Reader's Digest Australia August/September 2025

M y father kept lists. He listed the 539 books he read in his last 25 years. He listed every C-Span Booknotes episode he watched religiously every Sunday night for almost seven years (322 shows). Oh, yes, he loved books! He kept shopping lists for his small fridge in his man cave (Pepsi, hazelnut coffee, heavy cream), and long lists of daily tasks. He recorded them in pocket-sized notebooks kept close by his reading chair. He never stopped writing lists until 5 p.m. on Dec. 31, 2004, when the cancer finally stopped him. After his death, I scooped all his lit- tle notebooks into a box. Besides the book list (recorded in what was rev- erentially called “the green book”), I rarely perused the other notebooks. The pain of his death was too raw, and then the business of living interfered. Dad was born in 1927 in Lowell, Massachusetts. His father worked in a tannery that turned cow carcasses into leather. His Irish immigrant grand- father rose from the wool mills to a city job as a “sparrow man,” cleaning Low- ell streets by shoveling horse manure. (To those who disparaged Lowell, he cracked: “You’d never call Lowell a one-horse town if you followed me around on my daily rounds!”) Dad was smart as a whip. After a summer working in the tannery with his father, he resolved to avoid a life- time of drudgery. At 16, he graduated from Lowell High School, then moved on to Boston College for a year before joining the Army in 1945, later return- ing to Boston College on the GI Bill to earn his bachelor of science and mas- ter of science in physics, commuting all six years from Lowell. His first job, in 1951, was as an engi- neer in the Ballistic Research Laborato- ries at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. But soon he became home- sick, so when he heard the Watertown Arsenal was hiring, he made a call. “Oh, sorry, we’re not hiring,” said the woman on the line. Crestfallen and about to hang up, he took a stab and meekly offered: “Ma’am, I’m a physicist.” Instantly her tone changed, as if Dorothy had shown the ruby slippers at the shuttered gates of Oz. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” she bellowed. “We’re hiring physicists!” In the 1950s, he was an early ex- pert in FORTRAN (a computer pro- gramming language), then worked a decade at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory. He moved his wife and five children from a Lowell tenement to a Boston suburb, and sent his kids to private colleges. It seemed he had left Lowell behind, but not so. In his heart, despite all the education and success, he viewed himself as simply a working-class Lowell kid. Alone in his reading chair, he some- times talked to himself. If you caught him in the act, he was unembarrassed: “I have a rich interior life,” he cracked, borrowing a phrase used 23 illustrations by Helena Perez Garcia World of Good reader ’ s digest READERSDIGEST.COM.AU