For better or worse, each of us has a grandfather. Many of us never get to know them. Sadder still is that most grandfathers don't know us at all.
They're often shadowy figures in the background -- maybe they get to say Grace at the Thanksgiving dinner table, but more than likely they sit quietly, listening to the chatter and trying to cope with the changes in a way of life that they only dimly remember. Most of them are confined to a comfortable chair in the corner. They will sit there until taken back to the 'home' or helped upstairs to their bedroom to sit, like a child, among the toys of their life.
It's rare to find a grandfather blessed with the panache to be the life of the party.
My grandfather's name was Bill Harragan. He was a second string tenor with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company when it made its first voyage to America in 1887. The tour was a financial disaster -- Americans didn't take to Gilbert & Sullivan then, and very few of them do today. The backers abandoned them, and the troupe was stranded. The most talented among them had the money to return, but the second stringers were left behind. Bill Harragan was one of them. But he liked it here -- he had met a pretty Connecticut lady in Hartford while on tour and stayed with her family. When the rug was pulled out from under him, he was torn between the desire to get back home or to make his way in the new world. His success with the D'Oyly Carte had been borderline and marrying Rachel seemed to be a better choice. He did so, and the two of them moved to a small house in Brooklyn where they spawned five daughters.
He was born with the natural command of English that even unschooled Englishmen are gifted with. He could spell the most arcane and esoteric words with ease; he said if he closed his eyes he could see them. He could punctuate like a pro and found work as a proofreader for the American Book Company, a publisher of public school texts. He couldn't write a lick, but he could tell those who could, how best to say what they meant to say.
He could sing not only Gilbert & Sullivan but also all the scatological ditties written for the English four-a-day music hall, and he taught them to his five daughters, though Rachel, with her strict New England upbringing, begged him not to. As a result they grew up wiser in the ways of the world than most girls born in the final decade of the nineteenth century and were more quick-witted by far than the men they married.
Old Bill never lost his edge, but there were times when his five teen-age girls and his tongue-clucking wife made the house in Brooklyn seem unbearably small. Rachel underwent menopause, and the girl's monthly cycles often resulted in a bedlam of crying and a constant slamming of doors. Under such conditions the average English male will either grow a garden, buy a horse, take a mistress, or enter politics. Bill, instead, bought a boat. It was a well-calculated decision that saved his sanity and his marriage as well. He could have named it after his wife, but he didn't. He might have used his daughters' initials . . . in which case it could have been the "EGGER" if you took them in order of their appearance. But he didn't do that either. He christened it the "HMS Pinafore." The captain of the Pinafore was the only role he ever starred in, the night the scheduled lead was too drunk to go on.
The "Pinafore" was not a big boat. It wasn't new and it wasn't seaworthy. Furthermore, it was at the bottom of Paerdegat Channel in Bergen Beach when he bought it, and all he could see of it was the tip of its stubby mast. It had been a victim of a severe winter storm. The owner, an Irishman, was overjoyed to sell a boat in this condition to an Englishman. He had often mentioned to his fellow boat owners in Bergen Beach that "the son-of-a-bitch rolls in a dead calm." To my grandfather, the vessel lying in the muck of Paerdegat Channel would be his magic carpet to whisk him away from a house of bickering females.
He had it raised and dragged to the boatyard. For seven years he labored lovingly and, without having a fortune to spend, did every bit of it alone. The motor was reconditioned, the boat was recaulked, and a bilge pump was installed. He even worked out an underwater system of stabilizers to keep the 'son-of-a-bitch' from rolling. By the time three of his daughters had married, he was ready to put out to sea. Paerdegat Channel, however, leads to the sea in a very indirect manner. It empties into Jamaica Bay, a secondary waterway leading from Rockaway Inlet, which in turn brings the hopeful mariner to Sheepshead Bay and thence to the open sea. It was a route that Jason and his Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece would have considered irresponsible.
Before long, his daughters began to bear children, and before the 1920s had drawn to a close, he was blessed with nine grandsons. I was one of them. We were his Argonauts, and with him, we navigated the Duck Point Marshes, the Ruffle Bar, and The Yellow Bar Hassock. Old Bill Harragan was not used to small boys. He considered us to be short, stupid men, fully capable of making decisions on our own. He would sing his bawdy songs and bellow at us as he pissed off the side of the boat, leaving the tiller in the hands of whoever had the presence of mind to grab it before we ran aground.
"Bring her about, goddammit -- you tryin' to strand us out here?" Such was the extent of our maritime education.
We learned the law of the sea not from him but from our own mistakes and the advice frantically shouted at us from other boatmen. For instance, we discovered to our delight that under certain conditions the little 'Pinafore' had the right-of-way over larger craft, even tugs with barges under tow. We learned how to fish and, more than once, had to save each other from drowning when we fell overboard. We promised old Bill we'd never tell our parents of these brushes with disaster or the dangers we faced in our quest for the 'fleece.'
If it hadn't been for Grandpa Harragan and his Pinafore, we nine cousins would never have known each other. We lived in different parts of the city and only got together on those rare days in the summer when the sea sang its siren song, and Captain Bill had money enough for the gas. I suppose he ventured out alone when we weren't there, but bearing in mind his uncertain seamanship, I doubt if he sailed as well as he did with us. He died while his grandsons were off to the war. None of us were around to see him off -- it was a journey he had to make alone. He was a rare grandfather. His nine grandsons are grandfathers now, and I venture to say that none of our grandchildren hold us in such esteem. He left us all the old songs from the bawdy days of English mintrelsy and the fleeting image of the golden fleece at the entrance to Sheepshead Bay.