“Give Me My Freedom, For As Long As I Be”

“All I Ask of Living is to Have No Chains on Me”

Give me my freedom for as long as I be.
All I ask of living is to have no chains on me.
All I ask of living is to have no chains on me,
And all I ask of dying is to go naturally.
Oh I want to go naturally.” ~~~ And When I Die (Blood, Sweat, and Tears) (1970)

[Update: 7/10/11 – just came across this wonderful essay on the dumbing down of “The Great Gatsby”, was moved by the excerpted passages of Fitzgerald’ beautiful prose, and couldn’t help but note the contrast: the Wolfe’s not Carraway’s!:

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day. – end update].

As I sit quietly and listen to the muffled distant explosions of fireworks echo on this eve of the 4th of Juy, I contemplate just what the Fourth of July really means to me.

You can keep all your patriotic , “don’t tread on me”, “rockets red glare”, declaration of independence, war mongering, flag waiving, crap.

When I was a kid, the 4th of July had nothing to do with patriotism – it meant a huge family picnic at my grandparent’s house.

That’s because July 4th was my Grandfather “Pop” Wolfe’s birthday.

The Wolfe’s were 19th century Polish immigrants. They weren’t here with the Founding Fathers, but their story is part of the living history that illustrates the meaning and the best of this country, blending feeedom and liberty with economic justice and social mobility.

Those are the core principles implicit in the Motto: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”.

The meaning of their story is just as important and remains as relevant as the formal foundational documents, like the Declaration of Independence, that we celebrate on this day (with Liberty and Justice for All, and all that jive). The economic justice component – long forgotten and still unrealized – was fleshed out in FDR’s “Four Freedoms speech.

Here’s “Pop” in 1962 – he’s the guy in the middle of 4 generations of Wolfe men:

Four Generations of Wolfe’s (1962)

I loved Pop. He used to reminisce about his days as a baseball player. He enjoyed talking to me about my own baseball exploits, as I was a precocious star baseball player.

Pop was a die hard Boston Red Sox fan, so I heard a lot about Ted Williams. As a kid, I can recall him telling me that he played on a Yonkers City champion team when he was a kid, which was a big deal at the time, and an accomplishment for which he won a tiny but real gold baseball. He gave that memorabilia to me, but I’m sad to say I lost it somewhere along the way.

Before Pop was born, his dad, great Grandpop Wolfe’s family, had left the 19th century Massachusetts mill town of Lowell when the mills started to close, in search of opportunity in New York. I don’t know when the Wolfe family immigrated to the US or where Great Grandpop was born, but he was born circa 1875 and raised his family in Yonkers NY. I recall him as a funny old man who smoked cigars. He died at around 95 (when I was about 7).

I never knew much of Great Grandpop Wolfe or the Lowell millwork experience, but when my Dad was young, he worked for his dad, in the family’s small trucking/moving business. But that didn’t work out, in part due to Pop’s service in the Navy in WW II. When Pop returned from the War, he tried to re-establish the moving business and later formed a new business installing floors. But, that didn’t work out either.

Although I remain sketchy on the timeframes, somewhere along the line, my Dad was drafted into the Army during the Korean “police action”, and the Wolfe’s flooring business failed too. After that, dad came home and married mom. Despite my Mom’s nagging him to make something more of himself, dad went for stability, and ended up working as a bus driver.

In retrospect, I sense that these business failures, during a time of economic boom, exploding expectations, and formation of the mythical post WW II American Dream, affected their lives in a negative way. Who knows, maybe this is why I never did much with my dad or had any business ambitions – he might have wanted me to avoid these kind of disappointments.

Anyway, here’s four generations of Wolfe men almost 30 years later, on the 4th of July in 1990, as I proudly celebrate my son, Travis: