Most of the men I know in my personal life, and know of through friends are decent and hardworking, they're just not the ones that we see on the news and read about in the papers. You might just say that he was wildly successful at fulfilling his ambition.Īs I was writing that first line, I was thinking what a shame that decent, hardworking men are so scarce these days, but that's not true. His son grew up to be a celebrated journalist and humorist who wrote a funny, loving memoir of his father and the values he imparted. He became a mid-westerner from head to toe. Joseph, Missouri with his family, and his greatest ambition was to be an American and give his children the chance to live the American Dream, as it used to be known. He came to America from the Ukraine when he was 2 years old, landed in St.

Ĭalvin Trillin's father Abe was a decent, hardworking, opinionated family man. The author's unerring sense of the American character is everywhere apparent in this quietly powerful memoir, Messages from My Father.

Presumably he had also sworn off swearing, although he was a collector of curses, such as 'May you have an injury that is not covered by workman's compensation.' Although he had a strong vision of the sort of person he wanted his son to be, his explicit advice about how to behave didn't go beyond an almost lackadaisical 'You might as well be a mensch.' Somehow, though, Abe Trillin's messages got through clearly. He was given to swearing off things―coffee, tobacco, alcohol, all neckties that were not yellow in color. In Kansas City, he was a grocer, at least until he swore off the grocery business. Joseph and the dreams of America of someone who had been born is Russia. Calvin Trillin, the celebrated New Yorker writer, offers a rich and engaging biography of his father, as well as a literate and entertaining fanfare for the common (and decent, and hard-working) man.Ībe Trillin had the western Missouri accent of someone who had grown up in St.

When Dreams Come True by Calvin Miles