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CANAL RAT ON THE DELAWARE
Delaware City is a little town that could have, but never did. But it’s where I grew up. And I still love it.
It was originally settled as Newbold’s Landing, surrounded by peach orchards, a small port on the Delaware River serving farmers in southern New Castle County. In 1829, it suddenly grew to prominence—and was renamed Delaware City—when it became the eastern terminus of the newly constructed Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, linking the Chesapeake Bay to the Delaware River, and Baltimore to Philadelphia.
Delaware City’s at the east end of the canal; Chesapeake City, at the west end. As a kid, I remember being shown an old map on the wall of our town hall that projected Delaware City to grow bigger than Philadelphia was at the time. But that was not to be.
By the turn of the century, many larger ships could no longer squeeze through the locks at Delaware City. So, on January 31, 1927, the locks on the old canal shut down and a new, wider, and straighter canal opened. It was rerouted to enter the Delaware River at sea level at Reedy Point, a mile to the south of Delaware City. Grand plans for the next Philadelphia collapsed. And Delaware City remained a small town with a big name.
Today, Delaware City’s much the same as it was back then: a quaint, sleepy, forgotten, little one-traffic-light town on the banks of the Delaware River, nine miles south of historic New Castle. The running joke among locals is that Delaware City’s population is 1,200. At low tide, that is. Only 900 at high tide.
It was in Delaware City that I spent the first eighteen years of my life. And—for a young white boy, at least—it was a magical place to grow up: an Ozzie and Harriet kind of town, where everybody knew everybody else, where neighbors and family looked out for one other, where nobody had much money but it didn’t really matter, and where life centered around work, church, and school. I only realized later that not all of Delaware City’s residents had it so good.
I might as well admit this, too: For those first eighteen years, I was not known as Bill Press, either. I was stuck with the family nickname: Chippy, or simply Chip. My family called me that, I was told, because I had the same legal name—William Henry Press—as my father and grandfather before me. (My full name, in fact, which I never use, is William Henry Press III.) So they needed some way to tell us apart. And, besides, I was just a “chip off the old block.”
I suffered that nickname gladly until the first day of my eighth grade class at Salesianum High School, when Oblate Scholastic Mr. Robert Lawler called the roll. After declaiming, “William Press,” he asked, “What do they call you, son? Bill?”
At that point, I’d never been called Bill in my life, but I was too scared to contradict him. “Yes,” I nervously stammered. And, from that day on, I’ve been Bill Press—everywhere, that is, but in Delaware City.
The Press family, part of the Cook Cousins clan, made up a big part of Delaware City, even at high tide. The family patriarch, my grandfather, William H. “Pop” Press Sr., was born on December 2, 1888, in Salem, New Jersey. He joined the army in World War I and was assigned to Fort DuPont in Delaware City, directly across the Delaware River from Salem. There, like many of my uncles and family friends, all fellow Fort DuPont alumni, he met and married a local girl, and never left.
For us grandkids, the big question, then and now, was: Where did the Press family come from? It’s a question we often asked Pop-Pop Press, without ever getting a straight answer. He insisted he was a direct descendant of the Cherokee. As proof, he’d unbutton his shirt, show us his bare smooth chest, and ask, “You never saw an American Indian with hair on his chest, did you?” Not exactly a DNA test, but some of our family still believe that tall tale. Even as a kid, I always thought it was bullshit. And I am now more than ever convinced it was.
My first sign came while working at my first job in politics, as administrative assistant to San Francisco supervisor Roger Boas. One day, I accompanied Roger to a luncheon at one of the city’s big synagogues. Roger, a prominent member of San Francisco’s Jewish community, sat at the head table, alongside the president of the congregation, whose name was, curiously enough—Sam Press. Meanwhile, I was seated at a table in the back of the room, where everyone was speaking Yiddish. At one point, the woman next to me turned and whispered, “You do understand what we’re talking about, don’t you?” When I admitted I didn’t have a clue, she was stunned. “What? A name like Press and you don’t speak Yiddish?”
More evidence poured in, years later, once I popped up on television, first on KABC-TV in Los Angeles, and later on CNN and MSNBC. I’ve heard from dozens of people from all over the country with the same last name, none of them directly related to our Press family. Yet every one with the same story: their ancestors were Russian Jews who emigrated to the United States from Latvia.
I was especially struck one night, attending a black-tie event at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles, when a friend asked if I knew Jim Press, then head of Toyota Motors for California (later head of Toyota for the entire country). When I said I’d never met him, my friend disappeared across the ballroom, only to reappear with the more famous Mr. Press in tow. Jim walked up, stuck out his hand, and gave me a big smile. The first two words out of his mouth were “Russian Jew!”
How could it be otherwise? I have since, hit or miss, traced Pop-Pop’s family back to the 1830s, all in the Salem or Pennsville, New Jersey, area. In immigration records, I’ve also discovered several Presses arriving in the Philadelphia area from Latvia in the early nineteenth century, long before Ellis Island. So I’m convinced there’s a connection, even though not yet firmly established. Interestingly, even in Latvia in the 1800s, the name was already Press—although, much earlier, it must have been shortened from a longer family name.
So I have long considered myself the Catholic descendant of a Russian Jew—a prospect that did not go down well with Grandmom Press, a loyal Catholic of German descent, who made sure all of her grandchildren were baptized and raised Catholic and went to Mass every Sunday. On one visit from California, I told her I’d heard from a lot of people around the country named Press and, after doing a little research on my own, concluded that Pop-Pop’s family were originally Russian Jews. “No!” she snapped. “Pop-Pop weren’t no Jew!”
I thought afterward that maybe Grandmom Press’s attitude toward Jewish people said a lot about why Pop-Pop hid his lineage. At any rate, I never met a (self-admitted) Jew the entire time I grew up in Delaware City. Of course, I never met a Native American, either.
For Grandmom, that was the end of the story. But not for me. In 1998, after mentioning on CNN that I believed my ancestors had immigrated here from Latvia, I was invited to a reception at the Capitol for Her Excellency Vaira Vike-Freiberga, president of Latvia, on her state visit to the United States. When I was presented to her, she greeted me as “America’s most famous Latvian American”—this was well before current NBA Latvian sensation Kristaps Porzingis—and invited me to Riga for an official ceremony honoring my success in the New World. I begged off, telling her I wanted to verify and confirm my Latvian roots before publicly celebrating them. And the search continues.
Back in Delaware City, Pop-Pop was a big fish in a small pond. He owned and operated a gas station on Fifth Street, the main road into town from Highway 13. For years, my grandmother Marie operated a small grocery store on one corner of Pop-Pop’s gas station property.
Pop-Pop was also a commercial crabber and fisherman. For several summers, he ran three party boats—the Wave, the Aunt Kass, and the Happy Days—out of Indian River Inlet, just north of Bethany Beach, in southern Delaware. During my entire childhood, he also served as Delaware City’s mayor.
To my grandfather I owe my first taste of politics. I remember riding with him one day in his green pickup when he was flagged down by a resident complaining about a pothole in front of his house. At that time, most of Delaware City’s streets were still unpaved. Pop-Pop listened politely and promised he’d take care of it promptly. I was probably only eight or nine at the time, but I never forgot the respect and attention Pop-Pop received as mayor and the power he was able to exercise. Simply by giving the word, he could fill a pothole—more than the United States Congress can get down in an entire year!
And that’s where it began, my lifelong connection with politics. As we will see, it grew under my association with Peter Behr, Jerry Brown, Eugene McCarthy, Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and others, but my love for politics started right there, over my grandfather and a pothole, and it continues to this day. I still consider politics “the noblest profession.” To me, it’s about much more than winning elections or fixing potholes. It’s about how we shape and define our democracy, a challenge every citizen should be engaged in at some level. It’s about how we fulfill our civic duty. It’s about how we build a better America. I’ve been involved in politics for over six decades. I’ve seen some of the best of it and some of the worst of it—notably on November 8, 2016, when Donald Trump of all people was elected president of these United States. But I’m still a believer in the political process and the ability of the American people to make the right decisions, over time, and most of the time.
The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Growing up, my father, William H. “Billy” Press Jr., worked in the family gas station. Then, after returning from serving with occupation forces in Japan at the end of World War II, he built and operated his own gas station—Press’ Esso Servicenter—on a piece of land his father gave him, across the street from his own former business. Later, Dad also took his turn as Delaware City’s mayor.
And he worked his ass off. To this day, I’ve never seen anyone work a more demanding schedule. Dad opened up his gas station at 8:00 a.m. every morning except Sunday, when he opened at 10:00, following 8:00 Mass. He went home, two blocks away, every day for lunch, then back to work. He joined us for dinner at 4:30 or 5:00, before going back to man the pumps until closing time of 9:00 p.m. The only break he had was on Wednesday evenings after 6:00, when his assistant, Francis Walker, would take over and our family would celebrate his one free evening by climbing into the car for an outing to nearby Saint Georges or Augustine Beach. My mother and father never took a vacation until I was fourteen or fifteen, old enough to oversee the garage myself for a couple of days.
One important gas station rubric: Because we operated a small business in a small town and couldn’t afford to alienate anyone, we never talked politics or religion. Never. Nowhere. Neither at work, nor at home. Which, you must admit, is most ironic. I left Delaware City to spend the rest of my life immersed—first, in religion; then, in politics—and built my career talking about religion and politics on national radio and television. I even wrote a book about it: How the Republicans Stole Religion. Maybe I’ve been making up for lost time.
My mother, Isabelle, was also very much part of the family business. She grew up on a farm just outside Delaware City and used to accompany her father, delivering milk door to door, before going to school every morning. She and Dad were married on April 6, 1939. I came along two days short of a year later. In addition to raising us three kids, preparing all meals, and managing the house, Mom also handled the books for the gas station, paid the bills, and sent out monthly statements to regular customers, who were allowed to buy on credit. This, of course, was long before credit cards.
Mom and Dad started out married life in a small apartment on Hamilton Street, where I spent the first couple of years. For $1,100, they then bought a house at 105 Washington Street, big enough to hold two more children: my brother David, born in 1944; and my sister Margie, who came along in 1949. For me, those were very formative years. Next-door neighbor Harry James taught me to swim in the Delaware River at our town beach, the Y, at the foot of Washington Street. His father-in-law, retired river captain Jack “Pee-Pop” Tugend, taught me to fish and introduced me to his favorite fishing spots out the old railroad tracks in the marshes north of town.
Pee-Pop was also a yellow-dog Democrat. He schooled me on the difference between Republicans, who only cared about wealthy people like Delaware’s ruling Du Pont family, and Democrats, who stood up for working-class families like those of us who lived in Delaware City. I sat with him for hours in his living room, watching broadcasts of the 1952 Democratic convention—and I cried when Adlai Stevenson conceded the election to Dwight Eisenhower by quoting Abraham Lincoln: “It hurts too much to laugh, but I’m too proud to cry.”
We were far from rich, but we never knew we were poor. Mom once told me that Dad never made more than $10,000 a year at the gas station. But we were better off than many of our cousins. And, besides, we had everything we needed. Indeed, the highlight of our days on Washington Street was our first television set, a twelve-inch black-and-white Philco. We were the first family in town to have a TV in our own home, and our living room became, in effect, the local movie theater, with friends and neighbors crowding in on Saturday afternoons to watch cowboy-and-Indian movies.
In 1951, we moved “uptown,” four blocks away, to 301 Clinton Street and a big, three-bedroom Victorian, for which my father paid $10,000. In our new home, television remained a big part of our family life. We never missed Dragnet with Jack Webb, The Honeymooners with Jackie Gleason, Texaco Star Theatre with Milton Berle, Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar, The Red Skelton Show, or Amos and Andy. Before going out on Saturday nights, my mother and father would dance in our living room to the bubbly sounds of Lawrence Welk.
Years later, when I was working at KABC-TV in Los Angeles, I was thrilled to run into Lawrence Welk one day, walking to his car in the ABC parking lot. I stopped and thanked him for all the happiness and good music he’d brought to my parents for so many years.
While living in Los Angeles, I also got to know Milton Berle through his wife, Ruth, who was active in Democratic politics. Milton, who loved talking politics, kind of adopted me. He once took me to a Friars Club luncheon to meet his fellow comedians. On July 4, 1988, he appeared on my radio show to plug his book B.S. I Love You. I still have my copy, inscribed: “To my good friend, Bill. A future Prez!” And when I ran for California insurance commissioner, Milton agreed to provide the evening’s entertainment—for no fee—at my fund-raising dinner at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. “I was so offended, walking into the hotel tonight,” Milton began. “There were two men on the street corner, speaking Farsi. I couldn’t help myself. I went up to them and said, ‘Don’t you realize where you are? This is the United States of America. Speak Spanish!’”
COUSINS CLUB
Mark Twain once said, “I spent $25 researching my family tree—and then spent $50 trying to cover it up.” Not me. I’m proud of my family.
We were all part of the extended Cook Cousins clan, the biggest family in Delaware City, which numbered about a hundred people. My great-uncle John and great-aunt Peggy Cook had three children: Patsy, John, and Michael. John Cook had three sisters: Marie, Katherine, and Zita. Marie Cook, my grandmother, married Pop-Pop Press. They had five kids: John, Sis, Billy (my father), Georgina, and Harry. And they in turn produced fourteen cousins: Uncle Johnny and Aunt Toots Press, parents of Ruthie and Vicky (killed in Vietnam); Aunt Virginia, or Sis, and Uncle Wally Stephens, parents of Bobbie and Billy (my best friend, who died in July 2011); Aunt Georgina, or Georgie, and Uncle Leon, parents of Bootsie and Marie; and Uncle Harry and Aunt Louise Press, with their sons, Gene and Bobby.
My mother and father were the most prolific, with five kids: me, David, Margie, Mary Anne, and Joseph. In a sense, we were three families in one. Until I went away to college, we were only three kids. I was the oldest, born in April 1940. David came along four years later, March 1944, followed by Margie in October 1949. But our tight little family suddenly expanded in 1959, when Mom gave birth to Mary Anne. Two years later, my parents decided she needed a playmate, so Joseph came along. Now we were two distinct families in one.
But our family was still to grow. A year after our mother, Isabelle—or Izzy, who was already fighting a fatal case of breast cancer—died of a blood clot in December 1967, Dad married Dorothy Miller, a close family friend from Delaware City. He and Dot raised Mary and Joe. Then, in 1970, Dot gave birth to Patrick, just seven and a half months before my wife, Carol, and I welcomed our first son, Mark. Even though David, Margie, Mary, Joe, Patrick, and I grew up as three separate families, we’ve grown closer and closer over the years. Today, it’s like we all grew up in the same house at the same time.
It’s hard to believe any gang of cousins could be closer than we young Cook cousins. We were all about the same age. We lived in the same small town, within a few blocks of each other. We went to the same Catholic church. We gathered at our grandparents’ house every Sunday after Mass. We spent summer weekends together at the beach in Fenwick Island. We even had our own Cousins Club.
Cousin Billy Stephens and I were best buds. He and I explored the entire Delaware City area on our bicycles. We’d ride out Wrangle Hill road to the railroad crossing and wait for hours for a freight train to roar past and flatten the pennies we’d placed on the tracks. Or out to the old Reedy Point drawbridge to watch the big freighters make their way in and out of the canal. Our greatest adventure was biking to the little town of Saint Georges, two miles away, walking our bikes up to the top of the Saint Georges bridge over the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, then roaring like a bat out of hell down the other side.
Like any fraternity, we cousins even had our own secret sign and official song, both of which were inspired by my father’s 1955 hemorrhoids operation. The Cousins Sign consists of linking index finger to thumb and holding up three fingers, as in making the sign for A-OK. Except, in our case, it was meant to signify asshole. Not as in accusing anybody of being an asshole, but just as in asshole fixed.
The Cousins Song, which some cousins still insist on singing at the top of their lungs at the most embarrassing times and places—like our son David’s wedding reception, or at Osteria al Doge restaurant in mid-Manhattan—also celebrates my father’s successful hemorrhoid surgery.
There was a little bird, no bigger than a turd,
Sitting on a telegraph pole.
He stuck out his neck, and shit about a peck,
And puckered up his little asshole.
(Chorus)
Asshole, asshole, asshole, asshole …
He puckered up his little asshole.
Actually, singing, not usually so vulgar, was a big part of our family life. Several of my aunts and uncles had wonderful voices. Aunt Kass was the top soprano soloist in our church choir. And we cousins never got together without breaking out in song. We sang all the old favorites: “When You Wore a Tulip,” “You Are My Sunshine,” “Down by the Riverside,” “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad,” “Wait till the Sun Shines, Nellie,” “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” “How Dry I Am,” and many others.
David, Margie, and I grew up learning the old songs from our mother while she was giving us our baths at night. At the age of five, I made my musical debut singing “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad” in a Delaware City minstrel show. (Yes, there was blackface, but not on me. More on that in a bit.) The following year, I sang a duet with cousin Sally Jordan.
More music. I was only eleven or twelve when Mom and Dad signed me up for accordion lessons; once a week, I took the local bus to Wilmington, then a city bus to Larry Laravella’s home studio. He taught classic accordion, but all my mother wanted me to learn were her favorites, like “Roll Out the Barrel.” In Delaware City grade school, I sang in the chorus of two Gilbert and Sullivan operettas: HMS Pinafore and The Mikado. I also sang the male lead in Come Out Swinging, our senior musical at Salesianum High School. Mercifully, that was the end of my musical career.
During the summer months, our family life in Delaware City moved one hundred miles south—to Fenwick Island. At that time, Fenwick straddled the Delaware-Maryland state line, half on one side, half on the other. Today, only Fenwick Island, Delaware, remains. Everything south of the state line is now part of an expanded Ocean City, Maryland.
In the 1950s, Fenwick was but a collection of small, rustic summer cottages built right on the beach, either on top of the dunes or right in front of them. Among them, three Cook cousin cottages: Pop-Pop and Grandmom Press, in Delaware; our own family’s cottage, about one hundred yards south, in Maryland; and cousin Eddie Jordan’s, next door. And we were all squatters. Nobody knew or cared who owned the land our cottages were built on.
When I say rustic, by the way, I mean really roughing it. We had no electricity, no running water, and no indoor plumbing. We used kerosene lamps, dug a well for drinking water, and built an outhouse behind each cottage. After dinner every night, we’d dig a hole in the dunes behind our cottage to bury the day’s garbage.
For my first few years, we spent almost the entire summer in Fenwick, while my father commuted north for work. And if life was rough, we never knew it. For us, life was paradise. Our house sat right on the beautiful ocean beach. The Atlantic was right out our front door. For weeks at a time, we seldom wore anything but a bathing suit. The only time we put on clothes or shoes was on Sunday morning, before driving ten miles to Mass at Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church in what was then the small hamlet of Ocean City. After Mass, each of us kids was given twenty-five cents to spend playing games or buying candy on the boardwalk. And, if we were really lucky, we were treated to Thrasher’s french fries.
The rest of the time at Fenwick, we were in the ocean. All day long. We learned to bodysurf. We lay in the sun. We went fishing with our father. We went crabbing or clamming at favorite surefire spots. We took long walks on the beach, collecting seashells. We built bonfires on the beach at night, roasted hot dogs, toasted marshmallows. And sang, sang, sang.
Best of all, we ate what we caught. Fish fresh from the surf. Crabs from a nearby creek. Clams from an estuary behind Bethany Beach. Fresh corn, tomatoes, and peaches from the neighboring, plentiful farms of lower Delaware. Without knowing it, we were the first of the locavores.
Two big events changed Fenwick Island forever. The first, in the late ’50s, was an edict from the State of Maryland requiring all Fenwick residents to acquire titles to their land by purchasing the properties their cottages were built on from the rightful owners, which state surveyors and title officials had somehow dutifully identified. For two oceanfront lots, our cottage, and that of cousin Eddie Jordan next door, we paid $1,400.
At about the same time, electricity and indoor plumbing arrived, making Fenwick more comfortable but much less colorful. Goodbye, kerosene lanterns and outhouses. Hello, electric lights, flush toilets, and showers. Somehow, it wasn’t as much fun.
The second big event was a nor’easter in 1962 that ravaged the Eastern Seaboard. In Fenwick, the entire oceanfront row of cottages—including the three belonging to our family—were all swept out to sea. We lost our cottage. We lost our property. And we lost the fun experience of living on the beach at Fenwick forever. Because so much of the beach was lost, it was impossible for us to rebuild.
For a few years, our family decamped to a trailer (not fancy enough to be called a mobile home) in a Delaware City residents’ trailer park next to the Fenwick Island lighthouse. Later, my father and his second wife, Dorothy, bought a bay-front home in Fenwick Island, Delaware, at 1407 Bora Bora Street, which became his retirement home and where he lived until he died in 2006.
My mother’s side of the family, though smaller, was equally close. Her mother, Bessie K. Bendler, or Mom-Mom, was a real character, one of my favorite people, and a wonderful cook. I can still taste her vegetable soup, lemon butter, chicken and dumplings, and chocolate fudge.
My mother was one of three Bendler children: Aunt Marty, married to Uncle Mac McCoy, lived in Smyrna with their two sons: cousins Ronnie and Burris, or Bo. Cousin Ronnie McCoy is still a football legend at the University of Delaware. Uncle George, or GI, married Aunt Ruth and moved his family to Salisbury, Maryland, where they had four children: cousins Randy, Marie, Lisa, and Jimmy. I never met my grandfather Bendler, the black sheep of the family. He ran off with another woman, leaving my grandmother with three small children to raise as a single mom. And while serving as postmaster of Delaware City, he was caught embezzling money and served time in federal prison.
Only eleven years older, my uncle GI was like a big brother to me. On July 19, 1951, he took me to my very first concert, a string quartet, at the University of Delaware’s Mitchell Hall. He taught me how to build a duck blind, which we did in Dragon Run at the beginning of every season—and took me duck hunting and rabbit hunting. Later, he taught me to play golf at Green Hill Country Club in Salisbury, Maryland.
Except for Mom-Mom Bendler, I must admit that our food experience growing up in Delaware City, living on a very limited budget, was not exactly haute cuisine. We ate a lot of boiled cabbage and hamburger gravy. My favorite snack was a slice of buttered white bread (was there any other kind of bread?) covered with sugar. Or a slice of white bread buried in ketchup. Mom often made hamburger gravy, served on toast. Our favorite dessert was Mom’s cinnamon “war cake” (no eggs, milk, or butter). A favored seasonal treat was wild duck, shot by my father. We learned to chew our duck carefully, because of bird shot still in the meat. And nothing was more exciting than when one of the locals would show up with a snapping turtle caught in nearby Dragon’s Run—out of which Mom made a great snapper soup.
We ate a lot of two other favorites, locally caught or captured. Surrounded by marshland, Delaware City’s specialty was muskrat. In fact, my uncle Johnny made his living trapping muskrat. The exterior walls of his garage were lined with muskrat pelts, drying in the sun, which he later sold to clothiers to make popular muskrat coats. The meat he sold to locals for food. Fried muskrat was a big favorite in our home. We ate it often. It’s still a delicacy in Delaware City and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where there’s an annual muskrat festival.
As mentioned, during the summer months at Fenwick Island, the big treat was blue crabs. Our family would drive to our favorite crabbing spot, a bridge over a nearby creek, where we could easily catch a bushel of crabs in a couple of hours. Until the day he died, my father made the best steamed crabs west of the Mississippi, and my mother made the best crab cakes—a tradition continued after her death by our stepmother, Dot.
For us kids, the biggest event of the year came at Christmastime, when Mom-Mom Bendler would take us on the train—the slow, slow local train—from Wilmington to Philadelphia to see the Christmas decorations at Wanamaker’s (meet at the Eagle if you get lost!), do our Christmas shopping, and have lunch at the famous Bookbinder’s. She even insisted we have a touch of sherry in our turtle soup, just like grown-ups.
Mom-Mom was also famously outspoken. One day I came home from Salesianum, my Catholic boys’ high school in Wilmington, to find Mom-Mom in our kitchen. Somehow we got around to talking about religion. She reminded me that she was a Presbyterian, but then assured me, “But I don’t have anything against Catholics. They don’t know any better.”
Mom-Mom Bendler intrigued us kids for another reason, too. She worked as a nurse’s aide at Fort DuPont, a stone’s throw across the canal from Delaware City proper, where, among other things, she cooked and did laundry for German prisoners of war. I remember her telling us about those young German soldiers and how friendly they were, and showing us paintings they’d given her.
The military, in fact, was very much a part of our young lives in Delaware City. As mentioned above, most of the men in our family served in the army. Some, starting with my grandfather Press, first came to Delaware City as army recruits assigned to Fort DuPont. Others, like my father and several uncles, were drafted in World War II. Uncle Leon was career army. My father served with postwar occupation forces in Japan.
The war also made its mark on Fenwick Island, where my parents, grandparents, and several cousins had summer cottages. Oceanfront cottages were issued blackout shades for all windows facing the ocean. Army units patrolled the beach. The National Guard manned antiaircraft towers just north of Bethany Beach and did occasional target practice out over the ocean.
During these days, the beach was home to women and children only. All the men were off to war. I have vague memories of marching up and down the beach as a five-year-old with other kids and banging on pots and pans when word came that the war was over, gathering with other families around a big bonfire on the beach that night to celebrate.
Later, during the Cold War, we were again on military alert in Delaware City. As a teenager, I volunteered as a plane spotter. From a National Guard tower built on the river at the end of town, which we manned 24-7, we’d calculate the size, description, and direction of every aircraft passing overhead, enter that information in the daily log, and phone it in to civil defense headquarters. I’m not sure what we accomplished, but at the time, we believed we were playing a key role in keeping our country safe.
GROWING UP CATHOLIC
If family was our primary focus growing up in Delaware City, church was a close number two. Our lives centered around events at Saint Paul’s Catholic Church: baptism, First Communion, confession every Saturday afternoon, Mass every Sunday morning, Benediction on Sunday evenings, novenas, feast days, and funerals. For us boys, that meant becoming altar boys as soon as we were old enough to memorize and mumble the Latin responses. Many were the mornings I rolled out of bed, walked the two blocks to Saint Paul’s, and donned cassock and surplice to serve the 7:00 a.m. Mass.
For most of my childhood, our parish priest was Reverend Lawrence Ward, a member of the order of Oblates of Saint Francis de Sales. Father Ward was a jovial, friendly soul. He loved socializing with parishioners and taking us altar boys to major-league baseball games in Philadelphia. But he was also a strict conservative on social issues. I remember his trumpeting from the pulpit that, before marriage, young women should never let any man get close “by touch or by sex” (which made me run home to the encyclopedia to find out what sex meant).
He also insisted that, as Catholics, we should not socialize with non-Catholics. We weren’t even supposed to talk to them. Which might have worked in Philadelphia, where he grew up, but was, of course, difficult in a small town of 1,200, of whom maybe only 300 were Catholic, and where there were Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches within two blocks of Saint Paul’s.
If difficult for others, it was impossible for our family. Because while we kids were at Mass with our father, our mother—then still a Protestant; she later converted to Catholicism—was home preparing breakfast for us. We weren’t allowed to talk to her when we got home?
So, on this issue, as on several others, I learned at an early age the most important lesson I ever learned about organized religion: listen to and respect what church leaders say, but don’t assume they always get it right—and don’t necessarily obey everything they say. God gave us the gift of reason, and he intends for us to use it, not just swallow whole everything we’re told—not even by priests, bishops, or the pope himself—without thinking it through and asking tough questions. On the issue of birth control, for example, the male-dominant Catholic officialdom is simply dead wrong. Most Catholics realize that and simply ignore the Vatican on that issue. Same with demanding celibacy for priests and refusing to accept women priests. Someday soon, all that will change.
And, of course, that same healthy skepticism about dictates from above is not limited to the church. For me, it applies to all authority figures, especially politicians. Yes, even the president. We listen to what they have to say, but we don’t have to blindly follow. Because, as often as not, they’re just plain wrong. I think a good rule to follow is: Don’t take anything as the Bible. Question everything and everyone. The more universal or popular an opinion is, the more you should suspect it, the more questions you should ask.
As welcome as I was at Saint Paul’s as an altar boy, that changed dramatically years later, once I popped up as a liberal commentator on national television, taking the exact opposite positions on contraception, abortion, or same-sex marriage than those dictated by the church—as I discovered when cousins Bootsie and Marie invited me to give the eulogy for their mother, my favorite aunt, Georgie.
The night before the service, Marie called me in tears. Saint Paul’s rector, Father Phil Siry, had been out of town when she made the arrangements. When he saw my name on the program upon his return, he asked Marie, “Is this the same Bill Press I see on television?” Enemy of the Vatican thus confirmed, he laid down the law: “That man will never be allowed to speak in my church!”
No worries, I assured Marie. Of course, Carol and I would still attend the service, even if I wasn’t allowed to speak. Besides, it was all about Aunt Georgie, not me.
Not everybody accepted the news so calmly. When we arrived at Spicer’s funeral home the next morning for Aunt Georgie’s wake, my cousins were up in arms. Cousin Billy Stephens had already personally called Bishop Saltarelli in Wilmington and warned him he had a revolt on his hands in Delaware City. Billy suggested family members stage some kind of protest. Again, I urged them to calm down and think about Aunt Georgie and her family, not me.
From the funeral home, we walked a block through the snow to Saint Paul’s. We hadn’t been there long when we became aware of some commotion outside. After another ten minutes or so, the lay deacon showed up to announce that Father Siry had slipped, fallen on the ice, and broken his leg on his way into church—and had just been taken away in an ambulance. A substitute priest had been summoned from Wilmington, he told us, but it would take an hour for him to get there. He asked us to wait patiently for the service to start, then walked over to my pew, and with a big smile leaned over and whispered, “Looks like you’ll be giving that eulogy, after all.”
There was little surprise and no doubt in the minds of my cousins: God had punished Father Siry for messing with Aunt Georgie. Cousin Billy even received a letter of apology from Bishop Saltarelli. Later, I learned that Father Siry never did return to Saint Paul’s. When he got out of the hospital, he resigned as parish priest and moved in with his housekeeper, with whom he’d apparently been having an affair for years.
It was also at Saint Paul’s that I met an extraordinary woman who had a profound influence on my life. Rosalie Reybold was the heart and soul of Saint Paul’s. She lived nearby, with her husband, Bill, and children, Billy, Patty, and Walter, in one of the biggest and most beautiful homes in Delaware City. The classic church lady, she attended daily Mass, scrubbed floors, prepared the altar, arranged flowers, and looked out over each and every member of the congregation. She took particular interest in young people of the parish, often inviting us over to her home for cookies and iced tea.
And she took special care of me. One Saturday, Rosalie took me on the bus to nearby Wilmington and helped me sign up for my very first library card—at the Wilmington Public Library on Rodney Square.
Getting that library card was one of the most important events in my life. It introduced me to a whole wide world I might never have discovered otherwise, and, as Philip Roth wrote about his own similar experience at the Newark, New Jersey, public library, it helped “to enlarge the sense of where I lived.” It also made me an insatiable reader and awakened in me a love of books that is still my great passion today. Thank you, Rosalie.
Thanks to my mother, too. On weekends, she loved going out to auctions and estate sales with her friends. And, recognizing my nascent love for books, she’d often bring back for me a big box of used books, for which she’d paid twenty-five cents and which I would excitedly sort through, hoping to find at least one that I wanted to keep and read.
And then there was the Delaware City Volunteer Fire Department.
* * *
For any boy growing up in Delaware City in the 1950s, there was only one goal in life: reaching his sixteenth birthday so he could join the fire company. At the old Delaware City School, we grade school kids would watch in envy whenever the fire siren blew and high school boys bolted out the door to the firehouse. We couldn’t wait to join them. Like all my buddies, I joined at sixteen and put in two excitement-filled years before I went away to college.
Unfortunately, at the time, the fire company was made up of only white men. No blacks or women were allowed. Fortunately, that’s now changed, and all for the better.
Every evening, we young bucks loved just hanging out at the firehouse, listening to old-timers tell stories about big fires they’d fought in the past, reliving every minute of every last fire call, laughing at the same old dirty jokes—and waiting, waiting, waiting for the phone to ring. I remember feeling guilty about wanting somebody’s house or car to catch fire so we could spring into action. But of course, I counseled myself, we only wanted fires with no loss of life or serious property damage, and impacting no friends or family.
Firefighters enjoyed their own brand of humor. Old-timers Harry Bright and Jukie Pasquino, for example, used to brag, “We haven’t lost a foundation yet!” This was also the time the big Tidewater refinery was being built two miles north of town. Thus instructions were duly given: “If a call comes in for a fire at the refinery, roll up Clinton to the traffic light at Fifth Street—and turn south [away from the refinery]!”
Nighttime fires were especially exciting. We lived at Third and Clinton Streets, two blocks from the firehouse. Every night before going to bed, I carefully laid out jeans, shirt, and work shoes alongside my bed so I could jump into them just in case the siren went off in the middle of the night. Then I’d run out to the street corner. As the fire truck came up Clinton Street, the driver would slow down just enough for anyone waiting to leap onto the back running board and then race off to the scene of the fire, with those of us on the back of the truck holding on for dear life, usually arguing about whose turn it was to man the nozzle once we got there. That position, while clearly the most dangerous, was also considered an honor: to be first in line, closest to the flames, manning the nozzle.
As with everything else in Delaware City, firefighting was a family affair. My grandfather and father were both volunteer firefighters. And my family often followed the fire trucks to see what was happening. At one middle-of-the night call, I jumped on the truck while my father followed in our car accompanied by my sister Margie, then nine or ten years old. Mom stayed home, sitting on the porch, waiting for us to return. A couple of hours later, she was surprised to see the fire truck, returning from the fire, stop in front of our house. She was even more surprised to see little sister Margie, still in her nightgown, climb out of the truck. Dad’s car had broken down, so firefighters gave Margie a ride home.
Speaking of a family affair, one Saturday around noon, my father and I were working at the gas station when the siren went off. Usually, I couldn’t answer calls on the weekend because I was needed at the garage. But this time, the siren kept blowing and blowing. Clearly, this was a serious call. So, instead of going to lunch, I convinced Dad to go to the firehouse, where our dispatcher, Pop Cavalier, told us there was a big house fire over by the canal. They badly needed one more truck, he informed us, and couldn’t find a driver.
Immediately, Team Press swung into action. Dad drove; I rode on the back. Arriving at the scene, we were ordered to hook up to a hydrant. Dad operated the truck while I unloaded the hose, grabbed the nozzle, and joined the fight. For years, we bragged about how Team Press had saved the day!
Another call did not have such a happy ending. One night, we were summoned to the fire hall in nearby New Castle to cover while their volunteers fought a hellish fire at a local factory. We’d sat around the fire hall for a couple of hours when a few New Castle firefighters returned, carrying the hat, fire coat, and boots of one of their young members. He’d been killed when a barrel of chemicals exploded as he entered the burning building. He was only sixteen. I fought back tears, realizing that kid could easily have been me, and thinking about my parents getting the grim news.
One Christmas, Mom and Dad gave me a book called The Romance of Firefighting. But that tragic incident made me realize that, yes, there is a “romance” to firefighting. But there’s a real danger to it, too.
Firefighters, both professional and volunteer, men and women, are among our most outstanding public servants, putting their lives on the line every day to keep our communities safe and protect their fellow citizens. I have great admiration for them, and we all owe them a debt of gratitude.
My decision to enter the seminary and study for the priesthood after graduating from high school—more on that in a bit—meant not only going away to college but leaving Delaware City for good. So, before leaving town, my fellow firefighters surprised me by making me an honorary member of Delaware City Fire Company. It’s one of the greatest honors of my life—and one I cherish to this day. In 2017, the Delaware City Fire Company celebrated its 130th anniversary.
Looking back, there’s one other event during my high school years that had a profound impact on me, even if I wasn’t aware of it at the time: construction of the mammoth Tidewater oil refinery, just north of town. Actually, it wasn’t the construction of the refinery that made a difference. It was the destruction of the beautiful countryside where the refinery now stands.
At the time, Delaware City was surrounded by unspoiled marshland, cornfields, and peach orchards. It was the classic bucolic setting, with our little town nestled in on the banks of the river. And we loved it. We lived off the bounty of the local farms. We hiked, fished, trapped, hunted ducks in the marshes, and swam in the Delaware.
Then came rumors that King’s College, a small evangelical school located two miles out of town, had been sold to Tidewater Oil Company, which planned to build on that property and surrounding farmland the largest refinery on the East Coast. At first, reaction was mixed. We were sorry to see the farmland disappear, but we were assured that the new refinery would create hundreds of jobs, we’d all get rich, and Tidewater would put Delaware City on the map.
None of that turned out to be true. The refinery, which Tidewater immediately dubbed “the world’s most fabulous refinery,” began operations in 1957. Yes, some locals got jobs there, including two of my brothers, David and Joseph, and my brother-in-law Herb Netsch. But more jobs initially went to experienced workers who moved into the area from out of state. Nobody got rich out of the deal, except maybe a couple of farmers who’d sold their land. And Delaware City today is no bigger or wealthier than it was before the refinery was built.
And the price paid was high: the loss of our town beach, replaced by Tidewater’s oil tanker pier; loss of access to the great marshes north of town; and loss of the bountiful croplands and orchards. All replaced by a giant refinery and acres of storage tanks, surrounded by several satellite chemical companies located nearby for easy access to refinery by-products. Not to mention the foul smell of rotten eggs whenever the wind is blowing in the wrong direction, several major fires, and occasional accidental releases of toxic chemicals.
Commuting to high school in Wilmington every day, I watched them knock down the buildings of King’s College, level the hills, mow down the orchards, fill in the marsh, and bulldoze the cornfields. In its place rose a virtual ugly city of industrial towers, smokestacks, holding tanks, pipelines, and service roads, all enclosed by chain-link fence. It’s the image that popped into my head the first time I read Gerard Manley Hopkins’s magnificent lament, “God’s Grandeur.”
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell.
Later, after I had relocated to California and become active in environmental politics, I knew where my conservation ethic was born: in Delaware City, watching God’s creation destroyed to build a man-made monster. In those days, nobody ever talked conservation or environment, but we loved the land that sustained us. I soon came to realize that our corner of paradise had been sacrificed to corporate greed and gain, with little local benefit.
That experience planted deeply in me a powerful lesson: We have a moral obligation to care for and protect our planet. As God tells us in the book of Genesis, we are meant to be wise stewards of the land. And, as parents, part of our responsibility is, in the great tradition of the Native Americans who came before us, to enjoy our brief time on this land—but to leave it cleaner and healthier for our children and grandchildren. Everybody who lives on this fragile planet Earth should be an environmentalist. Indeed, we have no choice. As Adlai Stevenson said in 1964, when he was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, “We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent upon its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.” I’ve never understood why Democrats and Republicans can’t all agree on that.
SOUTHERN TOWN
Yes, Delaware City was a great place to grow up. What I didn’t realize until much later was that Delaware City was a great place to grow up—as long as you were white. Not for African Americans. Even though we didn’t live in the Deep South, Delaware was still a border state, and Delaware City was a segregated town. There were black churches and white churches, black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods, black markets and white markets. There was even a separate black section of town, across the canal, called Polktown. We white kids, grades 1–12, walked a couple of blocks to Delaware City School. Black kids walked a mile out of town to the “colored” school. We didn’t call them blacks or coloreds then, of course. Like everybody else in the South or border states, we routinely and thoughtlessly used the N-word.
Cousin Billy Stephens once told me, though I was never able to confirm it, that Delaware City even had its own chapter of the KKK, led by two local businessmen, Harry Kirk, who was Grand Wizard, and his brother, Ray, both of whom we knew well. I once asked Aunt Georgie if the KKK were active in Delaware City. She told me she never saw them in action but remembered as a little girl being warned that “the Klan was on the march,” whereupon she and her siblings would huddle together in a bedroom, afraid the Klan would burst into their house.
In their book about Fort Delaware, Unlikely Allies, Bruce Mowday and Dale Fetzer report that Delaware City was also the beginning of a reverse-direction Underground Railroad that took Southern sympathizers to Dixie to join the Confederate army.
It seems strange, looking back, not only to have experienced segregation but to have practiced it. Which we did, as kids, I’m ashamed to say, without even thinking about it. Why? Because that’s just the way things were. That’s how we were brought up. That’s what we accepted.
One of the big events of the year, for example, was the annual minstrel show, performed by an all-white cast before an all-white audience. My father and several of my uncles sang in the chorus, all in blackface. Aunt Kass was the star of the show. Aunt Louise and Aunt Toots also sang solo numbers. As I noted above, I made my stage debut in a minstrel as a five-year-old, singing “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad” (thankfully not in blackface). And—talk about a sign of the times—the minstrel was a fund-raiser for our parish, Saint Paul’s Catholic Church! Further evidence that, at the time, nobody thought of the minstrel show as a racist statement. But of course it was.
I’m also proud that, in their own way, my parents dared to buck the prevailing culture. My father welcomed “colored” customers at the station, hired several black employees, and extended credit to black customers, as well as white. He didn’t preach about it, he didn’t brag about it—he just did it. And his example made a powerful and lasting impression on me. I’ll never forget how he’d make a point of inviting his black employees, as well as Bootie Carter, a black friend and customer, to the annual Christmas party at our home on Clinton Street. Bootie would show up, but, despite Dad’s trying to talk him out of it, Bootie would always insist on coming in the back door. Because, he said, he didn’t want to get my father in any trouble with our neighbors.
There was one other time that Dad bucked the segregationist trend. As one of the founders of the Delaware City Lions Club, he convinced members to move their weekly meetings from the Recreation Club, which banned black customers, to the Pea Patch Inn downtown—where the club soon became embroiled over whether or not to evict a white member who had adopted two black children.
Dad’s response was to challenge the Lions Club by nominating Jim Mitchell, the head of the local NAACP, as the club’s first African American member. Of course, that caused an even bigger uproar and prompted a long, bitter debate—which Dad ultimately lost. But he’d made his point, and I’m still proud of him for fighting the good fight.
It wasn’t until high school that I fully understood what a segregated environment I was living in and how wrong it was. Following Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and thanks to the courage of Principal Father Thomas Lawless, Salesianum became the first high school in Delaware, public or private, to accept African Americans as students. Yet in my freshman year, there were only three black students at Sallies. And all three of them commuted to Wilmington an hour on the train every day from Baltimore—because that was the closest integrated school they could get into.
Another life lesson learned the hard way: Discrimination in any form is just plain wrong. I still can’t believe I once routinely used the N-word, called gays queers and faggots, and believed women inferior to men. Yes, I can hide behind the excuse that “that’s just the way things were back then” and “I was never taught any differently,” but I still feel guilty—and thus strive even harder to be open and tolerant today. In fact, because of my background, I’m even more intolerant of those who discriminate, especially those hypocrites who try to hide behind religion or politics to justify their prejudice against people of color, women, LGBTQ Americans, Muslims, or Jews.
There’s no excuse for treating any group of people differently or denying them their full and equal rights under the Constitution. It is fundamentally un-American. Nor is there anything in the Bible to justify discrimination. So-called Christians used to cite the Bible to defend slavery, just as so-called Christians today cite the Bible to defend discrimination against gays. They’re woefully ignorant, or they haven’t read the New Testament. Either way, they’re not true Christians—and they’re not true Americans.
SALESIANUM
Ironically, my first break out of the small world of Delaware City came thanks to football, a sport I have never played, followed, or even liked. In the sacristy one morning after Mass, when I was in seventh grade, Father Ward showed me headlines in the morning paper about Salesianum High School’s football championship. He asked if I might be interested in attending a big school like that, with such a winning football team.
Of course, I was too nervous to say anything but yes. I talked to my parents about it. They talked to Father Ward. He talked to his fellow Oblates of Saint Francis de Sales who taught at Salesianum. And the following September, I entered eighth grade at Sallies as one of twenty “gremlins,” the designation then given to seventh and eighth graders.
I was the first boy from Delaware City to go to what everybody called Sallies. It was a big deal. But it was also a big sacrifice for my parents. Students had to wear a jacket and tie every day, which represented a big, new clothing bill. I had to commute fifteen miles to Wilmington, which meant bus or carpool money, on top of money for lunch and school books. And tuition in 1953 was eighty dollars per year, which my parents paid in four installments. Mom and Dad made that sacrifice because they wanted me to have the best possible education. Later, my brothers, David, Joseph, and Patrick, all attended Sallies.
Salesianum is a great school. Still today, I value my time there. It changed my life and shaped my life, more than any other experience before or since. All for the better. At Salesianum, for starters, I joined the staff of the school newspaper, proudly saw my first byline in print, wrote my first column, and became the paper’s editor. I’ve been writing and publishing ever since. At Salesianum, I ran for student council and in my senior year was elected president. I’ve been involved in politics ever since. Perhaps most important, at Salesianum I joined the debate team, learned to see and understand both sides of every issue, and was trained to make my arguments succinctly, clearly, and convincingly. And I’ve since made a career of debating the issues on radio and television. Even though I didn’t realize it at the time (who could?), the arc of my career in politics and journalism was set there. In a sense, I’ve never left Sallies.
Along the way, I made great friends at Salesianum, some of whom I’m still in touch with over fifty years later: Joe Stiller, Bill Taylor, Ted Burke, Pete Feeney, Dennis Reardon, Jack Hurley, Joe Mealey, and Stan Kisielewski, among others.
My love for Sallies remains strong, even though I agree with little of what we were taught there about Catholic morality. Sex, we were incessantly told, was acceptable only between man and wife—never before marriage, and certainly never, never, never between a same-sex couple. And even inside marriage, sex was okay only for the purpose of procreation—never for pleasure. None of which any of us believed or practiced. The obsession with sex even extended to school dances, where Father James Donovan warned us about slow dances, which he called “dry fornication.”
As for masturbation: Don’t even think about it. You’ll go blind or grow hair on the palms of your hands, or run out of semen and never be able to have children. Wrong on all counts, Father!
Abortion, of course, was the ultimate wrong. Never acceptable under any circumstances or for any reason. And pornography was the evil influence that led to all the above. I’m embarrassed to admit that I joined a group of student council leaders from Sallies who met with the owner of the Warner Theatre in 1956 to protest his plans to screen the movie Baby Doll, a dark comedy written by Tennessee Williams, and threaten him with a Catholic boycott if he didn’t cancel the film. It was my only involvement with the Catholic Legion of Decency, and I still regret it.
Sallies also had a great school spirit, which I enjoyed, even though I did not play sports in high school. Statewide, we were number one in basketball and football. Wildly enthusiastic rallies were held before each game. First at the old school at Eighth and West Street, and later, at the new school at Eighteenth and Broom, where we moved during Easter break of my junior year, we were all proud to be boys from Sallies, as reflected in our school fight song:
We’re the boys from Eighth and West,
Not afraid to face the best,
We’re the boys with the grim determination.
Oh, they say we are not tough,
That’s because we are not rough,
But we’re out for your complete extermination!
Salesianum was the first high school in America founded by the Oblates of Saint Francis de Sales, and we had a very colorful and talented faculty made up of Oblate priests, brothers, scholastics, and seminarians. Our principal, Father Thomas A. Lawless, all of five feet tall and already a legend for his bold anti-segregation stand, stalked the halls, smoking his pipe. His deputy, equally diminutive redhead Father Francis D. Dougherty, ran the school with an iron fist. Others who left a lasting impression on me: Father J. V. O’Neill, football coach; Father John Birkenheuer, basketball coach and religion teacher; Father Robert D. Kenney, baseball coach and math teacher; social studies teacher Father Thomas L. McNamara; English teacher Father James B. Donovan; and religion teacher Joseph A. Connolly.
Of all the Oblates, Father Joe Connolly became my best friend. We joked around a lot. He called me Kingfish, after the character in Amos and Andy. We played golf together. We often went to New Jersey for dinner with his sister and her family. He became such a regular visitor to Delaware City that the entire Cook cousin clan adopted him as our chaplain. He even converted my grandfather from basically no religion and baptized him a Catholic on his deathbed.
A proud Democrat, Father Connolly also loved politics. And in his role as faculty adviser to the school newspaper, where I served as editor, he introduced me to my first big-name Democrats. The paper was printed by the McClafferty Printing Company, whose owner, Bill McClafferty, was Democratic chairman of Wilmington. In my junior year, McClafferty set up an interview for me with the Democratic state chair of Delaware, Garrett Lyons. And in my senior year, he arranged an exclusive interview with a young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy.
I was a huge JFK fan, having watched him bow out of the contest for the vice presidential nomination at the 1956 convention with charm and grace. By showing such class at the convention, Kennedy was already a national star and considered a front-runner for the presidential nomination in 1960. He came to Wilmington to keynote the annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner. Classmate Peter Feeney and I were waiting for him at Penn Station.
When Kennedy’s train pulled into the station, we looked up and down the platform with no sign of the entourage we expected surrounding a national politician. Then I noticed a tall, thin man, toting a brown, leather briefcase step out of one of the forward cars and start walking, all by himself, down the platform. It was JFK. McClafferty introduced Father Connolly and the two of us, and Kennedy very generously and politely welcomed our questions.
I still have my notes for that interview, where I had prepared two questions. First: What advice did he have for young people like us, who wanted to get involved in politics but didn’t know how to get started? Find a candidate you like, Kennedy advised, and volunteer for his political campaign. Get involved, gain some experience, meet some people, see whether you like it—and who knows what might happen. Good advice, which I was to follow several years later in San Francisco.
I also asked Kennedy how he, a busy U.S. senator, could find the time to write a book like his 1957 Pulitzer Prize–winning Profiles in Courage. Kennedy noted that while recuperating from back surgery, he ended up with a lot of time on his hands and devoted that time to putting his book together. Most presidential historians now agree that while Kennedy may have devoted a lot of attention to the book during that time, the book was largely written by speechwriter Ted Sorenson—in part because JFK’s back injuries were more serious than anyone ever knew.
Frankly, I don’t care who actually wrote the book. That interview with John F. Kennedy remains one of the highlights of my life. And, like Bill Clinton’s famous 1963 handshake with JFK in the Rose Garden, it helped catapult me into a life in politics—even though the seeds of my political activity lay dormant until ten years later, after my seminary years, when I arrived in San Francisco.
As mentioned above, my experience on the Salesianum debate team also helped shape my career path. I loved the opportunity to debate the issues of the day, from the death penalty to the Cold War. One favorite challenge in those days was the classic debate question: “Better Red than Dead, or Dead than Red?” And it was out of that debate experience that I learned an important skill.
Because, depending on the luck of the draw, we could be asked to debate either side of an issue, I learned to anticipate what objections my opponent would make to my arguments—and be prepared to demolish them. Thus prepared, I never went into a debate without knowing the con side as well as the pro side. It was a valuable lesson that came in handy later on Crossfire.
Upon graduating from Salesianum, I had several great choices in front of me, having been accepted for admission as a freshman at Boston College, La Salle College, Notre Dame, and Georgetown University. But by that time, after months of inner turmoil, I had decided on a different path.
On the night I graduated from high school, Mom and Dad threw a party for me at our home in Delaware City. After everybody had had a couple of drinks, I stood up on a chair in our dining room and announced to family and friends what only my parents knew until then: that I would not be going to college that fall. Instead, I’d be joining the Oblates of Saint Francis de Sales in order to study for the priesthood.
And so I closed the door on Delaware City and opened the door to the rest of my life. While I wasn’t yet a full-fledged progressive, there were already stirrings of the true progressive inside me ready to burst forth—but only after going underground for the next ten years.
Copyright © 2018 by Bill Press