Labor Day

When I was little, I didn't know exactly what my father did for a living. I knew he took a train into The City every weekday, always dressed in a nice suit, close-shaven, hair slicked back. (I think he even wore a hat, before those pretty much disappeared from the scene.)

As I got older and asked questions, I began to understand that he was in something called Public Relations, and that he'd also been in something called Advertising. A few more years went by, and I acquired enough sophistication - so to speak - to understand what these things were, and what the significance of the place called Madison Avenue was.

By now, it was the mid to late '60's, and I had begun to develop some political and cultural attitudes of my own. But in many respects, I was more heavily influenced by my parents' views than I realized (or cared to admit): they loved music, art, and reading; they had taken me to places like Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art many times, from the time I was too young to absorb very much till the time I no longer wanted to spend much time with them. They bought me my first Beatles album, and perhaps more significantly, my first Dylan album. And they let me go unchaperoned to the April 1967 March on Washington.

But by the late '60's, I felt I had out-grown their traditional liberalism, and that there's wasn't much I could learn from either of them in this Brave New World. (In all fairness to myself, I was about sixteen - not a particularly tolerant age for most people, in my experience).

Around this time, my friends and I were starting to get into some trouble with the local police about our night-time gatherings on the high school grounds. Technically, the place was off-limits after dark, but our attitude was, it's our high school, it's our neighborhood, and the cops can just go to hell.

So we'd gather, they'd roll up in their cruisers, we'd scatter, they'd leave, we'd re-group, and so on. Occasionally, though, they'd chase us, box us into a corner, and make us show ID. That part really got under my skin, enough for me to actually complain to my parents about it.

My father's response was, don't be an idiot; the proper response when a policeman stops you is to say, "How can I help you, officer?"

Well, of course, I answered, YOU'D say that; you're a man in a three-piece suit - when has a cop ever hassled YOU?

Which is when he decided to tell me something about his past - a thing he rarely, rarely did. Turns out that had he actually been a labor organizer for a spell back in the '30's, and one of the places he and his crew had tried to sign workers up was a mining town in Pennsylvania. A company town - did I know what that was? Not really, I said. Well, it's where the company effectively owns the whole town - including the police. And that's how he came to get his head beat in before being thrown into a cell for three days, then escorted to the edge of town and told to never show his face there again.

He never spoke of any of this to me again. But he didn't have to. He had made his point - not about how to interact with police, necessarily, but about making assumptions based on limited knowledge, and about taking things for granted. Like the right to join a union.