Summary of Chapters 16-18
Family life. Frankie and Albie meet their wives and start their own families. Kids come along soon and in rapid succession. Life is good - Albie pulls in a respectable income as a truck driver and member of the Teamsters Union. He plays softball for Reiss Beer Sales and then Modern Auto Body, alongside older brother Frankie. The Dawsons now have three children and move to a larger house. All’s well, but there are clouds on the horizon. Although Albie doesn’t realize it right away, his marriage is in trouble.
Chapters 16-18 are unabridged
Chapter 16
By this time Frank had graduated from college and was looking for a teaching and coaching job. He found one at Park Ridge High, in NEW JERSEY, about six miles south of PEARL RIVER. He was not pleased with me, about quitting school, but did not break my chops to bad. I think mom told him to let it ride and cool it. I was dating a great girl in PARK RIDGE at that time, but it didn’t turn into anything. She had a lot of problems with her mother and father. They were Catholic, and I was not, and that was the part that her mother didn’t like, so the relationship ended, and we both moved on. We were both too young and it was just puppy love anyway.
Frankie got married to his girlfriend from college, Lynn, she came from LONG ISLAND, and that’s where the wedding took place. They rented an apartment in PARK RIDGE, for about a year and then bought a house in Montvale N J., a nice little town close to the school, where they both worked. Lynn became pregnant soon after them moving to the house. This was the first of three children they were to have.
Frank wanted to become the coach that he idolized in school, Ira Shuttelworth, and he was on his way. I was taking a different road in my life. I had enough of moving furniture and was ready to move on. I had learned to drive a tractor trailer, but only being eighteen years old, no company would hire an inexperienced kid like me. A friend of my brother told me that where he worked, they were hiring helpers to deliver beer. This sounded pretty good. I put on my suit and tie and went to apply for a job. I was hired on the spot and could start right then and there. I took off my suit coat, my white shirt and tie and went to work on the beer truck as a helper. After being there two years, I took the warehouse job, unloading beer trailers from the brewery, and parking trailers in the yard, so they would be ready to go to the city for more beer, the following day.
I started bowling at the alleys in Nanuet NY. where I ran into a friend from school, Jeff Cole. We became good friends, actually best friends, he had friends that drank there and I became one of the crew of steady bar customers to hang out there. Jeff worked at a rubber stamp factory in SPRING VALLEY, and didn’t much care for his job. We were both heavy drinkers at this time. He drank to forget his job, and I drank because it was part of my job, and I liked it. While hanging out there, at the allies, I met my first wife, she was bowling with a team from Lederle Labs, where she worked, we started dating and things progressed from there. Jeff had met a girl there also, and we doubled dated a few times. Well things were going along fine and Sharan and I got engaged.
After the engagement, we had decided to wait a while. We had plans to make and wanted to do it right. Jeff and his girlfriend had a bad breakup and he decided to enlist into the Army. He went to boot camp at Fort Dix, in NEW JERSEY, and after that he was sent to Vietnam, where the war was still going on. It was 1961, and Nam was not the place to be. I was worried sick as was his mom and dad. I think it was a good move for him. I think he needed to get away, he was drinking a lot and I think the ARMY just might have saved his life. He did two, one year tours of duty there and decided to make the ARMY his carrier. He stayed in for over twenty years and retired a master sergeant. Thank GOD, he got home from Nam alive. So many of our young men, and woman gave their lives in that terrible war.
I had started playing softball for Reiss Beer Sale in the Sunday league in PEARL RIVER. A lot of the cops that made up the team were getting older and they needed some young blood to hold the team together. It was still a good league, a lot of young teams. It finally came to pass that REISS had to combine with another team, and that’s when we formed a new team, MODERN AUTO BODY. Frankie was the pitcher and I was catching or playing first base. We had a lot of good players and won a few championships. This was a slow pitch league, and we had to form another fast pitch team, to play in a bunting and stealing league. This team was ANDY’S MENS WARE. Both these teams set many records, and won many tournaments in ROCKLAND COUNTY, during the 60’s and 1970’s.
I’m a senior citizen now, at the age of 69 years old and I look back at those years with fondness. I was fortunate to be affiliated with two of the best softball teams in the county, and to play with, and against some of the best players in the area. The best part of these years was that I was able to play with my hero, my older brother Frank. We played for these two teams almost twenty years.
After our engagement, Sharan and I made plans for our wedding. We were going to keep it a small affair, about sixty or seventy people at the most. By the time we made up the invitation list, it grew to almost one hundred people. We trimmed the list as much as we could, and sent out the invites. She picked out her gown, we found a reception restraint. We wanted to try to keep the cost down. We knew that her parents didn’t have a lot of money. We all agreed these were the best plans and everything moved forward towards the big day in October. Something was wrong; I couldn’t put my finger on it, until Sharan called me, and said that her mother would not let the marriage go through. I got in my car and went up to her house and walked into a hornets’ nest. All I heard was that I wasn’t any good and she was too young, and if I didn’t get out of their house they were going to call the cops. They advised me that they never had any intention of paying for the wedding, which they waited until it would be too late and we would have to call the whole thing off. Well this changed a lot of things and we had to make some quick decisions. We only had three weeks to go until wedding day.
After a heated argument and me telling them what they could do with their wedding money, and a few other choice words. I asked Sharan what she wanted to do, did she want to get married to me, or did she want to stay here and be controlled by her mother. I wanted an answer from her, or I was leaving. She could come with me to our apartment, or we could call her dearest aunt and stay with her. She was very upset when we got to her aunt’s house. She ended up staying there until our wedding day. Her mother and step father did not come to the wedding and I could have given a shit.
I was in a bind, I needed money fast to pay for this wedding. The only option I had was to sell my brand new Ford convertible, of which I owed money on. I had put a big down payment on the car and when I took it to the city to sell it, the bank got paid and we had about two thousand left over. I was still short two thousand. I went to the friend that my father had at our bank and floated a quick loan, mom cosigned for me and now all I had to do was get some kind of car so I could get back and forth to work. I picked up an old Chevy, in very good shape, about seven years old. Thank GOD that I had a good job at the beer distributor and Sharan had hers at Lederle. We were all set, her aunt was great and helped her with the last minute arrangements and I made sure everybody was going to get paid. I gave all the checks to be paid out to my brother and the day we got married I only had eighteen bucks in my pocket of a rented tux. No lie.
Apparently I had underestimated my mother in-law before the wedding. I can see now that she had no intention for her daughter to leave home, and get married. She had played her part very well, thinking that if she waited until the last minute we would have to call off the wedding, that we didn’t have the money needed to go through with it. Well she was wrong, as she was many other times in our marriage. This was a big warning for me, and it looked like I was going to have the same problem, that my mother had with Mary Dawson. Intimation is a great tool, if you know how to work it. Sharan was definitely intimidated by her mother and this I would find out down the road through our marriage. I knew that I was not liked by her mother, and the feelings were mutual, I slept very well and could have given a shit what she thought. I’ve prided myself about one thing, if someone shits on you once, you don’t give them another chance to do it again. Looking back, in the long run, she won out with her daughter, but not with me.
Soon after our marriage we found out that we were going to have a baby. This was great news. Even though we were in somewhat of a hole, money wise, from the wedding, we started to make plans for late June or July, for the new arrival. This news didn’t soften up any feelings from my in-laws in the least, as far as I was concerned. Sharan was getting large and on July 19th we haled ass for the hospital in Suffern NY. I was not doing very well. I was worried all to hell and praying at the same time.
I was sitting in the waiting room for hours. Other fathers were coming and going whenever the phone would ring. They would call from upstairs, when your baby arrived. Well, I waited and waited. I really started to get worried and then out of the blue, my father arrived. He said that he remembered how he had felt, when I and Frankie were born, and thought he’d come and sit with me. He exclaimed that sometimes it can take a long time, and for me to relax. Easy for him to say. We waited over fifteen hours, and then the phone finally rang for me. I went up stairs and saw my son for the first time. I was scared, the baby looked like he was light blue and his head came almost to a point and I could see all the blue vanes in his body. I thought I was going to faint until the doctor came out and told me everything went fine. Just a little longer then he expected. He put my mind at ease when he told me that every baby looks like that, minutes after they are born, but he was perfect. We didn’t call her parents when we started for the hospital, so out of kindness I called them and let them know that they had a grandson and that Brian was born early in the morning on the 20th of July. I will never forget that day, or the feeling that came over me when I first saw him. Any man who has become a father can relate to what I was feeling and how proud I was of my wife. We went home to our apartment in Nanuet, and I got my first lesson on changing diapers and heating formula. Of course I was handing out cigars to my friends at work and the softball team as well. We were happy in our small apartment, but things started to change.
Chapter 17
Mom and dad were still living in the apartment above the bar when Mr. Rowan informed them that he wanted to sell the building, and wanted to give dad enough time to make a move if they wanted to. Mom decided that there was another place that her and Gertrude had looked at years before, and see if was for rent. The building was owned by a local construction company that dad knew of and he went to check on the availably of any apartments in the building. Well it seemed that mom and GOD were on the same track once again. The apartments in the building were just done over and there were two for rent and mom could have her choice. The building was just up Central Avenue, a block away from where the presently lived. They took the biggest place and mom was quite happy. The Braunsdorf Park was just across the street, where she would meet Gertrude, sit in the shade, or go across the street to the coffee shop for some ice cream. It was closer to the Grand Union store, In the middle of town, for her shopping.
The apartment was good for mom, but not so good for dad. It was close to Oakley’s paper store for the paper and cigarettes but it was sixteen steps up the stairs, and dad’s lungs were getting bad from smoking those Old Gold cigarettes all those years. He was still working at the State Hospital; he had become the foreman of the plumbing shop years earlier, while Frank Jr. was still in college. They were doing ok and were living a quiet life. Dad wasn’t well and finally stopped working his side jobs. He would stop and see Mr. Ablondi, at the bar, to say hello to his old friends. He would park his car around the back, on Ridge Street, so if mom was sitting in the park, she wouldn’t see that he was having a beer. Like she couldn’t tell if he had a beer or two. Ha!!
Well the baby was getting pretty big. We had noticed that his right foot was flopped over to the outside. We became concerned and took him to an orthopedic specialist. He said that Brian’s foot was growing crooked and we had to put his feet into a special brace and that he would have to keep the brace on twenty hours a day. That was easier said than done. Brian hated that brace. He was six months old and would scream and cry when he had the brace on. When we took it off for the four hours he was fine, but trying to get it back on was a trip. It tore my heart out sometimes to have to do that to my son, but the doctor said that it was working and that his foot would be normal in a few more months. We went through two cribs; he would raise his both feet in that brace and come down on the rails and just splinter the sides.
Living in Nanuet was fine with us. I joined the fire department and our apartment was close to everything. I had joined the Teamsters Union at my job, and that meant that I would have benefits for my family, and a retirement plan later on down the road. Then we got another surprise, we were pregnant again. So much for that rule , no sex for six weeks before or six weeks after giving birth. Well, what can I say, we were happy about the news and we were going to have to make a few adjustments. We had an opportunity to buy our first house and we did. It was a small, two bedroom house, on Lexow Avenue in Nanuet, not far from the fire house. It was pretty cheap, and we could just about afford it, the payments were less than the rent we were paying on the apartment.
Well along came Robyn Dawson, eleven months to the day, after Brian was born. We didn’t have to wait too long for Robyn to arrive. She was eager to see the world and on June 20th, Fathers Day, two hours after we got to the hospital, she was born. I had envisioned another long wait, but GOD had different plans, and the phone rang, and I left the other guys in the waiting room, instead of me being left. She was beautiful then as she is today. We all went home to our little house, and we already had the dresser draw ready for Robyn in our room. By this time Brian had his own room, and there would be room for another crib when Rob outgrew her draw. Brian was all excited with the new baby, and confused at the same time. He had been out of the foot brace about a month before we brought Robyn home.
Brian’s foot healed perfectly, straight as an arrow. The doctor said that he didn’t think he wouldn’t have any further problems with the foot at all. Soon after we moved into the house, and everything seemed to be going our way, the bottom fell out. We had a labor strike where I worked and I was out of work for nine weeks. Talk about getting into a hole. I picked up a few jobs, here and there, but not the steady money that I was making at the beer distributor. They settled the strike and we went back to work. We didn’t get anything that we had struck for and it all seemed like a total waist. I became depressed with my job and decided that I had to make a change. When I talked to a friend of mine, he told me that a fellow he knew was a business agent for the Teamsters, and that he was looking for tractor trailer drivers for steady job. I met with this man and decided to take a chance and make this big move. I was leaving the beer job, where I was making $135.00 a week, which in 1964, wasn’t bad money and going to a trailer job in heavy construction, making $250.00 a week. I already had a Teamster’s book; all I had to do was transfer the book to the Teamsters local that was on the job. One problem, I would not have any medical insurance on my family until I accumulated one thousand hours of work. So we sweated this time out. Thank GOD, the construction project that I worked on lasted almost three years. By this time we had the hospital coverage, and I had built up a reputation as a good driver, and found steady work in the summer months. I liked the Teamsters Local I transferred too.
I was out of work a few winters but I was always able to find odd jobs to make ends meet. During this time Sharan became pregnant again and we had to make a move to a bigger house. We found one right around the corner from ours on Fruind Drive. We bought the house; it had three bedrooms and would be just right for our new addition arriving in the winter. On Valentine’s Day that year Eileen was born and we didn’t need a dresser draw for her. We had enough room, the two girls would have their own bedroom and Brian would have his. The world was perfect, or so I thought at the time. I did a lot of work on the newer house. I put in a big patio, an above the ground pool for the kids, big and small. I also made a den and did some work in the basement and garage. I was pretty active in the Nanuet Fire Company and I was playing a lot of softball with my brother and for the fire house team. Work was plentiful in those years; I was good at what I did and never turned down a driving job and took all the overtime that I could get. I also never got fired from a job and the heads of my Local Union noticed these things and made me a shop steward, which is in charge of all the drivers on all of the jobs, I would have in the future. This meant extra money per week, and that I would be the last man on the job site until that job was completed. This was the career that I had made for myself and I had built my reputation on being fair to the men that worked under me, and to the companies that I worked for, over thirty four years in my Teamsters Local Union, and retired from there in 1998 with a full pension.
While at Fruind Dr., Brian and Robyn had started school and took the bus every morning right out in front of the house. They were gone a good part of the day and Sharan would take Eileen with her and go up to see her mother. This apparently was a steady thing each day, or at least three times a week. There still was no love lost between me and her mother. I did not see what was happening, that my wife was being, once again intimidated by her mother. I was busy working and playing ball and didn’t notice that she and the children didn’t have the time to come to the games. Now that I look back, I should have noticed this, and other things, but did not. After a while, a long while, like a puzzle, all the pieces were coming together.
My father’s health was failing. He had built up a lot of sick time at the State Hospital and was forced to take this time off and relax. His lungs were shutting down. His breathing was becoming worse, and it became more difficult for him to climb the stairs to the apartment on Central Avenue. It became evident that those stairs were going to kill him. They would have to move to a ground floor unit or else.
Chapter 18
Dad had used up his sick time from his job. With the doctor’s recommendation, he decided to retire. Brother Frank and I had talked it over and told mom that we had to look for a place for them to live.
Frankie had his own problems with his first marriage. It ended in a bitter separation and divorce. While separated from his wife, he stayed with mom and dad. He had taken a new coaching job in a bigger high school, further south in NEW JERSEY. He had three children from his first marriage, one boy, the oldest, and two girls. After a short time, he and this woman he had met at the same school, dated and ended up getting married. They lived close to the school, where they both taught and soon after the wedding he had informed us all that a baby was on the way. Well he had his hands full. They had an apartment in her family’s big house and down the road there were more children added to the Dawson, second family. All toll, Frank had six children from his two marriages. Two boys and four girls. The children from the first marriage, stayed with their mother, who remarried to a nice guy.
The fellow that Lynn married had three sons himself and his wife had passed away. They only lived a few houses away from each other and got to know each other through friends. Anyway, now they were together, and had six children to raise. Frank made sure that he could see them and tried to have some kind of relationship with them. They had to move to Columbus Ohio, because of the step-fathers job and this made it hard on the relationship between the three Dawson kids and their father. This move, plus many other problems between them and their father and his new family took a heavy toll down the road. A lot of things could have been done and said to the children, differently and being eight hundred miles away from them was a said factor for him and them.
Frank and I talked over mom and dad’s problem. We knew that He couldn’t bring them down to live with them in Garfield NJ. Mom would not have anything to do with that. My house was too small and I had no room to build on to it. There weren’t any ground floor apartments available in PEARL RIVER to be had. I talked it over with my wife and we decided to look for a bigger house that we could make an apartment for my mother and father. Frank and I agreed to this and we together would do whatever we had to do to make it work. It wasn’t easy; first I had to sell my house on Frieund Dr. so I would have the money to put down on another house for all of us. Sharan needed to look for a house that would fit our needs and one that we could afford. After a few weeks, she found a house in PEARL RIVER. The house was a big bi level and it was more than we could afford on our own. I took Mom and Dad to look over the house, which was vacant, and to see if there was enough room for a one bedroom apartment down stairs for them to live. I would have to make one of the garages into a bedroom and make a small kitchen and make the bath room bigger. They agreed that it would work. It was on the ground floor and they would have a little patio outside the door, to sit in the shade. It looked great. I would start thinking what I needed to do, to make over the new bedroom and all the rest. First things first, I had to sell my house. This is where it gets tricky. The owners of the house in PEARL RIVER were holding to their price and I was trying to barter them down. It worked; I got them to where we could afford the house, with a little left over. One problem, they wanted to close on the house with in thirty days. This I could not do. I had no money. All my money was in my home in Nanuet, and all I had in the bank was about two thousand dollars. I needed at least ten thousand more dollars and a good banker to close the deal. Well it was crunch time. Time to get the balls out of the closet. I called big brother Frank and told him where we were at on the house deal and told him that I had an idea, but needed his help to pull it off. I had just started a big job, a power house, that I was going to be on for at least three years and I would be making good money. I told him this and told him that I needed ten thousand dollars cash to put down on the house and I needed a good banker, if he knew any, to swing the deal for This is where it got sticky and everybody was sweating for a while.
Frank told me that I was crazy, which I probably was, but we had to take a chance for dad’s sake, if not for any other reason. He didn’t have ten thousand dollars. I asked him if he could get it from his father-in-law, who was pretty well loaded? He said no way, but there might be a way with somebody else. I was open to whatever he had in mind. There was this guy that his father-in-law knew where we could find the money, for 1% on the money borrowed, per month until the whole amount was paid off. It would cost me one hundred dollars a month just to borrow the ten grand. I would put this in my savings account, giving me a total of over twelve thousand dollars. Frankie had a friend that he knew from high school that was a loan officer in a savings and loan bank and I went to meet him and fill out the mortgage loan papers. Well, he thought that there shouldn’t be a problem; I had twelve thousand in the bank, over thirty thousand equity in the house that I was selling and a good job and good credit through the years. I looked like a done deal. Now I was the owner of two houses, with two mortgages, of which I couldn’t afford and a shy lark in NEW JERSEY who I owed ten thousand dollars too and was paying him one hundred dollars a month interest until it was paid off. WONDERFUL. It gets better than that. The house didn’t sell in Nanuet, and was vacant for over a year. Well my friend GOD, was looking out for me and answered my prayers. The house sold and I made more on it then I had planned. The apartment was made at the new house for mom and dad and they had moved in two months after we bought it.
With the house in Nanuet sold I could pay off the loan shark in NJ. Frank could breathe a little easier. The ten thousand dollar debt was done and it had cost me about twelve hundred dollars to swing the deal. Dad was breathing a little better. The kids started in the PEARL RIVER school system and went to Evens Park grammar school, only two blocks away from the new house on White Avenue. Thank GOD I was working steady on the new power house job, so that I would be able to pay both mortgages for two houses. Once again, my friend upstairs was looking out for me and mom. We did the best we could to help dad, but in the end it just wasn’t enough. He lasted about two years. The lack of clean oxygen getting into his body and lungs was making him delirious, carbon-deoxidize was building up and his brain and balance would go hay wire. We had to put him into the same hospital where we had put Uncle Giggy, Summit Park, in Pomona NY. Dad passed away in 1975, he was only 68 years old. A combination of hard work all his life, problems with his heart and of course smoking four packs of cigarettes a day, which gave him an acute form of enphysima. His lungs simply could not hold the air he was breathing in, causing his heart to fail.
We laid dad to rest with the rest of the Dawson family at the New Hempstead Cemetery, next to his older brother Bill. Now all the brothers were together with their mother and father. Mom stayed at White Avenue about another year, but was not happy. One day she called me down to her apartment for a talk. She said that there were things going on that I should know about, that my wife was hardly ever home, and neither were the kids. She had heard screaming on the telephone for hours on end. She also knew that we were arguing a lot and that things weren’t right with Sharan and me. She was right, a lot of things were wrong. I had given my wife basically a free rein to run the house. We had a joint checking account and the same savings account also. Working at the power house, I was making between eight hundred and one thousand dollars a week, big money for 1975. Sometimes I would even make more than that, if we had to work on Sundays, ten and twelve hours a day, I could make up to two thousand for the week. This money I thought was going to paying the bills for the house, car payment and utility bills. I came to find out that the phone bills were ranging between two hundred and three hundred and fifty dollars a month. Mostly overtime calls to her mother’s house. To say that I was mad to find these things out was an understatement. I questioned my wife about these things, and couldn’t get any direct answers. All I got was bull shit. Well I did a lot more checking on our finances and found that our checking account was close to empty. I was making great money; she was driving a school bus, and we were broke.
I could see that I wasn’t getting any straight answers as to where all the money had gone, and to this day I have my own ideas but I can’t prove a thing. I knew in my heart, what was going on. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the morning we woke up and somebody stole our brand new 1973 Pontiac station wagon out of our driveway. I called the police, they came to the house and filled out the report and left. About an hour later, the police called, they found the car, it was repossessed and it was sitting at the bank in NEW JERSEY, where I had borrowed the money for the car. Come to find out that the payments were four months overdue and had called rapidly and spoke to Mrs. Dawson about the problem, and apparently were getting the same bull shit answers I was getting. Well I had to float a quick loan from a friend, to bail the car out and also had to pay an extra one hundred and fifty dollars towing fee. Things were not good at White Avenue. I tried not to bring this crap up in front of the kids; they knew a lot more than I did, apparently. It didn’t do any good talking about it anymore, I couldn’t get any truth. I was being lied to and deceived too. I was at the end of my rope. I was going to make a move but I didn’t know which way to go. I told mom that we would look for another place for her. She was not happy in this house and knew what was going on. She had seen all this before, years ago with dad, him being dominated by his mother, Mary Dawson, the same as Sharan was being controlled by her mother, because of the bad feelings that she still had towards me.