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- Story Listed as: True Life For Adults
- Theme: Drama / Human Interest
- Subject: General Interest
- Published: 06/13/2021
My Father
Born 1929, M, from Roseville/CA, United States.jpeg)
Author's Note: I wrote this column a number of years ago for a senior paper, The Sun Senior News, and wanted to post it here before Father's Day.
My Father
As some readers may know, in addition to being a New Yorker and retired I do free-lance writing for several local publications, including the Sun Senior News. We recently made our annual trip to New York City and, coming back, I found myself thinking a lot about my father, who passed away two years ago , just a few months before his 99th birthday. So, here’s something about my father.
Tom Brokaw’s best-selling book, “The Greatest Generation,” is about those Americans who endured the
Depression of the 1930’s and then successfully fought the second World War. My father Joseph Green was born in 1899 and so was too old to actually fight in World War II but he experienced the Great Depression and was a true member of the “Greatest Generation.”
The oldest of seven children in New York City, he went to work as soon as he could to help support his family. I don’t know what jobs he had in his teens and 20’s but I do know that sometime after the first World War he had a stint in the Navy. He had a good job in the paymaster’s office and could have made the Navy his career but after a few years returned to being a civilian. Maybe he got tired of being out at sea. Maybe he had a premonition that he’d meet my mother Julia. They were married 73 years ago, in 1927. By this time my father had entered the occupation he’d work at until he retired (the first time); he was a plumber.
I was born in 1929, just after the stock market crash, and my sister Phyllis came along in 1934. I’m sure that during the depression years of the 1930’s my father struggled to put bread on the family’s table. I’m not sure how but, working for the WPA and doing plumbing jobs for our landlord, he succeeded.
Although my father was too old to actually fight in World War II, he was a full participant in the war effort. Even before the war, he started to go out of town to work on war-related projects. The first time was in 1939 when he left the Bronx and went south to Florida. (For years, we had a little seashell lamp from there as a momento). He then went to such places as Oklahoma, Michigan and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he worked on something having to do with the making of the atomic bomb.
Wherever my father worked, he was always the first to be hired and last to be fired (the war-time jobs always ended and it was on to the next one). The landladies at the boarding houses where he stayed all loved him and saved their best delicacies for him.
Even after World War II ended, my father had to go out of town to find work. I remember that he worked for a long time in Pittsburgh, from where he’d come to the Bronx on weekends to see us. Finally, it must have been in the early 1950’s, New York City had a building boom and he was able to come home to stay.
As I look back on it, my father spent the years from when he was 40 to his mid-50’s away from his family and on the road. This must have been a tremendous hardship, but I never heard him complain. His job was to support his family and he’d go to any place where the work was.
My father retired from plumbing when he was 69. Then he went to work for a lamp factory in Queens. This meant he had to travel an hour and a half one way on two subways. He was in charge of the factory’s supply room. He began to collect unused spare parts and put these together to make elaborate lamps. Soon, everyone in our family and all of his friends had beautiful lamps in their homes.
When he was 79, the long subway rides finally became too much and my father retired again, this time for good. Until a few years ago, he and my mother alternated between their Bronx apartment for most of the year and a Miami residential hotel over the winter. During all this time, my father resisted moving into a senior residence because he didn’t want to be in with “all those old people.” When he was 96, he finally gave in.
My children remember Grandpa from pushing them on swings and taking them for walks. I remember him for always being cheerful. He was loving, kind and generous. His love for my mother lasted over 70 years and until the end he’d tell her how beautiful she was. If he’d lived, he’d have been 100 last year and we’d planned a big family get-together to celebrate his birthday. It was not to be. Instead, we’ll all remember Joseph Green as a member of the “Greatest Generation” and, to us, a great man.
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