Fathers and Sons

Copyright, Joe Baker

Boiling Springs Pa, 2013

 

It’s the ornate 1920’s iron railing of the staircase that triggers the memory. The staircase leads to the train platform at the Harrisburg station. I am maybe five years old, and my grandfather and I have just walked down the staircase from the station to meet my dad. Pop, my dad called him Pop, held my hand coming down the stairs and the other hand reached up to grip the fancy hand rail. Dad is coming
home from Johnstown, or maybe Philly, from some Godforsaken place he had to go to work. When Dad arrives, he sweeps me up in his arms, and I am enveloped by love. This is one of my earliest conscious memories, a fragmentary wraith of neural activity and emotion more than 50 years old. It is now faded and worn to just a few threads, but it is precious to me and I hold it close.

I have just descended those same steps again. I am ensconced in a train, on the same line Dad took to Philly and Pop maintained during his decades working for the Pennsylvania Railroad. I am going to a funeral in New York for my first cousin Bob. Bob, 79, passed from this world a few days ago unexpectedly following a grave but fairly common heart operation from which he was expected to recover. The funeral will be tough. He raised five kids to adulthood, mostly by himself, and they are all wonderful people who returned the attention and kindness he gave them with much love. They will miss him terribly, and so will his wife and his brother, as will our entire extended family. However, after the funeral, when we have all gone home and returned to our own journeys through life, his wife and kids will discover something good and useful and probably unexpected.

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My dad, Charlie, was a piece of work; kind, funny, loud, big, tender hearted and generous of spirit, a very memorable character. He and Julie had two daughters separated by just a few years, then seven years later, I appeared (my uncle told me Charlie returned from a business trip on a Sunday, and none of the drugstores were open).  He was happy beyond expression that he now had a son, and he showered me with affection.  He worked a lot, like a piston in an engine, but whenever he was home, he spent time with his kids and we all basked in our father’s attention. Understand; Julie and Charlie weren’t Ozzie and Harriet, but we were happy, and certainly we were loved.

In 1969, around Christmas time, Charlie got sick, went to the hospital, and died. He was 55, I was 13. That was that.

This crushed us. I do not think my Mom ever really recovered from the blow. I went nuts for years, and passed through a prolonged and angry adolescence in this condition. I remember working at a local supermarket one evening, and seeing a man who looked a lot like Charlie loading groceries into his car. I began to have this fantasy that maybe Dad wasn’t really dead, and had gone to live a new life somewhere, and maybe we could find him and ask him to come home. On especially bad days, I would peer tearfully out of the windows of cars, buses and trains I was riding in and desperately look for him, but I never saw him. 

It took a long time, but the worst of it passed. What I was left with was a tendency to laugh rather than fume or cry at life’s outrages, a fondness for good food and drink, an enjoyment of the company of young folks and kids, a belief in the essential goodness of others, an ability to see both sides of most arguments, a heart that sometimes surprises or embarrasses me with its depth of feeling.  In the end I found Charlie, I was just looking in the wrong place.

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Sometime in the early 70’s, a year or two after Charlie’s death, my grandfather, Giuseppe DiRado, and my brother in law and one of his friends were bird hunting in a great sweeping field of corn stubble somewhere near Mt Joy Pennsylvania. Grandpop was in his 80’s, but despite debilitating arthritis he still loved to bird hunt, and despite cataracts that were making it hard for him to read a paper, he could still break 18 of 20 clay pigeons at a skeet range.  

We walked the field in a line, Pop to my right, the two younger men to my left, each of us about 30 yards distant from the other. A pheasant burst from the stubble in front of me, and I shot it. I ran to pick it up, but to my horror, found it alive though gravely wounded. It was terrified and in agony, and fought for its life. I had trouble holding on to it. I began to cry, and the younger men began to hoot at me and snicker. I felt a hand on my shoulder, it was Pop. For years he had moved very slowly, now, to my utter amazement, his hand shot forward, seized the bird by the neck, and administered the coup de grace with a violent and efficient snap. He placed the dead bird in the back of my vest, and his eyes were fixed not on me, but on my brother-in-law and his buddy. He didn’t say anything, or even glare, he just gazed on them steadily. The laughter faded to chuckles, then to smiles, then to silence. They were ashamed. He patted my head.

“You OK, Joe-boy?”

“Yes Grandpop.”

“OK, we go now.”

And we went.

This was my first inkling of what constituted a real man.    
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When I arrived at Fort Shirley last July, I found Jonathan Burns in a condition Charlie would have described as “a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest.” Jonathan, a young PhD in his 30’s was running a Penn State archaeological field school at the site of an 18^th century frontier fort.  This means he was teaching, keeping notes, photographing, surveying, orienting visitors, making decisions, cheerleading, correcting and talking all at the same time. Everybody seemed to be having a wonderful time.

In part this was because of the site. Fort Shirley was one of a string of small frontier fortifications erected in 1755-1756 following the initiation of what is known in America as the French and Indian War. It was built around a trading post, and its inhabitants included the trader, his retinue, Native American allies of the British colonists, and Colonial Militia.  It’s in an out of the way corner of Pennsylvania, and so its archaeological signature is not muddled or destroyed by industrial land use, and the site is remarkably well preserved. The dark and distinctive stains of the palisade and defensive works are readily seen below the plowed soil and the trash and other features of the site have produced ceramic, glass, metal and stone objects in abundance from England and France and Holland and Africa as well as Native made items from local materials. There’s a lot to hold the students’ attention, but that’s not the only reason they’re enjoying themselves.

In no small measure it’s Jonathan. He pays attention to them, he pushes them, he teaches and encourages them. They feel involved and valuable, because they are. He’s the kind of teacher everyone should have, and I know where he learned the craft.

Jim Hatch taught archaeology at Penn State between 1976 and 2000.  A student’s professor, Hatch was intellectually curious, talkative, glib to acerbic in temperament, funny as hell and extremely smart. He is not widely known among the profession’s cognoscenti because he didn’t publish a lot of research. Truth is, while he was passionate about his research interests, he was much more interested in his students, undergrads and graduate students. He was Penn State’s Teacher of the Year, not its Archaeologist of the Year, Teacher of the Year, a couple times. He was a brilliant lecturer who could weave enthralling and beautiful fabrics from the sometimes meager evidence left in Native American archaeological sites. He was kind and encouraging to his students, though not beyond giving them a pedagogical boot in the ass if he thought they needed it. He took me under his wing in the 70’s, got me my first technical publication, and my first paying job, and believed in me when all available evidence suggested he should not do so. He became a friend. Likewise, a couple decades or so later, he took young Jonathan under his wing. Jonathan’s from the same rural corner of Pennsylvania as his field school site, and is not the product of anything that could be construed as privilege. But Hatch, as he so often did, saw something in the kid. He encouraged him, taught him, lit a fire under his ass. He got his BA, and went on to get his doctorate at Temple.

In 1998, Jim was digging at what turned out to be his last site in Lancaster County Pennsylvania. I went down to visit.  As I said, he loved to talk, and somewhere in the middle of a lengthy oration on the peculiarities of this site, he stopped and asked me “When was the last time you saw my son?” This was unusual for Jim. He was as unsentimental and sarcastic a bugger as you will ever meet, and he kept his professional and private lives firmly separated most of the time. He caught me off guard. After a pause to think, I told him it had been years. He told me “You oughtta see him now. He’s 22, and he’s a really impressive guy.” That’s all he said on the subject, but I filed it away.

A bunch of archaeologists now working in the Middle Atlantic and Southeastern states owe some portion of their career to Hatch, so when they buried him at the shamefully young age of 52 in 2000, the church was full. Hatch’s boy Chris stood up to speak. He was living in Colorado at the time. He had a roommate who was having some trouble with his father, as young men will. Then the roommate’s father died unexpectedly, and Chris’s roommate was distraught and bereft beyond words.  So it was, that at about 2:00AM Eastern time in the summer of 1998, Chris called his Dad. Once Jim determined that the boy was neither drunk nor in some sort of trouble, they had the sort of conversation that fathers and sons ought to have.  Chris finished his remembrance of his father with a joyous expression of gratitude that, before his father left this world, they knew how they felt about each other. I remember thinking “THAT’s why he wanted to talk about this boy!”

Jim is Jonathan’s model for the treatment of students, my model for how I treat interns and young employees, and that’s true of many of Jim’s former students and colleagues.  There are generations of kids who have benefited from Jim Hatch’s way of doing things that have scarcely or never heard of him. He would have liked that. 

Following my tour of the site, Jonathan tells me “Guess what…the Department Chair is on sabbatical and despite the fact I’m just an adjunct, they’ve asked me to teach the Eastern North American Prehistory course fall semester!” That was Jim’s signature course, the one that made me and a good number of peers become archaeologists. This causes me to suddenly tear up a bit, and Jon and I say a quick so long, because it apparently did the same thing to him.

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Bobby’s funeral was by turns difficult and inspiring. The wife of thirty years he married when he was a single father spoke of his quiet and unfailing love for her, and of how he told her when he proposed that he wasn’t looking for a mother for his children. They were his responsibility. He was looking for a wife. All five of his kids expressed their sorrow at losing their go-to guy, their rock. They lauded his acceptance of each of them as they were, not as he wished them to be. How his quiet kindness and complete dependability reflected his mother Nicky, who was most certainly the foundation of our entire extended family.  One of Bob’s grandsons paid a heartfelt tribute to a grandfather who called him his buddy as well as his grandson. One of Bob’s and my cousins played a breathtaking and beautiful “I Know You Rider” on the guitar with a broken finger. Lots of people who loved Bobby stood up and spoke for him. We’re all mostly Italians, and the tears fell like rain, sometimes through bright smiles.

Good men, good people, sink roots like trees into the soil of those they love.  The tree may get old or topple in a storm, but we all rise from the rootstock and we reach high.  When the wind blows hard, we can feel them down there nourishing us and anchoring us to bedrock.  In the coming months, Bob’s widow and children and brother will find when they instinctively seek solutions and not judgments for trouble, when they recognize irony and laugh at it, on days when they maybe feel like sleeping in but get up early to help a relative or friend hang a new set of kitchen cabinets, in silly and bawdy stories told after dinner over a few drinks, in moments when they stand tall and proclaim the truth in a loud voice, in a very low tolerance for bullshit, that Bobby has not gone anywhere. He will be in their hearts and their habits and in how they see the world as long as they are alive.

The people who teach us and care for us never really leave us. They are sort of immortal.