Reds by Ted Morgan

Author:Ted Morgan [Morgan, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

XI

JUDGE JOE

Wisconsin became the thirtieth state in 1848, the same year that a revolution in Germany brought thousands of immigrants to America. Many of them found their way to the sparsely settled state, and so did Poles, Scandinavians, and Irish, all looking for cheap land. From County Cork in southern Ireland, a dairy region famous for its butter, with a fine harbor to set sail from, came Stephen McCarthy. In 1859, he bought 160 acres at the northern tip of Lake Winnebago, near the town of Appleton, poised between Green Bay and Milwaukee. By moving to Wisconsin, he was able to buy a bigger spread than he could ever have owned back home. When he had settled down, he found himself blessed with a multinational pool of single women to pick from. He married a German frau, Margaret Stoffel, twenty-one years his junior, and had ten children, two of whom became nuns.1

One of the ten, Timothy, born in 1866, worked on his father’s land until he was thirty-five, then inherited 143 acres, which he cleared for a farm of his own. In 1901 he married Bridget Tierney, known as “Bid,” whose parents also came from Ireland. They had seven children in rapid succession: Mary Ellen in 1902, Olive in 1904, Stephen in 1905, Billy in 1907, Joseph on November 14, 1908, then Howard and Anna Mae. These early settlers brought with them the habits and talismans of the Old World. Women were breeders, children were farmhands, the father ruled his dairy fiefdom with its cows and horses and fields of oats and barley. Life turned on fifteen-hour days and devout Catholicism: beads before bed, the Holy Name Society, and Sunday mass.

An early settler described Wisconsin as “a young buffalo, who roams over his beautiful prairies and reclines in its pleasant groves with all the buoyant feelings of an American freeman.” He might have been describing Joe McCarthy, the only one of Tim’s seven children to shed the halters of his immigrant grandparents and break away from his cramped Wisconsin upbringing to embark on a larger life. The three girls married, Steve became a factory worker, Billy a truck driver, and Howard a farm auctioneer.2

The Underhill Country School, a mile away from the McCarthy farm, was the proverbial one-room schoolhouse where all eight grades studied together. The McCarthy children were not expected to go on to high school. Joe graduated at fourteen, already thick in the chest, but clean-cut, with none of the jowly, predatory look of his adult years. In the stern McCarthy clan, Joe was like a vein of quicksilver in a block of granite, voluble, restless, independent, entrepreneurial. He launched his own chicken business at the age of fifteen and soon had two thousand laying hens. He bought a truck and drove his eggs and broilers to the Chicago market, even though he was not old enough to drive. But one time he overloaded the truck, which tipped over on a curve, sending the cages full of chickens splintering across the road.

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