Last time I wrote about some historical events that had a direct impact on my ancestors, determining in a sense the future of the bloodline. I argued that, had these events not happened as (and when) they did, I would probably never have been born. Of course, there are millions, if not billions, of events and choices that determine such things. Someone moves across the country for a job, or to get away from overbearing parents. My friend’s parents, both from the urban northeastern United States, each ended up in Mexico somehow in the late 1960s. They fell in love there, married, moved to New York, and had two sons who’d never have existed if one of them had gone to Miami instead of Baja California.
My grandfather always used to tell a story of his young childhood. His father, an Irish immigrant who settled first in Albany, moved to Brooklyn for economic reasons (discussed below) and married there. But he yearned to move back upstate and, when my grandfather was a year old, he convinced his wife to do so. The experiment lasted a few months, but she panicked every time the neighborhood squirrels got into the attic and scampered just over her head.
These hinterlands were no place for a city girl. Entreaties that squirrel-free housing could be procured in the greater Albany region were dismissed as so much claptrap. A foot was put down firmly and back to Brooklyn it would be. Decades later, my grandfather would ride on crowded, graffiti-covered subway cars in Brooklyn muttering, “Those g—damned squirrels!” Nobody on the double-R train even looked up. And, of course, it was for the best. He needed to be in Brooklyn, not Albany, to meet my grandmother and create my mother, who had me.
But, once again, I’m looking not at those private forks in the road, but at major public events that directly affected the direction of my direct ancestors’ lives. Here are a few more.
The Brooklyn Bridge Opens, 1883
The majestic Brooklyn Bridge, at the time of its construction, was regarded as one of the most incredible engineering achievements in the world. It was the crowning achievement of German immigrant John Augustus Roebling, who had designed suspension bridges in many other American cities, but none as ambitious as the one that first spanned the East River and led to the creation of modern-day, five-borough New York City.
John Roebling began work on the Great Bridge in 1867, but never lived to see its completion. In 1869 he lost several toes when his foot was crushed by a ferryboat while he was surveying along the riverbank, and died soon after of tetanus. His 32-year-old son, the decorated Civil War veteran Washington Roebling, took over the work. A year later Washington Roebling was paralyzed by decompression sickness suffered when reentering the normal atmosphere after spending time in the “pneumatic caissons” that had been constructed underwater to permit erection of the bridge towers. Many construction workers on the bridge suffered the same fate.
One of the iconic Brooklyn Bridge towers, from the Manhattan side
Washington Roebling carried on, renting an apartment in Brooklyn Heights with a clear view of the bridge site. His wife, Emily, lobbied for New York officials to retain the him as chief engineer and learned the complex math of bridge construction so that she could be his liaison with the onsite construction managers and engineers. The bridge was 50 percent longer than any other then-existing suspension bridge, and the complex project took many years to complete. Rightfully so,
Emily Warren Roebling was the first person to cross the bridge when it opened on May 24, 1883.
The bridge's famous, and beautiful, cables stretch out from the Brooklyn tower
Soon after my great-great-grandfather Michael was crossing it with his sons. Michael, an Irish immigrant, had married another Irish immigrant in Brooklyn in 1865 and they had several children. In about 1873 the family moved to Jersey City, New Jersey. There Michael grew vegetables in a small plot and rode the ferry with his sons to sell them from a pushcart in Manhattan. With the opening of the bridge, Michael decided to return his family to Brooklyn and walk across to Manhattan for free instead of paying for the ferry. His descendants still live in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn – not Jersey City – is where his daughter met my great-grandfather, where my grandfather met my grandmother, where my mother met my father, and where I was born.
This Brooklyn Bridge walkway, shown here in about 1910, has played an important role in my family's history
The dysfunction of the New York State legislature
Early in this post I mentioned my great-grandfather, who moved from Albany to Brooklyn without really wanting to. (Remember the squirrels?) Why’d he move?
Residents of New York State may not be surprised to learn that the state legislature’s dawdling played a big role. In recent times, the Brennan Center at NYU Law School has issued several reports calling New York’s the most dysfunctional state legislature in the nation (to be fair, the characterization pre-dates the 2010 Tea Party debacle).
New York's striking Capitol building in Albany, where good ideas often go to die. The Erie Canal the legislature wouldn't fund sat about a mile away.
For most of the past 50 years, the state Senate has been in Republican hands (though it’s been a
hot potato of sorts more recently), while the Assembly has been under Democratic control. Generally the Governor sits down with the head of each house and they work out whatever deals are going to get through. This system has not been very productive most of the time, although there have been signs of progress lately.
Things weren’t much better a century and change ago. My great-grandfather, who’d grown up in a fishing village on the Irish coast, had come to Albany in 1892 and become a boat captain. He plied the Hudson River and the Erie Canal, which then began at Albany, immediately across the street from his house. Albany’s prominence as a shipping port, however, was waning. The canal, in particular, was in great need of improvements, but for decades the state legislature had resisted spending any money on it. Sound familiar?
A map of the Albany waterfront as it was in the 19th century. The red arrow, top right, shows where my great-grandfather lived in 1900. As befits a boatman, the basin at the origin of the Erie Canal was directly across the street.
Lock Number 1 on the old Erie Canal, right near the basin, as it looked shortly after my great-grandfather came to the United States
My great-grandfather gave up, moving to Brooklyn, part of the greater New York City megalopolis the Erie Canal had played an instrumental part in creating. A couple of years later, in 1903, the legislature authorized major investment in the canal, but the eastern terminus was moved north from Albany to Waterford, where an
impressive series of locks were built to surmount the Cohoes Falls.
This marker is practically the only indication the Erie Canal once began here. The large Albany Basin, smaller Canal Basin, and the canal itself have all been filled in and sit under I-787 and Erie Boulevard.
As a result of this switch and a massive fire in the adjacent Lumber District, my great-grandfather’s old Albany neighborhood all but disappeared. The unused Albany portion of the canal was filled in and paved over. Today it’s a desolate, unnecessarily-wide boulevard in an area that bears no resemblance to the vibrant community that once was there. My great-grandfather never navigated the “New York State Barge Canal” that replaced the canal he loved; he died three years before it was finished in 1918.
The atomic bomb attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria
The only uses of nuclear weapons against human populations in the history of the world took place on August 6 and August 9, 1945, when the United States military dropped the bomb on two Japanese cities. The attacks caused incredible devastation to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and have remained a topic of great controversy ever since. Historians continue to debate, in particular, whether there was any military necessity for the bombings that could begin to justify the horrific death and human suffering they caused.
The unspeakable destruction at Hiroshima. Many survivors lived in physical agony for years.
What is not disputed is that Emperor Hirohito decided to surrender within three days of the Nagasaki bombing, and cited the atomic bombs in his August 15 public announcement of the surrender. In his August 17 address to the military, the emperor shifted focus to the Soviet Union’s resumption of hostilities against Japan a few hours before the August 9 attack on Nagasaki.
Times Square celebrates V-J Day. My grandmother was there; she knew her husband would be coming home soon.
Had the United States undertaken a land invasion of Japan, my grandfather (a sergeant in the signal supply corps) would probably not have been killed. But it still seems safe to say that I would not exist without whatever factors caused Japan to surrender exactly when it did.
After the formal Japanese surrender ceremony took place on September 2, the United States government quickly found itself under pressure to demobilize. Plans already were underway for the discharge of service members in Europe, with preferential treatment for those with children. In my grandfather’s papers I found his request for expedited discharge, dated in late September 1945. He asserted that, pursuant to new military regulations, he was eligible to preferential treatment in going home by virtue of being over 33 years old and having a minor child, an 11-year-old daughter from his first marriage.
My grandfather serving in the Pacific, 1944
My grandfather’s expedited discharge was approved and he sailed from Manila to Pearl Harbor in October. He sailed again from there a couple of weeks later, arriving in Los Angeles shortly after celebrating Thanksgiving on the troop ship. From there he took a train across the country and my grandmother met him at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he received his official discharge, on December 2, 1945. Nine months and two weeks later, my mother was born. If he’d come home much later, things would have been very different for us.
The Vietnam War
My father, an easygoing sort, couldn’t wait to get out of his parents’ house and enjoy college life when he finished high school in 1961. He was sure he was going to have a lot of fun. And he did. Altogether too much fun. So much fun that his grades were terrible and his father, who believed mightily in education and had seen his own opportunity for it deferred 25 years by the coming of the Depression, informed him that his parents would no longer subsidize the studies of one who didn’t study.
Back home it was for Dad, who found odd jobs here and there and tried to pay his own way through a local college. He mostly worked as a messenger downtown, which is amusing to those of us who know a man who can get lost in his own living room. Dad was delivering a package in shirtsleeves on an unseasonably warm November day 50 years ago when he heard on a secretary’s radio the news of President Kennedy’s assassination.
By the time my father turned 20 in the spring of 1964, he’d not gotten very far in paying his own way through college. My grandfather wasn’t making it easy, charging him rent to live in the house. Wanting a change of scenery and a way to pay for school, Dad decided to join the military. His father had gone to college thanks only to the GI Bill. Never a great athlete, my dad was assigned to the Air Force, which had the easiest qualifying tests. He still barely ran the mile in the required twelve minutes.
They sent Dad to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, his first time outside the northeast. A few short months later, a little thing called the Gulf of Tonkin incident happened (or, rather, didn't happen) and the Vietnam War was underway in full swing. He didn’t go over right away, being first transferred to Texas, where he ran into culture shock when he and some buddies stopped to pee in a desolate area and were sent packing by an angry rancher shooting over their heads. One of the buddies was black.
This document, the Tonkin Resolution, kept my father in the Air Force about three years longer than anticipated
By early 1966 Dad was on the way to Vietnam. Fortunately for him, he wasn’t in combat. He worked for a supply division that moved military equipment and replacement parts for planes to the combat units. He was never near the front, but he still he spent more than two years there before coming home in December 1968. My father isn’t much of a gung-ho veteran and never talks much about his time in Vietnam. The most I’ve gotten out of him are vague recollections of “moving a lot of crates,” and sitting around with other servicemen on hot days listening to music. “We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place” was a particular favorite. To this day Dad hates eating rice, which he said was a big part of every meal he had in Vietnam.
My father's brief return to his parents' home after serving in Vietnam. Soon he was in New York City going to very different kinds of parties.
My father stayed in touch with only one Air Force buddy, a fellow northeasterner of Irish descent who shared the same last name. We saw plenty of this friend when I was a kid and it took me years to realize he wasn’t a relative. That guy had a big plan: to move to New York and party hard. My father, nearing 25 and once again chafing in his parents’ house, was all for it. He and his friend took an apartment near Greenwich Village and had a blast as events like the
Stonewall riots unfolded around them.
Greenwich Village as my father experienced it in the late 1960s
Pretty soon, though, my father was tired of the partying. Rather than go home, he rented a small room near the Brooklyn Bridge and started attending a local college at night. During the day he worked for a succession of financial firms in lower Manhattan. My mother also worked in one of them, and let it be known through intermediaries that she found the tall, trim vet attractive. My dad still not making a move, she went up to his floor and asked him out one day. A somewhat bold move for 1970, but in my dad’s case necessary. They had drinks at a local dive bar and walked across the same Brooklyn Bridge that prompted her great-grandfather to move back to Brooklyn from Jersey City. And the rest…is history.
My parents, when they were dating, worked in lower Manhattan and would often sit outside watching construction on the Twin Towers during their lunch break.
The industrial docks under the bridge where my father used to wander have been replaced by a fabulous park in a now-ritzy neighborhood