People at Holy Cross who insulted the Navy or ROTC might as well have been insulting my mother. Next to her husband and her children the Navy was the best thing that happened to her, although there were times I suspected I didn't rate as high as the Navy.
It was very unlikely that the Navy selected her for this important distinction. The program was run by a patrician Yankee from Radcliffe. My mother was from a blue-collar Cambridge family who didn't own their home. Both her parents were Irish immigrants. Her mother and sisters worked as cleaning women. Her father was a union organizer who worked for the MTA back in the days when they derailed trolley cars to make their point, and often came home thoroughly beat up for their trouble.
Her Uncle Ned immigrated to America after doing time in a British prison for being a captain in the Irish Republic Army (there were no privates). He worked on the Boston docks and belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World, aka Wobblies. After Uncle Ned arrived in America my grandfather stopped coming home beat up. Ned was one of what they called the "hard men." No pretend revolutionaries in our family: Ned was the real deal. The Navy's security checks must not have been very thorough back in those days.
Their lives weren't all union brawls and drudgery, though. By the time my mother became aware of the people around her, Cambridge had settled into peaceful co-existence... to hear her tell it. In a largely segregated America many of the children who attended school with her were Afican Americans. Felix Frankfurter pitched in to help grandpa with union arbitration, Harvard started giving scholarships to smart neighborhood kids, and my mother's brother with "The Right Stuff" went there to play baseball. Jack and Joe Kennedy sat behind Grandma Honoragh, the farm girl from Lisdoonvarna, at the baseball games and cheered for "Shanty" Regan. Sounds nasty, but people then didn't take offense as readily as today. Mom's brother joined the Navy ROTC at Harvard and after Joe Kennedy got into flight school, he said if that bum Kennedy can do it so can I. He flew at torpedo plane, an ensign killer, in the Solomons and won the Navy Cross for sinking a Japanese ship at Rabaul. After the war he qualified as a test pilot and was among the first to fly jets.
Avery Dulles like Paul on the road to Damacus had an epiphany while walking past my mother's Cambridge church when he heard the people singing, converted to Catholicism and joined the Society of Jesus. The Portuguese fisherman's family down the street kept goats in their front yard. Did Avery Dulles remember the goats? Years later in Arizona completely by accident I met and married the great-granddaughter of that Portuguese family. There are some coyotes in our neighborhood but no goats.
My mother's Aunt Kathleen went into business with a Yankee woman and a black man. The ladies baked cakes and the black man delivered them to customers in Cambridge. My mother would watch the women bake and listen to their stories. When the black man arrived for his next delivery, he'd give her a smile and say, "Mark my words, Miss Mary, you're going to Smith College some day." He might as well have said she was going to be the first woman on Mars or the first woman officer in the US Navy.
Towards the end of high school my mother asked her father for career advice. He said, be a teacher. It's a worthwhile job and you have the summers off. So she commuted by train each day to Lowell State Teachers College. She'd arrive back home at Cambridge late at night and waiting for her at the station would be her an old black neighbor man, waiting there to walk with her and make sure she got home safely.
Teaching jobs were hard to find during the Depression, but they let her substitute at the Cambridge schools. When war broke out they closed the schools for a day and had the teachers work on distributing ration cards. The principal told my mother she had to work, too, but the powers that be wouldn't let him pay her. He hung his head and said sorry. "I quit!" says she.
The General Electric plant at Lynn needed a cost accountant to replace a man who was about to be drafted. My mother got the job and became a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
On lark a she and her friends also applied for a Navy program. She did well on the aptitude test and the next thing you know she was on her way to Smith College to train to be an officer in the US Navy. The man she was supposed to replace turned out to be 4F and didn't get drafted. The union treated her like every other service man and sent her cigarettes and chocolate every month throughout the war even though she was assigned to the communication center in Boston for the duration.
