Rant #2,488: Long Live Love

Today is my father's funeral.

It will be a private one, with only his close family in attendance.

The coronavirus put a damper on anything larger, and I know that if we could have put on a formal funeral, it would have been standing room only in the chapel.

My father touched a lot of people, and so many want to pay their respects that I am having a virtual shiva tomorrow through Zoom.

I hope I set it up correctly, but we will know at 7 p.m. on Thursday. It should be interesting, and if you want to attend, just either Facebook message me or send me a message right here, and I will get you the details.

I really questioned whether I wanted to write an entry today or hold off until later in the week, but I decided to write one, because I have so much more to say about my father.

He came from humble beginnings, but he made his way in life, was married to the love of his life for 64 years, raised a successful family, loved his son in law and his daughter in law, and reveled in his grandchildren.

And he was full of stories, some of which I believed, some of which I think were true but he embellished a bit, and some of which ... heck, I just don't know.

Some of the "I just don't know" stories happened while he was in the Marines in the early 1950s during the Korean War, and they are XXX-rated, so I won't go into them in detail here.

But he served in some interesting places, like in the Deep South in North Carolina during the Jim Crow Era, in Puerto Rico, and in Cuba. It was in Cuba that most of the risque stories emerged, but one sort of clean story that I can tell from his time in Cuba was this one, which both my mother and late grandmother said was absolutely true.

My father served in the Marines for two years, and I think his last duty stop was in Cuba. This was not Fidel Castro's Cuba just yet; it was emerging as an American playground, a place that Americans could visit and sow their oats if they wanted to, sort of like a Las Vegas in a tropical setting.

Well, if you believe my father's XXX stories, he sowed his wild oats there for sure--based on these stories, heaven knows when he had the time to serve as a Marine--and when he came home from his stint as a serviceman, one of the first things he told my grandmother was that if any Cuban women came to the front door of their home and asked if he lived there, she was to tell these women that she never heard of such a person and shut the door in their faces.

So yes, I just might have some half brothers or half sisters living in Cuba right now that I will never meet up with.

Anyway, when he came back from the service, he went right into working at the family's butcher store on Delancey Street in Manhattan, and through one circumstance or another, that is the store where his future fortunes were set.

They had a customer who was constantly trying to fix up my father with their female grandchildren, and finally, my father relented.

The first one that he was set up with was a lady who made Jackie Gleason look thin, and the girl just wasn't for him.

The customer said, "OK, I have a skinny one for you," and that skinny one was my mother.

Within weeks they were engaged, and, well, the rest is history. They were married for 64 years, and the marriage produced myself and my sister, and later a total of five grandchildren.

My father always put family first, with my mother at the pinnacle, but work was also important, which meant his passing on Labor Day was eerily fitting in a weird sort of way.

But back to the butcher shop ...

In the mid-1960s, New York City decided that they were going to build a roadway on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and that new roadway would go right through the butcher store, so it had to be torn down. (Note: the roadway was never built, and for generations, the site of the old store remained vacant.)

My father had driven a cab off and on in the early 1960s here and there to pick up some extra cash, and when the end of the butcher store came closer, he really did not know what to do with his life.

Through the prodding of a close friend who was a cab driver, he was convinced that he could make it driving a cab, and went whole hog into his new profession, buying his own medallion and first cab--a white and blue car (New York cabs did not have to be yellow at that time) that never worked right from the time he took it out of the shop to the time he dumped it.

He found that Manhattan was his oyster, was his personal office, and that he could not only make a go at it, but that he could be a success as a cab driver. He later bought a Checker Cab, and that is where his career really took off.

He had so many stories about driving a cab, picking up you and me and also the indigent and the rich and famous.

In between fares, he would pick up many of New York's ubiquitous "street people," and drive them from here to there for free. He would pass out loose cigarettes and give out food to those who needed it, and he felt that he had become so lucky with his new profession that those less fortunate than him should be part of his success, too.

He picked up the rich and famous, having arguments with Howard Cosell, being unfairly cut down to size by Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and by transporting the likes of Tiny Tim and Michael J. Fox and Georgia Engel and Brook Benton and Andre the Giant and countless other athletes, stars of the stage and screen, and near celebrities where they wanted to go.

He was in the movies, on the radio, on television, and yes, Martin Scorcese rode his cab doing research for what was then a future film, and that film was "Taxi Driver." No, I don't think the main character had any of my father's traits, but Scorcese did say that he would give my father a credit line at the end of the film, which he never did.

One of my father's great interests was sports, and he was a die-hard Yankees fan. Family lore has it that in May 1967, he picked up an obviously drunk Earl Weaver, the manager of the Baltimore Orioles whose team was in town to face the Yankees in a weekend series.

Weaver, the future Hall of Famer who was also known as a fierce drinker, had arrived in town a day early with his team, and even though it wasn't even the evening yet, he had tied on a big one on this particular day.

Hurling a cascade of expletives as my father pretty much carried him into his cab because he was so inebriated, my father realized who he had picked up and asked him a favor: he had purchased tickets for my birthday to see the Sunday, Mother's Day game at Yankee Stadium between the Yankees and the Orioles. Mickey Mantle was stuck at 499 home runs, and could one of his pitchers groove a pitch to Mantle so he could hit his 500th homer during the game that we attended?

Mantle was at the end of his career, he was old and broken down, but he was revered by other players as few players had been at that time. Pitchers would often groove pitches to the Mick to hit as homers by this time, literally so they could tell their children and future grandchildren that Mantle had hit one off of them, so my father wasn't asking anything out of the ordinary.

Weaver used one F-bomb after another in reply, coughing and gagging in between expletives as if he was going to upchuck anything he had previously imbibed.

Finally, my father got him to the hotel where the team was staying at, and he literally had to drag Weaver from the cab to the hotel doorman's feet, and he told the doorman, "He's your problem now."

That was on the Thursday off day. The Orioles and the Yankees played on Friday and Saturday, and the Mick was stuck at 499 homers.

Then came Mother's Day of 1967, a bright sunny day, and my father took me and two friends to Yankee Stadium to see that day's game.

Every time Mickey Mantle came up during the game, people--all 23,000 of us or so, filling about one-third of the Stadium--stood up, in anticipation for what we felt was a historic at bat.

I know that Mantle had one at bat early on, and I don't remember what he did, but by the middle of the game, Stu Miller, a pretty good pitcher in his day on excellent Oriole teams, was on the mound and Mantle came up to the plate.

After a few pitches, Miller threw another one to Mantle, a real meatball that even a vegan would jump at.

Mantle swung, the ball went into the rightfield seats, and the Yankee slugger jogged around the bases with his 500th home run, and the place went wild.

We will never know if Weaver did that to pay back my father for taking him while drunk as a skunk to his hotel, but it is a nice story to tell, and to believe if you want to.

Yes, the cab was his workplace, Manhattan was his office, and well, just about anything could happen when you mixed all of the elements together, with my father at the controls.

My dad did live the "good life," which is what he always called his life as he got older.

There were so many other stories that I could tell if I had the time, but I will leave it at that.

He lived the life, what more can I say, and he was my dad, and I loved him, and i will never forget him.

He made me the man that I am today, and for that, I will be ever grateful to him.

He was the perfect role model for me, and today, when I say a little speech about him at the funeral, the emphasis of my speech will be on that, along with some other things I have to say about him.

He will always be in my mind, in my heart, and in my very being.

I love you Dad, and I always will.