Fathers and Butchers

Well, hi, good morning. It's Tom, and I just got finished listening, watching Peter in his most recent video, and it really brought back some great memories. And so I wanted to tell us a similar, in some ways similar kind of story on the theme of fathers and meat and butchers. Peter's father was a butcher, and Peter Tom Guarriello told us a story in this latest video about, among other things, netting rabbits and then skinning them and butchering them. Now, first of all, that's the kind of story that we don't hear a lot of today. We hear stories about, you know, kids telling stories about their fathers, but not too many stories about their fathers netting and butchering rabbits, which is, I think, you know, here we are, here we have an indication of the way in which our lives have changed pretty dramatically since Peter's childhood. And I was thinking that, you know, Peter's, what, 79, and I'm 59, and, you know, a lot of people who are watching these videos are, well, who knows how old you are anyway. When I was a kid, I grew up in the Bronx. I grew up in the Bronx in the '60s, you know, the '50s and '60s. And in the '50s in the Bronx, this was a very ethnically rich and diverse kind of a neighborhood, an area. You know, the Bronx is a borough of New York City, people who don't know about the Bronx. And pretty heavily Italian populated, and we were an Italian family, of course. And so there were lots of ethnic— they weren't thought of as ethnic at the time, they were just grocery stores and places where you went shopping. And in my family, as in, interestingly, more Italian families, I think, than in other kinds of ethnic groups. That's not scientific, that's just kind of an impression that I've had. The men did shopping for groceries and so on. It wasn't uncommon for that to happen. So in my family, my dad was the shopper. He loved to shop in grocery stores, and as a kid I would go with him, 5, 6 years old, you know, this is early '50s now, all the way through the time really when I left for college as a just 17-year-old. So used to go shopping with my father all the time in an area of the Bronx known as Arthur Avenue. And Arthur Avenue is this great, still to this day, this great little Italian enclave of markets and merchants and really centered around a green market that was built by Fiorello LaGuardia. Of course, great— the Italians took great pride in the fact that the Italian mayor, Mayor LaGuardia, built a produce market right there in the Bronx for us to shop in. So we would go to the Arthur Avenue Market and the markets that had sprung up around that market on Saturday mornings when I was a kid. Get up, my dad was an early riser always. We'd be up and we'd be off and off to Arthur Avenue. And much like Peter, you know, that sense of the wonder of the meat market was always always something that was pretty vivid in my childhood. Because Italian markets, you don't have little pieces of meat in those days cut up and put on plastic trays wrapped in stretch-tight plastic kind of wrappers. You had meat. So there were, and still are again to this day, rabbits hanging in the window of the butcher shop, and there are halves of lambs and whole lambs, sometimes still with the wool on them, hanging in the markets, again, still to this day, in those butcher shops. And as a kid, you know, you'd walk into those markets and there would be these animals, you know. They weren't— it wasn't meat. It was animals, you know. And even more vividly at that time, there was still a live chicken market on Arthur Avenue. And we would go— we did not buy live chickens in my family. My grandmother, my maternal grandmother, used to buy live chickens at that market, but we did not. My dad wasn't that adventurous, so we didn't buy live chickens. But you would walk by the live chicken market, and first of all, the smell was unbelievable. Uh, it, you know, you knew that there was live animals in there, and it was not pleasant. And the sounds, the sounds of the chickens, you could hear the chickens in the market, and you could look in and you could see them in these wooden crates, and, you know, there were feathers, and it was a— again, as a kid, it was a pretty vivid sort of a sight. I learned a lot of lessons in those markets from my father. One of the things that I learned is that my father would say to me when we would go into the, into the markets, particularly the, the, the butcher shops, which also sold cold cuts. You know, Italian Americans— Italians, period, and Italian Americans in particular— were very big on cold cuts, sandwiches, ham, salami, prosciutto, different kinds of cold cut meats and cheeses. And so that was part of our Saturday morning ritual. We'd go in and we'd get ham and so on for the lunches that my family would pack to take to work during the following week. And my father would walk in always to these markets and everybody knew him. My father was a fairly gregarious person and he'd walk in, "Hey Eddie, how are you?" You know, yadda yadda yadda. And people, and they'd say to him, "Give me a pound of ham," he would say. And they'd say, "What kind do you want?" He'd say, "Give me the best. Give me the best." That was one of my father's classic lines. "Give me the best. Give me the best." And I asked him one time, I don't know how old I was, I might have been 10, 12, something like that. And I said, "Dad, why do you always say give me the best?" And he said, "Well, I can't afford the best cars and I can't afford the best house, but I can afford the best ham." So he would say, "This is where I get the best." And that was one of those lessons that stuck with me for a long— to this day from my father. This idea that, you know, no matter what, I can get the best of something. And it made him feel— it made him feel great to be able to get the best. Anyway, I just found Peter's reminiscences about his father and meat to have a connection with mine. And Peter, thanks once again Here you are telling stories that, that, you know, people have never— many, many people have never heard anything like them, and they're great stories and told with terrific warmth and sincerity, and we all appreciate it. So thanks very much, and thanks for triggering this great memory for me as well too. See you again. Bye.