My mother’s brother was born a year after her, in 1926, in a small town in New York’s Hudson Valley. By the time he was a year old, it had become apparent Jack was not going to be a healthy, active boy. His legs misshapen and his muscles weak, he was by all indications destined to be what he would refer to himself as, jokingly, for the rest of his life—a cripple. He never seemed to find that word demeaning, just descriptive. And in the 1920s and 1930s, terms like “differently abled” were not part of the lexicon.
My uncle, Jack Fogarty, suffered from cerebral palsy. I say “suffered” because there was no question he was in pain much of his life. He was not wheelchair bound; he could walk but not easily. He bore the stance that many people with CP have: a crouched back, knock knees, one foot raised on the toes, and an arm bent inward like a wing. Unlike most boys who could bound up and down stairs a few steps at a time, Jack faced an excruciating extended lurch up the stairs, one misshapen foot at a time, to his bedroom each night. It was the bedroom he slept in most of his life, on the second story of a house built in the mid-1800s that he shared with his mother, my grandmother. The house had been in my grandfather’s family since its construction. It had a storefront attached, facing the main street of the town, and a back door approximately 150 yards from the door of the town’s Catholic church.
I know very little about Jack’s childhood. My mother didn’t talk much about it, except to say the nuns at the Catholic school next door tried to teach Jack, “but he was too busy goofing off with his neighborhood pals” to take school seriously. Many people mistook his strongly slurred speech as an indication of mental limitations. He never learned how to read but a few words and do enough math to make basic calculations and play the numbers every week.
But you don’t need school to learn interpersonal skills, and he had plenty of opportunities in the 1930s and 1940s—when the neighborhood was the center of social life—to practice those skills despite his differences. Jack perceived early on that the way to break down barriers between him and people who might be put off by his contorted appearance was to make a joke of it. He always laughed the loudest when his neighborhood buddies ended a sentence directed at him with “Jack, ya dumb cripple.” It sounds cruel; society wasn’t as careful about language back then, and people today might be justifiably appalled by this type of exchange. But in those days, between the neighborhood guys, this mock derision took the elephant in the room—Jack’s handicap—and put it in focus, then dismissed it. His good friends, and he had a lot of them, were the ones most likely to be in on the joke.
There was a time and place, sixty years ago in a small-town neighborhood bar, when Jack belonged just as he was.
After Prohibition ended, the storefront attached to the house became a beer bar (no liquor, just beer). When my grandfather died in 1941, there was no one to run the bar. I’m a little unsure what happened between when my grandfather died and when Jack became legally old enough to run the bar. I think a relative stepped in for some years. All I know is that by the time I was born in 1959, it was Jack’s bar: Fogarty’s Bar and Grill.
Fogarty’s Bar and Grill was a study in what sociologists today call a “third place”—a place that’s neither home nor work where you gather to relax and connect with your neighbors. Those boyhood pals who distracted Jack from school grew up to become his barroom cronies. Some came to the bar to be sociable, stopping after work for one or two beers and catching part of a game (on the sixteen-inch black-and-white TV that sat at the end of the bar), then heading home. Some came to avoid being somewhere else (a house full of kids or an empty, lonely apartment); they had five or six drinks and stayed until 10 or 11 p.m. It was the latter patrons who were the core of Jack’s group of cronies. Their antics extended beyond the bar to backyard barbecues, trips into New York City for baseball games, practical jokes, and not a few late-night beer-fueled brawls (from which Jack steered clear).
Many years later at my uncle’s funeral, one of his patrons, one of the very few still alive in 2012, came up to me and said, “You know what I liked about your uncle’s bar? The hats.” “The hats?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, “next to the door there was a hat rack, and all the hats would be lined up in a row. The banker’s hat, the construction worker’s hat, the monsignor’s hat, the policeman’s hat. We were all there at Fogarty’s.”
Though his career options in the mid-twentieth century were limited by his condition, running the neighborhood bar might have been the perfect job for my uncle. Jack had a naturally gregarious personality—he was an extrovert, we would say today—and his handicap made his patrons feel like they were doing him a favor by stopping in for a few, when it was mostly really the other way around. The bar was where he belonged. He was like a piece of the puzzle that made the neighborhood complete—the guy who couldn’t do construction, be a plumber, or a banker, or a priest, but who could bring them all together at the end of the day.
Despite many late nights at the bar, most mornings Jack would cross the road to attend daily Mass. I don’t know what was happening between my uncle and God during those hundreds of hours he spent in that church. Perhaps he was asking God why he was different; why he had to suffer more physical pain than most; why he was trapped in a societal cage that dictated, in that era, that he would never marry and have children. Maybe he found relatability in the fact that the curing of the lame features so prominently in the Gospels. Or maybe he was just praying for his cronies, who had different sources of suffering, whose jobs, responsibilities, wives, and children inflicted other types of angst.
“Crippled,” poorly educated, and with few choices in life, he must have had to trust in God that his existence had meaning—that he, too, was a beloved child despite his infirmities, just as we all must. Perhaps because he had less of what the world had to offer—health, wealth, status, good looks—that trust in God came more easily, unmuddied by the ego boosts that cloud the connection between most of us and God. I don’t know. All I know is that he must have found some comfort in that daily Mass, or I don’t think he would have kept going for most of his life.
The 1960s were the heyday of the bar and the shenanigans of my uncle and his cronies. By the mid-1970s, life was evolving to become much more about the world beyond the neighborhood. The people you related to, the ones you judged yourself against, were more likely to be the created characters on TV sitcoms and commercials and less the people in your neighborhood. People who walked and spoke as imperfectly as Jack, whose lives were simple yet difficult, weren’t on TV. I don’t know if it was the change in society or the change in me as I grew from adolescence into the later teen years, but for the first time I began to feel a little embarrassed by my uncle. His world, bordered by five or ten blocks that surrounded the bar, and the bar itself, started to feel like an anachronism. And the neighborly congeniality that was its essence was fading away as well.
Once in high school, I was sitting with my best friend and two male friends on a hill in a field at dusk, sipping a bottle of beer. One of the boys told us how he had stolen beer from “Old Jackie” because he left the door to his storeroom open and “he can’t chase me anyway.” My female friend gave me a sideways glance and said to the boy, “You know Jackie is Caroline’s uncle, right?” The boy looked sheepish, even a little afraid, thinking perhaps I might call the police. “Eh, don’t worry about it,” I said, unable to defend Jack, awash in my all-consuming, adolescent need to be part of the crowd. I know that if any of those barroom cronies of Jack’s had heard this, they would have punched that kid in the face. But even through my thick adolescent self-centeredness, I felt a little heartsick that my uncle was seen now as a pathetic figure in the town where he once so seamlessly belonged.
Jack’s life certainly would have been different if he were part of a later generation. Since the 1970s, we’ve rightly enacted many measures to protect the rights of persons with disabilities and greatly improve their lives. If he had been born fifty years later, my uncle would have been required to go to school. They would have tested his IQ and probably found that it was at least as high as his peers, no doubt higher than some of his buddies in the bar. Physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists—a whole team of professionals would have been summoned to address his physical and psychological needs, to make efforts to help him walk and improve his speech. To fix him. My grandmother never sought out these types of services, most likely because they didn’t exist in the 1930s and 1940s, but also because I don’t think it ever occurred to her that he needed fixing. She certainly would have done anything she could to have alleviated his pain. But she loved Jack, not for who he could be but exactly for who he was.
We’ve gotten better at helping people perform academically and in careers and in conforming more closely to an ideal of what we envision a human life should be—perhaps with the intent of making those who are different feel they belong. But there was a time and place, sixty years ago in a small-town neighborhood bar, when Jack belonged just as he was.
After my grandmother died and Jack entered his sixties, his physical needs became unmanageable at home and he became wheelchair bound. He spent the last twenty-five years of his life in a nursing home, the walls of his room plastered with pictures of his cronies from the heyday of the bar and of the scenic Hudson Valley town that was his home.
One morning, the nursing home aide went to get Jack up and into a wheelchair to take him to the Mass being held in the nursing home common room. As she was getting him in the chair, he said to her, “I’m going to die today.” She brushed it off, thinking if he was able to get out of bed, he would probably make it through the day. But as she wheeled him back to his room after Mass, he began to “mottle.” The aide knew death was near; Jack didn’t make it long enough for my mother to drive to the nursing home to say goodbye.
Perhaps those conversations between God and Jack, cultivated over all those years of daily Mass, opened a channel of communication that gave Jack an “inside scoop” that last morning about when he would die. I like to think that in that conversation, God was telling him he was a dearly beloved son, loved unconditionally by his maker, his mother, and his friends. One who could finally lay a long-suffering body to rest.