Eulogy For My Father

First off, he isn’t dead. I’m a firm believer that if you love someone, you should tell him or her that you do before the day comes when it will forever be too late to do it. Or if you think someone is great or special, you should tell that person why you think so sooner rather than later. Or tell the world.

My father was born in 1923, the fifth child to Italian immigrants. By age five he had lost his father to blood poisoning, the result of an otherwise minor accident at the steel mill where he worked. The following year, his widowed mother, his six siblings, and the rest of the nation tumbled headlong into the Great Depression. Already dirt poor, they were probably better able to cope than those of middle income in that day, for they already knew how to live on next to nothing. My grandmother had a house. Her husband had nearly finished building it when he fell ill. The home was completed by local workers paid by associates of one Alphonse Capone, a great story in itself, to be told some other time.

My father, and others of his generation, grew up learning how to survive. At times his family had to endure meals of jelly-and-onion sandwiches because that was all there was to eat. My grandmother was a strict woman and her methods, though probably frowned upon today, brought up respectable, law-abiding citizens. There weren’t many things that a swift hand or an accurately wielded broomstick couldn’t correct.

My father was the only of his mother’s children to graduate high school. He and four of his brothers fought in, and returned intact from, World War II. It was one of his duties in the Army that eventually led him to his own enterprise – barber. Upon his discharge he did factory work until he determined that he could succeed as a barber. He also married and began a family. Ten years and six children after getting married, he opened his own shop, one block from the home where he grew up.

I can’t imagine the challenges he faced and overcame: the Great Depression through his entire childhood. Four years away from home fighting a war. Learning, without his own father’s example, how to be a father as his family grew. Raising with his wife five of his seven children through the1960s and losing not one to drugs or Vietnam.

I came along in the ‘60s. I am largely ignorant to the family’s rich history in its sixteen years before I was born. My oldest sibling had moved out and joined the military practically before I had any cognitive knowledge of his existence. But the remaining siblings demonstrated a respect for my father that I had no option, no other example, than to follow. From the day I realized that other kids had fathers, too, I have been somewhat in awe of mine.

As my father I always knew him to be stern and strict, and the disciplinarian of our family, though my siblings will tell anyone who will listen that I, the youngest, had it easier than any of them. He dealt justice with a razor strop – three strips of leather clamped together at one end and used by a barber to condition a straight razor before shaving someone. He was never cruel with it, nor vicious. It was a plain and simple fact: if you misbehaved past his last warning, you got a swat or two across the rear with “the strap.” I don’t think contact with “the strap” ever hurt as much as knowing you had earned it.

I also always knew him to be a very funny comedian. During my kindergarten class’s spring picnic, mine was the only father to be a “room mother” for the event. The other kids made fun of me because my father came along, until we got to the park and every kid fought to play with him because he was so much fun. I’m sure he also managed to flirt with the teachers and the other kids’ mothers in between.

He often had me along when he visited with friends, and there was usually a lot of laughter – and foul language. I was always astounded at the two different people my father was, at home versus with friends. At home I never heard him say the ‘f’- word. With his friends, I never heard anyone say the ‘f’-word more! But it was always good-natured, always bracketed with laughter.

And he was generous. Since he had no money, all he could give you was his time and his expertise. As a young man, in order to survive, he had acquired many different skills – some with which to make money, and some with which to save it – which, later in life, he gave as a wealthy man would give money. If a friend’s mother or somebody needed some carpentry work done, or plumbing, or painting, or demolishing, my father was there, that jack of all trades, master of none. Sometimes he would accept money for his time or effort, other times he would not. If an elderly customer came to his shop for a haircut, he would refuse to let the customer pay, often insulting his friend in the process until he either accepted the money or let his friend leave the shop offended. If he heard a friend was in the hospital or laid up at home, he would go in the evening with his traveling barber kit to his friend once a week for as long as the person was laid up – man or woman – and provide a haircut with no expectation, no demand, of payment.

You could step into his barbershop to witness every waiting chair occupied, to hear a lively discussion on just about any topic – though his education was limited to high school, my father was always listening, always aware of the day’s current events, and he always had an opinion. And he always had a knack for opposing you on a topic, wrestling with you over it, and suddenly you’d find yourself arguing FOR his earlier point and against yours! And then, with all those people in the waiting chairs, he would finish with the person in the barber chair and then look at you and say, “You’re next.” The others in the waiting chairs would all look at you, and you’d realize that they’re all there for the conversation.

When times got tough, my father stepped up. During the late 1970s he had three part-time jobs in addition to his Tuesday-through-Saturday eight-hour days at the barbershop. He would lock the door to the shop by 5:30, but then finish the remaining customers who were waiting. He would stop at the bar adjoining his shop, run by the owner of the building, and have a beer or three, and then he would go home. After dinner he would then go to 20th Century Bowling Lanes where he ran the counter, tended bar and gave free bowling lessons until closing, usually around 12:30 or 1:00am. He’d then come home, sleep until 4:00am and get up to clean the office at a finance company. From there, around 6:00, he would go to a strip mall a few miles north and pick up trash and dump garbage cans into a dumpster. He would arrive home around 8:00am, lay down for a nap, and then he would open the shop again at 9:00.

To say the man had boundless energy would not be accurate, as he more often than not fell asleep within minutes of sitting down to watch a television show or football game, when he had the time to do so. More accurate would be to say that he had abnormally high determination and willpower. And patience. After 40 years of smoking, he quit – cold-turkey – once. He and my mother took out a second mortgage on our home so they could buy a lot with a dilapidated house near a river. On weekends and days off over the next seven or eight years or so, he pretty much single-handedly gutted the house, raised it onto cinder-blocks, and rehabbed it to quite a comfortable condition, if a little rustic and eclectic of décor.

Time has caught up with him, however. After cutting back his shop hours to three days a week for about 15 years, he finally sold the shop and retired completely, at age 81. The wear and tear of essentially 55 years of barbering have taken their toll, with numbness in his hands and feet, the result of irreversible nerve damage from the years of standing, and of holding vibrating clippers in raised arms. After nearly 20 years of living in the river house – most of them alone since my mother’s death in 1993 – and now unable to take care of it himself, he has sold it and moved in with one of my sisters.

The change was gradual, and maybe it was connected to his advance in age, but he went from being the rough, gruff, single-emotion disciplinarian of my youth, to a softer, gentler, more affectionate father in my adult years. I had only seen the man cry twice – at the funerals of his mother and of one of his brothers, about four years apart, in the early- to mid-1970s. He didn’t cry at sad movies. He didn’t cry at weddings. Tough as nails. Then there was the visit by my oldest brother, who had joined the military 15 years earlier for what had become his career. He brought with him his older child to meet her grandparents for the first time. It was a joyous event for the whole family in the summer after my high school graduation. When it was time for my brother to leave I was shocked to see my father first choke up as he said good-bye, and then break into sobs as he hugged my brother. I was moved to tears myself. The old man cracked! It was to be understood. This was his oldest child, someone he had only seen a few times in the past 15 years.

Nearly two years later I returned home from the first 18 weeks of my military stint, a brief break on my way into my future. I was only able to manage a week at home before I was to drive off to Montana. On the day of my departure it was almost a carbon copy of the day with my brother. And as my parents said good-bye, my father’s voice cracked, and tears welled up in his eyes. For ME?! It didn’t affect me until I arrived at my duty station in Montana three days later, that first night there, the first night of my real adult life. I lay there in bed, helpless to fight off the tears of homesickness, of loneliness, for how much I missed my family, and, now, for how much I realized my father missed me.

There’s a quote, by whom I don’t know, that goes something like, “He is not poor who has friends.” If this is true, then my father is one of the wealthiest men alive. Through his kindness, his sense of humor, and his endless generosity, he has collected more friends in his long life than anyone I know.

While I was growing up, there were things I resented about being his son. Other kids’ parents were wealthier. They had more toys, bigger houses. They were allowed to go places, to do things, to stay out at night to hours that my parents would not allow me. They went on family trips to places like Disney World. They had air conditioning in their homes.

But one evening juswt a few years back, while mingling with my elderly father and a few of his friends, one of the people nearer my age spoke to me in regard to my father. “You’re his son?” he asked.

I nodded.

“He is such a great man. It must be so incredible to have grown up with him as a father.” The man could not stop raving about how much he admired my father, how much he envied me my childhood with him. It was the first of several such exchanges, with several different people, over the period of a few years. That’s when I was struck by how many people, of all ages, love my father. It is not a massive fortune for which they admire him. It is not fame that draws them. He’s the genuine article. The real deal.

And so it is, a week late for Father’s Day, that I pay humble tribute to a man whom I admire beyond quantification, beyond the grasp of words, the greatest man nobody knows.

I Love You, Dad.