Long Shot Read Free

pieces that had fallen from the hopper cars. He’d fight anybody who had their eyes on the same pieces.
    To my dad, fighting was a fundamental, necessary part of growing up. Day after day, on his walk home from school, he’d be met along the way by an older kid who had brought along somebody to finally take him down. “I’ve got a kid who’ll knock the shit out of you,” the older boy would tell him.
    “Yeah, okay,” my dad would say, before tearing into the latest foil and leaving him in tears. He claims he never lost a fight. He did, however—repeatedly—get his ass kicked by his father when he got home, for being scuffed up.
    Still, in spite of the rough stuff, the family was in it together, which meant that everybody brought home whatever they could, starting as soon as possible. Long before his job at Judson Brothers, my dad caddied at the golf course where his father did maintenance. He pumped gas at night. He got up at six in the morning for his paper route, delivering the Philadelphia Inquirer . The route took him past a neighborhood grocery where his mother was always behind on her charge account. Most mornings, the milk had just been dropped off outside the store and my father would help himself to a quart or two. Now and then, he’d see the light inside come on for just a few seconds and then go out again, so he was pretty sure that the owners,the Schmidts, knew what he was up to; but they never said anything. Later, it ate at him that he’d taken advantage of their benevolence. When he got out of the army, he planned to face them and make restitution, but they’d passed away.
    During his last couple of weeks of basic training for Korea, my dad picked up a bad infection in his foot. While he was in the infirmary, his company was shipped out. The upshot was that he had to go through training a second time, after which his orders sent him to Germany, where he served in artillery and drove a heavy piece of equipment that pulled a twenty-ton howitzer. He says his ears still ring from when they would fire that monster off. His superiors wanted him to go to Officer Candidate School, but then they found out he’d only completed the ninth grade.
    He was discharged in 1954 with $325 of mustering-out pay. After a year as a merchant seaman in the coast guard, he applied for a job at Superior Tube in Collegeville. The guy who interviewed him said, “Piazza? You Italian? . . . We don’t hire Italians.” Then he heard they were looking for people at B. F. Goodrich, and it was true. He worked the night shift, pulling tires off the mold in about 120-degree heat, and stayed until they laid him off after seven years. He hadn’t figured on sticking around for the long haul, anyway. Dad had plans, and he’d already gotten started on them.
    His first used-car lot operated out of a one-car garage at his sister’s house on Egypt Road in Audubon, between Norristown and Phoenixville. It was a rented house, but the owner didn’t mind him being there; and neither did his sister, since he helped out a little bit with the rent. The lot was effectively a junkyard. When he left Goodrich in the morning, he’d catch a few hours of sleep, then snoop around town trying to find a junker to buy from a dealer. Some of them he could fix, paint, and sell. Others he’d park behind the garage, out of sight, and strip off the parts he could put into another vehicle or somebody’s hands. He bought an old truck for hauling the scrap to the salvage yard, to be crushed for twenty-five or thirty bucks a load. Around five o’clock, he’d head home for the rest of his sleep, and by midnight he was back on the tire line, popping salt pills to keep from passing out. At eight, he’d punch out of the plant and do it all over again. To this day, there’s a junkyard at my dad’s first lot on Egypt Road.
    He remained there for about a year after he was laid off from Goodrich, then moved to a better location in Jeffersonville and took on a