The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
The ballad of the Depression Kid
The Depression Kid liked to give folks in the family little pocket knives. You know, those inch-anda-half long Swiss Army numbers with the tiny blades.
A pocket knife was required survival equipment for boys back in the Great Depression — from playing mumblety-peg, to whittling down sticks for roasting potatoes — but not so much these days. I lost more than one in security pat downs along the way and gave up carrying them.
Still, you find it on your key chain to cut open an envelope, or use the minuscule scissors to snip into a plastic bag, if the need arises. The Depression Kid still thought they were essential, and who wanted to get into that argument? I would just accept a knife every few Christmases and perch it on a bookshelf somewhere.
In later years, the Depression Kid, who never stopped working after age 14, counted the jobs he had: grocery bagger, hospital orderly, oil company dispatcher, security guard, 23 jobs in all. Most importantly, the Depression Kid, my father, Claude Dixon, was a public-school teacher and radio and newspaper reporter.
My earliest memory of the news business is around 1958, age 4. I am in the old WSTC newsroom, on the second floor, across Stamford’s Atlantic Street from St. John’s Church. I inhale the warm, inky aroma of the old teletype machines clattering away — United Press, the International News Service, the Associated Press — relaying developments from around the nation and world.
He’d have finished a full day teaching sixth grade at the old Franklin School, then driven downtown to the station — 1400 on your AM dial — to prepare copy for reading the 6 p.m. news.
It was something, to hear your father’s voice on the radio, and maybe on this day, he allowed me to sit quietly in the studio as he read the news on the air.
Then we’d head back up Bedford Street, to Strawberry Hill, where we rented one of two houses on 14 wooded acres — now long gone — in the shadow of the more than 400-foot-tall WSTC tower and its transmitter building.
To a pre-schooler, there was nothing higher in the world than that tower, with its blinking red light up near the stars, beaming your father’s voice.
We’d have dinner with my mother and sister, a toddler, then he would go out again to cover a school board or Board of Representatives meeting.
It was from that transmitter, with its own generator, that my father became one of the few news broadcasters in the Northeast during the historic regional blackout of November 1965. Years later, he couldn’t remember what he said during those hours before the electric grid was restored. He got Mayor Tom Mayers on the phone at one point, and listeners were somehow reassured that nuclear Armageddon might not be imminent.
One of the youngest to go off to World War II, he dropped out of Hamden High shortly after turning 17 in December 1942. Too young to join the Marines, he got there anyway, a Navy medical corpsman attached to the Marines in the Pacific.
After two combat tours, he was stationed in New York, on Pier 92, so he was in the Times Square crowd on V-J Day, Aug. 14, 1945.
My mother remembered the nights, for years after the war, that the post-traumatic stress — there was no term for it back then — would rattle him with nightmares and sweats. Like so many war veterans, he spoke little of his combat experiences. It wasn’t until 2009, as his gall bladder was shriveling like a deflated football in the hospital emergency room, that my father spoke about wartime trips across the world.
He taught school in Greenwich and Cheshire, but mostly in Stamford, at Franklin, Springdale and finally, Stark schools, for 35 years.
He wrote for the old Bridgeport Sunday Herald, the Bridgeport Sunday Post and The Telegram, where he also edited copy, into the 1980s.
He was my best reader and I usually thought of him, back home in the house in Belltown, where we moved in 1962, as I was finishing a column or big story.
Father died in the Stamford Hospital ICU last week at 92, following a fall in his home.
I had the honor and duty to be with him those last few hours, at the end of a week-long decline. I was born for it.
It was the most gutwrenching and somehow beautiful thing I have ever been through, and the ICU staff were professional and kind.
His last day was incredibly sad, as the morphine eased away the discomfort, as his heart rate raced and his blood pressure dropped. I kept talking, and for a time, he would occasionally wink his right eye in acknowledgment.
Finally, his pulse was down to zero and he was off to find our mother.
Afterward, I looked around for a scissors to cut a few locks of father’s hair. I searched the various table tops in his room: nothing. I reached into my pocket. There, on his key chain, was a little knife with a scissors.