THE HOTEL CHILD: MY MOM THE SOCIALIST

Actual factual picture of me and my mom as the family leaves Hawai'i.

by Grant McGee

If it were now… not then… I reckon they’d have called her a liberal.

But back in 1970 they weren’t bandying that word about like they do here in the future.

So I reckon Socialist is what someone might call her.

My mom, the Socialist.

But then, maybe mom wasn’t, maybe I just heard things she said and listened to things she told me and just thought she couldn’t possibly be a conservative, couldn’t possibly be a Republican even though she was married to one.

Now there was no doubt my old man was a conservative Republican, what with him derisively referring to President Franklin Roosevelt as “King Roosevelt.”  And then there was the time that the dude who leaked some secret papers about the Vietnam War to “The New York Times,” Daniel Ellsberg appeared on the TV screen during the evening news and my father yelled at the tube, pointing, “THAT MAN SHOULD BE CASTRATED.”  Not thrown in prison, not executed by firing squad, but castrated.

Yep, my dad was a conservative Republican.

But my mom?

Mom told me about the time, around 1964, when we moved into a southern city where my dad was managing a hotel.  She joined The League of Women Voters.  At that particular time and place, according to my mom, the league was getting black voters registered, something that caused a measure of controversy back in the day.

“Then your father told me to get out of the League,” said mom, telling me the story one day.

“Really?” I asked in wide-eyed amazement.

“He said he didn’t think that the wife of the manager of the top hotel in town should be involved with such rabble-rousers,” she said.

There was another time I was watching the movie “The Bird Man of Alcatraz.”  It’s the story of a fellow who ends up in prison for murder and while in there he starts to keep birds and study them, becoming an expert, writing books and such.  He ended up becoming real famous.  Burt Lancaster played him in the movie.

Anyway, so I’m watching “The Bird Man of Alcatraz” and the prison officials are transferring Burt Lancaster from prison to prison and my mom is walking by.  She stops, watches the TV screen for a few moments then says, “Man’s inhumanity to man.”

I was young and didn’t fully understand.

“What do you mean, mom?” I asked.

“Keeping someone locked up like that for their whole life, robbing them of any hope,” she said.

“But he killed some people,” I said.

“I know that.  But how long is enough?” and she walked on.

These thoughts came back to me the other day when I saw a fellow working in the back room of a store.  He had a severely cleft palate.

My mom’s voice came to my head from long ago.

“That boy will never stand an equal chance in society,” were the words.  “That’s why we need socialized medicine.”

It was something she said one morning on the way to school.

It was probably almost 50 years ago mom used to take me and Dead Kevin to and from school.  Dead Kevin wasn’t dead then, that would be 12 or so years in the future.

Anyway, riding with mom was always lively because she’d talk about all kinds of stuff.  Dead Kevin used to say stuff about the Bible and she’d take him to task over it.

“The end times are prophesized in the book of Revelation,” Dead Kevin pontificated one morning.

“Oh Kevin,” said mom, “The Bible is a book of history and a guide to good moral living, it is not a book of prophesy.”

Dead Kevin gasped.

“I’m shocked you’d say such a thing,” he said.

“How can you say that, mom,” I said.  “You teach Sunday School.”

“Because that’s what I teach.  The stories, the parables are a history of that region.  The lessons are a guide to good moral living, it’s just that simple,” she said.

So one morning we were on our way to school and we drove by a guy, older than us, we didn’t recognize him as going to our school.  And he had the biggest sticky-out ears you’d ever seen on anyone.

Dead Kevin and I laughed.

“You boys shouldn’t laugh at him,” said mom as she drove.  “That boy will never stand an equal chance in society.  That’s why we need socialized medicine.”

“What’s socialized medicine?” I asked.   I was just a junior high school kid.

“It’s health care paid for by the government,” said mom.  “Some countries in Europe have it.  You think that boy’s parents can afford the cost of surgery to fix those ears?  No.  He’ll be ridiculed and his self-esteem will be affected.  He’ll never reach his full potential.”

Socialized medicine.

It would be years before I realized my mom was speaking words that in some quarters would be considered fightin’ words.

And yet I never heard her mention such ideas again.

Was it how she really felt or just a passing thought?

One time when I was a lot older I asked my Aunt Margie, my mother’s kid sister, if she knew anything about my mom’s socialist leanings.

“Your mother?  A Socialist?  Oh my!” said Aunt Margie with a wry smile.  “I thought your mother was an elitist.”

“What?”  Now I was confused.  From one extreme to the other.

“There was that time you all were living at the hotel in Buffalo and we came to visit,” she said.  “Your mother told us to come up to your family’s apartment by way of the service entrance and elevator.  I always saw that as she was ashamed of us.”

So I don’t know.

Mom’s done “gone on to glory.”

I suppose I may have been wondering about her political leanings, trying to figure out where some of my silly notions came from.  Silly notions like this one time long ago I had this idealistic thought that people with children shouldn’t go to prison because of the affect it has on children.  House arrest yes, but not to “the big house.”  Luckily I kinda kept that thought to myself because I know of someone who did say that out loud and was practically laughed out of town.

Or the times that I have wondered aloud why we humans all can’t simply just get along with each other.  That thought was met with raucous laughter and queries as to my planet of origin.

And I guess it all really doesn’t matter.

Mom was mom.

And after all mom was the greatest mom ever.

                                                                                -30-