Like Bloomberg March 1, 2012
I didn’t remember until last night that Peter met Alice at
Curtis Wright in Lodi.
He was stuck in a largely nowhere department and she was
secretary to the big boss.
Big Pete’s son, little Peter, always thought this was funny,
saying the boss didn’t want to upset his best secretary. So, instead of laying
Big Pete off originally planned, he transferred Pete to a position in a
different department.
“He offered my father a job in the computer department,”
Little Peter said.
This was in the late 1950s. Nobody knew just how computers
would change the world. It certainly changed Big Pete’s life.
Like Bloomberg, Big Pete learned computers early and later
transferred those skills to Wall Street where he would rise from the ground
floor to become the executive vice president of a major investment firm.
Unlike Bloomberg, however, Big Pete never lost touched with
humanity, keeping his ties to the old world and his family and ours.
I once compared Big Pete and my aunt Alice to the characters
on the Dick Van Dyke show because they seemed to live the same charmed life,
creating a perfect model for what was then seen as The American Dream. They
might also be compared to the characters Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn
played in that old movie about computer programing and romance on the job.
Last night at the funeral parlor with the hundreds of people
coming into to pay their respects to Big Pete, I was reminded of Alice’s
funeral back in 1975 and the line of cars that stretched down Route 80 for
miles needing a local and state police escort to get from Fairfield to the
graveyard in Paterson as if a president or prime minister had died.
John, Big Peter’s younger son, called it “leaving a big
footprint” and Big Pete did just that.
Even though Pete had not lived in Fairfield in years, scores
of people from that town thronged into see him and his children or the children
of his children. Some like me came to remember what he had been long. Long ago.
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