I come from a long line of storytellers and verbal family historians. As a child we learned our family history at the knee of our grandmother. She would entertain us kids for hours with stories about our mom and her sisters and brothers. Sometimes she would tell us stories about her childhood, mostly stories about our great-grandmother who was apparently the first true bossy female in our family.

Of all the storytellers I am related to, my dad, who just celebrated his 89th birthday in May, is by far the best.

He lived through World War II, the Great Depression and he served in the Korean conflict. During that time he met and married his one true love, losing her just one short week after celebrating 60 years of marriage.

During the Depression my grandfather worked for the tobacco heiress Doris Duke. The Duke estate is known to this day for its lavish gardens. The property is surrounded by miles of stone walls that were laid in place by members of the Conservation Corps created during the Depression. My grandfather was one of those who worked to build the walls with his bare hands.

Sometimes my dad would accompany his dad to Duke’s property while he worked and dad would spend the day playing at the Duke Estate. Dad must have raised some hell because as he tells it, by the end of the day Duke would have her chauffeur drive them home just to get rid of him.

On other days, when my grandfather was not working, he would take my dad for long walks along the railroad tracks. My father says that they would walk for miles and miles, never tiring of the time they got to spend together.

On Sundays the two would take the excursion into New York City for a quarter. They would just walk around the city, having no spare money to spend. Dad says they were window shopping.

Dad lost his father one month before he turned 8. His father had gone down to the basement to shovel coal into the furnace and never came back upstairs. He had a stroke. Grandpa was laid out in the living room of the family home and buried in Raritan, New Jersey, under a veteran’s grave marker next to his own grandfather, my great-great-grandfather.

Dad was raised by a single mother along with his older sister, Dorothy. For a short time, an elderly aunt and uncle lived with them as well.

My grandmother was a hard woman. Imagine coming out of the Depression as a single mother of two young children, with a mortgage and no marketable skills. My grandmother never lost her home. She worked as a nanny for a local doctor and his family and she worked in the woolen mill.

That work ethic stuck with dad, who talks of having three jobs at some times.

“I would get up in the morning and drive a school bus. This was in the days of no snowplows and no such thing as closing school for a snow day. Often the school bus would be the first vehicle driving down the snow-covered road in the morning.”

After dropping off the students, dad would head into the Far Hills Inn where he was a prep cook. Dad was eventually promoted to chef under very strange circumstances.

“I got to work and there was a delivery of two steers that needed to be butchered. The chef was an older, nasty man who quickly got tired of me goofing off and told me to sit there and watch a real man work. I sat and watched him butcher both of those steers, and then when I tried to help carry the wrapped meat down to the freezer in the basement he told me he didn’t need my help and he proceeded to carry it all down by himself.

“When he was finished he wiped the sweat off his face and asked for a cold bottle of Coca-Cola. I watched him drink down the whole bottle without a break, then he keeled over dead. The next day I got promoted to cook.”

A car with no engine

As a child, dad and his friends got into some pretty sticky situations. My favorite story from when I was a child was when he and his friends “drove” a car with no engine, from Raritan to Belle Meade.

“When John Blaine’s brother went off to the war, he left his car with no engine in it waiting to fix it when he got back. It was light without a motor, so we pushed it up to the highway and sat there and waited until someone stopped to see if we needed help. So of course, some nice guy comes along and offers to give us a push start and we get in and we pump the brake, like the car is trying to start every now and then and finally the guy gives up and offers to push us to a garage where we can get help. This happened over and over until we made it 8 miles and then back home again. One guy almost figured it out and we thought he was going to beat the crap out of us.”

Taking risks

My father has always complained of his knees hurting. One day I heard him telling the story of how he originally hurt them.

“There was a guy in the neighborhood building a new house and, in the evenings, we would go over and play at the site. One night the guy caught us there and threatened to have us arrested if he ever caught us there again. That didn’t stop us and one night I was up on the third floor and my buddies thought it would be funny to tell me he was coming and to jump and run, and I did. I jumped out of the third-floor window and landed standing up in a pile of sand. I still remember the pain.”

And of course, he and his friends continued to take risks.

“Do you know what a “laddie-cake” is? It’s a chunk of ice we used to break off on the Raritan River in the winter and we would ride it down the river into Manville. You know if you ride something down the river, you need to get off and walk back home. So, we would have to get off into the ice-cold water and walk home soaking wet. I would walk in the house with my clothes frozen to me and mom would send me to the basement to defrost.”

“One time I was down the basement and the window came down on my head and broke and I had glass in my head. I went upstairs and told my mom that the window broke on my head, she assumed that I was doing something stupid, can’t blame her for that, but she grabbed the first thing she could get her hand on and spanked me with it. Unfortunately for me it turned out to be a picture frame which broke on my butt and now I had glass in my head and my butt.”

He got spanked by his teacher the very first day of kindergarten as well.

“I was 4 when I started school and I walked into the classroom and I remember there being a vise attached to a workbench in the back of the classroom. I still have no idea why there was a vise in a kindergarten classroom, but that was not what I was thinking at the time. I started to play with it and I unscrewed it all the way until the end fell off onto the floor. That got me my first school punishment.”

This is only the tip of the iceberg or laddie-cake so-to-say. The stories never stop coming and I could write an entire story on just the celebrities and mobsters he claims to have encountered growing up in New Jersey.

We are lucky that dad made it to 89 with all the shenanigans he pulled growing up.