EMOTIONAL STORMS WON'T BREAK HIM OLD N.O., STERN DAD HELPED Submitted by N.O.V.A. July 2005 Times Picayune 10-4-1998 ************************************************* Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************ Somewhere in the deep currents of the mind where no words swim, Charlie Staunton understood that someday, sooner or later, there would come a hurricane that had nothing to do with weather. And so he has tried for 60-plus years to batten every hatch. His mother and father did the same. They watched their pennies. They maintained their Dauphine Street property. They took care of their boat, powered by an automobile engine ingeniously and economically installed by Staunton's father. They went to Mass every Sunday, and they wanted for Staunton what many parents want for a child - that he should feel less vulnerable than they felt. "When you grow up," Staunton's mother told him, "Don't rent. Make sure you buy a house." Staunton's father, an electrician with a grammar school education and a conviction that nothing should enter his home that was not American union-made, maintained a dictatorship over his family that Staunton, now 71, judges benevolent. It was based, he explained one recent morning, on a simple rule. "What the daddy says, goes," Staunton said. "My father was very strict with me and my brothers and my sister. He was never tender with me, but I knew he loved me. The way I could tell that my father loved me was because he beat the hell out of me. Maybe that was the only way he knew how to get it done." To get what done? Staunton would not know the answer to that until his own hurricane struck. "I grew up in a little shotgun house," he said. "All we had was a front room, a bedroom for my parents, a smaller bedroom my sister stayed in, a kitchen, and a back room that had a folding daybed where me and my two brothers slept. We didn't have a heck of a lot, but everybody was happy and loved each other and took care of each other." As a boy, Charlie basked in the summertimes in a now-vanished New Orleans. When school was out for the year, he set off for Bucktown to be with his grandfather, a house painter well-known as a glorious character in a primitive lakefront settlement rife with characters. Staunton's grandfather, "Good Time" Tony Staunton, was the New Orleanian of song and story. He had weathered the storms of life and come out of them with an insouciance that both defied and embraced death. "Good Time" Tony lived with his wife, Mamie, in a squatter's camp built on the canal at Bucktown. He taught Charlie to swim by tying a rope to the boy's midriff, tossing him off the camp porch into the lake and asking the boy to trust him. Charlie became a good, confident swimmer. "My grandfather played guitar and harmonica at the same time, like the old one-man bands used to do," Staunton said. "We were great friends. He loved to party, and these were the days when you could call up the brewery and get a quarter keg of beer delivered for about three dollars and a rented jukebox for a dollar. "In the morning, he'd catch the West End streetcar, go wherever the painting job was, do his work, get back on the streetcar, ride to West End, get off and walk down Hammond Highway across the Bucktown Bridge to his house. It had four rooms. He loved to fill it up with the family, and played the old-time standards, five- foot-two, eyes of blue, coochie-coochie-coochie-coo, has anybody seen my gal? "Things like that, up-tempo stuff." As Staunton grew, it became clear that he had his grandfather's musical ability and attraction to the limelight. He learned harmonica and banjo, took up gymnastics and balancing, and became a competitive weightlifter. From his father, he inherited a gift for things mechanical. He loves the order and predictability of pre-computer-age machinery, like automobile engines and typewriters. And he loves baseball. In 1950, after he'd married Muriel Costa, a roofer's daughter who lived eight blocks from the Stauntons, Staunton built a house on Abundance Street, across from the all-wood Perry Roehm baseball park. He and Muriel had a baby girl by then. Staunton was working at the Wembley tie plant, so he'd go to Abundance Street in the evenings, hammering and sawing until 10 o'clock every night. New Year's Eve of 1950 found him still working at midnight, spreading concrete under the din of whistles and bells and firecrackers. True to form, he built a 900-square-foot bungalow as efficiently and economically as possible. "Then, in the summertime, I'd come home in the evenings and climb the rungs on a post, sit up on top and watch Rusty Staub hit balls over the fence," Staunton said. What more could a man want? Perched atop a pole, with a mortgage-free home behind him and a ballgame before him, all was as Staunton had willed it. And, for the most part, things stayed that way. As the years rolled by, the Stauntons found a new home in Metairie near a ballpark, Staunton started his own successful office machine repair business, and the kids grew up and had children of their own. Staunton, the semi-retired, aging weightlifter, lost muscle mass gradually and naturally. He played banjo and sang Sinatra songs at retirement homes around New Orleans and started a Sunday morning baseball league for older men at Lakeshore Playground. In his spare time, Staunton manicured the infield so that everything would be in perfect order for the games. And then it came, Staunton's hurricane. Last year, his daughter died of breast cancer at age 46. During her illness, Staunton went to Mass every day, but no amount of praying seemed to help. The storm beat at his windows, tore at his heart, put a break in his voice when he says the name - Dianne - but her death did not break Charlie Staunton. He had been storm-proofed by love and, perhaps, by a lifetime of obsessive maintenance. In any case, Staunton still goes to Mass every day. And lest anyone wonder about his state of mind, he recently put a new engine into an old Chevy. "I'll never get over losing my daughter," he said, "but I still play ball every Sunday."