June 25th is the 116th anniversary of the birth of Irwin Vincent Michael Wiley, born Wilcoszewski, on June 25, 1904 in Chicago, and died July 12, 1994 in California. He is my mother's father. He is our grandfather. We all called him Boompa.
To this day we all here his comments in our heads: "Don't muck around with the moon." "If you want to play, go to a gymnasium." "You little S-you's." "If it's not yours, don't fool with it." "You have to be smarter than the (fill in the blank--toaster, television, etc.)" "Did you teach the teacher anything today?"
He was a child prodigy, graduating from high school at 15, and from Crane Tech at 17. He was a licensed, registered professional engineer for 70 years. He surveyed the ways and calculated the slopes and curves of the road bed from Chicago to Montana, on foot, walking behind the train, for the Milwaukee Railroad. He worked there for almost 50 years.
He went to Mass every morning, even when he became a very old man and it took him an hour to walk the four blocks. He had Spartan discipline. When he became a grandfather at age 44, he realized the impact of his example, and immediately quit smoking, a lifelong habit. Stopped cold and never backslid.
When he began to see signs of the Irish Monster of Alcoholism crop up and begin to eat into the souls of the family, he stopped drinking altogether, quietly, even though he never had the problem himself. He could be a problem drinker from moment to moment, and there are some very wild stories about him, but mostly, he was moderate, and his life was pretty normal. His father had it bad, and so he knew its ravages.
When he was 50, he weighed 165 pounds. He began marking his birthdays backward then, counting down from 50, so that when he was 60 he said he was 40. He declared that he would lose a pound a year for the rest of his life, and when he died, 40 years later at 90, (10), he was exactly 40 pounds lighter, at 125! A spartan engineer!
When we were kids, Boom and Boomp had their house stocked with stuff that never entered our house or only lasted ten seconds there. Coca Cola, bottle after bottle, larders full of it, dill pickles, ice cream, cherries, sausage roll-ups. We used to sleep up in the attic, a wonderland of cool stuff. Boompa hid a stack of Playboy magazines up there, out in the open where we could find them and managed to never catch us looking at them.
He created a gigantic sandbox, filled with Lake Michigan sand, under his back porch steps, in the middle of the Back of the Yards neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, for his grandchildren. It was like a miracle-land. He put in an entirely new bathroom, carpentry, masonry, plumbing, electrics, tile, the works, by himself, with those toughened, incredibly strong and gentle hands of his, when he was 65.
He was a pure blooded Pole, descended from the leader of the Reds, Wilkoszewski, and the leader of the Whites, Gorczynski, from a hundred years earlier in Gdansk, home of the shipyard revolution led by Lech Walensa, that blossomed into the Glasnost movement that ultimately liberated Poland, along with 45 years of American vigilance along the NATO border.
But he was more Irish than most of the Irish in the neighborhood, because he inhaled the very soul of Boom Boom.
Frances Sheehan, daughter of John and Catherine Sheehan. Catherine took Frances aside, when Fran was about 19 and said, "Woosha, don't marry one o' those barbarian Irish boys. You see your cousins, the Fitzgeralds, over here breakin' up the farniture, biting the paperboy, drinking like bristling hogs. Look at those Polish Wiley boys, with their shined shoes and combed hair, going to Communion with their mother. That Irwin, there, he's the best of the bunch." Boom Boom looked him over. They were married until she died in 1997 at age 94.
One of the most telling events of his life took place when he was 14. He came downstairs, got his lunch pail from his beautiful and gentle mother, Wanda Zinn Wilkoszewski, kissed her goodbye and went to school. Then he never saw her again. She died of the Spanish flu that morning, the authorities took her away to the morgue with the thousands of others in the city of Chicago--it was the horrible Spanish flu epidemic of 1918--and she was buried without an open casket. I think he may have spent the next 76 years looking for her, never having that book closed in his mind, never having seen her dead, never really believing it. When she would come up in family talk, I used to watch him bow his head and close his eyes and then look away.
Margaret was sitting with him just before he died, (Just a day or so earlier he described how he had "just been at a cocktail party with some of his brothers and Aunt Pat Leonard and some others from the old neighborhood." All these people had been gone for years. He said the hors d'ouevres were ok but the cheese was a little stale.) But on this occasion, he was holding on to life. Monsignor Maher had been in to see him and proclaimed him the "deepest faith I have ever witnessed."
He used to say that there were two guides for us all the time. First, he said, "Just think about Jesus. There's your example." And he said, "Sometimes you get a hunch, or a nudge, or a little accident happily occurs--that's the Holy Spirit."
He was holding on for something. Margy told him how we were all ok, he had taken real good care of the family, it was ok for him to go. Then he sat up, raised his arms up and smiled as if he saw something, and said, "Mama. Mama. Mama." Then he lay back down, closed his eyes, and in a few minutes quietly slipped into the Hands of God, and I believe, the loving arms of Wanda Zinn Wilcoszewski. I think she brought him into the world, and was there to take him out, as if not an hour had passed since she had handed him his lunch and kissed him goodbye.
The world is a lot better because he was here. He is still here.
Happy Birthday, Boompa. Please keep watching over us like you have always done.
God bless us and keep us and save us from harm.
Love, Patty & Seamus the Older
Out of Asia
I saw the blow strike, the cheek turn-be turned.
The eyes closed, the mouth clamped, the brow twisted.
I saw the billions pouring over the cliff into the sea, saw the Asian swarm.
Suffering Asia, epicanthic folds aligned like fish,
Dying in incredible array.
I saw it in one blow-before Viet Nam.
I have seen it since in nearly every race of man:
My own baby progeny, stepped down from me twice, and his fold.
My daughter, my grandfather, my own eye with Slavic ramp.
When he felt most like crying, my grandfather squinted.
He never cried but he suffered. Before he died he lifted up his arms and said “Mama.”
Then he went, closed his folds, over the cliff. So do we all.
And it seems we all squint.
Sully
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