Every time there's a Census I can't help but think of growing up, and therefore of my mother and father, particularly my father.
I don't know how old I was when they came around for the 1950 census. That sounds like I don't know when I was born. I do know. But I have a memory of someone coming to the door one evening when we lived in Flushing and asking my mother and father questions about who was in the house, what was in the house, and spending a little time with them as he recorded answers on I guess a clip board.
I was young, I know that. And my mother and father weren't always home together in the evening when I was awake. He generally came in after I had gone to bed. So, add a few things up, and we have something that sticks in your mind. Why can't I tell how old I was?
Well, if they came by in 1950 I think I would have definitely been too young to remember anything so specific. But if they came by, in say, 1951, another year could make a big difference. And here's where that comes in.
For a man that was a World War II veteran and worked for Uncle Sam as a project engineer at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, my father was very non-compliant with anything official. The Census was one, and taxes were another.
My guess is they would have sent a Census form in 1950 to all the households they could. I'm sure we got one. The house was built in 1923, and therefore would have showed up on any property registry at the time. What I now think is that even in 1950my father didn't answer his mail. So, with no answer, the Census people probably got around to sending someone "out to the house" to get a first hand answer. In my home, that was their only chance. When they might have done this, I don't know, so therefore, I don't really know how old I was when our 1950 census answers became officially recorded.
1950 wasn't my father's only omission. I remember what might have been the 1980 Census when my family and I lived in the other half of the two-family home and someone came walking onto the block with a suit and tie carrying papers and wearing a big button that told anyone with eyesight that he was with the Census. Sure enough, he headed for my father's door looking for answers. My own form had long before been mailed back. I wasn't surprised. In fact, we let the guy into our downstairs half of the house because that's where my father was anyway, killing time, and no doubt drinking scotch.
If my father had been a low-level Mafioso he surely could have earned a nickname as "Ducks," because he was always ducking people,and process servers. Teddy Ducks. Generally, these were people who wanted money or information. He often owed money, only occasionally to unsavory types. He owed money for the lights, the phone, the grocer, the butcher, the hardware store, anyone who took a check from him, or extended him credit. He always paid. Eventually.
As a young lad I distinctly remember acquiring a piece of legal information from my father. At the time, he had been transferred to Washington, D.C. after the Brooklyn Navy Yard closed and we generally saw him on weekends. Saturdays and Sundays. Well, he owed someone money who was serious enough about getting it that there was a summons out for him. He told us we might only get to see him on Sundays since they couldn't serve him with a summons on Sundays.
How true this was, I don't know. Blue laws were still somewhat common. I've always treasured that piece of information. I've never had any excuse to test it myself, but I've often wondered if when the bounty hunter Dog is chasing someone around the shopping carts in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Arizona, if it's Sunday, and if it is, the guy shouldn't really be running. I don't really know if this would be true for whatever guys are running away from Dog for, or, if it applies to Arizona.
Taxes were a whole other story to themselves. Money was withheld from his paycheck, like it was withheld from anyone's paycheck. When I was old enough to ask a question like, "are you getting any money back this year" he'd generally say,"I have to get to that." He'd generally add that they already had his money, so there was no real rush.
Toward the end of his life and he was sick, I took over, and made him whole with as many branches of the government that were finally catching up to him. So, when I delayed answering my own Census form this year by a week, I thought of my father and Ogden Nash.
Ogden Nash, the great American light verse humorist has always been a favorite of mine and I distinctly remember reading a poem of his in the late 1960s in The New Yorker that had to do with the IRS, paying taxes, and that the least they could do was provide him with a prepaid postage return envelope in which to remit what was owed.
It was a typical Nash poem, and right now, I can't locate it. But it ended with something like "the IRS could at least blow me to the cost of a stamp." In my search for the poem's text I saw something on the Web that Nash was in tax trouble toward the end of his life. He passed away in 1971. So, like Willie Nelson, he made something creative out of owing the government money.
When I delayed sending back the Census form I wondered for a week if it contained at least a prepaid postage envelope. It did. (Taxes still don't.)
And wouldn't you know it. I guess it crossed in the mail, but I got a post card this week that reminded me that completing the Census form was important.
The sins of the father are trying to get me. I only let them get close.
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