Chapter 9
In stark contrast to the cohesive love binding the Huber family together, such warmth seemed to escape the family of a young boy living in the center of Orange County. In 1955, the year Disneyland came into existence and focused a national spotlight of wholesome entertainment on the region, living conditions on peaceful Victoria Drive in Santa Ana should have been ideal. Lined on both sides with ancient, twisted cedar trees shading expansive yards, the wide street had attracted wealthy urbanites during and after WWII. They erected lavish multi-story homes decorated with ostentatious columns and crafted stone facades in Tudor, Georgian, and ranch styles, all reflecting posh affluence. Prosperous owners lived in comfortable safety insulated from the ghettos and barrios in poorer sections of Orange County or neighboring L.A. County. The civic center, which included the Santa Ana Police Department, government buildings, and the courthouse, could be reached in a five-minute walk from Victoria Avenue. Main Street shopping, with all the major department stores, also lay within a brief stroll. Few would deny that the neighborhood could be regarded as a slice of upper middle-class America.
Inside the walls of the Famalaro home, though, a frigid tension languished, at least from the viewpoints of the three children.
Six-year-old Francine Famalaro saw the need to act as a substitute mother for her frail three-year-old brother, John. Their mother, Anna Mae Famalaro, had reportedly suffered a difficult pregnancy with John, forcing her to take to her bed for long periods of time. As Mrs. Famalaro reverted to the habit again, it gradually became apparent to Francine that the relationship between John and their mother fell far short of any normal symbiosis. Years later, Francine would recall, “There wasn’t a lot of bonding” between the child and his mom. So, with the help of her maternal grandmother, Francine did her best to provide the nurturing that John craved. Her fosterage grew in importance considering the smallest child’s frequent symptoms of illness. “He was sick a lot. I don’t remember the nature of the illnesses ... Just a lot of colds. He was the one who got the chicken pox first and the measles first, and that kind of thing. He was sort of weak at that age.”
John’s brother, George, five years older than his male sibling, agreed with that diagnosis. “He was ill with something all the time. He had a hard time. Things were slower coming to him. Seems like there were headaches. He had kind of twitch stuff. The thing that scared me the most was ... bleeding colitis, a lot of colon stuff.”
All three of the Famalaro children were born on Long Island in New York, George in 1952, Francine in 1954, and John in 1957. During John’s infancy, the parents made a decision to relocate to one of the fastest growing counties in the United States where their father, Angelo Famalaro, would embark on a thirty-year career as a storm window and aluminum siding dealer. In 1962, they built a six-bedroom home with three and a half baths on Victoria Drive and immediately outraged conservative neighbors by painting it a pumpkin orange.
With other investments contributing to their income, the Famalaros flourished. Economic stress which often rips families apart did not exist for them. If seeds of disfunction sprouted and grew in the family, the reasons might have been diagnosed in those early years by a counselor, but no one thought of seeking professional help. Only the children, it seemed, recognized the problems.
In Francine’s view, her older brother, George, not only attracted most of their mother’s attention, but he appeared to be apathetic toward his brother and sister. At first, Francine hoped for aid from George in shielding their kid brother from tormentors, but he demonstrated little desire to act as John’s protector. Instead, as she saw it, George selfishly basked in favoritism given by their mother. Francine remembered: “He generated a lot of interest from my mother and received a lot of attention because he was in piano recitals and a debate team. He had a very outgoing personality [which] really paralleled my mother’s personality.” The mother appeared to be vicariously living her personal goals through the life of her older son. She incessantly praised him for good grades in school, and encouraged him to participate in extracurricular activities.
George saw it differently. “John got the wrath of my mom . . . she didn’t feel like she knew what to do with me, so she would hammer on John, take it out on John. I knew he didn’t feel the love from Dad that he would want. I really feel bad about John in the way things were in that household. It was very tough for him. Since there were no children after him, he was on that conveyor belt the longest. He was in the incubator the longest, taking all of what he took from Mom. . . .”
Recognizing the void in John’s life, Francine’s maternal defense of her little brother became even stronger. “As we grew older, I pretty much protected him from the family dynamics that were in the home at that time. Then, when we started school together at St. Joseph’s, I was sort of the guardian. He was weak, and people would pick on him. It became my role to take care of him.” Her own personal relationship with their mother fell somewhere in between that of the two boys. “I really just stayed away from her. I didn’t want the attention. I figured out early on that the less attention, the more tranquility I would have in my childhood. So I leaned more towards staying in my room doing my homework. I didn’t ask for a lot of attention, and I didn’t want it.”
In John’s early school years, he began to demonstrate certain odd behavioral characteristics. He often found himself in trouble with the nuns. And at home, for some reason, he began locking his brother George out of the house. According to Francine, their mother did little to correct her youngest son. “She would be angry but would just put him in his room so she didn’t have to deal with it.” Sometimes, she would simply delegate his care to Francine, ordering her to take the child outside; “Take him for a walk, go ride the Big Wheels, something, get him out of there.”
Mrs. Famalaro, in assessing her youngest son’s childhood, recalled that he was hyper, but thought he was reared under normal circumstances and seemed like a happy child with playmates in a nice neighborhood. “John was part of our little pack. There were two girls up the street who were their friends, and a little boy who was George and John’s friend. My husband and I would take them everywhere. We would go to Knott’s Berry Farm, or to Disneyland, or to a particular movie that would be all right.” Her children, she said, “would go out in the street and do their thing. And they brought these kids home, and that was fine.”
Regarding John, Francine, and George visiting other playmates on the block, Mrs. Famalaro said, “There weren’t that many children on Victoria Drive.”
Some aid in John’s nurturing came from their maternal grandmother. Francine later recalled, “Nana also had an apartment when my grandfather was dying in a nursing home. She maintained it close to him so she could visit on a daily basis. I believe he died in 1966. Prior to that, she did live with us on and off, and once Grandpa died, she lived with us full time.” Francine welcomed the help from her grandmother. “She was a great lady, very strong. She had been through a lot, raised five brothers . . . [but] she was a cold woman. She displayed affection in other ways, meeting your physical needs, but not at all an affectionate person.” The grandmother did, however, show a certain fondness for the youngest child, John.
On weekends, instead of gathering with a group of other children, John would make a beeline to his grandmother’s apartment and “hang out.” with her. “He would watch TV, make Jello, walk in the park with her, and those kinds of things,” said Francine. When he came home on Sunday nights, he seemed sad. “He was always ... hyperactive, very active, never stopped in motion. But when he was sad or down, he would just really retreat to his room. It would be over by Monday. He would get up and go to school. It would be okay by then. But he really looked forward to the weekends with Nana. I spent some of those weekends there with him.”
Even Mrs. Famalaro generally agreed that John enjoyed a particularly close relationship with her mother, saying, “She singled out John because he was the baby, and my father called him, ‘Honey Boy.’ My mother couldn’t get enough, to be around him enough. So I relinquished a lot of my powers to my mother on John.”
The bonding between John and his grandmother, as George saw it, was strong. “It wasn’t your normal grandmother/grandson relationship. It was—there was more intertwining. And I think that John looked to Grandma for what he wasn’t getting from his mom. There was an attempt to get affection and tenderness from Grandma that wasn’t there from Mom. It was kind of weird, but I think they worked out a balance to where he got something he needed from her and she got something she needed from him.”
The children’s father, according to Francine, “was a great man. But my mother was the dominant force in the home, and my father tolerated it to keep the peace. I learned survival skills from him.” In full view of the children, she recalled, Mrs. Famalaro would verbally abuse her husband. Somehow his patient tolerance, although not entirely understood by the three children, drew their sympathy and affection, if clouded by a mix of resentment “One night,” Francine said, “I remember my older brother and I sitting up in Father’s den and asking, ‘Why? Why do you take this?’ And he went into this whole Italian-Catholic thing that this is what you do.”
George Famalaro’s memories, for the most part, coincided with those of Francine, seeing their father as rather ineffectual. “He was the mediator, the peace-keeper, trying to love his children as best he could, but walking the line in pleasing Mom. Because if he didn’t, then there was hell to pay in the house. He was passive and withdrawn, and didn’t stick up for us.”
Their mother, George said, tried to control everything, including an attempt to regulate what was taught in the parochial school the siblings attended. “My mom found herself being very active in what the curriculum was going to be, especially about morals, discipline, that kind of thing. Just going in and basically telling the nuns and priests how to do their job. You would see her show up, and she would have side talks with the nuns and priests. You know, other moms weren’t coming and showing that kind of interest. It seemed fine at the time.”
Mrs. Famalaro, he said, exerted a smothering influence to prevent the kids from participating in ordinary activities. “Don’t venture out. Don’t talk family business. Don’t talk politics. Don’t talk religion. Stay to ourselves. ‘It is us against them’ kind of situation.” Other children in the neighborhood, George said, “. . . would have sleep-overs. We wouldn’t. They could invite people to their house. We couldn’t. We were definitely different.”
Even while the family traveled in a car, their mother kept a tight rein on the three youngsters. Francine recalled the rule against whispering. “She would align herself in the back seat between two of us, and one child always sat in the front passenger seat. She would sit between the two in the backseat so we couldn’t have a conversation.” Whispering among the siblings, Francine said, was strictly prohibited.
To prevent painting an entirely dark picture of her home life as a child, Francine pointed out that there were some good times. “There were peaks and valleys. On some days, when she was up, we would have a wonderful day at Disneyland, and everyone was happy. It was like a normal, happy family. But the valleys ... she had a very short fuse, I guess, if I had to describe it. Her tolerance was very low for anything she didn’t agree with or think was the right thing to do.”
The anger expressed by the children’s mother took forms often more hurtful than a simple spanking. Francine wrestled with a description. “She would have an outburst or just psychologically cut [us] off I don’t know how to describe that. Just a very cold effect like we didn’t exist. You got the cold shoulder and that could go on for days. She wouldn’t look at us, wouldn’t talk to us for days.” Often, Francine said, when her mother did choose to speak, she would transform the incident into a religious transgression. “She would make it a much more serious offense than it was in reality. So it became a more frightful thing.”
One of the reasons the children couldn’t have guests in the home, they recalled, stemmed from the embarrassingly messy interior. According to Francine, their mother had a remarkable habit of saving every piece of paper that came into the house, newspapers, periodicals, magazines, amassing huge stacks in every room. The laundry, Francine said, stood in piles four feet high. Boxes of unpacked junk brought from New York filled the garage. The mother seemed reluctant to dispose of trash. “She went through it piece by piece so she would know what the three of us were throwing away.”
Certain rooms in the house were off limits to the children. “My folks had a master bedroom suite. We couldn’t go in there because she had . . . all these piles of stuff. You could barely navigate through the room. There were other areas. We didn’t go in the living room. We didn’t sit on certain pieces of furniture.”
While the disorderly stacks of newspapers and boxes kept the house in disarray, Mrs. Famalaro insisted on very orderly procedures for her children, according to Francine. No deviation could be allowed in the dining room seating order. For watching television in the family room, “We each had these stools, and she was in charge of the order. I was always in the middle, between the two boys, because I was the least rambunctious.” Whenever the opportunity presented itself, Francine escaped the dining experience at home by eating at her grandmother’s house.
Francine also suspected that her mother secretly developed a fondness for alcohol. “She would try to hide it from the kids. The big joke with John, George, and I was, she was going to have her ‘juice.’ Later, I found out that it wasn’t juice. At some point, my dad came out of his weak state and just pretty much leveled with her to stop it now. And she did for a long time.”
The tension and stress Francine felt became even worse as a result of George’s treatment of their little brother. “George was tough. He didn’t treat John very well. A lot of ridicule, making fun. He did the same with me, but not to the extent that he did with John because of age differences. George made fun of John’s inability to do sports and everything from the size of his head to ... little things. John was real uncoordinated, those kinds of things.”
George did not entirely agree with the criticism. He might have teased his little brother, he said, but he wasn’t deliberately cruel to the kid. “I certainly never beat him or anything like that.”
The older brother’s attitude caused Francine to draw even closer to John. She would never forget how sorry she felt for the little boy when he fell ill in 1960. “It touched me more than anything else. He was very sick, throwing up, and diarrhea. He was just very, very sick and he was laying in bed screaming for my mother. And she refused to go to him and wouldn’t let me go help him.” Francine hung her head as she recalled the incident, hiding the tears in her eyes.
The nearest thing to professional help ever obtained for John came when his mother began sending him to a tutor in an adjacent town. Once a week, Francine recalled, “We would go to Orange. I remember sitting in the car and waiting for him. Mrs. ink was a school tutor [hired] to help him with his studies since he wasn’t able to focus with that many kids in the classroom. We thought the one-on-one would help, and he really did bond with her. She was a very sweet, nurturing woman, and that seemed to help him.”
John was very nervous and active, Francine said. He couldn’t sit still, was always in constant motion. “You know, if I knew then what I know today, I would probably say he had attention deficit disorder. He was just constantly moving. He had to be entertained on a continual basis or he would run amok. There would be some kind of trouble that would ensue if you couldn’t keep him in an organized activity.”
Knitting her eyebrows as she looked back in time, Francine observed another oddity about the child. “He had a neck and head twitch that seemed to be exacerbated by some kind of stress or fretting over something. Sometimes he dreaded going to school, so like on a Monday morning, he would have that kind of a twitch.” She commented that her mother had a similar twitch. “John’s . . . started at the torso up through the neck area and head. Hers was strictly a facial twitch, and it wasn’t continual. It was just when she was escalating into one of her nervous deals.”
Yet another trait about John seemed peculiar to Francine; an almost ritualistic compulsion. “If we were playing a game or I was sitting at the table helping him with his homework, and I would reach over and touch his hand, he would make me touch his other hand. It would be ever more so in ball games. If someone brushed his shoulder, he would have to have his other shoulder touched, so it would be even.”
A female classmate of John Famalaro’s, in St. Joseph’s Elementary School, couldn’t recall seeing him associating very much with other children on the wide, well-manicured lawns of Victoria Drive. “I don’t remember him being outside playing. There were quite a few children in the neighborhood who got together and played, hut I don’t really remember him playing outside with us.” When she did see the fragile child, she noted that, “He appeared to be a loner, a lot by himself.”
Mrs. Famalaro, though, caught the attention of the eight-year-old girl in a different way. She later recalled, “I was walking my dog down the street and the dog lifted his leg and urinated on the sidewalk. Mrs. Famalaro came out of the home and scolded me. She told me to clean that up. So I had to go home and get a bucket and broom and come down to clean the sidewalk.”
Another young girl who attended St. Joseph’s School with John Famalaro also recalled that the boy sometimes seemed isolated and friendless. Her main recollection, though, related to seeing him with his family in church. They were very “focused,” she said. “I know that I got in a lot of trouble during mass and as classmates we all tried to find each other. But the Famalaros remained together and very focused. John’s head was straight ahead, never moved left or right.”
Recollections of elementary school classmates dim with time, especially of colorless children. Few of John Famalaro’s fellow students could find him in their memories, and those who did had only sketchy comments to offer. A classmate at Santiago Elementary School in Santa Ana described him. “I would say John was quiet. He was thin, kind of, I think the word I would use is awkward. You know, you had different kids that you would recognize as outgoing and some that were quieter and John was to himself.” Recalling that some of the tougher kids often teased the meek ones, the classmate said, “John was teased. I don’t know the extent as compared to anyone else, but I remember instances of John being teased.” A smile flickered across the man’s face as he searched his memory for an example, and found one. “You know, there were nicknames. John was called ‘Femalaro’ you know, with an ‘e,’ because he was meeker than others. Even I had a nickname. I was called ‘the earboy,’ ” he laughed.
Somehow, John’s hyperactive streaks escaped serious notice by Mrs. Famalaro. She later recalled, “There was a friend of mine who, when she saw how hyper John was, suggested that we have someone look at him. Her husband was a doctor and she thought John was manic.” The neighborly advice went unheeded. “I guess it went right through my head. I’m sorry to say, I just didn’t think. I was so busy, you know, chasing George around and doing the work and just trying to raise three kids that probably, like Scarlett O’Hara, I would have taken care of it tomorrow. And I guess I never did, obviously.”
There seemed to be general agreement. that Mrs. Famalaro’s favorite was George. Her comments about him give that impression. “George played the piano really well ... in high school. He would win all the talent shows and so forth. I was very proud of him. I got very captivated with my children. As I look back, I was overly absorbed with them ... They would go to church every Sunday, and they would pray. That evening, we would have a little play. Of course, George was the ring leader. He would come out and do his little acts, you know, and lead this little group that we had. They would follow George. He was the leader. It was a nice family at that time.”
During Lent, she said, they went to church every day. “I felt I had to reward them. I would take them into Buffum’s and get them a little treat. How wonderful they were, you know.”
Neighbors observed that the Famalaros always kept the drapes closed in their home. Mrs. Famalaro expressed what she regarded as a logical reason. “Well, I kept the drapes in the family room closed because that’s where the kids were playing all the time, and there was a lady in the backyard, and she would be behind her drape and peek into our house ...” To clarify, she explained that the woman lived in a house abutting the rear of the Famalaro property and had a view from the upstairs window of an add-on room. “They built an upstairs ... with a picture window that made us like a TV screen. They would be there looking at us.”
In her rationale, Mrs. Famalaro didn’t mention that she had reported the neighbors when the construction started, resulting in a six-month delay in the work to obtain building permits. Frazzled relations between the two families ensued when the Famalaros planted trees to block the view and the neighbors allegedly put salt at the base of the trees to kill them. Mrs. Famalaro complained to city officials again when the neighbors built a playhouse in their yard. The woman accused of spying from her upstairs window would later comment on Mrs. Famalaro’s behavior regarding the completed playhouse. “She would water the trees and the water would go up in the air and come down on the children.”
It has been said that more people have been killed in the name of religion than for any other reason. Certainly, religion has always been a matter of controversy and struggle. Some critics suggest that certain religious organizations keep their followers in poverty while the church hoards the wealth. Theologians ponder the tendency of humans to follow the creed of their chosen deity and adamantly hold that their faith is the only valid one, condemning all others as heretics or hellbound lost souls. Few compromises are made when it comes to strong religious beliefs.
For most believers, though, religious faith provides serenity, comfort in times of stress, and a path by which to guide one’s life.
Religion played strong and diverse roles in the lives of two families, the Hubers and the Famalaros.
It especially affected the three children of Mrs. Famalaro, who professed extreme devotion to the Catholic Church. Francine tried to define how her mother used religion. “As a family, we always went to church on Sunday, which was great. Two of us went through eight years of St. Joseph’s Catholic School in Santa Ana and that was a experience. It was a good education.” Francine’s face tensed as she described her mother’s application of religion in the family. “The way it got taken to extreme was again relating everything to religion, and you can’t do anything wrong or you go to hell. And, you know, I have got to save your souls, that type of verbiage. It seemed a little odd to me at the time ... [our mother] used religion more as a punishment rather than a Christian way of life.”
Much later, Francine would make a startling observation about her mother’s use of religion. “I now know that what she is is not religious. She was an eccentric religious person. I wouldn’t call what she was being was really religious. She viewed herself that way. In other words, she talked it.” The talk, in Francine’s view, seemed empty and used only to advance selfish goals.
According to George, his mother held powerful religious beliefs, and did everything possible to inculcate her children with the same faith. Religion, he’d reportedly been told, provided a pathway to heaven, and “. . . a way to keep from going to hell. The Catholic Church was the only thing going. There was nothing else. As it got more and more to the right, conservative, it had to be Latin. It had to be a certain way. The Pope didn’t know what he was doing any more. We started to know it was not a normal situation.”
An incident at school caused George to question the compassion of priests and nuns. “I think it was in the seventh grade, I tried to hold a girl’s hand. I was brought up in front of the whole student body assembly, in front of everybody. So was the girl. We were just humiliated by the priests and nuns.”
George had hinted to his mother that he might become a priest, largely to please her. His sister recalled it. “He went to Our Lady Queen of Angels prep school in Los Angeles.”
During his second year there, Mrs. Famalaro received a shock one day when she walked in his bedroom and allegedly found him masturbating. In his version of the story, George didn’t mention being caught indulging in autoeroticism. “I went off to a seminary. I lasted two years, and damned near had a nervous breakdown. Had to get out.” At age fifteen, he bailed out of the training for priesthood.
His decision and his sexual behavior severely disappointed his mother and caused her apparent favoritism to suffer a major setback. Mrs. Famalaro recalled that George came home one day, and announced he no longer wanted any part of the school. “And, of course, I was disappointed.” After she had caught him indulging in sexual experimentation, she wondered what he was getting out of the Catholic school. “We realized he wanted out. So we let him out. He went to Santa Ana High School, and became the toast of the town.” After that, she said, he became a “chronic liar.”
Soon afterwards, upon his return to Santa Ana High School, George recognized in his mother a distinct change in her attitude towards him. “She pulled back emotionally and never was the same with me. I didn’t do things the way she wanted me to ... I bucked the system to try to have my own life, my own thoughts. She got kind of worn out after that ... When I got to puberty, I got ostracized as the black sheep for not becoming a priest.” The mother’s apathy apparently extended to John as well. George theorized that Mrs. Famalaro could no longer summon the will and emotional strength to give much attention to young John, and that his father had also withdrawn from any bonding attachments. “I don’t think there was a lot left to give to John.”
The situation disillusioned George. “I think from my selfish standpoint at the time, when I felt that I was kind of ... had this picture of myself paving the way for Francine and John, and I was going to stand up to tyrants. Look, we wanted to have friends, we wanted to choose our religion. When Mom would get mad at me and take it out on the family and turn them against me, I felt a little betrayed. They wouldn’t see that I am trying to do this for all of us. I felt they kind of sold me down the river to just have a peaceful life.”
Perhaps, George thought, his mother still wanted to have a son enter the priesthood, so she redirected the desire toward young John. The boy spent time in three Catholic schools, St. Joseph’s, St. Michael’s and St. Thomas Aquinas. He would never be a priest.
In John Famalaro’s early years of parochial school, he conflicted with the nuns who ruled over the classrooms. According to Francine, “He was in trouble a lot in grammar school at St. Joseph’s, in the very younger grades. Got sent home a lot. Parent-teacher conferences a lot. Phone calls from school. He didn’t do awful things, but he just had an inability to sit still and focus on what was happening in the classroom at that time and disrupted the other kids. Therefore his grades were not good.” In her attempt to help him past this stage, Francine set up a card table in his bedroom at home. “Every night we would sit and do his homework.”
Interpersonal relationships at school also gave the youngster considerable trouble. According to John’s sister, people made fun of him. She speculated that some of the teachers may have resented the child’s inability to focus in the classroom. Other kids picked on him during the bus ride home. She tried to protect him as much as possible. “That’s why I started riding the bus with him.” She noted that John didn’t seem to have any friends. “He was the weakling. He was the odd man out. He couldn’t take care of himself. I threw people off buses for making fun of him. I was the violent one, I guess, because they were picking on him.”
The abuse John experienced at the hands of other children rang a bell in George’s mind, too. “My memory is him getting beaten up because he had a very, very, small frame. He was thin, very frail, kind of bent over. Francine and I, a couple of times on buses on the way home, needed to protect him.”
No one could believe it when officials at St. Joseph’s School expelled John from the fourth grade. Mrs. Famalaro said, “He got kicked out. It broke my heart, because I had tried so hard to make St. Joseph’s work. George and Francine had gone through and everything was swell. George was a great speaker, and he did all these wonderful things. I was so shocked. I think it was Mrs. Gleason who threw him out. I didn’t go to ask, ‘What did he do?’ I just felt if she threw him out, he must have done something, and we went on from there.”
She had helped John in many ways, the mother said. “Oh, I read books with him. I think I am known as the book-reading mom, and they became great readers. Every one of them. We read constantly.” She couldn’t recall him having any trouble. “He was very interested and he would try.” But sometimes, she recognized a certain moodiness in her youngest boy, unlike her first son, George. “George is very gregarious, outgoing. He can always tell everybody how to do everything. And Francine was quiet and reserved. She seemed to fit in with the two of them all right.”
It still rankled the mother that George had dropped out of Catholic school and given up his preparatory training to become a priest. John did not have priesthood goals, but his mother encouraged his attendance at the parochial boarding school. “He went to St. Michael’s and, in my opinion, I think he did very well there. He looked so nice. We would take him back up to school every Sunday night, and he seemed truly interested. And I think he was put on the academic decathlon one year.”
During the period he attended the boarding school, Mrs. Famalaro observed something she hadn’t noticed before in John. “You must remember, all we saw him was on the weekends. It seemed to me he was very interested about a lot of things ... he seemed very intelligent. But I saw a thread going through there, very nervous, very sulky. Those things worried me.” Comparing herself again to Scarlett O’Hara, Mrs. Famalaro in retrospect, said “I will take care of that tomorrow. You know. I guess poor John got caught up in all this and never got any help.”
The troubles John experienced at St. Joseph’s were left behind when he transferred to St. Michael’s. Perhaps the opportunity to be housed with other boys five days each week in the boarding school had some influence. Francine observed, “My understanding was when he changed schools he improved all around as far as his grades and his initiative to try to do better and excel rather than cruise through.”
George took a different view of why little brother John was sent to St. Michael’s and that some expectations might go unrealized. “I think that our mother had hopes that John would pick up where I left off, hoping that he was finally going to do the right thing by becoming a priest. I think that would have bonded them more.”
The pressures and problems did not prevent John from developing goals, though, while attending St. Michael’s. Disappointment apparent in her voice inflections, his mother said, “He had about twenty goals. He was going to be a chiropractor. He was going to be a journalist. He was going to be a mortician. I think I put that one in his head. I said, ‘George will treat the patient, and you bury them.’ Big joke ... big joke. Chiropractor. Journalist. He really meant well.”