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The Anti-Role Model

My father was born in 1914 and grew up in a crowded Italian American row home neighborhood in South Philadelphia.  This area of immigrants and first-generation Americans was fertile territory for those who operated outside the law.  His own father, Sebastiano, who had emigrated from Sicily, hosted card games for the local wise guys (check your guns at the door).  So, Dad – my namesake – grew up with a warped sense of right and wrong.

As a kid, he and his young buddies apparently were quite a crew. They would steal coal from stopped rail cars and then sell it by the bucketload, presumably at reduced prices, to appreciative neighbors. Mischief-making was a specialty.  Dad even learned to drive in a stolen bread truck.

His mother, Giuseppa (Josephine), also a Sicilian immigrant, feared that her four sons would grow up to be gangsters themselves. So, she insisted that they move from South Philly to another Italian neighborhood about six miles away in North Philly. Despite her best efforts, my father matured into a man who was okay with bending the law to his advantage and willing to be less than honest when it met his purposes. It is probably better to say that he was always looking for possibilities that would profit him in some way or allow him to get even in certain situations.

He liked to gamble, but was too cheap to become a “problem” gambler. He did bet small amounts frequently, however, with a bookie on horse races or the daily number. That was back before state-sanctioned off-track betting and lotteries became commonplace. He also would often go to Liberty Bell Race Track in Northeast Philly especially in the 70s, as he moved into his “golden years.” Admission was free for the two or three races at the end of each day’s card. For a man who often said, “If it’s free, it’s for me,” complimentary admission to the track was just the ticket.

On one occasion, he returned to his car in the parking lot after the last race to find that someone had stripped it of its hubcaps. Instead of reporting the theft to the authorities, he came home with a plan to recoup his loss. He said that he was going back to the track the next day, find a car like his in the parking lot, and steal his replacement hubcaps from that vehicle. While that made sense to him, Mom and I were able to dissuade him from that course of action. I am guessing that he eventually just went and bought some used hubcaps at a junkyard, which must have pained him to no end.

Dad delighted in the misfortune of others. So, it is not surprising that he loved to talk about his exploits in his younger days playing the card game Knuckles. It was a contest, maybe common in Philly only, in which the winner was allowed to inflict physical pain on the loser. The deck of cards was used as the weapon. The winner could either hold the deck together and slam it into the loser’s knuckles. Or the edge of the deck could be used as an incredibly effective scraping tool to remove some of the loser’s finger skin. All that I knew about Knuckles came from his stories. I had never seen it played. So, when I was a teenager, I asked Dad to show me how the game worked. He explained the rules, and we played a hand.  He won, of course. (I don’t know if he cheated.) Then, instead of stopping the lesson there, he treated me like any other loser and had me hold my hand out, balled up in a fist. Like a skilled surgeon with a scalpel, he scraped the edges of my knuckles with the deck at high speed, and before I knew it, I was bleeding all over the place. Lesson completed. Thanks, Dad.

Solitaire was absolutely his favorite game. Through his years of semi-retirement and then full retirement, he would spend hour after hour at the kitchen table laying out the cards and dealing himself new ones while the radio played in the background. It made no sense to me that someone would waste his days like that, although he seemed to revel in it. What totally blew my mind, though, was that he cheated … against himself! Isn’t part of the joy of that game to prevail while playing by the rules? 

Dad was always looking for an angle – legal or otherwise – to make money or to avoid spending it.  And one situation he exploited involved Philadelphia’s city wage tax.  It is a citywide personal income tax currently levied at almost four percent.  Of course, Dad did not want to pay that tax.  He didn’t want to pay any tax to any government – federal, state or local.  He spent most of his working life as a self-employed musician and was certainly paid under the table often. I don’t know what he claimed his income to be on federal income tax returns, but you can be assured that he low-balled it.

When it came to Philly’s personal income tax, he had a better approach. He just didn’t pay it, and he was covered because a buddy of his worked at City Hall. So, for decades, he paid zero – a great set-up. Through all of those years, Mom worried that he would be discovered and taken to jail. She said that sometimes she couldn’t sleep at night because it bothered her so much. Dad kept smiling, knowing that he had pulled one over on the taxman.

Then his buddy retired from his city job, and it wasn’t long until Dad’s years of illegal tax avoidance came home to roost.  He was charged and given a court date. In preparation for that day before the judge, Dad did nothing. He didn’t get a lawyer. He just showed up in court on the appointed day.  He loved to tell the tale of the other tax criminals in court that day, all lawyered-up, while he was just one brave man against the system. When his case was called, he went before the judge and basically pleaded guilty, not contesting the charges.  His reward for that was being assessed a fine that worked out to a tiny percentage of what he should have paid over the decades.  When he arrived home, he was ebullient.  He had scammed the system.  Mom was just relieved that her long nightmare was over.

Although a number of my father’s traits became my own, I have always detested lying and dishonesty. I am as straight as an arrow when it comes to the truth. If I were to tell a lie, my face would turn red.  You might think, then, that I take after my mother, but she could be less than fully truthful herself on occasion. I guess that this apple fell quite a distance from the tree.