Father's Day 2022

Today is Juneteenth - if you want to learn more, please check out my Juneteenth post.

Today is also Father's Day in the United States, and it also would have been the birthday of my best friend from childhood, who died in 2015.   

My father died when I was in my 30's, almost 40 years ago, and I think about him each Father's Day.

So I am going to repeat a post from Father's Day 2015 and combine it with another Father's Day I sometimes post.  It's long but I hope you'll read all of it.

Let me first take you back to July of 1914.  The world is on the brink of World War I, going through a series of crises, but no one knows how close to war the world is yet.  My father is also too young to know.  He certainly doesn't know that the life expectancy for a male born in 1914 is only 52 years.  Or that the leading causes of death in 1914 included tuberculosis, influenza, and diarrhea.  Or that his one daughter would use something called the "Internet" one day to blog, and to pay tribute to him.

He would have no idea what a blog was.  Or a cell phone.  Or a computer.  They were way in the future, the future he was fated never to know.

When he was a young child, he would have been too young to know that a pandemic would hit, taking some 675,000. American lives, and more than 50 million lives world wide.

My father was born and grew up in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood called Brownsville.  My grandfather owned a candy store, which he ran with the help of his wife (my grandmother) and their six children (including him).  A seventh child died weeks after birth.

In the 1930's, my father's mother died, from complications of high blood pressure, an illness so easily treated today.  My father ended up quitting high school after two years.

Dad doesn't have too much of an Internet presence, but there are a couple of things I can find.  Several years ago, I looked at his record in the 1940 census, when he was still living at home with his father and several siblings. 

I then looked up my father's World War Two enlistment record and found this.   What I know of his enlistment is that he was already considered disabled (a childhood illness destroyed his hearing in one ear) and had tried to enlist without success.  But, by 1942, we needed anyone who could serve.

State of Residence:	New York
County or City:	Kings[Brooklyn]
Enlistment Date:	6 Aug 1942
Enlistment State:	New York
Enlistment City:	Fort Jay Governors Island
Term of Enlistment:	Enlistment for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law
Component:	Selectees (Enlisted Men)
Source:	Civil Life
Education:	2 years of high school
Civil Occupation:	Semiskilled occupations in manufacture of miscellaneous electrical equipment, n.e.c.
Marital Status:	Single, with dependents
Height:	69
Weight:	130

I suspect one of the dependents was his younger brother, the only sibling still alive today.  He and two of his sisters helped to raise my uncle after my grandmother died, in their own apartment.

His military experience shaped my father's life.  For the first time, he was out of Brooklyn. He saw the South (stationed in Arkansas and Mississippi).  He was also stationed for a time in India.  He would sometimes tell me bedtime stories about his time in India.

My father didn't make it to the end of the war.  He suffered a head injury and was flown back to the States.  He was given an honorable discharge but suffered the aftereffects of that injury for the rest of his life.  

After the war he worked for several years on Governor's Island, part of New York City, where his World War II enlistment took place.

Now, his one child is in her late 60's, and our country is in its third year of a pandemic.  We recently passed 1,008,000. dead in our country, and 6,339,000 worldwide.

When I was 12, my mother died, and my father raised me to adulthood as a single father in their Bronx apartment in a city housing project.

When his last sister died, in the first decade of the 21st century, the funeral procession didn't go directly to the cemetery.  It wound through Brooklyn, going through some neighborhoods before it got on the highway. I wondered where we were going and why.  It didn't occur to me at the time that we were going near to where where my aunt, my father, and their siblings, had grown up.  It was one final tribute.  My father had died almost twenty years before.  I found out about why the path to the cemetery after the funeral.

I owe a lot to my father and the simple, everyday lessons he taught me.  He did what he could the best he knew how. He ended his life in Brooklyn, in the same facility where his own father spent his last days.

My love of history, a love I share with my late father, got me to thinking how much our world has changed in the many years since my father was born.

But also, how much the world has stayed the same.

I also wonder what my childhood best friend would have thought of these times.  One thing she never withheld were her opinions.

Happy Father's Day, wherever you are, Dad. 

And to you, my best friend from childhood, I commemorate your earthly birthday.

Memories of my Father 2019

I originally posted this on July 11, 2017.  Yesterday I read a blog post about City of Water Day and the memories came back........ memories of my father, who worked for the U.S Department of Agriculture Cotton Exports/Imports office on Governors Island.  He would tell me stories of taking a ferry to Governor's Island from lower Manhattan and then back home.  Sometimes, the commute got pretty rough.

Around 1963, the office closed and my father was offered a transfer to Chicago. He didn't take it.  He loved New York City.  Except for his military service, he spent his entire life there.

Here's my post from 2017:

On one Memorial Day recently, when a website called Ancestry.com allowed people to search for free, I took advantage of it to find out more about my heritage.

I looked up my grandfather on my mother's side and found (definitely) his World War II draft registration and (possibly) his World War I draft registration.  For the first time in my memory, I saw his signature on the World War II document.

More intriguing, I found my maternal grandfather's town of birth - something I never knew - but it doesn't seem to exist -"Altsandas, Austria" - another mystery for a later date. (I am not sure what country it is in today, but it was Austria-Hungary when he came to this country around 1903). Last year, a blogger did some research, and it appears this town, and its residents, may have been wiped out by the Nazis during World War II. [since then, I have more reason to believe that my educated guess, sadly, was correct.]  At any rate, I can't seem to find it anywhere online.  I've said before that I owe my very existence to the United States and all those who fought in World War II for our freedom, and I'm serious about that.

I wondered why my mother's father had to register for the draft.  He was born in 1878, too old to serve in the U.S. Army in 1942, but I found out there was an event called the Fourth Registration, where all males from ages 45 to 64 were registered.  That's how desperate things were in 1942. 

I then looked up my father's World War Two enlistment record and found what follows.  After the war he worked for several years on Governor's Island, part of New York City, where his enlistment took place.  What I know of his enlistment is that he was already considered disabled (a childhood illness destroyed his hearing in one ear) and had tried to enlist without success.  But, by 1942, we needed anyone who could serve.

State of Residence:	New York
County or City:	Kings[Brooklyn]
Enlistment Date:	6 Aug 1942
Enlistment State:	New York
Enlistment City:	Fort Jay Governors Island
Term of Enlistment:	Enlistment for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law
Component:	Selectees (Enlisted Men)
Source:	Civil Life
Education:	2 years of high school
Civil Occupation:	Semiskilled occupations in manufacture of miscellaneous electrical equipment, n.e.c.
Marital Status:	Single, with dependents
Height:	69
Weight:	130

There was Governors Island again.
More memories.  Why would my father have been single, with dependents?  I did know the answer to that question.  Because he helped to raise his youngest brother after his mother died.  Just as he raised me after his wife, my mother, died when I was 12.

I have so many memories of my father - the walks we took, the movie he took me to the day I graduated Elementary School (West Side Story), and then how life changed for him as he grew older, and ended up in assisted living in Brooklyn.

Right now, of all my aunts and uncles, only one survives - the man who my father helped to raise.  I visited him in 2002, and my uncle told me he owed a great debt to my father, who had sacrificed so much for him.  It was a debt he felt he could never repay.

And, as for me, I didn't know how much I owed to my father when I was a teen fighting to breakaway from him.  But I do know now.



I finally got to visit Governors Island, many years ago, for a couple of hours.  Perhaps I'll blog about that one day.

The Fathers of the United States Civil War

My father, who passed away over 30 years ago, loved history.  He would have been proud, I think, of his daughter blogging about the United States Civil War during its 150th anniversary 2011-2015.

For Father's Day, here is a reworking of my Civil War Sunday Post of Father's Day, 2011.  

Have you ever thought about Civil War figures as fathers?  Enough of them were.   Further, fatherhood was and was not like being a father today.

1.  Infant mortality was high, and even if your child made it past infancy, the father was rare who did not lose at least one child in childhood or young adulthood.

2.  Fathers could forbid their daughters from marrying a prospective suitor - but then, it didn't always mean the daughter would obey. (and, obey was the word for that cultural context.) Jefferson Davis faced this decision with his daughter, Winnie, when she fell in love with a Yankee, the grandson of an abolitionist.  Just like today, sometimes parents must watch their children as adults come to tragic ends.

3.  Then as now, many fathers had to be absent from home frequently, leaving their wives to be both mother and father.  (this hasn't changed, sadly, as many spouses hold down the "Home Fort" while spouses serve in the military - both men and women).

4.  Many fathers found themselves as single fathers when their wives died in childbirth. The solution, in many cases, was to marry again as quickly as possible.

5.  Although losing children was a fact of life, it caused great sorrow to the grieving parents.  Sometimes they didn't recover.  (One example: Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of Abraham Lincoln.)  There was not much that could be done in those days for depression.

6.  It was not uncommon for Civil War generals to bring sons to visit them at camp.  This is hard for a person of today to imagine, but then again, there was no such thing as email or video chats.

The following information is taken in part from "After The War-The Lies and Images of Major Civil War Figures After the Shooting Stopped" by David Hardin.  

Abraham and Mary Lincoln had four sons.  Only two outlived their father.  One son, Willie, died while Abraham Lincoln was in the White House and both Abraham and Mary took the death very hard. 

Abraham Lincoln's oldest son Robert Todd Lincoln grew up to be a Secretary of War under President James Garfield, who himself was a Major General on the Union side of the Civil War.

Although he did not witness his own father's assassination, Todd Lincoln was at the event where Garfield was assassinated, and also McKinley's.  Lincoln has no direct descendents alive today (the last one died in 1985) but does have living cousins, including actor Tom Hanks.

Jefferson Davis and his wife Varina had six children, four boys and two girls.  None of the boys outlived their parents.  Jefferson Davis' son Joseph, died at the age of five in April of 1864 from injuries suffered in a fall from the Confederate Executive Mansion.  Jefferson Davis does have living descendants.

William Tecumseh Sherman and his wife, Ellen, had four children.  As with Lincoln and Davis, Sherman lost a son, Willie (was this a bad luck name?) in 1863 at the age of nine. (There is interesting speculation concerning how this impacted Sherman.)  A third son, born in 1864, died at the age of six months. Still another son, Tom, became a Jesuit priest but later descended into insanity and died in Louisiana.  Quoting from "After the War":  "The son of the despoiler of Georgia lies in the Jesuit cemetery in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, next to the Jesuit grandnephew of Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy's vice-president."

Ulysses S. Grant, Union General and later President of the United States, and his wife also had four children.  Unlike many of the time, their children all lived to adulthood.  His great grandchildren are all deceased now (the last one died in 2011) but Grant does have living descendants.

Finally, it's time to discuss Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Robert E. Lee and his wife Mary Custis Lee (George Washington's granddaughter) had seven children.  Unlike the other major figures above, Lee's children all lived into adulthood.  One, Custis Lee (a Major General in the Confederate Army), lived into his 80's.  Lee does have living descendants today (as does his Union counterpart, General U.S. Grant).  It will interest you to know of the various political directions Lee's descendants have taken.

On today, Father's Day, we should all be thankful that modern medicine spares many modern parents what these people of some 150 years ago had to go through as fathers (and mothers).

With that, Happy Father's Day to all my readers who have, or have had, fathers, or father figures, in their lives.

Father 2018

This is a post I repeat almost every Father's Day, with some edits.

It is July of 1914.  The world is on the brink of World War I, going through a series of crises, but no one knows how close to war the world is yet.  My father is too young to know.  He certainly doesn't know that the life expectancy for a male born in 1914 is only 52 years.  Or that the leading causes of death in 1914 included tuberculosis, influenza, and diarrhea.  Or that his one daughter would use something called the "Internet" one day to blog, and to pay tribute to him.

My father was born and grew up in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood called Brownsville.  My grandfather owned a candy store, which he ran with the help of his wife, my grandmother, and their six children.

In the 1930's, my father's mother died, from complications of high blood pressure, an illness so easily treated today.  My father ended up quitting high school after two years.

He doesn't have too much of an Internet presence, my father, but there are a couple of things I can find.  I looked at his record in the 1940 census, still living at home with his father and several siblings.  1942, his enlistment record in the United States Army, where his term of enlistment was for the duration of World War II "plus six months", show him as "single with dependents". I suspect one of the dependents was his younger brother, the only sibling still alive today.  He and two of his sisters helped to raise my uncle after my grandmother died.

The military experience shaped his life.  For the first time, he was out of Brooklyn. He saw the South.  He saw India.  He would sometimes tell me stories about his time in India as bedtime stories.

My father didn't make it to the end of the war.  He suffered a head injury and was flown back to the States.  He was given an honorable discharge but suffered the aftereffects of that injury for the rest of his life.

After the war, my father married.  Today, in fact, would have been their wedding anniversary.

 When I was 12, my mother died, and my father raised me to adulthood as a single father in his Bronx apartment in a city housing project.

When his last sister died, in the mid 2000's, the funeral procession didn't go directly to the cemetery.  It wound through Brooklyn, going through some neighborhoods before it got on the highway. I wondered where we were going and why.  It didn't occur to me at the time that we were going near to where where she, and my father, had grown up (which is now in a slum). One final tribute.  My father had died almost twenty years before.  I found that out afterwards.

I owe a lot to my father and the simple, everyday lessons he taught me.  He did what he could the best he knew how. He ended his life in Brooklyn, in the same facility where his own father spent his last days.

My love of history, which love I share with my late father, got me to thinking how much our world has changed in the 104 years since my father was born.

And, how much the world has stayed the same.

Happy Father's Day, wherever you are, Dad.

Remembering My Father

On one Memorial Day recently, when a website called Ancestry.com allowed people to search for free, I took advantage of it to find out more about my heritage.

I looked up my grandfather on my mother's side and found (definitely) his World War II draft registration and (possibly) his World War I draft registration.  For the first time in my memory, I saw his signature on the World War II document.

More intriguing, I found his town of birth - something I never knew - but it doesn't seem to exist -"Altsandas, Austria" - another mystery for a later date. (I am not sure what country it is in today, but it was Austria-Hungary when he came to this country around 1903). Last year, a blogger did some research, and it appears this town, and its residents, may have been wiped out by the Nazis during World War II.  At any rate, I can't seem to find it anywhere online.

I wondered why my mother's father had to register for the draft.  He was born in 1878, too old to serve in the U.S. Army in 1942, but I found out there was an event called the Fourth Registration, where all males from ages 45 to 64 were registered.  That's how desperate things were in 1942. 

I then looked up my father's World War Two enlistment record and found what follows.  After the war he worked for several years on Governor's Island, part of New York City, where his enlistment took place.  What I know of his enlistment is that he was already considered disabled (a childhood illness destroyed his hearing in one ear) and had tried to enlist without success.  But, by 1942, we needed anyone who could serve.

State of Residence:	New York
County or City:	Kings[Brooklyn]
Enlistment Date:	6 Aug 1942
Enlistment State:	New York
Enlistment City:	Fort Jay Governors Island
Term of Enlistment:	Enlistment for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law
Component:	Selectees (Enlisted Men)
Source:	Civil Life
Education:	2 years of high school
Civil Occupation:	Semiskilled occupations in manufacture of miscellaneous electrical equipment, n.e.c.
Marital Status:	Single, with dependents
Height:	69
Weight:	130

More memories.  Why would my father have been single, with dependents?  I did know the answer to that question.  Because he helped to raise his youngest brother after his mother died.  Just as he raised me after his wife, my mother, died when I was 12.

I have so many memories of my father - the walks we took, the movie he took me to the day I graduated Elementary School (West Side Story), and then how life changed for him as he grew older, and ended up in assisted living in Brooklyn.

Right now, of all my aunts and uncles, only one survives - the man who my father helped to raise.  I visited him in 2002, and my uncle told me he owed a great debt to my father, who had sacrificed so much for him.  It was a debt he felt he could never repay.

And, as for me, I didn't know how much I owed to my father when I was a teen fighting to breakaway from him.  But I do know now.

He would have been 103 later this month.  Happy birthday in heaven, Dad.

Day 11 of the Ultimate Blog Challenge.

Father's Day 2017

This is a post, slightly reworked, that I originally wrote on what would have been my father's 100th birthday.  I am using this post as a Father's Day tribute.  My Dad would have been 102 if he was still alive.

Here's the post:

The last neighborhood in Brooklyn where my father lived

One hundred years ago today, my father was born.

July of 1914.  The world is on the brink of World War I, going through a series of crises, but no one knows how close to war the world is yet.  My father is too young to know.  He certainly doesn't know that the life expectancy for a male born in 1914 is only 52 years.  Or that the leading causes of death in 1914 included tuberculosis, influenza, and diarrhea.  Or that his one daughter would use something called the "Internet" one day to blog, and to pay tribute to him.

My father was born and grew up in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood called Brownsville.  My grandfather owned a candy store, which he ran with the help of his wife, my grandmother, and his six children.

In the 1930's, my father's mother died, from complications of high blood pressure, an illness so easily treated today.  My father ended up quitting high school after two years.

He doesn't have too much of an Internet presence, my father, but there are a couple of things I can find.  I looked at his record in the 1940 census, still living at home with his father and several siblings.  1942, his enlistment record in the United States Army, where his term of enlistment was for the duration of World War II "plus six months", show him as "single with dependents". I suspect one of the dependents was his younger brother, the only sibling still alive today.

The military experience shaped his life.  For the first time, he was out of Brooklyn. He saw the South.  He saw India.  He would sometimes tell me stories about his time in India as bedtime stories.

My father didn't make it to the end of the war.  He suffered a head injury and was flown back to the States.  He was given an honorable discharge but suffered the aftereffects of that injury for the rest of his life.

After the war, my father married.  When I was 12, my mother died, and my father raised me to adulthood as a single father in his Bronx apartment in a city housing project.

When his last sister died, in the mid 2000's, the funeral procession didn't go directly to the cemetery.  It wound through Brooklyn, going through some neighborhoods before it got on the highway. I wondered where we were going and why.  It didn't occur to me at the time that we were going near to where where she, and my father, had grown up. One final tribute.  My father had died almost twenty years before.

I owe a lot to my father and the simple, everyday lessons he taught me.  He did what he could the best he knew how. He ended his life in Brooklyn, in the same facility where his own father spent his last days.

My love of history, which love I share with my late father, got me to thinking how much our world has changed in the 100 years since my father was born.

And, how much the world has stayed the same.

Happy Father's Day, wherever you are, Dad.

Raisins and Almonds

On Sunday, a blogger started a series of posts about songs of her childhood.   

It inspired me.

I remember a lullaby my father used to sing to me.  I can still hear his voice singing the refrain from the lullaby, in the language of his parents (a language I, in turn, never learned).  I said to myself, "After all these years, I wonder if I can use You Tube and a search engine to find the song?"

And, since today would have been his birthday, what a wonderful way to celebrate a man who meant so much to me.

I have many childhood memories of my Dad.  I remember, especially, walks he would take me on some Sunday afternoons (no doubt, to give my stay at home Mom a break).  He would love to watch houses under construction, and we would walk to the construction sites. He would look at the houses-to-be.  I would listen to baseball games on a tinny sounding transistor radio.

Then, after my mother died, Dad raised me as a single father.  Things got rather stormy as I traveled through my teenage years, but he hung in there.

Anyway, about that lullaby.  It took about 20 minutes, but I found it. 

The English name is Raisins and Almonds, and this is the English version.

And this is the original Yiddish version, as sung by actress Jane Seymour.

Jane Seymour, (not her birth name) by the way, had a Jewish father.  Who knows, maybe her father sung this song to her.

Thank heavens for the Internet.  And, happy birthday in heaven, Dad.

This is Day Five of Write Tribe's Festival of Word #5. Why don't you visit some of the bloggers participating in this from all over the world?

Father's Day - Remembering

Today, in the United States, it is Father's Day.



This will be the 30th Father's Day without my father.  And, on top of it, a good friend would have celebrated her 64th birthday today.  In some ways, this has been a hard day for me (including a problem I have with swallowing certain food cropping up - no pun intended - and I am not feeling my best. )  But, as they say, consider the alternative.

So, I will let part of a post from Memorial Day, 2015 do the heavy lifting today.  The amazing thing about what I did on Ancestry.com that day in 2015 led a long-lost cousin in his mid 80's to find me (actually, his daughter).  He had been looking for me for years. 

Amazing things can happen online.







*  *  *  *  *  *

Today (May 25, 2015), the genealogy website Ancestry.com has free access and you can look up military records for anyone in their database.

I looked up my grandfather on my mother's side and found (definitely) his World War II draft registration and (possibly) his World War I draft registration.  For the first time in my memory, I saw his signature on the World War II document.  More intriguing, I found his town of birth - something I never knew - but it doesn't seem to exist -"Altsandas, Austria" - another mystery for a later date. (I am not sure what country it is in today, but it was Austria-Hungary when he came to this country around 1903).

I then looked up my father's World War Two enlistment record and found this.  After the war he worked for several years on Governor's Island, part of New York City, where his enlistment took place.  What I know of his enlistment is that he was already considered disabled (a childhood illness destroyed his hearing in one ear) and had tried to enlist without success.  But, by 1942, we needed anyone who could serve.

State of Residence:	New York
County or City:	Kings[Brooklyn]
Enlistment Date:	6 Aug 1942
Enlistment State:	New York
Enlistment City:	Fort Jay Governors Island
Term of Enlistment:	Enlistment for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law
Component:	Selectees (Enlisted Men)
Source:	Civil Life
Education:	2 years of high school
Civil Occupation:	Semiskilled occupations in manufacture of miscellaneous electrical equipment, n.e.c.
Marital Status:	Single, with dependents
Height:	69
Weight:	130

More memories.  Why would my father have been single, with dependents?  Because he helped to raise his youngest brother after his mother died.  Just as he raised me after my mother died.

These documents may not show much, but they can still tell a story.  You just need to be creative to read and understand the story.


Dad, I want you to know I miss you today, and my friend, too.  It was a beautiful day here in upstate New York.  I wish I could have shared it with both of you.

Throwback Thursday - Who Among Us Is Worthy?

Thirty years ago today, my father passed away.

What can I say to pay tribute to the man who raised me after my mother died when I was 12?

I can remember January 21, 1986 so well.  I lived in Arkansas and worked in Fayetteville, their third biggest city.  It was a mild winter day.  I sat outside at lunch and wrote a letter - a letter! - to an aunt living in Iowa.  Went home, took care of my chickens, had supper, and then got the phone call from my aunt who lived in New York City.

He died at a VA Hospital in Brooklyn.  My father had served in World War II and had suffered a head injury (traumatic brain injury) that left him suffering from seizures and with some other issues.  Like many disabled vets, he faced prejudice and a medical system that did not always work for him.  He also built a life, marrying, and fathering a baby girl-me.

He never stopped loving his country, and never stopped trusting the VA.  And, to me, he was a good father.

In a way, having a father with a disability prepared me for being the sister in law of a man, my spouse's youngest brother, who is developmentally disabled with a condition called autism.

Thinking about that made me think about a post from my blog, written in 2012.

Was my father less worthy as a person because he had epilepsy?  Is my brother in law less worthy because he has autism?

Who Among Us is Worthy?

As the sister in law of a 50ish year old man with autism, I have to say something about a recent event.  A little background first.

I know someone who, when a boy, was helped tremendously by Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP).  He had an illness that stumped doctors in this area.  His health failing, he was brought to CHOP and they were able to diagnose his illness.  He received treatment.  He recovered.

He was worthy.  Our medical system worked for him.  He is an adult today.

And then, there is the case of little Amelia Rivera, who was recently refused a kidney transplant by CHOP because...well, she suffered from Wolf-Hirschhorn Syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes many difficulties for those with it, including intellectual disability.  Finding a donor was not a problem (as it is in too many cases of kidney transplant.)  CHOP refused to do the transplant because she was, quoting what her parents said the doctor said:  "Mentally retarded".

After the mother went public on a support site, the story went viral.  In all fairness, we probably do not know the whole story.  But, in reading some articles, and comments, and lurking around on CHOP's Facebook page, it would appear that this kind of medical decision is not an isolated instance.  From what I can tell, CHOP is rethinking their processes, and are continuing dialog with little Mia's family.

Not that long ago I blogged about nostalgia not being all it's cracked up to be.  My father had epilepsy due to a brain injury he suffered in his service during World War II.  There was little nostalgia associated with the prejudice he suffered when he came back home.  In fact, in some states, I would not have been born because he might have been subject to involuntary sterilization.

So....in our modern day and age people with disabilities are still being denied medical care. Their lives just aren't as valuable as yours or mine.

So what will happen when my brother in law needs medical treatment? Thank heavens that day has not yet come. But will he be deemed worthy?  Until recently, insurance discrimination against people with autism was very much a problem, and it is only slowly being addressed by state laws prohibiting such discrimination.  Do we need legislation to prevent medical discrimination in care, too?

Some have written a lot more elegantly than me on the issue of the worthiness of Amelia to get this transplant. 

If we say we value life, it has to be all life-not just the lives of the smart, the lives of the wealthy, the lives of the beautiful.  Our medical system is broken, for this and other reasons.  We all have stories to tell from our own experience. Medical bills we can't afford, insurance that won't pay, not having insurance and suffering the consequences.  And now....we'd better not be disabled, either.

We must fix it, for many reasons, including the most selfish reason of all.  One day that person being denied care may be - you.  Or me.

2016 postscript: Amelia's case had a good resolution, incidentally- she finally received the kidney transplant.

Happy Ten Decades Birthday

One hundred years ago today, my father was born.

July 14, 1914.  The world is on the brink of World War I, going through a series of crises, but no one knows how close to war the world is yet.  My father is too young to know.  He certainly doesn't know that the life expectancy for a male born in 1914 is only 52 years.  Or that the leading causes of death in 1914 included tuberculosis, influenza, and diarrhea.  Or that his one daughter would use something called the "Internet" one day to blog, and to pay tribute to him.

My father was born and grew up in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood called Brownsville.  My grandfather owned a candy store, which he ran with the help of his wife, my grandmother, and his six children.

In the 1930's, my father's mother died, from complications of high blood pressure, an illness so easily treated today.  My father ended up quitting high school after two years.

He doesn't have too much of an Internet presence, my father, but there are a couple of things I can find.  I looked at his record in the 1940 census, still living at home with his father and several siblings.  1942, his enlistment record in the United States Army, where his term of enlistment was for the duration of World War II "plus six months", show him as "single with dependents". I suspect one of the dependents was his younger brother, the only sibling still alive today.

The military experience shaped his life.  For the first time, he was out of Brooklyn. He saw the South.  He saw India.  He would sometimes tell me stories about his time in India as bedtime stories.

My father didn't make it to the end of the war.  He suffered a head injury and was flown back to the States.  He was given an honorable discharge but suffered the aftereffects of that injury for the rest of his life.

After the war, my father married.  When I was 12, my mother died, and my father raised me to adulthood as a single father in his Bronx apartment in a city housing project.

When his last sister died, in the mid 2000's, the funeral procession didn't go directly to the cemetery.  It wound through Brooklyn, going through some neighborhoods before it got on the highway. I wondered where we were going and why.  It didn't occur to me at the time that we were going near to where where she, and my father, had grown up. One final tribute.  My father had died almost twenty years before.

I owe a lot to my father and the simple, everyday lessons he taught me.  He did what he could the best he knew how. He ended his life in Brooklyn, in the same facility where his own father spent his last days.

I am participating in NaBloPoMo, a monthly blogging challenge.  This month's theme has been "Decades". I haven't been following the theme much, but it really got me to thinking how much our world has changed in the 100 years since my father was born.

And, how much the world has stayed the same.

Happy birthday wherever you are, Dad.

Civil War Sunday - The Fathers

 A reworking of my Civil War Sunday Post of Father's Day, 2011.  

Have you ever thought about Civil War figures as fathers?  Enough of them were.  And, fatherhood was and was not like being a father today.

1.  Infant mortality was high, and even if your child made it past infancy, the father was rare who did not lose at least one child in childhood or young adulthood.
2.  Fathers could forbid their daughters from marrying a prospective suitor - but then, it didn't always mean the daughter would obey. (and, obey was the word for that cultural context.) Jefferson Davis faced this decision with his daughter, Winnie, when she fell in love with a Yankee, the grandson of an abolitionist.  And, just like today, sometimes parents must watch their children as adults come to tragic ends.
3.  Then as now, many fathers had to be absent from home frequently, leaving their wives to be both mother and father.  (this hasn't changed, sadly, as many spouses hold down the "Home Fort" while spouses serve in the military - both men and women).
4.  Many fathers found themselves as single fathers when their wives died in childbirth. The solution, in many cases, was to marry again as quickly as possible.
5.  Although losing children was a fact of life, it caused great sorrow to the grieving parents.  Sometimes they didn't recover.  (One example, Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of Abraham Lincoln.)  There was not much that could be done in those days for depression.

The following information is taken in part from "After The War-The Lies and Images of Major Civil War Figures After the Shooting Stopped" by David Hardin.  

Abraham and Mary Lincoln had four sons.  Only two outlived their father.  One beloved son, Willie, died while Abraham Lincoln was in the White House and both Abraham and Mary took the death very hard.  (Abraham Lincoln's oldest son Robert Todd Lincoln grew up to be a Secretary of War under President James Garfield, who himself was a Major General on the Union side of the Civil War. R. Todd Lincoln witnessed Garfield's assassination. No, you can't make this stuff up.)  Lincoln has no direct descendents alive today (the last one died in 1985) but does have living cousins, including actor Tom Hanks.

Jefferson Davis and his wife Varina had six children, four boys and two girls.  None of the boys outlived their parents.  Jefferson Davis' son Joseph, died at the age of five in April of 1864 from injuries suffered in a fall from the Confederate Executive Mansion.  Jefferson Davis does have living descendents.

William Tecumseh Sherman and his wife, Ellen, had four children.  As with Lincoln and Davis, Sherman lost a son, Willie (was this a bad luck name?) in 1863 at the age of nine. (There is interesting speculation concerning how this impacted Sherman.)  A third son, born in 1864, died at the age of six months. Still another son, Tom, became a Jesuit priest but later descended into insanity and died in Louisiana.  Quoting from "After the War":  "The son of the despoiler of Georgia lies in the Jesuit cemetery in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, next to the Jesuit grandnephew of Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy's vice-president."

And finally, Robert E. Lee. Robert E. Lee and his wife Mary Custis Lee (George Washington's granddaughter) had seven children.  Unlike the other major figures above, Lee's children all lived into adulthood.  One, Custis Lee (a Major General in the Confederate Army), lived into his 80's.  Lee does have living descendents today (as does his Union counterpart, General U.S. Grant.)

On today, Father's Day, we should all be thankful that modern medicine spares many modern parents what these people of 150 years ago had to go through as fathers (and mothers).

If you are interested in the living descendents of various Civil War figures, this is a good source.

Civil War Sunday - Father Facts

Today, in the United States, it is Father's Day.  It is also time for my weekly Civil War post.  Always looking for the slightly offbeat, I decided to do an internet search and see what I could come up with for Father's Day.

Some may call it trivia.  I call it living history.  Too many people are turned off by history, thinking of the dull, lifeless presentation of history too many of us endured in school.  I've always loved history and want to try to make it more accessible to people.

So how is this for a start - a 2010 feature in the Utah Deseret News - a woman, Bashie Thomander, talks about her father, who fought in the Civil War on the Union side.  Yes, she was 94 when interviewed, and yes, her father was 74 when she was born. Still, she links us with our past.

The story of her father's service is one of the fascinating things about the Civil War that few of us studied in college.  We think of the war as "North vs. South" but it actually was fought, in one way or another, in a lot of far flung areas - including Utah, which was still a territory at the time.  His service was not against Confederates but - well, you'll have to read the story for yourself.  If you read Mrs. Thomander's story, you will learn something about Utah and the Civil War that many people, including me, didn't know about.

Before posting this, I wanted to make sure that Mrs. Thomander was still alive. As far as I can tell through online research, she is.  (If you know differently, could you comment?)

Then, I found that, just like Mothers Day (which I blogged about on Mother's Day), Father's Day is also connected to the Civil War.  Why not?

And finally, I found some quick facts about Civil War personalities and the fatherhood part of their lives last year.  In an era of high infant mortality and mortality among those growing up, I invite you to read my Father's Day post from last year, talking about four main players in the Civil War and some little known facts about them as fathers.  You may be surprised and amazed to know these figures more as human beings and less as statues in a public square (or on a battlefield).

Happy Fathers Day to all my readers who are fathers.  It's one of the hardest jobs in the world.  On a personal note, today would have been my parents' 61st wedding anniversary.  Today, I pay tribute to my Dad, and to all fathers everywhere.

Did your father's father or grandfather fight, or otherwise participate, in the American Civil War?

Civil War Sunday-Civil War Figures as Fathers

A fellow blogger had a very good suggestion for my Civil War Sunday theme days.  She suggested I blog about less known figures or events of the Civil War (perhaps even subjects of YA books)...I am going to take her up on that suggestion but, in honor of Father's Day, I am going to blog today about well known Civil War figures but in a less well known setting - their role as fathers.

To understand this, you have to understand the cultural context of the 1860's.  In some ways this post is going to be depressing, but such was life in the mid 19th century.

1.  Infant mortality was high, and even if your child made it past infancy, the father was rare who did not lose at least one child in childhood or young adulthood.
2.  Fathers could forbid their daughters from marrying a prospective suitor - but then, it didn't always mean the daughter would obey. (and, obey was the word for that cultural context.) Jefferson Davis faced this decision with his daughter, Winnie, when she fell in love with a Yankee, the grandson of an abolitionist.  And, just like today, sometimes parents must watch their children as adults come to tragic ends.
3.  Then as now, many fathers had to be absent from home frequently, leaving their wives to be both mother and father.  This was the case with all the below Civil War figures.
4.  Many fathers found themselves as single fathers when their wives died in childbirth. The solution, in many cases, was to marry again as quickly as possible.
5.  Although losing children was a fact of life, it caused great sorrow to the grieving parents.  Sometimes they didn't recover.  (Mary Todd Lincoln, in part.)  There was not much that could be done in those days for depression.

The following information is taken in part from "After The War-The Lies and Images of Major Civil War Figures After the Shooting Stopped" by David Hardin.  
Again, I highly recommend this book if you are interested in the people of the Civil War.
 Abraham and Mary Lincoln had four sons.  Only two outlived their father.  One beloved son, Willie, died while Abraham Lincoln was in the White House and both Abraham and Mary took the death very hard. 

Jefferson Davis and his wife Varina had six children, four boys and two girls.  None of the boys outlived their parents.  Jefferson Davis's son Joseph, died at the age of 5 in April of 1864 from injuries suffered in a fall from the Confederate Executive Mansion.

William Tecumseh Sherman and his wife, Ellen, had four children.  As with Lincoln and Davis, Sherman lost a son, Willie (was this a bad luck name?) in 1863 at the age of 9.  A third son, born in 1864, died at the age of 6 months. Still another son, Tom, became a Jesuit priest but later descended into insanity and died in Louisiana.  Quoting from "After the War:  "The son of the despoiler of Georgia lies in the Jesuit cemetery in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, next to the Jesuit grandnephew of Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy's vice-president."

And finally, Robert E. Lee. Robert E. Lee and his wife Mary Custis Lee (George Washington's granddaughter) had seven children.  Unlike the other major figures above, Lee's children all lived into adulthood.  One, Custis Lee (a Major General in the Confederate Army), lived into his 80's.

History is a lot more than dry statistics and memorization of battle dates.  It is the people, their culture, and events and how people react and are affected by them.  And, we should all be thankful that modern medicine spares many modern parents what these people of 150 years ago had to go through as fathers (and mothers).

Next week, I hope to write about a  local New York Civil War soldier who played a part in several historic events before he died in 1864 in Atlanta.

25 Years Ago Today in Brooklyn

25 years ago tonight I got a phone call...my father had passed away in an emergency room in Brooklyn.

My father was an almost-lifelong resident of New York City, a veteran of the Army Air Force, a single father, a loving husband, a man who liked to invent and..a traumatic brain injury survivor back in the day when there was little or no support for a brain injury.

When I follow the progress of Gabrielle Giffords in the news, I think of my father, and I know a little of the hard road back that she faces (despite the optimism of the rehab center she entered today.)

I think of the many sacrifices he made for me, when I was too young to appreciate it.  I think of the many walks we took on Sunday afternoons when I was a little girl.  He used to love to watch houses being built.  I would walk at his side, transistor radio blaring a Yankees game.  He could strike up a conversation with anyone, and his very shy daughter must have puzzled him tremendously.

He loved to read, bought two newspapers daily, and read them on his commute to and from work on the subway.

He loved his city.  He gave birth to a daughter who fled that same city as soon as she graduated college (who didn't even attend her graduation, she was so eager to leave).

He would have been 97 years old in July.  But by writing about him, he will live on forever (or at least as long as Blogger stores blog entries) through the Internet.

You did a good job, Dad.  You passed on your love of history.  In some ways I have turned into you.  I still don't step on metal grates in the winter because you taught me not to.

I will always miss you.

The Fathers Day Post - But Not What you Think

No, this isn't going to be about my father, as much as he deserves his own blog post.  Or 1,000.  Especially because he put up with me when I was a teenager, which I became a month after my mother and his wife died.

And it won't be about his younger brother, who I sometimes wished (when I was that teenager) was my father instead of my lame, fallible father.  But as an adult I came to see this Uncle as a man of many good qualities but a man nevertheless, a human, a  man who did his best but made some mistakes. And, blessedly, he is still alive today.

No, this isn't about my Uncle either.

This father is someone I haven't met many times.

He is the father of one child, of my son's best friend.

This child has Aspergers Syndrome, which is considered by many to be on the "autistic spectrum".  I have mentioned before that I have a brother in law with autism.  So who knows but having an Uncle on the spectrum caused my son to befriend this young man.  I don't think so, though.  I think they just "clicked".  They are both very hands on. Both love to work on cars.  Both can be a handful at times, but this young man has never worn out the welcome sign on our porch.


This young man graduates from high school next Sunday, a year after his "cohort" would have graduated. But graduated he will do, which is no small feat in New York.


The father and also the Mom went to many many meetings with the schools, something called in New York a "CSE Committee" and at all times they did what they felt was right for their son.  These meetings are so emotionally draining that you can only know if you've been to meetings like these.

Because of their advocacy, their son is the fine young man he is today.


During all this growing up time, the father had to serve at least one tour in Iraq and be a Dad long distance.

And another unsaid thing is, that the divorce rate among parents with children on the spectrum may be as high as 80% (although this figure is disputed.)


So now.....


All parents hold their breaths as their children achieve independence.

The parents of a child with autism pray for his or her independence...and hold their breaths twice as hard.   Many never achieve full independence.  If this young man doesn't, or even if he does, this special father will have to be fully involved in his son's life for many years to come.

So on Father's Day, I salute this man.  His Mom has been right there too, but in our society we tend to take that for granted.

Sometimes...you hate to say it but sometimes fathers, when they find out their children aren't perfect, cut and run.  There is another woman I know, who had a son born prematurely, with many problems and that is just what her husband did.

Our father in question today didn't.

He stayed the course.

Happy Father's Day to you. And to all fathers with children on the spectrum who stay the course.  And mothers.