It has to be hubris. There's no other explanation about why someone would want to write an autobiography. Over-weaning pride – how else to explain the idea that anyone outside of your immediate family [or inside for that matter] would really care about what you've been doing all of these years. Perhaps if I were someone who was a linchpin of history – Dwight Eisenhower for instance – I might be justified in putting down my life. But, I'm not. I'm an average guy. If you saw me walking down the street you wouldn't give me another look. Then, why am I writing this? Maybe to examine my own life now that I've passed that midpoint where I've got more life behind me than in front of me. Maybe because there is so little I know of my forebears that I want to leave something behind for my nieces and nephews when they ask: Gee, what was Uncle Pete like? Thinking over what I'll include in this, I realize that some portions of this are going to be exposing more of me than I might want my family to know. But, how could it be otherwise? If I bowdlerize things, I'll just be taking the easy way out. If you read something in here that you don't like, remember that you've probably got something like that in your life. Just skip that part and go on.

        How far back should I go? It would be foolish to begin this with that "Eve" that was postulated somewhere in mid-Africa. I hardly knew the woman. Better to begin with people with whom I'm familiar.

        I have no memory of my maternal grandfather Charlie Murry. Don't let the name fool you. It was the best effort by some clerk at Ellis Island to transliterate my grandfather's Lebanese name into English.

        Charlie, who probably stood no more than five-foot four if he was lucky, came to the U.S. in the late 19th Century. It's very strange to think that one of my progenitors was cruising around before the turn of the century before last. He was one of the lucky multitudes that didn't get that dreaded "X" chalked on their shoulder for having a wandering eye or a hacking cough.

        He eventually wound up in the Oklahoma Territory. That's another phrase that seems to recall ancient history. Americans – and by that I mean those of us in the US, sorry to the rest of you who live in the Americas, but I don't mean any of you – as a whole have a poor chronological sense when it comes to history. There's the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, and then everything else. Say "Oklahoma Territory" to most Americans and we'll think it was so far back that Julius Caesar probably took a buggy ride there along with his pal Mark Twain with Jason and his Argonauts along as an honor guard.

        Just to put things in perspective, Ty Cobb was a star before Oklahoma became a state. And there's where Charlie Murry landed: low on funds in a country where he didn't speak the language and in need of a job. The railroad was hiring and Charlie signed up. He was just another one of those damn foreigners who weren't good for much else besides lifting, toting, underpaying, and there's plenty more where he came from. Luckily, he was three steps up the food chain: he wasn't Chinese, wasn't of African heritage, and wasn't Irish even though his name sounded like it. Thirty years earlier, Southerners would hire Irish laborers for work too dangerous for slaves – you didn't want an investment getting hurt.

        Internal family history says Charlie worked on the Transcontinental Railroad. He probably didn't, considering when he got here. But it makes a nice story. Charlie worked on the railroad for a week. When he got paid and saw how much he'd earned, he decided that working on the railroad was for someone with a strong back and a weak mind. He took his wages and bought whiskey which he then sold to the Indians. Yes, one of my ancestors exploited the noble Native Americans. But not for long. He was soon arrested, tried, and convicted for infringing on the rights of governmental agencies. If he'd been selling smallpox-infested blankets no one would have cared, but firewater sales were the sole domain of those who greased the right palms.

        He ended up in the federal stockade. Not being a hardened criminal, Charlie soon became a trustee and gained certain privileges, one of which was to accompany the supply wagon into town and help tote bales and lift barges. Fellow prisoners would give Charlie a nickel to buy tobacco, cigars, or other odds and ends not usually available in a federal stockade. His fellow inmates would often let him keep the change. Soon, Charlie had enough money to start buying plugs of tobacco, shoelaces, and other sundry items. Being a Middle Easterner, his first instinct was to sell these – at a markup of course – to his fellow ne'er-do-wells. After a few more trips, Charlie had a little "stand" in the stockade that was the metaphysical equivalent of a "Quickie Mart." This was possible due to the difference in penal reform than from what we have today. After an indeterminate amount of time, this being a family legend, the federal marshal told Charlie he was free to go. Which surprised Charlie since he had several more months left in his sentence. He informed the marshal that he would rather fully pay his debt to society, and besides, the stand was showing a nice profit. The marshal was adamant: time to go. Charlie offered to pay him rent to keep the stand. "You don't understand, Charlie. I'm taking over your stand."

        St. Peter don't you take me 'cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store.

        Now comes one of those compressions of time that result from an undocumented period in the family chronicle. Charlie is now in Pittsburg, Kansas, and the husband of Helena.

        Sadly, I don't know my maternal grandmother's maiden name. Charlie has a store and Helena helps run it while bearing seven children to Charlie.

        I consider that, in itself, a miracle since in my earliest memories of Grandma Murry, she seemed five year older than God. Then again, having seven kids and working to raise seven kids, keep a house, and help run a store would wear one thin. Looking back through family pictures, I wondered who Grandma Murry reminded me of, he said prepositional endingly.

        As you can see from the picture below, if Grandma cultivated a moustache, she would have given Hal Holbrook a run for his money.

        Helena is illiterate in English and probably Aramaic as well, since women, especially in the Old Country, weren't burdened with an education. But, that doesn't mean she's stupid. In the days when cash registers didn't count your items, weigh them, total up the bill, and debit your credit card, Helena could add up a week's groceries for a customer in her head and produce a total faster than I could with a calculator.

        Charlie mostly ran the store and other enterprises around town – there are oblique family references to restaurants and rental properties – while Helena raised the brood. They had livestock, kind of a kitchen-garden zoological assembly: chickens and lambs and other small edible animals.

        From the family references, she had an antipathy toward chickens: "If you want to go broke slowly, raise chickens," was a aphorism attributed to my grandmother.

        Supposedly there was a particularly territorial rooster in the brood that pecked Grandma Murry once to often, so she decapitated him on the spot by grabbing his head and cracking him like a whip.

        Grandpa Murry would occasionally slaughter a spring lamb and would enjoy the warm – uncooked – liver with an Ouzo-like liquor called [phonetically] Ah-da.

        Today we worry about undercooked hamburger.

        Grandma Murry was less than five feet tall. She looked, in my memories of her, remarkably like Samuel Clemens, but a little more barrel-shaped. She was fearless, according to my mother.

        "There was a time when she saw a rat climbing the wall. She snatched it by its tail and smashed it brains out," my mother said.

        Which begs the question: What the hell was a rat doing climbing a wall inside of their house? There have been hints and intimations that Charlie and Helena didn't live under the same roof toward the end of their marriage. They did cohabitate long enough to have six girls and a boy. The exact order of births is unclear, but I think the boy, Pete [for whom I am a namesake], was born in the middle.

        The story goes that when my mother, the youngest of the brood, was born, the doctor came out and told Charlie he'd have to think of another girl's name.

        "Jesus Christ!" Charlie said, dismayed by his run of luck in producing females.

        "Sorry, Charlie, that name's already been used, and besides that, she's a girl."

        The girl was named Blanche Eileen Murry and was my mother. She was the "baby" of the family, already having nieces older than herself. We'll leave Blanche there and take a look at my paternal roots.

        John Nofel was fortunate, his name translated fairly easily into English. John's history is also shrouded in the Unknown. From what I understand, his mother came to the US and brought John with her when he was a child. Also from Lebanon, they had the genetic proclivity to sell things to people. Grandpa Nofel related disconnected stories about how he would go door-to-door with his mother selling odds and ends: thread, buttons, and sundry items. He, too, ended up in the "Quickie Mart" business, but in Cleveland, Ohio.

        While stories of Charlie and Helena are told with fondness, family tales of John do not have the same positive PR. Charlie was a hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy who only lit one cigarette a day: from then on he lit the next one with the butt of the last. If he were down to his last two nickels, he spend one buying a beer for a friend he'd just met and use the other as the foundation for a new business which always put food on the table for him and his wife and kids. Maybe he and Helena fought, but no one ever had anything bad to say about Charlie.

        John had a sour view of life. There was never a good deed done to him that didn't have a slight in it somewhere. Where Charlie saw the silver lining, John only saw the dark cloud. John married a Lebanese lass – Ella – from Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, and fathered a large clan as well: three girls and two boys. Minera was the oldest with George the next in line.

        Perhaps the poverty in John's early life influence his outlook, but for him, money was the driving force in his life, and he used his children as a means toward that end.

        George was one of the smarter of his siblings. Born in 1922, he saw the worst of the Great Depression. After grade school at St. Stephen's on the Near West Side of Cleveland, he went on to one of the premier Catholic high schools in Cleveland at the time, St. Ignatius. In his freshman year in the Jesuit school he did well academically and played trumpet in the marching band. But, school wasn't free, and nickels didn't fall from the sky. John soon had him transferred to West Technical High School, a public high school. Hey, it was free.

        Today we call them magnet schools and think they're a wonderful innovation. Back then, it was a city-wide school that prepared students for blue-collar careers: welding, cabinet-making, foundry, automotive, career secretarial, electrical work. George lasted there until he was sixteen. Then John found him a job.

        Why go to school when you can work and earn money? George was soon working in a welding shop, doing grunt labor, unloading charged gas cylinders from trucks, and loading trucks with empties.

        Here's a little tidbit I learned during my stint as an editor of a gas and welding supply magazine: Acetylene does not like being acetylene. It would much rather be simpler materials. It hates being acetylene so much that you can't compress it to any extent or it spontaneously reduces itself with an amazing vigor. In order to successfully compress acetylene, you must fill a metal cylinder with a plaster-like material, soak the material with acetone, and then fill with acetylene gas. This makes for an astoundingly heavy gas cylinder: a couple of hundred pounds. Now imagine loading and unloading these monsters by hand. At sixteen.

        Now, even though the hours were long and the work hard, at least George was paid. But wait, he's got brothers and sisters, and it was John that found him that fine job. Here son, endorse that paycheck and give it to me. And, here's a couple of nickels for yourself.

        Jump-cut to the beginning of the 1950s. Television is the latest technical marvel. George and his sister Norma buy their father a TV. Wow, first on the block. It was the size of a small refrigerator with an eight-inch, black and white screen. Will wonders never cease? It made sense back then to pay an annual insurance premium to maintain this electronic conglomeration of tubes, condensers, and wire.

        George and Norma plunked down the money for the first year. Before the year is out, both George and Norma left home.

        Phone call: "Judge [why my grandfather christened his oldest son with a name he couldn't pronounce correctly in English is another one of those mysteries of my life]?"

        "Hi, Dad."

        "I got a letter in the mail today that the insurance for the TV needs to be renewed."

        "Yeah?"

        "Well, aren't you going to pay for it?"

        "Dad, I'm married. I have my own home."

        "Humph. Well, if your going to be that way . . . "

        The insurance wasn't renewed, the TV soon went on the fritz, and John had a nice wooden cabinet upon which to set flower arrangements if he ever cared to buy flowers which would just die anyway and you don't get flowers for a nickel you know. This gives you some idea of what John Nofel was like. There wasn't a crossroads in my father's early life where John didn't force him down a path that was usually a dead end.

        George ended up working manual labor and going to night school to get a high school diploma. Tough life for a kid. But not to worry, George soon has a younger brother, Bernard. But  Bernie is the apple of John's eye. Nothing's too good for him. Where George is quiet, smart, and endowed with a sense of right that can make him stubborn; Bernie is loud, flamboyant, and a wiseguy.

        Bernie got the leather jacket where George got the cloth. Bernie was sent to a Catholic high school until he flunked out; George paid his own way through night school. Bernie had his way greased into a bricklayer apprenticeship while George got shunted from one manual labor job to another because John found one that pays a nickel an hour more.

        One of the best things that happened in George life took place in the Pacific: the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. George was soon drafted into the Army.

        Basic training took place in one of those temporary Southern mudholes the Army calls a Camp. Being smart and able to follow orders – he's had a lifetime of training from his father – George soon became a non-comm and part of the training cadre. For a while. He soon got his orders to join the fighting in Europe. He didn't participate in D-Day, but he did have the pleasure of wading from a landing craft up to the beachhead in late fall weather because the LST driver didn't want to take a chance of running aground and getting stuck.

        Several minutes in icy water and then several hours in wet clothes knocked George down with a raging case of pneumonia. A dozen years earlier and he would have been just one more casualty, but Army doctors pump him full of that new penicillin stuff and he's back on the front lines just in time for the Battle of the Bulge.

        George spent his army career as a combat engineer: the troops on the bleeding edge of the front lines clearing mine fields, building bridges, and fixing roads so the infantry can follow up behind them to fight the enemy. Unfortunately, George was a bit too close to where a German artillery round decided to land. It blew out his eardrum. It's not a E-ticket home, but the Purple Heart he's awarded added points to his time in service and he's eventually released back to the States. There's a shiny chunk of gray metal about the size of a dice cube in a cigar box in his dresser drawer. It's part of the shrapnel from the shell that took out his eardrum. Each month, the government sends him a check for $21 – the going price for being deaf in one ear.

        It's 1950 and George and his cousin Johnny Joseph had a car, money from their army service, and itchy feet. They decided to travel. By what chance or direction I don't know, they end up in Pittsburg, Kansas.

        "Hey George, I've got a distant relation that has six daughters. Let's go see her."

        By now, most of Charlie and Helena's daughters are married. Only the youngest is still single. Blanche grew up as part Depression baby and part Swing Kid. She danced to the Big Bands and nightclubbed with a stable of beaus. She wasn't fast; her mother saw to that, as did her older sisters. She went to the local Catholic high school, learned typing, sewing, home ec, and the other classes that the powers that be figured girls would need to be good wives and fine mothers. She graduated near the top of her class of 27 students.

        It was a time when "sex" was the box where you checked "Male" or "Female." One girl in her high school class was allowing boys to "do it" with her.

        "Don't you know you can get a baby that way?"

        "Oh, Blanchie, you're crazy. Doctor's bring babies in their black bags."

        Obviously, this girl didn't have the edible home-livestock that the Murry's had, or she didn't benefit from their procreative examples.

        George met Blanche and was smitten. There's a black and white photo he took of her in her front yard. She's got dark hair with twin jelly-roll curls above her temples. She's wearing a dark dress with white cuffs and collar. She's facing the camera with her arms at her waist, holding what looks like a peony flower. Her eyes shine and her lipstick looks nearly black. It was taken late in the day with a flash because she's showcased against a dark background with only the ghost of her house behind her.

        They decide to get married. Hurrah! I'm nearly alive. It was so nice they did it twice. In the days before interstate highways and cheap airfare, getting from Pittsburg to Cleveland is an ordeal involving three days of train travel. One ceremony took place in Pittsburg and was a Roman Catholic ceremony. The other took place in Cleveland where the happy couple are once again united, but this time in a Maronite Catholic ceremony. The difference between the two sects is tough to ascertain from this point in my life. Maybe one eats their soft-boiled egg from the small end and the other from the big. What does matter is that John is a wheel in the Maronite sect. All of this will later cause me grief. September 14, 1950 is their recognized anniversary. About 15 months later, I am born. Unlike David Copperfield, I know I am the hero of this narrative.

        Dad was born in 1922 and he has 22 silver dollars minted in 1922. More about those later. Mom and Dad were living the American dream. Married, a baby, and a house of their own. Dad moved up since his days on West 54th Street where the narrow houses stand shoulder-to-shoulder like soldiers in tight formation. On Bernard Avenue, a side street bracketed by West 105th Street and West 110th Street, they have a two-story house with a full attic and full basement with a front and back yard. Dad had his high school diploma, but he worked in the Cadillac plant. Lots of GIs back from the war and although the economy is rolling along, labor was cheap and he's lucky to have had a job. I was a December baby and the house was cold. Down in that full basement there was a gravity furnace the size of a houseboat.

        Those contraptions have no blower. Air heated by the furnace is supposed to rise in the ducts and force the cold air down from the top of the house into the cold-air return duct, a tube the size of a Stalag 17 escape tunnel. It's a "gentle" heat, they say. So "gentle" that the house is freezing most of the time. In an effort to keep from freezing, my parents close off the second floor and move their bed and my crib into the dining room. Global warming is half a century away and it's a hard winter in Cleveland.

The saga continues as time and effort permit