels my dad to spill forth these stories,)

As he relays his stories to me and others, I’ve watched him exude the same vulnerability, innocence, embarrassment, shock and pride he must have experienced as a child and youth; the only difference being that at age sixty-eight he tells them with an adult’s hindsight and ability to laugh at and forgive his and other people’s foibles, In Bertice Berry’s book, I’m on My Way but Your Foot Is on My Head, she writes that Alice Walker once said, Sometimes even grief becomes absurd and that’s when laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity, My dad’s irresistible appeal is the way in which he lightheart-edly and compassionately shares these precious experiences to bring about his catharsis and ours as well, Pay close attention when you read these stories, You might catch yourself suddenly filled with empathy and respect for this man, If you listen, you may even hear soft teardrops plopping at the edges of his memory,

A special note to Catholics: while my father unfolds his experiences with a bit of blasphemy, it is done with all the talent and intent of any self-respecting "Bard of the St, Vincent

Orphans," as I like to fancifully imagine him. His vignettes of affliction contrasted with anecdotes of genuine joy and pure fun form a marvelous, accessible account that profoundly depicts what he actually lived through. Like the magnificent love songs of the bards of old, my father’s words wrap around the orphan in us all, allowing us to rest assured we aren’t alone and our songs are sung.

In Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels, Jesus is credited as having said:

"If you bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will be your salvation.

If you do not bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will destroy you."

Ready and willing to be my father’s free ghostwriter, I pursued bringing forth what was within him like a hound on the hunt. I interviewed and recorded him, transcribed hours of tape, returned with draft after draft of stories for his approval, grilled him for more details, and sometimes plagued him with phone calls at odd hours of the day to fill importantgaps, It would have been very difficult for him to write this book himself because he suffers from macular degeneration,

As it turned out, we had a blast, not only birthing this book together but getting closer in the process, a gift that has no price tag, During the final months of writing, he came over three days a week to keep me company and be there to answer questions I threw at him, Nothing can replace my dad’s animated behavior as he