We Burn on Friday: A Memoir of My Father and Me

By Richard Manieri

We Burn on Friday is Richard Manieri's account of growing up in the Italian-American community of Philadelphia, with hilarious tales of learning his way around a boxing ring, getting through weekly confession at his Catholic church (name and serial number only), and taking that frightening walk to meet a girl across the dance floor. His story extends to his determined but often stymied journey into broadcast journalism -- including his first job at a radio station, where he learned, after he was hired, that his work included burning the station's trash every Friday. And all of it is told through the prism of his deep and abiding love for his father, who, one way or the other, was with him every step of the way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BPS Books
• Release date: Feb 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781772360127

Richard Manieri

Long before writing We Burn on Friday, Richard Manieri spent the majority of his fifteen-year career in TV news as a reporter at the Fox affiliate in Philadelphia. During this time he won both Emmy and Associated Press awards for reporting. He later joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia as Spokesman and Director of Public Affairs, following which he became a media consultant and writer. His essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Philadelphia Daily News, The Palm Beach Post, and The Baltimore Sun. Manieri is currently a communications professor and head women’s lacrosse coach at Asbury University in Kentucky. He holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Communications from Villanova University and a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.We Burn on Friday is his first book.

Book preview

One

There’s a black-and-white photograph of my father holding me in 1965, when I was a baby. He’s wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and dark tie. His shoulders are broad and his waist narrow. He has a full head of dark hair, closely cropped. I’m pulling on his tie like I’m trying to start a lawn mower. His eyes are crossed and his tongue is sticking out the side of his mouth.

I remember my father chasing me during games of hide-and-seek around our house—a small row home in the Wynnefield section of Philadelphia where we lived until I was five. I used to hide in rather obvious places, but he always pretended he couldn’t see me. Then, when he came very close, I’d jump out and yell Blaaah!

Sometimes he hid too well, and I’d start crying if I couldn’t find him right away. He seemed surprised I was upset, saying, What? What’s wrong? And I explained I couldn’t find him and got scared.

There was a time when I could always find my father when I needed him. He seemed to have a knack for reappearing just in time. He would pop out from behind a chair just as I was beginning to panic. I could never imagine losing him for a long time, much less forever.

When my sister and I were small—she was six years younger than I—he threw us up in the air and held our faces against his so we could feel his five-o-clock shadow. When I was a teenager, he always kissed me goodnight, even though I felt too old for the ritual.

You should never be embarrassed to kiss your father, he used to say.

That was something his father used to tell him, a remnant from the Old World, where my father resided on a part-time basis. Dad was a second-generation Italian. He was very family oriented and believed strongly in traditions. But he didn’t travel to Italy for the first time until he was almost fifty, and he didn’t speak any Italian, except for a few obscenities and food items, the names of which I learned phonetically from him—gobbagool, brishute, brivilone. This made ordering those items from the grocery store—especially the first time my mother sent me by myself before I could spell—a challenge. The real spelling wasn’t even close, which meant I had to hope the lady behind the counter was Italian or, if she wasn’t, I had to say the names very slowly until she figured out what I was talking about.

Oh, you mean capicola! she would say, as if she just discovered uranium under the cash register.

My father smoked. He started when he was fourteen and couldn’t stop. He used to buy me candy cigarettes. When he pulled a cigarette out of his pocket, I grabbed one of my phonies, which were later taken off the market because they supposedly encouraged children to smoke. I had a hard time understanding why I couldn’t have those while Dad kept puffing on the real things.

I was my father’s primary runner for cigarettes in the days when business owners didn’t seem concerned about selling cigarettes to a little kid. After we had moved to Drexel Hill, a Philadelphia suburb, Dad gave me two quarters and sent me around the corner to the Chinese restaurant to buy a pack from the machine. He smoked Viceroys, which were about as raw and pure a smoke as you could find short of lighting up your own tobacco leaves. Cigarette smoke drove my mother crazy. She always sent my father outside when he lit up. When I was young, I never noticed the smell. Today, I can smell cigarette smoke from a block away.

When I was seven, I almost died. My mother had ordered me never to cross the busy street that intersected ours. I had a purple, three-speed bicycle, which I rode around and around our block. One day my friends talked me into riding it across the busy street.

On the way home, at rush hour, I decided it would be safer to walk my bike back across the street. I dismounted, waited until all seemed clear, and started crossing. I remember seeing the front of the oncoming car on my right. I’m told that I was hit and knocked several feet into the air.

Considering the force of the impact, I was lucky. I suffered a concussion, lacerated kidney, cuts and bruises, and a variety of long-lasting dental problems from the bike’s handlebar jamming into my mouth. No broken bones. I remember only one thing after being hit and before coming to in a hospital bed. As I drifted in and out of consciousness, I saw a doctor working on me and my father standing next to him. I found out later that the hospital staff tried to stop Dad from coming in, but he threatened to kill anyone who got in his way.

*

My father was an accountant. He was extremely intelligent, handsome, well read, funny. Not just witty but really funny. His sense of humor was magnetic. People loved being around him. He knew more about music and movies than anyone. Until he was sixteen, he lived across the street from a movie theater at 10th and Moore in South Philadelphia. He and my grandmother went to the theater almost daily to see new releases like Casablanca, Anchors Aweigh, and TheLost Weekend. He could have been a musician or movie critic.

But if he had such ambitions he never pursued them. Perhaps, like many children of the Great Depression, he did what he thought he was supposed to do and not necessarily what he wanted. He was good with numbers. Accounting came easily and could provide the path to financial independence, a destination his parents never came close to reaching. This wasn’t an era in which young men were encouraged to embark on journeys of self-discovery, and if they did venture out, they’d better hurry up and find themselves because there was work to be done. So he chose a career devoid of creativity and imagination. A life of figures lined up on long yellow pages.

Dad was the youngest of eight children, the offspring of Italian immigrants. He and his oldest sister were separated in age by twenty years. His three brothers all served in the military—Larry in Europe and Michael in the Pacific in World War II, Americo, known as Ricky, in Korea and Vietnam. Ricky actually flew spy missions over Cuba in the early sixties. But my father was too young for World War II, and by the time Korea came around, he was 4F due to the removal of one of his kidneys from an illness when he was a teenager.

I don’t know if soldiering was something he fancied anyway. I think he really wanted to be Gene Kelly or Frank Sinatra, which was a problem because he could neither dance nor sing. He could, however, play a mean trumpet. In fact, he was so good as a teenager, he was asked to play on local radio programs. Sometimes he showed me a newspaper photo of one of his performances. But the doctor who treated his kidney ailment had ordered him to stop playing, at least until he fully recovered. And so, while many of his friends were preparing for lives as professional musicians, he put his trumpet down and never picked it up again.

At sixteen, he dropped out of South Philadelphia High when his parents moved across town to 56th Street in the southwest section of the city. They relocated to be closer to their adult daughter, Antoinette, who was dying of cancer. In those days, there was no stigma to not finishing high school. Dad’s father made it only through ninth grade. Honest, blue-collar labor was an acceptable and even honorable alternative to education. My grandfather worked as a janitor at the old Beneficial Savings building. My father worked with him until he eventually landed a job as an elevator operator in the building. After the bank, he dug ditches for a few months. But by the time he was eighteen, he had had enough of physical labor and began to see the benefits of clean hands and steady employment.

He decided to go to college and matriculated at St. Joseph’s in Philadelphia. But he had never graduated from high school, a piddling detail that somehow slipped by the college admissions board. He was halfway to his degree in accounting before anyone noticed. Rather than throw him out, the administration allowed him to work toward completing his high school diploma while continuing his college education. I asked him many years later how come no higher-ups at the college seemed particularly concerned that one of their undergrads skipped an important requirement for admission. He said he never told the selection committee that he graduated high school—and never told them that he didn’t, either. It wasn’t like it is today. They were just happy to have people, he said.

After graduation, he decided that becoming a Certified Public Accountant was the path to stability. He studied for the test, infamous for its degree of difficulty, on his own. He took no special courses, received no tutoring, attended no seminars. He left his row home one April morning for the test location in Center City. On his way, as he was driving past Fairmount Park, he spotted a pea green Chevy that looked suspiciously like his nephew Nicky’s car, which had been stolen a week earlier. The closer he got to the car, the more convinced he was that it was, indeed, Nicky’s. The new paint, the wheels—it had to be his.

Despite the fact that he was fighting the clock, he followed the car around the park for a while, staying just far enough away so the driver wouldn’t suspect he was under surveillance. Continually checking his watch, he waited for an opportunity to make his move. Finally the guy parked on a side street and got out and opened the trunk. Dad bolted from his car and subdued him with the only weapons at his disposal—his hands and the Chevy’s rear bumper. After banging the suspect’s head on the polished chrome three or four times, he dragged the concussed and baffled thief to a phone booth and threatened to kill him if he tried to get away.

You have to hurry up. My whole life is hanging in the balance! he told the police on the phone. Nicky got his car back. Dad made it to his test on time and gave the cops a statement when he returned. He passed the test on the first try.

*

Dad was determined to have things better than his father, who toiled as a custodian and handyman most of his adult life. Grandpa died when I was about five, so I remember him only as a little old bald Italian man who used to give me bubble gum cigars. But my father told me about him often, usually in the context of how difficult it was to grow up with little or no money.

I think he made up many of those hard-luck stories—he swore they were true, albeit with a twinkle in his eye. He didn’t have enough money to buy a baseball glove so he wrapped string around and around his thumb and index finger to form a kind of a net. His father couldn’t afford to buy him a football for Christmas, so he sewed laces on a ham. He got into fights frequently because he was Italian and poor, not a winning combination in Southwest Philadelphia in the forties and fifties. That one I believed.

Being called a little dago or wop didn’t sit well with him. He was only about five-six, a hundred and fifty pounds, but was wiry and strong, fast and athletic. As a teenager, he had a reputation as someone not to be messed with, despite his size. A friend of his tells a story of the time he and my father were getting hassled on a street corner by a couple of sailors. Words were exchanged. An altercation was imminent. Dad didn’t start the fight, but he ended it. Within thirty seconds, one sailor was on the ground and the other was running in the other direction. Dad broke his finger on the sailor’s forehead.

More than a decade after my father’s death, I found myself on an elevator in Philadelphia with a man in his sixties. Just the two of us. I felt the man studying my profile.

Manieri, right? he asked.

I assumed he recognized me because I was a reporter on local TV at the time.

Yes.

I think I knew your father, from the old neighborhood. He was a tough little sonofabitch. You look just like him.

Two

In 1981, when I was seventeen, my father bought me a car. A 1976 black Ford Granada with red vinyl seats and a hole in the trunk.

Dad and I had spent a couple of months car shopping after I graduated from high school. He was buying me the car because I had no money and needed a way to get to work and college—Villanova University, just outside the city. We must have looked at a dozen cars, but he found something he didn’t like about every one of them. We were close to landing a 1976 Pacer, which was encased in enough glass to bake a turkey on a summer afternoon. But that wasn’t why the deal fell through. Dad didn’t like the salesman. When he thought the guy was jerking him around on the price, he threw up his arms and walked out of the dealership. These guys are a bunch of damn thieves! he said. We’ll find you another car.

He spotted the Granada on Route 30 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He thought he had pulled a fast one on a Mennonite farmer. He paid the guy a thousand dollars and drove the car home.

Look in the driveway, he said with a big grin as he burst through the front door of our house.

There it was. My car. So very black, right down to the hubcaps, typical of what a Mennonite would drive around a farm. It might have been used to pull a cart.

What do you think?

I could tell he was proud of his purchase, so I faked it. Dad, it’s great.

He loved a deal. Everything is negotiable, he used to say. Even more than he loved a deal, he loved a hard-fought negotiation, the satisfaction of outwitting a worthy but lesser foe, overpowering him with the force of his intellect, leaving the poor sap a quivering mass, beaten yet somehow thankful for having been defeated by a master at the top of his game. This poor farmer, this simple hayseed who had no television and looked like Abe Lincoln, was just his latest victim.

I was grateful for the independence the car gave me. Besides, I hated having to drive my mother’s enormous, beige Bonneville Brougham, which had been my father’s. Dad loved big cars. It was almost as if his automobile selections were based on square footage—an Olds ’98, a Chrysler New Yorker, and the granddaddy of them all, a Plymouth Gran Fury, which could comfortably accommodate four adults in the backseat.

The Bonneville got about eight miles to the gallon and was the size of the USS Nimitz. It was impossible to make a graceful entrance in that car. Even my friends, who had seen the car a hundred times, made that ocean liner noise, where you form your lips as if you’re going to whistle but you blow out a low hum. They’d say, Where do you dock that thing? or Hey! Did you save any gas for the rest of us? or We don’t need to take the bus to the game. We can all fit in your car.

I learned pretty quickly that the farmer who sold the Granada to my father was no doubt laughing all the way back to his equine-powered plow. Somehow my dad never spotted the hole in the trunk, which was created by the corrosive lime the farmer had stored in it. That wasn’t the only imperfection he missed. Every time it rained, the back window leaked. I had to stuff towels behind the backseats. After a while I just let the towels dry there so I could use them the next time. Eventually, the moisture blew up my back stereo speakers. The car often wouldn’t start if the weather was damp or chilly or humid or below freezing or if I hadn’t started it in a day or two.

Within two weeks the water pump went, followed days later by the muffler, which fell off in the Villanova parking lot. All