My Grandfather Going met Grandma when she was a teenager during World War I, when he was a horseman bringing up the animals from South Carolina to ship them off to France from New York City. They married shortly after the War ended and settled down initially in her hometown of Brooklyn (which accounts for me rooting for the Dodgers over the Yankees in 1955 and 1956, when I was 4 and 5, respectively).
Aunt Marie, Dad’s only sibling, was born in Brooklyn, but not much later they decided to move back to Amsterdam, his home town (there is a long family pattern of this, like there is some personal black hole that keeps sucking us back here even after we have seemingly escaped). The story is that he had passed most of the physical tests to join the Fire Department of New York, but asthma flared up and everyone thought it best for him to return to the healthy climate of upstate New York.
I don’t know anything about Aunt Marie’s birth, but Dad was born at home on April 30, 1922. We are a resourceful bunch, as can be seen by the fact that Grandfather Going delivered the baby. The Doctor arrived shortly thereafter, having been summoned from the pulpit while attending Sunday Mass at St. Mary’s.
The tradition back then was to have the father present the child for baptism while the mother stayed home. Grandma had instructed him to have the child named James, the same as his father and grandfather and great-grandfather. When they came home from St. Mary’s husband announced to wife that as far as he was concerned, there had been enough Jameses. “The boy’s name is Francis!” (after her brother, and father, and grandfather). The Christening gown has been used by every male member of the family since that day in 1922.
Jim Going moved his young family to nearby Tribes Hill in the mid-20’s, where he ran an early service station (his horse-training skills being of lesser value then) and a motor camp consisting of a handful of one room cottages to provide minimal shelter for the traveling public. Later he started an ice company and moved back to Amsterdam where they lived relatively comfortably.
When Dad turned seven, he became an altar boy at St. Mary’s. He had started school a year early at SMI simply by tagging along with his sister. (They lived across Maple Street from the school at that time, in a house later occupied by my classmate Frank Romeo).
Less than five years later, during a brutally cold ( -28 F.) February in 1934, Jim Going developed a raging fever, demanding that Dad open the windows and shutters in their house on Wilkes Avenue. Grandpa Jim died shortly after, having just turned 41.
After that, it was just the three of them.
They lost the business, and the house, and Grandma had to go to work in the factories and later took an office job at the freight terminal. Dad peddled the Evangelist, the Diocesan newspaper, on a route he shared with his friend Tom Eagan, who would later become a Jesuit priest and the Director of the Shrine of the North American Martyrs across the river from Tribes Hill in Auriesville. When he was a little older, Dad delivered telegrams for Western Union on his bicycle.
He started his life-long relationship with the medical profession with a series of childhood diseases, including rheumatic fever, and an appendix removal. From an autograph book he kept at the time, it appears he was a favorite among the nuns who were the nursing staff at St. Mary’s Hospital.
From the stories he told later, we got the impression that he was quite the cut-up in school. Oh, the tales usually involved the antics of Ed Dirsie, or Bud Langley, or Packy McCabe, or Dick Turner. But I’m not stupid. He was into the mischief right up to his neck with the rest of the them.
Aunt Marie dropped out of high school and went to work while Dad buried himself in his studies, earning the RPI Medal and finishing as Salutatorian of the Class of 1939 at St. Mary’s Institute. He was also an accomplished orator and debater. He was already interested in politics and public affairs, an eager follower of radio firebrand Father Coughlin and an opponent of Lend-Lease.
College was out of the question, so he worked at the Freight Depot with Grandma and passed into honorable manhood. During Wold War II he served in the Navy, variously stationed in Cleveland, Newport, Norfolk and overseas in Scotland (where he fell in love) and Cherbourg, France (where he developed scarlet fever).
After the war he was finally able to fulfill his dream of college, Siena Class of ‘49.
Here’s one of the first things he wrote for a class assignment:
English Comp
Francis Going
True Happiness
True happiness to me is the leading of a true Christian life in imitation of the Son of God. There is no greater satisfaction in the pursuance of the everyday tasks concerned with one’s journey along the road to death than that which comes with the knowledge that one is doing unto others as he would have others do unto him. It gives one an inner glow, a sense of fulfillment, which can be obtained through no other medium. It is but a short time that we pass in this vale of tears and what happiness we have here is but a small amount in comparison with the boundless happiness which God has in store for those who keep His word. True happiness then may be expressed as the leading of our lives in such a way as to obtain the true achievement of seeing God face to face one day.
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And then he met Mom.
It was love at first sight, love everlasting, love ever-perfect and a love that was stronger than death.
A whirlwind courtship, marriage, honeymoon in Nantucket, their first son (James) born a day shy of their first anniversary, followed by me less than two years later, then my sister Dale a year and a half later about the same time he was studying for the bar exam, then Tim the following year.
That was when we moved from Troy to suburban Albany into our own little house.
A year later Dad was near death from his disease-damaged heart. A team of brilliant young surgeons saved him, until the next time, and the time after that.
Dad had promised to build us a sandbox in the back yard in Westmere when we first moved in, but somehow he never got around to it. We didn’t see him during that time when they were making the railroad tracks all over his torso, so we didn’t quite understand that he would never be strong again. Listening now to the tape recorded message he made for us from his hospital bed after Christmas of 1955, I think I have a clearer picture.
The black hole sucked us back to Amsterdam in 1960 and by the following year he didn’t have the stamina to walk the block and a half from the Post Office to his law office on Church Street. He had open heart surgery this time, and more railroad tracks and afterwards we all pitched in so he could keep his practice going from home while he recuperated. I helped with the filing.
We actually had a lot of fun in those years. We went camping and drove through Canada and drove up Whiteface Mountain, and we continued to spend a couple of weeks each July at the Brunelli camp in Jaffrey, NH. Dad helped Mom correct her high school English papers and we all very much enjoyed his company. He was witty and wise and awfully smart about many subjects, including politics, where, not unlike his second son, he was something of a contrarian.
He helped found the New York Conservative Party locally in 1962, then ran as a Republican for Alderman in a primary against a long-term incumbent in 1963 (he lost by seven votes). In 1964 the two of us were out trooping for Barry Goldwater.
The politics may not have panned out, but the apple of his eye and fourth son, Sean Thomas, came around in 1966, my brother the only child.
Then came the heart attack in 1968, the continuing deterioration of his mitral valve throughout 1969, the surgery again for seven hours in January of 1970 (by this time I was a freshman in college and fully understood the implications) and the nearly five years of being homebound when he wasn’t hospitalized.
By then I was commuting to college and so got to spend more time with him than I ever had, and each moment was precious. Sometimes we’d stay up all night listening to the talk shows from New York City. He encouraged me to work on Jim Buckley’s campaign for the Senate in 1970 and mirabile dictu (as Jim’s brother might say), we finally won one.
I finished college and still didn’t know what I wanted to do, so now we actually spent quite a few days as well as nights together.
We kids surprised our parents with a 25th Anniversary party in September of 1973, and a color tv. We cleaned him up and dressed him up and they looked pretty darn good for an old married couple.
By the following Spring he started improving, at long last. I took him to the putting green at the golf course, he attended all my plays, he’d go for walks in the sweet outdoors. He even occasionally climbed the stairs at home. I began to feel some hope. Though his vision was nearly gone (a consequence of the surgery) he even talked about maybe trying to go back to work.
But by the end of the summer he started to slide backwards again. The Nixon thing didn’t help.
In and out of the hospital again. One day the visiting nurse couldn’t find any blood pressure, so off to St Mary’s we went and I stayed with him until he stabilized and I promised to be back the next day. He looked disappointed when I told him I had rehearsal for a benefit musical.
He died early the next morning, December 3, 1974 at the age of 52.
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On Dad’s 60th birthday, five months after Mary and Anna and I moved into our new house in Amsterdam (the black hole syndrome again), I painted a crude sign and drove it into the ground on the site in our back yard that would later include a swing set and sky fort that I built for our kids:
FRANCIS GOING MEMORIAL
SANDBOX
Dedicated April 30, 1982
