October 1-10, 2015

We drank Kool-Aid not pop, had margarine not butter on toast and Miracle Whip not mayonnaise in our ground bologna sandwiches, ate Hydrox not Oreos. We were straight-ticket Democrats who were going all the way with JFK and then LBJ. When my father pulled up a chair at the dining room table on Friday or a Saturday, the talk would invariably turn to some exchange during the week in which he had reamed some goddamned son of a bitching bastard a new asshole. With such lovely vulgarity the coin of our dinner table realm, it should come as no surprise that the first Union event I remember vividly was a picnic at Riverside Park where I saw a woman take a hit from a flying puddle of puke hurled outward from some large rotating swings.

I don't know when I realized I was growing up in a union family. I'm almost sure I didn't give it much thought in my younger days outside of a few reflective moments in junior high when it came to me that none of the cool kids had parents who typically ended up at or near the bottom of the list of trusted occupations: yep, there was my dad, the "labor leader," just a notch higher than "mobster." Now, of course, I realize that some son of a mobster was likely looking at that list and thinking if only my dad were a labor leader.

I had memorized his job title: my father was an International Representative for the United Auto Workers. He bargained contracts for workers with management, and his territory was the Northeastern quarter and Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I imagined that he drove from factory to factory during his interminable road trips, putting out fires and occasionally entering into full-scale contract negotiations. What growing up union in Saginaw, Michigan, during the 1950's and '60's meant, mostly, was this: my dad was on the road about forty-eight weeks a year, with our family vacations at the end of July, first of August and (I guess) the Christmas holiday the only exceptions.

When my father was away, he was usually driving his late model Chevy station wagon to Alpena, where the UAW represented the workers in a cement factory on Lake Huron or all the way up in Menominee in the U.P. When he was home on the weekend in those days before voice mail, more often than not the ringing of our home phone would be met with the words, "I'm not here." When I or one of my brothers answered the phone, we could count on taking messages from a reliable parade of names, some of whom were fellow reps like Johnnie Johnson or Harry Corson (who with his wife Kay filled the roles of best friends to my parents) with the occasional message from the likes of Heinie Balzer providing comic relief.

That we were being raised by what was effectively a single mother completely escaped me at the time. Only later did I realize it was a bargain they had struck: she would not leave him if he would take the road job. This was her reaction to my father's tendency to expressions of blind, stupid rage most often taken out on my older brother, Richard. I suspect it was a sense of atonement for having failed to protect her first son that led my mother to a special bond with me. Whereas the middle child often feels overlooked (or so I am told anyway, the notion being so foreign to me that it speaks volumes about our peculiar family constellation), I always felt I was a star in my mother's eyes. Thus, while our family identity stemmed from my father's job, it was just as much a product of my mother's, which she saw as raising three boys to be contributing members of an even slightly larger world than the narrow one to which being members of a Union family had consigned them, a fact that makes all the more poignant the other childhood event I remember clearly: a Christmas Party at the Saginaw Auditorium with its small army of shop worker Santas in the lobby handing out UAW Christmas stockings as we headed into the cold night air.