Chapters & Verse

MY MOTHER WAS NOT PLEASED that I chose that day—the day of the Oklahoma City bombings—to leave my father’s side. Forever.

There was nothing I could do. Had I been a surgeon or a shaman, I would have stayed to open his body or his soul to cure. But I was neither and comfort was the only thing left to offer and that offering would best come to my dying father in the form of morphine.

There was nothing left unsaid by me to Dad, although later, when it was too late, I would wonder about that. I say that only because we never really talked much, so there must have been a lot that was left unsaid. But I don’t know what those words would be.

And I had a family to get back to, something I know he would have understood could he have understood anything at that point.

He would die knowing that I loved him, me knowing that he loved me. In the end, I guess that’s all there really was. It would have to be enough.

He had been the best man at my wedding.

I HEADED DIRECTLY TO THE CITY, thirty-five miles east, found his parent’s graves at the Bohemian National Cemetery on Chicago’s near North side and paid my respects. The sculpted cement monument was a weathered gray tree trunk ornamented with acorns and squirrels. I don’t know why; I don’t know the significance of those adornments. There’s a space for me there should I so choose (I don’t); it was gifted to my parents on the occasion of my birth. Bohemians are a cheerful lot.

“We mourn a birth and celebrate a death,” Dad told me on more than one occasion.

Pointing my truck west, I left Interstate 88 for Route 30 and traversed the two-lane back roads of Illinois and Iowa, avoiding the highways and slowing down every eight, ten or twelve miles or so—distances determined a long time ago by how far a horse traveled in a day, I’ve been told, along game paths that had once led to salt sources—as I approached the little towns along the way, each one quaintly similar to the one before. Every town had an official posting of its name, population and altitude, the latter of which varied little across the vast plains; nearby were postings of the service clubs, fraternal orders and churches active in the area. There is a comforting sameness, this route through the neglected burgs of Middle America, this path rendered obsolete by modernity, convenience and speed.

I wish I’d have been traveling through these towns on a Sunday, if only to hear the ringing of church bells, melodic  reminders to congregants to gather as friends and neighbors, offer thanks for their blessings, and take quiet solace for an hour or so.

I prefer the back roads because one doesn’t see many towns from the Interstate. One can’t. Those insidious billboards offering the tired messages of the cluster of fast-food restaurants and chain hotels, each exit garishly similar with their towering fluorescent signs to the ones last passed and each defying, or denying, travelers to find something of interest beyond the proscribed borders of the cloverleaf access.

One must leave the highway to slow down.

One must leave the highway to discover what is left of an older America.

I eventually got to my first destination: Broken Bow, Nebraska, a city almost dead-center in the state. I checked into a modest roadside motel on the edge of town that had a restaurant offering a decent chicken-fried steak—a dish I find somehow appropriate and comforting whenever I’m in Nebraska—and a bar at the front of the parking lot. I wandered around the town on a blustery April afternoon.

The museum that housed some of my family’s history was closed, but the office of the Custer County Chief was open and I spent a few hours turning the fragile pages of some first drafts of local history.

IT WAS IN BROKEN BOW, NEBRASKA, that my mother’s paternal grandfather, an attorney of some renown (“one of the best known lawyers and odd characters in Western Nebraska,” a newspaper obituary said in its November 24, 1899, edition), had been shot to death on the courthouse steps during a trial in which he was boldly defending a murderer. It was the victim’s brother who murdered my great-grandfather there on the edge of the town square.

James Corbin Naylor, a native of West Virginia, fancied himself a poet, who in retrospect no doubt admired his Indian-hunting father-in-law, a Welshman named Frank Morgan. J.C., or Judge, as my great-grandfather had been called, had studied the law while guiding freight wagons from the Missouri River to Denver. After having spent some time in Iowa jails for his resistance to abolitionists, he had settled in Callaway, Nebraska, where he had been a “picturesque character.” His sins apparently forgiven, or perhaps never revealed to his constituents, he became a judge.

Apparently, he also had a law practice, which may or may not have been common for judges in those days. It doesn’t matter anymore. He was known as a “sarcastic writer and a good pleader in criminal cases, and had it not been for his personal habits and unfortunate appetite for strong drink he might have acquired competence and honors.”

What all of that boils down to is that J.C. Naylor, my great-grandfather, was a drunk, and he died of alcohol poisoning in his bed at the Morrissey Hotel and Restaurant in Broken Bow in 1899. The murder weapon was whiskey and none of his blood was ever spilled on the courthouse steps, though his vomit undoubtedly dirtied the bedclothes and floor beside his bed.

For more than forty years I had been passing along the family lie of a man the local newspaper called an “odd landmark of the community” who left his family “in destitute circumstances.” The members of the Nebraska Bar Association paid his funeral expenses.

My mother’s father, who was five-years-old when his father died, was so desperate to maintain respectability that he lied about the very events that are not all that uncommon in other families. He had fabricated a story that turned his father into a hero and kept it alive until well past his own death.

I visited the Judge’s grave in nearby Callaway that April day, along with those of his second wife and my maternal grandparents, as well as my mother’s maternal grandparents who were, in fact, quiet, kind and humble people who farmed a small plot of land they had homesteaded and about whom no wonderfully romantic stories ever had been concocted, though my great-grandfather, Immer, had served on the school board.

“They had chickens,” my mother told me, pretty much capturing the essence of their simple lives. “They lived in a sod house.”

MONTANA SEEMED WELCOMING AS I CROSSED over the border from Wyoming, traversing a route through the Crow reservation and Billings before heading west. I stopped at a grave site on the frontage road along I-90 near Reed Point to learn about a widower, William Thomas, his eight-year-old son Charley, and a Canadian teamster named Joseph Schultz who had traveled from Prairie Ridge, Illinois, to Montana to seek a new life. They had been killed by Lakota warriors there near the confluence of the Yellowstone River and Bridger Creek on a hot August day in 1866. Jim Welch, the Blackfeet writer whose Killing Custer is the best book I’ve ever read about that particular chapter in our sadly, mostly successful genocidal effort against native Americans, had told me about this tiny roadside memorial. It is quietly profound, understated, and I have returned there often.

It is a good place to contemplate death and imagine the pasts of others. The sounds of the I-90 traffic are muffled by the wind blowing through the tall grasses.

DAD WAS SCHEDULED TO DIE on Wednesday, May 3, 1995.

“Art has, three, maybe five days,” the doctor told my mother. She split the difference and called me with the date.

Geri and I went to the schools to make the arrangements to take the kids out of school for the trip back east for remembrances and interment.

“I’m so sorry,” said the school principal. “When did he pass?”

“This coming Wednesday. It’s on the schedule.”

We headed an industrial-looking white rental van with Idaho plates east and were just outside of Madison, Wisconsin, when we got the news on Geri’s mobile telephone, a leaden contraption encased in an attaché that had been her fortieth birthday present a few months earlier.

It was Wednesday and he had dutifully adhered to the schedule my mother had devised. He was dead. The services had been arranged, a reception hall rented, the caterer hired. Everything had fallen into place, right on schedule. Let the mourning begin.

I wept quietly behind the wheel of the rental van as I steered our way through Beloit and Rockford and on to St. Charles. The kids loved their Grandpa, and Geri thought the world of him, too. We drove silently to the condo apartment (I’ve lost count of which home that one was) where I knew that any opportunity for contemplative silence would be replaced by on-demand hysteria.

WHEN MY MOTHER’S FATHER DIED, thirty-three years before, we made the drive to Nebraska, my mother sobbing in time to the relentless thumping of the tires against the concrete breaks of U.S. Route 6 for the better part of two days. Finally in Imperial, near the Colorado border, my mother’s mourning and her mother’s mourning grew into a bizarre competition of whose loss was greater. “He was my daddy,” she cried. “He was my husband,” she cried. Although my father, at one time an officer and always a gentleman, would never have uttered such a phrase in polite company, I’m sure was thinking, “He was an asshole.”

James Corbin Naylor, Jr., was a teetotaler newspaper publisher, the progenitor of rather elaborate lies about his father, and a New Deal Democrat who loved mankind and had absolutely no use for people. He believed that the great majority of Americans didn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain and therefore should be taken care of by those who did have the sense to come in out of the rain, namely, those elected officials who had gained office after garnering votes from the aforementioned senseless.

Politics can be tricky and are always cumbersome.

Granddad Naylor had no sense of humor, a personality trait he passed on to my mother, and my mother in turn passed on to my sister. He did not suffer fools at all, let alone gladly—peculiar for a man in the newspaper business. He took nothing in stride. He worried about everything, another trait my mother inherited, and possibly gave to me, although I prefer to think that mine is more from the Bohemian side of my genetic pool.

The difference between the two, of course, is that I don’t worry that things might turn out badly; I just accept the fact that they will.

From what I could tell and now remember, was that Granddad didn’t much care for children, although he tolerated my sister and me as long as we didn’t let the screen door slam or talk about things that didn’t interest him which, as little as we were, pretty much demanded our total silence. Nobody could breathe a word or enter the room while he was watching the weekly broadcast of “Perry Mason” on his black-and-white console television set.

He loved dogs because, I believe, dogs are generally obedient and don’t complain much, qualities he admired in mammals. As long as you give them a little something, they’re happy.

He pretty much viewed people that way, too.

It seems to me that his only redeeming quality, other than being a decent writer, a Democrat and liking dogs, was that he loved baseball.

Granddad’s funeral at the First Methodist Church (do they name those places anticipating that a second one will open?) in Imperial, Nebraska, was well attended. He was widely admired, respected and feared (remember, he owned the town’s only newspaper). He was also profoundly disliked. He was thirty-second degree Mason and a laic minister who spent many a Sunday evening preaching in little towns of western Nebraska. As payment for his diligent work on behalf of the Democratic Party in a notoriously Republican state (none of which, in the long run, had really paid off) his funeral was attended by two chartered planeloads of officious, dark-suited Democrats from Lincoln, Nebraska, and Washington, D.C., who sat flanking the minister on the church’s altar, sweating uncomfortably in the sweltering heat of a July day in Nebraska.

Oh, did I mention that his funeral was on my mother’s birthday? Believe me that did not help, though it might have given her a little leverage over her mother’s sense of sorrow, whose birthday was in June.

Many of the dignitaries were noticeably checking their watches as if they either might have another appointment or wish they had. None of them wanted to hang around to sing “Happy Birthday” to my mother—an event that didn’t happen, but if it had, she would have found to have been a loving and respectful act that the rest of us would have found just macabre.

The day after his funeral service, my grandmother, who my sister and I called MeMa, drove me the block or two to Einspar’s Drug Store in the ’62 Chevy Bel Air I would buy from her seven years later for a chocolate soda. She told me that while she loved her husband she was now ready to lead her own life. It would be years before I figured out what she had meant.

The next day we followed the hearse to Callaway and watched Granddad’s casket be lowered into the ground. I liked the finality of that, but being claustrophobic it’s the last thing I would wish for myself. We spent the afternoon with people my family barely remembered and I certainly didn’t know, ate a pot luck supper of casseroles, macaroni salads, Jell-O concoctions with shredded carrots and/or marshmallows and unadorned sheet cakes (what exactly should one script on a cake at a funeral reception?), and returned to Imperial.

The next night, we went to the picture show and saw Auntie Mame, a movie released four years earlier that my grandfather would have truly loathed.

MY MOTHER, WHO HAD ALWAYS LED her own life (Dad was always there to handle the details, however), could turn on the tears with faucet-like precision. Just as she had at her father’s funeral, hot- and cold-running emotions flooded the St. Charles apartment to choruses of “me-me, poor-poor-pitiful me” while my sister, with her own peculiar expression of grief, recalled how much more like Dad she was than I, from facial bone structure to complexion to temperament.

Really, Jo? Whatever.

I was given the task of retrieving my father’s ashes from a local mortuary and when I returned with the cardboard box containing an urn of his remains another predictable flood of tears poured forth.

“This is all that’s left of your father,” Mom wailed, hoisting the box over her head as if it were a trophy.

I believed differently, choosing, rather, to focus on memories—even if there weren’t a lot of them—but arguing with my mother at this stage in her bereavement seemed pointless.

Actually, arguing with my mother had always seemed pointless.

MY DAD WAS TOUGH AS NAILS and yet he was the kindest man I have ever known. Our biggest disagreement in forty-four years came over my opposition to the Vietnam War; his biggest disappointment was when I was arrested for flag desecration. He came around to believing that his war was the last good war, and that it was fought, in a very small part, so that I could desecrate a flag. He cried when the two of us went to a multiplex cinema in suburban Los Angeles to watch The Killing Fields. The last movie we had seen together in a theater was The Odd Couple, and the one before that was Auntie Mame.

In some ways, I think he may have wanted to talk with me more, but maybe couldn’t figure out how. For that, I will forever be sorry. We got mildly drunk on scotch together in a car on a country lane outside of Imperial, Nebraska, once (MeMa did not allow alcohol in her house) and he told me that he would never fear dying because after his experiences in World War II—from the D-Day invasion to his third wounding in Holland—every single day was a gift, every day just icing on a cake that so many others never got to taste.

My mother, who was not with us in that car, insisted that he never uttered such words. To her, his death was less an end of his life than it was an inconvenient abandonment of her.

In retrospect, I know that I should have taken a different tone with Dad from time to time. Although uneducated and unread, he was every bit as smart as I imagined myself to be. I’ve had time to think about this and have to come to believe that he was probably smarter because he didn’t feel any urgent need to defend his positions or convince me or anyone else to share his beliefs.

At times, he breathed easily while I gasped.

THAT HIS SERVICE WAS HELD IN GENEVA, a one-time bastion of racial bias, was ironic perhaps, but it was well attended, mostly by a diverse array of former employees to whom he had offered opportunity. He employed many older people, but he mostly employed high school kids, many of whom were minorities, and he thought that those young applicants who claimed to aspire to a career in his employ were “full of it.” He opted to hire those kids who merely wanted to earn the money they needed to go to college or to augment their wardrobes or to buy a car and were honest enough to say so.

Many of them came that day to pay their respects, to tell their stories of gratitude and admiration.

His ashes were interred on a rainy spring day at Arlington National Cemetery after a ceremony that was both respectful and impressive with its brass band, rider-less horse, black-draped caisson, 21-gun salute and final taps—a distant bugle, its soft tones echoing through the trees, headstones and monuments—and, finally, a military honor guard thanking my mother, on behalf of the President and a grateful nation, for her husband’s service to our country as he handed her the crisply folded flag.

“Art would have loved it,” my brother-in-law noted at lunch after the interment.

My mother, whose own remains were to be interred with her husband’s, wondered aloud if she might be afforded the same ceremony.

MY FATHER LOVED GOING TO restaurants, and for that I will be forever grateful.

We ate at some, if not most, of the best restaurants in Chicago—perhaps out of self-preservation (my mother, as I’ve mentioned, just could not cook). My father was a gracious man, always a gentleman, and he complimented my mother generously on her culinary efforts while claiming that eating out was “a break for Mom.”

In reality, of course, it was a break for us. With dad at the wheel, we eagerly traversed the three sides of the city in search of food that didn’t taste like it had come from a recipe in the latest issue of Women’s Day or Redbook magazines, two grocery-store publications that promised gustatory miracles with a pound of animal protein, some variety of Campbell’s soup and elbow macaroni or rice. At our house, nobody ever asked what was for dinner because it really didn’t matter. It all tasted pretty much the same and it was all, at best, borderline terrible.

In all fairness, I should note that many of Mom’s soups were pretty good. She grew up in Depression-era Nebraska preparing soups for the “traveling” men who wandered through town looking for work. There were no recipes for those soups and I believe, in retrospect, that her lack of confidence was what kept her from being even a passable cook. Leftovers dumped into a pot of simmering water became a palatable meal for men who did not know when their next meal might even be. As time wore on, she began making soups that involved more than just leftovers, improvising in a way, building a little culinary confidence. Soup, I believe, became not only the one area of cooking where she felt comfortable, but the only one she could do without strictly following a written recipe.

Growing up, soup was also what we most often had for breakfast.

DAD WAS PARTICULARLY FOND OF OPERA AND BIG BAND JAZZ. I think he was attracted to the ornate spectacle of opera, as well as the music, and he seemed to appreciate the structured freedom of jazz. I can’t be sure because we never had any meaningful talks about music, but I could sense that his comfort zone was more with melody than improvisation. Dad was not particularly articulate or emotionally effusive, but there was a sparkle in his eyes when he recalled having heard after-hour jam sessions at some of Chicago’s nightclubs, or when he broke into spontaneous renditions of “O Sole Mio,” which we encouraged with great laughter and eye-rolling. Mom, I don’t think, cared much for either opera or jazz, though she pretended to. Spectacle was just not part of a Methodist upbringing in rural Nebraska that verily defined and celebrated modesty and repression. And jazz, at least in its earnestness, might well have represented everything she was afraid of—freedom, unscripted expression, unbridled enthusiasm for creativity and life itself.

We all loved the symphony and frequently attended concerts at Orchestra Hall, typically preceding an evening performance with appetizers at Don the Beachcomber’s, or following a matinee with dinner at the Cape Cod Room.

Oddly enough, my mother played piano, pretty much in the same manner she cooked: without a sheet of music in front of her she was lost.

My parents attended opening nights of the Chicago Lyric Opera every season for many years, and my sister and I would get a full report the next morning. Dad spoke of the majesty of it all, the voices, the orchestra, the story. To me, it seemed like a great adventure. Mom seemed to enjoy the red-carpet experience—not that they ever walked on it.

The patterns of contradictions and contrasts emerged and became understandable as I grew older, but not in ways that would invite much insight or understanding. Parents in all their guises are a difficult lot for their children. I’m sure my children would agree.

For his birthday one year, I presented Dad with the Victor Book of the Opera. I don’t know that he ever even opened it. Maybe he did. I have it now. I wonder if I bought it for him knowing that someday it would be mine? Perhaps.

And in what has seemed particularly contradictory to me for so long was that Mom and Dad instilled in me a longing for a life that clearly wasn’t ours; a harmless fantasy I suppose.

As a family, we were certainly not poor, but we were far from rich. We had no entry to the Gold Coast. We lived in middle-class neighborhoods and our neighbors were factory workers and shop owners, machinists, truck drivers, teachers and office clerks, nurses, cops and firemen, I suppose; a dentist and his family lived across the street from us on 18th Avenue, a lawyer around the corner, a bodyguard for Sam Giancana (how did we know that?) two blocks over, just off the alley. Most, if not all, of the men in the neighborhood were WWII veterans.

To my knowledge, my parents knew no writers or artists, nor captains of industry, and they weren’t connected politically. Most of our neighbors—not that it mattered, and it didn’t—were Irish or Italian Catholics; Jews were well-represented; there were Germans, too, and Poles and African-Americans, who were then known matter-of-factly as colored. Our neighbors and we were the people that Wally Phillips, the morning host on WGN radio, routinely made fun of at all of our expense and everybody laughed. At least on the surface. I don’t believe any of it was mean, and nobody took offense; again, at least on the surface. It was a very funny joke to Chicagoans of the 1950s and 60s, but it was also true that Bohemian matching luggage was, in fact, two shopping bags from Goldblatt’s, a department store that represented the flip side of Neiman Marcus. I know. My grandmother, my babi, carried her belongings in two shopping bags from Goldblatt’s when she came to visit.

From time to time, my parents hosted somewhat lavish, somewhat formal cocktail parties where even the non-smokers smoked. A variety of cigarettes were placed in small wooden boxes or porcelain jars, hand-painted with Asian designs—there for the taking. Lighters, freshly filled, stood beside the boxes. Gin martinis, Rob Roys and Manhattans were served from a bar my father manned, along with an international menu of French canapés, Tahitian rumaki, Swedish meatballs and oysters Rockefeller.

Ellington, Basie and Goodman records played on the hi-fi.

My job was to take the guests’ coats to my parents’ bedroom upstairs, piling the coats onto their bed.

I’d sit at the top of the stairs and watch the party unfold below me.

The parties were lively and inviting—the men in dark suits and the women, tossing their heads back theatrically at all the right moments, were dressed in gowns—with sounds of ice tinkling against glass, lots of exaggerated laughter and blue-gray clouds of lingering tobacco smoke. It was all very noir.

I grew up aspiring to smoke cigarettes and drink cocktails and to change into a tuxedo every day after five; the profound sadness of “Lush Life” was lost on a much younger me but I longed for Billy Strayhorn to offer more social guidance “to get the feel of life from jazz and cocktails.” There were twelve o’clock tales I longed to hear. Sadly, I suppose, I never outgrew it completely.

“Smoking, drinking, never thinking of tomorrow” is how I imagined growing old with a soundtrack of a mournful “Sophisticated Lady” or a carefree “Satin Doll,” their swing rhythms setting the pace of what would clearly be my carefree jaunt through life, always snapping my fingers on the two and four; the muscular tenor saxophone of Ben Webster or Coleman Hawkins accompanying my every step.

The Big Band Era was well over by the time I came along in 1951, but Dad kept it alive in our house by playing his Benny Goodman records on the hi-fi in our living room, as well as those by Count Basie and Duke Ellington, the Dorsey Brothers, Harry James and Glen Miller. We’d listen to Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Jo Stafford, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Rosemary Clooney, and his favorite, Nat King Cole. He loved Mahalia Jackson. He’d tell me stories about the nights before the war that he’d spent listening to those bands and singers at the Aragon and the Trianon Ballrooms, long-abandoned uptown places I could see from the window of the El on my way to Wrigley Field, or at the Brass Rail downtown. The College Inn at the Sherman House was one of his youthful haunts and it was where I celebrated my sixteenth birthday: Ella Fitzgerald with the pianist Tommy Flanagan, bassist Jim Hughart and drummer Ed Thigpen. We dined on the nightclub’s signature dinners of chicken a la king and lobster Newburg.

I could never have imagined that one day my work would allow me to come to know each member of that quartet.

Dad had a great time on that birthday of mine. He tapped his feet, rocked his head and drummed his fingers on the tabletop. He’d say that as a kid he dutifully studied violin and clarinet and joked that the only thing he could play was the radio.

I REALLY DON’T KNOW WHAT Dad thought about my becoming a jazz writer and coming to know many of the players he so admired. The subject never really came up.

Dad, who had no education to speak of, always told me that education was the most important thing that could be attained in life. Unfortunate circumstances may have led to his lack of schooling, but I cannot recall ever seeing him read a book; nor could my sister. It was actually something we talked about shortly before her death. His lack of motivation to educate himself or take pleasure in the written word bothered us. He resented my mother’s education (she held a bachelor’s degree in business administration and devoted most of her adult life to advancing educational opportunities for women through AAUW, the American Association of University Women), and he offered the odd advice to me to not marry somebody more educated than myself—“above your station” was how he said it, even though that phrase usually referred to one’s economic standing. He claimed to not care about what a anybody did for a living, but he did care. He told me that if I was going to be a garbage man I should be the best-educated garbage man that ever lived, but he probably would have disowned me had I chosen that as a vocation. Lawyer, doctor, dentist, golf pro would have been suitable professions for me in his eyes. He never suggested that I come into what was the “family business” and work with him, not that I had the interest or temperament to do so. He probably knew that.

To his way of thinking, I suppose, being a writer was no great accomplishment. Except for newspapers, he didn’t read. Apparently, he wasn’t much interested in exploring those worlds created by another’s imagination.

He died before I became a chef and restaurateur.

I HAD LUNCH ONCE WITH BENNY GOODMAN at the Brown Derby in Hollywood and Dad, for whom the King of Swing was something of an idol, seemed uninterested in the details of that lunch, at least one of which was quite entertaining. Goodman, who was basically devoid of many, if not most, social graces, in his effort to pour ketchup on food not meriting such treatment, unwittingly deposited the bottle cap atop whatever it was that graced his plate. Rather than removing the cap, he merely ate around it. The ketchup-cap incident notwithstanding, Goodman seemed delighted to know about my father’s introducing me to his music. The great clarinetist had died by the time my own son bought a Goodman CD as his very first recorded music purchase.

Many years later, I helped produce a benefit concert for the bassist Monk Montgomery in Las Vegas that starred Frank Sinatra. A powerhouse quintet led by drummer Louie Bellson, and Sarah Vaughan and her trio were the opening acts. Dad responded to my achievement with some personal memory of Bobby-soxers in pre-World War II America. Hell, I was impressed that I even knew these people and I guess that I hoped my father would have been.

Perhaps he just didn’t know what to say.

While he had certainly enabled my music studies—and rarely missed a concert date, let alone the club dates, dances and parties to which he drove me before I had a driver’s license—I’m sure he was relieved when I retired after seventeen years of playing professionally at the age of twenty-five. (For the record, my last official, paid gig was working a high school dance in Rantoul, Illinois, in an acoustic piano-bass-drums trio. We got three requests for “Stairway to Heaven” and one for “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” That’s show biz.)

Not that he knew any “show people,” Dad maybe wouldn’t have cared to know them thinking, perhaps, that they lived by different and somewhat inferior moral standards in which he could find no comfort. He did admire their work, however, and seemed genuinely pleased when I introduced him to Sarah Vaughan backstage at the Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl. (I have a snapshot of the two of them embracing; proof, said the singer-songwriter Benard Ighner, that my old man was terribly drunk that afternoon.)

That same June afternoon I introduced Dad to dozens of jazz stars, including the great jazz singer Joe Williams, who had become a dear friend of mine. Dad and Joe, who were about the same age, seemed to hit it off, talking about the old days in Chicago and, of course, golf. (Despite his 11 handicap, I discovered that Joe was a scratch golfer when we played Spyglass at Pebble Beach one afternoon.) My dad was delighted to host a round of golf with Joe and the bandleader/saxophonist Dave Pell a couple of years later at the exclusive St. Charles Country Club in suburban Chicago. Joe was probably the first black man to play there, at a time when “exclusive” still meant “no blacks.” I think my father took some sense of pride is his contribution to breaking the color barrier.

He was no Branch Rickey, but every effort counts.

WHEN MY FATHER OPENED HIS SECOND Ben Franklin store—this one in Batavia, Illinois, in 1963—he and my mother chose to settle our family in the slightly more upscale Geneva, which bordered Batavia on the north. For reasons that were his alone, Dad did not want to live in the town where he was opening his business. After selecting an appropriate and fitting home and negotiating the deal, the real estate agent proudly informed my parents at the closing that the neighborhood they were buying into was so exclusive that it had denied Ernie Banks the purchase of a home there—nothing official or on the record, of course.

“Well,” my father said, standing to exit the realtor’s office in as much of a huff as he could muster, “if this neighborhood is too good for Ernie Banks, it sure as hell is too good for me.”

Mr. Rickey would have been proud.

That’s when my parents “bought the farm,” as Dad used to say, four miles from Batavia, bordering on the meandering Deerpath Road. It was a modest acreage on which my sister trained her hunter-jumper and where I raised my registered quarter-horse, a descendent of the famous Texas Star Twist, to make tons of money for me as a brood mare. Doc Severinsen, the trumpet-playing leader of the Tonight Show band, once told me that he had to keep working as a bandleader to pay for the quarter-horses he raised and raced.

Horses were not to be my financial salvation.

My multiple business failings over my lifetime have taught me that I should have stuck with redeeming soda bottles, my original attempt at entrepreneurship being the only one that actually paid off.

And our only crop on “the farm” was whatever it was that grew on the two acres of fenced pastureland that the horses ate, although my father did have me cultivate and meticulously maintain enough lawn to carpet a par-five golf hole.

MY FATHER WAS BORN IN 1919 in Chicago, the second of three children and the first male. He grew up in Cicero during the Capone era. By the time of the Wall Street crash in 1929, his father had established his own steel business on the city’s South Side, fabricating staircases, sidewalk grates, foot bridges and wrought-iron railings—as well as those counter-balanced fire escapes he may or may not have invented. His mother, who had worked as a seamstress in Chicago’s sweatshops as a young immigrant girl, took in laundry, alterations and sewing, and was raising her family. They lived frugally, to say the least. They owned their own home, a modest, two-story brick bungalow in Cicero, but lived in the basement because they could get more rent for the two upstairs flats. They usually had a boarder sharing their subterranean space with them.
In 1931, my grandfather had his back broken by a steel beam that had broken loose from its cables and fallen from a shop crane. While Grandpa was in the hospital, babi closed her husband’s steel business, sold their home and bought a small corner grocery with an upstairs apartment. She turned a storage room in the back of the store into a space for her immobilized husband to recuperate and she set up her sewing machine next to his bed. She made soups and sandwiches for workers fortunate enough to have work in the area’s small factories, sold canned goods and bags of flour to the neighborhood’s housewives, distributed government-issued goods to people on assistance, and held her family together the best she could.

Aunt Violet, Dad’s older sister by a year or so, continued her studies, helping in the store before and after school. Uncle Eddie was too young to do much of anything to help out. Babi made my father quit school and found him a job. He was twelve years old and the job she found him was driving a truck to deliver vegetables and ice. He already had a paper route and, along with two friends, added the management of a couple of newsstands on Cermack Road to his resume.

Dad collected for his newspaper delivery route on Sunday mornings. One of his customers was Ralph Capone, Al’s younger brother who was nicknamed “Bottles” and who fronted the “legitimate” side of the family business—a bottling company that produced soft drinks. One of Ralph’s kids was about my father’s age, but they didn’t know each other. How could they have? Ralph’s kids probably went to private schools, maybe in a different state; Dad didn’t go to any school.

Anyway, my father never met Ralph Capone, who was his customer for almost five years, despite his being in prison for at least couple of those years. Maybe Mrs. Capone read the newspapers. On Sundays, my father would trudge up the wooden back stairs of Capone’s brick building to collect his seven cents (that’s what the Chicago Tribune, delivered, cost in those Depression Era times) and there would be a plate on the top step with a steaming hot cup of coffee, a frosted Danish and some coins. Dad would eat the cake, drink the coffee and drop the nickel and two pennies into a canvas envelope. Under the plate he would find a crisp five-dollar bill.

That, he put in his pants pocket to keep until he got home and gave it to his mother.

I was raised with a deep respect and an abiding appreciation for organized crime.

“They only fought among themselves,” Dad would offer in a deluded defense of his family’s Depression Era meal ticket. “They only killed each other.”

He would then wax poetic about the mob funerals, of which there were many. “We kids would line the sidewalks of the funeral homes and the mobsters would flip quarters and half-dollars to us. We’d scramble for the money, maybe get enough to go to the movies and even get some popcorn.”

My father’s life as an accessory to high crimes and misdemeanors came to an end in 1936 when he fudged his age and joined the Army.

Uneducated and not well-read, but certainly not dumb, and from a working-class family that had endured each and every hardship the Depression could deliver, my father became an officer and a gentleman.

Today, a sixth-grade education would not gain one access to Officer’s Candidate School. But my father, after receiving his basic training at Fort Dix in New Jersey and with a war looming on two fronts, found himself among the ranks at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he received his commission. In those pre-War times, he traveled the country and received his specialty training in desert warfare at Camp Swift, Texas. He was stationed for a while in Yuma, Arizona, where he invested heavily (a few dollars, in reality; maybe a month’s pay) in some desert property along the Colorado River that he later sold to the McCulloch Corporation at about the time he opened his second Ben Franklin store.

A couple of years after he sold his Arizona interests to McCulloch, Dad and I took the Santa Fe’s Kansas City Chief from Chicago to Kingman, Arizona, to visit Lake Havasu, a tiny part of which was being built on land my father had once owned. The Santa Fe did not compare favorably to the Burlington’s Denver Zephyr. For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, we rode the distance in coach. I read two books on that trip. Heading west it was Alan King’s Help, I’m a Prisoner in a Chinese Fortune Cookie Factory, which I found to be laugh-out-loud amusing (I was 12 and should have been preparing for my bar mitzvah that never happened) and on the return trip I read the inspiring Yes, I Can by Sammy Davis, Jr.

My father, addressing the subject of this one-eyed, married-to-a-white-woman man’s conversion to Judaism, said “Doesn’t he have enough problems?”

I learned on that trip Dad drank just a tad more than anybody knew.

We spent most of the trip sitting close to the bar in the Lounge Car on chairs that were not nearly as comfortable as our coach accommodations. At some point, in the middle of the day, actually, we crossed into Kansas and the bar part of the Lounge Car suddenly closed, a metal curtain pulled down like those of the shopkeepers in Chicago’s less-than-desirable neighborhoods. Kansas, we learned, was a dry state. That knowledge did not please Dad. His mood would not lighten until we crossed into Colorado.

FOR REASONS THAT ARE NOT CLEAR, Dad’s Army career led him to Colorado Springs, where he met my mother, a co-ed from Denver University.

She was just graduating from college and had been working part-time for a Denver-based insurance company as a trouble-shooter, a career she would continue after graduation and throughout the War until her marriage to my father. As a graduation present, her boss flew her and a friend, Ruth, from Denver to Colorado Springs—it was their first airplane ride—for a weekend at the Broadmoor Hotel, where her boss’s friend was manager. Charged with ensuring that the girls have a good time, the resort manager introduced them to my father and his best friend, Ed, who were living at the posh resort courtesy of the U.S. Army.

They all fell in love—Art with Peggy, Ed with Ruth—and the men soon thereafter shipped out to Europe—London specifically, where Dad’s and Ed’s desert warfare training was found somehow useful in the planning for the Normandy invasion.

“That’s how the Army works,” he’d say to me as I was growing up.

It was not an inspirational message.

Sand, to the best of Dad’s knowledge, was the apparent connection between the beaches of Normandy and the desert training he had received. He had thought that his service would be in North Africa. Anyway, he worked alongside General Dwight David Eisenhower and hundreds of others in London planning for the D-Day invasion. Taking into account the weather and the limited possibility of effective air cover and not knowing for sure what might be awaiting them, Dad did not think that an early-June invasion on the French side of the English Channel was a good idea. (Dad was not alone in his assessment, by the way.) Ike disagreed with Captain Liska and others of his ilk, including Ed, also a Captain, who died on Omaha Beach that June day.

“His head rolled right past my feet,” Dad once told me.

AS BAD AS I FELT FOR THE VICTIMS and their families of the Oklahoma City bombings of the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, I pitied my father more. After all, I knew him.

His body was withering as the cancer took over his very being, cascading through his body in a metastasizing frenzy. The television in his room at Delnor Hospital in St. Charles, Illinois, was looping the day’s destruction in Oklahoma and Dad was sobbing, at times almost uncontrollably over the deaths of the innocent children at the day-care center at the facility.

He was also talking about what was wrong with his golf swing and how he knew how to fix it when he could get back to the course come spring, which it already was. He pulled his hands from under the hospital bed covers and held them slightly aloft, the bony hands at the ends of his withered wrists arcing around an imagined grip.

And he was cursing Ike.

“The Germans were already there, you know. We found that out. But they couldn’t have defended an air strike. We were sitting ducks in a shooting gallery.”

He was crying for his best friend Ed and the men he commanded from his landing craft who had died fifty years before. “Eighty-five of them,” I heard him say in a very tired whisper.

And he was crying for the children.

MY FATHER USED TO JOKE THAT as a boy he kept his ball-playing far away from any of his family’s windows.

“A broken window at my mother’s house,” he’d say, “meant that Grandpa and I would have to get the sand to make the glass to fix the window.”

His father was all of fifteen years old when he made his way from Vienna, Austria, to Bremen, Germany, where he boarded a ship—he called it a boat, which his grandchildren found to be funny—named the Barbarossa that brought him to New York’s Ellis Island. His emigration to these United States from the Austro-Hungarian Empire was completed in 1906 when he got to Chicago, whose meatpacking industry had been assailed by Upton Sinclair that very year in The Jungle, and whose baseball teams, the Westside Cubs and Southside White Sox competed in the World Series (the Cubs lost).

How and why he chose the Windy City were questions never answered, perhaps never asked, although we know he had no family waiting there. Perhaps he had a friend there. It’s doubtful that he had read Sinclair’s novel as he would have been in the beginning stages of learning to speak English. And baseball had yet to catch on in Europe so I doubt if he cared about the World Series.

Before the start of World War I, he, his father and his two sisters were reunited in Chicago. I recall learning that one of his sisters was a cook for a prominent Chicago family; the other committed suicide by jumping into the Chicago River. I never knew them. From pictures we once had, I could see that great-grandfather Liska was a huge man, his frame and girth easily filling a doorway. His business in Austria was to dig basements with the use of horses. My father told me that he was mean and had a violent temper.

I never heard any mention of Grandpa’s mother from anyone in the family. Perhaps she stayed in Vienna or moved back to Prague. I’ll never know.

From the stories that pass as fuzzy history it was in Chicago that my grandfather, a man of slight build who was an educated steel fabricator and structural engineer from the Old Country (he was born in Bohemia and defiantly insisted that he was Bohemian and not Czech), would invent a counter-balanced fire escape that hung parallel to the street until one stepped on it, the human weight thereby creating a staircase to safety. The design also prohibited access to the building from the street. The patent for this amazing feat of engineering and design, of course, was not his. It belonged to the man who owned the company where my grandfather, Josip Liska, worked for wages. Grandpa was a young immigrant man who had received a mere pittance of a wage while his boss enjoyed yachts and golf club memberships, the best tables at the best restaurants and tailor-made suits, a beach house in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and a South Shore apartment with a splendid view of Lake Michigan.

Or so I assume.

I like that story. I have no idea if any of it is true, other than the ancestral and travel parts which have been documented, and if it isn’t true that he invented such a device that would over time save thousands of lives and help secure properties, then I offer my sincere apologies to those other families who might believe their grandfathers created such a fire escape under such similar circumstances.

It was, however, the story that was told around the kitchen tables of my childhood.

I’ve come to discover that many people have learned their family histories in the same manner, with little plot twists and turns that make the story more interesting, as well as its characters.

At heart and by our very nature, after all, we are storytellers.

What I know as fact is that Grandpa was multi-lingual, as was his wife, Mae Hamrová, my babička. They conspired to allow their three children to only speak English because, after all, this was America. Their arguments were wonderfully cacophonous, understood by no one but each other.

Grandpa was quite adept at fixing stuff. He was a turn-of-the-previous-century MacGuyver—minus the pyrotechnics, violence and dramatic tension—and he could breathe life into any inanimate object with a screwdriver, some baling wire and a roll of black electrician’s tape (this was before duct tape had become widely used, let alone legendary).

The stories of his self-sufficiency were endless and, obviously, exaggerated with each telling. If, for instance, babi wanted a rug for the front room (in Chicago, Eastern European immigrants had front rooms, if they were lucky; living rooms belonged to the suburbanites, parlors to the upper crust), Grandpa would raise a few sheep, shear them of their wool, spin some yarn, build a loom and proceed to weave her a rug comparable in design and quality to any that might have come from Persia. In the back of their brick bungalow in Cicero, Illinois, was a yard about the size of a one-car garage. There, reportedly, he grew enough cucumbers, cabbage, barley and hops to provide a year’s supply of pickles, sauerkraut and beer—each a staple of the Bohemian diet. The much-needed dill and caraway grew at the base of the damson plum tree that produced enough fruit to make enough slivovitz—a vile drink that tastes like what I can only imagine turpentine must taste like—to sicken his entire neighborhood of fellow Bohemians. Since he had yet to figure out how to grow tobacco on his backyard plantation, I can only guess that he bought the Lucky Strikes he chain-smoked.

So with all that having been said, my father, who renamed his father Grandpa after my sister and I were born (it caused less confusion at the time than it does now), grew to hate anything that involved tools, sheep, looms, dirt, sand, glass, plants, trees or the possibility of callouses.

And yet, when Dad returned something of a hero from the war in Europe he went into the steel business with his father.

Their plant was on the South Side of Chicago, within spitting distance of Comiskey Park. The business was designed to be a family business, but Dad’s brother, Eddie, wasn’t interested in working without a regular paycheck. His brother-in-law, John, whose wife, Dad’s sister Violet, had a good job at Brach’s candy company, wanted no part of it either. Uncle John worked as a body man for the Yellow Cab Company where he drew a steady paycheck.

The little company was structured to have Grandpa designing the work and running the shop. Dad did sales and worked in the shop. My mother did the books, and babi made them lunch from the little grocery in Cicero she had established in 1931.

The company muddled along, fabricating staircases, sidewalk grates, foot bridges and wrought-iron railings, the same things Grandpa had done in his first business. It was a struggle to pay the few men they employed, let alone draw more than a few dollars for themselves each week.

Grandpa, it should be noted, unionized his own shop. Having worked for wages as a young immigrant, he wanted his employees to have access to good jobs should his business fail. A union card would help any worker find employment.

To me, that was the most noble of acts.

And then one day Dad had his best day as a salesman when he closed a deal on the Florsheim Building on Adams Street in Chicago. After three years of struggling, winning the contract to construct the skeletal steel structure of the building was cause for celebration.

Eddie and John heard the news and wanted in. My father told them no and his father told him that they were family and yes, of course, they were in. My father, perhaps (probably) at the insistence of my mother, said that he had no interest in dealing with the prodigal sons and left the company.

And that’s when he got into the hardware business with a True Value franchise store on Roosevelt Road in Broadview, Illinois, a village bordering the west edge of Chicago.

BY TODAY’S STANDARDS, IT WAS A real, old-fashioned hardware store that mixed paint, cut glass and threaded pipe for the tradesmen who arrived early and drank coffee from ceramic mugs my father provided while he filled their orders.

And he got out of the hardware business a few years later because he didn’t like mixing paint, cutting glass and threading pipe for the trades—all the things hardware stores once did and the very things I wish hardware stores still did. I hate being forced to buy a box of two-penny nails when all I need is a handful, which you used to be able to buy by weight. I loved those rows of galvanized aluminum bins with dozens of different nails, a vicious-looking, wood-handled claw to dig them out, and the brown paper sacks one put them in. For the record, I would love to find a job at an old-fashioned hardware store, preferably one with wood flooring like my Dad’s and a pot-bellied stove: I’d wear a flannel shirt, lace-up boots and suspenders, as well as a baseball cap advertising a tool company or a local contractor. I’d speak slowly to explain to impatient young people exactly what a two-penny nail was because they’re not called that anymore and I’d smile as I heard them whisper “geezer” as they walked away.

Dad seemed addicted to retail. It was a “bad job with long hours and low pay,” he’d say. “What’s not to love?” He opened a Ben Franklin store in Bellwood, Illinois, that failed after a year or so. He would go on to open three more—each a success.

When I was growing up post-hardware store, if I happened to detect a leaky faucet in our house and mention my discovery to my father, he would hand me the Yellow Pages and instruct me to call a plumber. (“Do I look like a plumber?” my father would ask incredulously, as if I could recognize that one genetic trait that plumbers once must have shared to make them all look, if not exactly the same, at least like plumbers.)

The family joke was that the discovery of a burned-out light bulb was cause for us to move, although for a kid who attended six different schools before I was fifteen the joke fell flat.

By the time I had reached fifteen I, unlike my grandfather, had yet to earn a degree in structural engineering, let alone master German, Bohemian, Polish and Yiddish, traverse Eastern Europe or cross the Atlantic in steerage class with a couple thousand other immigrants with whom there were few common languages. On my grandfather’s trans-Atlantic cruise, shuffleboard probably was not a recreational option and dining at the Captain’s table was not within the realm of possibility. He traveled in windowless steerage, eating gruel from wooden bowls with flat spoons.

“I must be part Gypsy,” my olive-skinned father would note as professional movers packed the moving van.

Apparently he hadn’t noticed that real Gypsies lived in caravans and taught their children to be pickpockets and thieves.

THE WHOLE MOVING THING became only more problematic as I grew older.

In February of 1972 I traveled with a band to Iceland for a couple of weeks in the employ of the USO. After entertaining the NATO troops in Keflavik and at several radar outposts around the frigid island country (imagine the fun of playing a two-hour concert of rock ‘n’ roll music for five or six uniformed guys who never left their stations—desks that hosted eerily green, blipping radar screens), I returned home and called my parents to let them know that I was back home in New York, that Iceland was a really fabulous country with natural hot springs and where the aurora borealis was clearly visible nearly all of the time because it was dark most of the time. I also was eager to share with them my discovery of the magical, if not downright mystical and mind-altering qualities of akvavit in my journey. (Note to young people: Parents really don’t like hearing this kind of stuff.) What I discovered before getting to say anything to them about any of the recent changes in my personal history was that their home telephone had been disconnected and there was no new listing.

I called my sister, who I think had already moved to California by then. It doesn’t matter.

“They moved,” she said.

“What do you mean they moved?” I inquired.

“I don’t know how else to say it,” she fired back. “They moved.”

“Nobody told me anything. Why did they move?”

“The hall light burned out while you were gone,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“Iceland.”

“Why?”

“Not cold enough in New York.”

“Oh. Is that where you live now?”

“Only when I’m not in Iceland.”

We were a tight-knit family that shared everything.

A few years later, after finishing my degree at the University of Illinois and moving back to Cleveland to pursue a business deal that failed and left me flat broke inside of three weeks, I decided to come back to St. Charles, Illinois, a suburb on the Fox River some thirty-five miles west of Chicago where my parents had moved. My plan was to stay with them for a few leisurely weeks of not paying rent as I decided what would be the next direction I would let life drag me. Pulling into their driveway, I noticed the “Sold” sign in the yard of what had been their ninth home, not counting the three winter homes they had bought and sold in Florida.

And that’s when and why I moved to California. Really.

It was the summer of 1976 and my sister was getting married in Colorado to Gary Cronkhite, a Ph.D. professor of communications, an ordained Free Methodist minister, and perhaps the most intelligent person I’d ever met. He had long before abandoned his ministry and soon thereafter his faith, although all of that might have occurred simultaneously. (What differentiates Free Methodists from your everyday, run-of-the-mill Methodists, by the way, is that historically the Free ones didn’t have to pay for the pews in which they plop their butts on Sunday morning. Isn’t that precious? That fact alone should inform us deeply about at least one aspect of organized religion.) As I noted, Gary was a brilliant man and he had a wicked, dry sense of humor fueled to some extent, I suppose, by his incessant use of marijuana. How ironic it was then that he died of cerebral atrophy, his most-active brain slowly emptied of content and reduced to the size of a walnut at his death.

Anyway, I was to be their only attendant—best man, maid of honor, flower girl, ring bearer, witness, et alia.

At the time, I had a cairn terrier named Sappho, a pale-blue Ford pinto station wagon that hadn’t a name, and maybe thirty dollars. And now that my parents were moving to some undisclosed location, I was, basically, homeless.

My father gave me a credit card and told me he’d see me in Estes Park, Colorado, the site of the wedding. After the wedding, which was very nice in an outdoorsy, hippie sort of way, he told me to keep the credit card and follow the advice of Horace Greeley.

A couple of days later I was about as far west as a young man could go in these United States. I found myself camping out on a couch at my sister’s house in Winters, California, a one-horse town near Davis on Pudah Creek, where the fishing was pretty good, and the food and wine at the Pudah Creek Café was impressive. Considering that I was eating on my father’s dime, it was damned affordable, too.

“You want me to send it back?” I responded to Dad’s rather anxious inquiry about my finding a job. “No. Just cut it in half. Today. Now.”

To replace my father’s line of credit, I free-lanced a few pieces of feature copy for some local publications that paid in the low double digits. I traveled south to tour Corcoran State Prison to get a look at Charles Manson, making forbidden eye contact with him through what amounted to a mail slot in the door of his padded cell (nope, not much of a story there). And I made a mild killing by finding small manufacturing concerns along the Route 80 corridor between Sacramento and San Francisco that I would discover needed my editorial help. I’d enter these roadside places constructed of corrugated steel, decorative brick and tinted windows and ask the receptionist for an appointment with whoever was in charge of their promotion or marketing. Typically, that person was the owner. While I waited in the lobby to see that person, I’d quickly re-write and edit whatever brochures they had lying around the waiting room. When I’d be ushered into the office, I’d introduce myself and suggest that their marketing materials were so far below standard as to be embarrassing. About half the time I’d get a couple hundred dollars (I’d return a couple of days later with the work I’d already done in their lobby); the other half of the time, foul language was involved as I was shown the front door.

I learned that a lot people in Northern California who made gizmos and gadgets didn’t like being told that they were functionally illiterate.

I WAS MORE AMUSED THAN CONCERNED when my mother called me one early spring morning in Montana with her observation that “something was wrong with Dad.”

Oddly enough, I was working with a friend on a building project at the time. My hands were greasy and had grown calloused from the work, my hair flecked with sawdust, my Carhartts worn and deeply stained.

Dad, who had pretty much beaten his two-year bout with lymphoma, had become confused and agitated while hanging a new shower curtain, Mom said.

“He was hanging a shower curtain?” I snickered. “What? He couldn’t find the Yellow Pages?”

My mother, in addition to being a hypochondriac and a really bad cook, had little-to-no sense of humor. It was something she picked up from her father, along with the hypochondria; I’m not sure where or from whom she learned to be such a lousy cook.

“I’m taking him to the doctor this afternoon.”

The next call from her was to tell me that Dad had brain cancer. The prognosis was dire and the time he had left was being measured in weeks. I left for Chicago the next morning, driving my truck numbly across the wintry Great Plains as I replayed moments of our life together.

There really weren’t that many, despite the fact that I had known him for forty-four years. That fact might have contributed to my numbness.

Dad and I didn’t do a lot of father-son things together, unless you count all the time we spent in cars as he drove me around to my various activities, lessons and gigs as I was growing up, which he did dutifully and without complaint.

He didn’t like to fish, something I learned about him when I expressed an interest in fishing. He found me a surrogate, Uncle Ray, to teach me how to fish, which he did from a little aluminum boat he kept on Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where our family frequently visited and where we would later keep a boat that was used exclusively for leisurely cruises so my mother could enjoy looking at the mansions that dotted the lakefront. Water skiing was never an option; it was too dangerous.

Later, and on my own, I would travel to the Florida Keys to deep-sea fish with Uncle Ray, after first meeting my parents in Miami to go to the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day, an odd tradition whose genesis has been lost…none of us really cared all that much for football. They would travel back to Boca Raton and, in later years, to Naples, as I headed down to Tavernier on Key Largo to Uncle Ray’s winter home and we’d fish all day, every day for a week or so. Aunt Helen would cook our catch of red snapper and grouper each night, always followed by homemade Key Lime Pie. The narcoleptic Uncle Ray would complain about the “sons-a-bitches” who ran the government until he nodded off at the table. I’d retire to a stretch of pavement under the carport and drink beer and smoke cigarettes until bedtime.

I was never in Scouting (my father was deeply bothered by the sight of young boys in tan shirts with insignia, epaulettes and what might have appeared to be campaign ribbons) but several of my friends who were Scouts spent some of their weekends camping. I envied the stories about their wilderness adventures, most of which took place in the Cook County forest preserves that were always within earshot of highway traffic. When I asked Dad one day if we could go camping, “you know, Dad, just the two of us,” he lowered his newspaper, peered over his half-glasses and told me that after having “camped” across northern Europe from June of 1944 until the following January when he was shot for the third time the answer was simply “no.” Camping for him had had little to do with an appreciation of nature, the drama of campfire stories or s’mores and much to do with avoiding being the target of sniper fire.

Aware that a watch face could reflect light, my soldier father always wore the face of his wristwatch on the inside of his wrist.

One match lit one cigarette.

Dad really liked to golf and I did play a lot of rounds with him over the years. Unless it was men’s day at one of the two country clubs where he was a member over the years, I golfed with him and Mom. They rode together in a cart and, usually, I walked. On men’s days, Dad and I rode together in a cart and he would try to convince me to become a golf pro—a club pro. “What a life,” he’d say, his voice full of admiration for anybody who could find a job hanging around a country club in the service of well-to-do, overfed duffers with bad comb-overs and plaid trousers. For an FDR Democrat, he sure sounded like a Republican.

He would then proceed to tell me everything that was wrong with my game.

From I don’t quite remember when until 1962, when Granddad died, we went to two baseball games a year together. After that, I was pretty much on my own.

On one of the occasional weekends during any season that the Cubs and the White Sox happened to both be playing at home, my maternal grandfather would travel by train from western Nebraska to Union Station where our family would meet him and take him home for the day. That evening, Granddad, Dad and I would head to Comiskey Park to see the White Sox play a night game. After the game, we’d go home, sleep and arise to go Wrigley Field for the second game, after which we’d drive Granddad back to Union Station to catch the five o’clock departure of the venerable Denver Zephyr for his overnight trip back to Nebraska.

This was in the fun-filled, let-your-hair-down Fifties and the three of us would wear suits, ties and felt Fedoras with wide hatbands stuffed with clusters of brightly colored feathers from birds nobody had ever seen. Dad and I liked our hot dogs “dragged through the garden,” as they used to say; Granddad was happy to fill out a scorecard and scowl at the people around us who verbally reacted to any part of the game. God forbid a home run would be hit and they’d stand up and cheer.

Dad followed the Cubs religiously—in the newspapers and on the radio and later on television—just not at the ballpark.

My childhood summers on the West Side pretty much started with my leaving the house in the morning and returning home in time for dinner. We were wildly unsupervised in those days—no bicycle helmets, no seat belts in the car, monkey bars without safety nets and see-saws that delivered splinters to one’s rear while threatening serious spinal injury when the kid closest to the ground would abandon his end of the plank to facilitate your crash to earth. We also ate dirt, made fun of fat kids (“fatty, fatty, two-by-four”) and kids with glasses (“four eyes”) and kids with braces (“tinsel teeth”). We peed against alley fences and we only washed our hands before dinner. Most of us survived. In those days, self-esteem was earned by accomplishing something and trophies were won for performing better than the opposition. And nobody would have believed that such things as pedophiles, child abductors and serial murderers might even exist, though, of course, they did.

With financing secured from my profitable business of redeeming for pennies the soda bottles I found in the neighborhood alleys (that venture might well represent the most successful I have ever been in business), I would spend many of those halcyon days outside the friendly confines of Wrigley Field. I would take the green-and-white bus that ran along Roosevelt Road and turned onto Harlem Avenue to Oak Park. From there, I’d take the Blue Line El to the Loop and transfer to the Red Line to Addison Street and spend the afternoons alternating my location between Sheffield Avenue and Waveland Avenue, depending on who was at bat (we could hear the stadium announcer and of course we knew the lineup and who batted left or right). I played catch with kids I didn’t know, forever hoping a home run ball would leave the friendly confines of Wrigley Field and find its way into my glove.

I might have caught, or at least retrieved on a second or third bounce off the concrete pavement, a home run hit by Ernie Banks. I don’t know for sure. If I did, I played with it (like all the others I snagged), scuffed it up. It never would have occurred to me to get it autographed.

Sometimes, if the bleachers weren’t filled, a door on Waveland would open and a bunch of us kids would get to scramble into the bleacher seats for the last two innings. That was like winning the lottery.

On those days that I didn’t travel to Wrigley, I’d listen to the ball game on our radio while sitting at the kitchen table, a pink Formica-topped table for four with a pattern of tiny, overlapping boomerang designs in white and gray, and a ribbed chrome skirting. WGN, which was owned by the Chicago Tribune and whose call letters stood for World’s Greatest Newspaper, clearly an arguable point, broadcast the games and Jack Brickhouse, whose mind and commentary frequently wandered far from baseball, was the announcer. My mother would interrupt the game at 2:00 p.m. to listen to a fifteen-minute daily broadcast by Liberace on another station. If ever there was a guy whose act belonged in a visual medium rather than on radio, it was Liberace. Quaintly called “a momma’s boy” (wink, wink) by his adoring fans, he was, without the visible affectations, sequins and candelabra, just a mediocre piano player with a lousy repertoire that I had to endure on those days when I just wanted to listen to Ernie Banks and the Cubs play baseball.

Perhaps that is why I became a music critic. Perhaps I had developed a deep-seeded need to punish mediocre musicians who interrupted my enjoyment of baseball.

Mr. Cub was my first real hero and I met him once at an “all-Chicago celebrity” event in Beverly Hills (as a jazz critic for the Los Angeles Times, I was enough of a celebrity to warrant an invitation to a grand-opening party at a diner-inspired joint on the all-too-fashionable Rodeo Drive). I was absolutely tongue-tied when I was introduced. Over the course of my career, I have had the great honor and pleasure to have spoken with people from almost every walk of life—presidents, politicians, criminals, hookers, musicians, actors, scientists, artists, writers and bartenders (lots of writers and bartenders)—and have never had a problem posing a question or offering something to stimulate conversation.

I hadn’t a clue about what to say to Ernie Banks.

Beyond “Hello, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” I drew a blank. We shook hands and I merely stared at him, somewhat taken aback by his size, perhaps. After all, when I was a kid, he was an adult and therefore he was larger than me, a larger-than-life figure in a pin-stripe suit whose mantra was “Let’s play two!”

But what was I going to say to Mr. Cub?

“Geez, Ernie, you’re kind of a little guy aren’t you?”

Yeah, well, that wasn’t gonna happen.

And talking about the Cubs’ chances in any season was pointless because we all knew that any such discussion would end rather quickly with the inevitable “Maybe next year.”

I just stood there in the tented parking lot of Ed Debevic’s, eating White Castle-style sliders with Ernie Banks and saying nothing.

A signed portrait of Ernie Banks in the on-deck circle at Wrigley Field hangs in my office, courtesy of my son. I frequently touch it with the tips of my fingers and greet his image, as if that act might bring good luck.