Currently Reading
November 22, 2005
Alfred Lubrano’s Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams. There is a brief profile and precis of the book here.
The premise of the book is simple—people with blue collar roots who rise to the middle class have a different frame of mind from people who were born to the middle class. While I don’t quite meet Lubrano’s principal criterion for the people he calls “Straddlers”—he focuses on people who are the first in their family to attend college, and both my parents were college graduates—I identify deeply with much of what he says.
Early in the book he riffs on some of the values of blue collar culture, including some things he still holds close today:
Other things, too: loyalty; a sense of solidarity with people you live and work with; an understanding and appreciation of what it takes to get somewhere in a hard world where no one gives you a break; a sense of daring; and a physicality that’s honest, basic, and attractive. (When I worked for New York Newsday, a disgruntled reader had been stalking me and persistently threatening my life. A colleague suggested I get a “goon” to protect me. An editor answered, “Alfred doesn’t need a goon. Alfred is a goon.”)
Later, he talks about his grandfather, a bricklayer, and what a tough man he was:
Sometimes, we'd simply look at the buildings on which my father and grandfather had worked. My grandfather was Ellis Island, Class of 1914. As a kid, he boxed and performed gymnastics on piles of horse manure dumped by the city in empty lots. Once, he lifted his junior high school principal and hung him on a clothes hook in a classroom wardrobe. "Guy deserved it," my grandfather said, and we believed him. He was handsome, with his mustache, thick hair, and eye twinkle. George Clooney looks so much like him in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? that my mother cried when she saw it. Now when the urge strikes, I can go to New York and see his handiwork—run my hands over the bricks that line the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway or any one of dozens of places that look like buildings to you but are monuments to me. He saw New York as two things: the deepwater port of possibility where you could make enough money to buy a place for your wife and raise your three daughters, and the lunatic town where punks sprayed graffiti over his bricks. He died when crack was big, and the city's renegade feel had soured him. Several Straddlers told me about a bluecollar elder who impressed them as much as my grandfather did me. These tough-guy old-timers possessed a characteristic—-strength, or dignity, or willfulness—-that Straddlers tried to emulate in their own lives. While working-class machismo doesn't always serve a Straddler well, sometimes just the knowledge that they share genes with people of courage can help a limbo man or woman through the hard days and nights.
Well said, and exactly the sentiment behind something I wrote about my own grandpa, Giacomo Tripi, Ellis Island, Class of 1909.
Posted by Bill Trippe at November 22, 2005 11:15 AM
