Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (22 page)

The same portrait shows Ida with almost the opposite outlook. She is at ease. She is not smiling widely, either, and there is little evidence of a cheeky, girlish grin. But she smiles evenly, just enough to indicate that she is at peace. She’ll have help now. She won’t have to do everything by herself anymore. She relaxes her jaw but does not drop her chin. She is ready to hold her head high no matter what hardships the future might bring. She doesn’t know what to expect or how to prepare for it, but she trusts that she can rise to the challenge—now that she and Joseph can rise together. Her eyes gaze patiently and receptively before her, perhaps looking to intuit the silent advice and wisdom radiating from her parents. But she is uncharacteristically confident. She looks almost stately in her composure.

Joseph was 25. Ida was 24. They believed in marriage for life. They had known each other for ten months.

Ida recalled one thing in particular that seemed to cement her bond with Joseph early on. “He called his father ‘Tata.’ I always called my father ‘Tata,’ too. Now who else would I ever meet who would call his father ‘Tata’?” Ida had never met the other Tata, but she took comfort in having a simple but unusual common connection to someone else so central. For Ida, everything just seemed meant to be.

The wedding reception was a champagne brunch at a local Italian restaurant. “Where’s the cake?” the photographer asked, loud enough for all to hear.

“
Oh, darnit,” Ida reddened in front of everyone. “I forgot to order one.” The thought hadn’t crossed her mind until that moment. But it didn’t matter.

“
Here’s to Ida!” everyone had a good laugh and toasted her sense of priorities.

Joseph and Ida honeymooned in Palm Springs for about 48 hours, then drove home Monday evening. On Tuesday morning, he returned to school, and she returned to work.

On graduation day at Loyola University in June 1950, Joseph strode to the podium in cap and gown. He shook hands with the dean and accepted his diploma, then returned to his seat to watch his classmates follow in succession.

When the parade of graduates finished, the dean approached the microphone. “It is now my honor to announce the winner of The Accountancy Award. For the best student in accounting, The Accountancy Award for 1950 goes to . . . Joseph Godzisz!”

“
Oh, my God!” Ida exploded from the audience.

Joseph turned his head and spotted her in the crowd, his blue eyes beaming. He ascended the podium once again.

“
The winner of The Accountancy Award,” the dean continued, “receives this latest version of the professional bible, the
Cost Accountants’ Handbook
.”

The dean bestowed upon Joseph the reward. It would come in handy.

Joseph immediately faced his next professional challenge: the two-and-a-half-day licensing exam to become a certified public accountant, or CPA. The grueling 20-hour exam contained four parts: accounting theory, accounting practice, auditing, and business law. He needed to pass at least two parts to avoid having to retake the entire exam all over again. If he passed two parts, then he would need to retake only the remaining two parts. Few people ever passed all four parts on the first try.

He carved out a small workspace in a corner of the one-bedroom Spanish stucco cottage in which he and Ida lived in south Los Angeles. He wedged a wooden table into the corner and tried to contain his anxieties there, hoping to spare Ida some of the agony. He buried the surface of the table in stacks of books and piles of papers, except for a working area barely large enough for one sheet of paper and one cup filled with the pencils that he kept eroding and sharpening. He placed a wastebasket on the floor beside him to capture the crumbles from his erasers. Books of secondary importance crowded the legroom around his feet.

For a month, Joseph toiled at the table, crunching numbers, reviewing theories, and flaring his temples as he ground his teeth into his gums. He knew that his future jobs and earnings—perhaps his entire future earnings curve—depended on the outcome of the exam. And he sure as hell didn’t want to take it all over again.

As it turned out, it was impossible for Joseph to spare Ida the agony. Her stomach turned every time she saw his temples flare. Their bodies pulsated in nervous unison. She cooked his meals and washed his clothes but worried that her activity would disrupt his train of thought, especially when she stacked dishes into the cupboards or juggled pots and pans.

She consoled herself that her paycheck could give them a bit of financial cushion, at least for a little while, even if he failed the exam. But she made no mention of that consolation to him. She knew that he would not be happy depending on her paycheck. For him, that would be little more than a recurrent reminder of failure.

He took the exam in late June.

“
How’d it go, Joe?” Ida asked when he arrived home on the third and final day.

“
Your guess is as good as mine,” he went straight to bed and collapsed.

For six weeks, they waited apprehensively for the results.

The envelope arrived in early August. Ida handed it to Joseph as soon as he came home from work.

He sat down at the table. She sat down beside him.

He sliced open the envelope, unfolded its contents, flared his temples, and sighed in relief. “Whooh!” he caught his breath. “Thanks be to God!” he made the sign of the cross and reached out to hug his wife. “Now maybe we can provide for a family.”

She danced around and smothered him in kisses.

The immigrant kid who had joined the CCC and then gone off to war before finishing the tenth grade turned out to be one of just two people in his college graduating class of 20 accounting majors to pass all four parts of the CPA exam on the very first try. Resting upon his unpadded wooden chair in the corner of his one-bedroom rented home, Joseph felt as if he had staged a financial coup.

But his accounting challenges had only just begun.

He and Ida wanted to start a family. But they didn’t want to start a family in the one-bedroom Spanish stucco cottage at 1041 West 104th Street. Their hearts were set on a two-bedroom English stucco house less than two miles away at 9424 South Harvard Boulevard.

Built in 1925, the house on Harvard Boulevard had a den, a front porch, a back porch, French windows, hardwood floors, sprinklers, and a lemon tree. “It was heaven!” said Ida.

But heaven cost $12,000. Even with his earnings as a bookkeeper at Associated Battery Corporation plus her earnings from a new payroll job at Hammond Lumber Company, Joseph and Ida couldn’t afford the $2,400 down payment. They could scrape together only about $400.

Ida’s sister, Elsie, loaned them $800. But they were still short about $1,200.

“
I guess it’s not meant to be,” Joseph hung his head while walking out the front door of the cottage. He had grossly underestimated the higher powers.

“
Joe, why’s your chin hangin’ down to your knees?” his landlord asked. “What’s up?”

Joseph related his financial woes to the landlord.

“
Well, Joe,” the landlord responded nonchalantly, “I’ll lend you the money.”

Joseph could hardly believe it. The landlord was willing to sacrifice short-term cash flow
and
a good tenant. Not even the Jesuits at Loyola University had prepared Joseph for such an act of accounting largesse.

But the landlord liked Ida and trusted Joseph. It was as simple as that.

Joseph and Ida became homeowners in August 1950.

In early December 1951, Ida filled the home with the comforting aroma of steamed golabkis.

“
What’s the occasion?” Joseph sniffed when he walked through the door that night, greeting her with a kiss and looking into her eyes.

“
I saw the doctor today,” she sang. “It looks like we’re going to have a family!”

“
Oh, that’s beautiful!” he kissed her three more times. “You should be proud of yourself!”

“
This is what we’ve always wanted, Joe,” she glowed.

“
There’s so much to do!” his eyebrows lifted. “You should quit your job. I’m earning enough now to pay the bills for both of us—excuse me, all
three
of us!”

“
Are you sure, dear?”

“
Yes, I’m certain. It wouldn’t be right for you to keep working anymore. Your responsibilities are much more important right here at home.”

“
All right then. As long as you’re sure.” But Ida wasn’t sure if she’d ever work outside the home again.

Prior to their first encounter outside the Jim Dandy Market during Christmas break of 1948, Ida and Joseph had come from completely different states of existence. Hers was connectedness. His was aloneness.

For Ida, the natural state of being was that of being encircled among others, especially family, friends, and coworkers. When detached from her circle of connections, as she sometimes found herself in Los Angeles, she felt unhinged, even though those moments were only brief aberrations from the natural order.

For Joseph, the normal state of being was that of being caught between others, and his arrival in Los Angeles coincided with a deliberate distancing of himself from his parents and their competing claims. His normal state of being grew into one of self-determination, although it was ironically not his chosen state.

Ida and Joseph were perpetuating the opposite forces that their parents had brought to America decades before. Ida, who had been reared in the tight-knit immigrant enclave of extended families on Lehigh Row, clung to the ideal of a mutually reinforcing community of the type that her parents had helped to transplant there from places like Farindola. Joseph, who had come to America as the result of a family breakup hastened by his father’s desire to leave the farm towns of Poland behind, then left his own past and parents behind and struck out for California on his own.

The marriage of Ida and Joseph represented more than themselves. As individuals, they personified everything that had preceded them in the old country and everything that would follow them in the new country. Having emerged from opposite kinds of immigrant backgrounds—one communitarian, the other individualistic—they epitomized the tension in American life between the community and the individual. As a couple, they would project their own version of the great American tension most directly at one another. And just as they would perpetuate what they had inherited from previous generations, they would foreshadow what would come in future generations.

PART TWO: ASSIMILATION

6. Baby Boom

The torch was being lit for a new generation: my generation. From this point forward in this book, therefore, Joseph and Ida shall be referred to as Dad and Mom.

Dad and Mom gave birth to a son in 1952. He was born on the Fourth of July.

It was more than a coincidence. When Serafino and Maria Di Gregorio had given birth to their only American-born son on Armistice Day in 1918, there could have been no greater confirmation in their hearts that they had become truly American. On that day, their destiny and America’s destiny had become one and the same. In a similar way, when Dad and Mom gave birth to their first American-born son on the Fourth of July, there could have been no medal of honor that would have made the immigrant father and veteran Marine feel any prouder or more patriotic.

Mom fabricated her own kind of medal for the newborn boy and began a family tradition in the process. She knitted her first Christmas stocking, an elaborate two-foot-long sock with an image of Santa on the front and an image of a reindeer on the back. She used hairy angora yarn for Santa’s beard. She trimmed the stocking in the red, white, and green of Christmas and Italy. The front bore the name of its owner, “STAN,” and the back showed the year of birth, “1952.” In the decades to come, Mom would make similar Christmas stockings for all her newborn children and for those of family and friends. But none of the subsequent stockings ever compared with the original. To commemorate Stan’s birth on the Fourth of July, Mom embellished his stocking with multi-colored stars sparkling in the heavens around Santa and his reindeer, a star-spangled constellation of fireworks stitched into the holy firmament.

In 1954 and 1955, Mom gave birth to Genie and Geri. Dad wanted his kids to be recognized as true-blue Americans on their very first days of school. So he settled on a surname that couldn’t be found anywhere in nature but that had an Anglo ring to it.

Mom was all in favor of the change. Godzisz had never had the musical quality of Di Gregorio. So in October 1955, Dad led his wife and three kids, with Geri in Mom’s arms, up the steps of the Los Angeles County Courthouse. There, he completed his final legal act of Americanization by changing the family name of Godzisz—inscrutable to the Yankee eye and unpronounceable to the Yankee tongue—to the no-nonsense Godges.

“
Like Hodges but with a G!” we grew up telling people. We let it be known that we were just one letter away from being completely assimilated.

In 1956, another set of G.I. tract homes with low interest rates became available for veterans in the Los Angeles area. The new homes were built in the southernmost hills of suburban Torrance in a neighborhood called the Palos Verdes Riviera. The neighborhood overlooked Redondo Beach and the Pacific Ocean two miles to the west.