I have been a dad for so long now, I sometimes forget that I was once a son. That’s seems like a long time ago, and it was, but the memories of being my father’s son are a bit complicated, because in a very real sense I and my siblings had two versions of the same father.
Tom Wogan, my Dad, and my namesake was born in 1917, the second of two boys. His father would die in May of 1918, just prior to the Spanish Flu pandemic. He died of tuberculosis, as did many Irish immigrants. My dad never really had a father of his own, and I think in a way it made him stronger, but also gave him no model on which to build his own notion of fatherhood. He was first a and foremost a Chicago Fireman, but he had delivered ice, driven cabs, 18-wheeler trucks, and near the end of his life funeral hearses. He worked two jobs almost his entire life to care for his family.
I remember him in many ways from back then………….
I think my earliest memory of my dad was in Lake Delevan, Wisconsin when I was about four years old. We rented a cottage called “The Lazy Daze” and our little family (then probably 6 or 7 in number, including the parents) was on one of our annual vacations at a lake. My parents came in from a party and they were laughing and happy and they brought in red helium balloons which fascinated me. He chucked me on the cheek as I lay in my bunk bed and handed me one of the balloons. The string was still in my hand the next morning, but the balloon had expired and was hanging below my bunk.
I see him tip-toeing around the second-floor window ledges of our two flat, changing out the storm windows with the grace, but certainly not the build, of a ballerina, while the neighbors watched in horrified anticipation that he would fall. He never did.
I see him on the golf course in his white t-shirt and black slacks (shorts were for sissies, I was told), taking a swing at a golf ball. He would stride up to it, with his short, square frame, plant his feet, take no practice swing, and then suddenly attack the ball like it owed him money. Sometimes a great shot, sometime not so much, but he loved the game, and he liked having me along for nine holes. And I have been trying to get him out of my own backswing for many, many years.
Though short, he was tough. Once I witnessed a verbal argument between my Dad and a fellow I considered to be a war hero, as he had served in the 82nd Airborne in the war. The guy was clearly intimidated and, though nothing came of the argument, I was confused. My Uncle Jimmy straightened me out. “Your Dad is a tough guy, Tommy,” he told me. It was like a revelation.
My Dad had no fuse. He could be angered quickly and was not averse to throwing a punch. I think my younger brother Bill, who we lost in 1979, had the same mercurial makeup. I know I don’t. And yet he made friends easily and could be quite outgoing. Over a two-week vacation in Wisconsin, he started a lifelong friendship with a local bar owner named Gus Oberg. His many friends were lifelong companions from his youth and playing baseball.
He could be loving in his own way. When I was seven or eight, I screwed up and lied about it. We were vacationing on Lake Michigan and the lake was well below the bluff on which the cottage lay. He asked me to run up and bring down a tackle box, which I did, but I left the tailgate window up and open on the 1955 Chevy wagon. A thunderstorm came up and the back of the car got soaked.
He asked me if I did it and I denied it, knowing full well that it could only be me, as everyone else was down at the beach. For two days I denied it and he would not budge. I was grounded in the cottage. Even my mom started to lobby for my case, but he was adamant. Finally, I tearfully broke down and confessed. He took my by the shoulders and said, “OK, I just wanted you to tell the truth. Now go play’”. In all these years, I have never forgotten that lesson of tough love.
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In the summer of 1960, Dad had a cerebral accident, or stroke, one scary morning in Sister Lakes. We kids were scattered to other families for a few weeks before he was brought home. I next saw him in a wheelchair when he returned from the hospital. He looked smaller, tired, and a bit confused. I was afraid to go near him because he did not look like the robust, outgoing Dad I knew from just weeks before. And I was ten.
He was the same Dad, but different. He still worked full time, but he was more vulnerable, more emotional, at times, less able to control his anger. But in this altered persona was a Dad who learned to accept little acts of kindness, to let some of us do the heavy lifting now and then. He could also be sentimental. When the 1967 snowstorm hit Chicago, my brothers and I dug out the alley to allow him to get his car into the garage. He was so proud of us he teared up, something you would have not seen before the stroke.
And then there was the infamous incident in which my mother’s typewritten manuscript caught a gust of wind while on our way to Michigan. It was her story of her first marriage to 1Lt. Gilbert Finn, killed in 1945 over Japan. For reasons I never understood, other than his temper issues, he wouldn’t stop the car, claiming it was unsafe. My mother was distraught, seeing hours of work on her trusty Underwood typewriter suddenly gone. My sister Maureen sent her young husband Pat on an unsuccessful recovery mission of some 50 miles roundtrip, but the manuscript had scattered to the winds.
(Authors’ note: Mom rewrote her story in a very moving letter to her late husband on what would have been his 75th birthday. Syndicated columnist Bob Greene ran it in place of his own column one day and it appeared in most major newspapers.)
Once we drove to the south side to see Dad’s cousins, the Becks. Leaving the Dan Ryan at 99th Street, an older, somewhat frail gentlemen behind us misjudged his stopping distance and bumped our car. Dad blew up, and started out the driver’s side door, murder in his eye. My mother nudged me, then at age 17, to stop him, which I did, but barely.
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The medical world can do so much more for stroke victims today than they could in 1960. By 1968, the stroke caught up with Dad, and one July night, he fell in the living room, gone within a few minutes.
By far the more enduring image of my dad comes from those later years. I see him with his coal black hair, his olive skin, looking more Italian than Irish. I see him at the bar in Wallace’s Tavern at Adams and Laramie in his dark trousers, white t-shirt, smoking his Salem cigarette, and drinking his cold Budweiser. He is shooting the breeze with one of the other regulars, while being served by Ding Dong, the bartender. (See my article on “Joints” to learn more about” Ding Dong.”)
I see him relaxing on the bench outside the cottage at Sister Lakes or hanging on the street level patio with the other “Camp Geraldine” guests, firemen and policemen all. I see him at his firehouse, polishing the chaplain’s “buggy” as the car was called. I see him surprising my mom and all the guests of the “Fireman’s Club” by coming out of the bedroom costumed as “Reginald Van Gleason,” a Jackie Gleeson character of that time.
Both versions of Dad had this in common: He loved his wife, loved and was very proud of his family, was a courageous firefighter, a tireless provider, and a good man. Was he perfect? No, but then who perfects fatherhood? Certainly not me.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad.
Some Dads stories……………………
He was stationed at a firehouse at Pulaski and Wilcox, known as “95’s House.” Workmen were replacing the windows along the side of the firehouse and, as it happened, the new windows were longer than the opening for the old ones. The workmen were chipping out bricks at the base of the old windowframe, when a passerby asked his firefighter buddy, Jim McInerny, why they were doing that. Jim, a consummate wise-guy fireman, replied, within earshot of my Dad,” So Wogan can see out.” My Dad was not pleased.
He played football at Saint Philip High School at Jackson and Kedzie and once told me the story of how the coach told him to “take care” of his opposite number on the gridiron. So on the next play, as the ball was snapped, he stood up and punched the hapless player in the nose. He was ejected from the game, but was convinced he did what his coach asked.
He had a burn scar on his left thigh, roughly the size of a dinner plate. I thought he got it from a fire when I was little, but my mother told me the story of what really happened. My Dad and his only sibling, Uncle Bill, once hung around with a kid they called “Terrible Tommy Finn.” He was terrible indeed, pouring gasoline on my Dad’s pants, and causing the burn, tricking Uncle Bill into looking into an open fuel cannister and then tossing a match in afterward, burning Bills face. His finale involved accidently killing some poor guy on a hunting trip by firing a shotgun as the victim slept on a couch.
Cars were important to him and when I earned my driver’s license, we had a lot of fights. I once asked a girl to a dance and we had a three-day running battle over my borrowing the 1963 Pontiac Catalina. My mom finally got him to relent, but the next day when he discovered a pack of Marlboro cigarettes on the front seat (mine), he came upstairs like Christ into the temple and my mom had to calm him down again. This from Mr. two-packs a day of Salems.
He had a sense of the layout of Chicago that would rival Google Maps. In the days when he drove the Fire Department Chaplain, Monsignor William Gorman, they would be on their way to a fire. The good Monsignor, who had no sense of direction, telling him where to turn. And Dad was not able to correct the obvious errors. Invariably, they would be lost, and Monsignor would say “Well, Tom, we made a mistake. “
In his last years, while driving funeral livery, which understandably is day-to-day work, he was always happy to get “a trip” as he referred to a funeral assignment. The calls usually came in around dinnertime and he had given a private phone line to his network of funeral directors. We quickly named it the “deadline.” Unfortunately, my sister Rita also gave the number to her friends. One evening, as the phone rang and he jumped from the table, happy to have work for the next day, the caller asked for Rita. Everyone ran for cover.