Margaret Ann Passasini was a beautiful, first generation Italian American from San Francisco. Her Dad, Vince, was from Sicily and worked as a printer. Her Mom, Ada, was a Florentine whose family was from Lucca. She worked in a retail butcher shop. I visited Ada’s mother in Lucca when I was returning from Turkey. Marge had a younger sister, Carmela and a younger brother, Dominic.
“Our gal Marge is soft and squeezy, that’s why we call her fast and easy.” Except she wasn’t and neither was I. Marge was San Francisco sauve to me besides being almost Roman picturesque. She was also the oldest daughter, solid and responsible. She was made to be a mom for a good size family. The fact that she didn’t become one is a great tragedy, at least to me.
It’s difficult to write about Marge. I sometimes think I was not conscious or even old enough to have in fact seen her. She came to visit me and we vacationed for several weeks in Rhodes in the summer of 1966. I know it’s hard to believe but even though we slept together we did not have sex. We were such wonderfully trained Catholics – we couldn’t even be lovers, even though we were in love. I gave her an engagement ring. She went back to working in a Chinese school in San Francisco and I went back to my village. It’s still hard for me to imagine how that happened. But, I was still a virgin, as was Marge. Maybe if I had not been a virgin I could have convinced Marge to be my lover. As it was, I wonder if we were ever lovers, or just the college couple in love.
Turkey had changed me in many ways. I came back to the States shaken, but still standing straight. In fact, I even started to stand up for myself.
My Irish Catholic foundations had been rocked by living in a Muslim society for two years. I remember the Imam in my village asking me to explain the Trinity. I did the best I could in my limited Turkish. He said it sounded like a fairly stupid idea. On reflection, I could only agree with him. The Muslims also said that Christ was a great prophet, but not God. They believed in heaven and hell, the Virgin Mary and an afterlife. They didn’t seem like the heathens we were led to believe.
My Americanism had been shaken by what I thought to be the stupidity of American foreign policy in Turkey and the arrogant behavior of the few Americans that I did bump into in Turkey. I was convinced at that point in my life that an American who spoke fluent Turkish and had lived in a village for a few years could implement American policy so that the Turks would like us.
When I came back to the U.S. in 1967, even the war in Vietnam had creased my feeble brain and now the government was telling me they wanted me to go to Vietnam?
Then, the Church got in the way. The Archbishops like Spellman in New York and Connolly in Seattle were blessing the soldiers on their way to killing Vietnamese and taking priestly duties away from young priests who were questioning the war. I mean, some of those most loyal of young men, the ones who stuck out twelve years of seminary life, were now being told they couldn’t say Mass because they opposed the slaughter of innocents in Vietnam.
The Church had also changed the liturgy from Latin to English. I remember going to a mass when I got home and I was so shocked that I stood during the entire Mass. No smells of incense, no Latin incantations. no mystery. Guitar playing? I left that Church, and never went back. Say goodbye once, said Dad, and don’t look back. I followed his rule yet again.
Then, even Father Les came back into the picture. He said he would not say my marriage mass to Marge if I didn’t sign the Church’s statement against the use of birth control. I told my sister I didn’t want to get married. I was supposed to get married about two months after I got home from Turkey. It was scheduled for August. I didn’t have the guts to break it off. I didn’t even know why I would want to break it off. I probably still loved Marge. Maybe I just wanted to see if we could become lovers. At least I wasn’t a virgin anymore, even though I was far from a practiced lover.
Maybe my revolt against the Church’s demand that I sign the birth control paper was my indirect protest against the wedding itself. Maybe it was an indirect protest against all I was seeing or beginning to see at home.
I still hated Father Les, but he was our “family” priest and, of course, this wasn’t my marriage after all. It belonged to the families, the Church, society, history, long ago promises, momentum. I told Father Les and the Bishop of San Francisco I wouldn’t sign it. They said there could be no Mass for me and Marge. Then, Vince Passassini talked to me. Unlike Father Les, Vince was a real man, a worker, a family man, married to a beautiful woman. I respected him. He was someone I could be.
He said, “Look, Dan. I’ve got a great party organized for this wedding, music, food, booze. It will be great. Go ahead and sign the paper and then you and Marge can do whatever you want.” It made sense to me. Vince was an Italian Catholic. He didn’t bad mouth the Church, but he did what he wanted. I signed the form and the wedding was on. Like Vince said it was a great party and Marge and I were the focus of attention. Limousines, big Church, music and dances, wedding dresses and tuxes, bridesmaids, best men, photographers, families and a honeymoon.
Marge and I took off in my Mom’s new Chevy Malibu Super Sport, black, two door hardtop with the automatic shift in a panel on the floor, one of the first. Mom used to get so embarrassed when we bought her this car after Dad died because young dragsters would pull up next to her for a challenge and see an “old lady” sitting there on the way to Church. Our first marital trip was short. We went to the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square in San Francisco. It was a big, fancy place. At least the façade said so. The doorman approached and before I could scramble back to the trunk he was pulling out my suitcase which was secured only by an old belt. The reason the belt was there was because the locks didn’t work. As it turned out, neither did the belt and my clothes go sprawling onto the street.
Through the lobby, up the elevator and back into the not-to-glamorous old section of the hotel. I somehow thought marriage and honey moon meant a big suite of some kind, rather than just a hotel room, but me and Marge made it through. After our wedding night, we headed up the coast, stopped at Ireland’s Rustic Inn in Gold Beach, Oregon, where we had a little cottage to ourselves and had our food delivered to our cabin. I don’t remember much else. We must have made it to Seattle, dropped off Mom’s car and flown back to New York City.
Marge and I both had fellowships to New York University. Marge was in a two year, Masters of Social Work Program for an MSW at 3 Washington Square North and I was in the Public Administration Graduate School at 4 Washington Square North.
New York City was a big adventure for both of us. Aunt Mary had a friend who was an administrator of a V.A. hospital in the city. She lived in Peter Stuyvesant Town, a series of middle class apartment houses on Manhattan’s east side in the 20s. We stayed there first while we searched for an apartment in Brooklyn.
We found a furnished apartment on 18th street off of Flatbush Avenue near Erasmus High School. I remember having to go to Erasmus High School to get my literacy diploma so I could vote. I kept that diploma on my wall for a long time. I wonder what I had to do to prove literacy and where that test came from and how it was used to exclude people from voting, an old tradition in American democracy – limiting the franchise.
Our apartment did not have a window in it that received direct sunlight. I remember going home one time to Queen Anne hill and waking up one morning and staring out the front window. For a long time, I could not figure out what I was experiencing, but it was direct sunlight.
We were close to the Church Avenue stop on the D train and the D train would take us into Manhattan to the 6th Avenue stop just west of the Washington Square campus of NYU.
Marge and I got busy with our studies and our life together. I actually think we were happy together but the strain of exterior forces and my own stupidity or chauvinism made it worse. Marge had a very rough program. She was in a social work school that put its students through both classes and a slave labor program. Marge not only did papers, but worked as a case worker for agencies as part of her graduate work. She would come home exhausted from work and still needing to write-up case management summaries. I can’t remember the name of these things, but I hated them. Her graduate study was not like mine and more importantly, I think for us, gave Marge a different explanation for world events. Social problems were reduced to behavioral explanations calling for intervention. I remember some friend of mine asking me whether if there was a social worker for every poor person in New York city would the problem be remedied. Slowly, the “problem” got in the way of our marriage, as our worldviews separated.
My graduate school experience was a slide compared to Marge’s. It’s hard to tell my students these days, but I had a fellowship. Not only was my tuition free, but I was paid to read books. My NDEA stipend was $300 per month. Marge also had $300 per month. We could live on that. I was one of four straight shot doctoral students in this program. It was me, Cary Hershey, Rick Devine and Ron Sakolsky. All of those guys were from New York city.
Cary was a New Yorker and married to Beverly Mizencho who was from a small, mining town near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. They had an apartment in Manhattan. Marge and I smoked our first dope with them and ate the best rum raisin ice cream in the world shortly there after. Cary had a great laugh and they also had a beautiful baby girl, named Jessica. A few years later around 1972, when I was down and out in Brooklyn, Cary, who was by then a faculty member at Cornell, helped get me a job as Director of Cornell’s Human Affairs Program. As Cary said a bit after that, “Here is my friend Dan Leahy. He stayed in my house, drove my car and now he’s fucking my wife!” Well, ex-wife. I lost track of Cary after I left Cornell in 1978. Beverly moved to Florida with Jess and set up her speech pathology clinic. Bethany and I visited her in Florida when we were doing a public power study for the American Public Power Association.
Rick Devine was the son of an Irish cop from the upper west side of Manhattan. Rick was a tough talking, street wise, smart and hard working. I’m not sure any of us worked like Rick. He got some funds one time from the City Club of New York to do some form of housing assessment. It called for some socio/economic statistics and I did up that part of the study. Rick worked on this in an alcove on the top floor of the brownstone that was our Graduate School. He was intense then and he still is.
He did his dissertation on red-lining. I think it might have been one of the first. Red-lining is a process by which banks collect funds from depositors and then refuse to loan mortgage money in an area outlined in red. Rick traced this process in the South Bronx which was systematically being burnt out by landlords and 3 alarm fires.
Rick got a job as the Housing Director for the Urban League right out of graduate school and I lost track of him for a bit. A few years later in one of my down and out stages, I called him looking for work. By now, Rick was in D.C. as the affirmative action enforcer for the Nixon Administration. Rick called me back and said that if I was a Black, blind, gay, paraplegic, he could offer me a job. He left for California soon after he wrote an extensive critique of the gutless Affirmative Action Enforcement office and started during work for the Center for Community Change’s low-income housing projects. He’s still in SF today as the head of his own firm, Devine and Gong.
Ron was the son of a post office worker from Brooklyn. He was married, too, and his wife was having a baby that turned out to be a beautiful brown skinned girl named, Natasha. Ron did his dissertation on the fight for community control of schools which was a very controversial and bitter struggle between an emerging, teacher union leadership led by Al Shanker of the AFT and leaders of the African American community who wanted a say in the running and teaching of the schools. Ron became a professor at Sagamon State College in Southern Illinois and taught public administration classes using literature. He became or maybe always was a anarchist into community living and music. He wrote and edited several books and became such a thorn in the side of Sagamon State that they bought him out early and he took off to live on Denman Island in British Columbia. He is a member of the Heroico Batallon of San Patricio and is in charge of making credentials for all those who operate underground.
