How did it happen that I don’t understand what people are saying? When I encounter a simple conflict, I take it personally and react angrily rather than rationally? Why are office politics completely alien to me? Why did I have no idea that someone like Carlton wanted to beat the shit out of me? (See eponymous first blog.) We learn how to navigate the world, in large part, I think, from watching our parents, and my father simply had no parents to help him, so he had nothing to pass down.
My father’s side was Polish. My grandfather and grandmother were born in 1872 in what was then Prussia and 1885 in the Austro-Hungarian empire, respectively; they met in a little coal town in eastern Pennsylvania near Wilkes-Barre. I have cousins still living there.
We used to go visit his large family there when I was young.
My mother came from WASPs, Dutch and English who settled the Hudson River and Pennsylvania, though her father was actually French. We have Van Nesses and Van Lingenfelters back there. I’ve heard that Margaret Van Ness was Martin Van Buren’s cousin, but that probably came from my totally unreliable mother.
You can imagine how my parents’ parents viewed this conjugal proposition: papists vs. puritans. Though, actually, my father’s father died of the Spanish flu in 1918, so he wouldn’t have much cared. Yes, my family can stretch out a generation to absurdly historical lengths.
There is nothing exotic about this. Every American has such a background, for instance, a father whose second language was English. I mean, immigrant kids’ second language is English. So why am I so incapable of making myself understood, why do I wander around so cluelessly?
My father had it rough. As I said, English was his second language. His father died when Dad, the sixth of seventh children, was seven. His oldest brother had to go into the coal mines to support the family. My father went to college on an athletic scholarship—and played baseball, basketball, football, and ran track. Yeah, I’ve got the college yearbooks, in which he’s called Yaretski. He was small even for the time, 5’8” 155 pounds, and he played shortstop, point guard (though the box scores indicate an awful lot of shooting), tailback, and he was a sprinter.
When he graduated, in the Depression, he cracked rock to build highways. He got a master’s at Duke, where he met my mother. He found a job in Pennsylvania teaching high school chemistry and coaching basketball, and his teams won a state championship and finished second another year.
Then the war. He fought in Patton’s army and, sadly, the records burned up in a warehouse fire in St. Louis, so I have only his few comments to go on. I think given the timing he may have been in the Battle of the Bulge, where, or somewhere, he was wounded, shot in the leg and knocked out by a shell. When he revived, Germans were walking all around him. They weren’t taking prisoners by then, so he lay extremely still till they went away. Eventually he was found (really? Isn’t it amazing that the Americans took such good care of their wounded?) and taken back to England. His first son, my brother, was born when he was in France.
While working there in troop movements, in Grosvenor Square, one of the new German missiles exploded nearby while he was on the phone, and the glass blew past his face. He was unhurt, but I can just imagine his face. Later, when he was home with us, he screamed at night in his sleep.
Finally home, he got his doctorate in two years from Penn State so as not to hear his in-laws complaining about him. He secured a job teaching at West Virginia University in Morgantown, where I was born.
He was slow to anger, but when he did, he’d blow up. A high school friend whose father worked with him said that he saw everything in black and white: you were with him or against him. I wonder if he knew how he behaved at work. It wasn’t necessarily inappropriate, but I know him, and I know me: he must have boiled over at some point and alarmed people.
A child of the Depression, he would always buy the least expensive of anything and then was disappointed in the quality. But he always dressed well, and, true to a childhood vow, he always made sure there was ice cream in the house.
He was an extremely fierce competitor. Once we were playing doubles tennis, and he poached a shot from me at the net. I said, “I’m trying to get better at those, let me have them,” and he replied, “Not while I’m trying to win.”
Regarding baseball: the St. Louis Cardinals offered him a contract, but his coal miner older brother said he wouldn’t make it and to tend to his academics instead. Uncle Stanley was probably right. Yet Dad was careful never to behave like some dads, hanging around and offering advice to my baseball coaches, though certainly he knew more baseball than they did.
Yet when I pitched in high school, I would suddenly be aware that he was there, in his suit and tie, leaning on the fence down the left-field line. One day my friends spotted him and ran down to tell him I had a no-hitter going. He said he couldn’t sit behind home plate because he was too anxious for me to do well.
He had what I now see as an odd take on how to get ahead: you got to know people, you developed “rapport”, because he believed that people were always willing to help you. Every term when I was at Auburn, I’d get a form letter from the dean congratulating me on making the dean’s list and inviting me to let him know if there was anything he could do. Dad would say, “He means it, too.” Even at 18, I knew that couldn’t be true. I’ve struggled to understand where he came up with this theory of relationships; no one helped him much, that I can ascertain.
For someone who cracked rock on the Pennsylvania turnpike, and who shot Germans to avoid being killed himself, he had an oddly optimistic take on the world. He used to say, Everything works out for the best. Even being in the Army, he said. My mother once blurted out, Oh, well it didn’t work out so well for Dick, who got killed the first month you were in France. Dad didn’t respond.
No wonder I don’t know how to hear what anyone says to me or how to express myself. Dad made it up as he went along, by his own best lights. On occasion, someone would offer me a quiet correction. When I left Auburn to go to law school, Miller Solomon, my immediate boss and one of the sweetest men I’ve ever known, said, “You don’t have to be so obsequious.” Funny how Dad, who was so fierce, could also turn me into someone who could be so intimidated by other people. He sure wasn’t.
So Dad, son of a Polish immigrant coal miner, and a man who had literally to fight for everything, somehow had nothing to teach me about how to make my way in the world. I wonder if he knew that he had nothing really to tell me? I wonder how he decided how he would, to quote an earlier post, stick himself into the world? What did he think about whether he succeeded?
You know the answer to that: men of his generation didn’t talk about things like that.
But he was a sweet dad. I will always remember how, when he was in his late 50’s, he’d come home from work and, still wearing his suit, crouch down in the backyard and catch me. Teach me that curve ball. Tweak my delivery. The year when I was 12, I struck out 114 in 54 innings.
I didn’t learn how to interact with people, and I still don’t have much sense. I have to ask Nancy whether what I have in mind to say to someone is appropriate. But I know how to work and fight and hustle. Mainly fight which isn’t so good. Kate got that too (he’d have adored her competitive nature). He did absolutely the best he could, and it wasn’t so bad, given his circumstances. Thanks, Dad. I’ll struggle along like you did, and be grateful for what you gave me.
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