Sunday, June 16, 2013

MY OLD MAN

For Father's Day weekend I got to see all my kids and grandkids up in The Berkshires, including hearing my oldest son play at The Red Lion Den in Stockbirdge last night with the Transmitters, a mostly instrumental trio that reinterpreted some funk, rock'n'roll, surfer and soundtrack music like great jazz improvisers.

But today I'm thinking of my old man and since I love all the shots friends have posted of their fathers, and I just dig old photos and what they reveal about us and the people and styles and times that we come out of, I thought I'd share some photos of him, starting with before I was born:

Oldest known photo of my father, we guess in his late teens or early twenties with a cousin and aunt that was given to my daughter by an old woman she got to know in The Berkshires who turned out to be my father's cousin, this taken when he visited them in Massachusetts.
My old man and a buddy behind him on a trip in the 1920s in what may be Florida, where he spent the week between Xmas and New Years all his life as his only vacation, cause he could go to the track there in winter. 
My three brothers (who survived childhood) with our father in the '30s at my maternal grandma's down the Jersey shore in Belmar.
Around the time I was born, down the Jersey shore with his youngest brother John behind him and a friend behind him, c. 1941.
1942, me in my baby dress on my mother's lap and all my siblings (except the one who passed as an infant before I was born)—this photo disappeared with the printer who printed one of my early books (chapbook) THE SOUTH ORANGE SONNETS.
Me in my mother's arms with my siblings and old man WWII.
Jersey shore at my mother's mother with her, some siblings, my mother, and my father with his hands touching the big troublemakers in the family, my brother Robert, before he became a cop, and me with my summer burnt toast tan 1950s.
Me and my sister Irene in front of my old man's home repair business, where I worked and she had obviously stopped by maybe to visit me, 1950s.
In the 1960s, after I left home, my old man was given a political appointment job for being a great ward healer, getting out the vote for the Essex County Democratic machine in the 1950s and early '60s, so they made this seventh grade dropout "secretary and executive assistant to the Essex County Shade Tree commission"—but being a stand up guy, he actually did the work and taught himself the names of all the trees, and had more planted which he's pretending to be part of here by standing in the street with a shovel!


10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Michael,
You honor your family with "My Old Man."
Harry Northup

Lally said...

Thanks Harry, and you do yours in your poems.

William McPherson said...

Great piece, Michael, and great photos.

William McPherson said...

P.S. "My Life 2" is also great. So simple and so powerful.

Anonymous said...

so nice..thanks for posting

suzanne

AlamedaTom said...

Lal: Great stuff. Makes me realize how lucky we are to have been born into a time after photography had been invented.

~ Willy

Lally said...

thanks Bill and Suzanne and totally agree Willy

tpw said...

Great photos. I must have known about the disappearance of the SOS cover shot, but I'd forgotten. A real loss, but at least you still have a version of it.

JenW said...

Wonderful pictures of your father and family. Love looking at all the old photos too. It's pretty cool when you see a grandparent or parent "young" and it's almost like looking at the younger generation. Genes are funny. And that tan you sported- Im thinking Irish skin wasn't meant to get that much sun...
(We call that burnt sienna here :-)

Lally said...

tpw, yeah, the collage of family photos on the back cover went with him too...and JenW, definitely not meant to tan the way we used to, by getting blistering burns several times in a row at the beginning of summer, bad enough to put me in bed for a day or two then back to the sun, crazy micks...