Thursday December 2, 2004 – One Generation's View of Another

Thursday December 2, 2004 – One Generation's View of Another

In an earlier blog entry, I mentioned my father and his trip to Syracuse, New York to take care of the grave of his longtime friend Charles Upton. As I mentioned in that entry, Charles Upton was close to 100 when he died in his bed asking for but never finishing a bologna sandwich, which my dad had left at his bedside. My father and Mr. Upton were quite different from my generation and even more different from the generation of my children and grandchildren. All the refinements of society we take for granted were unheard of in their time. Smoking and drinking, for example, was not only socially acceptable, but nonsmokers and drinkers were scorned as people who were too uptight to have a good time.

My father was raised at a time when few of his peers completed high school—he finally got his GED in his early 40s. My dad was largely self-taught, his knowledge of gasoline and diesel engines—his specialty—was gleaned from experience tearing them apart and putting them back together and later in the military learning from the maintenance manuals that came with most of the equipment he had to repair. His days in the military during World War II on troop transports to and from combat zones—he was deployed in the Pacific Theater, on R&R behind the lines, and after the war when he was stationed in out-of-the-way places where dependents were not permitted- were spent reading, mostly westerns and mystery novels, both his favorites, that is when he was drinking and smoking with his buddies at the NCO (non-commissioned officers) club.

War was different then as well. Solders had no body armor except a helmet. His weapon was an M1 rifle, some grenades, a bayonet, and whatever you learned or knew about hand-to-hand combat. Soldiers were expendable, as the bodies on beaches of the Pacific islands retaken from the Japanese will attest. He and my mother are planning to revisit some of those places next year, a kind of sentimental journey—the name of the song Doris Day made famous in 1944 when the war was nearing an end and GIs all over the world made the song their own (still one of my dad’s favorites). He made it through the war with no serious injuries or wounds. After the experience, all the obstacles life threw at him seem insignificant by comparison, except one, the death of my grandmother. I’ve never seen my dad so distraught. I was too young to know what had happened, only that she was no longer in my life and I couldn’t understand why.

His early life was lived without seat belts, though he uses them religiously now. Both paint and gasoline were leaded—gasoline was the solvent of choice when cleaning up anything mechanical he happened to be working on. By the way, when I was growing up gasoline for my Vespa motor scooter was selling for $0.25 a gallon and my dad was complaining about the high cost of gas. My dad’s first car was a model T Ford that he had purchased when he was around 15 years old. He had gotten a job in construction driving earth moving equipment, a skill he picked up serving as an apprentice to a man he met in a train yard just before he turned 15 when he was trying to hop a freight to take him out of Brooklyn, Mississippi for any place west.

The man, who my dad described as about his own father’s age and physical size, had watched my father’s futile attempts to find and board a freight without much success. He called my dad over, asked him his name and where he was going. My father told the man that he had no father—not a legitimate one at any rate—and had been living with his grandmother until she had passed away—true though he had been living with his real mother until he’d decided to leave home to find work. The older man told my dad he could come along with him if he wanted. For a year or so the two passed themselves off as a father and son team at construction sites that the older man somehow knew was hiring workers.

Besides teaching him how to get work at whatever construction there was available, the older man taught my dad about being a man: about how you come into town on a freight car with a clean change of clothes and shoes and a kit for cleaning yourself up and where to go to get cleaned up, about having enough money to feed yourself between jobs, about looking a man in the eye when you addressed him, and answering him straight that you could do the job he was looking to have done, about believing what you just told the man and delivering what you said you would. By the time he was sixteen, my dad had seen a lot of the southwest U.S. and had saved up enough money to buy himself that model T and to return home and show it off to everyone he knew in Brooklyn.

He still has just about every car he ever owned except those early ones—including that first model T—he bought before joining the Army and going off to war. To my dad a car was something that not only got you from place to place it was something you spent time working on. I suspect he valued both equally.

The older I get the more I see my father as the embodiment of his time. He’s like a time capsule of the first half of the 20th Century: the music his generation enjoyed, the literature and art that gave expression to his generation, the view of the world and the meaning of life his generation held to be true: both forged by the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Korean Conflict—all of which my dad lived through. My life has been pretty cushy by comparison.