Week 3 - Namesake - William McLaughlin

Week 3: Namesake - William McLaughlin

My paternal grandfather was named William (NMI) McLaughlin, my father was William Addison McLaughlin and I am William Harry McLaughlin. I was named after both my grandfathers, William McLaughlin (Pop) and Harry Cook. I smile when I remember eating Thanksgiving family dinners at Pop’s house. My Aunt Grace, his daughter, did the cooking and she loved calling us all to the table because there were five of us there named William. All she had to do was holler out, “OK, Bill, come and get it!”

My Grandfather, better known as Pop, connected me to a past that began at his birth in Norwalk, Connecticut in 1879. Our McLaughlin family, all but Pop, were born on Long Island, New York in Queens or Nassau County. Pop’s father was in shoe manufacturing and worked in Connecticut for a few years around the time of Pop’s birth. In the early 1880s the McLaughlins were all back in Queens County on the western end of Long Island.

Pop’s first job as a teenager was working for a rug cleaning company before the advent of home vacuum cleaners. He worked as a laborer rolling up rugs in customers’ homes, hauling them downstairs and putting them on horse-drawn wagons for transportation to the company cleaning facility.  Once the rugs were cleaned, the process was reversed.  He quickly saw there was not much future for him in this dirty, dusty business.

Pop’s next job was as an assistant in a carriage paint shop. He sanded black paint between each coat applied to each carriage. I don’t know if there was any breathing protection in the late 1890s but Pop became deathly ill with lead poisoning from inhaling dust from his sanding. The good news is he had a strong constitution and fully recovered within two years. (He also told me about a fellow worker that everyone called “Shaky Jake” who had terribly shaky hands. He was the shop’s pin-striper. The moment he took a fine paint brush in his hand he could paint perfectly straight pin stripes. I’ve wondered for years how he did that.)

Pop (center), carriage paint shop, c. 1897

 

Pop’s older brother, Rob, worked as a station superintendent for The Long Island Railroad which also ran ferry boats between Brooklyn and Manhattan Island across the East River. He got Pop a job as a dock hand at the 34^th Street Ferry. Pop’s job was to roll the boarding bridge into place as each ferry arrived at the dock. Pop loved to tell the story about how one winter’s day there was ice in the water at the ferry landing causing the inbound ferry Captain to come in fast to break the ice. Only problem was that Pop had already deployed the bridge and the ferryboat rammed it sending Pop running for his life down 34^th Street with the bridge right on his heels. That was the end of that job.

Rob next got him a safer job as a ticket agent for the Long Island Railroad. After marrying my grandmother in 1906 he went into business for himself as a house painter and later changed that to the more interesting sounding title of interior decorator. My father went to work with Pop sometime during the mid-1920s and the stories that they both told me while I was growing up about their various business adventures in the 20s and 30s often had me rolling on the floor with laughter. I remember one day asking them to tell me about our family hardships during the “Great Depression” of the 1930s. They both looked at me quizzically and said, “We never had any problems, we worked for school teachers throughout the 1930s, they always had money.” So much for the impact on our family of “The Great Depression”.

I remember Pop as my funny grandpa who raised chickens in the backyard, drove an old Plymouth panel truck, sat in his comfy chair for the last 15 years of his life, smoked smelly cigars and drank beer that my uncle would bring home in a bucket from the corner beer-joint each evening. Television was in its infancy during the 1950s but it kept him entertained every afternoon and evening with Brooklyn Dodger baseball games and professional wrestling. He lived until 1962, from the age of the horse and buggy to the beginning of the space age. What a life!

Pop - William (NMI) McLaughlin