On January 14, 1912, my dad was born to Polish Catholic immigrant parents in Flushing, New York. His negative experiences during the time he was a practicing Catholic no doubt unfairly influenced us to view the Church the same way as he did, disapprovingly; yet, we never thought of leaving the Catholic religion.

Dad attended Polish Catholic School where he’d been harshly treated by cold and callous nuns. At the local Catholic Church, he was an alter boy. Three of his duties as an alter boy, he said, were to “carry the liquor from the trunk of the priest’s car into the church rectory, and to count and then carry the money donated for the support of the church into the rectory after church services.” He said the priests lived lives of luxury while the parishioners were struggling to put food on their tables. Then to top it all off, a year after dad married the woman who would be my mom, the then parish priest died in a car accident. Killed with him was his mistress!

It was because of these events that this alter boy saw no holiness in the representatives of the Catholic Church. All he saw were human failings and weaknesses. This account is not written to condemn the Catholic Church, but to share a story of why my dad was not interested in religion. These and other events destroyed his admiration for the shepherds of the Church, and, as an excuse, I guess, for giving little thought to God.

My father was not a scholarly-type, but an independent, tough, Jimmy Cagney-like character. During the Depression, Dad was employed by the New York City subway system laying tracks for only a few dollars a day. His hands were calloused from the work. He married my mother in 1935 and in 1937 my brother was born. When they were completely exasperated with the bedbugs living with them in an over-crowded city apartment house, they moved to East Meadow, Long Island, New York, where they bought a small cottage that was unfinished which dad worked on during the evenings. A year after I was born, the house caught fire and because my mother was a light sleeper she smelled  the smoke that was wafting in from the basement at 2:00 A.M. She had a difficult time waking my father, a sound sleeper, who told her to go back to sleep, that she was dreaming. As she yelled at him, she grabbed my brother and me and her purse and went out the front door. She actually saved our lives for the house was completely destroyed. We stayed with my father's parents until my parents bought a house in Whitestone, New York, a few miles outside of NYC proper.

Attending church was not part of Dad’s life but he did go to mass with the rest of the family on Easter Sunday. That’s when the “blue-collar” non-believing males like him in the family dressed up in their double-breasted suits with Windsor-knotted neckties placed neatly under stiffly starched collars of equally stiffly starched white cotton shirts.  As they headed out to their cars, as was the custom back then the men placed snappy brown fedora hats on their heads, and, accompanied by wives and children, headed for church.

After church, photos were taken of the family dressed in Easter splendor. Once home, my brother and I opened our Easter baskets and ate jelly beans and chocolate bunnies while my mother and grandmother made a huge meal for the family while telling us to stop eating so much candy because we would spoil our appetites.

Late afternoon dinnertime was long and leisurely. Afterward, my grandfather and my dad, along with his two brothers, one sister, and her husband, played cards—poker—on the dining room table, while sipping whiskey or brandy and smoking Camel cigarettes. I remember the room reeked with so much noxious smoke, which made me cough and cough that I vowed never to smoke cigarettes and make anybody as miserable as I was.

Equally important, we celebrated Christmas in a big way too, and once again the relatives came to our house in Whitestone for dinner. We lived in a two-story house, with my Polish grandfather and my grandmother, who spoke no English, living upstairs. My Aunt Alfreda and Uncle Jerry also lived there, but when they divorced, Harold married my aunt and came to live upstairs. All the festivities took place downstairs in our living room where a huge Christmas tree was located with lots of gifts for my brother and me because, at that time, my aunt and two uncles had no children.

In July of 1946, my grandfather, a New York City subway system conductor, died of stomach cancer. I remember crying during the priest’s eulogy at the funeral home; and, afterward, crying more intensely when drapes were drawn shielding the coffin from everyone’s view. That’s when the enormous swathe of flowers was removed off of the closed lower end of the casket lid. Then the upper part of the lid, which was open so the bereaved could view my grandfather, was closed by the funeral director. I couldn’t see through the drapes, but I saw what the man was doing because, from where I was sitting, I could look around the side of the hangings. And these acts of finality only made it worse for me because dealing with the pain of losing a loved one in death was something I had never experienced before.

There was nobody to comfort me, a sobbing child who watched as the beautiful satin-lined lid of the coffin was closed to conceal from view her grandfather sleeping his perpetual sleep on white silken tufts of satin that lined a dazzling mahogany box. My angry father and his two angrier brothers were not consciously ignoring me. They were busy comforting my bereaved grandmother because, before the drapes were closed, Grandmother began crying, and then moaning, while rocking back and forth in her chair, all because she saw a woman dressed completely in black walk down the isle to the casket to pay her last respects to my deceased grandfather.  My mother kept hushing me while she and my aunts stared in shock at THAT WOMAN who had the nerve to dress entirely in black with a black veil covering her face like it was her husband who died, like she was the widow. I didn’t know who the woman was then, but years later, when I was older, my mother told me THAT WOMAN was my grandfather’s mistress!

Back in the 1940s Catholic kids in public schools were released early every Thursday afternoon for catechism class which was oral instruction about the Catholic religion. And where we lived, we walked from our school to the church for our class.  My first experience with a sexual criminal offense happened one day in 1947 when I was seven. While walking with my girlfriend to church for class, we passed a parked car. A man sitting inside the car opened the car door and offered us candy. We looked his way and saw that he had exposed himself. Horrified, we ran as fast as we could to church and excitedly told a nun what had happened. She called the police, and the next day we found ourselves at the police station viewing a line of men, who had been picked up the day before, trying to identify the perpetrator, but he wasn’t there.

Later that year, when I made my First Communion in the Catholic Church, I wore a lovely white dress and a pretty veil on my head to symbolize purity. The rite of First Communion is when for the first time the sacrament of the Eucharist, symbolized by a disk-like thin piece of bread, is put on a Catholic child’s tongue as the boy or girl knelt at the alter.  In our family, like in other Catholic families, First Communion was an important festive occasion and all the family came to our house to celebrate.

The next big event for me was when I was Confirmed at age eleven after more Catholic instruction classes. Confirmation is seen as an occasion for professing personal commitment to the Church on the part of someone approaching adulthood. This effect has been described as making the confirmed person "a soldier of Christ." I think that the bishop put some oil on my forehead, but I’m not to clear about that. Once again I wore a pretty white dress. But at this time I wore a wreath-like thingy on my head, not a veil. And, again, all the relatives came to our house to celebrate.

It was lots of fun to take tap dancing lessons at the YWCA when I was eight years old, so much so that I asked a new kid on the block to also join the "Y" and then we could go there together after school. My new friend told me she couldn't do that because she was Jewish. I hardily protested that it didn't matter whether she was Jewish or not, but she was adamant that the people who ran the "Y" would not let her take dancing lessons there. So certain that Jews were welcome at the "Y", the next time I went for my dance lesson, I told a woman sitting behind a desk what my Jewish friend said and added that I knew my friend could join the class so would she tell me I was right? I could hear hesitancy in the lady's voice and as if embarrassed, she would hem and haw, then she softly replied that my friend was right, Jews could not join the YWCA. She clarified by explaining that YWCA stood for "Young Women's Christian Association" and only Christian women could join. I knew what the letters stood for but to my eight-year old mind, it meant Christians ran the group, but everyone was welcome to come there. Boy, was I ever wrong. Nobody ever told me that only Christian women could belong to the "Y" and I was sputtering angry when I found out. To my mind, this policy was just so unjust that I refused to take my dance lesson that day or any other day.

I remember being immensely upset by this experience that I stammered and cried as I tried to tell my mom. After all, it was just three years since WWII had ended and I clearly remembered seeing in movie news-clips Jews being persecuted in Europe along with photos of children in concentration camps that brought me much grief. And then telling my Jewish friend that she was right and I was so utterly wrong was one of the most difficult times up to that point in my life, even worst than going to the police station to try to identify a sexual pervert.

To my young mind, there was something wrong with religion; it didn't bring people together as I thought it should. Like the time when another neighborhood friend asked me to go to her Methodist Church and I had to tell her that I couldn't because Catholics could not go into a Protestant church, which I personally thought was downright silly but didn't say so. This in effect, put a strain on our friendship because her mother was upset that I refused the invitation taking it to mean that I thought my religion was better than theirs.

It was during my eleventh year that my parents moved us back to East Meadow, NY. After visiting the nearby Catholic Church a few times, my mother wouldn’t go again. She told me when the priest stopped by our house, all he was interested in was a donation. He left a pile of envelopes for her to put money into, one for each month of the year. So, hungry for more religious instruction, I would sometimes attend church by myself, but being a kid, I was ignored. When I was twelve, two of my Catholic girlfriends were fondled by a Catholic priest at the church during after-school activities. While we were walking to school, the girls told me what happened to them. Their mothers did not notify the authorities because they presumed the girls would not be believed. Well, I believed them and the three of us never went to Catholic Church again. My parents said nothing when I didn't go to church anymore. We just didn't talk much about religion, but if someone asked what our religious affiliation was, we said we were Catholic.

I never heard of Jehovah’s Witnesses until I first became introduced to the group in 1953. It was early that year when I would hide a small lamp under my blanket at night to read the Bible. I couldn’t make any sense of it because I always started to read at Genesis, which I found so boring that I eventually gave up reading the Bible. However, I needed some sort of help to ward off my feelings of fear and insecurity because these were the atomic bomb years when during school drills we kids had to get under our desks in preparation for a bomb attack. It was a scary time.

One afternoon after school, while I was visiting at the home of one of my school chums, the doorbell rang. Looking out a window, my girlfriend’s mother told her daughter to open the door and tell the woman who rang the bell that her mom was not at home. My friend wouldn’t do it, so I did. After I explained that the person she wanted to see was not available, the visitor did not leave but asked me some questions about my religious viewpoint and then she began to explain to me what the Bible said about this or that. I was fascinated. We talked for what seemed to be an eternity. I asked the lady if there was a burning hell and immortal soul. She said no. That reply was good enough for me because my family didn’t believe in these teachings either. I asked if she would visit me at home and reassured her that it would be okay with my parents. So I was delighted when she came to our house in the early evening of that same day.

My mother recognized the lady as the one who had left religious magazines with her in the past which she didn’t read. Because my mother knew the woman, she was not suspicious but agreed to a Bible study. As silly as it might sound, we didn’t even know what religion the woman represented and didn’t care. The only thing that interested us was to have the Bible explained. My father worked a night shift at a Long Island aviation company and didn’t mind us studying the Bible although he was not one bit interested. I was so excited about what I was learning from the Bible that soon my brother sat in on the studies too, this at a time when he was behaving somewhat rebelliously so my parents thought the study might do him some good.

Who was this woman that caused us to stop calling ourselves Catholic and to convert to her religion, that same religion, I later found out, which caused my grandfather in Poland to read the Bible and be excommunicated for doing so? Read in the next musings of Barbara Anderson the connection this Bible study instructor had with the Catholic Church, molestation, and Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, who wrote an expose' of Jehovah's Witnesses in her book, "Visions of Glory."

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