My son, Daniel, had asked me, “What was your Dad like when you were a child?”
I would have to say that is a hard, maybe an impossible, question for me to answer, but an easy one for me to write about. To attempt any answer requires me to set the stage for my childhood. The curtain would open onto 3 houses in a row, set in a typical working class Dallas neighborhood, called Oak Lawn.
Ours was a brick house on the corner. It was a duplex, and we had the second story. Along side our duplex came two single story frame houses. They were the typical cottages at the time, white, with wooden sidings and ample front porches. Our cousins, the Zables, lived one house over, and the Allens, an elderly local Dallas couple, lived next door to us, in between.
In my home, I was a child living among four grown-ups: mother, father, and two older brothers. My brother closest in age to me was Don, 9 years my elder, a lifetime from my perspective. Jerry was 14 years older. You could say I grew up as a ‘sort-of only child’, giving me a somewhat isolated childhood but enriched by having two extra caring parental figures.
Mother was the person who dressed me and fed me breakfast each morning. Father was by comparison rarely seen, and was generally only a presence on weekends. There was no TV, only a few ragged books and shabby broken toys passed down from my brothers. Like now, (in my COVID-19 ‘second childhood’), I was often compelled to occupy myself alone, which I frequently did with pencil and paper, scribbling. My brothers were my main contacts with the outer world — they were the ones who played with me, baby-sat me, at times advocated for me, but usually (I strongly felt) just bossed me around.
My parents were not native born but naturalized citizens. They came from an immigrant background, although they both arrived before puberty and thus they spoke an unaccented English. Their lives centered around their business, ‘the store’. I was still short of 4 when they invested their life’s savings to purchase a curtain laundry. It was a massive gamble for them.
To understand my childhood and fully appreciate the setting, you need to imagine what it must be like to grow up in an immigrant family, running a laundry — not just any laundry, but a Chinese laundry in Manhattan. Of course, as a child I had no concept of a “Chinese laundry”. Although it has now become a quasi-racist stereotype, the image of the Asian family spending most of their day working together, cramped in a small space, comes closest to my own memories of my family when I was a child. It is only now, with the experiences of a lifetime, that I can look back and recognize the same gravitational laws that underlay both life in the Chinese laundry and my own family’s actions, interactions and priorities.
Although the laundry itself was a mile or two away from our home, as a child, it felt like it was part of our house. I would pass with my family from kitchen, through dining room, to living room, then down a staircase leading to the street. We would get into the car. Our car was like the docking module of a space station. The door would close in front of our house and a few minutes later would open into the store, the laundry. Everyone in the family was involved in the business.
Whenever I think of our curtain laundry, with its noisy machinery, its boilers and steam irons, I see the image of my mother wiping beads of sweat from her upper lip with a rag. This was Dallas, before the age of air conditioning. My parents were usually behind a counter and on the phone, taking orders and managing one or two workers. Wet curtains were being wrung out, stretched and placed on drying racks. My brothers managed the pickups and deliveries, always an essential component of the business. Offered the option of going on a ‘pickup’ with one of them in a rickety station wagon or staying back in the store (which offered zero stimulation for a child, and where I knew I would only be in the way), I inevitably chose the pickup.
It is from this setting, my childhood environment, that I must try to answer your question.
My father loved his family passionately. I think there was little dispute that I was his favorite although we were together for relatively brief periods, for what today you would call “quality time”.
Even back then, I was aware that other kids spent much more time with their fathers. In the second grade, I complained about that and the next Saturday morning, he took me to the movies — not the nearby theater 4 blocks away, but one 20 blocks away. He walked fast and I had to run continually to keep up. The movie was uninspiring and never again did I complain about the little time we spent together. He was not particularly fun to be with.
I knew my father was smart. I knew he was wise. I respected him for his wisdom and sagacity and could see that other family, my aunts and uncles, did also. I went to him for advice in all things, rather than my mother who I saw as rigid and small-minded.
My father was older than the fathers of my playmates and classmates. He was 42 when I was born. In 1948, when I was in the first grade, my classmates would often bring their father’s medals and souvenirs to school for informal ‘show and tells’ on the playground. Their fathers had just returned from fighting the germans and the japs, and they all seemed to be war heroes. In contrast, my father had enlisted in the army, 4 months before the end of World War One. He was still in training as a cavalryman (with his horse!) when he was demobilized in 1918.
Like all children, I felt I was entitled to more. And like most children, even if I received something, it was never enough. I was always in battle with one or the other of my parents. Sometimes my father was my best friend and ally and sometimes he was my worst enemy. With a child’s slim palette of emotions, sometimes I loved him dearly and sometimes I hated him. I even recall lying on my bed, after being punished, wishing him dead. And as if to underline the impotence of my rage and the uselessness of my curse, he went on to live for almost 50 years more, to past the age of 94.
My father had an aura about him, that was detectable to me, even as a child. I knew he had not gone far in life. I knew he had failed to fulfill his potential. At the end of the 1920’s he was an attorney, admitted before the Michigan bar and practicing in his own office. At the end of the 1930’s, he had been beaten down by the Depression, and was eking out a living, delivering milk with horse and wagon. His law degree had been wasted on the milkman.
Initially, my parents’ investment in the curtain laundry paid off big. They had a number of good years where they seemed to be making a very good living… and then the times changed. Curtains went out of style almost overnight and fine drapes took their place. Instead of being laundered, drapes needed to be dry cleaned. To adapt to the new fashion, they would need to “go big or go home”. I think having passed the age of 50, my father was just too old for another gamble. He left the store and took a blue collar job in a defense plant, where he had prior experience. The curtain laundry continued as my mother’s business, in which my father would help when he could, but ultimately it shrank through the years into a part-time enterprise, small enough to be run out of our home and garage.
My father was always good-natured in disposition. Although mild in temperament, he could lose his temper. His spankings, in retrospect, were mostly delivered as deterrence to back up his frequent threats of punishment, which were almost always just bluff. He was stoic and I never heard him complain of any disappointment dealt him by life.
He was solid when solidity was needed. I remember my father sitting with my cousin Sandra Jacobson in a small waiting room in Parkland Hospital. She was in her 30’s and had 2 twin infants at home, or maybe she was pregnant with twins. Her husband was in a terminal coma after a sudden massive cerebral hemorrhage from an unsuspected aneurysm. We were all in the hospital awaiting his death. They were going to “pull the plug” and my father was breaking the news to her, telling her to be strong but not sugar-coating the reality.
My father was brave and just. Once, my father and my Uncle Joe Zable had a terrible and violent quarrel. I hesitate to even report any of this because it might not be fair to my Uncle Joe. Although I was present, I witnessed none of this. I only report now what had become family lore and therefore must be always considered suspect.
As it was always told, my cousin Norman had ran over that day, crying that his father was beating his mother. My father went over to protect his sister. As he was walking back home, his brother-in-law came out of his house with an iron poker, brandishing it as if to brain him. Mr. Allen came out on his front porch with his rifle and made my uncle drop the poker. Apparently, my brothers and I were witness to this event which we watched behind a green hedge. Amongst us, the telling and retelling of this incident endured. But my only memory is of a trembling green leaf in front of my face.
Most of all, I remember my father as my loving caretaker and nurse. This was the role he took freely, as opposed to my mother, who left this role to him. It was he who I turned to when I needed comfort. I will always remember lying on my father’s chest with my head nestled against his shoulder, sick with this or that childhood illness. Hour after hour through the night, he would hold me in an easy chair in the living room. However long it took, he would pat my back and gently soothe me with “Sha, sha, bubbeleh” delivered in a rhythmic singsong until I fell asleep. (This caring and comforting I believe was innate with my father. I know he did not learn it from his father, who was self-centered, narrow-minded and mean spirited — and largely absent from my father’s life when he himself was a child.)
I loved both my parents; both were “good enough”, and in their own unique way, nurturing. But my father was something special and always will be to me.