I think it’s regretful that most people, including me, have no or little memory of the first few years of our lives. I’ve often wondered what was my father like in those initial years following my mother’s death. How long did he carry that grief, what was his attitude and what were his emotions as he moved forward with his own life, how did he relate to me, and what situations and circumstances did he experience and confront as a surviving parent on my behalf?

My first memory of my Dad occurred when I was about 5 years old. My sister was in a school play, dressed as a little nun, and I remember my father taking me to see her performance. I have a vivid picture in my mind of this tall man with a long overcoat and a fedora hat holding my hand. After the play was over there was a reception of sorts in the schoolyard and I remember my father talking to a couple of nuns. This I’ll never forget – one of the nuns turned to the other and referring to me said “this is Sally’s little boy; he’s a delicate child”. I don’t know whether my father said anything after that comment was made, but I have always wondered what did it mean or say about me.

St. Patrick’s School had a kindergarten program for 5-year olds. I attended for about three days. On the last day I was there the kindergarten nun asked my father to stop by. He came from work and she told him that I was crying most of the time I was in her class. I’m not privy, of course, to what discussion they had about that, but what I do remember is my father taking me home and saying that I didn’t have to go back to kindergarten. I mention this incident because it was the first decision that I remember my father making about my upbringing. It may also have been the first time that I as a spoiled kid got my way. That I do not remember. As an aside, however, the plan (or ploy if you will) worked. I did stop crying and I happily entered first grade the next school year as a more mature 6-year old.

My Dad was a sales manager for a wholesale distributor of carpet and linoleum. This required him to cover a territory extending from central and eastern Pennsylvania to central and eastern New York state. Many of his trips were for more than one day, but some were just day trips. I remember Dad taking me along on several summer day trips. One trip in particular that I recall was to Ithaca, NY, home of Cornell University. My father fainted while in a customer’s store that day. It was probably due to Ithaca’s altitude and his heart impairment, but fortunately he revived quickly. Another trip I clearly remember was to Wellsboro, PA, where we had dinner at a restaurant which overlooked a stunning landscape known as the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania. A most noteworthy trip was to Allentown, PA. After making his customer calls that day Dad showed me the house on Turner Street where he resided with my mother and my sister before my birth and also the hospital where I was born and spent the first two months of my life. He had previously been to Allentown on business multiple times after my mother’s death, but still I wonder if my presence on that trip evoked painful memories for him. I always relished the sales trips with my Dad and the one-on-one father and son bonding time they provided.

Since Dad was often away during the work week I remember most weekends as special times with him. There developed a pattern for Saturday. He usually had to go to his office on Saturday morning to review the sales reports of the other salesmen and any customer matters that were pending or upcoming, and I would often tag along with him. I was allowed to play with the adding machines, use the wonderful Remington Rand typewriters, and obtain a blurred self-image by pressing my face and hands on the pre-historic copy machine. After a couple of hours at the office Dad and I would have lunch. That would be at Chick’s Diner which was next door to his office and which served a homemade chicken noodle soup and the best and most greasy cheeseburger, or at a hotel restaurant downtown called the Purple Cow, known for its BLT sandwich and pie desserts. Our Saturday afternoons together also included visits to my Aunt Eleanor Noone’s house (which was the Tyrrell homestead for my father and his siblings) where she would give Dad a bowl of her wholesome chili, going to our family barber for haircuts, and staying home to watch the Game of the Week on CBS, which happily was frequently a Yankee game. He was the biggest Mickey Mantle fan I’ve known.

Every few weeks or so Dad would take my sister and me out to dinner on Saturday night, most often to an Italian restaurant named Aldino’s, located just beyond the Taylor Dump. It was on those occasions when I learned that Dad enjoyed a Manhattan or two. When she was old enough my sister would join him in ordering that cocktail while I had to be content with a Coke. The dinners at Aldino’s were great, although I remember feeling sad at the times Uncle Bill, Aunt Ann, and Jackie were just around the corner dining at Stanton’s, a much less expensive and smaller restaurant. Dad said that he sometimes invited them to join us, but they declined. I think that was probably because for her own reasons Aunt Ann limited her public appearances.

Sunday was mostly a day of rest in our house after Mass. The one activity I remember, though, was the bowling competition at the Catholic Youth Center. The various parishes in the Scranton Archdiocese participated in a Sunday afternoon bowling league. My Uncle Bill was always on the St. Patrick’s team and my father was an able substitute if another team member couldn’t make it. Dad would take me along with him and I became the unofficial, unpaid scorekeeper on our lanes. While I enjoyed the bowling matches the best part of being there is that after the match was over Dad would drive to the nearby Krispy Kreme and allowed me to select half of a box of a dozen doughnuts he was buying for our house. On Sunday evenings my father would frequently take my cousin Jackie and me to a comic book store known as Heller’s where I could purchase up to three comic books with my weekly allowance of 50 cents, and then he would drive us to one of Scranton’s two most popular local dairies for a Sunday night ice cream cone. That allowance, by the way, was not a freebee, as Dad bought a shoeshine kit and had me shine his shoes once a week.

Other than bowling Dad didn’t participate in any sports or exercise activity during his adulthood. He did play a lot of baseball in his youth, quite well I was told by a couple of his brothers, and he remained a lifelong fan of the game. I don’t remember him being a football fan (other than for the St. Patrick’s Shamrocks, our high school team) until professional football games started to be televised. He then became a fan of the New York Giants Football Team. My Uncle Bill decided to be a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles, and I remember thinking what is it with these two bros? They had something in common because they married two sisters, but one rooted for the New York Yankees and Giants and the other cheered on the Philadelphia Phillies and Eagles. I think my father had little interest in following basketball, but one of my most thrilling memories is when the world-famous Harlem Globetrotters came to town and my father bought tickets for him and me to watch their antics on the basketball floor of the Catholic Youth Center. As for his personal fame and achievement in a sports activity there should be no doubt that would be what transpired on an August day in 1960 when at my urging he took Jackie and me to a 9-hole par 3 golf course. On the fourth hole, which was about 100 yards long, he scored a hole-in-one. That was the first and only time my father stepped on a golf course. While he was a humble man he did carry on immodestly about his ace, and others quickly joined in acknowledgment of his feat. It so happened that evening was the last night of the St. Patrick’s Annual Block Party and I remember a congratulatory announcement being made over the loudspeaker so the whole parish learned about it. If that wasn’t enough a well-read sports column in the following Sunday’s edition of the Scranton Tribune included a line about it, stating, and I quote (or if by reason of passage of time it may not be an accurate quote, something close to this): “On the very first time he played golf Joe Tyrrell of West Scranton had a hole-in-one on Friday, an unheard of accomplishment”. I remember thinking everyone was going a bit overboard about the lucky shot, as a hole-in-one is really a fluke, an opinion I only disowned when following in the footsteps of Dad’s nicely shined shoes I scored my own well-played ace in September 1985.

While by no means a rich man Dad provided financial help and advice as well to family members when needed. I remember him as a leader, not a follower. Folks just looked up to him. He was for those days a tall man, stout but not obese, and he never threw his weight around. He certainly was a leader in our household. While Aunt Ann more or less ran the house on a day-to-day basis, I have memories of her discussing household matters with Dad. He led his co-workers at Columbia Distributing Company, which was his employer from age 17 after high school graduation (the first of the Tyrrell family to graduate) to age 63 when he passed away. I met most of the salesmen who worked under him and I witnessed their respect for his leadership and integrity. When the pastor of our parish decided to build a new school he invited my father and two or three other parishioners to the rectory and asked them to be co-chairmen of the fundraising effort. Dad worked hard on that in whatever free time he had and the new building was finished in time for my class to be the first graduating class of the new St. Patrick’s School. As fate would have it, after I lost out on being valedictorian of my class to an annoying, anti-social brainy classmate of the opposite sex and also didn’t receive salutatorian recognition because of another female classmate who had a higher grade point average than me only because she took the commercial course and learned typing and shorthand while I conquered the academic course featuring math and science studies, I was selected to give the next most important speech on Class Night for the Class of 1962, which was a tribute to our pastor, Monsignor Burke, for the building of the new and modern school. I wrote and delivered a great speech. The disappointment, though, was that Monsignor Burke was not even there to hear it. I was told that he was over in Rome, probably hanging out with the Pope and his followers. I felt like I should have made that tribute to my father and his co-chairmen who brought in the bucks for construction of the new school building.

Another thing that I remember with fondness about my father was his desire to be well-dressed. He would buy the most distinguished business suits and the smartest leisure wear he could afford. He was a handsome man and while not being vain about it I believe he tried to play the part. In 1964 Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona was the Republican nominee for President. From a distance at least, with his white hair and black rimmed glasses, Dad bore a resemblance to Senator Goldwater, and several people told him so. While Dad was clearly of a different political persuasion I think he liked the attention to this resemblance, so much so that there is a picture of Dad sitting at his office desk with a big smile on his face, and at the bottom of the photo Dad wrote Senator Goldwater’s campaign ad slogan which was “In your heart you know he’s right”. This became one of his favorite expressions to customers, changing “he’s” to “I’m”. Dad had a number of other sayings that you would often hear from him, such as “what’s the good word”, “knock ‘em dead”, “it’s your dime” (said to my sister and me whenever we would make a chargeable long-distance call to him), “when the going gets tough, the tough gets going” (his go-to advice on meeting any challenge), and “it only costs 10% more to go first-class” (Dad did not live in the 21st century).

Gratefully, my childhood memories of Dad have not significantly faded over the years. He was exemplary, responsible, generous, decent, fair, loyal, and understanding. Those are all features of a role model for any child. He was that for me and I can never thank him enough for demonstrating those qualities and for teaching me the solution to the “where’s the other dollar” story.