Requiem Josephus
Aug. 16th, 2015 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nebris..written for my father's memorial services, the private one yesterday and the public one next Saturday..
My name is Michael Varian Daly. I am Joe's son by his first marriage. I will be sixty three years old five days after this memorial service. And that fact seems as strange to me as I suspect does for many of you listening to these words. I suppose I should feel a specter, the mysterious other child off in the vague distance. But in these past few years I have been closer to him, at least in my own self, than at any other time in my life.
It has been a quarter century since I last saw my father. The last clear memory is of spending an bright spring afternoon with him, Betsy and a then infant Stephen. We were up on Broadway in Eighty's or thereabouts. He was walking ahead of Betsy and I, holding Stephen by the hand. It was Betsy's words that imprinted that moment for me. Looking at them walking side by side she said, “All you Daly men have the same square ass.”
If I was there myself, at this point I'd look over at Betsy, give her a big grin and say, “Yes, I do love my wicked step mother.”
Besides my square ass, I have also inherited my father's flippancy and perverse sense of humor, which I shall do my best to restrain in these words. I know he hated the maudlin and will also stay away from that, as much as I might wish to become weepy at this moment. So instead let me tell stories of my father, some I believe you may not have heard.
Joe had a truly tough childhood. I know a number of horror stories, but let us just say it was along the lines of Tennessee Williams and John Steinbeck and leave it at that. I just said to Zanna that it was amazing that he turned out to be the truly good man that he was.
He grew up in Oakland, California. He was eleven at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor and fifteen when the war ended. Like most American boys of that time, he wanted to go and fight. He did get to see the war effort unfold before his eyes as the San Francisco Bay area was a major staging point for the Pacific War, full of US Navy warships and transport vessels packed with men and materiel.
By the of the war, he was essentially on his own. Like I said, he had a tough childhood and his adolescence was no prize either. At fifteen, he joined a motorcycle gang known then as The Booze Fighters, World War Two vets who themselves had come of age in War and simply could not become a part of civil society. As the name implies, they rode around, got drunk and got into fights. They later changed their name to the Hell's Angel's.
Joe rode around Northern California with them on a Triumph motorcycle with a German war surplus P-38 pistol stuck in his belt. That he was that tough a mother expletive redacted will come as no surprise to his fencing students. I can still see the Teutonic smirk he would sometimes get when describing his teaching methods to me.
At seventeen he joined the Coast Guard. He missed the infamous biker riot in Holister California because he was on duty that weekend. Said event would later inspire the movie The Wild One, which was a rather sanitized version of events.
At eighteen he transferred to the Air Force and wound up in England with the Seventh Air Division of the Strategic Air Command, flying a typewriter as part of the Base Security Staff. That allowed him to be a bit of a Milo Minderbinder. For those of you who have not read Catch 22, let us just say he was something of an operator. And that reputation brought him to the attention of the head of SAC, a four star general named Curtis LeMay. He is the chap who orchestrated the bombing Japan, nukes included, and had created SAC in the first place.
LeMay was also something of an operator, to put it mildly. He has been accused of trying to provoke a war with the Soviet Union on several occasions. I suspect he was conducting his own foreign policy, flying quietly into the UK to conduct meetings with Important People in big houses in the English countryside.
And he picked my father as his driver and bodyguard. It is my understanding that one of those crazy bikers had been an officer who had served with the general during the war and personally vouched for Joe. LeMay need a man who could handle vehicles, handle himself and keep his mouth shut. Joe was not even twenty, but he fit the bill.
LeMay would fly in to the SAC base as an unlisted passenger on an Air Force transport. He'd be dressed in a civilian suit. Joe would meet him on the tarmac with a civilian car, an old model and a different one each time. He would be in civvies also and have a Colt .45 automatic tucked in his belt.
They would drive off to one of those big houses in the English countryside. Joe would wait in the kitchen while LeMay did whatever he was doing, probably flirting with any of the cute house maids that might be around. When LeMay was done, they would drive back to the base, the general would board the transport aircraft and that would be that.
That was back in nineteen fifty/fifty one. He said he'd hadn't talked about it until he told me in the mid nineteen seventies.
My father loved his cars and motorcycles and with his Air Force pay being an easy ten times what the average English worker made back then, he could indulge in that love. He bought a brand new Triumph motorcycle and an MG two seater sports car. Of course it is no surprise that he was popular with the English maidens. Tall, handsome, charming, with money and nice rides, he was awash in fine English female sexual reference redacted.
He was buying a sweater for one of those maidens when he met my mother. Sixteen years old, working at the sweater counter at Fortnum and Mason. He later told me she did wonderful things to a sweater.
She also ran with a motorcycle gang herself, 'Mick and the lads' he called them. When he first met them, Mick asked him, “Oi, mate, wut ya fink ov Stan Kenton?” Joe then launched into a rap on California progressive jazz and was in like Flynn.
I came along maybe a year later. I don't think I was planned, but he and me mum had bonded and Joe liked my grand dad, who'd been a flier himself at the end of World War One, though he got his wings just as the war ended. He was musical, too, a woodwinds man.
His time in England was very happy. Financially well off. Pretty new wife and baby. Nice in-laws. His service buddies and Mick's crew. He could tap the base PX for all manner of goodies, too.
Then his enlistment ended. He could re-up, but he'd get sent to some hot dirty bunghole in Texas. So he left the Air Force and we wound up in New York, where he planned to pursue acting. The marriage did not survive the transition. I was three years old.
My father became a more or less marginal presence in my life at that point. My 'new' father was less than satisfactory and that is all I'll say about that.
He didn't vanish however. I clearly remember him taking me to see The Fantastiks in its early days, you know, back when Jerry Orbach played El Gallo. “Try To Remember” makes my cry every time to this very day. I cried a bit just writing that.
When I became an adult we spent more time together, especially during my short lived attempt to become an actor myself, but I'm certain there are many others here today who can more effectively fill in the stories of the rest of this part of his life, so I'll skip ahead several decades.
I have spent a significant part of my life examining what makes people tick and how they do so. One thing I have seen many many times is how children from one marriage come to hate the children from another marriage. There tends to be this sense that those other kids are getting something you didn't. Sometimes, they are.
But at the root of that is the feeling you didn't get whatever it is because you didn't deserve it or mommy or daddy didn't really love and so on. Rarely are those older children willing to see that the parent has simply become an actual adult and learned how can raise a family properly. Of course, all too often those parents didn't become that at all, but just repeated the same mistakes.
My father, Joe Daly, was one of those people who very much learned how to be an actual adult, and without losing his ability to be a joyful wise-ass. He even learned to find a good woman to marry and keep her close, no mean feat in and of itself.
He was just a kid himself when I was born and I'll admit I did carry resentment that he walked away back then. I didn't understand for years that he truly felt he was doing the best for me. When I saw years later how wonderful a father he was to Susanna and Stephen, it clarified for me what a good man he really was and I forgave the mistakes of his youth.
A few years ago I wrote him a letter telling him so and I'm profoundly grateful that I did. Though I will miss him and will shed my tears over his passing, I have the good fortune of knowing we have parted in peace with each over. And he allowed us to do that by being the good man he was....
My name is Michael Varian Daly. I am Joe's son by his first marriage. I will be sixty three years old five days after this memorial service. And that fact seems as strange to me as I suspect does for many of you listening to these words. I suppose I should feel a specter, the mysterious other child off in the vague distance. But in these past few years I have been closer to him, at least in my own self, than at any other time in my life.
It has been a quarter century since I last saw my father. The last clear memory is of spending an bright spring afternoon with him, Betsy and a then infant Stephen. We were up on Broadway in Eighty's or thereabouts. He was walking ahead of Betsy and I, holding Stephen by the hand. It was Betsy's words that imprinted that moment for me. Looking at them walking side by side she said, “All you Daly men have the same square ass.”
If I was there myself, at this point I'd look over at Betsy, give her a big grin and say, “Yes, I do love my wicked step mother.”
Besides my square ass, I have also inherited my father's flippancy and perverse sense of humor, which I shall do my best to restrain in these words. I know he hated the maudlin and will also stay away from that, as much as I might wish to become weepy at this moment. So instead let me tell stories of my father, some I believe you may not have heard.
Joe had a truly tough childhood. I know a number of horror stories, but let us just say it was along the lines of Tennessee Williams and John Steinbeck and leave it at that. I just said to Zanna that it was amazing that he turned out to be the truly good man that he was.
He grew up in Oakland, California. He was eleven at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor and fifteen when the war ended. Like most American boys of that time, he wanted to go and fight. He did get to see the war effort unfold before his eyes as the San Francisco Bay area was a major staging point for the Pacific War, full of US Navy warships and transport vessels packed with men and materiel.
By the of the war, he was essentially on his own. Like I said, he had a tough childhood and his adolescence was no prize either. At fifteen, he joined a motorcycle gang known then as The Booze Fighters, World War Two vets who themselves had come of age in War and simply could not become a part of civil society. As the name implies, they rode around, got drunk and got into fights. They later changed their name to the Hell's Angel's.
Joe rode around Northern California with them on a Triumph motorcycle with a German war surplus P-38 pistol stuck in his belt. That he was that tough a mother expletive redacted will come as no surprise to his fencing students. I can still see the Teutonic smirk he would sometimes get when describing his teaching methods to me.
At seventeen he joined the Coast Guard. He missed the infamous biker riot in Holister California because he was on duty that weekend. Said event would later inspire the movie The Wild One, which was a rather sanitized version of events.
At eighteen he transferred to the Air Force and wound up in England with the Seventh Air Division of the Strategic Air Command, flying a typewriter as part of the Base Security Staff. That allowed him to be a bit of a Milo Minderbinder. For those of you who have not read Catch 22, let us just say he was something of an operator. And that reputation brought him to the attention of the head of SAC, a four star general named Curtis LeMay. He is the chap who orchestrated the bombing Japan, nukes included, and had created SAC in the first place.
LeMay was also something of an operator, to put it mildly. He has been accused of trying to provoke a war with the Soviet Union on several occasions. I suspect he was conducting his own foreign policy, flying quietly into the UK to conduct meetings with Important People in big houses in the English countryside.
And he picked my father as his driver and bodyguard. It is my understanding that one of those crazy bikers had been an officer who had served with the general during the war and personally vouched for Joe. LeMay need a man who could handle vehicles, handle himself and keep his mouth shut. Joe was not even twenty, but he fit the bill.
LeMay would fly in to the SAC base as an unlisted passenger on an Air Force transport. He'd be dressed in a civilian suit. Joe would meet him on the tarmac with a civilian car, an old model and a different one each time. He would be in civvies also and have a Colt .45 automatic tucked in his belt.
They would drive off to one of those big houses in the English countryside. Joe would wait in the kitchen while LeMay did whatever he was doing, probably flirting with any of the cute house maids that might be around. When LeMay was done, they would drive back to the base, the general would board the transport aircraft and that would be that.
That was back in nineteen fifty/fifty one. He said he'd hadn't talked about it until he told me in the mid nineteen seventies.
My father loved his cars and motorcycles and with his Air Force pay being an easy ten times what the average English worker made back then, he could indulge in that love. He bought a brand new Triumph motorcycle and an MG two seater sports car. Of course it is no surprise that he was popular with the English maidens. Tall, handsome, charming, with money and nice rides, he was awash in fine English female sexual reference redacted.
He was buying a sweater for one of those maidens when he met my mother. Sixteen years old, working at the sweater counter at Fortnum and Mason. He later told me she did wonderful things to a sweater.
She also ran with a motorcycle gang herself, 'Mick and the lads' he called them. When he first met them, Mick asked him, “Oi, mate, wut ya fink ov Stan Kenton?” Joe then launched into a rap on California progressive jazz and was in like Flynn.
I came along maybe a year later. I don't think I was planned, but he and me mum had bonded and Joe liked my grand dad, who'd been a flier himself at the end of World War One, though he got his wings just as the war ended. He was musical, too, a woodwinds man.
His time in England was very happy. Financially well off. Pretty new wife and baby. Nice in-laws. His service buddies and Mick's crew. He could tap the base PX for all manner of goodies, too.
Then his enlistment ended. He could re-up, but he'd get sent to some hot dirty bunghole in Texas. So he left the Air Force and we wound up in New York, where he planned to pursue acting. The marriage did not survive the transition. I was three years old.
My father became a more or less marginal presence in my life at that point. My 'new' father was less than satisfactory and that is all I'll say about that.
He didn't vanish however. I clearly remember him taking me to see The Fantastiks in its early days, you know, back when Jerry Orbach played El Gallo. “Try To Remember” makes my cry every time to this very day. I cried a bit just writing that.
When I became an adult we spent more time together, especially during my short lived attempt to become an actor myself, but I'm certain there are many others here today who can more effectively fill in the stories of the rest of this part of his life, so I'll skip ahead several decades.
I have spent a significant part of my life examining what makes people tick and how they do so. One thing I have seen many many times is how children from one marriage come to hate the children from another marriage. There tends to be this sense that those other kids are getting something you didn't. Sometimes, they are.
But at the root of that is the feeling you didn't get whatever it is because you didn't deserve it or mommy or daddy didn't really love and so on. Rarely are those older children willing to see that the parent has simply become an actual adult and learned how can raise a family properly. Of course, all too often those parents didn't become that at all, but just repeated the same mistakes.
My father, Joe Daly, was one of those people who very much learned how to be an actual adult, and without losing his ability to be a joyful wise-ass. He even learned to find a good woman to marry and keep her close, no mean feat in and of itself.
He was just a kid himself when I was born and I'll admit I did carry resentment that he walked away back then. I didn't understand for years that he truly felt he was doing the best for me. When I saw years later how wonderful a father he was to Susanna and Stephen, it clarified for me what a good man he really was and I forgave the mistakes of his youth.
A few years ago I wrote him a letter telling him so and I'm profoundly grateful that I did. Though I will miss him and will shed my tears over his passing, I have the good fortune of knowing we have parted in peace with each over. And he allowed us to do that by being the good man he was....
(no subject)
Date: 2015-08-18 05:08 pm (UTC)