An Extraordinary Summer

Quite a bit of baseball these days. Last night the National League defeated the American League 5 – 1 in the All-Star Game, which still makes me happy, even after years of confusingly shifting allegiances. Continuing on the theme, we’ll be cashing in on Jackson’s perfect attendance during the final grading period this past school year by going this evening to watch the Round Rock Express, our local Triple-A affiliate, and farm team of the Texas Rangers. It’s going to be hotter than hell the first few innings, so I’ll seek shade until it cools down.

Those minor league games aren’t really about baseball anyway, at least not when you go with kids. They’re more about the food (kids eat free tonight – yay!) and the rock climbing wall, which Diego and Jackson like to scale again and again and again.

The boldest baseball headline – maybe the boldest sports headline came this past Saturday, when Derek Jeter finally reached the milestone he’s been approaching all year – 3,000 hits. He takes his place in history, not only as the 26^th man ever to achieve the feat, but also as only the second ever to do it with a homerun (Wade Boggs being the other) and, surprisingly, I thought, the only Yankee ever to reach 3,000. I don’t think there’s been much doubt he’ll reach the Hall of Fame – I think we’ve known this for a few years now. With this accomplishment Jeter can start to picture his number 2 posted up there in Yankee Stadium with all the other single-digit greats of the past, like Mantle (7), Berra (9), DiMaggio (5), Ruth (3) and Gehrig (4), none of whom accomplished what he has.

I feel a little bit about Derek Jeter the way I do about U2. It’s a bit different, in that I was brought up by a rabid Yankee-hating Brooklyn Dodger fan. During my brief rebellion in the mid-1990’s, I watched Jeter, then a baby-faced rookie, famous for his good manners and near perfect swing, quietly take on his role as captain of a constantly rotating band of baseball superstars. He did it with unquestionable class and finesse. Like the Irish rock and roll band, his success grew and grew; U2 became a supergroup, he became a superstar. And I was there from the beginning for both.

3,000 hits is a remarkable milestone; anyone who knows anything about baseball acknowledges that. Doing it in New York City, where the sports chatter never stops, and they love to report on who you’re dating, makes it even more impressive. Jeter has spent his entire career in Yankee pinstripes, and I’d be surprised if he retires wearing anything else. He’s famous for saying it’s the only team he’s ever wanted to play for.

In my mind, his even greater accomplishment was converting me – however briefly – into (sorry, Dad) a Yankee fan.

The Other Grandfather

I've already written about my father's father, Bill Fuchs, in a previous post. My mother’s father was a man named Herman Thomas Runyan, who was born on April 6, 1897 and died in 1986, while I was away at college. He had spent the final few years of his life living with us in our house, before moving to a rest home in his final days.

Herman was a bit of a mystery to me. I didn’t see much of him growing up, as he was down in Little Rock, Arkansas, which, on the few occasions I did visit, felt completely foreign to me. I remember two little girls cornering me in a supermarket there, one of them saying to the other, “It’s him. It’s Jack Tripper from Three’s Company.”

“Uh, I’m twelve,” I answered.

“Yeah, twelve,” my brother, ten at the time, added.

“Oh my gosh,” one of the girls giggled. “I just think y’all have the cutest li’l accent!”

Herman has a special place in my life, because he is the subject of the only short story I’ve managed to publish thus far, The Watch, which chronicles his days with us at our home in Purchase, as his health deteriorated. They printed it in the Winter, 1985 edition of the SU literary magazine at that time, The Review. It’s not a bad story, I have to say. I just re-read it for the first time in years, and it holds up fairly well. It’s really about a young person having to face up to the aging process, and with the fact that everyone he loves, and he himself, will die one day.

He was my mother’s subject, as well, not only in a high school pencil sketch (above) but in a lovely poem, which is actually a nice companion piece to my short story, called Tea Parties:

The man who used to throw me in the air,

and make me laugh, and shiver with excitement,

I now give baths to.

Every other day: we plan them carefully.

We exercise much more thought

than we ever did

for the tea parties of my childhood.

When he was thirty-five, I was five.

We sliced the apples very thin

and laid them on soda crackers.

Our tea was milk,

and afterwards we often took a walk

in the sweet-and-bad smelling Chicago dusk,

under the rumbling El.

But he can hardly walk now.

He’s 87.

So weak, so frail.

Should “we” lower him into the tub,

or put him in it seated on a stool?

He lets me decide.

Look at all the diamonds,

I used to say.

(The mica in the sidewalk

on which the moon shone

as we walked hand in hand.)

I gently wash his face.

Briskly soap his back, arms, chest, legs.

Attend to each misshapen toe,

then hand the cloth to him

for the remaining parts.

When I was young,

The veins and muscles of his arms entranced me.

He was so strong and wonderful!

The money-earner who, one special payday,

brought me roller skates.

He’s so thin now.

Naked.

Rising slowly, carefully,

from his beloved bath.

A rosy victim of a holocaust.

Those magic summer days!

Squealing little girls with blue lips

splashing ‘round him in Lake Michigan.

How gallantly he shepherded us

back and forth on the trolley.

I help him dress. We reminisce.

“Do you remember our tea parties?”

he asks.

“Oh, yes, I do,” I answer,

“and all the rest.”

Looking back, I wish I’d made more of my time with him – gotten to know him a bit better. Back then, in my early twenties, I was so very self involved; I didn’t see what a wealth of knowledge, and interesting stories I had with me in that little TV room in Purchase, New York.

I do know, from reading our family genealogy, Tracking the Descendants of Isaac Barefoot Runyan by Marie Runyan Wright, (Gateway Press, Baltimore, 1980), that Herman served in the U.S. Navy during World War I, in the Medical Corps aboard the U.S.S. Wyoming.

I also remember him as an exceedingly sweet man who, in his later years, would become effusively emotional at the drop of a hat. When my friends would come over and say hello to him at our house, he must have experienced their greeting as a gesture of kindness, because he would invariably cry.

I have a photograph of him somewhere, in his Navy whites, handsome as all get-out, with a confident look on his young face. He had his whole life ahead of him.

I miss him, just as I miss all the other Runyans and Fuchses who have left. To say that I’ll see them again someday sounds too clichéd, and I’m not certain I believe it. What feels more accurate to me, if no less clichéd, is that they live on in me, and in my children.

I’m starting to understand that our ancestors are always with us.

Honoring the Dead 100 Years Later: The Triangle Factory Tragedy

This date has significance, as today marks the centennial of the day a group of 146 garment workers -- most of them young women, the youngest of whom was 14 -- perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The factory was near Washington Square, which, coincidentally, was also the first place I called home, when my parents brought me to their apartment at 2 Washington Square Village, Apartment 8-H, the day after I was born.

Those girls and women must have gone to work that day as they did on any other. Maybe they walked; maybe they rode the trolley. Perhaps it was warm for late March, promising Spring, or rainy, or chilly. They probably thought nothing of it, as they made their way into the building and up the elevator to the ninth floor.

Who knows what the morning was like for those girls and women? They were the hardest-working of the working poor -- Jewish and Italian mostly, many of whom had recently arrived in America, hoping for something better. If not better for themselves, then they hoped for a better life for their children, real or imagined in the future.

There are some good oral histories from that infamous day one hundred years ago -- most notably in Howard Zinn's seminal A People's History of the United States, as well as in the library of the American Social History Project in New York City.

The reason I know about the ASHP, which some may think of as somewhat obscure, I admit, is because I had the good fortune to work with one of the best Social Studies teachers/historians in David Silberberg.

David and I worked together at Satellite Academy High School from 1992 to 2004. He still teaches Social Studies there -- the only one left from that Dream Team of a teaching staff from the late-1980's and early nineties. (Happily, I can say they've brought on great teachers consistently since then, and there have been many new Dream Teams in the intervening years.)

We talked about team teaching quite a bit, as David and I shared an office in that wonderful, run-down building across from the Tweed Courthouse. The American Social History Project had developed a powerful interdisciplinary curriculum that was meant to be taught by a Social Studies and English teacher together, so that students would learn about events through first-hand oral histories, while developing their writing and literacy skills. It was perfect, and I loved every minute of teaching that class.

In addition to examining the stories from that horrible incident, David and I worked with our students to understand images, like the one above. Television obviously hadn't been invented yet, but photography had, and the images of all those girls and women falling, jumping from the ninth floor to their deaths, became a rallying cry for the labor movement. Management had apparently blocked off and locked doors to prevent workers from stealing scraps of fabric. They had also chosen to forgo fire drills, because, they said, it hampered productivity.

I thank people like Howard Zinn and David Silberberg who keep telling the story. Organizations like the American Social History Project and HBO, who produced an excellent and heartbreaking documentary about the fire deserve our collective gratitude, as well.