Wednesday, April 17, 2024
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Aside from being my Godfather, and at the risk of hurting anyone’s feelings, I liked Larry best and most identified with him in my family. When I was a kid, my Nana Helen told me a story, I suspect because she thought me soft. She told me that in a ballgame, after an opponent spiked his teammate rounding second, a young Larry tried to take on the entire opposing team. He was a big guy, and his cause was just, but this was more doing the right thing than it was necessarily realistic.
After school, he went to work for the company and, because of his indispensable skills, he spent fifty years working for them. I think that he might be one of the last guys in America like that: guys who did the work, stuck it out and, for that matter, got to stick it out. Contributors. The guys who built this place up. I imagine he got this from his pop, Sylvester, an assembly line worker who built warbirds in the Big One and whose hands fitted the lunar module ascent engine that brought Armstrong and Aldrin back from the moon. Grandpa built stuff. Larry fixed stuff. Real work.
Larry always did for his family, in hard times and in good times. I don’t think of him as a smiling man and he didn’t take crap. But he was kindhearted. When he and my mom spoke on the phone, they’d be two hours and her western-New York accent would come back for the rest of the evening. He was deeply loved and a big loss to us all, especially to his immediate family who were the very center of his life. You were one of the real gooduns, Larry. <3
