(Mom and Dad, 1949, getting ready to leave NJ for Detroit and the Big Auto Boom).
I didn’t intend to go this way this rainy Arlington morning, but I am in a bit of a pensive mood. I have several correspondents whose communications are treasures- ongoing narratives of thought and adventure. One pal has discovered that the leadership of his lodge were skimming tens of thousands of dollars out of the lottery machines at the bar, and are determined to brazen the matter out. Ugly scene in a small place.
It reminded me of Mom, when she put on her Nancy Drew Girl Detective hat as President of the Local Society and unraveled the mystery of where all the donated stocks and bonds had gone- the volunteer treasurer had embezzled thousands of dollars over the years. Mom was pretty tight with a buck- not cheap, but she knew how to do the family books.
That was on my mind, since my Left Coast Attorney and I have been going back and forth on the great issues of the day. He sent me a remarkable long letter explaining where he was coming from, and how his views on the culture wars and politics had been formed. He thought it was a means to get off the usual talking past one another that comes from the crazy polarization of society.
His story is a good one- starting back with FDR and leading through being one of the few ethnic families in a WASPY Long Island town, through a prestigious Ivy League College and into a year of combat in a little Vietnamese town on the Cambodian border. I wrote him back a short note and told him it was a lot to process, and I would get back a more thoughtful response in the morning, when I was able to get out of bed. I thought I would start with the single most influential person in my life- Mom.
I have talked about the first of the Irish side of the family to come to America before. Mom was the first one in her Irish family to go to college- valedictorian of her little high school, she was always an overachiever at everything she did. Winning the scholarship to Bethany College was the key to it all, since there was no money.
Grandpa Mike had been a high school football star, Doughboy, railroad man and Bonus Army Vet who lived hard. He died during the second war, a bottle of whiskey in front of him. Mom found him that morning, and the railroad was very sorry but the pension stopped with his death. Grandma went back to work. She was a beauty and only married Mike with the provision that the kids, when they came, would not be raised in the Catholic Church.
Mike was more than a bit of a rascal- one time Grandma had to take Mom and her older sister in a stroller to holler in front of the house of a sweet young thing with whom he had a dalliance to show what she was getting into.
At school, Mom insisted on the three-year program, rather than the customary four, which was available to the ROTC men. Sometimes she had to jump out a window at the academic building to make it on time to the next class.
She had a Professor who was called up to be a VP in The Texas Company in New York City to support the war effort, and was working in the HQ in the iconic Chrysler Building. He knew Mom’s work ethic and determination to get out of the Ohio River Valley. He sent a telegram indicating he needed an executive assistant, and Mom jumped at the chance. Grandma supported her daughter’s decision to climb on the train and leave the Valley.
Mom lived in one of the Women’s boarding houses in the Village- Spellman Hall, at 607 Hudson Street. It was a heady time in the City.
With the impending end of the fight in Europe, the Boys started to come home to rest up for the invasion of Japan. She dated some of the ones from back home while they were in The City. She also accepted the occasional blind date, and after the A-bomb settled things abruptly, one of them happened to be a tall, dark-haired guy who had elected to leave the Navy after getting his Wings of Gold. He looked a little like Gregory Peck. That was Dad.
Dad’s line was the usual amalgamation of West Europe and the British Isles. The family showed up in the 1840s in Central Pennsylvania, a mix of German, English and Scots, one of the latter having been a private soldier in the Revolution. That adventure started in Colonial Philly, but the way west called and the family settled in south central PA, at a place then called Shippensburgh.
They allied themselves with a mercantile concern owned by Major David Nevin at Numbers 3& 5 East Main Street. The Concern became Nevin & Socotra in 1851, and the Socotras bought the Major out in 1857, and the concern became J & J.B. Socotra and Sons in 1874.
At one of the periodic visits to attend a funeral at the family plot in the Spring Hill Cemetery, I stopped at the local historical society to see the clippings about the Confederate raid that occupied the town just before the climactic four-day encounter at Gettysburg. The docent related a family story that I had not heard before.
She told me where the Socotras may have scraped up money for new inventory. Apparently, she confided archly, they volunteered to go perform relief work in the aftermath of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The brothers specialized in excavations- and one of the places they particularly liked were the ruins of former banks. I still have the wooden crate labeled “machine tools” that brought the silver trove back to PA.
The blood ran out of “The Busy Corner” in the 1920s. Grandfather was not interested in “cloths, cassimeres, furs, groceries, &c.” and got an engineering degree and migrated to New Jersey to work for the burgeoning Western Electric concern. He married and got a house in East Orange, and traveled the world installing phone systems. He did the first telephone exchanges in Bermuda, Rio and Panama, including the system on the Canal.
His love of technology was passed on. My Uncle (17 years older than Dad, the baby) was fascinated with airplanes and decided he would be an aeronautical engineer. He designed the first all stainless steel aircraft, the Fleetwings Seabird, and eventually the camera systems that went to the Moon on the Ranger survey missions, and pioneered the electro-optic transmission of high quality images from space, the applications to the Intelligence Community being fairly obvious.
Dad had problems getting in the service- heart murmur- but eventually got in in 1943. Fleet training seats were hard to come by, and the training pipeline was long and diverse. His skill on the ping-pong table was directly attributable to long hours in the day rooms at NAS Millington and Pensacola. When the bombs dropped and the war did not require an amphibious invasion of Japan, his class was allowed to get their wings, third to the last to have the choice.
On demobilization, Dad went to New York to attend Pratt Institute of Art to try his hand at industrial design. And that is where his pal Ray set him up with a pretty young thing who worked at the Texas Company in the shining tower of the Chrysler Building.
In 1947 they were wed, and set up shop at 123 St. James Place and then at 294 Cumberland St. in gritty Brooklyn as Dad completed school. In 1949 they got a call from a pal who had found work in the growing automobile business. Dad had always loved machines- airplanes, of course, and motorcycles and cars. He packed his portfolio of industrial renderings and they packed the Model A Ford and drove to the Motor City.
I will end this part here- but the point of it all was that Dad’s side of the family was always composed of solid members of bourgeoisie- never rich, but comfortable. Of course, I did not mention Great Uncle Pud, who turned the Busy Corner into a pool hall when he got his hands on it and had a fast reputation. And later, while things were tough in the Depression (Grandma insisted the kids pick up coal along the railroad tracks on the way home from school) they never missed a meal and their clothes- when they needed replacing- came from Abercrombie and Fitch.
Mom’s folks were poor, and she knew how to survive on not much. We all learned those lessons from her, and these days I am going to start thinking about them again.
Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303