Recollections of a Jersey City Childhood

The indictment of New Jersey's Hudson County Democratic boss John V. Kenny seven weeks ago brought back special memories for TIME Copyreader Madeline Butler, who was raised in Jersey City. Although she has not lived in Kenny's bailiwick since 1957, she vividly recalls what it was like to grow up under his now-vanishing kind of politics:

TINY for an Irish politician, his smile still happy as a choirboy's, John V. Kenny was shown on national TV as he left federal court. The television reporter did not laugh at the sad little quip Kenny, now 77, made when he was asked how he felt about being indicted. "You live rich and you die poor," said J.V.--and it all came back. In Jersey City when I was a girl, it was good manners to have a small joke at the tip of your tongue at even the most serious times, especially at wakes. No priest or politician was thought well of who could not get the grieving family to laugh just a bit.

Everyone who was brought up in Jersey City must feel in his prejudiced but knowing heart, as I do, that the charges are absolutely true. Why, this has been going on for 50 years! But for John V. and the rest to stand in the public gaze, for the district attorney to promise "scores of witnesses, thousands of pages of testimony" against them--that is what shocks the Jersey City soul. Who talked?

We knew, of course, that so-and-so was the "bagman," a collector of graft and bribes for Mayor Frank Hague, whose machine Kenny served and then ousted. That somebody's indolent cousin had been put "on the pad" by some ward leader's exertions. That every year on "Rice Pudding Day" those lucky enough to receive city patronage or employment kicked back a certain percentage of their gains. That "the little guy" himself distributed work tickets early in the morning to men going to the docks for the shape-up. That, as a matter of course, if a firm got a city order a quid pro quo was expected. We knew all this, but we did not talk about it--except to one another.

It was a way of life, mixed now with my memories of school and home and church: my classmate Peggy, on the morning after one of Frank Hague's victorious elections, offering me a glance at a large white mint wafer on which was written in green sugar script, "From Uncle Frank." "Uncle" Frank! What glory! Of course she was no more Hague's niece than I was, but her father belonged to the inner political circle and mine did not.

Other memories: my mother refusing to tell my father whom she would vote for in the next day's election (the walls had ears, we felt). The ugly neighborhood tomcat we privately nicknamed "Mayor Hague" because he bossed all the other cats--and my mother's horror when my four-year-old brother called the cat just that in the crowded butcher's store. Politics seems even to be mixed with my memories of St. Aloysius Church: the smell of dust and sin in the confessional, of candles and innocence at Sunday Mass. Did the knowledge that my father and his father before him (it ran in families) were not favored at city hall carry over into a feeling of unworthiness before the Lord?

Kenny after Hague was like Khrushchev after Stalin. The celebration on the night of his election was the only spontaneous one I ever saw in Jersey City. But though fear diminished, the System, with all its involuted roots, survived and flourished. How could it be otherwise? I will believe it has ended only when the great, greasy, Victorian city hall turns into an opera house and ward leaders become crusaders for ecology. As my grandmother used to say (she, like Mr. Kenny, had her own little adage): "We live in hope and we die in despair."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.