The Mayor’s Daughter

In 1950, my father ran for mayor of Alma, Nebraska, population 1,768. He ran against a strong, popular candidate, Paul Haeker. The April 4 election, a heavy one, drew more than three hundred voters, 162 for Dad, 148 for Haeker. Dad won just by 14 votes, but he won.

So my dad was Mayor, and I, the Mayor's Daughter. 

Almost thirteen years old, I quickly learned the downside to my new status. I felt sure my classmates would be so impressed by it that they would no longer holler at me, "Teacher's pet! Pthppthppthppth! Teacher's pet!"

I was right. Now they hollered, "You think you're so smart Pthppthppthppth! 'cause your dad's mayor!" 

Isn’t It Odd…

that nearly all of the dozens of people I chat with on Facebook are male?

that most are widowers with one beloved child?

that these widowers work overseas (usually military men or engineers) and their beloved child is in school in the states

that their child gets in some kind of trouble and ends up in a hospital needing several thousand dollars for surgery 

that their fathers want me to send money. To help their child.

I don't begrudge their child the cash, of course, but I do send it directly to the hospital, not to the father.

Hoffa in Love

Jimmy Hoffa, to help out a laundry on strike that March 1936, stepped in the picket line and fell in love.

"I was looking," he recalled, "into the brightest damn pair of blue eyes I'd ever seen. Geez, but they crinkled in the corners when she smiled back at me. Her goddam hair was shining blond and although she was small and looked frail she walked erect and proud. I felt like I'd been fuckin' hit on the chest with a blackjack."

Jimmy jumped in line behind her.

"Better watch out." he warned her. "There's a man on your heels."

And there was.

Six months later, Jimmy and Jo drove to Bowling Green, Ohio, a town known as a place where a couple could get hitched in a jiffy. And so they did, on Saturday, September 24, 1936. Hoffa went back to work Monday.

City Folks

In 1929, my twenty-two-year-old Dad sat on Joe Howard's farm house porch in Harlan County, Nebraska, with a half-dozen neighbors shucking corn. Joe turned to a neighbor. "I know its a bumper crop, but how we going to get it from here to Omaha?"

"Beats me, Joe. Didn't you take it last year?"

"I did." Husks rattled as Joe tore them off. "But I can't spare the time this year. Get up before dawn, drive until dusk, get to that burg at night, city folks crawling all around. Take a hotel for safety, get up before dawn, drive until dusk." 

Dad tilted his head to one side. "Did you see city folks everywhere you looked?"

"Ain't you ever been to Omaha?" Joe's face lit up. 

Dad shook his head and grabbed another ear of corn.

"Tell you what," Joe said, "I'll loan you my truck if you haul this corn to Omaha for us."

Dad beamed, grabbed Joe's hand and shook it.

He didn't know it, of course, but that hand shake took Dad one move closer to squaring off with Jimmy Hoffa.

Snatched by the Letter of the Law

My roly-poly teacher, Miss Florence Suitor, appeared ancient, as all adults do to a first grader.

Just before recess, she introduced a new rule: do not run in the hall.

I was obedient, even though the hall was long. It ran from the restroom through the length of the building all the way to a short flight of stairs that led outdoors.

So I walked circumspectly down the long long hall. When I reached the end, I ran up the stairs and outdoors.

Wooops! Big Mistake!

"Didn't I tell you not to run in the hall?"

I sat out recess in the classroom where I learned that, under Miss Suitor's law, "hall" didn't really mean "hall," it meant "hall and stairs."

This caused me to be suspicious of adult language, especially when I learned that Miss Suitor never had one. 

Who Killed That Teamster Jimmy Hoffa?

No one knows, not even the FBI folks who have sniffed down dozens of felonious paths. 

The first thug to fess up was Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran, so called because his towering stature and blond hair set him apart from all the short swarthy Italian gangsters who hung out around Hoffa.

When Frank confessed, he received such good publicity that a dozen other thugs owned up to killing Hoffa, too, muddying the already murky water. 

What's a writer to do, pen a chapter with a dozen different hypotheses?

I picked up "I Heard You Paint Houses," Frank's confession, and read it straight through. "Painting Houses" meant "hiring to kill," Frank's specialty. He'd whacked off a few gents for short Hoffa, and the two "Mutt & Jeff" guys became friends.

Their friendship inspired legendary Mafia boss Russell "McGee" Bufalino to choose Frank to paint Hoffa's house. McGee preferred to use close friends as assassins. They roused less suspicion.

Frank, of course, could have refused McGee but that, in turn, would have been The Irishman's death sentence.

What a set-up!

As a former English teacher, I know a good story when I read one. So I chose Frank as the killer in my memoir That Punk Jimmy Hoffa.

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese chose Frank, too. Scorsese's now directing a movie of Frank Sheeran's life titled "The Irishman." It features Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci. Should be out in 2019.

What do they say about extraordinary minds? Something about running in the same passage to the sea?

The Irish O’Coffeys

Irish blood ran in my dad's veins, that I knew for a fact.

I heard him brag about his granddaddy who left Gallway county in Ireland when the potato famine hit, who came to New York City an orphan at age 11, who stayed to fight dozens of Civil War battles, marry and sire nine kids, all male but one.

After boasting about his granddaddy, Dad would pull out a whole stack of Irish records which he'd play and sing for me and my sisters. We joined in on the choruses.

We sang about shillelaghs, about Clancy lowering the boom, about Molly Malone, and especially about who threw those overalls in Mrs. Murphy's chowder?

When we ran out of steam, we turned to slow tunes: Danny Boy, Glocca Morra, the summer's last rose, and the little bit of heaven that fell from the sky to become Ireland.

On St. Paddy's Day, Dad slipped out to join the guys for coffee, scissors in hand. He came home bragging that he cut off the necktie of any man who didn't wear green.

My half-German mother didn't say much. Dad's shenanigans washed over her like water.

I was in college when I realized that Dad's Irish father had married an English woman. Which made Dad only half-Irish. And me only a quarter Irish.

Nevertheless, I gave him a genuine Irish shillelagh for his birthday.

And on Saint Paddy's Day, now that I'm 80, I forget my mixed heritage. With Dad in mind, I pin on my shamrock and my brooch that reads: "Very Irish but hardly GREEN." And I march up and down the street to the well-rehearsed tune of Mrs. Murphy's chowder.