Music Appreciation

... of the hole of the by a couple of men.

It made it hard to me to go to funeral homes for viewing for decades. If I had to go with my wife, I would sit in the car in the parking lot. My irreverent sense of humor is not universally appreciated. Especially by the family.

When I was about 14 my father's dad died. He was brilliant machinist who ran Goodyear's Aeronautic machine shops at the Blimp Hanger during WWII. He made the first tooling for Wurlitzer's first 'modern' juke boxes in the 30's. And he was a degenerate alcoholic. there was a Goodyear Police squad whose job every Monday morning was to find out which floor he passed out on on Kenmore Blvd and bring him in to set up the week's work.

My grandma had married and divorced him twice, and would have married him again if he were sober.

She invited him over every Christmas Eve and sometimes he'd show. The last Christmas Eve I saw him, I was at her house and she asked my uncle Fred to go pick him up and I went along.

Grampa Ralph lived in an SRO(sleeping room only) on East Market street, across from Goodyear Rubber and the largest Goodyear sign on the planet.

I started to get out of the car. Fred suggested that it would be better if I waited. We parked under Ralph's window and I saw him through the shade as Fred was trying to get him going. He was too loaded to go. This was not the only time I saw him, but it was the first time I remember seeing him.

He died a few months later. He was seated at the desk in his room when he had a heart attack and knocked the nitro glycerin pills to the floor and died in the chair. He was discovered four days later.

At the funeral were at least three factions of the family each sharpening grievances with each other. I vaguely remember some being asked to leave.

At the cematary, in the raw early spring rain verging on snow, I saw my father cry for the only time I saw it. Ralph was buried close to the woods and that was the only brief humor of the day.

Six or seven years before, Ralph was living with my father and step mother (I was living with my mom and step-dad), in a big house they owned in Bath. Ralph's drinking was supposed to stop, but my father would find empties in Hannibal's (a mule we had) feed trough, feed storage, in the mucking pile from the stall. He took Ralph aside and asked him if he knew he was dying from his drinking. Ralph answered we all die, "When I die, stick a ham bone up my ass and let the dogs drag me into the woods."

One night he was loaded and started a big fire in the fireplace and left the damper closed. This was before home smoke detectors. My sister was only months old and Barb was tired of Ralph letting the outside dogs in the house anyways, but the smoke out was the last straw and Ralph started living at the SRO.