I earned my living doing various jobs, but primarily as an academic, eventually a professor. Across decades and continents, I have tracked many transformations, for better and worse, in the modus operandi of universities. Here again I looked for the patterns and underlying forces shaping these developments, even while participating in them and sometimes resisting them.
In writing my way through this, I relived and reassessed my life, my times, my relationships. I think that we resynthesize our life experience all the time, sometimes in small and nearly imperceptible ways, but other times more overtly and dramatically, as new experiences bring old ones up for consideration again. I have been conscious of a dynamic between me then as a character in my story and me now as its author. I have tried to be scrupulously honest about this and not attribute my mature views to my younger self, while still bringing to bear my mature perspective in interpreting events in a way that I might not have done then. The writing of any story is itself a story. I remembered things I had forgotten. I discovered things about the past that I did not know at the time.
However, the biggest story of writing the story for me was finding people I had lost along the way and coming to terms with questions about those whose lives intersected with mine before taking another path. It was easier with some than others. A person I particularly wanted to find was most difficult to locate, but after employing my best detective skills and persisting long after a less obsessive person would have abandoned the search, I finally found him again. I resumed contact with him and others, but discovered that others were dead. I grieved for them, not only because they were gone, but because I was too careless of their continuing presence in the world before they left it. Many of these were long-distance relationships, which were harder to maintain in pre-Internet days. Still, I could have done better than I did and regret that I didn’t. I found the Internet invaluable for pursuing the trail of the past. I only wish it had come sooner.
On a whim, I started naming chapters after songs and wondered if I could sustain it. It turned out that there were enough songs from the soundtrack of my life to capture the themes I wanted to express. I initially intended to write my story in a single volume, but arrived at a book-length manuscript when I was only up to 1988. I decided to make this project a two-volume work, as my later life was no less eventful than my earlier one, and I still had a lot to say. In fact, the world turned upside down with the end of the Cold War, which had so shaped my life and times until then. My next book will open with those dramatic events as I experienced them, often in Eastern Europe, as socialist regimes were falling and the transition to capitalism was beginning, and will proceed from there through several decades of life in the new world order.
1
Born in the USA
Born in the USA, I was a child of war, first a hot one and then a cold one. This is the first of many ironies to unfold in my story, as I have spent so much of my life protesting against wars, particularly those conducted by the nation where I was born. I was conceived on a US Army base in Georgia during the Second World War. By the time I was born in July 1944, my father was on the front lines in Europe and his letters to my mother were from Somewhere in England, Somewhere in France, Somewhere in Germany. After the war, he did not return immediately, as he was assigned to duty in the American sector in Berlin as the hot war turned cold. We finally met when I was eighteen months old. My parents, Eugene Sheehan and Helen Kernan, were typical of their time, place, and generation. Their lives were circumscribed by many forces, including depression and war. They were unquestioningly compliant within the system structuring their fates. They were particularly loyal to the United States of America and to the Roman Catholic Church. They did not live in an atmosphere of philosophical or political debate and saw no reason to question the prevailing orthodoxies of their time.
Going back generations, as far as I can tell, most of my ancestors lived in such a way, buffeted by forces they neither comprehended nor questioned, subjected to famine, war, and depression, then lifted by rising standards of living, all underpinned by stifling dogmas they embraced as self-evident truths. Perhaps somewhere in those generations there was some questioning, but I can find no signs of it, except for my great-grandmother’s cousin, who was an early critic of banks and railroads and the power they already wielded.
My father’s father, Thomas Sheehan, found work of one sort or another, even amid high unemployment, before settling into a job as office manager of a Teamsters Union local. He married Elizabeth Thomas and they lived in a row house in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, inhabited by a large extended family. Their oldest child was severely disabled after a nurse pushed his head back into the birth canal to delay childbirth until the doctor arrived. There were no lawsuits or social services to ameliorate this burden. My grandmother’s life was dominated by this tragedy. She went on to have other children, including my father. When her brother’s wife died in childbirth, she took her nephew and raised him as her son. She also looked after her own brothers and her sister, who never married. Despite all this, she had a sunny manner, and I remember times with her as full of fun. My mother’s father, Clarence Kernan, worked as carpenter, door-to-door salesman, and summer stock opera singer, but was often out of work. Despite their poverty, my grandmother, Margaret Moore, born in Virginia, had the air of a grand southern lady. You would think that she had been the mistress of a large plantation. She grew up on a small farm. Her father, Dr. John Moore, was a country doctor, who was murdered in 1895, when she was only a year old. Her mother was a cousin of William Jennings Bryan, populist politician, congressman, three times the Democratic Party candidate for US president, Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson and prosecutor in the infamous Scopes trial. He was in the history books we studied in school. He was famous for saying “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,” lambasting East Coast wealthy-class forces that advocated the gold standard against the interests of working people.
This branch of the family, that of my mother’s mother, left more traces than any other. More photos and other records have survived. When cousins on both sides went about constructing family trees, this line was the one that could be traced furthest back. They acquired property and education beyond that of my other ancestors. My grandmother’s ancestors were all Protestants until John Moore converted to Catholicism and then converted his wife, mother, siblings, and children as well. The rest of my relations were Catholic. They were peasants turned proletarians. They did not go to university, and they left few photos, records, or writings. They came mostly from Ireland as victims of famine. My great-greatgrandfather, Richard Sheehan, left Kill, County Waterford, with his two brothers, and arrived in Philadelphia in 1848. The Kernans too came from Ireland to Philadelphia, via Canada.
Census records from 1880, 1910, and 1920 list the occupations of my male relations as laborer, cooper, smith, printer, clerk, box maker, brewer, electrician, wagon builder, gager, soldier, mailman, packer, druggist, tester, watchman, lineman, milkman, bookkeeper, salesman, office manager. The occupation fields for my female ancestors list saleslady, shoe paster, paper bag maker, and dressmaker. The others registered as widows or housewives. The causes of death specified on death certificates are myocarditis, nephrosclerosois, intestinal nephritis, circhios hepatio, carcinoma, apoplexy. Looking at these documents, it is striking how many of the children died soon after birth. In one case, both the first and last child of James Kernan and Catherine Furey were named Leo. The names of dead children were often passed to their siblings.
The lives of these dead generations are shadowy to me. Aside from William Jennings Bryan, they left no texts. They left so few traces. As were the majority of those who lived for centuries, they were silent on the stage of history. The few traces extant have been gathered by cousins, who have dug out census records and death certificates and street directories, have only deepened their obscurity to me. I find it hard to reconstruct their lives and imagine them as individuals. Yet in a wider sense, I have a strong sense of emerging from this silence to a time and place where I can write, even a duty to those who did not write, even though I believe that they would not approve of what I write.
I went to Kill in County Waterford with my son to see where our ancestors struggled to survive famine before emigrating to America, never to return. The