My Eighteenth Year
By Godsil
Let’s rewind the story a bit to my 18th summer, before Kennedy was assassinated, when worries involved basketball and girls, not a nation headed for new kinds of nightmares.
John Kennedy was president when I turned 18. Our family was enthralled. I can remember all five of us in our tiny living room at 6209 Marquette Ave, in South St. Louis (quite like Milwaukee’s “south side”) witnessing this brilliant, gorgeous man, an Irish Catholic American, just like us, offer compelling images of our nation’s possibilities and destiny. But politics was did not loom large in my mind's eye back then, despite Uncle Emmett’s advise to introduce myself to the precinct captain of the local Democratic Party office over on Chippewa Ave., which was also the famous Route 66, only 10 blocks from my parents’ home.
Basketball, Kerry Moore, and roofing were my passions. I was preparing for my freshman year at Rockhurst College, a small Jesuit all-male school in Kansas City, chosen because it offered the prospect of playing basketball, perhaps winning a scholarship if I made the grade my freshman year.
Kerry and I were sweethearts during our junior and senior years in high school. I went to the local Jesuit school, St. Louis U. High, she to the “sister school,” St. Joseph’s Academy. Kerry was a lovely girl in every way, but her profoundly class conscious and overbearing mother made it very clear that no blessing would be forthcoming for a South St. Louis boy whose father was a tool and die maker. “Kerry should marry a banker’s son,” she literally told me more than once! And roofing!
My father did not want me in harms way at his factory, where fingers were lost and young boys brushed up against hard men. But neither Mom nor Dad objected to roofing, even though roofers make machinists and tool and die makers look like choir boys. So Rock Tarantola and I, in our second year of roofing, found ourselves making the incredible sum of $2.50 per hour at South Side Roofing, he as Glen’s helper, me as Ed Diamond’s. Roofing made me feel strong and rich. It did, however, detract from my basketball ambitions. I didn't have that much energy to practice after a day on the roofs in St. Louis summers. And I put on some bad weight from the Ted Drew malts, sometimes two, that my wages allowed me to purchase just daily, thinking it good to add some weight to my 155-pound senior year playing weight.
Highlights of the summer of my 18th year include impressing Ed Diamond with my shingling prowess, playing basketball against Kenny Rutledge, taking a trip to Grand Haven, Michigan with Rock in his Ford convertible, and dating Katey Cravin and Mimi Francisco.
Ed Diamond
Ed Diamond, like most professional steep roofers, was a spectacularly rough fellow. Cursed with a countenance only the most blessed of mothers could accept, and an interior as homely as his exterior, Ed Diamond saw me as a necessary evil, a college Lord Fauntleroy sissy, beyond contempt. He was enraged, spewing spit and venom, during a morning drive to the job site that found me unable to howl with him in appreciation at the silhouette of an elderly woman’s legs outlined beneath her house dress as she waited at a bus stop. He asked Bob Osterholtz, the Rock Hudsonesque owner of South Side Roofing, renowned for fabled stories of troweling roofing tar at roof/wall intersections with gloved hands rather than a trowel, to get rid of me that same evening.