By the Light of Burning Dreams by David Talbot

Author:David Talbot [Talbot, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

CRAIG RODWELL HAD the sort of childhood that contained just the right elements in just the right proportions to make a lifelong rebel: plenty of brute institutional authority, and enough love to give him the mettle to confront it. He was born in Chicago on Halloween, 1940. His parents separated when he was a baby, and his mother, Marion, went to work as a secretary, leaving little Craig in the care of neighborhood women whom she paid to look after him. (Rodwell recounted these childhood travails in detail to the historian Martin Duberman, who interviewed him at length for his indispensable 1993 book about the Stonewall uprising.) One of them, a Mrs. Merkle, took in laundry and made the five-year-old Craig push sheets and pillowcases through the old-fashioned mangle—he was always terrified of getting his fingers caught between the rollers. She may have been harsh, but with her live-in husband and stay-at-home work, Mrs. Merkle was respectable. When she told Marion she wanted to adopt Craig to save him from growing up in a household with a single mother, Marion, panicked that the other woman might succeed, placed him in a boarding school for “problem” boys, where he went on scholarship.

The boys at the Chicago Junior School had “different problems,” Craig told Duberman, “behavioral problems, weight problems, uncontrollable, in some cases orphans, even a couple of displaced children from Germany.” Though there were a few kindly house mothers, who slept in a room next to the dorm and told bedtime stories, the general regimen was harsh: 5 a.m. wake-up followed by Bible study; a march in formation to the dining hall; and a breakfast eaten in silence, perched on the front halves of the chairs for good posture. His own mother was permitted to visit once a month. Boys who got in trouble—as Craig often did for speaking with his incorrigible frankness, or neglecting to say “Sir,” or fooling around under the bedclothes with other boys, a sin to which he readily admitted—were often set to work pulling up thick, tough burdock root that grew in the woods behind the school. One teacher preferred to beat the students with an electric cord.

Still, Craig, who remained at the school from the age of six till he was fourteen, remembered it fondly for the warm camaraderie he experienced with the other students, often in resistance to the school superintendent, and as the place where he first discovered his homoerotic feelings. He worshipped Bob, an older boy in his dorm who played the piano beautifully, and one very cold night, when Craig woke to find an extra blanket pulled over him, he just knew it was Bob, who “in the middle of the night had gotten up so concerned about me.”

When he was twelve, Craig developed a crush on a boy named Tony, like him a fervent baseball fan. One day Tony managed to get them tickets for a Cubs doubleheader at Wrigley Field. They had permission to watch only the first game but they couldn’t resist staying for the second.

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