Making Other Plans: A Memoir

By Tom Mackin

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• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 10, 2009
• ISBN: 9781452071510

Book preview

Contents

PROLOGUE:

No Strings Attached

Snow Job

My Daughter

Is Getting

Married Today

How To Cull The Christmas Card List

You Don’t Have To March On St. Patrick’s Day to Be Irish

Happy Birthday, Joe

A Death In The Family

The Mortgage Is Paid Up, Hurrah?

Caught In The Real Estate Bust

Saving The

Family Jewels

Tis The Season.

Or Is It?

Watching Tv For A (Poor) Living

A Dark Day

On The Tube

This Is A Busy Signal

Hoping For A

Fat Envelope

Cape Cod,

Here We Come

A Commuter

And His Shadow

All The Corrections Unfit To Print

Hawkeye Vs Tolstoy

The Empty

Orchestra Seats

Melvil Dewey

Casts A Spell

Adjectives Are Fattening

Sir Lew: The Host

With The Most

The Man Who

Played The Piano

They’re All Gone"

Nothing Up My Sleeve

Raising A Little Hell

A Strange Way To Fight A War

The Intrepid

Joe Mooney

In Pursuit Of Underwear

The Stolichnaya Run

From Gemutlichkeit To Godderdammerung

A True Fairy Tale

The Best Restaurant In North America

Where The Woodchucks And Porcupines Play

The Country That Disappeared

Seeking

John Wayne’s Yacht

The Bartenders Were All Geologists

Watch Your

Goddamn Language

Musing On

Marching To War

The Smartest Man

In The Room

Soap Got In My Eyes

A Barnum & Bailey World

Shirley’s Other World

Once A Song And Dance Man….

Someone’s In The Kitchen With Dinah (Me)

Jack Paar Revisited

A Museum For Gilligan’s Island?

Billy Rose’s Ghost

Nikita, Walt And Me

Grooming A Star

The Cinderella Man

The Rear View Mirror

Invitation To An Execution

I Buried My

Daughter Today

About The Author

FOR ALMA, MELANIE AND TARA, AS ALWAYS

33233.jpg

Melanie, Alma and Tara in Charleston, S.C.

PROLOGUE:

Goodbye to Hilden

I was born in a four-room, cold-water, attached tenement flat in Hilden, a grimy mill village in Antrim, the bleakest county in Northern Ireland. Since the British were in control of that part of the storied island, my family, devout Roman Catholics, called it Occupied Ireland.

Sharing the tiny rooms with me were my mother and father, aunt and uncle, and older brother. I didn’t know what it was like to sleep alone till I got married.

That’s the way it is with the Irish. They tell jokes to keep from crying.

John F. Kennedy said, There’s no use in being Irish unless you know the world is going to break your heart.

There were only two streets in Hilden, both mean. At their terminus – the crotch – stood a fetid jute mill, grandly called The Linen Thread Company, whose foul emanations imperiled the lungs of the underpaid workers, which included my Aunt Rose, a tiny woman who was smaller than the rings of flax she lifted onto the spinning machines. .

The streets themselves, patrolled by Protestant footpads, were dangerous for Roman Catholics. You could always identify the Catholics. They wore scapulars and were the fastest runners.

There was only one way out of Hilden, and that was up. There was no down in Hilden.

It was the bottom. (I was not surprised but a bit disappointed to learn a few years after I left that my birthplace, which I thought might one day be a tourist attraction, was razed by the Ulster Improvement Authority to make room for a strip mall.)

For me, up was Ellis Island, and, eventually New York City, another dangerous place. In Manhattan, you strolled on Park Avenue, strode on Fifth Avenue, and ran like hell everywhere else. I never stopped running.

But New York was a magical town. To proud New Yorkers, every place else was Hilden. I worked in the ABC Television building at 1330 Avenue of the Americas, which everyone called Sixth Avenue. It was also known as Broadcast Row, for the three major television networks were nestled there side by side. My office was on the 29th floor with a narrow view of Central Park, where you also had to run like hell.

After a few breathless years in the ABC building, whose lobby reeked with the odor of Howard Cosell’s cigars, I learned the true function of a network vice president. It was to sit in an office with a window facing north and sound the alarm if you saw an iceberg coming. My job was somewhat more restricted. I had an office with a window facing the CBS building, and I was to sound the alarm if I saw Mike Wallace coming. He never did; I had to meet him on neutral territory.

As the head of media for ABC Sports, I worked at seven Olympic Games, where you won medals for running. I was at the tragic Games of Munich in l972, where eleven Israeli Olympians were assassinated by Arab terrorists. I stood near the ABC Sports studio as Jim McKay told the world of the murders in three stark words, They’re all gone.

I was a sailor in World War II for four years and six days without firing a shot. I hid behind a Navy-issue Underwood typewriter on U. S. destroyers in the South Pacific and wrote of the heroism of the guys who did the shooting while I tried to get their names straight without getting my feet wet.

It’s never easy for one of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I worked my way through college playing the piano in dingy saloons where the drunken customers demanded endless choruses of My Wild Irish Rose. (When I complained to the owner of one Irish bar about the wretched condition of the piano, he had it painted.)

During a long career in journalism and television, I ghost-wrote newspaper columns for Billy Rose, volunteered to attend a state electrocution although I was against capital punishment and stood in the hot Sinai desert in my new Gucci loafers while an insolent Peter O’Toole tied on his Roman legionnaire leggings and refused to speak to me. And on a cold October day, I buried my beautiful young daughter among strangers in an Ohio cemetery.

My revels now are ending; the years are dwindling down, and as I record the Troubles I’ve seen, I sometimes think I can hear the Hilden footpads behind me. I’m looking over my shoulder as I run. And on certain spring days, the pipes of Londonderry that are forever calling Danny boy seem to be calling me. But the sound is getting fainter.

Lakewood, N. J.

Winter, 2009

No Strings Attached

My younger daughter, Tara, received her first violin yesterday. There was the instrument, resting in its Velcro-lined case on the bureau, next to the Barbie doll. My wife stood beside it, sobbing. I sized up the situation at once.

Don’t cry, I consoled her. We’ll only let her play it in the basement.

Oh, you never understand anything, she whimpered. I’m crying because it’s so beautiful.

For that kind of money, it should be beautiful, I said.

How can you talk about money at a time like this? I can just see her now, playing in the school orchestra. It will be a whole new life for her.

I thought she had a pretty good life already.

Now she and her sister can play together beautifully.

I had the idea they played pretty well together with just the Hula Hoops and the Barbie doll clothes.

You forget when you were a child you had music lessons, and now you resent your children having advantages.

There are going to be lessons, too? How much?

There you go with money again.

Mine only cost a dollar an hour.

You know we pay our babysitters more than that.

O. K., what’s for dinner?

Don’t you even want to hear what she learned in her first lesson? You care that little about your children’s education?

All right, show me.

The child picked up a long yellow pencil, Eberhard Faber, No. 2, medium hard, held it lightly between her thumb and forefinger and whipped it back and forth through the air like a little jet plane.

That’s a music lesson? Flying Eberhard Faber pencils in the air?

Oh, you can be so cruel. That’s the first lesson in holding the bow.

Why doesn’t she hold the bow? It’s over there in the Velcro-lined case.

Before you can hold the bow, you must learn how to hold a pencil. You get to hold the bow in the second lesson.

How much do we shell out before she’s allowed to pick up the violin?

If I hear another word about money in front of this child…

Well, I don’t mind paying for lessons, but I think she should be able to take the violin out of the case for nothing.

That’s it. The violin goes back in the morning.

O. K., what’s for dinner?

They were both crying now. Tara was sticking the eraser end of the Eberhard Faber pencil in her ear, and her mother was closing the violin case with the Velcro-velvet lining. It was a throat-clutching scene.

All right. She can keep the fiddle. But for heaven’s sake, stop crying.

How about the music stand?

Why does she need a music stand? She’s not allowed to touch the bow yet.

All the children in the class have music stands.

How many kids are in the class?

Two.

You mean two others?

No, two altogether.

There we go, keeping up with the Joneses again. I thought you said this was a musical community?

It is, dear, but the teacher explained this is a big year for reeds.

O. K., what’s for dinner?

String beans.

Snow Job

Who’s going to shovel the snow?

I recognized the voice right away, also the question. I had heard it three weeks earlier. I considered several answers and opted for silence.

I’m going to ask one more time.

An ominous tone there. The silence was as deep as the nine inches of white stuff collecting silently on the lawn.

A small voice: I’m studying for my SATs.

No help from that quarter. But more hostility.

If you won’t shovel the snow, you could as least help your daughter with her math.

We’d been through this before, the double Hobson – two no-choices .I love my wife, but Oh, Euclid!

I’m waiting. Which will it be, math or snow?

You mean, trig or treat?

I will not dignify that with a groan.

But you know how poor my math is. That’s why I majored in comparative literature. As Chekhov said, Literature is my mistress.

:Here’s some literature from your wife. The snow is getting deeper.

If man were meant to shovel snow, he’d be built like a plow.

Who said that, Chaucer?

No, but funny you should mention him. He did write, Where are the snows of yesteryear? and everyone, including Shakespeare, lifted it.

I’m not talking about the snows of yesteryear. I’m talking about the snows of today. And nobody is lifting it, except the town.

Speaking of the town, what time does Piers the Plowman come by?

Who?

Piers the Plowman, that’s a poem by a contemporary of Chaucer.

If I hear another word about Chaucer…

Well, you must admit it’s a great name for a snow-removal outfit.

Only if they’re clearing out Harvard Yard. Now, how about your yard?

I was thinking about how lovely it looked in its pristine state. Emerson called it, The frolic architecture of the snow. What a shame to ruin that natural symmetry with a shovel.

Wasn’t he the one who wrote about the shot heard ‘round the world?

Now, wait a minute. If you’d listened to me last week, we wouldn’t be in this fix.

Jog my memory while you’re putting on your boots.

I had this great idea: tie a giant diaper from the maple trees to the garage roof. It would catch the snow before it hit the driveway.

But what would we do with all that snow?

Call diaper service.

I have a better idea. Here’s the shovel.

(Another tack.) What will the neighbors say if they see a literary man spending time on manual labor?

They’ll say, ‘It takes a heap o’ shovelin’ in a house to make it home.’

I’ll make believe I didn’t hear that.

(A desperate appeal.) Are you aware of the number of middle-aged men who have had coronaries from heavy lifting?

None in your immediate family.

O. K., I’m going out there, but let me recall for you Alan Seeger’s lines:

I have a rendezvous with Death

At some disputed barricade…

"That’s not a disputed barricade. That’s your property line, right there where your neighbor stopped shoveling,"

(A last try). Where are the young kids – Whittier’s Barefoot boys with cheeks of tan - who used to come around every time it snowed?

They’re wearing shoes now, and getting $10 an hour.

Where’s the shovel?

My Daughter

Is Getting

Married Today

My daughter Melanie is getting married today.

What memories those words summon up! But memories alone are not enough to recall the days and years that have rushed by so swiftly. Evidence of her is everywhere in the house: a sweater here, tennis shoes with broken laces there, a dusty violin stored under the piano. The evidence is strongest in her room, which has been kept exactly as she left it when she went away to college, then to law school, then to a legal career in another state.

When she comes home for brief stops, I sometimes ask her, as we sit in her room, Do you feel you’re home now, Melanie, or are you just visiting?

She answers promptly, Oh, I’m home, dad. I’m home. Of course, she isn’t, but I love to hear the words.

Occasionally, when she’s away, which is most of the time, I sit alone in her room and try to create her presence through the artifacts of her years. What does a young girl save? What does she cherish enough to pin on a bulletin board? To frame and hang on a wall?

Which dolls have survived the years of childish loving and squeezing? There is a blue and gold dachshund from the Munich Olympics; a pebble-filled bullfrog crouches on the back of a sofa; on a bookcase stands one of King Henry VIII’s wives. Is it Anne Boleyn, Catherine of Aragon, or Jane Seymour? Who can say?

On another shelf sit a glass unicorn and a china bull coin bank representing Taurus, her zodiac sign. Miraculously, a few coins rattle inside.

Too many books to count: from Ragtime to Moby-Dick, from Agatha Christie mysteries to a biography of Clare Boothe Luce. And record albums: The Beatles and Elton John, of course, but, thankfully, The Nutcracker Suite and Fiddler on the Roof.

Over there, pinned to a corkboard is a collection of high school Playbills. In How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, she was in the violin section of the orchestra; in Carnival, one of the Bluebell girls, not much of a role, but more visible; in ‘Oklahoma!," she played Ado Annie, her first big part!

I believe, as I sit here, that I can hear her dancing through the house practicing her featured song:

"I’m jist a girl who cain’t say no,

I’m in a terrible fix."

Her stage career seems to have ended on that note. There are no other school Playbills. But next to them is a long white program of the Ninth Annual Concert of the All North Jersey School Chorus. There is her name – which I underlined - with the Altos 1. How proud of her we were that Sunday afternoon as we huddled anxiously in a drafty auditorium listening to unfamiliar music by Bruckner, Schubert and Copland.

On the bottom shelf of the bookcase lay a single long-playing album. It was a recording of The All North Jersey Junior High School Orchestra. It was a mixed bag of music, with works by Wagner, Teleman, Saint-Saens, Verdi, and, finally, Jerry Herman’s Hello, Dolly.

The names of the gifted young musicians were listed on the back. I had highlighted Melanie’s name among the violinists. I remembered once again how proud we were.

And photographs. Many of them out of focus, and most of them, sadly, without captions or dates. There are class photos – from Grades 1 through 6 – and team pictures, probably field hockey. A very small one appears to be of the senior prom, and beneath it single snapshots of several young men.

Who are they? Why are none of them walking my daughter down the aisle today? Where did they go, these ever-youthful boys of summer who live on in faded Kodak prints?

Hanging next to a small Smith College pennant and a charcoal portrait done by an artistic roommate is a framed sampler with an epigram that must have impressed her: Happiness is not in our circumstances. Happiness is something we are.

Standing menacingly in a corner is a large paddle from some forgotten summer camp. How did she ever get it home?

Affixed to the bulletin board are two yellowed newspaper clippings. The illustration on one shows her getting the striped cap of a hospital volunteer. The other tells of a visit of a teenager to our home years ago. I sat down for a moment to recall the story.

The teenager was from Tunisia, a pen pal from the sixth grade. Her name was Melanie Marshall, and she was selected by our daughter because they shared the same first name. The correspondence continued into junior high school. When the Tunisian family moved to Washington, D. C., our daughter invited her namesake to come up to New Jersey for a visit. The invitation was not answered, nor were several others.

Many weeks later, a letter arrived from Washington. It was simple and brief. It began, I apologize for not answering your letters, Melanie, but there is something I must tell you. I’m black…

With address in hand, Melanie sprang to the telephone and before long she had her namesake’s phone number. The young girl accepted her invitation at once, and for ten days our home rang with the laughter and song of two Melanies. It was a magical time. The local newspaper sent a reporter and photographer to record the event.

Then one day a tall, handsome young attorney from Ohio came to ask for our daughter’s hand. I greeted this stranger’s presence with fear and trembling, and after a time surrendered my lovely daughter to him with supreme reluctance. But she was no longer mine to keep.

Our wonderful, unforgettable years together were coming to an end.

The next few months were spent in furious excitement, with invitations, gowns and flowers. Our Irish terrier, Riley, darted about the house in mad confusion. He too knew something momentous was afoot.

There was little sleep on the eve of the wedding. The next day the sun seemed reluctant to rise, seeming to anticipate my fears. But by noon, its warm rays drifted through the windows, filling the rooms with its beneficial warmth. It just had to be a day full of sunshine.

My beautiful, talented daughter, Melanie Ring Mackin, is getting married.

How To Cull The Christmas Card List

The annual writing of Christmas cards, unlike trimming the tree, stuffing the stockings or hanging the wreath, is not a cooperative effort at our house.

It is a solo ritual. The children want no part of it, and the woman of the house long ago washed her hands of it. The chore is mine – and mine alone.

As the holiday approaches and I gather my Christmas card materials about me – the 3x5-inch cards in the tin box, a ballpoint pen, a cruet of water, a sponge and a roll of federal stamps – I am given a wide berth. There have been ugly moments in the past.

My system, a model of order and efficiency, is not appreciated, or even understood. It is based on one simple question: Did they send us a card last year?

That’s Scrooge-like, my wife hissed when the arrangement was introduced some years ago.

No, I countered, businesslike.

Vindictive, she shot back.

Since then, there has been stony silence.

Thus, it was again this year that I sat in monastic isolation riffling through the dog-eared cards, some of them dating back to the 1960s. Each one bears the name, address and zip code of the recipient – tentative recipient, that is – and rows of dates, all stretching a dozen years ahead (after which I must replenish the stock.)

A check mark under the date signifies that I sent the addressee a card that year. A counter-stroke over the check mark indicates that a greeting card was received in return.

And so it is easy to spot an offending file card in the first shuffle. These are removed from the tin box and put aside for study.

Illness, the whimsical Postal Service, holiday trips abroad – all these excuses are given due consideration. For one year, that is. Two years without a countersign, and the person, or at least the file card, is cast into exterior darkness.

Divorce is a particularly pesky problem for my system, which is basically binary in nature. It interrupts the natural flow of things, for it requires an asterisk. However, there is little room for such rhetorical detritus in my finely honed method; moreover, to which separated member is the greeting to be sent?

The two-year plan, the hallmark of my system, is employed here also. The disjoined pair is given that much time to become reconciled or find new partners.

Meanwhile, with some reluctance, both are sent greetings, their names clearly asterisked in the file for easy identification (and removal) the following Yuletide.

Now you’re playing God, said my otherwise silent partner when apprised of this ploy.

This is no time to invoke the name of the deity, I reproved, bent Cratchit-like over my paraphernalia. Besides, maybe the loss of our annual message will help them get their act together.

Once removed from the file, it is not an easy matter for a name to regain entry. Again, the charitable two-year limit comes into play.

If a once-truant correspondent sends us a Yule salute two years running without a reply from our side, he or she is restored to good standing. These names, however, are put on yellow cards and watched closely for future defection.

The final element in the Christmas card rubric is a check for new neighbors or business acquaintances who might be considered for entry into the tin box. This is not lightly done, for once a name is added, it is devilishly difficult to remove if the new party abides by the rules.

There are people in the file whom I haven’t seen since the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration. I’ve almost forgotten how they got there in the first place.

I have no idea what they are doing with their lives, or even if I would recognize them if we met. They are only Christmas-card names that are encountered once a year, checked off and as quickly forgotten.

Occasionally, an uneasy thought occurs: Maybe they have a similar file system and don’t know how to get rid of me.

Nevertheless, all is now in readiness. The index cards that have withstood the various litmus tests are stacked alphabetically, and the envelopes are prepared to receive my practiced chancery hand. Here we go:

ANDERSON, Mr. and Mrs. Harry: A warm and heartfelt Christmas greeting from our home to yours…

You Don’t Have To March On St. Patrick’s Day to Be Irish

I have never marched in a St. Patrick’s Day parade. I’m Irish, and therefore as eligible as the next person. I may even be more eligible than some because I was born in Northern Ireland. (I attained the use of reason before I ever heard that name; my family insisted on calling it Occupied Ireland.)

But I have never marched on Fifth Avenue on March 17, or the nearest Sunday. Privately, I have thought that those who did were social climbers, and I was already a member of the club.

When I have watched the marchers from curbside, I found myself asking: Why are they doing that? Isn’t it enough just to be Irish?

That’s the point. You don’t have to do anything to be Irish; you just have to be lucky. As a Celtic bard sang, You wake up one morning and say to yourself – with a tingling pleasure and constant surprise, and a certain sadness – I’m Irish!"

For reasons I find hard to explain, I have seldom spoken about being Irish. Perhaps it is part of the contrariness of the race: To be somehow ashamed and proud of it at the same time. Nor do I willingly take part in its public manifestations, many of them laced with faintly concealed ridicule.

In fact, my being Irish-born came as a surprise to most of my acquaintances and some of my friends who thought I was as American as George M. Cohan.

Of course, it is easier to deny one’s heritage than one’s name. Few Irishmen have found the need to change their name, although there was a comedian from Boston, John Florence Sullivan, who unaccountably changed his to Fred Allen. I rejected such iniquity, and because of my surname I have been unable to escape certain seasonal social overtures.

Every St. Patrick’s Day for decades, non-Irish colleagues of mine in New York have insisted on taking me to lunch at Gallagher’s, a Manhattan restaurant that once a year features an indifferent menu of Gaelic dishes accompanied by a brace of tartan-clad pipers who galumph through the dining room defeating conversation.

My closest friend in New Jersey, who is not Irish, importunes me to attend an annual March 17 dinner at Dunphy’s saloon in Harrison, where green cardboard hats and clay pipes are the order of the evening and most of the guests are Italian-American.

Moreover, the annual Irish parade in Harrison is sponsored by an Italian-American organization. St. Patrick, whose origins are as druidically obscure as those of Ste. Philomena, clearly attracts idolaters of many ethnic persuasions.

It has long been a source of mild frustration to me that the most delightful description of an Irishman was coined not by Joyce, Synge or O’Casey, but by Rafael Sabatini:

He was born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad.

Alas, Sabatini was speaking not of a Borstal boy, but of his great character, Scaramouche.

Once, a misguided Hibernian committee in Kearny, N. J., where I grew up, named me Irishman of the Year, mainly, I discovered, because they needed a dinner speaker. I tried to decline the accolade, protesting that one more dinner of corned beef, cabbage and boiled potatoes – and an Irish tenor singing Macushla – would finally derail my digestive track.

Despite my vehement protestations, when the president and founder of the Friends of Erin, Joseph M. Healey, who was also a state official as well as mayor of the town, appealed to my sainted mother, I caved.

Asked for biographical information by a reporter for the local weekly newspaper, I said I was born in Kearny. This subterfuge at once concealed my humble beginnings and, I felt, deprived the evening of a certain cachet: a real, honest-to-Antrim Irishman. Thus was my ambivalence toward the affair assuaged.

Once on my feet, after the inevitable dinner ritual, I did what was required of me. I stood before the formally clad audience of clergy and laymen and gave them what they had come to hear, self-inflicting Irish jokes. As I looked out at their happy, expectant, flushed faces, I began:

There couldn’t be a banquet like this without mention of how much the Irish drink. They say the only difference between an Irish wake and an Irish wedding is that there’s one less drunk at the wake.

The listeners, their costumes festooned with tiny shamrocks and green ribbons, nodded as one and raised their