We lived in a half-duplex in West Hazleton, Pennsylvania until early February 1954. I think a large object in the cellar was a coal furnace, but our heat came from the kitchen cast-iron coal stove, and something called a “heat-o-lator” in the living room, which was some kind of coal firebox with a protective sheet metal jacket around it, painted in wood-resembling brown enamel. The heat rose through one of those grated holes in the floor, the euphemism for which is “convection heating.” There were no holes leading to the attic, where RIcky and I slept after I grew out of the cradle stationed in Janet’s room. Janet didn’t gain by my removal because anyone going to the attic, or needing the bathroom, still had to pass through that room.
The attic was cold I realize now, although my bones were trying to tell me so at the time; I chronically woke crying with a pain in one or another knee. Sometimes it was hard work to make myself loud enough to rouse Mommy, but usually she would come and either rub the pain away or fill a hot water bottle for me. My pain did worry her; several times I recall sitting with her in Dr. Gillespie’s office and hashing out this issue. But once we moved to a house with a cast-iron radiator in its corner the problem went away. Even when winter winds pushed the window curtains four or six inches into the room, my knees remained at ease.
There were more kids in our first neighborhood however, many more. One winter afternoon a clutch of us were playing on the sidewalk right in front of my house, with our iron-runner sleds. I don’t know who was there; I think Janet was but not Ricky, but I was never sure afterwards. Our method was to run with a sled, then slap it down and belly-flop onto it. At best I’d say we were getting a mere taste of gliding on the level sidewalk, but that was where I and my cohort had license to roam and no farther.
Then Daddy came home in his uniform, at that time a brown jacket and trousers and one of those military-style hats, flaring above the skull like somebody had stuffed a dinner plate into it. With that hat, jacket and trousers somebody might have taken him for someone who pumped gas and washed your windshield and so on at a gas station, or who came around the neighborhood reading utility meters, or who delivered mail, or other things, but my Daddy was a milkman for dozens of one-room Mom-and-Pop stores, and supermarkets like the A&P too. It was still light, so if he was finished with his day that meant he’d put in his ten or so hours and it was about three or four p.m. (I never saw him at breakfast; he was already long gone.)
I don’t remember; I never remembered what was said or done next. As with so many of my memories I lost that connection from an ordinary moment to one magical, unforgettable and, if I do say so, ineffable. So the transition hasn’t ever really been part of “me”: What I have is a scrap of Daddy lashing sleds together—I replicated this act later in childhood with other friends. And then, he was towing a train of us, three? four? five even? behind himself, one man, with this show of strength far surpassing even him lifting us to the ceiling or going about the living room, two of us on his back, being a horse for us. I looked up at his rounded back bending to the weight. He looked immense. I imagine more than remember breath streaming from his nostrils—perhaps I am mixing that with the sight of horses I saw later being put to the task; possibly the sound of the breath sounding its course through their great pipes reminded me of my father, played on an awareness he had already shaped in me.
He pulled us all the way around the block. He may have pulled us twice. If he had pulled us a thousand times we would have called out, “Again! Again!” But certainly, knowing himself, he had to say, “Enough…enough.”
Within ten more years of that day I learned the measure of my father: He was 5’5”, 5’6”, small even in his generation. He was always everybody’s friend, nobody’s idea of a tough guy. He used to do some springboard diving when I was smaller, and we had family softball games at picnics (where my mother and aunts batted, ran, and threw, just like everybody else), but otherwise he didn’t display athleticism. Certainly he didn’t show strength for the sake of showing strength—if something didn’t need to be lifted he didn’t lift it. He backed away from fights.
In another ten years, no twenty, the dimension of his strength altered, and grew. I knew even as a child that Dad became the Man of The House after his father died of black lung (actually, silicosis)—Dad was three months short of high school graduation. He was four months short of his sixteenth birthday. His hopes of going to business school disappeared; to younger cousins went the honor of being the first in the clan to attain higher education. He went to work and helped support the family, three younger brothers and a younger sister. It was 1932. He made five dollars a week.
He made five dollars a week the next five or six years. Then in 1938 came the first minimum wage law. For a 40-hour week he got ten dollars. “President Roosevelt gave me my first raise,” he told me.
He continued supporting his brothers, sister, and mother for many more years, even as he started his own family during World War II, and the U.S. Army sent him off to Burma. Later I heard of him “helping” my uncle, his younger brother, on the path to ordination, which must have meant money for the long process. But during the Depression, I am certain that my grandmother’s own mother, and her younger brothers and sisters, living adjacent and always nearby in town, must have helped. Donated food, used clothing, hand-me-downs: those waves of mutual care sloshed back and forth and into my own life. I received from some cousins, bequeathed through my mother to other cousins.
Also, in 1977 my grandmother revealed to me that she had received what she called Mothers Assistance in the 30s. “A couple of dollars a week.”
I was stunned. Until that moment the family saga had been one of heroic struggle and self-denial. Dad himself might never have known the family had benefitted from “welfare.” Yet there we were, sitting at the table where my grandfather had coughed clotted blood before being helped upstairs to the bed he would die in shortly after, and Nona handed me that truth, about the story she herself had promoted all that time. It was a teaching about our teaching.
I saw Dad therefore pulling two generations of family along, not just three to five sleds on that winter afternoon. And Dad kept pulling me, more times than I want to talk about. I like home-run hitters; I recognize wealth is necessary to the commonwealth. I even admit that money isn’t all that easy to make, and you have to work-work-work to get from zero to millions. But the person I always wanted to be, the person I recommend, is Dad.
My older son sent me this picture today; it reminded him of the story I once told him of Dad pulling us in train, although he can’t remember when I did; that has submerged somewhere within him, into a common ocean. The person here is my younger son; there are two indistinct figures in the sled behind him, his children, my grandchildren. Maybe my boys and my daughters recall me pulling them in this same way, because this field is where they did their growing up, and where we had family tobogganing. My son’s outline is almost exactly how I remember seeing Dad. He is just a few years younger than Dad would have been, that afternoon in 1952, 1954. I have passed the day basking in one of those rare illuminations showing something done right, which in turn gives hope that more right can be done. I hope the children in the picture continue doing as their father is doing here, so that near the end of this century they receive a picture of their sons pulling their grandchildren.
–December 2022