An apology, if The Modesto Bee really did get deceived by abusive mother — 50 years ago
When we get something wrong in The Modesto Bee, it’s our policy to correct it.
When the thing we got wrong happened 50 years ago, it’s my policy to listen carefully and try not to smirk.
Not that this happens often, mind you. I don’t know that it has ever happened before, or ever will again. Such a demand — retracting something The Bee printed when I was a lad in grade school — is truly out of the ordinary.
“I’m very angry. No one bothered to call to ask for any clarification,” Sagi McCleary fumed in a recent voicemail. “This is a total misrepresentation, a total lie.”
No one bothered to call — 50 years ago? What? How can that even be proved?
But she sounded sincere in the voicemail. Very sincere.
I picked up the phone — more curious, I admit, than determined to right a wrong.
Sagi, by now much calmer, explained that she had run across a Bee clipping from Jan. 7, 1972, given to her along with other mementos from her youth by her father some time before he died in 2000. Now 70, she has been blind for 60 years, and the clipping sat unread in an envelope until recently.
The article, printed on the fourth page in a “Women’s Activities” section, lauds her mother for volunteer work with the March of Dimes in Modesto. That was a natural outgrowth, the story suggests, of Sagi’s mother having been “totally blind” for two years until surgery corrected her vision, and of visiting the downtrodden in “several area convalescent hospitals and rest homes.” That was “very satisfying work,” but “the only problem was becoming too emotionally involved with the patients and their lives,” only to grieve when they passed on, the piece quotes Sagi’s mother as saying.
Now, why would anyone object to such a saintly portrayal of their mother?
Because she was an abusive drunk who slept around, Sagi said.
Because Sagi was blind — not her mother.
Because Sagi, a Downey High grad, sang sweet songs at convalescent hospitals and rest homes — not her mother.
“I want to puke,” Sagi told me on the phone from where she now lives, in Kansas City. “This is an out-and-out sham story.”
Some readers will remember the old-school way that newspapers used to identify a woman by her husband’s name; Martha would appear on the society page as “Mrs. George Washington,” for example. It seems weird that newspapers were still doing that in 1972, but they were — in all three articles on that page 50 years ago.
So Sagi’s mother’s full name did not appear, and although I know it, and even though she’s dead, I think I’ll leave it out of this column. You soon will see why.
Horrific abuse; discretion advised
“She loved the party. She would have all the (neighborhood) kids to the house where they could smoke cigarettes and pot and drink whiskey,” Sagi recalls. “Those were crazy times. It was like a party all the time.
“There is such a thing as slapping a kid on the butt to get her attention,” she continued. “But when an adult makes you take your clothes off and get your own switch off the tree, and if she didn’t like it, you would get it even harder because you didn’t pick the right one — it hurt so bad, I couldn’t go to school with huge welts across my back and butt and legs, I couldn’t sit down. She would tear into us and hold us down with an arm across your neck so you couldn’t move, so you would lie on your belly and she would just wail away and wouldn’t stop until we screamed, and if you would interfere you got it worse.”
My smirk was long gone by this time, believe me.
I read aloud part of the 1972 article which said Sagi’s mother “devotes more time helping others with their problems than she does thinking about her own.” Her mother, it said, would coordinate from 700 to 900 March of Dimes volunteers collecting donations throughout Modesto to improve the health of mothers and their babies.
Sagi’s response? Sustained, uproarious, scoffing laughter.
“If you knew my mother — no way. No way would she ever be put in charge of anyone, God help me. What a shock. She didn’t even get out of her nightclothes.”
Even Sagi’s birth name, Sandra, was a cruel reminder of her mother’s infidelity, she said. The neighbor she slept with who might have been her real father — his wife’s name was Sandra. As an endless humiliation to her husband, Sagi’s mother named her baby Sandra; Sagi changed it when she was old enough to stand on her own.
She was upset, too, that the article said Sagi (Sandra, at that time) was living at the time in Keyes with her husband and their 5-month-old baby named Janet. The truth: Sagi was caring for her 5-month-old niece in Modesto because Sagi’s sister in Keyes, whose name was Janet (and who since has died), was an unwed teen mother trying to recover from a drug addiction.
I can see an earnest reporter jumbling names and relationships in that paragraph. It’s just as likely that they were relayed poorly.
A 50-year-old correction
But the rest, in all honesty, probably wasn’t the writer’s fault.
I asked Sagi, Could most of this just be the reporter simply believing what your mother said?
She drew a sigh.
After her mother’s death, Sagi had a talk with her mother’s psychiatrist and learned she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. People with it sometimes exaggerate, and can be sadistic.
Mostly to humor Sagi, I called her niece, the one misidentified in the article, who agreed that the woman described in the 1972 article “was not my grandmother, not the person I knew.” Like Sagi, she left home as soon as she was able, and has tried not to look back.
“Some of us managed to get away,” Sagi said, “but the scars just do not leave one’s body, mind, soul.”
I’m not sure a newspaper correction, 50 years late in the form of a feature column, will help. But I’m willing to try.
