It was a time when color television was the newest technology, the hula hoop was the latest fad and the evening news typically began with coverage of the Vietnam War. At 116 Nevada Street in Dubuque, Iowa, life was reasonably good. In this memoir, author Roger Neuhaus reminisces about his life in this time period, growing up as one of eight children in a strict Catholic family. Nostalgic and often humorous, (Mostly) True Confessions of a Recovering Catholic tells of a neighborhood filled with youthful adventures and an array of Catholic grade school and church experiences, including a colorful cast of mischievous characters. This anthology of anecdotes takes place from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, addressing the changing times of the era. Neuhaus narrates tales of a simpler time and place, one filled with the wonder, excitement, and playfulness of youth. (Mostly) True Confessions of a Recovering Catholic shows how the teachings of the Catholic Church and his family's core values worked to shape the future of one young man.

(MOSTLY) TRUE CONFESSIONS OF A RECOVERING CATHOLIC

By Roger Neuhaus

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Roger J Neuhaus
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-3489-5

Contents

1. First Recall........................................................12. Let it Snow.........................................................43. Frank and John's....................................................64. Polka Dots and Harpo................................................95. Hot Wheels Track....................................................136. Oh No, Big Bro......................................................167. Gasoline Alley and More.............................................198. The More the Merrier................................................259. Search for Tomorrow.................................................3010. Mark Mac...........................................................3411. Phelper............................................................3712. The Lyness Brothers................................................4213. Take Me to the River ... and Back..................................4614. Catfish Creek and Twin Sisters.....................................5115. Craig and Bakes....................................................5416. Bound for the Big Leagues..........................................5617. Field of Dreams....................................................5918. Tree Heist.........................................................6419. Sherwood Forest....................................................6920. Urban Sprawl and the Mall..........................................7321. Pixie Shmixie!.....................................................7722. The Family that Prays Together Strays Together.....................8023. Driving Lessons....................................................8524. My Sister, the Mayor...............................................8925. Uncle Donnie Takes a Dive..........................................9626. Paula and Pat......................................................10127. Say It Ain't So, Joe...............................................10428. Uncle Who?.........................................................10829. Good Knight, Bad Knight............................................11130. Cousin Kevin to the Rescue.........................................11531. School Friends.....................................................12132. Kipper, by George..................................................12533. First Taste........................................................12934. Paying the Price...................................................13435. Bingo!.............................................................13736. Fiasco at the Field House..........................................14337. College Kids.......................................................14738. Ken Comes Around...................................................15139. Viva la France.....................................................15940. Sex Education......................................................16341. Radio Lunchtime....................................................16942. Oky Doky...........................................................17243. Shleets Slips Up...................................................17544. Ostey, Cos, Brownie and Alfie......................................18045. Graduation.........................................................186

Chapter One

First Recall

I grew up in Dubuque, population 50,000-something, in the northeast section of the great State of Iowa, on the banks of the Mississippi River where the Hawkeye state, Illinois, and Wisconsin seek unsuccessfully to connect. It was the 1960's and 1970's. Things were simple, and people treated one another like family. Summers were sticky and humid and packed with adventure; winters were frigid and too long; the fade of autumn was sad; and the first signs of spring inspiring.

It was a time when color television was the newest technology, the hula hoop was the latest fad, the first videogame (Pong) was yet to be introduced, and the evening news typically began with coverage of American soldiers fighting a misunderstood war in a faraway land called Vietnam. All in all, life was resoundingly good in Dubuque. Of course, back then, we had nothing to compare it to.

The earliest memory I can recall about being the sixth of eight children in a Catholic school and church-going family, was in the basement of my family home at 116 Nevada Street, commonly referred to by my siblings and me simply as '116'. It was a mid-October day in 1965 or '66 at 116. Ken Neuhaus had fathered eight children in the first eleven years of marriage to his wife Mary (don't let the 'holy' name fool ya, as there was nothing immaculate about these undeniably Catholic conceptions) and now spent most of his days and nights working multiple jobs to feed them. He had driven to his day job at the loading dock of Torbert Drug Company that morning in the baby blue 1962 Buick family station wagon—the kind with a rumble seat facing out the back. The rumble seat was a favored place in the car, and inevitably, three of the eight Neuhaus offspring fought over it on family drives; apparently, there was something alluring about inhaling the carbon dioxide fumes that crept in the window as we tooled along. The sun was bright, pretending to be warm, but the cool wind that blew that morning kept my younger brother Greg and me playing in the house instead of outdoors.

In the basement of the house, a musty aroma always prevailed amidst the limestone block walls and hard concrete floors. I must have been about four years old, and Greg was about two. We were playing together, but kind of doing our own separate things as we passed the hours. While we awaited the greater excitement that came with the older kids returning home from school, I decided to play a trick on Greg and see what kind of reaction it would bring. In retrospect, it was a really poor decision on my part. Like so many other things that go awry in life, it seemed like a good idea at the time and turned out to be anything but.

As Greg played on the floor with the contents of Dad's tin red toolkit strewn around him, I approached him from behind with an illuminated flashlight pointed upward from below my chin. In such a sparsely lit area, the distortion of my face proved a bit unnerving. In the scariest voice a four-year-old could muster, I began to tell Greg I was a ghost. He verbalized his belief that it was just I, but he began to tremble, trying to convince himself of what he was saying. I persisted with my act and expounded that I was actually the ghost of Roger because I had killed the real Roger and was now about to kill him. Apparently, Greg did not feel his young life should be over just yet, so in a reactive motion of self-defense, the resourceful and terrified toddler lifted a ball pin hammer from the tool kit, raised it over his head with both hands, and brought it down on my forehead with a force I had seen only one other time in a coyote and roadrunner cartoon on TV.

Boooom! Down like Jack from the beanstalk went the ghost of Roger, who, as it turns out, must have known our mother somehow, because he ran up the basement stairs instinctively while frantically screaming for her as he held his hands over his nose, now gushing bright red blood from both nostrils. Perhaps it's not such a good idea to back even the smallest of opponents into a corner. Thus, the first of many life lessons I can recall learning the hard way during my tenure at 116.

Chapter Two

Let it Snow

Our place at 116 was poised on the corner of Nevada and Solon Streets. It was a large white three-story home that was raised on a natural grassy terrace about fifteen feet above street level. It sat prominently in its place, appearing somewhat more stately than most of the middle—to lower-middle-class abodes in the neighborhood, mostly due to its elevated status and a large, long limestone block wall that skirted the entire front of the house like a mote protecting a castle along the Solon Street front entrance.

A favorite way of entertaining ourselves during the cold and snowy winters of the era involved my three brothers and me, a handful of other available neighbor boys, and the pliability of a heavy, wet snow that allowed for the effortless reshaping of a flat layer of the glistening white stuff into softball-sized projectiles. With a simple scoop and cupping of the hands, a couple of pats, and a little smooth shaping of the edges ... behold, a weapon was born. One Saturday evening around the middle of January, a group of us were looking up enjoying the backdrop of a dark winter sky and the reflection of the moonlight off the swirling, featherlike snowflakes as they fell from above. We were involved in a heated competition to see who could catch the most flakes on their tongue. After this exercise lost its appeal, we began to seek other ways to entertain ourselves. It was a good, wet snow, and as we pondered what else could be done with it, there was only one logical answer: It was the perfect occasion to take target practice at the occasional slowly passing automobiles.

About six of us took our positions, mostly on the terrace and behind the trees on the elevated snow-covered yard that surrounded 116 on the Nevada Street side. We each prepared two snowballs, one for each hand. We stood motionless in the damp winter silence, waiting for headlights to appear from the end of the block that would announce the unsuspecting next victim. As a car approached, we cocked our respective throwing arms back and fired the first round of attack mortars, flipping the others to our throwing hands like a second baseman dropping the ball from his glove to turn a double play and then firing to first. In the course of about five seconds, the passing motorist received ten to twelve sudden and alarming thumps to their windshield, hoods, and doors. The immediate reaction of each passing motorist would be a sudden slamming of their brakes, which would cause their car to slide on the snow-packed asphalt, followed by relief when they could regain control of the car and pass on down the block. It wasn't until then that they realized they had been on the receiving end of a prank. Occasionally, a pounded car stopped momentarily, as if the driver was considering getting out and pursuing his or her attackers, but they never really wanted to leap from a warm car out into the cold Iowa night to hunt down a band of deviants who had really caused no significant damage ... at least not until Polka Dots showed up.

Chapter Three

Frank and John's

From about 1968 until 1975, the Neuhaus brothers staked claim to and retained ownership of the neighborhood paper route. Yes, Route 155 of The Dubuque Telegraph-Herald was in good hands back then. The papers were delivered reliably and on time for the better part of those seven years. As anyone who managed a paper route during that era knows, every route had a drop location where the newspaper truck would leave the bundled stack of papers at the same place and time each day for the carriers to pick up, place in their canvas bags, and hand deliver to the customers' doors. Route 155 consisted of ninety-eight doors, and the drop location for the route was at a place called Frank and John's Gulf Station—a neighborhood filling and auto repair garage. Of course, this was back in the day before convenience stores became the norm. Our papers were dropped outside on the step of the station near the metal refrigerated box that contained ice for sale. Rarely did a day pass that did not find us inside the lobby of the station with our eyes gazing longingly through the glass encased counter that contained more varieties of confections than anyone could ever eat. There were Rolos, Three Musketeers, Milky Ways, Snickers, Zagnuts, Mambo Pies, Zero bars, Nougats, Snirkels, Black Jack chewing gum, Charms suckers, and more. Across the lobby against the wall on the path to the restroom was a soda machine with a big 7-up logo on it that read The Uncola. It had a six-inch wide clear glass door that ran from top to bottom of the machine on the right-hand side. Through the glass, we could see twelve different sodas stacked horizontally atop one another, separated by individual metal circles around each bottle. Back then, instead of buttons, we had to look at the bottle cap we saw through the glass door, and for ten cents, we could open the glass door and pull the bottle from its metal circle and another one would fall from somewhere else into its place, as though it had always been there. Infinite sodas? What a concept!

Frank and John's had a distinct character about it. The aroma that greeted us when we entered the twelve-by-twelve lobby was something of a hearty mixture of oil, gasoline, and the rubber from tires and windshield wiper replacement blades all rolled into one. There was a calendar on the wall behind the counter that was supposedly an advertisement for NAPA auto parts, but, being the pre-pubescent hormone factories we were, we were more impressed by the luscious blonde who occupied most of it than by air filters and car batteries. She had sexy little pigtails, bright red lipstick, skimpy cut-offs that left little to the imagination, and a tank top with lots of cleavage spilling out. If auto repair can be suggestive, the calendar had accomplished it, as she was holding a dipstick in her hand and wiping it off with a cloth as if there was nothing in the world she would rather be doing. We all decided that we wanted to buy our auto parts at her store when we got our first cars!

The linoleum square-tiled floor had a permanent smear of black grease embedded in most of it, and every time a car pulled into the gas lane and ran over an air hose that was stretched across the drive, a bell would ding twice to alert the guys in the auto repair bay that a customer had arrived.

Perhaps the most distinct thing about Frank and John's persona, however, were the guys who worked there. They were a surly bunch of grease monkeys, if you will. We were pretty sure none of them ever finished high school (if they even made it that far), had ever taken a bath, had ever seen a dentist, or would ever get the grease out from under their fingernails. One thing that we knew for certain was that none of them were ever going to get a date with the pretty girl on the calendar despite the cool shirts they wore with their nicknames scripted above the pocket. There were Frank and John George, an uncle and nephew who were the proprietors. Frank wore the full Gulf Station uniform, with matching navy Dickies slacks and shirt. He must have been the senior partner. There was John McCann, the guy most of us recognized more by his ass crack than his face because of his proclivity for always being bent over at the waist with his head under the hood of a car, and his jeans hanging way too low. Colby was about five-three and 250 pounds, and he had three or four chins; he clearly spent too much time with his head in the glass confection counter out front.

And then, there was Polka Dots. We called him 'Polka Dots' because while all the guys at the station wore some type of hat that was auto related, he opted for a pink one with white polka dots. We didn't know how he got away with this among his co-workers, but he did. It was unreal.

Chapter Four

Polka Dots and Harpo

As the next car approached that snowy January evening, my brothers, the neighborhood guys, and I had shuffled our positions a bit. It had been a while since a car had come, so we got impatient and had begun a snowball fight amongst ourselves. As someone yelled out "CAR!" we all scooped for snow to reload for an assault on the approaching vehicle. Just at the moment the white arsenal began to fly, I quickly realized that during the position shift, I had ended up below the grade of the yard at 116, very near the sidewalk on Nevada Street, about ten feet from the car that had now slammed on its brakes and had been thrown into park in what appeared to be one fluid instant. It was not a mere veiled threat. This driver was actually braving the arctic temperatures to get out and come after us. In the darkness of the evening, his bright fluorescent hat was unmistakable. "Holy shit! Polka Dots!"

As everyone turned and ran through the yard at 116 to escape the area by ducking into an alley, I found myself in a losing attempt at sprinting up the middle of Solon Street. I had received a pair of knee-high army green colored rubber boots for Christmas a few weeks earlier, and up until that moment in time, I thought they were pretty cool. But on this fateful night, what I really needed were some PF flyers. As I got about halfway up Solon Street and near the end of a wooden fence that corralled the yard of the house across the street from ours, I decided to try and make a quick turn around the corner of the fence to escape into another yard. As I began to round the fence, I peered over my shoulder to check on the progress of Polka Dots: He was on my ass and not letting up. As I turned my head forward again, out of the darkness a telephone pole appeared two-steps in front of me. I bolted to the right to dodge it, but slipped on the incline of a snow bank, falling onto my back with a thud. The next thing I knew, Polka Dots had me pinned to the frozen ground and was sitting on my chest, rubbing icy cold snow in my face and stuffing it in my stocking cap and pulling it down over my eyes. The whole time—which seemed like an eternity—he was cursing violently, a selection of lingo he had obviously taken from Frank and John's potty-mouth dictionary that Sister Mary Paschal at Nativity School had told us would make us go to hell. Mercifully, the wrath of Polka Dots subsided eventually. I suppose he realized he had ventured some distance from his running car, which was blocking the street that had been narrowed to one lane due to the blizzard conditions. As he turned away, I arose from the snow bank and began to empty the snow from my stocking cap. It was then that another life lesson was bestowed upon me: Don't mess with people who dress like they're crazy, because they probably are. But in Polka Dots' case, at least there was justice in knowing he was going to hell anyway. Sister Mary Paschal said so.

While Polka Dots was a strange character indeed, he was certainly not the most eccentric guy wandering around Dubuque back in the day. That esteemed title would have to go to a guy by the name of Harpo.

Nearly two decades before Madonna came on to the pop scene and made one-word names fashionable, Harpo was already onto it. Perhaps, then-popular Sonny or Cher inspired him, but whatever the reason, Harpo kept his first and surnames hidden from public knowledge. He was just Harpo ... and God only made one of him.

Harpo lived downtown at a place called the Iowa Inn, which had previously served for many years as the YMCA. When a new Y was built, the Iowa Inn evolved into some type of government-subsidized housing project. The rooms were similar to dorms at an old college, with common shower and toilet areas. The Iowa Inn was, in essence, the last line of defense against homelessness, and for Harpo, it served a much-needed purpose.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from (MOSTLY) TRUE CONFESSIONS OF A RECOVERING CATHOLICby Roger Neuhaus Copyright © 2011 by Roger J Neuhaus. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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