When Mom and Dad married and Dad bought their first car—used, from a friend—he had to finance the purchase with a loan. “A loan?” Mom said. “Isn’t that what hillbillies do?”
It was Dad’s first set of wheels, unless you count the trailer he lived in with his mother in high school. He had to leave the trailer to use a communal bathroom, so when he says “We didn’t have a pot to pee in,” he is telling the God’s honest truth. He would sit on the toilet in that outbuilding, picking the flies off the wall and feeding them to the spiders to pass the time. Growing up fatherless in a Fort Wayne, Indiana, trailer park next to a sewage treatment plant may have instilled a mild hillbilly phobia in Dad, because he told Mom’s mom—my Grandma Boyle in Cincinnati—that the used car he bought to convey his twenty-two-year-old bride to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, was not the end of his automotive ambitions. “Someday,” he told Grandma Boyle, “I’ll drive a Cadillac.”
This story is the only time I will ever hear of my father boasting about anything. He trades in self-deprecation—and the deprecation of others, especially motorists and television newsreaders—but he loathes self-promotion and so does Mom. “Don’t toot your own horn,” she has told me many, many times. And so I just assume it’s something better left to the hillbillies that walk among us.
Whatever its source, Mom’s aversion to hillbillies does not stem from a fear of falling into poverty or a discomfort with poor people. On the contrary. After she graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a degree in primary education, Mom was one of two white teachers to integrate the all-black faculty at an all-black school in one of Cincinnati’s poorest neighborhoods. Her rectitude and na?veté were instantly on display in her fourth-grade classroom in the mid-1950s. Students lined up for recess in front of the chalkboard, and when the line marched out of the room, there was often a single word scrawled on that board. She would erase it, and the word would reappear the next day.
After a week, my future mom finally asked the class, “Why does someone keep writing ‘Pussy’ on the board?”
The children gasped and giggled.
Mom pressed on. “Is Pussy somebody’s cat?”
There was more giggling, and a girl raised her hand. “Miss Boyle,” she said. “That’s something a lady has.” This only confirmed Miss Boyle’s notion that Pussy was indeed a cat, and she let the matter rest, but not before telling my future dad, who palmed his face in disbelief.
I don’t yet know any of these stories, of course, only that I can—simply by putting on a brand-new Izod shirt thirty-six hours after purchasing it or walking out of Famous Footwear in a pair of brand-new Thom McAns—end my parents’ hard-won climb up the greased pole of the American middle class and send them (and me and my growing number of siblings) crashing back to hillbilly class.
In truth, the only hillbillies I know from TV are living a life of unimaginable luxury after moving to Beverly (Hills, that is). California holds a fascination for all of us. Viewed through our Zenith, everything there—The Brady Bunch house, The Partridge Family clothes, the blue-and-yellow license plates on the twelve-lane freeways—looks like the future. And so we lobby Dad, a frequent traveler to that magical land, to take us there someday.
He answers the same way he does whenever I ask him to take us bowling or to tell me what Watergate means or to explain Vietnam (or Viet Nam). “Someday,” he says. “Someday.”
There is a new rhyme to endure on the bus in the fall of 1972: “Nixon, Nixon, he’s our man! McGovern belongs in the garbage can!” I repeat it at home. Mom is a Democrat, Dad a Republican. I’ve heard him say, “We cancel each other’s vote.” I don’t know if he has come by his political affiliation after great thought or if he just wants to negate women’s suffrage.
I take Mom’s pained expression on hearing me trash McGovern to be disapproval, though it might just be morning sickness, for she is pregnant again, with a fifth child. Sears portrait-studio photographs of the first four of us hang in descending order—Jim, Tom, Steve, Amy—down the wall of the staircase. In a fifth frame above the bottom step, Dad—an accomplished doodler—has hand-drawn in cartoon bubble letters WATCH THIS SPACE.
Dad is in Los Angeles when Mom goes into labor. He arrives home just in time for the birth of a fourth son, who is named—with an extravagant four letters—John. To avoid confusion, Mom no longer sings to me “Diddle, diddle dumpling, my son John” but instead wakes me with just its uncoupled second line: “One shoe off and one shoe on.”
She’ll pass me on the couch in the middle of a Saturday morning and sing, “One shoe off, one shoe on,” for that is often how she finds me: wearing one mateless sock or limping like a peg-legged pirate in a single shoe, absorbed in a waking dream about almost anything—who would win a fight between Inch High, Private Eye and the Ty-D-Bol man, for instance, and why the former wears a raincoat to receive clients while the latter wears a blazer to circumnavigate the toilet bowl. Perhaps they should swap wardrobes. And so it goes, for hours on end, until that terrible moment when American Bandstand begins and brings down the curtain on five and a half consecutive hours of Saturday morning TV.
For Mom, the arrival of her fifth child is fractionally eased by the arrival of disposable diapers. There is still a stack of cloth diapers and pink-and blue-capped diaper pins in a dresser drawer in Amy’s room, but they are ignored in favor of Pampers, another wonder product from Procter & Gamble, the global leviathan founded and still headquartered in Mom’s hometown of Cincinnati, to which she remains intensely devoted. She serves chili over spaghetti, as they do in Cincinnati, roots for the Reds with a singular passion, and believes in the sanctity of Procter & Gamble. Our dishwasher detergent is Cascade and our fabric softener is Bounce, so that Cincinnati, like God, is always with us and all around us—on our forks and plates and underpants.
Like Ignaz Schwinn, William Procter and James Gamble were Old World men shaping my life from beyond the grave. They immigrated separately to the United States—Procter from England, Gamble from Ireland—and only stopped in Cincinnati by coincidence, both men seeking medical attention on their way west. Procter stayed and became a candle maker; Gamble stayed and was apprenticed to a soap maker. When the two happened to marry sisters—Olivia and Elizabeth Norris—their father-in-law suggested they go into business together, which they did, forming Procter & Gamble in 1837.