What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [115]
By then, Ira had had enough of working in an isolated military outpost. With a burgeoning family of five children, ranging in age from one to six, and another child on the way, he was anxious to move to the private sector. He landed a job with Raytheon in Bedford, Massachusetts, and moved from hands-on engineering to managing others who were writing specifications for test programs. For a period of time—when he was part of a Raytheon team that won a contract to produce Patriot missiles—Ira was actually happy at work. But when his involvement with the Patriot program ended, work became unsatisfying.
For years, Barbara was more than fully employed raising the Smiths’ brood. She cooked, cleaned, checked homework, and worked hard to stretch the family budget and still put savings aside for investment. “Ira let me take care of the money, and it was the only thing that kept me from going out of my mind,” she said.
While the Smiths’ children all found initial academic success, the college years did not go smoothly for some of them. Their two oldest sons, Rick and David, dropped out of Tufts and Princeton, respectively, and joined The Way, a self-described Christian biblical teaching fellowship. Critics, including Barbara and Ira, considered it a cult. “It was exceedingly painful for me,” Barbara said. “We had major philosophical disagreements with The Way. And the boys were very upset with us because we didn’t agree.”
Eventually, the Smiths made their peace with their sons’ religious paths. But it wasn’t easy. Rick Smith had been a National Honor Society student and a track star in high school. After his involvement in The Way subsided, he returned home, worked at a series of low-level jobs, and lived with his parents for ten years. He later moved to Princeton, where he got a job in a warehouse, and lived with David, by then a successful contractor, and his family. Daughter Kathryn became pregnant in her first year of college, dropped out, and gave up her child for adoption. (She would later receive a couple of degrees and work as a trainer at Harvard University. She was reunited with her daughter in 2008.)
The Smiths’ children say they were intensely aware of their father’s unhappiness at work, though they had little idea what he actually did. “The man you meet now is not the man I grew up with as my father,” said daughter Elizabeth Otterbein, a research chemist for a pharmaceutical company. “The father I grew up with came home every night and had a drink. Then, with six kids sitting at the dinner table, he tuned out and didn’t say a word.”
After dinner, he dropped into the BarcaLounger and nodded off for the evening. Saturdays were often even more unpleasant. Ira barked orders at his children to do work around the house, Otterbein recalled. “My mother was always vacuuming the carpets, doing laundry, making the beds, and cleaning the bathrooms. We grew up with a lot of tension.” Only Sundays brought respite. Ira would take the children to bowl or to hike, and Barbara would relish the vice of shopping for groceries and family needs by herself. Popcorn with dinner was the family treat.
While the children began to see their father’s spirits lift in the years following his retirement and often came home to find that their parents were using the extra bedrooms to give refuge to someone in need, nothing prepared them for their parents’ commitment to the Household Goods Recycling Ministry. In fact, they were skeptical about their obsessive immersion in it. They worried, too, that their parents, already in their sixties, might injure themselves with all the lifting they were doing. It was also disconcerting to return home for visits and find the driveway and the family’s volleyball court filled with sofas, refrigerators, and stoves. “For the first few years, everyone was under the impression that my mother was crazy. It was as if she was trying