Lessons from my absent parents
I was helping Dad get dressed for Mom’s funeral. Five days a week, as long as I remember, Dad wore a suit and tie to commute on the Long Island Railroad to-and-from his Manhattan office.
Age 91, Dad long ago retired. Meticulous his whole life about not gaining a pound, his late life inability to go on daily walks contributed to his adding a few pounds, a few inches to his waistline. His suit pants no longer fit well.
When an important event came around — such as his wife’s funeral — Dad wanted to wear a suit. Fortunately, he was the same size as his friend, Larry, and Larry loaned dad a sharp blue suit to wear.
My job that day: get Dad dressed and to the funeral home on time. Compression socks, shoe laces, and necktie excepted, dad dressed himself. While he was dressing, I noticed a medium size brown cardboard box under his tv table. On closer inspection I was surprised to find a box full of Dad’s old letters.
Still in their original envelopes, dad had the letters packed upright, back-to-back, the way letters are placed for sorting in USPS trays. Flashing back to my childhood stamp collecting, I recognized the purple US postage stamps as three-cent Thomas Jefferson stamps from the 1940s.
I didn’t know these letters existed. Saying nothing to my father, I thought of the letters’ value as family history. To my day’s responsibilities I added a promise to ensure those letters were secured for posterity.
Two years later, Dad died. He was buried wearing Larry’s now gifted blue suit, along with Dad’s familiar knit cap and sheepskin walking gloves. My sister, Maribeth, told me my parents had several boxes of old letters. My sister, Andrea, gave me a box of letters she thought were mostly written by my mother to my father.
With my parents alive I would not have read their letters. Gone, my parents’ letters provide a chance to know them as college students; dating, unmarried, at the dawn of the US post-World War II.
I am discovering in these 1946-47 letters opportunities to listen to music my mother heard, to read books my mother read.
On winter break from her freshman year at UMass Amherst, Mom and a girlfriend walked along snowy sidewalks in the city of Auburn, stopping at a popular drug store for a soda and conversation with high school chums. Mom writes to dad about a popular song on the drug store jukebox, “Huggin’ and Chalkin’.”
I looked for the song online. Sure enough, there it was on YouTube, a lesser known song, I guess, by great American songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. Mr. Carmichael wrote the classic song, “Stardust.”
“Huggin’ and Chalkin’” isn’t “Stardust.” It’s a typical mid-1940s goofball dance tune that certainly wouldn’t pass muster with today’s PC police.
In another letter, Mom writes to Dad of her introduction to specific classical music. Knowing the back stories, she says, helps her appreciate the music. Weber’s “Der Freischütz,” Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger, and Beethoven’s “Leonore Overture #3.”
I look forward to listening to those pieces.
February 25, 1947 mom writes about a book she’s reading for “my next book report in Race Relations” called “’New World A’ Coming’ by Roi Ottley. It won a Life in America Book Prize and it’s [easy] to see why.”
Ottley, new to me, is an accomplished journalist and writer. The full title of his book is “New World A-Coming: Inside Black America” (1943). Mr. Ottley was also a WWII correspondent.
I’ve ordered “New World” and will order “Roi Ottley’s World War II: The Lost Diary of an African American Journalist.”
It’s heartwarming to know, with hundreds of letters to go, I have much more to learn about my parents, and my parents have much more to teach me.
Scott K. Fish has served as a communications staffer for Maine Senate and House Republican caucuses, and was communications director for Senate President Kevin Raye. He founded and edited AsMaineGoes.com and served as director of communications/public relations for Maine’s Department of Corrections until 2015. He is now using his communications skills to serve clients in the private sector.