Joe's Birthday

Today is me Grandpa Joe's birthday. He would have been 121. Sure, that would not be a likely age for him to have made. But I can imagine the hell he would have raised if he had.

He passed away August 27, 1991, just shy of 86, so we buried him pretty close to his birthday. He smoked heavy from his teens (his doctor at the end remarked that his lungs were probably like leather). No doubt some tobacco farmer lived the high life because of Joe. 

I remember him smoking Carltons. It's a silly thing to be sentimental over but I can still see clearly those red packages they came in, and him opening a fresh one on his front porch, tearing the cellophane off with a carpet knife because that's what he did when something didn't open readily enough. Which, for his purposes, they typically would not. 

He went home in style. Me Pops rented a large black Chevy Suburban and drove Joe back to Jacksonville, Illinois for internment. Joe always promised himself he was going to buy one new car before he died. He never did, but his last trip was in one. I wonder if, perhaps, that was Pops' salute to his old man.

Down at the funeral home in Jacksonville I remember me and me cousin Art were standing by the casket. One or the other of us said, "This ain't right."

"What?" the other asked.

"He can't leave this world without a pack of cigarettes."

"I'll get the smokes, you get the lighter," I said. Off we were to find a store. I bought a pack of Carltons for the first and only time in my life. Art got the lighter. The undertaker solemnly placed both in the vest pocket of Joe's suit.

A little while later we were talking to an uncle, telling him what we'd done. "I don't know that that was a good idea," Uncle remarked. "What if that butane mixes with the gases of the body decomposing? It might cause an explosion."

Hell, Joe would have loved that! Dirt spraying up and the headstone falling over to the side? Magnificent. And I can't help imagining me Grandma Cosgriff lying next to him, shaking her head and tsk tsking. She had to do that often enough in life, and now two of her grandkids go and give Joe one final reason to annoy her. Everyone else in the cemetery would be thinking, 'That's just Joe'. Grandpa would simply be cackling in the way he always did when he found something funny, a hee hee hee as though forced out of his body.

Happy Birthday Joe. I know you're still rooting that explosion.

Laying the money down

They're always in a hurry until it's time to lay the money down. That's an old saw of me Pops, and it holds true as much now as whenever he first said it. Yet it still amazes me that it happens, that people will hold off on paying for things which, theoretically at least, pay for their living, their food and trucks and houses and such.

For larger projects and orders, except from well established customers, we get significant down payments. Even then, with as much as half down, we'll have folks leave things hanging for weeks, or even months. Yet there are repairs which we simply do and trust that they guy will return. Generally that involves things which we can easily sell to someone else if it comes down to it.

A good example is repaired sectional drain cables. If a fella doesn't return after awhile we just sell them. I won't bore you with the details, but we can make it up to the original customer if it comes down to it. Why, I would even honor our oldest obligation on that count.

We have a man, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, whom we owe six cables from 1983. We called him several times back then until the old man decided it was no longer worth his trouble. Yet if he comes in today I will give him the cables he's owed. I will even sell them to him at the price we charged back then, nine bucks a cable (they're $35 each now) just for the novelty of it. And out of an odd respect for the chutzpah it would take to try and claim them 43 years later.

Hey, it may even make good PR, right?

Cooling Agent

Sometimes at the Shop we have to heat things. Maybe two parts won't come apart, maybe a bolt won't loosen; you get the idea. Consequently we keep a large bucket of water near our work bench in case we need to cool hot metal. You know, for safety's sake. Because we Cosgriffs are all about safety.

So one day Pops was heating something or other while fixing a machine for a customer; I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name. When Dad finished he dropped the red hot whatever into the bucket of water. Cloyce asked, "Is that water, Cosgriff?"

With a twinkle in his eye Pops answered, "No. It's a special chemical compound called H2O".

"Oh," Cloyce responded with about half a laugh.

A few months later Cloyce was back, this time with a friend. Pops was heating something up again, and dropped the part in the water as he finished. Cloyce said to his buddy, "I bet you think that's water, don't you?"

"Uhh, yeah," the guy answered uncertainly.

"Nope. That's a special chemical compound called H2O," Cloyce responded. Dad said you tell that Cloyce was proud of that faux scientific factoid because he clearly did not realize that H2O was water.

"Really?" the man in turn responded, giving a curious eye towards Pops, who simply but mildly shrugged his shoulders. The man himself clearly knew H2O was water, but left it at that.

I believe Dad was happy that he did. After all, he was only cracking a joke however many months ago. He was not out to embarrass old Cloyce. 

Cool Ghoul Cloyce

As he sat on the front porch with a cup of coffee one warm summer morning me Pops heard an old friend, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, coming down the street. "George!" Cloyce was yelling. "Here George! Come here, George!"

Eventually he came into sight. "What's going on, Cloyce?" Pops asked as his friend.

"The dog ran off," his buddy explained. "I'm trying to find him."

"Well, good luck," Dad offered. Then he asked what you would think an obvious question. "The dog's name is George?"

Cloyce bristled just a bit. "Nah, the kids named him Cool Ghoul."  He gave a quick, dismissive wave to me Pops unspoken question, then continued, "But I ain't going around the neighborhood yelling, Cool Ghoul! Here Cool Ghoul!" 

Pops laughed. Eventually Cloyce found George. Er, Cool Ghoul.

Enough is Enough

Me Pops had this old friend, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who apparently did not have the best marriage.

A couple of years after Cloyce lost his wife, the woman's sister's husband passed away. Awhile after the funeral, Cloyce got a call from his former in-law. She suggested that, with their respected spouses gone, perhaps they could get together.

"What did you say?" Pops asked on being told the story.

"I told her no," Cloyce responded. "I said I spent 40 years with your sister, and that was enough."

"Ouch," Dad said. "That even hurt me."

The staring contest

Old Amos was tight. He was a good man yet he was very careful with his money. Consequently, me Grandpa Joe would often send Amos out to buy this or that for the welding business. He knew Amos would get him the best deal. One story me Pops liked to tell involved such an event.

I can't remember now what it was Joe wanted, but he sent Dad and Amos after it because it would take two people to handle whatever contraption he wanted to buy. Dad drove, and then simply stood back to watch Amos at work.

Amos tried every way in the world to get the seller to back down on price. He begged, he pleaded, he pointed out flaws in the machine. The guy wouldn't budge. It reached the point where Amos stopped talking and began pacing. He would pace a few steps beyond the man and then return. On his return, Dad said, Amos would stop abruptly right in front of the guy and spend a few seconds just glaring at him. Then he'd walk on, return, and do the same thing. He must have been trying to intimidate him, was all Pops could think.

After as few minutes of this, during which the seller did exchange a quizzical look at the old man, the guy finally said, "Look, just give me my price. But I'll put a lower one on the bill of sale to help you out on the sales tax."

Amos would have none of that. "Now, listen here. I want to get the best price I can out of you," he explained to the seller. "But what goes on paper is going to be right no matter what we agree to." Amos then resumed his pacing tactic.

As I recall (I wish I'd have listened more closely to Pops' stories) they eventually agreed on a price and Dad and Amos took the thing to the Shop because Joe had to have it. But I sure would have liked to have seen that battle of wills, that staring contest.

Clean Slate

Bush's Drug Store was pretty much right across the street from the house me Pops grew up in at 1104 Putnam in Detroit. The Cosgriff family frequented it for their medicines and whatever other sundries the store might have offered.

One day when in his teens me Pops and a friend were drifting around the old neighborhood, killing time on a winter afternoon. As the pair neared the store his buddy said to Dad, "Bet you can't hit Bush's sign with a snowball." Above the doorway, adorned with the Coca-Cola moniker, was sign which said 'Bush's Drugs', a typical way of advertising in the day. Actually, until yet I suppose.

"Sure I can," a supremely confident Teenage Pops replied. He scooped up a handful of snow, packed it tightly, and let it fly, striking the sign dead center.

It shattered into dozens of pieces. Pops assumed the sign was metal or wood, but it was slate. On that cold day, a well pitched snowball was bound to do irreparable harm.

'This is going to take weeks for me to pay for,' Teenage Pops thought woefully. But right was right, and the Cosgriffs and Mr. Bush were friends as well as patrons and druggists, so Dad went in to confess what he had done.

"I threw a snowball at your Coke sign and it shattered, Mr. Bush," he explained when the pharmacist came from a back room.

Mr. Bush offered a wry smile. "Well, young man, you picked a good day. They're coming out tomorrow with a new sign to replace it. Clean up the debris and we'll be fine."

The fog lifted, the angels sang, and Teenage Pops' Shop salary wouldn't be dunned. Life was good.

Learning From Me Pops

I just received my new business cards. I had the Shop address put on them. That should not surprise; the locals who actually come to see me need to know where its at while it doesn't really matter to the out of towners. And I learned from me Pops not to use me home address on such ephemera.

Me Pops was a smart man. But like so many of us he made his share of tactical errors, as he would himself confess. One was putting his home address, since it was also his business mailing address (mail never has come to the old barn, for whatever reason), on his first business cards. He found out quickly that that was a mistake.

Customers, and not the good and worthwhile ones, would hunt him down at horribly odd hours, 8:30 at night on a Saturday for example, to fix their cable or machine which had been broken for five days because they had an emergency job to handle. Dad, having a wife and bunch of rug rats to feed, clothe, and house, and also being concerned with someone else's emergency (who wants a backed up sewer at any time let alone late on a Saturday evening?) would generally open up and take care of business.

Yet that got old very fast. And, again, it was the less than stellar drain cleaners who demanded his time. Add this to the fact that a homeowner in dire straits would find another way out of their dilemma somehow, and he stopped such late night weekend nonsense. It would teach those special plumbers a valuable lesson too: get your drain snake fixed when it breaks, and not only when you would need it, potlikker.

Spliced Cloyce

I don't think you need to know a lot about drain snake cables to understand this tale.

Back in the 60s and 70s there was this one plumber, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who was as the parlance says, so tight he squeeked. He had the first dollar he ever made. He'd squeeze a penny so hard Lincoln would yell. You get the picture.

One day old Cloyce came into the Shop to have me Pops repair his cable, which had broken. Again. When a snake cable breaks you can use a threaded metal piece called a splice to fix the break. In this particular case the cable was broken less than 18 inches from the end. Typically in such instances Pops would put on an end fitting rather than a splice, as splices too close to a cable end can cause problems. Trust me on that.

So the old man says to Cloyce, "I'll just put an end fitting on."

Cloyce was aghast. He was almost panic stricken at the thought. "Oh, no, Bill, splice it. I can't lose any length; that's my good cable.

Me Pops looked over the snake. He counted 18 splices in Cloyce's 'good' cable. The thing needed to be replaced, but Cloyce was too tight for that. So Dad spliced it and charged accordingly. 

The fact was that with what he had paid for over 18 splices (well, 19) he could have more than paid for a new cable. Probably two, honestly. Yet that's simply not how old Cloyce thought. He was a forest for the trees sort of guy.

Near Reunions

One day back in 2003, me Pops, me self, and me son Charlie sat at the office in the Shop, drinking coffee. Hey, it was a well deserved break. We'd been working hard that day.

Anyway, for whatever reason me Pops was staring up at the calendar on the wall. He observed, "Man, time flies. I have my fiftieth high school reunion coming up."

Curious myself about mine at that remark I did some quick math and said, "Yeah, really. Looks like my twenty-fifth is next year." 

As a little smarmy smile grew on his face, me son Charlie remarked, "I'm coming up on my second."

Touche, boy. Touche.

The Fiftieth Cosgriff

Although it does not happen so much as it once did, I will still occasionally get a robocall aimed at me Pops. That's not surprising, seeing as I use the same business number from when he started up in 1966.

You've gotten them, I'm sure, where the computer voice begins, "This is a call for" after which there is a brief pause before the apparently same voice fills in, in this case, "William Cosgriff" before proceeding. Naturally enough I hang up on them.

One call did make me raise an eyebrow. "This is a call for," the voice started, then said, "William the Fiftieth Cosgriff." I was perplexed, even intrigued, yet went ahead and hung up.

A couple days later, and then again after that, calls came in for William the Fiftieth Cosgriff. I nearly hit 'one' to take the call. I was that curious. Then I remembered: his middle name being Leo, there were times where he sent things out as William L. Cosgriff. 'L' is the Roman numeral for 50. The artificially generated voice was translating the capital L as a form of fifty.

Sometimes artificial intelligence is as dumb as regular human intelligence.

Cousins Have Your Back

When me Pops graduated from High School in 1954, he and his cousin Jerry took a three week trip out west to celebrate. They drove an old station wagon, figuring to spend some nights sleeping in the back to save on hotel costs. Sometimes one of them would drive while the other caught a nap. 

Being young and naive, and consider too that it was the middle Nineteen Fifties, they occasionally picked up hitchhikers. They only had a scare once.

Pops had picked the guy up while Jerry was asleep in back, dozing under a blanket. Everything seemed all right at first. But then the man began talking out of his head. It was all nonsense stuff, me Pops recalled, yet the guy was getting himself all worked up and increasingly animated, throwing his arms around to emphasize this or that point, and growing angry.

"What am I gonna do?" thought the old man, traipsing across the barren landscape of I believe New Mexico. Glancing at the rear view mirror, he realized that an apparently awake Jerry was worried too. Dad had seen a hand reach out from under a blanket and stealthily grab an empty glass Coke bottle, sliding it back with him obviously for use as the weapon Jerry was increasingly convinced would be needed.

Thankfully nothing came of it. When they had reached the hitchhiker's destination the guy readily hopped out, said thanks to the boys, and went about his day. Yet they stopped picking up hitchhikers after that.

Pops Strikes Joe

I've mentioned many times that me Grandpa Joe rented welding equipment and that me Pops worked for him. I don't believe that I've talked about how Pops was a Teamster. Joe paid for Dad to be union because many sites in the fifties, sixties, and seventies wanted only union workers on the job. It had further advantages for Pops and Joe too. It gave Dad health insurance, something well needed for a man with a wife and 7 kids, and a pension of sorts. I say of sorts because I don't believe the Teamsters did Pops justice on that count, but that's another story.

Anyway, for a long time every three years there was a new contract. I remember a couple of times as young teen toiling at the old barn, the Teamsters business agent would come by the Shop with the master contract to 'negotiate' it with Grandpa Joe. You know, to discuss if there were any particulars peculiar to Dad's job which the master contract either didn't touch or was vague about. For Joe and the agent I think it was simply a reason to kill an hour as they usually just looked over a few points and then shot the breeze; even Pops would join in here and there, just talking. There was never a problem of course.

But what great fun there could have been if there had been issues. Can you imagine the business agent ordering William Cosgriff to go on strike against Joe? Could you see me old Pops walking a one man picket line outside the old barn, 'Joe Cosgriff UNFAIR!' being proclaimed from the sign he'd carry. Or maybe Dad chanting between himself, 'What do I want? FAIR WAGES! When do I want them? NOW!' We could have even gotten him an old oil drum to light a fire to warm himself if it were winter.

And what about poor me? Do I cross the picket line to work for the man who was paying me, or respect my father and stay home in sympathy? Oh, it would have been the latter, but, sadly, out of a reason to be lazy rather than support a strike, all under the guise of supporting me Dad. What could be better?

It never would have happened. Yet, the possibilities and images make me chuckle.

Cloyce TV

Me Pops had an old friend growing up, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who spent part of his adult life as an over the road trucker. Cloyce liked the job, other than one particular day.

Generally, Cloyce didn't haul one load of one given item. His truck trailers would be filled with all sorts of miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam destined for someplace other than where they began. He merely picked up a trailer, drove it to terminal, and was given another trailer for the flip flop. Easy peasy.

But one day he was given a load which was nothing but brand new RCA color console TVs. You know, those wooden behemoths which were the centerpiece of most of our dens and living rooms in the Sixties and Seventies. The retail cost of the load was around $60,000, not chump change today but a much heftier sum in 1967.

Cloyce found he was scared to death the whole time he had that trailer full of television sets. "Bill, there's people out there who hijack trucks when they know such valuable things take up the whole trailer, " Cloyce was explaining to me Pops. "They'll kill you over that!"

It wasn't too much later that Cloyce found another job. He didn't want to get another haul like that.

Golf Cart Shower

Joe Cosgriff rented welding equipment and me Pops worked for him. That meant the old man got to know a lot of folks in the construction trades. One such fella, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, had a streak of Big Kid in him.

Cloyce was job foreman who ran many large jobs for the company he worked for way back when. He was known for being a bit of prankster too. It never interfered with his work though, and was always in good fun.

On the bigger construction sites it wasn't unusual for the company to have a golf cart available so that Cloyce could get around more quickly. One day him and me Pops were out looking for a particular guy for some reason; I don't recall what. When informed that he was on the other side of the plant where they were working Cloyce told Dad, "C'mon, Red (Dad was called Red back then because he had red hair when he was younger), let's hop in the golf cart and go find him."

Cloyce drove them outside the building to tool around to the opposite side; it would be easier than weaving in and out of machinery and what not inside. Pops said that as they passed beyond a corner there was a huge puddle, really a small lake, left in the parking lot from a thunderstorm the night before. He guessed it as better than a hundred feet wide. And he noticed a small grin on Cloyce's face, and a glint in his eye.

"I knew what was coming," Dad would explain in telling the tale, "So I figured I might as well enjoy the ride." Cloyce turned cart right towards the center of that lake and tore through it, completely inundating the old man and himself in the tremendous shower of water which their little vehicle created, both of them shouting like banshees all the while.

It happened that the man they were looking for was standing right in a doorway as the two approached him. "What happened to you guys?" he asked, mouth agape.

"Just ran into a heavy rain," Cloyce answered, as though nothing was out of the ordinary.

The man looked up at the blinding sun, then back at the two soaked golf cart passengers, merely shaking his head.

Pops Had the Power

For the last thirty five or so years of Joe Cosgriff's life, me Pops, his son, had full power of attorney over him. What that meant was that Dad could make any and all decisions about my grandfather's person, property, or business arbitrarily and unilaterally, without Joe's permission or even knowledge. Me Pops could have sold his house, his cars, drained Grandpa Joe's bank account, anything.

That's all stuff Dad would never have done, of course. But Grandpa wanted Pops to be able to make business decisions for him whenever Joe was on the road, which was often. He figured that with no easy ways of communication back then, sixty or seventy years ago, he'd set things up so that me Pops could immediately do whatever was necessary to run the family welding rental business. Joe figured that giving his son full power of attorney was the easiest way to do that: decisions could be made by Dad on the spot.

The lawyer setting it all up was aghast. He vehemently advised Joe not to do it. "It's dangerous to give someone that kind of power over your person and property, Mr. Cosgriff!'" the man argued.

"Hell, if I can't trust him now, when can I trust him?" Grandpa Joe shot back.

Joe and the old man had a good relationship, I tell you what. A good relationship.

Cosgriff Coffee

We Cosgriffs, at least us Detroit and Illinois Cosgriffs, loves our coffee. I actually get the urge double, seeing as me Grandpaw Hutchins, me Mom's Dad, loved his coffee too. Anyway, family lore, and by family lore I mean that both me Pops and me Grandpa Joe insist it's true, holds the following tale.

When me Pops was about 5, Joe took him along on a train ride to visit family in Illinois. In Chicago, I believe, they had to switch trains. There was a layover of a couple hours, so Joe takes his eldest into a diner at the station to mark the time and grab a bite.

The waitress approached right after they had sat themselves at a table. Setting down menus, she followed with the typical, "Can I start you boys off with something?"

"Two coffees, one black, one half and half," Joe responds.

As Joe tells it, me very young Pops looks up at him and asks innocently, "Joe, you gonna drink that coffee with cream?"

"Two black coffees," me Grandpa corrected himself to the waitress.

That's knowing how you like your coffee, folks.

 

Red and Blue

Dad liked to play poker. Just penny ante stuff at the kitchen table; no big stakes. Well, once years ago when he and his brothers and friends played regularly on Saturday nights he found himself on a hot streak which lasted several weeks. As most games were played at his house, Pops was teased a lot about marking the cards before the guys arrived for a game. So he decided one day to, I guess you'd say, call their bluff.

He bought a brand new deck of cards to use for the next Saturday's game. He left it in the plastic wrapping until time for the first deal, which would be his. Dad was going to make a show of how that game would be fair by opening the cards in front of the guys. It was meant to be all in good fun, going along with his being ragged about card marking.

So Saturday night came, everyone sat down, and Pops pulls out the new deck. You can all see for yourselves, fellahs, that this is a new set of playing cards which are obviously untouched, he says, or something similar. He gets a knife and cuts the clear plastic wrap, opens one end of the box, and triumphantly fans out the red-backed poker cards for all to see. Well, they were red, except the one blue-backed card (which happened to be an ace of spades!) amidst all the others. Sure, Bill, you don't mark deck.

Even Dad got a belly laugh out of that. As poker players might say about such things, 'What are the odds?'

Bill Cosgriff's Poker Glory

Dad liked to play poker. Not high stakes poker as you see on TV. Just penny ante stuff, nickels and dimes, maybe quarters. He often hosted poker games with family and friends. Even I had the chance several times to play cards with the guys.

One of his favorite, sort of, that is, games, was the time he held four kings. You don't have to know a lot about poker to know that four of a kind is a powerful hand, and especially strong with face cards. It was draw poker too. That's not like the hold 'em variety so popular lately. There were no community cards: each player held five cards none of which were revealed to the table during play.

So Dad held his kings, and was starting to feel the rush of victory when another player, someone named George, began calling Dad's raises and then raising him more. Needless to say, Dad raised and re-raised himself, properly confident of a big win as the coins piled up in the center of the table. He couldn't wait for the reveal, when he would set down those cowboys and rake in those coins. You need to know that this was in the 1960s, when a pot of 12 or 15 dollars was much more significant than today. $100 dollars a week was good money then.

Dad raised, George raised, and that pot kept growing. Showing those kings was becoming a more satisfying thought every time and Pops was anticipating it with relish. And then my Uncle Bob chimed in.

He said to George, "You better have something, because Bill doesn't bluff."

"I fold," said George immediately. Dad not only lost a shot at kitchen table poker glory, he wasn't even able to keep building the pot on a sure win.

He never did show the guys his hand. He didn't have to. It wasn't called. But he also never quite forgave my uncle.

Pops nearly shot himself

Jokes and novelty songs have been made about this type of situation, but one day me Pops almost shot himself. Really.

It's been nearly fifty years ago. One summer we took a four week family vacation to see Mom's people in North Carolina. Pops drove everybody down in the old Dodge Polara station wagon, stayed a week with us, then left the car there for Mom and us kids while he flew back to Detroit for two weeks. He returned for the fourth week and drove us all back home after that. He spent the two weeks in the middle (other than working) replacing the front porch on our house. It was easier for him to do that chore without us rugrats in the way.

After a few days he had completed the deck but not the stairs. But it was late so he went to bed, knowing he had plenty of time to add them. Yet he hadn't counted on me Grandma Cosgriff's paranoia interfering with his sleep.

Me grandparents lived next door, and Grandpa Joe was off on one of his jaunts for a couple weeks. Grams called Pops in the middle of the night and said she heard a prowler. He grabbed his pistol and rushed out the front door.

He threw open the door and took three quick, unthinking steps. On the fourth step, the step just exactly too far, he realized to himself just too late, 'There ain't no stairs'. He fell face down onto the ground, his pistol in hand right under his chest. Yes, he fell smack on top of the gun.

Luckily, obviously, it didn't go off. And of course, there was no prowler. Pops would often tell the story, yet with a nervous laugh even years later.