The Night My Father Disappeared and Returned a Comic Book Hero
(Or, If You Love Someone, Put It In Writing)
We were aboard the old Broadway Limited to New York when my father hopped off in Baltimore to buy cigarettes. When the train pulled out of the station a half hour later, he hadn’t returned.
I was only about 11 then, but just worldly enough to have heard the cliché complaint of a deserted wife: “He went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.”
Dad might have merely lost track of time and missed returning to the train, but that seemed improbable, because he was very punctual. I considered darkly that if he had not abandoned us, it was more likely that he had been injured, killed or kidnapped.
We waited for him to come walking in from the next car. No Daddy. With each passing minute, the odds of seeing him again anytime soon, or ever, seemed to wane.
My mother reassured my sister and I. But the drawn expressions on the two female faces revealed a thought process I’ve never forgotten.
The two were thinking about what life after the sudden loss of husband and father might be like. Soon, I was, too.
And suddenly, he was there, with a tale to tell. Jerry Leavitt had left the station on an impulsive errand, and had to run for the moving train when he got back. A conductor put his hand out to help him leap on, he said, just like in the movies.
He handed me a stack of comic books. He had gotten the idea of buying me one at a station newsstand, but there weren't any. He decided to go outside to look for a sidewalk vendor.
Several of the comics he eventually found were for little kids, like “Little Lulu” and “Richie Rich,” but I didn’t complain. The drama of the moment made the gesture unforgettable. My father had probably never made me feel so worthwhile.
I was worth a risk!
It was even more impressive because he disapproved of comic books. He had never bought me one before. He never would again. But one night in Baltimore, he found himself running for a train with eight of them under his arm.
One of them was the Classics Illustrated version of “The Three Musketeers.” The Alexandre Dumas book was his favorite as a boy, growing up in a world where his mother spoke little English and his father was mostly absent. He was sharing with his son a part of himself. He had wanted to be D’Artagnan.
“Besides, we are men, and after all it is our business to risk our lives.”
After retrieving this memory, I realized something I hadn’t known about my life: Many of the most charming gestures and kindnesses I have enjoyed have involved the sharing of books and other reading material.
If you have had similar experiences, please contact me at honestcontext@gmail.com. I’d like to write about them here.
I bet most of you have had them, because if you’ve gotten this far, you like to read.
At about the same time as the Broadway Limited incident, another figure in my young life took an interest in my slowly-developing mind. Bill Wylie, the 19-year-old next door, lectured me on civil rights while I watched him repair his motorcycle. He tried to explain that representative democracy had little meaning when Black Americans faced extra hurdles trying to attain political office.
“You don’t get it,” Bill said. “I have a book you need to read.”
He handed me a thick paperback copy of “The Man” by Irving Wallace. The 1964 novel is about what happens after a series of improbable deaths lead to a Black President Pro Tempore of the Senate being sworn in as President of the United States. Just the premise was telling: Wallace, like many others, couldn’t yet imagine a Black person being elected president outright.
The 712 pages were daunting to a kid in elementary school. Bill sensed my hesitation. “It’s fiction,” he said. “It’ll go fast.”
At the age of 11 or so, I couldn’t imagine reading more than a handful of 700-page books in a lifetime. So I had to choose carefully. And I didn’t relish dedicating so much time to a novel featuring a Black protagonist. If I was going to read the longest book I’d ever tried, I wanted it to be about someone with whom I could more readily identify.
But I read it, because Bill, the coolest guy on my block, said I should.
It did go fast. And it changed my thinking.
Though written by a white man, “The Man” suggested that Blacks actually had something important to say to me. It got me started trying to learn what that might be. By the time I reached Bill’s age, I would read most of the books written by James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Willard Motley, Gwendolyn Brooks and Ralph Ellison.
For the middle majority of us all, knowledge of Negroes firsthand is probably limited—limited to the colored cleaning woman, who comes twice a week, limited to the colored baseball player who saves or loses a home game, limited to the garage mechanic, or dime-store clerk, or blues singer seen and heard on a Saturday night. To this white majority, the black man is as unknown as once was the heart of the Dark Continent of Africa.
My old friend Jack Hicks gave me several books. He was in the business, having run the Deerfield Public Library for years.
In 1994, he sent two volumes of short stories by one of his friends, retired attorney Lowell Komie. Komie wrote with a jaundiced eye about lawyers.
Vance Werner is a probate lawyer. Every morning he walks in the door carrying his heavy black satchel. He drops the satchel on the floor and before he takes his coat off the receptionist hands him obituary notices neatly clipped from the morning paper. He smiles at her. She smiles at him. I think they both groove on death.
I became a fan of Komie’s and a friend. I read all his books about lawyers and other things until he died in 2015. He got me out of the habit of telling mean jokes like, “What do you call 1,000 lawyers at the bottom of Lake Michigan? (A start.)”
After the death of my wife 10 years ago, Lali and Ian Watt invited my 11-year-old daughter and I to visit them at their little farm in western Wisconsin. While there, they gave me the latest edition of the local weekly, “The La Farge Episcope.” Lonnie Muller writes and edits most of it, runs it through a printer on 81⁄2 by 11 copy paper and staples it together.
It usually reads like it was written before we were born.
No La Farge visit is complete without The Episcope. And during the pandemic, Ian drops off copies at my place in Chicago, because we all need a little Episcope now and then.
The last issue I read included farm reporter Johnson Gunfrunk’s childhood memories of going to the circus in La Crosse and seeing a death-defying conflict between a vicious lion and a courageous lion-tamer.
He said on the way out, he spotted the lion’s cage being cleaned by a “seedy old colored man” who kicked the beast in his tawny rear to move him over. The essay was entitled, “Disillusion.”
None of us ever miss the menu of the La Farge Senior Citizen Dining Center at Kickapoo Haven.
Monday, Dec. 7 -- Ham and scalloped potato casserole, stewed tomatoes, dinner roll, mixed fruit, fruit crisp w/topping.
A few years after discovering The Episcope one of the most important people in my life gave me a copy of “The Snow Queen,” a mystical fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson. A favorite of hers from childhood, it told of the power of love to heal. We read it together.
And Gerda kissed his cheeks, and they became blooming. She kissed his eyes, and they shone like her own. She kissed his hands and feet, and he became well and merry.
I spent happy days with another woman whose greatest gift may have been reading her own writing to me, and introducing me to the poetry of Mary Oliver. I treasure the memories of handing a collection of Oliver’s back and forth, reading aloud to each other poems like “Wild Geese.”
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Years before, in college, a pretty girl gave me a book, and I assumed she found me fascinating. But then I read the fever dream that is “The Late, Great Planet Earth,” and knew she wanted my soul, not my heart.
Leon Champer and I became friends at the same university. We still agree on most things, including politics. Recently, he wanted me to understand more about the history of the conservative movement, so he planned to mail me his copy of “Conservatives Without Conscience” by John Dean. He couldn’t find it, so he sent me a new one.
It made me smarter. Just like talking with Leon does. Usually.
Years after our graduation, a business partner gave me a dog-eared copy of “Gateway,” the most-read book in Frederik Pohl’s “Heechee Saga.” I was hooked all summer on the stories of ancient abandoned spaceships that sped off to unpredictable preset destinations when a button on the dash was pushed.
I had never been west of the Rocky Mountains, or to any foreign country that wasn’t Canada, but for a few months, I felt like a citizen of the universe.
In my teens, I started reading the works of Harry Mark Petrakis, the Chicago creator of memorable Greek-American characters, most of whom seemed 10 feet tall and deeply flawed at the same time. The novel that hooked me was “The Odyssey of Kostas Volakis,” a stunning tale of love and loss from 1963.
When Petrakis died at 97 on Feb. 2, I resolved to re-read this book, to perhaps recapture the forgotten experience of discovering this great writer. I looked it up, but I was too cheap to pull the trigger.
My daughter saw the search activity on our joint account, and sent “Kostas” my way for my recent birthday. She had remembered how I felt about Petrakis, and I was touched.
I found that I still can be entertained by Petrakis. When immigrant Kostas Volakis takes his first job in America on his first day in Chicago, he watches with amazement as his cousin Glavas opens the door of his diner, where Kostas will wash dishes 18 hours a day.
He walked to the front of the restaurant and turned the lock. He put his face to the glass and clenched his fists. “Enter, donkeys,” he said fiercely. “Come in, gorillas, baboons, and assorted relatives. We are ready for you now.”
My daughter sent other books, including one I didn’t understand how I had missed. She remembered that as a boy, I had met Jim Brosnan, who pitched for the Cubs, White Sox and two other teams. He was the only professional athlete of my acquaintance until I was a grownup. But somehow, I had never read “The Long Season,” Brosnan's groundbreaking baseball diary of 1959.
Now I have. And now I remember why I didn’t read it before. I had tried.
I had previously read “Ball Four,” Jim Bouton’s funny, socially-conscious diary of his 1969 season. In comparison, Brosnan’s book is dull. It’s not funny, and it sloughs off and even participates in the petty prejudices of baseball in the fifties.
But Brosnan paved the way. And he included one line that’s classic snark.
Joe Garagiola is considered something of a humorist, and, like Mark Twain, is from Missouri. The resemblance is strictly residential.
Garagiola published his own first book, “Baseball is a Funny Game,” the same year as Brosnan came out with his. Garagiola described what it was like to be called a dago. Conversely, in his book, Brosnan quoted himself calling people dagos.
We usually learn something when we read. It’s hard not to. Sometimes, we learn as we write, too. Today, I think I came to understand why I like gifts of books and why most other people probably do, too.
A well-chosen book tells one of two things about the giver. They show she understands you well enough to offer something that appeals to your heart or mind. Or they say something about her that she wants you to understand.
I’ll remember that. We all want to better understand the people we love.
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