Anchors aweigh to an old sailor

It has been quiet around my house. My cell phone isn’t ringing incessantly throughout the day and there are no panicked trips into the night, because my father died June 3 of geriatric alcoholism.

My dad was a good man. He was crazy about my mother, probably a little crazier for her than she was of him. In his prime, he was a stud, sharper than a box of tacks, and highly capable. He supervised dozens of electricians on extremely complex projects that involved some of the tallest skyscrapers in the United States, if not the world.

I never saw my father take a sick day, even when he threw his back out. He worked his ass off as a union electrician, or a “sparky” as they are known around the trades. Whenever I ride into the city, I can pick out a half dozen of his buildings rising from the Chicago skyline.

He had every reason to become one of those drunk, asshole fathers that beat his kids and made life miserable for everyone in the family. His own father was a practicing alcoholic, a taciturn Swede who never became literate in the English language. My dad often remarked that he had to grow up fast. It was his mother – my grandma – and her siblings, who smoothed out the turmoil caused by his father.

As a boy, he was sent up to Wisconsin in the summers, probably to get him away from his father. He stayed with a family friend who owned several cabins which she rented out to tourists. He bunked with the hired hands and did chores. In the afternoons he swam in cold lakes and fished. My grandmother sent him a dollar a week to buy milk and food.

My father had one of those “Our Gang” comedy kinds of childhoods growing up during the Great Depression. His mother, aunts and uncles were a wild, happy bunch that sang around the piano, took day trips in Model T’s, told fortunes and made bathtub gin. Gathering the pictures for the prerequisite foam boards to place around the funeral home during the wake, there was a massive group photo of my father’s family, where his uncle is hoisting a bottle of Jim Beam, and my dad is holding a gun to his aunt’s head.

He attended five public grammar schools and two high schools on Chicago’s North Side. His family moved about once a year. He told me that his father would stop paying the rent in February, then move out in the middle of the night on May 1 before they were evicted. Everyone did this, and I imagined street cars loaded down with people carrying stoves and furniture moving furtively through the night.

Toward the end my dad’s short-term memory was shot, but he could remember everything that happened to him in the navy during World War II. He was a first electrician’s mate, whatever the hell that is, serving on the U.S.S. Rockbridge. As one of the ship's original crew members he was a “plank owner.” The ship was built and commissioned in 1944 to replace some of those that were blown up in Pearl Harbor.

He volunteered for any war-time fool’s errand that was asked of him, climbing masts during Iwo Jima and typhoons to install signal lights, getting shot at or dangling precariously over a stormy sea. His ship traveled all over the South Pacific and saw a lot of action. He said he got about three hours of sleep during his whole war time experience.

My grandfather died while my dad was still on board the ship. The chaplain told him that his father committed suicide. He was discharged and came home to Chicago, tossing his duffle bag of navy gear into the Chicago River. When he got home he hooked up with some of his crazy bastard friends from high school. They got into two car accidents in one day, the second in which he broke his back.

He was in a body cast for about 10 weeks. When he recovered, he realized that he needed to find some new friends so he wouldn’t become a bum like his father. He met my mother on July 20, 1947 at Good Templar Park in Geneva, Ill., when she was 16. He fell instantly in love. Going through my mother’s old letters and scrap books, he declared his love for her by saying that she made him “the happiest boy in the world.” He must have been terribly lonely, as little boy far away from his home and family sharing a bunk house with farting hired hands, and as a young sailor in the middle of a war.

My parents got married in 1948, when my mother was 18 and my dad was 22. Like thousands of young World War II veterans, my father was able to achieve the American Dream. He provided us with a home, although it always seemed that our cousins had slightly better houses than the modest shacks we lived in. The babies started coming in the 1950s, with my brother Romberg added as a little tagalong in 1963.

As an electrician, he got well-paying, summer construction jobs for his younger cousins as well as my older brother so they could pay their way through college. One of my cousins dedicated his thesis to my father. He hated it when guys drank on the job, and once followed one of his journeymen to a bar during the morning coffee break. My dad tore into the guy and fired him on the spot. My older brother, who was working with my dad, said it was one of the most unpleasant events he ever witnessed.

Growing up, my father used to entertain us at the dinner table with stories of horrific accidents on his work sites, about guys falling off of buildings or impaling themselves on steel. He dislocated his knee, had tinnitus for a year following an explosion when he was inside a tunnel, and once took 220 volts of electricity through his arm.

My father started instituting safety measures on his job sites long before work place safety was regulated by the federal government. His projects boasted such stellar safety records, that he was brought in as a consultant when OSHA was being formed in 1971.

He was a big guy, about six foot four, and didn’t take shit from anybody. I can recall numerous times when some punk with a Napoleon complex would swagger out of a car after some minor traffic incident to take my father on. Inevitably, when my dad would exit his own vehicle, the other guy would get a look at how big my dad was, then jump back into his car and drive off like a little girl. My father didn't even have to open his mouth or swing a fist.

Cleaning out his house, which is staggering in itself, I spend a lot of time looking at his old artifacts and ancient family photos from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. My father lived a whole life before I was even born. It’s comforting to read the cards that people have been sending, mostly from cousins and the children of family friends from my generation. They recall his laughter, power, intelligence and his many talents. I need to have these memories stoked again, to remember him as he was, and not the sad, old depressed man who in many ways became my own little boy these past several years.

On the morning that my father died, his doctor told us he was going through the DTs and would probably end up becoming a vegetable. It’s still not clear to me why he had to be sedated. My brothers were hurrying to the hospital with a copy of his DNR when he died.

A nurse’s aid had been assigned to sit with him in his room because he kept ripping out his IVs. She told my brother that in the end, my father raised his arm as if grabbing something, took his last breath and passed away. Perhaps he was reaching for my grandma who was pulling him over to the other side, or maybe he was just swiping away a giant, DT-induced taradactyl. Anyway, I prefer to think it was the former.