Gas line explosions and my grandfather

Maybe ten years ago, maybe more, there was a terrible gas explosion in a home in my town. The house was destroyed; the owners were outside, doing garden work. They were not hurt, and not amused at the "Aren't you lucky?" comments.

I felt a connection; my grandfather Linehan had started his career digging trenches for the People's Gas, Light, and Coke Company, in Chicago, and worked his way out of the trenches. Before he retired, he wore a suit to work. He used a pocket watch, and I always liked to look at the chain.

His parents came from Ireland in the mid-19th century, in the years of diaspora after the famine. He never finished high school, and was part of the first generation of Irish cops, firemen, phone guys, electric guys, others, who built the city. They became the middle class, mostly uneducated, smart and ambitious, craving respectability, who made sure their kids went to college.

He was the one who gave me the Notre Dame t-shirt when I was 4. He died when I was 7; I remember him as a cheerful guy. His friend Tony Mullaney, the fire commissioner, gave me a ride on a fire engine, and even turned on the siren. I never met any of his relatives. His life and death were never mentioned in my family; only intense questioning of my grandmother got me anything at all about him, much later in my life and toward the end of hers. She found him, she said, on the kitchen floor, dead from a stroke, with the water in the sink running. I didn't know how much I missed him until much later; an image of the two of us, of him walking me to school when I was in first grade, sometimes floats into my mind. I don't have an actual picture of him. So it goes with the Irish.

The movers and shakers of that generation were all men, all white men. The women worked in the lower paid and lower status jobs. My grandmother, for much of her life, was a telephone operator. She was able to say "Number, please" and happy to make sure that ni-yun sounded completely unlike fi-yuv. My other grandmother ran a penny-candy ice cream fountain near a school. One earner families showed up after WWII, at least in the middle class.

My mother also worked as a telephone operator while she was in high school. More ni-yuns and fi-yuvs.Then she went to a "normal" school, a teacher's training college, and worked as a teacher for several years before marrying my father. Married women couldn't teach back then, and so her career was very short. I never knew if she really wanted to be a teacher; my sense is that she did not. Teaching was the job open to girls from ambitious Irish families, and that was that. The other choices were nursing and nunnery.

I know, though, that I would not want to be a student in her room. At a guess, she was the sort of teacher who rules with a chilling emotional intimidation. But, my experience of her at home may not have much to do with what she was like at her job. Or maybe it did.

I know that she kept the friends from her years as a teacher for at least 40 years, until they began die, or moved to a warmer place. She had only one new friend for all the years I lived in the house -- several drinking buddies, but one friend. That may have been the norm for women who came of age, and the middle class, at the end of the Depression. Their warmth was left behind. The friends they made early adulthood were the closest in their lives. Moving to the middle class meant moving their most basic connections to their husbands and children. I know that the times she did have lunch or dinner with her early friends were happy times for her, but I can't say how I know that.

The People's Gas, Light, and Coke Company is now Integrys Energy Group, a new name not so Maoist. The gas, light, and coke are now moved through trenches dug by folks of color, replacing the Irish. They will move to the middle class. Unions are powerful in Chicago, and still provide decent money for their members. Their children will go to college; their grandchildren will run the country.

60 years ago, I was six, walking to school with my grandfather.