I grew up in the midst of an extended Irish family in Waukegan, an industrial town on Lake Michigan 40 miles north of Chicago. My dad had 4 brothers and a sister. I had 14 first cousins, all of whom went to Immaculate Conception school around the time I did. The feeling of being part of a loving and loyal family was something that I have always tried to recreate wherever I landed in life.
The Drews have roots in Lake County going back to the 1840s – farmers, undertakers, gold rushers, and most of all horseshoers. I still have the Drew family anvil. “England” is stamped on one side. Why import such a heavy object all the way from England? Those were the early days before white hot iron and steel began to flow in Chicago and Gary.
Walter Drew lost an arm battling the confederates at Kennesaw Mountain in Georgia. My great grandfather, Steven Drew, shod horses for American troops in the invasion of Mexico, for the Union Army in the civil war, and for gold prospectors in California. My dad’s dad was one of the rail workers who were blacklisted in the 1890s for their walk off in sympathy with the Pullman car strikers. Arthur Connelly was brother-in-law of my granddad. He was a Chicago cop wounded when working men and women raised the banner of the 8 hour day at Haymarket in 1871.
Maybe my grandfather even voted for the socialist leader of the American Railroad Union, Eugene V. Debs, in the presidential election of 1900. I don’t know, but the possibility raises some questions. How deep are the feelings that we carry from one generation to the next? How much do these allegiances change through the years and epochs? As kids we picked up the Irish resentment against the British and even heard disparaging words about the “lace curtain Irish”. We heard that one of the Dunlay brothers from my grandmother’s family tree was forced to leave Ireland to escape political persecution.
Another hallmark of that culture was the ethic of standing up, balling up your fists and fighting back. The arrival of huge gangs of Irish canal and rail workers in the second half of the 1800s introduced a new dynamic to class struggle in America. These guys would literally take over a job site and riot when paychecks didn’t come. I remember when my father showed me a photo of his dad’s hero – the bare-knuckled brawling blacksmith, Bob Fitzsimmons. When the ambulance came to take granddad for his last ride to Mercy Hospital in Chicago, he took a swing at the driver.
My grandfather was a great story teller. I’m told that he still had a bit of a brogue. The kids’ favorite story was the one about Froggy Ward. Froggy was a fireman on the train making runs between Chicago and New Orleans. He used to pass his time shooting at the frogs in the marshes down by Murphysboro. One day the frogs plotted their revenge. They all climbed up on the tracks – one right after the other. When Froggy’s locomotive neared the bend, the frogs were crushed to grease and the train slid off the rails and into the swamp. Unity and sacrifice: an Irish form of revenge.
My dad’s generation survived the Great Depression and the war. In their youth, the boys had stuck together to compensate for the failings of “the Dad”, who was an alcoholic widower. Fortunately, as is sometimes the case with Irish families, the boys were also cared for by their deceased mom’s brother, Uncle Willie Dunlay. The Dad and Uncle Willie were competitors in the horse shoeing business. The raging, heavy drinker often made Uncle Willie sleep outside in the barn. It was Uncle Willie, a teetotaler, a bachelor, and a successful businessman, who made sure that all but one of the kids made it through college.
The brothers Drew moved into decent jobs in post war Waukegan. My uncle Dan had been able to adjust to changing times – starting out with delivery of ice, then coal, and then fuel oil. His business ended when everyone switched to gas heat. Many were the wintery nights that he got out of bed to bring fuel to a house that was out of heat – regardless of that family’s unpaid account.
My uncle Steve was my football and track coach in high school. He had been a drill sergeant in Texas during World War II. It was Uncle Steve and my dad who most pushed the idea on me: “We’re Irish. We’re not afraid to get mad. Not afraid to fight.” Maybe that caricature of Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish mascot dogged me through life and was part of my excitable temperament?
After Dan, Mary, and Steve, my dad came next in the birth order. Richard Drew was a lawyer who specialized in helping families from our parish. These families had known the Drews for generations. He worried their worries. A few of his cases involved some big decisions. He won a good judgment against the North Shore railroad for an engineer who was injured because of faulty crossing gates. He tried at least one murder case and a few involving drugs. Mostly he helped with real estate, traffic, misdemeanors, and wills.
In politics, he supported the Republicans who controlled Lake County. As a young lawyer he had worked some eminent domain cases for the district attorney, a Republican. But Dad and the rest of the family were proud voters for JFK, the first Catholic president.
For years there was a photo of my dad in the “W” shop. He was smiling and standing with two fraternity brothers from his time at Marquette Law School. One was Whitey Budrunas, Waukegan’s first professional basketball player. The other was Tailgunner Joe McCarthy, who was barnstorming in our town with his Red Scare message. The first time I saw Dad and Whitey in the photo with a senator, I thought it was pretty cool.
My dad was a role model as someone who was there to help others. He also was a leader of the brothers and Aunt Mary. He organized the subdividing Uncle Willie’s farm on the edge of town. He sold off lots and distributed the profits among the six siblings. He built us a new ranch house on the best lot in his “Dunlay Meadows” subdivision. We moved from a farm house that had been owned by Uncle Willie to live in the new house in 1959. I am named after Uncle Willie. My middle name is Dunlay. It meant a lot to me to carry the name of a guy who had sacrificed for his sister’s kids. My son, Billy, carries that same proud name.
My Uncle Tom was just a couple years younger than dad. We think that he was really traumatized by his mom’s death when he was 10. He wandered the creeks behind the Drew homestead as a little boy. The family was unable to give him the attention he needed and sent him to boarding school in South Bend. His scrap books from those days were filled with pictures of Knute Rockne and the Four Horsemen. Uncle Tom became a fireman and never married. He once carried a guy named Johnny Von Neuman out of a burning building.
When we succeeded in getting him to talk about his life, he enjoyed re-living his time as a football player at the Colorado School of Mines. He regularly swam from pier to pier in Waukegan harbor. Like Uncle Willie, he was the Irish bachelor uncle who was there to step up for his nieces and nephews. Uncle Tom loaned me $50,000 to buy my house here in Chicago. He died with Alzheimer’s. His dementia started after he was beaten up by drug addicts preying on his gentle nature.
The youngest was Uncle Bernie. He had the same first name as my grandfather. He wasn’t a true junior because “the Dad’s” middle name was Higenious. Bernie was an excavating contractor and a politician. Bar room stories and wild laughter were his stock in trade. When I needed a fixer to make sure I’d get my driver’s license after failing my road test twice, Uncle Bernie was the one who took me. His twin sons, Tim and Tom, were a couple of months older than me and my constant companions in grade school. Tommy died of AIDS in San Francisco in the 90s.
My dad’s older sister, Aunt Mary, was a stern elementary school teacher. Unmarried, she lived with Uncle Tom. She had been a disciplining older sister to the youngest 4 boys. She was probably the one who made sure they read the Tom Playfair and Claude Lightfoot novels of Father Finn. Her lifestyle was one of self- denial and religious observance. I remember going to Aunt Mary and Uncle Tom’s. They didn’t even have any extra easy chairs in front of their TV – only a lightweight lawn chair. I inherited five thousand dollars from her. I used some of it to loan to a drug dealer that I was trying to get in with.
She was a strong force in the lives of my two oldest cousins. She convinced them to become nuns to make amends to God for the alcoholism of their dad. Marianne joined the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration which prevented her from having any contact with the lay world. She was restricted to a strict discipline of constant prayer. Marianne later left the sisterhood and married. The second sister, Betty, became a practitioner of liberation theology to the poor. One of her assignments was ministering to scavengers in the garbage dumps of Tijuana.
All of the brothers were alcoholics except Uncle Tom.
