My grandfather used to own a construction company in New Haven, CT, back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. It never got too big. My dad always said he never wanted to go big. I don’t know why. Maybe he would have bumped up against the local mob if he got any bigger, who knows?
He used to run a crew with maybe 10 or 12 guys. My dad used to drive a dump truck for him sometimes. We’d go to the yard with the construction equipment, climb up into the truck and motor off to the quarry. I still remember driving into a little tunnel, and then the truck would rumble while the gravel was dumped into truck.
One of the guys on my grandfather’s crew was his brother, Mike. Mike was kind of a free spirit. My dad used to tell me that he was in the infantry in WW2, and he’d desert every now and then and go find a French girl. He never got in real trouble for that, apparently. As it turns out, disappearing without leave to go and have fun was okay (what’s a few days in the stockade compared with a lifetime of memories?), as long as there was no action going on. Desertion and cowardice in the face of the enemy were something else entirely, I bet.
But I only knew Uncle Mike as a kind old man with a nice smile. When we’d go to visit him and Uncle Art and Aunt Mamie (dad’s grandmother), it was always fun, in an Old World sort of way. They were all chain smokers, and they had ash trays with little…