Below, a shot from 1926 of my maternal grandfather, who worked for Fox Movietone News, with the first woman to swim the English Channel, American Gertrude Ederle. I showed the pic to my niece and told her that her father looks like him. She opined that I look like him. True on both counts. Interesting still to see the ancestors, your own face in an earlier version. Nice pants, eh?
Since famous English convert to Catholicism, Cardinal Newman, has been beatified by the Pope this weekend, I should add my grandad's conversion story, just passed on to me by my mother. Pop Pop, as we called him, was a Scandinavian from Chicago and a Lutheran. He and my Irish Catholic grandmother had to be married in the church sacristy because he was a heretic. Years later, he started hanging out with the local guys at Oney Smith's bar on Quentin Road in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, where the family lived. These were almost all Irish American Catholic guys. On Saturdays, they'd all head down to Sheepshead Bay to go to the beach and drink beer and gab. And on Saturday afternoons, they'd go to the local Catholic church there for confession, once a regular Saturday afternoon ritual. It impressed Pop Pop and he forswore his Protestant ways and joined the Church of Rome. Irish Bars as Tools of Evangelization! In later years he'd take me to Oney Smith's after Mass on Sunday...for a coke. I spent happy times with him and his friends there. So whenever I pass a bar with an open door and smell the beer, I think of him.
Hillaire Belloc had a line, "Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, there's always laughter and good red wine." How do you rework that for Schlitz or Rheingold?
And this masterpiece of the future ExCathedra...talking and pointing even then.
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