Pound for Pound Read Free Page A

pregnantbefore they got on the boat for New York, and sick all the way across, but she kissed the ground of Ameriky when they landed, and both hoped they had reached salvation from hunger and fear.
    Padraic was mad-dog crazy for Irish football and hurling, had played both and had the scars to prove it, but he instantly fell in love with boxing and baseball—he read every inch of the sports pages every day to follow the standings and batting averages—and he used baseball to improve his reading comprehension. He knew the records of Irish fighters, starting with the great John L. Sullivan as a bare knuckler. When there was money enough, he took his older sons to the fights at the old Madison Square Garden, and to St. Nick’s in Manhattan, even took them all the way up to the Bronx Coliseum if the card was right. Nora had the kids, and thanked God from her knees, twice daily, that she hadn’t lost any—so many children had been lost back in Ireland—and for the good man who labored so hard to put food on the table every day.
    It was food hard earned in the early days, which included the bread lines of the early thirties. Padraic first supported his family as a roustabout, showing up at the docks or labor sites before dawn, hoping to be picked early and to work late. Then came steady work for New York City as a garbageman. When he got promoted to driver, he was able to move his family from the raging violence of Hell’s Kitchen to their loft near the Bowery, where Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, and Italians were protective neighbors, and a decent girl could walk to school safely. Sidewalk justice was meted out to any punk who even thought of tampering with her. The loft was another step up for the Cooleys. It was where the last two boys were born, and it was in the quiet of the loft late at night that Padraic and Nora studied to become citizens.
    The Cooleys would surely have stayed in New York but for the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s subsequent gearing up for all-out war. California suddenly had plenty of good-paying jobs and was short of men (and women) to fill them, so in mid-1 942 the family moved by train to Los Angeles. They found a place to live in the old dock town of San Pedro, on the westerly rim of what would shortly become the massive LosAngeles Harbor. Padraic found employment on the assembly line at the Douglas Aircraft plant in Long Beach. He worked twelve-hour shifts, sometimes seven days a week, and never missed a day. With overtime, and with Nora cashing every check and marking down every penny he earned and every one she spent, they lived well enough for him to buy his first car, a used 1934 Chevy four-door sedan for $165.00, a high price because of the war. Now he could drive to work like an American, instead of wasting hours a day on the bus like some Jerk McGee green off the boat. His children always had milk, and his family ate three times a day. That was why he had come to the United States in the first place.
    The two older boys, Cathal and Liam, enlisted in the U.S. Navy, and though neither was wounded or won medals for valor, they hadn’t been draft dodgers, either. By the end of the war, the number of two-car families had grown, but then the war plants closed down. Money was tight and jobs were scarce. Padraic used his experience at Douglas and the money he’d saved to open his own body-and-fender shop. Dan and his brothers worked for their father, Dan after school and on Saturdays, the older boys full-time until they went on to become policemen or firemen once they were sure the old man’s business was successful.
    “A man with a trade is worth two men,” Padraic would counsel his sons at the dinner table, “and a man with a trade won’t go hungry, not in this great land.”
    Nora would bump him with her hip to let him know who was the real boss, the one with the real trade. “Eejit, ya didn’t like yer dinner, didja, nor the one yer not gettin tomorrow?”
    Padraic would answer,