Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?
By John R. Powers

312 Pages • $12.95

INTRODUCTION
by Tom McGrath

Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?
By John R. Powers (click here to learn more about this author)

[Open a pdf version]

I know John Powers. Actually, I’ve never met him, but I know him because he tells the stories of my youth. We grew up as near-contemporaries on the South Side of Chicago in the late fifties and early sixties. I’m sure if we engaged in the Catholic South Sider’s second favorite pastime, asking “Do you know So-and-So from Saint Whozit’s?” within thirty seconds we would discover multiple connections and thus be able to locate each other in the South Side’s unofficial social register.

My friend, Tim Unsworth, likes to say, “There are only six people on the whole south side.” I agree, and three of them are my cousins. Unsworth served as a brother at Powers’s high school around the time Powers was living out and collecting hilarious anecdotes to fill this book. Unsworth recalls the time he needed to organize a fundraiser involving the families of students and alumni. He gathered a team of four dads to review a roster of some 2,100 names. Unsworth came away amazed there were a mere handful of people on the list who weren’t known, related, or otherwise connected to at least one of the four men through family, job, parish, bowling league, or other shared history. Life for the people on that list was a network, a web, an entire social cosmos where everyone knew the same stories and played by the same rules. And the rules were set forth by the church.

Thus, Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? arrived on the scene in 1975 like an astute anthropologist’s report from the field, detailing the mores, social structures, and courting rituals of a rich and complex culture in full flower—just as it was about to change forever. Perhaps because it observes a world on the brink of change the book was not only popular when it was first issued but also continues to touch hearts so deeply. It captured and conveyed a way of life that had been so fully “the way things are” even as people were coming to realize it had now become “the way things were.”

The book is blessed with a title that, in a single phrase, conjures up that vivid time and place with characters whose foibles and longings are all exposed. Did any nun actually ever warn a classroom of pubescent girls to keep their provocatively glossy pumps tucked away in the closet? Possibly, but it doesn’t matter. Powers spins his yarns on the level of myth, not veracity. With exaggeration and mischief he tells tall tales that people can find themselves in.

You probably know Powers, too, or somebody like him. He’s the good friend you hung out with who observed everything and missed nothing. The one who would have you in stitches just recalling the common events of your daily life together. The one who could recount your shared history in a way that not only opened your eyes to life’s hilarity but also its hu­manity and its gold. Readers believe Powers’s stories because, to one degree or another, and in their own situation, they’ve lived the life those stories evoke. After all, who didn’t recoil from the class bully or egg on the class clown? Who didn’t suffer an inept teacher who was driven to nervous breakdown by merciless students? Who didn’t walk into a dance absolutely certain that everyone in the place was staring at the pimple on their chin? Eddie Ryan and his pals lead us through such rites of passage, vintage 1962. We reenter the world of basketball rivalries and after-school jobs, sock hops and first dates, “permanent records” and lasting memories. We relive the excitement of first cars and first loves along with the agony of first car-repair bills and Christmastime breakups.

When we meet him, Eddie Ryan is on the verge of two new worlds, both of them seemingly beyond comprehension: successful adulthood and meaningful faith. And if you read the book on one level, most of what he is offered is bad advice and miscues about his future. Of course, that bad advice and those miscues provide much of the humor of the book. (Considering the church’s decision to deal with Catholic teens’ budding sexual desire by keeping boys and girls separate leads Powers to say, “most likely the church would try to get your mind off food by starving you to death.”)

The priests, brothers, and, especially, nuns of that era were popularly ridiculed for their tactics and obsessive fussing about dating and sex. Every Catholic student of a certain age has their own story to tell of nuns on purity patrol brandishing rulers to measure hemlines and keep slow-dancers at least a phone book apart from one another, or priests whose nervousness at discussing “the marital act” made Barney Fife look like a cool customer. And yet the emptiness of today’s courtship rituals, exposed most sadly in the so-called reality-dating programs, amply demonstrates that these celibates’ worries about sex that is divorced from care and commitment were not misplaced. What’s more, that group of nuns, priests, and brothers, along with a dedicated array of lay people, shaped and prepared that generation of young women who would take their place as lawyers, doctors, CEOs, and entrepreneurs in record numbers. Many of the first feminists, whether they claimed the name or not, were classroom nuns who stoked the ambitions of girls and young women. I know. I’m gladly married to a product of such formation and training.

As in any good story, there’s more to Eddie Ryan’s story than first meets the eye. He may be able to easily dismiss ill-­conceived advice on sex, relationships, and his own potential, but he can’t dismiss the broader medium that carries that ­wayward ­message—his community. The urban Catholic world of his era was an extremely effective and far-reaching force capable of forming a cohesive culture and passing on its values. Big corporations pay megabucks to consultants who can help them approximate even the smallest degree of that culture-building capability.

Yet the all-encompassing brand of cultural Catholicism so essential for early immigrants as they navigated their passage into a new world had begun to fit a little too snug for second- and third-generation teenagers. These teens, products of America’s wealthiest generation up till then, saw themselves on the forefront of Kennedy’s New Frontier. Ready to throw off all constraints and take on the world, every cautionary message of church and family they heard came across as “thou shalt not.”

And this left Eddie Ryan and his cohorts in a quandary. There he stood with his “overactive gullibility gland” but also a heart attuned to “the possibility of miracles.” The challenge for all of us in that era was to lose the gullibility while remaining open to the miracles. Sadly, some jettisoned both.

Those moving into adulthood would need miracles. Floating in the background of the humorous accounts of elusive love and fortune are rumbling echoes of the era: troubled race relations, objectification of women, ridicule of homosexuals, all of which were the shadow side of a closed society. And there on the distant horizon was the looming reality of Vietnam. While Eddie and his buddies wondered idly what they would do with their futures, for many in that generation, an active military draft was already deciding their fate and their names are now etched on a mournful wall in Washington, D.C.

As the cohesiveness of that insular world began to disintegrate—as much from the obvious success of Catholics in America who now could choose where and how to live—those problems of the larger society and wider world could no longer be ignored. And in Rome the church took note with a world-changing council and an openhearted document called The Church in the Modern World.

Those who endured the teenage rites of passage in the sixties shared a conviction that life would soon be better, and we would be the ones who would make it so. Our generation would save the world, renew the church, and end racism, poverty, and war in our time. Such cockiness fueled a lot of good. And it fueled a lot of arrogance as well. Either way, it wasn’t enough. Saving the world has proven as elusive as Una, “the one” who Eddie Ryan longs for, the one who got away.

Eddie Ryan’s uncle Elmer tells him, “These are your fun years.” And though Eddie heard those words when his heart was most raw with agony, he would later come to agree. The adolescent years, whether fun or frustrating, are the time when we learn some of life’s most fundamental lessons. Eddie’s tale shows that ordinary life contains within it clues to all the good that life holds—like hope, heroism, friendship, kindness, humor, and even longing. And, of course, love.

Oh, the South Sider’s favorite pastime? That would be telling stories. And John Powers knows how to tell stories. So sit back and get ready to revisit the days of your youth, or as Eddie Ryan put it, “the kingdom that has been prepared for you for all eternity.”

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