Seeking answers in Mobile, Ala. 69 years later
Project 2025's impact on the Untied States is only beginning
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So much of the story is still a mystery.
The facts as I know them are that Rose Marie Sally of Belfast, Northern Ireland, age 27, married Edward Arthur Tingley of the USS Corregidor on June 30, 1956 in Mobile, Alabama before two witnesses they did not know.
There is a single black and white photo of the event at the altar of the Cathedral-Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Mobile.
If there was a celebration afterward, the details were never shared.
But there was apparently a honeymoon since I was born 10 months later.
Each time I look at the photo I find it more intriguing.
Fifteen months earlier my father paid for my mother's passage aboard the Queen Elizabeth.
The passenger list shows she never boarded.
There was never a mention of this small detail from either of my parents, only the fact she did board two weeks later and arrived in America on December 7, 1955 and stayed for a time with my father's parents in Connecticut.
It didn't go well, one of my aunts told me. My mother was Catholic, or future in-laws Baptist and my mother smoked.
After my mother passed in 2013, I found an alligator handbag - made in Cuba - I believe my father purchased during his Navy travels. Inside were a series of letters my father sent to my mother in the weeks before that marriage took place.
They were love letters.
More precisely, they were desperate love letters.
They bely the tough-as-nails demeanor my father showed me with this lonely, love-sick sailor beside himself with worry about whether his fiancee will show up when he docks in Mobile.
The second sentence of a June 16, 1956 letter six days before he docks is revealing and adds to the mystery.
"Sure do wish I knew what you were doing and just how you are feeling toward me," my Dad writes. "I sent a telegram to you 2 days ago and still haven't gotten one. Gosh honey, you can't imagine how bad I am feeling right now. I just can't think or do anything. You are on my mind steady and I just pray to God that you still want me."
After all, she did miss the boat seven months earlier.
What happened between June 22 when the Corregidor docked in Mobile and June 30 when they were married was unknown to me and a source of much curiosity.
On Monday morning, I walked into the Portier House across the street from the Basilica and was greeted by Sandra Ramos.
She was expecting me.
A few weeks earlier I called Sandra wondering if the church had any record of my parents' marriage.
They did.
There was a baptism certificate and a certificate of confirmation to prove my mother's Catholicism. It also showed she came to America armed with documents needed to be married in the Catholic Church.
But it was not that simple.
This was a "mixed marriage." My mother was Catholic. My father Baptist.
The document Sandra handed me was signed by Father Anthony McDevitt is a detailed questionnaire about them, their understand of marriage and what it means to be united in the Catholic Church.
It was dated June 25, 1956 and showed there was at least cursory plans in place for their impending nuptials.
The form labeled "Sponsa" is a long one asking many question, but ultimately seems to be an intent to lockdown a lifetime commitment to be a Catholic.
It provided more clues.
My mother answered she had been engaged "15 Months which dates their engagement to Ireland six months before leaving for America.
My father answered "about a year," so manybe only three months before leaving for America.
When asked when they intended to marry, both answered "As soon as possible."
Then, there was this: Have your parents any objection to his marriage?
My mother answered "No."
My father answered "Yes." It then asked, "If so, why?"
It was left blank.
The next day, Father Anthony McDevitt took the testimony of Leon John Brutoski of Passaic, N.J. a shipmate of my father's on the USS Corregidor who described himself as "a very good friend" who had known my father over three years.
When he was asked if my father had ever been married or whether he had any reason to suspect my father did NOT intend to "enter into a true Christian marriage," he answered "As far as I know, no."
Not a resounding endorsement, but good enough for Father McDevitt. Leon died in 1988.
On June 30, 1956, the Diocese of Mobile granted a "Matrimonial Dispensation" because of they were of different religions. It was signed by the chancellor of the diocese.
Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Mobile is not just the church where my parents married, it is a cathedral.
As I stood in the back of the church, I unexpectedly found myself overwhelmed.
Out of nowhere, a young man appeared and asked if we had been there before.
He told us about how Mobile had the largest contingent of Catholics in Alabama and its roots were with French settlers in the 1700s.
He was so knowledgeable I thought he worked at the church.
I told him my parents had married here in 1956.
I showed him their wedding photo and explained the altar looked different back in 1956.
He explained a small partition had been removed during a 1980s renovation.
When I asked him if he knew anything about an old priest named Anthony McDevitt who died in 2010, he shocked me by telling me his parents were good friends with the priest, an explained that the priest was good friends with a prominent family in town named Zoghby with Lebanese roots.
It stopped me cold.
On my parents marriage license, two witnesses - Joseph and Gloria Zoghby - were listed.
The man told us that the Zoghby family was a big deal in Mobile that operated a major department store near the church and a uniform company that still operated today.
Joseph Zoghby died in 2020 when he was 97 and was still a member of the Basilica of Immaculate Conception.
At the altar I stood where my parents stood nearly 69 years ago before an ornate alter and wondered why they never mentioned this spectacular church.
Perhaps, they only had eyes for each other. After all, they wanted to marry "as soon as possible."
After a time, I turned around and faced the rear of the church, trying to put myself in Ed and Marie's place as a photographer captured the moment for posterity.
Yes, they looked happy, but the smiles seemed frozen, their eyes fixed as if they are realizing for the first time they don't really know the person next to them.
Ten months later I was born.
Four years after that came my brother Dave.
They were married 45 years. And there is no mystery about that.
Last American Newspaper
The exciting news coming from the Adirondack Theater Festival is that nearly all the season-ticket subscribers have opted to attend one of the three dramatic readings for The Last American Newspaper July 25-27.
We’re almost a sellout.
The remain tickets for The Last American Newspaper reading go on sale Thursday at noon at the Wood Theater boxoffice, so if you want to attend, I suggest either buying a season-ticket today or get there early Thursday for the single tickets.
Project 2025 - Worse to come
David Graham writes in The Atlantic that what he discovered from reading all 922 pages of Project 2025 was "more radical and more interesting than I'd expected."
Graham produced a book - The Project - where he warns that there is so much more worse things to come.
"Trump has already moved to limit transgender rights, but the Project 2025 agenda is much wider, aiming to return the United States to a country of married families with male breadwinners and female caregivers," Graham writes.
It's as if the Handmaid's Tale is coming to life for real.
"The most important tactic laid out in the plan was to transform the federal bureaucracy by firing as many civil servants as possible, changing others into political appointees, and terrifying the rest into obeisance," Graham continues. "We are already seeing the impact: Trump has bought out, driven off, or fired tens of thousands of federal employees, and although courts have ordered some of them reinstated, he has transformed—perhaps permanently—the federal bureaucracy."
Graham predicts that the two most significant things to watch are the attack on policies that acknowledge climate change - the Defense Department has already canceled climate work and the EPA has plans to fire hundreds - and a more organized campaign to to promote traditional families and Christian morality.
"To bolster traditional families, they want to pay caregivers to remain at home, nudge single fathers toward marriage, and restructure welfare programs to reward married couples," Graham writes. "Taken together, these moves will try to replicate an idealized vision of pre–Roe v. Wade America."
Graham finally concludes:
Thinking about Project 2025 as simply a laundry list of management tweaks and policy proposals is a mistake. The authors set out to turbocharge the Trump administration and reshape the executive branch, but their ambitions are much bigger. Their goal is to transform American society in their image. So far, everything is going according to plan.
Correction
Former Post-Star editor Steve Thurston clarified my reporting on Lee Enterprises' search for a new editor at the newspaper from last week. He told me that the job wanted ad in journalismjobs.com was not for a new editor, but for a News Editor because he originally wrote the ad months ago before he left.
He also suspected the reason the new editor's name is not on the masthead because the Regional Design Center in Wisconsin was notorious for not being able to take care of those simple details.
He also told me the new editor, Lisa Reider, was still working remotely while looking for a house and had not yet moved into the region.
Ken Tingley spent more than four decades working in small community newspapers in upstate New York. Since retirement in 2020 he has written three books and is currently adapting his second book "The Last American Newspaper" into a play. He currently lives in Queensbury, N.Y.
You took us back in time and deeper into the Catholic religion's prerequisites for marriage. I'm sure your research provided much insight and satisfaction in seeing your father's writing and learning of their time and connections in Mobile, Alabama. Wonderful!
But your post on the Administration's covert/overt plan to take us back to women relegated to staying at home and not contributing to our country's workforce, let alone every aspect of development in every field imaginable, just shows how misogynistic, how manipulative, how insidious and how misguided, to put it mildly this Project for absolute hegemony is.
How nice you found love letters from your Father to your Mother and happy you were able to visit where they were married. Very sweet.