Harrowgate Tales - Excerpts

My latest on Kindle - Harrowgate Tales


Excerpts:


Parade in Kensington - Harrowgate Memorial Day Parade


...The biggest event annually in Harrowgate - Kensington was the Memorial Day Parade being that most parents of school aged children in the neighborhood and areas were veterans of WWII and Korea. Old males likely vets of WWI etc. I once marched in Memorial Day Parades in high school with the North(east) Catholic High marching band of which I played Sousaphone.

One performance I personally remember was in a parade that was in Port Richmond, we were bused to different locations that day in a P.T.C. chartered bus. There I saw two amazing things. An old man of about ninety, skinny and tall and wearing what looked like a Boy Scout Uniform with some medals and looking through thick as the bottom of a Coke bottle lenses of his eyeglasses. This old guy was an actual Veteran of the Spanish American War. Small world. There too, this is the late 60's, I saw my English teacher from freshman year who at that time was a seminarian studying to be a priest, teaching on a year long sabbatical of sorts, teaching in our high school for a year, after finishing four years of college in the seminary before continuing with an additional four years of seminary training after this year of teaching. It was after all a teaching religious order and his salary from the archdiocese doubt went to support the order. 

He was no longer in a black cassock but in a white tee shirt, shorts and sandals. She was also with what must have been his girlfriend. He saw me during a break from marching and said hello with no other explanation other than to say hello and ask how Junior year was going etc. I guess he left the seminary for one reason, reasons or another etc. ...


The Long Dark Corridor

...I guess that the religious order had decided to maintain the property until it could be evaluated whether to sell it - use it, convert it etc. I think that maybe about fifteen priests and seminarians used the grand estate as a second faculty house - to relieve overcrowding in the primary faculty house – and commuting by car back and forth to the high school. 

In retrospect I connect some dots (possibly in total error) and perhaps it was the gay section of the original faculty house that went into separate quarters at this white elephant mansion.

Oh this speculation breaks down into two categories: good gays, abstaining from gay sex religious and the bad gays - actually occasionally practicing their natural instincts -

There is not much to this story except for connecting dots and wondering. In the middle of that sophomore year, a young, dynamic, charismatic seminarian teacher died in a car crash coming back from some long distance weekend duties - deacon at some parish etc. I remember his picture in the newspaper and the official speculation that he had fallen asleep at the wheel of his car in this "single vehicle collision" - And then my biology teacher, I liked him, died during the summer break.

I suppose I would not be writing this today except that in the next school year, my junior year, a very prissy but not unlikable priest blurted out something in class. Father Tom, a history teacher, said something like a veiled admission regarding the sudden tragic death of Father Ed, the biology teacher. He said something like "wrapping oneself around a highway pillar was indeed a suspicious thing to happen" while talking to the class one day, I think his comments went over many students heads... 

Chapter Two - The Long Dark Corridor

...But I got the A+++.  Been there.  Done that.  Time to move on. Etc. 

I decided then and there. I would drop his course. So much of what he had fed this class so far was his own personal bullshit full of his ambitious plan to one day run the school system downtown which he in fact did one day. I have since read many things about cults and brainwashing and such and “E.” would have made a great Jim Jones in the secular world etc. IMHO. 

I also as I have written this blog for many years have to wonder how ambitious church lady types with penises, how they rise to the top of their professions being perhaps tops and not giving a shit about who gets ground into sausage along the way, especially children.

I also have  to wonder how “E.” built his great education system as the archdiocese, one by one, shut down their inner city schools and high schools.  That glory sometimes is a story, a press release, as the world and or institution dies from attrition.  

Will the last person in the Archdiocese Education Office at “222” kindly turn off the lights as they leave the building forever. 

I also have to wonder how many times how the elites of the Education Department rubbed elbows with the Elites of the hierarchy at board meetings or gatherings over cocktails and how polite church talk and education talk never got mixed with the very real talk of child abuse and criminal cover up emanating from the Cardinal’s penthouse office suite on the top floor above?...

Cowardly Racists Emerge From The Shadows of America -- Santorum: Obama exacerbated racism -- Officials to investigate alleged racial discrimination at pool of Philadelphia swim club

I quit FB because I had no real friends there, save for one or two. I no longer talk to the victimizing older brother who still has my mother's ashes in a closet there in Phoenix years after I offered to pay half of the cost of shipping her body to be in a grave with our father in Bucks County Pa - he my "brother" among former online "friends".

The thing about FB is that I joined a few groups related to Philly centered on neighborhoods. One was of the greater area of Kensington and one on the narrower neighborhood of Harrowgate, an invented Railroad Burb of the 1880s within Philadelphia County which eventually became the factory town that I grew up in. I quit the  Kensington FB forum after someone made a nice comment on the poet Maya Angelou after her death, a poet of which I had no particular fondness in her writings, but the anonymous - they did have their full names on FB - but I did not know them except as "friend" of a "friend" response or hatred of a black female poet. (and I only recently bothered to read a Wikipedia bio of Maya to realize what a monumental life she had led even if I was not previously aware of it etc.) Well I shy away from conflict. That and later in life realizing that I have had a touch or more of A.D.D. all my life which in retrospect explains why I have not been more successful in my life of trial and error false start runs for the money. That many times for me and my memory, a word like "spatialize" would send me to a dictionary in fear of my unknown ADD to be discovered or looked down upon in comments by Ph'ds or worse I-V league trained lawyers in forums that I did not really belong in. Should know my place in life this late in life for "my kind".

Well I shied away from Kensington FB after the white jackals got their jollies off chewing up the bones of the person who thought it appropriate to say a simple RIP to a black poet on FB. I quit that "Forum". That over time, the FB crowd talk a lot of code and the "they ruined the old neighborhood" talk told me that a lot of people I grew up with and did not grow or accept others in their own right and or light of the divine within that the Quakers rhetoric be prone to in the Quaker subculture context of Philly.

PC Curtain in the Temple now Torn in half in America with the LEADER now in the WH.

Recently this Jerk Off Opus Dei Catholic X-senator Santorum of Pennsylvania shows up on the Jerk Off Fox Network wanting to show and share his dirty tighty whitey racists tracks, share them with his friends, like papal royalty like Countess Annie Leary like Newt Gingrich where it can be purchased as in bought and sold ambassadorships and hang out in the white teenage country club locker room to share w/ brotherhood members of the Dick memories of their conquests over c**ts and n****** and democrats - context...

Rick Santorum did not live in Pennsylvania when he was senator from that Alabama North turf. He lived in Virginia where his children could attend daily mass at his Opus Dei suburb of purity.

Of course my relatives went to Montgomery county in 1964, after the local Philly riots and I have not seen or spoken to them since, me be poor and not therefore not white enough for them I think. The incident mentioned below in Huntington Valley Pa., right over the Philly city line, where they live, happened before with the mixup on scheduling and the black kids upsetting the delusion of safety in the burbs in the 90s or the 00s - even pools needs cash flow even if it from the city budget of that distant place where inferior people live etc.

This time, it blew up almost as a flashpoint of toxic flammable hate being ignited by Obama at this pool in July 2009 which I think in some bizarre way of Catholic College Education in America these days means what Santorum sadly genuinely believes what he is saying. Anointed white penised Christian males tell no lies? Obama did indeed exacerbate racism simply by being born and being himself and of course being POTUS.

Sad how America in its best parts, the burbs do not know how to retire, leave the next generation to deal with the day to day stuff, live and let live like the rest of planet, and enjoy the multi-culturalism as it exists in big northern and west coast cities. Sad how some successful white men who are workaholics and lonely and cannot retire and relax end up like people like Anthony Bourdain who are talented with the gift of the gab and have skills and have never matured past adolescence into adulthood. Good luck with obscurity Rick. And your lonely old age when yours kids discover their freedom from your putrid chains. Whatever.


Santorum: Obama exacerbated racism

Santorum responded by saying that it was actually Obama who used the presidency to fan the flames of racism.

“Many people saw Barack Obama being just that, doing more to exacerbate racism,” Santorum said.

Asked exactly what Obama did to exacerbate racism, Santorum said that “every time someone of color was involved, he took the side, many times, against the police.”

"He did it over and over and over again,” Santorum added. “President Obama was to many people out there someone who could have come together, brought this country together.” 

Santorum has often shied away from criticizing Trump and instead chosen to focus on Obama.

Last month, he brushed off questions about false claims from Trump and said that Obama told more substantial lies.

Officials to investigate alleded racial discrimination at pool of Philadelphia swin club

"A couple of the children ran down saying, 'Miss Wright, Miss Wright, they're up there saying, "What are those black kids doing here?""' she said.

The gated club is on a leafy hillside in a village that straddles two townships with overwhelmingly white populations. It says it has a diverse, multiethnic membership.

Wright said she went to talk to a group of members and heard one woman say she would see to it that the group, made of up of children in kindergarten through seventh grade, did not return.

"Some of the members began pulling their children out of the pool and were standing around with their arms folded," Wright said. "Only three members left their children in the pool with us."

Several days later, the club refunded the camp's $1,950 without explanation, said Wright, who added that some parents are "weighing their options" on legal action.

Abandoned Bank - Ceiling - Kensington Philadelphia

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Historic Beginnings of American Culture War – Philadelphia – 1970s

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I had a nightmare last night.  I dreamt that State Senator Martin P. Mullen had come back from hell to inflict more inhumane legislation on not only the people of Pennsylvania but the whole planet.


I don’t know how the culture war in America took shape in various other parts of the country, but like New Hampshire where the shot heard round the world that supposedly started our American Revolution, the culture war in America has no better historic model than Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the 1970s.


I drift back forty years to the point where I, as an eighteen year old, decided that I did not want to hear anymore boiler plate sermons about Satan from the local priest in Philadelphia and I never set foot in that church again.


All around me was a world where the War in Vietnam was wrapped in a flag.  That fucking war was so important to all the middle aged losers who hated their lives and had served so faithfully and or really had no choice but serve in World War Two. 


The basic cultural war in the minds of Philadelphians then, if you were young, was if your draft number would come up and you would have to serve, fight in a war that made absolutely no logical sense. 


On another level, there was the creeping fear that blacks would try to cross the invisible border, south on Lehigh Avenue, and try to invade your beautiful turn of the century row house paradise, built for factory workers. 


Oh there were factories in the neighborhood, and they employed blacks, but in retrospect I can remember all the blacks lined up at the 5 bus stop after work waiting to get back to wherever it was that they lived outside our perfect white lower middle class bubble existence.  In retrospect, the image of Apartheid comes to mind and is superimposed on those distant scenes.


I have seen or heard comments from people who lived there at the same time.  The thing that destroyed Philly, they usually say, was “Section 8” housing, which is of course code talk for racism and welfare.


In a way, the inability of people to recognize and love your neighbor is what destroyed that old Currier & Ives idealized brain image of the slums where I grew up in Kensington - Harrowgate in Philly.


Where was I? Oh yes, the war, the blacks and yeah Vatican II.  Well Vatican II did not change anything in a neighborhood of mixed Irish and I-talian catholics.  Oh there were protestants out there.  We saw their churches dotting the landscape.  Never saw who entered those houses of worship on Sundays.  Didn’t care.  The predominant local culture was of Irish Catholic factory workers and Irish Catholic churches and schools.



In a way, my parents were intelligent, and liberal.  They got into the ideal that blacks should have equal rights.  But somewhere along the timeline, people like my parents got scared about what they saw on the tube with black militant groups, war protestors and the rapid decline of a normal society into chaos around 1968.  They never told me directly but my so called liberal parents voted for George Wallace in 1968,  I figured that out later along the timeline.


I guess I stayed there, going along my own liberal timeline, and did not realize how secular I was and in relation to terms of also being a Catholic from birth.  Did not feel the difference until they shot Martin Luther King.


I can remember to this day, the priest Father Locke, freshly minted from the seminary, stumbling for words, almost apologetically, from the pulpit that next Sunday, stating something to the effect that he did not know if it would be proper but would not forbid personal prayers for a Protestant (after all, only Catholics go to heaven- your prayers are probably wasted on him), for the slain civil rights leader.  Huh?


It was there that I got the clue that maybe Catholics were not really Christians like people like MLK who called themselves Christian.  Christian was not a word I heard often in the first eighteen years of a Catholic life.  I heard the word but in conjunction with other words like Christian Doctrine etc.


(An aside - Reminds me of my own Irish Catholic joke I told to a former boss in the 1980s, also Irish Catholic – “I was twenty-one before I realized that Protestant and bastard were two separate words.” – My boss howled in laughter.)


Oh yeah, getting back to Vatican II, I wrote some thoughts on that in my earliest blogs here, but let me get to the point and back to my nightmare about the late great Martin Mullen of the Pennsylvania State Legislature.


Pennsylvania on a map may look like an east coast type of place.  But like the famous political advisor said and is quoted.  “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.”  I have already shared a few thoughts above on my cosmopolitan cultural upbringing in Philly. There was that other thing, the sex thing and the RC church confusion about birth control.


Paul VI brought out his Zero Tolerance document on birth control.  Like all life in general, most of us just stumbled into ways of dealing with our own individual sexuality.  (No user manual necessary.)


The cultural war in Philly and Pennsy had a pie-eyed, drunk on his own arrogance and self importance, fanatic in the form of Martin Mullen who suddenly was on the black and white TV screen, the chosen mouthpiece of John Cardinal Krol and his decision to bring Pennsylvania under the recent Catholic Sharia Law (Humanae Vitae) on human sexuality. 


PENNSYLVANIA: Bitter Abortion Battle

Mullen, backed by equally conservative John Cardinal Krol and his Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, decided that the state, with its 35% Catholic population, was natural terrain to make a stand against the trend to more liberal laws on public morality. The battle was joined over the issue of abortion. To counter a liberal abortion bill, the conservatives proposed a bill of their own that outlawed abortion altogether except when a panel of three physicians certified that the mother's life was endangered. It made no allowance for victims of rape, incest or mental illness. Supporting the conservative bill, the Catholic Conference ran a long and costly campaign that included weekly pictures of truncated fetuses and aborted embryos on Page One of the Cathotic Standard &Times, the official organ of the archdiocese of Philadelphia. Last June the campaign paid off: the liberal bill was easily defeated, and the conservative bill was adopted by both houses and sent to Shapp for his signature. Mullen warned the Governor that if he attempted to stop the bill through veto or pocket veto he would run against him in the Democratic primary next year.  

While Shapp mulled over what to do, the protest and counterprotest boiled on. In an unusual turn, Patricia Arney, 32, a divorcee who is a district Democratic committeewoman, revealed to the Philadelphia Inquirer that State Senator Henry J. Cianfrani, 49, one of the conservative bill's strongest supporters, had paid for her abortion in 1970 while they were having an affair, and produced a receipt for his check to prove it. He did not deny their relationship, but said that he had given her the money to visit her family in Toledo and did not know that there had been an abortion. Though the disclosure caused yowls of protest on the floor of the state senate, letters to the Inquirer ran 10 to 1 in favor of Arney's blow against hypocrites.  

Last week Shapp, calling the bill "unsound, unenforceable and totally unfair," vetoed it. Mullen failed to muster the three-fourths majority necessary to override the veto, leaving the state functionally without an abortion law of any kind, since lower courts have declared the present statute unconstitutionally vague and appeals are pending. With that, Mullen sounded the charge for his race against Shapp next spring, which could be among the bitterest elections in Pennsylvania's history: he called the Governor's veto the result of a "paganistic, atheistic philosophy."

In reality, few states had laws to deal with archaic or non-existent laws to deal with modern technology and recent developments in birth control.

Somewhere along the timeline, the culture war on birth control became the culture war on abortion.  The discussion regarding sexuality was not about choice in the form of birth control methods to prevent pregnancy, it became all about abortion and the strategy and the rhetoric of Krol’s hand puppet to the media in the 1970s has not changed much to this day IMHO.

My leaving my local church, not the People of God, when I was eighteen was also in reaction to archconservative mean spirited types shouting at you on the TV like Martin Mullen as Krol’s in front of the curtain media voice .  It was also the loss of the sermons on Satan, a chance to nod off, that got dropped on Sundays and propaganda spiels from the pulpit that you had to pick up the mimeographed letter to your state legislature in the church lobby, copy it in your own handwriting, and mail it to show that you were in favor of the most current Martin Mullen anti-sexuality law pending in Harrisburg.  Model – Modus Operandi – set for the American future landscape.  Pity.

I have read many a Catholic blog lately and the ones that aren’t praising, drooling on,  the guys in red are the ones that wonder why priests these days don’t bother to deliver a decent homily.  Considering what I know, the truth is that the thought police might hear something like love or tolerance being advocated and send off a letter to the bishop to complain about dogmatic incorrectness that would get back to the priest and rather than get slapped down, why bother to preach anymore. 

After all, isn’t it all just about the ritual and the consecrated bread? (And the collection plate?)

The American culture wars are far from over.  The best, I fear, is yet to come.

John Paul II – King Maker – Edward Piszek

An old friend, a Catholic in good standing, recently told me that the “Catholic Church is all politics”. The friend, in the middle of some sort of annulment of a previous marriage thing, is going the distance with the RC bureaucrats because of love. Love is a powerful energy in this world. As for the politics thing, I bit my tongue. A friend is a friend.

Being a cousin of the late Bishop of Allentown Pa, I have heard the family stories not published and the stories of the internal Vatican politics it took to carve five counties in upstate Pennsylvania out of the archdiocese of Philadelphia to become the private fiefdom of my cousin who, when his chances to become a Cardinal of Philadelphia got blown in the 1958 election of John XXIII, the consolation prize from his powerful friends in the Vatican was Allentown.

Getting on with the politics in the RC church, they are Beautifying John Paul II, who is on a fast track to sainthood. Of course JPII changed the rules for sainthood, cut out the long bureaucratic wait thing, in favor of streamlining a thoroughly medieval process. And of course, saints and relics and such went out of fashion with the Reformation for us Protestant types. Whatever.

Here is a story of the man, the Polish American Edward Piszek, who was not so much a king maker as he was pope maker in the case of John Paul the Great.

I don’t know if it is not PC to call Edward Piszek a Polack. There was a time when perhaps Polack had a negative connotation in the immigration pecking order of things here in America. The latest ethnic group to arrive always seemed to be at or near the bottom of the pecking order of society. I heard that word used in my youth for the Polish amidst the still strong ethnic enclaves of Philadelphia. More later on that term.

It is perhaps out of a need to succeed as the son of immigrants that John Piszek succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. I remember an article in the Sunday Magazine of the Philadelphia Inquirer in the mid 70s that specifically was tracing out Edward Piszek’s philanthropy role in the great white (papal) hope of Polish Americans at the time in the person of John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia.

Here you have two Polish Americans, both originally from the midwest and both ambitious and successful in their perspective fields of business and religion in Philly.

The magazine article had its liberal, perhaps cynical, but definitely Wasp-ish, bent openly analyzing the ambitions of two Polacks on the make in a still then Wasp society pecking order of things in Philly.

The article seemed to emphasis how Piszek was upset that the wasp name Mrs. Paul, his business partner wife's name, had the success whereas in the beginning he did not think that a Polish name like Mrs. Piszek’s fish fingers or sticks had much marketing potential. So it goes. Woulda. Coulda. Shoulda.

Anyway, Cardinal Krol was campaigning to be the next pope as the article outlined. He was not buying votes. He was however making frequent trips to East Asia and Africa and making financial donations to the building of schools and hospitals in the five and six figure money category, which was a lot of bread or fish sticks back then. And of course, the philanthropist Piszek had the check book to make Krol a viable candidate for the papacy, even though he was American and not Italian.

From a source, I cannot remember who in Philly told me this story, this Philly urban legend of sorts; it had to do with the papal election in 1978 after the death of Paul VI. I am told the Italians put up a good and or dirty fight to get a fellow Italian, Albino Luciani, elected John Paul I.

The story goes that when the Italians seemed to be getting ahead on votes in the papal election, votes committed to distant runner Cardinal Krol got released by Krol, asking those released voters to consider, closing up fast runner, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla over Luciani. The story goes that Krol, when he released the votes, told, urged his cronies, to “Give it to the Polack”. Or so I remember the story.

John Paul I only reigned as pope for something like thirty three days. The runner up in the first papal election, Wojtyla, had the momentum and or mojo going to push him across the finish line at the next papal election.

The rest is history. Not much about Piszek on Wikipedia. His role in the politics of making Karol Wojtyla pope and now saint is forgotten in history.

Ed Piszek Obits

Piszek, 87, a Fort Washington resident who died of bone cancer March 27, also told his son to "give God the credit. I was under his tutelage. I was his messenger. I was his Johnny Appleseed."

Two cardinals presided and a procession of priests participated in Piszek's Funeral Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, where hundreds came to pay their respects.

Among them were baseball Hall of Famer Stan Musial, who teamed up with Piszek to bring Little League baseball to Poland, Piszek's ancestral home; and former Phillies pitcher Larry Christenson, whom he called "my best buddy."

Pope John Paul II, Piszek's friend for nearly 20 years, said in a note from the Vatican that he was "deeply saddened" by his death. "I am confident that his memory will inspire others to give of themselves freely and charitably," he added.

A self-made man, Piszek turned a mistake into a multimillion-dollar business when he made too many crabcakes during his shift at a Kensington bar in 1946, and decided to freeze some.

He launched Mrs. Paul's Kitchens with partner John Paul. In the 1950s, Piszek bought out his partner and ran the company for about 30 more years before selling it to Campbell Soup Co. in 1982.

I always say you learn a lot more about somebody from his Obituary than you probably already thought you knew. That is not true in this case. In the above Obit articles, I only see Cardinal Krol in one sentence that also mentions Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, a very small understated footnote in history.

Edward Piszek died in 2004 at age 87. He called himself the “Polish Ben Franklin” considering his considerable patronage and philanthropy to the City of Brotherly Love.

If Piszek were still alive, he would be 94, and sitting in the front row as Benedict XVI Beatifies the Polish Pope.

Whether alive or not, I have no doubt that his spirit as pope maker and now saint maker will be in Saint Peter’s square on May 1.

It’s is a hell of lot of story associated with one lonely fish stick or I should say billions of fish sticks.

And so it goes.