My Sister Was an Only Child

This is the story of my Irish-American family from the period of the Great Depression to the Eisenhower years. The struggles of the family were marked by a string of calamities and opportunities that may seem unlikely, but they marked our experience and shaped us all:

•My grandfather's total disinheritance in 1900 plunged my father and his brothers into poverty for most of his youth.

•The early death of my mother's father in 1913 sent her family into poverty when she was nine. The youngest of her three brothers was still in the womb.

•A special act of charity toward an ailing aunt unexpectedly helped the family buy the house on 7 Webster Place in 1930.

•My mother's dream gave my father the winning numbers he played on his way to work, saving the family home from foreclosure in 1933.

•My mother's youngest brother botched a bank robbery and found himself in the army in 1942.

•My father's rescuing an abandoned aunt with Alzheimer's disease proved one of the most painful experiences of the middle 1940s.

•My father's alcoholic brother broke in one night and threatened us with murder.

•A daring Christmas Eve burglary while the family slept completely shocked our sense of security in 1948.

•With one grandmother in bed with cancer and the other grandmother in bed with a stroke, our house became a hospice until 1949.

•My beautiful sister suffered an unhappy childhood and, after jilting her wartime sweetheart, married the wrong man and made her life difficult and painful.

•White Flight in 1952 ended our years on Webster Place and began a series of moves that reduced the circumstances of my parents but gave them some security in their old age.

The story of my Irish-American family living in East Orange, New Jersey, covers a period of great political and social change. 7 Webster Place housed ten people in 1935 when I was born. I thought of myself as an only child, as did my older sister. We became aware of our conundrum only when we were much older and all the people of our youth were gone.