Down in the basement, in two five drawer metal filing cabinets is all that remains of my mother's life. Her public life anyway. If I mentioned her name to you you would not know it. She was not famous like some other women of the era, such as Gloria Steinem or Betty Freidan or Jane Fonda.

In fact she would be bolting out of her grave if she knew I was bringing up her sainted name along with THEM. My mother was their enemy, though Gloria and Betty and Jane never knew it...I think.

I am thinking, however, that I want them to know it, and thanks to the invention of the internet and the fact that I saved her papers from a bunch of glory-grabbers, I may let her have her say in cyberspace.

It is said that men get their character and personality mainly from their mothers. As I get older I find that to be true. I have my father's common sense and impatience and my mother's attitude when it comes to righteousness and civility. When I think of it, this combination should have gotten me further along life's road, and the only reason I can think it hasn't has been a wholly unique trait of my own, called procrastination.

That's going to end soon, when I get around to it.

My mother died in 1997 of a horrible disease called sarcoidosis. For older fans of MTV you might remember a VJ called Julie Brown, not to be confused with Downtown Julie Brown. This Julie Brown was of northern european stock and not African heritage and is probably the most famous person who had sarcoidosis. She is still alive as far as I know.

Sarcoidosis is one of those orphan diseases, as opposed to a celebrity disease like HIV/AIDS, breast cancer and heart disease. What this means is nobody cares. Few people get it on a percentage basis compared to breast cancer and heart disease, and HIV/AIDS which has its own lobbying group, so Sarcoidosis is not a big deal. More people die in bathtub accidents. The thing about this disease, which causes lesions to grow on various body organs, is that it does not strike everybody the same. It's not that the disease wouldn't want to wreak the same havoc --it strikes mainly northern europeans and people of african decent-- but each body it enters into has its own defense. Some bodies are stronger, that's all, and can fight off the attack on vital organs.

When my mother came down with Sarcoidosis in the seventies we (and she) didn't have any idea what she had. She started to lose wait, feel week and her color was bad. Trips to her doctor turned up nothing. I was nineteen at the time and was convinced it was lung cancer. My mother was a heavy smoker. On one cold day in January my father carried her skin and bones body down the front stairs and into the car. She had put off seeing a specialist long enough. I drove, tears in my eyes, a few miles over to tell my grandparents, her mother and father, the situation in person.

A few days passed and the tests came back. It was what again? We all scrambled to look it up, but the main words that stuck in my head was "not terminal" and "treatable". Sigh.

My mother was not healthy most of her adult life. She started out strong, on the south side of Chicago, St. Columbanis parish, but was struck with polio. She survived a 106 degree fever with her teeth ruined, and was partially paralyzed, but considered herself lucky as she was eventually able to walk again, with a limp, but she had cheated the iron lung. She also use to get a kick out of taking her teeth out of her head and scaring us toddlers.

Further complications of the polio and fever which also destroyed some spinal column discs brought a back surgery in the mid nineteen-sixties. In those days they got to the spine through the front, so all her guts were laid out like a dressed deer. She was laid up in a body cast in a hospital bed in our dining room for six months. We got our first air conditioner then, a huge window unit that needed a 220 amp outlet. That outlet, painted over, is still there today.

My mother's Sarcoidosis went into remission, but before she was given enough steroids to keep the entire Chicago Bears team pumped up for a year. Steroids, or "roids", cause the body to bloat, hair to fall out, personality to change, and can kill you just as certain as the disease if you're not careful with them.

Eventually the ravages of the steroids decreased and while still a younger woman she returned to looking like someone who resembled human.

Things were happy but her fighting spirit turned away from her physical problems to bigger issues.

She had had her issues even before her bout with the orphan disease, but after being latched to the hospital bed for six hot summer months she decided that she would attack those bigger issues and decided to save the world and America, and not necessarily in that order.

What can I say, my mother thought big.

My mother was not content to let the CIA fight the commies; she wanted in. Soon we began to see writings by Mr. John Birch, Father Coughlin and Phylis Schlafly. I didn't see the relationship between a missionary, a long-dead Catholic priest from Detroit and a lady who ran something called the Eagle forum, but my mother did -- for awhile.

She was armed with their thoughts and words and was going to win that cold war all by herself. She even took on a bureaucratic organization bigger and more dense than the US Government, the Catholic Church. The bishops here were in her scope, and she even had problems with Rome.

What a bitter drink it was. The days were the late sixties, the seventies and even into the eighties. Those first two decades were ones of turmoil in this country. Anybody who thinks there is trouble and dissent now was not around then. Or forgets. Cities burned, black versus white was fought with bricks and bullets instead of lawsuits; cops and soldiers were scorned; the "establishment" was not to be trusted. We even had a walk out at Evergreen Park Community High School over something which was so unimportant it has slipped my mind.

My mother did a little spying too. She and her friend, Dolores, infiltrated a radical community organization once, and obvious "front organization" dressed with blond wigs and long coats and asked pointed and revealing questions of the government officials in attendance and of the pinkos running the "taxpayer funded group". Fearing her cover was going to be blown she and Dolores skipped out before the end. She had been gaining a local reputation and was starting to be recognized in gatherings.

In time my mother saw that Reagan and the Pope John Paul-II were doing macro battle with the Soviet Union, and that the "Captive Nations" were on the verge of having walls fall, so she resigned the battle with the Commies and focused on the one institution she really wanted to save: the Church.

Actually she feared the Commies were in the Church too, and what could be better proof than Vatican II? That meant Latin was out, priests faced the people, and guitars were strummed in place of the beautiful pipe organs.

Heresy and the smoke of the devil.

She may be right yet.

During this time my mother started an organization called, "Catholics for Truth in Education", known about the kitchen table as "CTE". She and her friend Ann, wrote these detailed papers on the bad influences within the Church, some caused by Commies and some caused by the Devil, which were one-in-the-same to her really. These were sent to clergy and lay people across the country. Often we would take calls from some bishop here or this book author there.

At the time I mocked hunting the Commies in the confessional, but I was just out of my teens and in my early twenties. I knew everything. My mother predicted the scandals with pedophileia that would bubble to the surface decades later, because so many of the bishops were corrupt.

There were many other right predictions too, having to do with politics and social institutions.

The orphan disease, Sarcoidosis, didn't stay an orphan though. In the early nineties it came back, and forced her onto oxygen as the lesions has attacked her lungs, made them brittle, and made activity very hard. She used to say, "Richard, when you can't breathe you can't do anything."

Mostly the battles were fought by this time. My father had died in 1987, and my mother did things with her friends. Not world saving things, but enjoyable things like going up to our place in Michigan and floating around on the pontoon boat, or visiting craft places up there and buying nic-nacs. The warrior rested.

My mother smothered to death on August 20, 1997. I was there when she died and so were my sisters and her brother, but it was agonizing for her to live and agonizing to watch. Determined though, she went two weeks prior to her dying, confined to a wheelchair, to get her drivers license renewed. I think she only passed because the lady giving her her eye exam (which she really failed) knew that my mother would not ever be behind a wheel again. I decided to have "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" played as the procession hymn out of the church at her funeral.

The more that time passes the more things big and small I see my mother was right about. Not long ago I went downstairs and pulled out some of those newsletters. This validated my thoughts. I had saved her work from some hangers-on "friends" who wanted to keep her organization going and could they come and get the file cabinets. Had it not been one week after she died I might have said yes, but I couldn't deal with them snooping around in her house when the body wasn't even cold. All they would have done is take credit for her and Ann's work.

The internet, the scanner and the PDF file format has convinced me to put these papers online for anybody to see if they wish. This will be my winter project. I will not procrastinate. Promise, ma.

My mommy fought the commies. Now communism, as a ideology, is only thought to be a workable system by Hollywood actors, a few non-literate songwriters, and about ninety percent of college professors. My mommy fought the commies, and while you might not know her name, Mary Catherine MacLeay Davis --there are still a few out there that do-- and she contributed, unheralded, to a fight that went on for the last half of the previous century.

My mommy fought the commies while many mommies fought their husbands over the color of the walls in the living room. That's okay though. Not everybody can or should do battle. There is a price to pay, and sometimes we were sick of her fighting the commies. We wanted at least half the attention that the Kremlin got.

My mother dying of Sarcoidosis was good fortune for one man that I can think of.

My mother was a patriot too, and loved the blessings of this country, and had she been around when those planes crashed into the World Trade Center buildings she would have been on the first flight to Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden, you are lucky Mary Catherine MacLeay Davis is not after you.

See, my mother had told me years ago about radical Islam. All I said was, "Sure. Right."

Right.

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