My Father was an Alcoholic

  My Dad was an Alcoholic

My dad didn’t drink during World War II.  He was a Polish slave laborer in Buchenwald Concentration Camp for four years, and in the camps there wasn’t much drinking or even eating.  Right after the camps were liberated, however, he searched for something to drink and found it.  Later in the refugee camps that he and my mom spent six years in, he ran a still and made booze as soon as he could set one up.

He drank for the next 30 years.  He didn’t drink on weekdays.  Weekdays were for working and making the money that the family needed to live in America.  He was absolutely sober those days.  He wouldn’t touch a drop.  

Weekends, however, were different. When I was a kid, I didn’t understand why he drank, but now I do.  My dad drank because he was trying to push back the memory of all the terrible things he had seen in the war.  He hoped that the drinking would cut him off from his memories and from the outside world.  He wanted to isolate himself in that piece of himself that hadn’t seen men castrated, women bayoneted in the breast, babies thrown in the air and shot.  He never found that peaceful place.  

So he drank.  Fridays when he came home from the factory where he worked, he would go to the kitchen and take out a bottle of vodka and fill a glass and sit down at the table and drink.  If anyone was in the kitchen with him, he would smile at them and say “to your health.”  He would finish that glass and then take another and another.  He would drink until he passed out.  Saturday, he would begin with beer in the morning and switch to vodka in the afternoon.  Sundays, after church, he’d go to the bar on the corner for his Sunday drink, a free glass of booze that would lead to another and another.  

The peace that he sought never came.  No matter how much he drank, the memories of the war still haunted him.  Sometimes, when he would pass out from the drinking, we could hear him in his sleep weeping or screaming from those memories.  

When he was 56 he realized that the drinking wasn’t helping him, and he sought out a psychiatrist.  He gave him Librium, a medication that’s supposed to relieve anxiety.  It didn’t help my dad.  He went back to drinking, and the drinking got so bad that the psychiatrist talked about the possibility that my dad would have to be committed to an asylum of some kind.  

What finally saved him from drinking was my mom telling him she would leave him if he continued to drink.  He couldn’t stand that thought.  Her leaving would have been his end, his suicide.  

She was his church.

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My recent column from the Dziennik Zwiazkowy

Dimes and Quarters

 Dimes and Quarters

My previous column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy was about trying to convince my mom to give me an allowance when I was a kid. She refused, of course. She was a Polish woman born in the Old Country and didn’t understand why American kids like me were always asking for an allowance.

This week I’m going to write about what I did back then to make the money I couldn’t get from my mom and dad.

The first “job” I remember was collecting empty glass soda bottles. At that time you could take them to a store and get what was called a refund. For a small bottle you’d get 2 cents. For a large bottle you’d get 5 cents. That doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but you have to remember that when I was a kid in the 1950s a nickel was pretty substantial. For a nickel you could buy a popsicle or a candy bar. For two nickels, you could get into a movie theater or buy yourself a comic book. For four nickels, you could buy a Cadillac. Just joking.

And where would we find these bottles? When I first started looking for them when I was 8 or 9, I’d simply walk around the neighborhood. People tended to just drink their sodas and leave the bottles wherever they finished. I’d find bottles on curbs and front porches. As I got more experienced as a bottle finder, I learned some tricks. One of them was to look in trash cans in alleys for soda bottles. But the best trick I learned was to search for bottles in the park.

Humboldt Park was down the street from where I lived, and my friend Gene and I would take his Radio Flyer wagon and roam the park looking for bottles. On a normal day, we’d find 5-6 bottles. On a great day, we’d come across 50 bottles. As soon as the wagon was full, we’d wheel it down to Mendel’s soda shop on Potomac and Washtenaw.

As I got older, I found other ways to make money. One day, when I was about 13, a neighbor woman saw me standing in front of my house and offered me 50 cents an hour to put up drywall in her apartment building. I didn’t know a thing about drywall but signed on. I lasted about 2 weeks. Drywalling was just too hard. After that I delivered eggs around the neighborhood and put up the titles of movies on the marquee at the Crystal Theater on North Avenue.

But the best job I had as a kid was going through second-hand stores in the neighborhood and looking for rare comic books. I was about 15 when I started this. I was a comic book reader and discovered that people didn’t know how valuable the comic books they were selling at second-hand stores were. I once bought an original Captain America comic from 1940 in one of these stores for a dime. I sold it later for $100.

I love to tell people that when my wife and I got married in 1975 I bought our first house with the money I made from the comics I bought in second-hand stores.

My only regret is that I didn’t hold on to the comics longer. My friend Frank did, and he retired to Florida at 40 on the money he made on his comics.

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This column appeared originally in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.  

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/guzlowski/grubsze-drobniaki-dimes-and-quarters/

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