a year Mom’s pregnant again.)
Just as Dad gets well, Pogo fractures his skull playing football. During his long convalescence and absence from school, Mom devises ways to keep this bright boy engaged and entertained. Chief among them, The Family Journal.
•••
Mom has made up a bed on the sunroom couch for Pogo so she can keep an eye on him. Because of his head injury, he’s barely supposed to move at all. She comes in with her afternoon cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes.
“How are you feeling, son?”
Silence. He’s buried in a book.
“What are you reading, dear?”
“Count of Monte Cristo.”
“It’s a good book, but you’ve been reading for hours.”
“Yeah, well, it’s good.”
“I’m going to write a letter to our relatives and let them know how well you and your father are doing.”
She pulls the typewriter up out of its foldaway haven in the desk.
“Typing? Now? Can’t you just write?”
“I have to make copies, son. Carbon is the only way.”
“Please, Mom, I’m reading!”
I like to think a ray of golden late-day sun beamed onto the desk just then.
“How would you like to be the Editor of a Newspaper?”
“What do you mean?”
“Instead of me writing a letter, let’s do a newspaper. You be the Editor and dictate stories. I’ll be the Printer and type them up and send them to everyone.”
“Hot dog!” We all want our names in print.
“But you have to stay still, son. Doctor’s orders.”
So begins The Family Journal, a fetching little freshet in our landscape.
The first issue is dated December 4, 1952.
Designated both “Editor” and “Reporter,” Pogo dictates short items while “The Printer” types them onto onionskin, complete with masthead, headline, and columns, making ten carbon copies in the process. Every night, the one-page original appears on Dad’s dinner plate; every week, the carbons are mailed to out-of-town relatives.
It’s published intermittently through 1955—sometimes there’s a new issue every weekday; then none for several weeks.
The one hundred or so issues in the morgue are a sweet, funny, and intimate record of one lively mid-century American household as told by its children.
News items range from awards and school plays to blizzards, colds, earaches, and the occasional original verse. Here we see family rituals, budding personalities, kid humor, and how we entertained ourselves in the early fifties. Our family with our “Waltons” faces on.
It’s where “Kracked Barrel Head,” “33 crimes in Minneapolis,” “the lost carving fork,” and the lyrics to the Milkman song are found (as if I could ever forget them).
The emphasis on manners threads from repeated rotations of The Milkman’s Job through our behavior in public at the rare event of a restaurant dinner (both Mom and Dad write how proud they were of the family) and the creation of:
“POLITENESS DAY—everyone treats his brother or sister not as a brother or sister, but as a person! A great success.”
The pages are a salmagundi of Bishop Sheen, Andy Griffith, and Art Linkletter, noting Saint’s Days and altar boy practice, classroom achievements, humorous anecdotes, out-of-town visitors.
Charitable works: sewing pads for cancer patients, making scrapbooks for hospitalized children.
Building a beautiful snow fort. Birdwatching. Butterfly hunting (“Caught one, but let it go.”) Stamp-collecting. Listening for distant radio stations. Playing Scrabble and Clue (“The new rage in the O’Brien household!”) Exploring the new paint-by-number sets. (“Looks just like a real painting!” Even Dad does one or two.) Scanning the neighborhood with binoculars, spotting a turtle, capturing it, identifying it (according to The Book of Knowledge, a Snapping Turtle), keeping it as a pet awhile before releasing it.
Want Ads:
“Wanted—person to do fifth-grade homework at low fee. Must be very honorable. Ask for Tommy.”
“For Sale: snow shovel. Cheap. Please do not notify Dad of this sale. Contact the boys.”
Next day: “Retraction: snow shovel not for sale. Dad read the paper.”
“Wanted: Cleaner boys. For sale: grimy boys.”
“Anyone who has not read Tommy’s magic book is requested to refrain from doing so. He needs an audience and it isn’t much fun to do tricks before people who already know about them.”
Three-year-old Skip wants a tricycle license, so Mom issues one:
“Skipper O’Brien is licensed to operate a 1952 tricycle, signed President of the Department of three-wheeled vehicles in the O’Brien household.”
In addition to Pogo and Dad on the mend, the paper reveals that someone is always sick: a cold, an earache, or the flu. And one kid or another is always saying The Darndest Thing.
Skip: “That’s so funny it makes my nose laugh.”
Kako writes about three-year-old me:
“When I asked her what her upper lip was, she informed me that was where she put her mouth. When I asked what her shoulder was she told me that was where she put her arm. When I asked her what her ankle was she said it was ‘where I put my sock on.’ ”
You get a sense of the intellectual and moral issues posed at our dinner table. Here’s the resolution of the earlier debate:
Dec 31, 1952
“We had a good discussion last night on whether it was a sin to kill a man if he paid you to do it. We reached the conclusion that the only time you can kill is in self-defense. It was a very interesting discussion ranging from the last war to the martyrs.”
One night, a practical exploration of the legal process:
Jan 13, 1953
O’Briens Hold Court Last Night; Pogo Found Guilty; Jury Deliberates Two Min.
“Pogo was tried and found guilty of the crime of calling Tom a fig. Judge Don O’Brien presided, and accusations of Badgering the Witness and Contempt of Court were rampant. A countersuit was planned by the defendant.”
There are also sweetly mundane items. A trip to the drugstore on a summer day “for ice cream and reading material.” The children get comics, Mary Kay buys a photography magazine, and Mom selects “a couple pocketbooks and
