Rudy: My Story Read online

  That night, I placed that major league ball on the nightstand beside my bed, where I could see it from my pillow. The last object I would see before I fell off to sleep. I kept it there for years, unknowingly holding on to that feeling. Holding on to that tiny moment when I gave it my all and got exactly what I wanted. A feeling I would someday need to recapture: proof, in the form of a little round ball, that anything—anything—is possible.

  I misplaced that ball somewhere in my travels through life. I’ve always hoped that someday it would show back up. But the memory and feeling of that ball will never be forgotten. It’s embedded in my thoughts forever.

  My mother always made us fold our underwear.

  I know that’s a strange thing to remember, and probably not one of the first things most people would mention when recalling their childhood, but I hated it. I hated the very thought of doing it. It made no sense to me. Why would we waste time folding an article of clothing that we’re only going to put in a drawer where no one will see it? Especially considering the fact that it goes on under our clothes! Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against folding underwear if that’s what you’re into. But to have it forced upon me as a kid seemed like some sort of unjust punishment.

  Taking it one step further, my mother actually pressed our underwear before we got dressed for church on Sundays. She refused to let us leave the house without perfectly cleaned and pressed underwear. “Why are you doing that?” we’d ask her, and her reply was always the same: “In case you get in an accident on the way to mass.”

  I can still picture my mother in the kitchen, clear as day, her tiny frame wielding that heavy iron with ease, standing there in a flower-print shirt, pressing our underwear and the dozens upon dozens of other items that just came off the clothesline—crooning old show tunes to herself while she did it, as if she enjoyed it. The funny thing is, I think she actually did. She had dreams of becoming a singer someday, and I don’t think she ever stopped dreaming. You could hear her dream while she hummed, and there was something about putting those clothes in order and tackling that task, one skivvy at a time, that gave her a sense of peace. That inspired me. When she sang a song, she was relaxed and joyful. You could feel her energy and it relaxed our whole household.

  In a house full of fourteen children, peace wasn’t exactly easy to come by. In fact, my parents believed there was really only one way to find it: through order and discipline. So as far back as I can remember, order and discipline ruled in the Ruettiger house. My mother was in charge, every object had its place, every child had his or her duties, and breaking that sense of order meant you’d find your behind at the receiving end of my dad’s big, strong hand—while bent over a hard wooden stool in the kitchen. (Often while mom continued ironing.)

  I was the oldest boy in that massive family—my parents had seven boys and seven girls by the time they stopped having children—and let’s just say up front that “order” and “discipline” were never my strong suits. My sisters have un-fond memories of me dressing up as a cowboy and bounding down the basement stairs, destroying their quiet attempts to play house by kicking over their makeshift toy kitchen sets. “Mom!” they’d scream. “Danny’s doing it again!!” The spanking never deterred me. I’d keep coming back for more.

  In fact, that’s pretty much the story of my childhood.

  My parents, Dan and Betty Ruettiger, married young, and like a lot of people in those days, they started having kids right away. After two back-to-back girls—my older sisters, Jean Ann and Mary Eileen—I came into the world on August 22, 1948. My mother would forget my birthday the very next year and celebrate it on August 23 instead—a date that would stick with me as a sort of pseudo-birthday from that day forward. I’m not sure why she forgot, but it stuck!

  I was born Daniel E. Ruettiger (my whole family still calls me “Danny”), at St. Joseph’s Hospital. Just like the rest of the clan, I was raised in the town where we were expected to grow old and die, the same town in which both of my parents had also been born and raised: the working-class Chicago suburb of Joliet, Illinois.

  Joliet is a good forty-five-minute drive south of the city—far enough to seem like a world away when you’re a kid. In fact, I have very few childhood memories of Chicago at all, despite the fact that it was so close. My memories tend to revolve around a one- or two-mile radius of our house. That was my world. Church. School. The park. The grocery store. The constant sound of train whistles blowing, and the functional, beautyless, hard-worn streets and buildings of America’s working class.

  My parents’ first house at 206 South East Circle Drive had three tiny bedrooms squeezed into less than seven hundred square feet. There was a one-car garage set back and to the side, with our neighbors’ houses (all equally small) just a few feet away on either side. As we got older, the little patch of grass under the willow tree out front became a meeting point for those neighbors. It was a spot where we’d play football together. Laugh together. It seemed big then.

  It’s difficult for me to remember the period before that house was packed full of brothers and sisters. And by full, I mean bursting-at-the-seams full. I was a freshman in high school before we would finally move to a bigger house, and by then there were ten kids in our family. Imagine, just for a moment, trying to squeeze all of that pent-up energy into the four walls of that little yellow box of a post–World War II track home on the edge of a cornfield. One bedroom for the boys, one for the girls; bunk beds crammed together in each. In between sleep and school came what can only be described as resounding (if somewhat controlled) chaos.

  The noise was constant. “Quiet, Danny!” “Tim, please!!” My mom did the best she could to keep a lid on it, but if you’ve ever walked into a grade-school cafeteria at lunchtime, that’s pretty much the feeling you’d get if you walked into our house unannounced. After me came Carol, Rosemarie, Betsy, Tim, Francis, Mickey, John, Rita, Norma, Bernie, and Mark. The last few (from John on down) wouldn’t be born until we moved into that slightly bigger house my freshman year, but I think after your family exceeds maybe five children, the enormity of the routines remains the same.

  My mom loved to cook. Even for that army of kids. Dinners consisted of a lot of spaghetti, bean soup, or chili—stuff that could be prepared in bulk, wasn’t too expensive, and would go a long way. In the summers, us kids would sit around shucking thirty bags of sweet corn at a time. We’d all cringe at the thought of liver and onions, but we’d eat it anyway. And occasionally my dad would bring home a live chicken from his parents’ chicken farm—chopping the head off and letting it run around ’til it bled out in the backyard before handing it to my mom to pluck, boil, roast, and serve whole for dinner. The weekends usually meant hot dogs and hamburgers, and whatever leftovers there were would get consumed all week long. I don’t know how she did it, but it was always delicious. And the smell of that food coming together made us all the more anxious to see dad’s car pull into the driveway at the end of each day.

  When dad came home, dinner was served at the big table he’d cobbled together by hand, and we all sat around and didn’t talk. It was by far the most peaceful time of day in the Ruettiger house. In fact, the only other time I ever remember it being that quiet was each Christmas Eve, when all of us boys would stay up late and freeze in absolute stillness if we heard a noise that might be Old Saint Nick approaching.

  At those dinners, for as long as I lived at home, we said our prayers, and if we wanted something we politely asked for it—we never grabbed. Even as kids, we all accepted that it had to be that way. I could see my dad decompressing while we ate. There were times when he fell asleep right there at the table. But I could always see my mom’s satisfaction when everything went smoothly. It just made her happy when everything was in order. Even after spending all that time cooking dinner each night, she would take the time to pack all of our lunches for school the next day and line ’em up on the kitchen counter for us. She somehow knew that no family, let alone a family as big as
ours, could live in chaos. So she did what she could to get a handle on it—to keep a lid on our antics—every day.

  Just think about the logistics of juggling that many kids. I remember one day mom piled us all into the station wagon to go grocery shopping, which was always a bit of an ordeal, and when we got back home to South East Circle Drive, she realized one of the kids was missing! My sister Carol just plain wasn’t there. My mom panicked. I’ll never forget that look in her eyes, thinking that she had left a child behind, and what if something happened. It was awful to see her like that. But she piled us all back into the car as quickly as possible and raced back to the store. Thank God, there was Carol—my eight-year-old sister—just wandering happy as a clam up and down the aisles wondering where everyone had gone.

  From that day forward, my mom counted heads and made us call out our names before she’d put the car into drive, no matter where we went. “Who’s in the car?” she’d yell from the driver’s seat. “We got eight? Call ’em out!” And we’d run down our names one by one, just to be sure.

  Here’s the thing that really gets me, though. The thing that seems so impossible in today’s world, by today’s standards, even though most families don’t have half or even a quarter as many kids as my parents did. I mean, my mom’s whole life was washing clothes and cooking, right? That alone was more than a full-time job. She didn’t really have time to do anything else. Yet she served as the president of the Mother’s Club and never missed a Little League game or a school play—for any of her kids. Heck, my dad coached Little League even while holding down three jobs to make ends meet! I think about what a commitment that was. In their eyes, their children always came first: “It’s all about the kids.” Despite the difficulties and complications that come with having so many children, it’s as if that one guiding principle kept both of my parents sane and on track. “We had them; we’re responsible for them.” Simple.

  That’s not to say they were perfect parents. Nobody’s perfect. Nobody. And I don’t particularly agree with how much of their discipline was doled out the old-fashioned way. Just about every report card day, at least a few of us boys would get in line for a spanking over the stool in the kitchen. It wasn’t because of our grades. It was over reports that we weren’t being respectful to our teachers or were being troublemakers in the classroom. My dad was concerned with honor and respect. So one after the other, whack! “Next!”

  My brother Francis and I were the main culprits. We were both deemed troublemakers, and we both dealt with the same sort of issues in school. The spankings were so routine that Francis eventually figured a way to get out of it: he’d stuff a couple of thin books down the back of his pants so the hits wouldn’t hurt. My dad was so busy going from one kid to the next that he didn’t even notice! There were other times when my dad would get so frustrated he’d spank you a second or third time for no apparent reason. I get it. With fourteen crazy kids running around in a little house, all of his worry about fixing the car, and paying the bills, I’d probably want to whack something too. But I wonder what it taught us. Did it keep us in line? Maybe. Would we have turned out for the worse without it? Hard to say. My brothers and sisters and I all grew up to be good people, and I say that without bragging. There are no big mess-ups in the whole family of fourteen. That’s pretty extraordinary. Yet I think that’s a reflection of the love and support our parents showed more than any hand-to-rear discipline. Even so, it’s a tricky game to second-guess and look back with twenty-twenty hindsight. There are no instant replays in life. You get what you get and you have to live with the calls that were made at the time.

  Setting corporal punishment aside, I think a lot of parents, teachers, priests, and other authority figures forget just how much influence their words alone can have on a young child. For instance, when we went to the little church attached to our elementary school, St. Mary Magdalene, on Sundays, our family took up two full pews: one for the boys, one for the girls. In order to keep us quiet throughout mass, our parents were strict. They insisted that we never, ever turn around, and my dad told us that if we talked in church, God would punish us and our ears would fall off. What a horrible thing to say! I believed it too—for a very long time. If my dad told it to me, why wouldn’t I believe it? I was scared to death to open my mouth ’cause I liked my ears just the way they were—attached to my head!

  I’m not sure how old I was when I finally shook off that fear of losing my ears in church. Heck, when I’m under the glow of those stained-glass windows to this day I barely speak—and if I do, I keep my voice down. It’s an amazing thing how a parent can fill your head with goofy thoughts like that, and how they can haunt you the rest of your life. They’re goofy thoughts that have no good reason to be there, but they are so incredibly difficult to get rid of once they’re embedded in your brain.

  I don’t blame my parents for that kind of stuff. Their intentions were good. They were doing the best they could given their situation, and Lord knows they were learning on the job with no guidebook other than memories of how they had been raised themselves. But that doesn’t mean I have to carry on in the same tradition. That certainly doesn’t mean I couldn’t change. And I would change—quite a few years down the road. Today, I don’t dwell on the negative stuff. I hardly even think of it. In fact, if I weren’t sitting here writing a book about my life, I might not have brought it up at all. But I want you to get the whole picture. I want you to see that my upbringing wasn’t perfect. I didn’t have special advantages. I was raised like a lot of other kids in my generation, and I know there were lots of other kids that were raised under entirely different circumstances as well. Circumstances that I can’t even imagine.

  What I’m driving at here is that where we start in life doesn’t define who we will become. If it did, that would pretty much mean we’d never have any kind of progress or evolution in the world, and of course, that’s not the case. The only way to move forward is to take what you need from your upbringing. Learn from it—the good and the bad—and apply it to the life you want to lead. When you need a little something to lean on, think back on the good stuff and be thankful for all of that good stuff you had, whatever that good stuff may have been.

  What sticks with me the most from those early years, especially as I get older, is knowing how hard my parents worked and how dedicated they were to taking care of this family they created. When I focus on that, all of those other goofy thoughts disappear.

  Long before I came into the picture, back when my dad was just a kid, the Ruettigers were landowners. My grandparents at one time had more than two hundred head of cattle and enough land for them all to roam on before Joliet grew into a more industrialized town after World War II. Taking care of the farm, the land, and those cattle involved all of the kids as soon as they had the strength to help out, and I’d imagine that’s where my dad’s old-fashioned bootstrap work ethic began.

  If the Ruettigers had held on to those cattle and all that land, my upbringing might have been very different. Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be. In a single year, some sort of disease swept through the entire herd, killing every last one of those animals, and when my grandparents couldn’t get a loan to replace the herd, the whole operation went belly up. They lost their livelihood. Lost their land. Lost everything.

  Thinking of all that, it’s easier for me to understand why my dad was who he was.

  My father was always covered in grease. He loved fixing things and building things in that Greatest Generation–era, bull-in-a-china-shop mentality of “just get it done.” It didn’t matter if it was pretty. It just had to work. And it seemed like he could make anything work, from a rusty old lawnmower to our first electric washing machine to the big old Plymouth Fury station wagon with balding tires that managed to cart our entire family around through most of my childhood.

  As hard as my father worked, he could never afford a new car with so many mouths to feed. So he brought home junkers and hand-me-downs and kept ’em running on s
pare parts and duct tape. But we never went without a vehicle.

  It’s kind of funny now to think about fourteen kids fitting into a single station wagon. Nobody wore seat belts in those days, of course, so we’d pile into the way-back and squeeze ourselves in wherever we could find a spot. It must have looked like a clown car at the circus when the Ruettigers pulled into the church parking lot on Sundays: kid, after kid, after kid, after kid, all piling out of that Plymouth!

  Of course, what kid wants his family to be looked at like a bunch of clowns? I’m not sure how old I was the first time I overheard a snide comment about how many kids my parents had. There were times when a co-worker or some old-timer from town would say something directly to my dad: “Why the heck would you want to have so many kids?” But usually it was said off to the side somewhere. “Did you hear? Ruettiger’s got another one comin’.” “There goes our insurance!” they’d say at work. My mom even got it at the grocery store: “Oh look, poor Betty’s got another bun in the oven.” It’s amazing how hurtful people can be with their words, and especially their tone. Do you think we can’t hear you? Did you ever stop to think how insulting it might be to make fun of someone else’s choices in life? Just because they might not be the same choices you’d make doesn’t make it right to look down on someone else because of it. And what’s so awful about bringing another child into the world, anyway? I always hated that half-joking voice people used when talking about the size of our family. Why do you care? Of course, I never spoke up. I’d just keep those feelings inside—the same way my dad did. I never heard him say anything back to any of those jokers. Not once.

  The thing I saw early on was that none of those guys he worked with had any idea just how dedicated my father was to his family. He didn’t just work hard at one job in order to support us. He held down a second job, and most of the time a third job in order to provide for us the best way he knew how.