Mean Dads for a Better America

by Tom Shillue

  Red Rover was made for breaking wrists. Both teams would hold hands and make a chain, and take turns inviting someone from the other team to try to break through it. “Red Rover, Red Rover, send Jimmy right over!” and Jimmy would get running as fast as he could, aiming for what he thought would be the weakest link in the chain. If he broke through, he’d run back to his team. If they stopped him, he’d belong to them and take his place in their chain. The ostensible object of the game was to create the longest chain possible. But the real goal was to inflict some pain and suffering.

  We’d battle against each other in all these violent matches until supper, when my mother would ring the cowbell and we’d come running. Then we’d barge in the kitchen and attack our supper. We took her big casseroles for granted; even though it was good and hearty, the stuff she prepared for us was surely not gourmet eating. Mom’s food was sustenance, made for shoveling into the ever-burning furnaces of her growing children. Supper was not a solemn or sacred time in our house; it was a stop at a filling station. After speedily saying grace and making a hasty sign of the cross, we’d devour whatever was in front of us, put our dishes in the sink, and run out the door for the rest of our nighttime play. I used to see families on television, dressed well for dinner and holding hands to pray, with kids bowing their heads toward the napkins in their laps, and Dad at the head of the table. It seemed tedious and unnecessary. That was what we did on Sunday and Thanksgiving and Easter, but every day? My mother didn’t have time to create some kind of Courier and Ives scene at the dining table; she was a stoker and we were the forge. She put dinner on the kitchen table and we ate it. And we wanted it that way—our daily routine was play, play, eat, play, sleep. We took it very seriously.

  At night the games continued, and in the fall when it was dark right after supper, our go-to was Flashlight Tag. The rules for that game were simple—the one who was it only had to catch you in the beam of light to tag you. But if you could get a hand on him before he got the light on you, you had immunity for that round. The question was, should you try to hide out and not be seen, or go full ninja and try for the immunity. Flashlight Tag was my favorite game because it was the one game where it was most fun to be “it.” It was spooky wandering through the pitch-black, but we all knew every inch of our neighborhood so well that it was still hard to hide from whomever had the flashlight. We’d keep playing up until the last moment when we were called in for bedtime.

  There weren’t just yard games, but a whole assortment of street and bike games, too.

  One of our favorites was a bike game I’m pretty sure we made up ourselves called Numbers. One kid would ride out on his bike with a pad of paper, writing down house addresses. On a separate sheet, he would copy down just the house number without the street. He’d hand out the sheets of paper with a big list of numbers, 42, 528, 2132, 28A, etc. There was no limit to where the leader would go to get the addresses; it was basically as far as he was willing to ride. Then the players would have to ride around trying to find the house numbers. As they found each number, they wrote down the street address after it as proof. Since many numbers repeated on different streets, all you needed was a valid address. (It didn’t matter if the leader had written down 18 Maple St.; if you found an 18 Winter St., you were good.) The winner was the first one to return with a completed sheet. Depending on the length of the list and the determination of the leader to collect addresses, this game could take all day. That was okay with us.

  If we weren’t making up games, we were playing the classics. City kids played Stickball, but suburban kids played the great American game of Wiffle Ball. Our yard was the unofficial Wiffle ball stadium, not only because of its ideal shape, but because a spontaneous edict by my father led us to rejigger the rules to create a quirky game. One day he came out of the basement after presumably hearing one too many Wiffle ball taps against the basement window and declared, “If the ball hits the house, it’s an out!” Then he walked back into the basement and slammed the door. That became a permanent rule, whether my dad was home or not. But because our house stretched the entire left side of the field, it was hard to avoid. So, in an inspired bit of genius, my brother decided the drainpipe on the far corner of our house would be an automatic home run. Then, if a batter made good contact and pulled the ball to the left, it was either an automatic out or a home run. It added the perfect bit of unpredictability to the game, and made for many upsets and come-from-behind victories. Whenever that rare ball dinged off the aluminum drainpipe, we all went crazy. Most kids would go all summer and just hit one or two drainpipe homers, but John Sullivan, the Babe Ruth of Wiffle Ball, usually hit one per game.

  My brother’s best buddy Sully lived right across the street. There were dozens of Sullivans around, but only one Sully. He was the kind of athletic kid that every other boy wanted to be. Sully was always the best at every sport he played, no matter what the season. He was tall and strong, but he wasn’t just a jock. He had a physical grace that put him in a different category. In a foot race he would leave everyone else in the dust; when he played hockey he moved across the ice like a figure skater; and when we played Kill the Kid with the Ball we couldn’t even get our hands on him. He would stop and spin like Fred Astaire then dart off in the other direction, leaving us lying in the grass wondering what had happened. He could also climb a tree without using his hands. He would get a running start and just dart up like it was a flight of stairs. Once time Mrs. O’Brien witnessed this feat from her porch. She crossed herself and uttered, “Glory be to The Father!”

  I often think of Sully when I go to a Major League Baseball or NBA game. He still lives in Norwood and works as a mortgage broker, but it’s impossible to overstate how much more physically gifted he was than everyone else around him growing up. If John Sullivan didn’t possess the skill required to play at that level, it boggles the mind to think of the level of God-given talent in someone like Derek Jeter or Steph Curry. What was Jeter like in his hometown? He must have been all anyone ever talked about. With Sully, every Wiffle Ball game at our house was epic.

  In our world if the sun was shining, there was always the noise of a game going on. Of course, we all got into trouble occasionally, but there were no thugs or hooligans in our neighborhood. For that you had to visit Marion Ave. It was a half-mile ride by bicycle if you took the roads, but by shortcut it was just two backyards away. For some reason it was just a little rougher over there. Marion Ave. was lined with big oak trees on both sides, which shrouded the whole street from the sun. Their thick roots burst through the sidewalks, and they would trip you as you walked. It almost seemed that the street itself was harassing you.

  If you wandered onto Marion Ave., you were bound to have a run-in with Kenny Tebeau. Kenny ran that street, and like John Sullivan in ours, established the tone of the neighborhood. Kenny was physically strong, but sports were not his main interest. What he excelled at was intimidation, along with his silent, fearsome right-hand man Jimmy Bandanza. “Banna” always had his telltale red bandana tied snugly over his head like a skullcap. He had the whole package down—his name was Jimmy Bandanza, his nickname was Banna, and he always wore a bandana. For a twelve-year-old suburban thug he certainly had a very strong sense of branding.

  The first time I rode onto Marion Ave. Kenny demanded, “Shillue! Hey, let me take a spin on your bike, Shillue!” If a kid asked to take a spin on your bike, especially an older kid, you had to say yes. If you refused, you would be, well, I don’t really know, no one ever did. After the spin, Kenny handed the bike off to Banna, who promptly gave it a “ghost ride” and let it crash into a stone wall.

  My only crime: being from a rival neighborhood. Welcome to Marion Ave., kid. In Norwood, the hierarchy of loyalty was neighborhood first, then pool, then school. So even though we all went to the same school, and all swam at Father Mac’s pool together, if I decided to go over to a different neighborhood, I was on my own. It may have been only a few backyards away, but in attitude it was
a whole different world.

  For many years I avoided Marion Ave. But as my friendship with Heyn and Mitiguy grew, who were both from Marion Ave., I became interested in what was really going on over there. The influence of Kenny and his buddies was evident.

  When we played street games over on Marion Ave. and teams were being selected, everyone was allowed to play, but they had to be judged first. They wanted to divvy up the teams evenly, so older kids would be more valuable than the younger ones. Older kids would be counted as two, younger kids would be counted as one, and little kids and handicapped kids would be considered half.

  There was a kid named Michael, who had a leg brace and a weak arm and always played sports and games with the other kids. He bravely made up for his disabilities on the playing field: he could crook a hockey stick under his arm and get off a pretty good one-armed slap shot, and in baseball he caught and threw with the same arm. From the outfield, he could catch a fly ball with his glove, then quickly flip the glove up in the air; as the ball fell out, he’d snatch it out of the air with the same hand and throw it to the infield. It was pretty impressive.

  But the way Michael was treated was not ideal. Calling him half a kid obviously was cruel, and it surely bothered him. But it had its upside. It made him resilient.

  Did he want to be called half a player? No. He was not half a player and he knew it. And he proved it in every game. He wanted to play sports with us, so he was willing to deal with the requisite cruelty to do so, and he used it as a way to consistently exceed expectations. Michael was an extraordinary handicapped kid. Or as we called him, “one tough cripple.”

  There was also the kid on Marion Ave. who we called Himmy. His name was Timmy, but because of his very slight lisp, the T came out soft when he said his name, sounding a little bit like “Himmy,” so that became his name. I never heard anyone actually tease him about it, even though you could say that his nickname itself was teasing, but it was used like any other nickname. “Himmy, you want to play hockey?” It never occurred to me that there was anything mean or inappropriate about his nickname until I was an adult. I’m not sure you could argue that there was any good that came of that, other than to introduce the idea to Timmy that kids will always be mean if given the chance. Perhaps Timmy was hurt by it, and early on made the decision to embrace it rather than being the victim. He never objected to his nickname. Maybe he just realized as a kid that he had to be tough to learn to deal with the world as it was.

  From my street to Marion Ave., to every street in Norwood, these were the ways kids filled the hours after school back then. If we weren’t sleeping, or eating, we were outside creating our rules, our hierarchy, and our fun. We didn’t need adults to play with us or devices to entertain us. It may have been rough, even dangerous, and sometimes cruel—but it helped me learn a lot about human nature. The world is competitive. The world is territorial. You need to pick teams and have strategies and figure out how to win, but you have to follow the rules, too. And wouldn’t life be more interesting if adults settled disagreements over a game of Buck Buck?

  I WAS LUCKY, I SUPPOSE, TO BE BLESSED WITH A HEAPING dose of confidence as a kid. Plenty of kids struggle with confidence, hanging in the shadows and staying quiet, not wanting to draw attention to themselves lest they do or say the wrong thing, or have their perceived faults pointed out to them. Well, not me. I was a very confident kid—overconfident even, but it wasn’t because of any signals I was receiving from the outside world. I was not very skilled in sports, but I always wanted to play anyway. If I came in for criticism, I’d just shrug it off. For instance, if I dropped an easy fly ball in right field, my teammates might moan, but I’d simply pick up the ball and toss it to the infield, yelling something like, “Just think if I wasn’t here at all! The ball would still be sitting right here on the grass! Think about that! Look alive!”

  I think my overconfidence stemmed from a combination of things I absorbed in my childhood. As an adult, I’ve always been attracted to self-help books, life coaches, and anything that falls under the “motivational” heading, but I never really subscribed to any one doctrine or approach. I just skim the books in the aisle of the bookstore and think to myself, Yeah that probably works. But I almost always come away thinking, I think I had that figured out when I was seven years old. Just living your life back then was a self-help book. After all, most of what is taught in these books is pretty simple: they advise you to take a less emotional, more analytical approach to situations, so as not to let your bad feelings get in the way of doing what you want to do, and achieving what you want to achieve. I believe that I adopted that approach at home and on the streets of my neighborhood, through the constant exposure to a combination of strictness, moral clarity, independence, and pluck.

  I love the idea of “pluck.” I don’t think it’s something you’re born with; it’s something that’s developed, and I think there was never a better laboratory to create pluck than the environment I grew up in, with its peculiar combination of 1950s rigidity and toughness and 1970s feel-good vibes. So I got a mix of lessons from my family and the culture of the day. My peers may have belittled me, but then TV’s Mr. Rogers built me up and told me I was special. The behavior of the bullies at the playground was met with the solutions of my mother’s time-tested aphorisms. My dad may have scared me into silence, and then Saturday-morning TV announced, “The Most Important Person in the whole wide world is YOU, and you hardly even know you!”*

  My parents’ generation, all they got was the toughness. Kids of today just get the soft stuff. I was in the sweet spot.

  I was overconfident, but not in an ego-driven way that had me walking around thinking I’m great. My calculation was more, I may not be great but that’s okay! Run the numbers and you’ll see I’m pretty good! This was aided by the fact that I was from the first generation to be raised on child-centric entertainment like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Before these shows, the offerings were of the Bozo the Clown and Captain Kangaroo variety—basically strange-looking men talking down to kids and telling them to behave themselves and obey their parents. These new shows were developed by child psychologists and educators, and were very focused on building the child’s self-esteem. We were constantly hearing messages like “You are special,” and “There’s no one quite like you.” Most of our parents were still raising kids in the old-fashioned way, so kids of my generation were growing up in that small window of time where the people we watched on TV were much more loving and understanding than our own parents. Of course I loved Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood—he was more gentle and understanding than anyone in my neighborhood. I remember Fred Rogers singing:

  It’s you I like,

  It’s not the things you wear . . .

  At age seven that line resonated with me because most of my clothes were unremarkable, and I’d been looking for a way to spin that into a positive trait. I always wanted nice, well-fitting clothes like those worn by Christopher Robin, the dapper boy from the Winnie-the-Pooh series. I knew I would have them someday, but for the present I had to wear mostly ill-fitting hand-me-downs.

  Every year at back-to-school time, I wanted to do what the TV commercials told me I had a right and an obligation to do—to go to Bradlees and stock up on crisp new outfits for the fall. But my mother would always point to the fact that we had plenty of clothes that my brother Billy had just grown out of, “So those will have to do for now.”

  When I heard that Mister Rogers lyric I thought, Yes, that makes sense . . . perhaps these clothes are not me, they are just hanging on top of me like a costume; underneath is a well-clothed boy like Christopher Robin. I didn’t wish to be a neat, tidy kid who never got dirty. Nor was I really into clothes or fashion. I was a regular boy who would ruin outfits the same day he put them on, but I was wearing hand-me-downs, so I felt like I deserved better. So what I was really asking myself was, Why aren’t my clothes living up to me? A fair bit of self-absorption to be sure, but with the help of
Mr. Rogers, I owned it.

  I remember getting ready for second grade, and wanting to make a splash on the first day of school. Kindergarten and first grade had gone well enough, but I really wanted to get off on the right foot and make a strong impression in second grade. From my cobbled together hand-me-downs, I was able to assemble an outfit that looked like it was new. I already had a blue blazer for special occasions. I paired this with a nice white short-sleeve button-up shirt and a pair of knee-length dark-brown shorts. Then I added the kicker: white socks and black penny loafers, like the kid on the Buster Brown Shoes logo. I knew this combination was eclectic and different, as I had meant it to be. I wanted to push the envelope and get noticed on day one. I topped off the outfit with a pair of sunglasses (likely an old oversized pair of my mother’s, plucked from the glove box of our car).

  As I walked to school I knew my outfit was killing it. Passing drivers did double takes, and adults in their front yards smiled and said things like, “Well, hello there!” as I walked by.

  When I got to school, I strode into class a few minutes late to get the full effect. It was immediate and stopped me in my tracks. The whole class erupted into laughter. Everyone. The guys. The girls. Even my buddies Johnny Heyn and John Mitiguy. In fact, they seemed to be taking a lead role.

  “Ha, ha, ha! Nice look, Buster Brown!”

  “Where’d you get those shorts, Bermuda?”

  “Hey it’s Joe Cool! Ha-ha-ha!”