What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [111]
“There would be stoves and refrigerators and half a dozen sofas covered with plastic sitting out here,” Barbara said one day as we walked up the long driveway to the modest, brown-shingled, five-bedroom house in which they have lived for nearly fifty years. “Furniture filled the garage. And all the household goods were crammed into every inch of the basement.”
When Barbara and Ira began recycling furniture to needy families, Barbara had finished raising their six children. Ira had spent thirty-five unfulfilling years as an electrical engineer, helping develop surface-to-air (SAM) missiles for the United States Air Force and then working on various projects for Raytheon.
“My work was mainly filling slots and doing work that was not a heck of a lot of value. I spent my time caught in a lot of red tape and writing reports on this or that that never amounted to anything,” he said. Admittedly, there had been some exciting periods, such as helping develop Patriot missiles, which would become the U.S. Army’s main medium-range tactical air defense and the army’s anti-ballistic missile platform. “It was a fantastic thing for our defense, as were some of the other projects I worked on, like helping us to figure out how to send the second wave of ICBMs over to Russia or how to keep the Command Post alive so that we could send another wave over after a preliminary attack. But after a while, those things really got to me. I had work-related depression for years and was never really happy in my work.
“If someone had told me, ‘Well, Ira, now, at age sixty, you’re going to enter into another career, and for twenty years, you’re going to work six days a week, and you’re going to go out and carry refrigerators in sub-zero weather, and you’re not going to get paid anything,’ I would have said, ‘Oh, God, don’t let me live.’ I would have taken a gun and shot myself in the head,” he said. But no one warned him. And instead of all he might have dreaded, Ira—a trim, handsome white-haired man with a slim mustache hugging his upper lip—says, “These have been the best years of my life.”
It began with a phone call to Barbara in 1989 from a fellow parishioner at Saint Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church in Acton. Barbara was writing the church bulletin in those days. The church member asked her if she would include a notice in the next bulletin requesting donations of furniture and household items for a fellow church member’s sister who was arriving from war-torn El Salvador. The twenty-six-year-old woman, Cecilia Palma, had fled her country with her two small children. She had lived next to the church building where six prominent Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and the housekeeper’s teenage daughter were slain by twenty armed and uniformed men while they slept. In fighting that had followed, government forces destroyed Palma’s house. With her sister’s help, she scraped together enough money for plane tickets to the United States and for rent and security on an apartment in Acton. But neither she nor her sister had any money left to buy beds, linens, or any other furnishings.
The slaying of the Jesuit priests was big news and a stinging reminder in the United States of the four American nuns murdered with Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador nine years earlier. It galvanized concern in the United States about the systematic violence and human rights abuses carried out by the Salvadoran death squads and the military against suspected leftists. It also heightened questions about President Ronald Reagan’s vocal support of the Salvadoran government and the billions of dollars in military aid that had been sent to Latin American nations in the 1980s. That support came under even sharper focus in Massachusetts after the late Representative Joseph Moakley, an old-school Boston politician, initiated a congressional investigation.
Acton residents responded to the plea to help