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Back to Bethlehem: Tell it Again, Dad
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15434 |
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LIFE
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12 / 1989 |
2,778 Words |
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Bradley D. Ross
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"When we were kids, we were so poor that … When we were kids, our neighborhood was so tough that … When we were kids, we walked miles though the snow to get to school, and it was so cold that …" For thirty years I listened patiently, but skeptically, to my father's tall tales of his hometown. At each retelling, Dad's old neighborhood grew colder, tougher, and poorer. This year I decided to call his bluff. We would take a surprise trip back to Dad's hometown--a town I had never seen and a town Dad hadn't visited in forty years.
My father was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia. He moved to Los Angeles when he was fourteen years old. The youngest of three children, he grew up on the doorstep of Lehigh University. Although Lehigh was known for engineering and not football, my father's stories always recalled those ever-so-cold autumn afternoons when the Lehigh Engineers played their dreaded rivals, the Lafayette Leopards. Of course, my father was "too poor" to afford a ticket to the big game. Instead, he would stand "in the cold" outside the looming wooden stadium gates. Hearing only the roar of the crowd, he and his friends would take turns squinting at the game through the jagged cracks in the wood. Finally, two minutes before the end of each game, the ticket attendants would open the gates for the crowd to depart, and my dad and his friends would flood in, racing to catch a last-second glimpse of the field and players.
Although he never attended Lehigh as a student, he surely adopted the school as his own. Later, as we sat in front of the television each week in Los Angeles watching college football games, he would always wait anxiously for the Lehigh score. His yells of approval or dismay could be heard all the way back to Bethlehem. He still cannot understand why the networks reuse to prominently feature Lehigh in the televised game of the week, or why the announcers refuse to provide Lehigh score updates at five-minute intervals.
The annual "Big Game" between Lehigh and Lafayette was coming up in late November. This year for the first time we would see it together and in person.
The trip was to be a surprise, so I told my father that I needed his help on a business trip to northern California. He was puzzled, but in convinced him that my job was at stake. What else could he say? "Of course I'll help."
When we arrived at the airport for our flight to Philadelphia, my father was still reluctantly resigned to a dull business trip to northern California. As we approached the boarding gate, the monitor showed "Flight 395 to Philadelphia." "They must have forgotten to change it from the last flight," I explained.
We took one step onto the plane and my father's eyes grew as wide as the plane's wings. He knew that 747s didn't fly the short distance from Los Angeles to northern California. "Where are we going?" he demanded. Just at that moment, the flight attendant confirmed over the loudspeaker that this flight was bound for Philadelphia. "Is the business trip to Philadelphia?" my father asked.
My mouth went dry, and I couldn't say a word. I reached into my coat pocket, pulled out the two football tickets, and handed them to my dad. Now there were two of us who were speechless. We both just sat there in
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