In much delayed honor of my father on his 85th birthday
by Rick Weiss
When I was a little boy, we were poor. Oh no, not poor by the standard of the Third World's Poor. Nor were we poor like the poor Chinese and Biafrans that my mother constantly reminded us of when we gagged down the candied carrots or liver with spinach and kidney beans that she served up. We weren't even poor by the standards of the immigrant poor, our brave grandparents who flooded the Eastern America shores at the turn of the century.
Yet we were poor by the standards of the neighborhood that we lived in, the sprawling insular sixties suburban society. In our neighborhood, men and women of manifest vision built razor clean, unsparing split levels and colonials with oversized picture windows on generous, partially wooded tracts, chopping down, plowing under, manicuring the last vestiges of rural countryside to surround the eastern cities; fleeing their parents’ cities and blazing open the new frontiers of suburban America.
My father was one of those men. Having his honorable discharge from the Marines, he painstakingly scrimped, scraped, working two, sometimes three jobs, to produce the nest egg that moved my mother, me – aged three and my baby brother, out of a downtown two bedroom Pittsburgh rowhome and into a three bedroom ranch in a new development called Northwood Acres. A $19,000 GI loan bought him the property – three-quarters of an acre, cleared – and the construction of a split-level three bedroom orange brick ranch. Dad had "gotten in" early and built when prices were low. Only four properties dotted the development's ninety-some acre expanse when we first arrived. Years later, when we moved again, there were well over a hundred houses in Northwood Acres.
