Unless you were born in the late 1930's in Litchfield County, Connecticut, you have already missed your best chance for a proper upbringing, so what follows is not a 'how-to' but a nostalgic reminder of how things might have been if fate had favored you.
I do not mean to suggest that my upbringing was ideal, or even entirely proper. Definition happens at the margins, that black line that tells us the difference between the subject and the background. My upbringing was uncomfortably close to that line, which may also be evoked by the cliche, 'skating on thin ice.'
Money: In those days money was not the sole criteria of respectability. In the midst of a terrible depression that (my parents believed) President Roosevelt had so unjustly blamed on Herbert Hoover, most people had very little, and (as often happens) many of the wrong people had the most. For those without much, respectability was thought to turn upon other criteria. Still, there is an ineffable nexus between money and propriety. Having a bit of lolly never hurts, and having a lot will often offset other deficiencies. We had none, so we skated as fast as we could along that line between the firm ice and the thin ice--a slightly hazardous enterprise.
In our favor was the God of the Puritans. He was with us, and we were (of course) with Him, so there wasn't any question that we were right, but the Congregational Church, once so aggressively evangelical, was still recuperating from the Civil War. The challenge of freeing the slaves, and the effort to rectify the whole country, had exhausted God's undoubted elect. Congregationalists were taking a temporary break from telling everybody else what to do (while reserving the right to resume that dutiful burden in the future.)
Family: We were poor relations (which we fully understood) and worse (although we didn't yet realize it) the poor relations of a family already bypassed by Irish and Italian Democrats, who, in the midst of the Great Depression, and the Second World War, held many of the political sinecures we considered the due reward of our cousins and other Republicans. Even more astonishing, their children had graduated from famous universities, and were practicing law and medicine. Happily, family privilege had not completely eroded--my father had a guaranteed, albeit low paying, job as a the bookkeeper and (eventually) vice president of a mutual savings bank organized by one of his ancestors.
Education and Culture: We had as much as we thought we needed. We read a lot--but our reading was entirely undiscriminating--everything from the backs of cereal boxes to the latest 'great novel'. Everybody in our block had a copy of "Kristin Lavransdatter" on their bookshelf, (probably no more than half read.) On average, our reading lay in a fairly narrow channel defined by what the right people (e.g., Dad's Uncle, a small town banker and a sometime Republican candidate for Governor) would consider acceptable, TIME, LIFE, The Torrington Register on weekdays, The Herald-Tribune on Sundays, and every month a copy of The Reader's Digest--so Mom could talk about books, if ever she had a moment to spare (which she never did--having had too many children for a WASP.)
On the plus side, I was a pretty good student, and by reading everything within three feet of my eyes, had accumulated a mountain of trivial information that served me well on entrance examinations. My infallible sense that "Helm is to Hat, as picklehaube is to porkpie,' brought me an academic scholarship--although nothing so lucrative as the awards to promising quarterbacks, and (alas) not at Yale, the alma mater of choice for the more prosperous branch of our family.
(To be continued)
