Aside from a few brushes with fame (and who doesn’t have those these days), I have led an ordinary life. I grew up in suburban Detroit, went away to college, moved to San Francisco, got married and later divorced, and worked for a living like everyone else. I am now middle aged, remarried, and still reside in California. This page sketches the story of my early life. For me, these autobiographical passages are an exercise in memory. They are also a search for understanding. I doubt any of our lives have lasting meaning. But still, I aspire to remember, and create. © 2024 Thomas Gladysz
Passages (growing up) | Passages (college years) | Passages (California dreamin’)
Beginnings: I was born on February 2, 1961 at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan. I believe I had a rather ordinary childhood, but thinking about it now, decades later, I really don’t remember all that much of my early life. I have, at times, taken to researching my past, as if I was writing the biography of someone else. I don’t know how much I should remember, but it doesn’t seem like very much.
Though I was born in Detroit proper (a fact of which I am proud), I grew up in an otherwise undistinguished suburb of Detroit known as Harper Woods. This community was incorporated in 1951, just ten years and two weeks before I was born. Then, it was mostly middle class, and likely all white. My parents moved there in the late 1950s. We lived on Country Club, at the corner of Balfour, and my Uncle and Aunt and my three cousins lived down the block. I was the second youngest of six boys. I went to kindergarten at Poupord, grade school at St. Peter’s, and high school at Notre Dame. The latter two were Catholic schools, and each were located within walking distance. Harper Woods was my world, though admittedly a small, circumspect one. In most regards, it was an uneventful place. To get a sense of what it was like to grow up in Harper Woods, check out Jeffrey Eugenides’ 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides. It is set in the next suburb over, and alludes to the city and even name checks actual places, like Eastland.
While I was growing up, Harper Woods was known (if in fact it was known for anything) as the home of Eastland Center, one of the first outdoor malls in the Midwest. It was large sprawling place, with dozens of stores both large and small. Eastland was enclosed in 1975, a couple years after I started to go there on my own or with my friend Danny, who lived across the street. To me, Eastland was a world within a world. There was a chain bookstore, a record store, a hobby shop, a department store and most importantly, other teenagers, especially girls. The things these store’s sold, and the many people who shopped there, came from outside Harper Woods. In a way, Eastland helped open up my world. I bought my first books and records there, and still have some of them today. I even saw my first concert at Eastland in the 1970s, featuring then retro acts Chubby Checker, Danny and the Juniors, and Mary Wells. (9-12-2021)
Blessing: The earliest picture of me with anyone remotely famous (with fame being defined here as someone who has a Wikipedia entry) is this snapshot of me as a toddler in my Mother’s arms being blessed by Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston. The occasion for Cushing’s visit was the unveiling of a painting of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa at a Catholic shrine in Orchard Lake. That August day, Cushing addressed a gathering of 8,000, and mingled with the crowd. According to press from the time, it was very hot, and one member of the Knights of Columbus fainted. The heat also explains why my Mother was wearing a sleeveless blouse. The Black Madonna, which is venerated in Poland, was of special interest to my Polish Bobcia, who was also likely on hand that day. As a child, I recall seeing a picture of the venerated painting in my Bobcia’s home, and asking why she was black.
Cushing’s trip to Detroit in August, 1963 generated a considerable amount of press. Cushing was a close friend of the Kennedy’s, and at the time, likely one of the most visible Catholics aside from Kennedy in the United States; Cushing officiated at the marriage of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in 1953, and would later baptize many of the Kennedy children. Cushing gave the prayer invocation at Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, and just a day before his Detroit visit, he said a private mass for one of the Kennedy children, Patrick, who died after only two days. Three months after his Detroit visit, Cushing said President Kennedy’s funeral Mass, following JFK’s assassination in November, 1963. The day before the funeral, the Cardinal gave a televised eulogy for the President which was viewed by millions.
Of course, I don’t remember any of this. I was just two and a half years old. To learn more about the snapshot, I had to look up the event in an online newspaper archive. What I recall, decades later, was my Mother telling me about the event and what a special thing it was to have been personally blessed by this famous Cardinal. (9-11-2021)
Losing My Religion: Despite the special blessing I received from Cardinal Cushing, my Catholicism didn’t stick. I had a “crisis of faith,” or rather lost a faith I never really had when I was about twelve years old.
Although raised in the Catholic Church, I have never been a religious or spiritual person, and certainly, I have never had any kind of religious or mystical experience. Is it a shortcoming of mine? Some may think so. As a child, being Catholic was a matter of instruction, ritual, rote behavior, and tradition. It meant going to Sunday school, saying prayers at bedtime, and going to mass every Sunday and on holy days (i.e. Christmas and Easter). Around the 6th grade, I made my confirmation – which meant I was asked to confirm my religious beliefs as if I had an adult understanding of Catholicism, let alone religion. The Roman Catholic Church views confirmation as a sacrament which confers the gifts of the Holy Spirit (wisdom, understanding, knowledge, counsel, fortitude, piety, and fear of the Lord) upon the recipient. That did not happen to me. I recall being glad to get it over with, as I and the other grade school kids had to go through special instruction in the Catholic faith — as well as renounce the Devil and all his works. I thought it dumb, as the closest I ever came to the Devil were the exorcism movies I heard about but weren’t allowed to see. And too, what did I or any grade school kid know about religious wisdom or understanding? Even then, I remember thinking I didn’t know. I went though with my confirmation, however, because it was expected of me; I also remember deliberately mumbling the words while publicly confirming my faith to satisfy my childhood sense of integrity.
The seeds of my religious doubt were planted the year before, and can be traced to a book I bought at Eastland, namely Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods. Like other kids my age, I was intrigued by U.F.O.’s and flying saucers and the Bermuda Triangle and Loch Ness monster. And let’s not forget Bigfoot. All of this pseudo-science stuff was in the air at the time — in the early 1970s, and I must have seen something on TV or read something in the Detroit News. Though I don’t remember when I first heard about these things, I do recall finding a paperback copy of Chariots of the Gods at Kresge’s.
In his bestselling book, von Däniken makes the argument that there are millions of planets in the universe, and at least some of them must contain life. And of those which contain life, some must contain intelligent life, and of those that contain intelligent life, at least some of them must have learned to travel through space. Remember, I was reading this just a few years after American astronauts first stepped on the moon. Chariots of the Gods seemed to make sense. The author then proposed what is the book’s central hypothesis, that the technologies of many primitive Earth civilizations were given to them by astronauts from other worlds who visited Earth long ago. Naturally, these ancient civilizations saw ancient astronauts as gods. . . . And poof, my religious faith crumbled like a house of cards. Jesus wasn’t the son of god, he was an ancient astronaut from an alien world! It didn’t really matter if it was true, because it made as much sense to me as did Jesus’s virgin birth, the miracles he performed, and his rising from the dead.
If losing my religion over a discredited book like Chariots of the Gods seems ridiculous, that’s missing the point. It isn’t that von Däniken was a great thinker (though he could be convincing in his way), it was that the Catholic faith of my upbringing was so tenuous that it could be easily dissolved.
I maintained my interest in flying saucers and ancient astronauts and the like for a few more years, until I entered high school; then, I more or less lost interest. But in the meantime, I read Von Däniken’s other books, as well as Crash Go the Chariots, the famous rebuttal. I read Charles Berlitz’s book on the Bermuda Triangle, a book on hollow earth theory (a favorite topic), Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision, books by Jacques Vallee, and a dozen other related titles. I even went to see a double bill of In Search of Ancient Astronauts and In Search of Ancient Mysteries at a local theater. Both were narrated by Rod Serling (of Twilight Zone fame), which I thought was cool as that was a favorite show. In all likelihood, I probably yammered on about these things to other kids in school, because my peculiar interests led to one of the most ridiculous incidents in my life.
At St. Peters, the eighth grade science teacher was Sister Dorothy. The kids called her “Pickles” for reasons of which I am not quite sure. Nevertheless, I recall that she was kind of flighty, and would often leave class to attend to some matter or do what ever she did. (Some kids said she was a secret drinker, in that she got “pickled.”) One day, she asked if I would like to teach class and lecture the students on the Bermuda Triangle and Loch Ness monster and flying saucers. As well, would I like to give everyone a test! I said “yes.” (9-19-2021)
The Detroit News: I once joked that I got my start in journalism as a paperboy. From about the fifth or sixth grade until my senior year in high school, I had a paper route. I delivered the Detroit News; and my route covered most of an apartment complex located on Balfour near 8 Mile road in Harper Woods. As I recall, I had about 60 or so customers, which was considered a somewhat large route.
Back then, most newspaper routes required going from house to house and placing the paper on the front porch or inside the front door. For my route, however, I was tasked with putting the papers into individual chutes located at the back of the various apartment buildings which made-up this large complex. That required walking my bicycle with its overstuffed paper bag balanced on the handlebars from one building to another until I was done. It might take 30 or more minutes to complete the route depending on the weather, which might be hot and humid in the summer or raining, windy, or snowing during other months of the year. With little to do while I walked my route, I took to reading the headlines and skimming the front page news.
As I grew-up, various stories began to catch my attention, especially stories which dovetailed with my interests. Because some of these stories would linger in the news for days or weeks at a time, I recall finishing my route and going home to page through the day’s paper, looking for articles of interest.
I got my paper route in the early 1970s, and remember reading stories about the U.F.O. sightings that seemed to regularly make the news back then. Reading about these things in a newspaper, where authority figures like scientists or government officials might be quoted, legitimized my interest in these topics, at least in my mind. I also read about other things that interested me including space exploration, the Beatles, rock ‘n roll, the protest movements, and even my first celebrity crush — figure skater Dorothy Hamill. I also read about the plight of Soviet dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. They seemed heroic, and I became interested enough to mail-order a book on samizdat literature. Sometime around then, I also discovered one of my favorite sections of the newspaper, the obituaries — not the columns of death notices noting the passing of individuals and their funeral arrangements, but rather the articles about individuals of note who had passed away. There, I read about people who I had never heard of who did something that was considered important. Reading the daily newspaper helped broaden my perspective.
Sometime in my teens, I started clipping articles from the newspaper, and following up on what I had read. When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, I read about his life and famous novel, Lolita. Some time later, I went to the bookstore in Eastland and found a copy of The Annotated Lolita (which I still have.) One day in high school, I was sitting in the library reading Lolita (not fully understanding what I was reading but still enjoying the prose, especially the alliteration of the book’s opening sentence) when a teacher approached and asked why I was reading that particular book. I could tell from the tone of his question that something might be wrong, or I was suspect. I determinedly answered that the author had just died; I had read about him in the Detroit News, and that he was supposed to be a great author and this is supposed to be a famous book. The teacher said, “oh, alright then.” What else could they say? And that was the end of that. (10-17-2021)
Viewing Thoreau: I saved one piece of homework from high school. It was a paper I wrote in my senior year for period 2 lit; the paper was titled “Viewing Thoreau.” I likely saved it for a couple of reasons. As a teen, I was into Henry David Thoreau, not just as a nature writer, but as a thinker and dissenter akin to Bartleby, the Scrivener. Back then, I read every book I could find on H.D.T., and even tracked down articles in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. That, or an anthology of writings on Thoreau, must be how I came upon a piece Joyce Carol Oates had written which I quoted in my essay. The other reason I saved this paper was because there was a handwritten comment at the top from my favorite teacher, Mr. Schusterbauer. He wrote “I’m glad you used Oates! She’s an excellent novelist, shares the views of those who look on man’s dark side and used to be a teacher of mine. ” That comment encouraged me, just as other conversations with this teacher inspired me = that literature was a contemporary (not just a historical) thing, that writers were people we could know, and that I was somehow on the right track. Thank you Mr. Tom Schusterbauer.
“Viewing Thoreau” is not a “tremendous piece of work” as my teacher wrote on my report in 1979. Reading it today, I find it somewhat a gloss- or at least that is the way my adult mind now judges my high school mind. But still, it is interesting to me now that I was reading essays then by the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf, and Charles Ives and thinking about what I read, or at least trying to. Despite whatever shortcomings it may have, I am glad I kept this paper all these years, if only because it is an extensive, 22-page example of my cursive handwriting, which I never liked, for some reason. It also shows how I wrote and signed my name for a while, with the year — in this case “79” — extending from the last letter in my name. (Also, I don’t know why I didn’t type this paper, since our family had an old manual typewriter, and I took a typing class while an underclassman at N.D.H.S. )
My high school had a rather good English department, besides Mr. Schusterbauer, there was also Mr. Kelly (who made us memorize the first 40 lines of the Canterbury Tales in middle English), soft spoken Fr. Graham (who I chatted with on occasion, once trying to convince him of the literary merit of “Let it Be”), and the legendary Conrad Vachon (who never studied with Robert Frost, after all).
Back then as today, one thing would lead to another. . . In high school, I was also somewhat into Charles Ives, the American composer, because he was into Thoreau, the individualist. I owned a copy of Ives’ Essays Before a Sonata, which contains his piece on Thoreau, which I also quoted in my essay. Sometime in my teens, I also bought an LP of Ives’ music, notably a recording of his Sonata no. 2 “Concord” (1916-1919). Ives’ music, not an easy listen, helped push the boundaries of my appreciation of classical music – before that it was Beethoven symphonies and Strauss waltzes and Pachelbel’s Canon and the like. Here is the Thoreau passage from the “Concord Sonata”. (10-14-2021)