My Father, the King of Hearts

Father’s Day, 1967: I was 12 years old 50 years ago this Summer, and for all the things that I remember, the thing that sticks with me most is how rich that year was in my growth, intellectually, strategically and emotionally. With 3 brothers and 2 sisters, my big Italian/Irish family was a tight clan, indeed.

My parents ruled the household and were a formidable set of instruction givers; particularly during the school year. But as Summer approached, and with much of the work completed in the large, beautiful English Cottage we had moved into just 2 years before, (due to the brimming size of the family) with 2 years in, all the redesign that my Mother and Father had imagined when they bought 357 Plainfield Avenue, by then, had been completed.

My father was not one to just sit around. 

However, for the first time I remember, that year he allowed himself, at age 38 to enjoy the longer Spring evenings; in our quiet and peaceful screened-in porch that overlooked our Floral Park, Long Island suburban backyard.

My mother had given my father an AM/FM stereo radio for Christmas 6 months before, so with the weather warming up, my father stationed it in the screened porch. We loved to listen to “Cousin Brucie” the famous DJ that played Beatles and Rolling Stones records, among others, on WABC-AM; when my siblings and I dominated the porch with our neighborhood friends.

However, when my father was on the porch, the radio station was automatically redialed to WNEW-AM, radio, which played Frank Sinatra, almost ‘round-the-clock. My father’s first name was Frank and though he was quite vocal about his dislike for Frank Sinatra-the public personality, he absolutely adored his singing. So did my mother and ultimately all of us as well.

To complicate matters, Like Sinatra, Dad also had beautiful blue eyes, the same light baritone singing voice & to top it off, my mother's name is Nancy (...with the laughing face)?

Yet, in every non-musical way Dad constantly railed about the world-famous entertainer’s behavior, due to my father's very stern disapproval of Sinatra's wild side. It was a bit confusing for a 12-year old, as on one hand, Frank Sinatra was filling our home and hearts with his amazing songs; yet I was confronted with my Father’s vocal disapproval about the Sinatra-the man, who was constantly in the news back then, doing things and acting out in unconventional ways that my father disapproved of, to no end.

That was one of my first experiences of learning how to weigh conflicting opinions about things, and what I understood later in the phrase, “Trust the art, not the artist” …in this case, about entertainers and ultimately later, about friends and co-workers. 

Life’s ironies and contradictions were only beginning to invade my brain and mind’s eye; so that era stands out as I took my own first awkward steps toward developing my own opinions about people, things and places. In many ways, Dad was my trusted guide, or co-pilot, in the back porch.

With only a high-school education, though he wasn’t terribly cerebral, by then, he had in fact survived the Depression, WW2, was a Korean War wounded veteran (which he NEVER spoke about), was well-respected in the local community, our catholic parish and within the New York City Civil Service organization. 

…So much so that that just a year earlier, my brothers and sisters had personally met Mayor Wagner, Bobby Kennedy, during his NY Senatorial run, and FDR, Jr.; at an event where my father was held up as a prime example of the new productivity-based management within city government.

The world was changing.

Yet, what I remember most about that Summer was how I found myself also conflicted between playing with my neighborhood friends, versus choosing instead to hang out with my father. My friends would come calling after dinner, which put me in an uncomfortable position, as I found myself making lame excuses, declining to hang out with them, opting instead to stay with my Dad. 

Other than girls, I found he was far more interesting than virtually any of my friends.

My father was a great storyteller. And though every story he told always had a moral to it, I didn’t feel like I was being preached to. It was my first memory of him “chilling out”, as he shared a wide variety of things from his past, or observations about contemporary culture at the time, which I found fascinating. We had a great rapport.

He got me thinking.

We talked about almost everything (except the birds and the bees, of course); from music & politics, to the war …and for the first time, he began relating to me about his own experiences as a 12-year old kid. Up until then, conversations were pretty much one-way between him and me. My Dad would give me an instruction. I would respond, “Yes, Sir” and I would do what I was told. Or else. 

So, hearing his perspective which mirrored my own pre-teen age era was a first. It was actually hypnotic. But in addition to his stories, he also taught me and my other siblings, how to play Pinochle, in the back porch. 

To me, back then Pinochle was an adult game, since a standard pinochle 48-card deck only has 2 number cards (9 & 10) with the rest being the “royal family” if you will, with a dandy-looking Jack, a beautiful Queen, a majestic Henry VIII King and lastly, the Ace. This is not a tutorial about how to play, but the insight into the game’s requirement to read people, size up their bids and their capacity to play strategically may have been the first lesson that inevitably led to my becoming a media negotiator, later in my career.

In the beginning, after each game, he would then spread out the order of just-played hand & then had an uncanny ability to play back how each of us played, working back with a near-instant knowledge of where each of us played well, or mis-played our hand.

Very quickly, the conversation around pinochle became strategic & then later, a bit attitudinal & humorously quip-based, which my Dad's Irish personality "had in spades," (proverbially) as they say. :--))

The thing about pinochle playing is that you are dealt a different hand every game; so you have to rack up as many points, on the ever-changing cards you're dealt…. from the best possible hand to the absolute shittiest.

My father knew pinochle inside & out, so we were all his Kung fu "Grasshoppers" learning, especially after each game was over, as he would point out, what we did right or not, until each of us inevitably was ready to play, on our own.

While chess is the ultimate strategy game, the learning I took from Pinochle was in the bidding. And how, once the bid was set, the person who won the bid went from just being a fellow player, to the target of everyone else’s goal to take down; through how we each “played our cards.” This went on all that Summer.

None of the friend’s parents apparently played, so my pinochle stories I shared with them fell on deaf ears. They had no idea what I was talking about. Their card games were still very elementary.

Dad drilled a phrase into me and a way of thinking that became a mantra from him countless number of times; that in pinochle as in life, “Everything is negotiable.”

In a time of cultural tumult, race riots, war in Southeast Asia, an oncoming generation-gap and what in retrospect was my first experience of our US President’s “Credibility Gap” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credibility_gap, the things I remember most, are the sweet Spring scent of blossoming backyard flowers, playing cards, Sinatra serenading the warm, quiet night air and my father’s hypnotic storytelling.

Happy Father’s Day, my King of Hearts! I will love you forever.