Friday, January 1, 2021

American Normal: Of Golden Ages and My Father's Swing Dance Story




Image: Sergey Ivanov, 2020


“One of the sturdiest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing. The months preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor offer a rare exception to this axiom. During 1941, in the wake of that outburst of gaudy hopefulness, the World’s Fair…..the economy was experiencing a renewal not only of sensation but of perceptive movement in its limbs, Joe DiMaggio hit safely in fifty-six straight games, and the great big bands reached their suave and ecstatic acme in the hotel ballrooms and moth-lit summer pavilions of America.”—The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay.

It may have been in that golden 1941 that one young American, who then would have been twenty years old, might have stood outside the gates of one of those summer pavilions and danced with his friends to the big band sound of the Benny Goodman Orchestra--Sing, Sing, Sing, maybe, or Stompin at the Savoy, or One O’Clock Jump. The sound of which, he would say many years later, would “blow your ears back.”
To be twenty years old is a kind of golden age of its own, suffused with the promise of something momentous in the offing. Out beyond the country’s horizons, dark clouds were forming over Europe; the 20-year old could not have been wholly oblivious. He had at an early age already experienced loss, had already learned the stark lesson that the world you think you know is not permanent. But on that night, I like to imagine that he was (along, perhaps, with the rest of an America closing its eyes to the forbidding horizon) having fun; for now, that would be all that mattered. Whether he’d taught himself or taken lessons I don’t know, but the man knew how to swing dance, the Lindy Hop, or the Collegiate Shag, the Jitterbug, or the Lindy Charleston.
Every story is, in a sense, a conjuring up of a golden age. Let me tell you how it was, back in the day. But the real truth about anyone’s Golden Age, what really happened beneath the scrim that is memory, is liable to be more ambiguous than you or I would wish. The story of the twenty-year old dancing with his friends to the Goodman Orchestra, of what preceded and what followed, is illuminative. It was a life that made a forcible impression on my own. And yet I have to confess there is a lot I have to fill in from scratch or imagination. I only dimly recall him telling me about attending a concert by Goodman’s band, and I don’t know for certain if it was really 1941, or earlier when he was in high school. I don’t know if it was in the nation’s capital, where his family had moved in 1933, or in New York city where he might have travelled for Goodman’s storied concert at the Paramount Theater, or somewhere else.
How little we know about the most exalted moments in the lives of the people who matter most to us. Goodman’s obituary in The New York Times in 1986 described the euphoria among fans of the bandleader, who in 1935 became the King of Swing when his band performed an explosive concert at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles. The stunning roar of that crowd in Hollywood would follow the band throughout the swing era, which lasted into the 1940s. And it greeted the band in March 1937 in New York at what came to be known as the Paramount Theater riot.

Teenagers, who had followed the band on radio and had bought its records but could not afford the prices of such places as the Manhattan Room of the Hotel Pennsylvania, where the band usually played, were lined up around the theater at 6 A.M. to get into the morning show for 35 cents. During that day, more than 21,000 people jammed into the theater to bounce deliriously in the seats or shag in the aisles and battle ushers as they made desperate lunges toward the stage.”

Wherever he might have heard the Goodman band, at whatever theater or moth-lit summer pavilion, I like to imagine, as the Orchestra reaches a crescendo of delirium, the young man and his friends scaling the gates or storming the guarded doors, just like any contemporary music-loving concertgoers. And as a kind of retroactive act of gratitude for the prudent, cautious and retiring example he set for me, I like to envision the young man, my father, Robert Thomas (Bud) Moran, ascending the barrier or breaching the boundary, and then  at the very apex of his personal Golden Age, triumphantly tumbling over or tumbling in, and crashing the joint.
Here is his American story.

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“It’s hard for you to understand what it’s like to be 13 and to lose everything.”


All his years later he might have recalled the brilliance of the lake down below, would recall its azure surface as sheer as onion skin, the sailboats lazy in a summer lull, and the billowed blanket of small green and brown hills around it. Might have recalled it as a vista spread expressly for a child’s imagination, just for him, there up above the sailboats on the big wrap-around porch, lounging in the hammocks with his brothers and sisters. Good or ill, benevolent or otherwise, the world is received by a child as an intention: this is meant for me.


It might have gathered all the sunlight to itself after it was gone, casting a shadow on all his remaining years after, the memory of that childhood with the big old cottage in Skaneateles overlooking the lake, where the family would retreat from Syracuse in the summer. The earliest picture of Bud is of an uncommonly sweet and trusting boy. His father, my grandfather, might have been imposing, intimidating, or he might have been the kind of presence that inspired a sense of safety and assurance. I knew him only briefly before his death in 1965, when I was five, knew him only as an old man with a cane and a penchant for giving overly wet kisses. His obituary in the Washington Post, beneath a headline that read, “John F. Moran Dead, Aid in Depression,” showed him as he was in his prime during that period in the 30s, after the move to Washington, when he was a federal receiver for local banks that had failed after the crash; a photograph that suggested a man whose tombstone might have read: Very Substantial Banker.

Tax records in the town of Skaneateles from 1932 indicate a lakefront home, listed as a “cottage,” was owned by John F. Moran with a total assessed value of $5500.[1] For years through the 1960s and 70s, a pen and ink drawing of the cottage hung in the “recreation room” of our house where I grew up. The drawing suggested a lost life of carefree ease, an impression confirmed by the account left by my father’s brother Richard. My uncle Dick wrote a lively and informative memoir of his own life, published in book form by Richard’s wife for their children, that includes a richly detailed description of the family’s life in Syracuse and their summers at Skaneateles.

Every June, the day after school ended, the family loaded up the car and drove twenty miles to Willow Brook on Skaneateles Lake. This annual odyssey began in 1926 and ended in 1931. The cottage had four bedrooms, a sun porch added by John Moran in 1928, a garage near East Lake Road with a small bedroom for a chauffeur or servant, a bridge over the brook to a grove of large willow trees on the water. Peonies lined the driveway; a small formal garden was in back of the house, a rose trellis at the side door. The brook was about two feet deep maximum. It offered great opportunities for play with toy boats, crabbing and spearing suckers the came into it in early summer to spawn.[2]

To be sure, it was an idyllic period of leisure and fun—anyone’s happy childhood, however mythical. That my grandfather was successful and prosperous is certain and John F. appears to have possessed the determination to rise, to overcome, that is common to the children of immigrants. He was born in Syracuse in 1889. His mother Alice was born in Ireland and likely immigrated to the United States between 1863 and 1883; his father (my father’s grandfather, John J. Moran) was born in New York, but almost certainly to recently arrived immigrants. The father appears to have died or otherwise departed the picture around 1898, and the children were briefly in an orphanage; John F. was in the House of Providence, a boy’s orphanage, while his sisters were in St. Vincent’s Asylum for girls. Their mother Alice remarried, and by 1910 census records indicate John F. and the other children were living with their mother and stepfather.[3]

John F. began working as a bookkeeper in the Crouse Grocery Story, in Syracuse, then as a teller for City Bank. In September 1913, he married Kathryn Handrahan (my grandmother). He rose steadily through the ranks of City Bank to become a member of the board of directors. Robert (Bud), my father, was born in May of 1921.

In late 1929, after the Wall Street Crash, City Bank Trust merged with First Trust to become the largest commercial bank between New York and Buffalo.  At that time, John and his wife Kathryn and children were living on Bellevue Avenue in Syracuse. By 1932, he was a deputy superintendent of banks for the state of New York.2

What happened exactly to my grandfather’s fortunes is unknown. Dick’s autobiography records only that John sold the cottage in Skaneateles in 1932 as the depression was deepening. Sometime after Roosevelt’s election that year, my grandfather took a job in Washington, D.C., within the office of the comptroller in the department of justice—a job that spoke to his resourcefulness and to his connections within the banking world, but which was also invariably a steep step down in salary for the banker and in “lifestyle” (a term that was probably unheard of at the time) for the family.

It’s difficult for you to know what it’s like to be 13 and to lose everything. I might have been 13 myself—that passage of rawness and awkward discovery coupled with an exhilarating sense of one’s purchase on the world—when my father said this to me.  Whether my grandfather really lost everything or whether it was simply my father’s recollection of a dramatic and disorienting shift in his own life and the life of the family, is hard to know. My father’s remark was in any case a singularly dramatic comment by a man never given to drama, reflecting the shock of his impression, one that would never quite leave him, that the ground beneath our feet is never certain.

My grandfather took the job sometime in early 1933 and was acting as a receiver for several failed local banks that year; the family appears to have stayed behind in Syracuse for a period before moving in October 1934 to Virginia where, according to Richard’s autobiography, the family moved into a “large frame house overlooking the Potomac River, the city of Washington and Boeing Field, which later was expanded to become National Airport.” Their sojourn there lasted only two months and in December they moved to Bethesda into “a pleasant two-story brick house on a quiet street in a subdivision known as Battery Park.”  In the summer of 1936, according to my uncle, they would move yet again to a home in the 7000 block of Connecticut Avenue. My father’s parents must have been renters during these early years, for their names do not show up in property records as homeowners until 1940. [4]

And so my father and his family arrived in the nation’s capital and would become Washingtonians.




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        The village of Chevy Chase was designed by a couple of entrepreneurs before the turn of the century as a “home suburb for the nation’s capital,” a bedroom community. A streetcar made its first run in the 1880s, ferrying residents of Chevy Chase into the city, and in the earliest months of the family’s arrival in Bethesda in 1935, it may have been a fun novelty for my father and his siblings, a feature in their social life. But the advent of the personal automobile meant its demise that same year, and by the time of their arrival in Chevy Chase the next year, the streetcar had been replaced by bus lines.

My father was a student at BCC High School, which opened in its current location on East-West Highway in Bethesda in 1935 (the school had existed since 1926 as a two-room building on Wilson Lane). My uncle’s autobiography mentions a young man who had his own car and drove Dick and my father (and perhaps whoever else could pile in) to school, a young man who would become a lifelong friend of my father’s. This boy with the car—that American invention of freedom and mobility—must have been the talk of the campus.

My father. From the Washington 
Post, circa 1935
My father wrote for the high school newspaper and was photographed in the Washington Post having won an award for “columns.” It shows a handsome if still callow looking youth, immaculately well-groomed in the jacket and tie that students were expected to wear—a presentation that was the hallmark of the era that shaped my father and for which I believe he would always be nostalgic. My father was popular and a partier, and it was in this period when he came to love Benny Goodman and the big bands, swing dancing, Fred Astair and Ginger Rodgers. It was the advent of the entertainment era, of “movie stars” and “show biz.” Years later my father’s voluminous album collection would serve as background music to the Sunday afternoons of my childhood when my parents would relax (with cocktails and cigarettes) in the living room—Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald. And mid-century Broadway musicals—Carnival, The King and I, Camelot, Hello Dolly. I am unsure what happened to his album collection; in later years he acquired a small collection of CDs, a portion of which fell to me after his death, and I was slightly surprised to find Billie Holiday among his favorites.

Another, darker strain was also a feature of my father’s adolescence. His younger sister Alice had osteomyelitis, a crippling and painful infection of the bones. Penicillin, discovered in 1928, did not become widely available until after the World War so I am unsure how her condition was treated. Alice was bedridden for a period and I believe I recall my father saying there was a time when she was unable to attend school. He spoke with feeling about her plight which, like the family’s upheaval from their idyll in Syracuse, may have ingrained in him an awareness that in the blueprint of our universe, fairness is given no quarter; he entertained her during her bedridden years reading society news about the stars and starlets of the period. But Alice was feisty and would grow up to become a journalist for Time Magazine. (She wrote the cover story in 1949 for the magazine about Perle Mesta, a Washington socialite and pioneering feminist who had been appointed by President Truman to be ambassador to Luxembourg). Remarkably, in the early 1960s the magazine purged its staff of women, providing my Aunt Alice with an extremely generous compensation on which she retired. (Her husband, Al Goldsmith, covered Capitol Hill for a newsletter he published for the insurance industry.) Alice was a voracious reader and spent her long early retirement consuming books, especially political biographies. When we visited her house, she would have a waist-high stack of books by the sofa she was working her way through. She was a staunch and vocal New Deal Democrat all her life. My father enjoyed baiting her, and one summer night arguing outside on the porch of our house, after a few drinks, Alice became so loud and overheated that my parents became alarmed that she was disturbing the neighbors.  

One other event during this period of my father’s adolescence would make its mark on him, I believe, when his father became a central player (and I believe a hero) in a local bank scandal.

The Park Savings Bank was located at the intersection of Kenyon Street and 14th Street in Mt. Pleasant. It had been opened in 1909, by residents and businessmen of the neighborhood who wanted a regional bank. It closed in March 1933 with liabilities of nearly $4 million. After the Bank Holiday that year, Park Savings did not re-open but fell into federal receivership. On July 17, 1934 the front page of the Washington Post reported that 28 directors of the bank were being sued “by John F. Moran, receiver, in District Supreme Court yesterday in an effort to recoup the huge losses suffered by the bank.”

Charging the directors with ten acts which involved “nonperformance of, malfeasance in the performance of, and the malfeasance of duties imposed by law,” the action listed liabilities of $2,595,991.60 which it alleged were traceable to the directors.

This report appeared on the same day that troops from the National Guard and tanks were sent into the city of San Francisco to quell riots that occurred in the wake of a general strike. Also reported by the Post that day was unrest at a University in Germany by students protesting the Nazi closure of student fraternity organizations; that article also noted that the national leader of a German Catholic youth organization was killed, and “a new attack on Jews was inaugurated by Der Angriff, newspaper of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.”

In November 1933, seven months before the suit my grandfather filed in court against the bank directors, there had been a move in court by a group of depositors to have my grandfather replaced, presumably by a locally-appointed receiver. Newspaper reports about this episode are not clarifying; it may have represented a difference of opinion about how to proceed in recovering depositors’ money, or it may have been a reflexive distrust of the federal government to act in the best interests of depositors.  The suit by the depositors’ group was dismissed and for the remainder of the 1930s my grandfather proceeded to act in the role of undertaker for the bank and to strive to retrieve depositors’ money.

The scandal appears to have involved a principal actor, a director of the bank named Robert Stunz, and a handful individuals to whom, over a period of years, Stunz made loans with no collateral, using depositors’ money. Somewhere in between the lines of the Post reports there is, I believe, a story about what kind of leverage these individuals may have had over Robert Stunz; the reports are intriguing but raise more questions than they answer. In addition to the wildcat loans, several reports cite “hard liquor supplies” that Stunz purchased with depositors’ money. Shortly after the bank holiday in March 1933, the Post reported that Stunz died by suicide, leaving behind a note accepting blame for the bank’s failure and absolving all other employees of any wrongdoing.

My grandfather’s obituary in 1965 cited four other local failed banks that fell under his receivership. Some 9000 banks failed during the decade of the 1930s, more than 4000 in 1933 alone. The facts surrounding the Park Savings Bank scandal, as well as the attention the local press gave to it, suggest a criminal escapade, something that rose above the standard story of depression era failure; a report in the Post on May 7, 1937, offering one of the clearest summaries of what happened, refers to what auditors and investigators were calling “a conspiracy to embezzle.” Still, the machinations of the bank directors could only have happened in a time when banks were unregulated to a degree that is unimaginable today. Although my grandfather’s part in this saga unfolded during the decade of my father’s adolescence, when the drama of his own life commanded his attention, it can hardly have escaped my father’s notice when his father’s name was appearing occasionally on the front page of the local paper.

On October 20, 1939, a month and half after Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland, the Washington Post reported that the United States Senate was debating lifting an arms embargo to European allies. That story shared the front page that day with the following account that appeared to mark the end of the Park Savings Bank saga: 

“Directors of the Park Savings Bank yesterday paid Receiver John F. Moran $500,000, making a total of $793,000 which will be distributed among 18,000 depositors of the institution before January 1. The directors’ checks were in settlement of half a dozen suits growing out of the failure of the bank in 1933.”

By that time my father was 18. He would go to the University of Maryland and after graduation, after Pearl Harbor, would enlist in the army. He would be swept up in the immense events that were to come, World War and Cold War.

But my father was, first, a Depression-era child, and the events of that period, including his father’s role, occurred at the stage of his life when one is possibly most receptive to the imprint of the larger world. In these two  events—the family’s upheaval and my grandfather’s role in securing the depositors’ money—were illuminated the central themes that formed the lived experience of an entire generation that came of age in the Roosevelt years, the men and women who would fight the world war and later forge the post-war American consensus: the ground beneath your feet might be ever uncertain (you have no idea what it’s like to be 13 and to lose everything), yet the government could use its power to secure the ground, at least minimally, freeing you to flourish as you might. In its best light, the New Deal was in the service of that high American ideal of freedom; you could not ever be truly free if you were forever at the mercy of calamitous circumstance.

Not everyone bought this, to say the least. There was most certainly a vigorous opposition to Roosevelt and to his plain-speaking successor from Missouri. (David McCullough’s epic biography of Truman is consoling, if you need reassurance that poisonous character assassination in American politics is nothing new). My father was a lifelong registered Democrat, and I believe the New Deal was for him formative. But he was by no means an enthusiast, and he was all his life ambivalent, at best, about politicians in general—all of them. (I do not recall him expressing great enthusiasm for any politician with the possible exception, briefly, of Henry Jackson.) In later years, the tumult of American life in the 1960s, would push him rightward. But his family’s experience, his father’s role in the Depression, and his sister’s infirmity, fostered an acute awareness of, and a genuine fellow-feeling for, the regular guy or gal and his or her vulnerability to wanton and outrageous fortune.  
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My father’s sojourn at the University of Maryland was unremarkable; he majored in accounting and joined the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, in whose house he may have lived during his upper-class years. He graduated in 1942.

Life changed for everyone that year in December, and sometime after the attack on Pearl Harbor my father enlisted in the Army. He would be stationed at Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas.
In the Army
Of his time in the Army my father was memorably sardonic. It was, he said, where he learned a sense of humor. The truth, I think, was that he already had one, and it was what helped him survive apprenticeship in a life—the life of a soldier—for which he did not bring a natural talent. I think he must have appreciated Joseph Heller’s classic account of the absurdity of military life in Catch-22; it was a place, he once memorably told me, where you might be told to go dig a ditch and then ten minutes later be told to fill it back up. You meet the world when you go in the Army, and my father recalled being platooned with guys from all over, guys who grew up in the sticks in Tennessee or Arkansas, guys who couldn’t read or write. My father was sometimes enlisted to write letters home to parents, wives or girlfriends. “Dear Mom, miss you terribly. Food’s horrible, but I’m ok. Try not to worry. Love, Joe.” Something like that. He was discharged in 1946 as a second lieutenant, never having been sent overseas.

One of my father’s best, lifelong friends did see combat. He received a medal for taking out a bunker full of German machine gunners, this friend of his, tossing a hand grenade into the bunker and killing them all. My father said his friend never spoke about this episode and did not want to. His friend confided to him only that it wasn’t heroism, he was terrified. Many years later, with advanced emphysema, this man—the boy in high school at BCC who had his own car, the talk of the campus—would die by suicide, a casualty of alcoholism and depression.

Shortly after his return home to the D.C area, my father would meet my mother—six years his junior—then a student at the University of Maryland and a roommate of my father’s sister Mary. My mother, Ellie, was a fun and lively young woman, a bit of a party girl perhaps, but with cultural and intellectual aspirations as well that she instilled in me and my brothers. She had grown up in Baltimore. She had a knack for friendship and was instantly liked by everyone; the fast group of women friends she made in the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority—and later with their husbands—would prove the nucleus of my parents’ social lives. Over six decades from the 1950s to the early 2000s, they shared the arrival of children, many University of Maryland Terrapin athletic events, vacations together with all of our families at the eastern shore, the decline and passing of their own parents, as well as a tragedy or two along the way. All of these passages were punctuated by countless high-spirited cocktail parties; these men and women were a sturdy bond of fun and music, camaraderie and celebration that nourished both my parents to the end of their days. 

My father and mother were married in 1953. They settled first in the Glover Park neighborhood of the district. My father had a job as a bookkeeper for a local radio station; later he would become the accountant for Barry Pate Chevrolet, a family owned car dealership located at 1129  Connecticut Avenue, with which my father would be associated, through location and name changes, until his retirement. (At some point in the early or mid-1960s, the dealership merged with Addison Chevrolet and the new Barry Pate and Addison would be located—somewhat fatefully, given late events that would transpire—at Florida and 14th Street.) My father was remarkably reliable; over many years I can count on one hand the number of times he stayed home sick, and he was awake at the breakfast table every day at 6:20 a.m.

To live for long in this most self-important city is to begin to see your life against the backdrop of national and international events. Looking back at the frontpage headlines at the time of my and brothers’ birthdays, two themes are consistent: the emerging and burgeoning civil rights movement here at home, and the confrontation with the Soviet Union. On May 4, 1954 when Michael, my oldest brother, was born, Post reporter Chalmers Roberts topped the front-page headlines that day with a report about the collapsing French adventure in a far-off region few Americans probably gave any thought to—Vietnam. A conference in Geneva was being worked out to “take up the Indochina problem”; the agreement at this conference would divide the country, with fateful results, into a north (supported by the Soviets and the Chinese) and a south supported by the U.S. Just above the fold, Murrey Marder reported that Democrats and Republicans were tussling over the scope of the Army-McCarthy hearings, a sordid televised drama of accusations and counter-accusations, an off-shoot of McCarthy’s red scare investigations; it was during the Army hearing that the Senator would be called out—“have you no shame, sir?”—beginning the end of his prominence. Thirteen days later the U.S. Supreme Court would rule in Brown v. Education that public school segregation was unconstitutional. 
Michael recalls our father taking him, in November 1963, to the showroom of the dealership on Connecticut to watch the funeral motorcade following President Kennedy’s murder in Dallas on its way to St. Matthew’s Cathedral on Rhode Island Avenue. Nine years old at the time, Michael remembers seeing the President’s stricken wife, his brothers, French president Charles De Gaulle, and Ethiopian Emperor Haile Sallesie.

In the December of the following year, when Robert, my next older brother, was born, the Montgomery bus boycott would begin in Alabama. Earlier that year, the Pentagon announced a decision to build inter-continental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads; Congress authorized President Eisenhower to use force to protect the island of Formosa against the People’s Republic of China; and the Soviet Union and seven eastern bloc countries signed the Warsaw Pact. On my birthday on St. Patrick’s Day in 1960, rain was turning an eight inch snow storm into the characteristic DC slush festival; that headline shared  the front page with a story about West German chancellor Konrad Adenaur who was calling for a plebiscite in West Berlin to “demonstrate that its citizens `absolutely reject’ Soviet demands on  their city,” and an article about plans to test a 10,000 pound bomb underground in New Mexico. (Slightly lower on the page was the headline: “Ike Comes Out Publicly for Nixon.” Seems even President Eisenhower was a tad ambivalent about the vice president, a man who would dominate the news for much of my later childhood and adolescence, a man described memorably by the novelist Thomas Mallon as “this darkest of dark horses.”)

To the privileged children of a prosperous kingdom, news of trouble in the kingdom reaches their ears as through a scrim; it sounds bad, but what could it mean? The year 1968 was so brimming over with bad news even an eight-year-old couldn’t miss it. I occasionally helped my brother deliver the Washington Star in my neighborhood in the afternoon and can still recall the shock of that picture of Robert Kennedy lying on the kitchen floor of that hotel in Los Angeles. I had never heard the name Martin Luther King before April 4 of that year; in the aftermath of his murder in Memphis, the District of Columbia experienced the most searing episode in the city’s history, when rioting ravaged large sections in and surrounding the U Street corridor, all the way up to Capitol Hill and in other discrete areas throughout the city. A car was set afire on a lot at Belmont and 14th, the lot belonging to the dealership my father worked for, whose store front was a block south at Florida and 14th. The Evening Star reported broken windows at the dealership, which remained closed during the riot. I recall my father journeying downtown while it was still raging to check on the state of affairs; for whatever reason—perhaps because the business had established a reasonably good relationship with the surrounding community, perhaps because black men and women were employed there—it was spared the kind of comprehensive damage that destroyed other businesses in the area. It would re-open and remain in business for a lean years in the now ravaged neighborhood before relocating. Later that summer I recall attending a Washington Senators baseball game at D.C. stadium with my family when National Guardsmen patrolled the bleachers.

It wasn’t all bad news. My father was an early joining member of the Edgemoor Club in Bethesda, a tennis club that had opened in 1920. A prettier picture you can hardly imagine: a private club “nestled” in a leafy green and well-to-do suburb; its clay courts are expertly manicured and for years has enjoyed a reputation for training some of the top tennis players in the region (including Davis Cup competitors) and for hosting elite competitions.

In fact, it always seemed to me like a pretty friendly and casual place, untouched by country-club stuffiness. But Edgemoor was really my father’s thing; he joined in the 1940s when he returned from the Army. My brothers and I used the pool quite a bit, but tennis never really took with any of us in a big way. For years, my father regularly played two sets of tennis on Sunday morning with a leading staff member for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired at that time by William Fulbright. (Our mother took us to Methodist church while he played; my father had been raised with an especially dark and forbidding version of Irish Catholicism and as soon as he was of age, he left the Catholic Church—an institution about which he had nothing good to say—and never again darkened the door of a church.)

In 1968 he was president of the club, when the issue of race visited its cozy confines. On November 3, of that year, a report in the Post on page 3 of the A section of the paper was headlined: “Edgemoor Won’t Play `Whites Only’ Tennis.”

 The Edgemoor Club of Bethesda, long regarded as the citadel of Washington area tennis, has decided not to participate in competitions with clubs that refuse to allow Negroes to play. The decision was made by a “decisive majority” of the club’s 300 members at a meeting Tuesday, according to Robert T. Moran, club president. At the same time members also urged the Greater Washington Tennis Association, the Middle Atlantic Lawn Tennis Association and Country Club Amateur Swimming Association to adopt similar stances.

My father was quoted in the article saying Edgemoor “wanted to go on record as disapproving of clubs that were arbitrarily not hosting matches because of the presence of Negroes on visiting teams.” He declined in the article to name those other institutions, but the Post report did. It also noted that the wife of Carl Rowan, then a prominent black columnist with the Evening Star (and later the Post), had joined the Indian Spring Country Club, after which some other area establishments dropped out of the league in which she would have played. (The article said the clubs denied that Mrs. Rowan’s race was the reason for their departure).

Against the larger backdrop of what was happening in the country around race at that time, and of the history of the civil rights movement since its origins in the aftermath of the world war, this declaration by a private suburban enclave was assuredly no revolutionary moment (the article noted that the Edgemoor Club itself had no black members at the time. “There would be nothing preventing a Negro becoming a member should he apply,” my father was quoted in the Post as saying.) But within its own rarified sphere it was influential—the club was described by the Post as the “Forest Hills of Washington tennis”—and I do not doubt my father’s wholehearted support for this position. He was the farthest thing from any kind of activist or social justice warrior, but I think he knew stupid when he saw it. Whatever else the segregationist policies of that era might have been—immoral, unethical, unjust, untrue to our values, and damaging to generations of black people and their families—they were also surpassingly stupid. And the club’s declaration spoke to the momentum of a movement, seven months after the murder of its leader, that was no longer confined to the southern regions of the country.

What my father was (and everything in this narrative stands or falls on this declaration) was decent, a characteristic that has lost ground, at least in the public sphere, to flashier traits. His background made him alive to the petty injustices visited upon everyday people. Closely allied with integrity, decency speaks to a private accountability, a holding of oneself to a standard. The striking thing about decency is that in the everyday lives of everyday people—on the ground, so to speak, where all of the cultural divisions are dissolved in the sober light of prosaic reality—it is everywhere. People like to be decent. In the public sphere—in public office, in public pronouncements, in social media and on cable news shows, and in the online comments section of articles and opinion pieces—no one is accountable to anything at all, a plague of public indecency. 
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The following year in 1969 saw an event that had its genesis in the Cold War confrontation and the arms race,  but which in its culmination transcended the Cold War and became—in the minds of many, and in popular legend—a landmark of American technological wizardry, and human ingenuity and courage.
My family at a Fenwick Island cottage we 
rented, circa 1965.
My family was on vacation in Fenwick Island, Delaware on July 20 that year when two Americans walked on the moon. In prior years we had stayed in rental cottages or in motels in Fenwick or Bethany, but earlier that year my father had bought a rustic old beach cabin, across the street from the beachfront, for the grand sum of $10,000.  It had been built before or shortly after the second world war, surviving a severe storm that had ravaged much of the coastline in 1962. The cottage stood on cinder blocks, its water was pumped from a well in the ground, and the house smelled of pine wood, beach tar, and sea salt. During a storm the house might shake on its rafters and during one particularly nasty off-season gale, it trembled so perilously my parents seriously considered bailing us from the house and finding shelter elsewhere. Over the years it was the source of many happy, prosaic memories: I read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time while holed up in our cottage, huddled under blankets during an off-season storm. 
The young folks on the beach at Fenwick Island, 
circa 1968-70.
That day of the moon landing we played football on the beach with the children of my parents’ friends, a dozen or so teenagers and a handful of us younger ones. I was nine, a childhood friend from school had joined me and my family for the vacation. I recall looking up from the game and marveling at the moon, already risen in a daytime sky: three men were up there, in a little craft, two of whom would get out and walk around on its surface. It was dreamlike and magical, but then you looked back down and saw your own feet were planted on the earth and your own reality—whatever it was—all around you: a crystal blue ocean, its tide coming in and going out as it had done since the beginning of time, the hot sand, friends and family, a football game, and over the dunes the ramshackle cottages. It made you a little giddy to think of it this way: we had made the leap from down here to up there.

That night our three families—parents, children and their invited friends, assorted others that came together for the event—gathered at the rented cottage of one of our parents’ friends around a staticky black and white television. Larger than the one my father had bought, the house was of the same vintage, one of the oldest standing structures in Fenwick, and it stood just feet from the dunes that separated it from the beach, so that you could hear the waves cascading against the shore a hundred yards away in the darkness. The exit by the astronauts from the lunar module seemed to be delayed interminably; reception on the tiny television was tenuous (when, say, the  wind blew), and I fell asleep on the floor to what seemed like a blur of static and commentary. Someone shook me awake just in time to see Neil Armstrong step off the ladder and onto the moon.

I think sometimes of that summer of the moonshot, when I gazed up from the sand at the moon in a crystal blue sky, as the apex and the end of something. Americans today are nostalgic for a “golden age” and—political slogans aside—almost everyone in this strange and troubled time feels that we have left something behind along the way, that we are off our game. If I could point to a golden age of my own, I guess that summer would be mine. I grieve now for the loss of what feels like an American normal my daughter, now in her twenties, will never know; a country that collectively did great, unimaginable things, that conquered the moon. (It is astounding, for instance, to recall that the moon shot was pulled off using computer systems that would be considered antiquated in any office setting today.)

But I know it must have been only my innocence that was coming to an end, the kind of bubble that is for lucky children to experience. Outside the picture frame of my memories there was, of course, an enormous amount of trouble in that year 1969, although I was only dimly aware of it. (There is, too, an alternative narrative about the moon shot, one that many Americans held to then and might ascribe to now, a story of extravagant sums of money wasted on a technological venture that bore little real tangible benefit for citizens, a lavish expenditure while our inner-city communities were  in turmoil and our cities were in flames.)

I am aware that my narrative describes an impossibly privileged childhood—a private tennis club, a cottage at the beach—and I know that in real terms I was extraordinarily fortunate. All I can tell you though is that it didn’t feel like privilege. My brothers and I attended public school from kindergarten through high school. We did not take vacations in Europe, but drove three hours to the shore, where extravagance was a trip to the boardwalk in Ocean City and ice cream at the Dairy Queen. (We also drove 6 hours the other way, in summers or at Christmas, to rural Ohio to visit my mother’s parents, a journey that always seemed to me an exotic and magical trip to the edge of civilization.) When we went as a family to baseball games we sat in the bleachers. My mother bought my clothes each new school year at discount department stores. The life of my childhood and that of my friends seemed to be a life that was available to every American. Who could blame me for thinking the world, like the Skaneateles of my father’s youth, was a given? I was safe, protected by a kindliness that seemed to pervade everything in a benevolent and fair-minded country that (I was taught to believe) allowed the strong and gifted to flourish while striving to protect the weak and vulnerable. Over the dunes, those modest, ramshackle cottages seemed accessible to just about anyone.

They are gone now, almost all of them, replaced by multimillion-dollar winterized mansions.

As my adolescence progressed, I entered that long, self-absorbed tunnel through which you can only see your parents as tedious, simpleminded and embarrassing. The most minor foible becomes an indictment of their entire way of being; my father sometimes wore so much aftershave it knocked you sideways; we had to tell him to dial it back. I was not above thinking my father should have been something more than he was, accomplished more than he did.

Many years later, when I was myself a father, a friend introduced me to Robert Hayden’s dagger-to-the-heart retrospective on fatherly devotion and adolescent scorn.

“No one ever thanked him,” the poet says of the man who “got up early/and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold/then with cracked hands that ached/from weather in the weekday weather made/banked fires blaze.” 

Too late, the poet is the wiser now.

Speaking indifferently to him

Who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well,

What did I know, What did I know

Of love’s austere and lonely offices?” [4]

What did I know?

That same summer, or perhaps the next, an August night in Washington, the air is torpid and wet with humidity. Summer has dragged on too long, greenery everywhere is limpid, given up, exhausted by the heat, sagging into the streets. The night is close. There’s a party of some kind at the Edgemoor Club and a large crowd is assembled in the clubhouse that separates the pool from the tennis courts. I am here tonight with my mother and my older brother and there is an air of anticipation, although for what I can’t yet know. My mother knows for sure and seems to let on that it will be fun, but she isn’t saying. My brother may have known as well, though he would be as astonished as I was at what was to transpire.

A space is cleared and the assembled crowd falls back to line the walls around the parquet floor. My father is at one end of the floor and a dance partner, a neighbor, a dear friend of my mother’s, is at the other end. There is an announcement and silence falls. My father is striking a curious, anticipatory pose, as is his partner, our neighbor, at the other end. I see my father tapping his foot, counting out a beat.

And then the music begins.
________________



To watch the swing dancers at the Spanish Ballroom in Glen Echo is to realize how some of us come to accommodate our bodies as if it were a jail or small holding cell. For those of us invested almost entirely in words and ideas as a form of expression, the only form, it is to realize what a lonely little island that form is, waving semaphore signals at passing lifeboats in the distance. I came to the Spanish Ballroom because I didn’t think I could adequately describe from memory—aside from my own sense of astonishment watching him—what I saw my father do that on that dance floor fifty years ago. There is nothing lonely about these dancers; they are connected, even when they spin off from each other as I do recall my father and his dance partner doing. That was one thing that stands out from that night—I had  seen my father move about on a tennis court with some dexterity, but out there on the parquet he covered the floor (at least the length and width of one side of a singles court) with an athletic grace and lightning speed that took our breath away. The website for GottaSwing, which hosts dances at the Spanish Ballroom, notes that swing jazz (made famous with white audiences by my father’s favorites, Benny Goodman, Glen Miller, Artie Shaw and others) and the distinctive swing dance—the Lindy Hop—grew out of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s; the Lindy Hop drew on elements of ballroom, jazz and tap dancing. You can see that in the dancers at the Ballroom, a seamless mix of precisely choreographed formal dance steps along with a kind of exuberant, carefree improvisation that finds its expression in the feet—think of very young children, utterly unself-conscious, skipping down a street.

To see our parents whole when we are young is impossible. What I saw in my father that night at Edgemoor as he danced was as different from the man I thought I knew—the man who would be there at the breakfast table at 6:20 a.m. as always, the next morning—as a hurricane is from the written description of one. The crowd lining the walls thundered approval when the music stopped, respectful at first of the dancefloor space still buzzing as if with static electricity from the exuberance of the dance. But then we stormed the floor engulfing my father whose white button down shirt was soaked through with perspiration. My mother, I saw, embraced our neighbor, her friend; my mother was not, alas, a dancer and the moment must have been a poignant one for her; but she was celebrating my father’s performance. She had always wanted him to step outside the work-a-day workaholic role that he, like so many fathers of that generation, assumed; it was my mother who made him take a week off work one summer to take some classes at Chautauqua. I forget entirely what I said to my father afterward, stunned as I was, but I seem to recall he was as disavowing as Atticus Finch was when his children were awed to see him shoot a rabid dog in the street.

What did I know, what did I know?

Between that night at the dance and his death many years later in 2007, my father and mother (who worked for the Board of Education in Montgomery County) put me and my brothers through private college (with none of us having to take out a loan). They travelled some, my mother and father, and they partied a lot with their friends. He retired in 1982 and they lived year-round for a short period in Fenwick before moving back to Bethesda.

             Meanwhile the country that had defeated fascism and faced down the

Soviet Union, that had enacted a guaranteed income and publicly funded 

medical care for elders, that had walked on the moon, experienced a cascade of 

dispiriting episodes, their fallout engendering a steady, corrosive rain

of recrimination, cynicism and insincerity: Watergate, Iran-contra, Anita Hill 

and Clarence Thomas, OJ Simpson, the LA riots, the Trial of the Central Park 5, 

Monica Lewinsky.

September 11, 2001. I watched the towers fall just days after I had been laid off from a job, a casualty of the first dot-com boom (when we were all going to become millionaires on websites that had no business plan). There was briefly a revival of purpose, a common sense of the specialness of our country that had been attacked. But it dissipated amid a growing partisan divide, a heartbreaking failure.

Iraq and Katrina.

Today as I write this, we are four weeks into a global pandemic that has shut down the American economy. Amidst an ocean of distress—infected persons dying alone, unable to be visited by family; businesses that will never recover; unemployed individuals with children at home they must home-school—a new crop of American heroes have been discovered, like the husband of my father’s oldest grand-daughter, an emergency department doctor overseeing a unit of COVID-infected individuals in a hospital on the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel. They had been showing up daily at difficult jobs—all those nurses and doctors and hospital staff—exposing themselves to disease and death, long before this. Elsewhere as usual people are finding ways to practice decency in straightened circumstances. A new generation is learning the lesson that the ground beneath our feet is never assuredly secure, and no one knows what the future will look like. My videos of Opening Game at Camden Yards or of the celebration parade for the World Champion Washington Nationals last year—last year! A year otherwise brimming over with dissension and public indecency—seem already like fossil remains of a happier Atlantis we left behind.

What is the American normal, anyway? Where is that promised land?

I think my father might have been able to tell you that there is no golden age, there never has been. There is only the current moment, all that we have. The present is always arduous, the future has always been uncertain. He died in October of his 86th year. In the week or two prior to that morning when my mother found him where he had gotten up in the middle of the night and collapsed, a jazz pianist named John Eaton that my parents admired had come to the retirement community where they lived to play a concert. My father was first in line at the door, and sat in the front row, moving to the music to the end.






[1] For information about John F. Moran’s property in Skaneateles, I am indebted to the work of Beth Battlle, researcher at the Skaneateles Historical Society.
[2] My uncle’s memoir also includes important information about the family’s first years in Washington, D.C., on parts of which this account is based.
3 For all information about the early years of my grandfather, John F. Moran, in Syracuse and the probable roots of his parents, I am indebted to Sarah Kozma, Research Specialist at the Onandaga Historical Association.
[4] I am indebted to Beth Huffner, director of the Archive and Research Center at Chevy Chase Historical Society, for her research of property records for John F. Moran and Kathryn.

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