ANOTHER REGISTRY STORY

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” (Psalm 46:1)

The last posting was about the closing of the Framingham Registry of Motor Vehicles which is something I’m greatly concerned about, but tonight I want to share another Registry story. I thought I’d written about this sometime ago on the blog, but I checked and checked and just can’t find it in the archives. It’s a story about forgiveness, forgetting the past, and moving on.

It’s strange and paradoxical that this story about forgiveness and moving on is from the life of my father. He could be very “hard line” about some issues and was NO “pushover”. But he also had a pragmatic side and was not the kind of guy who was going to allow himself to be eaten up by bitterness and hatred. Most of you know my father was a career Registry of Motor Vehicles employee. After several years as a Boston police officer, my father joined the ranks of the Registry Inspectors (later called Registry Police and later merged into the State Police). His first job, from 1956 to 1963 was giving driving tests. By his retirement in 1982, he was one of the Supervisors at the old 100 Nashua Street, Boston headquarters. My father’s best friend on the RMV was Bill Mitchell who lived in West Roxbury. In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, both of them worked out of the Quincy branch office.

In his younger years, my father could be pretty idealistic about some things. Some folks think there was no corruption in the Massachusetts State Government in the pre-1970 days. In fact, things were probably MORE corrupt then! There was all kinds of corruption that my Dad and certain “by the book” Registry Inspectors were aware of. In those days, they weren’t allowed to have a “Union” but somewhere around 1960, some of the Registry Inspectors formed a “Registry Inspectors Association” which among other things, attempted to take on corruption at high levels including with the Registrar at the time whose initials ironically spelled out “C.A.R.” Some old timers will know who I’m talking about. “C.A.R.” was what Howie Carr would today call a “very well connected Democratic Party hack” who lived in Norwood. The Registry Inspectors Association sort of took him “head on” regarding a number of issues and situations. I almost forgot to tell you that Bill Mitchell became the President of the Association and my father the Vice-President. So, in a very real sense, my “Mr. Law and Order” father was sort-of like a “Union agitator”.

I will always remember coming home from our two week vacation on Cape Cod in August of 1962. I would have been just under 8-years-old at the time. Shortly after getting home, my father received a phone call from Bill Mitchell informing him that as pay back for their agitation, Bill Mitchell had been transferred to Worcester and my father had been transferred to Lowell. This was devastating to my parents. Our house in Canton was an unfinished “oversized Cape” style house. My Dad was trying to work nights and weekends to finish the second floor, build a fence outdoors, build a stone retaining wall around the exterior property and all sorts of other things. Almost forty years later, there were still a lot of unfinished projects around the Canton property. My mother always blamed “C.A.R.” for causing him to lose interest in a lot of these projects.

In those days, my folks had one car, a manual transmission blue 1951 Plymouth coupe. Each day, Dad now got up to make the long drive to Lowell up Routes 128 and 3. Money was tight. I remember that we were told we would not be getting much for Christmas 1962, and compared to other years, we didn’t. The commute was long and hard on the old car. During the 1962-1963 winter, the car died in the middle of that commute and that was it for the Plymouth. My father was a Civil Air Patrol volunteer. There were several C.A.P. cars at the local C.A.P. facility, and so the C.A.P. let him take a 1955 Ford station wagon, which was one of them, for his personal use. (Believe it or not, as I recall, some neighbors actually complained about that!) My grandmother (my mother’s mother) gave my folks the money to buy a brand new 1963 Dodge Dart station wagon shortly after this. It was one of the few brand new cars the family ever had.

There was a change of Governors around that time. I forget if Volpe gave way to Peabody, or if it was the other way around. In any case, by the early Spring of 1963, the new governor appointed a Judge from the Brockton area, James R. Lawton, to be the new Registrar. Within days of the change of Registrars, my Dad and Bill Mitchell were transferred to the Boston office, and later to Quincy.

Almost twenty years later, a young friend of my father’s was trying to build a new auto body shop in South Norwood. It was one of those kind of situations where a bunch of environmentalists and others were trying to stop the construction. A committee of concerned citizens, who wanted to help the young man named Rick get his shop built, was formed. Among the committee members were my father and the now elderly, retired C.A.R. who had been Registrar twenty years earlier. One night, C.A.R. called my father and they talked about what the strategies would be to help Rick get his shop built. When he hung up, my mother was kind of angry and disgusted.

“How can you talk to that man who so terribly harmed this family?!” she bitterly asked. She had no use for C.A.R.

My father replied that you can’t hold things against people that happened twenty years ago. My father was probably now about the age C.A.R. was when he was Registrar. Dad was now a Supervisor in his late 50s...older, wiser, seasoned. He was no less opposed to corruption, but he was a lot more realistic about how the world works. I think in his own way he realized he was kind of an idealistic guy in his 30s when the transfer happened, who maybe should have realized what the consequences of his agitation would bring. He had no bitterness about C.A.R. He had “moved on”.

I’m actually “wired” much more like my mother, so that story has been very helpful to me. I’ve used it as a sermon illustration several times. Dad, Bill Mitchell, and C.A.R. are all now long dead, but the lesson has stuck with me. We can hold on to things, and we can, frankly, have some very unrealistic expectations of other people. Much of the time, we need to learn to “let go and let God” and “move on”. Yes, there are things worth fighting and dying for (like the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘60s, for instance). But other stuff will just be other stuff until Jesus Christ returns to set up His Millennial Kingdom.

Today, a guy I know told me, “God is a very PRESENT help in trouble”. That means he wants you to forget the past and focus on the present. It sparked me to go on the blog and share this story. I truly hope you find it helpful!