Brookview was a moonscape. A huge water tower loomed over the development, but there wasn’t a tree in sight. We followed the main road in as it swept us in a gentle curve. Off the main road were the “courts.” One side was built, but the other was still under construction. We could see the heavy machinery idling among the mounds of dirt and red clay. It was a hot summer day, so our car windows were rolled down. I can still remember the smell of that red clay, the sulfurous stink from the bowels of the earth. As we arced down the main street toward a new home, my mom caught sight of these airless little one-story apartments. They were the color of brown mustard. My dad must have seen my mom’s face as she scanned her new neighborhood. “Don’t worry, Pudd’,” he told her. “It’s not these. We have a big one.”

He pulled the car around to the bottom of a bend, and without getting out of the car, he pointed across an expanse of not-quite lawn, toward the big one. Our new home was a two-story unit, white, with thin columns in front — a hint of Tara, I guess — and a one-story box off each side. “There it is,” he said.

“All of this?” Mom asked.

“No, just the center,” my dad said. Then, “Don’t worry, Pudd’, it’s only temporary.”

From the backseat I could tell my mom was crying.

“Mom!? What’s the matter, Mommy?”

“I’m just so happy. Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it beautiful?”

Actually, it didn’t seem bad to me. It was a miniature version of a center hall colonial, and we had bedrooms upstairs. I had the bedroom in back, which meant from my window I could gaze upon the object of my deepest desire, my Oz: Archmere. Right in the middle of this working-class steel town, not a mile from the mills and directly across from the entrance of Brookview Apartments, was the first mansion I had ever really seen. I could look at it for hours. John Jacob Raskob had built the house for his family before the steel mills, chemical plants and oil refineries came to Claymont. Raskob was Pierre du Pont’s personal secretary, but he had a genius for making money out of money. He convinced the du Ponts to take a big stake in General Motors and became its chairman of finance. Raskob was also a Catholic hero. He used part of his fortune to fund a charitable foundation, and he’d run the campaign of the first Catholic presidential nominee, the Democrat Al Smith. In 1928 the Democrats had political strategy sessions in his library at Archmere. Raskob went on to build the Empire State Building.
The mansion he built in Claymont, the Patio at Archmere, was a magnificent Italianate marble pile on a property that sloped down to the Delaware River. Archmere — arch by the sea — was named for the arch of elms that ran on that slope to the river. But after the working man’s families, not to mention the noise and pollution from the mills, began to crowd the Patio, Raskob cut his losses and sold the mansion to an order of Catholic priests. The Norbertines turned it into a private boys’ school. Archmere Academy was just 20 years old when I moved in across the street.

When I played CYO football that year, our coach was Dr. Anzelotti, a Ph.D. chemist at DuPont who had sons at the school. Archmere let Dr. Anzelotti run our practices on the grounds of the school. From the moment I got within the 19-foot-high wrought-iron fence that surrounded the campus and drove up the road — they actually called it the yellow-brick road — I knew where I wanted to go to high school. I didn’t ever think of Archmere as a path to greater glory. When I was 10, getting to Archmere seemed enough. I’d sit and stare out my bedroom window and dream of the day I would walk through the front doors and take my spot in that seat of learning. I’d dream of the day I would score the touchdown or hit the game-winning home run.

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