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Chicago, May 19, '72
Dear Jack:
Thanks for your letter of May 11 with the 'cuttings." Donald Grant, who is regaling us
(some of us, anyhow) with stories of Irish farm life, does appear occasionally in the Sunday tribune, the travel section, usually. And by the way, the name Grant is pretty well known in Ireland, and in my childhood on the far southeast side we had a landlady named Grant whose accent could be cut and sliced, she was so Irish. Kind though, and even after she finally had to evict us (my father believed it was cheaper to move than pay rent), as we lived several blocks further away afterward, I was invited to stop in for lunch and did have lunch for a few weeks. It may have been that Mrs. Grant had some naive idea that maybe my father WHISKY HEADwritten in blue ink would eventually come up with some backrent some day as a matter of conscience, but he had no conscience, as he abandoned his family many times, and my mother, totally unable to think of divorcing or separating from him, would let him come back even after his long vacations ( 2-3 years). We preferred California. But I digress; I always do. Erna Bombeck doesn't appear in the Chgo Daily News, either, and I only buy the Trib. on Sunday, with just the NEWS otherwise.
The Irish are a nation of farmers, good ones, though. Did you know that Dubliners
call the rural types "Culchies"? And the ordinary Dubliner has a distinctive accent. A woman my daughter and I met at at Hampton Wick , Kingston-on-Thames (how about that?) told us she used to have an Irish boy friend who came from Dublin. When she and he parted after a date, he'd say "So long, I'll see you next Tursday." Having become acquainted with a Dubliner in Chicago, I visited Donnybrook, where the famous fight is a joke. [[insert written in blue ink in right-hand margin]] just a drunken brawl with lotsa shouting, the natives say.
As to the bulges of pregnancy, I can recall seeing my wife running to catch a
Fullerton Ave. street car (we lived near Crawford - I can't say Pulaski - and Fullerton) while I watched from the other side of the street. I'd just come home from a night job on the Milw. R.R., and we hadn't met. But she was so obviously pregnant. The streets were loaded with snow. She had a job with an insurance company downtown. And in those days women couldn't work many months after inception, largely through the ignorance and stupidity of other people. (Just now, over radio, we hear that "The Joy" has had some action, alleged IRA action - prisoners released in a short jailbreak). Pregnant high school girls always left school as soon as they began to get heavy. Not now, if they don't want to leave. But when my wife was working we'd only been married a short while, and after the honeymoon in England, were trying to get a bit ahead - furniture etc.
I had difficulty stopping an ocean of tears the day I heard of J. Edgar's death.
It happened on my son's birthday, so I'll never forget either occasion. I immediately wrote to The Nation, asking if they had any copies left of their FBI special of October 1959. The Nation office reported they had no copies left, didn't contemplate a new issue. But I recall how the late Senator Norris of Nebraska had J. Edgar appear at a senate hearing, where Norris roasted hell out of Hoover, and Hoover had to admit he had never made an arrest himself, but said he had helped to get Emma Goldman deported! The stunt used to get Emma deported was to void her already dead husband's naturalization, so, not being the wife of a U.S. citizen, on grounds of some razmataz, probably as a dangerous person (she had done time in the Springfield MD can, along with another famous woman rev- olutionary, whose name escapes me, but she became attached to the C.P. (not Emma), and I think it was Eliz. Gurley Brown. Sen. Norris denounced Hoover as being America's No.1 Publicity Hound. Shortly after, Alvin Karpis was penned-up in a New Orleans tenement, the local cops merely holding him at bay, it being arranged that J. Edgar could come and "capture" this bank robber. So, in a big display, accompanied by lotsa newsmen etc. Hoover was allowed to get the credit for the capture, but as Hoover hadn't foreseen the necessity of bringing handcuffs, Karpis' hands had to be tied with neckties! One of the complaints brought before the senatorial committee was that Hoover was only hiring you-all help, that the few northerners hired over his head were being kept on 24-hr assignments so much they couldn't get proper rest, so quit. There were at least two cases of FBI prisoners who "fell" out of rooms where they were under questioning ( torture, probably) to their deaths, these being "leftists," mentioned in The Nation special issue. After that senatorial hearing, any captured or holed-up prisoner or any evidence brought to light by local cops and citizens was always "sequestered," or kept in under wraps until the big moment for J. Edgar to appear (lotsa newsmen, photographers) and claim full credit.
written in blue ink in left-hand margin (Surely Dublin has the world's tallest TV antennae- to catch BBC!!)