Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(7)
On November 22, 1963, I was walking to school near that same mound with the thorny bush, and another kid was climbing on the mound. He had a strange look on his face, and he chanted something over and over.
“Kennedy’s dead. He got shot in the head.
Kennedy’s dead. He got shot in the head.
Kennedy’s dead. He got shot in the head.”
The little kid was chanting naively. I thought he was just sing-songing nonsense. When I reached school, the teachers sent us all straight home again. Now I knew something big was up. We watched the news on our little black-and-white TV on Sangamon Street. Lee Harvey Oswald had shot and killed President Kennedy, and everybody in my family was sad. I walked outside; everybody was sad. We went to the store; everybody was sad. The whole country was grieving. I didn’t know anything about politics, but I knew that my president had just been shot. I was sad too.
Not long afterward, Jack Ruby killed Oswald on live TV, and I watched the violence unfold in front of my eyes. As an eight-year-old, I didn’t know what to think about what I’d just seen. About all the turmoil in my country.
About all the changes happening to America.
Life wasn’t all sad. At the end of third grade, we moved from the South Side to a big old historic house in Highland Park, the north suburbs of Chicago, and in the fall of 1964, I started fourth grade at a new school called Indian Trail Elementary School. For Christmas I received my first guitar. Acoustic. I had no idea how to play, but I loved it. The Beach Boys had become my favorite band. My first record was Beach Boys Concert, a live record, and as the songs spun on my record player, I loved to hear the crowd cheering in the background.
We lived four blocks from Lake Michigan, with a park at the end of our street. A lot of neighborhood kids went to the same school, so some of the guys and I grabbed our guitars and formed a band. We called ourselves the Beach Dwellers, an homage to my favorite band. We tacked up cardboard signs around the neighborhood and invited all the little kids to our first concert in my living room. None of us Beach Dwellers knew how to play, but a grand total of six kids came to the show (standing room only for a living room), and we put my Beach Boys Concert album on the turntable, wailed away with our guitars in our hands, and lip-synced along with the tunes. By the time we reached “Little Deuce Coupe,” everybody was dancing like crazy.
Mom and Dad eventually invested in guitar lessons for me in fourth and fifth grade. My teacher played an electric and always dangled a lit cigarette from his mouth, and I emerged from each lesson with a headache and reeking of smoke. But he taught me scales and chords, and in sixth grade I formed another band, a real band this time. With a drummer. We played for some kid’s birthday party in my backyard, and we weren’t lip-syncing anymore. Performing felt fun and cool, and we sounded terrible, but at least we were actually playing. In seventh grade, I realized everybody and his dog plays the guitar, so I picked up the bass instead. As a bassist, you’re always in demand. We played the Kinks and the Yardbirds. I took to the bass naturally.
I’ve always had curly hair, but all the cool kids in school—not to mention my musical idols, the Beach Boys—had straight hair. Cool straight hair. I began to hate my curly hair and felt like a dork, so I tried plastering it down with gel. That didn’t work. My hair looked frozen like plastic, but it still curled up on the ends. I noticed that after I wore a baseball cap during a ball game and took it off, the hat hair was there, but the curl was minimized. One morning Mom woke me for school and there I was, sleeping with a stocking cap on. I jumped up, took it off, and looked at myself in the mirror. Ha! The curl was gone! I felt just a little cooler at school that day.
In sixth grade I went to another new school, Elm Place, across the street from Indian Trail, and right away earned a name as a terrible student. Every report card I brought home stunk. This had been going on since the first grade. Reading and writing didn’t come easily to me, and my handwriting was a mess. In fact, my handwriting remained a mess all the way through my teen years and into my twenties. Today, they’d probably diagnose some sort of learning disability. But maybe I just never learned the fundamentals. Mom was always kind, fun, and loving, but she carried a load at home, not only raising three kids, but also taking care of her mother and her sister, who lived in a couple rooms in our basement. Mom was very pretty, and at one time—while we were living in Harvey and I was still really young—she even worked as a part-time model. I remember seeing her on our little black-and-white television set on a show called Queen for a Day, walking out wearing a cute little outfit and displaying one of the prizes, a toaster or a blender or something similar. Dad, meanwhile, was always at work downtown in the city. Our house in Highland Park was a larger house, and I think Dad probably overextended himself financially, and that’s why he worked all the time. He loved us as a family. He just always needed to work to pay the bills since moving up to the northern suburbs was more expensive. So with Mom and Dad having their hands full, it was a rare moment that anybody was ever able to sit and do homework with me. At school I had trouble paying attention. I was always daydreaming, looking out the window, but somehow, I kept passing each grade with something like a straight D average.
A big Jewish community lived in Highland Park, and lots of my friends went to synagogue on Saturday and had bar mitzvahs and things I didn’t quite understand as a kid. Summers, the older kids traveled to Israel to work on a kibbutz. Israel was less than twenty years old as a state then, and all the Jewish families I knew wanted to be connected to the Holy Land. But I wasn’t raised with any sort of strong religious faith. We went to Sunday school until I was about six, but that was it. My great-grandfather Vito Sinise was Catholic and had raised his family Catholic, but when Grandpa Dan married Grandma Betty, she was Presbyterian, which caused a bit of a stir. I don’t remember having any big thoughts of God at a young age. God, faith, service—the things that became so important to me later in life—weren’t on my radar as a kid.