Alcoholism

This is a very personal story but it's one I that want to share with anyone who has a drinking problem. It's my way of showing what alcoholism can do to the people in your life and to encourage you to get help.

Alcoholism killed my dad. While his body lived until 2006, the wonderful person that he was when he was younger died long before that.

People have told me what a sweet, caring person he was. My aunt...his younger sister...told me how he used to hold her while they were in the bomb shelters of World War II Germany. She told me that he was her special brother. My mother once told me how much he used to love her. Once he walked many miles in a snowstorm to meet her at work so she would not have to drive home in the bad weather.

As a young child, I remember looking up to him and thinking that he was the perfect image of what a man should be. He was an excellent carpenter and I was always proud of the work he did. Not only on his regular job, but also on home projects for friends and family. He remodeled rooms, built additions to houses, and even participated in building entire houses. It wasn't until I was about eight or nine years old that I started to understand that he had a drinking problem. At first, it was when I began to realize that the amount of time he spent in bars was not normal. He sometimes brought me with him. He’d put me at a table and feed me Cokes and beer nuts to “keep the kid happy” while he sat at the bar and drank. We’d be weaving around the road while driving home after leaving the bar.

I remember being at family functions that had a lot of drinking going on. My mother would be sitting on a couch or cowering in a chair, keeping very quiet to herself. After a while, I started to understand that she was anticipating the way he was going to treat her once we got home. After us kids were in bed, he would reach a stage of drunkenness where he would be yelling at her and picking at her, emotionally abusing her for whatever was bothering him on that particular evening. Usually it was something trivial. He would berate her in his drunken stupor until he fell asleep. He was not like this when he wasn’t drunk. The difference was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Once I got a little older, he would start those drunken tantrums on me. One time he slapped me on the face so hard that it turned red. Another time he came into my bedroom and yelled at me for how messy it was. Then he started shoving things from the top of my dresser and shelf onto the floor. I can't begin to count how many times I was in the car with him driving drunk and weaving all over the road. It amazes me that I am still alive today to tell you this.

By the time I was ten years old I lived in fear of my dad. He would almost always go to a bar after work and stay until late in the evening. If I was sitting in the living room with my mother watching TV, as soon as we saw the headlights of his car come into the driveway, she would expect me to run upstairs to bed and pretend I was sleeping. She took the brunt of his drunken abuse and tried to spare us kids. He would come into the house and start yelling at her about whatever. I could not understand what he was saying because of my hearing, but he was loud enough for me to know that he was yelling at her. I would eventually fall asleep to the sound of his yelling voice.

He had plenty of accidents due to driving while intoxicated. He totalled seven cars that I am aware of. Laws were different then and they kept letting him off. By the early 1990’s, laws had finally changed and he permanently lost his license after yet another accident.

The alcoholism got worse as the years went by. He became a role model for the man I never wanted to be. I hated his drinking, his smoking, and what he did to my mother. Most kids get upset when they find out their parents are splitting up, but I was relieved when my mother told me she was going to separate from him. I was 13 at the time.

Long-term, what this did to me was put me in a state of constant fear of anyone who was drunk. The legal age at that time was still 18. Drinking at the local bars was very popular in those days. When I turned 18, I mostly avoided bars. I only went to them to see my friends who played in bands or when I played out in a band.

When I first started college, I avoided the bars completely. Over time I got comfortable enough to go to a disco in Geneseo so I could have at least some semblance of a social life. Once in a while I would go to see a live band at another bar. I did not want to date or get into a relationship with anyone who seemed to have a drinking problem. When I first met Mary, who became my first wife, I was comfortable enough with her to go dancing at the bar that had a DJ and we went there fairly often.

After I graduated college and entered the workforce I very rarely went to any bars or socialized with my coworkers outside of work. If I went to a party where there was drinking going on, once it reached a certain level of drunkenness, I would leave. All of this was due to the fear that was instilled in me by my dad's alcoholism.

A major turning point came for me at Christmas time in 1985. Mary and I were invited to Christmas dinner by my dad’s wife. He was not home when we arrived; he was down the street at a bar, drinking. We were seated at the table when he arrived, stumbling into the house. He was at his mushy stage of drunkenness and wanted to hug everybody. Once he got to Mary, who was pregnant, he started to fall over on her. I feared for her safety and the baby, and said, “We are leaving.” His wife looked at me with understanding and we left. It became a symbolic moment for me, realizing I never again had to rely on him for rides while he was drunk or anything else. He did come over to our home the next day while sober to ask me why I left. I told him flat out, “It’s because you were drunk.” From that moment on, I rarely saw him. Nor did my sisters. He has grandchildren that he never met. Never showed much interest. This is what alcoholism did to the man who once protected his younger sister during the bombing raids of World War II.

In his final years, he ended up in a nursing home, a shell of a man. I visited him on a few occasions. In 2006, when I was told he wasn’t going to live much longer, I made my final visit to him. At the end of the visit, I stood up, looked him straight in the eye, and said, “Goodbye.” I walked out of the room and never saw him again.

Five years ago my life changed in ways I never expected. After my first marriage ended, I ultimately met Stacey. I have come out of my shell in many ways. We do go out a lot but I still don’t drink much. We go out mostly to be with friends, hear bands, dance, and sing karaoke. I have learned to keep my distance if I see too much drinking going on.

I am not a teetotaler. I do have a drink once in a while. Very often people who see me having a drink are surprised. I never liked beer. I've heard it said you need to acquire a taste for beer. I never had any interest in acquiring that taste. I like sloe gin fizz, red wine and some other wines, and I will once in a while have a mixed drink with vodka. Anytime I do have a drink it would be early in the evening and only one. Stacey doesn’t drink much either. I am very thankful that Stacey does not have any kind of a substance abuse problem.

So, again, I write this story so that people with a drinking problem will hopefully understand what they are doing to their loved ones and encourage them to get help. I hope you pay attention. Thank you for reading this.

My Memories of September 11, 2001

Everyone who was alive on September 11, 2001 has their own story about the day, so here is mine.

It started out as a routine Tuesday for me.  At the time I lived on Willowood Drive in Greece, was married to Mary and our daughters Kristi, 15, Tracy, 12, and Melissa, 10 all lived with us.  I was working the evening shift at WHEC Channel 10 in the control room and was due in at 3:00 PM.  Mary was teaching at Brookside School and the girls were all in school that day.  My plans before work were to go shopping and then attend a meeting of the group, SHHH, Self-Help For Hard of Hearing People.

For reference, the times of the plane crashes on that date were 8:46 for the first plane into the World Trade Center, 9:03 for the second, the Pentagon at 9:37, and a field in Shanksville, PA at 10:03.  The first tower collapsed at 9:59 and the second one collapsed at 10:28.

It was shortly before 9:00 AM when I was driving to Wegmans and had WCMF radio on in my car.  I heard them discussing something about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center.  I knew that a plane had hit the Empire State Building in the fog in the 1940's.  The damage was a hole on the side of the building, which eventually got repaired.  I pictured this incident being something like that.  They did say something on WCMF about air traffic being restricted from the New York City area.  As a private pilot myself, I tried to comprehend what this would mean for routing air traffic away.  "What a mess," I thought.  I surely did not grasp the magnitude of what was happening at that moment.  

I went into Wegmans and completed my shopping trip, all the while wondering how a plane could have crashed into the World Trade Center in this day and age, and thinking about the air traffic situation. It was around 10:15 when I got back in my car, turned on the radio, and that's when it all hit me about what was going on.  While I was shopping, the second plane hit the Trade Center, a third plane hit the Pentagon, and a fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.  As shocking as it was, it didn't take much for me to figure out that this was some kind of an attack on the United States.  But who?  And why?

My home was only 5 minutes from Wegmans, so as soon as I got in the driveway, I left the groceries in the car, ran into the house and turned on the TV.  All I could see from the aerial shots was a tremendous amount of smoke and dust over southern Manhattan. I was shocked!  I could not believe what I was seeing. What I didn't know was that the first tower had already collapsed.  Just then, my phone rang. It was a reporter from a newspaper....I don't remember which one.  At the time, I was president of the Rochester Pilot's Association and they wanted my thoughts on the national aviation airspace being shut down.  I told them I was just learning of everything and didn't know what to think or say at this point.  I have no idea if my comments got published or not.

I continued watching for a few more minutes.  In all the  smoke and dust, I did not realize that the first building had already collapsed.  The phone rang again.  It was my mother asking me if I was watching this, and if I had seen the plane crash into the building.  Up to then, I had not.  As we were talking, I had an eye on the TV and then I saw the second building collapse.  I said to her, "The building just collapsed!"  Only then did I realize that the first one had collapsed a half hour earlier.

My mother, at that point, had been fighting pancreatic cancer.  She passed away 8 months later.  It's sad for me to know that she spent the last 8 months of her life in the post-9/11 world.

After we hung up, I continued watching the events unfold on TV.  At some point, I managed to get the groceries in from the car and put away.  I received a message that the SHHH meeting was cancelled, and I was asked to come into work earlier, at 1:30, to stand by for whatever was needed on the crew.

I remember that Mary called me at one point, worried about our daughters' reactions to all this.  I reminded her that, like her in her own classroom, their teachers would be handling the situation with their students. That seemed to calm her down about our daughters.  I did leave a note on the table for all of them to read, when they got home, expressing my feelings and offering hope that they were handling this OK.

I arrived at work at 1:30 and don't remember what I did for the first hour and a half.  Probably just sat around, watching coverage from NBC and waiting on standby in case I was needed for something.  I was scheduled in Master Control at 3:00, and that's when I took over.  

Master Control was the position on the crew where you run all the programs and commercials that go over the air.  At the time, our programs came from videotape machines. a satellite feed, or the NBC network feed.  In this case, we were running everything from NBC since they had the resources to show what was going on in New York City, Washington DC, and Shanksville, PA.  I was asked to stay in Master Control for my entire shift, including my lunch break.  We usually rotated crew positions, but on this day, we all stayed in one place for the whole shift so that everyone could focus on one job and there would be no confusion with people changing around.

NBC was based in New York City near Ground Zero.  Since no one knew where these attacks came from, NBC didn't know if the network might get knocked off the air or not.  They sent messages to their affiliate stations, advising us to keep local programming on standby in case the network feed was lost. Therefore, part of our job was to keep the regularly scheduled programming running on our tape machines so that we'd have something to go to if we lost the network.  In the meantime, the news department was keeping up with the local angle.  We actually already had a crew in Albany because of another story that we had planned to cover, but that was cancelled and the crew was sent to New York City to get as close as they were able to get to the World Trade Center.

Through my shift, I continued to keep track of the programs we were running on standby.  All of the commercials were cancelled so we could run news coverage as a public service, which was the original intent of television and radio broadcasting.  I did keep track of the commercial schedule, just in case for some reason they decided to start running them again.  If I recall correctly, I think we went three days without airing any commercials.  That's a lot of lost revenue!

Most of my shift is a blur to me.  Just seeing endless repetitions of videos of the planes crashing into the buildings, the collapses, and all the dust and smoke.

We broke into network coverage several times to give local news updates, and we ran a full half-hour newscast at 11:00 PM.  I actually have the program log from this day.  Program logs are required to be kept for a certain number of years and then they can be destroyed.  When the logs for 9/11/01 and 9/12/01 were slated for shredding, I was able to obtain them.  At this point, if I was able to find a suitable museum that would treat them with the historical respect that they deserve, I'd be happy to donate them.

I signed off my shift at 11:38 PM.  I went home and tried to sleep with visions of buildings collapsing dancing in my head.

I recall that in the immediate days after the attacks, the whole country came together.  No one knew what was going on or who was behind this.  For a brief  moment in time, we were all Americans and the rest of the world was united in support of our country.  It saddens me that over time, politics and crazy conspiracy theories emerged and have divided us.