Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Hi, everyone. This is Dawn Clem, and you are on my podcast, Milkweed and monarchs.
[00:00:08] Today I'm going to be doing part two of Nicholas Farrow, my dad. And so I'll start where I left off on his journey.
[00:00:23] So in the last episode, he had punched his 8th grade teacher, and I think he gave him a black eye, actually, and stormed out of the classroom. And he never went back.
[00:00:40] So my dad never went back to school after that.
[00:00:44] And he was only, what, 1314 years old at the time, so he had to figure out how he was going to survive. He was still living with his grandma. He didn't see his dad very much.
[00:01:00] His dad had started working in carnivals or with fairs, doing fair type of food. He actually worked at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, which has a large amusement park for those of you that have gone there before. And he ran like a food booth down there. So he was doing things like that.
[00:01:27] And so my dad really didn't get to see his dad very much.
[00:01:32] And when my dad was, like, still living with his mom's mom, so his grandma and he and his brother would help work on the farm. They lived on a small little farm, but my dad started to pick up other kinds of jobs, too, to. He would help painting houses, he would help siding houses, odds and ends, and just any way that he could make an income and bring some money home. He would help his grandma out in the household.
[00:02:09] So that worked out good for everyone.
[00:02:12] But this was at the beginning of World War two. So when my dad turned 18, I think it was right before he turned 18, actually, because his birthday was in December. At the end of December, December 28, he decided to enlist in the army. He was going to go over and fight the war, and he was deployed right away to Germany.
[00:02:42] So he went over there as a private in the army, and he fought the war. He was not there. He was there during the battle of Normandy, but he was not in Normandy on the beach when that happened. He was still in Germany. So he was stationed in Germany most of the time that he was in, and he was only in for, I think, two years, maybe two and a half years, and then he was discharged to come home.
[00:03:13] He had had a girlfriend before he left, and she was five years older than him, and he was quite smitten with her. And when he came back home, he decided to marry her. So I think he was 20 and she was 25 when they got married. And they ended up having my two half sisters. So they were a couple years apart in age, actually. They were five years apart in age, so she might have gotten pregnant right away with my older sister. And then five years later, she got pregnant with my sister that was older than me.
[00:04:00] How it was is my oldest sister was 15 years older than me. The next one was ten years older than me. And the one that was ten years older with me had lived with me when we were growing up.
[00:04:14] So I know that's kind of complicated.
[00:04:19] The one thing I do remember about my dad, though, during this time, what he relayed to me many, many times, is that he was a Roman Catholic. And as a matter of fact, I still have his dog tags from the military, and they're with my dog tags. And one of the things that they asked back then is what religion you were and what your blood type was. So if there was of an emergency, they could look at the dog tag and know right away what kind of blood you might need. And then if you needed last rites delivered to you, because, I mean, you're in the war, they would know what religion you were. My dad's family on my grandpa's side was italian, and the whole family was Roman Catholic. And that was really, really important to my dad. He was really, really committed to being a Catholic.
[00:05:23] So after he had been married for probably six or seven years, I think he was, like, 27 and she was 32, it became obvious that their marriage was not going to last. And he got a divorce from her. He divorced her. And just as a note, this was during the time a, that divorce was frowned upon. So it was not looked in a favorable light at all for people to get divorced back then.
[00:05:57] And the other thing was that meant that he couldn't be a member of the catholic church anymore. And he talked about that for years. That definitely impacted him in his life.
[00:06:10] Later on, the priest told him that he could get his marriage annulled if he wanted to.
[00:06:17] And that was right before he married my mom. And he was like, no, I cannot get my marriage annulled. I have two daughters. That would be like me denying the fact that I was ever married to their mother, and I'm not going to do that to my children.
[00:06:36] So he lived with the fact that he divorced her.
[00:06:42] And when it he had met my mom through one of his best friends, one of his best friends was dating my mom's sister, and he introduced my dad to my mom. They went out on a double date together. My mom said that one date, and then that was pretty much it. She never saw anybody else again, and he neither did he. And a couple years later, they ended up getting married. Now, my dad was 32 at the time and my mom was 21. My dad was eleven years older than my mom, and they had to wait till my mom was 21, first of all, because her parents were not a big fan of her marrying somebody that was divorced and somebody that was Catholic. So they were really not thrilled with the whole thing. So my mom was like, well, I'm. And when I turn 21, I'm going to do what I want to do. And that's exactly what happened. She married my dad when she turned 21. They didn't get married in the church. They got married at someone's house.
[00:07:53] And that was okay for my mom. My mom was kind of a rebel. And so this fit this whole profile of my dad, kind of fit in with my mom. She would do something different. She did not want walk the usual path. Let me just put it to you that way.
[00:08:12] So I think, though, it was hard for him to be married to her because she had such a big family, and her family was all part of the United Brethren church because her grandpa was a minister and he was big into that church. So there were some challenges with him being catholic. But my dad never wavered from that faith. Never what? Not one time ever. And I can remember the whole time growing up.
[00:08:45] Later on, like when I was in my twenties, he would watch church every Sunday and it was always a catholic mass. So he did that for years, all the way up until the day he died. He, in his heart of hearts, was a Roman Catholic, and that's just the way it was.
[00:09:04] So their marriage was pretty good, my mom and my dad, and they had me and my brother and my dad ended up getting a job at the car dealership. My mom went back to work when I was in the fourth grade, and she worked at the local hospital.
[00:09:25] And we had a pretty much a standard upbringing at that time.
[00:09:30] But I think all the experiences that my dad had gone through in his life kind of turned him into a humanitarian. I would say that about my dad. He joined every organization that he could think of, and he was so active in the community. So he was a member of the rural fire department, he was a member of the rural rescue league. So he would go out on EMS runs for patients, and he was a member of the civil defense. I can remember when we had a really bad tornado in 1967 in Hillsdale. My dad was in the middle of that. We always had a CB radio, so we knew what was happening in the town. And my dad, which hat my dad was going to put on, to go out and help, and I. He was also involved in the leadership of the boy scouts.
[00:10:30] He went to every single one of my brothers little league baseball games. He went to all of his band performances. I mean, he was just really, really involved in the community. He wanted us to be part of the community, and he would help anybody that needed help. He just went out of his way to make sure that he was giving back. And I don't know if it's because of how he was raised. He felt the need to give back or if he was just a natural humanitarian.
[00:11:09] When he first married my mom, he ended up trying to have a relationship with his father. Now, his father had moved back to Indiana, and I. He opened his own restaurant down there. It was called the Green Parrot, and I think it was in Angola, Indiana. And so my grandpa really liked my mom, and he was happy that my dad had met the right person. So they would go down there, and they would help my grandpa run that restaurant. My mom would be a waitress, and my dad would help cook, and they would also help, you know, bust the tables, and they would just help him run it. Sometimes my dad would go down there for a week at a time and help my grandpa, and my mom would go down when my dad needed more help. So they went down there a lot, and it was going really great. I feel like my dad thought that his life had turned the corner, and he was starting to have the life that he had always hoped he would have.
[00:12:23] One time they went down to see my grandpa, and the whole restaurant was closed up. There was nothing there.
[00:12:31] Lock, stock and barrel closed up. And my mom said, my dad was so mad.
[00:12:41] Years later, after my brother and I had been born, we finally met my grandpa. But I think I was probably seven years old, and my brother was five the first time we met him. So my mom and dad had been married four years before they had me. So my dad had not heard from my grandpa in, like, 1011 years when they showed up at our house, he and his new wife. Okay, so her name was marge, and I think he met her at Cedar Point. That's how they had become an item. And I think he did. Um, he must have had her at that restaurant, too. So she was a partner with him there. And so when he left, she went with him, and it was closed down. But my dad had no idea where my grandpa went, and he was really upset about it. I think that definitely impacted him.
[00:13:48] So I would say that from an early age, my dad suffered from depression. I think he was kind of sensitive. So anything that people said he actually took to heart. Sometimes you wouldn't know it, but he suffered from depression.
[00:14:11] Some of the things that went on over in Germany, he would never really tell us what happened, but I know there were things that happened over there, and it wasn't a good situation.
[00:14:23] And so he suffered from depression for that. Sometimes he would get mad at us, and we wouldn't even know why he was mad. And he would leave and he would go driving for hours. We might not even see him for a couple days, and then he would come home. So he definitely suffered from depression, and he definitely suffered from his upbringing, but he did the best he could with what he had been given. And the fact that he turned into a humanitarian and gave back to the community always made me so proud to have him as my dad.
[00:15:18] I really feel like he managed to get somewhere when all odds were against him, because they really were. And the fact that he turned out as good as he did is kind of a miracle, in my opinion. And the same for his brother Bob. The two of them were just so close, and they would get mad at each other, but they were never far apart. When my dad was dying, my uncle Bob, I mean, it just devastated him. And my dad died in that September, like I told you, right around September 11. And then my uncle Bob died at the end of January the following year. That was no surprise to me at all, because the two of them could not be separated. That's just how it was. They had to be together.
[00:16:14] Well, when my grandpa showed up that time to meet us, we were like, dad's like, where the heck have you been? Where. Where have you been? You know, you. We went down to the restaurant, and you were nowhere to be found. And here it is, like, ten years later. What the heck is going on? Well, he said that, you know, he was in trouble with the law. That was the truth. Because he was still part of the mafia. That's the bottom line right there. He was still part of the mafia. And so he was on the run a lot of times for past discretions that had gone on.
[00:16:58] And when my grandpa died, he had. We found out that he had, like, three.
[00:17:05] I mean, I heard so many stories, it's hard to know, but he had somewhere between three and 20 different Social Security numbers, names associated with all of them, because he was bootlegging whiskey during that whole time. And he was involved in a lot of illicit activity.
[00:17:32] I will say that Marge, the woman that he had met in Cedar Point, ended up really stabilizing my grandpa, just like my mom, stabilized my dad, and eventually he married her. But it was the funniest thing. So they had two children together, and they were quite a bit younger than my dad and his brother, but they had a daughter, the first and only girl in the family, and they had a younger son and the younger son. One time we were having, like, a family get together, and the younger son said, hey, did you know that I'm a bastard? And I'm like, what the heck is he even talking about? He's telling this to my mom. My mom starts laughing. She goes, what are you talking about? He goes, my mom. And just. My mom and dad just barely got married, like, five years ago. I was born out of wedlock, and of course, all of us just cracked up. I mean, that's how they lived their life. On the edge back then, that. Just on the edge. And that's all I can tell you. They came over from Italy, and they had a hard life to get started over here because they were immigrants and it was not easy. And the mafia came about because it was like a brotherhood and they were gonna protect each other. Were there illicit things that went on? Yes, but can you understand why? Yes, but did it impact their children ultimately, like my dad and his brother? Yes.
[00:19:21] So it was an interesting life, and what my dad went through made him have more character than many people have in their lives today. I mean, he just lived a rich life. I know that I'm so much like him in so many ways. I consider myself a humanitarian, and I think it's because of the example he set to me. I'm an avid reader like my dad. That was the other thing about my dad. He had his iq tested, and I think it was, like, 135. He was a very smart man, and that's part of the reason, probably, why he could survive.
[00:20:06] He was an avid reader. He was. There was not a day with me growing up that I don't remember him being up early reading a book. He read everything he could get his hands on. He was just an avid reader. He had a lot of common sense. He was very practical.
[00:20:26] He just had depression, and there was nothing you could do about that. And all of it was just from this tumultuous upbringing that he had had.
[00:20:38] But he stayed married to my mom. They were married for 48 years when he died. So he ended his life, I would say, on a high note. And for that, I'm really, really proud of him, and I'm proud to say that I was his daughter.
[00:20:56] He encouraged me to be the person that I am today.
[00:21:04] Normally, this would be the end of the story, but something happened to me while I was in the middle of thinking about writing or doing this podcast. I really should just write a book about him. I think it would be so fascinating.
[00:21:22] But we have a little market in Grand Rapids, and that market, to me, it reminds me of an old italian market that we had in my hometown where I was growing up called Savarino's. The market up here is very similar. It's got the old wood floors, it's got the high countertops where you go up to the counter to pay for your food, and it's got a big old deli counter.
[00:21:54] I love that market. I can't get enough of that market. And I go in there all the time to buy food from the deli. It's got a ton of different kinds of wine, every kind of wine you can imagine. Specialty beers, specialty food. I mean, it's just a great place to get specialty items if you're having an event or you just want something different for dinner.
[00:22:21] So I had just gotten paid, and I said to my husband, oh, I want to go. I'm going to go down to the market downtown in Grand Rapids. He says, okay, that's good. They sell blackened salmon that they have already cooked and grilled. And so you can get a couple of filets. And I usually get that. And they'll have, like, a kale salad in there. Fantastic. Just a quick dinner to put together. Buy a bottle of wine, get my husband some beer. So I get to the market, and, you know, just so excited to go in. I hadn't been in there in a long time.
[00:22:55] One of those really hot summer days. It's been a stinker this summer. And I get in there and I get everything bought, and I bring it up to the counter, and the guy gives it to me, and, you know, we're chitchatting, and I walk out the door, well, on the sidewalk, and they're the cobblestone sidewalks with the bricks, and it's in an older part of grand rapids, and they have put out metal tables with little umbrellas. And sitting at one of the tables were two women, two older women, older than me, and they were drinking a ginger beer. And I said to them, is it hot enough for you today? And they said, cheers, we're drinking a ginger beer. I said, oh, that's great. So I go over to their table to talk to them, something my dad would have done, very similar actions to my dad. And we started talking. Well, they were here. They were nuns from the dominican order, and they had come over from Detroit. I think the one was a nun and the other one was her chauffeur. And they were here for the jubilee celebration in the church. And so they're telling me all this, and I go, oh, perhaps you might know one of my friends. When I worked at Mercy hospital, I developed a great friendship with a nun that worked there. So they wanted to know what her name was. And I told them, of course they knew who she was right away, right? So they said, oh, we're gonna tell her that we met you. Do you have, like, something that you could write your name down so we can show it to you? Well, it just so happens at that point, I had one of my business cards for milkweed and monarchs, and on the back of it, it has my name. So I pull it out of my purse and I hand it to her, and she says, oh, this is going to be delightful. I cannot wait to go up to her tonight and say, perhaps you might know one of my good friends that lives here, and I'm going to pull your card out with your name on it. And I just had to laugh, right?
[00:25:18] Coming full circle. And she says.
[00:25:23] She says, are you italian? I go, yes, I am. She says, have you seen that movie Cabrini? I said, no, I never heard of that movie Cabrini. She says, you have to watch that movie Cabrini. It's all one word. She spelled it out for me. C a b r I n I. She says, it's on Netflix. It's not on Netflix. I'm sure you can find it on Amazon prime. This is the lady, somebody I'm just barely meeting, right? Somebody I just barely meeting. So I'm like, okay, yeah, I will watch that movie tonight with my husband. Thank you so much for the recommendations. They gave me their email addresses, I gave them my business cards, and I walked away. That was the end of that conversation.
[00:26:15] So that night, my husband and I had our salmon and our beverages and the kale salad. We're all relaxed, and I said, let's watch that movie Cabrini. Hey, what the heck? We don't have anything to lose. He goes, that's a great idea. So we rented the movie Cabrini. Well, lo and beholden, the movie was all about the italian children that came over from Italy at the turn of the century.
[00:26:48] When they were orphaned. They didn't have any parents or anybody to care for them. They came over in boatloads from Italy to try and make a better way of life for themselves.
[00:27:03] And I watched that movie, and I'm telling you, I cried so hard, because all I could think about. And I had just done part one of my dad podcast, and all I could think about is what his family went through when they immigrated here all those years ago with eight kids. I mean, they were actually in a family, and they still struggled to make it, which is why my grandpa was in the mafia. You know what I mean? And it just was like. It was like my grandpa tapping me on the shoulder, saying, hey, you got to watch this movie. This is how the Italians started out over here.
[00:27:55] I know. It was one of those God moments where you think, wow, how did this even happen? How did this even happen? It was either my dad or my grandpa. One of them was looking over, tapping me on the shoulder, saying, if you want to see a movie, you're going to know what really went on. And it was fantastic. It was fantastic. And a couple last year we have the symphony. Here we have the Grand Rapids Symphony, which is fantastic. And what they've started to do is they'll show these major films. Like, one year they did the Polar Express, last year they did elf, and they show the movie on a huge, huge screen. And then underneath it is the symphony, and they play, live, the musical score to that film. So one of the movies that they were gonna play was the godfather.
[00:28:58] Now, that movie came out in the seventies, and I was in high school then, and my husband was in middle school. So I said, have you ever seen the movie? And he said, no, I go, neither have I. Why don't we. Let's go watch the movie together, you know? So we got tickets and we sat there. It's a four hour movie, okay? And it's back in the seventies, so some of what goes on. You could see how far we've come with our technology now. But when we got done with the movie, my husband turned and looked at me, and he said, what'd you think about the movie? I said, it was just like. Just like going to a family reunion for me. And he started cracking up. Because some of the things that they talked about in there is they always had a pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove. And that's what my dad always talked about, having a pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove. Even my grandpa had a pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove in his restaurant. And they don't call it spaghetti sauce. They call it gravy. So some of those things just came pouring back into my mind, and it made me appreciate my history I think sometimes we don't really appreciate our history or with my dad. My dad was kind of ashamed of his history, but I'm not really ashamed of it. I feel like we're lucky we immigrated over here, and maybe I'm talking about this right now because we're right in the middle of all this immigration discussion over here.
[00:30:34] And I know one thing is for sure, that when they immigrated here, they immigrated legally, and they weren't accepted, though they were. They immigrated, but they weren't accepted. And they had a hard life. So now we have people that are coming over that did not immigrate legally, and they're not accepted. And I think the thing is, if you want to live in this country, you got to work hard to make yourself get ahead. You can get ahead here, and you can come from another country to here, but it's not an easy path. It's not an easy path, and coming in illegally is not the way to go. If you thought, if you want to be accepted, you're barely accepted the other way, you got to fight for what you want to. So watch the movie Cabrini if you have a chance. It's fantastic. It's a great history lesson to all of you, and I hope you enjoyed the story of my dad and some of my family history.
[00:31:52] So I have a couple of more episodes I'm a little behind on here that I want to get out, but in the meantime, I am going to be going to the studio to record an interview with somebody, so that might be interjected in between. So we want to see how that kind of goes. I'm excited about that.
[00:32:15] I would love to hear from you. Any feedback that you want to share with me is always so appreciated.
[00:32:22] I heard a lot of feedback from the last episode about me, the second episode when I was in Iceland, and I want to thank you for that.
[00:32:32] I appreciate hearing from all of you on that story. It was a challenge for me to tell that story, but obviously it hit a chord with a lot of people, and because of that, I'm glad I told the story.
[00:32:49] If you have something that you want to talk about, though, please go on my website, milkmon.com, m I l k.
[00:33:00] All one word. And at the bottom of the website is a section where you can actually put questions in, and it'll come to me via my email or you can call me or contact me directly. Either one is great. And if you have somebody that you think would be a good interview for me or you just want me to tell your story, please don't hesitate to reach out to me until the next time.
