"Just like other families," dad "brought home the bacon." I guess we weren't big bread eaters.

Dad never finished the eighth grade. He went to work to help support his mom and seven siblings and was self taught. His dad died early. I know nothing of him.

When WW I began, he volunteered and was sent to France with an Aero Squadron and rose to the rank of Sergeant Major because he could read and write. Returning, he joined the office staff of John A. Hull, a firm that weighed commodities on the waterfront on the piers all around New York, Staten Island and Brooklyn. They weighed hides, skins, tobacco, sugar and other resources that were shipped into the Port of New York, way before containerization.

Commodities coming into the Port Of New York from around the world had to be weighed. Shippers wanted to know that the stuff they shipped really got there. Dad's company provided that service on the piers using huge scales, stevedores and longshoreman. Strikes, other union labor problems, the mob, and legal haggles were routine.

He ultimately bought the business from the owner using loans where he could get them and became a Weighmaster, and a successful business man with less than a grammar school education and little formal business training. He wouldn't let me go near that business.

Dad developed a significant vocabulary. I still use some terms and phrases he used. (And now some of my kids complain that they are beginning to sound like me, and they hate it.)

I visited dad's office at 84 Gold Street in New York near the base of the Manhattan Bridge a few times as a pre-teen. Once I remember, after leaving our home in Brooklyn in a packed 1942 Packard, the family had to stop by the office for something before we left for the summer at Green Pond, a lake community in New Jersey. Dad's business was on the top floor of a grungy two story building. His name was on the glass part of the entrance door to the business. Due to the nature of the work, the place needed housekeeping. Men using adding machines, telephones, a Western Union connection, roll-top desks and smiles to the boss's kid were noted.

But, as the world turned, the need for his services went away and a broke, depressed old man sold his life's business for $300.

Dad's old Seth Thomas Eight Day pendulum clock that hung in one of his office rooms now hangs ticking with a vengeance on a wall in my home in New Jersey. One hell-of-a loud ticker. Is that you, Dad?