When I was a kid my mother and I would go to church every Sunday to pray for the soul of my father.
He’d be home praying for the Rams to cover the $50 he laid on them. That was my pop.
One year, it was a few weeks after the holidays and our Christmas tree was still up. “Harry, when are you going to take the tree down? Today?” my mother kept asking.
Finally, during halftime, my father took the tree down. He opened the window of our second floor apartment and threw it out onto the lawn below, decorations and all. Then, he sat down in his easy chair.
“Marie, the tree’s down,” he yelled into the kitchen.
Now, to some that might seem a bit rash, but my dad had a lot of Ralph Kramden in him. He could fly off the handle one minute and be a contrite, little boy apologizing to his mother the next.
After the game, he and I had a precious father-son moment sitting together on the lawn taking the decorations off our Christmas tree. Nice throw, dad, I told him. He smiled.
The day I threw the baseball through Mrs. Williams’ front window on the ground floor of our apartment building, I thought my dad was going to kill me.
He didn’t mind paying his bookie $50 on a losing bet, but paying Mrs. Williams downstairs, who didn’t like me, for a new window was just a down right waste of hard-earned cash.
I was prepared for the worst and got the best from my dad. He threw me my glove and said let’s go play catch, son, and we did, right in front of Mrs. Williams shattered front window.
“Nobody yells at my kid, but me,” he said, loud enough for the neighborhood to hear. Yeah, nobody. You tell them, pop.
My dad used to laugh whenever I complained I was having a bad day at work, the words just weren’t coming. Poor guy, he’d say, having to lift all those heavy words for a living.
He was a Brink’s Armored Car guard who spent eight hours a day — more often 10 for the overtime — for 35 years, hefting 50-pound sacks of coin into banks with a gun on his hip.
He was shot once, and never made more than $30,000 a year for the target on his back.
His claim to fame was he made page one, top of the fold, in the night edition of the Los Angeles Times the day he was shot. Below the fold was a story on Nixon’s historic trip to China.
“Look at that,” he said. “I got top billing over Nixon.” Not bad for a kid from the Bronx who never made it past 8th grade. What he learned, he learned on the streets.
He was a blue collar Teamster and proud of it. If you don’t sweat, is it really work? He couldn’t understand why I took a pay cut and quit my job hustling packages for United Parcel Service to become a newspaperman.
I had security and a good paying job. Why throw it away for some words on a piece of paper? It took awhile, but he came around. He saw those words could be powerful and passionate, if you handled them right.
Even before he lost his eyesight, the only paper he ever read, and not just scanned, was the Racing Form. In later years, my mother would read my column to him.
She’d give me a call later. “Your father liked the column today” or “Your father thinks you’re full of it.”
He was a man of few words. He was proud of me. He just couldn’t say it.
I got the call at 6:30 a.m. last Sunday from the rest home. My dad had passed away. I refused to believe it. Not on a football Sunday. He wouldn’t do that. He’d wait to Monday. We were going to watch the Rams game together.
It was true. He was gone at 96. I cried and then I laughed. Man, you should have seen him throw that Christmas tree out the window.
I laid $50 on the Rams for you last Sunday, pop. They covered.
Dennis McCarthy’s column runs on Sunday. He can be reached at dmccarthynews@gmail.com.