Reflections Part 1

        It is Labor Day, September 5th, 2011.  I have been enjoying a work free day unlike many folks in this country who continue to suffer without a paycheck because they have been lacking work for months and even years.  As I was driving to Fire Arts this evening I made a point of making a photographic record of the beleaguered remains of the Studebaker industrial sites.  Nearly all the remnants of that once proud and vibrant company are gone.  As I pulled up to the Chapin Street side of the remaining structure I reminisced about the times my mother and I would pick my father up from work.  You see my father was not a pleasant person.  He was an alcoholic in the grand Polish tradition which professed:  Unless interrupted by sleep or food, one should be consuming beer or hard liqueur.  My dad did not disappoint that tradition and it ended his life at the relatively young age of 56.  He was a mean drunk and in retrospect I often wonder what drew my mother to pairing up with this man.  Although they were destroyed in the fire that took my studio in 1993, I found evidence in family photos that alcohol was a constant companion for my father.  It seemed as though every picture showed him with a bottle of beer in his hand.  It was always a Drewry's because my Uncle Ed had the perfect job for a South Bend Pole.  He was a foreman at the brewing plant.  Oddly my Uncle Eddie seemed the least possessed with this Polish disease and he lived decades past my father who was his younger brother.  My dad's alcoholism kept our little family strapped for cash, even though he did work a weekend job as well.  He held a sales position at El's Liqueur Store, go figure.  He was never paid in cash but took home his compensation in the form of fifths and unending cases of Drewry's.  My Uncle El owned that liqueur store.  This wasn't enough for Dad although because the evening ritual included picking up Dad from Studebaker's, dropping him off at the local bar and heading home until he called for a ride or had a friend drop him off.    It seems as though any time my parents spent together was characterized by ugly arguments laced with copious amounts of profanity and ultimately with my father in a drunken rage, lashing out physically at my mother.  Even as a youngster I wondered at the irony of driving to church on Sunday mornings with my parents explosively arguing all the way there and back.  The only good thing about mass was that they had to be quiet.   I have no recollection of my dad driving.  I know he must have but......What drove my father's alcoholism?  Maybe it was the realization that his life would never improve, that he was in a loveless marriage of his own making and that he was destined to work until death at hard labor that seemed to pay less than the rest of his family's and neighbors' occupations. 
        My mom held the family together by working a fulltime factory job as well.  This was in that wonderful era when women earned 50% of the pay for working the exact same job as the man stationed next to them.  This angered Mom intensely.   She was active in unions where they existed  and I know she became a steward at one factory and lobbied hard for equal pay rights. I think headway was made on that front by the time she approached retirement.  Mom was an incredibly hard worker.  She'd come home from the factory and then task herself with cleaning, cooking and sewing(which she loved to do).  Often she complained of sore feet, aching bones and her hands bore the cuts and scrapes that evidenced the brutality of her day job.  Now Dad on the other hand would come home and he was also grubby from head to toe but his evenings consisted of sitting in front of the television, drinking beer and eating his staple diet of crackers and milk.  Mom did provide a supper meal but I cannot remember him eating it with us.
       Anyway...as I was photographing today all these memories emerged.  I grabbed two brick fragments that had escaped the confines of the fenced wrecking zone.  I plan on placing them in the garden here at home, not because of pleasant associations but because they represent a bit of history.  Someone decades ago helped build an automotive empire with those bricks, but as all empires must do eventually, Studebaker crumbled to ruin taking with it thousands of jobs and throwing the lives connected to the jobs into disarray.  Studebaker was a victim of it own faults, symbolized by the only new car my family ever purchased.  It was the ugliest thing....pukey beige and the cheapest model of Lark.  It leaked oil from the first day it was parked in our garage.  Mind you the milk man who lived next door had a Golden Hawk and the fireman's family down the street drove around in the splendor of a Red '57 Chevy station wagon.  Yep keep that damn Lark parked in the garage. It'd be kind of cool to have that Lark in mint condition now but it'd still be way better to have a Hawk or '57 Chevy.