June 6th: D-Day and Dad’s Day
Thanks to history, I could never forget my dad’s birthday.
As I look back on his life and mine, I see the stages we went through as I grew up. Like most boys, it was a bit of a "love/hate" relationship—the teenage years were rather rebellious. I think that was also partly due to his own youth.
Being Italian back in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and even into the 50s carried a heavy burden. For summer jobs, they dug ditches (more on that later). Before WWII, my father, being the oldest, went to college. He was the first in the family! He attended RPI and earned a degree in Civil Engineering. Afterward, his brothers and cousins went into home construction. While in college, my father was also in ROTC.
Then came the Great Depression. He and his brother used to joke about how my father talked them into joining the National Guard during the Depression just for some extra cash. But then WWII happened, and guess who got called up first?
At the beginning of the war, he was stationed in Coastal Defense to guard against German submarines, before being sent to Key West to defend the harbor. After V-E Day, he went to the Pacific theater with an anti-aircraft unit. Then the Army made a discovery: he had a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering! They promoted him and put him in charge of rebuilding the Manila water and sewer systems.
(An aside for one of my pet peeves: What military units landed on Iwo Jima? A: The Marines. B: The Army. C: Both. The correct answer is “C,” both! But you never hear about the Army landing on Iwo Jima; it is always "John Wayne!" Toward the end of the campaign, the 147th Infantry Regiment—an independent unit from the Ohio National Guard—was assigned to the "mopping up" operations. Thousands of Japanese soldiers were still hidden in the island’s massive 11-mile tunnel network. The 147th spent months in intense, small-unit underground combat, using flamethrowers and satchel charges to clear the caves.)
After the war, he returned to Connecticut and climbed the ranks in education: teacher, then assistant principal, then principal. Eventually, he became the head of the state technical colleges.
I later attended Waterbury State Technical College. Only one person there knew who I was: the president of the college. I was the son of the boss of bosses! Then one day, just before my graduation, there was a knock on my classroom door. The professor turned and saw my father, immediately assuming he was there to see him in his capacity as the head of the professors' union.
Instead, my father said, “No, I’m here to see my son. My car broke down and I need a ride home.”
The professor looked at me, then back at my father, and I could practically see the gears turning as he put two and two together.
After I graduated, I went on to RIT for my four-year degree. My father retired the exact year I graduated from college—but just like me, he didn't truly retire. He worked as a consultant, advising other states on how to create two-year technical colleges, and wrote articles for trade magazines. He even became the head of the American Vocational Technical Association and stayed active in the Kiwanis. And, of course, there was travel!
I lived with my parents until I was in my forties, but there was a catch. The year my father retired and I graduated from RIT, they bought a summer cottage on a lake in New Hampshire. During the summers they were at the cottage, and in the winter they went to Florida. They were only home during November, December, March, and April. The rest of the time, I had the house to myself.
It was when I was building my own house that we truly bonded. I had the "great idea" of acting as my own general contractor—after all, I came from a home-building family! Yeah, right... but they didn't have a regular 40-hour-a-week job to balance at the same time!
When I was building the retaining wall, my father was right there giving me instructions. When I was laying brick and floor tiles in the basement, he was there too—sitting in a lawn chair, drinking his Bourbon Manhattan, calling out, “No, no, that tile is out of line,” or “that brick is low.” Those are the fondest memories I have of him.
(I actually got into a very heated argument with my brother over laying tile once! It was so heated that I left the cottage in the boat just to drive around and cool down. The argument was over whether to “butter” each tile one at a time, or put the thin-set mortar on the floor and do a whole section at once. After I did it my way, he admitted it was faster. I replied, "Of course it is—that’s how Dad taught me!")
I also remember getting a phone call at 7:00 AM right before rushing off to work. My mother said, “Your father is having chest pains.” I told her to call an ambulance, but she replied, "No, he wants you to take him. What would the neighbors think?"
Then there was the Saturday morning I got a call from my mother saying, "Come over and tell your father to stop chopping wood! He is 90 and he’s going to have another heart attack!" I told her, "Mom, he is doing what he wants to do. It makes him happy." I ended up chopping the wood that Saturday while we sat and talked.
A few years passed, my mother passed away, and the spark went out in my father. He passed away a few years later from an old folks' disease: aspiration pneumonia.
I carried an extra burden that he never knew about, something that cried me to sleep at night. He never knew I was trans, and I always wondered how he would have felt if he had known. Everyone tells me he would have been very accepting.
