My Backstory series offers stories about my upbringing and background. You can find the whole series under the category “Biography,” if you’re interested.

We just celebrated Father’s Day, and I loved seeing all the photos of everybody’s dad popping up in my Facebook feed.  It reminded me that I promised y’all way back that I’d finish telling my dad’s story…. but I haven’t.  Most of it has been told, at least as a story arc, up through my early years. What remains is a sketch of what were to me the most vivid memories of my life intertwined with his.
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To recap:  My dad was the son of an Italian immigrant and he grew up in a poor immigrant section of Connellsville, Pennsylvania – a town that existed to feed the industrial behemoth of Pittsburgh via coal, coke, and glass. My dad survived his childhood, impoverished and terrible as it was, and did a stint in the Army before settling in for a 30-year career in the world’s longest steel mill. (Really!)

He met my mom when she was the single mother of two teen boys and fell in love. Along the way, he became a Christian and they got married, touching off a firestorm in their small church. But my dad was stubborn, so he stuck it out in the pew Sunday after Sunday, growing angry that he’d been pigeonholed as an unrepentant “adulterer” (because anyone who marries a divorcee is breaking the Bible’s commandments, right?) and sidelined from doing anything more at church than warming a seat. Meanwhile, they’d built a house and manufactured a daughter, and so the set pieces for my young life were all in place by 1980.

I imagine if my dad were to list the critical moments of his life, a fateful Sunday morning on a lovely October day in 1981 would rise to the top of the list.

He got up and dressed for church, as he always did. There was a funny foggy spot in his vision in his right eye, but he assumed it would go away eventually; if not, the eye doctor would be open on Monday and he could get it checked out.  The church lights really bothered him that day.

Monday morning found my father, who was almost never sick and certainly never in the doctor’s office, sitting in the chair of the town’s optometrist. Our town was small and our doctors not exactly cutting-edge. Anything “fancy” happened down in Pittsburgh, more than an hour away. My dad always wondered if perhaps a better doctor would have saved his sight, but “what if’s” do nothing but stir up dissatisfaction.

A few routine tests indicated that something – a rogue blot of calcium perhaps? – had hemorrhaged my dad’s eyeball, not the big inside part but the small area between the lens and the cornea. The fluid was 90% gone, meaning the growing grey spot which had eaten my dad’s vision in his right eye was permanent.  The eye itched and burned and ached and he was able to see only at the very top of the field of vision.

At first, I think my dad had a little bit of hope that perhaps they could find a solution, and a great deal of gratitude that the chunk of calcium or whatever that had floated around in his head chose to lodge itself in a blood vessel in his eye rather than in his brain to cause a stroke. But it was a cold comfort for a man who’d spent 50 years working with his body.

I was too young to process much of what was going on, other than the fact that my dad was home a lot more and not going to work as much.  I imagine those were deeply disappointing weeks for him.  He talked to his bosses and US Steel offered him sick leave and eventually a new job: dipping disks (of some kind) in acid (for some reason I don’t remember). Dad was quite offended that this was his option. I’m not sure if the job was demeaning (to him) because it was a huge demotion from his previous work driving big dump trucks and bulldozers, or if he felt it was unsafe for a half-blind man. Either way, he was rather indignant and walked away from the offer.

Fortunately for our family finances, dad had just completed his 30th year at USSteel-ClairtonWorks, meaning he was eligible for a small company pension and continued health insurance coverage. It was a massive pay cut, offering about 40% of his former salary. But it was something.

I remember a few of dad’s mill buddies stopping by to see him during the year that followed. His personal misfortune was soon gulfed by the widespread collapse of the steel industry in Pittsburgh in 1983-84. Ironically, many of his friends who stayed at the mills to try to squeeze out any final months of work were rewarded with less than what my dad got from his pension.  If he’d stayed at Clairton, as he’d intended, he probably would have been in the same position…. along wit the 25% of people in Fayette County who were unemployed by 1983. (!)

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Life for my dad form then on was a lot more bitter. He still played Johnny Cash tunes for me at nap time, fiddled around the house with building stuff like our back deck, and cut wood to burn for heat in the winter.

Dad was a very skilled man, really, considering his aborted acquisition of a college education. He could figure out how to build nearly anything — but now he couldn’t see well enough to hit the nails squarely.  The constant watering and pain in his eye made going out in bright light nearly impossible, made reading very difficult, made driving dangerous (though he still drove), made everything harder.

So at 50, my father wrestled with God over what to him were the worst possible questions: What had he done to deserve this? What sin had he committed that brought upon him blindness, uselessness, encroaching poverty, inadequacy? As he said it (many times), “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t run around, I don’t gamble. Why, God? Why me? Why us?”

I don’t think the answers ever came.

We continued on as a family, cutting expenses and tightening our budget, eliminating household utilities that others probably considered necessities.  My dad cooked (he was an amazing cook) and did laundry and met me at the bus stop after school.  He still mended his own socks (as he’d been taught in the Army) and picked away at songs on his guitar or harmonica and wielded his chain saw with mastery. We listened to Pirates baseball games together on the radio or TV on hot summer nights as tree frogs and crickets created such a chorus from the trees around us that we had to put the volume on high. I was daddy’s girl, just as I’d always been.

But my dad wasn’t the same anymore. That gregarious, talkative, personable man shrunk down into his shell of pain and irritation and bitterness and darkness and watched as many of the bright spots of his life faded before his eyes.

By the time I was a teenager, the marital strain was painfully obvious. It was joint blame for sure, for my mom’s loyalty to her older children above her current husband led to bad fights and a lot of screaming and a hateful anger which took up residence in our house and didn’t leave. Their intimacy crumbled, their working lives crumbled, and their drive to be something useful to the world fell apart as well.

By the time I went to college, I’d learned to appreciate the love and energy my parents had poured into me – on that score, they were still united. But my dad’s bitterness and soul-darkness did not break until my mom died.

That’s probably a story best left for another day. 

I’ll pick up more of my dad’s story in future posts, including how he met my mom and my childhood.

Somewhere I’ve got a photo of my dad in his “work clothes” (actually, he wore this all the time) – a pair of brown Dickies work pants and a solid color Hanes pocket T-shirt, often in black. A ball cap (nearly always black or navy blue), his black-rimmed safety glasses, and a deep tan (I didn’t get his flawless Italian complexion) completed the look.

His wedding ring sat unworn on his dresser – not a slight to my mom; a practical concession to the dangers of working at the mill. He’d seen several men lose their fingers or whole hand when their wedding ring caught in a piece of machinery. So a watch (that probably spent time in his pocket rather than his wrist) was the only jewelry he wore.

For now, let me jump to my toddler years.  Dad worked swing shifts – spending a week or so on “days” (7am-3pm) then a week or so of 2nd shift, and occasionally working 3rd / nights. Eventually he was able to pull seniority to get a daytime schedule nearly all the time. Clairton is a good hour’s drive from where we lived.  So to get there by 7am and avoid the rush hour traffic, he tried to be out the door by 5:30am. That meant he got up at 5 or earlier on workdays.

One of my sweetest toddler memories happened on the occasional morning when I’d hear him get up, and I’d crawl out of bed to see what he was up to. I learned his routine and it’s sounds– he had his own bathroom at one end of the house (I’m not sure why, but I think  years of trying to share one bathroom among 10 people turned my dad into a man who wanted his own bathroom and wanted everyone else to have the same, so we had 3) and he’d spend a short while down there showering and shaving. I’d hear him come into the kitchen, where he’d turn on the light at the far end of the house so as not to disturb mom or me and read his Bible while drinking a cup of coffee.

I’d toddle out and find him reading under the bare light bulb (I’ll talk about this later, but he built our house himself, and some of the finer details – like light fixtures – didn’t get finished for a while).

He’d scoop me up for a kiss and some father-daughter time, then scoot me back to bed so he could leave on time and hit the road for another 8 hour day at the mill.
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I picked up “the wee sma’s” phrase from the Anne of Green Gables books – one of the older ladies that Anne knew used this colloquialism for the “wee small” hours of the morning. It’s always been one of my favorites. 

My Backstory series offers stories about my upbringing and background. You can find the whole series under the category “Biography,” if you’re interested.

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Eventually my Dad made it to graduation – I don’t remember how he scrounged up a suit for graduation, but he did.  He shared a nerve-wracking group dinner with his principal and faculty (he told me), who seemed to like him and encouraged him to pursue further education.

College was out of the question for a poor son of an immigrant, so he tried to sign up for the Marines.  It was 1950 and the Korean War had drummed up patriotism and enlistments.

Dad by this time was working at one of the Pittsburgh steel mills for good money and supporting the remainder of his family since his dad had basically abdicated that role. Entering the Marines would mean trading that paycheck for a military pay, but Dad was ready to sign up.

He went to the recruiter with a friend (Harry, perhaps?) and was told he couldn’t enlist till he hit the 120 pound weight minimum. (Bear in mind, my dad was a shade short of 6 feet tall, so to weigh 117 pounds at age 18 and that height is really sad.)  The recruiter suggested that my dad eat bananas to bulk up.  He did.

Three days later, when he headed to the station to finalize the deal, his friend had decided to skip out altogether.  So dad left too.

I don’t know a lot about his early adult years, but I heard a lot of stories involving his good friend  Ellsworth (who died of cancer when I was very little) and adventures.  Like trying to navigate the unnavigable Youghiogheny River rapids above Connellsville on an Army surplus raft.  Or the time they raced a “woodie” station wagon (wood paneled sides) so fast that splinters were blowing off the side. So the story went.)

Two years later, Dad was drafted, given a waiver because he was considered the primary breadwinner for his family (I think his dad had basically abandoned them financially by this point despite holding a pretty cushy job).  Finding out he had been waived, Dad angrily demanded to enlist since he wouldn’t be set aside as a “4F draft dodger.”

Dad’s military stories boiled down into two epochs:

1. Texas, where he did his basic and advanced training.  I think he was at Fort Hood and Fort Sam Houston.  It was in Texas that my father, the only Pennsylvanian in a company full of Texans, made a few judgments about his new surroundings:

a) “There was nothing so small as a Texan with the wind knocked out of him.”
b) Chiggers were hell
c) The South sucked. (His opinion, not mine.)

In fact, when he finally got to leave Texas and make his way back home for leave after completing his training (on a hellish DC-9 plane ride in the middle of a storm), my dad vowed he would never set foot in the South again. And he kept his word – skipping even my college graduation.

2. Aberdeen Proving Grounds.  As an MP, my dad was assigned to gate duty . Aside from arresting drunk enlisted men and guarding prisoners, he was part of General Montgomery’s honor escort when “Monty” visited the base, I assume in 1953 or 54.

The Aberdeen years were good ones, it seems. I think my dad liked the experience there, and he was close enough to hitchhike home for regular visits.  But the Army didn’t promote him quickly, and he decided to leave once his two years were up.  Still, the marks of military discipline were stitched into his behavior: his shoes were perfect straight tucked under his side of the bed; he did all of his own mending or button-sewing; his schedule was dependably consistent.

Coming home after his military service, my father fell back into a regular job at the Clairton Mill, the longest steel mill in the world (4 miles of continuous industrial facilities along the bank of the Allegheny River, south of Pittsburgh).  He moved through various jobs, working his way up to running bulldozers, driving buses around the mill (delivering skilled laborers like bricklayers to their jobs around the plant), and a lot of big truck driving. It gave him the ingrained habit of always driving any vehicle with his right hand at rest on the gear shift, even if the car was automatic.

I know he experienced one of the major steelworker strikes of the 50s, and spent his earlier years as a devout Democrat and supporter of unions.  By the end of his career, he’d decided the union bosses were just as greedy as the management of USSteel, and he had little use for either side. But he raged at Ronald Reagan (his first Republican vote) for “breaking the unions” when he ended the air traffic controllers strike.

Dad watched the steel industry transfer from the older methods of steel manufacturing to the computer age –but he spoke with reverence about the almost mystical knowledge that “old-timers” had for looking at the molten steel in the crucible and being able to tell by its color and appearance exactly when to “tap out” the steel – pour the giant bucket of molten metal down the channels into the rolling mill.

In August 1963, a major tornado whipped through the mill, tearing up the steelworks and sending my dad and some of his buddies into a concrete block washhouse to cower in a shower stall.  He said the tornado forced water through the concrete blocks in the shower block. Red lightning (his term for lightning so close that you couldn’t see it) struck all around them.  Though far from God, my dad said he prayed more in those 10 minutes than he had at any time before.

More to come….