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Why I Write. By Paul McHugh

Episode 1 – Newsboy of the Everglades
8-11-2007

The first tale that ever I told that captivated a crowd was a yarn about the tragic sinking of a luxury ocean liner. Not the Titanic, the Andrea Doria. I was five years old at the time. But I was able to tell this story, because I had a newspaper route. A very tiny one, that involved a great deal of running.

I’ll explain. Many scribes of my age and those generations adjacent to mine launched an initial fascination with writing with a stint as a newspaper boy.

You know the iconic image of lads pedaling up on their bikes pre-dawn shadows to a distribution center or appearing at parked trucks driven by their field bosses, where they roll copies of the latest edition and snap bands around it, then jam those rolls of newsprint into rickety handlebar baskets, then pedal away down dark suburban streets, hurling those newsprint batons toward front doors while visions of Sandy Koufax careers dance in their heads (big points scored for a hearty thump! right in the center of a door, alerting the house occupants that morning had indeed arrived, although the next great  pitcher for Major League Baseball was soon to depart).

Since my family of seven lived out at the edge of the Everglades in South Florida – which was a much broader and less defined area of swamp and woods back then - my route was quite different from the urban archetype. It was run barefoot down a muddy road that wound through the moss-draped live oaks. I picked up just two newspapers for two clients, who were my father, and an elderly white widow who lived in another part of the woods, Mrs. Roberts. She gave me my first paying job. I would deliver a paper right to her door for the princely sum of a nickel per week.

For the years I was ages five through eight, it was my mission to leap out of our house, usually wearing just my pajama bottoms (don’t forget, this was Florida), as soon as my father sat down to his bowl of cereal and  his first cup of coffee. Then I ran pell-mell through the moss-draped woods to snatch two Miami Heralds from their metal tubes under our mailbox, at the end of the long road through the woods. I brought one to Mrs. Roberts, then scampered back home and handed the other baton of newsprint off to my dad. He usually expressed a measure of shock and delight at how swiftly I had managed to deliver that third major, indispensible ingredient for his morning routine.

“I can’t believe you’re back so soon!” he would exclaim. “Didn’t you just leave this house two seconds ago?” And I glowed with achievement and pride, suspecting it was quite possible that I might turn out to be the fastest boy alive. It’s probably important to mention here that for me to win any positive or complimentary commentary from my father was an extremely rare event during in my childhood – or indeed, during any subsequent year.

As soon as he got his hands on that paper, my father flapped it open on the table, and immediately lost himself in the mysteries it offered whilst slurping his coffee. To me, then, the reading a newspaper or magazine seemed a quintessential adult activity. I imagined, this was how grown-ups acquired lore about that impressive, bewildering world sprawling out there beyond the last fringe of our woods, where roads eventually became ribbons of pavement radiating away to shops and schools, churches and farms, factories and airports of Homestead, the Keys, Coral Gables, Miami, and beyond.

I could not read at all when my father launched me on my news collection mission, but I was entirely avid to learn. If newspapers held all important current knowledge, reading, I guessed, might be my best key to understanding life, and mastering it. During my own breakfast, I would steal glances at my dad as he absorbed his paper. Finally, mid-way through the summer that I was five, I screwed up my courage and asked him what he was reading. He shocked and mightily pleased me, by taking the time, right then, in July of 1956, to read me the whole headline account of the ramming and capsize of the Andrea Doria, an Italian ocean liner on its way to New York.

As she emerged from the fog, another liner heading east, the SS Stockholm, suddenly appeared on a collision course. Their captains mistakenly took evasive action that unfortunately brought them together again on the same line. The Doria got rammed amidships at a combined speed of about 40 knots, then was raked along her length.

Thanks to much better communications gear than Titanic had 44 years earlier, as well as the presence of more ships nearby, Doria’s casualties were slight – 46 died, 1,660 were rescued – despite a heavy list to starboard that meant fully half her lifeboats were unusable. That lean increased until the mighty ship at length capsized and sank, while the Stockholm limped back to port.

Now, let’s shoot forward a few months. I am in first grade in Sacred Heart elementary school, in a class run by Franciscan nuns in their long cool white habits. Quite early in the school year, Sister Bertha Francis asked her students to come, one by one, to the front of the room, and tell the rest of the class a story. The first few rambled through disjointed yarns about their pets, or something they had done during the summer just over. Then it was my turn. My heart pounded as I nervously trudged up front to occupy the strange new ground of this stage. I stared bug-eyed at at my classmates for a long, tongue-tied moment.

And then I gave them the story of the death of the Andrea Doria. I won’t claim that I repeated all details of the story my father had read to me from the newspaper, verbatim. But I do know that I remembered, and rendered, important aspects of it in most particulars.

 After I finished, that whole classroom, nun included, remained for several seconds in a stunned and eerie stillness. That felt very satisfying.

I realized, in a manner which I was not then very well-equipped to fathom, that I’d somehow scored a hit.  Days later, I overheard sotto voce commentary from the nun to my mother, alerting her to the classroom episode. I’d discovered something powerful about a story-teller’s ability to cast a spell. It was fascinating to learn, that story-teller could be me. 

Other clues to the power of stories arrived steadily. In church, where our good Catholic family could be found on any Sunday or holiday, tales from the Gospels of Jesus were constantly re-told. And these ancient tales were deemed so fraught with significance, that priests next launched into sermons, exegesis and explications of the stories, rambling rampantly, sometimes for as long as half-an-hour.

Spell-binding as this seemed, also at that early age, I reached a private conclusion that some of those priests were talking through their hats. Their riffs often seemed contrived, not altogether aligned with the spirit of the original. I remember one priest in particular, a tall, portly, fire-breathing Manichean, the Irish import Father McCann. He wore an aureole of gray hair around a pale, bald dome that would steadily brighten to crimson while he orated. On that particular Sunday, Fr. McCann, with shaking jowls, wiping sweat from his brow with a handkerchief, poured verbal brimstone into the ears of the sinning faithful.

I gradually lost interest.

Now, the church where I had been baptized, where my family worshipped until I was eight, was a small, pioneer building, with white stucco walls, a pine floor, and tall, narrow windows made of yellow leaded-glass. While Fr. McCann bloviated on the endless punishments of a loving God, who sorrowfully inflicted upon us only what we deserved, I found my attention drawn more to the bright golden light that poured in from outside through those tinted panes. “There,” I thought. “Now, that’s really more like God. Right over there.”

Something about that bright, quiet, steady bounty streaming into our church to glow in long puddles on the varnished pine planks made more sense, and offered a much warmer, more reassuring message, than anything I was hearing from the pulpit. I’ve never forgotten that experience. Eventually, that old church was decommissioned and became our parish hall, then it was shuttered and torn down to make way for a more modern and efficient structure. But during the demolition, I made sure to grab myself a few shattered pieces of that old yellow glass. I still possess them. Whenever I happen to take them out and look at a tawny patch of tinted sunlight through them, it always returns me to that moment.

I’m not trying to say that I intellectually dominated Catholicism or Christianity at young age, nothing like that. There was plenty more that the church had to teach me, and it’s an education that continues. I still turn over and over in my mind all the things I heard and saw in the years when my faith was strongest. What I do mean is that the story seemed so vast and alluring, that I felt compelled to burrow my way into its meaning and key themes. And these surfaced to affect me in many ways.

For instance, I loved hearing the congregation launch into a full-throated singing of the old hymn, “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name,” after the “Ite, missa est” (Go, the Mass is ended.). It entranced me to watch a white-clad young lady crown a statue of Mary with a wreath of blossoms after an outdoor procession in May. And as a young student, I would watch, fascinated, as the tall priests in their black cassocks would soberly stalk the perimeters of our playground, silently reading the pages of their breviaries.

It may be hard now, after all the turmoil, hubbub, revelations and scandals, for people to really grasp the sort of stature and status that Catholic priests enjoyed during the 1950s.

MORE TO COME, SOON… in Episode 2 of this series, I will write about the power of the priests, and why I felt moved to try to join their ranks.