Month: June 2022

My dad spent considerable time writing this. Although my dad has written a couple of novels for public consumption, I do not believe this was written with the intention of being published. He is getting older and wanted to pass on information about himself and his family before that information was lost to time.  My dad is 77 in the picture above and getting ready to perform in the pit band for his musical ,”The Drowsy Chaperone”.

The book describes very humble beginnings. When my dad was young, he lived in Chicago with both his parents, his sister, his brother, and his grandmother – all in a one bedroom apartment.  He worked delivering meat for a local butcher as kid. This allowed him a little bit of spending money.  When he got a little older, his family moved to a two bedroom house that also had a basement. My grandfather, who worked for many years as a carpenter, later added a level to this house which had an apartment that my parents and I lived in when I was born.  The house is still there, but no one in my family owns it anymore.

My father was a musician for most of his life, so much of the autobiography centers around music and musicians he worked with.  He discovered the saxophone in his teens and devoted most of his early years to mastering it. He has some old 78 rpm records he played on after just 18 months of practice.  Being a decent musician may have saved his life. Before he was to be drafted, he auditioned for the army band and was accepted. He still had to do boot camp like everyone else, but army bands aren’t known for taking much enemy fire.

He finished his military obligation, which allowed him to see much of Europe, and entered college. He worked as a musician and used the GI bill to pay for college.  Around this time he also met my mother who was fairly new to the United States. She grew up in Switzerland and moved to the US with her mom, knowing no English, when she was 19.  My dad and his army band buddy, who happened to be named Buddy, hosted a party in the apartment they shared. My mother lived in a neighboring apartment and attended the party. I am told it was love at first sight.  They married a few years later and my mom gave birth to me a few years after that.

My dad earned his degree in French during that time.  If you are wondering what sort of an occupation is available to someone with a French degree, the answer is, “I don’t know.”  My dad substitute taught at a high school and worked for a while selling instruments to school music programs. He had no insurance when I was born, but my mom did. She worked at a camera store. Despite my mother having insurance, the expense of my birth was not covered. Only the insurance of the father could pay for the birth of a child at the time.  You can’t make this stuff up.  I think I was, “paid for”, when I was about five at which point my parents also had my sister.  My dad continued to work as a musician on nights and weekends, but got a regular job at the post office.  This afforded the whole family insurance and a stable income.

My father worked at the post office for 32 years. He played “gigs” on evenings and weekends.  I rarely saw my dad on Friday or Saturday night.  It seems normal when that is your life, but looking back, it was sort of an odd way to grow up.  When my dad was home, he was always practicing his instruments – he added flute, clarinet, harmonica, and keyboards to his repertoire, in addition to the saxophone.  I found it annoying at time when I was growing up. I could not watch a tv show or talk on the phone without live music playing. Now I look back fondly on those times. My childhood had an actual soundtrack.

After my dad retired from the post office he began devoting most of his free time to writing, musicals, plays, songs, and novels.  He had about a dozen musicals and plays produced locally.  He still feels as though he has never “made it”.  As DJ’s became much more prominent at parties and weddings, my dad’s opportunities to earn money playing dried up quite a bit.  The majority of his work in the last two decades was split between two bands – Jazz Spectrum and the Melodaires.  The Melodaires have become defunct, but Jazz Spectrum still plays fairly regularly.  My father, up until recently, has also taught music a couple of days a week to keep himself busy.  He is now 86 years old.  He has recently had a medical event and is convalescing. Prayers are welcome.

 

Here is a powerful quote from the book:

The present system has enabled capitalists to make laws in their own interests to the injury and oppression of the workers.
It has made the name Democracy, for which our forefathers fought and died, a mockery and a shadow, by giving to property an unproportionate amount of representation and control over Legislation.
It has enabled capitalists . . . to secure government aid, inland grants and money loans, to selfish railroad corporations, who, by monopolizing the means of transportation are enabled to swindle both the producer and the consumer. …
It has allowed the capitalists, as a class, to appropriate annually 5/6 of the entire production of the country. . . .
It has therefore prevented mankind from fulfilling their natural destinies on earth—crushed out ambition, prevented marriages or caused false and unnatural ones—has shortened human life, destroyed morals and fostered
crime, corrupted judges, ministers, and statesmen, shattered confidence, love and honor among men, and made life a selfish, merciless struggle for existence instead of a noble and generous struggle for perfection, in which equal advantages should be given to all, and human lives relieved from an unnatural and degrading competition for bread.

The above was written by the Workingmen’s party in Chicago in 1876.

The following quote is from  Henry Adams in 1887 regarding President Grover Cleveland.

We are here plunged in politics funnier than words can express. Very great issues are involved. . . . But the amusing thing is that no one talks about real interests. By common consent they agree to let these alone. We are afraid to
discuss them. Instead of this the press is engaged in a most amusing dispute whether Mr. Cleveland had an illegitimate child and did or did not live with more than one mistress.

Unfortunately, not much seems to have changed.  The problems the country faced 140 years ago are still around.

This book provides all the US history that was likely missing from what you were taught in an American grade school or high school. It starts with the bizarre celebration of Christopher Columbus. This “adventurer” and “discoverer” was treated pretty well by most of the indigenous people he encountered in the Americas. In return, he enslaved, tortured, and stole from them. Columbus, despite popular historical references, was nothing more than a slave trader and plunderer sponsored by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain.  His sole purpose was to gather as many slaves and as much gold as he could to make his explorations profitable to himself and his sponsors.  Hard to understand why he has a holiday. He was not even the first European to travel to the Americas. Leif Erikson reached the Americas 500 years before Columbus.  This has been known since evidence of this was found in the 1960’s with excavations at L’Anse aux Meadows, on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, but the public schools were still teaching the Columbus version of events when I went to school in the 1980’s. Why?

The book, at over 700 pages, takes quite a while to read. It fills in the real reasons for most of the conflicts and wars the US participated in. There is a recurring theme in these motives – all hinge on keeping overseas commerce healthy for large corporations.  The book also describes the systematic mistreatment of native Americans and other minorities by the government.

The final chapter of the book is somewhat shocking. It outlines how the government is used by the wealthiest members of society to create turmoil between the middle and lower classes, so that those two classes focus their anger and attention on one another while the wealthy control most of the resources and garner little attention.  The book basically calls for citizens to overthrow this government in favor of one that distributes the abundant resources more fairly.  The author, Howard Zinn held a PhD in history and taught at both Spelman College and Boston University.  He was asked to leave Spelman after administrators feared he was radicalizing students in the 1960’s.  I have a feeling he may have been doing just that, but it may just be down to semantics – was he “radicalizing” or just educating students to the slanted way the government was working against most of his students?  Zinn also served as a bombardier for the US Army during World War II, bombing targets in Berlin, Hungary, and France.  He had a very anti-war stance in his later life and learned that one of his bombing missions in France had wiped out a small, but ancient city and killed over a thousand French civilians.  Zinn described how the bombing was ordered—three weeks before the war in Europe ended—by military officials who were, in part, motivated more by the desire for their own career advancement than in legitimate military objectives.  This was likely the start of his distrust of the military and government.