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Big Al: Mr. Reavis to His Face
Paperback
Biographies GeneralGeneral Parenting
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ISBN13: 9798953338059
Publisher: Reavis Publishing
Published: Nov 5 2026
Pages: 188
Weight: 0.57
Height: 0.43 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Reavis Publishing
Published: Nov 5 2026
Pages: 188
Weight: 0.57
Height: 0.43 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
I asked my father what it means when you find a penny on the ground, heads up. I expected to hear something about good luck.
He said, You are a penny richer. And he walked away.
That was my father. He was sixteen years old and on his own in 1929, the year the Depression started. He was a small, quiet, light-skinned man with wavy hair, and the whole block called him Big Al behind his back and Mr. Reavis to his face, and in sixty years, I never once heard him waste a word.
He said, You are a penny richer. And he walked away.
That was my father. He was sixteen years old and on his own in 1929, the year the Depression started. He was a small, quiet, light-skinned man with wavy hair, and the whole block called him Big Al behind his back and Mr. Reavis to his face, and in sixty years, I never once heard him waste a word.
He was a projectionist at a theater that ran three movies at once. He was out-earned by his own wife. And he paid off his house in full before he retired, ran two cars, and put two children through Catholic school on a projectionist's wage.
When a doctor told him smoking might kill him inside a month, he quit that same afternoon, and the only explanation he ever gave was four words: I want to live.
When he found out my mother had been turning me against him, he did not argue, and he did not defend himself. He said, I understand now. Then he started taking me bowling on Sunday mornings, which ran for three years and ended in a partial scholarship to Lincoln University.
This is thirty-five chapters of what that man taught me, in the only shape that fits him: what he said, what actually happened, and what I understand now, forty years later.
He never decorated anything. Not a penny, not a diagnosis, not his own death.
I am keeping the story anyway, Dad.
When a doctor told him smoking might kill him inside a month, he quit that same afternoon, and the only explanation he ever gave was four words: I want to live.
When he found out my mother had been turning me against him, he did not argue, and he did not defend himself. He said, I understand now. Then he started taking me bowling on Sunday mornings, which ran for three years and ended in a partial scholarship to Lincoln University.
This is thirty-five chapters of what that man taught me, in the only shape that fits him: what he said, what actually happened, and what I understand now, forty years later.
He never decorated anything. Not a penny, not a diagnosis, not his own death.
I am keeping the story anyway, Dad.
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