High school grad
Sonny didn’t graduate from high school before entering the military. He left home at age 17 and learned by doing. He became a supply sergeant in the Air Force. After three years he came home and got a job in a steel mill. In the 1950s steel mills were good places to work, financially. Sonny learned to repair machinery and became a union representative. He could carry 40 pounds of equipment when needed. He arbitrated between union employees and their employer in minor conflicts. There were a lot of such over 20 years; he had no illusions about people’s work ethics and motivations.
At home he read the newspaper and solved the crossword every day. He bought crossword dictionaries and learned a lot by looking up the words. He didn’t attend church himself, but drove his wife and children to church and took them out for donuts on Sunday mornings. Patty attended Mass every week and her sons all served as altar boys.
He encouraged his children to work hard and behave. His wife worked as a custodian and lunch lady in the school. When my future husband got in trouble at school, the principal notified them he’d be spanking their son. Sonny dropped what he was doing and came into the school, taking off his belt as he went. He asked his son, “Did you do what they said you did?” My husband said yes. Sonny then said, “If anyone’s going to punish him, it’s my job,” and got ready to do so.
His eldest son went straight from high school into the steel mill. It was a good enough job that his son went from work to the car dealership and brought home a new hot rod; Sonny’s reputation and the pay at the mill carried weight. His second son moved to Texas and worked in oil refining as a chemist.
His third son came home from school one day to tell them his girlfriend was pregnant. I can only imagine how Sonny felt, knowing a little of what Sonny had gone through in childhood. He told his son, “You will marry her, and you will support that child.” His son did.
The steel mills shut down around that time. Their fourth son, my husband, worked a paper route as a boy and served as a teenage baseball umpire, but the mills were not there to go into. The family pressured him to go to college. My husband resented that change in expectations.
Sonny dropped from well-paid mechanic in the mill to unemployed older man with no high school diploma. He worked as a bartender in a sports bar a block from his house.
Their fifth child was a girl, Sonny’s darling daughter. As a graduation present, Sonny took his GED and earned his high school diploma at the same time she graduated.
