Chapter I / Pre-Ramble: Anti-cedents, part 1

Lillian and May Fitzpatrick (age 2)

The reason I am writing this memoir is to try to explain to myself as well as my children how it was that I could have so much “Dumb Irish Luck” and do so little with the serendipities I was blessed with. It is not a happy story although I have been, with the exception of certain crises, a happy go lucky man. It involves a sweetheart marriage that failed after twenty years, and was followed by crippling animosities that have seriously damaged two of our three children psychologically. I’m not trying to blame anyone—besides myself. But my weaknesses have an etiology that deserves to be described.

The most damaging event in my life was my father’s running off with his secretary Ruth in 1930 when I was three years old. My only sibling, Harry Jr., was ten at the time, and it definitely wrecked him utterly. He had already become an alcoholic at Catholic Central High School, and after service as a bombadier in B-29’s in the Far East during World War II, returned to Detroit to a bleak life that ended in a fatal drunk during the Belmont Stakes in 1980, aged sixty. He was a charming man, but a mean brother: my own recollections of him were utterly negative:as a three year old taking the Michigan Central train from Detroit to Holy Rosary Academy in Bay City, I was pissing my pants on the way to the train toilet and he was mocking me to his friends instead of helping me.

Ten years later, as I walked along a path to our cottage at Lake Huron my swimming trunks were sliding down. Instead of quietly telling me to shape up, he pulled them down further-- to the delight of his peers. I was in the hospital getting born at the same time he was suffering from infantile paralysis. When the nurses heard that I was being named Patrick, they immediately dubbed him Mike—and the Pat/Mike paradigm followed him through life. My kids called him Uncle Mike. Our father’s absconding must have been much more damaging to him than to me, who barely knew the man. But I must sadly say that I never had any fraternal feelings for him at all, ever.

My father was a blank to me until I was thirty and flacking for the new Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania—visiting, for example, the TV networks in Hollywood to tell them what we were up to, and how they could help us with their expertise which we would translate into a new kind of curriculum. On the way back from LA on my way to the Aspen Design Conference in 1957 I stopped in Las Vegas and proceeded to his real estate office without an invitation.

The receptionist pointed to his office and I knocked on the door. “Harry Hazard,” I asked as he smilingly stood up to welcome any new real estate customer. “Yes, what can I do for you today?” like he was willing to sell me a hundred feet of the Sunset Strip. “I’m Pat Hazard.” He blanched. You see, Brother Mike had a bad reputation of gray mailing him.

He’d come out to Vegas to drink and gamble, two things he did inordinately in excess with very little success, and then rely on Harry’s fears as a bigamist to take care of his debts and other offenses. Harry jumped to the conclusion that I was another gray mailer and got me into his Buick to drive me to the Hoover Dam faster than you could say Senator Pat McCarran, one of his pals. He was relieved to learn that I was just a harmless professor—simply curious to see the man that had betrayed his youth.

I have often wondered about why he took off with Ruth after only ten years of marriage. He had been a small town boy from Pinconning, MI who had risen very fast in the American Expeditionary Force in 1918-19, returning a Captain, to take up a life as a furniture salesman for Jury-Rowe, a chain that moved him from Battle Creek, where I was born in 1927, to Jackson and then to Detroit. My mother May was the last of eight children born to Edward and Catherine Macdonald Fitzpatrick in 1895.

They were immigrants from Ireland, and they put all eight children through college (unusual for first generation Irish at that time) because of his very successful career as a lumberman in Ausable, MI. The oldest William G made it to a villa in Grosse Pointe, as the legal counsel for the Detroit Street Railways.(Holidays we poor cousins romped through his regal house, walking proudly across the street to Lake St.Clair to watch Gar Wood break new speedboat records.

It was son Leo took over the lumber business in Detroit. Uncle Vic became a Veep for Bell Telephone in Richmond, Va, Ned was a salesman at Hudson’s, Detroit’s most prestigious department store. Al studied theology in Rome and became the editor of the Catholic Universe Bulletin in Cleveland. The three girls came last, Loretta, Lillian, and May. Trained to be teachers, only Lillian was content to be a mother—of a factory worker.

Loretta became the first woman principal of a middle school in Detroit. Innocently, we regarded her as the family egghead, as she took the Sunday New York Times out of her rural mailbox on U.S.23, ten miles south of Tawas. My mother’s cottage she dubbed Birchloft because of the glorious second stand of birches on our bluff overlooking Lake Huron. Loretta followed with Silver Birches.

It wasn’t until graduate school that I discovered by walking across the highway to Jack Oates’s woods (he built our cottage for $750 in 1938, $800 for the fifty feet of frontage.)that our land was originally covered by humungous pine trees. The stump was so broad in circumference that I was stumped at first imagining what it was. Grandpa Fitz, of course, was the happy felon who directed this soft larceny!

It was a very traditional Catholic family—the high point of Gramma and Grandpa Fitz’s life together was sailing the Atlantic to Rome for Al’s consecration as a priest. The high point of Uncle Al’s summer vacation “at the Lake” was his saying Mass at an improvised altar, with me doing the altar boy thing. We never talked about serious things such as why Harry had abandoned his family.

I can imagine now that Harry spent too much time in Paris whorehouses to be easily satisfied by an American virgin. Though I don’t know because I only visited Harry twice after our strangely strained meeting in Las Vegas. Once in L.A. and once in San Francisco, where his brother Joe was a union official. That’s all I knew about him. Period. Indeed I was out in L.A. romancing a young lady at UCLA when Harry died in 1970, at age 77.

Mother asked me to do the family honors, although I didn’t get invited to the funeral, out of “respect” for his bigamous “wife” Ruth. (As a traditional Catholic, May wouldn’t, couldn’t at the time, give him a divorce.) Fifty years later, my ex-wife asked me to support her application for an annulment at the Detroit Catholic Tribunal: indeed she wanted to marry the man, now a widower, whom I had beaten out in the race to get married in 1950! For $75, it had become easy as pie not to get “divorced” but to pretend a legitimate marriage had never taken place!

When I visited Vegas for his death, a woman introduced as his “political secretary” (his bigamous state meant he had to work behind the scenes in Democratic politics in Nevada) said a lot of my father’s friends would be attending a fund raiser for the Women’s Committee of the Clark County Democratic Party. Would I like to go? I gladly went.

First it was Vice President Humphrey, “Oh, we’re really going to miss Hap.”(an unfamiliar appellation which made me smile!) Then it was Senator Bible. “Great Guy! Patrick.” Then the state’s Representative.. Then the Mayor. By the time I got to him in the reception line I wanted to say, “O.K. Tell me the truth what kind of a guy was this son of a bitch who walked out on his children.” But the nuns had trained me too well. I just had to accept that, now dead, my dad would never be able to explain his motives to me. But I had just gotten divorced (in Juarez, because in Pennsylvania you needed to plead adultery for a divorce, and though I had by then qualified on that account, for the sake of the children , I went alone to Juarez.) so I had a good idea of what had motivated Harry to split.

But the really salient effect of the fatherly betrayal was a pathological fear of being asked by other students at Holy Rosary who and where my father was. When I saw aimless chatter veering to family talk I would grandiosely change the subject—to the consternation of my companions! This obsession in effect kept me from forming close friendships for fear my secret (of abandonment) would be out. I would say such fears were the most important influence on the twisting of my character, as will become more apparent as the narrative unfolds.

Since my mother lived the life of a nun (her first boarder was a former nun!), never dating, except for one dinner with the gay guy who lived across the hall in an apartment in Highland Park. He once feigned fatherhood by taking me to see my first Detroit Tigers game at what was then called Navin Field, after the first owner. I was nuts about baseball at the time, even harboring the fantasy that I would one day replace Billy Rogell at short stop.

We had really good seats, right behind the visitors dugout near first base. Sunny Jim Bottomley, as it happened, was a slugger in a slump, and each time he ambled to the plate, I’d holler out, “Where’s that smile, Sunny Jim.?” Endlessly, until my effeminate patron began to fear that Sunny Jim might pop off to us, if he popped out another time. It was the first instance, in my memory, which I didn’t have analyzed until thirty years later as bipolar disorder! The solitary life my mother lived spilled over on me. We never had visitors. Indeed, the economics of the Depression had my mother giving up the apartment at the end of the school year, spending June, July, and August at the cottage, finding a new apartment in the fall.

Oddly, I was an easy going guy, always eager to say hello and meet a new person, whether in school or out. But never close. My cousin Bob (son of Aunt Lil and a half year older than I) was a chum throughout the summers at the cottage. He stayed a few cottages over with his Aunt Loretta. But I was a book worm and Bob turned out to be an industrial designer for General Motors as I started the intellectual preparation as a professor of American Literature.