“Aleck worked the night beat and could be seen most days trolling and casting in the river from a small rowboat,” wrote his colleague Anne McIlhenney Matthews. “He knew where the best fish haunts were and seldom came home without a sizable catch. Often he brought presents of the fish to headquarters. He would forget what desk drawer he put them in, with the obvious result. Being a cub and eager to please it was usually my job to clean up. Aleck worked on most newspapers in Buffalo at one time or another, got fired every time, either for nonappearance or for insulting the city editor, who quite often hired him back. After a bit of bourbon to get the creative juices flowing he was known to heave every typewriter in the pressroom out the window. Luckily it faced out onto the old Terrace tracks so the shower of metal didn’t kill anyone below.”
Grandpa Watson’s newspaper cronies would get up to such tricks as installing drugstore-style pay phones in the pressroom to avoid being scooped by one another. Of course, it wouldn’t be long before someone borrowed a stethoscope from a doctor friend to hear every word
being said.
When the Polish boy-wonder chess-expert Samuel Reshevsky arrived in Buffalo to play thirty games with local experts, the nine-year-old prevailed in every match but one. Grandpa beat him. And though Reshevsky was young at the time, he’d go on to become a world grand master.
When he was at home, Grandpa would shave in the bathroom while calling out his chess moves to my uncle Jim, who then moved the pieces across the chess board in the living room. Grandpa followed the positions of all the pieces in his head and almost always won.
In his free time, Grandpa could usually be found at a local watering hole, Tommy Martin’s speakeasy, performing all twenty or so verses of the World War I song “Sing Me to Sleep.” According to eyewitnesses, the proprietor was not pleased when the barroom bard began to declaim, as it had the effect of dispersing his clientele.
Grandpa Watson also regularly recited “In Flanders Fields,” by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae. Like the poem’s author, Grandpa fought with Canada in World War I. He enlisted on August 4, 1914, the day after Canada declared war on Germany. Canada was joining the effort with Great Britain, which in turn was coming to the aid of France against the Germans. The United States simultaneously declared neutrality, and President Wilson didn’t ask Congress for a declaration of war until April 2, 1917.
Grandpa spent the next thirty-seven months as an infantry scout with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces in the trenches of France and Belgium, and he fought in the famous Battle of Ypres. He was decorated for bravery in the Battle of Amiens and received a military medal for bravery in the field from the Prince of Wales (who later became King Edward VIII and abdicated the throne to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson). They’d meet again at the opening of the Peace Bridge between the United States and Canada in 1927. Grandpa kept these medals in a small gold box given to him by Queen Mary when she visited the troops one Christmas day during the early years of the war.
Grandpa was among those who led the first tanks into the initial Battle of the Somme. For his efforts he received a bullet in the back that was never removed, and it’s probably a good thing he didn’t have to deal with airport metal detectors. He returned from the Great War and got back to business as usual. When not hot after a story or gone fishing or rescuing a little girl from an oncoming trolley, he could be found at the racetrack betting on the nags. My aunt once watched him lose two thousand dollars on a horse without blinking an eye, knowing full well that he probably didn’t have two dollars in his pocket to get through the remainder of the week.
The rest of his time was spent in gin mills. Grandpa drank his way out of so many jobs that in his forties the only work he could get was picking tomatoes for Campbell’s Soup, which paid twenty-five cents a day. A monk found him in a ditch and brought him to Alcoholics Anonymous. Grandpa eventually became the head of AA in New Jersey, occasionally visiting Buffalo and lecturing his old bar buddies on the evils of demon rum. One friend remarked, “I preferred his performance of ‘Far, Far from Ypres.’”
As it turned out, Grandpa Watson’s finest hours may not have been during the war; over the last seventeen years of his life, he helped many people become sober, and the hundreds who turned up at his funeral spoke to the family through heartfelt tears about all he’d done for them.
Just before he died of lung cancer at the age of seventy-three, Grandpa’s old friend Anne McIthenney Matthews wrote in the Buffalo Courier-Express, “He worked the police beat in the Roaring 20s and his was one of the loudest roars, with antics to match anything in Chicago, New York, and the heyday of the no holds-barred cops and robbers rat-race of prohibition.”
From what I’ve heard about the funeral, had Damon Runyon still been around, he’d have picked up a few more characters for his famous underworld stories that eventually became the framework for the musical Guys and Dolls.
Having been at the dedication of the Peace Bridge, Grandpa
Watson wanted his ashes scattered from that spot into the Niagara River, where he’d enjoyed so many hours of fishing in his rowboat. My uncle and aunt fulfilled his wish while Mom waited in the car, fearful they’d be arrested.
***
Grandpa Watson had some lively brothers and sisters, which possibly accounts for Grandma’s favorite warning: Never put the Yorkshire pudding in the oven until you see the whites of your company’s eyes. When I was eleven, my mother announced that we were going to visit her father’s sister Catherine who was in a mental institution.
Despite being ninety-three years old, Aunt Kate didn’t seem like any nutter to me. She was sweet, partially lucid, and excellent at rhyming words and recalling song lyrics. It transpired that in the twenties, Kate’s mother had plans for her daughter to be an opera singer. Though talented, Kate had fallen in love with a young man whom she desperately wanted to marry. Back then a gal couldn’t do both. So she attempted suicide by leaping from the bridge in Delaware Park and at the age of twenty was institutionalized for the rest of her life. As we left Aunt Kate, my mother the psychiatric nurse said, “Nowadays if you take a lover’s leap they rarely even keep you for a couple days, just send you home with some medication and counseling twice a week.”
Mom also had an uncle who was an architect and dabbled in magic, specifically, making himself disappear for several days at a time.
However, my favorite relative to hear about was Mom’s aunt
Gertrude, another of her father’s sisters. Gertrude was a concert violinist and one of the first female Spiritualist ministers in the community of Lily Dale, located an hour south of Buffalo and better known as the Transylvania of Western New York. Spiritualists are members of a religious group that combines a belief in “the God of your own understanding” with the idea that it’s possible to live and communicate with the dead. Today in Lily Dale one can still find over fifty registered mediums, regular clairvoyant conferences, “development circles” that send and receive messages from the departed, hypnotherapy, past-life regression, future-life progression, and sessions in natural healing. “Lily Dale is to Spiritualism as Rome is to Catholicism,” according to local historian Ron Nagy.
Back in the 1800s, western and central New York State became known as the Burned-Over District, as it was roiled by the religious fervor of not only Spiritualists, but seers, Mormons, mystics, Millerites, the Chautauqua Movement, and other freethinkers. The Shakers first had a village outside Albany, where they practiced communal living
and celibacy while crafting unornamented, functional, finely made furniture. It’s difficult to grow a commune while practicing celibacy, so they eventually died out, but not before inventing the clothespin.
The Oneida Community, established near Syracuse, was populated by self-described “perfectionist vegetarian Bible communists.” These utopian visionaries, who practiced free love, are better remembered for incorporating themselves as the makers of quality flatware and having Charles Guiteau, who would go on to assas
sinate President James Garfield in 1881, as a member.
One had to listen quietly and carefully in order to patch together the family tree. Furthermore, it could only be done late at night, usually when cards were being dealt. During the daytime, recollections dimmed, becoming what seemed purposefully vague, and the information one did unearth was considerably less interesting.
***
My mother and her brother and sister grew up in Buffalo during the
forties, in a freewheeling household where the three high-spirited children outmatched the adults. The Second World War was on and this meant shortages and rationing of everything from meat, milk, and sugar to clothing, gas, oil, and coal. Forget about having any hosiery or butter. The only good thing was that with so many of the men off fighting, there wasn’t a shortage of employment for women.
Their mother worked as an aide at a nearby hospital. Back then, hospitals were also repositories for mental patients, and Grandma would often be kicked and scratched so that by the end of a shift she was covered with bruises and sometimes blood. Having attended the prestigious Nardin Academy for girls in Buffalo, Grandma had been trained to write neatly, set a proper table, and have good posture. Her parents had at one time been solidly middle class, but their finances were wiped out by the stock market crash in 1929.
Meantime, back at the family home, if their ambidextrous paternal grandmother Jessie wasn’t in the kitchen ironing with one hand and writing a letter with the other, it probably meant the ponies were running that day and she was off to the racetrack. To be sure, you could check the teapot in the kitchen cupboard and see if she’d taken her bankroll. My mom remembers her grandmother as a formidable opponent who moved down the street like a ship under full sail. She was one of the first women in the neighborhood to wear pants, she kept a bottle of Old Overholt Canadian rye above the sink, and she suggested that the children should go to an orphanage.
In Great-Grandma’s defense, at times the youthful inmates truly took over the asylum. Wooden slats meant for weighing down the window shades were employed as swords in epic battles, after which the broken pieces were shoved back into their cloth coverings. Parquet floors in the long hallway were ruined by roller-skating, and oftentimes a table lamp or knickknack paid the price.
Allegiances quickly shifted and when the two girls needed to retaliate against their brother, they utilized Camp Fire Girl creativity. One such escapade involved flooding the floor outside his door with water, placing a hundred tacks pointy side up, and yelling “Fire!” The girls first made sure that he was barefoot.
In the kitchen you could find Ichabod, a chicken that lived under the table. The yard was where the Watson trio invented games and played catch with snakes. They were usually flanked by a pack of hunting dogs—dogs hunting for a place to lie down, most notably the ABC mutts: Archie, Banjo, and Corky.
Without a television, the children easily amused themselves. When not trying to kill one another, they played guessing games such as twenty questions or a ship came into the harbor. If conversation lagged, their mother taught them the Gaelic she’d learned from her Irish father, Eugene Costello. Though all my mother can remember of this is how to make the sign of the cross and say “kiss my ass.”
Times were tough, with shortages during and after the war, and the month was always considerably longer than the money. Rarely was there enough food or clothing, and they were regularly without utilities. My mother has always threatened that she’s going to die young as a result of poor childhood nutrition, but now that she’s reached age seventy in fighting form, I’m no longer convinced.
Growing up in reduced circumstances was something my mother would never forget, particularly banging the broom against the stairwell to scare away the rats before going down to fetch the coal, if they were fortunate enough to have any. Mom later said the only good thing about having a small bathroom is that when you are sick and unsure of where the most activity is going to take place, you can sit on the toilet while leaning over to vomit in the tub.
Six
When Johnny Comes Typing Home…
Wedding-Bell Blues
My father’s childhood was lived slightly above the poverty line. And it was much more sober, in every sense of the word. He was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near the George
Washington Bridge, on May 20, 1931, and remained there throughout the Depression. When Dad was five years old, his mother took him by ship to Denmark to meet his relatives. A New York neighbor recalls him returning six months later yammering away in Danish and confused that old friends could no longer understand him. Shortly thereafter he was speaking English again and can’t remember a word of Danish to this day. It didn’t help that he wasn’t allowed to speak Danish in his home.
The European immigrants who arrived at the beginning of the last century were not always interested in preserving their culture. They’d left for a reason, whether to escape religious and political persecution, family expectations, or poverty, and they were fixed on becoming full-fledged, freedom-loving, flag-waving Americans. That meant taking American names, speaking English, and eating hamburgers, though sometimes kosher burgers or ones drenched in Limburger.
By 1941, Grandpa Pedersen had saved enough money to pursue his dream of starting a Scandinavian smorgasbord restaurant. The Scandia Arms opened in Mamaroneck, twenty miles north of Manhattan, with Grandpa as proprietor and Grandma as hostess. The first night was a huge success, except for the two goldfish swimming in a bowl on the buffet table, meant to be a decorative touch. Grandpa put a candle underneath the fish bowl, and they were accidentally boiled.
As bad luck would have it, the United States entered World War II a few months later and gas shortages sent the business the way of the goldfish. People couldn’t afford to take their cars out, and energy use was rationed.
In debt, Grandpa moved the family to Huntington, Long Island, to work at a restaurant owned by his Danish friend Peter Nielsen. The pressing need to pay off creditors and support his family through the difficult postwar period kept Grandpa from ever again opening his own establishment. He’d work as a waiter for the rest of his life. And although Grandma was bright and ambitious, she was a woman of her time, which was not all that great a time to be a woman, and would remain a housewife. Dad and Grandpa always said that if Grandma had been born fifty years later she’d have run a large corporation, as opposed to just investing in them.
Growing up, my father was tall, skinny, and fast—six foot two inches tall, 150 pounds, and all legs. He claims to have taken up table tennis in high school to avoid getting pulverized, reasoning that when the bullies came looking for trouble, one would recognize him and say, “Hey, that’s John. He’s the Ping-Pong champion of Long Island.” The strategy worked.
After high school, Dad went to junior college and studied office machines, accounting, bookkeeping, and English. Upon graduating in 1951 he received job offers from Shell, Mobil, and IBM. However, the offer he couldn’t refuse came from Uncle Sam, full time and all expenses paid. Drafted into the United States Army for the job of fighting the Korean War, he found the bullets a bit too widespread and effective to call it a police action. Or a conflict, as some politicians referred to it, as in “We are at conflict!” And though it would later be called The Forgotten
War, Dad remembers Korea all too well.
Following basic training, he was shipped to the front line where, despite his two years spent learning office skills (Dad can type faster than you can drive), he was made a forward observer. This entailed darting around enemy territory and then telling the fellows with the heavy artillery where to shoot. The position carried with it the kind of stress level that encouraged Dad to make full use of his cigarette ration, and thus began a beautiful friendship with nicotine.
After Dad spent several months dodging cross fire, digging foxholes, and sharing tents with poisonous snakes, Uncle Sam realized a mistake had been made and recalled him for a clerical job in Seoul. They’d somehow
overlooked the office-skills part of his résumé, and even more desirable than GI Joes were GI No-Typos. The problem was you didn’t have to stay in the army as long if you were being shot at, as opposed to wielding correction fluid. More important, at least to Dad, was that he’d trained and fought with a bunch of guys for almost a year. What are you supposed to say to your buddies: “Uh, yeah, they found out I can alphabetize faster than I can shoot”?
When Dad was discharged from the army in 1953, he returned to his parents’ two-bedroom apartment on Long Island, dumped his uniform, dog tags, three bronze stars, and assorted medals in the garbage, and went back to school under the GI Bill to become a court reporter.
***
Though times were tough in the Depression, as well as during and after World War II, my father’s family always had enough to eat. It helped that Grandpa was employed at a restaurant and was best friends with the owner and chef. But they survived largely because he worked hard as a waiter seven days a week. (Grandma was just embarking upon her stock trading.)
Grandpa began work in the early afternoon, leaving an hour before Dad returned from school and arriving home long after his son was in bed. He waited tables all day on Saturday, Sunday, and holidays. When Dad sang a solo a cappella version of “Old Man River” at his high school graduation in a stunning bass voice, Grandpa had no idea that his son was able to sing at all.
My parents are both from the waste-not-want-not era where
everything was used, conserved, and reused. As a result, while I was growing up in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, there was never any talk about “the good old days” of the thirties, forties, and fifties.
Despite straight As in all her academic subjects, my mother took the secretarial track in high school, which was common for girls at that time. After graduating in 1955, she found a job at the unemployment office in downtown Buffalo. Personally, I’ve always liked the ironic sound of “I work at the unemployment office.” Mom earned eighty dollars a week while the claimants received about seventy, but they only had to come in one day a week instead of five. It was mostly clerical work and typing forms in triplicate. If there’s one genetic marker that runs on both sides of the family, it’s for typing.
Buffalo Gal Page 5