A few years ago, when my wife fell down and injured her knee, the injury prevented her from walking without pain. Because of that, she asked me to take some of her art work to the local YWCA to submit the works for the Y’s annual art show. I took two of her paintings into the building and went to the registration desk. The woman behind the desk was busy filling out registration forms. As I waited for her to finish her paperwork, I turned around and saw a framed YWCA Mission Statement attached to the wall. I stopped briefly to read it. Then I also noticed four tables of women playing bridge in an adjoining room. The juxtaposition of the Mission Statement and the card players amused me.
You see, the Mission Statement said the function of the YWCA was, among other things, to “strive to create opportunity for women’s growth, leadership and power in order to attain a common vision: peace, justice, freedom and dignity for all people.” In my mind that sounded like a curious admixture of the tenets of the National Organization for Women, and of the United Nations. I had no idea that a place as mean and prosaic as Salem, Ohio could possibly contain an organization with such lofty goals.
Those women playing cards seemed to offer some stubborn evidence that the Mission Statement did not apply wholly to them, however. I asked myself what card-playing had to do with empowerment and peace and justice. More specifically, how does one obtain “dignity for all people” by playing cards? It would seem to me that the demands of universal dignity would surely require more than an idyllic afternoon spent shuffling playing cards amidst the chatter of gossip and the clinking of teacups. Perhaps it might have been better - and certainly more honest - if the Mission Statement had said that the YWCA organization existed to give women a place to exercise and to socialize, and simply left it at that. But, then, such a statement might have been far too simple for the world we live in.
You see, there is a long and storied tradition of depicting the virtues as stylized women: as Wisdom, or as Temperance, or as Charity, or as Justice, or Liberty, or whatever. It has become almost a cliché to see, for example, Madame Justice, blindfolded and holding the balance in her hand, adorning the facade of courthouses in even our most rustic municipalities. There is a tradition in the West - and perhaps it is something we received from the Greeks - of feminizing the virtues to the point that women now have become the de facto custodians of virtue in society. Since almost all depictions of the virtues have been personified as women, it is then assumed by many that all virtues are, ipso facto, essentially feminine. And it is for that reason that the mission statement of the YWCA soars with those frothy, high-minded, feminized intangibles. Good heavens! All that seemed to be missing from the YWCA building that day were a brace of ponderous caryatids, say, of Hope and Charity, in long flowing robes, with their breasts bared to the wind, holding the roof above the card-players. But even that might have been too much for a place as prosaic as Salem, Ohio.
In a way those women playing bridge reminded me of an ad hoc boys' club the neighborhood boys had formed when I was a child. We had built a tree house in an old box elder in the vacant lot behind Nick Spollas’s house. We wanted to reserve the tree house exclusively to ourselves. And a tomboy named Patty Ann, who usually hung around in our group, was excluded because she did not help us with the tree house construction. She said that our plans for a tree house were stupid and she had refused to help. We should have seen that coming because she had said the same thing about the scooters we had built with old roller skates and apple boxes. “Those scooters were dumb,” Patty Ann had said, until she found out how much fun they were to skate up and down the sidewalks on Bank Street. Then they were so nice that we couldn’t keep them away from her. But I think the real reason she objected to our tree house was because she didn’t know how to use a hammer.
So, in a spate of spitefulness, we posted a “No Girls” sign on the tree and climbed up the rope ladder to the tree house and pulled the ladder up behind us. When Patty Ann came to the gnarled box elder, she objected to our exclusivity and begged us to lower the ladder. We told her that she wasn’t a member of our club. “This is a boys' club,” we told her, “and you ain’t no boy.” We would not let her come up into the tree house. She stammered and whined below us, until she realized that we really meant it when we said it was a boys' club. And then she lost her patience and darted off across the street to her home, whimpering and cursing at us with unintelligible words. We didn’t see her for quite some time after that, and we were shocked at the revelation of that facet of her personality that she had managed to keep well hidden from us: there was a meanness that simmered just below the placid and implacable surface in Patty Ann.
While we may have started our club out of pure spite to keep Patty Ann on the ground (and yes, Virginia, there were glass ceilings in those days too - even in tree houses), we soon found ourselves discussing the rules for being a member of our newly-formed club. Essentially, you had to be a boy to belong to the club. That seemed pretty obvious. After all, it was called the Bank Street Boys' Club. And you had to be able to play baseball and football, and to explore Supple’s Marsh without getting lost, and to go fishing in the Big Hole all day long without being unhappy about not catching anything. Beyond that, however, we weren’t exactly sure what we were supposed to do. Empowerment and peace and justice never suggested themselves to us at that early age. And the concept of “dignity for all people” was utterly beyond our comprehension. We didn’t even know what “dignity” meant.
Someone did suggest, however, that we pay dues of 10 cents a week. No one knew how the dues were to be used, though. But it seemed good and proper that the club should have dues if ours was to be a club at all. Every club worthy of the name charged its member dues, and our club was to be no different. We spent weeks discussing what we were going to do with the dues. We stuffed the accumulating funds into a tobacco tin and put it in a knot hole in the box elder. We were amazed that Patty Ann didn’t find our dues money up there that evening she sneaked across the street and climbed the rope ladder to inspect our tree house. Later on, in order to settle the matter of deciding what to do with the dues, we voted to empty the treasury on glasses of Kool-Aide that Pitzie Buehler sold at the stand she erected near the street in front of her house. And we were happy that we didn’t have to elect someone to be our treasurer, either. No one wanted the job anyhow.
One of the boys, Joey, said we should write a constitution for our club. Most of us did not understand what a constitution was. Instead, we were content to climb the rope ladder to the tree house, and to sit up there talking among ourselves, until we heard the shrill whistle on the Tolibia cheese factory telling us that it was time to go home for lunch. But Joey explained that a constitution listed all the rules for the club and that we couldn’t have a real club without a constitution. We weren’t so sure, however. He even volunteered to write the constitution. So we sent him home to pore over his books and reference materials, and to write the constitution. He returned a few days later, beaming, with something that looked like an unhappy marriage between the United States Constitution and the Gettysburg Address, with bits and pieces of the Declaration of Independence thrown in for good measure. We might have been able to predict the future course of Joey’s life from the document he had produced, had we been a bit more prescient. After college, Joey became an accountant, and later, the Chief Financial Officer of a manufacturing company where he worked. And we always wondered why his parents kept calling him Joseph. He was surely meant for more serious things in life, and his constitution certainly proved that fact.
Like that YWCA’s Mission Statement, Joey’s constitution had a flowery preamble that dabbled with those peace and justice issues. Somehow, that all seemed wildly inappropriate to the rest of us. Just as those soaring “peace in the world” goals of the YWCA seem inappropriate to me today, our boys club goals never seemed to go much beyond throwing penknives at trees, and belching as loud as we could, and - of course - keeping the rope ladder pulled up into the tree house so Patty Ann couldn’t pester us. “Peace” never entered the subtle calculus of our gritty childhood, that’s for sure. And, as far as “liberty and justice for all” was concerned, well, that was well beyond the pale, too. I mean, really, it was the Bank Street Boys' Club, not the Boston Tea Party, for crying out loud. “Liberty and justice for all,” to us, were words that a black-robed judge mumbled into the microphone next to the statue of the Civil War soldier in front of the courthouse. And those words were mingled in with the sounds of marching bands and the appearance of that old Spanish-American War veteran who sat up, pale and frail, propped against two younger soldiers in the back seat of that old Packard convertible, in those annual Fourth of July parades down Main Street. Joey was miffed at our rejection of his constitution and left the tree house with his constitution half torn in his hands, not to return for several days, embittered by our truculent stupidity. He didn’t even hear Billy Booger Nose taunting him and calling him a cry baby as he slouched off into the distance on the sidewalk across the street from the Beer Hut.
And so, we ran our club without any rules, until a strong wind destroyed the tree house one night. Patty Ann jeered at us the next day, “Hah. Some tree house you boys built!” She seemed almost pleased that a rude misfortune had come to our tree house in the form of a strong, fresh wind off Lake Winnebago - a wind, now that I think of it, that lacked the usual aroma of Stinky Point. Instead, the wind bore the August smell of that dog-day green algae that colored Lake Winnebago every summer: a smell not unlike an old woman’s breath or of the muck at the bottom of Supple’s Marsh. After that Patty Ann could be seen pushing a doll buggy around the neighborhood and she no longer hung around with us boys. We had no idea where she had gotten the doll buggy because she always ran around the neighborhood with a baseball and a fielder’s glove. She had never shown any interest in dolls as far as we could tell. Actually, she was the best third baseman we had. No one could throw out the runner at first like Patty Ann. Now that girl had an arm on her. But we lost her to a dumb old doll buggy just because we wouldn’t let her climb up the rope ladder to our Boy’s Club tree house.
Well, you can say what you want, but there’s no justice in that.
