What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [91]
It wasn’t long after the dust settled that he went looking for a new wife to help him raise Renee. He pulled out his dancing shoes, and in 1963, he met Margaret Riley at a dance at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan. Peggy, as she was known, was thirty, widowed, and the mother of a five-year-old. Her husband, a New York City police officer, had committed suicide a year earlier. Ted asked her to dance, and she says he danced well: “I’m a Catholic from the Bronx. Usually, if you went to a dance, you’d ask someone what parish they were from. If they were from another parish, you never heard from them again. But we just clicked.”
A few months later, Ludwiczak and his one-year-old daughter, Renee, moved into Peggy Riley’s three-bedroom ranch house on a cul-de-sac in Garnerville, New York. Most of the neighbors were, like Peggy, Catholic natives of the Bronx who began moving to Rockland County when the Tappan Zee Bridge opened the way over the Hudson River in 1955. Ted and Peggy’s son, Christopher, was born in 1964, and their daughter, Susan, three years later. With Peggy at home with the children and Ted devoting himself to his business, the family attained a semblance of suburban happiness.
Ted expressed his creativity mostly through his frugality. If he had a mantra, it was: Don’t buy what you can make or fix. And, according to those who knew him best, he bought little that was new. His children got bicycles, but they were castaways that he repaired and sometimes souped up. But no bike was ever delivered in a factory box. “We were never happy about it. My friends would always say, ‘Gee, I wish my dad could do something like that,’ ” said Christopher, now a FedEx driver. Their friends were less envious of other ways Ted expressed his Old World parsimony. “The worst day of the year came the night before school pictures had to be taken. There’d be a lot of crying, but my father would insist that we go to the basement, where he gave us a haircut. If you look at the pictures now, you’ll see a lot of scowls. We were definitely different. You might even see a resemblance between our heads and the ones he carves now,” Ted’s son joked.
Over the years, Ted transferred his love of the sea into a passion for the Hudson River, and found another outlet for his creative energy when he joined the Seaweed Yacht Club at Stony Point, New York. Founded in the mid-1950s, it was a working-class club, limited to fifty families who paid an annual membership fee of ten dollars. The members, including skilled electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and other construction tradesmen, worked collaboratively to turn a mothballed barge, bought for a dollar, into a family oasis. Ted worked diligently alongside his new compatriots—so diligently that he was eventually given a plaque of gratitude for his dedication. He absorbed skills that, along with those he developed as a lens grinder, were apparently later applied to stone carving. Every day on his way home from work, he stopped off at the club for a couple of beers and, in good weather, to work. His family spent its weekends at the club and on the boats he came to own, including a thirty-seven-foot Chris-Craft. “We had a lot of good parties,” Ludwiczak said, delighted at the memory. “It was real America!”
By the late 1970s the good times waned, and Ted’s business and domestic life foundered. Communications between husband and wife had never surpassed the obligatory, and the pressures of blending their families eventually overwhelmed them. A painful period of feuding led to separation in 1979 and, eventually, divorce. Taking seventeen-year-old Renee with him, the fifty-three-year-old Ted moved to the house in Haverstraw,