Chapter 7
Legacy
A week or so before he
died, in January 1998 at the age of 73, Dad dictated to Kathi instructions
about the dispensation of his gun collection, and of the trucks, trailers and
tractor at his place in West Virginia. For the last five years of his
life, Dad lived on 50 acres in Tyler County – up in the northwestern tip of the
state. It was his retirement place, and he envisioned it also as a family
retreat for us- his six grown children, and our families. He was proud to
tell us that no bank owned that land- he did. He paid off the mortgage during
his last few years of work as a Letter Carrier. He called it “our place” and it
was to be his legacy to us.
Once he got settled
there, he didn’t have long – about five years- to ramble around among the hills
and creeks of his land, or walk the miles and miles of roads around the
sparsely-populated Tyler County. For some years, (about 20, since 1975 at
least,) he had been minimizing the fact that he had “a little heart trouble,”
and he had always refused anything but the most basic treatment. Instead of
considering bypass surgery when it was suggested, for example, he took a daily
aspirin pill and the prescribed Valium when he really needed it. He also
carried nitroglycerin tablets for emergencies. He was living with a “ticking
time bomb” but he chose to ignore it. He did not visit doctors routinely, and
probably did not trust them.
When we would visit him
in West Virginia, he liked to take us for walks down along the creek (“Mistake
Creek”) or to the top of a hill (“Upthe Hill”) out behind the trailer he was
living in. He would stop often to show us various trees or animal nests.
We realize now that he was probably stopping to catch his breath.
He never talked about his health, just his plans to build an energy-efficient home and other buildings for equipment and guests. But in five years, he hadn’t made much progress. He was probably unable to sustain the energy to get much hard work done. He walked, though. He always had a “good- running vehicle,” but he walked his property every day, in all seasons. And, just because he was curious, he walked to nearby towns. The closest settlement is seven miles away, in West Union. His neighbors and good friends Jim and Judy Bagley would tell us that they were never surprised to see John McNulty walking along the road, often with his dog, “Dawg,” as far away as five or ten miles from his place.
Dad never talked, with me
anyway, about the heart condition that he had known about since 1975, when he
was 51, but he wrote about it. When he had been living in West Virginia for
about four years, and just six months before the fall of 1997 when he suffered
the big heart attack that eventually killed him, he took the time to type out
this story. I can’t do better than he did to explain how he chose to handle his
dilemma. So, in his words:
In the spring of
1983, I was informed, soon after my “rush” re-appointment, that I would
be sent to a Postal Service contract doctor for a thorough cardiac exam as a
condition of my employment. I had no choice in the matter. Postal
Administrators had determined that I had “heart trouble” and were intent on
exploring every avenue (and expenditure) to prove their point.
I was afraid that they
would “pre-determine” the outcome of the exam. I had to take some defensive
action. I decided to use my eligibility at the VA for a back-up exam, in
case the Post Office–selected doctor was willing to go along with their game
and find me “unfit for duty.”
The appointment with the
Post Office doctor happened first. I was ushered into the exam room the doctor
said, “Sit down and tell me about yourself.” I started to tell him about the
“alleged” heart trouble. “No, I want to hear about your walk to DC!” He turned
out to be a fitness freak, and really into walking. We talked for over an hour.
All this time, I’m sitting on the exam table with a cup of coffee. At last, I
asked, “Shall I undress, or maybe jump around on one leg so you can check me
out physically?” “No,” he said. “You’ve proven your point with your
walk.” He did not check blood pressure, heart rate, temperature or
anything else. I wonder how much it would have cost us taxpayers if he had
pulled a real exam on me. I heard later that he charged over $700.
That doctor gave me a
clean bill of health in his report to the Post Office. Little do they know!
Local PO supervisors made inquiries to make sure that it was really me who was
examined. That was a pleasant surprise, as I fully expected they would have had
the doctor “fixed.” Guess they were too sure of their “diagnosis” to worry
about the doctor. They gambled and they lost!
The irony comes next, at
the VA.
Things just went along at
work for a few weeks, until I got a letter from the Miami VA giving me the date
and time for my free cardiac exam. Sometimes things make you feel
apprehensive. This was one of those times. Took time off without pay and
checked into the Miami VA facility for a preliminary exam. I was told that I
had better arrange for “further evaluation” since the exam had found
indications of some cardiac problems. I was checked in as a heart patient,
assigned a bed and a robe. Went through the standard test procedures,
including a treadmill test and an angiogram, with a catheter and x-ray. I even
saw the internal view on TV! It was determined that I was in deep trouble
in the cardiac department. They found three severely blocked arteries and
wanted to schedule me for surgery at once. “Call your family and make arrangements
for a big operation.” The VA cardiac surgeon tried to convince me that surgery
would be a wise choice, and maybe my only choice if I wanted to live much
longer. I declined the operation and asked to be discharged at my own risk. I
asked about a non-surgical alternative, so he prescribed a series of pills to
be taken on a daily basis and nitroglycerin to be carried at all times. I
stopped at the dispensary to pick up the medication (free to me) and drove home
to talk things over with Barb. We had some beer and a pizza at Lou’s place, and
decided that life is not worth living if you can’t LIVE IT.
Now what was I going to
do? Thought about it and decided that, “As long as the weather holds up and the
paint keeps on flowing smoothly, why not just slap on another coat?”
I went back to work the
following Monday and said nothing about the VA visit.
Now I would have to
really play it cool. After all, I did have some heart problems. I decided that,
no matter what kind of work I did, the risk would be the same.
They had been working me
12 hours a day, six days a week, every week. I guess I was supposed to become
fed up with it and just quit. You hear about some postal employees who just
can’t take it anymore and sometimes (a very few) wind up killing themselves and
even taking others with them. You don’t hear about the (many more) who are able
to find the strength to bear up, for just one more day, month after month.
One result of the Post
Office’s efforts to “work the bastard to death” was that I earned enough
overtime to buy a new GMC pick-up truck. My first brand-new vehicle. As
far as the ability to do the work despite a “severe heart condition,” I suppose
it was a matter of personal pride. The Irish have a saying, “Don’t let the
bastards wear you down.” I continued to work as hard as any and much harder
than most until I decided to accept early (optional) retirement. Now as
I accompany Dawg on our daily walks around the “Hunting Lodge” in the hills of
West (By God) Virginia, I ponder the sheer idiocy of the government.
Just a few months
after he had written this account, on an October day in 1997, he was
feeling weak and sick, and he couldn’t walk it off; he knew he was in trouble.
So he got in his truck and drove to the Veterans Administration (VA) hospital
in Clarksburg, 35 miles away. For a man who avoided doctors all his life, he
had to have been more than a little bit concerned about his heart to go looking
for help from the medical establishment. But he trusted the VA.
And, as a WWII Navy veteran, he was entitled to free care there.
Wed, Oct 1st, ‘97
Not feeling well. Lungs
seem congested.
Working on gas pipeline.
Not enough energy to
(really) do anything.
Bad night to Thurs AM.
Upset stomach early morning.
Decide to look for help.
Thurs, AM -Power company
meter reader makes his reading.
I mention to (to him)
that I may go to town clinic for help since the “possibility” of heart trouble
exists.
Babe heard me and asked
about it. She knows I’ve been “funny” lately.
I tell her that I (might)
check with the VA for “possible” heart trouble.
“No need to tell my kids
about it.”
The person he refers to
as overhearing him, near the end of the page, was his younger sister Rose,
(nicknamed Babe) who was visiting at the time. She apparently left shortly
after this date, and was heard from only rarely by the family for the rest of
her life. She did not come to visit her brother in the hospital, or attend his funeral.
Dad never talked about what may have happened during this visit, but once,
during his time at the VA, I heard him mumble, “Babe was a good girl,” which
made me think there might have been an unsettled argument between them.
When Dad arrived at the
VA hospital, his mouth full of foamy spittle from his congested lungs, doctors
examined him and determined that he had suffered a massive heart attack, with
three arteries completely blocked. His heart had become greatly enlarged,
barely functioning. They saw no way to repair the heart, and no chance of
recovery. They told my siblings and me (who were contacted, somehow, in spite
of his wishes,) that he was dying. They did not believe he could have driven in
his condition, until Thom showed them his truck in the parking lot.
Because he had survived
the first few hours after arriving at the hospital, he was transferred to the
VA hospital in Pittsburgh PA, about three hours away, where there was a cardiac
unit.
Dad had been sedated
immediately after he was admitted, so that a breathing tube could be inserted.
The idea was to try to clear his lungs, and give his heart a break. The doctors
did not really expect him to survive this intervention, but he did. After a
week, he woke up groggy, but impatient for some coffee. Barb had flown up from
Pompano to see him, and all of us kids were able to come and spend as many days
or weeks as we could. I flew down from Massachusetts, Jack drove up from
Florida, and Jim came from Ohio. Thom drove up from South Carolina, Kathi flew
from Minnesota, and Ginger drove over from a small town outside
Pittsburgh. It was Kathi, a registered nurse, who talked with the
doctors and staff, and stayed with Dad for weeks, listening and taking notes in
his hospital room. One day, she thought maybe Dad was getting a little
sentimental, because she thought she heard him say “You’re a delight,” an
unusual sort of remark for Dad to make. Later on, she realized he was actually
saying, possibly as a joke, “You’re in the light.” This was something he often
yelled at Jack, Jim or Thom when they blocked the light while he had his head
under the hood of a car, or was working to fix something around the house.
Dad’s heart was shot, but
his will and his body did not relent for another three months, during which
time he struggled to deny his condition. At one point, probably in November,
against doctors’ orders, and in spite of his frugal nature, he decided to check
himself out of the Pittsburgh VA against medical advice. He arranged for a taxi
to take him home- a trip of over two hours. Thom, who was concerned after
talking with him on the phone, drove up from South Carolina and found Dad in
his trailer, huddled under a blanket next to a kerosene heater. His heart just
couldn’t pump enough blood to keep his body warm. He convinced Dad to
accept a ride with him to the VA hospital in Clarksburg, WV. After a few
days there, doctors sent him to a nursing home to die, but he checked himself
out of there too. It was in the nursing home (which had been billed as a
“rehabilitation facility”) that I saw him for the last time, just after
Christmas. He complained about the mushy food, and about loud partying by night
staff. He had to hide his belongings under piles of old newspapers to keep them
from being stolen while he slept. I did what I could think to do to make him
comfortable in this dire situation. When I found that the oxygen tank on the
wheelchair in his room was empty, I got the staff to replace it. I brought him
a roast beef dinner from a restaurant in town. I
filed complaints about
the night staff. I covered the bulletin board in his small room with photos of
Dad on his land, and newspaper clippings about The Walk, and a picture of the
USS Enterprise. It was a deplorable situation, but I didn’t think I could
get him out of there. I hugged him and mumbled a pathetic, “Thanks for
everything you’ve done for me, Dad.” and went back to Massachusetts. The next
day he asked Thom to drive up from South Carolina and take him to the
Clarksburg VA, where he was once again accepted as a patient. Kathi came back
from Minnesota to be with him for two more weeks. He died there on January 18,
1998.
At some point after he
had returned to the Clarksburg VA hospital, Dad bravely accepted the fact that
he had run out of time and that he would not be able to go home
again. Kathi wrote pages and pages of instructions as Dad dictated
them to her. They included the words for a sign that he wished he’d gotten
around to posting at the entrance to his place, out by the dirt road. He
wanted it to say: “This is Mac’s Place. He worked his ass off for
it!”
It wasn’t until after he
died, but one small thing I thought I could do right away to honor Dad’s memory
was to put up the sign he wanted at the entrance to his place. So, when I
got home from his funeral, in January 1998, I found a shop to create a sturdy
metal sign with Dad’s exact words. I took the liberty of adding a color
photo of his slightly smirking, handsome face. When my brothers and sisters
and I gathered the following summer to scatter some of his ashes at the top of
Dad’s favorite hill, we hung the sign, and it’s still there, in 2019.
John McNulty lived a hard life, as anyone who knew him would
agree. This is not a biography, but here is a summary of the ordeals that
constituted his life.
Dad never enjoyed the
luxury of a formal education past the eighth grade. His own father was a
Philadelphia police officer, and his mother had four children before she was
30. Dad was born May 1, 1924 at the Crozier Hospital for Incurables in
Chester , PA. The family was poor, and Dad, the oldest, quit school
at 16 so he could work at construction jobs to help support his mother and
three sisters. He had only completed the eighth grade by that age. He
started school at the age of eight, instead of six like most kids, because he
refused to walk to school until his sister Rose, two years younger, could go
with him.
Their mother was one of a
few women in 1940 who, after several attempts, managed to leave her abusive alcoholic
husband. This left the family even poorer. She did what many mothers did
then- sent one or two children to temporary foster care. Instead of going on to
high school, Dad joined the Navy in May of 1941. He was 17, so he had toget
special permission to enlist. He hoped the Navy could provide him with a hot
meal every day, some money to send home, and maybe a high school education.
Joining the military is hardly a risk-free career move at any time, but in
early 1941, the Navy was a safer bet than the Army. The war was heating up in
Europe, and US troops were fighting there, but no one expected the Navy to
become directly involved. Dad did not join up in order to fight in a war,
but just a few months later, having been trained as an aircraft mechanic, he
was assigned to serve on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS
Enterprise, stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
This was just a few
months before the Japanese attacked our Navy at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on
December 7. America was at war, and Dad, just a kid, was in the middle of
it. The Enterprise was involved in every major battle in the war, and became
the most heavily damaged and highly decorated ship in the US Navy fleet. In one
of those battles, near the Santa Cruz Islands in the Pacific, off the northeast
coast of Australia, Dad survived a schrapnel attack on the flight deck which
fractured his skull. He was one of 75 sailors injured in that battle.
Forty-four were killed. He spent four months in the ship’s sick bay, and
completed his service after returning to active duty on the Enterprise, which
continued to be involved in battles throughout the Pacific. He was honorably
discharged in January 1946. Today we would say he suffered Traumatic
Brain Injury, and possibly Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Back then, he
was just a young veteran lucky to be alive. He had bad headaches and seizures
and sometimes he passed out. Babe told us his personality was never the same
after he came back from the war.
By this time, he and Mom
were married with a baby on the way. The child, a son named John, lived only
three days after he was born in 1946.
For most of the next two
decades, Mom and Dad worked and raised their growing family, which, by 1965,
included six children. Dad worked as a truck driver, a car repair mechanic,
apartment maintenance man, and laborer on construction sites and in steel
mills. When Mom could, she worked as a grocery store cashier or store
clerk. In 1964, they decided to move from Philadelphia to South Florida, where
life might be easier, especially for Mom, who walked with a limp as a result of
contracting polio in 1951. Dad’s air conditioning repair service started well,
but never supported us, so in 1966, he applied to be a letter carrier with the
Post Office. (It became the US Postal Service in 1971.)
He was hired in
June 1966, when he was 42 years old. This job meant security for the
family, and Dad was always proud to be a letter carrier. It was good honest,
physical work.
He had an excellent
record for 11 years with the Pompano Beach Post Office, until the day
Supervisor Edward Tellian began work there in 1977. The next 15 years of Dad’s
life would be consumed in conflict with the Post Office, until the day he was
able to walk away on his own terms, after 20 years’ work, and live on his 50
acres, free and clear, in West Virginia.
This description of
events might suggest the life story of a bitter and defeated man, but Dad was
anything but bitter, and he refused to be defeated. Sure he was angry, but more
than that, he was curious, intelligent, skeptical, stubborn, earnest, morally
and physically tough, and funny until the day he died.
When I think of my dad, I
see him laughing, with his head thrown back. Or smirking without saying a word,
looking down and shaking his head, or staring with a blazing focus in his hazel
green eyes, usually waiting for one of us kids to come up with the answer to a
question he put to us. I remember him challenging us, if we didn’t
know about an event in American history, or the meaning of a word, or about a
scientific phenomenon, to “look it up.” One of the only luxuries I can
remember throughout my childhood, wherever we lived, was a bookshelf filled
with the 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
When I try to picture
him, I see him moving- always in motion, clapping his calloused hands together,
and saying “Welp! Let’s get going!” I see him crouched over a lawn mower or a
truck engine, or a washing machine, surrounded by tools, and greasy engine
parts, and a few of his sons, (never his daughters) if he could corral
them into helping.
Dad with his grandson, John McNulty, in 1996, walking up the hill behind his place.
In spite of a lifetime of
hardship and disappointment he was so fully alive. I never recall seeing him
sick, or even taking it easy. When I walked into his room in the VA
hospital in Pittsburgh and saw him in the bed, the shock for me was not the
breathing tube or the machines surrounding him, but simply seeing my Dad in a
horizontal position.
He was a tough man, and
he had a hard life, which he lived with what I like to call “irreverent
dignity.” I sometimes wonder if one or two different choices on his part could
have made a difference in how his last 20 years played out. Could he have
kept his mouth shut and avoided years of conflict with the Post Office?
Probably not. He spoke out, in his own style, against the
cruelty and indifference of Post Office Supervisors Edward Tellian and Rick
Munnell. It simply would not have been possible for Dad to ignore them.
Just as he chose to handle his heart condition the way he did, there would
have been no other path for John McNulty to take.
In his early life, he
simply struggled to survive, and in the end he fought. He chose his own
battles, surely, but he fought. And in the fighting he triumphed and achieved
something legendary.
The Walk is more to me
than a good story, or a notable physical accomplishment; it represents my
father’s very character . The decision to not roll over and play dead. The
decision to do something purposeful and physical and unexpectedly creative, in
the face of crushing defeat.
There’s a Latin phrase, solvitur ambulando. It means “The solution is in the walking,” or “The problem will be solved by walking.”
Dad solved a problem; and he did it not by thinking harder or
yelling louder; he solved his problem by walking.
The power of Dad’s Walk,
to me, is that he accomplished this hard, hard thing, and he did it when
everyone was telling him his fight was over.
The Walk changed Dad’s
life, and because of what he did, my life was changed too. His accomplishment
is my legacy. Because of his example, it has become my deep instinct to speak
up in the face of injustice, to keep going without complaint, and always,
always to “see how much fun we can have with those bastards.”
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