bound for Bremerhaven from Boston. They carried their instruments, bass fiddle for the friend, banjo and four-string guitar for my father. They arrived in Europe broke, without papers, and jumped ship; the plan was to find work as jazzmen. It was not a sound plan, and soon my father collect-wired The Doctor for passage money home. In place of money he got a reply, also sent collect: DID NOT RECEIVE YOUR CABLE STOP WILL NOT RECEIVE YOUR NEXT CABLE EITHER STOP FATHER .
My father borrowed his way home, and worked at menial jobs around Hartford, even picking tobacco for cigar wrappers with stoop-labor migrants for a few weeks. Broke, he nevertheless learned to fly, and fell in love for good with airplanes, but again his father, without malice or intention, diluted his pride. The week after my father’s first solo flight there was a headline in the
Hartford Times:
PHYSICIAN PILOTS PLANE AT 77: “Always possessed of an adventurous and inquiring spirit, Dr. Wolff piloted an airplane at the age of 77 without any previous instruction. While riding in a plane over Brainard Field, he took over the controls.”
Not long after, Bill Haas heard Duke tell someone he had had a trying day, flying the mail from Hartford to Boston through a thunderstorm. Haas called my father on his fiction, told listeners that Duke could fly, but not that well, and had never flown the mail. My father exploded at this betrayal with the hurt anger of someone truly wronged, and he left Haas with the burden of believing that, yes, he
had
wronged his cousin: “I shouldn’t have butted in,” he told me.
The closest Duke could come to a job in aviation was to clean engine parts at Pratt & Whitney for two bits an hour. While he was at this work Duke’s comrades struck the plant, and my father was used, successfully, as the workers’ and managers’ go-between. He was not in later life ashamed of this work, so I learned of it from him, but that is almost all of his Hartford life I do know fromhim. He worked elbow-deep in bins of gunk that cut grease and carbon from odds and ends of airplane engines due for overhaul. He’d then take his lunch from a fitted wicker picnic basket that held sandwiches with their crusts removed by the Norwegian cook, a linen napkin, and a fruit knife to pare an apple’s scrubbed skin. He did not discourage these dandy airs, just as he liked to be called Duke and allowed himself to be driven to a strike meeting by his father’s chauffeur in his father’s Rolls-Royce.
In 1932, at twenty-four, he tried to enlist in the Navy, and was rejected for his stammer. Two years later he was tentatively accepted for Army officers’ training school until a major in the personnel office at Governor’s Island, New York, where Duke had enlisted, received a reply to his routine query to Manlius for confirmation of my father’s accomplishments there: “Mr. Wolff did not complete four years of R.O.T.C., nor was he a Second Lieutenant of the machine gun company while at this institution.”
So until 1936 my father mostly drank too much at parties, played the banjo and piano, read novels and poems, became a fabled clothes-wearing man, and waited for something to happen to him.
5
R OSEMARY Loftus, my mother, met Duke during the great Hartford flood of March 1936. The Connecticut River’s excitement had stopped the city dead, and my father with half a dozen of his sidekicks had holed up in a couple of suites at the Hueblein Hotel, where they ran out of girls before they ran out of gin. My mother was nineteen, with time on her hands. After Sunday mass a “fast” friend asked if she’d like a blind date and my mother, bored, said sure, she’d take potluck.
The first time my mother saw him, my father was sitting in the back seat of a friend’s new convertible, with a handsome girl giggling on his lap. My father was too informal for my mother’s taste: “He seemed tight, and he needed a shave. He was wearing battered sneakers and white
My father borrowed his way home, and worked at menial jobs around Hartford, even picking tobacco for cigar wrappers with stoop-labor migrants for a few weeks. Broke, he nevertheless learned to fly, and fell in love for good with airplanes, but again his father, without malice or intention, diluted his pride. The week after my father’s first solo flight there was a headline in the
Hartford Times:
PHYSICIAN PILOTS PLANE AT 77: “Always possessed of an adventurous and inquiring spirit, Dr. Wolff piloted an airplane at the age of 77 without any previous instruction. While riding in a plane over Brainard Field, he took over the controls.”
Not long after, Bill Haas heard Duke tell someone he had had a trying day, flying the mail from Hartford to Boston through a thunderstorm. Haas called my father on his fiction, told listeners that Duke could fly, but not that well, and had never flown the mail. My father exploded at this betrayal with the hurt anger of someone truly wronged, and he left Haas with the burden of believing that, yes, he
had
wronged his cousin: “I shouldn’t have butted in,” he told me.
The closest Duke could come to a job in aviation was to clean engine parts at Pratt & Whitney for two bits an hour. While he was at this work Duke’s comrades struck the plant, and my father was used, successfully, as the workers’ and managers’ go-between. He was not in later life ashamed of this work, so I learned of it from him, but that is almost all of his Hartford life I do know fromhim. He worked elbow-deep in bins of gunk that cut grease and carbon from odds and ends of airplane engines due for overhaul. He’d then take his lunch from a fitted wicker picnic basket that held sandwiches with their crusts removed by the Norwegian cook, a linen napkin, and a fruit knife to pare an apple’s scrubbed skin. He did not discourage these dandy airs, just as he liked to be called Duke and allowed himself to be driven to a strike meeting by his father’s chauffeur in his father’s Rolls-Royce.
In 1932, at twenty-four, he tried to enlist in the Navy, and was rejected for his stammer. Two years later he was tentatively accepted for Army officers’ training school until a major in the personnel office at Governor’s Island, New York, where Duke had enlisted, received a reply to his routine query to Manlius for confirmation of my father’s accomplishments there: “Mr. Wolff did not complete four years of R.O.T.C., nor was he a Second Lieutenant of the machine gun company while at this institution.”
So until 1936 my father mostly drank too much at parties, played the banjo and piano, read novels and poems, became a fabled clothes-wearing man, and waited for something to happen to him.
5
R OSEMARY Loftus, my mother, met Duke during the great Hartford flood of March 1936. The Connecticut River’s excitement had stopped the city dead, and my father with half a dozen of his sidekicks had holed up in a couple of suites at the Hueblein Hotel, where they ran out of girls before they ran out of gin. My mother was nineteen, with time on her hands. After Sunday mass a “fast” friend asked if she’d like a blind date and my mother, bored, said sure, she’d take potluck.
The first time my mother saw him, my father was sitting in the back seat of a friend’s new convertible, with a handsome girl giggling on his lap. My father was too informal for my mother’s taste: “He seemed tight, and he needed a shave. He was wearing battered sneakers and white
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