FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY

“When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also.” (2 Timothy 1:5)

January 12, 1960. Like this year, it also fell on a Tuesday. I was only a 5-year-old on Tuesday, January 12, 1960 - fifty years ago today - but I remember it well.
I believe I wrote about it on one previous occasion on the blog, but this is a fresh entry and reflection. On January 12, 1960, my maternal grandfather, Joseph Philip Richard died almost instantly of a massive heart attack.

I can still see our family seated around the supper table that evening. My mother answered a call on the red kitchen wall phone. She burst into hysterical crying and handed the phone to my father. It was her Uncle “Duke” on the phone telling her that her father had died of a massive heart attack. My mother was very emotional and very dramatic. I remember her hysterically yelling, “All his brothers are dead- and now HE’S DEAD, TOO!” I had never seen her like that before. For the next week, she was weeping and devastated. I remember my Dad leaving for work the next day and telling my brother, sister, and me that “Grandpa died so don’t give your mother a hard time today,” and we didn’t!

I wish I’d known him better, but even though I was so young, I do have a good memory of Joseph Philip Richard. He was French-Canadian, originally from a small town in New Brunswick. To his family, he was always, “Phil” but to most of his friends and coworkers, he was “Joe”. Here, since I’m family, I’ll call him “Phil”. Phil was from a very large family. One of his brothers had fallen through the ice one winter, and his father had jumped in to save him. The father succumbed to pneumonia just a few days later. In the custom of Canada, Phil’s older brother took over the family farm. The brother made Phil quit school and worked him like a slave. He hated it. Phil wrote to another older brother who lived in Maine and worked in a logging camp. The brother urged Phil to come and join him in the logging camp. I assume he paid his way, and Phil did exactly that. Later, Phil moved to Boston. When he first came to Massachusetts, he lived with a kind Irish-American family, the Crowleys, in East Boston. My mother remembers her Dad taking her to visit them many times, and that they always treated her like a little princess. I guess he did sort of become like a son to them.
Phil got various jobs, but eventually qualified for the Boston Police force. (Somewhere along the line, he also became a U.S. citizen.) Phil was one of the Boston cops who went out on strike in 1919 and who were fired by then Governor Calvin Coolidge. He later went to work for the U.S. Post Office and worked there until his retirement in the late 1940s. He was grateful to always have a job during the Great Depression. Phil had purchased a 3-family house in Boston’s Roxbury section and rented out the other two apartments to help pay the mortgage. Along the way, he had married Mary MacDonald a Canadian of Scottish heritage, originally from Prince Edward Island. Mary’s parents did not approve of the marriage. To British Canadians of that period, the French in Canada were looked up the way Blacks were in the American South. The couple was married in a church basement with few relatives present.

Of course, I remember Phil Richard as a man in his 70s. He was 6-feet-tall, which is tall for a Frenchman. He was very thin, but very strong. I remember that he was constantly smoking a pipe. When he was NOT smoking a pipe, he was popping Smith Brothers wild cherry cough drops. He always let me have some Smith Brothers wild cherry cough drops to suck on, and to this day, I have a particular fondness for Smith Brothers wild cherry cough drops.

The most important characteristic of Phil Richard is that he was a very spiritual man. He was a Catholic and a very devout Catholic. But I think with him, his faith was much more than just religion. He loved JESUS. In some versions of Pre-Vatican 2 Catholicism, there’s a big devotion to the “Sacred Heart of Jesus”. Now, as a Protestant, I realize some of that gets excessive and downright idolatrous. BUT, Phil was not really into “Maryolatry” as were so many Catholics of that period. He was into Jesus. He went to mass EVERY day, and TWICE on Sunday. He spent a great deal of private time in prayer. When my mother as a little one was stricken with the worst form of meningitis, he prayed for a miraculous healing, and she was miraculously healed!

You might think that since he was so “religious” he was a wimp, but that was not the case at all. My mother described him as very outspoken and opinionated. He said exactly what he thought and was never phony in any way. Phil Richard was also an amazingly optimistic man. My mother remembered him as cheerful, positive and optimistic. This was particularly amazing because he came from a family in which there was a lot of depression and some suicides. My own mother battled depression all her life, and I’ve battled depression. I believe we inherited it from that family, yet Joseph Philip Richard was not a depressive man at all.

Yes, it was fifty years ago today, and I remember.