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Show TODAY'S KIDSBETTE HE HOSTESS of a rich, happy, middle-class home sought my advice some months ago. She pulled me aside and said confidentially, “Stanley isn’t happy.” Then she sighed. I had met Stanley earlier in the evening, a boy of 15- with beautifully tailored clothes, a manicure, and clear diction. Stanley had told me he was learning how to drive. He wanted to get his junior driver’s license this spring, and every day he practiced with one of the three cars the family owned. So when I found out that Stanley wasn’t happy, even with the good marks he had just received from his prep school, I replied that I was pretty sure Stanley was going to survive his unhappiness but that I wasn’t sure about.his mother, and I patted her shoulder con- solingly. I promised her that things have a way of working out. As talked on, I recalled my own childhood in the ghetto of the Lower East Side of New York City. My brothers and I usually slept three to a bed, and as long as I can.remember we worked at something. We sold newspapers, ran errands, carried sample cases for salesmen—wedid anything to earn a few pennies. There was poverty all around us, grinding poverty, but I suspect that if we had told our mother we weren’t happy, she would have thought the statement absolutely incomprehensible. But that doesn’t mean Stanley is speaking incomprehensibly. Stanley probably is very unhappy. And his parents, who have given him everything, cannot understand why. Butthere is a reason. And the reason probably doesn’t have anything to do with them. Let us grant they are good parents. There is no reason notto. Despite the money, there is really little difference between Stan- ley’s parents and the fellow on the Lower East Side who carried a bag of coal up five flights of tenement steps to sell it for 20 cents. He did this day after day in tenement after tenement, and he was filled with but one consuming passion: namely, to make his son a doctor. Certainly his motive didn’t run counter to those of Stanley’s parents. I remember walking along the street with the late William O’Dwyer when he was mayor of New York City. I was a reporter, and we had left City Hall at the same time one evening on our way to our respective homes, To make conversation, I pointed to all those fascinating lights beginning to flick on in the empty office buildings, and said, “These lights in the office buildings at night fascinate me. What a wonderful treat they are for the tourists.” Mr. O'Dwyer studied the lights and, turning to me, said, “Every one of those lights is an Irish cleaning woman trying to earn enough to send her son to the seminary so he can become a priest.” The Mayor was exaggerating,of course, but he was exaggerating 4 Family Weekly, April 2, 1967 OR WORSE? |