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    Irish Mongrel Child
    Irish Mongrel Child
    Irish Mongrel Child
    Ebook77 pages1 hour

    Irish Mongrel Child

    By Ruby Cooper

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Hilarious mostly true stories of a post WWII child growing up in an Irish bar in a small mountain town of Western Pennsylvania with her reliable grandfather and decidedly erratic mother.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateJul 19, 2013
    ISBN9781483503776
    Irish Mongrel Child

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      Book preview

      Irish Mongrel Child - Ruby Cooper

      ISBN: 9781483503776

      With loving memory of my

      Mom, Alice LaVerne Naughton,

      Grampa, Leonard Joseph Naughton,

      Dad, Harold Lee Cooper,

      God Mother, Anna Melany Thompson,

      and nurturing Back-up moms,

      Tacy Armstrong and Mary McCoy

      plus

      The Village of Foxburg, PA

      1943-1953

      Special thanks to my daughters, Alice and Anna, who unfailingly support and believe in me.

      Irish Mongrel Child is based on the stories of my childhood between 1943 and 1953. I’ve done my best to pass them on as they were told to me and as I remember them, but my memory is admittedly faulty and unreliable. Since I am the only one alive left to tell them I’ve filled in the questionable areas and blank spots with my imagination. -rc

      Passion and Lust

      Like many war babies, I am the product of passion and lust. My mom, Alice, a shapely, vivacious woman and my dad, Bud, a good-looking WWII soldier conceived me shortly before he was to be shipped off to Normandy where he would float through the sky, dangling from a billowing white parachute into enemy fire: nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Bud, perceiving himself to be a goner soon, pumped all the fear and anxiety of a man condemned to death into his seed. His desire was that of every man: to leave behind an heir, someone to carry his genes into later generations.

      I’m sure my mother returned his ardor with fervent empathy, and embraced him with desire, compassion and the combined juices of faith and hope; the ingredients he hung on to as his friends died around him before they even hit the ground.

      I understand completely how he fell under the spell of the shapely Irish American woman whose gray-green eyes fringed with dusky lashes sparkled when she was happy, but smoked as obviously as a campfire made with damp wood when her mood turned. I loved her for fifty-five years.

      Alice

      At twenty-nine, Alice wasn’t a virgin, but neither was she dulled by a surfeit of dalliances. Becoming pregnant was a surprise, and a huge disappointment, she told me decades later. If abortion had been legal back then I would have had one.

      Alice LaVerne Naughton was born in l913 in the hamlet of Foxburg, PA, population 500. Her brother Fred, four years her senior, was the apple of her eye. To hear her tell it, he was the handsomest, smartest, most popular guy around.

      Mom in background wearing a giant hair bow, holding an unidentified baby. Uncle Fred is in the chair.

      Not that she was a shrinking violet. She served as secretary of her senior class at Erie Academy, played the piano and sang in the choir. She also spent a great deal of time with her beloved mother whose superior cooking, she said, made her fat. Looking at her senior portrait it’s difficult to tell she weighed 180 lbs. Your eye is drawn to the lush auburn hair, threaded with strands of copper affirming the blood of ancient Vikings, that lay in deep finger waves framing creamy skin and sensual eyes like you’d see on a movie star. Her bones are not lost in the fullness of her flesh, but well defined. Alice was blind to that. Throwing the photo aside, she’d spit, Look at that fat.

      Fat, and the feeling that she lived in the shadow of her brother’s exulted orbit caused her to feel inferior to him and other men who seemed to glide effortlessly through life. Nevertheless, she was popular. She loved to dance and was good at it. I weighed a lot, but I was light on my feet, she liked to say.

      When Alice was twenty-five, five years before I was born, her Mother died of heart disease. Grief devoured the excess pounds that had concealed her voluminous breasts, sexy curves, and shapely legs––the Gates legs–-passed down by Grandma’s Nordic ancestors. She enrolled in cosmetology school in Pittsburgh, became a beautician, and a blonde.

      The dark shapeless dresses she had always hated were replaced by fashionable wide shouldered, well-cut suits that accentuated her waist and ankles, and sculpted bias cut dresses made of the new rayon material that molded her sensual womanly body.

      I would watch, rapt, as she dressed for evenings out. First she dusted her face lightly with a translucent powder to keep the shine down.

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