Wiser With Age

Tag: son

  • My father and his replacements

    My father and his replacements

    All through my boyhood, my father worked from early in the morning until late at night. I spent a lot of time missing him. When would he come back, I often wondered.

    My grandfather fit the bill as my old man for decades. He took me to his office with him, and to baseball games at Yankee Stadium. He set the standard in taking the time to ask me how I was doing in school and what I planned to do for a living. And that worked fine until he died in 1981.

    I wanted my Uncle Leonard to take over for my absentee father. He was worldly and witty and accomplished — a Yale Law School graduate with a French wife and an English sports car. And to his everlasting credit, he, too, tried to play back-up.

    Once I became a father myself, I told myself everything between me and my Dad would someday change for the better. He would take more of an interest in me — and more important, in my wife and our son and daughter.

    But he remained elusive. And then, in 1997, at age 70, he died. Whatever opportunity once existed for us to be a father and son, at least as I imagined fathers and sons should be, was now suddenly gone for good. I cried at his funeral as I’d never cried before or have since.

    My search for an honorary old man resumed. I reconnected with Stanley, a former boss, recently retired and almost 30 years my senior. We became good friends. I drove out to Long Island regularly to visit him and go for walks with him in a waterfront park. At least until he, too, died, in 2011, at age 88.

    So it still goes for me, even now, at 66. I’ve stayed in touch with another long-ago boss, Morty, now 92. We’ve lunched together and messaged each other on Facebook. He’s taken an interest in my family and done me more than a few favors professionally.

    I also came to know John, 77, a retired doorman. And grown friendly with Ron, 83, a retired police officer. I’ve stayed in touch with Charlie, 74, once my next-door neighbor and a former printer turned security guard.

    I’ve now looked my whole life for a man who would put his arm around my shoulder and guide me through whatever came. An old man who, having gone around the block more than I had, could act, if only part-time, like a father to me. Set an example for me in how to be a father myself.

    Tell me, as I wish to this day I could hear my own father tell me, that I’ve turned out okay.

    Finally, my old man would show me how to be an old man myself. He would serve as a lighthouse beaming a signal through the darkness of the future to bring me safely to shore.

    But now I’m fast running out of old men to call my own.

    At what age does an adult outgrow the need for a Dad, if ever? Lately, I suspect that I’m getting too old to feel this biological impulse anymore, that it’s too late in the game for me to entertain such expectations anymore. If I’m to be realistic, I have to recognize that I’m already down to my last old man. If I’m still to look for an old man to call my own, an old man who will be around as long as I’m around, I now know just where to find him.

    The mirror.

    Bob Brody, an executive and essayist in Forest Hills, NY, is author of “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.”

  • Author Bob Brody: A note of thanks, on my dad’s behalf

    Author Bob Brody: A note of thanks, on my dad’s behalf


     

    A woman with short hair wearing red necklace.
    Bob Brody’s father, Lee Brody, as a boy. (Courtesy Bob Brody)

    Ask me for my favorite Thanksgiving story and here’s what I’ll now have to tell you.

    In 1930, a certain 4-year-old in Newark had yet to speak a single word. So his mother took her first-born son to see a series of physicians for a diagnosis.

    It turned out that my future father had been born almost completely deaf.

    Two of those doctors recommended sending Lee Brody to a private school, the Central Institute for the Deaf (CID), a kind of Harvard for deaf children, more than 800 miles away in St. Louis, Mo.

    My grandparents, despite such heavy expense during the depths of the Great Depression — my Poppa ran a saloon — took that advice.

    My father arrived at CID in 1931 and graduated in 1941. There, he learned to speak, to listen, to read lips and to function as well as any hearing person. That much I knew.

    But then, two years ago, some old letters arrived in my sister’s mailbox, and from an unlikely source: the woman my father had lived with after he divorced my mother. We’d had no contact with her in the 18 years since my father died in 1997. Our family had long presumed such letters to be either non-existent or long lost.

    One of the letters revealed a reality about my father that I neither knew nor ever had cause to suspect. In 1936, with my father now 10 years old and already five years into his stay at CID, my Poppa ran out of money to foot the bill. My father was pulled out of his classes to return to Newark and enroll in a public school.

    My Nana then evidently wrote a letter to Dr. Max Goldstein, the prominent ear, nose and throat physician who had founded CID in 1914 and served as its executive director. She informed him that her son was performing poorly in the new school and pleaded for the institute to accept him back.

    In response, Dr. Goldstein wrote, “I can readily appreciate your own disappointment in his limited progress (in Newark) . . . and your satisfaction with Irwin’s progress while with us.†She had “made a very frank statement of your family’s financial affairs.â€

    Dr. Goldstein then agreed to lower the annual tuition fee for my father to $900.

    “I hope this concession in the tuition fee will make it possible for you and Mr. Brody to have Irwin return to CID next September,†he wrote, “for I know it will be for the child’s good and will contribute much to your happiness.â€

    As a result, my father returned to CID the following semester and stayed there for five more years. He would graduate from Weequahic High School in Newark, and then from Rutgers, among the few deaf students ever to do so.

    Much later, my father — now age 42, with a wife, two children and a full-time job managing real estate — founded a nonprofit organization, New York-New Jersey Phone-TTY, headquartered in Hackensack. Partnering with IBM and AT&T, among others, he was instrumental in establishing a network of specially adapted teletypewriters, or TTYs, from coast to coast.

    As a result, millions of people with hearing impairments could, in written messages transmitted instantaneously, “speak†with each other as never before. The TTYs also connected the deaf and hard-of-hearing for the first time to police stations, firehouses, hospitals, airports and government.

    Later, my father received a personal letter of appreciation from then-President Ronald Reagan. Bell Telephone’s Pioneers Club inducted him as only its 29th member since 1911. The Stevens Institute of Technology held a memorial service in his honor that drew 500 mourners. Gallaudet University, the world’s only higher education institution for the hearing-impaired, named a scholarship after him.

    My father confided to me more than once throughout my boyhood that without his education at CID, he might never have accomplished much of anything. And he often expressed his gratitude, justifiably so, to his parents for funding it all at considerable sacrifice. No doubt he learned only later about the letter his mother sent to CID arguing her case for his return.

    And so a certain question now haunts me. What would have happened to him without Dr. Goldstein’s altruism? We’ll never know. So, in keeping with the spirit of Thanksgiving, Dr. Goldstein, I thank you. As a pioneer in education, you made possible a pioneer in communications. I thank you for seeing the future in my father.

    This article was originally published on NYDailyNews.com. Bob Brody is the author of the new memoir, “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age,†and you can read more about him here.Â