Remembering Bob Lally

Robert "Bob" Lally, my cousin Nancy's husband, died in Cleveland Heights, OH, January 12th, 2008, of Parkinson's (from which he suffered for over 20 years), at home, surrounded by family and friends. He was one of those larger-than-life individuals who grace our lives every so often, "the gift unbidden," in Frost's words, enriching us, making us better. An unforgettable character in mine, he was 79.
His life in many ways was the stuff of legend. Not a big man, he played high school football, a lineman, and his team never lost. At Notre Dame again, still not a large man, a mere 185 pounds compared to the 300-pound-plus behemoths of today, he played under another legend, Frank Leahy. And again, his team never lost a game in the years he was the starting guard, 25 wins at Cathedral and 38 at Notre Dame, 63 straight victories in all, winning for him an entry in Ripley's "Believe it or Not." He deserved it.
Did I mention that he captained both the football and track teams his senior year in high school and was the salutatorian at graduation there .Not too shabby, as a later generation might put it. Still, his adult life only beginning, the promise was already there for all to see.
After graduating from Notre Dame, he continued on at South Bend to take a law degree and practiced the law for a time in Cleveland. He found it "too slow" for the things he wanted to accomplish and went to work for his dad's company, Norton Brothers roofing, eventually heading the company as co-owner and president for 40 years.
He married Betty Koch and together they had 11 children before she died of an asthma attack. My Cleveland cousin Nancy about this time had lost her husband, Ron, leaving her with four children and an uncertain future. Bob and Nance met at a Parents Without Partners group, one thing led to another and they married in 1966, brave souls that they were. Fortunately Bob had a large, 15-room house and Nancy and her brood moved in. The following year, Jennifer Lally was born, making an even 16 kiddos in all. How they did it I'll never know, but suffice it to say that when my wife, dear Frances, my college sweetheart, died of a brain tumor in 1973, our second year in Amherst leaving me with five children, ages five to fifteen, Nancy and Bob served as inspirations. If they could do it, so could we, once I found a woman brave enough to take on my menagerie.(Fran had encouraged me to marry and I did so less than a year after her death.)
Marie Frisardi, the first woman hired at Boston Latin, herself the mother of two boys, was brave enough (foolish enough?) to say yes and we've been married now 35 years next December. It's been a roller coaster ride, with more ups than downs fortunately, but never dull. My gang are all UMass grads, all married, two to their UMie classmates, all parents and home owners, the three boys own their own businesses. I may be biased but I believe they received really good educations at UMass. One sign of this: the caliber of the friends they brought home during their college years and another, how well they've done, professionally and personally since graduation. We have 11 grandchildren from this group and these kids, no doubt about it, make life worth living for Grandpa and Grammy.
Marie's sons are both married, one a lawyer in Boston, the other an editor/poet/teacher in Orvieto, Italy where he and his wife have lived for the past nine years.The Boston Frisardi's have three children, making 14 grandkids in all, the eldest, a recent Princeton grad.
Back to Bob Lally. My favorite memory of him is this: When I taught at Ohio State,1968-71, he and Nancy came down to Columbus for an OSU-Purdue football game. The stadium holds close to 100,000 fans, most of them OSU rooters. For some strange reason known only to him and God, Bob that cold winter day decided to root for Purdue, perhaps because Notre Dame is also in Indiana also and perhaps too because Nancy did not attend the game that day. At first I thought we, sitting around this football idolator were going to be tarred and feathered before the game was over. It wasn't long, however, before Bob had those initially hostile fans eating out of his hand. They soon realized that he was simply having some good-natured fun, was not at heart a real Purdue fan and was merely trying to make this lopsided game a bit more interesting for one and all. That he did and by game's end--not an exaggeration--they had all come to be won over by him, just as we, his family, did. Is love too strong a word? I think not, so lovable was he, and charming, an Irish storyteller with a bit of the "debbil" in him, all of these.We couldn't help ourselves. Could I have pulled that off? No way, Jose.
This little story is yet another reason that I have missed him since I attended his funeral earlier this week in Cleveland. At the Offertory procession, his grandkids brought up the gifts, all 38 of them, many of them unabashedly weeping, and coincidentally as luck would have it, the same number as his Notre Dame wins.There were few dry eyes in the church, including two of my kids', a son and daughter who joined me in Cleveland.
Bob, you set the bar high for those of us left behind. We'll do our best to live up to your high standards, but it won't be easy.
When I think of your life, I think of Marc Antony's words over the fallen Caesar, "This was a man. When comes such another?"
Rest in peace, dear brother, rest in eternal peace.

Roland Merullo's Writings, cont'd.

"Revere Beach Elegy," the third of Roland Merullo's Revere Beach stories, is actually, unlike the earlier two of the trilogy, "Revere Beach Boulevard," and "Revere, In those Days," a memoir. The former were fictional stories built roughly on the model of the historical Merullo family. I can say this authoritatively because in the memoir, he lets us know that, yes, his father was one of eight children, and yes, the extended family did visit his father's home every Sunday, without fail, all 25 or so of them, each and every Sunday, just as he said they had. That his grandmother, his father's mother, was one of the 'true north's' of his childhood, the source of much spirituality, particularly humility, in the young Roland's life, that his father, even in memory, continues to be an important model for him--Merullo pere went to Suffolk Law at night in his late 40's,(he got them to admit him with only a high school diploma), graduated from Suffolk, age 54, and took the bar exam not once, not twice, but four times before he passed it on the fifth try and settling down to the practice of law for the last 12 or so years of his life. The father had been Christian Herter's secretary but when Herter went to Washington, Merullo pere decided to stay in Revere, "with the family". Or that Roland and his family's favorite vacation spot is Italy where they try to go as often as they can, his paternal grandmother's birthplace in a small town east of Naples especially reminiscent of that very special presence (force for good he would call it) in his life.
I also learned that Roland, though now a practicing Buddist, has deep roots in the Catholic faith so his writing about both faiths is not fictional, that he was a sickly child, that he was always small for his age but had a growth spurt during a hospital stay, he claims, so that now he's close to six feet tall, that he was always good at sports, except swimming, so those references to baseball, track, golf and rowing have a basis in fact, that he worked construction after high school, that he attended Boston U for two years before transferring to Brown, a Russian lang/lit major there, that he worked in the Soviet Union for 28 months after college with the USIA, hence his novel, "A Russian Requiem," during which he fell in love, deeply, madly, spiritually, with the Russian people, and also that he served in Micronesia with the Peace Corps but gave it up after only six months of his two-year tour, one of the big failures in his life he laments, because there he literally had nothing to do, and it drove him the point where he had to leave, it was driving him crazy.
What else? That he did odd jobs, including carpentering, in western Mass, drove a taxi in Boston, is the father of two girls, Alexandra and Juliana, that his wife of now 20 years is Amanda, also a Brown grad and a photographer by profession, that he loved Phillips Exeter almost as much as Revere, his "two heavens," and that, finally, he has several chronic health "issues," as some in Amherst and surrounds like to say, that, now at age 54, have slowed him down.
What I'd like to muse briefly about here is the account of the woman, a slight acquaintance of his mother's, who told her that Roland, when still quite young, should go to school elsewhere, that the education he was getting in Revere was not up to his abilities. Roland helped out by winning a half-scholarship to St. John's Prep in Danvers where one of the subjects he was assigned was Russian language, before being admitted to Exeter where he continued the subject, and at Brown later, before going to Russia and really becoming fluent in it. He has always loved Russian novels but the language came slowly to him. No wonder. It's a hard language to learn, as most would agree.
But my thought has to do with Providence, some would call it Fate, in his, in our lives, a subject he addresses in the memoir. The woman happened to meet his mother, gave her that unsolicited suggestion, a bit hubristically on her part I'd say, completely, it seems, out of the blue, and the family, for some reason or other--they must have believed her--acted on it, Rol winning the half-scholarship, his mother reentering the work force to help pay the bills that would make it all possible and eventually, the young Roland actually writing about his Russian experience. Coincidence? I think not but perhaps a combination of two things, luck and what's been foreordained. (I have friends who say there is no such thing as happenstance though I would not go quite that far myself.)
And yet I wonder. I dated many young women in high school and college before a college classmate "fixed me up" with a young lady from his evening course in Logic--is that ironic or what?-- for an upcoming St. Joe's dance. On out second date she did something no date had ever done, she tucked her arm, a very simple act in itself, into mine as we walked up the path to the country club for the event taking place there. Did she hook me or was it vice-versa? And our third date was to an Irish Ball, as they were called at the time, The Kerry Ball, to be exact, in downtown Philadelphia where her father's orchestra, "The Four Province Irish Ramblers," were playing the Irish music, to which I became completely smitten and eventually, this led me to become an Irish citizen. What's so strange about all this? I married this young lady, Frances, and together we had five children together, before she died in 1973. My second wife, Marie and I met, again, in a seemingly fortuitous fashion, but again, was it?
And finally, the Irish citizen part, my father never, and I mean never, spoke about his Irish background so this was something, the Irish connection, I had to pursue on my own many years after he died. He often opined that he did not want to become "a professional Irishman," as some of his friends had done. He liked to say that his father was from King's County, his mother from Queen's County, but as no such counties existed on the maps we consulted, we thought--he was a great story teller--that like many of his stories, he was just making it up. He wasn't. These counties reverted to their original Irish names, Laois and Offaly, after the peace arrangements of 192 with the hated British. He wasn't just telling a story after all.
So I ask again, Providence, Lady Luck, Fate, a combination? And doesn't everyone have similar questions to ask about their own backgrounds? I'm leaning to the former explanation, Providence, with a bit of luck, fate and free will thrown in for good measure. (And of course, put that way, I need take no, or little, responsibility for results based on the original decisions and what followed. Or, if they turned out badly, I guess I could always say, "The Devil made me do it.") Thank you, Charley, for fixing me up with Fran. You're an angel.