By
the time I entered high school in 1961 my family and I had lived in 15
different houses, nomads of a sort. Nineteen sixty-one was the year Dad finally
bought his first home and we settled down in our two-story brick home on Blaine
Avenue in Bradley, Illinois. Dad drove each day the hour long trip to Ford
Motor Company Stamping Plant in Chicago
Heights where he worked as a welder repairman.
Up until that year Dad had often moved us from place to place as he found
better paying jobs, or a new job after the old one had run out.
He was a good
provider for our family of six and mostly worked as a miner, mining coal,
uranium, cobalt, and copper, low paying jobs requiring hard physical labor.
Always renters, when we packed up and moved from place to place we only took
with us our clothes and a few treasured items, no furniture, no pets, only what
would fit into our automobile, for Dad never rented a U-haul.
After
six years in the Navy during WWII, Dad came back home to southern Illinois and married
Mom in 1946. He soon came up with a way to organize and store his important
papers such as birth certificates, and car titles. He used an empty cardboard
shoe box and dubbed it his “worrying box”, kept it close at hand. He felt
strongly about paying bills on time so stored those papers in that box and when
it came time to pay them he got the box out and that is when us kids saw it,
became aware of its importance to him. I’m sure it was those debts that made
him give it the name he did.
Mike
was two years old when his first memory of Dad’s worrying box was indelibly
printed on his brain. As Mike recalls, “I was holding a glass of milk that I'd
been drinking. Dad was on the bed going through the worrying box, when he
picked up the little red ball from the jacks game and threw it at me,
playfully, I suppose. I dropped the glass and it broke, I fell on the broken
glass, cut my artery, ran to Mom in the kitchen, sat on the floor against a wall as
blood spurted onto the wall. Mom said, you'd better take him to the country
doctor. They tied a tourniquet around my arm and took me to the doctor for
stitches.” Mike still has a noticeable scar on that wrist, and a vivid memory
of Dad’s worrying box.
Fran
remembers how Dad would bring the box out from where he hid it, place it on his
bed, and thumb through it, commenting on what he found in there. We have tried
to remember if there were photographs, too, maybe his Navy bracelet, a pack of
cigarettes, pens and pencils. What we do recall is how personal it was, much
like a woman’s purse is to her, not something us kids were allowed access to.
Mom had a round metal can with tight fitting lid where she stored treasured
family photographs. Often she opened up that can and showed the pictures to us,
even let us rifle through them ourselves. But Dad’s worrying box was his and
his alone.
All
these years later, I have my own worrying box, perched on my shoulders,
residing in my head. If only I could remove it from there, place it on a shelf
in my closet like Dad did, and bring it out when needed.
Our
Dad is gone now since his death in 1995, but when the three of us get together,
Fran, Mike, and Pam, he is there, no doubt about it. His impact on us, in
shaping our morals and influencing our lifestyles is obvious. This memory of
his worrying box was one that Fran wanted saved and shared.
