On the Waterfront

It was a good while ago when I read it, but I never forgot Anthony DePalma's valentine to his father about his working as a longshoreman on the Hoboken Docks.

It was in the New York Times Sunday Magazine section that I used to read religiously. Not so much anymore. Never mind why. The reason I'm thinking of it again is because I saw a book review in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, "On This Ground," by Anthony DePalma, reviewed by Naomi Schaefer Riley.

Even since the Sunday magazine story, which was in 1988, I always looked for Mr. DePalma's byline in the NYT. Generally his stories were about the waterfront, its changes, its organized crime side, the latest corruption cases against organized crime. He wrote what he knew best.

I always wondered by I was no longer reading Mr. DePalma's byline. Simple. He left the Times in 2008 and devoted his time to teaching and writing several books. On the lively Google page his name takes you to  you see a wiry man of 73, who looks hale and hearty. He's only a few years younger than myself, so we've been alive for the same presidents.

His current book is about a Newark Catholic prep school that came back from the abyss of the riots and is thriving quite nicely under Father Edwin Leahy. Mr. DePalma is himself a product of New Jersey Catholic school education, graduating Seton Hall University. 

His current book tells of the year he spent at St. Benedict's Prep interviewing students, faculty and administrators. The reviewer is a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute who is the author of "No Way to Treat a Child." Mr. DePalma's book gets a resounding thumbs up.

It was nice to learn that Mr. DePalma is still with us. In his Sunday magazine piece titled, "From Fathers to Sons on the Waterfront," Mr. DePalma writes of growing up in Hoboken with 5 siblings, with a mother who controlled the house and a father who worked as a longshoreman on the Hoboken docks, until one day in 1971 he went to work and the gates were closed. Locked. For good. Basically, containerization changed everything.

His father was 60 when the gates were locked. He had been on the docks for 32 years. Eventually, his father is an A-Man, the most senior of the longshoremen which guarantees him work, or pay even if there is no work.

When they were making the movie "On the Waterfront" Anthony's father tells of the time the movie people wanted to use "his legs" on camera for the scene when Terry Malloy, played by Marlon Brando, staggers back to the shack after his fight with Johnny Friendly, played by Lee J. Cobb. His father declined. He wanted to work. (As to whose legs might have been used, if anyone's, it is left to those who research movies.)

Mr. DePalma never worked on the docks. His grandfather and uncles did. His father enjoyed his work and took pride in the accomplishment of unloading a ship and neatly stacking sacks of cargo for their next journey. His son, Anthony. works with palettes of words.

But here's the sentence in Mr. DePalma's article that I've dined on. so to speak.

"Legend has it that in the old days, an Italian shoe manufacturer used to send his goods to New York in two shipments in insure they weren't stolen: first the left shoes, then the right. Containers effectively ended that kind of pilferage."

I love anecdotes. All my life I seem to insert them into a conversation with someone. I'm always telling a story. I have a cousin who told me that when he and his family visited us in Flushing, coming in from Illinois to see my mother, I kept him laughing so hard with stories. I have no memory of this, but I do know I could have only been maybe 7 when the family visited.

I once had a cluster of salesmen at Saks in the men's department in hysterics when I told them the left/right shoe tale. I of course inserted a bit of imaginary  dialog about the guys opening up the crates and finding only shoes for one foot.

There was once a New Yorker cartoon of hippies holding up a Fink bread truck. One of the hippies tells his accomplices, "Hey man, it really is bread."

I see a cartoon of wise guys opening a crate of Italian designer shoes and seeing that there are only shoes for the left foot: "Hey, where we gonna find de people wid two left feet?"

My work life eventually morphed into the detection of fraud in health insurance. I once closed a meeting with the tale of the left and right shoes being separately shipped. People who commit fraud are clever, and I love it when there is a clever way to thwart it.

Here's to the Italian shoe manufacturer.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

I Dropped Something

Ever drop something on the floor? Sure you have. Have you quickly found it? Not very likely. Where did it go?

I'm not talking of dropping something big, like a dollar bill. No, something small, like a screw, a nut, a pill.  Einstein said matter can disappear by converting it into energy. 

When you drop something on the floor and can't find it, the disappearing matter has been converted into the energy of your trying to find it. Good Luck. The object has disappeared into some wide abyss, probably never to be found no matter how hard you look on your hands and knees. It's gone. Your floor has made something disappear.

Right now I'm still looking at sections of the kitchen floor where I heard a pill drop. I didn't see it drop. I heard it, and as such, I know it landed somewhere. Ha! Come and find me.

I cleaned the same kitchen floor a few days ago and came across a pill I dropped from some other day. A different pill; a different size and color. I didn't notice what part of the floor it came from, but there it was, the missing pill from last week. Or two weeks ago. I threw it out. 

I scan the kitchen floor pretending I'm in a helicopter dispatched from sea and rescue unit to look for survivors. I mentally stare at the floor as if there are quadrants. I slowly sweep my vision over all parts. I make believe I'm searching for important people like Amelia Earhardt, John F. Kenedy Jr. and the Bessette sisters. I report back into my imaginary headset: "Negative."

I report back into my imaginary headset.

Anyone who might have crashed in a plane, or been in a ship wreck. I imagine it's urgent, like looking for John Kennedy Jr. It doesn't help. No matter how much I concentrate on what is really not a large kitchen floor, even after imagining I'm searching in quadrants, I come up empty. It's disappeared.

Amerlia Earhardt...The Bessette sisters...Judge Crater.