In the Shadow of the Courthouse
Memoir of The 1940s Written As A Novel
by
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Epiphany One
The first day of my life was when I was eight-years-old and met Bobby Witt. I can remember it well. I still feel the atoms of my body rearranging themselves. It was April 1942. The winter thaw had left the naked trees shining with glistening pride. Expectation was in the wind. Happy tree limbs sprouted green buds promising a forest of beauty. The aroma of spring was everywhere. The sky was the color of my eyes, an azure blue, with mountains of puffy clouds rolling across it in silent music.
My family had just moved into our first real home. "We are no longer renters," my da said. "We have joined the capitalists." Cigarette dangling from his lips, his narrow shoulders arched with cocky pride, he failed to mention that he borrowed $300 from my uncle Arne, the down payment for this $3,000 white clapboard two-story house, money that he would never repay.
Like many Irishmen of the time, my uncle Arne never married. A frustrated cartoonist, he settled for a job at the Chicago & North Western Railroad roundhouse making boxcars. The shops employed better than 2,000 workers and stretched for ten blocks along Camanche Avenue on Clinton, Iowa’s south side.
Our new home was at 318 Sixth Avenue North, in the heart of this small industrial city of 33,000, in the middle of the United States, a few blocks directly west of the Mississippi River, but only three houses from the most beautiful building I had ever seen, the Clinton County Courthouse.
Epiphany Two
Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime as I have, there can be seen a consistent order and plan as though composed by a novelist. Events that when they occurred seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. Schopenhauer suggests that just as an aspect of ourselves of which our consciousness is unaware composes our dreams, so, too, our whole life is composed by the will within us. My life began the day I met Bobby Witt and it was changed forever when I broke my arm. It forced me out of my routine as primarily a jock into a world of deeper reflection, a world that was always beckoning me, a world of books and ideas, a world that has led to this book. What stirred me the most were the writings of Emerson, especially his essay, Self-Reliance. Its message would prove consequential as the next six decades would put a strain between self and reliance to the point of near estrangement, not only for my generation and me, but for all succeeding ones. It took the death of my friend, Bobby Witt on August 27, 1989 to jar me out of my reverie, and to reflect on what made us, us. Lads and lasses of my generation who rose out of the rich soil of our birth would march through the maelstrom of wars, scandals, corruptions and new paranoia to have careers, marry, have children and grandchildren as they partnered to the dance of life in an atmosphere of death. They bled the blood of their time and its color and consistency is now lost to Time’s memory. But what is time? Time, as Longfellow reminds us, is the life of the soul. The soul connects us all to each other, the living and the dead. I learned this at the courthouse at the feet of the philosopher Bobby Witt who only wanted to play baseball in the Major Leagues.
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About the Book
Imagine coming of age in Clinton, Iowa in the middle of the United States at mid century in a farm belt community of 33,000 snuggled languidly against the muddy Mississippi River in a time of world war.
It is in this working class climate that the author comes of age In the Shadow of the Courthouse, while the nation struggles to come of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb.
It was a wonderful yet frightful time, wonderful because young people were mostly ignorant of the war, and frightful because of that war. Many loved ones were taken from Clinton homes in defending the nation, as with countless other communities.
The author takes you through his awakening years from 1942 to 1947 as he goes from a troubled adolescent to an insightful teenager who senses that he is living during a vanishing age. He has a special attachment to the Clinton County Courthouse. He confesses to his best friend Bobby Witt that he loves the building. "You’re kidding?" Bobby says in disbelief, "How can you love a building?"
It was a good question. He didn’t know why. The courthouse just gave him a kind of peace, a kind of warmth like his mother’s hug. It was strong and tall and there, always there. Besides, it was beautiful. It was God made visible in splendid wonder. Not a He God like in church, but a "thing god" that he could see, feel and touch, and talk to as he walked by. And the four faces of the magnificent courthouse clock chimed every half hour and threw a metaphorical shadow over his life and that of his friends so that they need never be late for meals.
This is the story of the courthouse neighborhood through the eyes of an old man looking back to the time when mostly stay-a-home mothers in two-parent families ruled the roost; when few parents managed to get beyond grammar school and nearly all worked in local factories; when divorce, too, was as foreign as an ancestral language.
It was a time in hot weather that people slept with their families in the Riverview Park, left windows open, doors unlocked, bicycles on the side of the house, and if they had automobiles, keys in the car, knowing no one would disturb their possessions. It was in this atmosphere that the author and his friends created their own recreational activities without parental supervision or involvement, as parents were too tired or too involved in eking out a living.
This is a snapshot of a time, place and circumstance that will resonate with the old and enchant the young.
About the Author
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. has had a distinguished career in organizational/industrial psychology, author of seven books and hundreds of published articles in the discipline, and as an international corporate executive. This is his first work of fiction.