Getting Settled in Massachusetts
When Louie arrived in America, he only had ten dollars and twenty five cents with him. He moved in with his aunt and uncle in Haverhill, Massachusetts. His uncle Mike owned the Old Kerry Bottling Company also located in Haverhill and offered Louie a job there loading trucks. He really wanted to attend Merrimack College and get an electrical engineering degree; he told his family he would go to college for 4 years and pay for it by working at the loading dock on nights and weekends, but they told him “four years was too long to be in school” and that he should do something better with his time to get established and become successful. His job at his uncle’s company paid a dollar an hour and he made a total of forty dollars a week, however his aunt charged him seventeen dollars a week for room and board.
Louie only worked at his uncle’s company for a month or so before he began working as a waiter at the Brookline Country Club. He was given a place to stay and three meals a day as well as a decent salary. He said “the Brookline Country Club was the first place [he] ever really saw ‘prejudice’”. That club was the first established in the state and was primarily made up of “rich, snobby, Protestants”. He remembers one day when he was clearing tables in the restaurant, a club member who was eating lunch looked at the paper and read that John F. Kennedy (then a candidate for President) had won the New Hampshire primary; as soon as the man saw that title, he threw the paper down and stormed out of the restaurant because he was irritated that a Catholic candidate had won the primary. He remembers that as the first time he first handedly experienced prejudice in America.
Louie had been working at the Brookline Country Club for two years when the United States government began calling up the draft for the Vietnam War. In order to avoid the draft, Louie quit his job at the Country Club and enrolled in the National Guard. Throughout the six months he spent in the Massachusetts National Guard, he met many people from all over the country. He met two cousins from the south and thought “they were the oddest, most brutal people he had ever met”; nonetheless, he appreciated the many different nationalities and the types of people he was introduced to. He did not approve of the Vietnam War and believed that “in his lifetime or even within his grandchildren’s lifetime the United States would never invade another country without probable cause”. Once he finished his training, he came back to Brighton where he worked as a trolley driver for the MBTA. While working in Boston, he witnessed many more marches and protests by students and young adults, protesting the Vietnam War. He remembers one night he was coming home from work when he got stuck in traffic that was backed up all the way to Mass. Ave. because MIT students and other students from neighboring Boston schools were doing a silent march through Boston to protest the war. Louie recalls “veterans and the children of servicemen were spitting on them but they just kept walking, with the spit hanging off their face” and he remembers it as a “beautiful image of peaceful demonstration” and wished he had the guts to join them as they walked by.
During his arrival, the United States was deep in the Cold War. Louie was afraid of the threats and remembers it was “a scary time. Nothing was certain and you could not count on any news reports you heard”. He was frightened by the possibility of a nuclear war and paid close attention to the movement of American troops because of his brother’s enrollment in the Korean War. During the Bay of Pigs invasion, he stayed up late nervously watching news reports to get any information he could. The U.S. put a blockade around Cuba after it was found out that the Soviet Union was placing missile silos along the northern coast of the country. When the U.S. heard that Soviet supply ships were heading to Cuba, the nation got nervous as they waited to see what action would be taken. Louie, much like the rest of the country, awaited nervously and stayed up late listening to news about the location of the ships. The night before the Soviet ships were scheduled to arrive at the blockade, Louie was up all night watching the television waiting for an update. He described it to be “nerve-racking because no one knew if they would turn around or if they didn’t turn around or what would happen”. Tensions were high throughout America as the people waited for Kennedy’s response and “when the Soviet ships turned around without any violence [they] all let out a sigh of relief, [they] could finally rest peacefully after weeks of being nervous”.
Louie believed “the Rosary won the Cold War”. The other Irish that lived in his neighborhood when he lived with his uncle, encouraged each other to do a Rosary everyday to end the Cold War. The Irish believed that communism had no religious roots and therefore was unstable and did not have God on their side; they believed that because the Irish were so faithful and devoted to God, their prayers would weaken the Soviet Union. For that reason, the Irish Catholics throughout the country devoted their daily Rosary to the Cold War in their own personal attempt to end it. Therefore, when the Cold War finally ended, Irish Catholics gave credit to their daily Rosaries.
