Impure Thoughts: Growing up Catholic in the 1950s and early 1960s

It is hard now, in our age of explicit display and information saturation, for younger generations to grasp the hermetically sealed innocence of a Catholic childhood at midcentury. The general culture itself shielded the young. On television, broadcasters of the three lone networks stuck to a code dictating that married couples have separate beds and that the bad guys were never to be shown emerging triumphant. Within a Catholic household like mine, the influence of the conservative church held sway. In Cleveland, that meant seeking guidance from the biweekly newspaper The Catholic Universe Bulletin, which rated movies, usually negatively, by the measuring stick of church morality, and even the most innocuous family fare could be deemed “suggestive.” As a young child, I wondered, “Suggestive of what?”

I played with toys on the kitchen floor, crawling occasionally beneath the table amidst the legs of my mother and her women company, listening and trying to understand their gossipy conversations. There was complaining about husbands: “You know what mine did?” And discussions of diseases. So and so had cancer. Someone else had a goiter. And talk of television: “That comedian last night, he didn’t have to go blue.” I could hear the disgust in my mother’s voice when she made that remark. But what did it mean to work blue and why was it so disgusting? And what was a goiter?

“A goiter,” my mother tried to explain to me, “it’s a swelling….” She motioned with her hand to the base of her neck and upper chest.

I still didn’t really understand. So on I played with my toy trucks and green plastic army men.

One day, though, I had a revelation. My Uncle Albert was visiting, and, like a typical noisy kid, I decided to explore the inside of his sedan while he chatted inside. Climbing in the back seat and looking down, I saw there was something beneath the seat. I pulled it out. A magazine. With a woman on the cover. When I lifted up the magazine, a folded page sprung open, a centerfold with another woman, a woman kneeling with her hands behind her head, and she was wearing no clothes. I studied the photo. It was the first time that I had seen naked female breasts. I knew that they were hidden beneath the blouses of the women around me. But this woman’s breasts were huge. In the women around me, breasts that size were usually located down by the waist. This woman’s mammoth breasts seem to swell up from the top of her chest. Swell… Oh, this poor woman. Now I understood. She had a goiter. Two goiters. Having made my diagnosis, I lost interest and returned the magazine to beneath the seat.

Thus I lived in a state of prelapsarian innocence. When I was seven attending Holy Family Elementary School, the nuns prepared us for First Confession. Then came the day. Wearing my school uniform – navy blue pants, light blue shirt, and clip on tie – I stood in line with other kids, waiting to enter the scary darkness of the confessional booth. My anxiety must have been plainly written on my face because a nun, seeing me, approached and asked, “What’s a matter, Dale?”

“I don’t have any sins to confess!” I blurted out, looking up at her plaintively.

“Do you remember the Fourth Commandment?” she responded. “Honor thy father and mother. Do you always listen to your parents?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Then you have sins to confess.”

Yes! Thank God. I had sins!

In the third grade, though, I began to discover a reliable source of sin. I had a lay teacher with the unfortunate name of Mrs. Beaver. I couldn’t help noticing how pretty she was, and I began to take a nonmedical interest in her body, and I wondered too what was beneath the black garments of the sole young attractive nun who stood out from her ancient and portly comrades.

Then there was the girl who lived down the side street. Older than me and a foot taller. Would l like to go to her house and play? Sure. That sounded like fun. After some preliminary activities of laughing and horsing around, she said, “I have a game! I’m going to take this puppet and hide it under my clothes and you find it.” She turned around, the puppet disappeared, and then I slid my hand under her top and began feeling for it. When I discovered it and pulled it out, she was left looking quite pleased. I was very pleased too, although I couldn’t have explained to you why. I was never invited back. I think her mother had something to do with that.

When my parents gave me small camera, I dared the next-door neighbor girl – who was my age—to pull down her pants and I snapped a picture. I immediately had this pang of guilt. I asked my mom, “What would happen if you took a picture of someone who wasn’t wearing any clothes?” Just a hypothetical question, mom.

“When you went to get it developed,” she replied, “they would call the police and throw you in jail.” My blood ran cold.

At school, I soon learned the name for my type of curiosity: impure thoughts. A terrible type of sin. Thinking like that, why, it was sick. For that type of sickness, God could throw you into the flames of hell the same way I took our garbage down into the basement and dropped it into the flames of our incinerator, a gas-powered appliance that was not uncommon in homes of the time. As child, I would stare with fascination at the flames, which provided a ready image of God’s fiery furnace.

But as much as I feared damnation and learned what you could call the Disease Model of Human Sexuality, I couldn’t keep these impure thoughts out of my mind. The best that I could do was keep a running count of them and shamefully relay the number to the priest at confession. And blue? I still couldn’t fully understand the negative significance the color blue, but I soon figured out that it was somehow part of the whole sordid sex business.

As I got older, my father made two unhelpful attempts at the “birds and bees” talk. One day, while we alone together riding in car, he turned to me and said, “Ever notice the girls in your class getting heavy upstairs?” Seeing a look of befuddlement on my face, he took his hands momentarily off the steering wheel and cupped them in front of him. Oh, girls’ breasts. Now I understood. Impure thoughts, impure thoughts, impure thoughts…. Then he tried a different angle. “How do you think babies are made?” I had never given this question any thought. Cute little babies seemed unconnected with my sick imagination regarding girls.

Nonetheless, I took a stab at an answer: “A dad wants a baby and the mom wants a baby and when they both want a baby, she gets a baby.”

My father scoffed and gave me a look as if to say, “I’m raising a moron!”

He dropped the subject for then, and, when he later returned to it, it was to take an even less promising approach. “Every month, something comes out of your mother’s body. I wrap it in newspaper and take it downstairs and burn it in the incinerator.” That was it. That was the talk. He stopped after those two sentences. I knew from his discomfort that he was attempting a sex talk. It, of course, did nothing to enlighten me and amped up my anxiety by making sex seem like a cross between trash removal and Satanic ritual.

Sex. The forbidden. “Dale, what happened to that camera we gave you?”

“I don’t know, Mom,” I answered, thinking please don’t search the garage. “I’m going out to play.”

I was still a kid, meaning I could escape my fears and worries in the pleasures of childhood.

My brothers and I spend most times of clement weather outside, exploring the nearby woods or playing games and sports, running our fool heads off and often falling and tearing the knees out of our jeans. The holy grail for my mom was finding inexpensive blue jeans that she could afford on my father’s draftsman’s salary.

After such a purchase, I remember playing hard during the hot, humid summer days, at night haunted by increasingly persistent “impure thoughts.” That’s when I noticed. That’s when I understood. That’s when the horror came upon me. When I pulled down my pants to use the toilet, my genitals were blue! Blue! So that’s it! The connection between the color blue and sex is that if you are continually immersed in the filth of impure thoughts, you get this disease and your crotch turns blue! I was sure that this had to be fatal. But how could I tell anyone? What depths of revulsion would overcome my parents upon learning the horrid truth? How come I go to doctor? What would the doctor say? “Mr. and Mrs. Palof, I have never seen such a severe case in such a child so young. What sort of revolting pervert are you raising? In a world of moms and dads and cute babies, and saints dying for the glory of God, and cowboys being straight shooters, your slug of a son, sliding along on the slime of impure thoughts, has now reduced himself to the worst sort of degrading, hopelessly diseased sinner. Why didn’t you listen to your mother? Didn’t she ever tell you that you didn’t have to go blue?”

I had to keep this wretched condition to myself, keep it hidden and await my death. But maybe, maybe, if I policed my thoughts better, prayed long and hard, threw myself on the mercy of God….

Those hot summer days I silently borne the burdensome awareness of my moral and physical illness. Saturday bath times came and went. The routines of the household continued: cooking, cleaning… laundry. Then, miracle of miracles, the blueness began to wade. I would live, but live a changed boy, resolved to lead a purer life.

But then, one day, while we were getting into our swimsuits, my brothers began laughing and pointing at me. “Look where he has hair!” one exclaimed.

It was during that time that my confession began to include impure acts along with impure thoughts to point that an exasperated priest reprimanded me: “Son, you’ve got to get a hold of yourself.”

Alas, father, that’s the problem. THE END