I was lucky to have good parents, but unlucky to be born first. There was no handbook for parenting and by and large my parents were not prepared for my personality.
They certainly were not prepared for the cultural changes that growing up in the sixties brought along. My father was the quintessential Dad. He was my coach, mentor, and role model but he was never my friend. We didn’t have long talks about life or how it was going to work out. He was busy moving up the corporate ladder and trying to pay the bills for an ever expanding family which eventually included five kids. At Church he was an usher, which meant he seldom sat with the family. In Boy Scouts, he was the Scout Master which meant individual attention was out of the question. At home, he was usually asleep on the sofa, most nights by 9:00 pm.
From the time I was eleven, I found things to do that kept me away from home. First, it was a morning newspaper route, seven days a week. I was up and out of the house by 4:30 every morning, home for breakfast by 6:30 and off to school by 7:00. After school was athletics. Football, Basketball, and Track, every season was covered. On the weekends were Sock Hops. Boy, did I look forward those, even though I didn’t know how to dance, neither did anyone else. During the summers, after breakfast, I would mount my bicycle and head out for the day, returning only to attend to obligatory chores around the house. Toting out the clinkers from the coal furnace in the basement in the winter, mowing grass in the summer, and carrying out the trash to the alley were some of the mundane tasks that were my responsibilities. Some of my friends did not have daily responsibilities, but then, they were not the recipients of a weekly allowance. This stipend was a source of hot debate occasionally, when it was withheld, due to non-performance of a certain task.
Looking back, the responsibility of daily tasks and the weight of disappointment that non-performance carried with it, has stuck with me my whole life. If I did not perform my assigned role, my parents would be disappointed and be there to hold me accountable. Accountability is now one of my strongest character traits. If I didn’t get up to deliver the newspaper, no one else would be there to perform the task. There was no option to neglect to perform your duty. According to my Dad, I signed up and it was my responsibility, period. He was right, and I have never regretted accepting responsibility. The sixties turned out to be pretty strict, but it was nothing like growing up in the Depression like my parents did.
