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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