Silly Saturday

The year was 1937, my father, Raymond Leary was just ten years old. It was a chilly morning when Pop (Daniel T. Leary born: 1900) prepared to head off to work as a truck driver. As he walked to the car he realized that he had a flat tire. Returning to the warmth of the house he woke my father to make him change the tire.

(For those young’un’s reading this and thinking that this was inappropriate, it was common for ten-year-olds to do man’s labor at this time in history.)

Blurry eyed and hardly awake Dad stumbled his way to the driveway to change the flat. The more he worked, the more awake he became, and when he was done he returned to the house full of pride for his accomplishment.

Pop went to the car to head to work and realized his son had changed the wrong tire, and he still had a flat.

About fifty years later, Dad’s four-year-old son would make a similar mistake. When our Dad went to go to work one day he opened the garage door and something shiny and red caught the sun and the reflection caught Dad’s eye. Looking down he discovered that Dan had taken the tail light off the old Volkswagen Beetle and placed it behind the wheel so that the car wouldn’t roll. Lucky for Dad, he saw it before running it over.

And, this is why Family History is so important, if we don’t learn from the past we are bound to repeat it in the present and future.