Everything you wanted to know about brakelights...

but didn't want to ask the cab driver.
I got to explain how the brakelights light up automatically when someone steps on the brake. He didn't know if it was something they did on purpose or not. We saw truck start to change lanes on some car without looking, then snap back into his lane. Dado asked about how hard it is to change lanes and what's involved.

This is the longest– and really only– road trip he's ever taken. When he was 16 or 17 was sent to Nevada by train to work in the CCC, Civilian Conservation Corps. According to Wikipedia, it was FDR's work relief program designed to combat poverty & unemployment from the Depression. Groups of 200 guys worked outdoors doing construction and buidling roads. Dado said you got a dollar a day– $30 a month. $22 of it went back home to your parents and you had $8 a month to live on.

In WWII he was in the Merchant Marines. That's when he lost contact with his brothers and sisters. Back in NYC in 1945, I went to work at his uncle Connie's bar, Hurley's, the only establishment in Rockefeller Center to not be owned by Rockefeller. Rockefeller offered them $1 million to buy it and they refused. Dado said Walter Winchell wrote in his column about how those Hurley's could turn down $1 million for a bar.

Dado worked there 1045 to 1950, serving Joe DiMaggio, Tuesday Weld and Perry Como. Perry Como always drank a beer from Pennsylvania, as he was from Pennsylvania. They got a lot of business from guys working in radio and TV who wanted a drink, without crossing 6th Ave. One time, a guy came in and ordered a "pinch and soda". Dado turned around, made the drink, turned back around and the guy had dropped dead. Heart attack. Last words on earth were "pinch and soda." (A pinch, apparently, is a Hague & Hague.)

Back then everyone drank coctails: daiquiris, stingers, sidecars, brandy alexanders, gin alexanders, slow gin fizzes, orange blossoms. In the 70's it all switched to "punches", as Dado called them. After Hurley's he went and worked in various bars on Wall Street for 30 years, right across from the World Trade Center. He retired in 1982.


I picked him up from his apartment Thursday. It reminded me of the apartment Tom Hanks' character in Big stayed at when he had to go to the city and get an adult job. Small, sparse, smelled like 30 years of cigarete smoke. Everything felt brownish-yellow.

I'd always been under the assumption he was reclusive. Non social. But on this trip he's been talking as comfortably and often as anyone I know. From all I can gather, he's been ready for this trip for awhile.


We met Dad here at the hotel in Knoxville at around 7. They're staying in the room right next to mine. Dad seems preoccupied and a little tense. He'll probably be that way till they make it back to Waco and Dado's settled in.