Son of a Son of a Sailor

Father's Day got me thinking. In February 1941, on a Saturday morning, my father, Robert Pryor, woke up and found his father, Thomas Pryor, drinking coffee alone in the kitchen with only the winter light coming in through the backyard window. My grandmother and uncle had left for work. Dad, 11, talked baseball with his Dad for an hour while eating three bowls of cereal. My 40 year old grandfather, ill with Potts Disease, a late stage Tuberculosis, told his son he needed to rest and suggested Dad go out and play. Dad got dressed took his mother’s scarf on his father’s suggestion, then he got a long hug and wet kiss from his father and good bye in his ear, twice.

After my father left, my grandfather pushed himself up from the table, grabbed a bunch of towels and stuck them under the front door and all around the two windows. He closed the door between the rooms pulled a chair over to the oven, stuck his head in it and killed himself. My father found his father dead an hour later.

If my Dad was still here, he’d be 83 and he’d still be expecting a call a day and a kiss on the lips, hello and goodbye. When I was young I didn’t understand his strong grip on Rory and my life. He was a suffocating son of a bitch but I guess he wanted to make sure we didn’t leave him.

Lucky for me, he was the most interesting pain in the ass I’ve ever known, and I miss him every day. His artistic and mechanical talent was boundless, barely owning an education (his early schooling was movies and music at the Paramount) he read everything and could talk any subject intelligently. He knew every joke ever told, and told them well. Most of all he was a sailor, in his heart and in his soul. No conversation was ever far away from a reference to the sea, the Navy, the Merchant Marine, or his three trips around the world.

Dad joined the Navy on his 17th birthday in 1946 after a failed attempt the previous year to get in before the war ended. They caught him lying about his age. After two years in the Navy he spent three in the Merchant Marine.

If Dad didn’t meet Mom, he would have made a career at sea. He loved us dearly but never lost his yearning to be a sailor. We often heard at home, “if it wasn’t for you I’d be on the ocean.” He told me his father’s fondest wish was to be a sailor. Maybe in his heart that’s what my grandfather was. Being a sailor must have been a dreamy place to go to when he was a boy in the Staten Island orphanage and later when the disease sent him to Tuberculosis Sanatoriums for 7 of his last 10 years. Maybe my Dad wanted to finish his father's dream. For five years he got that chance.

That makes me a Son of a Son of a Sailor.


Happy Father's Day, Dad.