My father worked on the railroad, through many live-long days. He was a pipefitter, and that meant that he fixed trains. He worked for the Central Railroad of New Jersey —later consolidated under Amtrak—for 42 years. And I imagine that a visit to the shop where he worked, filled with engines and freight cars that would limp in sadly and chug out proudly like an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine sprung to life, would have been quite captivating for a young boy. Which is why he kept me away.
Of Tiny, Cockeye Louie, and My Other Uncle Joe
My Dad liked his job and he was good at it. His hands were amazing, so thick with callouses that he could casually pick up a pot off the stove without a potholder. Around the dinner table, we talked about the guys he worked with—Tiny (who was anything but) Cockeye Louie (who wouldn’t answer to anything but) and a guy I called Uncle Joe because he was at my house more often than my real Uncle Joe in Chicago. Every year for Christmas, I’d get a jar full of the loose change that he’d find under the seats of the passenger cars. My father believed there was pride and dignity in a hard day’s work. And when you did it for your family, it was a way of saying I love you. And somehow he instilled those things in me.
He also believed that hard work could overcome just about anything. When my five-year-old nephew’s kindergarten class had a watermelon party, he told the teacher “Save the seeds. My Grandpa will plant them and grow watermelons in his garden.” The teachers tried to tell him that you can’t grow watermelons in New Jersey , but he insisted. “Okay kid, take the seeds home to your grandfather” they chuckled. Through sheer force of will, by getting down on his knees and cultivating and weeding and digging in compost and compost and more compost, my father defied Mother Nature. And when school started in September, my nephew brought in a watermelon that his grandfather grew in New Jersey. My father was a 90-percent perspiration kind of guy.
But my Dad also taught me about the other side of the working life. He’d laugh about his first job, a machine shop where a guy named Barney Rubine paid him 32 cents an hour. When one of his fellow workers got up to go to the bathroom, the boss would say “Prosperity got the best of you?” and point toward the ten guys outside happy to take the job at the tail end of the Depression. Even if it meant crossing your legs until quitting time.
Like the second verse of a Springsteen song, my Dad lived through strikes and layoffs, picket lines and broken promises. I’d see his fingernails turned black with blood blisters and infected metal splinters that ballooned his fingers until his pinky was as big as my tiny wrist. He was a union guy, fighting for overtime and better health benefits, but also fighting for safety regulations that might cost the bosses a little money, but might save Cockeye Louie’s life. By the time I was born, he had worked his way up the seniority ladder enough that things were pretty good.
But there was also an unspoken message: this is not for you. I was supposed to get As in school, and go to college like my brother. I’d get a job where I’d sit at a desk, wear a tie, and keep my hands clean.
This wasn’t about money or social standing. It was about survival.
The Legacy of a Work Orphan
That’s because my Dad was a Work Orphan. His own father died in a tank fire at a refinery in the days before OSHA. The company that’s now Exxon Mobil tossed my grandmother a little cash and found another guy who needed a job more than he valued his life. My dad was only eight years old at the time and he and his brothers had to hit the streets, selling apples and newspapers to support his mother and her Brady Bunch-sized family.
My mother was a Work Orphan too. Her father was a window washer who fell off a building when she was only seven years. The crazy bachelor uncle who raised her and her sister because her mom died of pneumonia? He fell off a building too, a higher one, and somehow survived.
My father would break the cycle, but he wouldn’t end it. It turns out that all those years, he wasn’t just smashing his fingers and singeing his skin. He was also slathering those steam pipes with asbestos insulation. He would dump out bags of asbestos the way a mason would empty a bag of cement, and the dust would billow and hang in the air like a cloud.
So when he retired, as fit and strong as guys half his age, he didn’t get a gold watch. He got mesothelioma.
Forget those late-night TV commercials; this is not a disease you’d wish on your worst enemy. It’s relentless and deadly and unflinching like Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men. Every day I’d head over to his house from my newspaper job to get him dinner and watch the Mets lose, and he’d be a little bit weaker and the simple act of breathing was a little bit harder.
My Dad died 20 years ago this month.
I still think of him every day, whenever my kids do something that would have made him smile and slip them a dollar.
I thought about him when my Other Uncle Joe, his older brother, died late last year at the age of 96, happy and healthy until the very last days of his life. But for that railroad job and those bags of asbestos, that could have been my Dad.
And as executor of his estate, I got to see the companies that made the asbestos assign a modest dollar figure to the 20 years my dad lost and the pain and suffering at the end of his life. And then, with the blessing of the court, those companies declared bankruptcy and paid out 15 cents on the dollar. The check wouldn’t even pay for a decent funeral.
My father wasn’t a great communicator—he generally saw the virtue in keeping his mouth shut. But he walked the walk and he passed on a subtle, vital message: Work can save you. But it can kill you too.
So today there’s a part of me that wishes I could take my own kids to the place where my Dad worked. And another, bigger part that’s glad that I can’t.
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