Below: A temporary reprieve from election mania.Archie

Archibald Parry was born in Lancashire, England in 1901. He and his family migrated to America when he was a teenager. When he married my aunt, Gertrude Hanlon, in 1930, he was 29; she was 23. They rented an apartment on Cornelia Street in Brooklyn. He worked as a “sweeper.” After sweeping for a few years, the NYC Sanitation Department assigned Archie a truck and his own route.

Archie soon became a warm and beloved member of the Hanlon clan. He had a genial manner, a warm smile and a gentle nature.

A photo of Archie giving one-year Billy Shaw his first cigar.

Archie was the only cigar smoker in our family. He puffed even when doing simple everyday activities, as when working on the family-built bungalow in Candlewood Hills, Connecticut. He did not smoke, however, when ate, slept, or attended mass.

As for eating, Archie loved limburger cheese sandwiches with onion slices atop. Limburger, of course, is a spreadable Belgian cheese with a powerful odor. Think cow barn or dirty diaper. He loved to tease my brother and me when we were kids by bringing it near us and offering us a bite. It wasn’t technically child abuse, but it was close. He would always wash his nasty sandwich down with a cold Schaefer beer. Archie loved beer. Beer. Limburger. Cigars. Gertie.

Sadly, beer cost Archie his job as a “sanitation engineer” — as he liked to be called. After driving his garbage truck on the same route for many years, Archie would frequently interrupt his daily rounds for a cold Schaefer and a tasty cigar at his favorite bar. After some time, restive residents noticed that the garbage truck in front of the local bar and the languishing trash cans in front of their houses had something to do with each other. Archie was retired earlier than he expected.

Archie also loved to sleep, and he would sleep long and deep. My Aunt Gertie knew one sure-fire way to wake him, and she and my Aunt Vera enlisted me, as a ten-year-old to rouse him from his slumber while they watched from the doorway.

I simply lifted the covers over his feet and tickled them. Archie bolted upright and seeing me shouted, “Jesus Christ, Goddammit Billy! Don’t you know you can kill a man that way?” My two aunts howled and rushed off to tell everyone else in the house.

A few months later, Archie got his revenge on Vera and Gertie without even contemplating it. My Aunt Vera had invited her young cousin, Tom Larity, over to a fancy Sunday dinner. Tom was a seminarian, and the pride of the entire Hanlon-Larity enterprise. Having a priest in an Irish family (even an Irish-American family) was a special blessing in itself, a sign that your clan had an inside path to heaven. Vera also invited Tom’s seminarian friend.

Tom Larity, Vera, and Tom’s fellow seminarian at Jack Dempsey’s Restaurant on Broadway

Archie was seated at the dinner table with Vera and the priests. Gertie and I sat across from them. (Why I was there, I cannot remember.) The table was set with the best china and flatware. Gertie had prepared a fine roast beef dinner. Before we began eating, Fr. Tom gave the blessing. Vera then asked the lads about happenings in the seminary. Gertie chimed in on occasion. I said nothing, more interested in the fine meal than seminary life.

Archie was quiet as well, transported to a meditative state as he devoured his beef. . .until. . .until he let one go — a trombone-like blast that exuded notes of limburger, onion, with subtle hints of garlic — a chef d’ouvre of the fart genre.

Strangely, Archie kept chewing his food, oblivious to the sudden silence in the room and the crisis he created.

The two priests looked at each other in stunned disbelief, not sure how to react.

Vera shook her head in anger, muttering, “Goddammit Archie, you never disappoint.”

Gertie shouted, “Jesus Christ, Archie!”

Archie jolted from his noshing reverie, raised his head and said, “What?”

Gertie replied, “Can’t you at least apologize?”

He looked confused, but shrugging, he apologized. I think he realized something was amiss when he glanced at me across the table. I had laughing tears in my eyes and was straining not to burst. Still, even after his apology, Archie seemed baffled by the fuss.

The hoped-for tone of the occasion, however, was never restored.

Years later, Archie joined my uncle, Al Faller (husband to Mary Hanlon), in crafting another family memory. They decided upon a Christmas Day celebration, that it would be a grand idea to carry my grandmother, 82-year-old Mary Hanlon, the family’s matriarch, downstairs from her sickbed, where she had managed family affairs for the previous 25 years. She was not in good shape. Ten children, a lifetime of struggle, money problems, and several falls had left her lame and quite willing to spend her waning years in her bedroom.

Mary Larity Hanlon, earlier, in 1943

Archie and Al, however, decided that they should wrestle Grandma into her wheelchair and usher her safely down the steps into the living room to celebrate Christmas with her family. Now, Al was a short man, say 5’2”, and in his sixties, although he was certain he was taller, younger, and stronger than he was. Several cocktails had convinced both men that this was a good idea, eminently doable, and they were the ones who could pull it off.

They wheeled Grandma to the top of the steps. Archie first situated himself on the steps below the wheelchair so Al could hold the wheelchair from above. Grandma had a terrified look on her face. A lifetime of bad stuff had no doubt braced her for this moment.

Sure enough. The wheelchair rumbled only three bouncing steps before Al lost his grip. As Grandma screamed, the wheelchair catapulted downward, barreling Archie into the wall below. Luckily it was plaster board and not solid plaster since Archie hit the wall so violently that he punched a large hole in it with his butt. Oddly, it caused him less pain than it might have. And Archie’s bulk had cushioned Grandma from fatal injury.

Though physically shaken and mildly bruised, Grandma was either in shock or just too angry to speak. After Archie and Al slunk out of the way, four other family members struggled to get her back upstairs and into her bed. Grandma did not leave her bedroom again until the day she died.

Despite his foibles, idiosyncrasies, and occasional mishaps, my Uncle Archie was a delightful man — decent, generous, fun-loving, and loyal. I sat with my Aunt Gertie for a long time after Archie died. She was tired and sad, but at peace. His dementia during during his final few years made him a handful. But he was always kind and respectful to her, and they managed a long loving friendship. He died in 1979. She died less than a year later, in August 1980.