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When I was young there was always someone I could count on when times were tough.
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| Ed Pierce Sr. served in the U.S. Army during World War II and later earned a college degree in mechanical engineering. COURTESY PHOTO |
He was my father, gone for a while, but still the smartest and funniest person I have ever known.
His outlook on life was forged during the Great Depression and World War II. Born in 1925 in Fairport, New York as the youngest of nine children, his early life was spent growing up on a farm and tending to chickens and geese. He started working at a tin can factory at age 9 to help his family survive.
Math and science were his favorite subjects in school, and he dreamed of possibly becoming a physician as an adult, but that was set aside when the United States entered World War II in December 1941. He was a sophomore in high school and uncertain if there would even be a future as war broke out in nearly every corner of the planet.
Following his high school graduation ceremony in June 1943, a letter arrived informing him he was being drafted into the U.S. Army. Upon completion of training in Texas, my father joined thousands of other soldiers in boarding a troop ship bound for Morocco and Northern Africa and military service in the U.S. Army’s Seventh Corps.
By 1944, Seventh Corps had moved on from North Africa and was heavily involved in fighting the Germans in Italy. At one of those skirmishes, a German sniper hiding in a church bell tower shot my father in the back while he was on a mission to repair and secure an essential communications line. As night fell, the sniper climbed down from the tower and attempted to search my father’s body for paperwork. But he wasn’t dead and rolled over and shot the sniper. For his actions, my father was awarded the Bronze Star medal by the U.S. Army.
When the war ended, my father was discharged from the Army and enrolled at Manhattan College in New York City to study engineering. He didn’t like being so far away from his family, so he transferred to the Rochester Institute of Technology about 17 miles away from Fairport.
While attending RIT, he noticed an advertisement in the daily newspaper for a part-time job as a private detective. He applied and was hired and trained to be part of investigations and cases undertaken by the company. On one of those cases he was assigned to, he met a divorced woman with a child who was looking to receive child support from her ex-husband. The court had ordered the ex-husband to pay $10 a month but he had failed to do that, claiming that he had no money and wasn’t working.
My father tailed the ex-husband and discovered he was working and that evidence was used when the case was re-opened in court.
A year or so later, the divorced woman ran into my father at a department store, and they struck up a conversation. A year later they were married in 1951, and I came along two years after that, followed by my brother in 1957. My father had earned a three-year engineering degree from RIT by then and he was part of the team at AC Delco in Rochester that created the Bernzomatic portable torch used in welding.
During his career as a mechanical engineer, he also worked in satellite imagery and detection for ITEK Corporation in the early 1960s and then helped design a practical copier for Xerox in the late 1960s and received a patent for a portable water carrier that attached to the frame of a 10-speed bicycle in the early 1970s for Nalgene Plastics. In his final job, he helped design tactical handheld combat radios for U.S. soldiers for Harris Corporation.
Despite his important work, he remained jovial and would seek opportunities to inject humor into situations whenever he could. Once during an intense discussion in the 1960s with relatives, when it was his turn to speak, he got out of his chair and made everyone laugh when he attempted to sing “Fever” by Peggy Lee.
Another time I was in high school and asked him the best way to ask a girl out on a date. He responded in a high-pitched, squeaky voice with the nonsense lyrics from the song “Witch Doctor” singing "Oo-ee-oo-ah-ah, ting-tang, walla-walla-bing-bang."
His humor could be unexpected and disarming and eased many a tense family dinner. He was able to perform perfect impressions of Ozzie Nelson, Bullwinkle the Moose and Milton Berle. My favorite was his Joe the Bartender "Crazy Guggenheim" sketch by Frank Fontaine from the Jackie Gleason TV show.
He had been retired for two full days when a drunk driver swerved into his station wagon on a Sunday night as he was returning from visiting his sister in May 1991 in Florida.
It’s been nearly 35 years, but I miss him still. <
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