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Reflection for September 4, 2005

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Labor Day is more like Memorial Day for me. It reminds me of all who died in more ways than one during the Great Depression of the 1930's. It brings back memories of my father who was a laboring man, who lifted things, climbed ladders, worked with his hands. He started as a roofer in his mid-teens. I have a photograph of him taken during a lunch break on a Philadelphia rooftop with several other grimy looking fellows, all wearing those caps that were the fashion of the working class. You can almost smell the tar. By the time he was twenty he had become an excellent sheet metal man, making rain gutters, vents, panels, things that required even artistic skill. And everyday from 1926 until 1947 he recorded in a notebook his work site, hours and incidental costs. Here's a sample of what he wrote:

1926 - Sept. 9, Tasker St., Spout, 8 hours, fare 13 cents; . . Sept 11, 3rd & Jefferson, Skylight, 10 hours, fare 9 cents; . . . Oct. 15, Rain; . . .
1927 - Jan. 7, Villanova, Repair, 8 hours, phone 5 cents; . . . Jan. 8, Snow; . . Feb. 9, Married Mary; . . .
1928 - Jan. 20, 34th and Spruce, 8 hours; . . . Jan. 21, Baby Born, 12.45 AM; Jan. 22, 34th & Spruce, 8 hours, fare 10 cents.

Though interspersed with brief personal notes, it was on the whole a record of hard work and (after 1929) of months when he faithfully recorded: "No work, No work, No work". A record, too, of weekly salaries of $13 until the WPA hired him in the late 1930's to work at the Navy Yard for an incredible $42 a week! It's not that he was without ambition. Entering the Roaring Twenties, he shared the hopes of his generation. He dreamed of suburban happiness. He crooned songs about "a smiling face, a fire place, a cozy room; a place to nestle in where the roses bloom". He danced the Charleston. But by 1943 somehow his youth was gone. Shamed during the Depression years by a foreclosure on his first home, forced to crowd his family into his mother's house, forced for a time to go on Relief, he had begun to drink in a counter-productive effort to quell his frustration.

By that time I was long gone! By the age of fifteen I had developed a strong distaste for twentieth century economics and went off to live in the thirteenth century of the Poverello: I entered a Franciscan monastery. I never realized how much that added to his sense of despair - because I never felt we had any real relationship. I felt myself to be a mere inhabitant of his household, a bemused, often frightened observer of his decline and fall. I found out later he often wept over the emptiness of my room.

He lies buried today in the cemetery of Mother of Sorrows parish in Philadelphia. How appropriate a name, for the spires of Mother of Sorrows now look down upon a sprawling African-American ghetto where young men in their struggle to survive feel the same confusion and rage my father felt - a rage God himself must share as he beholds so many millions of his children laboring simply to survive in a world rich enough to support and promote the human potential of us all. I used to fear your rage, my father. I understand it now, and make my own the dirge Dylan Thomas wept over his father:

Do not go gentle into that good night, / Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light . . . .// And you, my father, there on the sad height, / Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. / Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

(Reprint from 1993)

-- Geoff Wood