An American Leprechaun: A Memoir

By Ken Austin

To illustrate this humor factor, Ive added a humor column to the end of each chapter. Some of them are from my grandfathers book of kid puns and quips. I do hope they will bring a smile to your face. Enjoy!

Welcome to my world! I hope you will enjoy reading about the people and events that helped shape my life. If you ask me what most influenced my very being, I would tell you it was my sense of humor. Ive always been able to see some humor in almost everything. I do believe that this ability has extended my business success and my life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503520653

Ken Austin

Ken Austin began his marketing career with Johnson & Johnson. He later joined Warner-Lambert and then Venus Esterbrook as vice president of marketing. In 1969, he ventured into the nascent home inspection field. In 1979, he founded the HouseMaster home-inspection franchise system. He retired from HouseMaster in 2008.

Book preview

AN AMERICAN

LEPRECHAUN

A MEMOIR

KEN AUSTIN

Copyright © 2015 by Ken Austin.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 01/07/2015

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

Preface

1 A Night To Remember

2 In The Beginning

3 Boys Meet Girls

4 Twixt Twelve And Twenty

5 A-Ttention

6 Off We Go…

7 What’ll You Have

8 Growing Up

9 Surprise, Surprise

10 Heading Home

11 Help Wanted

12 Ready Or Not

13 Farewell To Arms

14 A Fresh Start

15 Code Blue

16 Off And Running

17 Family Matters

18 Follow The Leader

19 Take Me Out To The…

20 Going, Going, Gone

21 And The Beat Goes On …

To my loving grandchildren and

their children’s children.

PREFACE

Welcome to my world! I hope you will enjoy reading about the people and events that helped shape my life. If you asked me what most influenced my very being, I would tell you it was my sense of humor. I’ve always been able to see some humor in almost everything. I do believe that this ability has extended my business success and my life.

To illustrate this humor factor, I’ve added a humor column to the end of each chapter. Some of them are right out of my grandfather’s book of kid puns and quips. I do hope they will bring a smile to your face. Enjoy!

1

A NIGHT TO REMEMBER

I t’s New Year’s Day night in 1951. I’m nineteen and a sophomore at Fordham University School of Business in the Bronx, New York. My father, an immigrant from Ireland, asked me if I would help him out by filling in for his regular night bartender who had taken ill earlier in the day.

While I had bartended at my father’s Bliss Tavern in Sunnyside, New York, a working-class neighborhood of Queens, in the previous summer, it was always during daytime hours. This was different; it would be my first stint as a nighttime bartender. My father felt confident that I could handle it since New Year’s Day night had always been pretty quiet in the bar business. The usual patrons would still be recuperating from the night before.

But not this year! From the moment I relieved Eddie Metzger, the day bartender, at 5:45 PM, the place was hopping. It seems that many of the twenty-year-olds of yesteryear were in town for a quasi reunion. Now in their forties and fifties, they were looking to renew old friendships—and old rivalries.

Toward the center of the long sixty-foot bar sat Freddie Stitz and his beautiful wife, Dolores. Freddie had served fifteen years at Sing Sing Penitentiary on the Hudson River for his complicity in the murder of a local storekeeper. Now paroled, he sought respectability. He and his wife were dressed to the nines.

Further down the bar sat popular Billy Dunn, now a union carpenter. Billy was a Sunnyside hero; he had earned the right to fight Joey LaBoa for the featherweight championship at the Long Island City outdoor arena the past July. Everyone was confident that Billy would win the championship bout and wear the treasured belt. Billy was knocked out in the first round. But everyone still loved him. He is now married and living in nearby Maspeth.

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Ken Behind The Bar

Another pair that stands out in my memory of that eventful night was two tough guys who had been rivals in years gone by. Now they sat, side by side, toward the front of the bar exchanging barbs. Taken lightly at first, they were resentful as the night wore on and their alcohol levels rose. As I recall, around ten o’clock, one of them bolted out of the bar. Some thirty minutes later, he returned to his saved barstool. I heard him mumble to his crony, I’m packing heat, while slightly opening his jacket. I saw the grip of a handgun. The stakes were rising rapidly. I couldn’t do anything about the gun but to keep an eye on the duo and stay out of range.

I thought about the baseball bat that the regular bartenders kept hidden below the bar for emergencies. During my indoctrination to bartending, several bartenders explained that the bat was there to deal with out-of-control patrons as a last resort. I promptly dismissed the thought of swinging a baseball bat at a patron’s head for several reasons. One was that I had served the rowdy with the drinks that led to his current state, and more importantly, what if I missed my target and hit his nose or ear? He’d be quite upset and would probably grab the bat and make mincemeat of me. I couldn’t chance that.

By eleven o’clock, the place was hopping. People were two and three deep at the bar. I remember that wine spritzers were very popular that night, particularly with the ladies. That’s a tall frosted glass half-filled with Rhine wine and half with seltzer water. Beer, of course, was the number one choice of many drinkers, with Rheingold leading the pack. Rheingold beer was so popular that they ran an annual Miss Rheingold beauty contest and election. Each year, three contestants’ faces were plastered all around New York City on billboards, posters, and ballot boxes in bars and subway/bus banners. The vote count each year was staggering. It was said that the ballot count was second highest in the United States; only the presidential elections topped them.

Miss Rheingold Contest

Seagram’s led the blended whiskey field (remember seven and seven?), and Dewar’s was the preferred scotch. Vodka hadn’t caught on yet. In the middle of all the hoopla, my main Rheingold tap ran dry. What to do now. I asked one of our more dependable patrons to cover for me while I went downstairs to tap a new keg. While I had never needed to tap a keg before, how difficult could it be? I had seen see my father do it.

I rolled a fresh keg into place and set it upright. I loosened the screw coupler on the spent keg and carefully released the pressure. Then I removed the vertical tap rod and drove it into the fresh keg, piercing the plug while tightening the coupler to secure the rod. I thought that I had completed the task successfully. I released my grip on the rod. It flew up out of the keg with enormous power, piercing the low ceiling, just grazing my right eye. Though shaken, once I reset the rod and tightened it securely, all was well.

No sooner did I resume my bartending role than a car roared into the No Parking—Fire Hydrant spaces in front of the bar. The driver jumped out of the car and ran into the bar. I soon found out that he was the infamous Billy Donovan, the longtime nemesis of almost every guy in Sunnyside. He looked up and down the bar and yelled out, Who wants a piece of me? In the crowd, he recognized Billy Dunn, a longtime adversary. Donovan went right at him and shoved him to the floor. Billy countered with a drunken swing that triggered a punch barrage by Donovan. Poor tipsy Billy fell to the floor.

Billy’s friends rushed over to Freddie Stitz, urging him to come to his old friend’s aid. Initially, he resisted the request but then relented when he saw Billy sprawled out on the floor. Freddie took off his suit coat and went after Donovan like a bull. Donovan wanted no part of an enraged Stitz. He took one furious swing at Donovan but missed him. Donovan ran into the bar’s side dining room and jumped on and over tables until he got to the front door and dashed for his car. He got in and backed into the car behind his. He then swerved out of the space and raced down the street, running a light at the next intersection.

Everyone was expecting Donovan to return later with some of his henchmen. My gun-toting drinker and his tough-guy buddy moved up closer to the front door and window to defend everyone if Donovan came back. He never did, thank God!

When I got home, I couldn’t sleep. I was awake when my father got up. I had to talk to someone about my incredible experience. Dad listened attentively and remarked that it was quite an evening. He suggested I jump into bed and try to get some shut-eye. He went off for another day in the trenches.

That certainly was a night to remember!

HUMOR

What do you call deer with no eyes?

No-eyed deer.

2

IN THE BEGINNING

M orphing back nineteen years to June 18, 1932, Tom and Sally Austin were about to become parents for the first time. They didn’t know the gender of their offspring. Ultrasound technology hadn’t perfected