Eight Is Enough: A Father's Memoir of Life With His Extra-Large Family by Tom Braden

Author:Tom Braden [Alsop Stewart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Family & Relationships, Parenting, Fatherhood, Humor, Topic, Marriage & Family
ISBN: 9781504045353
Google: pCakDgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-06-20T23:48:39.873821+00:00

The Anti-Saloon League and Me

When I was a small boy in Dubuque, Iowa, I accompanied my mother and my grandmother one evening to hear a lecture by the Reverend Wayne B. Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League.

Mr. Wheeler was a large, florid man with white hair and an old-fashioned style of oratory. He boomed at the respectable citizens gathered in the basement of the First Congregational Church, and after he boomed, he pled: “For the sake of the soldiers, dead on the field of battle; for the sake of the unborn babies stretching out their heavenly arms, woncha, woncha give up rum?”

Mother wrote a description of the meeting for H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury and reported that the Reverend Wheeler pled first with the organist of the Second Baptist Church, then with the rector of St. John’s.

“He induces,” she wrote, “the whole company to stand in groups and for an assortment of reasons: ‘the WCTU ladies because they are the mothers of the Anti-Saloon League. Oh, what a story could be told about them.’”

Mother thought the Reverend Wheeler was funny, but she wrote her article under a pseudonym. It would have been almost as cruel to let Grandmother know that any child of hers would make fun of the Anti-Saloon League as it would have been to let her know that any child of hers would take a drink, which, of course, Mother did.

I think of the relationship between my mother and my grandmother on the subject of the taboo because it seems to me a nearly perfect mirror of the relationship between my children and me. My grandmother thought alcohol an abomination. My mother disagreed. I think drugs an abomination. My children disagree. “One generation passeth away and another generation cometh” did not adequately warn us that the roof was about to fall in.

It began with innocence. I went upstairs one evening in the fall of 1967, and passing by my son’s room, I heard low voices. Thinking to exchange a pleasantry or two, I knocked twice and entered. A remarkable scene confronted me. In a circle on the floor, their legs folded beneath them, their eyes, I later reflected, looking up at me with startled awareness of intrusion, was a group of boys, my son among them, engaged in what appeared to be some form of worship.

On the floor in the center of the circle was a tall candle. In the center of the circle also was a candlestick containing incense, and on two side tables outside the circle, incense also burned.

“What in the world,” I asked, “are you doing?” Ah, the age of innocence. To think that only a few years ago, I could, upon witnessing such a scene, ask such a question.

“Just burning a little incense, Dad,” David answered, and I find it almost unbelievable now to think that, while I wasn’t quite satisfied with the answer, I did not thunder nor accuse.

Nor know. A group of fifteen-year-old boys engaged in some strange rite—was it an initiation

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