When he was 18, his father dropped dead of a heart attack. On Olney Avenue in Philadelphia, the world no longer included school in South Bend. And in spite of a tight-knit Irish Catholic family, he took it on his slender shoulders.
My dad was a tinkerer. When we renovated the house down the shore, he told me about his grandfather’s hardware store, and pointed to the tools that had skipped a generation to him. It might have been around that time that he mentioned why his grandparents bought it. That house was, and remains, linked to his own dad. They bought it that summer for the family. Maybe as a celebration.
Tinkering and his logical mind brought him to engineering. He traded Notre Dame for the Main Line, and ended up with a Ph. D in physics. He also met the woman he’d fall for around that time. Continue reading
