My Dad: A Life

What Else Do You Write About on Father's Day?

Reissuing this, annually.

My dad was born Alphonsus Pivoriunas in Chicago, Sept. 30, 1909 on the South Side of Chicago. His father, Leonas Pivoriunas

came from Lithuania in 1907, and then went back and married Gelena Genes

(spellings vary) and brought her back to Chicago. The Lithuanian genealogy group on Yahoo generously researched this and found that he stopped in Liverpool for a few months to earn enough money to continue his passage to America. I suppose I could go to Liverpool and try to find out where he lived (hey, what if he lived on Penny Lane?).

After Alphonsus, they had Albert. That’s where I get the first part of my pen name. Albert was killed in an accident on his first day on the job at Swift & Co., in the Stockyards, in 1936. He either fell off a scaffold or it collapsed; I’m not sure.

In 1917, Gelena ran away and was never heard from again. The ad above was what Leon placed in the Lithuanian-language newspaper to try to find her. Mom and I found it in Dad’s safe deposit box after he died.

I had it translated:

I am looking for my woman Alena Pivoriuniene, maiden name Genaite, native of county of Vilnius, district of Svencioniai, parish of Tverecius, homestead of Piemenai. My dearest Alena, don’t listen to what people are talking about, please. Please, forgive me and I am forgiving you, and came back – we will lovingly raise our children together. After all it is not their fault and they should not be struggling with strangers. Please respond to the address below, or whoever is first to let me know where she is I will give a reward of $25.

Leonas Pivariunas,

Another ad read:

I am looking for my woman Alena Pivoriuniene.

My Dear Alena, don’t listen to what people are talking about, please. Please, forgive me that I slandered you without any reason. If you left me just because of this I pray, please, forgive me in the cause of love for our children and come back, please. They, little ones, have had enough of the cooties eating them. Lots of people are angry at other, but not for so long like we are. People’s gossip destroyed our life because we listened to them too much. Please, don’t listen to them anymore, come back and we will sell our house, and will go back to Lithuania, because I am very tired of living here. If you will decide not to come back, God bless you my dearest. I pray, forgive all my evils. I am forgiving you for everything.

“cooties” means “bed bugs.” So Leon was ready to go back to Lithuania! I guess I wouldn’t be here if she did come back to him.

So what happened? A guess would be that they were the subject of gossip among the Lithuanian community and she believed it. Anyhow, Dad was 8 and he never saw her again. To this day we don’t know what happened to her. I suspect she went back to Lithuania, but the records of ship passengers are not on the Internet and certainly not in English, so I’d have to hire someone to go to Vilnius or Kaunas and look for her. I don’t think I really care that much at this point.

Whenever I mentioned to Dad that I thought of going to Lithuania and looking up our relatives, he was against it. “They’ll probably just ask you for money!” he said. When Leon died in 1936, Lithuanians somehow found out about it and wrote him, asking for money! I suspect, but have no way of knowing, that Leon borrowed money to go to America and then never paid it back.

If you were watching the dates there: yes, Dad lost both his father and his brother in the same year: 1936. Annis horribilis.

Growing Up

Leon was now a single Dad with two boys. He did various jobs including sweeping the streets to support them, and Dad said they moved numerous times, when landlords got tired of having two young boys with no one to supervise them.

Although the fact that Leon said, “we will sell our house” doesn’t quite square with Dad’s memory of renting rooms and getting kicked out of them. I have no clue on that one. I know Dad did inherit a house when Leon died.

People didn’t walk around with cameras then, the way we do now. I don’t have any photos of little Alphonsus and Albert playing together, the way modern parents exhaustively document every single thing their little kids do.

Fenger High

Dad went to Fenger

If that doesn’t look like the Fenger you’re thinking of

that’s because the lower building was only opened in 1926. All the students marched over there the day it opened. My mom and I attended there as well. I assume Albert did, too.

Sports was Dad’s salvation. He played quarterback on the football team, despite weighing 110 pounds! Back then, “quarterback” didn’t mean what it does now: throwing the ball. They played a single wing formation where the Tailback or Fullback ran the ball most of the time.

He also played baseball and wrestled.

Back then, having an ethnic name wasn’t cool. Dad wanted to be American, and he was going to change his name to “Privy,” until his coach told him that was a toilet. So he chose to become “John Purvy” instead.

I always wondered if “pervert” wasn’t also a common word then! Oddly enough, I don’t remember many kids making fun of my name for that (“scurvy” was more common). However, my niece did get teased for it a lot, and she was very happy to get married and become “Cory.” That’s where the second part of my pen name comes from.

“Pro Baseball Player”

That’s kind of a joke. He wasn’t really a professional baseball player, but back then, there were industrial leagues where each company had its own team(s). He was hired at a laundry mainly so that he could play on their baseball team! I don’t know if that was before or after going to college.

A Short College Career

Dad enrolled at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. They had compulsory ROTC then, and in one class at the Men’s Old Gym

The building is still there but no longer used. I had a gym class there myself. Back then, it was nicknamed “Old Men’s Gym.”

He had all his money for the semester pinned inside his shirt, and it was stolen out of his locker. He was ashamed to tell his father, and he dropped out of school.

That’s why I’m not, technically, the first member of my family to go to college, but I’m the first to graduate.

B-School and Swift

He went to Englewood Business College, which I can’t find on the Web, but here’s the neighborhood. I don’t think it was quite so crime-ridden then.

At that school, he learned typing and shorthand, and that enabled him to get an office job at Swift & Co. in the Stockyards in 1929. He worked there until 1974 when he retired.

The Stockyards are a famous part of Chicago history. Of course, he was not slaughtering and processing animals like you see in that video; he wore a tie and worked in an office. The job title I always listed for him was “administrative assistant.”

Here’s another article on the Stockyards.

In the book, you mention that when the stockyards opened, they were quite a tourist attraction.

And remained a tourist attraction well into the 20th century. By the turn of the 19th century, about 500,000 [people] a year were coming to visit the stockyards and the packinghouses. We should keep the two apart. The stockyard was a livestock market: 450 acres covered with pens and railroad chutes and office buildings.

But the packinghouses adjacent to it were another several hundred acres of meat packing plants. And people would come and take a tour of both. They'd go through the stockyards, usually entering through the stone gate just west of Halsted Street, and then eventually end up in the packinghouses themselves.

I guess they stopped having tours, because I never went on one. I remember going to the office with Dad one weekend, but I didn’t see any animals.

The Depression

Swift was a big company and people still had to eat and they bought meat. Dad had a job all through the Depression, and he even had a car! By the standards of the time, I guess that made him rich.

Fishing

He always told us that he’d go fishing

in Wisconsin with his buddies on weekends, and he’d pay for everything except the beer. They would drive all night, and in those days there were no 4-lane highways and you went through every town.

Here’s me with him

I still have that metal tackle box he’s holding. It’s real heavy.

Golf

Dad was a great golfer; not quite “scratch” but pretty darned good:

After retirement he shot his age a number of times (e.g. if you’re 81 you shoot an 81).

At one time in his youth, he saw a golf pro to find out if he was really good enough to make it on the tour. The guy watched him and said he had potential, but he’d probably need to rebuild his swing completely and that would be a slow and painful process.

Anyhow, I didn’t inherit that talent. He’d see me drive it off 45 degrees to the right, and he’d just shake his head and say, “I don’t know what you’re doing wrong.”

Dancing

He used to say that on weekends he’d shoot 54 holes of golf on Saturday, 36 on Sunday, and then go out dancing on Sunday night. Guys were tougher then than we are now. I guess that’s why they call them The Greatest Generation.

Of course, maybe he was exaggerating and only did all that one weekend! Who knows?

So he was a good dancer, too. He met Mom that way, at the Trianon

where he was one of the monitors, or teachers, or whatever they called them. If you showed up and didn’t know how to dance, those guys would help you.

Marriage

She was 25, which was practically an old maid by the standards of the time, and he was 31.

I’ve inherited those non-marrying tendencies, at least, and gone them one better: I’ve never gotten married at all!

They got married in July, 1940. Jack (RIP) was born March, 1942, which means she was pregnant when Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941 happened. Dad was playing golf that Sunday morning, so he heard that we were at war on his way home. Here’s an article about him from the Swift internal newspaper

Dad was 32, so the combination of being over 30, married, having a child, and working in a “strategic industry” (meat-packing) meant he was initially exempt from the draft. As the war went on, the standarda got progressively less picky.

When we hear about the War now, it’s always “the good war” and supposedly everyone was united and pulling together. In reality, the neighbors across the street were upset that their men had to go to war and Dad didn’t, so they reported him (to no avail). People were constantly saying to him, “Oh, you work at Swift! Can you get me a ham?” because meat was rationed.

In May, 1944, he was drafted by the Marines. I mentioned that the draft had been getting more and more sweeping, and by then, you could only be exempt if you had two kids. Just in the nick of time, along came my brother Bill, who was born May 12, 1944. Dad went down to the draft board and said that he was ready to go, but he showed them the newspaper clipping about the new draft rules. They said, “OK, you’re out! Go home to your family, buddy.”

Since the Marines launched a number of bloody assaults on Pacific islands in late 1944 and early 1945, including Iwo Jima

it’s quite possible Dad would have been part of that battle or some other battle, and maybe I wouldn’t be here.

On the other hand, maybe he would have been too old for combat duty, knew how to type, and they would have had him handling logistics. Who knows?

Along Comes Bob

I was the last kid. Jack and Bill were, let’s just say, not college material. I was, on the other hand. I have memories of being four years old and Dad showing off to visitors how I could add up a column of numbers. Here’s the whole family, me in the center

Whatever I have now, I owe to Dad.

He was the one who took me to the library without fail, every two weeks, and browsed while I took out books. In our neighborhood (Roseland) I can only think of one other kid’s house that even had any books in it. It was not an upscale neighborhood. With hindsight, I was a fish out of water there.

Dad also wanted me to be an athlete, like he was. He took me out at age 7 and taught me to play baseball, and when I went out for Little League at 8, he took a job as Coach of our team (not Manager, which was higher) mainly so I’d get a chance to play. There were so many kids in Roseland Little League, this being the Baby Boom era, that they had a “minor league” was well as the regular league. I was in the minors.

So: was I any good? I was OK. I could play shortstop or second and make the plays most of the time. I had a good batting average but no home runs (the closest I ever came was a ground rule double). I pitched in relief and usually did OK. I spent endless hours in the basement, throwing a rubber ball against the wall, 45 feet away (that being the distance from the pitcher’s mound to home plate in Little League), and I had some pretty good heat.

Back then, a pitcher just threw as hard as he could and hoped it was over the plate. Dad had a signal for me: if he yelled, “C’mon Bobby, old boy, old boy” I was supposed to throw a changeup. I don’t think the opposition ever caught on to that signal.

Yes, Field of Dreams does that to me, too:

Playing catch with Dad — it’s a universal tearing-up moment for guys.

Usually, when you got to be 10, you’d get called up to the regular Little League. I did not get that call. Dad told me once, reproachfully, that one of the other dads said about me, “He just looks like he doesn’t really care!” And I guess he was right: I didn’t.

After I was 12, I played in the “Liberty League” for kids 13-15. Dad did not coach that team, the manager was an asshole, and I was getting seriously uncompetitive, not having grown like the other guys had. I quit at 14, and didn’t get interested in baseball again until I was 24.

Dad Takes the Leap

Dad had worked for the same boss, Mr. McShane, for twenty years. He found out much later that guys in other departments had asked about hiring him, and Mr. McShane had just filed them in a drawer and never told him.

Finally, when he was 58, he somehow got the opportunity to manage a construction project in Hammond, Indiana. He told me that he really didn’t know if he’d have any job when that project was over. Nonetheless, he took the chance. After it was over, he became Office Manager at Globe Engineering, a subsidiary of Swift, in downtown Chicago. So Dad finally got a chance to show what he could do.

College

It was never a question whether I would go to college or not. I was going. As it turned out, I went to the same college that Dad went to briefly: the University of Illinois, majoring in Electrical Engineering. He gave me the entire semester’s worth of money at the start and trusted me to manage it responsibly.

I’d had relatively little science training up to then, and I was really turned off by the courses. I switched into Psychology, the standard second major for kids then. I’d never planned on being a shrink, though; I thought I’d do some kind of measurement or engineering psychology. Anyhow, the folks were horrified. Dad didn’t say anything.

In my sophomore year, I switched again, into Mathematics and Computer Science (there being no B.S. in CS back then). That’s where I stuck, and Dad was happy. “That’s the future!” he always said, and told me for the millionth time about how the payroll at Globe was so screwed up by the computer that they called him out of retirement to fix it.

Retirement

Dad retired just as I was starting my career. He started a side job as tax preparer, which he’d been doing as a second job at H&R Block before that. He got me a part-time job at Block when I was in high school.

One morning I mopped the floor and then went to school. No one had told me you were supposed to dry the floor, too! The first guy to come in called Dad at the office to complain about the wet floors. Dad said, “What do you want me to do, get him out of school?”

His business was pretty successful. Then Mom and Dad moved out to California. Besides Bill and I being out there, all Mom’s four siblings were there, too. Eventually they bought a double-wide mobile home in La Verne, near Aunt Liz. He played golf two or three days a week, and they played duplicate bridge four times a week.

Here we are at Aunt Catherine’s on Laurelmont Drive

Love you, Dad. I miss you every day.