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INTRODUCING CHUCK O'MALLEY
..A Midwinter's Tale is the first volume in a family saga that
I have thought about for years. It will trace the history of a family and a neighborhood
and a Church through most of the years of this century, from November 1918 to the
present. The protagonist is one Charles Cronin O'Malley, a pint-sized, freckled face
red-head who would have graduated from grammar school the same year I did. The first
volume tells of his early life in the Great Depression and the War.
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He graduates from
high school in 1946 and goes off to Bamberg in Germany to serve in the Army of Occupation
and then returns to St. Urusla parish on the West Side of Chicago to be overwhelmed by the
prosperity of the post-war world. He has an honorable discharge from the Army (and a
Legion of Merit medal) but he wonders if he will ever receive an honorable discharge from
the Great Depression.. Chucky is a picsaresque hero, at least in his own
self-image. He's charming, quick-witted, with, as his younger sister Peg remarks of him, a
fast mind and a faster tongue. Women of every age think he's cute. Older men think he's
brilliant. Chuck wants nothing more than a steady, reliable job as an accountant.
He's typical of many men and women of my generation: he enters his years of
"initiation" into life with the most modest expections for the future. The
prosperity and the opportunities of the post-war world force him very much against his
will to change all his life plans, despite his hidden fear that the Depression will
return.
Half fun and full earnes -- Chucky is that kind of guy -- he blames the women in his life
for the loss of his plans for stability and security: his lovely mother April Mae, who
sees the world through rose-colored lens, his fearsome younger sister Peg who bosses him
around but always for his own good, Peg's inseparable friend Rosie Clancy with whom Chuck
does not want to fall in love, and Trudi the German refugee with whom he falls in love in
Bamberg.
He returns from Germany, having fought the corruption of the Black Market and his own
internal corruption, older but in his judgement not any wiser. He admits that in
addition to being a sensible, stable accountant, he might also make a decent assistant
precinct captain, but nothig more.
Peg and Rosie have other ideas.
The conventional wisdom, about the postwar world, peddled by the likes of David
Halberstam, is that it was a time of materialism, conformity, repressed sexuality, tale
fins, and huala hoops. In this series I hope to show, among other things that such a
reading is just plain wrong. |
