Up the Irish!

I NEVER THOUGHT WE'D MAKE IT (254 pp.)--Ernest Havemann & George G. Love--Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Fifty years ago the U.S. scene was enlivened and not infrequently disturbed by veritable armies of Irish couples very much like Ma & Pa Love--who met and married in the New World, raised a family of six on an iron molder's pay and managed to send them out into the world feeling that only ill luck or (that ultimate folly) leading with a right could keep them from inheriting the earth. But while most American immigrant families prefer to forget their early struggles--or make them sound like Life with Father--the Love tribe remembers the triumphs and tribulations of its hard years with pride, amazement and nostalgia.

The result is a wonderful piece of Americana, full of the smell of beer and coal smoke--and of the potato soup on which Ma fed her brood, sometimes for weeks on end, when Pa was looking for a job or "fighting the interests" during one of the dozens of strikes in which he was privileged to take part. Pa was a formidable and handsome man--tall, erect, curly-haired and with a straight right capable of breaking a man's jaw. Ma was handsome and formidable too--once she hit a slum bully over the head with a ball bat and knocked him colder than a brass casting. But there the similarity ceased.

So They Got Married. Pa was a rebel, who had marched with Coxey's Army, and boomed about the docks, harvest fields and foundries of the U.S., indulging his love of fisticuffs and agitating for the union shop. Ma, who had worked as a nursemaid for a rich Cleveland family (and named four of her children after theirs before Pa caught on), yearned for respectability. Ma always said she had married Pa against her better judgment: "That man . . . wouldn't take no for an answer." Pa's story was a little different. "I was keeping company with your mother ... in Cleveland [but I] was promised a job by Bad-Eyed Bill Guiness, who was foreman of a foundry in Oil City, Pa. So I told your mother that I was getting out of town again and she started to cry her head off, so we got married. What in hell else could a man do?"

All during their married lives Ma & Pa engaged in daily verbal sparring--usually before breakfast. But they faced the world stoutly and together--a world which consisted for years of drafty old houses (once the family lived in a tent) and endless peregrinations in search of work (Ma always bought just one railroad ticket, sent her big brood scurrying off through the train to hide in the lavatories).

Test of Success. As the boys grew, they were sent to work after school as a matter of course, and Ma herself often helped piece out the family finances. Once she bought a whole carload of apples and made $100 profit selling, them to the neighbors. "Your Ma," muttered Pa almost fearfully, "is acting like a crazy woman." Pa, a man of set ideas and enormous faith in his own mind, sometimes thought his children were going off their trolleys, too. But in the end, even Pa had to admit that the Loves--not, of course, excluding himself--had done well. His two daughters were grown up and married; his four sons were thriving. One of them, son George, a make-up editor at TIME, wrote out his account of it all strictly for family eyes. Later he showed it to his neighbor, Ernest Havemann of LIFE, and I Never Thought We'd Make It is the result.

The title comes from a remark of Ma's, the happy day she watched her eldest graduate from high school. Later, on their 50th wedding anniversary, Pa went back to the idea in a little family speech, and added a thought of his own. "I always did the best for my kids," he said. "I put them all through high school and"--he cried triumphantly--"not one of them have ever been arrested."

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