50s: The “Broken Home”

I had a friend who came from “a broken home.” Billy’s parents had divorced, and he lived with his single mother, close to Loyola School, a bike ride from our house. Billy and I hung out a lot. It never occurred to me that the broken home stigma was anything more than incidental, a fact of life important to Billy but not to anybody else.

I mention it here because life has changed so much since then. Being from “a broken home” made Billy different, and vaguely, I hate to say it, but vaguely less than normal.