Walter OneschukWally Oneschuk was sixteen years old when Ronald Reagan was first elected president. It was 1980, and he was living with his family outside of Boston, in the small city of Lynn. No one called Massachusetts a blue state back then—it was just liberal Massachusetts. But there were plenty of people who felt let down by Jimmy Carter and the Democrats, and in Lynn, Reagan-Bush lawn signs were everywhere. People wanted change, which was understandable: they’d lived through the seventies, through gas lines and unemployment lines and water rationing and sky-high inflation and the return of Vietnam vets who nobody thanked for their service and a stock market that lost 40 percent of its value in less than two years and an Iranian hostage crisis that went on for what felt like forever. In his 1980 campaign slogan, Reagan promised to make America great again. He won by a landslide. And just like that, America—strong, proud, hopeful—was back. The hostages came home. The yellow ribbons came off the trees. It was Morning in America.
Wally believed that.
In those days, Wally was having a good time, or trying to, which is about as much as you could say for any suburban white kid in 1980. The economy was still in a slump, particularly in fading industrial cities like Lynn, though Wally’s family lived in a nice part of town and sent their sons to private school, so he didn’t really think much about those things, as they never seemed to touch him. He was tall and athletic, with dark brown eyes and dark wavy hair. At St. John’s Prep, the all-boys Catholic school he attended, Wally played football, ran track, and mainly tried to stay out of the way of the Jesuits. He was a good skier and a decent swimmer, important skills to have in his social circle. In the eleventh grade, he grew a thick mustache because he could. Wally told people he thought it made him look older and tougher, like Magnum, P.I., or the Marlboro Man. And at least it was different. Everyone looked the same at St. John’s: jacket and tie for school; khakis and Top Siders or duck boots at all other times, with thick L.L. Bean sweaters and old oxford shirts. This was the uniform of the East Coast WASP establishment, and it was a look that Wally, lacking that pedigree, appropriated. And even with the moustache, he pulled off the look as well as any other New England prep school kid whose middle-class parents aspired to more. If you have to fake it, the logic went, at least fake it well.
Wally’s father, Walter Oneschuk, Sr., was also a faker, though it would take years for Wally to learn the extent of his father’s disguise. Walter was a salesman, and the only thing his son ever knew about him for sure was that he’d been born poor and grew up during the Depression in Chelsea, a working-class town just across the Mystic River from Boston. After that, the facts were mutable. He claimed to have been a navy officer during World War II, though as Wally later learned, he was actually a baker’s mate. He said he’d attended Columbia University, though he never produced a diploma. He also said that his Russian-born father had married an Italian opera singer, though in truth, Walter’s mother wasn’t an opera singer, and wasn’t Italian but was, like her husband, Russian or Ukrainian or Belarusian—it was all very confused, Wally thought—and for all anyone knew, they might have been Jewish, since one out of every three people in Chelsea at that time was part of the Jewish diaspora. But nobody knew. Like most immigrants, they’d come to America to escape their pasts and start again, and they’d succeeded.
They were Americans.
Lynn, ten miles north of Boston, was settled in 1629 by the Puritans, stern English Protestants who saw all of eastern Massachusetts as a promised land. Their pastor, Rev. John Winthrop, urged his flock to build a new society that would be “a shining city upon a hill,” as Winthrop put it, quoting Jesus. For more than two hundred years, Lynn’s residents, aspirants all, lived and farmed, and then tanned leather, and later built a thriving industry in shoe manufacturing, though by 1892, it was the new General Electric plant that served as the city’s main economic driver. Wally’s maternal grandmother, Dora Consoles, worked in Lynn’s shoe factories, and at GE, as did her parents and her husband and all his brothers and sisters, who had come from Italy around 1900 and lived within five blocks of each other. When Wally’s mother, Josephine, was a little girl, in the 1930s, her father did some masonry and landscaping work, on top of his job at the factory. When things got really bad, her parents left Lynn for jobs at a Rhode Island rubber factory, and Josephine stayed behind with her aunts and uncles. This helped forge Josephine into a remarkably self-sufficient woman for her time, whose reverence for hard work was matched only by her desire to rise above her station. Her mother shared her drive. “Who is better than us?” Dora would say.
Who is better than us?Josephine internalized that mantra. Profoundly optimistic—Wally would later describe his mother as someone who didn’t so much see the world through rose-colored glasses as reject that there was any other color—she was a shrewd businesswoman who loved nice things and set out to acquire them. In high school, she worked at the salon inside of Lynn’s most elegant hotel, the Edison, doing pin curls for wealthy clients. Within a few years, she’d moved to a new salon in nearby Swampscott, and then she bought the salon, and then the entire building. By the time she was thirty, Josephine had made enough to leave the immigrant enclaves of gritty south Lynn for the leafy east side of town and was on her way to opening her second salon.
It was around that time that Josephine, recently widowed, met Walter Oneschuk, who then worked in the beauty supply business. He was suave and handsome and a snazzy dresser, and Josephine was charmed. In 1962 they were married, and two years later, Walter, Jr.—Wally—was born, joining two older half brothers from Josephine’s first marriage. The family lived in the house that Josephine built on Lynnfield Street—which was still in Lynn, but “on the Lynnfield line,” as people liked to say as a way to distinguish their proximity to a wealthier town. Wally grew up in that house, which his mother decorated in the most au courant fashion, with damask wallpaper and modish wall sconces and a powder-blue entrance hall and a pink kitchen. There were two living rooms, one upstairs and the other leading out to the pool, where, on summer weekends, the Oneschuks entertained their friends and clients. By the late 1960s, Josephine had three salons and a sizable real estate portfolio. This was what paid for her sons’ schooling and the ski trips and tennis lessons and eleven summers at Camp Tohkomeupog in New Hampshire, and membership at the Salem Country Club, where Josephine served on the decorating committee. In keeping with the mores of that time, it was her husband who held the membership.
Later, Wally would reflect on the supreme irony of this. His dad never made much money, though in the 1970s, when Lynn’s manufacturing industry was at its nadir, Walter, Sr., bought a few properties, expecting they’d be gentrified. Instead, they became Section 8 housing and Walter became a slumlord who fixed things on the cheap. A few years later, one of his properties burned down, and Walter, who’d never taken out fire insurance, had to borrow money from his wife’s portfolio to rebuild it. Ten years later, he was still paying down the loan.
Walter, Sr., would ultimately borrow so much money from his wife she’d have to refinance her house three times. Still, when Wally applied to Phillips Andover—a stretch, given that he was only a B student—father and son drove up in Walter’s Mercedes to tour the campus. They had barely met the admissions officer before Walter adopted an upper-class Bostonian accent that made his son want to crawl under the table. Afterwards, he confronted his dad. “I mean, are you shitting me?” he said, mortified.
Walter gave his son a look. “What, you think they’re gonna let Phil the trash man in here?”
That was Wally’s father in a nutshell. He was still the poor boy from Chelsea who had spent years trying to sell a more glamorous version of himself. Then again, that was the promise of American reinvention: that with the right clothes, and cars, and club memberships, you might just pass as genuine, even when your lies were as transparent as your fake Brahmin accent.
Copyright © 2026 by Janet Reitman. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
