Mean Dads for a Better America

by Tom Shillue

  “What in hell are you doing!” the third base coach yelled at me. I looked up and both teams looked on in shock. Was this kid losing his mind? Did he not know what a home run was? Did he have some score to settle with the second base bag?

  “RUN!” they were all yelling. I started up my run again, and as I rounded third, I took another stab at leaving some holes in it, but it was no use. As I headed home, my puzzling behavior at second base was forgotten. The home run was enough of a surprise to negate my crazy base jumping. My cleats hit the hard surface of home plate and I bounced up, but didn’t come down . . . I was already up in the air, being pushed up by twenty or so hands that carried me back to the dugout.

  My love of baseball continues to this day. It is the most American of pastimes, and although very few people can master it, almost anyone can do it and have a good time. For a mediocre player, you can find joy in being part of a team, but the fleeting moments of individual glory, those you can savor forever. When I replay that game-winning home run in my mind, I can see the baseball diamond laid out before me and hear the faint sounds of the game as if they are coming through an old transistor radio. When the coach dropped me off after the game that night, I jumped out of the back of his pickup and walked into my house as my teammates chanted “HOME RUN KING! HOME RUN KING!” I thought to myself I’ve got to remember what this feels like. I knew that would probably be my one and only Little League home run, and as it turned out, it was. But one is better than none. I’ll take it. I don’t even remember all those pop flies I missed.

  I could always sense it the second I woke up. Snow cover created an unmistakable sound blanket; the world outside was noiseless. I’d flip up my window shade and get blinded by the white and think . . . snow day! Snow day? We still had to check the radio. We’d huddle down together to wait for our town to be read out. Andover, Attleboro, Ayer . . . All Schools. Bainbridge, Braintree, Brighton, Burlington . . . All Schools. We had to wait all the way to the N’s to hear “All schools . . . Norwood!”

  Winter lasted forever in Massachusetts when I was a kid. I don’t know if the U.S. weather service or the Farmer’s Almanac will back me up on the facts, but I’m going to trust my memory on this. Sometime around Thanksgiving the snow would begin, and the world would turn white. Snowstorm after snowstorm would pile one on top of the other. Our backyard would be covered under at least two feet of snow at any given time. The three-foot hedges that lined our yard became just a little speed bump around the edge of our property; we wouldn’t see them until the Ides of March. All the sidewalks in our town disappeared, buried by the runoff from the snowplows. Sidewalks became snowbanks. You had to walk in the streets—a dangerous proposition because they were a narrow maze covered with a thin superpacked, ultraslick layer of snow and ice. If you didn’t have chains on your tires, good luck. As I was out walking I’d frequently see a car crawling down the street toward me trying to gain traction, its rear end sliding back and forth like an overweight water-skier, banging into the snowbanks on each side. I’d crawl up on the side of the bank and let it go by.

  Driveways were just trenches—most people just dug out a car-wide path so they could get to work. Occasionally you’d see someone who did their civic duty and shoveled out the whole sidewalk in front of their home, but what good did it do? The clean sidewalk ended abruptly at their property line, and you had to either climb back up the snowbank or walk back out in the street.

  My dad didn’t make us shovel the sidewalks, but he did insist on us shoveling the whole driveway to the edge of the concrete. We considered him a real tyrant on this issue, but he knew if he didn’t enforce this, with each successive snowstorm his driveway would get smaller, and by New Year’s he’d be squeezing into a car-sized wedge and not be able to open his car door.

  The magic of a snow day was quickly smothered by the reality of our shoveling duties. We’d just finished jumping up and down after hearing the “Norwood . . . All Schools” message on the radio when my dad would walk into the kitchen with an expression that said, Oh yeah? What’s so good about it? Put on your boots and grab a shovel.

  Shovel is actually an aspirational term for the tools we had to use. Spade is more accurate. My dad never went out and bought actual snow shovels—you know, those glorious, wide-mouthed beauties made of lightweight aluminum, with ergonomic handles, designed so that you can actually lift them over your head without strain. No, Dad was content with his three garden shovels, with the thick wooden handles and rusty iron mouths, difficult to lift even without any snow on them. These were more suited for digging a cemetery plot than clearing snow. Two of the three were actually spade-shaped at the front; they came to a point! Each scoop exposed only a thin line of driveway in front of you. Sisyphus himself would be looking down on these two boys and laughing. Regarding most housework, my dad was egalitarian, and the boys and girls all had to work, but when it came to shoveling, raking leaves, and mowing the lawn, these three were boys only. My sisters, although avid proponents of women’s liberation, never complained.

  Like the Don’t-Mention-McDonald’s rule, my brother and I wished in silence for our dad to someday buy some real snow shovels, but we never asked him to. The truth is he probably would have bought them for us—anything to increase our work output, which was, I’m sure from his perspective, unimpressive. I’m now judging from my own kids, but anything I ask them to do, whether it’s “Clean up your room” or “Put on your shoes,” leaves me thinking, How is it possible that this is taking them so long? But unlike my brother and me, my daughters have no problem asking for assistance or letting me know exactly how they feel about the task I’ve assigned them. This is another area where I could use a little more internal Darth Vader; it would make my life a lot easier. Chalk up another one for my dad’s parenting style. Mean dads for a better America, I’m telling you.

  After we finally finished with the driveway, we hit the slopes. There were a couple of really good sledding hills in town. St. Catherine’s church was one, where there was a massive hill in the back that led down into the parking lot. On the first morning of a snowstorm, the hill was just about perfect.

  Of course, sledding technology was not what it is today. Most of us had the old Flexible Flyer–type sleds with the metal runners on them, oddly named because these were the least flexible pieces of equipment imaginable. These sleds worked well, but only in certain conditions. The snow had to be hard; if too powdery, the blades would scrape through to the ground. If the snow was too deep, the blades would sink in and the wooden base would just hit the snow and drag to a stop. But with solid-packed snow, or on ice, those things would fly!

  We didn’t have the best sleds, but at least we had them. There was always one kid who showed up with a trash can lid that his mother gave him to use. “This is what I used to use! It worked fine!” I’m sure she told him, but of course they never did. We pitied the lid kid. We also knew how he felt, since our mother subjected us to many of her own winter hacks. She made us wear Wonder Bread bags on our feet. The kids called me Wonder Boy. Now, I remember wearing these bread bags as my actual boots. My mother swears that she used these as boot liners, which helped the boot slide on easier, and helped keep socks dry. I’m sure she’s right, but I must have lost my boots during a run one day and just kept on sledding, because I distinctly remember the experience of trudging up those hills in nothing but the Wonder Bread bags.

  *

  Back then there was zero talk of climate change. There did seem to be a lot of concern about a hole in the ozone layer, but we weren’t really clear on what the ozone layer was, and apparently all that we needed to do to keep the hole from getting any bigger was for adults to switch their hair spray and deodorant from aerosol to pump bottles. The only thing we kids knew about the weather was that snowstorms were a gift from Almighty God, who obviously created them just for us. He wanted us to wander the drifts to do whatever we pleased—sledding, ice caves, igloos, which we did until it became very dark or we got so h
ungry we had to go home and demand food from our mother.

  Then it arrived: 1978, and with it, the Blizzard of ’78. News of the coming Blizzard had been circulating for, it seemed, months. Michael Dukakis was the governor at the time, and everyone in Massachusetts watched him on TV with his Irish cable-knit sweater and a shovel in his hand, his wife Kitty by his side, telling everyone to remain calm. It was such perfect political imagery—shoveling snow with an Irish sweater with his Greek head sticking out of it, as that was about as multicultural as it got in Massachusetts. It was that winter that people started talking about Michael Dukakis as someone who could be President someday. And you know how that worked out.

  Every snowstorm my brother and I prepared for the dreaded shovel duty, but miraculously, the Blizzard of ’78 was so overwhelming, that we were off the hook—the whole state was to be hopelessly buried for at least a few days. So as the snow started coming down I took the last opportunity to get out and meet my friends and get ready for a week of snowball fights. Heyn, Mitiguy, our friend Jon Perkins and me were already in a months-long snowball fight with Perkins’s big brother Chris and his friend Monster Rob.

  That first morning of the blizzard, we met up in the library parking lot and were quickly set upon by Monster Rob and Big Perkins. About twenty minutes later, we were huddled between the central air-conditioning unit and the building, as we were effectively being destroyed with hard-packed snowballs. We outnumbered them four to two, but they were bigger, and their snowballs stung. We were forced to run, and they followed us all the way up to Shattuck Park, where we were able to hold them off for a while from behind a stone wall—but then they stormed that, and so we ran through several backyards to my house, where they continued to pummel us. As we took fire from behind we ran inside via my basement door and slammed it shut. Snowballs pounded on the door. BUPH! BUPH!

  But we were safe inside the basement. Soaked and exhausted, we stood in a puddle and breathed easy. Then, two more snowballs hit the door.

  We started to laugh.

  “What the hell is going on here?!!” Out of the darkness came a sight much more terrifying than any snowball: my father. He was home, totally out of the norm. It was the daytime! But of course it was the Blizzard of ’78 and nobody was at work.

  “You’re dripping everywhere, get the hell out of the cellar!” he shouted.

  I shrugged my shoulders and nodded. Physical gestures seemed to work best with my dad; if absolutely necessary, a few mumbled words. I don’t think I spoke a complete sentence to him until the mideighties.

  BUPH! BUPH . . . BUPH!

  “What the hell?” My dad pushed by us and walked to the door. I looked to my friends, as if to ask them if I should stop him. It seemed to happen in slow motion as he reached for the door, turned the knob, and swung it wide open.

  BUPH . . . BUPH . . . BUPH!

  I was looking at the silhouette of my dad in the doorway as he was bombarded with well-packed Blizzard of ’78 snowballs. Through his legs I could see the fierce determination on the faces of these two tough guys as they unloaded their frozen projectiles, then, as they hit the target, I watched their expression turn to shock, then horror, as they realized what they had done. THEY HAD HIT MR. SHILLUE.

  Mr. Shillue! The most feared of men! He seemed to enjoy his status as the scariest dad this side of Winter Street. (The south end of Winter Street had a few divorced families on it, and the moms’ boyfriends, while technically not dads, were definitely scary and drove vans.)

  I stared, savoring the wonderful sight of Monster Rob and Big Perkins struggling through the snow, running in the other direction as fast as they could. My dad was still standing in the doorway in shock as the snow and slush dripped off him. He turned around slowly, slush sliding down the sides of his head.

  “GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!” he yelled at us, as loud as I’d ever heard him.

  We scrambled outside and ran until we were out of range of my house. We eventually caught up with Big Perkins and Monster Rob, but instead of starting the fight up again, everyone burst out laughing. We had a solidarity now—we were able to bond over my mean dad.

  The Blizzard of ’78 had arrived at just the right time in my life. I was at the perfect age to take maximum advantage of its magic. That snowstorm, with the fifteen-foot snowbanks and the reckless abandon with which we took the streets, was pure kid joy, the kind that I’m not sure would ever be possible today.

  WHEN I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD I OFFICIALLY became a Boy Scout. As a scout, few things excited me as much as the prospect of going to camp. You noticed I said camp and not sleepaway camp, a redundant term used by many New York parents. All camps by definition should involve sleeping away. The camps they refer to are not actually camps at all; they are places somewhere deep in Westchester or Long Island with lots of trees, where their kids are shipped in the summer. At a real camp one must, after all, camp. If you have to put the word sleepaway in front of your camp, you are probably running a resort.

  For years I longed to go out into the woods and do all the things I had read about in the Boy Scout Manual. I had pored over every page of that book, learning everything one needed to know to become an impressive man: knot tying, tent pitching, water collecting, fire building, and, most important, good citizenship (whatever that meant). I would stare for hours at the front cover of the manual, at the pen-and-ink sketch of the teenaged Scout in his pressed khaki uniform striding purposefully toward me, adorned with merit badges that attested to his mastery of many disciplines. This is the boy, I thought, that I am destined to be.

  I could see myself clearly in my mind: piercing the center of the target on the rifle range and being awarded the rifleman badge; demonstrating my ability to spark a flint into a flame and earning my fire starter badge; boiling potatoes with that flame and then proudly collecting my cooking badge. I would fill my shirt with these badges until there was not an inch left, and then I would get a sash to hold the rest.

  Troop 49 met in the St. Catherine’s church basement and therefore we had a decidedly Catholic slant to our Scouting activities. We all prayed together at the start of meetings, and the only merit badge that everyone in the troop was required to get was the Ad Altare Dei badge.*

  Scouts particularly appealed to me because though I loved sports and athletic competitions of all kinds, I was never the best athlete, but I knew I could be the best scout. The only physical conditioning we had to endure at our scout meetings was the painful “duck-walk,” which was used as disciplinary tactic when we got out of line. This involved being forced to walk in a deep squat, like a duck, up and down a long hallway in the church basement. We were made to walk like this for a time that was commensurate with the level of our misbehavior. It may not sound like much, but unless you have done this walk, you should not belittle this punishment technique. The burn in the legs is intense. If I ever have an occasion to interrogate a prisoner, I’m going to use it. It is not torture, but it skirts the line. And so, I did everything I could to avoid being punished at Boy Scout meetings.

  But for the most part Troop 49 meetings were lacking in adventure. We watched slide shows about poisonous leaves and berries and old 16mm safety films of all kinds. I suspect that our Scout leader Mr. McCue had access to a massive library of training films in that church basement, which he used whenever he wanted to burn through a few hours of Scout meeting time. I remember once watching a driving safety film—even though for most of us, getting our license was years off—that demonstrated the proper technique for steering a car while sliding on ice.

  “Resist the urge to turn the wheel in the opposite direction—this will only increase the lack of control,” the narrator said. “It may feel wrong, but turn the wheel toward the skid. The wheels will gain traction and then you will once again be able to regain control of the vehicle.”

  I remember thinking that this advice seemed so counterintuitive that it must be true. I ran over the scenario in my head many times, imagining a time when I might b
e able to make use of the maneuver, perhaps years later when I had my license and happened to be driving across a frozen lake.

  But despite the occasional James Bond driving lessons or duck walks, these weekly meetings in the church did not excite me. I longed for real scouting, out in the wild, with tents and fires. I pictured what it would be like. I would walk into the woods a boy and emerge a man with a coon hide hanging from my waist. What had transpired between the coon and me? Well, they’d just have to use their imaginations. Suffice to say, I was ready to leave the friendly confines of our neighborhood for a month in the woods.

  I brought along my Pillsbury Doughboy, a tiny rubber reproduction of the little doughboy that appeared in all the Poppin’ Fresh Dough commercials. For years I’d kept him propped against my headboard. Here’s the thing—I didn’t think of him as a doll, more as a cool mascot. Linus had his blanket, and while he was certainly seen as eccentric, he was by no means a social outcast. And Dwight Stones, the 1972 Olympic high jump champion, used to wear his trademark Mickey Mouse T-shirt to almost every meet. The sports announcers would always mention it, and it was considered quirky and hip. My Pillsbury Doughboy was, I thought, a sign of my offbeat coolness. As I was packing for my trip, I impulsively threw him into the footlocker.