For Father’s Day

myfather1944wmjgarbusblog

My father, I thought at first 1944, when he was age 23 (but it may be him at age 17 in 1938). My grandmother named him Vladimir Stanislaus, but the nurses wrote down William John. He spoke only Polish until age 6 when he started to NYC public schools. He was a great reader and some of my happiest memories are of him reading aloud to me — the night he read RLS ‘s “The Sire de Maltroit’s Door” and “A Lodging for the Night” remains with me.

There was a time in our middle years (he in his 50s to 60s, me in my 30s to 40s) when he and I would phone one another once a week and talk for an hour. I remember how monthly faithfully for years he’d send WBAI in NYC $200! he must have heard Amy Goodman when she did Pacifica Radio. He would have eagerly followed Bernie Sanders’ campaign.

He read British novels (and re-introduced me to Trollope by giving me a copy of The Vicar of Bullhampton in 1988), but though he read Sayer’s novels (sand liked Nine Tailors and Five Red Herrings), he disliked the snobbery and to him effete quality of her conception of Lord Peter, so might not have been keen on my pseudonym of

Miss Sylvia Drake (from Gaudy Night).

Author: ellenandjim

Ellen Moody holds a Ph.D in British Literature and taught in American senior colleges for more than 40 years. Since 2013 she has been teaching older retired people at two Oscher Institutes of Lifelong Learning, one attached to American University (Washington, DC) and other to George Mason University (in Fairfax, Va). She is also a literary scholar with specialties in 18th century literature, translation, early modern and women's studies, film, nineteenth and 20th century literature and of course Trollope. For Trollope she wrote a book on her experiences of reading Trollope on the Internet with others, some more academic style essays, two on film adaptations, the most recent on Trollope's depiction of settler colonialism: "On Inventing a New Country." Here is her website: http://www.jimandellen.org/ellen/ No part of this blog may be reproduced without express permission from the author/blog owner. Linking, on the other hand, is highly encouraged!

8 thoughts on “For Father’s Day”

    1. He was a kind supportive father to me and died in his later sixties. If I may I’ll mention (in relation to your on your father, my husband died of cancer metastasized into his liver in his sixties so that struck a chord in me too).

  3. Richard, my cousin: If not for your comment, I would have guessed this was taken when he worked at the CCC. I remember his stories from back then.

    Me: He’s a little too old; he was at the CCC before he was 17. it was placed in the album I have in the period where he’s courting my mother or just before. He looks like he does when he is working at the gov’t (after 18). He took my mother to a camp for their honeymoon in 1945 and I’ve wondered if this place was the same one — I”ve some photos of that. Let us recall that earlier time though and how he was removed from the physical labor and made company clerk.

    Richard: “That’s the story I remember most. Very few could fill out the pay slips to get their pay.”

    Me: Ah. I forgot that detail. Yes. We probably remember different details. How sad, Richard, they were near illiterates: it reminds us that maybe public education is not so much worse than it was, how few people then did finish even high school. The photo does look like Oregon (rather than Connecticut): we have no one who remembers from living it to ask.

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