Dad's Memories, Part II

(Intro and Part I in preceding two posts.)

I did my junior year at Portsmouth High School (1932-1933). My aunt, Florence G. Cummings (she was always called Barbee), wanted my mother to stay with her for a year, so I went along. My dad stayed in Brockton and worked, etc. Violet, Pop's mother, had been living with Barbee for years, as she had had a mild angina attack years before and wouldn't be alone.

Violet wanted to go to Oregon for a year to be with her family, so my mother and I were the subs. She had money left to her when her husband died (he was an M.D., with a practice in Brewster, on Cape Cod). She outlived him by thirty nine years. So my junior year passed, and the depression was still only in the newspapers and the movies.

Vi came back and we went back to Brockton, and I graduated from high school in 1934. Pop wanted Vi (his mother) to come and live with him, as he needed someone to care for his children so he and Rena could work.

So this time the three of us went back to Portsmouth. My father's brother (Uncle Charlie to me) died, so I had his room.

My father worked part time for a tailor in Portsmouth, as did my mother from time to time.

I got a job in Portsmouth at Rowe & Voudy's Restaurant and Cafeteria at 25 cents an hour for a 60 hour week as a counter man. I think I was there close to two years. They went out of business and the next day I went to work at Bert's Diner by the Olympia Theater on Vaughn Street.

I think I was there a year or so. I bought a 1931 Chevrolet 4 door sedan for $60 from Tacetta, and it took me four months to pay for it.

I quit the diner (owned by a local cop) and the next day I took a ride down the road and wound up at Mickey's diner in Saugus, where I stayed for three years or so. Met your mother, got married, got you, and got a call from Civil Service to show up for a job, all in that three year (or so) span.

(Jr here: The beginning of this paragraph begged
for explanation, so I asked Dad why he quit Bert's
Diner. He was annoyed by something, but he no
longer remembers what. This did trigger some other
thoughts, however. Mickey (Helen Riewinski's step-
father sold the diner in Saugus to a Russian. The
whole next week was spent by all in improving the
appearance of the diner - scrubbing floors, varnishing
the ceiling with rags, etc.On payday, when the employees wanted their pay,
they were told, "Oh, no. You did that to keep
your jobs." Dad went to work Monday. At the end
of the day he took his pay from the register and
never went back. Driving home, he thought of various
ways to tell Mom that he had quit, although he was
sure he could get a job at another diner the next
day. When he got home, the Civil Service letter
was on the table.)

November 1941 was the date of the Civil Service job call, and I had a choice of locations, so opted for the Naval Station in Portland, Maine, and after 30 years I retired, aged 55.

Bobby showed up in Portland, and I think it was 1948 when I was transferred to the Yard in Portsmouth. During the above time period I was drafted for about a year (boy, did I hate that shit). I have met guys in the service that knew the dates of all that had happened to them, and I never could understand why they cared. I don't think I could put an exact date on anything written here. It was never of any importance to me at the time.

In much of the above the depression was with us for sure. It was of minor concern to me, I suppose, because once I started to work, I was never a single day without a job, although the pay wasn't good until I got into Civil Service.

I usually worked part time at something else, from diners to the One Ten House. World War II ended the depression I guess, but I didn't care because I had never joined it . . . Ha . . . .

Dateless Dad

CONTINUED IN THE NEXT POST

Dad's Memories, Part I

(Intro in preceding post.)

 Jr,

You asked me for my memory of the depression. It is pretty dim, as I didn't know it was going on, and if it affected me I didn't know it at the time.

October, 1929 seems to be the date it hit this country. I only knew about it through the movies; the first thing would always be "Pathe News." We saw men splattered on the sidewalks of New York after losing their shirts on the stock market and taking off from their office windows etc. in a high dive

 It was big for the newspapers and since I always read the papers, I was aware, but not concerned to any degree. Our local paper, "The Brockton Enterprise," cost two cents, twelve cents for the six days it printed, and the paper boy was always given fifteen cents. First class postage was also two cents, and haircuts were twenty five cents.

In 1929 my folks bought me my first bike. It was a "Miami," made by Columbia, and I was never more thrilled. I think it cost $29.00, a lot of money at the time. No depression yet.

My bike and my hormones kicked in at the same time. My first "kissy face" was just down the street and her name was Eleanor Gorman. My bike was often parked by her back steps. Her father was never home and her mother didn't pay much attention to what was going on on the back steps.

Most shirts were white at the time, and were long sleeved. When the cuffs got a bit frayed, the sleeves were cut off at about the elbow. Then you had a shirt for summer.

(Jr here: Dad has also told me that when boys got suits in
those days they got two pair of pants, one of them knickers.
They didn't get to wear the long pants until the knickers were
worn out. During the winter they wore long underwear, tucked
into their stockings. Going to school in the knickers, the
bulges in the stockings showed, and were very embarrassing.)

One night when I got home about dark, my mother was in the kitchen and noticed lipstick on the collar of my white shirt. Trauma in a second. The problem was that the girl was an Irish Catholic, and to a diehard Methodist family that was of great concern. I imagine there was relief when my bike showed up from a different direction.

We lived at 29 Nye Avenue from the time I was born until I was about sixteen. It was a "three decker" with large rooms. My grandmother and Bertha shared one bedroom; Irving, Ruth, and later Strafford had another bedroom; and my mother and father had another. When they went to bed, I was on a couch on a living room for the rest of the night

(Jr again: Dad said that when he was very young, they would
put him to bed in a bedroom, and he would wake up in the
morning on the couch.)

When we moved to 23 Newton Street, Strafford and I had our own rooms on the third floor, and the others had the whole second floor. It was a nice rent, and was owned by a Brockton school teacher.

I can imagine that so many living together was the result of the depression, but I didn't know it. Bertha, Irving, and my father were still working, although I know nothing of their wages.

Do you remember the watch that Gramp wanted Bobby to have (probably because he sat on his lap, listened to his stories, and stole cigarettes and matches)? In the watch case was a pawn ticket from a Brockton pawn shop. At some point (1931 or 1932) he had pawned it for $15.00, possibly for reasons depression related, but I just don't know. Why he saved the pawn ticket for so many years I can't imagine. It was redeemed less than a year later.

CONTINUED IN THE NEXT POST

What Changing PC's Can Do for You

I just swapped out an old PC for a new one. Before doing that I backed up everything important by sending it to the cloud. This reminded me that I had *years* (eleven, it turned out) of backup CD's and DVD's. I decided to go through them, keeping only the latest version of everything, "just in case." In fact, although I'll have cloud backup for everything, I have now resolved to make a DVD backup of everything important once a year, again just in case. Uneverno.

Without segue, I must tell you that before my father died I had a conversation with him in which I hoped aloud that he would document whatever he knew about the family, because "When you go, nobody is going to know anything."

This got him interested in genealogy. He was retired, and wound up spending many a day in public libraries and in cemeteries in various parts of New England. I do think it made his declining years more interesting.

This also led to conversations about his childhood and I asked him to write down whatever he remembered about his life during the depression. He sent me a number of typewritten pages (typed on an old Underwood typewriter which had only capital letters), and asked me to make copies or transcribe the material and send a copy to each of my three siblings. This I did, sending him a copy as well. The material he sent covered more than the depression period, beginning prior to that and ending nearly fifty years after it.

I found a copy of my transcription in my old PC backup files (Aha! The missing segue appears.)

The material is a treasure to me, and while it won't be that to you, you might find some of it interesting. Beginning with my next post here, sometime in the next several days, I will post what I transcribed and sent to him, my brothers, and my sister.

That material included some parenthetic comments from me, generally identified as being from "Jr," which I will break out from the main body of the text so that those of you not familiar with the family (aka "everybody") will be able to keep track of the main thread. I'll leave all names intact. I'll not provide information about names that pop in and out of the story as they are simply tangential references he thought I might be interested in.

I thnk this is going to appear in three parts, which is how he broke it down for me.

Talking with Strangers

I have mentioned my friend Rick, a former IBM colleague. I left the IBM job a dozen years ago, but five of us from the department have lunch roughly once a month, and Rick and I go to a movie and have dinner, also roughly once a month.

I'm not sure whether it's just shyness or what, but he really doesn't like to interact with strangers and doesn't like it at all when I do.

Several years ago we were having dinner in a restaurant and talking about movies in general, and neither of us could remember the title of a Brad Pitt movie. It was a well known movie, and at some point I turned to a middle aged couple at the next table (Rick, mumbling: "Oh, Christ") and asked whether they knew the name of the Brad Pitt movie involving vampires. It turned out they were British, pleased at being acknowledged, and were in the same boat - they'd seen the movie but couldn't remember the title.

Rick and I resumed our futile attempts to come up with the title. I began to become annoyed with it all and scanned our neighbors for likely prospects. Perhaps ten feet away there was a booth occupied by six young women. Now at that time virtually any young woman in the English speaking world could tell you whatever you needed to know about Brad Pitt, and I said to Rick "I *have* to know the name of that movie."

I stood up, turned toward the young women, and managed to avoid cracking up when I heard Rick say, "Oh, Jesus." I walked over to the booth and was greeted by six upturned faces, no paranoia, just curiosity and friendliness.

"I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I'm sure you can tell me something I need to know: What was the title of the Brad Pitt movie about vampires?"

Six women, in concert: "Interview with the Vampire."

"I thank you, and I'm just going to stand here for a few seconds and ramble on about nothing because for some reason my doing this embarrasses my friend."

Giggles from the six of them, and I returned to Rick, who was very well hidden by the menu he was holding in front of his face, and was greeted by "I can't *believe* you do that."

"That's nothing, watch this." I turned to our British neighbors and told them the title, and they responded with delight and thanks.

We got through the meal (Rick suffering no indigestion due to my activities), eventually paid the waitress, and as we put on our overcoats (it was winter) I said, "I have to thank them."

Rick rolled his eyes and I walked back to the women once more. "I thank you once again, and thank you for helping me embarrass my friend." We all turned to look at Rick, who was . . . gone.

It's What I Do

A bit of dialogue from a scene in the movie Van Helsing, a farcical Dracula story:

(Igor is poking a caged werewolf with a cattle prod.)

Dracula: "Why do you torment that thing so?"

Igor: "It's what I do."

A trait passed down to me by my father is a fondness for teasing. Not all the time and not everyone, but when the perfect opportunity arises I'm there.

Nat, a coworker at a firm in Virginia, was an Irish Catholic, a transplanted Illinoisan, and a *big* Notre Dame fan, especially during the football season. He was so partisan he was blind to reason. I once heard him complaining about the treatment of Notre Dame football teams by sportswriters.

Now let me tell you, over the years no team has received better treatment from national sportswriters than the Notre Dame football team. At least once they have been ranked in the top ten with a record that included *two* losses.

Nat left us to return to Illinois and get married, and it happened that his departure coincided with the football season. A few weeks after Nat left, Notre Dame, favored also by post-season bowl committees, had been given a berth in a bowl game despite a 6-5 record. Not unexpectedly, they lost.

I cut a column out of the next day's sports section of a local newspaper, did a little shopping, and found the perfect sympathy card, a "Sorry for your loss" sort of card, vague about what the loss might have been. I signed the card, took it to work, and got everyone there to sign it.

I sent the card to Nat, the column about Notre Dame's loss enclosed. Several evenings later the phone rang.

Loudly, and with outrage:

Don't you have anything to DO? Don't you have a fucking JOB?

They Listen Better . . .

My nephew Jeremy, sister Kat's son, was a handsome boy and is now a handsome man. He was and is very personable, with a great smile.

One Christmas while I was visiting Kat and her family, Jeremy, then perhaps eight or nine years old, sat beside me on a sofa while I looked through the past year's photos. You know the drill.

I came across one with Jeremy and his little sister, and in the picture Jeremy was wearing a smile that would melt the hardest heart. I said, "Boy, look at that smile."

Jeremy: "Yeah. It's fake."

Donnie: "What?"

Jeremy: "It's fake. They told me to smile, so I did."

A few years later Jeremy experienced some problems. He became more rebellious than one might reasonably expect a teenage boy to be. His parents were just unable to find the key to calming him down. Nothing seemed to work.

During our Christmas visit, brother Billy volunteered to take Jeremy back to Maryland to live with him and attend school there. Jeremy was consulted and all agreed that it seemed like a good idea, and when Billy drove back home Jeremy went with him.

On arrival, he got his own bedroom and a set of ground rules. Only several rules, but rules my brother considered important. The *most* important dealt with when Jeremy was expected home. He was told that he was to be home by nine o'clock on school nights, and if for some reason he couldn't make it he was to call Billy and fill him in.

On the very first school night, Jeremy returned home around midnight, having made no telephone call to Billy. Billy told me about it later. Billy, BTW, was perhaps a head taller and a hundred pounds heavier than Jeremy.

"I heard him come in at about midnight, but I just let him go to bed. I wanted to start the new day with the rule fresh in his mind. In the morning I got up early, showered and shaved, and just before leaving for work I went into his bedroom and grabbed him by the throat. I find people listen better when you have them by the throat."

Apparently so, as the rest of the year went much more smoothly, and even today Jeremy is what people once referred to as a straight arrow.

Karma

I once wrote about Joan here, a friend whose New Years Eve date stood her up - no call, nothing, just stood her up.

One night after work several weeks later, a couple of friends and I went to the bar at which he was a bartender. He was way down in the dumps and after a few minutes someone asked him what was bothering him.

"I made a big mistake." That was all he would say, but the word spread like wildfire, and we soon learned that he had been the victim of an old scam. A bar patron, a stranger, had quietly and confidentially offered him a deal: as many color TV's as he would like for $250 apiece. In the late 1970's this was a *major* bargain.

He asked around and five others, including the owners of the bar at which he worked, counted themselves in.

He was given the address of a warehouse and a time (at night) and date to show up. He borrowed a truck and kept the appointment. When he got there he was met by the stranger, who told him "Give me the money and back the truck up to the warehouse."

He turned over the money and the stranger counted it, said "Six TV's," and walked into the warehouse. Bartender backed the truck up and waited.

And waited.

And would be waiting there still if his departure depended on seeing those television sets. The stranger had gone into the back of the warehouse and out the front.

He was now out $250 of his own money and $1,250 he had to repay those he had cut in on the "bargain."

It isn't always true, alas, that what goes around comes around, but karma wasted no time on this one.