When Joey Fell

When Joey fell there were no headlines. The story exists as family history, shared in quiet conversation over several generations. The bones of the story are these. There was an accident. A boy died.

During the early years of the Great Depression, John C. and his young wife, Ida Mae, struggled to make ends meet in western Pennsylvania. John sold appliances. Money was scarce for families to buy consumer goods. Many had lost jobs. In the small rural communities around Pittsburgh, livelihoods were connected to the major local industries of coal, steel, and glass. All were ailing in the devastated economy. The family had moved several times. At that time, 1931, they had recently come to the small community of Canonsburg and found a house for a growing family. Ida Mae had given birth to four boys, John Jr., James, Joseph and a baby, Richard.

It was moving day. The house was in turmoil. Staying with them was Grandpa, who had volunteered to help with the move. Ida Mae was nursing Richard. Earlier, Grandpa had been in the basement, while the two older boys, then six and five were playing hide and seek. Joey, then three years old, was tagging along.

The basement door was open. Joey was on the basement stairs, perhaps intending to visit his grandpa. Five-year-old Jimmy closed the basement door and turned out the light, not realizing his younger brother was there. The old stairway lacked a railing or banister. Disoriented, Joey fell, striking his head on the cement floor below. He was rushed to the hospital where he lay with a concussion. There was little to be done. As he lay in the bed, his mother at his side, a train passed nearby. The boy opened his eyes and looked at his mother.

 “Choo choo train,” he said. And passed away.     

Joey had been the quiet boy, his father’s favorite. While the older boys were full of mischief and energy, Joey was calm and affectionate, content to sit quietly at his father’s side while he read the newspaper. These are the memories that persist. The lost boy is the child frozen in time and space. He is without fault, without sin, beyond reproach. There would be three more children, two in quick succession, David and Patricia, the only girl, and finally, Larry, born eleven years after Patty.

When Joey fell, his father’s drinking, which had been worrisome, worsened. His moods grew combative. He made life particularly hard on Jimmy, who he blamed for Joey’s death. How much guilt could or should be borne by a five-year-old boy, who surely loved his brother? The accident cast a pall over the family, created friction and argument, especially when the beer began to flow. Sometimes the only way to calm her father when drinking, was when daughter Patty would sing.

“Let me sing for you, Papa,” she would plead. He would produce a small hornpipe and his daughter would sing for him. As the boys grew older, they lost themselves in schoolwork and took odd jobs to help support the family. John Sr. began work as an insurance salesman. However, tension between the older boys and their father, particularly Jimmy, continued to fester. When World War Two began, Jimmy saw his chance and left home to join the Navy, at 17. John Jr. enlisted in the Army. The remaining children worked after school. Their father’s drinking continued. Shortly after Larry was born, John Sr. died of a heart attack, hastened from the effects of alcoholism.

The younger children worked to assist their mother with household expenses. Patty and her father had been close, as she had been the only daughter. She also enjoyed a particularly close relationship with her mother. One day shortly after coming home from school, Larry, still a toddler, was in a rolling seat he scooted around the kitchen. Someone had left the basement door ajar. Ida Mae came into the kitchen to find Larry peering down into the basement through the open door. Snatching him away from the stairs, Ida Mae called Patty into the kitchen and struck her violently across the face.

“Never leave that basement door unlocked,” she screamed. The two women each dissolved into tears, one in anger, the other in pain and humiliation. Some seventy years later Patty still recalled the pain and shock of that slap.

“It wasn’t me. I would never have left that door open. I understood its history.”

Some wounds that scar a family never heal. John Jr., who recovered from the theater of war never recovered from the battlefield at home. The consequence of that conflict contributed heavily to his drinking. Like his father before him, his battle with the bottle led to estrangement from family and subsequently, plagued his own children with the disease. Three of his children died young from the ravages of alcoholism.

Jimmy, plagued throughout his life by the guilt associated from his father’s accusations, returned from the war but never came home. He seized every career opportunity to transfer with his family to locations ever distant from his siblings, returning only on rare and special occasions. His children understood the burden he carried but rarely spoke of it.

The lost boy, Joey, was buried in St Patrick Catholic Cemetery in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. A temporary marker identified the grave. But a more permanent gravestone was never erected. Too much pain was associated with that accident years ago, perhaps. Discussion arose in family circles from time to time to have the body disinterred and moved to a plot in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, where family members eventually settled, died, and were buried, including parents John and Ida Mae, and brother David, who Joey never met.  

Two years ago, a headstone marking Joey’s grave was commissioned and marks the spot where he was buried. Larry, his youngest brother, one he never met but who was surely marked by his memory, honored Joey’s final resting place.

“I could never get it out of my head, his lying there in an unmarked grave,” Larry said.

St. Patrick Cemetery sits atop a steep hill overlooking the small community of Canonsburg, bordered by a white stockade fence. Among its scattering of gravestones in Section E, dating back to the early 1910s, sits a granite memorial honoring a child, a son and brother. Carved into the stone is reflected the brief span of time leading from his birth to the day when Joey fell.