I Found Dad’s Last List 20 Years After He Died. It Made Me Cry

My father kept lists. He listed the 539 books he read in his last 25 years. He listed every C-SPAN Booknotes episode (with Brian Lamb) he watched religiously every Sunday night for seven years (322 shows). Oh, yes, he loved books!

He kept shopping lists for stocking his small fridge in his man cave with essentials (Pepsi, hazelnut coffee, heavy cream), and long lists of daily tasks.

Dutifully he recorded them in pocket-sized notebooks kept close by his reading chair. He never stopped writing lists until 5 p.m. on December 31, 2004, when the cancer finally stopped him.

After his death, I scooped all his little notebooks into a box. Besides the book list (recorded in what was reverentially called “the green book”), I rarely perused the other notebooks.

The pain of his death was too raw, and then the business of living interfered.

Dad was born in 1927 in Lowell, Massachusetts, to a working-class family. His father worked in a tannery that turned cow carcasses into leather. His Irish grandfather, who emigrated in 1882, rose from the wool mills to a city job as a “sparrow man,” cleaning Lowell streets by shoveling up horse manure. (To those who disparaged Lowell, he cracked: “You’d never call Lowell a ‘one horse town’ if you followed me around on my daily rounds!”)

Dad was smart as a whip. After a summer working in the tannery with his father, he resolved to avoid a lifetime of drudgery through diligent studies. At 16, he graduated from Lowell High, then moved on to Boston College for a year, before joining the Army in 1945, and returning to BC on the GI Bill for his B.S. and M.S. in Physics (commuting all six years from Lowell).

His first job in 1951 was as an Engineer in the Ballistic Research Laboratories, at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. But soon he became homesick, so when heard the Watertown Arsenal was hiring, he made a call.

“Oh, sorry, we’re not hiring!” the woman on the line said ruefully.

Crestfallen, and about to hang up, he took a stab and meekly offered: “Mam, I’m a physicist.”

Instantly her tone changed, as if Dorothy had shown the ruby slippers at the shuttered Gates of Oz.

“Well, why didn’t you say so!” she bellowed. “We’re hiring physicists!”

In the 1950s, he was an early Fortran expert, then worked a decade at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, moved his wife and five children from a Lowell tenement to the tony suburb of Andover, sent his kids to private colleges. It seemed he left Lowell behind, but not so.

In his heart, despite all the education and success, he viewed himself as simply a working-class Lowell kid (“a nose-picking, crotch-scratching, wind-breaking member of the proletariat,” he said in his typically colorful way, burnished by reading all those books in the little green book.)

Alone in his basement reading chair, he sometimes talked to himself. If you snuck down, catching him in the act, he was unembarrassed, offering a ready explanation:

“I have a rich interior life,” he cracked, borrowing a phrase often used to describe the inner lives of contemplative saints like Thomas Merton.

He never cared to travel. He preferred reading. Near the end, I asked if he regretted spending (carefully avoiding the word “wasting”) so much of his life in a reading chair, missing out on so much. He did not. In high dudgeon, he justified himself.

“I’ve traveled the stormy Atlantic in clipper ships. I’ve climbed the Himalayas in wild blizzards. I’ve faced down wild animals in Africa.”

“Huh?”

“I read.”

Indeed, for a sedentary man, he had a remarkable skill set. He knew how to survive an avalanche (“swim through it like you’re riding a wave”), a shark attack (“strike them in the nose”), a 450-lb silverback gorilla charge (“Stand your ground! Stay calm!”)

At 77, with the cancer advancing, his thoughts harkened back to his childhood in Lowell.

Surrounded by his large screen TV, CD players, personal computers— the detritus of progress—he marveled at it all, but returned again to Lowell, on the Merrimack River: a sparrow man’s grandson, a tannery glazier’s son.

Like that other physicist Newton, he stood on the shoulders of giants.

He sometimes regaled us with how he had witnessed Lowell’s last living Civil War veteran in a parade. It connected him to a distant past, one link in the long chain of history. Dying now, he reconnected to his own distant past.

And so he pulled up a small, purple notebook and started another list. The Last List.

Penned in lucid moments, before morphine and hospice care silenced his thoughts to all but himself—the Last List takes one, hand in hand, on a last stroll back to the bygone days of an ingenious Catholic boy, a mill worker’s striving son, for a final visit to beloved Lowell.

Part nostalgia, part progress marker—the Last List embodies Dad’s two sides: reader and scientist. No doubt, there is warmth, sentiment, even yearning, in it, but there is also dispassionate observation.

On his 20th anniversary, I found the list at the end of the small, purple notebook. A phone number for Dana Farber in Boston carbon-dated it for me: Just before he died.

It startled me. In black ink, cursive style, Dad harkened back to 1930s Lowell: The things lost, never to return, captured only in memory now.

Lost and only in memory—that was exactly how I was experiencing Dad now. Squinting my eyes, I recalled him in the reclining reading chair, both gone. Tears flowed.

Dad never traveled from his reading chair to far-flung places. He didn’t have to. He had a rich interior life. It was all right before him.

· Doctors making house calls

· Tops on men’s bathing suits

· No teeth braces

· Funerals at home, wreath on door

· Undefeated, untied, unscored upon teams

· Pitching nine-inning games

· Drop Kick football

· Tobacco baseball cards (Honus Wagner)

· Parades with Civil War Veterans

· Buying gas by price – “dollar’s worth” (Now “fill it up!”)

· Nickel hamburgers and hot dogs

· Penny candy, 6 for 5 cents

· Weekly Rent

· Ice delivery, ice men, ice card in window

· Rag men going through neighborhoods

· Milk delivery in glass bottles to house

· Coal deliveries, coal bins

· Barber’s giving shaves using straight edge

· Tailors, cobblers everywhere

· Horse and wagons

· Troughs filled with water for horses

· Loud whistling – boys and men

· Pea shooters on Halloween (ringing doorbells)

· Thumbing rides

· Going barefoot in summers

· Inkwells in schools, blotters, dip pens

· Slide rules

· 2 years of Latin – college course

· Hit by teacher

· Cars not starting in cold

· Blankets over radiator

· Mechanical brakes, gas tank in front hood

· Running boards, rumble seats, curtains in car windows

· Putting hand out for left-right car signals

· 2-piece telephones

· Party lines on phones, give numbers to operators

· Sunday dinners and car rides

· Dressing up to go out (travel, church, movie)

· Pocket watches with chains

· Vests, two trouser suits

· Knickers, golf stockings, garters for men

· Straw hats

· Women wearing hats

· Cigarettes everywhere

· Victrola record player, records

· Washing clothes by hand, wringers

· Clothes lines, starching shirts

· Darning socks

· Water from hand pumps

· Walking to work

· Homemade pies, cakes, bread

· Burning leaves in fall

· Latin Mass

· Confession

· No meat on Fridays

· Catholics kneeling and kissing Bishop’s ring

· Catholic boxers kneeling and blessing selves before fights

· 12 o’clock fart before Communion

· Scarlet Fever – Home quarantined

· Grocery stores – served by clerk

· Stores selling raw butter

· Neighborhood political rallies

· Movies at least once a week

· Mail twice a day

· Multiple newspapers per city

· National Radio Shows (We the People, Cavalcade of America, Lucky Strike Hit Parade)

· Magazines (Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post)

· Steam locomotives

Robert Muldoon Jr., a Boston freelance writer, wrote the novel “Brass Bonanza Plays Again” about the late, lamented, star-crossed Hartford Whalers hockey team.

All views expressed are the author’s own.

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