MY OLD MAN He Lived, He Loved, He Laughed My Old Man never let me call him that. He thought it was a sign of disrespect. I felt it was a term of endearment. Clair Andrew Wingerson was born in Lawrenceville in 1907. He was named Clair after his mother's ancestral home, County Clare, Ireland. He was named Andrew after his father's brother Andy, who shortened the family name from "Wingertszahn" to Wingerson because it was too long to fit over the stoop above his bakery shop at 235 Beaver Avenue. When my Dad was a teenager, his Mom and Pop and six of their seven kids moved from Lawrenceville to what was then "the country" in Shaler Township on Anderson Road. They called the place "Hell's Half Acre," in honor of my feisty grandmother. It was once a halfway house for alcoholic priests. Today it's a centennial home in a subdivision. Before they moved, Dad's oldest sister, my Aunt Marie, married P.K. Donahoe, an heir to the Donahoe's chain of grocery stores. So all the Wingerson boys got summer jobs as butchers. Unfortunately, they also got used to grownup pay and some of them never went back to high school, including my Dad, who started Peabody High, but never finished. My Dad always regretted that decision. He said he was a graduate of the School of Hard Knocks. Later, when he was passed over for promotion by lesser men with degrees, he vowed his kids would go to college. As a result, all three of us have our Masters. My Dad and Mother went together for 11 years before they were married. Almost as long as Dick Tracy and Tess Trueheart. Those were Depression years. But that never kept my parents down. They sang a lot in the car in those days. Their favorite song was: "Oh, we ain't got a barrel of money, maybe we're ragged and funny, but we'll travel along, singin' a song, side by side." We never even had a car radio until Dad got his 1957 company Pontiac. Until then, he'd keep us entertained with his repetoire of obscure songs such as: "It ain't gonna rain no more, no more, it ain't gonna rain no more. How in the heck can you wash your neck if it ain't gonna rain no more?" And this World War I ditty: "Goodbye Ma, Goodbye Pa, Good bye mule with your old hee haw. I may not know what the war's about, but you bet, by gosh, I'll soon find out." And one of my Grandfather's favorites: "Down went McGinty to the bottom of the sea, he must be awfully wet, cause they haven't found him yet, dressed in his best suit of clothes." Or a little duet he'd do with my little brother. Dad would sing: "Oh, Mahtunyatsa..." Then Bobby would chime in with: "Peedalinka boom ya ya." My Dad was a live-wire, take-charge character with a lust for living. He loved good times and loved to tell jokes, play jokes and laugh. In fact, he was known for his laugh. An ongoing anecdote told how friends would track down parties by listening for Clair Wingerson's gut-rumbling belly laughter. "Ahh haah aha hah hahhaaah ho ho ho!" People would laugh just hearing it. He was also known for his love of people, especially children. He thought the saddest thing was for a kid to spend Christmas in the hospital. His niece and my cousin, Katherine Donahoe, worked on the children's floor at Pittsburgh Mercy Hospital. So he became the self-appointed Santa Claus at their annual childrens' Christmas party during the early fifties. "Ahh haah aha hah hah hahhaaah Ho! Ho! Ho!" When he was president of the Pittsburgh Radio and Television Club, he moved their Christmas party to the Western Pennsylvania School for the Blind and started a tradition. He read me the Pittsburgh Press comics on Sundays and taught me to swim the Australian crawl at the North Park Pool. He also taught me to love fireworks in Aspinwall, the Highland Park Zoo, the Police Circus at Forbes Field, the roller coasters at Kennywood, stock car racing at Heidelberg Raceway and South Park Speedway, Lionel electric trains from Conklin's on Lincoln Avenue and all kinds of antique cars. He loved funny stories and dialects and sound effects. He could fly! (With the use of a mirror.) He could catch an invisible ball in a paper bag. He took the unsuspecting on elaborate "snipe hunts." But he always laughed with and never laughed at. He loved to send people up. But he never put them down. He was as generous with himself as he was with his laughter and his love. My cousin, Mary Lou Schnuth Curry, lost her mother when she was born. So my Dad always included her in our family vacations to North East and Wildwood Crest, as well as our North Park swimming trips, Highland Park Zoo excursions and everybody's birthday parties. My sister's best friend, Barbara Ashton, was also left motherless. So she was also included in my Dad's plans. So was my best friend, Richie Hughes, whose dad had died. Two of my aunts, Betty and Rita McLaughlin, never married. They used to say: "When your Dad married your Mother, he married all three of us." My middle name is Eugene. I was named after Father Eugene McGuigan, fomer coach of the Duquesne University Basketball Team. During the Depression, Father Mac ran a soup kitchen for his Saint Anne's parish in Millvale. Every business night, he'd back his borrowed truck up to the back door of the Donohue's my Dad managed. "Any spoiled food tonight?" Father Mac would ask. "A lot of this stuff looks okay now, but it'll probably go bad by tomorrow. Take what you need," my Dad would reply. Together, they managed to keep body and soul together for many of the flock. Dad was an adventurer. During his Donahoe's days, he'd fly with a friend in a biplane to Erie, Pa. to pick up fresh lake pike for sale at the store. Donahoe's newspaper ads in the Press and Sun Telly that night headlined: "Fish So Fresh They Swam In Lake Erie This Morning." One weekend, Dad convinced my Mother to take a ride in the friend's biplane. She prayed the rosary the whole trip. But Dad was happy he convinced Mother that flying was safe...For a couple of days. Next week the the biplane was on the front page of the papers. Dad's buddy had crash landed it into a tree. My Mother never flew again until their silver wedding anniversary. Dad was also a traveler. Before they were married, my Dad and Mother and her friend, Jerry Grafelter, their "chaperone," drove his '36 jade green Dodge convertible out to California to visit his poet Uncle Joe and ambitious Aunt Annie, who left the family's Beaver Avenue bakery to make some dough in Golden State real estate. On the way, my parents watched workers sculpting Mount Rushmore and building Boulder (now Hoover) Dam. They drove across the desert with the top down and Dad got sunstroke and a bad sunburn he always blamed for his bald spot. As a sales manager for Westinghouse Appliance Sales, he'd win Westinghouse sales award trips and go to New Orleans (twice), pre-Castro Havana (twice) and the Kentucky Derby (twice). But he didn't just win trips. He won every appliance that Westinghouse ever made, and doubles and triples on some of them. In fact, our whole house became a Westinghouse. He was a real people watcher. Especially when he'd travel. Occasionally, he'd take the train to New York on business. He called himself "The Lone Wolf" and loved to wander Greenwich Village and look at what he called "the characters." Once he made a "talking record" post card from the observation deck of the Empire State Building and mailed it home to us on Morningside Avenue. His last words: "I'll be home...I'll be home...I'll be home..." got stuck in the groove and kept repeating over and over. Dad and Mother followed the Pittsburgh Steelers since they really were steelworkers who played Sundays under the Bloomfield Bridge and passed the hat at halftime for their pay. During the late forties and early fifties, my parents always had Steelers season tickets with my Uncle Fred. So I often got to go to Forbes Field to watch the Steelers lose when somebody else couldn't. He was a big boxing fan and watched the Pabst Blue Ribbon Wednesday Night Fights, the Gillette Blue Blade Friday Night Fights and the Mennen Saturday Night Fights. He sat ringside with my Mother at Golden Gloves bouts. She once got blood on her dress and got miffed. In Lawrenceville, he showed us fighting Fritzie Zivic's Bar on Butler Street. In Morningside, he showed us the house where former world middleweight champion, Harry "The Pittsburgh Windmill" Greb once lived. (On Jancey Street, near the Saint Raphael's Convent.) My Dad's big boxing claim to fame was that he once witnessed the shortest bout in history... 11 seconds...at the old Motor Square Gardens in East Liberty. We never believed the story, so he wrote a letter to True Magazine and had it verified. But he wasn't just a spectator sportsman. Besides teaching us swimming at North Park every summer weekend, he'd take us sled riding there in the winter. We used to pile on and go "bellygutsing" down hills so long, he'd use the Plymouth to drive us back to the top. Ice skating was also a big kick for him. He and my Mother would skate together, arm in arm, on the Highland Park Pond and the North Park Lake. But what he really loved was being anchorman on "crack-the-whip." He'd lead the line of skaters at breakneck speed, then go into a power skid and let centrifugal force whip the skaters. The last one in line usually went airborne. He played golf, too. But my Mother was "Queen of the Links," Pittsburgh's Public Golf Course Women's Champion at Schenley Park in 1938 and '39, and she usually beat him. So he excelled at everything else. During summer vacations at the Jersey shore, he was a manic volleyball player and a killer spiker. Every night after dinner he'd string up a net from our cottage to the one across the way and almost every man, woman, teenager and kid in the court got in on the action. Bowling was a big athletic and social deal, too. Ten couples had a league called "The Friday Nights And Their Ladies." They'd compete every season at East Liberty's Enright Bowling Alleys, just up Penn Avenue from the Enright Theatre where Garfield's Gene Kelly got his start. The best parts of this bowling league for us kids were the picnics at Kernan's Allegheny River cottage in Oakmont and the Friday Knighters' Halloween parties with all their creative costumes. My Dad loved those original Halloween costumes. One time he was Mammy Yokum with a live chicken. One time he was a huge wallflower, wrapped like a mummy in wallpaper and blending right in. One time he dressed up like a man on one side and a woman on the other, and spent the entire evening dancing with himself. My favorite costume was when he went as a big Westinghouse console television set. He sat inside it in a corner for an hour with hand puppets and rubber masks and did the news, sports, weather and an entire Punch and Judy show. After Westinghouse transferred him from Pittsburgh to Michigan, my Dad started a neighborhood trradition that's still going on after over 30 years-the annual Fort Dearborn Avenue Memorial Day Parade, Ball Game, Tug of War and Family Picnic. He wanted to bring back and keep alive a piece of his Pittsburgh past that he fondly rememberred - the neighborhood block party. After my Dad died, the neighbors petitioned the city to rename the picnic ground "Wingerson Park" and every Memorial Day, they erect a sign proclaiming it. Grownup ex-neighborhood kids now bring their kids back to the annual Wing Ding. Dad would have liked that. He always said: "If I die tomorrow, I'll have no regrets. I've done everything I've ever wanted to do." At 57, he had a mild heart attack. Then he had another major one in the hospital as the doctor examined him. He went into cardiac arrest and died for 10 or 20 minutes, but they jump-started him and he lived another year. At 58, he cut a long-stemmed rose for my Mother and put it in a pilsener glass in her kitchen. Then he went back outside to his garden and died for the last time. He was such a doer, he even had to die twice. At his funeral, more than one person said to me: "He may have only been 58, but he lived 85 years." Dad's mouth opened right before they closed the casket. My Mother said: "He never could keep it shut." A few years ago, my Pittsburgh cousin Mary Lou visited me in Florida. I asked her to tell my two sons about the Grandpa they never knew. She thought for a moment, then said softly: "What can you say about the most wonderful man in the world?" I just say I'm glad he was my Dad . . . My Old Man. Richard Wingerson