Vocatus Genealogy

 

Being Burns
James A. Burns (b. 1927)

Being Burns No. 1:

Burnses all:

There are 52 living descendants of James A Burns Sr (1885-1956) and Gertrude L Fetter (1896-1991).

We show notable mobility.  It seems the first thing our parents teach us is to get out of town.

There are 3 of us who are still holding down Columbus where it all started.

We are spread from Sao Paulo to Saginaw, from Liverpool to Berkeley, from Ithaca to San Diego, from Miami to McMinnville.
We are thick about the Great Lakes.

We live in North Carolina, Winona, West Point, Virginia, St Paul, and Cincinnati.

Luke Tyree is soldiering somewhere.

Colin McCrossin is following fish in either the Northern Hemisphere or the Southern Hemisphere.
Waverly has yet to be located.

The 52 of us divide into 4 generations.  There are 6 in the 1st generation, 17 in the 2nd generation, 28 in the 3rd generation, and Teagan Harvey is presently rattling around by himself in the 4th generation.

I am the oldest of the 52.  This makes me a patriarch of sorts.  In our non-patriarchal society, that isn't much.  But I don't require much.

My first patriarchal move was to get almost all the email addreses of the 52 of us who have them.

My second patriarchal move is to initiate a series of emails called Being Burns which you will receive on an irregular basis.  Or as my Dad would say: steady by jerks.

My memory goes back to the 1930's, and I have done a good bit of genealogical work.  This puts me in a posiiton to dump an insufferable amount of your history on you.  I don't intend to do that.  Or at least not directly.

I am interested in a more subtle elusive quest: what is that arch of the spirit which makes Burnses different from most family groups we know.

We have all know families where sections have lost track of each other, or members who don't talk to each other, or treat each other with controlled civility, or rarely visit one another.

When Burnses are together, we talk.  And talk and talk.
When we are together we tend to fill the hall.  Any sized hall.
We are comfortable with who we are.
We are extremely noisy.
There is graciousness.
There is a pervasive generosity of spirit.
We laugh and laugh without anyone ever telling a joke.
We enjoy each other.
There is banter.
We are comfortable with who others are.
We tend to continue conversations which could have started years earlier.
Good food is nearby.
Our massive dispersion makes it hugely expensive to get together as we would like.
But each has an abiding sense of where the others are.

I refer to this as the Burns factor.

I have been questioned time after time through the years by those who see us in action.  What is this all about?  Where did all this come from?

The answer I have always given: that is the way we are.

If you carefully analyze my answer, you will find that is totally without content. 

I don't mind being stupid.  But looking stupid on a continuing basis is wearing.

So I am proposing a hypothesis which I will attempt to authenticate through an abundance of historical material.

My hypothesis is:  Francy's and John's and Alicia's and Camilla's and Laurene's and Kathleen's and my father, James A Burns Sr, was a cultural earthquake of such magnitude that the Burns factor is his continuing aftershock.

When ten view a painting, ten different paintings are viewed.   I can only give what I see.  Others may see differently.  In history there is no absolutely correct view.

It is important to know that when I am talking about Dad, I am talking about all of us, because we are all an accumulation of our histories.  My brother Francy didn't happen in a vacuum, nor has any of us.

I approve of order in principle.  Some of my best friends are orderly.  But it has never appealed to me.  I am more comfortable meandering about.  Kicking a tire here.  Kicking a tire there.  Points I am making, if I am making a point at all, will tend to be cumulative.  So be patient.

I am starting with Dad.

Dad had a binary cast to his thinking.  He saw things as big or small.  Middle positions showed him little. To this he added a little Irish touch.  He saw things as big or small potato.

He was big.

This could go many directions, and that would please Dad.

Being Burns No. 2:

Burnses all.

Plastering is one of the oldest human crafts.

Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper on a plastered wall.  The ancient Romans plastered.  The ancient Greeks plastered.  The ancient Egyptians plastered.  The craft goes back many millenia earlier.  Frames of sticks were tied together with strips of hide to be plastered with mud.

My brother Francis Michael Burns was a plasterer.  He learned the craft from his father James Burns.

James Burns was a plasterer.  He learned the craft from his father Joseph Burns.

We know that Joseph Burns came from Dublin to settle in Plain City, Ohio.  But it is not clear whether he brought the plastering craft from Dublin or developed it in Plain City.

This requires a little historical work.

The first thing to sense is how paper-thin the Irish economy was.  When we loose our purchase on our economy, we face hardship.  When an Irishman of this era lost his purchase,  he faced starvation.

This translated into Irish husbands being older when they married.  The bride's family wouldn't allow the marriage until the groom was financially viable.  Otherwise the daughter would face almost certain disaster.  For a future husband, it took time to reach an acceptable level of financial viability.  Thus he was older.

Irish men tended to marry considerably younger women.  This expanded the time to have large families.  Large families were deemed necessary.  Infant mortality was so fierce that large families provided the only path to a seviceable number of adult children.

However the important point for our purposes is:  no good job, no wedding cake.

This brings us three miles down the road from Plain City to Joseph's formidable father-in-law:  Francis Michael Nugent.  Francis came a generation earlier than Joseph from likely the west counties of Ireland.   He arrived in America with little, but quickly rose to be a stable, respected, prosperous farmer owning one of the prize farms of Madison County,  His farm was profitable enough to buy additional land.

His wife died young,  He both brought up his children and ran his farm as a single parent.  He ruled both his farm and his children with authority.  His only son, the heir apparent to the farm, ran off to Cincinnati.

Francis was also infinitely superior in social status to fresh-off-the-boat Joseph.

Joseph was in no position to take Francis Michael Nugent lightly.

No one took Francis Michael Nugent lightly.

Joseph married Francis' daughter Eliza a fairly short time after his arrival.  We know that he would be required to have his plastering trade in a viable financial condition, or Eliza would not be available.  Joseph hadn't the time to both learn the extremely demanding plastering craft, and also set up the customer base necessary for a viable business.

If you throw Formidable Francis into the mix, Joseph's plastering craft came with him from Dublin.

This takes us to Dublin, the home of Joseph's father, John Burns.

John Burns had four adult children who came to America, but he himself never left Dublin.  He had a daughter, a hiatus of  12 years or so, and then a cluster of Joseph, and two daughters.  This hiatus was likely due to infant mortality, and Joseph was his only son.

Again we revert to the paper-thin Irish economy.

There was never any significant amout of money to set children on the road to independence.   Only the father's trade staved off starvation for his family.   All the wealth of the family was concentrated in this trade.  This wealth was jealously guarded.  If the father turned his son out in the street without this trade, his son's starving was a real possibility.  If a father loved his son, he would, from the earliest possible moment. incorporate his son into the family wealth by teaching his trade.  Thus he gave his son a future.  Education never stood in the way.  John's first daughter Marcella was the first Burns to land in America.  She was an illiterate teenager.

John Burns was likely a plasterer, and had the time required to pass the family treasure to his young and only son Joseph.

And where would John have learned to plaster?  He would have inherited the family treasure from his father.

And so back.  And so back.  And so back.

It is not impossible that the Burnses were plasterers back into the Irish Middle Ages.

This, of course, is speculative.  But it would be a comfortable working hypothesis for research.

Dad was never a plasterer.  He plastered because it supported the family he loved.  He was an intellectual.

Francy  was never a plasterer.  He plastered because it supported the family he loved.  He was a poet of the rural.

Francy plastered until his children were raised.  Then be bought a farm in the Appalachian foothills of Ohio.   He was never more himself than on that farm.

An intellectual and a poet of the rural closed a Burns tradtion which went far back into history.

How far no one knows.

It could have been to man just upright enough to bemud his lair.  

Being Burns No. 2.1:

 I have blundered.  I know about the durability of the forces of history.  I should have known better.

Francis Michael Burns taught John Berlin-Burns how to plaster.

John Burns of Dublin would have been proud of him.

John Berlin-Burns, however, hasn't gainfully plastered in quite some time.

John Burns of Dublin wouldn't have been able to understand this.

But this does leave us a relic of our medieval past alive and well in Winona.

This opens further historical possibilities.

I know that Hannah and Laureen are not becoming plasterers.  I checked the catalog at Concordia.

Molly and Erin seem unlikely.

But Charlie and Colin stand square in plastering's way.

Another disturbing possibility presents itself.

I have no clear idea of what Anne does in Berkeley.

Keep the lime out of your hair, honey -- bald is overrated.

If any more Burnses can plaster, I don't want to hear about it.

Being Burns No. 3:

Dad savored the human parade with relish.

Every night he brought a slice of it home for supper.

We had a story with our meal.

He was Irish.

The Irish have a rainbow of ways of not telling the truth.

However they are under some theological restraint.

They could never not tell the truth to the point where it would become telling a lie.

Else they would have to go to confession.

So they developed the knack of burnishing fact beyond recognizabilty.

Thus they could be both Irish and have a reasonably unspotted soul at the same time.

For the Irish, it's the music, not the words that count.

Being Burns No. 4:

None of us Burnses ever noticed any change in the ambiance of our home leading us to expect a new brother or sister. 

We weren't enthusiastic about the Stork Theory.  None of us looked particularly like storks.  Ohio wasn't great stork country anyway.  Storks mostly sat on Hungarian chimneys.

When Dad came home at night he announced his presence with a hearty:  Do I have a surprise for you!  A roar of little feet converged on him and we pressured him to the door.  We jumped up and down.  He held a bag high and turned it into a guessing game.  His surprise could be a quart of strawberries.  This would be high end because we were at the deep end of the Great Depression.

It was complex theater.  He kept us from knowing how little money we had, put surprise in our lives, and told us he loved us.

We transferred his nightly theater to the mystery of babies.  We were adherents of the Surprise Theory.

In early January of 1933,  Columbus was heavy snow.

We never heard of snow plows or snow shovels.  Perhaps they weren't invented yet.  Perhaps the technology had passed us by.  Columbus was a quarter the size it is now, and was ideally situated to have things pass it by.

The streets were cleared by having cars drive on them to pack them.  Studer was packed snow as well as Broad and High.  All cars wore snow chains.

The whiteness of Columbus remained until it melted.  Columbus was a huge snow carving with a rattle crackle of chains in white stillness.

Pedestrian walkways were made by tromping paths in the snow with boots.  The paths were usually one person wide.  Everyone walked single file.

Lovers walked single file.  The gracious thing was for the gentleman to precede his lady on the path so her little feet would receive a loving extra level of tromp.  Chivalry abounded.  Even if the lady was clearly the more effective tromper, the gentleman went first.  A harmless little fiction.  If the lady was a prodigiously gifted tromper, there was a pleasing downstream effect.  The rat-tail of couples following could get an occasional glimpse of pavement.

Dad rose early and tromped a path from our front door to the street.  This gave us a path to the chain-barred tracks which lead to Corpus Christi School.

The last instruction we received from Mom as we departed for school was to stay on the path.  The boys tended to run through drifts and arrived at school covered with snow.  As the snow melted in the classroom, their noses also began to run.  They brought their runny noses home and generously shared them with everyone.

Runny noses to the left.  Runny noses to the right.  Runny noses in between.

Snot became the sacral center of the sacred season of winter.

Except for the nuns who taught us.  They were otherworldly, so their noses couldn't run.

Mom was the warm presence which filled our home,  On this cold day of January 1933,  Mom was not home.  So we were all going to get Mom.

Dad tromped a path to our 1928 Pontiac.  We followed him like a string of geese.  The front seat was left open for Mom, and we were all loaded into the backseat.

Loading us into the backseat was a significant engineering feat.

We were lined up from the tallest to the smallest.  Starting from the tall end, we were distributed along the first layer.  Then starting from the small end, the smallest was put on the tallest and so on until both systems met with a pair of mediocres in the corner.  This seems straight forward enough.  However there was an overriding rubric which turned this into a chinese puzzle.  No two boys could be together.  They would poke and punch eash other.  The girls would scream and cry.  This further encouraged the boys.  The backseat would quickly escalate to a high level of unmanageability.

Only after a careful systems check of the backseat, the key could turn.

We followed packed Studer, packed Whittier, and packed Miller until we arrived at the packed parking lot of St. Ann's Maternity Hospital.

We were told to keep our places.  Dad wasn't anxious to shuffle and redeal the backseat.

He went up a short flight of miraculously swept stairs and disappeared into the hospital.

In a short while he appeared at the door carefully leading Mom.

Mom had a bundle with her.

And did Mom have a surprise for us!

It was Alicia.

Some slight clarifications suggests themselves.

Since mothers stayed in the hospital for such a long time, Alicia wasn't really vintage '33.  She was a remnant from the previous year.  And strictly speaking she wasn't Alicia either.  We get our names at baptism.  Since she was still a heathen, she was Baby Girl Burns.  And baptism wasn't a great leap forward.  She was named Rosaire.

Only after years of devotion, discovery, and generosity did she became Alicia the Absolute Chicagoan.

Dad saw Chicago as the bright spot of the galaxy.  The splendid cluster of full life.

Dad was only an incidental Columbusite.  His parents, Joseph and Eliza, brought him from Plain City to put him into St. Vincent's Orphanage.  It was their only available option to insure he had food.

Alicia is a daughter in whom Dad would be well pleased.

Being Burns No. 5:

Folks with a serious tomato patch in their backyard tend to clear it of ragweed.

There isn't anything particularly generous about this.  It is an act within their comfort zone.  They can now watch the evening news without fear of tomatoes being devoured by ragweed. 

My brother Francy bought me ice skates with the first paycheck he ever received.

When his wife Colleen became too frail for farm life, he left his farm.  He again took up his plastering tools to patch walls for the needy.

If someone were to point out to him the generosity of these actions, he would be mildly discomfited.  There would be a subtle misreading of who he was.  He didn't see himself as involved in generosity at all.  He was simply acting within his comfort zone.

Suppose you are attached to a kitchen which serves a nasty little ball of mashed potatoes every night.  On a given Wednesday, the cook goes through the cooking sherry and serves a generous pyramid of mash potatoes.

One would tend to say:  Oh my, oh my!   What a generous pyramid of mashed potatoes!

Notice the two level cuisine.  One is the normal little ball rountine which is punctuated by super Wednesday where the normal is exceded by the generous pyramid.  The generous is a departure from the normal.

Dad found the dichotomy between the generous and the normal small potato.  The generous should be normal.  The generous life is the only normal life worth living.   The generous life and the full life should be exactly the same thing.

It was for him.  And he made it so for us. 

Thus the word 'generous' loses its meaning.  There can't be one level excelling the other where there is only one level.

So when Francy is tagged with the word 'generous', it makes him uncomfortable.  It puts him in a two-level world he had never known.
He applauds generosity mightily, but finds the word problematic.  He has no instincts for the two-level world it implies.  He was brought up in a one-level world where generosity was the comfort zone.

Francy was one of ten children.  Our family had two notable characteristics:  1) it was virtually cloistered; 2) behavior within the family was not held up to the measure of good and bad, but to the measure of big and small potato.

We weren't intentionally cloistered.

When there are ten children within the space of twelve years, all the resources necessary to play and to do homework are within the home.  We all had friends, but we lived largely independent of them.  We didn't need them.

We played and developed outdoor games which made allowances for the spread of ages.  We played Cast on the street where the smaller ones had the slight advantage by being able to duck under the larger ones.  We played Hide-Go-Seek where the smaller ones made a smaller package to hide.  We played a game called Refrigerator which we likely made up.  We played Blindman's Bluff.  We played Go Sheepy Go. The girls did Double Dutch on the driveway.  The boys played quoits and flew kites  We had fun.

But inside our home we were most ourselves.  We had endless card games and board games.  We all became ferocious game players.  No quarter ever given.  Rotten losers all.   We were aggressive.  We were alert.  We were noisy.  Very noisy    We watched the other's eyes to divine a coming strategy.  We were unknowingly developing social sense.  A good teacher watches eyes.  He isn't imparting information; he is playing chess with minds.  Burnses still watch eyes.  But above all, we had fun.  Great fun.

Parents establish the theater in which their children grow.  It is the only world the child knows.  This theater is modified by other forces impinging on the family.  But it is within the parent's theater that the character of the child develops.

Since we were virtually cloistered, our parent's influence was all we knew.

Mom and Dad understood each other completely and loved each other completely.  None of us ever heard a sharp word between them.  We would be hard pressed to remember the slightest disagreement.

This gave our cloistered theater a single director, either Mom or Dad.

Dad thought passionately. 

He had a binary character to his thought where things were either big or small potato.  His thinking had another dimension which might be called the gift of suppression.  Anything small potato was deemed too insignificant to raise a sentence, so it had no practical existence.  Soon it had no existence at all.  Big was the only game in town.

Dad perceived the distinction between generous and normal as small potato,  The generous should be normal.  Generosity is big.  Generosity of spirit constitutes the only life worth living because it is big. 

Mom would correct our wayward behavior with: that was small of you.  We weren't prone to do bad things,  but small things were well within our range.

The language of theater sets the theater.

This theater was little modified by the kids we knew.  We had so little contact with them

The only significant contact we had outside the home was school.

We all went to Corpus Christi School where we were taught by Franciscan nuns.

Becoming a nun is an act of huge generosity.  It is well above normal.  We were not only in touch with their teaching skills, but in touch with their lives.  And these lives were generous.

This only added support to the theater of Mom and Dad.

So what Francy is doing might seem generous to the uninformed, but he is really acting within his comfort zone.

Because of Dad.

Being Burns No. 6:

Being Burns No. 7:

For a husband to be 11 years older than his wife was commonplace in Ireland.  Starvation was real.   A husband must first prove himself a provider of a decent life for his future wife.

Germany, on the other hand, was a large and rich country which could exist only in the dreams of scruffy little Ireland.

One could starve in Germany, but very, very rarely.   So  the marriage pattern differed.

Women were usually married at about 18 with the husband a year or so older.

For the woman to be a year or so older than her husband was a matter of extreme embarrassment.  The woman usually fudged on her age a bit to be culturally more comfortable.  It would be unthinkably rude for anyone to notice this.

Amalia Agel's eldest daughter Gertrude Fetter was a worry for Amalia.

Gertrude was lovely through and through.  A beautiful woman who was bright and strong and thoughtful, but gentle and shy and self-effacing.  Entirely different from her sisters who leaned toward the edgy and confrontational.

St. Mary's was full of eligible bachelors who would be delighted with her as wife.  But she was never interested.

Amalia saw her waiting for the perfect husband.   But since no perfect husband ever existed,  she would never get married.

You can picky yourself right off the market.

In 1923 Gertrude Fetter was 27 years old, well on her way to become a maiden lady.

Since women at this time had only a small range of job possibilities, all with little pay, a miserable life was inevitable.

Or she could become a ward of relatives.  In a culture which prided itself in self-responsibility, this would also be a miserable life.

But 1923 was a good year for Amalia.  Her favorite daughter Gertrude had not one, but two beaus.  Both of whom Gertrude took seriously.

There was German Jake Kulp and Irishman Jim Burns.

Jake was about her own age, and Dad was 11 years older.

In Amalia's eyes, Jake was the right choice.  He was a good St. Mary's Catholic.  He was the right age.  He had a good job.  He was sober and responsible.  He would make a good husband and good father.  Everything was there.  Gertrude's future was assured.
 
When Dad was courting Mom on the front porch of 475 Siebert St.,  she would laugh and laugh hour after hour.

There was a lightness she had never experienced before.  But there was also a seriousness with a quick mind which darted all directions.  An unexpected width and openness.  And he was always funny.  There were no jokes.  Just the Irish quicksilver delight in language.

When she went back into the house, Amalia would ask her what was so funny.

Mom couldn't say, but it was very, very funny.

Germans have a fine sense of humor.  They tell stories which are uproariously funny.  And they laugh heartily.

But Germans who could laugh hour after hour with nothing notably funny are in institutions.

Amalia saw Dad as a disastrous choice.  He was too old, not a serious person, and worst of all,  the proverbially feckless and irresponsible Irish.

Jake could provide what her German culture had.

She was waiting for what her German culture did not have.

She picked the man who made her laugh.

Some 40 or more years later, after Dad had died,  Jake Kulp was still an eligible bachelor.
He contacted Mom to see whether  they might start again.

She declined.

She was living on the memory of the man who made her laugh.

Being Burns No. 8:

An opera composer and a baker face pretty much the same challenge.  They must turn out a product which sells to pay the rent.

The composer faces a more complex situation.  He must turn out a product which will not only please the audience, but will also be something performers would be able to do.

An audience likes an opera which opens with bravura, then gathers steam while hurling toward a smashing climax.  The audience also likes about three hours worth.

This presents a range of problems for the performers.

Putting an orchestra through the three hours is not insuperable.  They sit the whole time.  The cellist uses less arm energy than a pitcher warming up.  The flute is basically a whistle which can blown all evening without adverse effects.  The brass requires considerable lung power.  These do not play steadily so the singers can be heard from time to time.  The french horns in Wagner are an exception.  Both the french horns and the soprano work together steadily, so they both tend to be large persons with lungs like shopping bags.

If the composer scores the lead soprano with the same nonchalance which he scores the orchestra, she will turn blue and fall on her face somewhere in the third act.  The piccolo can hit high C's all night long with ease.  But every high C the soprano sings uses up a great part of her day.  She needs a notable break in an opera.

Thus the chorus was invented.  It's half-time for the soprano.  She has a chance to lean against the wall in her dressing room.

Often choruses are the poor peasant folks in their Sunday best, whirling around in high generosity of spirit.  Up and down and in and around with flashing color.  The orchestra is playing faster and brighter than it has all evening since there are no singers in the way.  The dancers are all at top speed because their time on stage is brief and in your face.   Raw gaiety and generosity and spirit fills the hall.  When well done, these are thrilling.

If Aristotle were sitting in the front row, he would not be amused.  He would be stomping his clogs in disapproval.  He would see this extravaganza as thoroughly rotten under a poor reading of culture.

Poor peasants aren't generous-spirited.  They are mean-spirited.

Aristotle sees poverty as breeding meanness of spirit.

Aristotle sees want and need as leaching the generosity of spirit out of culture.

Let's take a trip to the Middle Ages to the shack of a serf family.

This family is grouped around a little pile of potatoes which stands between them and starvation.

A starving serf comes to the window and begs for some potatoes so he can continue to live.

The father in the shack can't let his family starve to death to keep someone else alive.

So he must painfully turn the starving serf away.

A week later the same situtation arises.

The father would have had time to meditate on the horrors of living on the edge of starvation.

But he must again turn another starving serf away from his window..  His first duty is to his own.

The next generation, still in the same poverty, would find the decision a little less painful.

They have the example of their elders, good people all, who have had to turn starving serfs from the window.

They have their family to think about.

Several generations later and still in the same poverty, the father would find turning the starving serf from the window a great deal less painful.

It's the way we've always handled the situation.

Family values must come first.

Turning starving serfs away is becoming a principle of the culture.  It's what we do.

Several generations later, still in the same poverty,  another starving serf,  the same response, everyone knew how to handle it.

Sending away starving serfs has become an unquestioned principle of the culture.

Family values are the only operative principle,

Suppose a generation later, there was a bonanza potato crop which fills the serf shack with potatoes,

Now is the time to alleviate some of the starvation about us.

Not so.

We have always taken care of our own.  So we are going to sell our surplus potatoes to invest in the future of our own.

The window had been wallpapered over years ago to keep out those robbing the future of our own.

Poverty has generated a narrow-gauge track which may or may not abound in family values but has no windows.

Mean-spiritedness reigns, whether it is cloaked in family values or not.

This is what Aristotle is talking about.

When a principle becomes imbedded in as unquestioned premise of a culture, it no longer needs what begot it.

A serf shack can be a mansion where no one eats potatoes because they are fattening.

The windowless narrow-gauge serfs see only their own lives.  These lives, by default, become the prototypical American life.  They cannot see any different life as valid because they can only see their own lives..

They become the real Americans.  All other approaches to life become invalid.  Any difference is failure.

They would see America rife with cultural health hazards.

They would see some satisfied with an un-American language.

Some satisfied with un-American clothes.

Some satisfied with un-American food.

Some having the effrontery of being born black.

Some even having the obscenity of being born gay.

If all these people insist on being different, why don't they go back to where they belong. 

There they won't be different.

Dad was a wide-gauged connoisseur of difference.

He saw pleasure in difference and partook as fully as he could.

He saw the hurt in difference and soothed what he could.

He saw a life without windows to difference as no life at all, but bare survival.

He had arenas where history has proved he did not do well.

But in this arena he was brilliant.

Dad has left us a legacy of joy and compassion through appreciation of difference.

Aristotle would stomp his clogs approvingly, but reservedly.   There isn't a whole lot of enthusiasm in his Nicomachean Ethics.

Being Burns No. 9:

Dad was a complex person who took a complex stance in the America of his own time.

The ultimate historical sin is to view the past in terms of the present.  One is measuring the past against evolved values unknown to the past.

Dad can only be seen in terms of his own America, because that was all the America he had.

Yet Dad's America didn't drop in a basket from the sky.  His America was a point in the evolutionary history of America which needs its own prehistory for a better grasp.

This is not easy to do.

What I have chosen to do is a sprawly meander which abounds in oversimplification.   The sloppy methodology is the tradeoff in giving some perspective to Dad's America.

I would be disappointed if you do not see the oversimplification.

But that is the cost of doing business here.

It will be a little long, but think how nice it will feel when it is over.

I promise this will be the last time.

One summer, when I was a Jesuit, I lead a seminar at the University of Munich.  The University wasn't impressed so our assigned seminar room was a medieval cellar.  I forget what the seminar was about.  Something fashionable at the time.  Likely an interdisciplinary vacuity which abounded in sentences without subjects.  It was forgettable.

I wasn't due back to Gonzaga for a month, and I had the stipend from the seminar.

This gave me an opportunity to do something I had always wanted to do.  To hear Bach played on the organs Bach played on.

I researched Bach's geography to death and prepared a map, rented a Volkswagen Beetle in Munich with the appropriate Bavarian license plates, and headed north on the autobahn.

Bach was Lutheran.  Northern German is largely Lutheran, while southern Germany is largely Catholic.

If I went south I would be in Austria within the hour.  I had to go quite a distance north to get by the Catholics with their dreadful O Salutaris and Tantum Ergo to get into Lutheran country with their glorious music.

Up in the far northwest,  in the province of Niedersachsen,  was the lovely medieval town of Luneburg.  Here my plan worked perfectly. 

The Jewish synagogue in Luneburg was an empty lot with bricks bordering it, and a sign: Victim of Krystallnacht, the night of shattered glass.  The Catholic church was a bad little piece of Bauhaus at the edge of town.  But in the center of town was the magnificent Lutheran Johanisskirche.  Bach played here.

The Johanniskirche is older than Lutheranism, but the Lutherans upgraded it by reworking the old Catholic organ into a magnificent baroque one.  It was a big gutsy Schnitker where every note had a chiff of its own.  While Bach's great contrapuntal works are usually a great wash of sound, the punch of each note made counterpoint utterly translucent.  One could follow the subject in its many incarnations as they raced along at staggered levels, all the while thickening harmonics to the final cadence.  The final chord was supported by the 32' pedal registry which was thunder shaking the pews.  Power and clarity in perfect marriage.   It was the Bach which Bach heard.  It was the finest Bach I had ever heard.

Bach however could never have played the Bach at Luneburg I heard.  He took organ lessons there as a kid.  He had yet to develop the ferocious technique which served him as a sort of copyright.  No one stole his music because no one else could play it.

As I was beetling along my Lutheran way, the lights on passing cars would blink from time to time.  It took me some time to figure out what was going on.  They weren't blinking at me but at my Bavarian license plates.  It was a signal of recognition from other Bavarians.  They offered comfort in solidarity while being surrounded by the barbaric north.

The German north and south don't like each other.

The German High Command during WW2 was almost entirely northern,  They considered the Bavarians as the wrong stuff for soldiers.  Almost as bad as the Italians whose last notable general was Julius Caesar.

They didn't like the sound of each other's German.  The northern buzzsaw and the southern lullaby were mutual irritants.

The Lutherans and Catholics saw each other as heretics.

These two Germanys had a separate cultural history. Downtown Munich was Vienna, and downtown Vienna was Florence.  The architecture of Munich is italianate on a German scale.  One's difference in history gives a pattern of different stress to values.  Conversations never quite meet because they stem from hidden springs of difference.

The two Germanys are quite distant, so they are rarely in each other's face.  They developed a sort of detente in distance where they knew of the difference, but have also learned to live with it.  Happy marriages and good friends existed between the two Germanys, but the partner was seen as more of a miracle than a cultural product.

Jews, gypsies, and gays were everywhere in the face of the whole nation.  They had no detente in distance.

The word 'definition' has the Latin word for boundary in it somewhere.

Let's go to a hausfrau in Speier down in the southwest province of Pfaltz.  She doesn't define herself as a human being because human beings are everywhere.  Nor does she define herself as German because Germans are everywhere too.  But she definitely defines herself as a hausfrau who does the cooking, washing, cleaning, and care of the kids.  She sharply defines herself as different from her lazy husband who spends most of his time in a bierstube slopping beer.  The neighborhood hausfrauen would exchange husband horror stories over the fence as their wash dried.  Defining herself as German made no sense.

Let's throw in a reactionary pig farmer from Westphalia.  He spoke a local dialect which no one outside his area understood.  Broken German was his second language.

About the only time a secretary from Berlin, a street cleaner from Munich, a housefrau from Speier, and our pig farmer could meet would not be in Germany, but in a place like Planck's on Parsons Avenue in Columbus.  Here were four people who had lost their geography and self-definition.  They had to seek new self-definition in new geography where their detentes in distance were gone. They were surrounded by people not German. They were four disoriented aliens from different planets.  This couldn't happen in Germany.

There was an attempt to establish detente in distance by the Catholics gravitating to the south and the Lutherans to the north in Columbus.   The Catholics won a bloodless Holy War which few Columbusites know about.   The Catholic end was gentrified into lovely German Village while the Lutheran end was largely torn up in building a freeway.

Hessenauer's, the jewelry store where Dad bought Mom's wedding ring, which is now Monica's, went with the Lutherans.

There seems to be an evolutionary principle which commands one to attack the unknown. The intention seems to preempt the off chance that the unknown has a first strike capability of its own.  Better safe than sorry.

While the German's were struggling with self=definition, the rest of Columbus had no such problem.

They were Krauts and Columbus disliked them.

Each of the American ghettos was as unhinged as the German ghetto.  But each in its own way.

Life was not good in the ghetto, but infinitely worse outside the ghetto.

The problem Ireland saw, besides being Irish, was being a de facto British colony.

When Henry VIII made himself both King and Pope with his invention of a Protestantism more compatible with his marital habits, he thereby made Catholics both heretics and traitors.  He controlled the levers of power where he could not only confiscate the lands of the wealthy, but also reward the important with the Catholic holdings he acquired such as monasteries and their vast lands.  For the little folks, being both a heretic and a traitor was extremely unhealthy in Elizabethan times.

With the backing of the Tudor army,  the new religion quickly swept through England.  The Tudor army  missed spots in England which had never much cared for London ways such as the area of the Mersey, Ribble and Dee.  The Catholics avoided conversion by going underground.

Another area where the the Tudor army drove the Catholics underground was near the Suffolk/Norfolk border.  Here the Spaldings went underground, and some eventually made their way to the only American colony where being Catholic was legal, Maryland.  From there some made their way to Kentucky and to Indiana.  One of them eventually made her way to Wilmette.

Belfast was no problem for the Tudor army.  It was an outpost of London where Henry VIII controlled all the levers of power.  But when the Tudor army turned south to rural Ireland they faced  a military horror.  These were the small thatched cottages and churches of Irish farmers to the horizon.  There were no levers of power to pull.  They were saddled with the problem of how many Irish farmers would have to be killed and how many barns would have to be burned till the light of Henry's new religion dawned.  The army went dutifully ahead and killed and burned.    But the massed army wasn't really geared for widespread individual killing and burning.  So they spread out.  When they spread out the Irish responded by killing them.  The finest army of Europe found itself in an unwinnable guerilla war.  After two years of draining the Tudor treasury, they returned to England.

This left the south of Ireland more Catholic than it had been for a thousand years, because it had been threatened.  This also left the south of Ireland with an undying hatred of both England and Protestantism.

Irish terrorism in London has a long history.

When the Russians occupied Czechoslovakia, they could, with difficulty,  communicate with one another.  Their Slavic languages evolved in different directions, but the basic plumbing of their languages was the same as well as many of the words.  The word 'mraz', as an example, means 'frost' in Prague, Warsaw, and Moscow.

Hungary was an entirely different situtation.  They weren't Slavs at all, but Magyar.  They were an enclave in a vast Slavic sea.  Their bloody history as an embattled enclave makes Irish history a stroll in the park.

But Irish history went on off the coast of Europe, while Hungarian history went on in the middle of Europe, both on separate tracks.  They had no cultural machinery for dealing with each other because they had no history of dealing with each other.

These tracks came together for the first time in history in a place like Columbus, and they crashed.  They became Micks and Hunkies and they disliked each other.

The Italian ghetto was north up in the Goodale area.  The central church was St. Francis of Assisi on Buttles.

The Krauts, Micks, and Hunkies all called this ghetto where the Wops lived Flytown.

Ethnic animosity could exist on a much smaller scale everywhere.

If an Estonian family had a Maltese family move in next door, it would be very unlikely the Estonians could find Malta on a map.  The first thing the Estonians would notice is the Maltese communicated with an ugly series of sounds they laughingly called a language.  The second thing they would notice in checking out their shopping cart was that they ate things normal human beings find disgusting.  If the Maltese had a dog which barked at night the stage was set.  A little time.  A little bad will.  Shake, don't stir.  The family next door would become typical Maltese animals.

It could even be on a smaller scale.

A kid throwing a baseball through someone's window is pretty much a kid thing.  But if the window were Lithuanian and the kid Dutch, it would become an ethnic thing.

The unstable ghettos faced each other in mutual animosity.   But when they ran into the Real Americans, the ugliness reached a new level.

The Real Americans had completely lost sight of their immigrant origins.  They belonged here.  They were conservative and therefore xenophobic.  They were segregationist.  They had no problem with lynching blacks.  But they were the Real Americans under the definition of controlling all the levers of power.  They needed the immigrant labor to become rich, but saw it as a terrible price to pay.  Their basic attitude was:  who dragged all this trash into our house?  They referred to the Irish as white niggers.

In 1923, lovely Gertrude Fetter accepted gentlemanly Jim Burns as her future husband.

And what did their families think of this?

Her German family exploded.  His Irish family exploded.

Dad can only be appreciated in the only America he had.

And America the beautiful was hideous.

Being Burns No. 10:

The overwhelming happening in Dad's life was finding Gertrude Fetter,  a woman of extraordinary breadth and warmth and charm.

He found her in the most improbable place in his world.

The German ghetto.

Her completeness so splashed his life and mind that he made a startling leap.

If such beauty could be found in the German ghetto,  hidden beauty must be in all  ghettos.

He thereupon saw each ethnic group as a mine where great beauty and richness of spirit could be found.

It was the duty of one striving to live richly to explore these many mines.

His America wasn't hideous but a garden with limitless hidden beauty.

The fragility of the ghettos in his time and their mutual animosity in his time did not suggest this.

But Gertrude Fetter did.

This leap filled our home with color, interest, dimension, compassion, breadth of interest, and a devotion to the ethnic table.

Difference was not threating, but thrilling discovery.

An ethnic stamp on anything became its certificate of validity.

He took this even a step further by redefining his America.

The WASP Real Americans were small potato in their mean-spiritedness toward those unlike themselves.

He effectively suppressed their existence.

His real America became the collection of its ethnic groups.

His America was a huge feast of  ethnic diversity.   A spread of wealth untold. 

The good life for an American was to luxuriate in this multi-splendored expanse.

Here he could exercise his bigness of spirit.

This lavish ethnic banquet became the theater where he could strut his Irish stuff.

His whole family lived  and thrived in his America.

But is was Gertrude Fetter who released this Irish spirit to well beyond its range.

Being Burns No. 11:

The  blueberry is the domesticated variety of the much smaller wild huckleberry.

Once Dad was at Central Market in Columbus.

He was pondering whether to buy blueberries or huckleberries.

A little bent-over Amish woman pulled him by the elbow.

Take the huckleberries.      Better flavor.

The huckleberries indeed did make a better pie.

This he liked.

But the huckleberries were also a myriad of little blue eyes peering into Amish culture.

This he relished.

Being Burns No. 12:

St. Ladislaus parish hall was the center of the Slavic ghetto in Columbus.

Few Germans and Irish would venture there.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of those who spell their names with mostly consonants.

St. Ladislaus parish hall held a food bank for the needy.   This food bank had a hole in its ceiling.

After my brother Francy returned from the farm, he set about donating his plastering skills to the needy.

While he was repairing the ceiling of the food bank, he fell from his ladder.

He knew he could plaster no longer.

It was in this very same hall that the brunch after his funeral was held.

During this brunch I went to the parking lot for a cigar.

A new and shining black SUV pulled up.   Smoked windows left the occupants in mystery.   Music blasted within.  The vehicle pulsed.  The SUV sat and pulsed until the music wore itself out.

A door finally opened.  A finely-clad gold-chained African-american got out.  He sauntered over and addressed me:  Hey dude, where's the food?

I pointed to the door of the food bank for the needy.

As he sauntered toward the door, a smoked back window lowered.  A corn-rowed head poked out.   In a voice of unearthly edge:  Hey Marvin -- don't forget the spaghetti!

This was a Dad event.

Marvin's questionable eligibility would be small potato.  Plenty of spaghetti where that came from.

Dad was colorful and attuned to the colorful.   He saw ethnic diversity as America's beauty.   He would delight in an African-american event at a Slavic venue celebrating his German/Irish son.  With just a soupcon of Italian.

A rich segment of the human parade.  The stuff of his stories.

Nita, the lovely Indonesian gift to our family would please him beyond measure.

He would have no idea where Indonesia was.

This would add charm on charm.

Being Burns No. 13:

Bible-based religions have the great strength of adapting the Christian message to any culture.

However they have the concomitant tendency to merely reflect that culture.   They also tend to multiply to high diversity in response to cultures becoming more diverse.

But each sees itself as somehow the true church.
The ancient Israelites were no better than other tribes of their time.   When a neighboring tribe proved troublesome, they killed all the men and sold the women.

This is genocide.

No bible-based religion includes genocide in its beliefs because it is repugnant to their culture.  But the culture is making the selection, not the bible.

King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines.

Polygamy demeans women so it is repugnant to western culture.  No bible-based religion incorporates polygamy into its beliefs.  The selection, again, is being made by the culture.

Except the Mormons.  Their specific culture was adaptible to polygamy,

From time to time, we all get our allocated pair of missionaries dressed in Utah chic at our front doors.  They are intent on saving our souls the only way they see available to us -- becoming Mormon.

Once I invited them in for theological dialogue.

When Utah applied to become a state in about 1900,  the US Congress refused their entry into the United States unless they renounced polygamy.  They renounced polygamy and became a state.

The point I made with my two missionaries was that if polygamy was God's will up to the point where it met the US Congress, wouldn't we have the situation where the US Congress was changing God's mind.  This would be a theological inconvenience of the first order.

They were prepared for me.

I got hit with a snow storm of God's ways are not our ways, and God's ways surpasseth human ken.

Carrying on dialogue in an arena which surpasseth human ken tends to get vaporous.

Blacks were excluded from Mormonism until the 1970's.

This could be seen as pressure from the Brigham Young basketball coach.

But again we are in an arena which surpasseth human ken.

There is an uncounted number of bible-based religions reflecting different cultures, all of which can splinter at any time as the cultural climate splinters within each church.

The result is a staggering diversity of rampant inconsistency, each of which claim to be somehow the true path to salvation.

Irish Roman Catholicism antedates bible-based religions by well over a 1000 years.

It is not bible-based.

It has zero tolerance for religious diversity.

St. Patrick wasn't Irish at all.   He was the son of a Roman family living in present day Scotland.  He was kidnapped by Irish raiders and sold as a slave in Ireland.  He was born about 420 and died about 490. 

He led the missionary activity among the Celtic tribes, and within a century or so, all of Ireland was Roman Catholic.

The rapid spread was hastened by preserving Celtic culture without compromising Roman Catholicism.

One of the codified elements of the early Celtic faith, and continuing to the present day, is the four marks or attributes of the Church.

The Church is One.  The Church is Holy.  The Church is Catholic (meaning universal).  The Church is Apostolic.

By One it means that any other path will not reach salvation.

By Holy it means that it is the path to salvation.

By Catholic it means everywhere,  leaving no other space for salvation.

By Apostolic it means salvation is gained only through direct physical and spiritual contact with the Apostles.

This teaching of faith is already codified as the four marks and commonplace in the century previous to St. Patrick.  This was the century of the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople.

The four marks are commonplace in the writings of the Church Fathers in the preceding century.

The four marks are commonplace in the writings of the even earlier Apostolic Fathers.

The four marks can be seen in the New Testament where all the elements can be comfortably found without forcing meaning, including the exclusivity of Christianity over Judaism and paganism.

The four marks find base in the Old Testament where the exclusivity of the Chosen People is contrasted to everyone else being unchosen.

So the Roman Catholic Church does not see itelf as bible-based, but as the living continuum which wrote the bible as descriptive and supportive of its religious life.

And it has no tolerance for religious diversity.

Ireland is frequently seen as a sort of a cultural lightweight with shamrocks and clog dancing and a gift of language.

Modern scholarship is going quite the other direction.  Ireland is being seen more and more as the cultural heavyweight of Europe.

Roman civilization almost completely broke down in the medieval Dark Ages during the barbarian invasions.

Ireland was almost entirely spared because of distance out to sea.

Scandanavian and Norman and Flemish barbarians would make landings in Celtic Ireland, but never in large enough numbers to make permanent colonies.  These small landings were absorbed into the Celtic population.  There are traces of Scandanavian, Flemish, and French in Irish names, but these cultures had no significant cultural impact.

While our German ancestors were running around in dogskins axing all comers, our Irish ancestors in their monasteries were patiently transcribing and studying the riches of Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Christian culture.  They became the only direct continuum of the riches of the past.

This is being a cultural heavyweight.

Another factor accentuates the Irish abomination for religious diversity.

Everyone was Celt.  Ireland was monocultural.  A church in County Kerry or up in County Antrim were the same.  There was little pressure for cultural diversity because there was little cultural diversity.

When a religious culture is held for so many centuries, it becomes totally immeshed in that culture.  It goes beyond being a religion, and becomes an integral part of being Irish.  It goes far beyond the tenets of faith.  It becomes who we are.

Dad was Irish Catholic.  In his own time.  Not in our time.

He always referred to the Catholic church as Our Holy Mother the Church.

This statement goes far beyond religious belief.   It was a statement about himself forged over many, many centuries.

He was saying who he was.

This put Dad in a conflictive position which he fully recognized.

Mom lead him to the beauty of cultural difference.

His Irishness had no tolerance for religious difference.

But the cultural and the religious interpenetrate.

They cannot be separated out.

The position is conflictive.

A standard Catholic father wouldn't even see the problem.

An extraordinary Catholic father might vaguely see the problem but learn to live with it.

Dad's powerful thrust toward life not only clearly saw the problem, but lead him to a resolution of the conflict in his own mind.

It was a bold and brilliant solution.  Few could ever have imagined it.

However his resolution of the conflict historically proved to have a dark side which Dad could never have foreseen.

It contributed to hurtful downstream effects.

Being Burns No. 14:

The Chinese built the American railroad system from the West while the Irish built from the East.

Both had a labor surplus, and both had starvation conditions.

They differed in that the Irish intended to stay while the Chinese intended to go back home.

Confucianism, with its web of filial piety, respect for elders, respect for ancestors, and the importance of the place of burial, does not function well at distance.

The railroad system designed for the East not only connected big cities, but also touched most small farm towns.  Ohio produced mountains of corn and West Virginia produced mountains of coal.  The thick mat of railroads in the East gave access to world markets.  There were hundreds and hundreds of little white train stations near small towns where a flagman could stop a train for local needs.

The coal-burning locomotives were huge and noisy and threw out great clouds of smoke and steam.  They shook the whole town as they thundered by.  They ran far more frequently In Dad's day because they lacked competition from trucks or planes.

The huge locomotives and the long trains gained an almost mystical significance in their powerful access to distant places of mystery.
The high point of a child's day was to watch the train thunder by.  The hopes and dreams of children included a mighty locomotive.  The mighty locomotive and its Pullman cars filled with the good life became part of Dad's hopes and dreams.

Building a railroad is tremendously labor-intensive.  An army of strong young Irishmen were employed.  These were not the educated cultured class of Ireland.  They were largely illiterate.

The building unit would be a train which would proceed along the newly-laid tracks.  This train would contain all the supplies necessary for the project.  Included were portable shanties for the work crew -- thus shanty Irish.

Whenever the crew would come to a town, they would take their recreation in that town.  But they did it Irish style.  They tore the town apart.  There would be a lot of drinking, a lot of noise, a lot of singing, and a lot of fighting.  The town statues would be climbed.  Chairs would be thrown through saloon windows.  They were a hurricane.

Dublin was well prepared to handle the rowdy element of Irish society.  They had done it for centuries.  They had cudgels and fire hoses which they used handily.

But these Irish were tearing apart small stable Protestant towns where drinking, dancing, and playing cards were either frowned upon or outright forbidden.  There was nothing in their culture which prepared them for this Irish event.  They got their daughters off the street, and locked their doors until the Irish passed.

These little Protestant towns were conservative and xenophobic so the Irish were trash before they got there.  The Irish event not only firmed this position, but added a nuance.  The Irish became railroad trash.

As the Irish track building team proceeded from town to town, it built the little white stations and tore the towns apart.
And these tracks were put down to virtually all towns of any size,  Here they got their little white stations and here they got their town torn apart.
If there were a contest on how to make the worst possible presentation of a culture, this would easily win.

When a small station opened, a few jobs opened.  Track maintenance, tickets, flagmen and that sort of thing.
The locals wouldn't know anything about railroads, so these were Irish jobs.
This enabled a few Irish to build homes on the undesirable property near the railroad track.

This also gave further Irish immigrants a place to stay where they worked themselves into the local economy.
In this way small Irish ghettos rose and huddled near the railroad.
The denizens of these small ghettos were solidly railroad trash now.
The railroad builders were not forgotten.

The first Burns in America was Marcella Burns.  She married Michael Grimes who was a railroad builder.
They settled in a little house near the railroad in Plain City where Michael continued in track maintenance.
Francy and I, on our last trip together, found their little house.  It is still there.
Her younger brother, Joseph Burns, the plasterer, joined her there.
From here he found a job in Plain City.
Eventually he moved to a home of his own, close to Marcella and within the small Irish ghetto.

This was the home of Dad's youth.

When Amalia Agel, Mom's mother,  moved from her childhood home to her married home, she moved from 431 Siebert to 475 Siebert.  Both within the Catholic end of the German ghetto.  Smooth and expected.  Just down the street.  Even on the same side of the street.

When Eliza Nugent, Dad's mother, moved from her childhood home to her married home, she moved 3 miles north on Chilicothe to the little Irish ghetto by the tracks.  This was anything but smooth,  It was a leap across an Irish Grand Canyon,  She left the home of stable, prosperous farmer Francis Michael Nugent to the ghetto of the railroad trash.

Francis Michael Nugent's worst fears were soon realized.

Joseph Burns rapidly became a dysfunctional alcoholic and remained so the rest of his life.

Dad told Mom this story.   Whenever Joseph had any money at all,  he would go to a saloon.  He would drink till he dropped.  Eliza would then go to the saloon and pick his pocket for any money which might remain.  She fed her family from this.

The money would get less and less as Joseph's ability to earn money faded.

His family arrived at a starvation condition.

This was Dad's youth in the ghetto of the railroad trash.

He never talked about it to his children.

Dad was born 125 years ago when Plain City had no social net to catch families which fail.

So Joseph and Eliza brought their children to Columbus to put them in St. Vincents Orphanage.

Here the children could be fed.

Dad was effectively warehoused until he became old enough to take Joseph's place.

And that is exactly what happened.

Dad and Eliza raised Joseph's  family.  This family included Joseph and Dad's brothers and sisters.  Michael Grimes left Marcella, and went to Chicago.  So it included Aunt Marcella.  His sisters brought home children from failed marriages and an occasional husband.  It included them too,

So the Burns family from Veronica to Camilla is actually Dad's second family.

This sequence also left no window for a formal education.

Our history in the ghetto of the railroad trash tells the 52 of us a little about ourselves.

There was alcoholism on the German side too, so we are genetically disposed to alcoholism.  Alcohol is a dangerous drug for us.

The mighty trains to Chicago rattled the ghetto of the railroad trash all day and all night.  These mighty trains worked their way into Dad's consciousness making Chicago the shining point of salvation.  Chicago became everything the ghetto of the railroad trash was not.

Dad took Mom on their honeymoon to Chicago.  This had been coming for a long while.  This was his ultimate compliment.

Food looms large to the starving.  But starving in the ghetto of the railroad trash requires food to go beyond mere nourishment.  It must advance to nourishment with windows outside this ghetto.  Food must have a story.  It must reach out to an event.  It must bring an interest from the outside world inside the home.  Food must be celebratory of being alive in the big world.

Mom was both a wonderful cook and a wonderful baker.  She prepared Dad's vision with flair.

We were never allowed to have corned beef and cabbage.  It wasn't possible to give corned beef and cabbage a window beyond the ghetto of the railroad trash.

Dad had a big and passionate mind. 
But it had its weakness.
He never had the ability to treat the complex complexly.
He engaged complex areas he was unequipped to deal with.
He reduced things to big and small potato.
This is binary.
A binary mind set has two ends, but leaves the center empty where complexity lives.
A formal education might have remedied this.
But Joseph took this option from him.

It is the mind set we all start with. 
Mothers teach their children the difference beween good things and bad things.
Putting a hand on the stove is a bad thing.
This is binary.
It is the mind set of behavior.

History is a long series of slobs like ourselves doing the best we can with the cards we are dealt.  We have our good points and our bad points.  But we struggle along.

If a group around us were asked to list our good points, and to list our bad points, we would get different lists.  These lists would also reflect the viewer.  And these could change from day to day.  If we were asked to isolate the absolute good and the absolute bad in their various manifestations in these combined lists, we would be entering a world of fuzz from which we may never return.

The structures of history such as religions, nations, and races have the same flow.  They struggle along with the cards they are dealt.  They have their good times and bad times, depending on the viewer's definition of good and bad at the time.

There is complexity aplenty here.

The binary mind set can't deal with the complexity of history in any depth.

I think you are wearing a terrible pair of sox.  This is a binary decision.   But it doesn't go to the heart of history.

Religion is an evil.  This is a binary decision.  This goes to the heart of history.  It is also an ignorant oversimplification.  Any position which makes one the wisest person in all of history is reasonably suspect.  This is simply a failure of a binary mind to deal with complexity at any depth.

Dad tended to make big binary decisions which deeply touched our history.

He classified things as big and small potato and drove them as far as they would go.

There were two little girls across the street from us named Helen and Mary Kristoff.  They were the only Protestants in a neighborhood of all Catholics.  We never played with them because they were Protestant.  They grew up without friends in their neighborhood.  I see this as unconscionable cruelty.  A terrible thing to do to little girls.  If these little girls grew to messed-up lives, we contributed.

Little girls are more important than ideas however grandiose.

Dad never had any problem with our excluding Protestant Helen and Mary.

Our Holy Mother the Church was big, and anything else was small potato.

There was no middle in his mind set where these litle girls could be of middling value.

He couldn't see them.

If Dad did not have his passion for largeness, and his driving intellect, we would have played with these little girls.

Or if Dad had the education to spread his binary set to deal with complexity, we would have played with these little girls.

Generosity of spirit was his chief characteristic.

He didn't see these little girls.

He couldn't treat them generously.

He was a big man.   He made a big mistake.

I somehow feel Joseph made him do it.

Being Burns No. 15:

Amalia Agel would walk the miles from Siebert St. to help her favorite daughter with her children.

She loved us all, but John was her favorite.

Johannis is the German for John.

Hannis is its loving diminutive.

She would feed Hannis his oatmeal in his high chair.

Instead of swallowing, Hannis would collect a load in his mouth.

Then Hannis would spit it all over Amalia.

She thought it darling.

I though it disgusting.

This is your recess break.

Being Burns No. 16

A bit of our Irish history to help keep our ancestors in their own times:

1803:  Ohio becomes the 17th State.

1820:  Birth of Francis Michael Nugent likely in the West Counties of Ireland.

1826:  Death of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

1839:  Francis Michael Nugent immigrates to the United States.

1839:  Birth of Marcella Burns in Dublin.

1845 - 1852:  The Great Irish Potato Famine where a million Irishmen died of starvation.

1856:  Marcella Burns immigrates to the United States.   

1861 - 1865:  The American Civil War.

1885:  Dad is born.

Francis Michael Nugent and Marcella Burns are the first two of our Irish ancestors to immigrate to the United States.

Francis Michael Nugent was in the United States a generation before Marcella Burns, so he is our deepest Irish ancestor.

Dad's parents are Eliza Nugent and Joseph Burns.

Francis Michael Nugent is the father of Eliza Nugent. Dad's mother.  He is Dad's grandfather.

Marcella Burns is the much older sister of Joseph Burns, Dad's father.  She is Dad's aunt.

Francis Michael Nugent became an eminently successful farmer in Madison County, 3 miles south of Plain City.

Marcella Burns became the first Burns resident of the Plain City Irish ghetto where success was hard to come by.

There are two stones next to each other in one of the Burns plots in St. Joseph's Cemetery.

Each has a single name on it.

One has Marcella.  This is Marcella Burns.
One has Frank.  This is Francis Michael Nugent.

Some of these dates might be a little soft because of documentation problems.

The 1860 census is the first one to catch Marcella Burns where her occupation is given as hired girl and her sex is given as male.

This is an easy one.

A more difficult one is where you can document a woman being born in five different years, none of which may be correct.

Being Burns No. 17

On a cold day Eliza Nugent visited her children at the orphanage.

She wore a large black cloak which came down to her shoes.

Inside the cloak was a number of pockets.

Inside the pockets was an orange for each of her children.

It was a wonderous day Dad never forgot.

No matter how miserable the Great Depression became, we always had a crate of oranges in the basement.

Being Burns No. 18:

An Irishman in a pub might remark that his daughter is becoming as ugly as his wife, and it won't be long before they are both whirring around Dublin on a matched pair of broomsticks.

If anyone within earshot would support this statement, he would get a broken nose.

Those were the rules.

Irish men protected their women.

John Burns and his wife Bessy Ginty of Dublin had a 16 year old daughter Marcella, and she was stuck.

She had nowhere to go.

Irish men were leaving Ireland by the boatloads because the economy had dried up.

There was never more that a slender edge of poor paying jobs for women, and even these were withering.

So any hope of Marcella ever supporting herself was fog on an Irish meadow.

Irish culture dictated that she find a good husband who would meet her father's approbation.

She would then become a dutiful wife and a good mother of a large family of children.

She was stuck here too.

Potential husbands were leaving Ireland by the boatloads.  The pool of potential husbands was shrinking on a daily basis.

There was both a quantitative and qualitative degradation of the potential husband pool.

It was the vigorous forward-looking men who left Ireland.

This left the potential husband pool smaller and smaller and limper and limper.

The odds of Marcella finding a husband who could meet her father's approbation approached those of the Irish Sweepstakes.

So John and Bessy decided that the only hope of a decent future for Marcella was outside Ireland.

The Irish working class was puritanical.  Good girls neither talked about sex, or thought about sex.  The best way to insure this was to keep them from knowing about sex.  Marriage was soon enough.  So a well brought up girl was extraordinarily naive.

A well brought up girl also cultivated defenselessness.   Irish maleness was dedicated to protecting women, so a woman with any capability of self-defense was undermining maleness.  This was culturally unacceptible.

A well brought up girl also cultivated sweetness.  Any edges in her self-presentation would signal a shrew of the future.  Wives were supposed to be sweet and dutiful.  Failures on the sweetness scale could leave a girl very single.

As Marcella's history unrolls, it seems her sweetness scale was always on the low side. 

Sending a boatload of brawling young Irish men to New York and sending a boatload of sweet naive defenseless young Irish women to New York were entirely different art forms. 

The men going to New York were treated a step above a cattle boat.  They were shoved into steerage, the hatch was shut, and they were pushed off to New York where they could take care of themselves.

A young Irish girl being unprotected in New York was every father's nightmare.

So the Irish developed a system of protecting their women every step along the way from the Old World to the New World.

The women's transportational system was more like delivering the crown jewels in an armored convoy.

Neither the men nor the women went directly to New York.  Ireland's maritime capability was largely fishing boats.  It was Britannia who ruled the waves.  So the route for the Irish was to go to Dublin, and from Dublin to take a boat to Liverpool, and from Liverpool to go to New York.  Even the Irish from distant County Kerry knew the Mersey River.

It was from Liverpool that the Irish went to America, to the British Midlands where the Industrial Revolution was providing jobs, to Canada, and even to Australia.  The main thrust was to New York where the Irish would quickly outnumber the Irish in Dublin.
Then from New York the Irish could spread all over America.

Protecting women was the Irish culture.  St. Patrick's parish in New York had a cadre of very large Irishmen who would protect and safely escort arriving women to a safe place.  If any New York scum came near, they would be flattened.  The fractious Irish become a smooth working machine when their women were threatened.

So Dubliners John and Bessy had little choice but to send their daughter Marcella to America.  America could offer marginal low-paying jobs where she could at least support herself after a fashion.  Ireland could not do this.   Above all the pool of potential husbands in America was  different from that in Ireland.   What was small and limp in Ireland was brimming over with Ireland's best in America.  In America there were a smaller number of good Irish Catholic girls available for wives.  The supply and demand picture notably reversed.

The safe delivery machinery was pretty much in place.  But the delivery point for Marcella had yet to be determined.

Setting up Marcella's destination took time because mail was slow.  Her parents started the process when Marcella was 16.  She boarded her shipload of all young Irish Catholic girls when she was 17.

Dublin was a big city, and like all big cities, had its nasty side.  John and Bessy knew this.  So having their daughter young and single in New York offered frightening prospects.

The parameters John and Bessy adopted were keeping Marcella as far as possible from the allurements of a big city, and having their good Irish Catholic girl surrounded by good Irish Catholics who would go to Mass on Sunday, go to confession when necessary, say the Rosary, and never eat meat on Friday.  A place supportive of a good Irish Catholic girl.

They found the perfect place.

It was in Ohio.

Marcella's new home was about 10 miles south of Springfield in Clark county.  Springfield was tiny before the Civil War.  Her new home was near a post office located in a feed store at a crossroads named Selma.  Tall Ohio corn to the horizon was the perfect buffer from any allurements of any big city.

Amidst the corn was a large house filled with Irish Catholics.

She was in an Irish Catholic world which would keep her the good Irish Catholic girl she was.

Here she was hired into her low-paying marginal job which was prearranged from Dublin.

She became a hired girl.

She could support herself in a world that had opportunities Ireland lacked.

She was 17.

It wasn't much, but ahead of the Ireland of her future.

Four years later, when she was 21, she faced a 1860 census tabulator.

He asked her name, and wrote down exactly what he heard.

Marcille Barnes.

If you say Marcella Burns with a working class Dublin brogue, Marcille Barnes is pretty much what you get.

She was in no position to correct the error.  She was illiterate.

There was no social stigma connected to illiteracy in Ireland.  Reading and writing were like astral navigation and Latin.  You learned them if you needed them.  If you didn't need them, there was no point in learning them.  You didn't need literacy to be a plasterer or a wife and mother.  

This gave Ireland an almost completely verbal culture.  Everyone talked and talked and talked.  In naturally competitive situations, one would show they can outtalk anyone around.  This would push everyone else to talk more colorfully than anyone else.  This verbal competitive pyramid escalated into wonderfully colored language.  This also produced instinctive storytellers.  Dad could tell a story.  And Dad was funny.

Martin Luther made illiteracy a social stigma in Germany.  You can't read the bible if you can't read.  So the Agels were finely literate.

The alpha male at Marcella's new home was a Christopher Truitte who himself came from Ireland.  He was the father of a patch of infants and toddlers.  He also somehow came by another patch of infants and toddlers from a Kinney family.  Their parents weren't around.

This resulted in an unusually large number of infants and toddlers, even by Irish standards.

Marcella gave the census tabulator her profession as hired girl.   A hired girl is a girl hired to do the jobs no one else wants to do.

So Marcella,  the first Burns in America, was up to her ears in used diapers.

That was the bad news.

The good news was that Christopher Truitte was the superintendant of the railroad abuilding in that part of Ohio.  On his property was a bunkhouse loaded with Ireland's finest who layed tracks, built little white stations, and tore up staid Protestant towns.

Since she was the only Irish Catholic nubile girl within many miles, her chances of getting married shot up to inevitability.

She picked Michael Grimes from the bunkhouse.

They moved to Plain City into the little house Francy and I found,  Here Michael continued in track maintenance.

They had no children.

It would seem that Marcella was always a difficult woman, and became more and more difficult as she aged.

The trains to Chicago which rattled Dad's house also rattled the house of Michael and Marcella.

On a given day Michael decided that enough Marcella was more than enough, so he got on a train to Chicago and disappeared from Burns history.

Marcella became the ward of Dad's father, Joseph Burns, and followed the family to Columbus.

Marcella continued her downward pesonality slide.

Marcella developed into a banshee of gloom.  Every bright side had a dark side, and every dark side had a darker side.

Dad was having one of the most difficult times of his life taking Joseph's place to support Joseph's family.

He was forced by circumstances to be where he didn't want to be, and do what he didn't want to do.

In these dark times, Aunt Marcella spread an endless shroud of doom over his life.

She was a spider in the corner spinning dark webs.

She was relentless.

She made returning home a bad experience.

Dad lost all tolerance of negativity for the rest of his life.

Dad made a dike through his history.  It had a front side which was from Mom forward, and a back side which was the era before Mom.

Mom was allowed to see both sides, but his children were only allowed to see the front side.

Eliza Nugent had a sister three years younger named Susan.  When Susan was born, the best Eliza could manage the word Susan was Tude.  The name stayed, and Aunt Tude was the last Nugent to hold the farm of Francis Michael Nugent.

We loved to go there and Dad took us often.  We enjoyed it immensely.  Some of the most wonderful memories of our chidhood were on Aunt Tude's farm. 

There were two ways to get to Aunt Tude's farm, one from the south and one from the north.  When we came from the north, we went  through Plain City, and right down Chilicothe where Dad's boyhood home was, and where he played as a boy.

He never once mentioned he had any connection with Plain City as we were driving down Chilicothe to cross the railroad.

It was on the far side of the dike.

Dad's shop was on 17th St. and was called The Barn.  Next to The Barn lived an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi.  He had a young son named Jakie Greenwald.  Jakie was the very model of a little Jewish boy.  He always wore his skullcap, had glasses with dark rims, and an aquiline nose. 

Dad and Jakie became good friends and Dad often took him around on his truck during work days.  We were regaled with Jakie events in Dad's stories at the evening meal.

I don't think all my brothers and sisters know that Jakie's house was the very same house where Aunt Marcella made Dad's life as miserable as she could manage.

It was on the far side of the dike.

Aunt Marcella was a powerful exception to the dike.

She broke through the dike with flair.

She became the ever-present symbol of negativity in our family.

Any negative statement was squelched with 'Don't be an Aunt Marcella'.

Dad used it.

'Don't be an Aunt Marcella'.

Mom used it.

'Don't be an Aunt Marcella'.

We used it among ourselves.

If I expressed an opinion that it would rain on the picnic tomorrow, Laurene would hit me with a ' Don't be an Aunt Marcella'.

We weren't fatuous Polyannas.  It just added a positive touch to the language of our home.

A positive view became normal; a negative view was hit with a 'Don't be an Aunt Marcella',

It gave a positive cast to thought which is a Burns characteristic.

Aunt Marcella was dead long before our time, but we lived with her every day.

After Francy's burial, a few of us went to a Burns plot.

A single name was on a stone.

Marcella.

That's she.

Don't be she.

Being Burns No. 19:

A cool April night in 1865 was the night of bonfires in Plain City.

Bonfires were built on both sides of the railroad tracks.

From one end of Plain City to the other end of Plain City.

Bonfires.

The tracks became an aisle of bonfires.

The townspeople gathered by the aisle of bonfires.

The Burnses were there.

Farm families hitched their buggies and came to the aisle of bonfires.

The Nugents were there.

Everyone waited by the aisle of bonfires.

In silence.

In expectation.

At last a train entered the aisle of bonfires.

Slowly.

Barely moving.

And gradually passed by.

Everyone stood.

In silence.

In respect.

In reverence.

It was the funeral train of Abraham Lincoln making its way to Illinois.

Being Burns No. 20:

We were in the worst of the Great Depression, and we would ask for things we simply could't afford.

Or shouldn't have anyway.

Mom and Dad had two different ways of saying no.

Mom:

You children should learn early that there are things in this life you simply cannot have.

A good solid German lesson in life.

Dad:

I'll be seeing to it.

This little Irish flourish launched our request off into space where it would never be heard from again.

It had a postive note about it which avoided the Aunt Marcella trap.

But we all knew the code.

It was on its way to not happeneing.

Being Burns No. 21:

It was advantageous for ocean-going ships and the nation to have ports as far up a navigable river as possible.

The ships would find safe harbor.

The ships would be in a nation's heartland with direct access to importing and exporting.

Thus the locations of Rome, Paris, London, Washington, and Bremen.

Bremen is 38 miles up the Weser River, and an important port in the Middle Ages.

With the invention of iron ocean-going ships with much deeper draft, the Weser could no longer accomodate them.

So at the point where the Weser flows into the Atlantic, the port city of Bremerhaven (Bremen harbor) developed.

While Liverpool was the main port for the Irish coming to America, Bremerhaven was the main port for the Germans.

The Germans were by far the largest group of immigrants in the 19th century, so Bremerhaven was a great deal busier than Liverpool.

The Irish made a great deal more noise than the Germans.  The Germans quietly and efficiently took their place in America.

The German contribution in making America is enormous.

In September 1884, the two men of the Agel family arrived in America from the farm village of Kriegsdorf.

They had come from Bremerhaven, and landed at Baltimore on the ship Nurnberg.

From Baltimore they came to 421 Siebert St. in Columbus.

They were both Josefs -- one was 42 and the other 11.

Their choice of Columbus would rest on relatives and friends from Kriegsdorf who had previously immigrated to Columbus.

They would be greeted by friendly faces who had served as contacts in preparing a home for the new arrivals, and lining up jobs.

The two Josefs were the first wave of the Agels to prepare the way for the rest of the family which would arrive the following May.

They left behind the wife and mother, Magdalena Heger, and four children: Johannis Nepomuc, Amalia, Ferdinand, and Adolf.

Josef and Magdalena married on March 2, 1864 in the Dreieinigheit, the Church of the Holy Trinity, in Kriegsdorf.

Kreigsdorf was east enough that the Dreieinigheit had an onion-shaped dome, a byzantine feature.

Calling the dome onion-shaped would be western ignorance--it was seen by those who know as flame-shaped.

Both the Agel and the Heger families had been farm families at Kreigsdorf for centuries.

We can trace the Agels at Kriegsdorf back to about 1720.  This is when the records of Kriegsdorf started, not the Agels.

From these historical farming depths came the tradition of loving and caring motherhood.

Magdalena's daughter Amalia, and granddaughter Mom,  were extraordinary mothers.

Farmer Francis Michael Nugent of Madison County south of Plain City was likely from an Irish West County family which had been farmers for centuries.

The Nugents produced a wonderful mother in Eliza.  She held up and did a heroic job in terrible circumstances.

Amalia Agel and Eliza Nugent were almost clones .  Nothing fancy.  No pretentions.  Both square and sturdy.  Both farm girls.  Both extraordinary mothers.  Mom and Dad loved and respected their mothers.

Both married poorly:  Joseph Burns was a dysfunctional alcoholic and Frank Fetter a functional alcoholic.

The generation before Mom and Dad held two strong and loving mothers who wonderfully succeded, and two fathers who largely failed.

The next spring the rest of the Agels left for the home the two Josefs had prepared for them at 421 Siebert in Columbus.

They boarded the ship Salier in Bremerhaven and arrived in New York on May 12, 1885.

Magdalena was 43.
Johannis Nepomuc was 11 by now, being a year younger than Josef.
Amalia was 9.
Ferdinand was 3.
Adolf was 8 months.

The name Magdalena was too long for the form, so the immigration officer put down Mag followed by a squiggle.

Johannis Nepomuc who was called Hannis when he was younger, was upgraded to the more urbane Johann at immigrations.

Amalia was misspelled as Amalie.  The name Amalia is spelled 5 or 6 different ways in her American official records.  Even Emily appears.  My sister Camilla got the genealogical records from Alois Agel, the last Agel to have lived in Kriegsdorf, and these records are extremely accurate.  Amalia is a name which had been bouncing around Kriegsdorf for centuries.  Amalia is how Kriegsdorf had always spelled it.

Ferdinand died shortly after arriving in Columbus.

Adolf was only a month old when the two Josefs left Kriegsdorf.  This was certainly part of the delay of seven months between the first wave and the second wave -- getting Adolf old enough to travel safely.  Adolf died shortly after arriving in Columbus.

The Agels left five children buried in the cemetery of the Dreieinigheit back in Kriegsdorf.

Anna died at 14 months.
Ferdinand died at 21 days.
Franz died at 2 years, 3 months.
Franz died on the day of his birth.
A child who was stillborn appears in the document of the registrar as simply:  Kind -- child -- who lived 0 months, 0 days.

Having a Ferdinand on the ship and also in the cemetery where there were two Franzes gave me a research problem.

I found the answer.

The German custom differs from the Irish custom.  The Germans could reuse a name of a deceased child while the Irish could not.

Francis Michael Nugent was the father of a son he named Francis Michael Nugent.  The son died as a baby, so the name was used up.

Before Dad left for the orphanage in Columbus, his grandfather old Francis Michael Nugent asked Dad to name his first son Francis Michael.

Dad was still in his early teens, and agreed to do so.

It took some time, but he did.

Thus we got our splendid Francis Michael Burns.

Being Burns No. 22:

The central event of Dad's life was Mom.  Their marriage was opposed by both their German and Irish families on purely racial grounds.

From this experience he embraced two lifelong principles:  a) there is beauty to be discovered in different cultures; b) the Catholic Church which has done nothing to heal these racial hatreds is a failure.

The momentum of his Irish history did not allow him to reject the Catholic Church completely, but he did reject the Catholic Church as it existed in the America of racial hatred.

He turned to Europe for the Catholic Church he would make the Catholic Church for his family.

Jane Austen, who wrote Pride and Prejudice among other works of fiction, was the daughter of an Anglican priest.   When she deals with the good and bad conduct of the characters in her books, the Anglican church has nothing to do with it.  Good conduct stems from good principles; bad conduct from bad principles.   There is an armload of pagan moralists who would be in complete agreement with her.

Her Anglican church became ritualized from Baptism to Evensong with the only non-scripted element being the Sunday sermon.  Here great care had be taken not to offend the patronage to whom the priest owed his job, lest he lose his ability to support his family.  An analysis was done on the correspondence between Anglican priests of her time, and nearly all of them dealt with preferment -- getting a better job in the Anglican corporate structure to provide a better living for their families.  Religious topics weren't of mutual interest.

The Anglican church, along with the King and Queen, became part of that warm wooly sweater which makes the British feel British.

But they really aren't supposed to do anything.
 
A group of Oxford dons in the middle of the nineteenth century saw this state of affairs and launched a crusade to have the English Church make a difference in English life again.  It became known as the Oxford Movement.

Anglican scholars of this magnitude become so acquainted with past history, that past history becomes like yesterday.  And yesterday has a great deal to tell us about today.

These scholars were medievalist and saw the thirteenth century as the high point in the Catholic Church making a difference in the lives of individuals and nations.

Here Greek, Jewish, and Arabic thought met great Christian minds such as Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and Duns Scotus who produced great works.  Universities were invented in founding Oxford University and the University of Paris.  The Franciscans, Dominicans, and Poor Clares were founded.  The great cathedrals were built.  Guilds flourished as the substructure of a middle class.  Charitable institutions were founded for the less fortunate.  Great saints, both men and women, abounded.

The Oxford dons differed on whether the Tudor intervention in Church history should be saved.  The leader of those who thought it should not be saved was John Henry Newman.  He and many Anglican intellectuals of his day became Roman Catholic.

They all wrote well and spoke well.

The Oxford Movement was a strong voice in Dad's time.

Dad relished Oxford Movement Roman Catholicism with its broad view, its endeavor to make a difference in the lives of individuals and nations, and its roots in a unified Christianity.  Dad decided that Oxford Movement Roman Catholicism would be the Roman Catholicism for his family.

In 1927 when the house at 1449 Studer was completed, Dad and Mom moved in with Veronica and Francy.

He had shelves made in his office where he installed all 50 volumes of the complete works of John Henry Newman.

This was his wall of faith.

We used Corpus Christi Parish as a presence of the Oxford Movement.  But we really belonged to the Oxford Movement.

Mom used to sit at Dad's desk under the great wall of the Oxford Movement  putting some order into Dad's business records.

Dad wasn't a detail person.

He specialized in big.

Being Burns No. 23:

Dad had a circle of old gray-haired black friends about Columbus.

They were soft-spoken courtly gentlemen.

What they all had in common was being slaves as young children.

Dad found the humor and the warmth of their culture endlessly fascinating.

Dad saw the path of entrance into the riches of another culture was sharing its traditional banquet.

He considered picky eaters cultural cripples.

He packed us all into our 1928 Pontiac and unloaded us into the basement of a black church for a traditional dinner.

It was fried chicken.

Dad sat at the head of a table with his family about him.

We were a little circle of white beans in a sea of black.

I was terrified.  I knew black was good, but this was much too much of a good thing.

Dad presided with perfect aplomb and complimented the black ladies who fried the chicken.
 
This seems anything but unusual now,

But it must be seen in its historical context.

At this very same time, local Baptist ministers, who were ex officio members of the Klu Klux Klan, were calling down God's blessing on lynching.

We might ask:  How can this be?

They would answer: That's the way things are.

Being Burns No. 24:

Alicia requested that our dining room mores be included in Being Burns.

1)  Mom and Dad sat at the ends of the table, with Mom being closest to the kitchen.
     The four boys were placed at the corners so they would be under immediate control by Mom or Dad.
     The girls, three on each side, sat across from each other between the boys.

2)  With ten children at the table, cloth tablecloths were impractical.
     We had oilcloth tablecloths.
     The boys soon learned that by picking up the edge of the oilcloth, they could make a sort of gutter below the table.
     By carefully controlling this gutter, they could pour a glass of water into the lap of their choice on their side of the table.

3)  Celery was never served with the tops on.
     The boys tended to use celery with tops to sprinkle the girls.

Being Burns No. 25:

Dad was born a sensitive intellectual with enormous generosity of spirit and insight into others.

Dad would have made a great teacher.

I think the tiny window where the forces of his history allowed Dad to be most himself was teaching public speaking at St. Charles Seminary in Carthegena Ohio.

He did this without being a high school graduate.

It is not all that clear that he actually finished grade school.

Mom was a high school graduate.

She belonged to the world which had German steel in it, 

Here you finish what you begin, and what's worth doing, is worth doing well.

Going to college did not become commonplace until the GI Bill of Rights after WW2 in 1945.

In the miserable youth he spent in Plain City, there were no symbols of hope within his dysfunctional family.  The only two available were within 50 feet of each other: tiny St. Joseph's Church and the railroad.

The Irish ghetto wasn't large enough to have its own pastor.  A priest from St. Patrick's Columbus walked the short distance to Union Station on Sunday, took the train to the little white station at Plain City, and walked the short distance to St. Joseph's.  Irish culture was railroad-bound because an army of young Irishmen built the railroad. 

Out of St. Joseph's as a symbol of his youth and under the impetus of his spirit,  Dad migrated to the Oxford Movement of John Henry Newman, and here he met the mind and spirit most like his own, Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

The railroad had an enormous effect on the psyche of the little Irish ghetto   The Irish built it, so it was very much like their own.   Everyone worked for the railroad or had relations who did.  And everyone's home was shaken day and night by the mighty steam engines roaring toward Chicago.

Dad saw Chicago as salvation from the misery of Plain City.
Columbus and the orphanage were the wrong direction.

As a kid on the edge of starvation, he could see the dining car go by where sumptuous meals were being served.
A good meal became a center from which he went all directions.

He could see passengers sipping coffee which must be the best in the world.
He later learned that the brand of coffee served was Manor House, roasted on the south side of Chicago.
We always had Manor House shipped from Chicago at home.
Dad spent his life in pursuit of the perfect cup of coffee.
But Manor House was never questioned.

The railroad also brought a totally unexpected seminal symbol into Dad's life.

In 1896, when Dad was 11,  a train stopped in Plain City with its caboose even with Chilicothe St., a block or so from his home.
Dad hurried down to see what was going on.
Townspeople gathered from all over.
They waited in expectation.
There was a little porch on the rear of the caboose.
Out onto that little porch strode a leonine figure.
It was the liberal Democrat candidate for the presidency of the United States.

William Jennings Bryan.

He delivered his most famous oration.

The Cross of Gold.

His oratory mesmerized the whole country.
Oratory became a national ideal.
Oratory competitions sprung up everywhere.

Dad was stunned.
He never dreamed that such power and beauty was possible.
Its contrast to the miserable scene of Plain City made it even more powerful.
This oration remained fresh in his mind and spirit for the rest of his life.

At the basis of this oratory was a huge voice which could fill a hall.
The ornamentation which was so persuasive were variations of this huge voice.
The invention of sound amplification in 1906 cut away the basis of William Jenning Bryan's style of oratory.
By amplification a normal voice could fill a whole hall.
An amplified normal voice opened up the art of persuasion to a much larger constituency.
A normal voice could be as dramatic and persuasive.

Opera withstood the invention of sound amplification by continuing to develop huge voices which fill an opera house.
Oratory was unable to do so.

The golden age of oratory was from 1896 to 1906, when Dad was between the ages of 11 and 21.
Oratory of this grandiloquence was a passing phenomenon for the rest of the country, but not for Dad.

The first icon in Dad's office at 1449 was the collected works of John Henry Newman.

The second icon was a composite of photographs of William Jennings Bryan delivering The Cross of Gold oration.

Dad first heard William Jennings Bryan when he was 11, in the fifth grade, and was in St. Vincent's Orphanage before he was in the eighth grade.

The orphange made no pretenses at trying to advance the academic careers of the orphans.

Their sole orientation was to give the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic as a basis of getting a job.

The main thrust was to give job experience so the orphans could support themselves.

The job experience they gave Dad was at the Josephinum Church Furniture plant at about Rich and 4th in Columbus.

His job was polishing the church pews they manufactured.

A classic example of a fine mind being wasted.

When Dad returned to take over his father's business, he had virtually no academic qualifications.

Dad wasn't the only male in the family.

He had a brother John who was a year older, and a brother Joseph who was three years younger.

Dad was the middle son.

His brothers married quite young and got out of there.

This left Dad with the responsibility of his father and mother, all his sisters, their children, an occasional husband of his sisters, and the formidable Aunt Marcella.

Dad never had any technical or mechanical interests.  He was a people person.  His being forced into the plastering trade was against who he was.  But he did it anyway.

Aunt Tude was particularly fond of Dad because she knew of the great sacrifice he was making for her sister Eliza Nugent.

Dad was eager for a formal education, but he had virtually no academic background to get into the normal educational stream.

An opportunity opened up for him.

In 1895 a Samuel Smith was a professor of music at Ohio Northern Normal School in Ada Ohio.  The school specialized in preparing teachers for the rapidly expanding public school systems.  Smith saw a teacher's market in Columbus and decided to open up a school of music there.  This was easily done because it was long before accreditation standards were devised.  As he was preparing to do this, the great ten year oratory boom of 1896 caught the teaching world by surprise.  So he added oratory to his school and obtained the services of Frank Fox to take care of the oratory side.  They purchased a rather ordinary home at 1078 Neil Ave. in Columbus, and put a sign on it: The Capitol College of Oratory and Music.  Music capability was everywhere, but they were in on the ground floor of the oratory boom.  The school flourished and lasted as long as the oratory boom -- 1896 to 1906.

There didn't seem to be any academic prerequisites, so Dad signed up and took the required courses to receive the degree of Bachelor of Oratory of The Capitol School of Oratory and Music.

He recorded The Cross of Gold speech.  It seems to have been lost.

This training gave Dad a sonorous oratorical capability which he could turn on at any minute.  This added color to his colorful story telling skill.

He required that all his sons take public speaking lessons. 

Dad saw this as keeping the torch of oratory alive until grand oratory returned.

Dad was absolutely unable to see something of the power and beauty of grandiloquent oratory becoming anachronistic.  He saw it as temporarily behind a cloud, but would return again.

After the school foundered, he worked with Frank Fox to have it opened again.  Dad actually became the owner of the title of The Capitol College of Oratory and Music. 

But they had made a powerful enemy, Ohio State University.  Through the state legislature they made reopening impossible.

Dad was no friend of Ohio State University.

To the first two icons in his office, the complete works of John Henry Newman and the framed pictures of William Jennings Bryan, he added a third.  A framed diploma from The Capitol College of Oratory and Music which proclaimed him a Bachelor of Oratory.

There was a fourth.  A framed copy of Joyce Kilmer's poem Trees.

Dad met a Father Leo Sponar CPPS from a Bavarian based congregation which specialized in giving missions to parishes to revitalize their Catholic life.  Their American seminary was in Carthegena Ohio among the Bavarian Catholic farmers of Mercer County.

This introduced the name Leo to the Burnses.

Speaking at missions was their primary occupation, and they had no formal training in public speaking.

For years Dad went up there on weekends to teach classes in public speaking.

I think this tiny window was where Dad felt most himself.

You have to admire him.

He gave all he had.

A good man.

Being Burns 26:

Dad was the overarching ideational sky of our kitchen.

He found recipes which would connect us with cultures no one could find on the map.

He shopped for all the ingredients, each coming with a story of rich history and geography.

This was the end of his contribution.

He left to Mom the task of putting all this grandiosity on someone's plate.

He never came into the kitchen during cooking.

He wasn't a nuts and bolts person.

Mom was a fine cook and held up her end of his cosmos with distinction.

There was one thing that was dropped on her which she didn't enjoy doing at all.

That was Yorkshire Pudding.

There was a risk factor in it.

To puff up or not to puff up, that was the risk.

While she succeded most of the time, she did have her failures.

Ovens did not get as hot in her day.

Failed Yorkshire Pudding is delicious.

It was likely that way for centuries until someone overheated it.

No one calls a dish with mountains and valleys a pudding.

Puddings are generally flat things with raisins showing.

Dad's problem with the our Yorkshire Pudding was its lack of cultural authenticity.

The recipe came from the Fanny Farmer cookbook.

And the cookbook came from Boston.

The wrong place.

Dad somehow obtained the address of a Yorkshire housewife.

He wrote her asking for her recipe for Yorkshire Pudding.

He made me the official watcher.

A watcher was the one who checked the mailbox, and reported back to Dad.

A watcher was never allowed to tranport any mail lest something be lost along the way.

A watcher was in the information business, not the mail business.

The parameters of the office were made abundantly clear.

I watched and watched until one day it happened.

Amidst the letters with their dull series of president stamps on them, one had a king on it.

And the king wore a crown.

Our mailbox never had it so good.

I reported this to Dad as all good watchers do.

He was as excited as I was.

It was indeed a recipe for Yorkshire Pudding from Yorkshire.

It's authenticity was beyond question.

It had the royal stamp of George V on it.

We made the ceremonial presentation to Mom together.

She was delighted.

The recipe turned out to be exactly the same as the one in the Fanny Farmer cookbook.

The Yorkshire housewife could have copied it from the Fanny Farmer cookbook.

Mom never told Dad.

She used the letter as a marker in her cookbook,  but used the cookbook because it was easier to read.

Mom made Yorkshire Pudding exactly the way she always did.

Dad pronounced it far superior to anything we had ever had before.

Being Burns No. 27:

This is the last picture taken of my brother Francy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This picture was taken of Francy on the front porch of the original home of his namesake and great grandfather Francis Michael Nugent.  The picture dates a week or so before Francy's death.

There has been little visible change to the original house which dates back before the Civil War.   The original outbuildings no longer exist.

This is the girlhood home of his grandmother Eliza Nugent and her younger sister Susan Nugent, Francis Michael's daughters.

Susan Nugent is better known to the family as Aunt Tude.

Both his grandfather Joseph Burns and his grandmother Eliza Nugent were dead before his time.

But we all knew Aunt Tude well.

Francy and I were acolytes at her funeral in the new St. Joseph's Church in Plain City.

There is a window in the church dedicated to Frank Nugent.  This is what Francis Michael Nugent called himself.

Dad wouldn't allow that name for his Francis.

The church was hit by a tornado in 1974.  My brother Francy replastered it.  The steeple has never  been replaced.

The three oldest Burnses with Aunt Tude.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Francy, Jim, and Veronica (Louise at this time).

Dad took the picture about 1930 on the Nugent farm.

Being Burns No. 28:

My long term goal is to pass on Dad's heritage to the 52 of us Burnses.

To him a family is a group of individuals who enjoy each other.

Who are noisy.

Who are somehow most Burns surrounding food.

The rest takes care of itself.

My hope is to make all 52 of us know each other better.

I'm filling in some of our common background to further this.

My measure of success will be that each of us 52 be comfortable enough with one another to bum a free meal when geography permits.

Here you will all be surprised at how Burns all the Burnses are.

All are bright and shiny in their own way.

Burnses don't do dull.

Packages of friends like this are hard to come by.

My first step is to establish a family symbol for the 52 of us.

I have picked a lilac at 1449.


                                 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dad had this lilac planted in 1927 before I was born.

Dad, Mom, Veronica, and Francy moved into 1449 early in 1927.

Countless bouquets have been cut from this lilac for Mother's Day and May celebrations.

It has withstood two families of ten.

It is now under the care of Philomena and Jim.

My brother Francy took the picture.
 
Just a start.

The next step will be sometime later.

I want a little more background on record for now.

Being Burns No. 29:

Aunt Tude had a watch turkey.

It roamed freely on the farm.

It was a huge tom with a particularly nasty disposition.

It tended to put its tail feathers in full array and chase strangers off the farm.

It made sufficient noise to be heard at the next farm.

Aunt Tude had an outhouse of the most primitive order.

Whenever the girls were in the outhouse, the turkey took up a position outside the closed door.

The girls were afraid to come out.

The girls would scream and holler for help.

The usual girl things.

They didn't want to spend the rest of their lives in an outhouse.

The boys would hear them.

They would fetch an adult who wasn't afraid of the turkey.

Leisurely.

Being Burns No. 30:

Dad was extraordinarily proud of his family.

He took every opportunity to show us off.

This is a photograph Dad carried folded in his wallet.

It is of Francy on his first plastering job.

Francy is on the right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can see how young he was.

The ceiling was the property of Ohio State University.

He has the hawk in his left hand which is the right-handed stance.

He was taught to write with his right hand in grade school.

But he was really left-handed.

He would soon be plastering with his left hand.

Francy had a wonderful photographer's eye.

Dad didn't.

The few pictures Mom attempted were worse.

The horizon always had a huge slope to it.

Whenever anyone would show any interest in his family, Dad would pack all ten of us in his Pontiac and roll us out on someone's lawn.

We had been to the circus where a small car was driven into the center ring,  Ten clowns were somehow folded into it.  They exited one after the other to the amazement of the audience.

I felt I was being treated like a clown.

I didn't like it one bit.

Being Burns No. 31:

This is our bobsled.

 At least that is what we called it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From left to right:  Camilla, Francy, Eileen, Leo, John, Jim, Kathleen, Alicia, Veronica, and Laurene.

The time is the winter of 1937.

I have a can of peas in my hands.  It was a Friday night which meant fish.  Mom was serving salmon loaf which required a can of peas she didn't have.  She sent me over to Streng's, a small family store at Thurman and Lockbourne, to get it.  The bobsled picked me up as I was returning.

Since Columbus did not plow streets, they remained packed snow.

Dad would hook up the bobsled to the bumper of the Pontiac with a heavy hemp rope, and pull us around the neighborhood.

It was another family celebration with which Dad filled our lives.

We all looked forward to it.

The first flake of snow always pointed to the bobsled.

This was the third version of the bobsled.

Dad had a carpenter build a flat one.  But we all slid off when Dad turned a corner.

He called the carpenter back to put sides on it.

The wooden runners began to wear. so he had a blacksmith put iron runners on it.

Dad did none of the work.  He wasn't handy with tools.

It was likely the only sled of its type in Columbus.

We never thought in those terms.

It was another celebrational event in Dad's world.

We were about to have Mom's salmon loaf which Dad would declare the best ever.

There would be a great deal of noise and bantering.

Dad would have a story.

What he did in the plastering world would never be mentioned unless it involved a vignette of the human parade.

We barely lived in Columbus, but in Dad's world.

We knew nothing of the misery of Dad's youth.  He never told us anything about it.

By this time we found out he was born in Plain City.  But only as a geographical fact.  Not as an element of Dad's culture.

We knew he had been in an orphanage because he played his laundry number at the games of chance at the Orphan's Picnic every July.  But this was connected in our thinking to another of our celebrational events.  Not as an element of Dad's culture.

We certainly knew about Aunt Marcella.  But only in terms of our family behavior.  Not as an element of Dad's culture.

Our culture was an evolution of a culture we knew nothing about.

Dad was brought up in a dysfunctional family which faced starvation.  There was nothing to celebrate.

So Dad devoted his life to making our lives a celebratory event from beginning to end.

We were to be treated to all he did not have as a youth.

We weren't spoiled children in any sense.

We were brought up to be good children in another world.

We really weren't brought up in Columbus.  We were brought up in not Plain City.

However we knew nothing about Plain City.

None of us understood Dad in depth because we did not know his historical context.

He did what he did because he did what he did.

He was just our colorful Dad.

The only cultural world we knew was Dad's.

The not Plain City world.

And it was a wondrous one.

It was also the way things were.

We had no way of standing outside it and judging it because there was nowhere else to stand.

We had no way of seeing it as unusual or isolated or cloistered.

We would learn that later.

We knew Mom in her historical context.

We never knew Joseph Burns or Eliza Nugent.

They died before our time.

But we knew both Frank Fetter and Amalia Agel.

We especially knew and loved Mom's mother Amalia Agel.

She often came to our home, and we often came to her home.

A lovely motherly woman.

We also knew all Mom's contentious fractious sisters and saw them in action.

There was rarely if ever a time when they all spoke to each other.

Mom used to invite them all to our home  to try to smooth out their relationships with one another.

But to little avail.

Her sister Helen went to the trouble of writing an ersatz genealogy to anger her sister Bernardine.   Helen had Amalia Agel born on a farm in Vienna when she knew perfectly well that Amalia was born in tiny Kriegsdorf.  The genealogy goes downhill from there.  Helen presented it to Bernardine at one of Mom's amnesty sessions in our home.  Bernardine became angry and called it a pack of lies.  All Helen's work served its purpose.  To anger Bernardine.  They both enjoyed the confrontation.  Just another Fetter girl passage of arms.

Mom was a loving peaceful woman.  She abhorred the fractious.

We asked Mom time after time how she could be so different from her sisters.

Her answer was always the same:  I was a love child.

Amalia Agel was pregnant with Mom when she married.

Mom not only did not see this as a stigma, but as a special honor which made her so obviously different from her sisters.

This must be seen in the context of the peasant culture of Kriegsdorf.   A family was so essential to surviving for millennia that head start babies were quite socially acceptable as proof that a family was possible.

Engagements were serious legal events.

Mom provided a climate of love and warmth to Dad's not Plain City.

She worked hard from early morning to late at night to make our home, and she did this lightly and lovingly.

She gave loving texture to Dad's celebrational.

This is where the uniqueness of us 52 started.

Most kids in Columbus had small sleds called Flexible Flyers.

Kids grabbed rear bumpers to be pulled by cars on the packed snow.

What few hills Columbus had were crowded with kids from all over the city using the hill to slide down.

Here there would be the usual pushing and shoving.  The establishing of pecking orders.  The tears and skirmishes.  The returns to the fray.  The establishment and realignment of friendships.  The hard knocks from others coming from very different backgrounds.  The comfort of finding some understanding in all this difference.  Earning a viable position which one could enjoy.    Seeing that there wasn't a great deal of generosity of spirit, but a great deal of self-interest. Finding a place in this society. The jungle skills of our evolutionary history were being honed.  Gaining an acquaintance and tolerance for the inherently hurtful dimension of society.

Adjusting to the real world.

This is what kids were doing, and this is the time to do it.   If this skill of dealing with the hurtful dimension of society is not learned as a kid, this dimension grows into a massive affront to an adult.

Human history goes on.  If one's early life is outside it, adult insertion into human history is costly.

We had little of these skills because we had a bobsled in a loving celebrational home.

There was a grinding reality in Plain City where Dad's family succumbed to it.

But that grinding reality was just as present in Columbus as everywhere else.

Removing the family from that grinding reality into a not Plain City home did not make that grinding reality go away.

But it left us with poor skills for dealing with it.

Our first total exposure to the real world was in leaving 1449.

We all crashed in our own way.

Francy's crash in the Navy was the most notable because it happened in such a short time.

But we all, including Mom, had our own Navies.

We all had experienced too much of a good thing.

All 52 of us have much of the genius of Dad and Mom to be thankful for.

Only my generation had to crash and regroup for the real world.

But Dad's and Mom's love and heart gave us the strength to regroup and thrive.

Being Burns. No. 32

The sheer size of our family made it made it socially self-sufficient.

Dad added event after event surrounded by Irish rhetoric which made this self-sufficiency exciting and fun.

We were solidly Roman Catholic which Dad had rooted in the 13th century based Oxford Movement with its advocate G K Chesterton.

Our social policy was 23rd century.  We saw ethnic diversity as America's richness.  We couldn't even understand ethnic discrimination.

We were taught to make generosity of spirit instinctive.

We were taught to be positive and upbeat.  The shadow of Aunt Marcella loomed over us.

We were taught to enjoy life.
The downside, which was unintended, was that we were relatively cloistered, spared the knocks and bruises which makes children grow up and come to terms with their own times.

We were all young for our age, and virtually without skills for entering the 20th century without considerable cost.

In the information age of American society today (2010), a cloistered family like ours would be almost impossible.

But in the 1930's and 1940's it was real.

We had a wonderful youth which was the antithesis of Dad's miserable life in Plain City.

But is was flawed.

Dad grew up very quickly in the 19th century and came to terms with his times immediately.  He had no choice.

He spared us the equivalent in our youth.

Dad had no master plan for our family.   He just did what he felt was right at a given time in given circumstances.  It is only at a great distance that a pattern of consistency appears. 

Dad would be unaware of it.  The consistency was who he was.

I see him as the catalyst most influential in making us who we are.

Mom flowered in his world.

My brother Francy enlisted in the wartime US Navy in 1944.

He returned to Columbus in 1945.

It was a crushing experience for him.

He was so bent over when he returned that a brace was put on his back to straighten his spine.

He never talked about his experience.

We all respected this and didn't bring the subject up.

I don't think his children know anything about his Navy experience.

But I have picked up bits and pieces of his Navy career over time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Francy came back from the Navy stooped over.

This he attributed to spending a long time in cramped crew quarters aboard his ship.

The family knew that submarines had cramped quarters so Mom thought he was on a submarine.

Since no one talked with him about his Navy experience,  this was never corrected.

He was not on a submarine but on a surface ship of the ATA class.

This is a 2009 photograph of the ATA-202.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eighty-four ATA's were built in Texas shipyards during WW2.

Few remain and none in their original WW2 configuration.

The ATA 202 is now preserved as a protected historic ship called the Comanche.

It is being restored to its original WW2 configuration.

It is berthed in Tacoma, Washington.

It is 143 feet long.

It chiefly consists of two large diesel electric engines, a 9 foot propeller, and a winch of heavy cable at the stern.

It was a heavy duty sea-going tug powerful enough to tow a battleship.

It was lightly armed with two machine guns and a 3" gun.


The ATA-202 was not Francy's ship.

Francy's  ATA was a sister ship.

But Francy would not be able to tell the difference between the restored ATA-202 and his ATA.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On May 14th of 1944, Francy would become 18.

Since it was WW2 wartime, he most certainly would be drafted into the Army immediately.

There was an unquestioned mantra in Columbus at this time:  enlist in the Navy before the Army gets you,

So in early May 1944 Francy enlisted in the Navy.

He was sent to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center which is on Lake Michigan about half way between Chicago and Milwaukee.

He had three months of basic training there.

Francy had a high level of mechanical skills.

He was selected to go into an additional three months training as an electrician assigned to an ATA.

In early January of 1945 Francy boarded his ATA in San Diego as a seaman electrician.

His ship had been brought from Texas through the Panama Canal to San Diego.

Francy was in electrician school in Great Lakes when the ATA-202 left San Diego for the war in the Pacific.

Francy's ATA left San Diego a few months later so it was slightly newer.

The atom bomb was dropped in August of 1945, so Francy's active duty was about 8 months.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Francy's theater of war was a large triangle in the Philippine Sea which is the Pacific Ocean between the Philippines and Japan.

He was based in a fishing village in Mindanao in the Philippines,  and operated at the Battle of Okinawa to the north, and the naval repair facility at Ulithi Atoll to the east.

His ATA would tow damaged ships from the Battle of Okinawa to Ulithi Atoll where they were repaired for the expected invasion of Japan.

He sent a picture home where he was standing at the juncture of two mud roads in the Philippines.

He added the caption:  this is the Broad and High of where I live now.   The two main streets from which Columbus grew are Broad and High.

The Navy learned a lesson at Pearl Harbor to keep the fleet as dispersed as possible.

The Battle of Okinawa was the most costly of the Pacific war where 300,000 were killed, including Allies and Japanese, military and civilians.

The Navy had more ships here than D-day in Europe, and sustained more damage than any time in its history.

There was an abundant need for ATA's to tow damaged ships.

Most of the damage to the Navy was through Japanese kamikaze pilots.

These piloted fighter planes with a large bomb strapped on them which were flown directly into the most vulnerable parts of ships, sacrificing the life of the pilot.

There were more than a thousand of them.

These were able to fly directly from the Japanese mainland.

The one-way flight doubled their range.

In towing a damaged ship from Okinawa to Ulithi, Francy's ATA was hit by a typhoon.

The cable broke with the backlash cutting the seaman at the winch apart.

The ship they were towing drifted out of sight.

The ATA was disabled and was dead in the water.

Using naval resources to rescue a service ship at the height of the Battle of Okinawa was out of the question.

Everything the Navy could manage was occupied in this massive battle.

Francy's ATA drifted in the Philippine Sea for perhaps months with little food or water.

We don't know exactly how long Francy drifted, but it was a long time.

Francy could have spent the major part of his active service in the Navy adrift.

The quarters were cramped because it was only a service vessel which wasn't designed for long voyages.

These were the cramped quarters he referred to.

The morale of the sailors on board became frightening.

Francy referred to a knife fight.

He hadn't developed defenses for this world.

Nothing in his background gave him the necessary toughness to cope with this.

Here he suffered most.

He returned to San Francisco at the end of the war.

When he visited San Francisco in 1971,  we walked together out to the center of the Golden Gate Bridge.

While we were looking out to sea, he said:  Jimmy, you will never know how glad I was to see this bridge.

Francy's naval career was a perfect storm of sorts:  a bad time in his life met a bad time in the Navy's life.

No one was to blame.

He put it behind him.

He grew back mightily.

I am drawing up a list of physical tactile places which Burnses can visit to refresh our heritage.

I think this will prove an effective way to make our genealogical table real.

The ATA-202 in Tacoma will be on the list.

Being Burns No.32.1:

The most difficult parts in putting together our history are Dad's youth and Francy's naval career.

I wasn't there and they didn't talk about it.

That isn't much to work with.

Mom knew of Dad's youth and filled in much after his death.

Dad lived in specific places which are reflected in plat maps.

There is census data.

There is the Plain City Historical Society which has been extraordinarily helpful.

There are resources to gather it together.

We don't have anything like that for Francy's naval career.

Mom thought he was on a submarine.

Francy told me he was on an ATA.

I thought I was the only living person who knew this.

I found out from an ATA historian that the ATA's in Francy's time operated between the Battle of Okinawa and Ulithi Atoll.  This was the only useful information he had.

He had the list of those who served on the ATA-202, but Francy was not among them.

The military records in St. Louis might have given the exact ship Francy was on.

They burned in 1973.

Over 50 years ago Francy told me of the typhoon and its consequences.

These jumped out as both his central and worst experience.

He used the phrase:  I spent most of the war adrift.

I misinterpreted this as a physical statement while it was more likely a psychological statement.

I had three major problems with the best reconstruction of the data I could manage:

1) The highest priority is given in the Armed Forces to taking care of their own.  It would be very unlikely that a ship would be adrift for months.

2)  If the broken cable cut a seaman apart, it would be too high to foul up the 9 foot propeller below.   How could it disable the ship?

3)  An ATA was a large service ship with a crew of over 100.  It would be very unlikely that it would have provisions enough to last months and months adrift.

It seems I wasn't the only living person who knew Francy was on an ATA in a disastrous typhoon.

Francy spoke to his son Gary about it in about 2005.

Gary provided me with details which gives this crucial incident more cogency.

The war in Europe was over and the Atlantic fleet had enough time to join the Pacific fleet.

The invasion of Japan was seen to be the end of the whole war.

The Japanese had a cult of death at this time by which it was more honorable to die than surrender.

It is within this context that the kamikaze flights arose.

The Japanese civilians on Okinawa were issued hand grenades by the Japanese army to commit suicide rather than surrender.

The invasion of the mainland would be unthinkably costly in human lives.

Okinawa was Japanese territory.  It was populated with Japanese citizens.

It was the base from which the invasion of the Japanese mainland was to be launched.

Japanese submarines from all over the Pacific were gathered here and the waters were extremely dangerous.

Japanese surface ships were effectively neutralized by this time.

Submarines provided the last desperate strategy of the Japanese navy.

Allied ships moved in convoys protected by ant-submarine destroyers.

Francy told Gary that he was indeed on an ATA but he couldn't remember the name of it.

The service ships didn't have real names at this time.  The ATA-202 was called the ATA-202.

Many of the ATA's were taken over by the Coast Guard after the war, and they received real names here.

Francy's ATA was indeed hit by a typhoon in the open sea while towing a damaged warship.

It was in a convoy on its way to Ulithi Atoll, the repair base.

The cable broke, killing the seaman, but the ATA remained under power.

His ATA rode out the typhoon for three weeks.

Then it retrieved the ship it was towing, and headed for Ulithi Atoll.

The convoy had continued on without them.

Francy's  ATA with the disabled warship was all alone in submarine infested waters.

The top speed of an ATA is 13 knots.  Towing a heavy warship would reduce it to almost walking speed.

It's slight armament couldn't protect it from submarines.

Any Japanese submarine noticing it could sink it easily without resistance.

It was during this slow long harrowing unprotected journey to and from Ulithi that the discipline of the ship broke down.

Okinawa to Ulithi is over a thousand miles.

It was unlikely that the sailors on an ATA received any shore leave during the terrible Battle of Okinawa which did so much damage to the Allied navy.

Francy was likely stooped over from spending his whole naval career on a service ship.

An ATA didn't have the accommodations found on a warship.

Thanks to Gary, I think we have a better picture of Francy's naval career.

It isn't any prettier.

There was nothing in Francy's background which prepared him to deal with this.

He was a gentle person.

This is as far as I care to go with Francy's naval career.

Being Burns No. 33:

Anne and Joseph Burns with their great-grandmother Amalia Agel.

She would be my brother Francy's grandmother and Mom's mother.

Her husband was Frank Fetter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amalia was a lovely motherly woman.  The strength of the Fetter household.

She arrived with her mother Magdalena Hager in New York in May 1885.  They had arrived on the SS Salier  from Bremerhaven.  They had come from Kriegsdorf and gave as their place of origin Austria.

Amalia was 9.

Her father, Josef Agel, had arrived in Baltimore the previous September to prepare the way to Columbus.  He had arrived on the SS Nurnberg from Bremerhaven.  He had come from Kriegsdorf and gave as his place of origin Austria.

One could reasonably suppose from the above that Kriegsdorf was in Austria.

Both the Agels and the Hagers were from old, old Kriegsdorf families.

Amalia was a well educated little girl who wrote letters back to her friends in Kriegsdorf for years.

She remembered many details of her early life.

Her family knew about these many details.

Mom used to tell us about them.

Mom's first language was German.

She didn't learn English until she started grade school.

Mom always started  Kriegsdorf tales by translating it from the German: Battle Village.

Here the kids used to scamper about and play by the stream that was just outside their home.  Amalia could see the stream from a window while she was washing dishes.  There was a bridge over the creek where the kids used to fish.  They had great fun.

I pictured them all dressed in Austrian costumes:  lederhosen and long colorful skirts. Little hats with feathers in the band.

I made up my mind when I was about 6 that when I grew up I would go to Kriegsdorf someday and play with these children.

My sense of history needed work.

Over the years whenever an Austrian map would come my way,  I would check for Kriegsdorf, but I could never find it.  I figured it was too small to make the map.

When I was at the University of Munich, I decided enough was enough.

I would find Kriegsdorf and go there.

It was time for the heavy artillery.

I went down to Vienna to the Wienerstadtbiblothek.  This is the Austrian equivalent of the Library of Congress only much more pretentious.  Its is staffed by scholars who know everything there is to know about Austria.  I had sufficient academic credentials so they would speak with me.

None of them had ever heard of Kriegsdorf but they took up the challenge.  Everyone in the building was dragging out maps which went back to Roman times.

After hours and hours of research by Austria's best, they came to a unanimous conclusion,

There is not, nor has there ever been, a village named Kriegsdorf in Austria.

My assumption that an Austrian living in Kriegsdorf would require a Kriegsdorf to be in Austria was somehow faulty.

It wasn't until much later in the year 2000 that I heard the magic word which would unlock the  mystery.

I heard that word in the corner of the porch of the cabin on Francy's farm.

It was uttered during a conversation with Mom's sister Bernardine, the last surviving member of Amalia's family.

My brother Francy happened to take a picture at this very time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was regaling her with the woeful tale of my lifelong search for the elusive Kriegsdorf.

During the course of our conversation,  she mentioned that her mother Amalia Agel referred to herself as maerisch.

MAERISCH was the magic word.

The heavens opened up.

It is German for Moravian.

Moravia is most certainly not in Austria.

Czechoslovakia was formed after WW1 from three provinces from the now defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire:  Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia.  Slovakia broke away later, so Moravia is now the eastern half of the Czech Republic.

I rushed to a Czech map of Moravia, but there wasn't a German name on it anywhere.

I obtained a German map of the Austro-Hungarian province of Moravia.

Behold there was a village named Kriegsdorf.

It was way up in the northeast corner of the province of Moravia, within hiking distance of Poland to the north and Slovakia to the east.

It wasn't even near Austria.

It was about as nowhere as one can get in Europe.

The Czech name for Kriegsdorf was  Vojnovice.

Amalia left Kriegsdorf when it was the Moravian Province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Her train to Bremerhaven would cut up through Germany and would get farther and farther away from Austria.

It is very unlikely that Amalia ever got even near Austria.

Why would she call herself Austrian?

Because all the Germans who came from the northern parts of Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia called themselves Austrian.

The name Moravian Province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire has three geographic possibilities.

Moravia, Austria, and Hungary.

Hungary was out of the question because Germans weren't Magyars.

Moravian was the obvious choice, but had a serious problem.

There was ethnic hostility between Germans to the north of Moravia and the Slavs to the south which had gone on for millennia.

When in Moravia, the ethnic groups distinguished themselves by Moravian in their own languages: maerisch and marovsky.

This wouldn't work in America.

Both are translated into English as Moravian.

The bulk of Moravia was Slav so the German maerisch would be thought of as Slav in America.

The Germans saw this as an intolerable slur.

So the German-speaking Moravians chose to be from Austria.

This has something to be said for it.

Austria could be understood as an abbreviation of  Austro-Hungarian Empire.

But it was really an intentional deception.

It fooled me.

Moravia wasn't considered a very good address.

The Moravians were considered country bumpkins.

Bohemia was considered a much better address.

Mozart premiered Don Giovanni in its capital, Prague.

Austria was considered the best address of all.

Austria had historical depth while Germany was just forming at this time.

Vienna was the center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Here is where the Hapsburgs emperors lived with their many palaces and gardens.

Being seen as German-speaking Moravians would put them on the fringe of both the German and Slavic ghettos in Columbus.

Being German-speaking Austrian was a step above being just German.

The sense of displacement which all immigrants shared needed all the support it could get.

Life was tough enough without a lot of ethnic baggage.

In the latter half of the 19th century, Bismark put modern Germany together.  He took the welter of all the small German-speaking states which were remnants of feudal times, and formed them into a single nation.

There were two major German-speaking populations he couldn't touch because he was no match for the Austro-Hungarian emperor. 

These were Austria itself and what the Germans called the Sudetenland.

The Sudetenland was the strip of German-speakers across the north of the Austro-Hungarian provinces of Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia.

Kriegsdorf was in the Sudetenland.

Hitler saw himself as the successor of Bismark.  He would complete what Bismark could not.

By a clever bit of political maneuvering called the Anschluss, he brought Austria into the Third Reich.

The Sudetenland was part of Czechoslovakia at this time.

In 1938, in the Munich Agreement, England, France, and Italy ceded the Sudetenland to Hitler without consulting the Czechs.  This was done to appease Hitler in order to avoid WW2.  Hitler was not appeased, and continued on to take the rest of Czechoslovakia,

Kriegsdorf was now part of the Third Reich.

The men of fighting age in Kriegsdorf were drafted into the Wehrmacht, and were replaced on the farm by POW's from the Russian front.

Northern German-speaking Moravians were now the conquerors of southern Slavic-speaking Moravians. 

The age-old ethnic hostility was at white heat.

The German response to the Czech underground was the same in all the occupied countries. 

The reprisal for any German soldier killed by the underground was picking a group of random civilians, lining them up, and shooting  them.  If the incident was in a village, the village would be razed by bulldozers.

The Czechs had a great number of their villages razed by the Nazi army.

At the end or the war in 1945, the Czechs deported the whole German-speaking population of the Sudetenland back into Germany.

In 1946 the Czechs razed many of the former German-speaking villages.

This was in retaliation for the many Czech villages the Nazi army had razed.

It was also a signal to the Germans.

if you ever dare return, there will be no place for you to live.

Alois Agel, the last of the Agels to have farmed Kriegsdorf, was deported in 1945.

He took up residence in the Bavarian town of  Ettlingen near the Black Forest.

The Czechs razed Kriegsdorf by bulldozers in 1946.

Nothing left standing.

Flat.

We had at last found Kriegsdorf, and it wasn't.

The whole area surrounding Kriegsdorf was turned into a weapons proving range for the Czech military.

Entrance to the site of former Kriegsdorf was strictly forbidden.

The Burnses weren't finished yet.

We had heavy artillery in Rome.

Camilla Burns was the Mother General of the Sisters of Notre Dame.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Through her nuns in Czechoslovakia she got permission from the Czech military to visit the site where Amalia Agel, her grandmother, was born.

In the largely Catholic Czech Republic, it would be career threatening for any Czech military to stand in the way of a Mother General in such an innocent quest.

There is an association in Germany of descendants of Kriegsdorf families.

They can't get in. 

And indeed Camilla was welcomed into the forbidden weapons proving range,

Accompanied by a Czech military guide.

All that remains above ground is this monument Camilla is by.

It marks where Kriegsdorf once was.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The monument commemorates the 50th anniversary of the destruction of 500 year old Kriegsdorf.

Kriegsdorf was a string of houses along a stream with the Dreieinigheit on a rise behind it.

Drei means three.  Einig means only one.  Heit means -ness.

Three-only one-ness is how the Germans say Trinity.

The byzantine-style dome indicates how far east Kriegsdorf was.

The Dreieinigheit was Kriegsdorf's most notable feature.

This is reflected on the monument.

The Czech name is first.

The Czechs want it abundantly clear that this site is Czech.

It would have been politically impossible to have used only the German name.

Soldiers of the Nazi army lived here.

The Czechs remember the horror.

The farmers of Kriegsdorf, in a remote corner of Moravia, were isolated from international events.

They would neither know much nor care much about them.

Their interest would be their families, and the fields their ancestors tilled for centuries.

Yet they got caught up in international events at terrible cost.

What Camilla didn't know at the time was that monument was put up by one of her relatives.

Alois Agel, the last Agel to have lived at Kriegsdorf.

My favorite picture of all.

Camilla on the bridge connecting both sides of the farms.
 
                                             

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can tell by the worn stone that this is a very old bridge.

This is the very bridge the children played on in Amalia Agel's day.

This is where they fished.

This is the bridge which Amalia could see when she washed the dishes.

Amalia called the stream in the picture the Oderl.

Oderl is the diminutive of Oder.

It is actually the beginning of the river Oder.

If Camilla were to get in a kayak and let it drift, she would end up in the Baltic Sea.

The Oder is the historic boundary between eastern and western Europe.

But we weren't finished.

If old Alois Agel was spry enough in 1996 to have a monument built, he might still be alive.

If so, he would very likely have Agel genealogical records.

He indeed was still alive.

Camilla cranked up her German nun-net, and had someone contact old Alois Agel in Ettlingen.

He did have the genealogical record of the Agels, and graciously made us a copy.

These records are meticulous and accurate.

They contained information on the Agels going back to about 1700 where the records start.

From these records we learned that Camilla had a half dozen or so great-aunts and great-uncles who died as infants and were buried in the Dreieinigheit cemetery.

We have the date of the marriage of Josef Agel and Magdalena Hager, Amalia's parent's, in this same church.

We have the date of Amalia's baptism here, and the names of her sponsors.

We also have the dates of the burials in the Dreieinigheit cemetery of Camilla's great-great grandparents, great-great-great grandparents, and great-great-great-great grandparents.  And their birth dates and marriage dates.

The records take us back to when Kriegsdorf was only 200 years old.

I don't doubt that the Agels were there before that.

What is notable in the records is that the Agels who survive infancy live a long, long time.

Old Alois Agel is an example.

He recently got his first computer.

Amalia Agel, Mom, and my brother Francy lived long lives and were as mentally sharp on their last day on earth as ever in their lives.

We always referred to this genetic phenomenon as the Fetter factor.

I think the Agel factor would be more accurate.

The creative and artistic didn't come from Kriegsdorf.

This came from Dublin.

Dublin is far more difficult to access than Kriegsdorf.

A thousand years of Dublin records burned in the Irish civil war of 1922.

Alois Agel's records contained something entirely unexpected.

A little map showing where everyone lived in Kriegsdorf.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a 1920's picture of Kriegsdorf.  The houses were stone so little would have changed since Amalia Agel left there in 1885.

Everything is drab because it is in winter fallow.

 It will be a carpet of green when spring comes.

Spring is the time of year Francy loved most.

One of the big crops was flax.  Linen has to come from somewhere.

The notable feature is the Dreieinigheit on the rise.

The cemetery by it is full of our Burns ancestors.

The red circle surrounds the Agel home.

The Oderl is down an embankment right in front of the house.

It can't be seen from this angle.

The bridge is about three houses to the right.

Somewhere within this red circle was the window Amalia looked out to see the children playing and fishing on the bridge while she was washing dishes.

The satellite view of Kriegsdorf is all treetops.

When tillage ceases, the forest returns.

It took a long time to get this together.

Camilla brought back a piece of stone from the rubble of the Dreieinigheit.

It is a family treasure.

So is Camilla.

Being Burns No. 34:

This is Frank Vincent Fetter (1873-1957).

                                                                  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He was the husband of Amalia Agel, and Mom's father.

Mom thought he was from Pennsylvania.

When Frank registered for the draft during WW1, he said he was from Ohio.

He also told the census takers decade after decade he was from Ohio.

Both Mom and Frank agreed that his parents were from Germany.

Frank spoke German fluently.

Amalia called him Franz.

We also know that he had an older sister, our Aunt Louise.

My generation knew Grandpa Frank and Aunt Louise well.

After a great deal of research,  it was clear that there is no record of a Frank, Franz, Francis or Franciscus Fetter in the United States with anything like his profile until he married Amalia Agel.

No sign of a prehistory at all.

Louise Fetter offered the same problem.  She doesn't appear until married to Charles Strasser.

No sign of a prehistory.

The Mormon data base I use has billions of names.

Frank and Louise exist all over the place after they were married.

There isn't a trace of either before they were married.

We could trace Amalia Agel back to the 1700's in obscure Kriegsdorf in Moravia, but we couldn't find the parents of Frank and Louise in Ohio.

The 'v' sound and the 'f' sound are the same in German.

Vetter and Fetter are both pronounced as Fetter.

So I tried Frank, Franz, Francis, Franciscus  Vetter.

Bingo!

The prehistory of both Frank and Louise popped out.

Frank Vetter was not only born in Ohio, but In Columbus.

Not only in Columbus, but in the same German ghetto as Mom.

About a 15 minute walk north of Frank's and Amalia's and Mom's home at 475 Siebert St.

It was in a Hessian neighborhood.

Ghettos, which are homes away from home for immigrants, tend to break down into further smaller ethnic units.

Frank Vetter was the youngest of four children.

Louisa Vetter b. 1867.  This is Aunt Louise.

John Vetter b. 1868.

Katy Vetter b. 1871.

Frank Vetter b. 1873.

Their parents were Johannes (later John) and Gertruth (pronounced gertroot -- later Gertrude)  Vetter.

In 1880, when Frank was 7, Gertruth told the census taker she was a widow.

This means that Johannes had either died or left the family by then.

Gertruth was born in 1843 and died as Getrude Vetter in Columbus on February 18, 1911.

We don't yet know her family name.

Mom was 15 at her death.

Mom would not have known Johannes.

It was undoubtedly at Amalia's  insistence that Frank Vetter changed the spelling of his name to Frank Fetter.

If her name were spelled Vetter, Americans would pronounce it with a 'v'.

To her German ear, this was a nonsense word.

The name pronounced Fetter was a real German name.

Aunt Louise never was a Fetter.  Her Louisa Vetter became Louise Vetter and then Louise Strasser when she married Uncle Charley.

Uncle Charley was a widower whose first wife was named Wilhemina.

He never had any children by either wife.

Louisa Vetter supported herself before her marriage as a boxmaker.

Charley supported himself as a dashmaker.

Whatever that is.

He later gave his profession as carpenter.

Mom and Dad took care of Aunt Louise and Uncle Charley at 1449 in their final years.

A great sorrow in Aunt Louise's life was that she was one year older than Uncle Charley.

Mom and Dad fudged her tombstone a bit so she could rest in peace.

The Strassers lived on 3rd St directly across from St. Mary's Church.

This became the first home of Francy and Colleen after they were married.                                   

               

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At least Philomena and Cecilia were born there.

Mom was named after Frank's side of the family.                      
                                                    
                                      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is Mom in the backyard of the home Francy lovingly bought for her on Studer Ave near Corpus Christi.

It was a three unit home.

She was in the center unit.

He put her sisters on either side to give her a safe neighborhood.

Her maiden name was Gertrude Louise Fetter.

This is an historically polished version of Gertruth Louisa Vetter.

Mom always liked the name Fetter.

She translated it as feather.

There was a lightness about it which pleased her. 

There was a lightness about Mom.

Actually Mom's German had got a little rusty.

The German word for feather is Feder.

Vetter (pronounced fetter) means cousin.

Johannes and Gertruth Vetter go pretty far back in our ancestry.

They are the great-great-great-great grandparents of Teagan Harvey.

The Agels go even further back to serfs on the estate of the Archbishop of Olomouc.

This is more greats than I care to type.

It is a pleasure to deal with German records.

Irish records are, by and large, a mess.

Frank Fetter always gave his parents as Germans coming from Germany.

If you were to ask Johannes and Gertruth Vetter whether they were Germans, they wouldn't know what you were talking about.

Bismark and his Prussian army had yet to put modern Germany together from all the small states which were remnants of feudal times.

They weren't Germans.

They were Hessians.

Both Johannes and Gertruth Vetter came from Darmstadt, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Hesse/Darmstadt.

This is not to be confused with the Grand Duchy of Hesse/Kassel.

People tend to get careless here.

A duchy becomes a grand duchy when the duke in charge is promoted to a grand duke.

I haven't the vaguest idea how this is managed.

These small states were in the rent-an-army business.

The British rented an army of 30,000 Hessians to fight in the Revolutionary War.

There were any number of Vetters in this army.

Constitution Hall was the main venue of the fine arts in Washington until the Kennedy Center was built.

It is owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Marian Anderson was not allowed to sing there because she was black.

The DAR is composed of women who are direct descendants of soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War.

They see themselves as ultimate Americans.

They seethe in self-esteem.

The women of our 52 might have an outside shot at the DAR.

It is quite likely that they are descendants of some Hessian Vetters who fought in the Revolutionary War.

The DAR would likely point out that they were on the wrong side.

However they might be descendants of a certain Johannes Vetter.

Johannes was a deserter.

A point could be made that a deserter of the wrong side is in effect a subset of the right side.

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