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By Root 451 0

there were walls. A piano sat in their parlor, and Will’s doctor’s office was at the back of the house with its own entrance. By the 1920s, a large radio sat on the floor in the living room, and it was here that the Walls would listen to the music of Caruso and Rudy Vallee, news shows and baseball games and The Lone Ranger. As no pictures were provided, they had to invent the images in their heads. Doc Wall loved imagining the streets of New York, the lair of the Green Hornet, or the canyons through which the Lone Ranger and Tonto would ride. Across the street from the Wall house was the local cinema, where the main feature would change two or three times a week. The village doctor made sure he never missed one, and he would sit there always hoping that newborns would be kind enough to take their time until the closing credits.

My grandfather enjoyed being in the thick of politics, and the local Republicans would meet at his house to plan their campaigns. His youngest daughter, my mother, Veronica, was bitten by the political bug and it would never leave her. And thus it was in our garage in the fall of 1960 where I, as a freshly minted first grader, heard my mother and father have their first argument.

“President Eisenhower,” my mother said as she handed my dad a box of old clothes to store in the attic, “He won the war and, despite the fact he’s not campaigning for him, he does support Nixon. What more do you need than that?”

“Yes,” my dad responded, “I like Ike. But Kennedy—our first Catholic president!” That was enough for me. But not for my mom.

“He’s too young, he’s inexperienced—and he’s a Democrat!”

“That’s a plus! We Moores’ve been voting for Democrats since Roosevelt!”

“Oh! Pshaw!”

Pshaw? Yes, she said “pshaw” a lot. And “ice box” (never “refrigerator”). And “grip” (instead of “suitcase”). The Bible on her shelf, from her mother’s side of the family, was from the 1840s. The complete volume of Shakespeare, also from the 1800s, was from her father. Her language and mannerisms were also from the nineteenth century. And clearly her view of the Republican Party was also lodged somewhere in a lost time. My dad was always fond of reminding her which party was in charge when the nation was sent reeling into the Great Depression. She would ignore such slights, as they were irrelevant to her. Her father, being the village doctor, was paid through the Depression with chickens and eggs and milk, not to mention a used sewing machine here or an oil change there. My dad, on the other hand, had memories of much more difficult times, and if there was one thing he was sure of, it was that he would be a Democrat ’til the day he died.

And so throughout September and October of 1960 I would listen to this back-and-forth parental sparring during the great Nixon vs. Kennedy presidential election. My sisters and I were with my dad (my youngest sister was only three and a half, so she just nodded when we told her to). I felt bad for my mom, as she was up against not only the four of us but also God—because the Catholic Church was the One True Church. The nuns and priests could barely contain their excitement that 170 years of anti-Catholic bigotry was about to end. We said daily prayers, held rosaries, conducted novenas, and did everything we could to implore the Almighty to put the Catholic in the White House. In the end, the value of Catholic prayer was proven to be quite powerful, and Kennedy “miraculously” became president. It would be another twenty years before my mother would finally toss the Republicans overboard. “My father would not recognize these Republicans!” she would say (and for that I have Ronald Reagan to thank).

My mother’s love of country, its government, and its political institutions was always evident. She saw it as part of her parental responsibility to school us in the values of a democratic republic, specifically this one: the United States of America.

When I finished fifth grade in the summer of 1965, she loaded my sisters and me into our Buick and drove us to our nation’s capital for our summer vacation.