New Page 0

In the summer of 1954, a heart attack cut short the career of the author’s father – Mark Hayes – at the peak of his career as an architect and gives him two years from hell until one last heart attack kills him in 1956. The memoir searches backward in time to recover the lost world of the author’s father.

The story takes the author back to his family’s origins in the Famine Irish. In 1846, a great grandfather emigrated from County Waterford to Ontario and escaped the mass, unmarked grave that became the fate of the rest of the family that stayed during the Great Hunger. From Canada, a second generation left behind the pioneer farms in Ontario and the Dakota Territory to make Minneapolis its home.

The story of the father’s coming of age is also the story of Minneapolis’ coming of age. Protestant Minneapolis had a knack for making Irish and Catholic life in the city even more peculiar than in its other American enclaves. Set in the 1920s and 1930s, his youth belongs to the history of the wrong side of the tracks in Minneapolis – to the city’s North Side. After graduation in 1923 from a Catholic high school fir for a James Joyce’s novel, he joins the Jazz Age generation at the University of Minnesota. A passion for art and painting leads him to the study of architecture and modernism. He graduates in 1932 just in time to spend six years making a living on odd jobs from stripping pine trees into telephone poles to semi-pro basketball.

In 1938, a job with a St. Louis firms puts the young architect on the road to success. In short order, he is a married man with children. The war puts on hold his career bringing him first to Africa in 1942-43 and then to the Pacific in 1943-45. After the war, dreams really do seem to come true – a good wife, four sons, a new house, a new Ford every other year, a booming architectural career, until one fine morning in 1954. . .

A wistful and ironic tone cannot dispel the sense of tragedy that casts its shadow over the memoir from its first to last page. This is a memoir of the extraordinary pain that came from an ordinary death in the 1950s. It is the pain of a son’s loss of his father and the loss of his father’s world.

Nick Hayes teaches at Saint John’s University in Minnesota, writes for newspapers, magazines and journals nationwide, and is a popular commentator on public radio and television. For more information, visit www.employees.csbsju.edu/nhayes.

For more information, Excerpt