After Finding My Way in Westport was published, I heard from a former colleague who had reported to my father at the Producto Machine Company in Bridgeport. He offered a portrait of my father that I had never quite seen as his son.
He remembered my father Raymond as impeccably dressed, intellectual, warm, personable, and “a perfect gentleman,” describing him as one of the most professional people he had ever worked with. He recalled my father’s habit of using the whiteboard in his office not simply to give instructions, but to ask employees to explain their own thinking while he challenged them with questions.
He also credited my father with playing an instrumental role in developing Producto’s precision NC rotary table, an important product for the company’s Machine Tool Division.
But the memory that affected me most was personal. After my mother died, the two men occasionally had lunch together. One day, his former colleague apologized for having bags of dirty laundry in the back of his car, explaining that he was a single man and had to do laundry whenever he could.
My father quietly replied, “That’s all right. I’m single now too.”
I knew my father for thirty years. Yet decades after his death, someone who worked for him gave me another glimpse of the man behind the father I remembered.