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DAZE WORK: We could use a little gangster in our lives
For the most part, I’ve always preferred to fight my own battles. Verbal or physical, it didn’t matter.
Not that physically there were ever that many of them to begin with.
My first real fight started just as horseplay when Ronnie, one member of the guys I ran around with in grade school, somehow popped me in the nose and it started gushing blood.
From roughhousing with my dad back then, I knew that if you could get a guy on his back and plant your knees into his armpits, you could basically immobilize him.
So I charged him, knocked him down and blackened his eye, putting an end to further shenanigans. Down goes Frazier ...
Don’t get excited. We were all of 10 or 11 years old when that went down. Kids’ stuff.
Being bigger than most of the kids I bummed around with never hurt. My shoulders were about as broad then as they are now, once causing an opposing baseball coach to holler that I should be made to take off my shoulder pads. Didn’t know then whether that was a compliment or a complaint but it made me throw a little harder when his team came to bat.
Then in high school, there was a rowdy basketball scrimmage where I got pawed in the face, had my glasses knocked to the floor, yet still somehow made the lay-up.
However, when the play ended, my tormentor -- who later made his way to Hollywood and some TV fame -- caught the business end of that Spalding basketball on his forehead. I used to joke that on a clear day you could still see the logo on his wrinkled brow.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating physical confrontation as ever the way to settle anything. I’m just reminiscing about how those glory days might have been different following the latest revelation about my ancestry.
Had I known then what I know now, there wouldn’t have been any real need to stand up for myself. Not with the family ties my sister confided to me in the aftermath of my recent trip down Ancestry.com lane.
A couple weeks back I shared what I did know about my grandfather, and how he fought in World War I as a U.S. Marine who was gassed in the battle of Belleau Wood.
Gramps shared little about those days or what preceded his relocation to the Chicago suburbs and his life with my mother and grandmother.
However, my sister, after talking with a distant relative, learned that upon returning from World War I, my grandfather and his brother were unable to get work as house painters in the area.
It was then that they went to work buying corn in southern Illinois -- this was during Prohibition, mind you -- for ... wait for it ... Al Capone.
“What!?” was my initial startled response, having never heard this story in all my years on this earth. “The Al Capone?”
“He’s buried in Hillside, you know,” my sister replied.
I did know that. It’s the big Catholic cemetery -- Mt. Carmel, I believe -- that sits at the corner of two busy thoroughfares, Roosevelt and Wolf roads, a little west of where I grew up.
Of course, we all know Al Capone wasn’t eating oodles of corn on the cob or feeding it to his cows and pigs. He was -- allegedly -- mashing it into illegal moonshine for his Chicagoland alcohol empire.
My mind was racing ... Oh, how my Wonder Years might been different if I could have just invoked the “Uncle Al” protective covenant into all disagreements.
Playground argument?
I could end it all with poor tough-guy talk, “You know, my grandfather worked for Al Capone ...”
Cafeteria bullying?
“You want an Al Capone knuckle sandwich?”
Valentine’s Day dance issues? “You know how Al Capone handled St. Valentine’s Day, right, sister?”
Good, old Uncle Al.
How did I ever live without you?