I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [9]
As a telegraph operator, Pop was at the top of his trade. Telegraph operators took great pride in their work, and they competed—how fast they could decipher and tap out Morse code. Just as on our phones we recognize a familiar voice, he could recognize the name of the sender on his telegraph from the pattern and style of the clicks received. At family dinners he often tapped on the table as he ate. I wonder today, was he secretly complaining? “Will you sit down, woman, and stop talking!” Dot, dot, dot-dash-dot, dot dot. Music was another passion. We had an old Victrola that you would wind up to play records. Delibes’s Coppélia, Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” Strauss waltzes, and various opera arias competed with the radio’s classical music stations. Pop read voraciously, especially newspapers, reading dozens front to back.
On Sunday mornings, I would share the paper with him: me, sprawled on the floor with the comics, a drawing pad, and crayons, inventing cartoons; him, reading the news with his feet on a stool, a cigar in his mouth, and arias surging from the radio—his idea of heaven. He would announce to the room, “Your mother is lucky to have me. I’m not your ordinary Irishman. I don’t drink, I give my full paycheck to my wife every week, and I’m home, not out gallivanting with other women.”
Boss would walk in, see my father sitting in his chair. “Andy, stop smoking that awful cigar, put down that newspaper, and help me move this table.” Or bed. Or bureau. When she wasn’t managing the household and our lives, she re-choreographed the placement of furniture. It was never-ending. She’d say, “Oh, Andrew, why are you sitting around, stinking up the house with your dirty cigar? Come and help me hang the curtains.” He’d say, “Woman, can’t I have a bit of peace and quiet on my one day off?” as he got up to do as he was told.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION—DEDHAM TO NEW YORK
In Dedham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, I was born at midnight, July 27, 1934, making a quartet of siblings, in age spaced roughly three years apart. My brother John was the eldest, close to ten years old, followed by Patrick, six, and my sister, Madeleine, about three. We lived in a dollhouse, its garden crammed with flowers. “Traffic stopped when they passed our house!” Boss, boasting, would recall, “People would ooh and ahh, the flowers were so beautiful … I was happy there.”
While our nation struggled through the Great Depression, my father snagged a great job working for a rich man—personal telegraph operator for Old Joe Kennedy, father to John, our future president. To the amazement and envy of out-of-work neighbors, Pop not only had a posh job but owned the brand-new Ford he used for his commute. Pop drove to Cape Cod and the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, where he received and passed on financial data for Old Joe, dotting and dashing off stock orders from his cubicle in the basement of the main house. Senator Ted Kennedy told me he remembered as a boy the telegraph operators in the basement of their summer home. Come fall, we all piled into the Ford, waved goodbye to the neighbors, and drove off to Florida. While New England froze, my father worked in shirtsleeves at the Kennedys’ Palm Beach haven.
Palm Beach, February 1935; my father, my brother Pat, my mother, my sister, and me (image credit 1.6)
On these seasonal trips to Florida, my mother, behind the wheel, would put pillows under her bottom to get herself high enough to see over the steering wheel.