BORN INTO THE MAGIC REALM

My father was Joseph Roy Flynn, born in 1885, one of seven children who survived to maturity. Like most Irish-American families of the day, he and his four brothers all went into factory work between the ages of eleven and fourteen, so none of them got a high-school education. My grandfather was too proud to put his daughters into Anglo-Saxon homes as servants, so Aunt Marie and Aunt Lucy did finish high school.

My father's first job was in the Rumsey-Sycamore Bed Spring Factory. In 1900, when he was fifteen, the boss put up a sign that said, "If this county goes for William Jennings Bryan [the more liberal candidate for President], there will be no work for two weeks." They voted for Bryan and were locked out for two weeks.

In their youth, all seven siblings worked as wandering actors in a troupe that offered plays — The Trials of the Working Girl, Ingomar, the Barbarian, The Hunchback of Notre Dame — around small-town Missouri. This was about 1910. However, they advanced to the professions because in those days credentialing was absent, and you could actually better yourself without an irrelevant college degree.

My father and two of his brothers became especially well-educated because, despite lack of formal education, they loved to read. My Uncle Ed read at night on a naval ship in World War I. Family legend has it that he used a torch, or flashlight. These were available by 1911 but it is possible he used a ship's lantern. As a result of his reading, he was one of six enlisted men who passed an exam to qualify for officer's training. Later he left the navy to become one of the most distinguished real estate entrepreneurs in Washington, D.C. He handled the famous Watergate Apartments where the break-in occurred that eventually led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon. He was the only one of the boys who did not have an alcohol problem, a disease prominent among Irish-American males (read Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night). Uncle Henry was a distinguished journalist whose life and career were ruined by alcoholism. Uncle Jack became a naval commander who drank himself to death on Guam. I do not know whether Uncle Paul liked to read, although he did work at the Library of Congress.

My own generation, with one exception, has been largely exempt, so alcoholism is not in our genes. (Maybe reading is.) I suspect that since we were all college graduates the struggle to reach our potential was less grim. Perhaps it was just our professions because in the past the military and journalism were staffed by hard-drinking men (there were no women). Journalism was on the fringe of social respectability. The police were corrupt and did not like reporters saying so, which meant there were risks. My father's teeth on one side of his lower jaw were damaged when a policeman hit him with a blackjack.

My father was a drunk but not an alcoholic. He got drunk most evenings but was always sober the next day for work and was never jailed for public drunkenness. He often went to the police station to bail out his brothers. He was an excellent journalist but was out of work for about six years during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Like so many others, he was rescued by the onset of World War II, when he entered public service as a press-relations expert. Of all the family, he loved reading the most. He became highly educated, with a vocabulary larger than my own. To show off, he would do The New York Times' crossw