by B. A. Berube
The Salvation Army donated most of our clothes: used underwear, socks, and other
necessary apparel. Though we were dressed unattractively n these antediluvian hand-me
downs, we were always clean, unlike many of our poor neighbors for whom poverty appeared
to require an exhibition of personal filth. The nuns taught us hygiene, and we practiced it as
well as we could. Clean attire was a non-negotiable obligation. Something in the Catholic
canon about cleanliness = godliness, I think. As we lost buttons from our shirts and coats,
Mom replaced them. As a result, over time, we sported many colors and sizes of buttons on a
single shirt. The Salvation Army provided the shoes, too—boys’ shoes and girls’ shoes. Too
large? Easy fix: stuff the shoes with paper. With shoe soles less than a quarter inch thick, it
did not take long for us to bore a hole an inch in diameter across the ball of the foot. The
solution? Insert a piece of thick cardboard in the shoe until another piece of cardboard
became its needed replacement. Connie nearly missed participating in her First Holy
Communion since she did not have the obligatory white shoes. A charity eventually came to
the rescue. As we grew older, so did our taste for respectable shoes. We’d remove our shoes in a department store, known as the Five and Dime, then walk away leaving the old ones
there. La survivance was not always principled. Yes, another twist, as in Oliver Twist.
One summer after I had left St. Louis Home, Brother Junior led Brother Bobby and me
on a dubious misadventure. It was all about self-respect and decorum as in, “Clothes make
the man.” Sisters Flora and Florence were the only ones still attending the orphanage, and
Dad did not permit them to come home for the summer, as he had done with me during my
final years at St. Louis Home. To make the summer more palatable for our sisters, we three
brothers decided to present ourselves in fine threads for the occasion. Our stop: Twin Cities
Shopping Center. At this discount store in Lewiston, we spotted some handsome fire engine
red shirts and red pants to match. Wow! This was clearly a prescient fashion statement in
waiting. We three malfeasants took our crimsons to the changing room, left our old clothes
there, donning our new threads and exited the store without paying. Not a moment later, a
man shouted at us, and insisted the police were on the way. We ran and ran and ran to finally
find a hiding spot under a filthy tenement portico. When the area appeared clear, we bandits
left for home. The next day, we tidied up our new cardinal acquisitions, proudly greeted our
beloved sisters at their orphanage, and enjoyed a splendid visit with them as well as with the
holy ladies of the habit who found the apparel for us three satans enchanting. Confessions at
church were to occur later for this well intended but most naughty misdeed. Lord, have mercy
on us.
When we approached age eleven or twelve, a more honorable opportunity knocked.
Real work for kids became available during the summer. As an early bus picked us up, off we were for the day to a string bean farm an hour away. Pick beans, weigh in at day’s end,
collect the money, and give most of it to Dad. After a full day in the sun, and pounds and
pounds of beans later, we could all relax and marvel at our respective twenty-five cent pieces
as the bus returned us home. Junior, ever the slippery entrepreneur, would sneak in a few
rocks among the beans in his basket. He was known to come home with a full dollar—until
they caught him. His malfeasances regrettably left the rest of us unwelcome to return to work
there. Bobby appreciated that his day’s bean picking wage of fifteen cents could buy him two
hot dogs. Problem was that he arrived home with nothing from his earnings left to give to
Dad. All he could do was to offer a feeble fib that his money rolled down the street and into a
manhole. Rightly unconvinced, Dad harshly poked Bobby in the sternum repeatedly with his
forefinger in partial payment of the consequences of deceit.
During the summer we would frequent the freight trains stationed near our Main Street
apartment. Unlocked cars carrying varying sizes of watermelons amidst much straw would
remain unlocked. What an invitation! All the watermelon we wanted; no one seemed to
care—except the priest to whom we vagabonds went to confess about our brazen pilferage.
We spent each summer and other sojourns away from the orphanages with little
oversight from adults. Poor as we were, neither a toothbrush nor toothpaste could be found in
our spartan lavatory. Maintaining bodily hygiene was very much a low priority. At our
respective orphanages, however, we brushed our teeth daily because the nuns allotted us each
our very own toothbrush and a tiny generic toothpaste tube. Ha! None of that back home.
Besides, our nearly toothless Dad taught us that brushing would wear our teeth out. Oh, to see Dad’s yellow and green Jack-o-Lantern smile when he said that! Like him, none of us visited
a dentist from infancy through our pre-teen years. Dad, in all probability, never ever visited a
dentist until he received Medicaid following his retirement decades later. A few of us have
fewer choppers today as a result of the decomposed teeth that were removed during our youth,
gratis, the dentists under contract with the city of Lewiston’s welfare department.
Acquiring good junk food often required neither money nor duplicity. There were
street vendors peddling samples of sweet treats. Our favorite was the Planter’s Peanut Man
sporting a silly peanut suit doling out fresh warm nuts to any pedestrian. On many hot
summer days, near the peanut store, a walk to the F.W. Woolworth department store, then
known as the “five and dime,” was a favorite choice for free sweet victuals. When their
doughnut-making machine broke down, freshly damaged warm doughnuts, crassly called
“cripples” at the time, were ours. We also asked for their broken cookies among the variety of
pastries that they sold in bulk. On one of her weaker moments, mys sister Flora pinched a
few cookies from the grocery store. However, when she ingenuously trudged them home to
share with us, Mom would not accept stolen goods, no matter how poor we were. However
mortifying the experience, Flora was required to return the goods and accept a second
scolding from the manager. Evidently, we remained budding delinquents.
Downtown freebies seemed abundant. We could haul off as much as five pounds of
peanut butter, along with chocolate chip, oatmeal, and Oreo cookies mixed with sugar
wafers–-all with very little effort. One summer day when sister Flora and I went about
begging the F.W. Woolworth discount store for broken cookies, we were successful in filling a large bagful of all sorts of cookies, all broken, to be sure, but otherwise flavorsome.
On Flora’s part, she offered me a generous opportunity for me to keep all those cookies to
myself if I supported her in a little in-home pilferage.. The plan worked out as a most
attractive deal to me. She had left our home with a petite booklet of S & H Green Stamps.
One could redeem those stamps among a selection of products in lieu of money at an S & H
redemption store. Cost of that gift-like merchandise was measured in numbers of stamps
collected and pasted in the little S & H booklet. The deal between Flora and me was that if
she could have the whole book of stam
ps that she surreptitiously snatched from the family
drawer, I could in turn have all the cookies. That would be our personal pact. Cast out of the
Garden of Eden long ago, I gamely agreed to the arrangement and encouraged her to go ahead
to the store to make her purchase: a little doll of her dreams on display at the S & H
redemption center. When she approached the clerk with her requisite book of stamps (one full
booklet would purchase one doll), her stamp book count was a bit off. She was missing three
pages—hence, no doll. Flora was visibly disconsolate. In a vicarious way, so was I. On the
other hand, I began to worry about this easily negotiated loot of pastry that Flora had already
turned over to me. Flora never did ask for the return of her share of the cookies. She was far
too heartbroken to have anything else but that doll. She quietly returned the incomplete stamp
book to the family drawer. All the same, Flora and I had sinned.
Other opportunities came our way vis-à-vis free samples of candies that were
honorably ours for the taking at city supermarkets. . Begging for healthier food required little
effort, although one had to be flexible on the matter of quality and taste, especially in midsummer. We would sometimes trek to the trash barrels in backdoor alleyways outside fine
restaurants to discover fermenting fruit awaiting our ravenous palates. Not to worry. We
would find free fruit elsewhere. I shoplifted a peach from a sidewalk fruit stand—a
mysterious fruit I had never tasted before. Before I could break through the outer fuzz to
sample the juices, I was bustedt! An intimidating lecture from the local police officer did me
good, though it would take a few years more before I would taste a real peach.
There was one sort of junk food that did require an expenditure. On one occasion,
Dad sent me to the store to pick up something for him with his two dollars. Change from his
two-dollar purchase should have been just under a dollar—lots of loose change. From all that
change, I figured I could hang on to a nickel of it to purchase my absolute favorite pastry,
Hostess Snowballs. That’s the super sugary treat containing two cream-filled chocolate half
moons, covered with pink and white marshmallow, coated with coconut. Nirvana, by any
pauper’s standard. Party’s over—time to return the change. To my way of thinking, Dad
would not miss so insignificant a coin among the many my light fingers returned to him for
his purchase. Oh, but he did notice the absence of this modest moolah, after he delivered to
me a sharp kick in the shin on the occasion of my duplicity. He subsequently directed me to
locate this elusive coin after I suggested that I must have dropped it on the way back home
from the store. Not very convincing apparently. I was to remain out there looking for this
cash that was rightfully his until I found it and returned it to him. What was I to do? I was
terrified. More than three hours later of my roaming about the neighborhood aimlessly and
returning to the front steps to sit idle, I eventually dared return to the apartment with nothing in hand. Dad was there all right. The teeth of Dracula would have been less fearsome. My
charge was to quietly remain out of sight to my visually impaired father. The exploitation
worked. No further reprisal. Never another inquiry. I had learned a precious lesson: never
cheat a pitiable father, especially mine. My chase for a nickel fulfilled Dad’s penchant for
inflicting terror on his wayward child. I was, indeed, a bad boy.
Real food, the kind one would expect for “three squares a day” was much more
elusive. Dad performed his food shopping each Saturday afternoon. I think he filled three
large paper bags for the following week—just enough to feed our family. Cheese macaroni
and cheap canned codfish cakes were our favorites. There was not much more than that. OK,
one loaded bag accommodated Dad’s beers. That food lasted, at most four days, with the
largest portion of it consumed as a large Sunday lunch in preparation for Dad’s sendoff to
return to a workweek at the Portland shoe factory. Although that Sunday meal was especially
important to him, we all ate with equal gusto the red meat, potatoes, and vegetables. Beyond
that feast, we failed to learn how to ration food for the rest of the week. In short, we often
went hungry. As Mary Ann put it, “Hunger was the worst feeling I ever had as a child.”
Once during any given month, our family was eligible to line up with other poor folk
on the dole to collect U.S. government surplus food on Pine Street in Lewiston. I witnessed
this process only during the summer months, since I was otherwise occupied at St. Louis
Home, along with brother Bob during the other ten months. This was the only welfare
program at the time available to destitute people.
There were some items from our monthly government food surplus allowance that lasted one or two days at most. These were either a whole chicken in a tall can or a canned
ham along with a large can of orange juice. Beyond that, it seemed impossible to create
recipes for meals from that surplus food: dried milk, a can of lard, a can of peanut butter, a can
of dried eggs, lots of real butter, flour, a five-pound loaf of unsliced American cheese, and a
box of white rice. There were no recipes that came with these ingredients; so, we made do.
“Combine government surplus bread, sugar, and milk,” recalled sister, Connie, and you had a
meal. We ate the peanut butter from its tin with a spoon (more often with the forefinger) and
called it a meal. We also drank the powdered milk once mixed with water that served to wash
down the peanut butter (without bread, of course, since bread was not in the package). We
broke off chunks of cheese to satisfy our appetite for another meal. The dried eggs never went
anywhere. They tasted dreadful when mixed with water, and rice was only an occasional
provision. That left flour, butter, and lard for the last few days until the next month’s surplus
became available. Sometimes we just went hungry; at other times, we’d chase down cookies,
candies, and fruit from a few kind merchants. When enrolled in the city schools, some of us
snatched food off other children’s plates. We sometimes panhandled about the streets when
we were ravenously destitute. Begging rarely produced much pocket change. We dwelled,
after all, in a city populated with the likes of Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean, Charles Dickens’s
Oliver Twist, and George Bernard Shaw’s Eliza Dolittle.
Our being together away from our respective orphanages was a time of immense bliss.
Nurturing each other was our the supreme friendships. We had no other friends; none of us
looked for others to befriend. Just us. We could manage adventures and misadventures very well amongst ourselves in the city of Lewiston. We could invent street trash for use as toys
with little preparation or invention. Saturday morning cartoons on the tube were nowhere to
be found. So, too for Tinkertoys, erector sets, Tonka trucks, old tires, baseball cards with
bubble gum slabs, and Lincoln logs, all of which were reserved for the more affluent. We
enjoyed the smallest and the cheapest of toys. Among them were hand-me-down marbles,
jacks, pea shooters, pick-up sticks, cork popguns, and tiddly winks. We played games of tag,
hide-and-seek, steal-the-bacon, and kick-the-can. “War” and “Fish” were popular if not dull
&
nbsp; card games. Spinning around, getting dizzy and falling down were cause for laughter. We
invented games. We rolled a tire down the hill with brother Junior right in it, in a fetal
position. We all laughed, especially Junior. Though the passing of time was rapid, it was
pleasurable. Our parents allowed us liberal independence on the streets of a safe city.
Punishments were rare. Perhaps there should have been consequences paid for some
clandestine misdeeds. Bobby and Junior, for example, stole Kotex feminine pads—lots of
them—which they thought to be army bandages. One wore a pad as a pirate’s eye patch as
other dipped red Mercurochrome on another pad and taped it across his head for laughs. With
hilarious mirth, they sought to impress Mom with this newfound creative expression. Mom
must have exclaimed, “No, boys, not funny. Those are not army bandages.” She never did
tell them what those pads really were. Mom almost always gave us the benefit of doubt about
our shenanigans.
Dad successfully secured a respite from his kids for one week during the summer
thanks to, yes, yet another charity. That was when all seven of us (sans Lionel the eighth sibling) attended a camp sponsored by the Volunteers of America. This camp was more a
place to hang out than it was a center of youth recreation. At camp, we ate three balanced
meals daily, we napped, and we probably tried to make new friends. As it happened, because
we stuck relentlessly to one another, none of us made friends. There were virtually no
organized activities, except for a pleasing walk to the ocean’s shore each afternoon. There
was one memorable camper we all recall: “Bougers,” as he was labeled by the unkind among
us. He was the one assigned to deliver the bread to the tables at each meal. Bread at this
camp was an understandably unpopular addition to each meal. One could never be sure if
their bread might have been enhanced with his personal phlegmatic ingredient. Curiously, at
the end of the camp season, every single child was given an unopened loaf of bread to take
home. It has taken me many years to figure out why there was such a surplus of bread at
camp’s end. For us, this was seven loaves to take home. Riches!
Saturdays, when Dad usually came home from the factory in Portland, was our day of
