Living History, Unknown [books to read in your 20s female TXT] 📗

after my grandfather in 1965. Her youngest, Russell, was her golden boy. He excelled in academics and athletics, became a doctor, served in the Army, married, had a daughter and came back to Scranton to practice medicine. In early 1948, he fell into a debilitating depression. My grandparents asked my father to come home to help Russell. Shortly after my dad arrived, Russell tried to kill himself. My father found him hanging in the attic and cut him down. He brought Russell back to Chicago to live with us.

I was eight or nine months old when Russell came to stay. He slept on the couch in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment while seeking psychiatric treatment at the Veterans Administration Hospital. He was a handsome man, with fairer hair and complexion than my dad’s. One day, when I was about two, I drank from a Coke bottle filled with turpentine left by a workman. Russell immediately induced vomiting and rushed me to the emergency room. He gave up medicine shortly thereafter, and jokingly called me his last patient. He stayed in the Chicago area, where he was a frequent visitor to our home. He died in 1962 in a fire caused by a burning cigarette. I felt so sorry for my father, who had tried for years to keep Russell alive. Modern antidepressants might have helped him, and I wish they’d been available back then. Dad wanted to tell his father about Russell’s death in person, and waited until my grandfather came for a visit. When he finally learned about Russell’s death, my grandfather sat at our kitchen table and sobbed. He died brokenhearted three years later.

Despite his financial success later in life, my dad was perceived growing up―by himself and by his parents-as neither as dutiful and reliable as his older brother, Willard, nor as smart and successful as his younger brother, Russell. He was always in trouble for joyriding in a neighbor’s brand-new car or roller-skating up the aisle of the Court Street Methodist Church during an evening prayer service. When he graduated from Central High School in 1931, he thought he would go to work in the lace mill beside his father.

Instead, his best friend, who had been recruited by Penn State for the football team, told the coach he would not come unless his favorite teammate came too. Dad was a solid athlete, and the coach agreed, so Dad went to State College and played for the Nittany Lions.

He also boxed and joined the Delta Upsilon fraternity, where, I’m told, he became an expert at making bathtub gin. He graduated in 1935 and at the height of the Depression returned to Scranton with a degree in physical education.

Without alerting his parents, he hopped a freight train to Chicago to look for work and found a job selling drapery fabrics around the Midwest. When he came back to tell his parents and pack his bags, Hannah was furious and forbade him to go. But my grandfather pointed out that jobs were hard to come by, and the family could use the money for Russell’s college and medical education. So my father moved to Chicago. All week, he traveled around the upper Midwest from Des Moines to Duluth, then drove to Scranton most weekends to turn over his paycheck to his mother. Though he always suggested that his reasons for leaving Scranton were economic, I believe my father knew that he had to make a break from Hannah if he was ever to live his own life.

Dorothy Howell was applying for a job as a clerk typist at a textile company when she caught the eye of a traveling salesman, Hugh Rodham. She was attracted to his energy and self-assurance and gruff sense of humor.

After a lengthy courtship, my parents were married in early 1942, shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. They moved into a small apartment in the Lincoln Park section of Chicago near Lake Michigan. My dad enlisted in a special Navy program named for the heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and was assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Station, an hour north of Chicago. He became a chief petty officer responsible for training thousands of young sailors before they were shipped out to sea, mostly to the Pacific Theater. He told me how sad he felt when he accompanied his trainees to the West Coast, where they joined their ships, knowing some would not survive. After he died, I received letters from men who had served under him. Often they enclosed a photo of a particular class of sailors, my proud father front and center. My favorite photograph shows him in his uniform smiling broadly, as handsome, to my eyes, as any 1940s movie star.

My father kept close ties with his family in Scranton and drove each of his children from Chicago to Scranton to be christened in the Court Street Methodist Church, where he had worshipped as a child. Grandma Rodham died when I was five and she was going blind when I knew her, but I remember she would try to dress me and braid my hair every morning. I was much closer to my grandfather, who had already retired with a gold watch after fifty years of employment when I was born. He was a kind and proper man, who proudly carried his gold watch on a chain and wore a suit with suspenders every day.

When he came to visit us in Illinois, he would take off his suit coat and roll up his shirtsleeves to help my mother around the house.

My father was always strict with his kids, but he was much harder on the boys than on me. Grandpa Rodham often intervened on their behalf, endearing him even more to us.

As children, my brothers and I spent a lot of time at his duplex on Diamond Avenue in Scranton, and each summer we spent most of August at the cottage he had built in 1921

about twenty miles northwest