Fishing
He grew up on the lower East side of Manhattan. He told me
stories of swimming in the East River - a nauseating thought in the 1960s. But
he claimed it wasn't that polluted when he was growing up. There were seven
kids in his family and one outhouse in the back yard of his tenement and it was
shared with everyone who lived in the building. He was extremely poor, a true
city kid right out of the movie, "The Streets of New York".
He went to law school and became a colonel in the army. One
could call it a real Horatio Alger story. He never lived anywhere but New York
City until he retired and moved to one of those over 55 retirement villages in
New Jersey.
It was there at the age of 65 that he held a fishing pole in
his hands for the first time. He loved to stand on the dock in Neptune Beach,
New Jersey, looking out at the ocean. And it was there, standing with my father
less than a year before he died, that I saw a completely different side of a
complex man.
Emily Gallo
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