Jim Gassensmith
(Editor’s note: Jim Gassensmith and I both graduated from St. Rose in 1954 and then from Joliet Catholic High School in 1958. He remains a friend of mine and lives in Florida. Jim has written an autobiography for his daughter which includes this interesting story. More stories will be published in the future.)
It was the summer of 2007 when I first started to write this story of my life at the request of my daughter, Jodie. I’d just turned 68 and I’d been retired as an accountant for a couple of years. I had reached the time in my life when the good old days were as clear as glass, but where I couldn’t remember what I’d had had for the morning breakfast. It was time to get some of my life down on paper.
I was born on May 18, 1939, back when Franklin Roosevelt was president, gas cost ten cents a gallon, and the big movie of the year was The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but I clearly remember having one of my baby teeth pulled with a string tied around it and the other end tied to the white doorknob of an open bedroom door. After setting it all up, Dad slammed the door. The tooth must have been pretty loose because it came right out, and I knew right then and there that we weren’t going to skimp on my medical care!
A lot of people didn’t know that my dad had a pretty good sense of humor. I still remember the time he lined up Gene, Lucille, and me. He told Gene to close his eyes and yell “Gypsy Fly!” as loud as he could when his name was called. Lucille was told to yell “Summer Fly!” I was told to yell “Letter Fly!“ When he called my name, I yelled, “Letter Fly!”—and he threw a wet dish rag right into my face.
Everyone thought that was great fun, and once I figured it out, I too appreciated the humor of me literally telling him to throw a wet rag into my face. I later tried this trick on some of my friends, but I could never pull it off. I must have been especially gullible as a kid because I was the butt of a lot of practical jokes growing up. Filling up an Oreo cookie with toothpaste was another one of Dad’s favorite April Fools’ jokes. He’d follow up later when he saw me with, “How was lunch today?” and then laugh his ass off.
Dad always kept up on current events and would frequently express his displeasure with whoever the current president was. I remember his anger at Harry Truman for firing General MacArthur, and he had no use for FDR—and really disliked his wife, Eleanor.
Dad was also very good at hide-and-seek. I remember him putting Lucille into a clothes hamper and hiding Gene under a bed. I must have looked for Lucille for an hour; I thought she’d left home!
But before I get too far off in too many different directions, let me introduce some of the cast of characters in my life. My brother Gene was the oldest, named after Mom’s father with Dad’s name as a middle name. I was born second and named James—after who knows who—but I got Dad’s oldest brother, Art, as my middle name. Lucille was the baby, and I think she was named after one of Mom’s sisters who had died. That’s how they did things back in the 1930s.
Now, at age 68, I still haven’t figured out who I was named after. I know it had to be some saint because I was born on Ascension Thursday, which was a Holy Day of Obligation in the Catholic Church. When you got confirmed, you also took another saint’s name. Mine was David (you remember David from the lion’s den?). I asked Mom where the name David had come from, and she said she just always liked that name. I think by the time I was confirmed, it wasn’t necessary to keep using up family members’ names. When our daughter Jodie was born, we took her to be baptized, but the priest couldn’t find a “Saint Jodie,” so he renamed her Julia. The world has changed a lot in the last 68 years, but the Catholic Church really hasn’t budged much.
As kids, we all collected bubble gum cards with baseball stars on them. We’d trade them to try to get a complete White Sox team—Minnie Miñoso, Nellie Fox, and whoever else was on the roster. We weren’t smart enough at that time to become collectors where they could have been valuable someday; instead, we used to put them in our bicycle spokes with a clothespin. They made the bicycle wheel sound like a machine gun when it spun around. You’d buy the bubble gum and get the card free, printed on cheap cardboard much like a cereal box.
Cereal box tops were also collected and sent away for various treasures like a decoder ring, a Yukon compass, and more. I grew up eating cereal for breakfast: Wheaties, Post Toasties, Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, Puffed Wheat, and Shredded Wheat. Nothing was sugar-coated back then, so you’d put a couple of spoons of sugar on the cereal before you ate it.
As you ate, you read the back of the cereal box—not the list of ingredients like they show you today, but something interesting, like how Puffed Wheat was “shot from guns” up in Battle Creek, Michigan, or how Jack Armstrong on the Wheaties box was an “All-American Boy” (whatever that meant). As far as I was concerned, I was an All-American boy. And Rice Krispies couldn’t be eaten until you put your ear to the bowl and listened for the snap, crackle, and pop. God, were we easy to entertain in those days!
Braidwood Beginnings 