Golfing With Dad

Dad at work. Associated Truck Lines.

I don't golf. I don't like to golf, it's frustrating and requires a lot of walking. Now that, that is established, let me tell you about my phone call with my Uncle Joe. Uncle Joe called the other day to check up on me and Mark. My eighty seven year old uncle called because he was worried about me and Mark. Let's just stop and think about that for a moment....   Anyway, during that call with my uncle and aunt, we discussed my dad and wondered how did he come to be such a cusser. One of the enduring memories of my dad was his cursing. I suggested he learned it when he was in the Army Air Corps during WWII. Uncle Joe felt it was probably something he picked up from the drivers and dockhands during his decades working for a trucking company.

This memory of Dad involves golfing. One bright Saturday morning my Dad, my brother, and I went golfing. It was the very first and the last time I ever golfed. We drove out to a small golf club near Orlando, Florida. Luckily for me it was not crowded. Just our trio and a few others, including a group of elderly ladies. So I tee off and my ball travels about five feet. Dad starts cursing, "What the hell are you doing? Goddamn, you gotta hit it better than that." First hole probably took me ten strokes. Beyond that things got worse and Dad continued to swear. He swore when I fucked up, and he swore when things didn't go well for him. Meanwhile, my brother seemed to be disturbed by all this swearing. Especially when the group of elderly ladies caught up with us. That was when my brother Dave, pulled Dad aside and asked him to calm it down. After all, this golf course was owned by the Baptist Church and those were some very genteel Baptist ladies that we let play through.

The Catch Basin on Wellington

After a few months of home ownership, I discovered that my shower and sinks wouldn't drain properly. My brother the plumber came over and diagnosed the problem as a full 'catch basin'. He took me out into my backyard and pointed at what looked like a little sewer. "There, that's your problem. We have to clean that out." A catch basin is a large tank that is placed underground in your drain line to the sewer. The purpose of it is to catch all the crap that is flushed down the drain that the city doesn't want in their sewer. Now the proper way to clean out this tank is to bring in a truck with a pump and suck all the gunk out into their tank, which they then take away and out of your life. What we did was to get two fifty five gallon drums, then take buckets to scoop out the slop, fill the drums with the slop, and then roll them out to the alley for the garbage men to pick up. One interesting thing we found out is that the people who lived in this house before me ate large quantities of SpaghettiOs®. It wasn't just a few SpaghettiOs® floating on top of the slop. No, almost all of the waste in the catch basin consisted of SpaghettiOs®. We proceeded to fill one drum with the slop/SpaghettiOs® and managed to get it out to the alley. It was when we were trying to wrestle the second drum, heavy with slop/SpaghettiOs® out to the alley that it all went wrong. As my brother and I pushed and pulled the drum towards the alley, one of us got out of sync. The slop sloshed against the side of the drum like a wave against the shore, and flew straight up and out at me. It happened so fast that I didn't have time to cover my face or even close my eyes. In seconds I was tasting the SpaghettiOs® of the previous residents. It was all over me, in my hair, on my clothes, in my face. I stood there screaming in disgust, with slop and SpaghettiOs® dripping off me. To this day, the sight of a can of SpaghettiOs® will trigger my gag reflex. 

The Backyard on Wellington

The Garage on Wellington

When I bought my house on Wellington Avenue in 1975, it came with a garage. A very old garage with barn doors instead of what we now call a proper garage door. Those doors were problematic when it snowed because you had to shovel all the snow out of the way to open them. So I really never kept my everyday transportation in that garage. Instead I looked upon that garage as an excuse to buy a series of things that I couldn't have if I was still living the life of an apartment dweller. First up, a well beaten 1966 Chevrolet Impala Super Sport convertible. This car was in such bad shape that the driver's seat was bolted to a couple of two by fours because the floor pan had rotted away. But I saw that car for sale on the side of the road and I had to have it. I enjoyed it for about one month before I realized it needed to go. I sold it to some Puerto Rican guy who test drove it down Lincoln Avenue at fifty miles per hour with me in the passenger seat, crapping my pants. I replaced the Chevy with a beautiful eighteen foot long, wooden sailboat. I saw that boat for sale on the side of the road and I had to have it. It just fit inside the garage if I opened the window at the back of the garage so that the mast could stick out. I took that boat out on Lake Michigan where I discovered it had the sailing characteristics of a pile of lumber strapped together with a sail attached. It didn't move very fast, and if the wind was under ten miles per hour it didn't move at all. I didn't use it much after the day the wind died out and I sheared a pin in the outboard motor. We were stuck a couple of miles out in Lake Michigan until a good Samaritan towed us back.

 So, I had the boat on one side of that old garage, but still had room for a car. Driving down an old country road one day outside Chicago I spotted the most beautiful 1955 Studebaker. It was for sale on the side of the road and I had to have it.

I now have a very nice garage with one of those automatic garage doors and room for two cars. If I get rid of a bunch of that junk that seems to have gathered on either side inside the garage, I'll bet I could fit a second vehicle in there. Maybe a nice antique Ford. They're small and wouldn't take up much room at all. You never know what I might find for sale on the side of the road. 

1323 West Wellington

Proud Owner of 1323 Wellington

In 1975 I bought a house on Wellington Avenue in Chicago. I paid $18,000 dollars for that building. It was a frame home with two apartments, an attic, and an ancient garage out back. It was run down, had only space heaters for Chicago's harsh winters, termite damage, and a chain link fence around it. I lived there for three years. In those three years I had two tenants. One that I liked a lot, and one that I had to evict. The thing about that house is that it taught me a great deal about real estate and timing. You see, I paid $18k for it in 1975 and sold it in early 1978 for $22k. That house was in the heart of the Lakeview neighborhood. A very working class place in 1975, but move ahead ten years and it was suddenly the gentrified 'Yuppie' destination. See what happened there? If I had hung on for just seven more years I could have sold that rickety dump for half a million dollars. Instead I sold it and took my money out to California. Not that I didn't enjoy my year in California. At least half of that year was fun, until I ran through my little real estate nest egg. So yes, I learned something from that experience and never sold a home short again. Termites, bad neighbors, the lust to move on to another state, none of those things would ever again lure me away from the prize. I recently looked up that property to see what it was worth today. It's worth $1,200,000.  Yes, eighteen thousand in 1975 and over a million dollars today. But I don't feel that bad because this is what it looks like today. 

Yep, they tore down that dump and built this.

Erin Go Bar, But the Bar Was Closed

I've never been a big fan of Saint Patrick's Day. The green beer, the crowds in the bars, I just don't get it. Okay, snakes. Saint Patrick got the snakes out of Ireland. Apparently he sent them to the New World in the form of politicians. Anyway, I'd like to know how did it go from snakes to blind drunkenness? And then there is my favorite movie channel, Turner Classic Movies. All day long they play corny Irish themed movies on March 17th. It's almost as bad as when they play all those horrible Elvis Presley movies on Elvis' birthday. To top that all off, every year Mark insists that we have corned beef, with stewed cabbage, potatoes, and carrots on this day. I do like the corned beef, but that cabbage. Pee Yew. I hate the cabbage and the cooked carrots, and those potatoes have no flavor at all. Simply boiled potatoes. What a waste of a meal. No, Saint Patrick's Day means nothing to me. I will still have my one vodka cocktail in the evening, but I won't be going out to some bar to drink some green beer. Besides, all the bars have been shut down by the mayor. Cheers!

A Repost from 2009

The Happiest Place On Earth

When I was nineteen, two of my cousins and I took a road trip from Chicago to California via the legendary 'Route Sixty Six'. One of the highlights of that trip was our visit to Disneyland, something I had been dreaming of since I was a five year old kid running around in a Davy Crockett coon skin hat, and a fringed jacket made out of vinyl. It was kind of pathetic, seeing a long haired, nineteen year old guy riding around in Alice's tea cup, and flying around on the Dumbo ride, but I had to fulfill that childhood dream.

Back when I had first heard of Disneyland, I knew that there wasn't a chance in hell that my dad could ever take us there. Our summer vacations always centered around a rented cottage on some muddy little lake, within four hours driving time of our town. Those vacations were always punctuated by angry outbursts by my dad, caused by the inevitable mishap, calamity, or misdeed by one of his children. The trip I remember most clearly is where the rooftop carrier, along with all of our luggage, went flying off the top of the station wagon, while we cruised down the highway at sixty miles per hour. The car immediately filled with the screams of children seeing their bathing suits and toys scattering across the pavement, while my dad bellowed and cursed from the front seat. I believe I might have actually heard a few new swear words that day as my dad was scooping up our clothes from the highway.

That was our vacation back then. So imagine my surprise to learn from my mom that after I had grown up and moved out on my own, my dad had taken the second tier of his offspring, the six youngest, on an airplane trip to California, and Disneyland. My jealousy was short lived however, when I listened to my mom describe the fun that ensued when they got to Los Angeles. Dad found that their hotel reservations were not honored, and the car rental agency tried to give Dad, Mom, and their six children, a subcompact car. I'm sure my little sisters had heard most of my dads repertoire of cursing before, but on that vacation he just might have kicked it up a notch.