By Rosalie Tirella
Tomorrow is President’s Day. For most Americans this signifies a day off with pay, a three-day weekend and/or the beginning of school vacation for the kiddos. When I was a little girl America was more serious and specific – not yet dumb-downed. We didn’t have a generic President’s Day where no one knew anything about anybody and a buffoon like Trump could be feted on the same day as a glamorous, forward-thinking JFK, a brave and compassionate FDR or an energetic, outdoorsy Teddy Roosevelt. Trump was our president, too, after all, so it’s his day as well! Ugh.
No, back in the 1950s and 1960s American students, moms and dads, factory workers, doctors and captains of industry remembered, honored arguably our two greatest presidents: Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. On their real birthdays – February 12 for Abraham Lincoln and February 22 for George Washington. It may have been different in the South when it came to Lincoln, but when I was a kid every Worcester Public School I attended or visited had those two famous presidential prints flanking the right and left sides of the proscenium in the school auditorium: a portrait, big and serious, of President Washington, usually seated on an impressive white steed, and the print of that painting of Abraham Lincoln, depicted from the chest up in his famous black suit, looking lugubrious and doomed. You could go into many Polish, Lithuanian, Irish or Italian immigrant homes in the 1940s and see calendars with the same pictures, only smaller, thumbtacked to the kitchen wall. I know that was true for our tenement in Green Island.
When I was a little girl my mother always reminded me of the special holidays because she shared her birthday with George Washington. Ma was born on February 22. Ma was very proud of this fact – having the same birthday as our first President, a great man, a man who led Americans during the Revolutionary War and won the war for Independence. Then he became our first ever president, leading a wet-behind-the-ears country into the future. Ma didn’t know Washington was a very rich land owner who owned slaves and that they were whipped and chained just like …Thomas Jefferson’s slaves were. She told me the tale of Washington chopping down that cherry tree and stuck to that narrative until the day she died. Underneath the story were Ma’s feelings for Washington and the America she chose to believe in: a country of freedom, honesty, hard work, fortitude, great opportunity, grace and goodness. Those attributes could propel America – you! – to the top.
Americans’ possibilities were endless, so thought Ma.
Rose’s mom, late 1950s.