Will the Circle Be Unbroken?_Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith by Studs Terkel

Author:Studs Terkel [Terkel, Studs]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality, Religion
ISBN: 9780345451200
Google: dAc3BAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0345451201
Goodreads: 23330545
Publisher: New Press
Published: 2000-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

A View from the Bridge

Hank Oettinger

He is a retired printer. He spends most of his retirement days reading all sorts of magazines and newspapers and visits his favorite alehouses. His obsessive avocation has always been and still is writing letters to the editor. He has written thousands.

MY GRANDFATHER Adam Oettinger fled Germany after the German liberal revolution failed in 1848; he settled in Wisconsin. They’re called the forty-eighters, and they were the basis of Wisconsin’s liberalism, up until the days of Joseph McCarthy. My grandmother was a member of a Catholic sect from Bavaria where the priest became disgusted with the pressures that were put on him by politicians—and he took his parish, congregation and all, and settled in St. Nasians, Wisconsin, close to Fond du Lac. He set up a Catholic-communist settlement. It became quite famous in Wisconsin history. One of the members of his congregation was my maternal grandfather. He was married, and they had five children—they settled in Peshtigo. My father was born in the last year of the Civil War. So I am a second-generation American.

My family consisted of eleven children—I’m number ten. The first four died in infancy from scarlet fever. The other seven were remarkable in their survival. I’m a good example of that because I am now eighty-eight years old. All seven and our parents survived until I was sixty-four years old. There was not a death in that family. My mother died at the age of ninety-six, and my father at eighty-eight. All the rest of the brothers and sisters were in their high seventies or eighties—a great survival rate. I have never had any disease except mumps when I was maybe six or seven years old. Never had any major operations in my whole life. Believe it or not, I was never vaccinated. I probably picked up immunity from my older brothers and sisters who probably had some of those diseases. I don’t have any troubles physically. I’m drinking my beers every day at the Old Town Ale House and Billy Goat’s and sleep well.

But there’s one thing: I can feel the approach of Alehauser’s disease—that’s my name for it. I can see that it’s starting. The loss of certain memories that were usually so clear, fast, in my mind. But nothing to worry about. There was only one case of Alzheimer’s in my family, and that was my father. In those days they called it the “insanity of the aged.”

I was brought up a very strict Catholic in a German Catholic family. My father had the job for years of ringing the church bell for Angelus at six in the morning and six at night in the little town of Crandon, Wisconsin, way, way up. He would oversleep too often, but Father Schmidt didn’t care about the morning Angelus anyway. Eventually, my father got confused and sometimes he would ring the Angelus at four-thirty in the afternoon . . . [Laughs] My mother had me pegged for the priesthood. From the time I could talk she taught me the responses for serving Mass.

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