Fred Garel was born in Philadelphia in 1921 but has lived most of his life in New York City. He has worked as a printer, short-order cook, oiler, elevator operator, building engineer, janitor, hospital orderly, maintenance supervisor and community service worker. His volunteer service has included cooking for Catholic Worker houses on the Lower East Side and for a psychiatric reachout-program for homeless people. His educational experiences include a one-room public "cripple school" on the Upper West Side (a school that took in grades one-to-eight, with a great teacher); the Institute for the Crippled and Disabled, where he learned sign language from deaf friends; studies with the famous waterfront and labor priests Fathers Corridan and Carey; and classes with Canon William A. Johnson and other non-stipendiary professors at the Institute of Theology (an Episcopal seminary founded to teach theology to people who did not have the traditional preparation for graduate work and to prepare some for ordination).
Fred Garel's essays, published in The Westsider, The Catholic Worker and the small voice, became the basis for many chapters in his memoir. These experiences include:
having to leave his father on a chain gang in the South;
going up to New York City with his Scottish-born mother, who worked as a domestic for $1 a day (with the understanding that her employer would provide her son with one hot mean every day;
participating in the community life of a tenement flat filled with his mother's "boarders"--illegal immigrants who often couldn't pay the rent;
being paralyzed by polio in 1933, when frightened friends often deserted a stricken family;
selling root-beer at one of the largest stands at the 1939 World's Fair;
talking to unemployed men on picket lines and at Hoovervilles in Central Park and on the Hudson River;
and raising a white family in public housing in West Harlem.
Lighting the Lamps is about the many worlds of New York City, past and present--living the robust tenement and street life of the Depression; encountering "the Desert Experience" in NYC faith communities; and meeting extraordinary people while working at a great variety of jobs--starting in the days when a skilled buildings-engineer supervisor might be illiterate and "manual labor" included amazing feats of skill.
In his introduction Fred describes the background of his book:
The early Desert Fathers felt--and taught--that one had to leave the cities in order to search for spiritual answers. John Corbett, in his spiritual search, at one point left the Catholic Worker to live with the nomads who live in our subway system. During that time he and I met accidentally after evening Mass at the Church of Saint Paul the Apostle on the West Side.
How good it was to see this man with whom I had worked--to see how contented he was! I asked how it was going for him--now--in the underground life of the City.
"Fred," he said, "the Desert Experience is here."
And so it was for my mother. She made the journey from the Catholic orphanage in Glasgow to this Land of Promise, through the bewildering confusion and fears of Ellis Island. She was dumped into the waterfront bonded-servant market--to be greeted by a scholarly nonreligious Jew who had been searching among the new arrivals for a women who would help create a wholesome atmosphere for the Newmans' young children. Rosina Murphy accepted his invitation to become the nursemaid of the Newman children, her first job in the totally New World. In the first decade of the twentieth century she moved into another alien world, the Jewish Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Here she found her spiritual home. For those of us who are children of the world's immigrants, it is so very alien, this past Land of Promise--so hard to visualize (even with our first-hand listening to their stories of endurance), this real poverty, yet the wealth of their spiritual lives.
I heard of the joyous struggles that she shared, Mom in her Promised Land. The people she loved, all of them inspired and inspiring others to lives of challenge. In this place of empowerment that is New York City.
Always I wanted to write. At least from twelve, the year with polio, the year in the hospital. Then I wrote my thoughts to a girl in Edinburgh in my mother's Old Country, poured out my soul. Later, no one was interested in what I wrote. Or I drank and tried to write, and tried to read it later. Much later, my children would ask: "Dad, what were you saying about--?" Algernon Black, my old boss at the Ethical Culture Society, was always trying to get me to write. Always so involved himself in the many worlds of New York City, he thought my story would interest others:
Growing up poor in New York (in four boroughs) in the 'twenties and 'thirties. Being hospitalized for a year with polio when the only treatment for kids was bed rest. Later going to "Cripple School". Getting an education through apprenticeships in machines and maintenance, often learning from dedicated teachers who had little schooling themselves and were even sometimes illiterate. Struggling with illness and addictions. Raising a white family in a Harlem public housing project in the 'sixties and 'seventies. Working with the old homeless of the Bowery and the new homeless on the West Side. Knowing people all over New York City, from police captains to Harlem activists to a self-described leader of the gay mafia. How many lives we can live in one city!
All this urging to write came to a focus when I was being fitted for a new leg brace. I told the prosthesis specialist that I was working on a book about coming up crippled in the Depression (and where we may be in the coming Depression). The prosthesis maker was interested. Many young people disabled by horrible accidents come to him to be fitted for artificial limbs and braces, but they get no counseling. They lack initiative and drive, he told me, adding that perhaps a book like mine could help.
This book is about lives lived simply in awe at life's gift: growing in spite of--the devil? Living in the face of others' often unconcealed contempt, you have to grow out of anger; that struggle becomes as natural and human as the very breath you breathe.
This book is about physical health and strength suddenly stripped from a young person who at that instant becomes a "lesser" human being. ("Crip!" adults used to shout in the street.) Treated with ridicule and contempt--and knowing from the onset that this life will have to be learned. Learning to live it by my rules, not to be crushed into the mold in which society casts the disabled.
It took all of these years: finally I am becoming full aware of how Mom was getting me ready for the polio long before we were hit with the illness, the paralysis, the fears, bewilderment and shame (to which we were all subjected by the community at large as well as by hospital staffs and other professionals). Shamed because we were now crippled, less than, our families were deserted by friends.
"Don't whinge," Mom had always said. And "I never told you it would be easy." She hadn't had it easy.
Her words made me determined not to be put down by anyone. Mom bought me chemistry sets, Erector sets, Tinker Toys. Build, experiment, learn.
The one-room "Cripple School" at P.S. 54, with a fantastic teacher. Odd jobs, delivering orders, doing errands. That was the way for me. So that when I did make it into Newtown High School for Agriculture and school authorities asked, "What is a crippled kid doing in a school like this?", I could say, the hell with them--and go to work doing anything I knew I could handle.
For me, work--all work--became not an affliction or a curse but a blessing. Through work I am set on my own human paths. And these paths lead into and about my worlds, fill the waiting of the present for the joys and tribulations of tomorrow. To get involved in, to do, steady heavy manual work--trimming coal, digging, planting, mopping vast expanses of floor, cooking for large numbers of people, serving them, then cleaning up and washing the dishes--that's relaxing. The work, especially the cooking, can also be very sacramental. All such labor can lead to a higher meditative state, or so it seems to me. My novitiate was: people, boiler and engine rooms, carpentry shops, farms, kitchens, hospitals, all kinds of human service, the soothing humility that comes with mopping a floor.
There was a time when I dreamed of building cathedrals to share our gratitude when things went well: healthy children, good work, bills paid up, no pressure. Then we shared in building a community. The Depression community of West Side tenements, later the new community of the Manhattanville Housing Projects in West Harlem.
Now I dream repeatedly about cathedrals and great buildings lying in ruins, filled with debris. In my dreams I am struggling, along with others, to clean up, to rebuild. By day I have experienced the decline of institutions that have meant so much: the official Roman Catholic Church, which was once mostly a church for the poor; a humanist movement which was a force for human services to people; schools, unions, public housing, even the kinds of jobs (skilled and so-called "unskilled" labor) that used to keep poor people going in this City.
But the dreams fill me with wonderment. Why they move me so, I don't know. Dreams are spiritual enterprises, like prayer, meditation. A dream writer, I place my written dreams at various places in the story--with no strategy in mind but to urge you, kind reader, to shift (in your way through life), to stay, to be aware of this gift that is teaching, guiding all of us in our Desert Experience.
This is a book written in a time when we are going toward an American future of lessened material expectations--and more poor among us Americans who have expected so much. A time when we need a non-stipendiary clergy, worker-priests in all religious denominations, because the other kind has failed. A time when we need a new civil rights movement in the North; and healing for people who do not have "New Age" or traditional religious affiliations. Now, in our communities, the old poor and the new poor need to build together from the base up. The way to build is to share--to share work with others of like mind: in the streets, the churches, synagogues, mosques--everywhere. Teilhard de Chardin said, "A fresh kind of life is starting." But any real new life can't be just for those who can afford it-- but especially for those who can't. How much we miss when we don't talk with/share with the homeless, the disenfranchised, the cup people, the can people, the nomads of our streets. From them will come a salvation when we open our hearts and minds to learn from city-street nomad-thinking. Their survival is our survival.
